Slashdot Mirror

This reminds me of the Domino Theory as the USA applied it to SE Asia in the 1960's, as the main excuse to go into Vietnam.

Speaking of The Domino Theory: Did you notice the list of related stories?

Linux Journal: Pakistan Government Looks to the Linux Users Group(Jul 15, 2002)

Update: Linux Bill Introduced in Finland(Jun 18, 2002)

Update: Ending Microsoft FUD: An Interview with Peruvian Congressman Villanueva(May 21, 2002)

GNU.org.pe: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft(May 07, 2002)

Enterprise Linux Today: Venezuelan Bank Marks Major Financial Deployment of Linux for S/390(May 03, 2001)

Looks like a row of dominoes to me. B-)

This reminds me of the Domino Theory as the USA applied it to SE Asia in the 1960's, as the main excuse to go into Vietnam.

Speaking of The Domino Theory: Did you notice the list of related stories?

Linux Journal: Pakistan Government Looks to the Linux Users Group(Jul 15, 2002)

Update: Linux Bill Introduced in Finland(Jun 18, 2002)

Update: Ending Microsoft FUD: An Interview with Peruvian Congressman Villanueva(May 21, 2002)

GNU.org.pe: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft(May 07, 2002)

Enterprise Linux Today: Venezuelan Bank Marks Major Financial Deployment of Linux for S/390(May 03, 2001)

Looks like a row of dominoes to me. B-)

Also, Bruce Perens is not the first person to write about using government buying power to require open file formats...I'm probably not the first either however (although my article was discussed on LinuxToday...where're you getting your ideas from Bruce?!?)

- adam

It's from 3 years ago, but it should give one a good base to start from

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-11 -07-001-05-NW-LF

If you think that's funny goto linuxtoday and keep hitting refresh button.

more big fuckin ads for Microsoft Visual Studio.Net

"Requiring the government to use a specific type of software is a bad idea, whether that software be open source or closed source."

Here's an interesting rebuttal:

"The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state law, such as:

Free access to public information by the citizen.

Permanence of public data.

Security of the State and citezens.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.

To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guarenteed due to the availability of the source code.

To guarentee national security or the security of the State, it is indespensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code."

I don't there is anything I can say that can top that. It should be obvious that proprietary software is not a solution for government software.

• Bill Gates donates $100 million to AIDS research
  
• Bill Gates donates $25M for AIDS vaccine
  
• Bill Gates Donates $37 Million to Combat Hepatitis B in China
  
• Gates Donates Millions to Schools
  
• BILL GATES DONATES $2.2 BILLION TO POPULATION CONTROL
  

go here to read future slashdot stories while they're still news.

Excellent slashdot alternative:

AlterSlash

I almost always read that instead of slashdot.

Reading or subscribing to slashdot only puts cash in the greedy pockets of VA Softwares board of crooks, er, i mean directors. The slashdot janitors and flunkies make the same garbage salary regardless of what happens.

Also another site that always gets the stories at least a day before slashdot sometimes as much as a week, or never in the case of something exposing hypocrisy from osdn.

LinuxToday

Last year when VA stock tanked Slashdot executed a nasty smear campaign against them in attempt to steal their readers, but due to blatant hypocrisy it failed.

Also if you want real dissenting political commentary from a respectable source may i suggest:

The Nation

This magazine was founded to promote the abolitionist movement in the 1800s and continues to be a well respected alternative news source today. Sure the DMCA is bad, but not being able to pirate DVDs on Linux is nothing compared to the real injustices going on in the rest of the world, many times funded by your tax dollars.

Enjoy these alternative news sources and feel good knowing you are no longer helping to line the pockets of crook CEOs from the days of infectious greed by supporting osdn and other fronts for the fizzled stock scam once known as VA Linux.

Excellent slashdot alternative:

AlterSlash

I almost always read that instead of slashdot.

Reading or subscribing to slashdot only puts cash in the greedy pockets of VA Softwares board of crooks, er, i mean directors. The slashdot janitors and flunkies make the same garbage salary regardless of what happens.

Also another site that always gets the stories at least a day before slashdot sometimes as much as a week, or never in the case of something exposing hypocrisy from osdn.

LinuxToday

Last year when VA stock tanked Slashdot executed a nasty smear campaign against them in attempt to steal their readers, but due to blatant hypocrisy it failed.

Also if you want real dissenting political commentary from a respectable source may i suggest:

The Nation

This magazine was founded to promote the abolitionist movement in the 1800s and continues to be a well respected alternative news source today. Sure the DMCA is bad, but not being able to pirate DVDs on Linux is nothing compared to the real injustices going on in the rest of the world, many times funded by your tax dollars.

Enjoy these alternative news sources and feel good knowing you are no longer helping to line the pockets of crook CEOs from the days of infectious greed by supporting osdn and other fronts for the fizzled stock scam once known as VA Linux.

If MS gets into the habit of heavy lobbing ( like in Germany) or even bribing goverments like seems to be happening in Peru and other countries is one thing. This is usual.

But if the U.S.A goverment starts threatening other goverments about the use of Microsoft products, it will be a completely different thing, and, in my mind, self defeating.

My favorite is still Linux Today. But perhaps something different might be in order for the future.

All of the Linux news sites, big and small, seem to be loaded with content pulled from other sites. Indeed, many of the sites make their headlines available in an easily parseable, machine-readable format. Wouldn't it be great, if instead of putting all of the bandwidth etc. expense burden on a few supersites, to have a network of smaller sites all sharing the news articles, and each doing a little reporting and scavenging to contribute.

I know, this sounds vaguely like UseNet, but I'm talking about something with a better signal-to-noise ratio. Something where you have to work a little bit to get things set up and on the sharing network, but once you're online you can provide news for a small group of users without getting killed on the bandwidth costs.

Alternatively, the megasites could eliminate interactive portions like talkbacks/comments entirely, and the community could create a volunteer-run caching network similar to Akamai. Naturally, the megasites themselves would have to return to being noncommercial; nobody wants to spend their own money to voluntarily help some other for-profit organization stay afloat (as Mandrakesoft found out when they tried it).

Ok, these ideas aren't fully thought through, but the point is that there are ways of keeping Linux news sites running out there without having to resort to subscription-based content.

And for ordinary discussions and conversations, I suggest that everyone do what they did in the 1990's: find a nice BBS that you're comfortable on and make it your home. A good one is listed below in my sig, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands more. The community BBS is alive and well, despite CmdrTaco et al's best efforts to try and convince the world that it's a thing of the past.

linuxinsider

linuxtoday

firstlinux

linuxsecurity

and somewhat linux related but definitely awesome...

oreilly's meerkat

oreillynet and not so much news but definitely up to date...

ONLAMP

The new Redhat Beta "Limbo" has a similiar feature set that includes gcc 3.1. Seeing that Mandrake is based off of Redhat they are probably just moving right along following Redhat's lead

Actually, I found a URL at Linuxtoday that lists many articles by Middleton. Although there are some doozies there, there are also some that show significantly more balance than the 3 we've discussed here. I'm at a loss to understand the radically varying quality of his work.

But fortunately this was not the case. The Slashdot editors would never do such an immature thing, would they? ;-)

not to bash slashdot, but why is it that Linux Today always posts the latest linux stories at least half a day before slashdot does?

anyways, on a side note, i think zimmerman is in the wrong here. if he is so concerned about the concept of pgp, then why isn't he focusing his efforts on GnuPG, which is a completely open version of the PGP concept?

Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez's answer to Juan Alberto González's letter is the most brilliant text about free and proprietary software written by politician I've ever seen. (Juan Alberto González is a General Manager of Microsoft Perú. Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez is a Congressman of the Republic of Perú.)

I really wish we had such people among Polish politicians. I wish you, Ramsés, together with other people in Panamá to convince your politicians what's best for your citizens, even if it's not best for fraudulent megacorporations like Microsoft, and even if it means making the richest man on Earth slightly less rich.

See also the interviews with Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez on LinuxToday and Linux Journal, as well as other links from the Peruvian Activism website.

Actually, that quote is from Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nunez, the Peruvian legislator that is part of a group proposing that the government of Peru use only open source software in cases where it is available and meets the needs of the state. You can read his response to a letter written by the head of Microsoft's Peru office here.

Even that one doesn't propose to do away with proprietary software, or prohibit it from competing for government contracts if it can meet the requirements of the state for openness. I recommend reading the full letter. It's quite interesting and well-written.

At the moment there seems to be only a one-page PDF document at the original site explaining that the original paper has been recalled for some unspecified rework. Info regarding the sudden change of position can be found at linuxtoday.

The most interesting point was that when they contacted ADTI, a representative informed them that he was not sure why the paper was off-line, but he believed "they had to make a couple of revisions to the paper." The representative was not sure when the paper would be back online. The paper's author, Kenneth Brown, was
unavailable for comment.

I mean, come on!

This is like being surprised that the Tolly Group gave a good report to a product.

When you pay for a review or analysis, you get exactly what you want. This is no different than the Mindcraft "study" that was biased.

When a reputable group/publication comes out with an unbiased study that says these same things then you should get upset. Until then, it's all smoke and mirrors, FUD and MUD.

Nothing to see here.

In fact, SuSE representatives confirmed that both the SuSE Personal and SuSE Professional releases would remain intact and would not fall under the UnitedLinux umbrella.

Speaking with Holger Dyroff, SuSE's U.S. Director of Sales, after the conference call, it was learned that while SuSE Personal and Professional would remain sepeate from UnitedLinux, because of SuSE's role as systems integrator of UnitedLinux's codebase, much of the same functionality in UnitedLinux would find its way back to SuSE's retail line-up. Dyroff speculated that the same would be true for Conectiva's retail offerings as well.

ESR Resigns from VA Board of Directors

--

VA Software Corp. (NASDAQ: LNUX) has silently severed
its ties with board member Eric S. Raymond, among others. No
mention of this was made on any of VA Software's OSDN news
sites.

Raymond, who was responsible for "[representing] the
interests and values of the open source community", confirms his recent change of status on his homepage.

ESR Resigns from VA Board of Directors -- VA Software Corp. (NASDAQ: LNUX) has silently severed its ties with board member Eric S. Raymond, among others. No mention of this was made on any of VA Software's OSDN news sites.

Raymond, who was responsible for "[representing] the interests and values of the open source community", confirms his recent change of status on his homepage.

ESR's Removal from the VA Software Board of Directors!

In fact, that article on Linux Today is the only one you'll be able to find on the entire WWW.

ESR'S HOMEPAGE DOES CONFIRM THE STORY, THOUGH.

No more " [representation of] the interests and values of the open-source community [at VA Software -- owners of OSDN and Slashdot]" then, I guess!

Oh, and for further information about VA Software's demise, you may want to read this email.

ESR's Removal from the VA Software Board of Directors!

In fact, that article on Linux Today is the only one you'll be able to find on the entire WWW!

ESR'S HOMEPAGE DOES CONFIRM THE STORY, THOUGH!

No more " [representation of] the interests and values of the open-source community [at VA Software -- owners of OSDN and Slashdot]" then, I guess!

Oh, and for further information about VA Software's demise, read this!

ESR's Resignation from the VA GNU/Linux^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Software Board of Directors!

In fact, that article on Linux Today was the only one I could find. ESR's homepage does confirm the story, though.

No more " [ representation of ] the interests and values of the open-source community there" then, I guess!

Oh, and for further entertainment, read this.

He's authored more than a couple programs I use day-to-day (fetchmail, for one), and I hear he's got a bit of free time on his hands.

Original Surpised by Wealth tidbit here.

+1 Informative

Original Surpised by Wealth tidbit here.

+1 Informative

They could get an IBM Mainframe running Linux , then partition it out to 40,000 virtual instances, and have each one running Bochs to emulate all the 8086 chips they need.

You know, it would probably still be cheaper then maintining what they have now in the way of hardware.

Problem is that they would need a third booster to get it and the power plant off the ground....

> but wouldn't you love to see SWAT teams breaking down doors to sieze copies of Outlook?

They already do that, except that it's federal marshals instead of SWAT teams, and it's done for agregated petty theft instead of mass murder.

Oh, well... our society almost has it right.

1. it usually takes a whole support team to install a geeks' workstation

1. Installation and maintenance requires 4-5 times the bandwidth a 'normal' OS would require

1. Linux was deliberately made completely incompatible and inoperatible with turnkey solutions like MS Exchange or MS SQL server. Investments in these products are therefore voided the minute you start rolling out Linux.

1. Applications developed in Perl or C, the languages of the linux community have proven to be slow,
2. unreliable, insecure and headaching complicated. Once developed and debugged, nobody is able to understand the code.

• All the 'geeks' wearing tux t-shirts are actually MIS support guys who are still studying for their MCSE exam.
  
• 'The screaming fast Linux machines at work' are actually refurbished workstations at a separated network segment, not allowed on the production network since every Linux (l)user seems to need nmap [insecure.org] to perform normal work-related computer operations.
  
• All the 'cool' Apache web servers are actually IIS machines with forged host headers. (yes, you can do that in IIS without recompiling anything. Heck, I lived for years without a C compiler and still do. )
  
  
• For the rare instance where a free UNIX is actually used in a production environment, management has smartened up and BSD is usually installed.

Yes, were. You said it in your mindless flame.

Just look at any microsoft ad now. Chances are it is about 1 degree of seperation and .net

As I don't really feel like typing more, I'll provide you with a mindless link

Next time search for a good review that's thorough rather than linking to some half-baked MSNBC article.

The best review out there isn't exactly a top-secret either, as is apparent below.

1] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&n ame=News&file=article&sid=670&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0
2] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&n ame=News&file=article&sid=667&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0
3] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-04 -12-014-26-RV-DT
4] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-04 -12-005-26-NW-DT
5] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=1856
6] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=1848
7] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/ 12/1740252
8] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/ 11/1459213
9] http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php

Thanks.

Next time search for a good review that's thorough rather than linking to some half-baked MSNBC article.

The best review out there isn't exactly a top-secret either, as is apparent below.

1] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&n ame=News&file=article&sid=670&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0
2] http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?op=modload&n ame=News&file=article&sid=667&mode=thread&order=0& thold=0
3] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-04 -12-014-26-RV-DT
4] http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-04 -12-005-26-NW-DT
5] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=1856
6] http://pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=1848
7] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/ 12/1740252
8] http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/ 11/1459213
9] http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php

Thanks.

And discussion on Linux Today...

Remember the post from "Linus" [iu.edu] to the LKML demanding that the free software community practice better personal hygiene? That's the sort of thing I want to be seeing.

How about the story on linuxtoday about Linus abondoning Linux? I found some amusement there.

I have to admit, I thought Alan Cox's 8086 Linux (complete with web server) was a joke until I followed the link to elks.

Shayne

Remember the post from "Linus" [iu.edu] to the LKML demanding that the free software community practice better personal hygiene? That's the sort of thing I want to be seeing.

How about the story on linuxtoday about Linus abondoning Linux? I found some amusement there.

I have to admit, I thought Alan Cox's 8086 Linux (complete with web server) was a joke until I followed the link to elks.

Shayne

Here's today's kernel mailing list joke.

Now that's an april fool's joke. Makes you laugh and scares the crap out of you at the same time.

Is this the same Eric Raymond?

If you inisist on using outlook, there was a solution: OpenMail but HP decided to kill it. Which, btw, everyone is assuming it's Sun they are replacing (a safe assumption) but with goofy I'll-do-a-merger-to-keep-my-job-and-blame-company- problmes-on-someone-other-that-I Carly at the helm of HP, I wouldn't be surpised if it's HP they need to drop.

Bynari is another calendaring solution that has been mentioned before for Linux. No, it's not open source, free, or even just like exchange; but it works, is virus free, etc.

As for point 2, I've done the virus thing with a cheesy script on each system, and other such lame sysadmin duct tape approaches taking care of windoze network unfriendly boxes.

Your primary point, the question, "just what are they replacing" is a good one and your conclusions are reasonable. My problem is what I sense inbetween the lines. Your point is that exchange makes outlook really easy to deal with and win2k server takes care of windoze boxes easier. Well, ya got me there. Yup, Linux isn't as good as windows in dealing with windows non-sense. I don't suspect it ever will be, EVEN if they were to play nice as Mr. Stallman suggested oh so long ago. You are suggesting that linux will never be ready for IT b/c IT runs windows clients. This doesn't have to be. Things in a linux server/win client enterprise would have to be different. In some ways it would be better and some ways not. There are of course growing pains - I'm sure you're one of the millions that have had to suffer through years and years of M$'s growing pains, mistakes and lies. Now, "their solutions" (ahem) are mostly workable on few commodity (cough, cough) systems - such as the most expensive Intel systems you could buy. That's one approach. Another might be to buy an old unix server (say, a Sun E450) and centralize each offices services to one reliable system.

My point is that the gap between windows and unix/linux is getting smaller in some ways. Unix apps can be easily recompiled to run (slowly) on your pc, and that win box can now pretend to be a newtwork server. Large unix apps can now sort-of slowly run on small linux installations. But the windows boxes can't scale the same was as unix apps, and certianly can't scale as far and will never scale as big. They are different things, and it is very disingenuous for you to say that unix/linux will never cut it in IT b/c it's not windows. Unix can now go big or go small, and it always goes smart and dresses in style. Don't expect to run a better network with out some effort and growing pains - and if you're running windows, always expect to spend a lot more. This why they are replacing unix and you can bet that if this pilot project goes well, windows will be phased out.

Every Free Software programmer need two things.

• To Eat!
• Contribute Free Software

While that's true, I think that one of the best responses that I've seen to this so far has come from someone at LinuxToday He says:

frankly most Linux users don't care about your profit margin -- and *there're not supposed to*! It's up to you to make your business a success, not the community. If the community wants GPL'd stuff, then it's up to you to figure out how to make it profitable. If you can't...well, there's always barber college.

Finally, for many of us, using the GPL is as much a philosophical as a practical matter. RMS, whatever his faults, has been crystal-clear on this issue from Day 1. GPL'd software is first and foremost a way to make software Free. If software houses find it difficult to make a buck that way, that's not his problem. It's not our problem. It's *your* problem.

The point is, that while software developers need to eat, that's not the community's problem. If a software developer can't eat, and that developer licensed his/her code under the GPL, that's not the GPL's fault. Do we know why the software developer isn't eating? Is it because the GPL prevents it or is it because the software developer doesn't understand the GPL enough to be able to make proper use of it?

I would think that releasing code under the GPL, and then making it harder than normal for people to get that code, just invites the kind of extra effort to deal with the myriads of people requesting the source code. The fact that you wasted time answering all of those questions isn't a consequence of using the GPL. It's a consequence of trying to use the GPL in a non-standard, albeit completely legitimate, way. Unless you're microsoft, there's a penalty for not conforming to standards. Should you be surprised when chosing to do so actually costs you something? In this case, the cost was spending too much time arguing instead of charging money for some value added service.

I think it's a cop out to say that they didn't make money because of the GPL. I think it's a way of deflecting attention on what might be the real issue: a poorly managed business.

Every Free Software programmer need two things.

• To Eat!
• Contribute Free Software

While that's true, I think that one of the best responses that I've seen to this so far has come from someone at LinuxToday He says:

frankly most Linux users don't care about your profit margin -- and *there're not supposed to*! It's up to you to make your business a success, not the community. If the community wants GPL'd stuff, then it's up to you to figure out how to make it profitable. If you can't...well, there's always barber college.

Finally, for many of us, using the GPL is as much a philosophical as a practical matter. RMS, whatever his faults, has been crystal-clear on this issue from Day 1. GPL'd software is first and foremost a way to make software Free. If software houses find it difficult to make a buck that way, that's not his problem. It's not our problem. It's *your* problem.

The point is, that while software developers need to eat, that's not the community's problem. If a software developer can't eat, and that developer licensed his/her code under the GPL, that's not the GPL's fault. Do we know why the software developer isn't eating? Is it because the GPL prevents it or is it because the software developer doesn't understand the GPL enough to be able to make proper use of it?

I would think that releasing code under the GPL, and then making it harder than normal for people to get that code, just invites the kind of extra effort to deal with the myriads of people requesting the source code. The fact that you wasted time answering all of those questions isn't a consequence of using the GPL. It's a consequence of trying to use the GPL in a non-standard, albeit completely legitimate, way. Unless you're microsoft, there's a penalty for not conforming to standards. Should you be surprised when chosing to do so actually costs you something? In this case, the cost was spending too much time arguing instead of charging money for some value added service.

I think it's a cop out to say that they didn't make money because of the GPL. I think it's a way of deflecting attention on what might be the real issue: a poorly managed business.

There's also an interesting analysis on LinuxToday of theKompany's tactics and how they allegedly intentionally damage Free Software. Although I wouldn't take all the accusations at face value, there's certainly something worrying about the claims.

What, I shouldn't take all the accusations at face value just because they've been debunked as being completely wrong in a reply?

Such skeptics we have here... tsk tsk.

Give me a company that sells support over one that sells software any day. The moment you put software in a box, its most important component -- the ability to be adapted and updated for security fixes and feature enhancements -- dies. Anyway, which is more successful, "theKompany" or RedHat?

There's also an interesting analysis on LinuxToday of theKompany's tactics and how they allegedly intentionally damage Free Software. Although I wouldn't take all the accusations at face value, there's certainly something worrying about the claims.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

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As far as dumbest moments in business go, can anyone top this?

"Linux has overtaken Novell's Netware operating system to be the second-most popular OS shipped on Intel servers, according to the latest research."

"The news is a big step for the open source operating system (OS) which has been quickly gaining acceptance among enterprise users."

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