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Oh, you didn't know?

By the way, it is 36 letters long.

By the way, it is 36 letters long.

wow, you really wish you were the voice of some great underground movement, don't you? you even have all the propoganda memorized... I can see you now, shouting over the crowd of hungry, huddled, helpless masses, "wir wünschen einen platz in der sonne!" you may want to look up cause versus agenda and find out which one you'd rather be led by. just that you feel obligated to apologize to the audience most likely to accept you shows your willingness to detach from your own standards of decency to make your point in a percieved stronger way. you would not do any cause or agenda (except violent rebellion) any good.

wow, you really wish you were the voice of some great underground movement, don't you? you even have all the propoganda memorized... I can see you now, shouting over the crowd of hungry, huddled, helpless masses, "wir wünschen einen platz in der sonne!" you may want to look up cause versus agenda and find out which one you'd rather be led by. just that you feel obligated to apologize to the audience most likely to accept you shows your willingness to detach from your own standards of decency to make your point in a percieved stronger way. you would not do any cause or agenda (except violent rebellion) any good.

There's also free/libre wordnet, wiktionary...

Why can't these projects work together? Seems like a lot of wheel-reinvention to me...

There are translation for some of the words, for exemple House:
* Arabic: (bayt)
* Basque: etxe
* Breton: ti m
* Catalan: casa
* Chineses:
* Czech: dm m
* Dutch: huis n
* Esperanto: domo
* Estonian: maja
* Fijian: vale
* Finnish: talo (1, 2), house (3)
* French: maison f
* Frisian: hûs n
* Galician: casa f
* German: Haus, n
* Greek: oiko, spiti (modern Greek)
* Hebrew:
* Hungarian: ház
* Indonesian: rumah
* Italian: casa
* Japanese: (, ie), (, tatemono)
* Latin: domus f
* Low Saxon: Huus n
* Malay: rumah
* Persian: (xne)
* Polish: dom m
* Portuguese: casa f
* Romanian: cas f
* Romanica: casa f, domo m
* Slovene: hisa f
* Spanish: casa f
* Russian: m
* Swedish: hus n
* Turkish: ev n

Wiktionary is a pretty good dictionary also, maybe they should join forces?

http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?

I saw this done by somebody and since then I've been doing it myself on Wiktionary and sometimes Wikipedia to discuss the history, etymology, and legitimacy of various recent words. I hope it doesn't stay gone )-:

or, just insert a link to here http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Main_Page

WP was the first WYSIWYG word processor I ever used (or saw) under VMS. Being first in that realm is kindof the opposite mindset, for a company believing GUIs were going away!

Or a testament of the inability for people to understand what the word 'paradigm' means!

Sorry, I don't click on any link that contains the word "wiki".

Or a testament of the inability for people to understand what the word 'paradigm' means!

Yep, and this is why slashdotters don't get laid http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Laid :)

Actually, a previous poster pointed out that he once spent $40 on a pair of sunglasses. He regrets it because he then sat on them.

I spent $80 on a pair of oakleys back in 1990 and sat on them 10 times. each time a lense popped out and an arm popped off. I just popped them back on an all was well. (if you do the math it's like having 10 pairs of $8 glasses over the course of 2 years.)

Also, at work, a high velocity bolt hit me in the "glasses", the oakleys came away with a small scratch.

So, you can truly get you moneys worth sometimes.

Oh, and I was getting laid http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Laid like crazy back then. (this was before I found slashdot)

I admit that I'll never spend $80 on a pair of sunglasses again but I'm proud to be more of an ignorant bastard now than I ever was. :)

Well, for looking up words like grok, Wiktionary is the way to go for me.

However, I don't believe you've taken a stand on copyrights and how you see them effecting technology and society.

However, I don't believe you've taken a stand on copyrights and how you see them effecting technology and society.

I should point out that, as we say, "Wikipedia is not a dictionary". If you want a Wiki dictionary, look at Wiktionary.

Your ideas about grammatical rules is slightly primitive: it's *hard* to check grammar.

My idea was a bit hand-wavy, I admit, but I still think it could work. For coding work, you need experienced software guys; but if you set up the project right, you can have language contributions from non-geeks. Start with existing natural-language tools like NLTK. If you need a dictionary, import one, such as Wiktionary. Set up an easily-parsed format for the rules, and let people submit rules.

The result would be about as good as the Word grammar checker; still brain-dead, still offering comments about things that might be wrong because it can't be sure, but by golly a grammar checker.

You figure it's ten years of work. If you can take advantage of work that has already been done (NLTK), and get help from many people (writing rules), it could shape up much quicker than that.

steveha

moderators, while moderating parent, please keep in mind the definition of the word "gay":
happy, joyful, lively, festive, bright, colourful.
thank you.

But I think that, in the long run, that's irrelevant. We have to consider each issue on its own merits.

Regardless of what Real may have done in the past, and regardless of their current motives, what they're actually doing right now gets my approval. Yes, I'm an Apple fan; I love my iPod, and rip all my CDs to AAC. I try to steer clear of any of Real's proprietary formats. But none of this blinds me to the current issue, which is whether Apple has the moral or legal right to lock up its platform -- to become a monopoly provider. And I personally think it doesn't. I'll still be suspicious of Real's future actions, and I'll still have a warm feeling for Apple, but I'd much prefer a world in which platforms like the iPod are open, and many companies provide music for it, than one in which new monopolies are so easily created and protected.

Mind you, this is all irrelevant for me personally. Although the iTMS is finally available here in the UK, these days I get most of my music from AllOfMP3, which is more than an order of magnitude cheaper, and gives me DRM-free files in the format and bitrate of my choosing!

That's primarily because the original poster spelled it wrong. It's Sesquipedalianism, not Sesequepedalianism.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I suggest that all slashdot posts be formatted in the wiki style.

Don't forget the wiktionary, a much smaller wiki where it is easier to contribute.

Style points for using the word perfervid.

Grandparent: The job of the editors is to post stories which generate hits to the site. Slashdot plays the self serving FUD game just as well as your favorite evil mega-corp.

Parent: Most insightful comment I've seen posted here all day. There's a damn good argument to be made that Slashdot is best served when the stories are inflammatory and riddled with falsehoods.

It's something that's always bugged me about slashdot, and I used to not post to stories out of some kind of vague principle. I figured that I was generating content (thus money -- albeit a small about) for them without getting anything in return and I didn't like it. I did however work on projects like Wiktionary, and smaller wikis like the open guide to London because no one was making any money off my labor in that case.

But, eventually I did start posting to slashdot when I started my own website. I figured the publicity that I could get from this site for my blog far, far out weighed the amount of money my comment on slashdot was worth. So it's a good deal for everyone, I make self-serving links to my own sites and get many regular readers from slashdot, and slashdot gets my own little contribution to their content pile and thus their coffers.

Still though, it does annoy me that it is in their best interest to have stories that end in either inflammatory or inaccurate comments.

Ironing

Thanks. Your post provoked me to search for a free multi-lingual dictionary database project and it looks like there is one in the works.

In spite of clueless politicians, the future looks bright (for now).

"which could be useful to subsidise low cost environments such as open source content projects e.g. wikipedia."

Wikipedia sounds like the right sort of idea. The only internet content I've paid for in the last year (apart from the cost of maintaining my own website) is a donation to Wikimedia (and not using PayPal either)

You could buy a subscription to some other reference source instead, but the best bit about giving the money to an open site is that everyone can benefit from your donation. In fact for the cost of a bookshelf of encyclopediae, you could get one which never becomes out of date.

If you're looking for a dictionary, try updating the wiki once you find out what a new word means, and we should soon get a decent dictionary too.

Of course, school teachers and parents might prefer to spend their money on textbooks

MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.

Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:

• section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
• automatic image rescaling
• LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
• message transclusion - create messages that can be used
• namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
• plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)

> Do not cheer on attacks on the SCO site.

Not even a <nelson>Ha, ha!</nelson>?

> I certainly wouldn't choose this method to attack SCO, nor would I suggest it to others. But since it's happening (ostensibly) I intend to enjoy it.

Time for us to treat Wiktionary to it's first Slashdotting.

"I'm a poor speller too, but I found "spell check" and a proofreader, why can't you?"

The obvious answer is, that a spellchecker will likely give you the wrong words for a lot of things. We just tested a few spellcheckers last weekend, and even on the UK-English setting, most of them crossed out correctly-spelled words, and suggested american-style replacements.

They can be useful to look for typo's, or when learning a language (the easiest way to type accents in french is to leave them out and then spellcheck it), but if there's a wrong word in their CV, they're no good at telling you about it.

For anyone who knows how to use their chosen language, a spellchecker is probably not necessary, as they'll spend the whole time pressing "ignore" to URLs, numbers, and other non-words. And for someone who doesn't know how to spell, they risk the machine making some rather odd decisions for them...

Anyone trying to find a spelling error in this post, could you go to wiktionary instead, and update a few definitions. Thanks.

Try a coke processing plant ( the black coal stuff, not the drink ) or a casting plant that uses graphite as a release agent.. Both will cause black lung, among other things...

That will give you this disease Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Damn !, I've been waiting since I was 7 years old to use that word for more than "I can say the longest word in the dictionary !"

"According to dictionary.com..."

According to the Wiktionary, there is no definition yet for spyware, nor is Gator listed in the Wikipedia

Of course, both reference sites allow you to edit the definition of any of their entries...

• soiree
  
• rendez-vous
  
• patio
  
• rodeo
  
• zeitgeist
  
• ansatz