After long ago abandoning Alta Vista for Google, I've recently found myself compelled to return, for one simple reason; Google try too hard to tell me what I'm looking for.
What I mean is this, Google are not content to let me tell them what I want to find. Their search algorithms now completely discount my use of quotation marks to group words, or to try to indicate that I really want whatever unlikely word I enter. Many of the old tricks for hinting to the search engine that you mean what you say are now ignored entirely. On Alta Vista, powered by Yahoo! (and therefore by Bing, I guess) those tricks still work.
When I perform technical term searches, which is much of what I do, I don't need the search engine second guessing my spelling. If Google would let me override their "corrections" I would continue to use them.
Fedhax (513562) wrote "Brad posted some brief comments from his interaction with the Dean campaign (9/10/2003)", but that mistates the case. Brad wrote "I met with a Presidential campaign yesterday" without stating that it was Dean's campaign, and then later, in reference to Drupal states "if you compare the features to what Howard Dean has on his site, you are basically setup with everything he has". This implies to me that he was talking with another campaign.
The fact that Dean's own site says "...have been working on this project for nearly six months... extending Drupal" shows that they have been using Drupal for a long time before Brad's meeting two weeks ago.
A lot of work has already been done on this frontier by people working on ODMA a specification which has been around since 1994, part of an effort by the Association for for Information and Image Management(AIIM). There is other work being done in the field now.
A company I worked for in the mid-nineties wrote an ODMA integration module for AutoCAD which required that the user complete the title block of the drawing before they could save the file. The pertinent attributes were extracted from the drawing and passed on to the document management system (DMS).
With most DMSs, the file to be saved is full-text indexed as well (often this work is done as a background task during slower periods) so that you can locate a document with fuzzy searches, even if you do not no what attributes were used to store it.
Novell Groupwise includes an ODMA compliant DMS which also includes viewer modules for many common file formats, and with the web interface can allow a user on the road to search an entire library, view the results via a web browser, and download or checkout the desired documents.
It would be wonderful if someone could come up with a standards based way to provide similar functionality in a Free Software based DMS. I know of a few companies who cannot switch away from Windows/Novell because of the need for a robust DMS, and the clients to integrate with it. This is especially important in fields like Medicine and Legal, where large numbers of documents are generated on a regular basis.
Back in 1978, when I studied PL/1 at SSU in Minnesota, I went nuts trying to figure out why my program, the first assignment of the class, wasn't working. I re-read every punch card (yes, punch cards!) and I still couldn't find the bug. Between each run of the program, I had to wait 30 minutes for my "job" to get it's turn (good ol' batch processing).
I focused all of my energies on card 47, column ten - the debugger was sure that there lay the problem. It was just what I expected, though, a period! Finally, a classmate came into the lab, and I asked if I could see his card #47. I held the two cards up to the light, and sure enough, there was a difference. My card and his had a different punch pattern for column 10! Turns out that I had a comma and not a period, but the print head on the card punch machine was broken, and wouldn't print any descenders, so what looked like a period was actually a comma!!
I dropped the class the next day, and never took another programming course. I have been programming ever since, but never again in PL/1.
Many of the engineers who run the biggest networks work very closely with Cisco to develop, implement and document new features in IOS. Here is a Cisco document which explains how an ISP should implement these features:
I subscribe to the New York Times, and have for years. I can't imagine that I will stop any time soon.
A newspaper gives me a lot of things that I just can't get from other sources - chiefly portability. There is no easily readable source available that is as light, malleable, flexible and convenient as a newspaper.
A news paper allows me to read the news in depth at my leisure wherever I am. Television news does not give me depth, except for the extraordinary Newshour with Jim Lehrer, or similar shows, and then they must sacrifice breadth. The web can give me both depth and breadth, but is not convenient to read on the bus, at a bar, while walking, sitting on the couch, or any of a myriad places where I regularly like to catch up on things.
I don't expect a general interest media like newspapers to give me the best and most up to date information about narrow interest fields such as intellectual property rights, new chip designs or DeCSS - that's what narrow interest media, like/. are for. It is worthy of note that while/. cites the New York Times on an almost daily basis, the NYT cites/. only about once a week or so - but they do cite/., which belies the claim that the "old media" is clueless.
You may just as well argue the death of any of the "old" media, as has been done over and over, as each new media arises to claim that it will replace all that preceded it. Newpapers didn't die when radio was invented - even though radio told a waiting world of the sinking of the Titanic or the crash of the Hindenberg well before any newspaper could. And T.V. didn't replace radio, nor the web replace T.V.
The human mind is amazingly adept at finding and assimilating new tools, and developing to use the best tools for any given job. The media world is no less of a choice of tools than any other realm of human existence - there is a place in it for all of the media which we have invented.
Just try to name a form of media which has been invented which is no longer in use! Morse code, semifore, flags - still used. Tabloid, broadsheet, magazine, roto-gravure - still used. Radio, television, videotext - still used.
Let's not be such fools that we rush yet again to write the obituaries and requium of still thriving and usefull media.
I am now going to sign off, fold up my portable news source, put it in my pocket, and take it to read in a public place - where I will learn many things from reading it which virtually none of those around me know, 'cause their too busy with the tele and the web.
I had initially registered for the event, but then realized that it was to be a Tuesday-Thursday event close to Christmas in New York City. This means that airfare would cost a fortune (no Saturday or Sunday stay over) and hotels, which are always expensive in NYC, would be even more so, due to the holiday shopping crowds.
I decided that I could not afford to spend $1000-US or more and take time off of work to attend a conference on free software. While I write free software (Postilion), I cannot afford to spend like this to attend a conference about it.
Good thing I didn't go - my credentials didn't show up until the day of the conference.
A few years ago, when I worked at Discovery World we ported the armlib software from UNC to work on RT-Linux with the PHANToM. Our work is available here . It was pretty fun work while it lasted. Unfortunately, when I left, the project died. We did develop an extension of the UNC client/server protocol for remote manipulation - we called it TouchU-TouchME, but we never had a chance to present a paper on it. Oh well... I note on the UNC web site that someone has created a scanning-tunneling probe using Lego Mindstorms. This would be an ideal mate to the work that WillWare describes above.
Slashdot Mirror
After long ago abandoning Alta Vista for Google, I've recently found myself compelled to return, for one simple reason; Google try too hard to tell me what I'm looking for.
What I mean is this, Google are not content to let me tell them what I want to find. Their search algorithms now completely discount my use of quotation marks to group words, or to try to indicate that I really want whatever unlikely word I enter. Many of the old tricks for hinting to the search engine that you mean what you say are now ignored entirely. On Alta Vista, powered by Yahoo! (and therefore by Bing, I guess) those tricks still work.
When I perform technical term searches, which is much of what I do, I don't need the search engine second guessing my spelling. If Google would let me override their "corrections" I would continue to use them.
Fedhax (513562) wrote "Brad posted some brief comments from his interaction with the Dean campaign (9/10/2003)", but that mistates the case. Brad wrote "I met with a Presidential campaign yesterday" without stating that it was Dean's campaign, and then later, in reference to Drupal states "if you compare the features to what Howard Dean has on his site, you are basically setup with everything he has". This implies to me that he was talking with another campaign.
The fact that Dean's own site says "...have been working on this project for nearly six months ... extending Drupal" shows that they have been using Drupal for a long time before Brad's meeting two weeks ago.
A company I worked for in the mid-nineties wrote an ODMA integration module for AutoCAD which required that the user complete the title block of the drawing before they could save the file. The pertinent attributes were extracted from the drawing and passed on to the document management system (DMS).
With most DMSs, the file to be saved is full-text indexed as well (often this work is done as a background task during slower periods) so that you can locate a document with fuzzy searches, even if you do not no what attributes were used to store it.
Novell Groupwise includes an ODMA compliant DMS which also includes viewer modules for many common file formats, and with the web interface can allow a user on the road to search an entire library, view the results via a web browser, and download or checkout the desired documents.
It would be wonderful if someone could come up with a standards based way to provide similar functionality in a Free Software based DMS. I know of a few companies who cannot switch away from Windows/Novell because of the need for a robust DMS, and the clients to integrate with it. This is especially important in fields like Medicine and Legal, where large numbers of documents are generated on a regular basis.
Back in 1978, when I studied PL/1 at SSU in Minnesota, I went nuts trying to figure out why my program, the first assignment of the class, wasn't working. I re-read every punch card (yes, punch cards!) and I still couldn't find the bug. Between each run of the program, I had to wait 30 minutes for my "job" to get it's turn (good ol' batch processing).
I focused all of my energies on card 47, column ten - the debugger was sure that there lay the problem. It was just what I expected, though, a period! Finally, a classmate came into the lab, and I asked if I could see his card #47. I held the two cards up to the light, and sure enough, there was a difference. My card and his had a different punch pattern for column 10! Turns out that I had a comma and not a period, but the print head on the card punch machine was broken, and wouldn't print any descenders, so what looked like a period was actually a comma!!
I dropped the class the next day, and never took another programming course. I have been programming ever since, but never again in PL/1.
Many of the engineers who run the biggest networks work very closely with Cisco to develop, implement and document new features in IOS. Here is a Cisco document which explains how an ISP should implement these features:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/EssentialIO Sfeatures_pdf.zip
A newspaper gives me a lot of things that I just can't get from other sources - chiefly portability. There is no easily readable source available that is as light, malleable, flexible and convenient as a newspaper.
A news paper allows me to read the news in depth at my leisure wherever I am. Television news does not give me depth, except for the extraordinary Newshour with Jim Lehrer, or similar shows, and then they must sacrifice breadth. The web can give me both depth and breadth, but is not convenient to read on the bus, at a bar, while walking, sitting on the couch, or any of a myriad places where I regularly like to catch up on things.
I don't expect a general interest media like newspapers to give me the best and most up to date information about narrow interest fields such as intellectual property rights, new chip designs or DeCSS - that's what narrow interest media, like /. are for. It is worthy of note that while /. cites the New York Times on an almost daily basis, the NYT cites /. only about once a week or so - but they do cite /., which belies the claim that the "old media" is clueless.
You may just as well argue the death of any of the "old" media, as has been done over and over, as each new media arises to claim that it will replace all that preceded it. Newpapers didn't die when radio was invented - even though radio told a waiting world of the sinking of the Titanic or the crash of the Hindenberg well before any newspaper could. And T.V. didn't replace radio, nor the web replace T.V.
The human mind is amazingly adept at finding and assimilating new tools, and developing to use the best tools for any given job. The media world is no less of a choice of tools than any other realm of human existence - there is a place in it for all of the media which we have invented.
Just try to name a form of media which has been invented which is no longer in use! Morse code, semifore, flags - still used. Tabloid, broadsheet, magazine, roto-gravure - still used. Radio, television, videotext - still used.
Let's not be such fools that we rush yet again to write the obituaries and requium of still thriving and usefull media.
I am now going to sign off, fold up my portable news source, put it in my pocket, and take it to read in a public place - where I will learn many things from reading it which virtually none of those around me know, 'cause their too busy with the tele and the web.
-30-
I had initially registered for the event, but then realized that it was to be a Tuesday-Thursday event close to Christmas in New York City. This means that airfare would cost a fortune (no Saturday or Sunday stay over) and hotels, which are always expensive in NYC, would be even more so, due to the holiday shopping crowds.
I decided that I could not afford to spend $1000-US or more and take time off of work to attend a conference on free software. While I write free software (Postilion), I cannot afford to spend like this to attend a conference about it.
Good thing I didn't go - my credentials didn't show up until the day of the conference.
-nic
A few years ago, when I worked at Discovery World we ported the armlib software from UNC to work on RT-Linux with the PHANToM. Our work is available here . It was pretty fun work while it lasted. Unfortunately, when I left, the project died. We did develop an extension of the UNC client/server protocol for remote manipulation - we called it TouchU-TouchME, but we never had a chance to present a paper on it. Oh well... I note on the UNC web site that someone has created a scanning-tunneling probe using Lego Mindstorms. This would be an ideal mate to the work that WillWare describes above.
Check out John Walker's web site at:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html
He started posting this stuff a couple of years ago. I believe he has made the resources available. It's a wonderful site.