Linus can't run. You've got to be born in the U.S. to be eligible for the office of President. I think if you're born on foreign soil to parents who are both naturally born U.S. citizens you are also eligible.
I always thought this was run by witchcraft types. Looks like I was wrong! Whew! Now I won't worry about Wikipedia being the cursed giver of satanic disinformation any longer. Even if someone wanted to be that, today they'd have to get in line behind Bill, RIAA and the MPAA. Now I can rest a little easier. At any rate, I like everything2 myself.
At first glance, this seems to be a welcome development. But read the following quote carefully:
He said that before New York pursued other cases, the attorney general would wait and see whether companies changed their policies, and whether consumers used the decision to address concerns with companies.
Does anyone actually think NY State is going to monitor companies to see if they change their policies? This translates into "corporations who do not donate to the party-in-control in New York State will be singled out for harsher treatment, so start getting out those checkbooks."
In all seriousness (the above was only partly tongue in cheek) though, this decision would have been OK even if no fine was imposed. It would be perfectly acceptable for the decision to basically say "These clauses are legally un-enforcable. Consumers should feel free to ignore them without any fear of legal liability." I would have been fine with that.
I disagree on your notion of a Constitutional Amendment to ban sales taxes. I do agree with you, however, that the notion of the "internet economy" is bogus. Just another buzz word phrase meant to fool those un-initiated in the club of high finance.
I had to install DX9 for compatability with a new piece of software I need to run. Since I'm a developer I also installed the DX9 SDK. Found this little tidbit in the Installation Notes:
Significant enhancements to the GraphEdit utility, including Windows Media Certification (dekeying of non-DRM WM graphs), Filter Favorites menu, improved connect/disconnect from remote graphs, save/restore options, frame stepping, and color coding of connected filters. XGR files are no longer supported by GraphEdit.
I'm not sure exactly what this means, but if new development, especially games, continue to force people into DirectX upgrades, all it takes is MS flipping the switch and we're trapped.
Americans buy approx. 400 billion cigarettes each year (extrapolated from this CDC data). At ten cents apiece, that's $40 Billion each year, and it's not hard to argue that cigarettes cost way more than 10 cents apiece. So in about 20 years Americans have spent almost as much on a fantastic piece of hardware as they do on cigarettes every year. Which is better?
True story: A guy I work with in NY is from Texas. He had a meeting with someone from the database group last week, and when he came back, he was telling us about the things "That Russian guy" told him. Well, the DB group doesn't have any Russians in it, so we asked him who he was talking about. His answer: "You know, the Russian guy with the beard. Vito." Once you've been to Texas things like this don't really surprise you anymore.
But the question is, "Which State?" Basically they all suck. The Northeast is too crowded and cold. The Dakotas? Minnesota? No thanks, waaaaayyyyyy too cold for me. Perhaps the answer is in AZ or NM. Aren't there significant numbers of native Americans there, forced into squalid living conditions on Federal "reservations", that would be only too willing to negotiate a new deal for themselves? Instant constituency.
Just because I Chinese you think I pirate movie! Well that bullshit! I'm not a stereotype, OK? I eat rice and buy lots of CDs just like you! I'm not a stereotype!
(goddamned Mongolians!)
Re:A users perspective of Red Hat 8 and KDE
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
It is a nice looking page. If you want to attain the next plateau in "quality", however, you really need to fix some of your spelling and grammatical mistakes. You constantly refer to Red Hat in the plural. "Red Hat have screwed up the desktop", for instance. Red Hat is a company, and while a company is made up of many people, it's customary to refer to a company in the singular. "Red Hat has screwed up the desktop" would be much better. There are countless more mistakes just like this polluting your page.
This is not meant to flame you, just some friendly advice. Web sites that strive to be "professional" looking (whatever that means) but have tons of spelling and grammatical errors come off as pretentious IMO.
Texas. LOL. I'm all in favor of fighting a NEW war between the states. The explicit goal would be to forcefully expel Texas from the Union. See ya! You haven't *seen* stupid until you've seen Texas. If ignorance is bliss then Texas is awash in ecstasy.
And yes, I've thought this long before W ever bought^H^H^H^H^H^H won the election in 2000.
Back in the mid-80s I was a consultant at a company that had several dozen tech-writers working for a guy who himself was a consultant. We were all doing tech documentation for a mil-spec project. The head guy had a cool sense of humor. As the project entered its final 6 months he would regularly update a file on one of the system disks called LAYOFF.LST
It was gibberish but looked like it was encrypted data. What a hoot watching everybody squirm as the revision numbers went up and up and up week by week. Of course, nobody ever really got laid off.
Even huge companies like AOL Time Warner appear to be struggling to figure out -- still -- how to come up with online content and services that mainstream consumers will be willing to pay for.
I've been on the 'net since the days of Mosaic and before that, WAIS and Gopher. You know what I just realized? I've NEVER paid cash money for "online content". Maybe someday I will, but not yet. I don't use the internet as a "consumer". I use it for information, mostly, and maybe 10% of the time for entertainment. The non-pr0n kind. Big media wanted the internet to become another vehicle to the masses like television. It's not working and I say Thank Heaven. It doesn't surprise me at all that AOL has hit the wall. They have never really provided their customers with "the Internet". They basically provided their advertisers with their subscribers' eyeballs. AOL in trouble. What a beautiful thing.
Clueless congressional representatives, obeying their masters in Holywood, have taken up the cry that the reason highspeed broadband internet access hasn't really taken off is that there is no "online content" that will entice consumers into the arena. Then they use that excuse to say that Holywood won't provide this content until they can be "protected" from IP theft (which is a bogus concept, but that's another story). The bright spot in there is that the big communications giants have strung a ton of fiber around the U.S. and there's a glut of it. I have a cable modem and my satisfaction with speed on the internet as a whole is above 90%. Thank heaven (again) they built out this high-speed infrastructure before going into a tailspin.
This is a little OT and some might not agree. In any case, I think elections in the U.S. would be much better if TV campaign ads were banned altogether. I could live without donation limits or overall campaign spending limits if only TV ads were banned. I don't think it's a free speech issue. Nothing guarantees my right to go on TV and spout off about my piss-me-off-du-jour complaints. The politicos and their henchmen argue that I could do that - if I had the money to do it. Let's face it, a big chunk of campaign money goes to TV and cable operators.
Get their self-serving, bashing, slime-hurling, pseudo-factual (and sometimes outright dishonest) ads off the air at election time altogether. Let the voter who wishes to be informed to READ about the candidates and issues rather than having (dis)information spoon-fed to them through the boob tube. The cost of campaigns would decline dramatically.
Ah, what the fuck. The problem of spamming politicians pales in comparison to the damage being done via political ads on TV. This country is doomed because the vast majority of the people in it are fucking stupid. Who was it that said "Nobody ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American public"? At one time in this country reasonable people had a good shot at educating/informing/persuading the masses as to what was "the right thing". TV, and to a lesser extent other forms of media, have turned Americans' brains to mush.
Didn't Rambus get slapped for this sort of trick? If I remember correctly, they held certain IP which they did not disclose during the standards meetings. Then they waited until lots of other companies were using those standards, which incorporated their IP. When the momentum was already strong, they attempted to collect absurd royalties, and let loose their legal dogs to pounce on anyone who didn't ante up. Sounds verrrrrryyyyyy familiar.
I would think this would lead to a situation where CYA would become a way of life. Sure, even the best developers will make an occasional mistake. The document notes that a successful culture needs to recognize that mistakes will happen, but if ONE defect is going to shut down 5,000 people, I know I wouldn't want to be the one everybody is pointing their fingers at. I can imagine the circus atmosphere when the blame-shifting and the search for the guilty goes into high gear.
PZ should get involved with Mozilla. For literally years I've been waiting for someone to build in some sort of public-key email (and newsgroup) crypto. It's still not there yet, and THAT has prevented several people I know - including myself - from adopting Mozilla as my sole internet access tool. I'd love to be able to dump some of the crap I run for email and usenet.
First it was the export restrictions that were deterring Mozilla crypto. Now it's something else. I guess these projects qualify for some of what's being done today, but I needed Mozilla to do built-in crypto years ago. The standard Mozilla comeback is "do it yourself". Well, I have neither the time nor the skill to do that. But Phil does!
I saw this on sci.crypt today and my interest was piqued in that I am currently trying to shoot down another bogus patent (that's another story). Anyway, I looked up the patent, U.S. 6,185,681 (Zizz) and specifically checked out the Examiner's name and the Asst. Examiner's name to see if either one was the same dull-witted wonk who "examined" the patent I'm otherwise researching.
Now the goddamned USPTO is slashdotted so I can't get those names for you right now, but they were different names for both the Examiner and the Asst. Examiner. So now we have at least 4 clueless fucknuts working at the USPTO. I'm willing to bet they're the tip of the iceberg. *sigh
Well, I got this in the middle of loading the 7th page or so:
This site has exceeded its limit of 3 Gigabytes of transfer for the month. You may buy extra Gigabytes of transfer by logging in to the user menu and choosing "upgrade".
John's coaster is kinda cool. Paul needs some remedial English and maybe a remedial web design class as well. The negatives adorning the left side of the pages were more frightening than the Blue Flash itself! You know, Paul, there are such things as thumbnails. Furhtermore, a simple jpg compression of 50% reduced some of the pictures from 700+ kB by a factor of almost 10 without too much image degradation. Could have saved some of that monthly bandwidth there, Chief. Ah well, what do you expect from someone who names their son "Bond"?
Re:How is this different than the Yellow Pages?
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 1
It's very much like the Yellow pages, but with a significant difference: It's called Honesty. The non-Google search engines are being fundamentally dishonest. If I look in the YP, do I expect to find non-paid ads? No, of course not. If I look something up in the White Pages, do I expect to find paid ads? Well, sometimes, but it's pretty easy to tell which ones are paid for - bold text, etc.
When a site presents search results to you and sprinkles the results with stealth paid ads and doesn't tell you which ones are sponsored, that's called dishonest. I would go so far as to call it fraud. I take issue with your final statement/question. No search site at all is better than a dishonest site. Ad revenue be damned. Most ads are sleazy anyway, but stealth ads are unethical, immoral, dishonest and should be made criminal.
A client needed some work done on a few of their Linux systems. They allow incoming traffic onto their LAN only through their Intel NetStructure VPN appliance. No problem, "send me the client software" I said, and they did. It was for Windows only!
So I undertook some research. Intel bought their NetStructure line from Shiva some time ago. After a few of their (Intel's) chip customers complained long and hard about competitive issues a la pre-packaged devices such as NetStructure, Intel decided to get out of the appliance biz. Then stopped making the NetStructure VPN appliance. They sold it to HP. Here's Intel's announcement and here's HP's announcement. Here's an IT World story about the same thing. They all tell how Intel's NetStructure 31xx VPN Gateway product line will still be available through HP as the HP VPN Server Appliance SA3xxx series. These are basically old Shiva products - hence their use of SST (Shiva Secure Tunnel) tunnels which are AFAIK unique to these products.
Here's the catch: while these server appliances run Linux (I know I saw that somewhere but I can't remember where) they have no Linux client software! Here's Intel's support page (look for their client software support) and HP's support page - don't have the URL handy but I'm sure of it - contains the same information.
The upshot of all this is that in order to work on Linux systems at a remote location from my local PC, I have to pass through a VPN Gateway which also runs Linux, but I have to use Windows on my end for the VPN client. What a crock! I looked into free/Swan but it doesn't do Shiva Secure Tunnels. Until HP gets serious about this one particular product line and gets some Linux client sotware into the picture, I'm steering clear of anything else they may trumpet as part of their "We do Linux" hype.
I wouldn't count on these anytime much before another 25 years at the least:
Real time language translation 2004
Machine use of common sense inference 2005
There have been no real breakthroughs in the former for a long long time. What psycholinguists call "Deep Structures" will almost certainly have to be validated and thoroughly researched before any hardware/software algorithm can succesfully and reliably translate human languages. Now if you're talking about translating FORTRAN into C, well, I might give you that by 2004.
As for the latter, the Japanese spent huge amounts of money on their "3d Generation" (or was it 5th) computing project back in the '80s via their fabulous MITI (Ministry of Information something something) and despite lots of publicity and hype, inference engines went exactly nowhere. We just just don't have enough of an understanding of meta-language or meta-reasoning to make all this happen in a few years. 25 years at least. I suppose breakthroughs could happen at any time, but I keep up on news regarding these areas and there's just not a lot being done in terms of well-funded research (the failed Japanese project notwithstanding).
This article is an excellent read in any case. Can't wait to see page 2!
Unlike the dot-bombs, Corel has been in a period of slow, steady decline. I heard an anecdote while working for a law firm some months ago. To wit: Apparently Bill Gates' father is a big lawyer muckety-muck somewhere and Bill questioned him on why it is that almost all lawyers and law firms in the U.S. were married to WordPerfect. (This was true of every law firm I ever dealt with, and that includes District Attorney offices on every level. Whenever I needed to produce a document that needed to be shared I had to convert it from Word into WordPerfect format.) The answer he got was twofold: (1) Inertia. That's just the way it is and it's always been that way so why change? and (2) There were some WordPerfect idiosyncracies that WordPerfect had that MS Word couldn't duplicate. What those are in particular, I'm not sure, but I would guess it involves hot-key commands (which are plentiful in WP) and "Show Control Codes" or some such function that lets you edit and touch up all the hidden commands that actually perform the special formatting for the WSYWIG output. Lawyers wouldn't even consider moving to a word processor that couldn't do that. I know I've struggled with Word formatting quite a bit as I'm sure everyone else has. Eventually it gets so frustrating that you just give up and settle for letting Word do what it wants to do.
At any rate, Bill decided that MS Word should be the legal Word Processor Uber Alles and directed his minions to make it so. As of today, he still hasn't succeeded in his goal AFAIK. The MS investment in Corel might be directed toward continued progress in that regard. As soon as Microsoft can supplant WordPerfect as the word processor of choice on legal desktops everywhere (at least in the U.S.), WordPerfect's and Corel Suite or whatever's usefulness will have ended.
Lawyers and law firms may just be the biggest single user group of Corel's office suite left. They may be the only customers that keep it alive. There are certainly enough of them to keep WordPerfect (and possibly Corel itself) alive for some time to come. When they finally switch (resistance is futile), WordPerfect will probably die and Corel will finally execute it's final CFIT. That's aviation terminology for "Controlled Flight Into Terrain".
Imagine, Microsoft - the Evil Empire - at long last in bed with not only its own lawyers, but all lawyers everywhere - Satan's Spawn on Earth. The Horror.... the horror.....
Slashdot Mirror
Linus can't run. You've got to be born in the U.S. to be eligible for the office of President. I think if you're born on foreign soil to parents who are both naturally born U.S. citizens you are also eligible.
I always thought this was run by witchcraft types. Looks like I was wrong! Whew! Now I won't worry about Wikipedia being the cursed giver of satanic disinformation any longer. Even if someone wanted to be that, today they'd have to get in line behind Bill, RIAA and the MPAA. Now I can rest a little easier. At any rate, I like everything2 myself.
Does anyone actually think NY State is going to monitor companies to see if they change their policies? This translates into "corporations who do not donate to the party-in-control in New York State will be singled out for harsher treatment, so start getting out those checkbooks."
In all seriousness (the above was only partly tongue in cheek) though, this decision would have been OK even if no fine was imposed. It would be perfectly acceptable for the decision to basically say "These clauses are legally un-enforcable. Consumers should feel free to ignore them without any fear of legal liability." I would have been fine with that.
I disagree on your notion of a Constitutional Amendment to ban sales taxes. I do agree with you, however, that the notion of the "internet economy" is bogus. Just another buzz word phrase meant to fool those un-initiated in the club of high finance.
I'm not sure exactly what this means, but if new development, especially games, continue to force people into DirectX upgrades, all it takes is MS flipping the switch and we're trapped.
20 years ago. And NOT to protect the incompetent. More along the lines of professional associations like the AMA, the ABA, the MLBPA or the NHLPA.
Americans buy approx. 400 billion cigarettes each year (extrapolated from this CDC data). At ten cents apiece, that's $40 Billion each year, and it's not hard to argue that cigarettes cost way more than 10 cents apiece. So in about 20 years Americans have spent almost as much on a fantastic piece of hardware as they do on cigarettes every year. Which is better?
True story: A guy I work with in NY is from Texas. He had a meeting with someone from the database group last week, and when he came back, he was telling us about the things "That Russian guy" told him. Well, the DB group doesn't have any Russians in it, so we asked him who he was talking about. His answer: "You know, the Russian guy with the beard. Vito." Once you've been to Texas things like this don't really surprise you anymore.
But the question is, "Which State?" Basically they all suck. The Northeast is too crowded and cold. The Dakotas? Minnesota? No thanks, waaaaayyyyyy too cold for me. Perhaps the answer is in AZ or NM. Aren't there significant numbers of native Americans there, forced into squalid living conditions on Federal "reservations", that would be only too willing to negotiate a new deal for themselves? Instant constituency.
Just because I Chinese you think I pirate movie! Well that bullshit! I'm not a stereotype, OK? I eat rice and buy lots of CDs just like you! I'm not a stereotype!
(goddamned Mongolians!)
It is a nice looking page. If you want to attain the next plateau in "quality", however, you really need to fix some of your spelling and grammatical mistakes. You constantly refer to Red Hat in the plural. "Red Hat have screwed up the desktop", for instance. Red Hat is a company, and while a company is made up of many people, it's customary to refer to a company in the singular. "Red Hat has screwed up the desktop" would be much better. There are countless more mistakes just like this polluting your page.
This is not meant to flame you, just some friendly advice. Web sites that strive to be "professional" looking (whatever that means) but have tons of spelling and grammatical errors come off as pretentious IMO.
Texas. LOL.
I'm all in favor of fighting a NEW war between the states. The explicit goal would be to forcefully expel Texas from the Union. See ya! You haven't *seen* stupid until you've seen Texas. If ignorance is bliss then Texas is awash in ecstasy.
And yes, I've thought this long before W ever bought^H^H^H^H^H^H won the election in 2000.
Back in the mid-80s I was a consultant at a company that had several dozen tech-writers working for a guy who himself was a consultant. We were all doing tech documentation for a mil-spec project. The head guy had a cool sense of humor. As the project entered its final 6 months he would regularly update a file on one of the system disks called LAYOFF.LST
It was gibberish but looked like it was encrypted data. What a hoot watching everybody squirm as the revision numbers went up and up and up week by week. Of course, nobody ever really got laid off.
I've been on the 'net since the days of Mosaic and before that, WAIS and Gopher. You know what I just realized? I've NEVER paid cash money for "online content". Maybe someday I will, but not yet. I don't use the internet as a "consumer". I use it for information, mostly, and maybe 10% of the time for entertainment. The non-pr0n kind. Big media wanted the internet to become another vehicle to the masses like television. It's not working and I say Thank Heaven. It doesn't surprise me at all that AOL has hit the wall. They have never really provided their customers with "the Internet". They basically provided their advertisers with their subscribers' eyeballs. AOL in trouble. What a beautiful thing.
Clueless congressional representatives, obeying their masters in Holywood, have taken up the cry that the reason highspeed broadband internet access hasn't really taken off is that there is no "online content" that will entice consumers into the arena. Then they use that excuse to say that Holywood won't provide this content until they can be "protected" from IP theft (which is a bogus concept, but that's another story). The bright spot in there is that the big communications giants have strung a ton of fiber around the U.S. and there's a glut of it. I have a cable modem and my satisfaction with speed on the internet as a whole is above 90%. Thank heaven (again) they built out this high-speed infrastructure before going into a tailspin.
This is a little OT and some might not agree. In any case, I think elections in the U.S. would be much better if TV campaign ads were banned altogether. I could live without donation limits or overall campaign spending limits if only TV ads were banned. I don't think it's a free speech issue. Nothing guarantees my right to go on TV and spout off about my piss-me-off-du-jour complaints. The politicos and their henchmen argue that I could do that - if I had the money to do it. Let's face it, a big chunk of campaign money goes to TV and cable operators.
Get their self-serving, bashing, slime-hurling, pseudo-factual (and sometimes outright dishonest) ads off the air at election time altogether. Let the voter who wishes to be informed to READ about the candidates and issues rather than having (dis)information spoon-fed to them through the boob tube. The cost of campaigns would decline dramatically.
Ah, what the fuck. The problem of spamming politicians pales in comparison to the damage being done via political ads on TV. This country is doomed because the vast majority of the people in it are fucking stupid. Who was it that said "Nobody ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American public"? At one time in this country reasonable people had a good shot at educating/informing/persuading the masses as to what was "the right thing". TV, and to a lesser extent other forms of media, have turned Americans' brains to mush.
Didn't Rambus get slapped for this sort of trick? If I remember correctly, they held certain IP which they did not disclose during the standards meetings. Then they waited until lots of other companies were using those standards, which incorporated their IP. When the momentum was already strong, they attempted to collect absurd royalties, and let loose their legal dogs to pounce on anyone who didn't ante up. Sounds verrrrrryyyyyy familiar.
PZ should get involved with Mozilla. For literally years I've been waiting for someone to build in some sort of public-key email (and newsgroup) crypto. It's still not there yet, and THAT has prevented several people I know - including myself - from adopting Mozilla as my sole internet access tool. I'd love to be able to dump some of the crap I run for email and usenet.
First it was the export restrictions that were deterring Mozilla crypto. Now it's something else. I guess these projects qualify for some of what's being done today, but I needed Mozilla to do built-in crypto years ago. The standard Mozilla comeback is "do it yourself". Well, I have neither the time nor the skill to do that. But Phil does!
I saw this on sci.crypt today and my interest was piqued in that I am currently trying to shoot down another bogus patent (that's another story). Anyway, I looked up the patent, U.S. 6,185,681 (Zizz) and specifically checked out the Examiner's name and the Asst. Examiner's name to see if either one was the same dull-witted wonk who "examined" the patent I'm otherwise researching.
Now the goddamned USPTO is slashdotted so I can't get those names for you right now, but they were different names for both the Examiner and the Asst. Examiner. So now we have at least 4 clueless fucknuts working at the USPTO. I'm willing to bet they're the tip of the iceberg. *sigh
John's coaster is kinda cool. Paul needs some remedial English and maybe a remedial web design class as well. The negatives adorning the left side of the pages were more frightening than the Blue Flash itself! You know, Paul, there are such things as thumbnails. Furhtermore, a simple jpg compression of 50% reduced some of the pictures from 700+ kB by a factor of almost 10 without too much image degradation. Could have saved some of that monthly bandwidth there, Chief. Ah well, what do you expect from someone who names their son "Bond"?
It's very much like the Yellow pages, but with a significant difference: It's called Honesty. The non-Google search engines are being fundamentally dishonest. If I look in the YP, do I expect to find non-paid ads? No, of course not. If I look something up in the White Pages, do I expect to find paid ads? Well, sometimes, but it's pretty easy to tell which ones are paid for - bold text, etc.
When a site presents search results to you and sprinkles the results with stealth paid ads and doesn't tell you which ones are sponsored, that's called dishonest. I would go so far as to call it fraud. I take issue with your final statement/question. No search site at all is better than a dishonest site. Ad revenue be damned. Most ads are sleazy anyway, but stealth ads are unethical, immoral, dishonest and should be made criminal.
A client needed some work done on a few of their Linux systems. They allow incoming traffic onto their LAN only through their Intel NetStructure VPN appliance. No problem, "send me the client software" I said, and they did. It was for Windows only!
So I undertook some research. Intel bought their NetStructure line from Shiva some time ago. After a few of their (Intel's) chip customers complained long and hard about competitive issues a la pre-packaged devices such as NetStructure, Intel decided to get out of the appliance biz. Then stopped making the NetStructure VPN appliance. They sold it to HP. Here's Intel's announcement and here's HP's announcement. Here's an IT World story about the same thing. They all tell how Intel's NetStructure 31xx VPN Gateway product line will still be available through HP as the HP VPN Server Appliance SA3xxx series. These are basically old Shiva products - hence their use of SST (Shiva Secure Tunnel) tunnels which are AFAIK unique to these products.
Here's the catch: while these server appliances run Linux (I know I saw that somewhere but I can't remember where) they have no Linux client software! Here's Intel's support page (look for their client software support) and HP's support page - don't have the URL handy but I'm sure of it - contains the same information.
The upshot of all this is that in order to work on Linux systems at a remote location from my local PC, I have to pass through a VPN Gateway which also runs Linux, but I have to use Windows on my end for the VPN client. What a crock! I looked into free/Swan but it doesn't do Shiva Secure Tunnels. Until HP gets serious about this one particular product line and gets some Linux client sotware into the picture, I'm steering clear of anything else they may trumpet as part of their "We do Linux" hype.
There have been no real breakthroughs in the former for a long long time. What psycholinguists call "Deep Structures" will almost certainly have to be validated and thoroughly researched before any hardware/software algorithm can succesfully and reliably translate human languages. Now if you're talking about translating FORTRAN into C, well, I might give you that by 2004.
As for the latter, the Japanese spent huge amounts of money on their "3d Generation" (or was it 5th) computing project back in the '80s via their fabulous MITI (Ministry of Information something something) and despite lots of publicity and hype, inference engines went exactly nowhere. We just just don't have enough of an understanding of meta-language or meta-reasoning to make all this happen in a few years. 25 years at least. I suppose breakthroughs could happen at any time, but I keep up on news regarding these areas and there's just not a lot being done in terms of well-funded research (the failed Japanese project notwithstanding).
This article is an excellent read in any case. Can't wait to see page 2!
Let the me-too's begin...
/. lameness filter.
Oh those wacky AOL'ers who venture forth onto Usenet! At least Web-TV'ers can't really download anything useful.
----------
Bogus disclaimer meant to avoid the
Unlike the dot-bombs, Corel has been in a period of slow, steady decline. I heard an anecdote while working for a law firm some months ago. To wit: Apparently Bill Gates' father is a big lawyer muckety-muck somewhere and Bill questioned him on why it is that almost all lawyers and law firms in the U.S. were married to WordPerfect. (This was true of every law firm I ever dealt with, and that includes District Attorney offices on every level. Whenever I needed to produce a document that needed to be shared I had to convert it from Word into WordPerfect format.) The answer he got was twofold: (1) Inertia. That's just the way it is and it's always been that way so why change? and (2) There were some WordPerfect idiosyncracies that WordPerfect had that MS Word couldn't duplicate. What those are in particular, I'm not sure, but I would guess it involves hot-key commands (which are plentiful in WP) and "Show Control Codes" or some such function that lets you edit and touch up all the hidden commands that actually perform the special formatting for the WSYWIG output. Lawyers wouldn't even consider moving to a word processor that couldn't do that. I know I've struggled with Word formatting quite a bit as I'm sure everyone else has. Eventually it gets so frustrating that you just give up and settle for letting Word do what it wants to do.
At any rate, Bill decided that MS Word should be the legal Word Processor Uber Alles and directed his minions to make it so. As of today, he still hasn't succeeded in his goal AFAIK. The MS investment in Corel might be directed toward continued progress in that regard. As soon as Microsoft can supplant WordPerfect as the word processor of choice on legal desktops everywhere (at least in the U.S.), WordPerfect's and Corel Suite or whatever's usefulness will have ended.
Lawyers and law firms may just be the biggest single user group of Corel's office suite left. They may be the only customers that keep it alive. There are certainly enough of them to keep WordPerfect (and possibly Corel itself) alive for some time to come. When they finally switch (resistance is futile), WordPerfect will probably die and Corel will finally execute it's final CFIT. That's aviation terminology for "Controlled Flight Into Terrain".
Imagine, Microsoft - the Evil Empire - at long last in bed with not only its own lawyers, but all lawyers everywhere - Satan's Spawn on Earth. The Horror.... the horror.....