Another vote for ABBYY FineReader. For us, it made the difference between not using OCR at all, and using it. All our previous attempts to use OCR seriously had failed, until we came across FineReader. We use FineReader Pro, but there's a whole product line of versions for different requirements.
I know what you mean about it sounding wrong. I think there must have been a fad at some point when people added "arian" to a bunch of words. One such word ended up being one of the longest words in English: antidisestablishmentarianism. Of course, it doesn't quite match floccinauccinihilipilification. You probably won't find either of those in the pocket oxford, though...;)
Time, in our universe, began when the universe was created. The "day before" has no meaning.
A separate question is whether our universe exists in some higher-dimensional structure, with its own timelike dimension(s). Even if it does, we'll probably never be able to determine anything about that - it may be physically (and philosophically) impossible to ever retrieve any information from "outside" of our universe.
How does APAP compare to ibuprofen from the toxicity perspective? I know ibuprofen is also not good for the liver, but is it similar/better/worse than APAP?
Will Microsoft ever go bankrupt because of Linux? Hardly. Will it be forced to change it strategies, modify its pricing, target some markets rather than others, because of Linux? The answer to every one of those is that it already has been forced to do those things, because of Linux, and that's the point of competition, and what the NYT editorial is saying.
Linux has had more success than Microsoft in the embedded space. It's giving Microsoft a run for its money in the server space - at least keeping market share away from Microsoft, if not actively grabbing it. It completely dominates in the supercomputer space, where Microsoft has no presence. So far, Linux has had very little impact in the desktop space, but that seems likely to change over the long term.
Over time, it's actually very likely that Microsoft's traditional sources of revenue will erode significantly, because of Linux and open source in general. Office suites are a case in point: on the one hand, you have Microsoft experimenting with licensing schemes where they try to charge consumers $100's per year for the use of their product, while on the other hand, you have very competitive free alternatives that have been improving at a dramatic rate and are
increasingly being noticed by organizations ranging from the governments of the U.S., Germany, and Peru, to colleges and companies with specialize needs. If Microsoft fails to get the world to switch to an office-suite-as-service model, and I think they will fail, Linux and open source will have played a big role in that.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is doomed. But they'll be forced to focus on and stick to spaces where they can compete effectively against "free" software - such as the big business world, where the consultants you can deploy are at least as important as the out-of-the-box software you provide.
In fact, Microsoft has been moving "upmarket" in this sense for a long time, which is one reason they began losing the support of small developers and companies: back when it sold DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft needed all the support it could get, and big business treated it as a minor side issue; now, big business loves Microsoft, and vice versa. If you're not a Fortune 1000 company, you're effectively little but a potential annoyance to Microsoft, a source of revenue that can't be supported in a cost-effective way.
Because of this, you can expect to see small business moving to Linux also, in servers to start with but later for workstations also, as Microsoft products become less and less suitable (Exchange, anyone?) and Linux becomes more and more off-the-shelf and automated (a la Red Hat network.)
In short, the New York Times is a little behind the times - they're acknowledging a grassroots trend that has been building for years, and that is already a reality. But they're quite timely in another sense, in that the effectiveness of Linux as a competitor to Microsoft has only just begun. It's only been four years since the Halloween documents opened many people's eyes to Linux, and the landscape has changed dramatically since then. Check back in 2006, and see how Microsoft has changed as a result. My bet is it'll be dramatic, although the specifics are hard to predict.
I might agree with you if the word could only be found on dictionary.com, which incorporates words from very modern sources like the Jargon File, but here's
"communitarian" at Merriam-Webster.
Passive as opposed to what? An active seismometer with giant hammers
Yeah, that's pretty much it - one of the ones used on Apollo missions was called a Thumper. Then there were the mortars which lobbed explosive charges, after the astronauts had taken off. See this or this.
They used active seismometers to do things like measure the depth of the regolith, i.e. the layer of mostly loose rock fragments and sand/dust that make up the outer mantle of the moon (and the Earth for that matter). The moon's regolith was found to be about 35 feet deep in the places they measured, compared to 300 feet in some parts of the Earth.
The problem is the horrible incompetence of the people that today "advise" you when it comes to computers. The idiots in "computer stores" today only know what press releases and commercials tell them.
That's a feature, not a bug. People sell people stuff they don't need, more money flows, economy looks good. But it's a bubble because sooner or later, people clue in to the fact that they don't actually *need* to upgrade again, and the market saturates almost instantly. This has in fact already happened, if you look at PC maker revenues over the past few years. This current article is just the latest of a sequence of events that's been going on for a while. The big boom is still winding down in some respects, and will continue to do that until there's some real or imagined reason to upgrade again.
Actually, a big reason "for each" doesn't generalize is because languages don't have good support for or factoring of the interfaces to their datatypes. If you look at how something like the STL library in C++ lets you iterate over arbitrary collection types (e.g. both linked lists and sets) with the same generic function, you get an idea of how a built-in "for each" construct should be able to work. Java comes close with its use of an Iterator interface, spoiled somewhat by the legacy Enumeration interface and lack of an actual foreach construct.
A foreach construct in Java would fix the Iterator interface into the language's design (since Java doesn't have extensible syntax), but once you've got a sufficiently general interface like Iterator, the downside to that kind of hardwiring is minimal to nonexistent.
Having syntactic sugar like foreach doesn't preclude having a more powerful or low-level loop construct, so I don't really see many disadvantages to this kind of thing. There's nothing wrong with using a foreach when it's appropriate and using something more specific in other cases.
OTOH again, though, if you never add the syntactic sugar, no-one would ever use switch statements or while loops, because you can achieve the same effects with zillions of if--else if--else if--else blocks or a degenerate for loop.
Witness languages like Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk, which have minimal syntax and do everything with functions or forms which look like functions (or message sends in Smalltalk's case). These languages are super-flexible, but lack of syntax seems (IMO) to be a barrier to adoption by the programming "masses". By contrast, look at Perl, one of the most syntax-heavy and also popular languages in existence.
The balance isn't a straightforward thing to judge, which is why I suspect scripting languages -- which want to do 50% of jobs as fast as possible and don't care about the rest -- incorporate many such helpers, while "industrial strength" languages tend to sacrifice the niceties in favour of a cleaner set of control structures, and providing tools to make them easier to use (iterator libraries and such).
I think the balance is still evolving. E.g., Java may have been right not to "commit" to a foreach until now, but at this point it wouldn't hurt to add it. Also, generic features as in STL have barely begun to impact language designs. Much of the balance that gets struck now is done between a very incomplete set of choices.
I fully expect to see languages appear with C-like performance and overhead (or the potential for that); the feel of a scripting language - including a traditionally friendly syntax; and the large-scale structuring capabilities of the "big" languages. I think C# was an attempt at that to some extent, but it had other goals and doesn't quite get there. I think there's a generational improvement waiting to be made, and you can feel it out there in the current crop of commercial and academic languages, but it's distributed and needs to be brought together in one language. It won't necessarily break new ground in terms of a groundbreaking academic feature set, but it'll be a package deal that as a whole will be a big improvement over the current either/or choices. That's my fantasy for the decade...
I wouldn't hold Javascript up as the ultimate programming language, but I think you're right that little things like this can make a big difference to the usability and perception of a language. Most language designers don't really seem to acknowledge this though. The scripting languages are usually stronger in this area, but there's no reason why other languages can't do a better job of this.
Simonyi doesn't really have to be original. If all he does is commercialize some of the ideas that have been floating around in academia and in "unpopular" languages (Lisp comes to mind:), Simonyi will have done the world a service.
What happened here is that the submitter read or heard something about a wireless honeypot being used to trap wardriving/walking etc. activity, and thought that the term just meant a free access point. He's confused.
"5. profit" was the business plan, based on somehow figuring out what step #4 should be.
Some companies thought it was "4. Spend IPO money and worthless inflated stock on acquiring other companies with loser business plans, and hope beyond all rational expectation that one of them will succeed and save our butts (and stock options)."
As one would expect, "5. go bankrupt" was the result.
Many years ago, I was working in tech support for a national software distributor. Out of curiosity and as a learning exercise, I cracked the "laser hole" diskette protection on a popular commercial software package. Learned a lot about Intel assembler and reverse engineering. I later went on to develop a couple of successful commercial software products, for which my reverse engineering skills were central, since the products were third-party add-ons to closed source products.
Seems to me that warez hacking of the kind you describe is hacking in the true sense, and is exactly why such things should not be illegal in themselves - because curiosity takes people to strange places. The line of illegality has to be somewhere beyond the curious hacker without malicious intent. Unfortunately, many recent laws don't recognize this at all. Criminalizing innocent acts just makes everyone a criminal...
This is not intended to be a facetious answer, but if you have to ask, then you probably don't need anything other than the default filesystem provided by your distribution.
Linux is used in an incredible variety of environments, from embedded systems without disks to seriously large servers and parallel supercomputers. As you might imagine, the default filesystem isn't always ideal. But, if you're just running an ordinary single-user workstation, and aren't experiencing any noticeable performance problems related to your disk access, then there's no reason to worry about your filesystem.
So "stick with what the installer suggests from now until..." you run into a reason to do otherwise, makes sense.
Re:Irrational Liberal "Epistemology" Strikes Again
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It's only natural that a group of borderline-psychopathic thugs and killers would get their epistemology so wrong as to conclude that they are the creators of the universe.
Excuse me, but I am the Creator of the Universe. Some people do consider me a borderline-psychopathic Thug - I admit, encouraging competing religions was a bad idea, not to mention the creation of trolls - what was I thinking? But no-one in their right minds would call Me a liberal. In fact, I have a good mind to smite thee for even thinking that!
But on second thoughts, smiting might be a tad psychopathic, and I've been trying to ease up on that a bit, since the whole World War II thing. I'll have to settle for having one of My acolytes mod you down.
Heh, your sqeezed-state idea sounds much more viable to me than the illusion theory of propagation speedup!
They're only saying that propagation speedups based on this might be possible, not that they've actually done it. Afaict, it's just a way of trying to position the research as being possibly related to something with a potential use, however remote. Previous experiments in this area have made similar claims, e.g. Lijun Wang's experiment. But I've yet to see a convincing explanation of how that speedup might be achieved, perhaps because no such explanation exists...
Actually, the most common reason for improved performance of "the internet" that I've seen is increased RAM. Browsers tend to chew memory, and if you don't have enough, the page swapping will slow even a fast CPU to a crawl. There are plenty of people upgrading 400MHz machines to GHz+ machines, who really just need to pop in another DIMM. (Of course, they're not capable of doing that, so buying a computer may be the best choice... Ignorance costs.)
The motion of the spot is only an 'illusion' (no actual photons are travelling faster than light) as are effects due to group velocity.
That's more or less what I was saying, i.e. that group velocities exceeding c are essentially an illusion, but my question was how the researchers plan to use this "illusion" to, according to the article, "boost electrical signal speeds in computers and telecommunications grids by more than 50 per cent." That'd be a pretty good use of an illusion!
(BTW, afaict, no-one else replying to my message is even remotely coming close to answering the question. Any real physicists out there?)
I'm not clear on what exactly bugs you about this. In your laser example, when you spin the laser 180 degrees, light travels out from the laser as it's being spun, and as a result, the appearance can occur of a moving spot which travels faster than c. The spot is not a single "thing" - it's the result of a succession of related events, as the emission source describes an arc. From the point of view of physics and special relativity, the fact that the resulting "spot" moves faster than c is unimportant, and doesn't break any rules. A projected spot or shadow is not a "thing" from the physical perspective, even though people tend to think of it as such.
Can't argue about New Scientist - it seems to have lost all credibility, perhaps since it began publishing on the web, I'm not sure. Luckily, we have Slashdot to correct it!;o))
Regarding phase velocity vs. group velocity, both phase velocity and group velocity can exceed c - see Superluminal, second paragraph. Group velocities exceeding c have been done for decades - for a bit of a history, see No thing goes faster than light.
The innovation in this case seems to be that it's doable with cheap equipment, and over fairly long distances.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is all quite difficult to follow, but try to keep up, m'kay?
I know what you mean about it sounding wrong. I think there must have been a fad at some point when people added "arian" to a bunch of words. One such word ended up being one of the longest words in English: antidisestablishmentarianism. Of course, it doesn't quite match floccinauccinihilipilification. You probably won't find either of those in the pocket oxford, though... ;)
A separate question is whether our universe exists in some higher-dimensional structure, with its own timelike dimension(s). Even if it does, we'll probably never be able to determine anything about that - it may be physically (and philosophically) impossible to ever retrieve any information from "outside" of our universe.
How does APAP compare to ibuprofen from the toxicity perspective? I know ibuprofen is also not good for the liver, but is it similar/better/worse than APAP?
(Transcribed into ASCII for the benefit of those who don't have a Klingon font - no, Microsoft's thinly disguised Borg font, Verdana, won't do.)
Wait, what am I saying - this is /. Never mind.
Linux has had more success than Microsoft in the embedded space. It's giving Microsoft a run for its money in the server space - at least keeping market share away from Microsoft, if not actively grabbing it. It completely dominates in the supercomputer space, where Microsoft has no presence. So far, Linux has had very little impact in the desktop space, but that seems likely to change over the long term.
Over time, it's actually very likely that Microsoft's traditional sources of revenue will erode significantly, because of Linux and open source in general. Office suites are a case in point: on the one hand, you have Microsoft experimenting with licensing schemes where they try to charge consumers $100's per year for the use of their product, while on the other hand, you have very competitive free alternatives that have been improving at a dramatic rate and are increasingly being noticed by organizations ranging from the governments of the U.S., Germany, and Peru, to colleges and companies with specialize needs. If Microsoft fails to get the world to switch to an office-suite-as-service model, and I think they will fail, Linux and open source will have played a big role in that.
That doesn't mean Microsoft is doomed. But they'll be forced to focus on and stick to spaces where they can compete effectively against "free" software - such as the big business world, where the consultants you can deploy are at least as important as the out-of-the-box software you provide.
In fact, Microsoft has been moving "upmarket" in this sense for a long time, which is one reason they began losing the support of small developers and companies: back when it sold DOS and early versions of Windows, Microsoft needed all the support it could get, and big business treated it as a minor side issue; now, big business loves Microsoft, and vice versa. If you're not a Fortune 1000 company, you're effectively little but a potential annoyance to Microsoft, a source of revenue that can't be supported in a cost-effective way.
Because of this, you can expect to see small business moving to Linux also, in servers to start with but later for workstations also, as Microsoft products become less and less suitable (Exchange, anyone?) and Linux becomes more and more off-the-shelf and automated (a la Red Hat network.)
In short, the New York Times is a little behind the times - they're acknowledging a grassroots trend that has been building for years, and that is already a reality. But they're quite timely in another sense, in that the effectiveness of Linux as a competitor to Microsoft has only just begun. It's only been four years since the Halloween documents opened many people's eyes to Linux, and the landscape has changed dramatically since then. Check back in 2006, and see how Microsoft has changed as a result. My bet is it'll be dramatic, although the specifics are hard to predict.
I might agree with you if the word could only be found on dictionary.com, which incorporates words from very modern sources like the Jargon File, but here's "communitarian" at Merriam-Webster.
Yeah, that's pretty much it - one of the ones used on Apollo missions was called a Thumper. Then there were the mortars which lobbed explosive charges, after the astronauts had taken off. See this or this.
They used active seismometers to do things like measure the depth of the regolith, i.e. the layer of mostly loose rock fragments and sand/dust that make up the outer mantle of the moon (and the Earth for that matter). The moon's regolith was found to be about 35 feet deep in the places they measured, compared to 300 feet in some parts of the Earth.
That's a feature, not a bug. People sell people stuff they don't need, more money flows, economy looks good. But it's a bubble because sooner or later, people clue in to the fact that they don't actually *need* to upgrade again, and the market saturates almost instantly. This has in fact already happened, if you look at PC maker revenues over the past few years. This current article is just the latest of a sequence of events that's been going on for a while. The big boom is still winding down in some respects, and will continue to do that until there's some real or imagined reason to upgrade again.
A foreach construct in Java would fix the Iterator interface into the language's design (since Java doesn't have extensible syntax), but once you've got a sufficiently general interface like Iterator, the downside to that kind of hardwiring is minimal to nonexistent.
Having syntactic sugar like foreach doesn't preclude having a more powerful or low-level loop construct, so I don't really see many disadvantages to this kind of thing. There's nothing wrong with using a foreach when it's appropriate and using something more specific in other cases.
Witness languages like Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk, which have minimal syntax and do everything with functions or forms which look like functions (or message sends in Smalltalk's case). These languages are super-flexible, but lack of syntax seems (IMO) to be a barrier to adoption by the programming "masses". By contrast, look at Perl, one of the most syntax-heavy and also popular languages in existence. I think the balance is still evolving. E.g., Java may have been right not to "commit" to a foreach until now, but at this point it wouldn't hurt to add it. Also, generic features as in STL have barely begun to impact language designs. Much of the balance that gets struck now is done between a very incomplete set of choices.I fully expect to see languages appear with C-like performance and overhead (or the potential for that); the feel of a scripting language - including a traditionally friendly syntax; and the large-scale structuring capabilities of the "big" languages. I think C# was an attempt at that to some extent, but it had other goals and doesn't quite get there. I think there's a generational improvement waiting to be made, and you can feel it out there in the current crop of commercial and academic languages, but it's distributed and needs to be brought together in one language. It won't necessarily break new ground in terms of a groundbreaking academic feature set, but it'll be a package deal that as a whole will be a big improvement over the current either/or choices. That's my fantasy for the decade...
Those aren't children - they're script kiddies! They're always getting into the honeypots...
I wouldn't hold Javascript up as the ultimate programming language, but I think you're right that little things like this can make a big difference to the usability and perception of a language. Most language designers don't really seem to acknowledge this though. The scripting languages are usually stronger in this area, but there's no reason why other languages can't do a better job of this.
Simonyi doesn't really have to be original. If all he does is commercialize some of the ideas that have been floating around in academia and in "unpopular" languages (Lisp comes to mind :), Simonyi will have done the world a service.
What happened here is that the submitter read or heard something about a wireless honeypot being used to trap wardriving/walking etc. activity, and thought that the term just meant a free access point. He's confused.
Some companies thought it was "4. Spend IPO money and worthless inflated stock on acquiring other companies with loser business plans, and hope beyond all rational expectation that one of them will succeed and save our butts (and stock options)."
As one would expect, "5. go bankrupt" was the result.
Seems to me that warez hacking of the kind you describe is hacking in the true sense, and is exactly why such things should not be illegal in themselves - because curiosity takes people to strange places. The line of illegality has to be somewhere beyond the curious hacker without malicious intent. Unfortunately, many recent laws don't recognize this at all. Criminalizing innocent acts just makes everyone a criminal...
Linux is used in an incredible variety of environments, from embedded systems without disks to seriously large servers and parallel supercomputers. As you might imagine, the default filesystem isn't always ideal. But, if you're just running an ordinary single-user workstation, and aren't experiencing any noticeable performance problems related to your disk access, then there's no reason to worry about your filesystem.
So "stick with what the installer suggests from now until..." you run into a reason to do otherwise, makes sense.
Excuse me, but I am the Creator of the Universe. Some people do consider me a borderline-psychopathic Thug - I admit, encouraging competing religions was a bad idea, not to mention the creation of trolls - what was I thinking? But no-one in their right minds would call Me a liberal. In fact, I have a good mind to smite thee for even thinking that!
But on second thoughts, smiting might be a tad psychopathic, and I've been trying to ease up on that a bit, since the whole World War II thing. I'll have to settle for having one of My acolytes mod you down.
They're only saying that propagation speedups based on this might be possible, not that they've actually done it. Afaict, it's just a way of trying to position the research as being possibly related to something with a potential use, however remote. Previous experiments in this area have made similar claims, e.g. Lijun Wang's experiment. But I've yet to see a convincing explanation of how that speedup might be achieved, perhaps because no such explanation exists...
Actually, the most common reason for improved performance of "the internet" that I've seen is increased RAM. Browsers tend to chew memory, and if you don't have enough, the page swapping will slow even a fast CPU to a crawl. There are plenty of people upgrading 400MHz machines to GHz+ machines, who really just need to pop in another DIMM. (Of course, they're not capable of doing that, so buying a computer may be the best choice... Ignorance costs.)
That's more or less what I was saying, i.e. that group velocities exceeding c are essentially an illusion, but my question was how the researchers plan to use this "illusion" to, according to the article, "boost electrical signal speeds in computers and telecommunications grids by more than 50 per cent." That'd be a pretty good use of an illusion!
(BTW, afaict, no-one else replying to my message is even remotely coming close to answering the question. Any real physicists out there?)
Regarding phase velocity vs. group velocity, both phase velocity and group velocity can exceed c - see Superluminal, second paragraph. Group velocities exceeding c have been done for decades - for a bit of a history, see No thing goes faster than light.
The innovation in this case seems to be that it's doable with cheap equipment, and over fairly long distances.