So far nobody mentioned 'the space merchants' by Pohl and Kornbluth, somewhere late fifties early suxties. Convincing story about consumerism and marketing run wild.
Western culture, including the pop culture has long suffered from the idea that 'new is good'. This idea naturally was fostered by commercial empires, that depended on this idea to rapidly dismiss old music, movies, clothes for new items, regardless of the intrinsic value of the old products.
It seems that Sony and Universal have pursued this idea to the next step.
Well, I plead guilty to being a computational linguist... but inspired by Zipf and Mandelbrot, I have messed around a lot with all kinds of communication data and generally you need a hundred thousand or more.
I doubt very much that there is enough terrorism-related data to have much confidence in this analysis. You need quantities lijke the number of words in a book to extract with any confidence Zipfs law or most other power laws. Even then, there are enough deviations from the straight line (on logscale, of course) to make the drawing of conclusions a very interesting job indeed.
To begin with, a sucessor/collaborator for Pratchett would have to be sixtyish, like Pratchett himself (and yours truly). That is because he draws so heavily from his experiences as an very intelligent observer of the second half of the 20th century, including the fifties and sixties. I *know* that my 25 and 28 years old daughters are Pratchett adepts, and I always wonder in how far they get the allusions, and if not, why they can enjoy the books so much.
You mentioned Good Omens, which certainly is one of the best (and which incidentally depends very much on biblical knowledge), but ithat book certainly is not the result of a slick writer taking over from a dead or retiring author.
"Terry Pratchetts Diskworld, in association with X" is a possibility that I did not yet even consider. Some things are too horrific even to think about.
But the day that people so completely lost their cultural roots that Salomon is forgotten, will be a black day indeed.
I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on two desktop machines, a laptop and a netbook.
* On the laptop, the wlan (rt61-based) stopped working. After searching the bug database and Google, this appeared a known issue, but the laptop is unuseable for work untill I buy myself an USB dongle. I really was upset about this.
* On one dektop several graphic features of the KDE destop stopped working, such as the revolving cube.
* There are unresolved issues with the fonts of thunderbird. This seems to be related to the use of KDE over an NX connection.
There are some bugs that I hoped/expected to be solved after the upgrade, but still are not working satisfactorily:
* syncing Evolution with a Palm Treo is not yet without problems, like the duplication of entries and having to reconfigure bluetooth after every sync.
* kpilot still a mess, Actually I consider it a total loss that cannot be salvaged any more.
* scrolling of firefox still too slow. This is a problem over a NX connection.
I would expect one of the most important features for a good desktop, the ability to use all functions of the PDA from the desktop, before all, effortless syncing of calendar, contacts and memos.
As far as I know, there is only a single line of PDAs that more or less can sync with Linux: the PALM based ones. Even then, there are all kinds of problems. Kpilot did work after a fashion with KDE3, but it is hopelessly broken with KDE4 because of the Akonadi disaster. Evolution does sync, even with bluetooth, but there still are some bugs. Jpilot works fine, but only over a serial link, and it is a stand-alone application.
If you don't have a Palm (and they are really old fashioned nowadays), the situation is worse. I know of no modern PDA, that is guaranteed to sync with the Linux desktop. Sometimes, partial succes is reported, but even then we are not talking out-of-the-box solutions. There is always a fair amount fiddling with libraries, (re)compiling, much burning of incense and never 100% functionality.
yesterday I got this fake when visiting www.tvgids.nl. As I use Linux, for me it is of academic interest only, but I thought it dangerous enough to inform the administrator of that site.
I don't know if your trip extends to Europe, but if it does, the Deutches Museum at Munich is probably the best museum in its kind that I have seen (and yes, I have seen the Smithsonian too).
Imagine a leading industrial nation that lost two wars, but still is one of the richest countries of the world. Imagine the urge that possesses such a nation to show the world that it still counts as a leading nation in this and other fields. Imagine (almost) unlimited funds. Now you have the Deutsches Museum.
Found in Germany by an international team. But unveiled in the American museum for natural history in New York, and rightly so. Lesser nations have no right on the discoveries made in their own soil.
I nowhere found the real meaning of the chineese characters, not on slashdot and not on the site referred to. So for all I know the translation is correct...
Can somebody enlighten me what the correct translation would be, and why this one is so funny?
I do not know what firm you are working for, but really well established companies do not spam. Tell your boss that he puts himself in the same league as Viagra sellers and email scammers.
reading the reactions of the slashdot public on this news item, I cannot help but be proud of the independent nerd mind. In general they seem to recognize the bigotry of this verdict and the horrible mess that the Bush administration has created in Iraq. As far as I am concerned, Bush should be brought for a Neurenberg-type court and hanged. The same for his british (and dutch) Quislings.
A nice property of perspectives is that they can differ. You seem to think that driving economic cars is all-important. I feel that escaping from the existing IT-monoculture is important too...
Philantropic missions are all very nice, but I'd much prefer Google to spend more effort on making their stuff available to Linux. Googlearth works so-so, but other interesting Googlestuff does not work at all under Linux. And I clearly remember how they became big using Linux as platform...
I started life - professional life, that is - in 1980 as an art historian, figuring out how to use computers (think APPLE II and IBM Selectrix) as tools for museum documentation. I felt that indexing and selecting keywords on statistical properties of words (such as Saltons SMART system) would serve the needs of the documentation community best, but my view was laughed away by the pundits, who all believed in unbelievably complicated typologies and corresponding forms for museum documentation.
My next twenty five years were spent in Academia doing research and teaching IR systems. Then my job changed and I found myself suddenly back in the museum world again. The electric typewriters were replaced by Microsoft Word, but the pundits still are fighting as relentlessly over their typologies as twenty five years ago, but now they are calling it the Semantic Web. If I interpret the signs correctly, this will last for at least another twenty five years.
In the mean time Saltons old-fashioned Vector Space Model, augmented with some machine learning is still doing all I want from it.
The great number of people who ridiculize this story is far greater than with other, equally unbelievable items on slashdot. Go ahead; count them. Now if/I/ were an intelligence officer with your navy, and if I wanted to suppress a story, I would likely try to drown it immediatly in ridicule. But I am just a common paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but isn't this just a rehash of what Macluhan already stated some fifty years ago?
Paai
So far nobody mentioned 'the space merchants' by Pohl and Kornbluth, somewhere late fifties early suxties. Convincing story about consumerism and marketing run wild.
Paai
Since nobody mentioned 'the king must die' as yet, I will.
Paai
Western culture, including the pop culture has long suffered from the idea that 'new is good'. This idea naturally was fostered by commercial empires, that depended on this idea to rapidly dismiss old music, movies, clothes for new items, regardless of the intrinsic value of the old products.
It seems that Sony and Universal have pursued this idea to the next step.
Paai
No, I really am a computational linguist with a great interest in power laws as applicable to communication.
Well, I plead guilty to being a computational linguist... but inspired by Zipf and Mandelbrot, I have messed around a lot with all kinds of communication data and generally you need a hundred thousand or more.
I doubt very much that there is enough terrorism-related data to have much confidence in this analysis. You need quantities lijke the number of words in a book to extract with any confidence Zipfs law or most other power laws. Even then, there are enough deviations from the straight line (on logscale, of course) to make the drawing of conclusions a very interesting job indeed.
Paai
To begin with, a sucessor/collaborator for Pratchett would have to be sixtyish, like Pratchett himself (and yours truly). That is because he draws so heavily from his experiences as an very intelligent observer of the second half of the 20th century, including the fifties and sixties. I *know* that my 25 and 28 years old daughters are Pratchett adepts, and I always wonder in how far they get the allusions, and if not, why they can enjoy the books so much.
You mentioned Good Omens, which certainly is one of the best (and which incidentally depends very much on biblical knowledge), but ithat book certainly is not the result of a slick writer taking over from a dead or retiring author.
"Terry Pratchetts Diskworld, in association with X" is a possibility that I did not yet even consider. Some things are too horrific even to think about.
But the day that people so completely lost their cultural roots that Salomon is forgotten, will be a black day indeed.
I *like* Pratchett, but Salomon came first :-)
Hasn't Knuth an award out for everybody who found a bug in TeX? Somebody must have found one :-)
Why do American minerals always end up in the soil of other countries?
paai
I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on two desktop machines, a laptop and a netbook.
* On the laptop, the wlan (rt61-based) stopped working. After searching the bug database and Google, this appeared a known issue, but the laptop is unuseable for work untill I buy myself an USB dongle. I really was upset about this.
* On one dektop several graphic features of the KDE destop stopped working, such as the revolving cube.
* There are unresolved issues with the fonts of thunderbird. This seems to be related to the use of KDE over an NX connection.
There are some bugs that I hoped/expected to be solved after the upgrade, but still are not working satisfactorily:
* syncing Evolution with a Palm Treo is not yet without problems, like the duplication of entries and having to reconfigure bluetooth after every sync.
* kpilot still a mess, Actually I consider it a total loss that cannot be salvaged any more.
* scrolling of firefox still too slow. This is a problem over a NX connection.
I would expect one of the most important features for a good desktop, the ability to use all functions of the PDA from the desktop, before all, effortless syncing of calendar, contacts and memos.
As far as I know, there is only a single line of PDAs that more or less can sync with Linux: the PALM based ones. Even then, there are all kinds of problems. Kpilot did work after a fashion with KDE3, but it is hopelessly broken with KDE4 because of the Akonadi disaster. Evolution does sync, even with bluetooth, but there still are some bugs. Jpilot works fine, but only over a serial link, and it is a stand-alone application.
If you don't have a Palm (and they are really old fashioned nowadays), the situation is worse. I know of no modern PDA, that is guaranteed to sync with the Linux desktop. Sometimes, partial succes is reported, but even then we are not talking out-of-the-box solutions. There is always a fair amount fiddling with libraries, (re)compiling, much burning of incense and never 100% functionality.
Somebody tell that to marc shuttleworth...
Hans Paijmans
yesterday I got this fake when visiting www.tvgids.nl. As I use Linux, for me it is of academic interest only, but I thought it dangerous enough to inform the administrator of that site.
Paai
I don't know if your trip extends to Europe, but if it does, the Deutches Museum at Munich is probably the best museum in its kind that I have seen (and yes, I have seen the Smithsonian too).
Imagine a leading industrial nation that lost two wars, but still is one of the richest countries of the world. Imagine the urge that possesses such a nation to show the world that it still counts as a leading nation in this and other fields. Imagine (almost) unlimited funds. Now you have the Deutsches Museum.
Found in Germany by an international team. But unveiled in the American museum for natural history in New York, and rightly so. Lesser nations have no right on the discoveries made in their own soil.
I nowhere found the real meaning of the chineese characters, not on slashdot and not on the site referred to. So for all I know the translation is correct...
Can somebody enlighten me what the correct translation would be, and why this one is so funny?
Paai
I do not know what firm you are working for, but really well established companies do not spam. Tell your boss that he puts himself in the same league as Viagra sellers and email scammers.
reading the reactions of the slashdot public on this news item, I cannot help but be proud of the independent nerd mind. In general they seem to recognize the bigotry of this verdict and the horrible mess that the Bush administration has created in Iraq. As far as I am concerned, Bush should be brought for a Neurenberg-type court and hanged. The same for his british (and dutch) Quislings.
Paai
A nice property of perspectives is that they can differ. You seem to think that driving economic cars is all-important. I feel that escaping from the existing IT-monoculture is important too...
Paai
Philantropic missions are all very nice, but I'd much prefer Google to spend more effort on making their stuff available to Linux.
Googlearth works so-so, but other interesting Googlestuff does not work at all under Linux. And I clearly remember how they became big using Linux as platform...
Paai
Lotus for Linux: at least ten years too late, and it is not even open source. We are supposed to go in convulsions over it?
Paai
I started life - professional life, that is - in 1980 as an art historian, figuring out how to use computers (think APPLE II and IBM Selectrix) as tools for museum documentation. I felt that indexing and selecting keywords on statistical properties of words (such as Saltons SMART system) would serve the needs of the documentation community best, but my view was laughed away by the pundits, who all believed in unbelievably complicated typologies and corresponding forms for museum documentation.
My next twenty five years were spent in Academia doing research and teaching IR systems. Then my job changed and I found myself suddenly back in the museum world again. The electric typewriters were replaced by Microsoft Word, but the pundits still are fighting as relentlessly over their typologies as twenty five years ago, but now they are calling it the Semantic Web. If I interpret the signs correctly, this will last for at least another twenty five years.
In the mean time Saltons old-fashioned Vector Space Model, augmented with some machine learning is still doing all I want from it.
Paai
The great number of people who ridiculize this story is far greater than with /I/ were an intelligence officer with your navy, and if I wanted to suppress
other, equally unbelievable items on slashdot. Go ahead; count them.
Now if
a story, I would likely try to drown it immediatly in ridicule. But I am just a
common paranoid.
Paai