Did you actually read my post? Because the post had both positive and negative things to say about Google. And in any case the negatives I just listed about Google bear no resemblance to the well-known negatives (poorly designed software, unethical and possibly illegal marketing methods) that MS is famous for.
Any company that has huge revenues, that lets top-notch developers work on anything they think is kewl, and is structured so that investors can't complain about them pouring millions into projects that will never monetize. Alas, there's only one of those...
The upside of Google is that they push the state of the art with everything they do, and they provide free access to products that we couldn't afford without them — assuming that these products would even exist without them, which they mostly wouldn't. The downside is that they're total amateurs when it comes to the nuts and bolts of providing a product that isn't buggy, doesn't have major UI issues, and doesn't have weird outages and feature changes without notice. Google Earth seems to typify both the upside and the downside.
Meaning that they take the fraction of capsicum and multiply by 15 million. It would make more sense just to give the fraction rather than copying the terminology of an obsolete subjective test, but I guess saying a pepper is 7% capsicum just doesn't sound as kewl as "one million scovilles!"
I'm no expert on these things (I like my food bland), but it seems to me that the fraction of capsicum is at best a rough measure of hotness. Physical and chemical interactions would have a big effect on how much capsicum actually makes it to the tongue. And indeed the Wikipedia article on the Scoville Scale mentions a couple of alternatives. Sounds like Scovilles are "universally accepted" only by marketeers and culinary masochists.
I once did a writing contract at Adobe. You know how when you pose for an ID photo, they put you in front of a curtain or something to hide the background? When I got my Adobe badge the security guy just posed me against a regular wall, then Photoshopped the wall out of the picture!
I'm reminded of the episode of Oz where somebody tries to tell a White Supremacist that Jesus wasn't white. He pulls out his bible and points to an illustration...
Another "everybody's exactly like me" post. I took carpentry in Junior High, but I sucked at it, and have only a single (really ugly) bookcase to show for my training. Maybe you can throw together something like this without a lot of effort. I never could hope to attempt something like this, and I suspect most people are in the same category.
Don't get me wrong, I admire (and envy) people who are good with their hands. And even though my own experience was less than positive, I bemoan that fact that most kids don't get a chance to take shop anymore. But dude, people have different strengths and weaknesses.
And, not incidentally, $8K is not that much to pay for this kind of furniture, if it's well made. Whether it's worth it to an individual is a personal call. But if you're a really serious gamer (I'm certainly not) it strikes me as a decent investment.
Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
You're oversimplifying. Recall that there isn't a simple obvious correspondence between letters and sounds. There are complications and ambiguities in every written language, and English has more than its share. And that has everything to do with the way language evolves.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bueraucratic mess.
I won't deny that having everybody use the same simple, consistent system of transliteration between English and Russian would be desirable. I just deny that it's possible. Not unless you have some kind of magic mind control ray that will force all English-speaking Russian scholars to use the same conventions.
And even if such rules did exist, how does that make life easier for the immigrant? It would save him a little trouble, since he wouldn't have to figure out the English version of his name, but he'd still have all the database issues to deal with. He'd still have to be the one that makes sure that every clerk he deals with spells his name correctly.
Also, it is very odd when you have to stuggle to understand what the hell those crazy americans mean, when reading a transliterated name that in your language has a single and very unambigous spelling.
It's odd, but it's also unavoidable. English doesn't even have consistent conventions for spelling English names. It's a messy, inconsistent language, no doubt about it. That's a pain for everybody who uses it, native speakers included. But that fact is not going to change.
You see Russian words ending in "ski" all the time. The Russian word for "Russian" is often latinized as "Russki".
There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.
My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "". (Oops, Slashdot doesn't like Cyrillic. Full post here). I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it without the "t", and you'll see the "tch" replaced by "z" and/or the "v" replaced by "w".
Why so many variations? Well, "" (no, I don't know what it's called, I'm the third generation off the boat) is pronounced like the English "v", but many people (even English speakers) use a convention that originates in Germany, where "w" stands for the same sound. As for ""; it represents a sound that isn't even used in English (I myself cannot pronounce it) so whether you use "tch", "ch" or "z" is pretty arbitrary.
(And of course, there's no single standard for pronouncing my name; don't even get me started on that.)
The fun part is that no matter which convention you use, somebody's bound to "correct" you. Phillip Davis wrote a book called Interpolation and Approximation for a very specialized audience of mathematicians. Most of the letters he got about the book were not about his math or his writing, but about his "misspelling" of the name of a Russian mathematician, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff!
I think you misunderstand what rotoscoping is. This is just plan "animation", where you use a rostrum camera to transfer your frames from paper to film. The difference here is that the frames themselves were computer generated. I'd be very curious to know whether they actually had some kind of animation software, or just used a text editor.
Funny thing, Oracle seems to see business cases where other people don't. They bought RDB, SleepyCat, InnoDB, all of them database products that have zero synergy with their existing database. All have flourished under Oracle; in the case of RDB (which was originally for the VAX, and still only runs on HP's DEC legacy platforms), Oracle's support is the only thing that has kept the product alive.
Whenever Oracle acquires another company, there's always somebody claiming that they bought it just to shut it down. (I kept hearing that about Sun, even the economics of such a move are absurd.) When it's a database application company, that's usually the consensus (as with PeopleSoft). And yet I can't recall the last time Oracle actually did that. Sure, they shut down useless blue-sky projects (and Sun has a lot of those) but the products that had any momentum at all tend to do quite well under Oracle.
Privacy has nothing to do with it. If you don't like tracking cookies, configure your browser so they don't work. Generating "virus" reports for them is a waste of time.
Huh. Three upmods and an "I agree". Last time I criticized a program for wasting my time on tracking cookies, I got flamed up the wazoo. I guess progress isn't a myth after all.
Excuse me? Do you consider it "evil or bad" when a telemarketer ignores the fact that you're on the Do Not Call List and interrupts your dinner? This is illegal, but if you don't know who called, you don't know who to file a complaint against.
I agree, there are situations where the user needs to secure all his communications. But we're talking about HTTPS, which is a web server security feature. hat's not a very effective means to that end.
Here's a very real example: the Iranian thought police are very interested in the internet traffic of their dissidents, who often communicate via social networking sites. Should these sites stop using plain HTTP in order to protect these users? That would add a tremendous amount of overhead, and would only provide the dissidents with a limited amount of protection. As you point out, these people really need to encrypt all their traffic. The obvious solution is a VPN connection, which doesn't just hide what pages you're looking at, it hides every single packet, totally hiding your online activity. (If I were an Iranian dissident, I wouldn't want the authorities to know I was even accessing certain web sites — masking which pages I accessed just wouldn't be enough.) And as an added bonus, VPN bypasses ISP content filters.
Slashdot Mirror
That would actually be a hell of a lot less useful. For one thing, nobody knows how to equate 1% capsaicin to a relative hotness.
Huh? If percentages are useless, than how are Scoville Units any better? Both express the fraction of capsicum. Percentages are just bigger.
Umm, are we following the same thread? Here's the one I'm in:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1594148&cid=31603122
Did you actually read my post? Because the post had both positive and negative things to say about Google. And in any case the negatives I just listed about Google bear no resemblance to the well-known negatives (poorly designed software, unethical and possibly illegal marketing methods) that MS is famous for.
My wild, uninformed guess: capsicum is cheaper. Or the fact that India grows the hottest pepper on the planet has a certain patriotic appeal...
Any company that has huge revenues, that lets top-notch developers work on anything they think is kewl, and is structured so that investors can't complain about them pouring millions into projects that will never monetize. Alas, there's only one of those...
The upside of Google is that they push the state of the art with everything they do, and they provide free access to products that we couldn't afford without them — assuming that these products would even exist without them, which they mostly wouldn't. The downside is that they're total amateurs when it comes to the nuts and bolts of providing a product that isn't buggy, doesn't have major UI issues, and doesn't have weird outages and feature changes without notice. Google Earth seems to typify both the upside and the downside.
Meaning that they take the fraction of capsicum and multiply by 15 million. It would make more sense just to give the fraction rather than copying the terminology of an obsolete subjective test, but I guess saying a pepper is 7% capsicum just doesn't sound as kewl as "one million scovilles!"
I'm no expert on these things (I like my food bland), but it seems to me that the fraction of capsicum is at best a rough measure of hotness. Physical and chemical interactions would have a big effect on how much capsicum actually makes it to the tongue. And indeed the Wikipedia article on the Scoville Scale mentions a couple of alternatives. Sounds like Scovilles are "universally accepted" only by marketeers and culinary masochists.
I once did a writing contract at Adobe. You know how when you pose for an ID photo, they put you in front of a curtain or something to hide the background? When I got my Adobe badge the security guy just posed me against a regular wall, then Photoshopped the wall out of the picture!
I'm reminded of the episode of Oz where somebody tries to tell a White Supremacist that Jesus wasn't white. He pulls out his bible and points to an illustration...
Another "everybody's exactly like me" post. I took carpentry in Junior High, but I sucked at it, and have only a single (really ugly) bookcase to show for my training. Maybe you can throw together something like this without a lot of effort. I never could hope to attempt something like this, and I suspect most people are in the same category.
Don't get me wrong, I admire (and envy) people who are good with their hands. And even though my own experience was less than positive, I bemoan that fact that most kids don't get a chance to take shop anymore. But dude, people have different strengths and weaknesses.
And, not incidentally, $8K is not that much to pay for this kind of furniture, if it's well made. Whether it's worth it to an individual is a personal call. But if you're a really serious gamer (I'm certainly not) it strikes me as a decent investment.
You're obviously not a Linux person. If you were, you'd know that the most important feature of a GUI is the icon that opens a command line window.
Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
You're oversimplifying. Recall that there isn't a simple obvious correspondence between letters and sounds. There are complications and ambiguities in every written language, and English has more than its share. And that has everything to do with the way language evolves.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bueraucratic mess.
I won't deny that having everybody use the same simple, consistent system of transliteration between English and Russian would be desirable. I just deny that it's possible. Not unless you have some kind of magic mind control ray that will force all English-speaking Russian scholars to use the same conventions.
And even if such rules did exist, how does that make life easier for the immigrant? It would save him a little trouble, since he wouldn't have to figure out the English version of his name, but he'd still have all the database issues to deal with. He'd still have to be the one that makes sure that every clerk he deals with spells his name correctly.
Also, it is very odd when you have to stuggle to understand what the hell those crazy americans mean, when reading a transliterated name that in your language has a single and very unambigous spelling.
It's odd, but it's also unavoidable. English doesn't even have consistent conventions for spelling English names. It's a messy, inconsistent language, no doubt about it. That's a pain for everybody who uses it, native speakers included. But that fact is not going to change.
If you can't live with ambiguity, I suggest you avoid communicating with humans.
I find it more practical to live with the fact that language is an evolving entity. That means:
Sorry about the bad link in the above post. Still learning how blog software works. Try:
http://picknit.com/mt4/isaac/a-slashdot-post-that-wasnt.html
You see Russian words ending in "ski" all the time. The Russian word for "Russian" is often latinized as "Russki".
There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.
My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "". (Oops, Slashdot doesn't like Cyrillic. Full post here). I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it without the "t", and you'll see the "tch" replaced by "z" and/or the "v" replaced by "w".
Why so many variations? Well, "" (no, I don't know what it's called, I'm the third generation off the boat) is pronounced like the English "v", but many people (even English speakers) use a convention that originates in Germany, where "w" stands for the same sound. As for ""; it represents a sound that isn't even used in English (I myself cannot pronounce it) so whether you use "tch", "ch" or "z" is pretty arbitrary.
(And of course, there's no single standard for pronouncing my name; don't even get me started on that.)
The fun part is that no matter which convention you use, somebody's bound to "correct" you. Phillip Davis wrote a book called Interpolation and Approximation for a very specialized audience of mathematicians. Most of the letters he got about the book were not about his math or his writing, but about his "misspelling" of the name of a Russian mathematician, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff!
I think you misunderstand what rotoscoping is. This is just plan "animation", where you use a rostrum camera to transfer your frames from paper to film. The difference here is that the frames themselves were computer generated. I'd be very curious to know whether they actually had some kind of animation software, or just used a text editor.
And then your neighbor buys the same model router...
Why not? Knowing your SSID doesn't help anybody guess your paraphrase.
BTW, who's your favorite porn star?
Or potentially profitable. Sun has some good products that don't do as well as they might, due to inept management and marketing.
Funny thing, Oracle seems to see business cases where other people don't. They bought RDB, SleepyCat, InnoDB, all of them database products that have zero synergy with their existing database. All have flourished under Oracle; in the case of RDB (which was originally for the VAX, and still only runs on HP's DEC legacy platforms), Oracle's support is the only thing that has kept the product alive.
Whenever Oracle acquires another company, there's always somebody claiming that they bought it just to shut it down. (I kept hearing that about Sun, even the economics of such a move are absurd.) When it's a database application company, that's usually the consensus (as with PeopleSoft). And yet I can't recall the last time Oracle actually did that. Sure, they shut down useless blue-sky projects (and Sun has a lot of those) but the products that had any momentum at all tend to do quite well under Oracle.
This guy makes a business case for Oracle MySQL:
http://bit.ly/81x9t
Privacy has nothing to do with it. If you don't like tracking cookies, configure your browser so they don't work. Generating "virus" reports for them is a waste of time.
Huh. Three upmods and an "I agree". Last time I criticized a program for wasting my time on tracking cookies, I got flamed up the wazoo. I guess progress isn't a myth after all.
If a product even bothers to tell you about tracking cookies, it's more about religion than security, and should be avoided.
Excuse me? Do you consider it "evil or bad" when a telemarketer ignores the fact that you're on the Do Not Call List and interrupts your dinner? This is illegal, but if you don't know who called, you don't know who to file a complaint against.
You had to ask that one, didn't you? Don't google "tuscaloosa dumpling". Trust me, you'll regret it.
I agree, there are situations where the user needs to secure all his communications. But we're talking about HTTPS, which is a web server security feature. hat's not a very effective means to that end.
Here's a very real example: the Iranian thought police are very interested in the internet traffic of their dissidents, who often communicate via social networking sites. Should these sites stop using plain HTTP in order to protect these users? That would add a tremendous amount of overhead, and would only provide the dissidents with a limited amount of protection. As you point out, these people really need to encrypt all their traffic. The obvious solution is a VPN connection, which doesn't just hide what pages you're looking at, it hides every single packet, totally hiding your online activity. (If I were an Iranian dissident, I wouldn't want the authorities to know I was even accessing certain web sites — masking which pages I accessed just wouldn't be enough.) And as an added bonus, VPN bypasses ISP content filters.