Maybe they could do a better job protecting their property before it's released ?
Yesterday I heard on a local radio station the full cd of Madonna is available on napster before it's released and the new single was also released earlier because of this and blahblahblah napster bad blahblahblah..
If record companies would control their employees and made sure new releases don't get out and someone can't take it home, they wouldn't have all these problems. I'm sure copying cds by personnel happened before, but it would only get some local distribution amongst friends. Napster is now a world-wide distribution method. But their problem is the same: they have leaks, they should do something against it and don't blame the one who distributes the music. (it's not the first time you'd hear 'recordings of XX new album got stolen', or even more funny, 'they got lost somewhere'..
There are billions of companies that can keep their R&D secret until it gets released, why can't record companies ? Aren't they professional enough ?
Studying the global warming (and more important: trying to prevent it) by letting people run their computers as much as possible at maximum cpu utilisation, people will also use their old computers to let it crunch numbers (slowly on 3/486's) 24hr a day instead of turning them off and leaving them in a corner, allowing all these computers to generate heat, requiring more electricity and more heat to generate this electricity, and so on.. ?
I think I'm missing the point:-)
Can anyone btw calculate how much electricity and thus heat this seti project has already generated (the number of hours all pc's are active is available) ? I think some scientists will talk soon about the seti-disaster of global warming *grin*
I believe it should be possible, but only in certain cases, when an employee neglects his job etc.
I know of a (family) company that has become bigger but where the boss reads every email that goes in and out. Employees know it and therefor are very sensitive about what they mail. Email is hardly used, and external consultants they work with are also asked to be very careful in what they email, certainly if it's about things that don't go too well:-) The result is that the employees aren't really 'shiny happy people' and modern technology isn't used as it could..
I'm very lucky as the company I work for does not monitor anything at all, doesn't restrict internet access, etc. We were talking about upgrading our bandwith recently and an isp's salesmen said the company could restrict the usage (eg downloading mp3's or other non-work related material) and our boss said he didn't want to do anything like this at all:-) Someone has been fired because he was downloading x-rated images for weeks though, but this happened because he neglected his job and other people had to do more work, project was going late,.. So as long as my job gets done I can read/. all day:-)
Everyone's afraid about the radiation by the phones but what about the radiation emitted by the base stations ?
They are being installed on appartments where people live and even very close to kindergardens etc.
It's a fact that people installing them get sick when working too long on them.
I don't know about the USA but with the GSM-system here in Belgium we have antenna's everywhere. GSM has an antenna every 3km (2 miles)maximum (much more in cities), and as we have 3 operators each using their own antennas, our cities are crowded with them.
Last week in Belgium a judge has (finally) ruled that 4 antenna's on top of an appartment have to be removed because 'as long as it isn't proven they're save we must consider them harmful'.
When telco companies started years ago installing them most antennas were placed illegally btw, without building permits, they needed to be installed right away so the permit was demanded later; or they are being placed on top of a metal container, didn't need a permission for that. People living next to those aren't always notified about antennas being installed (there's one installed on top of a 4-floor building across the street where I lived, only 3 houses left and right of the building were notified, no-one across the street. It was a very nice sight looking out of your livingroom:-(
> I'm starting to see anti-aliased text as *fuzzy* rather than smoother. Go see an optician, you need (stronger ?) glasses.. But I agree, new screens and high resolutions don't always display crisp images.. I still prefer my 5yr old 15' ADI at home to the compaq tft450 I have to see at work on:-( Refresh rates and sharpness of lcd's and so aren't what they should be:-(
Check http://www.amiga.com/feature/061400-volker.shtml it's about someone who's built his A500 to have an lcd screen and more.. (sorry for mentioning the amiga here - don't beat me:-) The article mentions a laptop's lcd won't work as the controller for that is on the motherbord, he used 'an industrial' type of lcd. So getting an lcd screen for your project should be possible, using one of a scrap laptop will be a problem.. (unless you find out what part of the motherbord you have to use ?:-)
I'd love to see if some people find algorithms to create something really intelligent. You could just use a random generator that matches the words, but that program doesn't have a clue about the content, what it's saying.
When you want to know what's some text about, you have to feed it all words of the dictionary and give extra information for each word. Creating sentences is even more difficult as there are linguistic rules, and they must sound normal to a native speaker (although haikus may be more simple).
One of our applications is able to create a summary of a text. The sentences of the summary aren't created, but are those sentences that represent the content of the text most. Feed it a txt/doc file, say how many lines/words you want and you'll have your summary instantly. Sounds simple but it is impressive when you use it.
What's behind it is even more impressive. Every word and sentence is analysed (what is subject, verb, adjective,...) and using a dictionary of weighted words we know what word is more important and what not.
There's a lot of manual work involved, feeding the databases. One of the databases consists of words with the relations to other words. So if a words has synonyms, homonyms, is stronger, is the contrary,... all these relations are marked in it. Without this you can't start to analyse the content of a text. When a word has more than one meaning/usage you also have to look at the context of the sentence and figure out the correct meaning.
It's a very interesting technology. The strenght is when you combine applications. Throw a multilingual search engine in it. So you type your question, it gets analysed (what exactly do you want, not just a keyword search), looks into the files in multiple languages, returns you the hits, and translates and summarised the results you want to see. Nice.
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Yesterday I heard on a local radio station the full cd of Madonna is available on napster before it's released and the new single was also released earlier because of this and blahblahblah napster bad blahblahblah..
If record companies would control their employees and made sure new releases don't get out and someone can't take it home, they wouldn't have all these problems. I'm sure copying cds by personnel happened before, but it would only get some local distribution amongst friends. Napster is now a world-wide distribution method. But their problem is the same: they have leaks, they should do something against it and don't blame the one who distributes the music. (it's not the first time you'd hear 'recordings of XX new album got stolen', or even more funny, 'they got lost somewhere'..
There are billions of companies that can keep their R&D secret until it gets released, why can't record companies ? Aren't they professional enough ?
I think I'm missing the point :-)
Can anyone btw calculate how much electricity and thus heat this seti project has already generated (the number of hours all pc's are active is available) ? I think some scientists will talk soon about the seti-disaster of global warming *grin*
Titanic rendered on linux ??
As far as I know titanic was rendered using newtek's lightwave.. and that's not available on linux (unfortunately :-)
btw it was rendered on Alpha's
I know of a (family) company that has become bigger but where the boss reads every email that goes in and out. Employees know it and therefor are very sensitive about what they mail. Email is hardly used, and external consultants they work with are also asked to be very careful in what they email, certainly if it's about things that don't go too well :-)
The result is that the employees aren't really 'shiny happy people' and modern technology isn't used as it could..
I'm very lucky as the company I work for does not monitor anything at all, doesn't restrict internet access, etc. We were talking about upgrading our bandwith recently and an isp's salesmen said the company could restrict the usage (eg downloading mp3's or other non-work related material) and our boss said he didn't want to do anything like this at all :-) Someone has been fired because he was downloading x-rated images for weeks though, but this happened because he neglected his job and other people had to do more work, project was going late, .. So as long as my job gets done I can read /. all day :-)
They are being installed on appartments where people live and even very close to kindergardens etc.
It's a fact that people installing them get sick when working too long on them.
I don't know about the USA but with the GSM-system here in Belgium we have antenna's everywhere. GSM has an antenna every 3km (2 miles)maximum (much more in cities), and as we have 3 operators each using their own antennas, our cities are crowded with them.
Last week in Belgium a judge has (finally) ruled that 4 antenna's on top of an appartment have to be removed because 'as long as it isn't proven they're save we must consider them harmful'.
When telco companies started years ago installing them most antennas were placed illegally btw, without building permits, they needed to be installed right away so the permit was demanded later; or they are being placed on top of a metal container, didn't need a permission for that. People living next to those aren't always notified about antennas being installed (there's one installed on top of a 4-floor building across the street where I lived, only 3 houses left and right of the building were notified, no-one across the street. It was a very nice sight looking out of your livingroom :-(
a spammer that can't spell the product he's spamming for.. djeezes..
just wanted to be first with a comment on an article :-) :-(
man, was this a long text, I almost fell asleep
it's pretty interesting though..
> I'm starting to see anti-aliased text as *fuzzy* rather than smoother. Go see an optician, you need (stronger ?) glasses.. But I agree, new screens and high resolutions don't always display crisp images.. I still prefer my 5yr old 15' ADI at home to the compaq tft450 I have to see at work on :-( Refresh rates and sharpness of lcd's and so aren't what they should be :-(
Check http://www.amiga.com/feature/061400-volker.shtml it's about someone who's built his A500 to have an lcd screen and more.. (sorry for mentioning the amiga here - don't beat me :-) The article mentions a laptop's lcd won't work as the controller for that is on the motherbord, he used 'an industrial' type of lcd. So getting an lcd screen for your project should be possible, using one of a scrap laptop will be a problem.. (unless you find out what part of the motherbord you have to use ? :-)
You could just use a random generator that matches the words, but that program doesn't have a clue about the content, what it's saying.
When you want to know what's some text about, you have to feed it all words of the dictionary and give extra information for each word. Creating sentences is even more difficult as there are linguistic rules, and they must sound normal to a native speaker (although haikus may be more simple).
The company I work for (DMP - http://www.dmpartners.be) is busy in this field.
One of our applications is able to create a summary of a text.
The sentences of the summary aren't created, but are those sentences that represent the content of the text most. Feed it a txt/doc file, say how many lines/words you want and you'll have your summary instantly. Sounds simple but it is impressive when you use it.
What's behind it is even more impressive. Every word and sentence is analysed (what is subject, verb, adjective, ...) and using a dictionary of weighted words we know what word is more important and what not.
There's a lot of manual work involved, feeding the databases. One of the databases consists of words with the relations to other words. So if a words has synonyms, homonyms, is stronger, is the contrary, ... all these relations are marked in it. Without this you can't start to analyse the content of a text. When a word has more than one meaning/usage you also have to look at the context of the sentence and figure out the correct meaning.
It's a very interesting technology. The strenght is when you combine applications. Throw a multilingual search engine in it. So you type your question, it gets analysed (what exactly do you want, not just a keyword search), looks into the files in multiple languages, returns you the hits, and translates and summarised the results you want to see. Nice.