Apparently, one of the reasons Microsoft included games with Windows was as a compelling way to introduce users to the mouse, menu system, etc. In my experience, this seems to work: I suppose people get more motivated when the reward is a game with a nice animation at the end, compared to a nicely-formatted invoice.
This has now changed. Lionel Jospin announced in January 1999 that the French government would no longer exercise control over the use of strong encryption, and legislation is supposedly due pretty soon. They still reserve the right to regulate export of crypto, I believe, and they *may* be requiring people who make cryptographic products to simply *inform* the government.
Human speech (at least in English) is very complicated - it's not just a matter of translating symbols one-to-one into sounds. English, according to my copy of the Big Book of Linguistic Facts (tm), has ~40 vowel sounds (including regional variants, but not including diphthongs). And 5, maybe 6, vowel letters. So the computer has to perform some fairly elaborate calculations that most humans can do "automatically" in order to decide which sound snippet to use, how to tweak it and blend it with surrounding sounds, etc, etc - personally, I thought that the output from the Bell program was quite impressive.
The unit selection and concatenation modules select and connect the acoustic inventory elements. These modules retrieve the necessary units, assign new durations, pitch contours and amplitude profiles and pass parameter vectors on to the synthesis module. Our TTS system uses vector-quantized LPC and a parametrized glottal waveform for synthesis.
ICANN mentions "aso", "dnso", "icann", "internic" and "pso" as reserved for their own use as second-level domains. But www.aso.com is already "Aircraft Shopper Online", and www.dnso.com is a very nice anti-ICANN site. OK, www.icann.com already belongs to ICANN, and www.internic.com looks pretty official. (www.pso.com, on the other hand, is one of those spartan "under construction" doodads).
(I haven't checked the longer "IANA" list, but there are probably a few of these that are already taken, and not just in.com.)
Anyway, I can see why ICANN might want to shut down the "Gnomes of Zurich" (who claim credit for dnso.com), but what about those poor guys selling aeroplanes? Are they being forced to relocate?
Re:What distros include 2.4?
on
eWeek on Linux
·
· Score: 1
SuSE are putting it in their Linux 7.1, which is due to ship on Feb 12. (Original press release)
Re:Open Source Movement and America
on
eWeek on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Well, it seems pretty evident that Open Source as an ideology has been affected by libertarian/free market thinking... just look at ESR. And it's true that this particular kind of political philosophy is stronger on the American side of the pond, though I wouldn't call Europe "non-ideological".
I think that since hackers generally tend to be different or separate from mainstram culture, they're more susceptible to radical ideologies. Your definition of "radical" will vary depending on your cultural environment, American or European... though it's hard to draw a sharp line between them, or indeed to sum up the full range of "European" or "American" political and social thought.
Some American hackers do seem to have (at least judging by posts here on Slashdot) a definite tendency towards libertarianism or anarchism, since there's a strong US tradition of opposition to the government and respect for individual freedoms. I think where the previous poster went wrong was in taking "British" ideals to be representative of "European" ones: there certainly is a British philosophy of ad-hoc governance, distrust of radicalism, and so on, but I don't think that this is true for (say) the French. They favour strong administrative structures directly inspired by ideology: the present French governmental model is rationalistic and Cartesian.
There is, I think, a difference in outlook between hackers of different nationalities and politics, but not in the same kind of way as suggested.
For a vivid demonstration of power usage in a supercomputer, try switching off the cooling system. The Cray-1 would, apparently, become a molten mass with a few seconds (not sure if this is true or not).
Graphics work is number-crunching, with the distinction that you get a pretty picture at the end of it. Or did you expect a computer to be manipulating something other than numbers?
Tim Berners-Lee, when asked what he would do differently if he had his time again, said: "I would make http://www.whatever.com into
http:/com/whatever."
The second version is certainly quicker to type and to pronounce, as well as resembling to the good 'ol Unix directory syntax (despite the differences behind the scenes).
On the other hand, where would the GNU project be without a stable, popular kernel? (It's only recently that the Hurd has become usable.) Linux has spread the GNU tools more widely than GNU itself has, now that the OS is penetrating deeper into business and personal environments -- the core of GNU proper has always been academia, which is an important but smaller field.
Bottom line, it's great for users to have a compiler like GCC and a kernel like Linux. There is no conflict, and no need for there to be one.
Surely anyone as "important" as Hitler is going to affect everything, including technology? Besides, the computer was not a direct result of Hitler's actions: it was a response to them. The credit still lies with the mathematicians and engineers who were directly involved.
I've recently started work on a fairly complex piece of Windows software that has suffered a pretty bizarre life cycle. It's essentially an ambulance simulator: give it a road map and some incident data, and it will figure out the best places for standby ambulances to wait, etc.
The program was originally written for an ancient MS-DOS C compiler, then ported to (Borland Turbo) C++. A few years ago it was made into a 16-bit Windows program with an early version of MSVC, and then hacked into 32-bit compliance with Win95 (under MFC) and MS Visual Studio 97. And then they hired me.
The code reflects its history in terms of general messiness, internal compatability layers, and confused data structures (especially for translation between the original int/float-style types and the Windows structs and typedefs).
While I am hesitant to cause yet another round of complicated porting issues, I'd be interested to try moving to Watcom as part of a general code cleanup. How much work do you think it might take to convert a Microsoft Foundation Classes project into something more portable - or does Watcom have any support for MFC?
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, one of the reasons Microsoft included games with Windows was as a compelling way to introduce users to the mouse, menu system, etc. In my experience, this seems to work: I suppose people get more motivated when the reward is a game with a nice animation at the end, compared to a nicely-formatted invoice.
This has now changed. Lionel Jospin announced in January 1999 that the French government would no longer exercise control over the use of strong encryption, and legislation is supposedly due pretty soon. They still reserve the right to regulate export of crypto, I believe, and they *may* be requiring people who make cryptographic products to simply *inform* the government.
Human speech (at least in English) is very complicated - it's not just a matter of translating symbols one-to-one into sounds. English, according to my copy of the Big Book of Linguistic Facts (tm), has ~40 vowel sounds (including regional variants, but not including diphthongs). And 5, maybe 6, vowel letters. So the computer has to perform some fairly elaborate calculations that most humans can do "automatically" in order to decide which sound snippet to use, how to tweak it and blend it with surrounding sounds, etc, etc - personally, I thought that the output from the Bell program was quite impressive.
Look at http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/tts-overview. html for more information on how they built this system:
etc, etc, etc
So you explain that, in fact, "Fokker" isn't a bad word after all, but the name of an aircraft.
To which the old pilot replies, "Yeah, but these fokkers were Messerschmidts."
ICANN mentions "aso", "dnso", "icann", "internic" and "pso" as reserved for their own use as second-level domains. But www.aso.com is already "Aircraft Shopper Online", and www.dnso.com is a very nice anti-ICANN site. OK, www.icann.com already belongs to ICANN, and www.internic.com looks pretty official. (www.pso.com, on the other hand, is one of those spartan "under construction" doodads).
(I haven't checked the longer "IANA" list, but there are probably a few of these that are already taken, and not just in .com.)
Anyway, I can see why ICANN might want to shut down the "Gnomes of Zurich" (who claim credit for dnso.com), but what about those poor guys selling aeroplanes? Are they being forced to relocate?
SuSE are putting it in their Linux 7.1, which is due to ship on Feb 12. (Original press release)
Well, it seems pretty evident that Open Source as an ideology has been affected by libertarian/free market thinking... just look at ESR. And it's true that this particular kind of political philosophy is stronger on the American side of the pond, though I wouldn't call Europe "non-ideological".
I think that since hackers generally tend to be different or separate from mainstram culture, they're more susceptible to radical ideologies. Your definition of "radical" will vary depending on your cultural environment, American or European... though it's hard to draw a sharp line between them, or indeed to sum up the full range of "European" or "American" political and social thought.
Some American hackers do seem to have (at least judging by posts here on Slashdot) a definite tendency towards libertarianism or anarchism, since there's a strong US tradition of opposition to the government and respect for individual freedoms. I think where the previous poster went wrong was in taking "British" ideals to be representative of "European" ones: there certainly is a British philosophy of ad-hoc governance, distrust of radicalism, and so on, but I don't think that this is true for (say) the French. They favour strong administrative structures directly inspired by ideology: the present French governmental model is rationalistic and Cartesian.
There is, I think, a difference in outlook between hackers of different nationalities and politics, but not in the same kind of way as suggested.
For a vivid demonstration of power usage in a supercomputer, try switching off the cooling system. The Cray-1 would, apparently, become a molten mass with a few seconds (not sure if this is true or not).
Graphics work is number-crunching, with the distinction that you get a pretty picture at the end of it. Or did you expect a computer to be manipulating something other than numbers?
The list is not complete as one of the submitters list says "other portions of application claimed confidential"
That company also asked for .sex and .xxx, so perhaps the TLDs are "rude words" that ICANN didn't want to publish.
Tim Berners-Lee, when asked what he would do differently if he had his time again, said: "I would make http://www.whatever.com into http:/com/whatever."
The second version is certainly quicker to type and to pronounce, as well as resembling to the good 'ol Unix directory syntax (despite the differences behind the scenes).
On the other hand, where would the GNU project be without a stable, popular kernel? (It's only recently that the Hurd has become usable.) Linux has spread the GNU tools more widely than GNU itself has, now that the OS is penetrating deeper into business and personal environments -- the core of GNU proper has always been academia, which is an important but smaller field.
Bottom line, it's great for users to have a compiler like GCC and a kernel like Linux. There is no conflict, and no need for there to be one.
Surely anyone as "important" as Hitler is going to affect everything, including technology? Besides, the computer was not a direct result of Hitler's actions: it was a response to them. The credit still lies with the mathematicians and engineers who were directly involved.
The program was originally written for an ancient MS-DOS C compiler, then ported to (Borland Turbo) C++. A few years ago it was made into a 16-bit Windows program with an early version of MSVC, and then hacked into 32-bit compliance with Win95 (under MFC) and MS Visual Studio 97. And then they hired me.
The code reflects its history in terms of general messiness, internal compatability layers, and confused data structures (especially for translation between the original int/float-style types and the Windows structs and typedefs).
While I am hesitant to cause yet another round of complicated porting issues, I'd be interested to try moving to Watcom as part of a general code cleanup. How much work do you think it might take to convert a Microsoft Foundation Classes project into something more portable - or does Watcom have any support for MFC?