Well, the console makers sell the consoles at a lose, and only make the money back by selling games. So if you illegal mod and pirate games, then they will just lose money from you. That is why the say you cannot mod the console.
That's their choice. Saying that modifying per se should be illegal (rather than copying games, which has always been illegal) because it might cause you to not earn back the loss on your loss-leader is like saying everyone who sees an advertisement for your product and doesn't buy the thing is a thief. (Charities tend to be rather good at the latter; they sometimes send out cheques with a free pen, trying to make you feel guilty for being cheap if you don't give anything back.)
Could someone explain this use of the word 'commodity' to me? (I'm asking in earnest, not trolling.) To me the word means 'a parcel or quantity of goods', or 'articles of commerce'. So anything bought & sold would qualify. So what's not 'true' about software being bought & sold?
The answer is; nothing is true about software being bought & sold. When you "buy" windows XP, you're actually buying a CD and perhaps a book; that's about $5 worth of goods right there. The rest is paying for the privilege of using it; a privilige is not a parcel, nor a quantity, nor an article. It's not tangible.
Aside from pedantry though, a commodity is a good that is freely traded. There's a sliding scale of how "commodotized" a product is; at one end are totally proprietary products on which a company has a complete monopoly - at the other end of the scale is a product like gold; any piece of gold is basically as good as the other (if it's the same amount and quality) they're completely interchangable.
Most consumer products aren't at either end of the scale; toothpaste has a proprietary brandname, you may have a preference for its taste, its formula is secret. On the other hand, if your favorite toothpaste was discontinued tomorrow, you'd change to another one, with no problems. And any one can start manufacturing toothpaste, given a reasonable amount of capital. The bariers to entry are slim.
Playing cards are a commodity, collectible trading cards are not. Cars are commodities, airplanes less so.
To say that a product is becoming a commodity is to say that the barriers to entry for competitors are lessening; that prices are dropping; that the product is becoming more standardized and interchangeable; that it's more widely used; etc. etc.
Sellers do NOT want their products to become a commodity; buyers LOVE products to become commodities (except collectors, even if they never sell, because they're anal about having something unique).
Re:Here is what needs to be done
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 1
I am not at all a CSS expert, but it sounds to me like what's being proposed is the stripping out of any marking and formatting that can be and is useful when viewed with a browser, say lynx, that doesn't support CSS.
So, lynx supports bold and italic? Hmm, not on my terminal.. However, it will highlight (in my case, in purple) text between I or B tags.. As well as text between EM and STRONG tags. But EM (emphasis) and STRONG are semantic markups. Emphasized text doesn't have to be italic, and STRONG text doesn't have to be bold. It may as well be purple. Which is what my lynx does.
Shunning I and B just serves as a reminder to that (though you could in theory also override the italics and bold font properties of those tags using CSS if you in fact DO want purple text to show on your gee-whizz graphical browser; it just doesn't make sense semantically anymore).
Pray tell how lynx renders FONT FACE="Arial" though..
Have you been to a casion lately? The last time I was in Vegas, they had machines for shuffling the cards. Then they went into another machine where the dealer pulled the cards from a feeder one at a time. It was not possible for the dealer to shuffle any special way or deal the cards from the bottom of the deck.
Excellent. Maybe these departments will start to be populated by students who actually have a passion for computer science (in its actual definition), not those who simply want to graduate with a working knowledge of VB and C++ and make their way into the world of "software engineering."
Ah yes. The exciting world of Software Engineering.. Why become a doctor and save lifes, why be a stockbroker and make millions, why even think about being an international man of mystery who has to fight of women with a stick, when you can get a CS degree and spend the next 40 years of your life programming banksoftware in a cubicle?
Oh, and next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day... so, you know, if you want to you can go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
As such, I've cut back as much as I can from the Targets and Wal*Marts and other large chains, instead attempting to find smaller "Ma and Pa" shops that offer similiar merchandise. In today's market, you'd think these stores are hard to find, but I've actually found the opposite.
I stopped going to stores like that when "Ma" and "Pa" started to recognize me.. That just creeps me out!
Encrypted DVDs store the encryption key in a special area on the disc that is not writeable on DVD-R/+R discs. So you can't make a bitwise copy that works. You have to use DeCSS to decrypt it first, thereby circumventing the copy protection scheme.
No single AV solution can be up-to-date at all times. For starters we can't update our virus definitions within minutes of a newly discovered virus. It just doesn't happen. AV companies couldn't afford the bandwidth without raising our costs beyond what's considered reasonable.
Surely they can license bittorrent? Their virusdefinitions already have digital signatures. They could use usenet to distribute them, sign a deal with akamai, use another p2p network than bittorrent, they could broker a deal where they sign up with a really large backbone but get billed by the byte as opposed to for a certain maximum throughput of bytes/sec so they can have bursty traffic, etc. etc. The solutions are plentiful. AV vendors are just unimaginative, technologically backwards, cheap, rip-off artists.
I'd argue that companies with famous brands should get the least amount of protection possible. This is simply because;
1) if their brand is so valuable, why don't they pay the schmoe who registered their domain what it's worth?
2) BigCorp can blast its URL over many communications, like commercials, logoes, branding, etc.; obviously, having an easy-to-remember URL is more important for those less fortunate.
3) Do you even type in a company's name and append.com anymore? You either look on their products for their URL, or you google for it. We all learnt to do this the hard way (whitehouse.com).
4) If a website is actually confusing consumers, or commiting libel; sue em. Don't need no UDRP. If it's too cosrly to sue some-one operating in alaska, well, then your brand isn't famous enough, get yourself a country (ccTLD) domain name.
The whole ICANN/UDRP/WIPO trademark circus is a big joke. Especially when they took away the possibility to register domain names (for free..) in the nice hierarchical XX.us state (sub)domains.
Actually I was thinking that even if most bills and letters are sent online, they would have less of a burden on their resources for delivering many packages and parcels (as well as the traditional hand-written letter or two), allowing for a very cheap rate and with high reliability. But it all depends on how much of their income is drawn from bills and letters.
Delivering parcels is a lucrative business, and a lot of businesses deliver parcels for that reason; not just the post office.
Any national post system relies on business letters for the vast majority of their income, and it's a steady income at that. In effect, they subsidize the delivery of non-commercial letters.
In a lot of countries smaller parcels are also exclusively (by way of government monopoly) delivered by the general post office, just to make sure they make some cash on the side.
If you take away small parcels and business mail for the post office, most nations won't be able to keep their postal system intact, if not for raising either the tax burden or the prices of stamps.
The deal is simply that in order to deliver packages, you just bung a few in the back of a car, drive around and deliver them. If it's too far away, too heavy, etc. you just say "fudge that" and don't accept the parcel. You can drive along a different route each and every day.
Mail on the other hand is viewed as an essential communications medium (e.g. for the government to be able to reach the inhabitants of every home in the nation); that involves mail(wo)men walking/biking pretty much the same route every day, dropping some mail into at least every other mailbox. That's a huge resource hog, lots of recurring expenses, so you need a steady stream of income. Hence the monopoly granted (on letters and small parcels) to a single post organization in all countries I'm aware of.
You lose a lot of credibility by misspelling "grammar" everywhere:-). I never said I was a native speaker:-P (I might've pointed out I'm not, somewhere along the way, even.. Too bad mozilla doesn't have a spellchecker for HTML forms.)
Obviously you haven't used the Office grammar checker in a long time either as you miss a lot of the features. It sounds like you're using the pre-Microsoft version they used to license from a third party. I doubt it. Either I make NO grammAr mistakes apart from making overly long and/or passive sentences, or it just doesn't find any mistakes.
I fed your sentence into Word 10, and changed it to say "Obviously you haven't use the.." - "you haven't use" was not found to be incorrect grammAr. Much use that grammAr check is, then:-(
I am very familiar with wordnet, but it's not something that can be easily used by most casual thesaurus users. Point is it can be easily, and cheaply, adapted for use in software that is easily used. E.g. a spellchecker and thesaurus for your favorite open source office suite (wordnet has a BDS-like license). I think wordnet is better value for money that Microsofts thesaurus, let alone proofing tools;-)
Some, speak English so well, only some words give hint of a bizarre accent which will cause someone to ask where they are from. You seem to be having some sort of superfluous comma problem here.
If you used idioms, slang or use of the language as a casual means of communications or to express your thoughts; similar to language use in poetry, then they have NO CLUE. An enumeration of what amount to synonyms, followed by another punctuation problem (consider using parentheses).
So NO. A Native Indian can not speak English, nor can they write it worth a damn either. "nor.. either."? You want to empoy either "nor can they" or "they can't.. either."
Companies outsource their programmers and engineers to India claiming they are good enough or even better. Who is making claims about whom? If "companies" are claiming, then "they" refers to the "companies". If "programmers and engineers" are claiming, then "they" refers to "programmers and engineers", but those are the ones being outsourced. It can't refer to "India", as it isn't a plural, and it isn't an object.
I call BS, becuase they say the same thing about phone support. becuase? (AND there's that superfluous comma problem creeping up on you again..)
If their programmer's abilities are remotely similar to those Indian's ability to speak English Programmers' and Indians', I suppose you meant to write?
/* I've seen the results of outsourced software development. It reeks. They are idiots, but to be fair, I haven't seen "all" the code, but I can only go by what I've seen sofar. */ Again, what is "They" referring to? The results are idiots?
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
The proofing tools CD also gives you a Dutch grammar-checker, thesaurus, hyphenator and some other tools. Most of these costs far more to develop than a spell-checker.
As I said the "official" list includes hyphenation, and it even comes with hyphenation guidelines for unknown words. Open source people have in fact jumped on this; the open office spell checking will be based on this in future.
Contrary to popular opinion, a spell-checker involves much more than a standard spelling list. You will also need either/both language model tools like a stemmer or agglutinator, OR a list of strings that includes every derivative form of a word (plurals, tenses, and other constructions). The spellchecker by VanDale lexicografie is included for free with their dictionary. They're the most authorative source of Dutch language lexicography, though there are smaller players like Kluwer and Standaard (Belgian publisher). Mostly, academic research is shared among a conglomerate of industry partners, which includes e.g. VanDale, Kluwer, Standaard and Lernout&Hauspie.
The spell-checking code also has to handle many special cases of text and punctuation, and then it has to have suitable heuristics for determining suggestions based on keyboard layouts and common keying errors. Good spell-checkers also deal with high frequency names as well. They won't be on your government lists. There are separate lists for high frequency names, as I'm sure you're aware. Also public domain, and available from your friendly neighborhood government statistics bureau.
The main benefit the established publishers have over open source developers and any public domain wordlists are the corpora (collections of published texts) they've collected over the years. They have access to archives of newspapers, transcripts of TV programs etc.; just like the Oxford English Dictionary, they include words in their dictionaries when they've been in significant use for a number of years (5 IIRC).
You might like to check out wordnet btw; a public domain, high quality, language tool, that includes synonyms, hyperonyms, hyponyms, meronyms, etc. and definitions. Good, good stuff. No hyphenation though.
I think most English language spellcheckers suffer quite a bit from the fact that English spelling is pretty fucked up to begin with, and that its grammer is generally described in a bullshit way (the Chomsky stuff, NP, VP, etc. Doesn't help a bit). The grammer check in Office is completely useless; it only ever tells me that "ooh, that's a long sentence" or "hey! that's a passive sentence", kind of like a mix between the paperclip and the "math is hard" barbie doll.
> because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
More like their people generally can't afford to pay for all the baggage (who can?). No offence meant, I'm sure;-) and none taken around here either, but that statement is a bit like saying that I use Debian because I'm too cheap to pay for Microsoft Windows/Office/VirusShield/&c.
I mentioned them being cheap-asses because a) it's true in the case of DVD/DVE b) that's a Capitalist motive, not a Communist one.;-)
The prrofing tools cost me about EUR 99,90; a Dutch only spellchecker from vandale costs EUR 77,90. The government approved standard spellings list is available for free, no copyright, and even lists hyphenation, so I'm sure there are even cheaper alternatives than the vandale checker. This is for a language spoken by only about 20 million people.
Proofing tools are cheap IF you also need a couple of the other languages, but to just embellish your English copy with Dutch spelling (or vice versa) it's not the cheapest option. Perhaps it would be even more expensive if all those French/Hungarian/Finnish etc. users wouldn't subsidize my small language by buying the bundle as well - but that would only enhance the comparative advantage of the third party checkers.
So answer the question. Why gets to decide what the standard is and why should one group get total control over the market?
Some reasons, historically abound; 1. They're a monopoly already 2. They're the ones allowing porn on the format 3. They're the ones with the patents 4. They're everybody, and everybody can join in
1) is the ITU way 2) is the VHS way 3) is the CD way (philips/sony) 4) is the ISO way
But you're missing the real point; obviously if everybody involved in making higer-capacity-than-CD optical media could just come up with a single, future-proof standard, there would be no confusion among consumers, and everybody would be competing on a level playing field. Standards aren't about excluding competitors - at least, not by definition. That only happens when smart asses throw in a lot of patents to rake in the money.
So that would be
5. People get fed up with factions, the peace pipe is smoked, and a single standard is decided upon to make sure the technology works and SELLS.
that would be
5) the way of the screw.
The way things are going with DVD, the Chinese stand a good chance to come up with a better, less encumbered, and more standardized format. And not because they're communists, but because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
How many tumblers are in the lock on your house/apartment door. How about in your car door? Your ignition?
Care to tell me the number of pins on a PCI card? An AGP card? A slot-A cpu?
What voltage is on your home phone line? What's the ring voltage? What's the max ring current? IIRC 60V, but tell me, what's the voltage on your VGA cable? And on your ps/2 keyboard? What's the maximum amount of current your mouse draws from USB? (Ring voltage is about 60V, I belief. Enough to be felt. Otherwise, low voltage.)
What frequency is your favorite TV channel transmitted on? What is the bandwidth? Modulation scheme? How about the encoding for the IR your remote control sends to your TV to turn it on? Respectively channel 11, 8Mhz, Phase-alternating-line, and philips RC5 (off the top of my head). Note that the exact frequency of channel 11 doesn't matter, and that I only know the other stuff coz I'm a bit of a geek.
Pray tell what the modulation on the PCI bus is though. How about the modulation on fast ethernet? And the bandwidth (in Hz) of firewire?
If we required users of all these devices to understand them the way us "geeks" understand computers, no-one would use cars or telephones, watch TV, or lock their doors. We know what we need.
You talk about not understanding cars; I distintcly remember having to take a test. It's not all that trivial. And if I had a quarter for every time even a family member of mine fudged something up w.r.t. their TV or (cell)telephone, I'd be a rich man. Or even for every time I tried to insert my key the wrong way up.
Although it's always fun to point out to megapixel-fetishists that 1024x768 looks find on a 15" panel mere inches from your face (wossat, 50% of your visual field) unless you're staring intently to make out every detail of some nice tits.
Get a whole bunch of Linux advocates in a room together with a bunch of BSD advocates. Casually mention licensing. Shortly before all hell breaks loose, one or two people will mention that Linux has not forked because it's under the GPL, while laissez-faire BSD has at least a dozen forks in it. Whereupon Alan will hit Theo over the head with a copy of the GNU Manifesto, rendering him unconscious.
Forking has happened with linux. In fact, linux comes pre-forked. Truly bleeding edge early adopters only use kernels with AC patches, don't they? And don't a lot of people use RedHat's kernels, which are usually older kernels with patches back-ported. Sounds forky to me.
Now, because of the GPL nature of derivative kernels, kernel patches often make their way into the mainstream Linux(R) kernel in due time, as with most journalling filesystems for example, but that doesn't necessarily happen; so people who adopted early to some bleeding edge feature that never got into the mainstream kernel need to keep on patching. That's a fork, baby.
In reality, which fork you use depends on to whom you swear allegiance; RedHat, Linus, TheoDeRaadt, etc.
Come on, any OSS app worth its salt has had language files that you can toss around at will, even though the app is alread compiled, for years.. Microsoft only figured out how to have more than one language in Windows that you can switch without having to install a whole different build of the OS in windows 2000.. And still it manages to bitch about a DLL being reinstalled in a different language, once in a while.
And don't even get me started on English/Dutch office, and the intricacies of getting Dutch spell checking to work on an English version of word (unless you want to shell out $MEGA_BUCKS for proofing tools which include spellcheckers for about 34 other languages; overkill methinks).
But now, you get the privilige of translating apps yourself! Wow! That's great. So now there can be 12 competing translations of one application, so as to make sure you HAVE to use the English version if you're training people, because the localized versions are all different. Yay!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the console makers sell the consoles at a lose, and only make the money back by selling games. So if you illegal mod and pirate games, then they will just lose money from you. That is why the say you cannot mod the console.
That's their choice. Saying that modifying per se should be illegal (rather than copying games, which has always been illegal) because it might cause you to not earn back the loss on your loss-leader is like saying everyone who sees an advertisement for your product and doesn't buy the thing is a thief. (Charities tend to be rather good at the latter; they sometimes send out cheques with a free pen, trying to make you feel guilty for being cheap if you don't give anything back.)
Also, not watching ads is theft too. Yeah.
Could someone explain this use of the word 'commodity' to me? (I'm asking in earnest, not trolling.) To me the word means 'a parcel or quantity of goods', or 'articles of commerce'. So anything bought & sold would qualify. So what's not 'true' about software being bought & sold?
The answer is; nothing is true about software being bought & sold.
When you "buy" windows XP, you're actually buying a CD and perhaps a book; that's about $5 worth of goods right there. The rest is paying for the privilege of using it; a privilige is not a parcel, nor a quantity, nor an article. It's not tangible.
Aside from pedantry though, a commodity is a good that is freely traded. There's a sliding scale of how "commodotized" a product is; at one end are totally proprietary products on which a company has a complete monopoly - at the other end of the scale is a product like gold; any piece of gold is basically as good as the other (if it's the same amount and quality) they're completely interchangable.
Most consumer products aren't at either end of the scale; toothpaste has a proprietary brandname, you may have a preference for its taste, its formula is secret. On the other hand, if your favorite toothpaste was discontinued tomorrow, you'd change to another one, with no problems. And any one can start manufacturing toothpaste, given a reasonable amount of capital. The bariers to entry are slim.
Playing cards are a commodity, collectible trading cards are not. Cars are commodities, airplanes less so.
To say that a product is becoming a commodity is to say that the barriers to entry for competitors are lessening; that prices are dropping; that the product is becoming more standardized and interchangeable; that it's more widely used; etc. etc.
Sellers do NOT want their products to become a commodity; buyers LOVE products to become commodities (except collectors, even if they never sell, because they're anal about having something unique).
So, lynx supports bold and italic? Hmm, not on my terminal.. However, it will highlight (in my case, in purple) text between I or B tags.. As well as text between EM and STRONG tags. But EM (emphasis) and STRONG are semantic markups. Emphasized text doesn't have to be italic, and STRONG text doesn't have to be bold. It may as well be purple. Which is what my lynx does.
Shunning I and B just serves as a reminder to that (though you could in theory also override the italics and bold font properties of those tags using CSS if you in fact DO want purple text to show on your gee-whizz graphical browser; it just doesn't make sense semantically anymore).
Pray tell how lynx renders FONT FACE="Arial" though..
Have you been to a casion lately? The last time I was in Vegas, they had machines for shuffling the cards. Then they went into another machine where the dealer pulled the cards from a feeder one at a time. It was not possible for the dealer to shuffle any special way or deal the cards from the bottom of the deck.
Machines cannot shuffle in a special way?
Excellent. Maybe these departments will start to be populated by students who actually have a passion for computer science (in its actual definition), not those who simply want to graduate with a working knowledge of VB and C++ and make their way into the world of "software engineering."
Ah yes. The exciting world of Software Engineering.. Why become a doctor and save lifes, why be a stockbroker and make millions, why even think about being an international man of mystery who has to fight of women with a stick, when you can get a CS degree and spend the next 40 years of your life programming banksoftware in a cubicle?
Oh, and next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day... so, you know, if you want to you can go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
As such, I've cut back as much as I can from the Targets and Wal*Marts and other large chains, instead attempting to find smaller "Ma and Pa" shops that offer similiar merchandise. In today's market, you'd think these stores are hard to find, but I've actually found the opposite.
I stopped going to stores like that when "Ma" and "Pa" started to recognize me.. That just creeps me out!
Encrypted DVDs store the encryption key in a special area on the disc that is not writeable on DVD-R/+R discs. So you can't make a bitwise copy that works. You have to use DeCSS to decrypt it first, thereby circumventing the copy protection scheme.
No single AV solution can be up-to-date at all times. For starters we can't update our virus definitions within minutes of a newly discovered virus. It just doesn't happen. AV companies couldn't afford the bandwidth without raising our costs beyond what's considered reasonable.
Surely they can license bittorrent? Their virusdefinitions already have digital signatures. They could use usenet to distribute them, sign a deal with akamai, use another p2p network than bittorrent, they could broker a deal where they sign up with a really large backbone but get billed by the byte as opposed to for a certain maximum throughput of bytes/sec so they can have bursty traffic, etc. etc. The solutions are plentiful. AV vendors are just unimaginative, technologically backwards, cheap, rip-off artists.
I'd argue that companies with famous brands should get the least amount of protection possible. This is simply because;
.com anymore? You either look on their products for their URL, or you google for it. We all learnt to do this the hard way (whitehouse.com).
1) if their brand is so valuable, why don't they pay the schmoe who registered their domain what it's worth?
2) BigCorp can blast its URL over many communications, like commercials, logoes, branding, etc.; obviously, having an easy-to-remember URL is more important for those less fortunate.
3) Do you even type in a company's name and append
4) If a website is actually confusing consumers, or commiting libel; sue em. Don't need no UDRP. If it's too cosrly to sue some-one operating in alaska, well, then your brand isn't famous enough, get yourself a country (ccTLD) domain name.
The whole ICANN/UDRP/WIPO trademark circus is a big joke. Especially when they took away the possibility to register domain names (for free..) in the nice hierarchical XX.us state (sub)domains.
Actually I was thinking that even if most bills and letters are sent online, they would have less of a burden on their resources for delivering many packages and parcels (as well as the traditional hand-written letter or two), allowing for a very cheap rate and with high reliability.
But it all depends on how much of their income is drawn from bills and letters.
Delivering parcels is a lucrative business, and a lot of businesses deliver parcels for that reason; not just the post office.
Any national post system relies on business letters for the vast majority of their income, and it's a steady income at that. In effect, they subsidize the delivery of non-commercial letters.
In a lot of countries smaller parcels are also exclusively (by way of government monopoly) delivered by the general post office, just to make sure they make some cash on the side.
If you take away small parcels and business mail for the post office, most nations won't be able to keep their postal system intact, if not for raising either the tax burden or the prices of stamps.
The deal is simply that in order to deliver packages, you just bung a few in the back of a car, drive around and deliver them. If it's too far away, too heavy, etc. you just say "fudge that" and don't accept the parcel. You can drive along a different route each and every day.
Mail on the other hand is viewed as an essential communications medium (e.g. for the government to be able to reach the inhabitants of every home in the nation); that involves mail(wo)men walking/biking pretty much the same route every day, dropping some mail into at least every other mailbox. That's a huge resource hog, lots of recurring expenses, so you need a steady stream of income. Hence the monopoly granted (on letters and small parcels) to a single post organization in all countries I'm aware of.
Appeals to authority and ad hominems. Grrreat. Hope your salespeople have better arguments.
You lose a lot of credibility by misspelling "grammar" everywhere :-). :-P (I might've pointed out I'm not, somewhere along the way, even.. Too bad mozilla doesn't have a spellchecker for HTML forms.)
:-(
;-)
I never said I was a native speaker
Obviously you haven't used the Office grammar checker in a long time either as you miss a lot of the features. It sounds like you're using the pre-Microsoft version they used to license from a third party.
I doubt it. Either I make NO grammAr mistakes apart from making overly long and/or passive sentences, or it just doesn't find any mistakes.
I fed your sentence into Word 10, and changed it to say "Obviously you haven't use the.." - "you haven't use" was not found to be incorrect grammAr. Much use that grammAr check is, then
I am very familiar with wordnet, but it's not something that can be easily used by most casual thesaurus users.
Point is it can be easily, and cheaply, adapted for use in software that is easily used. E.g. a spellchecker and thesaurus for your favorite open source office suite (wordnet has a BDS-like license).
I think wordnet is better value for money that Microsofts thesaurus, let alone proofing tools
Some, speak English so well, only some words give hint of a bizarre accent which will cause someone to ask where they are from.
.. either."
/* I've seen the results of outsourced software development. It reeks. They are idiots, but to be fair, I haven't seen "all" the code, but I can only go by what I've seen sofar. */
You seem to be having some sort of superfluous comma problem here.
If you used idioms, slang or use of the language as a casual means of communications or to express your thoughts; similar to language use in poetry, then they have NO CLUE.
An enumeration of what amount to synonyms, followed by another punctuation problem (consider using parentheses).
So NO. A Native Indian can not speak English, nor can they write it worth a damn either.
"nor.. either."?
You want to empoy either "nor can they" or "they can't
Companies outsource their programmers and engineers to India claiming they are good enough or even better.
Who is making claims about whom? If "companies" are claiming, then "they" refers to the "companies". If "programmers and engineers" are claiming, then "they" refers to "programmers and engineers", but those are the ones being outsourced. It can't refer to "India", as it isn't a plural, and it isn't an object.
I call BS, becuase they say the same thing about phone support.
becuase? (AND there's that superfluous comma problem creeping up on you again..)
If their programmer's abilities are remotely similar to those Indian's ability to speak English
Programmers' and Indians', I suppose you meant to write?
Again, what is "They" referring to? The results are idiots?
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
Don't google for "hot granny horse sex action".
The proofing tools CD also gives you a Dutch grammar-checker, thesaurus, hyphenator and some other tools. Most of these costs far more to develop than a spell-checker.
As I said the "official" list includes hyphenation, and it even comes with hyphenation guidelines for unknown words. Open source people have in fact jumped on this; the open office spell checking will be based on this in future.
Contrary to popular opinion, a spell-checker involves much more than a standard spelling list. You will also need either/both language model tools like a stemmer or agglutinator, OR a list of strings that includes every derivative form of a word (plurals, tenses, and other constructions).
The spellchecker by VanDale lexicografie is included for free with their dictionary. They're the most authorative source of Dutch language lexicography, though there are smaller players like Kluwer and Standaard (Belgian publisher). Mostly, academic research is shared among a conglomerate of industry partners, which includes e.g. VanDale, Kluwer, Standaard and Lernout&Hauspie.
The spell-checking code also has to handle many special cases of text and punctuation, and then it has to have suitable heuristics for determining suggestions based on keyboard layouts and common keying errors. Good spell-checkers also deal with high frequency names as well. They won't be on your government lists.
There are separate lists for high frequency names, as I'm sure you're aware. Also public domain, and available from your friendly neighborhood government statistics bureau.
The main benefit the established publishers have over open source developers and any public domain wordlists are the corpora (collections of published texts) they've collected over the years. They have access to archives of newspapers, transcripts of TV programs etc.; just like the Oxford English Dictionary, they include words in their dictionaries when they've been in significant use for a number of years (5 IIRC).
You might like to check out wordnet btw; a public domain, high quality, language tool, that includes synonyms, hyperonyms, hyponyms, meronyms, etc. and definitions. Good, good stuff. No hyphenation though.
I think most English language spellcheckers suffer quite a bit from the fact that English spelling is pretty fucked up to begin with, and that its grammer is generally described in a bullshit way (the Chomsky stuff, NP, VP, etc. Doesn't help a bit). The grammer check in Office is completely useless; it only ever tells me that "ooh, that's a long sentence" or "hey! that's a passive sentence", kind of like a mix between the paperclip and the "math is hard" barbie doll.
> because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
;-) and none taken around here either, but that statement is a bit like saying that I use Debian because I'm too cheap to pay for Microsoft Windows/Office/VirusShield/&c.
;-)
More like their people generally can't afford to pay for all the baggage (who can?). No offence meant, I'm sure
I mentioned them being cheap-asses because a) it's true in the case of DVD/DVE b) that's a Capitalist motive, not a Communist one.
The prrofing tools cost me about EUR 99,90; a Dutch only spellchecker from vandale costs EUR 77,90.
The government approved standard spellings list is available for free, no copyright, and even lists hyphenation, so I'm sure there are even cheaper alternatives than the vandale checker. This is for a language spoken by only about 20 million people.
Proofing tools are cheap IF you also need a couple of the other languages, but to just embellish your English copy with Dutch spelling (or vice versa) it's not the cheapest option. Perhaps it would be even more expensive if all those French/Hungarian/Finnish etc. users wouldn't subsidize my small language by buying the bundle as well - but that would only enhance the comparative advantage of the third party checkers.
So answer the question. Why gets to decide what the standard is and why should one group get total control over the market?
Some reasons, historically abound;
1. They're a monopoly already
2. They're the ones allowing porn on the format
3. They're the ones with the patents
4. They're everybody, and everybody can join in
1) is the ITU way
2) is the VHS way
3) is the CD way (philips/sony)
4) is the ISO way
But you're missing the real point; obviously if everybody involved in making higer-capacity-than-CD optical media could just come up with a single, future-proof standard, there would be no confusion among consumers, and everybody would be competing on a level playing field. Standards aren't about excluding competitors - at least, not by definition. That only happens when smart asses throw in a lot of patents to rake in the money.
So that would be
5. People get fed up with factions, the peace pipe is smoked, and a single standard is decided upon to make sure the technology works and SELLS.
that would be
5) the way of the screw.
The way things are going with DVD, the Chinese stand a good chance to come up with a better, less encumbered, and more standardized format. And not because they're communists, but because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
Quick, answer these questions:
How many tumblers are in the lock on your house/apartment door. How about in your car door? Your ignition?
Care to tell me the number of pins on a PCI card? An AGP card? A slot-A cpu?
What voltage is on your home phone line? What's the ring voltage? What's the max ring current?
IIRC 60V, but tell me, what's the voltage on your VGA cable? And on your ps/2 keyboard? What's the maximum amount of current your mouse draws from USB?
(Ring voltage is about 60V, I belief. Enough to be felt. Otherwise, low voltage.)
What frequency is your favorite TV channel transmitted on? What is the bandwidth? Modulation scheme? How about the encoding for the IR your remote control sends to your TV to turn it on?
Respectively channel 11, 8Mhz, Phase-alternating-line, and philips RC5 (off the top of my head). Note that the exact frequency of channel 11 doesn't matter, and that I only know the other stuff coz I'm a bit of a geek.
Pray tell what the modulation on the PCI bus is though. How about the modulation on fast ethernet? And the bandwidth (in Hz) of firewire?
If we required users of all these devices to understand them the way us "geeks" understand computers, no-one would use cars or telephones, watch TV, or lock their doors.
We know what we need.
You talk about not understanding cars; I distintcly remember having to take a test. It's not all that trivial. And if I had a quarter for every time even a family member of mine fudged something up w.r.t. their TV or (cell)telephone, I'd be a rich man. Or even for every time I tried to insert my key the wrong way up.
Almost, but not quite.
Although it's always fun to point out to megapixel-fetishists that 1024x768 looks find on a 15" panel mere inches from your face (wossat, 50% of your visual field) unless you're staring intently to make out every detail of some nice tits.
Pure and simple.
Get a whole bunch of Linux advocates in a room together with a bunch of BSD advocates. Casually mention licensing. Shortly before all hell breaks loose, one or two people will mention that Linux has not forked because it's under the GPL, while laissez-faire BSD has at least a dozen forks in it. Whereupon Alan will hit Theo over the head with a copy of the GNU Manifesto, rendering him unconscious.
Forking has happened with linux. In fact, linux comes pre-forked. Truly bleeding edge early adopters only use kernels with AC patches, don't they? And don't a lot of people use RedHat's kernels, which are usually older kernels with patches back-ported. Sounds forky to me.
Now, because of the GPL nature of derivative kernels, kernel patches often make their way into the mainstream Linux(R) kernel in due time, as with most journalling filesystems for example, but that doesn't necessarily happen; so people who adopted early to some bleeding edge feature that never got into the mainstream kernel need to keep on patching. That's a fork, baby.
In reality, which fork you use depends on to whom you swear allegiance; RedHat, Linus, TheoDeRaadt, etc.
Come on, any OSS app worth its salt has had language files that you can toss around at will, even though the app is alread compiled, for years.. Microsoft only figured out how to have more than one language in Windows that you can switch without having to install a whole different build of the OS in windows 2000.. And still it manages to bitch about a DLL being reinstalled in a different language, once in a while.
And don't even get me started on English/Dutch office, and the intricacies of getting Dutch spell checking to work on an English version of word (unless you want to shell out $MEGA_BUCKS for proofing tools which include spellcheckers for about 34 other languages; overkill methinks).
But now, you get the privilige of translating apps yourself! Wow! That's great. So now there can be 12 competing translations of one application, so as to make sure you HAVE to use the English version if you're training people, because the localized versions are all different. Yay!
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
Would you add a new Internet tax that everybody should pay?
Would you add new monitoring software so that an agency can track what people are doing on the net?
Would it actually be any more helpful to independents?
How do you get paid when your stuff is played on the radio?
(By the way, doesn't CA (California) have a larger government budget than CA (Canada)?)
I misread that as ComputerAssociates in California vs. ComputerAssociates in Canada... D'oh!