Natural language processing and speech recognition are two entirely separate problem spaces.
Natural language processing tasks involve parsing strings of tokens and mapping them to commands to be executed. So, from your example, "Pull up the name of employee number 12345", the natural language system must map "Pull up" to "SELECT", "the name" to "name", "of employee number 12345" to "FROM users where id = 12345". Really, it's largely a problem of context, and your example shows an excellent problem: the "of employee number 12345" to "FROM..." map requires the contextual information of where to pull this information from. Surely multiple tables of a database could have an "employee number" field in them. Do you want all of the tuples which matches, or just from a certain table? Now, in the context of looking up a bunch of other employees, maybe I know what table you've been hitting a lot, and can determine what you're asking, but without that context, I have no idea.
In fact, everyday speech has a lot more ambiguity in it than could be handled without keeping large amounts of state, be it contextual or experiencial/situational. For example, if I overhear two people in a conversation, and the first thing I hear is: "Yeah, but he's been lying all though his campaign, and I for one don't support him," I have no idea which politcal candidate might be speaking of. However, if I saw that person wearing a shirt for a political campaign last week, then I have enough context to make a reasonable guess that he's talking about that person's opponent.
Speech recognition is a "lower level" than that: it's about matching acoustic information into speech sounds and then using the speech sounds to determine the word that was said. This is a hugely complex task that has a number of unsolved problems (of which these are the 3 that I can think of off the top of my head):
1) "speech sounds" are fuzzy categories, and are not canonical targets. 2) salient "features" of phonemes are disputed, contradictory and large amounts of redundancy/conflicting info are built into the speech signal 3) idiosyncratic speaker-to-speaker differences make the phoneme categories even fuzzier and can complicate the task even for the one speech recognition system that we know works: the human brain.
At any rate, the problems that need to be solved for speech recognition are not the same problems in natural language processing. While there may be some cross over in pattern-matching, the specifics of the problem spaces make it unlikely that you will get much benefit for NLS (natural language systems) from just making the algorithms faster.
Which, in fact, is my main criticism of this article: the algorithms that we have now are piss-poor, and making them faster doesn't intrinsically make them better. Unless there's been some huge advance in the field that I'm unaware of, you'd still have to train a SRS (speech recognition system) on your idiolect, by reading some pre-selected passages to it. This model has lots of problems, most specially that it's tailored to an individual. Imagine if you had to have each person that you spoke with read some canned paragraphs to you the first time you met so that you could interact....
[sorry I don't have sources for all of this; I'm AFB, and I don't have time to dredge up info right now. But, apparently, I have time to write one long-ass entry...]
Nice of you to decide what Iraq should do with its oil. Way to call Iraq a blood for oil war on one hand and ignore your own cliam the next.
What? This is a stunningly stupid remark. Who else should decide what Iraq does with its oil? How about.... the Iraqi people! Basically, Hussein should have been deposed in 1992, and reconstruction should have occurred back then. Then, the Iraqi government could then decide what to do what they wanted with their own oil, unlike how any of the other Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia do. I guess you're arguing that the US should decide what is done with Iraqi oil? But, I don't actually know, because you aren't *making* any arguments, you're just being an ass...
And, how am I ignoring my "blood for oil war" claim? I do feel that this administration has started a war of aggression for control of the second-largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world, in that if there were no oil in Iraq, we NEVER would have sought to depose Hussein; in fact the US government helped put him in power.
I heard a lot of democrats saying that during the clinton impeachment too... oh wait, no I didn't.
First off, you know nothing about me. You're calling me a democrat, when you have no idea. So, the _fact_ that I didn't support Clinton lying about his affair doesn't really matter to you, does it?
Second, there is a fundamental difference between having oral sex performed on you and lying about it and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and over 1,000 American soldiers because you falsely lead the US citizenry to believe that Iraq is a threat. Sorry, but the latter crime is a repugnant and morally bankrupt action while the former is dispicable, but not even close to in the same category.
At least W wasn't under oath;)
I have no reply to this. If you can't see the difference between their actions, then I just feel really sorry for you.
And while we're on the subject of hypocrisy, how many of you guys screaming (not parent post) but Kerry served in Nam voted for Dole because of his service compared to clinton? Sigh...
Sorry, I'm not a single issue voter, and Clinton's draft-dodging just wasn't enough of a problem in 1996 to have me not vote for him, when his economic plans were actually working. I didn't really see any compelling reason to go back to Reagan-esque policies when the economy was doing just fine.
I just love how both replies to my comments didn't try to talk about how Bush did or didn't lie, but were just trivial personal attacks. You guys need to get your heads out of your asses and figure out what's important for yourselves rather than just follow your party's line.
Hey CLinton had his number called and lied to get out of it, you speak as if this is something new.
"Everyone else does it, so why does it matter?" Sorry, but I didn't vote for Clinton back in '92, either. I don't think that people should get to lie about this stuff and not have that held against them. Oh, wait, you just like to lump people into neat categories of "Liberal asshole" and "Republican god", rather than face the messier reality of real life.
Umm for the umpteenth time Oil is fungable if all the Oil in Iraq went to france the cost US companies pay for oil would go down as much as if all the Oil came to the US. If you dont understand market economics dont pretend to know what you are talking about..
So, according to you, the only 2 options are:
1) All of Iraq's oil comes to the US 2) All of Iraq's oil goes to France
What about:
3) Iraq keeps its oil, and the US cuts down on its dependance on foriegn oil by ramping up utilization of non-fossil fuel energy sources
But, hey, if that happened, energy & oil companies (i.e. the backers of Bush & Cheney) wouldn't be able to continue making massive profits.
Yes because puttiong that information togeter as it has now been done had nothing to do with the fact it actually happened? Look at Perl Harbor, all indications were months in advance something was going to happen, if we let the modern Liberal run things then we would still have comitties on why the radar was not followed up on, and would not have actually done anything about Japan..
Have you any evidence that backs up your assertion that a "modern liberal" wouldn't have reacted to the attack on Perl Harbor? I believe that liberals and conservatives alike supported going into Afghanistan. Do you remember? You know, that other war that we're in that nobody talks about anymore? The vote was unanimous.
Second: There's a difference between a) doing absolutely NOTHING to keep an eye on terrorist activities and b) working as hard as you can and learning as much as possible about what terrorists are planing. Bush & Co. did (a): They ignored the Clinton-appointed terrorist adivsor Richard Clarke and FBI memos before September 11th. Which would you rather see, a President that did NOTHING to make terrorism a priority, or one that tried as hard as possible to prevent terrorist attacks, even if they failed? I, for one, would rather see the latter.
But, obviously, you're not concerned with reality, but just your black & white view of it. Critical thinking is _hard_, and if you don't want to do that, then only you will suffer the consequences.
I, for one, am willing to bet that these documents (at least the CYA one; what about the others? Anyone re-type those, especially the ones with _signatures_?) are done in Word. It's _way_ too big of a coincidence that they line up exactly like this.
Now, I know tons of people here are saying "So what, this happened 30 years ago", and that it doesn't matter anymore. However, lying about it over and over and over again, _does_ matter.
And, as for this kind of trivial issue is distracting us from the bigger issues, you'd be right if this wasn't part of a larger pattern of contemptuous lying from Bush to the public. Basically, the guy lies about anything so that he can just do whatever the fuck he wanted to in the first place:
1) Didn't want to go to ANG duty, but still want to be elected? Lie about your service. 2) Want to secure Iraq's oil supply, but populace won't support outright imperialism? Lie about your reasons (and scare the crap out of them). 3) Want to get credit for cracking down on terrorists, but didn't do squat to actually prevent September 11th? Lie about what info you had earlier in 2001.
Bush is a pathological liar, and a danger to this country. He will say whatever needs to be said to push through his agenda. And, that makes it important to stop him, and makes this issue non-trivial.
How is this even considered an article? This looks more like a laundry list of complaints that some Java programmer (I use the term loosely) has heard over the years with some non sequiturs thrown in. He doesn't do any in-depth analysis of the few points that he does bring up, and doesn't mention any real criticisms of the Java language (e.g. much promised but little delivered garbage collection).
Let's look a few of the points he chose to include in his "analysis":
Java is popular. Anything popular isn't "cool".: What? First, prove that Java is popular. Second, how do you explain the iPod's coolness despite being wildly popular?
Java has a vast library that is available to all Java developers: (he means that you shouldn't re-invent the wheel, which makes it "less cool") Well, for most programmers comfortable with OO programming (including Linux kernel hackers; remember that the VM and VFS subsystems are OO design implemented in C), having a large toolset is a god-send, not something that's "uncool". In fact, most C++ programmers that I know think generic programming, which is pretty well enabled by the implementation of the STL, is pretty damned cool, in that it gives you a lot of high-performance power and reusable code for little-to-no work.
Java is an application programming platform (and therefore you can't do device drivers, etc.) Actually, who says that application programming isn't cool? Forms programming isn't very cool, but saying "applications programming" covers such a broad range of tasks that it's almost impossible to say it's any one thing with a straight face. I've done some incredibly cool applications programming in Objective C, and some really tedious applications programming in C. The language didn't change anything about the "excitement" of the task; it was all about the problem we were solving.
I don't like Java because I think it's a broken implementation of a decent idea. I prefer ObjC's object model and dynamism, C++'s operator overloading & template features and C's simplicity for the large majority of the programming tasks I perform, and Perl (a necessary evil) for anything that is small & quick enough that I need to do it on the command line. Java is a heavy duty programming language that's missing features like operator overloading and broken or brain-dead features like its garbage collection (how can you enforce memory reclaimation? Oh, you can't in Java. Hrm. Take a look at Cocoa's reference counting memory allocation/reclaimation system, or C++'s ctor/dtor paradigm for an example of how to do this correctly).
That's why it's not "cool", IMO: because it is inferior.
Actually, in the last quarter, the iTMS did post a small profit.
Also, the point isn't that FairPlay is driving sales of the iPod, but that Apple controls the total user experience of the iPod. It controls:
1) The UI & hardware of the iPod 2) The loading of music, playlist creation, etc. on the computer you use to interface with the iPod via iTunes 3) The online purchasing of music for use on your iPod
Apple, as they usually do, wants to have total control over all of those factors. It's the same damned thing they do with their OS & Hardware combo and their retail experience. They want to control everything, not because they're control freaks, but because "if you want it done right, do it yourself".
Mac users can't grasp things as simple as right click
Kinda hard to "right click" with a one-button mouse. Anyone who buys a 2-button USB mouse for a Mac can certainly "grasp" right-clicking; I did, and so did every other Mac user I've ever seen with a two-button mouse.
and totally wig out when they have to open a command prompt to do something like ipconfig
On Mac OS X, you don't need to use ipconfig, and that's the point. Use the Network Preference Pane, which is painless.
What you need to realize is that to most people computers are a means to an end, not an end unto itself. As a developer, I'm sometimes happy to tinker around with my work Linux machine, but mostly I just want to get something done and not have to tediously and endlessly tweak RedHat 9.0 to do what I want. I'd rather use Mac OS X and just get things done.
This is a bald-faced "Urban Myth" go back and review the facts of the 2000 election and you'll find the Supreme Court in reality ended up being a non-factor in the outcome of the election.
Ummmm. Nope. Sorry. You're the one who is mistaken here.
The Supreme Court ordered that the recount be stopped (and, that is the ONLY recount, not "multiple recounts" as James Baker and the Republicans claimed over and over again during the press coverage of the 2000 election fiasco) and that the totals from the election night be certified. This DID have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, because, as was found by a group of eight news organizations that did a recount of the Florida 2000 votes, Gore won in a number of different recount scenarios, even if you don't count the extra illegally counted absentee votes that pushed Bush over Gore's vote total.
Your facetious "can't make an X" statement shows how little you know about what happened. The main problems with the 2000 election in Florida were:
1) Tens of thousands of people were incorrectly put on the felon list and removed from the voter rolls 2) The "butterfly" ballot debacle that caused thousands of votes (3:1 of which were likely to go to Gore) to not be tallied. These were punch ballots, and not "X marks the choice" ballots.
Now, were the Consortium recounts widely reported as a Gore victory? No. Why? At least partly because they were completed in November of 2001, while the majority of the country was in shock after September the 11th. I'm not saying this as some sort of conspiracy theory, but a LOT of the news coverage at the time was pretty soft on anything related to Bush, because many, many people (look at his approval ratings from that time period) thought that we needed to support our President during the traumatic times.
Next time, before you call something an "urban myth", why don't you do some research?
Actually, there are greater problems than the global menu bar. The way we work around the global menu bar problem with Focus-Follows-Mouse in CodeTek VirtualDesktop is to do two things:
1) Allow the user to say "don't change focus if the mouse is in motion"
2) Have a configurable timer that has to elapse before focus takes place
These are pretty standard for other FFM implementations, but are really necessary for the global menu bar. Therefore, if I have my FFM to "Not while in motion" and a delay of.1 second, it works pretty well; I can move over other windows to get to the menu bar, the Dock or Interface Builder palettes all without triggering unwanted switches.
The bigger problem is that while we can focus other windows, we HAVE to raise the windows in the case of Carbon windows. We can non-raise focus Cocoa windows, but there are two problems:
1) It's confusing because some windows (at least to users who don't know what applications use which technology) arbitrarily will raise or not raise.
2) The rest of the system is strictly click-to-focus. This causes problems when you do things like select text from a window that has been focused, but not raised.
Actually, the 2nd problem is the greater of the two. When I have two Terminal windows open that overlap, I like to be able to cut & paste between the two without changing their stacking. Unfortunately, you can't do that because when you click to select text, the mouse down event is the click-to-focus event.
We're hoping that Apple can give us the flexibility to implement the kind of FFM that all UNIX/Linux users are used to, but right now the whole system has a different feel to it. Anyway, we do the best we can do under the circumstances.
Oh, by the way, there are a couple of minor problems with compatibility between CodeTek VirtualDesktop and Apple's X11, but we're trying to work these out with Apple so that they can work together perfectly.
Just to let you know, the product description URL for CodeTek VirtualDesktop is here with a direct download the the gzip compressed disk image here.
It's also listed on VersionTracker here. Plenty of good reviews there so you don't have to take my word for it.
One of the only things CodeTek VirtualDesktop is missing is different desktop backgrounds for each virtual desktop, which we're adding to the next release. We've got tons of other things we're adding, too, but I don't want to talk too much about new features until we're at least in beta for that version...
Errrr... Without protected memory spaces, I _don't_ think that this is what you want. You'd actually be setting yourself up for more problems. You don't want to save the system's memory state unless you can be sure that it's relatively clean & safe...
There were earlier pictures that have been removed now, but were easier to spot as fakes. Here is some discussion on MacNN about the "iWalk". Also note that "iWalk" is not a registered trademark of Apple.
What is an Apple trademark, though, is the "iPod" (NOTE: if you can't get the page to display, just start a new search for "iPod"). From the description, though, it does sound like a PDA...
Nice of Slashdot to finally put a story of this up... The original invitations went out last Friday!
And for the folks saying that you should use consoles only for gaming: WTF? That's insane; you must be made of money. If I pay $1500 for a computer, there better damned well be many games that are not only savory and delicious, but nutritional, too!
This doesn't protect anonymity in all cases. If the court decides that there is harm done by the anonymous post including: "breach of employment or confidentiality agreements; breach of a fiduciary duty; misappropriation of trade secrets; interference with a prospective business advantage; defamation; and other causes of action", they may grant the motion that reveals the anonymous posters identity.
They go on to give guidelines for when that motion should be granted:
We hold that when such an application is made, the trial court should first require the plaintiff to undertake efforts to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena or application for an order of disclosure, and withhold action to afford the fictitiously-named defendants a reasonable opportunity to file and serve opposition to the application. These notification efforts should include posting a message of notification of the identity discovery request to the anonymous user on the ISP's pertinent message board.
The court shall also require the plaintiff to identify and set forth the exact statements purportedly made by each anonymous poster that plaintiff alleges constitutes actionable speech.
The complaint and all information provided to the court should be carefully reviewed to determine whether plaintiff has set forth a prima facie cause of action against the fictitiously-named anonymous defendants.
So it appears that a company cannot simply request your identity for any old reason, but if they can show that your post has harmed them materially, your identity can probably be gotten. This doesn't seem to afford a defendant as much protection as being an anonymous source for a newspaper article or other media source. It seems to me that this doesn't go far enough at all, but is more like a decent first step.
I'm sorry, but I think that you're argument is incorrect. You're first assumption is bad, IMHO: you are not, in fact, defending your trademark by registering only the *.mysql.com domain name. Let's look at examples from another namespace, corporation names.
Example 1:
Company Foogiston, Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and makes Foogiston (TM) brand floogle-binders. Then, another company is incorporated in 2001 as Foogiston Systems, Ltd. and they make Foogiston Ltd. (TM) floogle-binders. Foogiston, Inc. is obviously upset, since it is very easy to confuse the two names and products. Foogiston, Inc. sues Foogiston Systems, Ltd. over the trademark, and probably wins, since they were incorporated first.
Example 2:
Foogiston, Inc. is incorporated in 1998 and makes Foogiston (TM) brand floogle-binders. Foogiston Systems, Ltd. is incorporated in 2001 and makes a software product called Foog! (TM). Since the companies have no common product, can Foogiston, Inc. sue Foogiston Systems, Ltd.? I don't think they'd win any such law suit, because they can't show that their floogle-binder product is hurt by the similar names. There's no material damage.
Example 3 (bringing it back to domains):
Foogiston, Inc. is a publishing house that prints Foog Magazine (TM), was incorporated in 1998, and has registered www.foog.com, www.foogmagazine.com (pointer to www.foog.com) and www.foogiston.com (the corporate website). Bill Whiteguy registers an online 'zine called www.foog-zine.net. Can Foogiston, Inc. sue Mr. Whiteguy because for
trademark infringement? You bet they can, because it is a similar product (website content) that bears a striking resemblance to Foogiston, Inc.'s product (online offering of magazine content) in product and name. This has happened many times, both justified and not.
The difference here is that MySQL.org is selling a slightly different version of the MySQL.com product. This is even worse than the above scenarios, becuase it is not only likely, but inevitable that someone (how many pointy-haireds are out there?) will confuse these products because of the strong similarities in the products AND the names.
For MySQL AB to protect their trademark, they need to ask NuSphere to not use their trademarked name in a confusing and (what they most likely consider) abusive manner. Just like I can't set up Foogiston Systems, Ltd. and make Foogiston Ltd. flooglebinders, MySQL AB shouldn't let NuSphere sell a modified version of their GPL'd software from the mysql.org website.
The issue with gTLDs being useful in that "different entitiees with the same name can have a domain with their name in it" doesn't hold when similar, or in this case nearly the same, product is being sold. I won't address the rest of your remarks, because I feel that your whole argument is flawed as shown above.
I wonder what Mr. Taco would have thought if three years ago (before the Andover takeover), someone set up a site called www.slashdot.com that had embraced and extended Slashcode and was selling it and support for it to websites without giving a dime to him. I think that he would be singing a different tune.
This is a fundamental problem with the "information wants to be free" argument that some people use to justify their Napster & software warezing/pirating habits: "It's just information (trademarks, music, etc.), and it should be free for me to do whatever I want to do with it". Unless it's my name, music, code, graphics, etc., etc. Then you find that you have to defend it.
This is a trademark issue. If you register a trademark, you have to defend it, or you won't be able to defend it in the future. I don't see any problem with someone saying, "Hey. I registered Foogiston, Inc. and www.foogiston.com, and I don't want you registering www.foogiston.org". What would have been better would be to register foogiston.org yourself, but if you got beat to the punch, you should still be able to tell someone not to use your trademark in their name.
I know that a lot of people don't like intellectual property here, but really. This is something that has precident and is defensible in court. I also don't like the language in the press release, becuase it shows a lack of maturity and professionalism on the part of MySQL AB, but that's doesn't detract from the core of their arguement.
If you don't want to carry a CD-ROM around with you back and forth to work, all of these books (except for Programming Perl?! What's the deal with that?) are also available at O'Reilly's Safari service. That way you can try these books out for a month (or as long as you want) and get as much out of them as you can/want.
I would highly recommend the "Perl Cookbook", as it gives very good examples on most things that you want to do with Perl. I find the camel books sort of annoying and not very useful, so I tend to stay away from them, but to each his own. I have heard that there are some problems with a few of the HTTP related examples, but I've never run into any...
I don't agree with his comment about not being able, as an automotive enthusiast, to modify your car. Besides all the rice-boy type modifications, people have been hacking their newer cars in ingenious ways. There was an article (which may require free registration) in the Chicago Tribune about people modifying their Toyota Prius for more efficiency, customizing it's dashboard and integral LCD (to be able to display any ol' video signal), etc. Look, people find a way to hack everything.
It's even less of an issue with PCs. There are enough electrical/computer engineers in the world to tell us how to hack just about anything. People said that the Intel Celeron (R) wasn't SMP capable, but look at all the people that were out there drilling pins out and rewiring their CPUs to take advantage of the PII core! Don't tell me that you won't be able to hack hardware; it just becomes more challenging and FUN!
There's quite a difference between "their next flight could be their last" (emphasis added) and "if you don't lose at least one during testing, you aren't pushing hard enough" (again, EA). The former means that the job is risky, the latter, suicidal (that is, I interpret his meaning to be, "If one aircraft isn't lost, then we're not being risky enough").
Other notes:
1) I wasn't responding to Timothy, rather HobbySpacer, the article's submitter. At least, that's how the quotes lead me to read it.
2) I don't think that this person presumed that this statement was only meant for unmanned flights; the link included in this comment was for the X-15, which did have a fatal disintigration, as memorialized in the link he gave.
3) I didn't mean to suggest that I thought this vehicle was manned. I was responding to his comment about the X-15.
Sorry if I ruffled any feathers; I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear.
Well, I don't know about you, but I think that the pilots of experimental aircraft would not agree with the "if you don't lose at least one during testing, you aren't pushing hard enough." comment.
In fact, on the X-15 page you link to, you give a prime example of why they might object:
On November 15, 1967 he made his seventh and final flight in X-15 No. 3. He achieved a maximum speed of 3561 mph and a maximum altitude of 266,000 feet (50.38 miles). Upon re-entry the vehicle entered a spin at a speed of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound). At approximately 18,600 feet the vehicle began to dive followed by high frequency pitch oscillations. The vehicled isintegrated when the forces reached 15 Gs (15 times Earth's gravity), killing Adams.
I'd have to say that, of course more than one prototype should be built, but it's rather insensitive to snidely say that "if you don't lose one during testing, you're not pushing hard enough".
Slashdot Mirror
Natural language processing and speech recognition are two entirely separate problem spaces.
Natural language processing tasks involve parsing strings of tokens and mapping them to commands to be executed. So, from your example, "Pull up the name of employee number 12345", the natural language system must map "Pull up" to "SELECT", "the name" to "name", "of employee number 12345" to "FROM users where id = 12345". Really, it's largely a problem of context, and your example shows an excellent problem: the "of employee number 12345" to "FROM..." map requires the contextual information of where to pull this information from. Surely multiple tables of a database could have an "employee number" field in them. Do you want all of the tuples which matches, or just from a certain table? Now, in the context of looking up a bunch of other employees, maybe I know what table you've been hitting a lot, and can determine what you're asking, but without that context, I have no idea.
In fact, everyday speech has a lot more ambiguity in it than could be handled without keeping large amounts of state, be it contextual or experiencial/situational. For example, if I overhear two people in a conversation, and the first thing I hear is: "Yeah, but he's been lying all though his campaign, and I for one don't support him," I have no idea which politcal candidate might be speaking of. However, if I saw that person wearing a shirt for a political campaign last week, then I have enough context to make a reasonable guess that he's talking about that person's opponent.
Speech recognition is a "lower level" than that: it's about matching acoustic information into speech sounds and then using the speech sounds to determine the word that was said. This is a hugely complex task that has a number of unsolved problems (of which these are the 3 that I can think of off the top of my head):
1) "speech sounds" are fuzzy categories, and are not canonical targets.
2) salient "features" of phonemes are disputed, contradictory and large amounts of redundancy/conflicting info are built into the speech signal
3) idiosyncratic speaker-to-speaker differences make the phoneme categories even fuzzier and can complicate the task even for the one speech recognition system that we know works: the human brain.
At any rate, the problems that need to be solved for speech recognition are not the same problems in natural language processing. While there may be some cross over in pattern-matching, the specifics of the problem spaces make it unlikely that you will get much benefit for NLS (natural language systems) from just making the algorithms faster.
Which, in fact, is my main criticism of this article: the algorithms that we have now are piss-poor, and making them faster doesn't intrinsically make them better. Unless there's been some huge advance in the field that I'm unaware of, you'd still have to train a SRS (speech recognition system) on your idiolect, by reading some pre-selected passages to it. This model has lots of problems, most specially that it's tailored to an individual. Imagine if you had to have each person that you spoke with read some canned paragraphs to you the first time you met so that you could interact....
[sorry I don't have sources for all of this; I'm AFB, and I don't have time to dredge up info right now. But, apparently, I have time to write one long-ass entry...]
Nice of you to decide what Iraq should do with its oil. Way to call Iraq a blood for oil war on one hand and ignore your own cliam the next.
What? This is a stunningly stupid remark. Who else should decide what Iraq does with its oil? How about.... the Iraqi people! Basically, Hussein should have been deposed in 1992, and reconstruction should have occurred back then. Then, the Iraqi government could then decide what to do what they wanted with their own oil, unlike how any of the other Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia do. I guess you're arguing that the US should decide what is done with Iraqi oil? But, I don't actually know, because you aren't *making* any arguments, you're just being an ass...
And, how am I ignoring my "blood for oil war" claim? I do feel that this administration has started a war of aggression for control of the second-largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world, in that if there were no oil in Iraq, we NEVER would have sought to depose Hussein; in fact the US government helped put him in power.
I heard a lot of democrats saying that during the clinton impeachment too... oh wait, no I didn't.
;)
First off, you know nothing about me. You're calling me a democrat, when you have no idea. So, the _fact_ that I didn't support Clinton lying about his affair doesn't really matter to you, does it?
Second, there is a fundamental difference between having oral sex performed on you and lying about it and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and over 1,000 American soldiers because you falsely lead the US citizenry to believe that Iraq is a threat. Sorry, but the latter crime is a repugnant and morally bankrupt action while the former is dispicable, but not even close to in the same category.
At least W wasn't under oath
I have no reply to this. If you can't see the difference between their actions, then I just feel really sorry for you.
And while we're on the subject of hypocrisy, how many of you guys screaming (not parent post) but Kerry served in Nam voted for Dole because of his service compared to clinton? Sigh...
Sorry, I'm not a single issue voter, and Clinton's draft-dodging just wasn't enough of a problem in 1996 to have me not vote for him, when his economic plans were actually working. I didn't really see any compelling reason to go back to Reagan-esque policies when the economy was doing just fine.
I just love how both replies to my comments didn't try to talk about how Bush did or didn't lie, but were just trivial personal attacks. You guys need to get your heads out of your asses and figure out what's important for yourselves rather than just follow your party's line.
Hey CLinton had his number called and lied to get out of it, you speak as if this is something new.
"Everyone else does it, so why does it matter?" Sorry, but I didn't vote for Clinton back in '92, either. I don't think that people should get to lie about this stuff and not have that held against them. Oh, wait, you just like to lump people into neat categories of "Liberal asshole" and "Republican god", rather than face the messier reality of real life.
Umm for the umpteenth time Oil is fungable if all the Oil in Iraq went to france the cost US companies pay for oil would go down as much as if all the Oil came to the US. If you dont understand market economics dont pretend to know what you are talking about..
So, according to you, the only 2 options are:
1) All of Iraq's oil comes to the US
2) All of Iraq's oil goes to France
What about:
3) Iraq keeps its oil, and the US cuts down on its dependance on foriegn oil by ramping up utilization of non-fossil fuel energy sources
But, hey, if that happened, energy & oil companies (i.e. the backers of Bush & Cheney) wouldn't be able to continue making massive profits.
Yes because puttiong that information togeter as it has now been done had nothing to do with the fact it actually happened? Look at Perl Harbor, all indications were months in advance something was going to happen, if we let the modern Liberal run things then we would still have comitties on why the radar was not followed up on, and would not have actually done anything about Japan..
Have you any evidence that backs up your assertion that a "modern liberal" wouldn't have reacted to the attack on Perl Harbor? I believe that liberals and conservatives alike supported going into Afghanistan. Do you remember? You know, that other war that we're in that nobody talks about anymore? The vote was unanimous.
Second: There's a difference between a) doing absolutely NOTHING to keep an eye on terrorist activities and b) working as hard as you can and learning as much as possible about what terrorists are planing. Bush & Co. did (a): They ignored the Clinton-appointed terrorist adivsor Richard Clarke and FBI memos before September 11th. Which would you rather see, a President that did NOTHING to make terrorism a priority, or one that tried as hard as possible to prevent terrorist attacks, even if they failed? I, for one, would rather see the latter.
But, obviously, you're not concerned with reality, but just your black & white view of it. Critical thinking is _hard_, and if you don't want to do that, then only you will suffer the consequences.
I, for one, am willing to bet that these documents (at least the CYA one; what about the others? Anyone re-type those, especially the ones with _signatures_?) are done in Word. It's _way_ too big of a coincidence that they line up exactly like this.
However, there is plenty of other evidence, based on the documents that the White House released earlier, that show that Bush did not complete his service legally, and even that the Air Force pointed this out to his ANG unit.
Now, I know tons of people here are saying "So what, this happened 30 years ago", and that it doesn't matter anymore. However, lying about it over and over and over again, _does_ matter.
And, as for this kind of trivial issue is distracting us from the bigger issues, you'd be right if this wasn't part of a larger pattern of contemptuous lying from Bush to the public. Basically, the guy lies about anything so that he can just do whatever the fuck he wanted to in the first place:
1) Didn't want to go to ANG duty, but still want to be elected? Lie about your service.
2) Want to secure Iraq's oil supply, but populace won't support outright imperialism? Lie about your reasons (and scare the crap out of them).
3) Want to get credit for cracking down on terrorists, but didn't do squat to actually prevent September 11th? Lie about what info you had earlier in 2001.
Bush is a pathological liar, and a danger to this country. He will say whatever needs to be said to push through his agenda. And, that makes it important to stop him, and makes this issue non-trivial.
How is this even considered an article? This looks more like a laundry list of complaints that some Java programmer (I use the term loosely) has heard over the years with some non sequiturs thrown in. He doesn't do any in-depth analysis of the few points that he does bring up, and doesn't mention any real criticisms of the Java language (e.g. much promised but little delivered garbage collection).
Let's look a few of the points he chose to include in his "analysis":
Java is popular. Anything popular isn't "cool".: What? First, prove that Java is popular. Second, how do you explain the iPod's coolness despite being wildly popular?
Java has a vast library that is available to all Java developers: (he means that you shouldn't re-invent the wheel, which makes it "less cool") Well, for most programmers comfortable with OO programming (including Linux kernel hackers; remember that the VM and VFS subsystems are OO design implemented in C), having a large toolset is a god-send, not something that's "uncool". In fact, most C++ programmers that I know think generic programming, which is pretty well enabled by the implementation of the STL, is pretty damned cool, in that it gives you a lot of high-performance power and reusable code for little-to-no work.
Java is an application programming platform (and therefore you can't do device drivers, etc.) Actually, who says that application programming isn't cool? Forms programming isn't very cool, but saying "applications programming" covers such a broad range of tasks that it's almost impossible to say it's any one thing with a straight face. I've done some incredibly cool applications programming in Objective C, and some really tedious applications programming in C. The language didn't change anything about the "excitement" of the task; it was all about the problem we were solving.
I don't like Java because I think it's a broken implementation of a decent idea. I prefer ObjC's object model and dynamism, C++'s operator overloading & template features and C's simplicity for the large majority of the programming tasks I perform, and Perl (a necessary evil) for anything that is small & quick enough that I need to do it on the command line. Java is a heavy duty programming language that's missing features like operator overloading and broken or brain-dead features like its garbage collection (how can you enforce memory reclaimation? Oh, you can't in Java. Hrm. Take a look at Cocoa's reference counting memory allocation/reclaimation system, or C++'s ctor/dtor paradigm for an example of how to do this correctly).
That's why it's not "cool", IMO: because it is inferior.
Actually, in the last quarter, the iTMS did post a small profit.
Also, the point isn't that FairPlay is driving sales of the iPod, but that Apple controls the total user experience of the iPod. It controls:
1) The UI & hardware of the iPod
2) The loading of music, playlist creation, etc. on the computer you use to interface with the iPod via iTunes
3) The online purchasing of music for use on your iPod
Apple, as they usually do, wants to have total control over all of those factors. It's the same damned thing they do with their OS & Hardware combo and their retail experience. They want to control everything, not because they're control freaks, but because "if you want it done right, do it yourself".
Feeding the troll
Mac users can't grasp things as simple as right click
Kinda hard to "right click" with a one-button mouse. Anyone who buys a 2-button USB mouse for a Mac can certainly "grasp" right-clicking; I did, and so did every other Mac user I've ever seen with a two-button mouse.
and totally wig out when they have to open a command prompt to do something like ipconfig
On Mac OS X, you don't need to use ipconfig, and that's the point. Use the Network Preference Pane, which is painless.
What you need to realize is that to most people computers are a means to an end, not an end unto itself. As a developer, I'm sometimes happy to tinker around with my work Linux machine, but mostly I just want to get something done and not have to tediously and endlessly tweak RedHat 9.0 to do what I want. I'd rather use Mac OS X and just get things done.
Ummmm. Nope. Sorry. You're the one who is mistaken here.
The Supreme Court ordered that the recount be stopped (and, that is the ONLY recount, not "multiple recounts" as James Baker and the Republicans claimed over and over again during the press coverage of the 2000 election fiasco) and that the totals from the election night be certified. This DID have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, because, as was found by a group of eight news organizations that did a recount of the Florida 2000 votes, Gore won in a number of different recount scenarios, even if you don't count the extra illegally counted absentee votes that pushed Bush over Gore's vote total.
Your facetious "can't make an X" statement shows how little you know about what happened. The main problems with the 2000 election in Florida were:
1) Tens of thousands of people were incorrectly put on the felon list and removed from the voter rolls
2) The "butterfly" ballot debacle that caused thousands of votes (3:1 of which were likely to go to Gore) to not be tallied. These were punch ballots, and not "X marks the choice" ballots.
Now, were the Consortium recounts widely reported as a Gore victory? No. Why? At least partly because they were completed in November of 2001, while the majority of the country was in shock after September the 11th. I'm not saying this as some sort of conspiracy theory, but a LOT of the news coverage at the time was pretty soft on anything related to Bush, because many, many people (look at his approval ratings from that time period) thought that we needed to support our President during the traumatic times.
Next time, before you call something an "urban myth", why don't you do some research?
Actually, there are greater problems than the global menu bar. The way we work around the global menu bar problem with Focus-Follows-Mouse in CodeTek VirtualDesktop is to do two things:
.1 second, it works pretty well; I can move over other windows to get to the menu bar, the Dock or Interface Builder palettes all without triggering unwanted switches.
1) Allow the user to say "don't change focus if the mouse is in motion"
2) Have a configurable timer that has to elapse before focus takes place
These are pretty standard for other FFM implementations, but are really necessary for the global menu bar. Therefore, if I have my FFM to "Not while in motion" and a delay of
The bigger problem is that while we can focus other windows, we HAVE to raise the windows in the case of Carbon windows. We can non-raise focus Cocoa windows, but there are two problems:
1) It's confusing because some windows (at least to users who don't know what applications use which technology) arbitrarily will raise or not raise.
2) The rest of the system is strictly click-to-focus. This causes problems when you do things like select text from a window that has been focused, but not raised.
Actually, the 2nd problem is the greater of the two. When I have two Terminal windows open that overlap, I like to be able to cut & paste between the two without changing their stacking. Unfortunately, you can't do that because when you click to select text, the mouse down event is the click-to-focus event.
We're hoping that Apple can give us the flexibility to implement the kind of FFM that all UNIX/Linux users are used to, but right now the whole system has a different feel to it. Anyway, we do the best we can do under the circumstances.
Oh, by the way, there are a couple of minor problems with compatibility between CodeTek VirtualDesktop and Apple's X11, but we're trying to work these out with Apple so that they can work together perfectly.
Thanks for mentioning our app here!
Just to let you know, the product description URL for CodeTek VirtualDesktop is here with a direct download the the gzip compressed disk image here.
It's also listed on VersionTracker here. Plenty of good reviews there so you don't have to take my word for it.
One of the only things CodeTek VirtualDesktop is missing is different desktop backgrounds for each virtual desktop, which we're adding to the next release. We've got tons of other things we're adding, too, but I don't want to talk too much about new features until we're at least in beta for that version...
Errrr... Without protected memory spaces, I _don't_ think that this is what you want. You'd actually be setting yourself up for more problems. You don't want to save the system's memory state unless you can be sure that it's relatively clean & safe...
There were earlier pictures that have been removed now, but were easier to spot as fakes. Here is some discussion on MacNN about the "iWalk". Also note that "iWalk" is not a registered trademark of Apple.
What is an Apple trademark, though, is the "iPod" (NOTE: if you can't get the page to display, just start a new search for "iPod"). From the description, though, it does sound like a PDA...
Nice of Slashdot to finally put a story of this up... The original invitations went out last Friday!
AP is announcing that a police/FBI raid is occuring at the Westin hotel right now: Story HERE!
So, with 1 GHz G4s. The problem will be that they'll only get 1 useful chip per die, and the chip'll cost roughly $150,000...
The the Genio that was just mentioned...
Beats the HELL out of my Palm III...
Well, thank you for pointing out the errors in my argument. I really do appreciate the corrections.
I did mean to say "date of registration of the trademark" and not "date of incorporation". I should have been more careful.
I didn't take into account the arbitrary-ness of the name "Foogiston" or "Foog!", though. Thanks for adding that.
I guess I should have prefaced all of this with a IANAL disclaimer.
Apparently, they have publically appologized for the difficulties.
And for the folks saying that you should use consoles only for gaming: WTF? That's insane; you must be made of money. If I pay $1500 for a computer, there better damned well be many games that are not only savory and delicious, but nutritional, too!
They go on to give guidelines for when that motion should be granted:
So it appears that a company cannot simply request your identity for any old reason, but if they can show that your post has harmed them materially, your identity can probably be gotten. This doesn't seem to afford a defendant as much protection as being an anonymous source for a newspaper article or other media source. It seems to me that this doesn't go far enough at all, but is more like a decent first step.
I'm sorry, but I think that you're argument is incorrect. You're first assumption is bad, IMHO: you are not, in fact, defending your trademark by registering only the *.mysql.com domain name. Let's look at examples from another namespace, corporation names.
Example 1:
Company Foogiston, Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and makes Foogiston (TM) brand floogle-binders. Then, another company is incorporated in 2001 as Foogiston Systems, Ltd. and they make Foogiston Ltd. (TM) floogle-binders. Foogiston, Inc. is obviously upset, since it is very easy to confuse the two names and products. Foogiston, Inc. sues Foogiston Systems, Ltd. over the trademark, and probably wins, since they were incorporated first.
Example 2:
Foogiston, Inc. is incorporated in 1998 and makes Foogiston (TM) brand floogle-binders. Foogiston Systems, Ltd. is incorporated in 2001 and makes a software product called Foog! (TM). Since the companies have no common product, can Foogiston, Inc. sue Foogiston Systems, Ltd.? I don't think they'd win any such law suit, because they can't show that their floogle-binder product is hurt by the similar names. There's no material damage.
Example 3 (bringing it back to domains):
Foogiston, Inc. is a publishing house that prints Foog Magazine (TM), was incorporated in 1998, and has registered www.foog.com, www.foogmagazine.com (pointer to www.foog.com) and www.foogiston.com (the corporate website). Bill Whiteguy registers an online 'zine called www.foog-zine.net. Can Foogiston, Inc. sue Mr. Whiteguy because for trademark infringement? You bet they can, because it is a similar product (website content) that bears a striking resemblance to Foogiston, Inc.'s product (online offering of magazine content) in product and name. This has happened many times, both justified and not.
The difference here is that MySQL.org is selling a slightly different version of the MySQL.com product. This is even worse than the above scenarios, becuase it is not only likely, but inevitable that someone (how many pointy-haireds are out there?) will confuse these products because of the strong similarities in the products AND the names.
For MySQL AB to protect their trademark, they need to ask NuSphere to not use their trademarked name in a confusing and (what they most likely consider) abusive manner. Just like I can't set up Foogiston Systems, Ltd. and make Foogiston Ltd. flooglebinders, MySQL AB shouldn't let NuSphere sell a modified version of their GPL'd software from the mysql.org website.
The issue with gTLDs being useful in that "different entitiees with the same name can have a domain with their name in it" doesn't hold when similar, or in this case nearly the same, product is being sold. I won't address the rest of your remarks, because I feel that your whole argument is flawed as shown above.
I wonder what Mr. Taco would have thought if three years ago (before the Andover takeover), someone set up a site called www.slashdot.com that had embraced and extended Slashcode and was selling it and support for it to websites without giving a dime to him. I think that he would be singing a different tune.
This is a fundamental problem with the "information wants to be free" argument that some people use to justify their Napster & software warezing/pirating habits: "It's just information (trademarks, music, etc.), and it should be free for me to do whatever I want to do with it". Unless it's my name, music, code, graphics, etc., etc. Then you find that you have to defend it.
This is a trademark issue. If you register a trademark, you have to defend it, or you won't be able to defend it in the future. I don't see any problem with someone saying, "Hey. I registered Foogiston, Inc. and www.foogiston.com, and I don't want you registering www.foogiston.org". What would have been better would be to register foogiston.org yourself, but if you got beat to the punch, you should still be able to tell someone not to use your trademark in their name.
I know that a lot of people don't like intellectual property here, but really. This is something that has precident and is defensible in court. I also don't like the language in the press release, becuase it shows a lack of maturity and professionalism on the part of MySQL AB, but that's doesn't detract from the core of their arguement.
Just my $0.02.
If you don't want to carry a CD-ROM around with you back and forth to work, all of these books (except for Programming Perl?! What's the deal with that?) are also available at O'Reilly's Safari service. That way you can try these books out for a month (or as long as you want) and get as much out of them as you can/want.
I would highly recommend the "Perl Cookbook", as it gives very good examples on most things that you want to do with Perl. I find the camel books sort of annoying and not very useful, so I tend to stay away from them, but to each his own. I have heard that there are some problems with a few of the HTTP related examples, but I've never run into any...
I don't agree with his comment about not being able, as an automotive enthusiast, to modify your car. Besides all the rice-boy type modifications, people have been hacking their newer cars in ingenious ways. There was an article (which may require free registration) in the Chicago Tribune about people modifying their Toyota Prius for more efficiency, customizing it's dashboard and integral LCD (to be able to display any ol' video signal), etc. Look, people find a way to hack everything.
It's even less of an issue with PCs. There are enough electrical/computer engineers in the world to tell us how to hack just about anything. People said that the Intel Celeron (R) wasn't SMP capable, but look at all the people that were out there drilling pins out and rewiring their CPUs to take advantage of the PII core! Don't tell me that you won't be able to hack hardware; it just becomes more challenging and FUN!
There's quite a difference between "their next flight could be their last" (emphasis added) and "if you don't lose at least one during testing, you aren't pushing hard enough" (again, EA). The former means that the job is risky, the latter, suicidal (that is, I interpret his meaning to be, "If one aircraft isn't lost, then we're not being risky enough").
Other notes:
1) I wasn't responding to Timothy, rather HobbySpacer, the article's submitter. At least, that's how the quotes lead me to read it.
2) I don't think that this person presumed that this statement was only meant for unmanned flights; the link included in this comment was for the X-15, which did have a fatal disintigration, as memorialized in the link he gave.
3) I didn't mean to suggest that I thought this vehicle was manned. I was responding to his comment about the X-15.
Sorry if I ruffled any feathers; I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear.
In fact, on the X-15 page you link to, you give a prime example of why they might object:
I'd have to say that, of course more than one prototype should be built, but it's rather insensitive to snidely say that "if you don't lose one during testing, you're not pushing hard enough".