Optical character recognition of text that's been scanned at optimum conditions (high quality scan of mint, original page of text), is hard enough....
Many asian languages have character sets that are orders of magnitude harder to recognise, because there are so many more characters in each set...
That's where you are wrong. OCR might be more difficult, but this is not OCR. That's even a bit of what allows grafitti to work. The whole point is that it's recognition of the drawing of a character.
In those 'harder' languages, the people are very touchy when it comes to writing the language. Each of those complex characters has an exact number of strokes, with the order and even direction exactingly specified. Given all that, recognition of Kanji characters turns out to be much easier than of English characters (just think of how many ways one can draw the lower-case letter 'a').
That's one of the reasons that PDA have been a huge success in Japan. The Sharp Zarus line has been huge over there, due much in part to their successful Kanji recognition.
One could almost argue that grafiti is a success exactly because it applied the order of Asian language writing onto English characters.
I doubt this. grafiti does not even vaguely resemble real writing, and it only has to simulate 256 characters (ascii). How crazy could it get to write 2000+ kanji and 2 versions of the gojuon?
But with Kanji the number, placement and order of the strokes are strictly defined. And all Japanese school children have been tought them from an early age. That's a huge boon for automated recognition schemes. And it's very different from grafiti, which is an artificial writing system imposed upon adults by a few software engineers.
I'm also reminded of the western bias during my youth, that thought that any western school kid with a calculator would be much faster than Asian school kid using an abacus (for basic arithmatic). Turned out both were about the same. Having been taught the tool's use from an early age is a huge advantage when it comes to speed.
Of course, it's http://news.com.com/ in a frame. So either C|Net got hacked, or that's how they're doing things now. Given that whois says CNET owns 'com.com', the latter is more probable.
Add to that this other 1993 quote, and you can see the context I was trying to point out:
But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining.
Because the point of my quoting was to show how in 1993 Bill Gates was personally claiming responsibility for the layout. Not that there weren't limits (which I'm not arguing, that's a different point), but that he himself claimed he set it up that way. My main point is that in 1993 he was stating for the record that he set that limit at 640k, but 3 years later he changed his story and sent out email claiming it was done by other people and implying that he would have at the very least had preferred to give 800k like with the Sirus.
Then: "
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM"
Now: "If
they had been a bit more careful we could have had 800K instead of 640K available"
(Emphasis added)
As to the limit, later on people came up with ways around that, but as others have pointed out in this discussion, there were problems in the design of DOS that made things more difficult. You can scan some other comments to see what others point out about this. One key thing is to remember that Bill Gates and Microsoft didn't even write the DOS that they put on that hardware. They just sold IBM on something that the then turned around and bought off of someone for a song. And changed "Quick and Dirty Operating System" into "Microsoft Disk Operating System". Now, if they had written the OS themselves, and if they had been as forward thinking about the limits as he later claimed, then it would have been an easy matter to design things with future expansion in mind. But, it just wasn't done. Even when I was writing multimedia software for Windows95 I had to go back and live within those original DOS limits. Ouch.
Even if he DID say the quote, it has definately been taken out of context...Nobody is that shortsighted, not even Bill Gates.
Well, given some of his statements from his interview with the Smithsonian that I've been citing a lot tonight, it does not seem out of context at all. Take for example this sentence from his discussion of the original hardware development of the IBM PC:
But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining.
Read the rest to get the context for yourself. Seems he was either short-sighted in either his original belief, or in what he should be saying in an interview for posterity. Either way, a mistake on his part is plausible.
From all accounts the IBM PC was essentially designed and manufactured in just over a year. Microsoft was brought in at least a year before the launch because writing the code would take time, so yes Microsoft was in a position to make comments about the PC design at an early stage. As Bill himself states, they were not listened to.
You're right on MS' input on the hardware. Back in 1993, Bill was claiming a much greater and successful involvement in the hardware development. To be more specific, it seemed at the time that he was telling people Microsoft and he himself were listened to quite well:
BG: Microsoft was playing a much broader role[laughs] than just doing software for this machine. I mean whether it is the keyboard, the character set, the graphics adapter, or even the memory layouts. I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that.
...the history that he provides (i.e., we really wanted to do things right, but the evil hardware people wouldn't let us) is self-serving and not exactly correct.
That it was not correct seems to pinpoint it. This interview with Bill Gates that's in the Smithsonian paints a slightly different picture:
So he seems quite clear that he himself did that. In the same interview he used "Microsoft" and "we" when appropriate, so it seems that in context this is indeed claiming that he himself did that.
Now, let's compare to the "spin" version of things:
1996 Bloomberg: "The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available."
contrast that statement to the earlier one of:
1993 SI: "I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that."
D'oh! By 1996 he 'forgot' that he was the one who did that. Ooops.
1996 Bloomberg: "We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years."
contrast that with his statement from the SI interview:
1993 SI: "But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining"
Look's like 20-20 revisionist history. Seems to be in-line with having held the opinion that 640K (ten times the shipping memory of the IBM PC) would be enough. In 1993 he was defending it. In 1996 he was denying it.
...since Psych 101 covered that blue and red make the most psychologically disturbing color combination, despite their difference in colorspace. I think it could have something with them being on completely different ends of the visible spectrum.
This does remind me of the info on mutant tetrachromat females. And also for the different types of normal color blindness. A color-blind friend from work pointed out this page on the types to point out the different effects. And a different co-worker happens to be an extremely rare type, perhaps 'monochromat?'
Anyway, what you use should consider distance in colorspace, and also position in the spectrum, with the effects of the different types of colorblindness taken into consideration also.
did Judge Claudia Wilken have to watch both movies to determine that there was little chance of confusion?
Well, it looks like Lucasfilm's attorney didn't view it before filing suit, so MMG is pushing that as a sign of Lucas' weak position. And I take it that the judge had to at least review the work in question.
One might be able to argue that IBM has been doing things just to piss-off and beat Microsoft. Open-source labs, linux for iPaq, and their whole jump behind Java...
IBM seems to have gotten into a situation where they can benefit the public while at the same time take a swipe at a long-time 'enemy' (remember IBM getting the short in with DOS, OS/2, etc.). Seems like a win for consumers, and an example of open-source and the free market together benefiting consumers.
I think it's quite interesting that under RedHat's proposal (where Microsoft puts all that money to hardware, and RedHat gives all the software for free) that was mentioned here the other day things change the settlement from giving 200,000 computers to giving over a million.
That alone should make one pause at the "stink test". At the very least it should point out the valuation of Microsoft's software in their proposal.
Re:licensing Qt == dangerous
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2
Well, that is currently on their website, and not hidden either. They reference all other FAQ's there, and still have it as-is. Their FAQ's were even reved just this past mid-July and then late-September, so there's no excuse on their part. (Oh, and their GPL faq also includes the no-shareware mention)
If TrollTech has changed their position (and not just made an exception here or there), then the burden is on them to 1) Change their FAQ's that state all this (non-free and no-shareware), and 2) actually put the commercial licenses somewhere that they can be easily accessed.
If they have changed their terms, then at the least this looks like scare tatics on the part of marketing to try to get more developers to cough up the per-seat licensing.
True Names.. ah, there is a truely great novella. I don't think that the link is accurate though, that edition has not (or should not have been) printed yet.
I know the story. Over the past few years Amazon.com has kept it for pre-sale, while Barnes & Nobel yanked it after the first or second publisher delay. They put it back up recently, and have stuck with the Dec 1 ship
I had given up on seeing this happen, as technology seemed to pass it by. But now it looks like Niven's work still holds water. And he pinpointed the military application.
Too bad Dream Park is out of print and hard to find. It's not on par with True Names, but is interesting from a 'how they saw it' viewpoint.
Re:licensing Qt == dangerous
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's complete bullshit. Qt's commercial license has no clause like that
No, it's not. All the free licenses have that. non-commercial, free, educational, etc. Check the TrollTech General FAQ
Q:Can we use the Free Edition while developing our non-free application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
A:No. The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software. [emphasis added]
That, along with the FAQs, statements, etc. from Trolltech's past seem to make it clear. Go check their site yourself. Perhaps have a lawyer check the mentioned Professional and Enterprise Edition licenses and let us know if you're right and Trolltech is wrong.
Go away, troll.
I'm not trolling, just trying to point out issues with the Qt licenses. If you start with a commercial license and never want to ship shareware with it, or if you start with the proper free license of your project and keep it open-source forever, then it's not bad.
> Qt has a very infectious license where if you at any time use a free version of Qt on your project, then you can never release your project commercially.
Q: Can we use the Free Edition while developing our non-free application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
A:No. The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software. [emphasis added]
> And Trolltech dismisses shareware completely. They consider it to not be a viable approach, and so Qt can't be used for it.
No they don't. If you have a commercial license, you can sell as much properitary, close source shareware as you want. If you use free Qt, you can sell as much of open sourced shareware as you want.
IANAL, but you need to get one to go over the license agreement carefully. Given current and past Trolltech FAQs and statements, and their interpretation of the contracts, you need to tread carefully here. Trolltech's position seems quite clear: start by paying or stay forever free/open.
I think Qt comes out ahead on the free/licensing issue; if you want to use it for free software, then Qt is GPL'd, but if you want to use it for commercial software you need to buy a licence
Actually, this is one point where Qt comes out way behind. Gtk++ is LGPL, which frees you to build commercial apps using it with no cost. Qt has a very infectious license where if you at any time use a free version of Qt on your project, then you can never release your project commercially.
And Trolltech dismisses shareware completely. They consider it to not be a viable approach, and so Qt can't be used for it.
Re:licensing Qt == dangerous
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1, Troll
One problem with Qt is that if any free version touches your project at any time, then you can never purchase a license and release your project commercially.
That contamination is one aspect to watch out for. Start commercial, or stay free. You just can never change your mind
Well, it's related to Moore's law, email delivery times vs. traditional snail-mail, etc. This is in contrast to the traditional business world where taking 3 years merely to build the manufacturing plant that you'd be using would not be considered slow. Instead, we can now create and deliver software or services on a much faster time-base. Even if delivery is not over the Internet, one can get CD's pressed and shipped out in a matter of weeks instead of years.
When the software and services industries are moving that fast, a legal system used to dealing with product lifetimes times stretching up into decades suddenly seems to be off-base as far as speed goes.
I agree with the judge in "her belief that a quick resolution to the case is in the best interest of the nation," however...
The hearings would not even start until March of 2002. Given that the legal process is slow (and much for good reason) will Internet time and monopolistic practices render such legal remedies a moot point?
This is where Pixar's RENDERFARM is put to work. For a Bug's Life, 150 dual-processor Silicon Graphics OCTANE[tm] workstations and an Onyx2[tm] visual system were employed.
Actually, since the early days Pixar has used Sun computers for their renderfarm. They even took out a full-page ad to thank Sun Microsystems right after Toy Story came out.
The SGI computers are mainly just for animator's worstations.
From one page about a Pixar programmer and A Bug's Life:
At one point they had about 1,000 processors in the render farm
I couldn't find their details off-hand (eating up my bandwidth getting Enigma), however their one page does mention:
The limitations are that the product may only be used for educational purposes on school hardware, and on the schools premises.
EEEEK! If that meshes with their previous licenses and FAQ's, extreme caution might be warranted. Their whole "once touched, forever tainted" doctrine makes things very dicey
Just read their FAQs and such. It be an issue for some, but no problem for others. Just be informed so you can make informed decisions.
When I looked into their licensing in general (for possible work use) I noticed that if any project was ever touched by any free version of Qt, it could never be later realeased commercially by purchasing a Qt license at a later date.
This one limitation might be a severe one for those who care about complying with licenses. Read the whole thing carefully before proceding. And get your lawyer to check things for you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's where you are wrong. OCR might be more difficult, but this is not OCR. That's even a bit of what allows grafitti to work. The whole point is that it's recognition of the drawing of a character.
In those 'harder' languages, the people are very touchy when it comes to writing the language. Each of those complex characters has an exact number of strokes, with the order and even direction exactingly specified. Given all that, recognition of Kanji characters turns out to be much easier than of English characters (just think of how many ways one can draw the lower-case letter 'a').
That's one of the reasons that PDA have been a huge success in Japan. The Sharp Zarus line has been huge over there, due much in part to their successful Kanji recognition.
One could almost argue that grafiti is a success exactly because it applied the order of Asian language writing onto English characters.
But with Kanji the number, placement and order of the strokes are strictly defined. And all Japanese school children have been tought them from an early age. That's a huge boon for automated recognition schemes. And it's very different from grafiti, which is an artificial writing system imposed upon adults by a few software engineers.
I'm also reminded of the western bias during my youth, that thought that any western school kid with a calculator would be much faster than Asian school kid using an abacus (for basic arithmatic). Turned out both were about the same. Having been taught the tool's use from an early age is a huge advantage when it comes to speed.
Well, if you go to http://www.news.com/ itself you see the same stories.
Of course, it's http://news.com.com/ in a frame. So either C|Net got hacked, or that's how they're doing things now. Given that whois says CNET owns 'com.com', the latter is more probable.
Because the point of my quoting was to show how in 1993 Bill Gates was personally claiming responsibility for the layout. Not that there weren't limits (which I'm not arguing, that's a different point), but that he himself claimed he set it up that way. My main point is that in 1993 he was stating for the record that he set that limit at 640k, but 3 years later he changed his story and sent out email claiming it was done by other people and implying that he would have at the very least had preferred to give 800k like with the Sirus.
(Emphasis added)As to the limit, later on people came up with ways around that, but as others have pointed out in this discussion, there were problems in the design of DOS that made things more difficult. You can scan some other comments to see what others point out about this. One key thing is to remember that Bill Gates and Microsoft didn't even write the DOS that they put on that hardware. They just sold IBM on something that the then turned around and bought off of someone for a song. And changed "Quick and Dirty Operating System" into "Microsoft Disk Operating System". Now, if they had written the OS themselves, and if they had been as forward thinking about the limits as he later claimed, then it would have been an easy matter to design things with future expansion in mind. But, it just wasn't done. Even when I was writing multimedia software for Windows95 I had to go back and live within those original DOS limits. Ouch.
Well, given some of his statements from his interview with the Smithsonian that I've been citing a lot tonight, it does not seem out of context at all. Take for example this sentence from his discussion of the original hardware development of the IBM PC:
Read the rest to get the context for yourself. Seems he was either short-sighted in either his original belief, or in what he should be saying in an interview for posterity. Either way, a mistake on his part is plausible.
You're right on MS' input on the hardware. Back in 1993, Bill was claiming a much greater and successful involvement in the hardware development. To be more specific, it seemed at the time that he was telling people Microsoft and he himself were listened to quite well:
For a quick summary, you can see my other comment
That it was not correct seems to pinpoint it. This interview with Bill Gates that's in the Smithsonian paints a slightly different picture:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.h tm (A transcript of a 1993 interview). Specifically under the mouse: http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.h tm#tc44
So he seems quite clear that he himself did that. In the same interview he used "Microsoft" and "we" when appropriate, so it seems that in context this is indeed claiming that he himself did that.
Now, let's compare to the "spin" version of things:
contrast that statement to the earlier one of:
D'oh! By 1996 he 'forgot' that he was the one who did that. Ooops.
contrast that with his statement from the SI interview:
Look's like 20-20 revisionist history. Seems to be in-line with having held the opinion that 640K (ten times the shipping memory of the IBM PC) would be enough. In 1993 he was defending it. In 1996 he was denying it.
...since Psych 101 covered that blue and red make the most psychologically disturbing color combination, despite their difference in colorspace. I think it could have something with them being on completely different ends of the visible spectrum.
This does remind me of the info on mutant tetrachromat females. And also for the different types of normal color blindness. A color-blind friend from work pointed out this page on the types to point out the different effects. And a different co-worker happens to be an extremely rare type, perhaps 'monochromat?'
Anyway, what you use should consider distance in colorspace, and also position in the spectrum, with the effects of the different types of colorblindness taken into consideration also.
Well, it looks like Lucasfilm's attorney didn't view it before filing suit, so MMG is pushing that as a sign of Lucas' weak position. And I take it that the judge had to at least review the work in question.
One might be able to argue that IBM has been doing things just to piss-off and beat Microsoft. Open-source labs, linux for iPaq, and their whole jump behind Java...
IBM seems to have gotten into a situation where they can benefit the public while at the same time take a swipe at a long-time 'enemy' (remember IBM getting the short in with DOS, OS/2, etc.). Seems like a win for consumers, and an example of open-source and the free market together benefiting consumers.
I think it's quite interesting that under RedHat's proposal (where Microsoft puts all that money to hardware, and RedHat gives all the software for free) that was mentioned here the other day things change the settlement from giving 200,000 computers to giving over a million.
That alone should make one pause at the "stink test". At the very least it should point out the valuation of Microsoft's software in their proposal.
Well, that is currently on their website, and not hidden either. They reference all other FAQ's there, and still have it as-is. Their FAQ's were even reved just this past mid-July and then late-September, so there's no excuse on their part. (Oh, and their GPL faq also includes the no-shareware mention)
If TrollTech has changed their position (and not just made an exception here or there), then the burden is on them to 1) Change their FAQ's that state all this (non-free and no-shareware), and 2) actually put the commercial licenses somewhere that they can be easily accessed.
If they have changed their terms, then at the least this looks like scare tatics on the part of marketing to try to get more developers to cough up the per-seat licensing.
I know the story. Over the past few years Amazon.com has kept it for pre-sale, while Barnes & Nobel yanked it after the first or second publisher delay. They put it back up recently, and have stuck with the Dec 1 ship
I had given up on seeing this happen, as technology seemed to pass it by. But now it looks like Niven's work still holds water. And he pinpointed the military application.
Too bad Dream Park is out of print and hard to find. It's not on par with True Names, but is interesting from a 'how they saw it' viewpoint.
No, it's not. All the free licenses have that. non-commercial, free, educational, etc. Check the TrollTech General FAQ
That, along with the FAQs, statements, etc. from Trolltech's past seem to make it clear. Go check their site yourself. Perhaps have a lawyer check the mentioned Professional and Enterprise Edition licenses and let us know if you're right and Trolltech is wrong.
I'm not trolling, just trying to point out issues with the Qt licenses. If you start with a commercial license and never want to ship shareware with it, or if you start with the proper free license of your project and keep it open-source forever, then it's not bad.
Yes it does. You should at least read the Trolltech FAQs. Check this one on their General FAQ:
Q: Can we use the Free Edition while developing our non-free application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
A: No. The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software. [emphasis added]
Again, no you can't. Check their FAQ on that on the Qt Free FAQ or the one on their non-commercial FAQ. Basically it says that you should either go free or full commercial.
IANAL, but you need to get one to go over the license agreement carefully. Given current and past Trolltech FAQs and statements, and their interpretation of the contracts, you need to tread carefully here. Trolltech's position seems quite clear: start by paying or stay forever free/open.
Actually, this is one point where Qt comes out way behind. Gtk++ is LGPL, which frees you to build commercial apps using it with no cost. Qt has a very infectious license where if you at any time use a free version of Qt on your project, then you can never release your project commercially.
And Trolltech dismisses shareware completely. They consider it to not be a viable approach, and so Qt can't be used for it.
That contamination is one aspect to watch out for. Start commercial, or stay free. You just can never change your mind
Well, it's related to Moore's law, email delivery times vs. traditional snail-mail, etc. This is in contrast to the traditional business world where taking 3 years merely to build the manufacturing plant that you'd be using would not be considered slow. Instead, we can now create and deliver software or services on a much faster time-base. Even if delivery is not over the Internet, one can get CD's pressed and shipped out in a matter of weeks instead of years.
When the software and services industries are moving that fast, a legal system used to dealing with product lifetimes times stretching up into decades suddenly seems to be off-base as far as speed goes.
I agree with the judge in "her belief that a quick resolution to the case is in the best interest of the nation," however...
The hearings would not even start until March of 2002. Given that the legal process is slow (and much for good reason) will Internet time and monopolistic practices render such legal remedies a moot point?
Actually, since the early days Pixar has used Sun computers for their renderfarm. They even took out a full-page ad to thank Sun Microsystems right after Toy Story came out.
The SGI computers are mainly just for animator's worstations.
From one page about a Pixar programmer and A Bug's Life:
And for Toy Story 2, it was
And for A Bug's Life, it was
I couldn't find their details off-hand (eating up my bandwidth getting Enigma), however their one page does mention:
EEEEK! If that meshes with their previous licenses and FAQ's, extreme caution might be warranted. Their whole "once touched, forever tainted" doctrine makes things very dicey
Just read their FAQs and such. It be an issue for some, but no problem for others. Just be informed so you can make informed decisions.
When I looked into their licensing in general (for possible work use) I noticed that if any project was ever touched by any free version of Qt, it could never be later realeased commercially by purchasing a Qt license at a later date.
This one limitation might be a severe one for those who care about complying with licenses. Read the whole thing carefully before proceding. And get your lawyer to check things for you.
Just for the record...
The kernel update broke both Nvidia's proprietary 3D driver and the open-source 2D driver. (PIII 500 with a RIVA TNT)