Wal-Mart might be worse than the behemoth in Redmond, WA?
Wal-Mart is selling linux boxen and living to tell about it.
You bet your ass they're bigger than MS. Of course, this is only until MS figures out how to make it so credit cards have to be run through some sort of hash scheme only their computers can process. Then MS controls all of Wal-Mart's credit card processing...
And I certainly don't browse with IE; I use Firefox. I use Windows on my laptop because it's most convenient for what I do. Furthermore, it's also convenient just to have a Windows box lying around:)
That said, I use SuSE 9.1 on my desktop and I love it dearly. I wouldn't go back for any reason. Yes, there's still the occasional glitch or issue I don't know how to resolve, but I'm fine with that.
Microsoft needs to understand, though, that if any sort of aggressive monopoly protection significantly affects the way in which I use my laptop computer, WindowsXP SP 2 will be going the same way as the Windows XP on my desktop: right out the, er, window.
Well... I actually wrote a paper lambasting the ontology for precisely what you bring up here. Specifically, I wrote working from a draft of Adele Goldberg & Ray Jackendoff's paper "The English resultative as a family of constructions" paper (_Language_ vol. 80 no.3, September 2004). It deals with strange things like
"The trolley rumbled through the city"
and led me to believe Victor's ontological approach would have some serious problems encoding this if it didn't have a more attuned syntax processor. It wasn't a good paper, but I made my point, and you bring up a similar idea on a more basic (and thus, even more problematic) level.
Anything remotely "idiomatic" (specifically, where the combinatoriality of semantics fails, as it does in your example, where time does not "fly" in the sense that it does not move through the air held aloft by differences in air pressure) starts to generate serious problems.
Your problem could be solved if the lexicon had in it information about common idioms, which it presumably would, to be functional on any level more colloquial than academic writing. Most linguists would tell you the lexcion really does encode idioms in some fashion too, so this wouldn't be some sort of computational stop-gap.
So the lexcion has in it "time flies" or something. The parser (or some sublevel of it) would then identify "like" as a metaphorical comparison to the following predicate "an arrow."
Thus, the TMR would have something to do with time moving briskly towards a target, perhaps.
I'm not saying this is an entirely feasible option, but read what Tim Berners-Lee is proposing, and see if you find it much more plausible. The amount of information out there people would have to manually encode would preclude the system from having any real functionality beyond keyword search. While I'm not a huge fan of the current implementation of the ontology, I do think future generations could start to sort things out. Its advantage is that once the concept database, the onomasticon, is complete, it should be mostly self-trainable, which is what Berners-Lee's solution lacks.
I want to offer an alternative, as proposed by Victor Raskin at Purdue. I speak for neither Sergei Nirenburg nor Victor (who does enough talking for himself).
While this idea for more thorough, concise, and accurate searches is a good one, I would question whether embedding semantic tags into web pages is the way to go.
As outlined in Ontological Smenatics, there is an automated system of semantic processing already underway. Basically, it takes a text, then runs it through a parser, which looks up meanings in a lexicon, then reduces whatever translation it comes up with to a text-meaning representation (TMR), by pushing the concepts from the lexicon through an ontology / onomasticon / world-knowledge library. The TMR is basically the "pulp" of the semantics of the article, web page, book, or whatever it's been fed. It just contains the ideas, the things involved, and other relevant concepts, stripped of all other linguistic information.
TMR is great, becuase the TMR can be used then, by reversing the process and using the lexicon of another language, to translate a text from one language to another.
However, it seems to me that with the bits and pieces of the TMR stored in a search engine's index, this could be a huge boon for the search engine.
Instead of just trying to match keywords, by parsing the TMR of web pages and by parsing TMR of search strings, you no longer search for keywords, but keyconcepts.
The advantage to semantic searches / indexes by this implementation is manifold:
-Searches (and the web as a whole) will gain the richness Mr. Berners-Lee is advocating.
-Web authors will not be able to lie in their semantic tags, or otherwise misinform spiders what the page is about (remember tags?)
-No extra work is required in the actual construct of the web or *ML standards. The TMR is only generated and stored by the sites / processes that need it.
The article does say that this is an "accessory" living area, which means it will be attached to a larger domicile -- and this "accessory" status played a role in the design of the home because of development code.
In other words, it's not a house. So the fact that it's 2000 ft^2 doesn't matter.
And furthermore, I have to agree with others in this thread. My current apartment, sans my roomies' bedrooms, is ~~ 800 ft ^2. I still have a modest bath, a decent kitchen, and a W/D, as well as generous living space. The tradeoff for this is, of course, that I don't have a 400 ft^2 bedroom. I only do a few things in my bedroom anyway, and I sure don't need 400 ft^2 for it.:)
I'm really quite comfortable in 800 ft^2 of space -- I think the key is that it just needs to be designed efficiently.
I agree with you in that the film is unquestionably propaganda. However, that does not affect the truth-value of individual claims within the film itself.
And I'd appreciate it if you'd substantiate your claim that the film advocates "short-circuiting the democratic process."
While the film does basically say that the primary concerned of any living, breathing, human-being voter should be to usurp Bush, I would suggest the film advocates overthrow of the government by peaceful revolution -- a process known as "voting," and not by a "short-circuit" of the process.
Is that there's no concurrent effort in the United States. I mean, yes, you can donate to FSF and EFF (great causes; yes, I support them) or even, God forbid, support a commercial linux distro with your purchase (yes, I use SuSE). While it's true the developing markets are worth a ton, as some extremely populous countries are in the "developing" category, software purchases are, to many people, still a way to spend some disposable income.
Spending $300 here on an OS / office productivity suite subscription hurts businesses here to an extent, but even our businesses typically have a shit-ton more money to be throwing at IT solutions than these developing markets.
So while it's true these developing markets have a huge incentive to stick with the lowest-cost options for any IT they might choose to purchase, this incentive still ignores the fact that the country with far-and-away the most money at the asking to spend on IT is doing it in a rather irresponsible fashion.
Crap. That was nearly incoherent. But do you see what I'm getting at? It's not that this isn't a great deal for the F/OSS community, it's just that in the largest of the markets, the battle is still uphill both ways in a foot of snow without any shoes on.
We need UN reps here for our election and for our software purchases both, IMHO. And if we have to subjugate ourselves to global government instead of Bush, so be it;)
Well, at least we can have comfort that here in a couple hundred years when they go back and introduce transparent aluminum to some guy in San Francisco in the mid-80s, they're not going to disrupt the timeline too terribly much.
I dunno what it was supposed to be... It was like a gay porn that just never...quite....got there. In fact, the only sucking was done by, yes, alas, giant mutant leeches (and, I suppose, the screenplay writers and production crew, but they weren't ever on camera).
I guess there was actually supposed to be a plot, but... I dunno. It was just terrible.
Hear, hear! You're exactly right. MS and Real both have a very vested interested in making sure BBC isn't allowed to do this.
If BBC IS allowed to do this, then all kinds of legislative repercussions might go down on this side of the pond. I'm so dismayed with Congress and the FCC right now that I wouldn't be surprised if the MS - BSA lobby came over here, told Congress (truthfully or otherwise) about how royalty-free distribution options reduce the ability for existing coprorations and CODECs to make money, thus it needs to be stopped.
I wouldn't be surprised if BBC still had to license somebody else's CODEC to broadcast to the US.
There's precedent for something like that, with what they're having to do with their Olympics coverage. It's freaking absurd.
what the President thinks about gay marriage or Hollywood?
Yes, to an extent. The President can push leadership (assuming the majority parties in Congress are the same as the President) to bring issues to the front of the line and deal with them as he, as the highest-ranking member of the party, sees fit.
The parties, however, don't always follow suit. Bush has had this problem, even in spite of majorities in the House and the Senate.
THIS is why it's important to educate yourself on the people in your district running for US Congress and the people in your state running for Senate. Those people are the ones who end up setting legislative priorities.
Candidates have websites. Mine (incumbent, challenger) do, and it's not hard to guess who I'm voting for.
Furthermore, members of Congress only represent about 450,000 people in my state (Indiana, nine districts), and as such, the candidates are generally quite open and available, either via phone, email, or in person, if you're willing to go to a press conference or meeting.
You can actually take the time to get to know these people personally, so they recognize you, and it's really not hard to do. Affect policy from the inside, you know?
The previous reply is correct; Nielsens are notoriously inaccurate. The Arbitrons (for radio) are the same thing. Gotta love working in radio. You figure out how to make someone who listens to your station 40 minutes a day count more. Serioulsy. Four ten-minute blocks could count for as many as four quarter-hours. One forty minute block could overlap as few as two quarter-hours.
Thus the idea of the "listening opportunity" is born.
Pure statistical bullshit if you ask me.
In the same way, Nielsens are generally pretty worthless, aside from their use as a comparative measure against other programming in the same time block.
What I can't believe is that there would be one program, say at 8 PM Tuesday, that would suffer a serious, statistically significant hit from TiVO, and the other programs' viewership numbers would remain the same. That's really the only way the Nielsens would get clusterfsck'd by this, far as I can tell.
If you think the Bush Adminstration is bad, do you really think Gore/Lieberman (two major advocates of censorship) would have been any better?
Hell yes! For starters, Michael Powell wouldn't be chair of the FCC. Name one thing that organization has done right under his tutelage.
I thought so.
Gore and Lieberman have been advocates of policies like labelling CDs which contain graphic, violent, or offensive content. And yes, I think that's bullshit, too. There is, however, a difference between giving something a scarlet letter versus burning it at the stake.
Instead what we have is a ridiculous, faith-based, ideological swing at the first amendment to the Constitution, which says, to paraphrase, with judicial review in play, that unless what you're saying is patently offensive or in some way endangers others, you can say whatever you want to say.
Now, we have the FCC running around pointing shotguns at all the broadcasters everywhere who are having a hard enough time just trying not to suck rocks, and now we have to worry about crap like this. It's not legislation, it's a balls-out threat. And all it will do is make folks like Clear Channel even more powerful because they can *afford* to pay fines. One little fuckup and a station the size of the one I work at is gone. My job has been explicitly threatened in memoranda on more than one occasion since this shit's gone down, and it's crazy. The memos basically say if the station is fined, you're fired, and the station won't send their lawyers to defend you against a personal fine should the FCC levee one (because, obviously, you've just been fired, so T.S.).
And there are no provisions in monopoly law that circumventing a monopoly to open your own business competing with that monopoly is illegal...
There have been some in the past, like the USPS, but today you can FedEx or UPS a letter first-class without a problem, though it's significantly more than $.37.
Slashdot Mirror
Increment ctrl by 1?!? What the hell is he talking about?!
at least in Indiana. There's a race on my absentee ballot right now, as a matter of fact.
Wal-Mart might be worse than the behemoth in Redmond, WA?
Wal-Mart is selling linux boxen and living to tell about it.
You bet your ass they're bigger than MS. Of course, this is only until MS figures out how to make it so credit cards have to be run through some sort of hash scheme only their computers can process. Then MS controls all of Wal-Mart's credit card processing...
And I certainly don't browse with IE; I use Firefox. I use Windows on my laptop because it's most convenient for what I do. Furthermore, it's also convenient just to have a Windows box lying around :)
That said, I use SuSE 9.1 on my desktop and I love it dearly. I wouldn't go back for any reason. Yes, there's still the occasional glitch or issue I don't know how to resolve, but I'm fine with that.
Microsoft needs to understand, though, that if any sort of aggressive monopoly protection significantly affects the way in which I use my laptop computer, WindowsXP SP 2 will be going the same way as the Windows XP on my desktop: right out the, er, window.
And judging by the NullPointerException, it sure as hell *is* bad programming :)
Well... I actually wrote a paper lambasting the ontology for precisely what you bring up here. Specifically, I wrote working from a draft of Adele Goldberg & Ray Jackendoff's paper "The English resultative as a family of constructions" paper (_Language_ vol. 80 no.3, September 2004). It deals with strange things like
"The trolley rumbled through the city"
and led me to believe Victor's ontological approach would have some serious problems encoding this if it didn't have a more attuned syntax processor. It wasn't a good paper, but I made my point, and you bring up a similar idea on a more basic (and thus, even more problematic) level.
Anything remotely "idiomatic" (specifically, where the combinatoriality of semantics fails, as it does in your example, where time does not "fly" in the sense that it does not move through the air held aloft by differences in air pressure) starts to generate serious problems.
Your problem could be solved if the lexicon had in it information about common idioms, which it presumably would, to be functional on any level more colloquial than academic writing. Most linguists would tell you the lexcion really does encode idioms in some fashion too, so this wouldn't be some sort of computational stop-gap.
So the lexcion has in it "time flies" or something. The parser (or some sublevel of it) would then identify "like" as a metaphorical comparison to the following predicate "an arrow."
Thus, the TMR would have something to do with time moving briskly towards a target, perhaps.
I'm not saying this is an entirely feasible option, but read what Tim Berners-Lee is proposing, and see if you find it much more plausible. The amount of information out there people would have to manually encode would preclude the system from having any real functionality beyond keyword search. While I'm not a huge fan of the current implementation of the ontology, I do think future generations could start to sort things out. Its advantage is that once the concept database, the onomasticon, is complete, it should be mostly self-trainable, which is what Berners-Lee's solution lacks.
It's supposed to say "Remember META tags" but I wrote it as HTML and the comment parser screwed me :)
d'oh!
I want to offer an alternative, as proposed by Victor Raskin at Purdue. I speak for neither Sergei Nirenburg nor Victor (who does enough talking for himself).
:)
While this idea for more thorough, concise, and accurate searches is a good one, I would question whether embedding semantic tags into web pages is the way to go.
As outlined in Ontological Smenatics, there is an automated system of semantic processing already underway. Basically, it takes a text, then runs it through a parser, which looks up meanings in a lexicon, then reduces whatever translation it comes up with to a text-meaning representation (TMR), by pushing the concepts from the lexicon through an ontology / onomasticon / world-knowledge library. The TMR is basically the "pulp" of the semantics of the article, web page, book, or whatever it's been fed. It just contains the ideas, the things involved, and other relevant concepts, stripped of all other linguistic information.
TMR is great, becuase the TMR can be used then, by reversing the process and using the lexicon of another language, to translate a text from one language to another.
However, it seems to me that with the bits and pieces of the TMR stored in a search engine's index, this could be a huge boon for the search engine.
Instead of just trying to match keywords, by parsing the TMR of web pages and by parsing TMR of search strings, you no longer search for keywords, but keyconcepts.
The advantage to semantic searches / indexes by this implementation is manifold:
-Searches (and the web as a whole) will gain the richness Mr. Berners-Lee is advocating.
-Web authors will not be able to lie in their semantic tags, or otherwise misinform spiders what the page is about (remember tags?)
-No extra work is required in the actual construct of the web or *ML standards. The TMR is only generated and stored by the sites / processes that need it.
-Others?
Just an alternative solution, for fun
Am I think only person who laughs when it turns out someone or some corporation is still using WordPerfect?
:)
I ordered it with my Dell laptop becuase they forced me to choose something, and I felt like Corel could probably use all the help they can get.
That disc sits, sealed in its envelope, inside my filing cabinet as we speak; the first thing I did when I got the computer was add OpenOffice
IIRC, Buran never flew a manned mission. The computers handled all the test flights.
I go all over for my political blogging...
;) But there's always witty political content there, both locally and globally, that interests me!
For crazy news from the Left, I like DailyKos; it's most blog-o-riffic.
For crazy news from the Right, even though it isn't really a blog, Drudge Report.
In dealing with legal / technical slants on political issues, it's hard to top Larry Lessig's blog.
I like To Be Determined, becuase it's my blog
And finally, for a news for nerds and stuff that matters , it's hard to top Slashdot!
Well, here's an RTFA troll... ;)
:)
The article does say that this is an "accessory" living area, which means it will be attached to a larger domicile -- and this "accessory" status played a role in the design of the home because of development code.
In other words, it's not a house. So the fact that it's 2000 ft^2 doesn't matter.
And furthermore, I have to agree with others in this thread. My current apartment, sans my roomies' bedrooms, is ~~ 800 ft ^2. I still have a modest bath, a decent kitchen, and a W/D, as well as generous living space. The tradeoff for this is, of course, that I don't have a 400 ft^2 bedroom. I only do a few things in my bedroom anyway, and I sure don't need 400 ft^2 for it.
I'm really quite comfortable in 800 ft^2 of space -- I think the key is that it just needs to be designed efficiently.
I agree with you in that the film is unquestionably propaganda. However, that does not affect the truth-value of individual claims within the film itself.
And I'd appreciate it if you'd substantiate your claim that the film advocates "short-circuiting the democratic process."
While the film does basically say that the primary concerned of any living, breathing, human-being voter should be to usurp Bush, I would suggest the film advocates overthrow of the government by peaceful revolution -- a process known as "voting," and not by a "short-circuit" of the process.
Is that there's no concurrent effort in the United States. I mean, yes, you can donate to FSF and EFF (great causes; yes, I support them) or even, God forbid, support a commercial linux distro with your purchase (yes, I use SuSE). While it's true the developing markets are worth a ton, as some extremely populous countries are in the "developing" category, software purchases are, to many people, still a way to spend some disposable income.
;)
Spending $300 here on an OS / office productivity suite subscription hurts businesses here to an extent, but even our businesses typically have a shit-ton more money to be throwing at IT solutions than these developing markets.
So while it's true these developing markets have a huge incentive to stick with the lowest-cost options for any IT they might choose to purchase, this incentive still ignores the fact that the country with far-and-away the most money at the asking to spend on IT is doing it in a rather irresponsible fashion.
Crap. That was nearly incoherent. But do you see what I'm getting at? It's not that this isn't a great deal for the F/OSS community, it's just that in the largest of the markets, the battle is still uphill both ways in a foot of snow without any shoes on.
We need UN reps here for our election and for our software purchases both, IMHO. And if we have to subjugate ourselves to global government instead of Bush, so be it
Well, at least we can have comfort that here in a couple hundred years when they go back and introduce transparent aluminum to some guy in San Francisco in the mid-80s, they're not going to disrupt the timeline too terribly much.
I dunno what it was supposed to be... It was like a gay porn that just never...quite....got there. In fact, the only sucking was done by, yes, alas, giant mutant leeches (and, I suppose, the screenplay writers and production crew, but they weren't ever on camera).
I guess there was actually supposed to be a plot, but... I dunno. It was just terrible.
And Eurotrip was awful. Anyone else see that?
Hear, hear! You're exactly right. MS and Real both have a very vested interested in making sure BBC isn't allowed to do this.
If BBC IS allowed to do this, then all kinds of legislative repercussions might go down on this side of the pond. I'm so dismayed with Congress and the FCC right now that I wouldn't be surprised if the MS - BSA lobby came over here, told Congress (truthfully or otherwise) about how royalty-free distribution options reduce the ability for existing coprorations and CODECs to make money, thus it needs to be stopped.
I wouldn't be surprised if BBC still had to license somebody else's CODEC to broadcast to the US.
There's precedent for something like that, with what they're having to do with their Olympics coverage. It's freaking absurd.
I thought Windows XP Home already had this enabled.
what the President thinks about gay marriage or Hollywood?
Yes, to an extent. The President can push leadership (assuming the majority parties in Congress are the same as the President) to bring issues to the front of the line and deal with them as he, as the highest-ranking member of the party, sees fit.
The parties, however, don't always follow suit. Bush has had this problem, even in spite of majorities in the House and the Senate.
THIS is why it's important to educate yourself on the people in your district running for US Congress and the people in your state running for Senate. Those people are the ones who end up setting legislative priorities.
Candidates have websites. Mine (incumbent, challenger) do, and it's not hard to guess who I'm voting for.
Furthermore, members of Congress only represent about 450,000 people in my state (Indiana, nine districts), and as such, the candidates are generally quite open and available, either via phone, email, or in person, if you're willing to go to a press conference or meeting.
You can actually take the time to get to know these people personally, so they recognize you, and it's really not hard to do. Affect policy from the inside, you know?
The previous reply is correct; Nielsens are notoriously inaccurate. The Arbitrons (for radio) are the same thing. Gotta love working in radio. You figure out how to make someone who listens to your station 40 minutes a day count more. Serioulsy. Four ten-minute blocks could count for as many as four quarter-hours. One forty minute block could overlap as few as two quarter-hours.
Thus the idea of the "listening opportunity" is born.
Pure statistical bullshit if you ask me.
In the same way, Nielsens are generally pretty worthless, aside from their use as a comparative measure against other programming in the same time block.
What I can't believe is that there would be one program, say at 8 PM Tuesday, that would suffer a serious, statistically significant hit from TiVO, and the other programs' viewership numbers would remain the same. That's really the only way the Nielsens would get clusterfsck'd by this, far as I can tell.
I'm going to Rawls Hall tomorrow afternoon and having a look myself :)
Don't bitch to Moz about that. Use Evolution and Firefox and rejoice, for your salvation has come.
Hell yes! For starters, Michael Powell wouldn't be chair of the FCC. Name one thing that organization has done right under his tutelage.
I thought so.
Gore and Lieberman have been advocates of policies like labelling CDs which contain graphic, violent, or offensive content. And yes, I think that's bullshit, too. There is, however, a difference between giving something a scarlet letter versus burning it at the stake.
Instead what we have is a ridiculous, faith-based, ideological swing at the first amendment to the Constitution, which says, to paraphrase, with judicial review in play, that unless what you're saying is patently offensive or in some way endangers others, you can say whatever you want to say.
Now, we have the FCC running around pointing shotguns at all the broadcasters everywhere who are having a hard enough time just trying not to suck rocks, and now we have to worry about crap like this. It's not legislation, it's a balls-out threat. And all it will do is make folks like Clear Channel even more powerful because they can *afford* to pay fines. One little fuckup and a station the size of the one I work at is gone. My job has been explicitly threatened in memoranda on more than one occasion since this shit's gone down, and it's crazy. The memos basically say if the station is fined, you're fired, and the station won't send their lawyers to defend you against a personal fine should the FCC levee one (because, obviously, you've just been fired, so T.S.).
And there are no provisions in monopoly law that circumventing a monopoly to open your own business competing with that monopoly is illegal...
There have been some in the past, like the USPS, but today you can FedEx or UPS a letter first-class without a problem, though it's significantly more than $.37.
Funny? Christ, they would've been called Nazis!