A natural language parser and an API
on
Ask Gneeves?
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· Score: 2
Rather than an attempt at a comprehensive "Ask Jeeves" replacement, perhaps a generic version of the software would be more appropriate. A natural language parser, and natural language query engine, with conversion utilties to go from this format to a variety of backends (RDBMS, maybe LDAP, perhaps even a front-end to commercial/popular search engines).
I think the Open Directory Project does a ot of what you have mentioned; what is missing is the ability to feed it natural language queries and fully structured sentences.
If the idea for a new database/repository were to go forward, a very important aspect would be making it very easy to contribute. Perhaps an API that can be easily embedded in software (something like CDDB does), with a dedicated protocol, and maybe even dedicated server software to collect the information.
Re:Open source this, open source that
on
Ask Gneeves?
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· Score: 2
Open source makes about as much sense in this context as it does with that ridiculous "Open Source Iridium" thing.
The phrase itself is ridiculous, but the meanging is not. The meaning is, "Let's make this a community project, in which anyone and everyone is allowed to contribute, according to a set of rules patterned after Open Source software."
How is this different from Mindstorms? It sounds pretty similar, except that the software for MindStorms has been ported to other platforms (like Not Quite C).
are there any other ASP solutions for Apache? I've yet to find one
Hey, there sure are. Joshua Chamas' Apache::ASP, which runs under mod_perl, is probably the best solution. It runs exactly as IIS' ASP does, using the same constructs. It would probably be worth your while to check out.
qmail with ezmlm is your solution. Use it instead of sendmail. To create a mailing list, you put a file in your home directory called.qmail-listname, and use the address yourlogin-listname, and qmail does the right thing (instant listserver! No admin needed!). There is even a couple of web-based interfaces (EZmlm-Web 1.02 and another one here) for adding and deleting users from a list.
qmail is pretty sweet anyway, you should be using it.
Yeah, everything is neat, but the main problem with it is that there is no editing. Do a search for Mr T Ate My Balls and then tell me what you think of Everything as a legitimate cataloging/archival site.
The ability for all the users to add content makes it easier and faster to get information in there
Yes, this is a definite plus, under certain circumstances. You can avoid the tyranny of The Editor as he prunes away the dross.
There seems to be the usual "Perl Is Ugly" threads going on here, so let me sum it up for all of you. People use Perl for the same reason people use Linix. Perl is superior to (most) other languages in the same way that Linux. If you want complete control over the language you use, there are few beside Perl for you. If you want hand-holding and coddling, write in VB.
So far, almost every complaint about Perl attached to this story has been uninformed whining or out and out untruths. People complain that Perl is a read-only language. That absolute bullshit. There is no such thing as a read only language -- there are programmers who write read only code. Yeah, some of the worst code I have ever seen was written in Perl, but some of the best has been written in Perl. I feel sorry for all of you people who are afraid to express yourselves in your code -- Perl is probably very scary for you, and rightfully so. "It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools" -- bad code is written by bad programmers, and is language independant.
To sum it up, and bastardize anoher great quote, "With most languages, you are limited by the language itself. With Perl, you are limited by your own imagination."
HTML files with PHP are read and evaled every time they are called. With mod_perl handlers, the scripts are compiled when Apache starts up and then never gets recompiled until you restart the server. That is the difference. The same thing goes for ASP scripts, and other embedded scripting languages (this actually includes things like ePerl, Embperl, and other embedded Perls). So, PHP is fast (no spawning a new interpreter), but the pages need to be read every time they are called.
I believe that PHP4 will have the option to compile HTML/PHP pages, so this will not continue to be an issue.
Some techniques that are essential to web development are:
Write clean code. Straigtforward code that doesn't pull in a lot of extre libraries and functions will run better than spaghetti code.
Use persistent database connections whenever you can, or use a small fast rdbms like MySQL.
Caching, caching, caching!
Turn buffering off whenever possible (e.g., $|++ in perl).
Use compiled modules/languages whenever possible. Languages and environments like Perl (CGI, not mod_perl), PHP, ASP, and the like are *slow* in comparison to compiled C modules and things like mod_perl, mod_pyapache, and mod_dtcl. As much as people like embedded scripting languages, the fact is the page has to be parsed every time it is run (PHP folks, I mean you!) This makes for fast development (which is definitely important), but not so great for running.
No JavaScript, no DHTML, no animated GIFs. Yeah, this goes against what a lot of people have been taught about the web, but they slow it the fuck down. A browser having to parse 300 lines of JavaScript (half of which is "if(userAgent == "Mozilla")" crap anyway) is going to be very slow, even on a BFM.
And, dammit, write good HTML. In fact, don't write HTML, write XHTML. Nothing ruins the effect of a well-thought-out dynamic page than HTML that the browser has to re-render 6 times to lay out correctly. You may think this is not a big deal, but it is, it really is. Take the time to learn XHTML, and your pages will be better for it.
Often, the speed of the web is, in reality, how fast the pages appear to be. This is the most important thing to remember when designing pages that are supposed to be fast.
A lot of people have said that the bottlenecks tend to be generating output, making database connections, and the like, but that is often not true. Generally, the bottleneck is the network connection. The way I often think of pages is in terms of the connection speed of the server. I have done work for people with slow connections from the server to their backbone, and in cases like this, connection time becomes less important than network speed. So I send the header, send some content for the top of the page, and then make my database connections, and do my calculations.
Even though it's often frowned upon, I like to use a lot of includes that are generated by the client whenever possible. That way, the multiple hits to the server (i.e., more network traffic) can make a slower server seem faster. When it comes down to it, when poeple say they want the web to be faster, they mean a fast experience, not a fast server.
NFS under Linux is notorious for it's locknig problems. There looks like there are a few options here:
Back out of that Solaris patch. You did backup everything up and install the patch with the backout option, didn't you?
If it only happens with the distributed.net client, stop using it. ("Doctor, it hurts when I do this" "Then don't do that"). Or, you could run the entire distributed.net process on a partition local to the Linux box.
Make sure that you are running the latest stable glibc (you're using a development version of Debian, right?), see about any NFS-related kernel patches (don't know know if there are any). Consider trying a development kernel; I've had good luck with 2.3.51, for example. The latest is 2.3.99-pre-something-or-other, these might also be good to try. Try a few different kernels: the NFS stuff is constantly changing. The 2.3.51 config contains experimental support for NFS v3, you might want to try that out. If you're running something like the distributed.net stuff, then it can't be too essential a machine and you can afford to test new kernels.
You'll probably run into this problem with anything that tries to do locking over NFS. I would slap together a few scripts or small programs that do locking over NFS to see if it might be the something strange that distributed.net client is doing. Maybe it's compiled for libc5 or libc6, and that might be causing problems (wild guesses here).
I know I shouldn't respond to this obvious troll, but here I go...
Does anyone use the Mac as a serious computing platform any more?
What does that mean? What is serious computing? There are many univesities that use Macs for teaching. There are many companies that still have a lot of Macs, especially for graphic design. There are many households who are still using Macs, and surprise, surprise, the marketing is working, there are many households that are actually buying Macs. Besides, a telnet client is a telnet client is a telnet client, right?:)
But just to reiterate -- this is not about Macs! This is about the PowerPC architecture. The hardware was never the weak link in Macs -- it was always the software. The hardware has always done an excellent job running the slow, underpowered, under-equipped software.
top of the range PC will still beat it hands down for performace
Actually, this is not true, contrary to the reports you might have seen. Yeah, a truly high end PIII or Athlon might beat a G4 for raw performace, but the beauty is, G3's and G4's are common, and relatively inexpensive, while the high end x86 chips are rare and expensive. The average G3 will toast the shit out of the average PII or PIII.
The seven-dish prototype unveiled today is a precursor to what will eventually be an array of hundreds, perhaps thousands of small backyard-type satellite dishes linked by sophisticated electronics to create an unparalleled SETI observing instrument
So, once this is fully in place, not only will they have folks all around the world crunching numbers for them, but they'll have folks all around the world listening for them as well. Now *that's* cool.
It makes sense, though. One of the arguments for helping SETI was that your computer is idle most of the time. Similarly, your satellite dish is also idle most of the time; why not make use of it?
We, as a community, tend to look at "patent" and see "software patent." A better question, when we talk about patent reform, is whether patents work in general. Yeah, they tend to be a bad idea when it comes to software, but in general, are they a bad idea?
We, as a community, need to take off the rose-colored Open Source glasses, and look at patents in a broader scope. Most of the patents that are issued every year have nothing to do with software. Many of them are not even related to technology. Before we start "reforming" patent law, maybe we should look at other areas that have a lot of patent activity.
I don't intend this as a flame! We hear about software patents all the time but there is definitely more to the patent picture.
Parents should not be allowing 13 y/o or younger children to surf the net unsupervised and if they were not neglecting their responsibility the COPPA law would not be necessary.
To a certain extent this is true, but a parent can't always be with h{is,er} children. Kids go to school, where there are probably computers. Kids visit friends, where there are probably computers. Kids spend time on their home PC doing homework, etc.
I have a 7 month old son, so things like this are constantly on my mind. Some day soon, some day very soon, he is going to start using the computer we have at home (he is already showing interest as he sits on my lap and we read Slashdot together -- he bangs on the keys and reaches for the screen), and I am not going to be able to be with him (as a progammer, I spend a lot of time at work). The best I can hope for is that by the time he is using it when alone, my wife and I have taught him what he should be doing and what he shouldn't be doing. Never give information out over the internet. Never make plans to meet someone you met over the internet. The same things as *I* was taught growing up about the phone -- if someone calls, and you don't know who it is, ask; if someone asks who you are, don't tell them until you know who they are; etc.
Will COPPA work? No, like all other laws it will not impact the law-breakers and the law-abiding people (except Disney!!!) were already doing what is necessary to protect our childrens rights
This is the fate of most regulation-type laws, unfortunately. Gun control laws tends to fail (or at least fail to live up to expectations) for the same reasons. Prohibition failed for this reason. The real answer is education -- I need to teach my kids what is right and wrong, and what is appropriate and inappropriate.
<rant> That poor, disillusioned man. Someone help him. Someone explain to him the difference between reading stuff on a monitor and long term digital storage. Someone exlpain to him the difference in size between 100,000 physical books and 100,000 books on optical media. Someone explain to him how much simpler it is to reproduce and redistribute the same books to every schoolkid in America if they are in a digital format. Someone explain to him how many trees will be saved if we don't have to have a printed copy of all 26 million books that are in the LOC. Someone explain to him how books available on demand is hundreds of times more convenient than a single copy of a book shared among dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of interested readers.
Someone please take out their cluestick and hit him hard. Someone remove him and put someone knowledgable in his place, before he reduces the LOC to a useless graveyard of dead trees and corroding media.</rant>
Please don't misunderstand me -- I understand why the LOC exists, I understand why we need to preserve books, I understand the value of preserving rare and unusual works. I don't understand the closed-minded attitute toward a little technological innovation.
This is absolutely deplorable. Hook the customers, cancel the line containing the product they bought (bait and switch), and then offer a "new, improved" version -- that just happens to come with a monthly service fee. This is disgusting. Even Microsoft isn't this sneaky.
There have already been a bunch of great ideas; here are mine.
Build community ties. By helping out with other projects, you get your own name out there. When people know who you are, especially when you have helped them with their projects, they will be more likely to use and advertise for your site. How can you help out others?
Offer to code review projects you are interested in
Offer to write content. Sites like osOpinion, OS Online, and Kuro5hin are always looking for content. themes.org has been advertising for help for a while, in a bunch of areas, inclusing webmastering, PHP development,and mysql management.
The GNU project is always looking for help, and has a large tasks list; helping out the FSF is a great way to establish yourself.
Once you have content up on some of these sites, its easy to reference your own site, whether through direct links, author bios, or something similar. I'm not advocating using other sites for your own gain; I'm advocating reciprocation. You help them, they help you. You may even find that your site has a very natural tie-in with another site, and you can work together to share data, user info, stories, and the like.
Of course, you can always just stick some advertising in your/. sig.
Re:No, you are missing MY point
on
Faster
·
· Score: 2
But we are not the three-year-olds in this equation, we are the doctors, or at least we should be. The doctor understands the drug, the researched who discovered the drug understands it. What you are suggesting is more along the lines of: 3-year-old with terminal cancer finds a magic pill on the side of the road, eats it, and gets better. No one knows what the pill was, or where it came from, or how it cured her. Thoughtful analysis of the human condition is not the same as curing a terminal illness (well, some buddhists think it is, but you know what I mean).
I agree -- a cure for cancer is not useless. I think somewhere along the line we started discussing two different things. Expecting answers from a book, which was written by (effectively) a pundit (as far as I can tell, he is not a licensed metaphysician, a theologian, physicist, or anything like it), is a little like expecting your computer to start spitting out answers to all the important questions. Those answers come from interaction, intelligent reflection on the issues, and a variety of viewpoints, and definitely not from one single source.
How you do it is going to depend a great deal on how you get your content.
For example, is your content mainly user-contributed, or does is come from professional writers? Where the stuff comes from is going to make a big difference as to how it gets translated. User submitted stuff could probably be run through the babelfish in pseudo-real time (a daemon which queues requests, uses wget or lwp-request to have them translated, and then sticks them into a database). On the other hand, professionally submitted content should probably be treated a little better than simply babelfish; hire some native speakers as translators.
The way I would do it is something like this (keep in mind that I am a Perl/C programmer specializing in Apache/mod_perl; some of the things I mention are inaccessible to PHP, like translation handlers):
Back end daemon that takes queued requests and passes them to babelfish to be translated, then they get stuck into the database (spearate thread, running as a cron or daemon). This daemon could be fed through a web-based form, for example, for a site with user-contributed content, and the data would be put into a staging area, where the daemon would read it, translate it, and then enter it into the live database.
Web pages would specify an initial two character language code (e.g.,/en/foo/bar.html). When a page gets requested, a custom URI translation handler would strip out the initial two character name and keep that around (via r->notes) for future use. This could be done via a Perl module as a PerlTransHandler or a custom C translation handler, or, if you are/can not use perl or C, you could use mod_rewrite to splice off the initial 3 characters, strip off the leading '/', and stick the last 2 into the environment as, e.g., LANGUAGE (fetch them like you would and environment variable).
Alternatively, if you are using user authentication, you could fetch the preferred langauge from the users profile after the Authentication stage.
When the time comes to actually produce content, I would retrieve the langauge code from the notes table/environment and use it as part of a custom SQL statement. The database would be set up in such a way that content is broken up into as many different tables as possible, so that as much common (i.e., non langauge-specific) content could be used as possible. Using some sort of a multi-table join, I would bring the content all together before the templates are actually filled in, so that when the time comes to fill them in, you don't need to switch on the language; it's all already taken care of by the database.
Retrieving the data and putting it onto the page would be the easy part... once you have the information stored in your database in the appropriate languages, that is. Designing the database so that you have as little unnecessary redundancy as you can while still ensuring that all of your content is available in all the required languages will definitely be a challenge, but it's an architecture problem, not a programming problem.
Good luck. I, for one, would be interested in hearing how you make out and what track you decide to take.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than an attempt at a comprehensive "Ask Jeeves" replacement, perhaps a generic version of the software would be more appropriate. A natural language parser, and natural language query engine, with conversion utilties to go from this format to a variety of backends (RDBMS, maybe LDAP, perhaps even a front-end to commercial/popular search engines).
I think the Open Directory Project does a ot of what you have mentioned; what is missing is the ability to feed it natural language queries and fully structured sentences.
If the idea for a new database/repository were to go forward, a very important aspect would be making it very easy to contribute. Perhaps an API that can be easily embedded in software (something like CDDB does), with a dedicated protocol, and maybe even dedicated server software to collect the information.
darren
PS Why is the "n" silent?
Cthulhu for President!
The phrase itself is ridiculous, but the meanging is not. The meaning is, "Let's make this a community project, in which anyone and everyone is allowed to contribute, according to a set of rules patterned after Open Source software."
darren
Cthulhu for President!
How is this different from Mindstorms? It sounds pretty similar, except that the software for MindStorms has been ported to other platforms (like Not Quite C).
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Hey, there sure are. Joshua Chamas' Apache::ASP, which runs under mod_perl, is probably the best solution. It runs exactly as IIS' ASP does, using the same constructs. It would probably be worth your while to check out.
The full Apache::ASP home page is at http://www.nodeworks.com/asp/, and there is tons of support for it on the mod_perl mailing list (including the author himself).
darren
Cthulhu for President!
qmail with ezmlm is your solution. Use it instead of sendmail. To create a mailing list, you put a file in your home directory called .qmail-listname, and use the address yourlogin-listname, and qmail does the right thing (instant listserver! No admin needed!). There is even a couple of web-based interfaces (EZmlm-Web 1.02 and another one here) for adding and deleting users from a list.
qmail is pretty sweet anyway, you should be using it.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Now that we all know that it is possible to crack their crypt , we can have it for free? Is this a joke?
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Yeah, everything is neat, but the main problem with it is that there is no editing. Do a search for Mr T Ate My Balls and then tell me what you think of Everything as a legitimate cataloging/archival site.
Yes, this is a definite plus, under certain circumstances. You can avoid the tyranny of The Editor as he prunes away the dross.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
There seems to be the usual "Perl Is Ugly" threads going on here, so let me sum it up for all of you. People use Perl for the same reason people use Linix. Perl is superior to (most) other languages in the same way that Linux. If you want complete control over the language you use, there are few beside Perl for you. If you want hand-holding and coddling, write in VB.
So far, almost every complaint about Perl attached to this story has been uninformed whining or out and out untruths. People complain that Perl is a read-only language. That absolute bullshit. There is no such thing as a read only language -- there are programmers who write read only code. Yeah, some of the worst code I have ever seen was written in Perl, but some of the best has been written in Perl. I feel sorry for all of you people who are afraid to express yourselves in your code -- Perl is probably very scary for you, and rightfully so. "It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools" -- bad code is written by bad programmers, and is language independant.
To sum it up, and bastardize anoher great quote, "With most languages, you are limited by the language itself. With Perl, you are limited by your own imagination."
Cthulhu for President!
Not repeats, recurses ...
darren
Cthulhu for President!
HTML files with PHP are read and evaled every time they are called. With mod_perl handlers, the scripts are compiled when Apache starts up and then never gets recompiled until you restart the server. That is the difference. The same thing goes for ASP scripts, and other embedded scripting languages (this actually includes things like ePerl, Embperl, and other embedded Perls). So, PHP is fast (no spawning a new interpreter), but the pages need to be read every time they are called.
I believe that PHP4 will have the option to compile HTML/PHP pages, so this will not continue to be an issue.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Some techniques that are essential to web development are:
Often, the speed of the web is, in reality, how fast the pages appear to be. This is the most important thing to remember when designing pages that are supposed to be fast.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
A lot of people have said that the bottlenecks tend to be generating output, making database connections, and the like, but that is often not true. Generally, the bottleneck is the network connection. The way I often think of pages is in terms of the connection speed of the server. I have done work for people with slow connections from the server to their backbone, and in cases like this, connection time becomes less important than network speed. So I send the header, send some content for the top of the page, and then make my database connections, and do my calculations.
Even though it's often frowned upon, I like to use a lot of includes that are generated by the client whenever possible. That way, the multiple hits to the server (i.e., more network traffic) can make a slower server seem faster. When it comes down to it, when poeple say they want the web to be faster, they mean a fast experience, not a fast server.
Just something to keep in mind.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Yeah, uh, none of these URL's worked for me. Here's the one I got from following links on the front page: http: //www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042100s ci-paleo-dinosaur.html.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
NFS under Linux is notorious for it's locknig problems. There looks like there are a few options here:
You'll probably run into this problem with anything that tries to do locking over NFS. I would slap together a few scripts or small programs that do locking over NFS to see if it might be the something strange that distributed.net client is doing. Maybe it's compiled for libc5 or libc6, and that might be causing problems (wild guesses here).
good luck.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Someone please send them the cluestick. I'll even pay for postage.
Ugh!
darren
Cthulhu for President!
I know I shouldn't respond to this obvious troll, but here I go...
What does that mean? What is serious computing? There are many univesities that use Macs for teaching. There are many companies that still have a lot of Macs, especially for graphic design. There are many households who are still using Macs, and surprise, surprise, the marketing is working, there are many households that are actually buying Macs. Besides, a telnet client is a telnet client is a telnet client, right? :)
But just to reiterate -- this is not about Macs! This is about the PowerPC architecture. The hardware was never the weak link in Macs -- it was always the software. The hardware has always done an excellent job running the slow, underpowered, under-equipped software.
Actually, this is not true, contrary to the reports you might have seen. Yeah, a truly high end PIII or Athlon might beat a G4 for raw performace, but the beauty is, G3's and G4's are common, and relatively inexpensive, while the high end x86 chips are rare and expensive. The average G3 will toast the shit out of the average PII or PIII.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
So, once this is fully in place, not only will they have folks all around the world crunching numbers for them, but they'll have folks all around the world listening for them as well. Now *that's* cool.
It makes sense, though. One of the arguments for helping SETI was that your computer is idle most of the time. Similarly, your satellite dish is also idle most of the time; why not make use of it?
Now, if I only had a satellite dish...
darren
Cthulhu for President!
We, as a community, tend to look at "patent" and see "software patent." A better question, when we talk about patent reform, is whether patents work in general. Yeah, they tend to be a bad idea when it comes to software, but in general, are they a bad idea?
We, as a community, need to take off the rose-colored Open Source glasses, and look at patents in a broader scope. Most of the patents that are issued every year have nothing to do with software. Many of them are not even related to technology. Before we start "reforming" patent law, maybe we should look at other areas that have a lot of patent activity.
I don't intend this as a flame! We hear about software patents all the time but there is definitely more to the patent picture.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
To a certain extent this is true, but a parent can't always be with h{is,er} children. Kids go to school, where there are probably computers. Kids visit friends, where there are probably computers. Kids spend time on their home PC doing homework, etc.
I have a 7 month old son, so things like this are constantly on my mind. Some day soon, some day very soon, he is going to start using the computer we have at home (he is already showing interest as he sits on my lap and we read Slashdot together -- he bangs on the keys and reaches for the screen), and I am not going to be able to be with him (as a progammer, I spend a lot of time at work). The best I can hope for is that by the time he is using it when alone, my wife and I have taught him what he should be doing and what he shouldn't be doing. Never give information out over the internet. Never make plans to meet someone you met over the internet. The same things as *I* was taught growing up about the phone -- if someone calls, and you don't know who it is, ask; if someone asks who you are, don't tell them until you know who they are; etc.
This is the fate of most regulation-type laws, unfortunately. Gun control laws tends to fail (or at least fail to live up to expectations) for the same reasons. Prohibition failed for this reason. The real answer is education -- I need to teach my kids what is right and wrong, and what is appropriate and inappropriate.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
<rant> That poor, disillusioned man. Someone help him. Someone explain to him the difference between reading stuff on a monitor and long term digital storage. Someone exlpain to him the difference in size between 100,000 physical books and 100,000 books on optical media. Someone explain to him how much simpler it is to reproduce and redistribute the same books to every schoolkid in America if they are in a digital format. Someone explain to him how many trees will be saved if we don't have to have a printed copy of all 26 million books that are in the LOC. Someone explain to him how books available on demand is hundreds of times more convenient than a single copy of a book shared among dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of interested readers.
Someone please take out their cluestick and hit him hard. Someone remove him and put someone knowledgable in his place, before he reduces the LOC to a useless graveyard of dead trees and corroding media.</rant>
Please don't misunderstand me -- I understand why the LOC exists, I understand why we need to preserve books, I understand the value of preserving rare and unusual works. I don't understand the closed-minded attitute toward a little technological innovation.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
This is absolutely deplorable. Hook the customers, cancel the line containing the product they bought (bait and switch), and then offer a "new, improved" version -- that just happens to come with a monthly service fee. This is disgusting. Even Microsoft isn't this sneaky.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
There have already been a bunch of great ideas; here are mine.
Build community ties. By helping out with other projects, you get your own name out there. When people know who you are, especially when you have helped them with their projects, they will be more likely to use and advertise for your site. How can you help out others?
Once you have content up on some of these sites, its easy to reference your own site, whether through direct links, author bios, or something similar. I'm not advocating using other sites for your own gain; I'm advocating reciprocation. You help them, they help you. You may even find that your site has a very natural tie-in with another site, and you can work together to share data, user info, stories, and the like.
Of course, you can always just stick some advertising in your /. sig.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
Yeah, I was kind of hoping it would be edited a bit before it got posted...
The only solution is to moderate everything else in this discussion up. :)
darren
Cthulhu for President!
But we are not the three-year-olds in this equation, we are the doctors, or at least we should be. The doctor understands the drug, the researched who discovered the drug understands it. What you are suggesting is more along the lines of: 3-year-old with terminal cancer finds a magic pill on the side of the road, eats it, and gets better. No one knows what the pill was, or where it came from, or how it cured her. Thoughtful analysis of the human condition is not the same as curing a terminal illness (well, some buddhists think it is, but you know what I mean).
I agree -- a cure for cancer is not useless. I think somewhere along the line we started discussing two different things. Expecting answers from a book, which was written by (effectively) a pundit (as far as I can tell, he is not a licensed metaphysician, a theologian, physicist, or anything like it), is a little like expecting your computer to start spitting out answers to all the important questions. Those answers come from interaction, intelligent reflection on the issues, and a variety of viewpoints, and definitely not from one single source.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
How you do it is going to depend a great deal on how you get your content.
For example, is your content mainly user-contributed, or does is come from professional writers? Where the stuff comes from is going to make a big difference as to how it gets translated. User submitted stuff could probably be run through the babelfish in pseudo-real time (a daemon which queues requests, uses wget or lwp-request to have them translated, and then sticks them into a database). On the other hand, professionally submitted content should probably be treated a little better than simply babelfish; hire some native speakers as translators.
The way I would do it is something like this (keep in mind that I am a Perl/C programmer specializing in Apache/mod_perl; some of the things I mention are inaccessible to PHP, like translation handlers):
Retrieving the data and putting it onto the page would be the easy part... once you have the information stored in your database in the appropriate languages, that is. Designing the database so that you have as little unnecessary redundancy as you can while still ensuring that all of your content is available in all the required languages will definitely be a challenge, but it's an architecture problem, not a programming problem.
Good luck. I, for one, would be interested in hearing how you make out and what track you decide to take.
darren
Cthulhu for President!