"All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground, or so they believed, and in such dwellings they still felt most at home; but in the course of time they had been obliged to adopt other forms of abode. Actually in the Shire in Bilbo's days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom. The poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind, mere holes indeed, with only one window or none; while the well-to-do still constructed more luxurious versions of the simple diggings of old. But suitable sites for these large and ramifying tunnels (or smials as they called them) were not everywhere to be found; and in the flats and the low-lying districts the Hobbits, as they multiplied, began to build above ground. Indeed, even in the hilly regions and the older villages, such as Hobbiton or Tuckborough, or in the chief township of the Shire, Michel Delvig on the White Downs, there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone. These were specially favoured by millers, smiths, ropers, and cartwrights, and others of that sort; for even when they had holes to live in, Hobbits had long been accustomed to build sheds and workshops."
That's from the prologue in the fellowship of the rings.
Well I'm sure it does, we aren't given all the information about the users viewing habits or a hint as to why they think it might have happened. Perhaps he watched a Korean film with subtitles, it may think he likes it. I'm sure it didn't just randomly decide he likes to watch Korean news.
If someone buys gay stuff they get offered more gay stuff. If someone orders a book about pregnancy, they get offered more pregnancy stuff. There is no check to see if they are gay before offering the pregnancy stuff, it doesn't really matter how they are stored.
People are also overlooking the obvious. I use Amazon a lot and yes, sometimes (especially at first) the suggestions were weird and usually tied into whatever I looked at last.
You have to train the system to know what you like. If all the computer knows about me is that I bought the latest James Bond movie. It's going to recommend other James Bond movies. Maybe if you got one with Peirce Brosnan than it may recommend the new Thomas Crown affair as well. It's not going to know that you really want Monty Python's Holy Grail. Why does it not know this? Because it doesn't know you like comedies, specifically Monty Python.
If you really want (I have no experience with Tivo so I don't know if you can do it there) Amazon has a way for you to rate items. If you like movies go through and rate as many movies as you can, the more data it has the better the recommendations will be.
Now I get fairly good recomendations. Also if you buy something as a gift (like the gay man in the article) you can check a little box that says something like do not use for recommendations.
I've taken a lot of AI classes and these types of programs are "learning" programs because over time they learn your preferences. But in order to give you confident recommendations rather than guesses it needs to know what you like. So go through Amazon and rate what you've bought (and check off to exclude those items you bought as gifts) and go through the recommendations rating them and watch it get better.
I got there no problem and I don't have a subscription. Can you not figure out how to work your computer? Click on the link before jumping to conclusions.
I use mine mostly for the to-do list, calendar and address book features. I took notes in class for a little while but I stopped after a while simply because I never really take notes in class (the same thing happens to my paper notebooks... I start the year taking notes and end up doodling in them)
My father-in-law owns his own small HVAC company and he uses it to take pictures of furnaces, make lists of what still needs to be done or picked up at the supply house. He also uses it for a call log, ie. when someone calls, he records the date/time name phone # and description. He used to use an old date/address book but has recently upgraded to a clie.
I also know of a bunch of other people that use there's. Everyone I know that uses it on a mostly daily basis uses the PalmOS. -Chris
It's funny, I see a lot of people saying they switched from slackware to FreeBSD...
But seriously, many people have a hard time installing Red Had or Mandrake so I really wouldn't recommend them installing FreeBSD.
I personally prefer Debian, X can be a little troublesome to configure but once you get it configured it is a lot easier to maintain and upgrade and choosing to keep the stable packages gives you quite a stable system. -Chris
Plus the information netcraft gets can be spoofed, while I don't think mp3.com or ftp.cdrom.com would have a reason to spoof them (other than misleading hackers to think that they are trying to hack something different than what they are running) I think Hotmail would have a good reason. I remember back when M$ bought hotmail, they tried to switch and had lots of problems. I think I remember a slashdot article that stated that they use freebsd/apache and make it look like 2000/IIS.
I can't really say much about what the corporate world uses at large but my school (the mcs department at least) uses a mix of solaris/linux with a few windows boxes for good measure. (The linux boxes are the NFS servers for the solaris machines).
IBM is starting to support Linux and ship server with linux installed, not FreeBSD. FreeBSD is great but until it gets more exposure it's not going to grow as large as linux. Right now linux is a buzzword and that means if I go to my boss and say let's use linux, he'll say yeah, I heard of it let's give it a shot but if I say lets use FreeBSD, unless he has an open mind, he's not going to allow it because he hasn't heard anything about it before. Personally I think getting hung up on specifics is silly, Linux and FreeBSD are both UNIX and I think an install of either over a non-UNIX os is a great victory. I've gotten to love UNIX no matter what version. -Chris
LOTR *IS* the geek book and now it is being made into a movie. To me that is news for nerds, stuff that matters. Just because the MPAA is evil doesn't mean the director (in this case Peter Jackson) and the actors and everyone else that worked on the film didn't create a great work.
Since the RIAA has gone after music sharers and now they are making copy-protected cd's... I refuse to buy a cd ever again. The movie industry, while pissing me off with macrovision protection and regional encoding, they haven't actually gone after things that make dvd players regionless, they don't (or at least it hasn't come out that they do) rape the artists and keep all the money.
Because of the rise of prices, I now rarely go see a movie in theaters because it's too expensive. For 2 people to go see a movie in the theater, it costs just as much to buy the dvd when it comes out. And for those movies you don't think you'd like, just head over and rent it (or download it).
I love movies, there is no other way to boycott the MPAA than to avoid watching movies except when I go to a friends house to watch it. Movies just aren't prevelant enough on the internet to download and after spending a few hours to download movie if you have a bad quality version you just wasted a lot of time.
If there is really going to be any change, the media needs to show people affected by these things.
Back to the original poster, Peter Jackson is making a great movie about possibly the greatest literary work of the 20th century. And if you don't like it, go to your preference page and check off to exclude movie news. Then you don't have to put up with it anymore. -Chris
It's a joke my friend... besides, they would still lose money because someone else will eventually buy the consoles, if they have a swell of demand for them, but no one really buys the games they will continue to produce more consoles. What do you think they make them all at once and hope they all sell?
Actually if you read the post he doesn't actually say he was happy with it just that the requirements to run it were low. I think he was hinting at the fact that since most times things get smaller and faster that speech recognition software would as well.
The fact is that the speech recognition used to SUCK! It has gotten a lot better since then but only because of the increased complexity of the software. -Chris
The headphone isn'y an issue, like you said, make it accept USB and get a good headset type mic and your good.
The problem is in recognizing what you said, the best software out there still sucks and you have to train it forever. No matter what you will have to train it to recognize your voice. My saying car and some one from Boston saying car are drastically different but they are the same word. Given a lot of training you can get something halfway decent but it still requires corrections. This is especially true if you have a cold, you just woke up or are sleepy.
It's a very complex thing and I don't see any signifigant breakthroughs anytime soon. I've used quite a lot of programs (with a good microphone) and you can get ok results especially for simple things like "Open" "Close" but I think we're a long way from really good dictation software. -Chris
More linux distros encourage development... if you just have one there would be no choices or innovation. What makes debian useful is different than what makes Mandrake useful. While I may find that Debian suites my needs more you may prefer a different distro... or as you pointed out Windows could be for you.
I think the different desktop/windows managers are a benefit because one person may want a slim, no frills window manager while someone else might want a bloated pretty window manager wheras the average person will probably want something in between.
The only time I've had X crash the whole system was when I was configuring it with the wrong driver trying to get it right. Once it's configured I haven't had any problems with it crashing the system.
Consistent look and feel? Configuration is what makes things unique... ever look at how many winamp skins there are?
want a manual? there's this site (www.google.com) where I can search the web and find all sorts of useful info on how to set up any part of linux. the linux documentation project is a really good starting point.
Now let's look at Windows... 1 windows... nope, just a few releases: 98, ME, XP, NT, 2000... shall I list more?
1 desktop/window manager... well I guess you could say that...
A stable GUI that doesn't doesn't crash the whole operating system... no, the GUI crashes the whole thing goes...
Consistent look an feel? one could debate this but we'll give it to you
Complete manual? Ha... good luck finding a manual or online documentation... If it's broke reboot... if it's still broke, re-install.
Drivers? well technically drivers are available for windows but I've had plenty of problems with drivers crashing while trying to install them or I would install a driver and it wants to install all this other useless crap.
Well, linux doesn't have what you want nor does windows. I too erased my hard drive but I put linux on instead of Windows. -Chris
I have a 667 with 1 Gig of RAM and I often put mine to sleep (by closing the lid) and then pull out the battery and put the new one in. Then I open it up and it works.
I don't know where you saw this fine print but cron does not run when it's asleap, nothing does. -Chris
These solutions solve the problem of running X-Windows programs on the Mac... something that can be done by just installing X-Windows on you mac. (You'd just have to set the window manager up to look like a mac)
Fact is the GUI isn't as UNIX like that I'd hope. Don't get me wrong, I love the interface and the GUI (despite a few small bugs) looks great. However, I think features similar to X, such as launching remote programs (either other mac programs or other X-Windows programs) would be great. One thing I love about linux is being able to type ssh -X host and be able to launch those programs on my X server. -Chris
I never once mentioned open source, I was merely pointing out a flaw in M$'s strategy for the XBox. And yes, advertisers for video games do target high school kids and college kids. Get a life, move out of your parents basement you fat fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
"All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground, or so they believed, and in such dwellings they still felt most at home; but in the course of time they had been obliged to adopt other forms of abode. Actually in the Shire in Bilbo's days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom. The poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind, mere holes indeed, with only one window or none; while the well-to-do still constructed more luxurious versions of the simple diggings of old. But suitable sites for these large and ramifying tunnels (or smials as they called them) were not everywhere to be found; and in the flats and the low-lying districts the Hobbits, as they multiplied, began to build above ground. Indeed, even in the hilly regions and the older villages, such as Hobbiton or Tuckborough, or in the chief township of the Shire, Michel Delvig on the White Downs, there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone. These were specially favoured by millers, smiths, ropers, and cartwrights, and others of that sort; for even when they had holes to live in, Hobbits had long been accustomed to build sheds and workshops."
That's from the prologue in the fellowship of the rings.
did you try the link or just spout off some crap? Hey, look at that I tried it and it's free.
I think he means a bitfield... he's a little slow.
Probably heard someone talk about it, heard bitmap instead of bitfield.
Well I'm sure it does, we aren't given all the information about the users viewing habits or a hint as to why they think it might have happened. Perhaps he watched a Korean film with subtitles, it may think he likes it. I'm sure it didn't just randomly decide he likes to watch Korean news.
How did you get to the Mac OS X Developer's Guide? Via The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, At Home in Mitford then Bridget Jones's Diary perhaps?
hey isn't that the link that was on slashdot?
Wow you really are a Karma whore.
Or you could explain it a little simpler...
If someone buys gay stuff they get offered more gay stuff. If someone orders a book about pregnancy, they get offered more pregnancy stuff. There is no check to see if they are gay before offering the pregnancy stuff, it doesn't really matter how they are stored.
People are also overlooking the obvious. I use Amazon a lot and yes, sometimes (especially at first) the suggestions were weird and usually tied into whatever I looked at last.
You have to train the system to know what you like. If all the computer knows about me is that I bought the latest James Bond movie. It's going to recommend other James Bond movies. Maybe if you got one with Peirce Brosnan than it may recommend the new Thomas Crown affair as well. It's not going to know that you really want Monty Python's Holy Grail. Why does it not know this? Because it doesn't know you like comedies, specifically Monty Python.
If you really want (I have no experience with Tivo so I don't know if you can do it there) Amazon has a way for you to rate items. If you like movies go through and rate as many movies as you can, the more data it has the better the recommendations will be.
Now I get fairly good recomendations. Also if you buy something as a gift (like the gay man in the article) you can check a little box that says something like do not use for recommendations.
I've taken a lot of AI classes and these types of programs are "learning" programs because over time they learn your preferences. But in order to give you confident recommendations rather than guesses it needs to know what you like. So go through Amazon and rate what you've bought (and check off to exclude those items you bought as gifts) and go through the recommendations rating them and watch it get better.
Have you tried to click on the link? Hey look at that you can read it without a subscription.
Dumbasses
why not just go to the damn site and read the article? Then you can come back and comment on it.
I got there no problem and I don't have a subscription. Can you not figure out how to work your computer? Click on the link before jumping to conclusions.
I use mine mostly for the to-do list, calendar and address book features. I took notes in class for a little while but I stopped after a while simply because I never really take notes in class (the same thing happens to my paper notebooks... I start the year taking notes and end up doodling in them)
My father-in-law owns his own small HVAC company and he uses it to take pictures of furnaces, make lists of what still needs to be done or picked up at the supply house. He also uses it for a call log, ie. when someone calls, he records the date/time name phone # and description. He used to use an old date/address book but has recently upgraded to a clie.
I also know of a bunch of other people that use there's. Everyone I know that uses it on a mostly daily basis uses the PalmOS.
-Chris
It's funny, I see a lot of people saying they switched from slackware to FreeBSD...
But seriously, many people have a hard time installing Red Had or Mandrake so I really wouldn't recommend them installing FreeBSD.
I personally prefer Debian, X can be a little troublesome to configure but once you get it configured it is a lot easier to maintain and upgrade and choosing to keep the stable packages gives you quite a stable system.
-Chris
Plus the information netcraft gets can be spoofed, while I don't think mp3.com or ftp.cdrom.com would have a reason to spoof them (other than misleading hackers to think that they are trying to hack something different than what they are running) I think Hotmail would have a good reason. I remember back when M$ bought hotmail, they tried to switch and had lots of problems. I think I remember a slashdot article that stated that they use freebsd/apache and make it look like 2000/IIS.
I can't really say much about what the corporate world uses at large but my school (the mcs department at least) uses a mix of solaris/linux with a few windows boxes for good measure. (The linux boxes are the NFS servers for the solaris machines).
IBM is starting to support Linux and ship server with linux installed, not FreeBSD. FreeBSD is great but until it gets more exposure it's not going to grow as large as linux. Right now linux is a buzzword and that means if I go to my boss and say let's use linux, he'll say yeah, I heard of it let's give it a shot but if I say lets use FreeBSD, unless he has an open mind, he's not going to allow it because he hasn't heard anything about it before. Personally I think getting hung up on specifics is silly, Linux and FreeBSD are both UNIX and I think an install of either over a non-UNIX os is a great victory. I've gotten to love UNIX no matter what version.
-Chris
LOTR *IS* the geek book and now it is being made into a movie. To me that is news for nerds, stuff that matters. Just because the MPAA is evil doesn't mean the director (in this case Peter Jackson) and the actors and everyone else that worked on the film didn't create a great work.
Since the RIAA has gone after music sharers and now they are making copy-protected cd's... I refuse to buy a cd ever again. The movie industry, while pissing me off with macrovision protection and regional encoding, they haven't actually gone after things that make dvd players regionless, they don't (or at least it hasn't come out that they do) rape the artists and keep all the money.
Because of the rise of prices, I now rarely go see a movie in theaters because it's too expensive. For 2 people to go see a movie in the theater, it costs just as much to buy the dvd when it comes out. And for those movies you don't think you'd like, just head over and rent it (or download it).
I love movies, there is no other way to boycott the MPAA than to avoid watching movies except when I go to a friends house to watch it. Movies just aren't prevelant enough on the internet to download and after spending a few hours to download movie if you have a bad quality version you just wasted a lot of time.
If there is really going to be any change, the media needs to show people affected by these things.
Back to the original poster, Peter Jackson is making a great movie about possibly the greatest literary work of the 20th century. And if you don't like it, go to your preference page and check off to exclude movie news. Then you don't have to put up with it anymore.
-Chris
Oh please, if you don't see the spoiler coming you deserve to have it spoiled. Maybe I just read the book too many times...
-Chris
It's a joke my friend... besides, they would still lose money because someone else will eventually buy the consoles, if they have a swell of demand for them, but no one really buys the games they will continue to produce more consoles. What do you think they make them all at once and hope they all sell?
Yeah, I just use my cell phone (non verizon) and I got cable modem specifically so I didn't have to get a phone line with verizon.
Actually if you read the post he doesn't actually say he was happy with it just that the requirements to run it were low. I think he was hinting at the fact that since most times things get smaller and faster that speech recognition software would as well.
The fact is that the speech recognition used to SUCK! It has gotten a lot better since then but only because of the increased complexity of the software.
-Chris
The headphone isn'y an issue, like you said, make it accept USB and get a good headset type mic and your good.
The problem is in recognizing what you said, the best software out there still sucks and you have to train it forever. No matter what you will have to train it to recognize your voice. My saying car and some one from Boston saying car are drastically different but they are the same word. Given a lot of training you can get something halfway decent but it still requires corrections. This is especially true if you have a cold, you just woke up or are sleepy.
It's a very complex thing and I don't see any signifigant breakthroughs anytime soon. I've used quite a lot of programs (with a good microphone) and you can get ok results especially for simple things like "Open" "Close" but I think we're a long way from really good dictation software.
-Chris
I think that post was one of those new fangled posts using sarcasm...
-Chris
More linux distros encourage development... if you just have one there would be no choices or innovation. What makes debian useful is different than what makes Mandrake useful. While I may find that Debian suites my needs more you may prefer a different distro... or as you pointed out Windows could be for you.
I think the different desktop/windows managers are a benefit because one person may want a slim, no frills window manager while someone else might want a bloated pretty window manager wheras the average person will probably want something in between.
The only time I've had X crash the whole system was when I was configuring it with the wrong driver trying to get it right. Once it's configured I haven't had any problems with it crashing the system.
Consistent look and feel? Configuration is what makes things unique... ever look at how many winamp skins there are?
want a manual? there's this site (www.google.com) where I can search the web and find all sorts of useful info on how to set up any part of linux. the linux documentation project is a really good starting point.
Now let's look at Windows...
1 windows... nope, just a few releases: 98, ME, XP, NT, 2000... shall I list more?
1 desktop/window manager... well I guess you could say that...
A stable GUI that doesn't doesn't crash the whole operating system... no, the GUI crashes the whole thing goes...
Consistent look an feel? one could debate this but we'll give it to you
Complete manual? Ha... good luck finding a manual or online documentation... If it's broke reboot... if it's still broke, re-install.
Drivers? well technically drivers are available for windows but I've had plenty of problems with drivers crashing while trying to install them or I would install a driver and it wants to install all this other useless crap.
Well, linux doesn't have what you want nor does windows. I too erased my hard drive but I put linux on instead of Windows.
-Chris
Or better yet, buy 2... after all M$ is counting on the ammount of games you have to make a profit, they are losing money on the consoles.
So buy two or three (two to hack and one to play.
-Chris
I have a 667 with 1 Gig of RAM and I often put mine to sleep (by closing the lid) and then pull out the battery and put the new one in. Then I open it up and it works.
I don't know where you saw this fine print but cron does not run when it's asleap, nothing does.
-Chris
These solutions solve the problem of running X-Windows programs on the Mac... something that can be done by just installing X-Windows on you mac. (You'd just have to set the window manager up to look like a mac)
Fact is the GUI isn't as UNIX like that I'd hope. Don't get me wrong, I love the interface and the GUI (despite a few small bugs) looks great. However, I think features similar to X, such as launching remote programs (either other mac programs or other X-Windows programs) would be great. One thing I love about linux is being able to type ssh -X host and be able to launch those programs on my X server.
-Chris
I never once mentioned open source, I was merely pointing out a flaw in M$'s strategy for the XBox. And yes, advertisers for video games do target high school kids and college kids. Get a life, move out of your parents basement you fat fuck.