English and English-like variants will stay on top for a long time.
Accusations of U.S.-centricity (I hope that's not a word) are frequent in Europe. However, if the issue of language and culture is avoided, then I've found most people will use English when working with foreigners.
In international projects, participants will insist on English just to keep the French^H^H^H^H^H^H other groups under control or from gaining too much advantage. English is a second (or third or fourth) language for a great many people and using it puts the group on more or less equal footing.
autopr0n already mentioned India where English is the least common denominator among the educated. Education and / or money being key prerequisites for Internet usage. China has a similar situation with so many mutually unintelligable spoken languages and use of English among many of the educated.
Then you have technological inertia; most systems and programming langages are derived from ASCII-based ones making it difficult to use even Western European languages.
Odds are that unless there is a lot of coordinated effort and investment to recreate a Chinese Internet, Chinese that know English will find it more convenient to keep using English-variants as the de facto language standard.
A colleague has scrapped most of the MS workstations in her school library and used the money to hire a part time 'gardner' to tend to both the Linux and MS-Windows stations. She now has the highest ratio of public workstations to students in Finland and has reduced unemployement by 1.
The term 'gardner' rather than sysadmin was an acceptance of the bit rot that accompanies the various windows distributions and a recognition that even unix machines need tending/monitoring.
Anyway, it's catching on and the kids like it because its faster than NT. The bureaucrats like it because not only does the money stay local, they get more service per dollar (mark/euro).
For written assignments, I was able to convince most of my professors to accept HTML documents instead of MS-Word based.DOC files and turned in many assignments by just sending the URL in an e-mail.
The first step was to specify the assignment in number of words, 200 or 500 words instead of 1/2 page or 1 page.
After that, it was sort of a carrot and stick thing.
Carrots:
My web pages worked in their favorite browsers.
The web was (still is) trendy.
Sticks:
Macro- and VBS-based MSTDs galore
6 different OS+version combinations of MS-Word on our campus gave constant rendering and compatibility problems.
Use the office hours to find a way in which they are willing to try it and be prepared to meet them more than half way. If you make the experience convenient and useful, then they'll also tell they colleagues. But if you don't ask, you don't get.
The Age of Fable aka Bullfinch's Mythology is online for free. It covers some basic European stuff with special sections for Aurthurian legends and Charlemagne. Of course, the first volume has the obligatory chapter on
Beowulf.
Frans G. Bengtsson's book, The Long Ships : A Saga of the Viking Age,
is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library.
The original title is Röde Orm. It and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature.
) by Frans G. Bengtsson is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library.
The original title is Röde Orm and it and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature as well.
One of the first web-oriented digitization projects was
Electronic Beowulf. It's definitely worth a visit to check out the methods, which include UV lighting and spatial filtering, used to scan the manuscripts. It's a real digitization / digital preservation / restoration effort.
Beowulf has been studied a lot. Check out the names and ancestries of the characters. The epic Beowulf is not English literature, but literature in English, very old English. The action takes place in southern Scandinavia with the southern tip of what is now Sweden actually being Danish at the time.
If you're looking for a more general dead-tree version of Beowulf, then Howell D. Chickering, Jr. 's Beowulf, Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1977 was a good one with both the transcribed Old English version and the modern English version side by side.
Advertising campaigns are expensive.
Obviously, they'd net more if they spent less on hype (aka advertising). If something's good, it tends to sell itself with minimal need for promotion. Heavy advertising is a sign that the product won't necessarily make it on it's own merits and needs a little spin to be accepted.
4. What made Steve Jobs speak out so loudly about this? He's been very quiet on bashing MS, even after MS got rid of their non-voting investment some time back.
Two things stand out that make it appear that Apple is threatened enough by the proposed settlement for Jobs to break his silence:
Microsoft's 1997 patent dispute settlement regarding a 5 year committment to keep MS-Office for the Macintosh is about up. Losing MS-Office right now would be very harmful.
The current settlement would likely displace Apple's position in the education market and lock schools into the all-or-nothing Microsoft license/upgrade cycle.
Yes, it's history or even completely unkown for most AOL / MSN users.
Because dirt is amusing, old and new for the Internet == Porn & Terrorist crowd and sells newspapers, it risks being the first introduction to Usenet for many newbies.
Now is a chance to point to the useful parts of Usenet and get them to try it.
If you want to learn about XML/SGML, Perl, PHP, Java, apiculture and so on, it's the place to look.
Find some interesting newsgroups. Start with lurking and nettiquette.
I hope naively to see less spam in the near future. Until then I have used rules similar to those, but weighted slightly to avoid false positives.
To get the first set of rules I saved up a few hundred spam and then found clusters with similar characteristics. Then I ran saved messages from lists and known people to tune the rules further.
Some spammers now make small changes to the text so that matching based on long strings verbatim will not work. A dynamic spam filter would be a good AI / machine learning project.
Some people (Cancelmoose) on Usenet used to check cross-postings to detect spam. Perhaps a similar effect can be achieved by monitoring key routes / mail servers to detect multiple messages and label them as potential spam, maybe an RBL-style service.
I've either had to customize other people's statistics generators or write my own.
Most of the services I've had to work with either have no session tracking or else use GET and include an identifier in the path. This make for long bookmarks / URLs but makes it easy to follow one session in the logs.
One issue that I have noticed is that unless you are serving scripts, hostnames in the logs are becoming less relevant due to caching and proxies. However, if you do track host names then getting a 100%(ok 99%) accurate list is hard
--
If you wait a few days, weeks or months to analyse your logs, then some of the IP may have changed owners. If you try to let the HTTP daemon do the lookup, then you suffer a drop in performance and the very
first lookup or two often fails anyway.
If you use Apache (I have no experience with the others), then it is easy to pipe the log output directly to a script.
CustomLog "|/usr/local/apache/bin/rotatelogs/var/log/access_log 86400" common
You can even make it tab-delimited or what ever it takes to be easier to parse.
Myself, I'm about to experiment with
logrotate, rotatelogs, cronolog and
mod_mylog.
mod_mylog puts the log output straight into your RDBMS and even claims to cache records if the RDBMS is temporarily unavailable.
Make it illegal for companies as well as government to sell personal data.
Two months ago, I left a clean e-mail address with a bank and now the spam is rolling in. Either some employee is on the take, the bank itself sells personal data, or the bank's intra net got cracked (not improbable given their practices and technology). We could rule out the first two if the sale personal data were illegal or carefully monitored.
Another poster said it quite well how
6 out of 6 would benefit.
I can add that a site I used to work on used to get fan mail several times a week from people glad to find a site they could use without graphics or fancy plugins. Specifically, visitors could tweak their display to their taste or needs. Most of this mail was from blind users.
Unix's main strength so far is flexibility in the interface.
The gist of the post seems to imply that
Richard Garriot's role as manager and interacting with management seems less productive than his earlier, more hands-on role.
Since many managers are MBAs, could be there's a positive correlation between the number of MBAs at a company and bad performance.
A few weeks ago a posting pointed out Aeron Chairs as Stupidity Barometers. Could the same be said of MBA's?
I've only seen the posters and the first thing I noticed was that those elvish warriors are going to die quickly because they can't see out of their helmets.
That said, I eagerly await the release here.
Computers are just another tool that skilled artists can choose to add to their kit. Take Photoshop or Gimp. You can create stills and put them on film. Or, you can use them to choose your effects and processing methods and cut your time in the dark room to a small fraction. Either way, it's up to the artist to create something that grabs you.
Yes, Sci-Fi creates new terms and some times even new concepts.
And how much of the bad do we choose over the good? How much of the good can we choose over the bad?
The original post does imply that the real world adopts ideas from literature. If this is the case, is it a conscious choice? If it is a conscious choice, why not choose the strong points and discard the weak and malevalent?
H.G. Wells seems only to be mentioned once in the other posts. He's known for The Time Machine. The Sleeper Awakes has a description of an aerial dogfight between aircraft using vectored thrust.
Whether you put them in meta elements (keyword, antithesaurus) or in the body of the document, strings by themselves have no meaning, no connection to the concept which they represent.
Take for example a search for the string tar, which will yield documents containing: tar -zxf update.tgz, or cp update.tar update.old, or roofing tar, or jeg tar en øl nu
Each instance of tar above has a different meaning, but the same spelling. When you get into misspellings, spelling variations, and conjugation, then the actual concept is even harder to associate with a given range of strings.
Even Google searches are for strings and not concepts, but Google's ranking algorithm relies on which pages get the most links from pages that also get the most links. However, you'll still get different results for color vs. colour and tyre vs tire. Because the algorithm only reflects how people have chosen their links, it does, from time to time give unusual associations.;)
Given the ongoing security problems with the various Microsoft product being peddled for the server room, wouldn't a company or institution that knowingly and willfully installs such software be knowingly aiding and/or sheltering terrorists/anarchists/criminals?
All it will take is one lawsuit or police raid and suddenly certain "IT-Solutions" will not seem as attractive as the normal Solaris/BSD/Linux/etc based ones.
The Morrow Project, Gamma World and the other ancient RPGs portrayed a rather dim, dystopian view of the future.
Stories like Brave New World (Huxley), 1984 (Orwell), Farhenheight 451 (Bradbury), did as well. The latter group was intended as a warning of potential consequences. Too bad, but they seem to be serving as a template for policy makers rather than as a warning.
Another one to add is the film Rollerball which fits the same genre of obscure sci fi. A short but key scene deals with the electronic archive which has been used to effectively destroy key information through technological obselecence. There a few large corporations
have taken over the planet and run the media and other information channels to keep the masses under control. Is this the path that policy makers wish to chose?
Destroying access to information won't do anything except hurt U.S. citizens. It's a rather unpatriotic move considering the countries background in freedom and openness. It certainly looks like win (or at least a major concession) for "the forces of evil". However, it could be a key tool in certain political agendas.
It's too expensive in other ways as well. Technical feasibility and definition of "viewing" and "page" aside, it costs too much attention.
Even from the user's point of view the inconvenience of registering, even if one does not investigate the rate schedule and privacy policies, makes micropayments not worth it. It's hard enough to find the answers during a search while weeding sites and doing snap evaluations on the way to finding the right page or pages. Adding worry about billing is just another disincentive to use that site and an incentive to find another, more accessible site.
Then you have the additional issue of whether the page site is viewable with your particular configuration of browser, monitor, graphics card and OS. If a page won't display legibly in any of my broswers, then I skip it.
The article about Brown points out that the students do not get the MS-Office package. MS-Office being the main reason most people keep Microsoft products on the desktop. To top it off, they don't even get any support.
It looks like Bill's now desperate to hook students into paying for MS-Passport.
As an example, the Nov. 13 issue of PC Magazine points out that even Microsoft's online privacy statement Generator requires hooking users first to MS-Passport. In contrast, IBM's generator does not.
So, it is good to see IBM using positive examples. If enough new people give up on pathways that lead to guaranteed vendor lock-in, then we'll see even more Open Source and Free Software and more useful applications.
Years ago, there used to be a hotline to report fraud, waste or abuse within the U.S. government. It shouldn't be too hard to put together a case regarding Microsoft products in one or more of those categories and then report it. There may even be a financial reward.
The decision to use NT over viable alternatives such as UNIX or Novell could certainly be questioned.
Yes, digital storage itself is a danger -- With digital material one must either actively migrate to new storage media and to new storage formats or develop systems for emulation of antique systems.
Many places, including The National Library of Australia, have lots of material on digital preservation.
With physical artifacts such as paper, vellum, or film it takes either many decades or direct physical effort to destroy it. The default for digital content that it is rendered unusable through changing technologies or even relatively rapid deterioration of the physical medium.
Slashdot Mirror
English and English-like variants will stay on top for a long time.
Accusations of U.S.-centricity (I hope that's not a word) are frequent in Europe. However, if the issue of language and culture is avoided, then I've found most people will use English when working with foreigners. In international projects, participants will insist on English just to keep the French^H^H^H^H^H^H other groups under control or from gaining too much advantage. English is a second (or third or fourth) language for a great many people and using it puts the group on more or less equal footing.
autopr0n already mentioned India where English is the least common denominator among the educated. Education and / or money being key prerequisites for Internet usage. China has a similar situation with so many mutually unintelligable spoken languages and use of English among many of the educated.Then you have technological inertia; most systems and programming langages are derived from ASCII-based ones making it difficult to use even Western European languages. Odds are that unless there is a lot of coordinated effort and investment to recreate a Chinese Internet, Chinese that know English will find it more convenient to keep using English-variants as the de facto language standard.
The term 'gardner' rather than sysadmin was an acceptance of the bit rot that accompanies the various windows distributions and a recognition that even unix machines need tending/monitoring.
Anyway, it's catching on and the kids like it because its faster than NT. The bureaucrats like it because not only does the money stay local, they get more service per dollar (mark/euro).
The first step was to specify the assignment in number of words, 200 or 500 words instead of 1/2 page or 1 page. After that, it was sort of a carrot and stick thing.
Carrots:
- My web pages worked in their favorite browsers.
- The web was (still is) trendy.
Sticks:Use the office hours to find a way in which they are willing to try it and be prepared to meet them more than half way. If you make the experience convenient and useful, then they'll also tell they colleagues. But if you don't ask, you don't get.
The Age of Fable aka Bullfinch's Mythology is online for free. It covers some basic European stuff with special sections for Aurthurian legends and Charlemagne. Of course, the first volume has the obligatory chapter on Beowulf.
Frans G. Bengtsson's book, The Long Ships : A Saga of the Viking Age, is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm. It and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature. ) by Frans G. Bengtsson is a great piece of historical fiction from about the same part of Scandinavia as Beowulf. It's probably available at Borders or Amazon and almost certainly in any medium or large public library. The original title is Röde Orm and it and his other writings are considered execellent works of literature as well.
Beowulf has been studied a lot. Check out the names and ancestries of the characters. The epic Beowulf is not English literature, but literature in English, very old English. The action takes place in southern Scandinavia with the southern tip of what is now Sweden actually being Danish at the time.
If you're looking for a more general dead-tree version of Beowulf, then Howell D. Chickering, Jr. 's Beowulf, Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1977 was a good one with both the transcribed Old English version and the modern English version side by side.
Star Wars? Nah. Quark was the way to clean up space.
Advertising campaigns are expensive. Obviously, they'd net more if they spent less on hype (aka advertising). If something's good, it tends to sell itself with minimal need for promotion. Heavy advertising is a sign that the product won't necessarily make it on it's own merits and needs a little spin to be accepted.
Now is a chance to point to the useful parts of Usenet and get them to try it. If you want to learn about XML/SGML, Perl, PHP, Java, apiculture and so on, it's the place to look.
Find some interesting newsgroups. Start with lurking and nettiquette.
To get the first set of rules I saved up a few hundred spam and then found clusters with similar characteristics. Then I ran saved messages from lists and known people to tune the rules further. Some spammers now make small changes to the text so that matching based on long strings verbatim will not work. A dynamic spam filter would be a good AI / machine learning project.
Some people (Cancelmoose) on Usenet used to check cross-postings to detect spam. Perhaps a similar effect can be achieved by monitoring key routes / mail servers to detect multiple messages and label them as potential spam, maybe an RBL-style service.
One issue that I have noticed is that unless you are serving scripts, hostnames in the logs are becoming less relevant due to caching and proxies. However, if you do track host names then getting a 100%(ok 99%) accurate list is hard -- If you wait a few days, weeks or months to analyse your logs, then some of the IP may have changed owners. If you try to let the HTTP daemon do the lookup, then you suffer a drop in performance and the very first lookup or two often fails anyway.
If you use Apache (I have no experience with the others), then it is easy to pipe the log output directly to a script.
You can even make it tab-delimited or what ever it takes to be easier to parse.Myself, I'm about to experiment with logrotate, rotatelogs, cronolog and mod_mylog. mod_mylog puts the log output straight into your RDBMS and even claims to cache records if the RDBMS is temporarily unavailable.
Two months ago, I left a clean e-mail address with a bank and now the spam is rolling in. Either some employee is on the take, the bank itself sells personal data, or the bank's intra net got cracked (not improbable given their practices and technology). We could rule out the first two if the sale personal data were illegal or carefully monitored.
Another poster said it quite well how 6 out of 6 would benefit.
I can add that a site I used to work on used to get fan mail several times a week from people glad to find a site they could use without graphics or fancy plugins. Specifically, visitors could tweak their display to their taste or needs. Most of this mail was from blind users.
Unix's main strength so far is flexibility in the interface.
That said, I eagerly await the release here.
Computers are just another tool that skilled artists can choose to add to their kit. Take Photoshop or Gimp. You can create stills and put them on film. Or, you can use them to choose your effects and processing methods and cut your time in the dark room to a small fraction. Either way, it's up to the artist to create something that grabs you.
The original post does imply that the real world adopts ideas from literature. If this is the case, is it a conscious choice? If it is a conscious choice, why not choose the strong points and discard the weak and malevalent?
H.G. Wells seems only to be mentioned once in the other posts. He's known for The Time Machine. The Sleeper Awakes has a description of an aerial dogfight between aircraft using vectored thrust.
Take for example a search for the string tar, which will yield documents containing:
tar -zxf update.tgz, or cp update.tar update.old, or roofing tar , or jeg tar en øl nu
Each instance of tar above has a different meaning, but the same spelling. When you get into misspellings, spelling variations, and conjugation, then the actual concept is even harder to associate with a given range of strings.
Even Google searches are for strings and not concepts, but Google's ranking algorithm relies on which pages get the most links from pages that also get the most links. However, you'll still get different results for color vs. colour and tyre vs tire. Because the algorithm only reflects how people have chosen their links, it does, from time to time give unusual associations. ;)
All it will take is one lawsuit or police raid and suddenly certain "IT-Solutions" will not seem as attractive as the normal Solaris/BSD/Linux/etc based ones.
Another one to add is the film Rollerball which fits the same genre of obscure sci fi. A short but key scene deals with the electronic archive which has been used to effectively destroy key information through technological obselecence. There a few large corporations have taken over the planet and run the media and other information channels to keep the masses under control. Is this the path that policy makers wish to chose?
Destroying access to information won't do anything except hurt U.S. citizens. It's a rather unpatriotic move considering the countries background in freedom and openness. It certainly looks like win (or at least a major concession) for "the forces of evil". However, it could be a key tool in certain political agendas.
Even from the user's point of view the inconvenience of registering, even if one does not investigate the rate schedule and privacy policies, makes micropayments not worth it. It's hard enough to find the answers during a search while weeding sites and doing snap evaluations on the way to finding the right page or pages. Adding worry about billing is just another disincentive to use that site and an incentive to find another, more accessible site.
Then you have the additional issue of whether the page site is viewable with your particular configuration of browser, monitor, graphics card and OS. If a page won't display legibly in any of my broswers, then I skip it.
It looks like Bill's now desperate to hook students into paying for MS-Passport.
As an example, the Nov. 13 issue of PC Magazine points out that even Microsoft's online privacy statement Generator requires hooking users first to MS-Passport. In contrast, IBM's generator does not.
So, it is good to see IBM using positive examples. If enough new people give up on pathways that lead to guaranteed vendor lock-in, then we'll see even more Open Source and Free Software and more useful applications.
The decision to use NT over viable alternatives such as UNIX or Novell could certainly be questioned.
Many places, including The National Library of Australia, have lots of material on digital preservation. With physical artifacts such as paper, vellum, or film it takes either many decades or direct physical effort to destroy it. The default for digital content that it is rendered unusable through changing technologies or even relatively rapid deterioration of the physical medium.