No kidding. Perhaps the most depressing part of it is looking at this and realising it's considered worthy enough to displace all my story submissions. Snot. I'm just going to have to kill myself now.
Tolkein always insisted that LoTR was six books, often published in three volumes.
No he didn't. Au contraire -- he wrote it as one book and was most miffed that it was published as three separate volumes. That was forced on him by the publishers, who were afraid the public wouldn't go for such a lengthy tome. (Depending on which account you read, this either happened right at the beginning or when Ace Books published it in America.)
I have to be honest and admit I never have, either. But I've been in plenty where someone's cellphone has rung and they've walked out of the theater with it ringing all the time. Hey guys, here's a hint -- if you're that vital that you have to keep it on, you surely have enough clout to demand one that can be set to vibrate!
My main beef is being in a movie theater where a group of kids are there -- not the eight year olds, more often the 15-18 year old -- and chattering away. I wonder why the heck they bothered to pay to come to the movie in the first place if they're not going to pay attention?
I once was in a theater where a whole row of school kids was sitting and goofing around, with the guys trying to impress the girls, and generally being a nuisance. Apparently someone finally got sufficiently irritated to complain, because the theater manager came in, stood at the end of the row, and told them all to get out. A couple of them started whining that they'd paid good money and he couldn't throw them out, and his only reaction was that it was his theater and he could do as he pleased, and if they wanted to bitch to him about it then they could do it outside, but they weren't staying in his theater one more minute.
He got a round of applause from the rest of the audience as the whole row of kids got up and filed out.
The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
Enough already!
Everyone knows the French are cowards, yada yada yada. Did you read that bit in the newspaper a few days ago where the French rescued all the Westerners (including several Americans) from the Ivory Coast? (And, by the way, the article fails to point out that the French had been there for several days before the American forces turned up.) Would it surprise you to learn that the French, prior to WWII, had one of the proudest and most effective resistance records in the world? Drop it, for crying out loud.
And no, I have no affinity to France. For what it's worth, I'm from one of the few countries which has felt the effects of official state-sponsored French terrorism in the past few decades. (The bombing of the ship "Rainbow Warrior" in Auckland, New Zealand, 7 July 1985, ordered by the French Secret Service to dissuade Greenpeace from protesting continued nuclear bomb testing at Mururoa Atoll.)
But enough with the xenophobic hatred. Considering the real wars and battles currently being fought by more than half the nations in the world, don't you think that leaving off these snide and childish insults might be rather a good idea?
I am assuming that the Linux and Solaris admins are using the CLI to manage the servers...
Me too. On Windows, yet.
but I believe the slowest way to manage a server is through a keyboard and mouse -- pointing and clicking away.
Me too.
Most of the Windows servers I have managed in my career were through a GUI interface using a remote control program like PC Anywhere and Microsoft's Remote Admin software.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Why?
With Linux, Solaris and now Mac OS X Server, I use SSH and a keyboard to do my work.
Me too. On Windows, yet.
With shell scripts and other tricks, I can blaze through server management that I would never be able to do in a GUI environment at the same speed.
Me too. On Windows, yet.
Even with Mac OS X Server's great GUI management tools, I prefer to fire up Terminal and remotely manage the system through a CLI
Me too. On Windows, yet.
Or, more to the point -- using Windows NT's built-in, no-extra-cost, fully-whiz-bang-scriptable CLI tools, I can do all my admin a lot faster than via the GUI. I just use the GUI to, say, view management graphs where it's a lot more obvious to see an unexpected sustained burst of activity than it is by hunting through rows and rows of numeric data.
By the way, before you start flaming -- I'm not saying Windows beats Linux at everything and is the best in every possible scenario. I'm just pointing out that some complaints aren't 100% valid:-)
My thought exactly. I have a friend in the U.K. who has been on tours throughout Europe, visited places like Bulgaria and Russia, gone home to New Zealand to visit his family, etc., etc. -- the only place his phone didn't work was the U.S., when he was in New York and Philadelphia for a week.
No, I don't think your beef is that you didn't get jobs, either.
I think it's that you're an elitist jerk whose superiority complex forces you to demean anyone who (in your short-sighted view) doesn't meet up to your standards. And, just maybe, part of it is simply that you're too frightened to admit that perhaps there's more to life.
Step out of that smug new-world ivory tower for a minute or two, and see if you can remember how to smell the roses.
So do pub-owners. And they get to drink the profits away.
Plus, there's the added entertainment value of watching the more inebriated customers trying desperately to chat up the other patrons and not realizing just how dreadful their pickup lines really sound.
The open-source community, contrary to your assertion, has for years said two things 1) Lazy admins risk getting hacked and 2) Open source patches flow more freely than closed source ones.
The Slashdot community, on the other hand, has for years appended a third comment: we're superior, we're Linux buffs, we're the best, and we apply patches.
Maybe the Slashdot community does. But let's face it -- in the face of this smug and elitist attitude comes the fact that thousands of Linux servers are being compromised because their administrators don't apply patches in a timely fashion. Remember, too, that when the Nimda et. al. worms hit, the Slashdot discussions included many regular readers who are also Windows administrators calmly pointing out that they had had no difficulties as they were patched long ago. Interesting, too, to note the (huge generalisation) often calm and mature reaction versus the yelling and screaming and chest-beating reaction of the "see-we-really-are-better-than-you-nyah-nyah-nyah" crowd (/huge generalisation).
If you show me a list of documented, unpatched holes, I'll show you a mailing list / IRC channel / news group that just found a list of things to do for the afternoon.
Very valid point. So let me ask you (plural you here) -- when was the last time you spent an afternoon coding, testing, reviewing, and QCing a patch? Maybe you're one of the admirable group who actually does code patches in your spare time. But, more likely, I suspect, is that the vast majority of the readers of this message never have and never will submit a patch.
Inexperienced teenagers (a large subset of all teenagers) and newbies are unable to refute your statement that Linux is as bad as Windows
I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this one go. The original poster didn't make such a statement. Not even such an inference. The post, instead, merely pointed out the hypocrisy demonstrated by the attitudes described.
An open source single sign-on won't solve the problem of a single sign-on. The reason people hate passport isn't because its written by MS. Why don't people understand that?
Simple: Blind rage of MS.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most succinct and lucid comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Thank you, FortKnox.
My experience, for what it's worth
on
Accurate OCR?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I've been working off and on with OCR packages since 1991, and have seen little improvement in the accuracy over that time. 98% or 99% accuracy sounds great; but, as you already know, you have to have someone go over the entire text and check it. If you consider that you don't know where the errors are likely to be, then you begin to realize the extent of the issue. I have generally found that, in cases where 100% accuracy is necessary (and there are some cases where 99% might be good enough), it's just as cost-effective to use a professional typing service.
The scanner you have is hard to beat. As for the software, I found that the Caere engine was a little better than the OmniPage engine when I first started working with OCR, but over time OmniPage has gotten that little bit extra oomph into it.
Having said that, there are some posts that recommend Abby, a product with which I'm unfamiliar, and state that a trial version is available, so it's probably worth a check.
Finally, one small factor that sometimes is overlooked: what resolution do you scan at? You may want to try lowering the resolution and seeing if that gives any better results. Lowering the resolution can have the effect of smoothing out some of the noise that can confuse OCR engines. Try going all the way down to 200 dpi.
Finally (part two), I've found you can also sometimes tweak the results by playing with the depth -- instead of scanning in b&w, try gray scale (I suggest 4 bit).
Finally (part three), I'm dubious that you'll find anything to handle formulae. For those readers who may be surprised to learn OCR accuracy is not quite up to scratch, just wait until you encounter OCR format preservation.
Good luck -- and if you do get better results, by all means let us all know!
Meanings tend to change a little faster. For example, there's an early-20th-century piece of literature (whose name escapes me today) that includes the sentence "He fagged his way down the road until he was knocked up." meaning "He walked until very tired." Obviously, connotative meanings of those terms have rendered that sentence completely obselete.
Let's not forget that different countries use words and expressions in different ways also. For example, I would say "I'm stuffed!", and, depending on the context, it could mean either that I've had plenty of food to eat and am full, or that I'm physically extremely tired. (This phrase, by the way, seems guaranteed to produce merriment when I use it in the U.S.)
But, even within the U.S., different words have different meanings between regions. Case in point -- I just read a newspaper article discussing which regions use "soda", "pop", or "coke" to refer to the same product. There again, I'd use "soft drink" or (in my lazier frame of mind) "fizzy drink".
Hmmm, what an off-topic post. It just came naturally. Sorry...
Except it wasn't a cakewalk for the bot. There was a two-inch step in the middle of the passage and the robot's handlers had a great deal of strife with that. Every time they tried to make it go over a step, it would fall over.
Finally, in a remarkable display of ingenuity, they decided that, rather than trying to fix the robot to do what it was supposed to be able to do, they'd just stick a ramp inside so it could roll up. This provided some wonderfully dramatic television as the techies described how difficult it had been to ensure the ramp was precision engineered so as not to make it any more difficult for the poor little critter.
Somehow, that little precious item makes me doubt it's quite up to the standard of anything used in real search-and-rescue operations.
When I was at university, I learned about an A.I. system which generated "concepts". It started with a base set of rules (say, for mathemetics, addition, subtraction, and so on), and generated new rules, or "concepts". Those were then rated by human experts and used to generate further concepts and determine a relevance ranking.
This was many moons ago, so I don't remember many details. But one of the most interesting points I do remember was that the generated concepts had a very high usefulness index to start with, but became progressively less and less useful. This was intriguing; you'd imagine that using a base of complex and affirmed concepts would lead to more complex and subsequently useful concepts as the system learned what garnered a high approval ranking from the human experts.
Mind you, it wasn't perfect. Amongst the cuter generated concepts was a parasitic concept. It didn't generate new concepts itself; it waited until a new concept had been generated and then attached its name to that new concept and claimed it had been the generator.
Another concept decided that any concepts generated by the system were automatically useless and must therefore be immediately deleted. Funnily enough, the very first concept it deleted was itself. So much for "artificial intelligence".
Rather, mean and cruel, and inexcusable on the part of a teacher, whose job description probably does not include "attempt to damage children's psyches through public humiliation". The person who asked about the parents suing the school was right on, in my opinion. Ordinarily I loathe over-zealous litigiousness, but in such a case it would be well warranted.
I would say that a bigger issue than this, and the real reason that Verisign should lose the ability to sell domains, is thier incredibly un-ethical marketing practices. You know the Renew with verisign spam even though you didnt enroll with then in the first place...
Only problem is that if such a rule was enforced across the board there'd be hardly any registrars left anymore. Verisign, abominable as they may be, are most certainly not the only culprits of this practise in the registrar world.
Our first amendment rights are already non-absolute, so that's not even the question. It's shades of gray, degrees.
And there-in lies the problem: most Americans desperately want the Constitution and the various amendments to be absolute. Why? Because it's the national religion. And no, I'm not being facetious.
It's always seemed ironic to me that people will spit venom on/. in the debates on religion, creationism/evolution, etc., and yet fail to realize that the United States actually is a country based around the religion of the Constitution. Think about it -- a significant number of people demand absolute adherence to the letter of the Constitution, and you will most assuredly be pilloried if you dare critique or lampoon this sacred document.
Fanatics don't like to admit something doesn't answer every conceivable situation and scenario. They don't want gray areas; they want the comfort of knowing their bible (and I'm using the word in a generic sense) answers any and all questions and problems. As remarkable a document as the Constitution is, it can't do that. (That's one of the reasons why you have provision for amendments to the Constitution.)
Absolute freedom of speech is pretty much impossible. You may be legally permitted to say something, but if you fear to speak that particular thought because of potential reprisal, you don't have freedom of speech. Abhorrent as some notions may be (for example, racism), if you cannot freely discuss all opinions on those notions without any fear of adverse reaction, you don't have absolute freedom of speech.
It's called a gray area. And the fact that such a concept exists in relation to the Constitution is a very real and disturbing problem for many, many Americans who have grown up with the belief in the sacred and inviolable nature of that US cornerstone.
By the way...before you abuse me or mark me down as flamebait, consider these points:
1. It's relevant. 2. I respect the Constitution as a very remarkable document. 3. I'm talking about how some people take their fanatacism surrounding the Constitution and produce this mindset. 4....oh, what the heck, go ahead -- after all, freedom of speech shouldn't have to apply if you don't like the consequences, now, should it?
Ditto for music. One needs to have a certain level of skill, and then practise to hone that skill. But there's this little thing called feeling. Either you have it or you don't. If you have it, then you can play nursery rhymes and imbue them with character and beauty. If you don't...well, then it's all just a bunch of notes.
That's why B.B. King is a genius. Can you imagine anyone going up to him and saying, "Wow, that concert tonight was technically perfect!". Or, for that matter, "Man, you played fast tonight!" Not to detract from his technical abilities, but what matters is feeling. Call it soul, if you like -- it's the difference between B.B. King and legions of metal guitarists who can squeeze out 15 notes per second, but will never be musicians.
It's probably the same reason why my spaghetti bolognaise is, well, usually not much more than your average spaghetti bolognaise. Sure, I can cook; but I haven't rehearsed my cooking, and I don't have a cook's feel for the proportions and the mixing and whatever else an expert does. And an expert in any field, be it cooking or painting or music, is a joy to behold.
Back to the grill, he's removed one of the plates on the side of his grill and fitted it with a piece of tailpipe. Then, when he's grilling, he sticks a hair dryer in the tailpipe and uses it to whip the coals into an inferno. Which might explain why he gets his oven mitts from the hardware store in the form of welding gloves. When talking about ovens, he describes how he builds an oven out of firebricks, and how he uses a large terra cotta pot to cook a chicken in his oven. It's all in the name of even heat distribution. He's also not above rewiring his electric skillet to provide a greater range of temperatures. You know you've read something good when the author includes a mini-disclaimer to the effect of "if you try this at home kids, I and the publisher are not responsible."
Okay, well, he's apparently fairly cool.
As for the question: how does he come up with these rather novel cooking methods? Is it trial and error (and, if so, what errors)? Does he have any sort of physics background? Or does he just wake up at 2am and think what a wizard idea it would be to use a hair dryer as a catalyst for his cooking?
Re:Why Comcast Sucks(not a troll)
on
Outside the Cable Box
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm utterly fed up with Comcast, and would dearly love to switch but have no options in my area. No DSL, and no other cable provider, unfortunately. Their crimes are many and grievous:
* The initial kit they sent me contained a dead NIC. That didn't matter too much, seeing as how they didn't supply drivers. That was back in, oh, April, I think. I still don't have a replacement NIC. By the way, Comcast, it's unacceptable to tell me that I can always go and buy my own NIC. I shouldn't have to pay extra to fix a problem in which the fault is entirely yours!
* Despite their advertising claims of "no disconnections" (a touted benefit over dial-up), I keep getting disconnected. I'll be surfing and emailing, then...nothing. Usually this results in me having to phone them and tell them they've got a problem (it's most frequently a server down). And, mate, do I love being told by them they don't have a problem and it must be on my end, until after five or ten minutes of arguing they finally say, "oh, wait, you're right, we DO have a problem in your area". No kidding.
* I'll frequently start up my computer and check my e-mail only to discover my authentication isn't accepted. I can wait and hope, or log on and reset my passwords and watch it spring back into life. Account maintenance? What account maintenance? Strange, by the way, the only accounts which ever have this problem are the three (out of six) from which I've sent email complaints.
* Their technical support staff have no idea what they can or can't do. I've phoned and been promised a specific resolution, then three days later phoned to find out the status only to be told "Comcast doesn't do that". When I've pointed out that I was point-blank promised they did do that only three days ago, I usually get some lame excuse of "well, we changed our policy last week".
I've asked them to explain the advertising claims of "no disconnections" which are demonstrably false. Big surprise -- they're conveniently ignoring that little issue. I've also asked them to explain why I often have to reset my account passwords. (Most recently -- this morning, three of my accounts wouldn't authenticate until I'd reset the passwords.)
Usually I get a reply asking me to call technical support. Why should I? The problem and resolution are clearly established, and calling technical support means I have to hang on the phone (wasting my time which I could be charging out at $250 an hour, thus resulting in lost revenue of $41.67 every ten minutes, which I'm sure they're not going to reimburse), only to get a reply which I can't be sure is going to be valid tomorrow.
I've never been this angry at a company, and would almost consider it worthwhile to go back to dial-up simply to be freed from the appalling company that is Comcast. And therein lies the rub; it's just too convenient, and I don't have a high-speed option. But here is the most telling feature of a monopoly; whenever I've complained to Comcast about their service problems, their reply has been two-fold:
(i) get a T1 line for my home to get more reliable connectivity (I kid you not, this was their recommendation); (ii) Comcast doesn't have any service level agreements. Out for more than 24 hours? Well, then we can credit your account out of the graciousness of our hearts. But we don't have to do anything, we don't have to provide any minimum level of service, and you can't do anything about it.
So who do I complain to? I'm a permanent resident, but not a citizen (I've not lived here long enough to apply for citizenship yet), so can I complain to a politician given I can't vote for them? Will the Better Business Bureau do anything? Or is there something like a chamber of commerce at a local level to whom it would be appropriate to direct complaints? Because, frankly, I've had a gutsful of Comcast and I'm angry enough that I want to do something to make them take notice, but I haven't yet heard of a class-action suit against them. Is there anything I can do in Montgomery County, PA?
I know, and I agree with pretty much everything you've written. I have been on both ends of tech support for several years now, and I've certainly had the clients who ask me for an answer and tell me I'm wrong when I give it to them, the clients who tell me they've done something when it's blatantly obvious they haven't, the clients who tell me they got an error message but clicked Ignore and everything seemed to be okay but it doesn't work and no, of course they didn't write down the error message, why would they -- get the picture? I've been there, done that.
My current position has me working as a consultant in a very high-end specialized niche market, which means I often must do phone-line tech support because it's frankly very difficult to find tech support in this market. I've also been at the opposite end: where I've installed highly-specialized software that I've never seen before, ended up having to call tech support two weeks into the project, have an engineer tell me how to fix the problem, and been compelled to explain to him why his suggestion will result in data loss when it becomes apparent that my two weeks' experience in the product and ability to actually read the manual trumps his four weeks' training period and two months' experience on the front lines. And that, my friend, is more a sad indictment on the quality of orientation and training programs that most companies provide for their tech support engineers than on the capabilities of the technicians who may well be just as frustrated as me.
My post was written tongue-in-cheek, and was about a specific scenario where the precise problem was well known, there was a simple procedure to confirm it was indeed that problem, and I was frequently talking to a technician who felt the same as me but was compelled to run the script anyway. It's about the silly policies of the companies, and it's about the frustration that all techs feel when we get stuck in these loops. We're notoriously impatient, and we disdain those of inferior capabilities.
Hey -- it's Friday. I hope you're not working the weekend shift, but at the very least you've apparently got a paying job and you're able to read Slashdot and make some posts, so you've got it easier than some poor blighters. There's always a bright side somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. Perhaps the most depressing part of it is looking at this and realising it's considered worthy enough to displace all my story submissions. Snot. I'm just going to have to kill myself now.
Dear "Ask Slashdot"...
Tolkein always insisted that LoTR was six books, often published in three volumes.
No he didn't. Au contraire -- he wrote it as one book and was most miffed that it was published as three separate volumes. That was forced on him by the publishers, who were afraid the public wouldn't go for such a lengthy tome. (Depending on which account you read, this either happened right at the beginning or when Ace Books published it in America.)
The article linked to from /. has a link back to /.. Wonder who gets /.ed first?
It's worth mentioning this cinema is independant by the way, could that have anything to do with it?
Yes.
Check prices in London, and you'll find they're more in the £5 to £7 range.
When I go to the independent cinema here in Pennsylvania, it's more like $5 US. And you actually get movies that are worth watching!
I have to be honest and admit I never have, either. But I've been in plenty where someone's cellphone has rung and they've walked out of the theater with it ringing all the time. Hey guys, here's a hint -- if you're that vital that you have to keep it on, you surely have enough clout to demand one that can be set to vibrate!
My main beef is being in a movie theater where a group of kids are there -- not the eight year olds, more often the 15-18 year old -- and chattering away. I wonder why the heck they bothered to pay to come to the movie in the first place if they're not going to pay attention?
I once was in a theater where a whole row of school kids was sitting and goofing around, with the guys trying to impress the girls, and generally being a nuisance. Apparently someone finally got sufficiently irritated to complain, because the theater manager came in, stood at the end of the row, and told them all to get out. A couple of them started whining that they'd paid good money and he couldn't throw them out, and his only reaction was that it was his theater and he could do as he pleased, and if they wanted to bitch to him about it then they could do it outside, but they weren't staying in his theater one more minute.
He got a round of applause from the rest of the audience as the whole row of kids got up and filed out.
The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
Enough already!
Everyone knows the French are cowards, yada yada yada. Did you read that bit in the newspaper a few days ago where the French rescued all the Westerners (including several Americans) from the Ivory Coast? (And, by the way, the article fails to point out that the French had been there for several days before the American forces turned up.) Would it surprise you to learn that the French, prior to WWII, had one of the proudest and most effective resistance records in the world? Drop it, for crying out loud.
And no, I have no affinity to France. For what it's worth, I'm from one of the few countries which has felt the effects of official state-sponsored French terrorism in the past few decades. (The bombing of the ship "Rainbow Warrior" in Auckland, New Zealand, 7 July 1985, ordered by the French Secret Service to dissuade Greenpeace from protesting continued nuclear bomb testing at Mururoa Atoll.)
But enough with the xenophobic hatred. Considering the real wars and battles currently being fought by more than half the nations in the world, don't you think that leaving off these snide and childish insults might be rather a good idea?
from the post:
:-)
I am assuming that the Linux and Solaris admins are using the CLI to manage the servers...
Me too. On Windows, yet.
but I believe the slowest way to manage a server is through a keyboard and mouse -- pointing and clicking away.
Me too.
Most of the Windows servers I have managed in my career were through a GUI interface using a remote control program like PC Anywhere and Microsoft's Remote Admin software.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Why?
With Linux, Solaris and now Mac OS X Server, I use SSH and a keyboard to do my work.
Me too. On Windows, yet.
With shell scripts and other tricks, I can blaze through server management that I would never be able to do in a GUI environment at the same speed.
Me too. On Windows, yet.
Even with Mac OS X Server's great GUI management tools, I prefer to fire up Terminal and remotely manage the system through a CLI
Me too. On Windows, yet.
Or, more to the point -- using Windows NT's built-in, no-extra-cost, fully-whiz-bang-scriptable CLI tools, I can do all my admin a lot faster than via the GUI. I just use the GUI to, say, view management graphs where it's a lot more obvious to see an unexpected sustained burst of activity than it is by hunting through rows and rows of numeric data.
By the way, before you start flaming -- I'm not saying Windows beats Linux at everything and is the best in every possible scenario. I'm just pointing out that some complaints aren't 100% valid
My thought exactly. I have a friend in the U.K. who has been on tours throughout Europe, visited places like Bulgaria and Russia, gone home to New Zealand to visit his family, etc., etc. -- the only place his phone didn't work was the U.S., when he was in New York and Philadelphia for a week.
No, I don't think your beef is that you didn't get jobs, either.
I think it's that you're an elitist jerk whose superiority complex forces you to demean anyone who (in your short-sighted view) doesn't meet up to your standards. And, just maybe, part of it is simply that you're too frightened to admit that perhaps there's more to life.
Step out of that smug new-world ivory tower for a minute or two, and see if you can remember how to smell the roses.
In good times and bad, they have a job.
So do pub-owners. And they get to drink the profits away.
Plus, there's the added entertainment value of watching the more inebriated customers trying desperately to chat up the other patrons and not realizing just how dreadful their pickup lines really sound.
Bliss.
The open-source community, contrary to your assertion, has for years said two things 1) Lazy admins risk getting hacked and 2) Open source patches flow more freely than closed source ones.
" crowd (/huge generalisation).
The Slashdot community, on the other hand, has for years appended a third comment: we're superior, we're Linux buffs, we're the best, and we apply patches.
Maybe the Slashdot community does. But let's face it -- in the face of this smug and elitist attitude comes the fact that thousands of Linux servers are being compromised because their administrators don't apply patches in a timely fashion. Remember, too, that when the Nimda et. al. worms hit, the Slashdot discussions included many regular readers who are also Windows administrators calmly pointing out that they had had no difficulties as they were patched long ago. Interesting, too, to note the (huge generalisation) often calm and mature reaction versus the yelling and screaming and chest-beating reaction of the "see-we-really-are-better-than-you-nyah-nyah-nyah
If you show me a list of documented, unpatched holes, I'll show you a mailing list / IRC channel / news group that just found a list of things to do for the afternoon.
Very valid point. So let me ask you (plural you here) -- when was the last time you spent an afternoon coding, testing, reviewing, and QCing a patch? Maybe you're one of the admirable group who actually does code patches in your spare time. But, more likely, I suspect, is that the vast majority of the readers of this message never have and never will submit a patch.
Inexperienced teenagers (a large subset of all teenagers) and newbies are unable to refute your statement that Linux is as bad as Windows
I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this one go. The original poster didn't make such a statement. Not even such an inference. The post, instead, merely pointed out the hypocrisy demonstrated by the attitudes described.
And it was correct.
An open source single sign-on won't solve the problem of a single sign-on.
The reason people hate passport isn't because its written by MS. Why don't people understand that?
Simple: Blind rage of MS.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most succinct and lucid comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Thank you, FortKnox.
I've been working off and on with OCR packages since 1991, and have seen little improvement in the accuracy over that time. 98% or 99% accuracy sounds great; but, as you already know, you have to have someone go over the entire text and check it. If you consider that you don't know where the errors are likely to be, then you begin to realize the extent of the issue. I have generally found that, in cases where 100% accuracy is necessary (and there are some cases where 99% might be good enough), it's just as cost-effective to use a professional typing service.
The scanner you have is hard to beat. As for the software, I found that the Caere engine was a little better than the OmniPage engine when I first started working with OCR, but over time OmniPage has gotten that little bit extra oomph into it.
Having said that, there are some posts that recommend Abby, a product with which I'm unfamiliar, and state that a trial version is available, so it's probably worth a check.
Finally, one small factor that sometimes is overlooked: what resolution do you scan at? You may want to try lowering the resolution and seeing if that gives any better results. Lowering the resolution can have the effect of smoothing out some of the noise that can confuse OCR engines. Try going all the way down to 200 dpi.
Finally (part two), I've found you can also sometimes tweak the results by playing with the depth -- instead of scanning in b&w, try gray scale (I suggest 4 bit).
Finally (part three), I'm dubious that you'll find anything to handle formulae. For those readers who may be surprised to learn OCR accuracy is not quite up to scratch, just wait until you encounter OCR format preservation.
Good luck -- and if you do get better results, by all means let us all know!
Cheers
Meanings tend to change a little faster. For example, there's an early-20th-century piece of literature (whose name escapes me today) that includes the sentence "He fagged his way down the road until he was knocked up." meaning "He walked until very tired." Obviously, connotative meanings of those terms have rendered that sentence completely obselete.
Let's not forget that different countries use words and expressions in different ways also. For example, I would say "I'm stuffed!", and, depending on the context, it could mean either that I've had plenty of food to eat and am full, or that I'm physically extremely tired. (This phrase, by the way, seems guaranteed to produce merriment when I use it in the U.S.)
But, even within the U.S., different words have different meanings between regions. Case in point -- I just read a newspaper article discussing which regions use "soda", "pop", or "coke" to refer to the same product. There again, I'd use "soft drink" or (in my lazier frame of mind) "fizzy drink".
Hmmm, what an off-topic post. It just came naturally. Sorry...
Actually, a few hundred years ago the spelling of names was far less formalized. There are approximately 40 different renditions of Shakey's name.
Have fun!
and a cakewalk for the bot
Except it wasn't a cakewalk for the bot. There was a two-inch step in the middle of the passage and the robot's handlers had a great deal of strife with that. Every time they tried to make it go over a step, it would fall over.
Finally, in a remarkable display of ingenuity, they decided that, rather than trying to fix the robot to do what it was supposed to be able to do, they'd just stick a ramp inside so it could roll up. This provided some wonderfully dramatic television as the techies described how difficult it had been to ensure the ramp was precision engineered so as not to make it any more difficult for the poor little critter.
Somehow, that little precious item makes me doubt it's quite up to the standard of anything used in real search-and-rescue operations.
When I was at university, I learned about an A.I. system which generated "concepts". It started with a base set of rules (say, for mathemetics, addition, subtraction, and so on), and generated new rules, or "concepts". Those were then rated by human experts and used to generate further concepts and determine a relevance ranking.
This was many moons ago, so I don't remember many details. But one of the most interesting points I do remember was that the generated concepts had a very high usefulness index to start with, but became progressively less and less useful. This was intriguing; you'd imagine that using a base of complex and affirmed concepts would lead to more complex and subsequently useful concepts as the system learned what garnered a high approval ranking from the human experts.
Mind you, it wasn't perfect. Amongst the cuter generated concepts was a parasitic concept. It didn't generate new concepts itself; it waited until a new concept had been generated and then attached its name to that new concept and claimed it had been the generator.
Another concept decided that any concepts generated by the system were automatically useless and must therefore be immediately deleted. Funnily enough, the very first concept it deleted was itself. So much for "artificial intelligence".
Rather, mean and cruel, and inexcusable on the part of a teacher, whose job description probably does not include "attempt to damage children's psyches through public humiliation". The person who asked about the parents suing the school was right on, in my opinion. Ordinarily I loathe over-zealous litigiousness, but in such a case it would be well warranted.
I would say that a bigger issue than this, and the real reason that Verisign should lose the ability to sell domains, is thier incredibly un-ethical marketing practices. You know the Renew with verisign spam even though you didnt enroll with then in the first place...
Only problem is that if such a rule was enforced across the board there'd be hardly any registrars left anymore. Verisign, abominable as they may be, are most certainly not the only culprits of this practise in the registrar world.
Our first amendment rights are already non-absolute, so that's not even the question. It's shades of gray, degrees.
/. in the debates on religion, creationism/evolution, etc., and yet fail to realize that the United States actually is a country based around the religion of the Constitution. Think about it -- a significant number of people demand absolute adherence to the letter of the Constitution, and you will most assuredly be pilloried if you dare critique or lampoon this sacred document.
...oh, what the heck, go ahead -- after all, freedom of speech shouldn't have to apply if you don't like the consequences, now, should it?
And there-in lies the problem: most Americans desperately want the Constitution and the various amendments to be absolute. Why? Because it's the national religion. And no, I'm not being facetious.
It's always seemed ironic to me that people will spit venom on
Fanatics don't like to admit something doesn't answer every conceivable situation and scenario. They don't want gray areas; they want the comfort of knowing their bible (and I'm using the word in a generic sense) answers any and all questions and problems. As remarkable a document as the Constitution is, it can't do that. (That's one of the reasons why you have provision for amendments to the Constitution.)
Absolute freedom of speech is pretty much impossible. You may be legally permitted to say something, but if you fear to speak that particular thought because of potential reprisal, you don't have freedom of speech. Abhorrent as some notions may be (for example, racism), if you cannot freely discuss all opinions on those notions without any fear of adverse reaction, you don't have absolute freedom of speech.
It's called a gray area. And the fact that such a concept exists in relation to the Constitution is a very real and disturbing problem for many, many Americans who have grown up with the belief in the sacred and inviolable nature of that US cornerstone.
By the way...before you abuse me or mark me down as flamebait, consider these points:
1. It's relevant.
2. I respect the Constitution as a very remarkable document.
3. I'm talking about how some people take their fanatacism surrounding the Constitution and produce this mindset.
4.
According to Merriam-Webster, the answer is no.
So why not save the confusion and use pedant instead? Then everyone wins!
Ditto for music. One needs to have a certain level of skill, and then practise to hone that skill. But there's this little thing called feeling. Either you have it or you don't. If you have it, then you can play nursery rhymes and imbue them with character and beauty. If you don't...well, then it's all just a bunch of notes.
That's why B.B. King is a genius. Can you imagine anyone going up to him and saying, "Wow, that concert tonight was technically perfect!". Or, for that matter, "Man, you played fast tonight!" Not to detract from his technical abilities, but what matters is feeling. Call it soul, if you like -- it's the difference between B.B. King and legions of metal guitarists who can squeeze out 15 notes per second, but will never be musicians.
It's probably the same reason why my spaghetti bolognaise is, well, usually not much more than your average spaghetti bolognaise. Sure, I can cook; but I haven't rehearsed my cooking, and I don't have a cook's feel for the proportions and the mixing and whatever else an expert does. And an expert in any field, be it cooking or painting or music, is a joy to behold.
From the /. review:
Back to the grill, he's removed one of the plates on the side of his grill and fitted it with a piece of tailpipe. Then, when he's grilling, he sticks a hair dryer in the tailpipe and uses it to whip the coals into an inferno. Which might explain why he gets his oven mitts from the hardware store in the form of welding gloves. When talking about ovens, he describes how he builds an oven out of firebricks, and how he uses a large terra cotta pot to cook a chicken in his oven. It's all in the name of even heat distribution. He's also not above rewiring his electric skillet to provide a greater range of temperatures. You know you've read something good when the author includes a mini-disclaimer to the effect of "if you try this at home kids, I and the publisher are not responsible."
Okay, well, he's apparently fairly cool.
As for the question: how does he come up with these rather novel cooking methods? Is it trial and error (and, if so, what errors)? Does he have any sort of physics background? Or does he just wake up at 2am and think what a wizard idea it would be to use a hair dryer as a catalyst for his cooking?
I'm utterly fed up with Comcast, and would dearly love to switch but have no options in my area. No DSL, and no other cable provider, unfortunately. Their crimes are many and grievous:
* The initial kit they sent me contained a dead NIC. That didn't matter too much, seeing as how they didn't supply drivers. That was back in, oh, April, I think. I still don't have a replacement NIC. By the way, Comcast, it's unacceptable to tell me that I can always go and buy my own NIC. I shouldn't have to pay extra to fix a problem in which the fault is entirely yours!
* Despite their advertising claims of "no disconnections" (a touted benefit over dial-up), I keep getting disconnected. I'll be surfing and emailing, then...nothing. Usually this results in me having to phone them and tell them they've got a problem (it's most frequently a server down). And, mate, do I love being told by them they don't have a problem and it must be on my end, until after five or ten minutes of arguing they finally say, "oh, wait, you're right, we DO have a problem in your area". No kidding.
* I'll frequently start up my computer and check my e-mail only to discover my authentication isn't accepted. I can wait and hope, or log on and reset my passwords and watch it spring back into life. Account maintenance? What account maintenance? Strange, by the way, the only accounts which ever have this problem are the three (out of six) from which I've sent email complaints.
* Their technical support staff have no idea what they can or can't do. I've phoned and been promised a specific resolution, then three days later phoned to find out the status only to be told "Comcast doesn't do that". When I've pointed out that I was point-blank promised they did do that only three days ago, I usually get some lame excuse of "well, we changed our policy last week".
I've asked them to explain the advertising claims of "no disconnections" which are demonstrably false. Big surprise -- they're conveniently ignoring that little issue. I've also asked them to explain why I often have to reset my account passwords. (Most recently -- this morning, three of my accounts wouldn't authenticate until I'd reset the passwords.)
Usually I get a reply asking me to call technical support. Why should I? The problem and resolution are clearly established, and calling technical support means I have to hang on the phone (wasting my time which I could be charging out at $250 an hour, thus resulting in lost revenue of $41.67 every ten minutes, which I'm sure they're not going to reimburse), only to get a reply which I can't be sure is going to be valid tomorrow.
I've never been this angry at a company, and would almost consider it worthwhile to go back to dial-up simply to be freed from the appalling company that is Comcast. And therein lies the rub; it's just too convenient, and I don't have a high-speed option. But here is the most telling feature of a monopoly; whenever I've complained to Comcast about their service problems, their reply has been two-fold:
(i) get a T1 line for my home to get more reliable connectivity (I kid you not, this was their recommendation);
(ii) Comcast doesn't have any service level agreements. Out for more than 24 hours? Well, then we can credit your account out of the graciousness of our hearts. But we don't have to do anything, we don't have to provide any minimum level of service, and you can't do anything about it.
So who do I complain to? I'm a permanent resident, but not a citizen (I've not lived here long enough to apply for citizenship yet), so can I complain to a politician given I can't vote for them? Will the Better Business Bureau do anything? Or is there something like a chamber of commerce at a local level to whom it would be appropriate to direct complaints? Because, frankly, I've had a gutsful of Comcast and I'm angry enough that I want to do something to make them take notice, but I haven't yet heard of a class-action suit against them. Is there anything I can do in Montgomery County, PA?
I know, and I agree with pretty much everything you've written. I have been on both ends of tech support for several years now, and I've certainly had the clients who ask me for an answer and tell me I'm wrong when I give it to them, the clients who tell me they've done something when it's blatantly obvious they haven't, the clients who tell me they got an error message but clicked Ignore and everything seemed to be okay but it doesn't work and no, of course they didn't write down the error message, why would they -- get the picture? I've been there, done that.
My current position has me working as a consultant in a very high-end specialized niche market, which means I often must do phone-line tech support because it's frankly very difficult to find tech support in this market. I've also been at the opposite end: where I've installed highly-specialized software that I've never seen before, ended up having to call tech support two weeks into the project, have an engineer tell me how to fix the problem, and been compelled to explain to him why his suggestion will result in data loss when it becomes apparent that my two weeks' experience in the product and ability to actually read the manual trumps his four weeks' training period and two months' experience on the front lines. And that, my friend, is more a sad indictment on the quality of orientation and training programs that most companies provide for their tech support engineers than on the capabilities of the technicians who may well be just as frustrated as me.
My post was written tongue-in-cheek, and was about a specific scenario where the precise problem was well known, there was a simple procedure to confirm it was indeed that problem, and I was frequently talking to a technician who felt the same as me but was compelled to run the script anyway. It's about the silly policies of the companies, and it's about the frustration that all techs feel when we get stuck in these loops. We're notoriously impatient, and we disdain those of inferior capabilities.
Hey -- it's Friday. I hope you're not working the weekend shift, but at the very least you've apparently got a paying job and you're able to read Slashdot and make some posts, so you've got it easier than some poor blighters. There's always a bright side somewhere.