you haven't been there for a while? germany's sales tax has been 16% for a long time now, and the thing with tax refunds across European borders is long gone. There are no tax refunds within the European union if you buy something abroad and bring it into another country.
The more important issue with the cars was that MANUFACTURERS simply marketed the cars differently in the different markets -- even German Volkswagen cars were cheaper in Spain than in Germany.
this explains a few things for me... while i've just come home from spending an hour at the beach reading a book, these occasions of absense from the network of news and friends have become rare for me.
i found relief in managing my news addiction in reading news with an RSS newsfeed reader that polls all the news sites automatically. This saves a lot of time -- i have no excuse any more to spend (probably hours each day)/a lots of time checking web sites like the BBC site, slashdot, macslash, versiontracker....
i welcome the productivity boost. let's see how long until my brain has increased the daily news volume...
twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.
In fact, Minitel and BBSs have quite a bit in common. The striking difference is that most BBSes were single-tasking (only one connection at a time) and many of them were not networked. So, they were local phenomena, since nobody wanted to incur the cost of long-distance phone calls.
The Minitel, in contrast, was/is centralized (like many things in France), thus commercially viable, long before the Internet got there.
The French, by the way, were ahead in many things. They had their fast train TGV (train a grande vitesse) a decade before the Germans did as well. But French R&D has never quite managed to deploy their technologies world-wide.
Categorization algorithms that combine different features would work quite well here, I believe!
There is a wealth of categorization systems out there. Generally, they "position" the sites in an imaginary, highly-dimensional space, depending on whether keywords occurr (and how often/prominent etc.), and on certain structural properties of the documents. You can then try to define separating hyperplanes, which are functions that devide the ("feature") space into separate compartments, so you can group documents together.
Usually, these systems are trained on a set of sample documents that are already categorized, in this case, for instance, a thousand blog pages and tenthousand non-blog pages.
An example for this would be Support Vector Machines and Joachim's text classification algorithm.
Relevant keywords (from the field) to look for include "Maximum Entropy Models", "classifiers", "categorization", "Bayesian *" (whatever), "Neural Network Classifiers", "Data Mining"...
thank you, excellent. i didn't even know these exist:)
myus.com costs more than $130 a year. mailforwarding.cc has a free monthly plan, however. great if you're able to check your credit card balance online!
too bad they obviously didn't manage to secure international rights. how can i get a credit card with a billing address in the U.S.? Any ideas?
No, I'm not moving there. Not for at least another year...:)
having moved to a city with high crime rates (in comparison to other European or US-American cities), I find myself surveilled by CCTV cameras, annoyed by having to use a giant steering wheel lock, constantly nervous about someone stealing my bike (which they did once, of course). The place I work in, full of computers and fancy technology gadgets, has doors locked everywhere. When I forget to take the little plastic transponder with me, I'll lock myself up in the restrooms.
That's about the view presented in the posting: If there are too many thieves, let's build a higher wall.
Sorry, but I hate that idea. This is not freedom.
ps.: the city is dublin. don't come here, there's no broadband (at home) available anyways...
if only this little app would allow for automatic clipboard sharing like you suggested. instead, you need to tell the program explicitly to send or fetch the clipboard content.
When I got a new machine at work, it came with a standard English (US or ISO? Don't know) keyboard layout. It wasn't until then that I realized that most formalisms I use require heavy use of English-only signs: C has {curly brackets} all the time, (La)TeX uses the \backslash and {curly} and [angled] brackets.
On my German keyboard (Titanium Powerbook), I need to press three keys to produce a backslash, and two keys to get the brackets, which aren't even marked on the keys (5,6,8,9).
Switching between my Powerbook, the Linux PC and the G4 Desktop is big-time annoying. Anybody here interested in trading an English Titanium keyboard for a German one?? Do I really need to put little stickers on the keys of my 2.5KEUR design laptop?
We need to acknowledge the fact that information - in particular, timely information, is a valuable resource that comes with a price tag.
A security advisor essentially sells information to customers who make/save money with that information. It's the same as stock quotes being circulated freely only with a delay, because real-time information is being charged for. Do some Wall Street companies have a moral obligation to issue a warning if stocks drop?
As a response to some "imagine if CNN had known about 9/11 beforehand" comment earlier on: There is a (moral) difference a community getting hurt financially by a worm, after neglecting available patches, and thousands of people getting killed. In the latter, there would have been a moral obligation.
XML doesn't create regular languages...
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
XML is NOT just a text file (just because we can read it with a simple "more hello.xml").
Perl is good at processing text, because it knows regular expressions and some extensions to them. However, an XML DTD (or a Schema) defines a context-free grammar, which make a language class above the regular languges. That's why we can't fully parse XML files with Perl's RE. A good example would be nested tags that result from recursive grammar rules in the DTD. These cannot be parsed without some serious geekism in Perl RE.
However, I love to write those little tools that operate on XML data in Perl. Very often, you can work with regular expressions on context-free/sensitive language data!
Apple opening up the user interface design requirements / guidelines?
No way. Because that's the main added-value OS X has in comparison to any GNULinux distro. While Linux, after many years of joint effort, hasn't managed to create a unified graphical user interface that people need to comfortably use applications, Apple has done so and made me happy with it.
Don't forget - even command line interfaces in Linux differ from application to application. Sometimes it's -?, sometimes --help, sometimes just nothing. It could be -h or/h, or even (crazy!) -help.
OS X integrates Darwin and Aqua (and more). A OS X program has an Aqua interface. That's the main difference between an OS X application and a Linux program. Film GIMP seems to run under X Windows, which happens to run under OS X.
If you apply the same logic, Quark Express is available as OS X application (as it runs unter Quark), and my 1995 file comparison utility égale is an OS X app, as it runs in an Atari TOS emulator (MagiCMac OSX). Wow, I could write programs for OS X way before it was released. Amazing!
1. There are no single lange Autobahns, at least not in Germany. (They might have em in Poland, but as far as I remember, there are no designated lanes anyways and, secondly, that's not called the Autobahn.)
2. The average car does not transport four people, but around 1.3.
3. Serious (empirical!) studies give us better numbers for the number of car throughput: A Swiss study mentions up to 115 000 cars / day, 4800 per hour. According to guidelines used in planning of roads, the acceptable throughput for a 2x2-lane Autobahn is 20.700 to 70.000 cars/day, so it's far less than the figure mentioned. (Source) That's data for both directions.
4. Assuming 40.000 cars/day (in accordance with the guidelines), we end up with 2166 persons per hour.
I just pressed Apple-Dot right after entering the website. This stops the JavaScript from being executed (I guess...) thus the theft prevention, as they call it, can't work. (Tried with Chimera, which comes with a pop-up blocker, and uses the Mozilla rendering engine.)
until recently, the PDA processors were not good enough, but that is changing rapidly (even though there is, in my view, little use for so much power except language technology).
The resulting dictation systems will not replace conventional keyboard input for a while, however, as recognition rates are.97-.98 (accuracy), and that's a wrong word in at least every second sentence. In comparison to low-bandwith input, however, (as in the PDA with the stylus or as in the author's case due to a fine-motor dysfunction), voice recognition is very competitive.
Sorry that I didn't state that more clearly. I am well aware of Sokal writing the article on purpose. My point was not about the wrongdoings (or, in Sokal's case, right-doings) of single scientists, but about the embarassment physicists brought to a science. Whether it be Sokal, Schön or Bogdanov: they all showed great creativity in making things up.
ps: Sokal was completely right in doing that. Post-modernist theory with its 10-lines-per-sentence publications needed it.
hahah. the physics people are the one's that don't understand - they obviously don't even understand each other anymore (except in their own sub-sub-subfield...)
It's always the physics guys...
Remember the Sokal affair? Prof. Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics (NYU), published garbled crap on some weird post-modernist theory in the renowned journal Social Text. Title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" .
Then, Bell Lab's star physicist Hendrik Schön got caught after having published faulty data. That was fraud on purpose.
The whole thing sheds a bad, bad light on science. I wonder why I work so hard to get my PhD sooner or (most probably) later... I think I should switch to physics.
1) EMI recently moved their headquarters to Berlin (from Hamburg). People in Berlin are known to be kinda rude. (Believe me, I lived in Europe's most interesting city long enough.)
2) Having read the letter, I may add, that it's tone is far from 'outrageous'. It may be a little sloppy, but it's still friendlier than the original inquiry sent to EMI. It seems to be very honest, though, and, honestly, I would like more companies to be as honest with me as a customer as the EMI guys are.
Without many words, let we cite macosrumours.com, dated Oct 31st:
In the mean time, one thing we can tell you is that if the announcements do indeed come next week, they will not include Superdrives. This is because, as noted in yesterday's update, Apple has stated publicly it will not adopt the portable DVD-RW/CD-RW drive until a slot-loading version is available -- something which will not come to pass until roughly the first of next year.
Wonder where they pulled those shiny slot-in superdrive-bunnies out of their black hat...
Slashdot Mirror
you haven't been there for a while?
germany's sales tax has been 16% for a long time now, and the thing with tax refunds across European borders is long gone. There are no tax refunds within the European union if you buy something abroad and bring it into another country.
The more important issue with the cars was that MANUFACTURERS simply marketed the cars differently in the different markets -- even German Volkswagen cars were cheaper in Spain than in Germany.
this explains a few things for me... while i've just come home from spending an hour at the beach reading a book, these occasions of absense from the network of news and friends have become rare for me. i found relief in managing my news addiction in reading news with an RSS newsfeed reader that polls all the news sites automatically. This saves a lot of time -- i have no excuse any more to spend (probably hours each day)/a lots of time checking web sites like the BBC site, slashdot, macslash, versiontracker.... i welcome the productivity boost. let's see how long until my brain has increased the daily news volume...
twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.
In fact, Minitel and BBSs have quite a bit in common. The striking difference is that most BBSes were single-tasking (only one connection at a time) and many of them were not networked. So, they were local phenomena, since nobody wanted to incur the cost of long-distance phone calls.
The Minitel, in contrast, was/is centralized (like many things in France), thus commercially viable, long before the Internet got there.
The French, by the way, were ahead in many things. They had their fast train TGV (train a grande vitesse) a decade before the Germans did as well. But French R&D has never quite managed to deploy their technologies world-wide.
There is a wealth of categorization systems out there. Generally, they "position" the sites in an imaginary, highly-dimensional space, depending on whether keywords occurr (and how often/prominent etc.), and on certain structural properties of the documents. You can then try to define separating hyperplanes, which are functions that devide the ("feature") space into separate compartments, so you can group documents together.
Usually, these systems are trained on a set of sample documents that are already categorized, in this case, for instance, a thousand blog pages and tenthousand non-blog pages.
An example for this would be Support Vector Machines and Joachim's text classification algorithm.
Relevant keywords (from the field) to look for include "Maximum Entropy Models", "classifiers", "categorization", "Bayesian *" (whatever), "Neural Network Classifiers", "Data Mining"...
thank you, excellent. i didn't even know these exist :)
myus.com costs more than $130 a year. mailforwarding.cc has a free monthly plan, however. great if you're able to check your credit card balance online!
too bad they obviously didn't manage to secure international rights. how can i get a credit card with a billing address in the U.S.? Any ideas? No, I'm not moving there. Not for at least another year... :)
having moved to a city with high crime rates (in comparison to other European or US-American cities), I find myself surveilled by CCTV cameras, annoyed by having to use a giant steering wheel lock, constantly nervous about someone stealing my bike (which they did once, of course). The place I work in, full of computers and fancy technology gadgets, has doors locked everywhere. When I forget to take the little plastic transponder with me, I'll lock myself up in the restrooms.
That's about the view presented in the posting: If there are too many thieves, let's build a higher wall.
Sorry, but I hate that idea. This is not freedom.
ps.: the city is dublin. don't come here, there's no broadband (at home) available anyways...
if only this little app would allow for automatic clipboard sharing like you suggested. instead, you need to tell the program explicitly to send or fetch the clipboard content.
When I got a new machine at work, it came with a standard English (US or ISO? Don't know) keyboard layout. It wasn't until then that I realized that most formalisms I use require heavy use of English-only signs: C has {curly brackets} all the time, (La)TeX uses the \backslash and {curly} and [angled] brackets.
On my German keyboard (Titanium Powerbook), I need to press three keys to produce a backslash, and two keys to get the brackets, which aren't even marked on the keys (5,6,8,9).
Switching between my Powerbook, the Linux PC and the G4 Desktop is big-time annoying.
Anybody here interested in trading an English Titanium keyboard for a German one?? Do I really need to put little stickers on the keys of my 2.5KEUR design laptop?
We need to acknowledge the fact that information - in particular, timely information, is a valuable resource that comes with a price tag.
A security advisor essentially sells information to customers who make/save money with that information. It's the same as stock quotes being circulated freely only with a delay, because real-time information is being charged for. Do some Wall Street companies have a moral obligation to issue a warning if stocks drop?
As a response to some "imagine if CNN had known about 9/11 beforehand" comment earlier on: There is a (moral) difference a community getting hurt financially by a worm, after neglecting available patches, and thousands of people getting killed. In the latter, there would have been a moral obligation.
XML is NOT just a text file (just because we can read it with a simple "more hello.xml"). Perl is good at processing text, because it knows regular expressions and some extensions to them. However, an XML DTD (or a Schema) defines a context-free grammar, which make a language class above the regular languges. That's why we can't fully parse XML files with Perl's RE. A good example would be nested tags that result from recursive grammar rules in the DTD. These cannot be parsed without some serious geekism in Perl RE. However, I love to write those little tools that operate on XML data in Perl. Very often, you can work with regular expressions on context-free/sensitive language data!
Apple opening up the user interface design requirements / guidelines? No way. Because that's the main added-value OS X has in comparison to any GNULinux distro. While Linux, after many years of joint effort, hasn't managed to create a unified graphical user interface that people need to comfortably use applications, Apple has done so and made me happy with it. Don't forget - even command line interfaces in Linux differ from application to application. Sometimes it's -?, sometimes --help, sometimes just nothing. It could be -h or /h, or even (crazy!) -help.
If you apply the same logic, Quark Express is available as OS X application (as it runs unter Quark), and my 1995 file comparison utility égale is an OS X app, as it runs in an Atari TOS emulator (MagiCMac OSX). Wow, I could write programs for OS X way before it was released. Amazing!
Fine, almost honor pre-calculus.
1. There are no single lange Autobahns, at least not in Germany. (They might have em in Poland, but as far as I remember, there are no designated lanes anyways and, secondly, that's not called the Autobahn.)
2. The average car does not transport four people, but around 1.3.
3. Serious (empirical!) studies give us better numbers for the number of car throughput: A Swiss study mentions up to 115 000 cars / day, 4800 per hour. According to guidelines used in planning of roads, the acceptable throughput for a 2x2-lane Autobahn is 20.700 to 70.000 cars/day, so it's far less than the figure mentioned. (Source) That's data for both directions.
4. Assuming 40.000 cars/day (in accordance with the guidelines), we end up with 2166 persons per hour.
Here's my friend Run who probably knows better how to spell amok than the ./ editors.
I just pressed Apple-Dot right after entering the website. This stops the JavaScript from being executed (I guess...) thus the theft prevention, as they call it, can't work. (Tried with Chimera, which comes with a pop-up blocker, and uses the Mozilla rendering engine.)
until recently, the PDA processors were not good enough, but that is changing rapidly (even though there is, in my view, little use for so much power except language technology).
The resulting dictation systems will not replace conventional keyboard input for a while, however, as recognition rates are .97-.98 (accuracy), and that's a wrong word in at least every second sentence. In comparison to low-bandwith input, however, (as in the PDA with the stylus or as in the author's case due to a fine-motor dysfunction), voice recognition is very competitive.
cheers from dublin.
ps: Sokal was completely right in doing that. Post-modernist theory with its 10-lines-per-sentence publications needed it.
hahah. the physics people are the one's that don't understand - they obviously don't even understand each other anymore (except in their own sub-sub-subfield...)
Then, Bell Lab's star physicist Hendrik Schön got caught after having published faulty data. That was fraud on purpose.
The whole thing sheds a bad, bad light on science. I wonder why I work so hard to get my PhD sooner or (most probably) later... I think I should switch to physics.
1) EMI recently moved their headquarters to Berlin (from Hamburg). People in Berlin are known to be kinda rude. (Believe me, I lived in Europe's most interesting city long enough.)
2) Having read the letter, I may add, that it's tone is far from 'outrageous'. It may be a little sloppy, but it's still friendlier than the original inquiry sent to EMI. It seems to be very honest, though, and, honestly, I would like more companies to be as honest with me as a customer as the EMI guys are.
In the mean time, one thing we can tell you is that if the announcements do indeed come next week, they will not include Superdrives. This is because, as noted in yesterday's update, Apple has stated publicly it will not adopt the portable DVD-RW/CD-RW drive until a slot-loading version is available -- something which will not come to pass until roughly the first of next year.
Wonder where they pulled those shiny slot-in superdrive-bunnies out of their black hat...
I found the SVM libaries to be quite handy. However, learning probably requires too much time if there are many samples.
ur right - bayesian statistics can give a good approximation. but a system that works in practics, but is flawed theoretically is far less exciting...