> if anyone were to stand-in for the Open Source movement #44. Richard Stallman
RMS is to Linus as Leif Ericson is to Columbus: yeah, he was there first, but hardly anybody knew about it at the time and even fewer people cared. It was Columbus (or Linus) who did something that brought it to the world's attention.
> Linus the excuse to play tag-team with Tove, and she'd kick the ass of Bill
No, you're forgetting, Bill would play dirty. Karate is a strong advantage in a normal fight, but except in the movies it doesn't work so well against an opponent whose tag-team member is a 350-lb body-building goon or packs heat or whatever other cheat Bill would employ. Actually, it seems like the most likely thing would be faking injury and then sending in a team of lawyers to sue, claiming Linus and Tove fought dirty by using Karate and caused his client a great deal of pain and anguish, plus the loss of wages for the rest of his disabled life... Karate can't fight that stuff.
> To commit heresy, though: should Linus be that high on the list? Sure, he's > influential in linux, and linux should be represented, but in the happy > world of IT shouldn't some Red Hat or Suse guy be higher?
Who at Red Hat or Suse would you rate higher? The most influential person I can think of at Red Hat is Alan Cox.
It's not that Linus is so influential he's single-handedly changing the world; it's more that very few individual people have that much influence, taken one at a time. Microsoft is incredibly influential, but what _one_ person at Microsoft is really that important? Gates hasn't _personally_ overseen the _actual_ development in a long time; he's a figurehead -- an important one, but a figurehead nonetheless. RMS at least still (I'm told) contributes to actual development, though he's really not critical to any particular project. Linus is very active in kernel development, but no more so than a dozen other people. Wall is deeply influential in language design, but that's more of a long-term thing; we won't see the results of that until years from now, when the software people use on an everyday basis is being written in languages influenced by Perl6 (though, already searching is better in many apps because of the influence Perl had on regular expression engines in various languages and tools, including grep -- but that's in the scheme of things really only a relatively small matter).
> StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don’t have the features > that Word does.
You gotta be kidding me. When someone asks me for help doing something in a Word document, the first thing I do is open it in OO.o so I can work with it. The features _may_ be there in Word, but they're sure not discoverable. I'm convinced some of the features just plain aren't there, too. Word's tables and frames for example don't seem to be anywhere near as flexible as OO.o's.
But the real feature of OO.o is the file format. Most people will never know or care, but for a programmer this is just great. Format up your sample document just the way you like it, unzip it into a working directory, and write your code to interpolate stuff into content.xml and zip it up, and voila, you're generating nicely-formatted documents automatically. The data can come from anywhere -- from a database, from a CGI interface, from a web-scraping utility,... it doesn't matter, it goes into the document.
Sure, you can generate Word documents using Word Basic, but you can generate OpenOffice documents using whatever. I use Perl, but you can use Python, Ruby, Java,... if you're into pain you could use Visual Basic; anything that can write text to a file and zip it up (or call an external zip util) will do in a pinch.
Like I said, this only matters to programmers, but whoah, it MATTERS to us.
> If I ever get caught sleeping (again), I will just read what I see first.
By sleeping through meetings, you're missing out on your action opportunity to participate in the process of visualizing the conceptualization of the goals of the department. If you don't participate in the process, if you don't take part in the synergy, you won't have the tools necessary to build a win-win scenerio. You can't meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives. In effect, you are cheating yourself of a complete and satisfying career -- of your career -- and of the opportunity to fulfill your role in the company's long-term future going forward. You won't be on the same page as your more astute coworkers, and that can hurt your bottom line.
> Maybe because some of us wouldn't notice the difference
Like I said: blind. These are probably the same sort of people who think JPEGs look "good".
> It's like audiophiles who complain about mp3s being lossy - a lot of > people don't notice it,
There's a word for people who don't notice the lossy compression in MP3: deaf. That's like listening to a dirty cassette tape on a battery-powered player with carbon-zinc ("flashlight") batteries that are wearing out, and not noticing. How could you not *notice* something like that, something so distracting that a normal person has difficulty willfully ignoring it? Would you "notice" if a fire alarm went off while you were standing right under it? Would you "notice" a flashing red and blue light in your rearview mirror?
Yeesh. I'm not a very observant person. There's a lot of stuff I don't notice. But stuff like that is... impossible to not notice, impossible to ignore. It reaches out and forcefully grabs your attention and squeezes.
> where's TOPS-10 in all this? It's not really a predecessor of TOPS-20. > And then there's TENEX
TENEX was a heavily-modified TOPS-10. (Modified to the extent that there was more new code than original code probably, but it was descended from TOPS-10 just the same.) TOPS-20 (aka TWENEX) was modelled conceptually on TENEX, and was written by some of the same people, but it was (at least mostly) a rewrite.
Unix eventually took over mostly because it wasn't tied to a specific vendor's hardware architecture, and nearly everything else was at the time.
In most other respects TOPS-20 was considerably more advanced than the Unix that was available at the time, but the 36-bit hardware it was tied to was going nowhere anyone wanted to be.
There are features of TOPS-20 that we would still do well to add even to the current state of the art in *nix systems. The interactive help system they had was vastly superior to our manpage system, for example. (Calling it "interactive" doesn't sound very exciting, but if you read about how it actually worked, it was really cool, MUCH better than the "interactive" help in VMS, for example (which is still better than man pages IMO).)
> It's 400K lines of assembly code... what could be sweeter?
That's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Assembly code is pretty verbose, but for all that it's not really hard to follow (until you need to get the big picture, at which point you hope the comments are accurate).
400K lines of assembly is probably equivalent to about 100K lines of C, 50K lines of C++, or about 10K lines of Perl (about half of which would be POD and comments), 3K or so if we're allowed to use modules off the CPAN with wild abandon and not count them toward the line count. Less if we play golf.
> Other categories may be added, and bonus prizes for most original, > most useless, and most useful code will also be awarded.
I've got an implementation of double-ROT13 in only 66 bytes of Perl... for my$x(<STDIN>){map{$x=~tr/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/;$x}1..2;print$x}
I'm sure it's possible to golf that down a little more and get under 64 bytes, but I was in a hurry to post this before someone else posts essentially the same thing.
> If the viscosity of a fluid doesn't influence your speed through it how > come you have a terminal velocity while falling in air but not in vacuum
Unrelated. Terminal velocity has to do with the coefficient of dynamic friction versus the acceleration due to gravity ballancing eachother out. Swimming speed is orthogonal to the gravitational acceleration, due to your buoyancy, and as far as the coefficient of friction, the friction of your torso and head is offset by the friction of your limbs going the other way, so it comes out to nothing (which is what this experiment was all about).
> And, as someone said, why can't we swim in air?
You can. In freefall. Or inside an air-filled container in orbit. What you can't do in air is float, because you're too dense.
You can. But only in very low gravity; at sea level, you can't stay afloat in air, for lack of adequate buoyancy, so you sink to the bottom of the pool.
Are these people *blind*? That's... what did we used to call it, HiColor? I *remember* what that looked like. It was great if you were used to 256-color mode, but when SVGA systems came out supporting 24bpp, we all abandoned that graphics mode, because 24bpp looked so much better. At least, I *thought* everyone abandoned 16bpp in the mid nineties. Apparently the gamers *still* haven't. I find this ironic, given that in most other respects their specs for hardware are fairly high-end. And, 16bpp fails particularly badly to render colors in the darker portions of the spectrum (browns and so on), which games tend to favor, so I thought.
Gah, personally I'm looking forward to 64bpp, so we can finally get things like wood grain to actually look moderately close to remotely similar to real. Can someone explain why gamers don't seem to care about color?
I'm also just a bit surprised that 1024x768 was so overwhelmingly much more common than 1024x768 -- I would have guessed them about equal.
> Is there a difference between "propretonic" and "pretonic"?
Yes. The pretonic syllable is the one _after_ the propretonic syllable, i.e., the syllable directly before the tonic (accented) syllable. Here's an example of both words being used in the same paragraph:
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings." — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
> I wouldn't mind if you could name an example of a language where they say > anything like 'the most the common the words'.
Greek might say it that way. Or it might say "the words the common the most", or "the words the most the common". Understand that this is a literal word-for-word rendering, not a translation; you wouldn't say it that way in English, and so a translator would make the appropriate adjustments.
> Why would they use the definite article in front of an adjective, for > example?
To place the adjective in the attributive position. If the adjective does not have the article, and the noun does, that places the adjective in the predicate position (i.e., you would translate it "the words are most common" in English rather than "the most common words" -- that would be confusing and inappropriate in a sentence that also has a verb).
So would all geeks who use Windows. WinFS gets a lot of hype, but it is Monad that will drive the next batch of upgrades for Microsoft, especially in server space. A good command shell is a killer feature.
I remember an online poll in about 1999 or 2000, asking what effect Linux would have on Microsoft. "Force them to change radically" was the option I voted for. Monad is the sort of thing I meant. A good command shell is one of the strengths of most POSIX systems; formerly Microsoft could argue it wasn't worth the licensing costs of a commercial Unix just to get a command line that only geeks would use, but now you see them arguing instead, "We're going to have that too." And they will. And lo, it will be a major improvement.
And they already moved from the 95/98/Me line to the NT line -- at least partly because the free unices have good solid memory protection, and "it crashes all the time" was a criticism they couldn't get around with 95/98.
They're also going to have to ship a decent text editor. They're the only major OS left that doesn't ship with both vi and Emacs. I don't think they'll ever ship those per se (though of course both are available for Windows -- but so is bash for that matter), but they're going to have to come up with something that blows the everliving socks off of Notepad, mark my words.
Microsoft will tell you that open source doesn't innovate much; it mostly copies. And that's got some truth in it. But open source is not alone in that. Everyone copies the competition's good features. It's the same reason all fast food restaurants today have kids' meals with toys and a drive-through window. One chain introduced it, and it was a killer feature, and so everyone has to have it now.
Competition is what makes us stretch, and do things we didn't want to bother doing otherwise.
If that mattered very much, we'd all be using Amiga or DOS, not Windows. Windows was a *horrible* platform for games, and game developers avoided it for _years_ (in some cases releasing games for DOS and requiring Windows 95 users to reboot in command-prompt mode), but eventually they had to embrace Win32 because it was so widespread, and they needed to sell the games to people who didn't know how to use DOS.
Amiga, in contrast, was *great* for games; game developers *loved* it. But they gave it up when it became clear that it was going to stay a small market.
> that will allow [me] to e-enable value-added infomediaries scalable > to customized models
Good, but... Can you say more than this about these infomediaries? It's nice that they're value-added and scalable to customized models, but it seems like they ought to have some more adjective phrases attached to them.
> to syndicate transparent mindshare,
Heh. Syndicate transparent mindshare. Good one.
> which in its turn disintermediates turn-key functionalities in order > to reinvent extensible deliverables in answering the [a]forementioned > questions in a synergistic environment.
Again, this is too easy to follow. It needs more tangential subordinate clauses to obscure it.
For the linguistically challenged, this is what all that means: As a creative person, I'd like to sell them my language services, which include the following:
* Use words in unusual ways.
* Tell the workers to work together as a team.
* Confuse the audience as they struggle to understand what is being said.
* Convince your competitors to do this stuff too.
* Give little actual information.
As one of the premier innovators of language solutions worldwide, I would like to offer them this one-time opportunity to re-invent themselves in a new, total-quality paradigm, by securing my first-tier services. My language solutions include the following unparalleled services:
* Utilize esoteric language units in unprecedented ways.
* Promote agglutinative team dynamics in your workforce to promote a robust
bottom-up holistic synergy and a fault-tolerant expectations paradigm.
* Leave your audience bemused and transfixed as they inefficaciously undertake
to apprehend your loquacious linquistic excursions.
* Redefine the use of language solutions in your industry and raise the
bar for language solutions among your competitors.
* Impart inappreciable quanta of enlightenment.
So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action opportunity by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals according to an open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively leverage agglutinative team dynamics and team-building best practices to create bottom-up holistic synergy through the empowerment and integration of key team players on the front lines of our sales and production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so as to focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant, results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate strategic core competencies in our interpersonal assets management, foster win-win outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set networking and group-to-group issues collaboration ecosystem, set us on a critical path to achieve total quality in our quality-driven, services-oriented resources management game plan, monetize the reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and up-sell the competition in the new economy.
> It seems there's a little over 40,000 words (excluding proper nouns etc.) > in use in the sample text (whole english-written web?)
I don't know about the sample text, but there are *WAY* more than 40000 English words in use on the web. Probably more than ten times that many.
Most of them, however, occur a relatively paltry number of times. If you did Google searches for most of the words on the list, the number of results for each would be in the tens of thousands or higher. There are many, many words that get only a few hundred results.
> I know there are already types of compression that take the most common > letters of a document, and then builds a binary dictionary off of it, to > create the most efficient way of storing the data. Perhaps this database > could be used, as a static dictionary, and compressing documents could be > even better, though the db queries might slow it down.
It's not likely to gain you much. The idea of adding multiletter sequences to a Huffman tree has been explored at length, but in practice there are precious few multiletter sequences common enough to warrant an entry in the tree. Increasing the size of the tree very much will substantially worsen the compression, by increasing the lengths of the bit sequences for some of the characters. Even very common sequences like "ed" and "es" usually turn out to be better encoded as individual letters.
Slashdot Mirror
> if anyone were to stand-in for the Open Source movement #44. Richard Stallman
RMS is to Linus as Leif Ericson is to Columbus: yeah, he was there first, but
hardly anybody knew about it at the time and even fewer people cared. It was
Columbus (or Linus) who did something that brought it to the world's attention.
> Linus the excuse to play tag-team with Tove, and she'd kick the ass of Bill
No, you're forgetting, Bill would play dirty. Karate is a strong advantage
in a normal fight, but except in the movies it doesn't work so well against
an opponent whose tag-team member is a 350-lb body-building goon or packs
heat or whatever other cheat Bill would employ. Actually, it seems like the
most likely thing would be faking injury and then sending in a team of lawyers
to sue, claiming Linus and Tove fought dirty by using Karate and caused his
client a great deal of pain and anguish, plus the loss of wages for the rest
of his disabled life... Karate can't fight that stuff.
> who else do we look up to when it comes to evil?
Spammers.
> To commit heresy, though: should Linus be that high on the list? Sure, he's
> influential in linux, and linux should be represented, but in the happy
> world of IT shouldn't some Red Hat or Suse guy be higher?
Who at Red Hat or Suse would you rate higher? The most influential person I
can think of at Red Hat is Alan Cox.
It's not that Linus is so influential he's single-handedly changing the world;
it's more that very few individual people have that much influence, taken one
at a time. Microsoft is incredibly influential, but what _one_ person at
Microsoft is really that important? Gates hasn't _personally_ overseen the
_actual_ development in a long time; he's a figurehead -- an important one,
but a figurehead nonetheless. RMS at least still (I'm told) contributes to
actual development, though he's really not critical to any particular project.
Linus is very active in kernel development, but no more so than a dozen other
people. Wall is deeply influential in language design, but that's more of a
long-term thing; we won't see the results of that until years from now, when
the software people use on an everyday basis is being written in languages
influenced by Perl6 (though, already searching is better in many apps because
of the influence Perl had on regular expression engines in various languages
and tools, including grep -- but that's in the scheme of things really only
a relatively small matter).
Who would _you_ put on the list?
> StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don’t have the features
... it doesn't matter, it goes into the document.
... if you're into pain you could use Visual Basic; anything
> that Word does.
You gotta be kidding me. When someone asks me for help doing something in a
Word document, the first thing I do is open it in OO.o so I can work with it.
The features _may_ be there in Word, but they're sure not discoverable. I'm
convinced some of the features just plain aren't there, too. Word's tables
and frames for example don't seem to be anywhere near as flexible as OO.o's.
But the real feature of OO.o is the file format. Most people will never know
or care, but for a programmer this is just great. Format up your sample
document just the way you like it, unzip it into a working directory, and
write your code to interpolate stuff into content.xml and zip it up, and
voila, you're generating nicely-formatted documents automatically. The data
can come from anywhere -- from a database, from a CGI interface, from a
web-scraping utility,
Sure, you can generate Word documents using Word Basic, but you can generate
OpenOffice documents using whatever. I use Perl, but you can use Python,
Ruby, Java,
that can write text to a file and zip it up (or call an external zip util)
will do in a pinch.
Like I said, this only matters to programmers, but whoah, it MATTERS to us.
> If I ever get caught sleeping (again), I will just read what I see first.
By sleeping through meetings, you're missing out on your action opportunity to
participate in the process of visualizing the conceptualization of the goals
of the department. If you don't participate in the process, if you don't
take part in the synergy, you won't have the tools necessary to build a
win-win scenerio. You can't meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives. In
effect, you are cheating yourself of a complete and satisfying career -- of
your career -- and of the opportunity to fulfill your role in the company's
long-term future going forward. You won't be on the same page as your more
astute coworkers, and that can hurt your bottom line.
> Maybe because some of us wouldn't notice the difference
Like I said: blind. These are probably the same sort of people who think
JPEGs look "good".
> It's like audiophiles who complain about mp3s being lossy - a lot of
> people don't notice it,
There's a word for people who don't notice the lossy compression in MP3: deaf.
That's like listening to a dirty cassette tape on a battery-powered player with
carbon-zinc ("flashlight") batteries that are wearing out, and not noticing.
How could you not *notice* something like that, something so distracting that
a normal person has difficulty willfully ignoring it? Would you "notice" if
a fire alarm went off while you were standing right under it? Would you
"notice" a flashing red and blue light in your rearview mirror?
Yeesh. I'm not a very observant person. There's a lot of stuff I don't
notice. But stuff like that is... impossible to not notice, impossible to
ignore. It reaches out and forcefully grabs your attention and squeezes.
> where's TOPS-10 in all this? It's not really a predecessor of TOPS-20.
> And then there's TENEX
TENEX was a heavily-modified TOPS-10. (Modified to the extent that there was
more new code than original code probably, but it was descended from TOPS-10
just the same.) TOPS-20 (aka TWENEX) was modelled conceptually on TENEX, and
was written by some of the same people, but it was (at least mostly) a rewrite.
Unix eventually took over mostly because it wasn't tied to a specific vendor's
hardware architecture, and nearly everything else was at the time.
In most other respects TOPS-20 was considerably more advanced than the Unix
that was available at the time, but the 36-bit hardware it was tied to was
going nowhere anyone wanted to be.
There are features of TOPS-20 that we would still do well to add even to the
current state of the art in *nix systems. The interactive help system they
had was vastly superior to our manpage system, for example. (Calling it
"interactive" doesn't sound very exciting, but if you read about how it
actually worked, it was really cool, MUCH better than the "interactive"
help in VMS, for example (which is still better than man pages IMO).)
> It's 400K lines of assembly code... what could be sweeter?
That's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Assembly code is pretty verbose, but
for all that it's not really hard to follow (until you need to get the big
picture, at which point you hope the comments are accurate).
400K lines of assembly is probably equivalent to about 100K lines of C, 50K
lines of C++, or about 10K lines of Perl (about half of which would be POD
and comments), 3K or so if we're allowed to use modules off the CPAN with
wild abandon and not count them toward the line count. Less if we play golf.
> Other categories may be added, and bonus prizes for most original,
1 ..2;print$x}
> most useless, and most useful code will also be awarded.
I've got an implementation of double-ROT13 in only 66 bytes of Perl...
for my$x(<STDIN>){map{$x=~tr/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/;$x}
I'm sure it's possible to golf that down a little more and get under 64 bytes,
but I was in a hurry to post this before someone else posts essentially the
same thing.
> If the viscosity of a fluid doesn't influence your speed through it how
> come you have a terminal velocity while falling in air but not in vacuum
Unrelated. Terminal velocity has to do with the coefficient of dynamic
friction versus the acceleration due to gravity ballancing eachother out.
Swimming speed is orthogonal to the gravitational acceleration, due to your
buoyancy, and as far as the coefficient of friction, the friction of your
torso and head is offset by the friction of your limbs going the other way,
so it comes out to nothing (which is what this experiment was all about).
> And, as someone said, why can't we swim in air?
You can. In freefall. Or inside an air-filled container in orbit.
What you can't do in air is float, because you're too dense.
> How come I can't swim in air?
You can. But only in very low gravity; at sea level, you can't stay afloat
in air, for lack of adequate buoyancy, so you sink to the bottom of the pool.
> I'm also just a bit surprised that 1024x768 was so overwhelmingly much more
> common than 1024x768 -- I would have guessed them about equal.
Err, more common than 1280x1024, I mean.
Are these people *blind*? That's... what did we used to call it, HiColor?
I *remember* what that looked like. It was great if you were used to 256-color
mode, but when SVGA systems came out supporting 24bpp, we all abandoned that
graphics mode, because 24bpp looked so much better. At least, I *thought*
everyone abandoned 16bpp in the mid nineties. Apparently the gamers *still*
haven't. I find this ironic, given that in most other respects their specs
for hardware are fairly high-end. And, 16bpp fails particularly badly to
render colors in the darker portions of the spectrum (browns and so on), which
games tend to favor, so I thought.
Gah, personally I'm looking forward to 64bpp, so we can finally get things like
wood grain to actually look moderately close to remotely similar to real. Can
someone explain why gamers don't seem to care about color?
I'm also just a bit surprised that 1024x768 was so overwhelmingly much more
common than 1024x768 -- I would have guessed them about equal.
> Is there a difference between "propretonic" and "pretonic"?
Yes. The pretonic syllable is the one _after_ the propretonic syllable, i.e.,
the syllable directly before the tonic (accented) syllable. Here's an example
of both words being used in the same paragraph:
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long
vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal
Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the
masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of
inflectional endings." — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
> I wouldn't mind if you could name an example of a language where they say
> anything like 'the most the common the words'.
Greek might say it that way. Or it might say "the words the common the most",
or "the words the most the common". Understand that this is a literal
word-for-word rendering, not a translation; you wouldn't say it that way in
English, and so a translator would make the appropriate adjustments.
> Why would they use the definite article in front of an adjective, for
> example?
To place the adjective in the attributive position. If the adjective does
not have the article, and the noun does, that places the adjective in the
predicate position (i.e., you would translate it "the words are most common"
in English rather than "the most common words" -- that would be confusing
and inappropriate in a sentence that also has a verb).
> I would love to see an improved command shell.
So would all geeks who use Windows. WinFS gets a lot of hype, but it is Monad
that will drive the next batch of upgrades for Microsoft, especially in server
space. A good command shell is a killer feature.
I remember an online poll in about 1999 or 2000, asking what effect Linux would
have on Microsoft. "Force them to change radically" was the option I voted
for. Monad is the sort of thing I meant. A good command shell is one of the
strengths of most POSIX systems; formerly Microsoft could argue it wasn't worth
the licensing costs of a commercial Unix just to get a command line that only
geeks would use, but now you see them arguing instead, "We're going to have
that too." And they will. And lo, it will be a major improvement.
And they already moved from the 95/98/Me line to the NT line -- at least
partly because the free unices have good solid memory protection, and "it
crashes all the time" was a criticism they couldn't get around with 95/98.
They're also going to have to ship a decent text editor. They're the only
major OS left that doesn't ship with both vi and Emacs. I don't think they'll
ever ship those per se (though of course both are available for Windows --
but so is bash for that matter), but they're going to have to come up with
something that blows the everliving socks off of Notepad, mark my words.
Microsoft will tell you that open source doesn't innovate much; it mostly
copies. And that's got some truth in it. But open source is not alone in
that. Everyone copies the competition's good features. It's the same reason
all fast food restaurants today have kids' meals with toys and a drive-through
window. One chain introduced it, and it was a killer feature, and so everyone
has to have it now.
Competition is what makes us stretch, and do things we didn't want to bother
doing otherwise.
> There is still IMHO no games in linux.
If that mattered very much, we'd all be using Amiga or DOS, not Windows.
Windows was a *horrible* platform for games, and game developers avoided it
for _years_ (in some cases releasing games for DOS and requiring Windows 95
users to reboot in command-prompt mode), but eventually they had to embrace
Win32 because it was so widespread, and they needed to sell the games to
people who didn't know how to use DOS.
Amiga, in contrast, was *great* for games; game developers *loved* it. But
they gave it up when it became clear that it was going to stay a small market.
Games don't drive OS adoption. They follow it.
> I am proactively exploiting efficient paradigms
This is too easy to follow. Revise.
> that will allow [me] to e-enable value-added infomediaries scalable
> to customized models
Good, but... Can you say more than this about these infomediaries? It's
nice that they're value-added and scalable to customized models, but it
seems like they ought to have some more adjective phrases attached to them.
> to syndicate transparent mindshare,
Heh. Syndicate transparent mindshare. Good one.
> which in its turn disintermediates turn-key functionalities in order
> to reinvent extensible deliverables in answering the [a]forementioned
> questions in a synergistic environment.
Again, this is too easy to follow. It needs more tangential subordinate
clauses to obscure it.
For the linguistically challenged, this is what all that means:
As a creative person, I'd like to sell them my language services, which
include the following:
* Use words in unusual ways.
* Tell the workers to work together as a team.
* Confuse the audience as they struggle to understand what is being said.
* Convince your competitors to do this stuff too.
* Give little actual information.
As one of the premier innovators of language solutions worldwide, I would like
to offer them this one-time opportunity to re-invent themselves in a new,
total-quality paradigm, by securing my first-tier services. My language
solutions include the following unparalleled services:
* Utilize esoteric language units in unprecedented ways.
* Promote agglutinative team dynamics in your workforce to promote a robust
bottom-up holistic synergy and a fault-tolerant expectations paradigm.
* Leave your audience bemused and transfixed as they inefficaciously undertake
to apprehend your loquacious linquistic excursions.
* Redefine the use of language solutions in your industry and raise the
bar for language solutions among your competitors.
* Impart inappreciable quanta of enlightenment.
So basically you're saying that we need to follow up our action opportunity
by revisiting our objectives and re-orienting our goals according to an
open-source mindset so that we can pro-actively leverage agglutinative team
dynamics and team-building best practices to create bottom-up holistic synergy
through the empowerment and integration of key team players on the front lines
of our sales and production demographics into our prioritized mind share, so
as to focus everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tolerant,
results-driven, and robust expectations paradigm that will initiate strategic
core competencies in our interpersonal assets management, foster win-win
outside-the-box thinking in our targeted skill-set networking and group-to-group
issues collaboration ecosystem, set us on a critical path to achieve total
quality in our quality-driven, services-oriented resources management game
plan, monetize the reusability of our top-down multitasking approach, and
up-sell the competition in the new economy.
> It seems there's a little over 40,000 words (excluding proper nouns etc.)
> in use in the sample text (whole english-written web?)
I don't know about the sample text, but there are *WAY* more than 40000 English
words in use on the web. Probably more than ten times that many.
Most of them, however, occur a relatively paltry number of times. If you did
Google searches for most of the words on the list, the number of results for
each would be in the tens of thousands or higher. There are many, many words
that get only a few hundred results.
> I know there are already types of compression that take the most common
> letters of a document, and then builds a binary dictionary off of it, to
> create the most efficient way of storing the data. Perhaps this database
> could be used, as a static dictionary, and compressing documents could be
> even better, though the db queries might slow it down.
It's not likely to gain you much. The idea of adding multiletter sequences
to a Huffman tree has been explored at length, but in practice there are
precious few multiletter sequences common enough to warrant an entry in the
tree. Increasing the size of the tree very much will substantially worsen
the compression, by increasing the lengths of the bit sequences for some of
the characters. Even very common sequences like "ed" and "es" usually turn
out to be better encoded as individual letters.
> That people at large think more about Microsoft than copulating. (Unlikely)
s/think(.*)Un/talk$1/; HTH.HAND.