Okay, that's cool. So the million dollar question is: how do you spell "the" post-Reform? You're pretty much obligated to make two words where previously we had one:
"Thee area" vs. "Thuh plais"
Of course, that ignores the fact that there are actually at least three pronunciations of the word "the"; the third comes (occasionally) when the following word starts with a long 'e', so now you've got "thee' eegl" as well. Of course, the third usage is more evident in some regional dialects. But whose dialect do we encode in this new phonetic spelling? If it is created at a certain institution across the river from Boston, it'll be no time before we all "pahk ah cah in Hahvahd yahd"; of course, were it created at my alma mater, everyone would "warsh behind thuh booshz."
Even if those problems were taken care of, there would still be major obstacles, such as the fact that we're attempting to signify 42 phonemes with only 26 graphemes. Even if you do have two or three words for "the," how do you know which "th" sound (through or though?) to use? If we try to use digraphs to signify too much, then we'll run right back into abiguities. For instance, how do you spell "hothead" phonetically? "Hothed" eliminates the "extraneous" "ea" digraph, but maintains the truly ambiguous "th" digraph.
The only completely logical system of spelling is one in which the number of graphemes is exactly equal to the number of phonemes; and, furthermore, every phoneme corresponds to exactly one grapheme, and every grapheme to exactly one phoneme. Finnish is the closest I know of to this, but even it has some flaws. Korean (Hangul) was spot-on -- 500 years ago, for one dialect of Korean. Designing a system like that for English would involve at least designing a major supplement to the current English alphabet, at most tossing it completely and using something like Hangul. At that point, you still have issues of regional dialects and, has other posters have pointed out, the constantly changing nature of language. If we put a phonetic alphabet in place and then underwent another Great Vowel Shift, some people are going to feel mighty silly.
This reminds me of Battlefield Vietnam, a generally great game where the AI left something to be desired.
In one level, there are two islands linked by a long bridge. If, as the Americans, you could take the low-lying island and the bridge, snipers at the bottom of the hill on the second island could rack up insane amounts of kills -- hundreds in very short games -- because the VC never learned to either a) take a different route (like going through the trees, or around the hill, or anything besides straight down the road, towards the snipers); b) spawning more snipers, to direct some fire at the American snipers; or c) using their tanks or artillery in an intelligent fashion to take out the very concentrated American base of fire.
On another level -- one of the Ho Chi Minh trail levels, IIRC -- the American start with five control points and the VC start with one, separated by a river and a bridge from the American control points. The Americans can easily take a bunker near the bridge, lay prone on top next to an ammo box (and out of the firing line of the VC) and lob grenades over the top, onto the bridge, and kill hundreds of VC. The VC never try lobbing a grenade back, or firing a mortar, or using any indirect fire weapon on the Americans on top of the bunker. They never swim the river and flank the Americans. They just die like lemmings.
These are two examples where a learning AI would have been of great benefit. The VC would have seen their fellow soldiers being blown to bits, adapted to it, and made the levels much more challenging and fun.
I was hoping, before I watched the "Network" one, that the cute Asian chick in the screen cap was going to be Linux. But she wasn't. That would have been false advertising anyway.
I'm sure every random Joe on the street would say that, too.
Seriously, put a Mac and a, um, Dell in front of 1000 people and ask them to point to the PC. The only one who'd say, "Well, technically,..." is wearing a pocket protector, has a serious case of nasal drip, and has distinct opinions on whether Kirk or Picard is the better captain.
You seem to be suggesting that, since there are traces of ancient civilizations all over Europe, there must not be traces thereof in Bosnia. Huh?
The fact that there are bricks elsewhere has absolutely nothing to do with the (non-)existence of this particular pyramid. All it proves is that many peoples in Europe posessed stoneworking skills, which we already knew.
Okay, seriously, that article in Archaeology is crap. Basically, here's what it says:
1. If he's right about the time period, it's impossible.
2. He's a loon.
His personal views, of course, have nothing to do with the veracity of the story. And it's perfectly reasonable to assume that his wild-assed guess of 12,000 B.C.E. is totally wrong, while he's 100% correct about the pyramid's existance. Nothing in that article casts any doubt whatsoever on the pyramid itself -- only on the researcher. Ad hominem, anyone?
Had you actually RTFA, you'd see that the reason it's back in the news is that the diggers found cut and polished stone blocks. Let me say that again, just for emphasis:
They found cut and polished stone blocks.
It sounds to me like the exact opposite of debunking is happening.
Before you rush out and buy Sun's Java System Messaging Server, subscribe to the mailing list and give a read-through of some of the recent archives. You'll find a whole lot of bitching about the system from people who are actually using it. We're among the many admins who will shortly be switching away from JSMS to precisely what the OP is asking about: a scalable, redundant, open-source mail system.
We'll be using a few front-line MX boxes running Postfix, SpamAssassin, and PureMessage (not FOSS), delivering via LMTP to several Cyrus machines, which will share SAN storage via Lustre. We'll also have a small cluster of boxes running the Horde suite for a web UI. All of this is authenticating against a four-way multi-master cluster of Fedora DS machines. Not only will that save us a bundle of cash, it will be far more stable than the breakage-prone JSMS, and, to be perfectly honest, support will be better from a bunch of 1337 h4x0r5 on a mailing list than from Sun.
"With all of the government-sponsored selling out of The People that has been going on in the past, say, 6 or so years, one has to wonder when or even if it is going to stop."
s/6/200/;
The problem isn't this president; the problem is the last 38 or so.
Nevertheless, I think that with no final solution for the middle-east issue in horizon, such cooperation will stay mostly limited, and won't rise to be a community-level cooperation..
Yeah, that's already been tried. And I think it would stifle cooperation more than encourage it....
Translation of the original article, rather than the meta-article:
"According to a generally very well informed source, Google could be read to buy the Opera browser. Although this information should be taken with a grain of salt at the moment, such a move by Google could be a response to Microsoft if the latter decides to integrate its own search engine into IE in a more efficient manner than currently. Right now, Microsoft's search engine is integrated with IE, but hidden in the address bar so that no one uses it unless the fat-finger a URL. For IE7, Microsoft could well be inspired by Firefox's ergonomic integration of the Google integration. But if that is the case, would could Google do to avoid losing, in a single blow, a major source of searches? They could launch their own browser, whence the Opera Hypothesis. Opera is, recall, very well entrenched in the smartphone market...."
Turning today's PCs in tomorrow's thin clients is an option. This way you can save money on new hardware and comply with centralized administration requirements.
Have you seen the prices on SunRays? You won't save a single thin dime on hardware. The only selling point for them is centralized management.
Funny, but no. The F/OSS stuff -- at least once you get away from Sendmail -- is comprehensible to the average mortal. Have you ever done a basic Postfix config? It's a breeze. Even more advanced Postfix configs are comparatively easy to wrap one's mind around. The giant monolith that is the JMS is, perhaps for a dedicated mail admin, understandable, but for the rest of us -- general purpose sysadmins who have to keep a handle on not only email, but also file services, web servers, user support, and a hundred other things -- it's too damn big.
Mail, despite being one of the oldest services on the Internet, is not trivial by any means. But Sun seems to go out of their way to make it less trivial.
Plus, the web UI sucks my sweaty balls. An untrained team of blind hissing cockroaches could write a more attractive, functional, stable, and browser-compatible UI. Even Johnathan Schwartz has to admit that.
Six single-letter names already claimed at the time [1993] -- "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" -- were allowed to keep their names for the time being.
I do use Sun's JMS. You can run it on Linux, and your non-profit can probably afford it. But it sucks for small deployments. The damn thing is just too powerful for most people; if you can't afford to hire a dedicated employee just to run the mail server, it's not for you. It's not a magical happy land, like the OP described; it's got a UI that makes your eyes bleed, about a bajillion config files, and inconsistencies up the wazoo. We've used it for four years, and now we're switching to Postfix + Courier IMAP + Maildir and a few other free, open-source components.
I absolutely agree. Anyone who thinks that OS X currently belongs in a server room has obviously never tried to use it there. After just a year running OS X for our file server, we switched to Linux. Our shop isn't as diverse as yours, but we run Solaris, Tru64, and lots of different Linuces, and I can agree: OS X is *by far* the least stable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Thee area" vs. "Thuh plais"
Of course, that ignores the fact that there are actually at least three pronunciations of the word "the"; the third comes (occasionally) when the following word starts with a long 'e', so now you've got "thee' eegl" as well. Of course, the third usage is more evident in some regional dialects. But whose dialect do we encode in this new phonetic spelling? If it is created at a certain institution across the river from Boston, it'll be no time before we all "pahk ah cah in Hahvahd yahd"; of course, were it created at my alma mater, everyone would "warsh behind thuh booshz."
Even if those problems were taken care of, there would still be major obstacles, such as the fact that we're attempting to signify 42 phonemes with only 26 graphemes. Even if you do have two or three words for "the," how do you know which "th" sound (through or though?) to use? If we try to use digraphs to signify too much, then we'll run right back into abiguities. For instance, how do you spell "hothead" phonetically? "Hothed" eliminates the "extraneous" "ea" digraph, but maintains the truly ambiguous "th" digraph.
The only completely logical system of spelling is one in which the number of graphemes is exactly equal to the number of phonemes; and, furthermore, every phoneme corresponds to exactly one grapheme, and every grapheme to exactly one phoneme. Finnish is the closest I know of to this, but even it has some flaws. Korean (Hangul) was spot-on -- 500 years ago, for one dialect of Korean. Designing a system like that for English would involve at least designing a major supplement to the current English alphabet, at most tossing it completely and using something like Hangul. At that point, you still have issues of regional dialects and, has other posters have pointed out, the constantly changing nature of language. If we put a phonetic alphabet in place and then underwent another Great Vowel Shift, some people are going to feel mighty silly.
I'm amazed the discussion has gotten this far without any jokes about the RIM-Jobs partnership....
Hack the planet!
This reminds me of Battlefield Vietnam, a generally great game where the AI left something to be desired. In one level, there are two islands linked by a long bridge. If, as the Americans, you could take the low-lying island and the bridge, snipers at the bottom of the hill on the second island could rack up insane amounts of kills -- hundreds in very short games -- because the VC never learned to either a) take a different route (like going through the trees, or around the hill, or anything besides straight down the road, towards the snipers); b) spawning more snipers, to direct some fire at the American snipers; or c) using their tanks or artillery in an intelligent fashion to take out the very concentrated American base of fire. On another level -- one of the Ho Chi Minh trail levels, IIRC -- the American start with five control points and the VC start with one, separated by a river and a bridge from the American control points. The Americans can easily take a bunker near the bridge, lay prone on top next to an ammo box (and out of the firing line of the VC) and lob grenades over the top, onto the bridge, and kill hundreds of VC. The VC never try lobbing a grenade back, or firing a mortar, or using any indirect fire weapon on the Americans on top of the bunker. They never swim the river and flank the Americans. They just die like lemmings. These are two examples where a learning AI would have been of great benefit. The VC would have seen their fellow soldiers being blown to bits, adapted to it, and made the levels much more challenging and fun.
I was hoping, before I watched the "Network" one, that the cute Asian chick in the screen cap was going to be Linux. But she wasn't. That would have been false advertising anyway.
Seriously, put a Mac and a, um, Dell in front of 1000 people and ask them to point to the PC. The only one who'd say, "Well, technically,..." is wearing a pocket protector, has a serious case of nasal drip, and has distinct opinions on whether Kirk or Picard is the better captain.
Geek speak != common speech. Get used to it.
The fact that there are bricks elsewhere has absolutely nothing to do with the (non-)existence of this particular pyramid. All it proves is that many peoples in Europe posessed stoneworking skills, which we already knew.
1. If he's right about the time period, it's impossible.
2. He's a loon.
His personal views, of course, have nothing to do with the veracity of the story. And it's perfectly reasonable to assume that his wild-assed guess of 12,000 B.C.E. is totally wrong, while he's 100% correct about the pyramid's existance. Nothing in that article casts any doubt whatsoever on the pyramid itself -- only on the researcher. Ad hominem, anyone?
Had you actually RTFA, you'd see that the reason it's back in the news is that the diggers found cut and polished stone blocks. Let me say that again, just for emphasis:
They found cut and polished stone blocks.
It sounds to me like the exact opposite of debunking is happening.
We'll be using a few front-line MX boxes running Postfix, SpamAssassin, and PureMessage (not FOSS), delivering via LMTP to several Cyrus machines, which will share SAN storage via Lustre. We'll also have a small cluster of boxes running the Horde suite for a web UI. All of this is authenticating against a four-way multi-master cluster of Fedora DS machines. Not only will that save us a bundle of cash, it will be far more stable than the breakage-prone JSMS, and, to be perfectly honest, support will be better from a bunch of 1337 h4x0r5 on a mailing list than from Sun.
The problem isn't this president; the problem is the last 38 or so.
How long before we see "Warp Engine" stickers appearing on yellow Hondas with giant mufflers and cosmetic hood scoops?
The 'regulatable' bit is set. It's right next to the evil bit.
Really, the walk upstairs isn't so long that I need my PSP for the trip, although I usually do need to stop and take a breather about halfway.
AOL!
Whoever modded this troll is an idiot.
Translation of the original article, rather than the meta-article: "According to a generally very well informed source, Google could be read to buy the Opera browser. Although this information should be taken with a grain of salt at the moment, such a move by Google could be a response to Microsoft if the latter decides to integrate its own search engine into IE in a more efficient manner than currently. Right now, Microsoft's search engine is integrated with IE, but hidden in the address bar so that no one uses it unless the fat-finger a URL. For IE7, Microsoft could well be inspired by Firefox's ergonomic integration of the Google integration. But if that is the case, would could Google do to avoid losing, in a single blow, a major source of searches? They could launch their own browser, whence the Opera Hypothesis. Opera is, recall, very well entrenched in the smartphone market...."
Mail, despite being one of the oldest services on the Internet, is not trivial by any means. But Sun seems to go out of their way to make it less trivial.
Plus, the web UI sucks my sweaty balls. An untrained team of blind hissing cockroaches could write a more attractive, functional, stable, and browser-compatible UI. Even Johnathan Schwartz has to admit that.
Only in Finland...
Opera has had both of these features for as long as I've been using it.
I do use Sun's JMS. You can run it on Linux, and your non-profit can probably afford it. But it sucks for small deployments. The damn thing is just too powerful for most people; if you can't afford to hire a dedicated employee just to run the mail server, it's not for you. It's not a magical happy land, like the OP described; it's got a UI that makes your eyes bleed, about a bajillion config files, and inconsistencies up the wazoo. We've used it for four years, and now we're switching to Postfix + Courier IMAP + Maildir and a few other free, open-source components.
I put a white Apple logo on the side of my PC, just for the fun of seeing people's heads asplode.
I absolutely agree. Anyone who thinks that OS X currently belongs in a server room has obviously never tried to use it there. After just a year running OS X for our file server, we switched to Linux. Our shop isn't as diverse as yours, but we run Solaris, Tru64, and lots of different Linuces, and I can agree: OS X is *by far* the least stable.