an ancient Greek king in Homer's Iliad. Well actually two:
Ajax the lesser of Locrian Ajax, son of Oileus, king of Locris
Ajax the Great or Telamonian Ajax, son of Telamon, king of Salamis
a Dutch football (in the soccer sense) team of Amsterdam, already mentioned
several ships of the Royal Navy
as already mentioned, a place in Ontario, Canada, named after one ot these ships
a character on the animated televion series Duckman
a car (actually several models)
several companies
a Californian boiler company
a Dutch fire security company.
a buzzword for a combination of technologies, see this Slashdot story.
Given the enormous number of different things one name can denote, it should't be any wonder there are actually people making money finding (unused) trademark-names for products.
WI don't see what makes him think that Google's efforts will "reflect a unipolar worldview dominated by the English language and American culture" other than the fact that it's being done by Americans.
Read the fucking article.
It's not that the Americans are doing it - it's just that the Americans are doing it with English books only, for now, without any garantee that they will do it with books in other languages later.
For now, Google partners with the New York public library and university libraries at Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Oxford.
As you probably know, Google is the Internet's primary search engine. This does give Google lots of power. So far, I don't have the feeling Google abused that power. Google says it has a "Don't be evil" policy.
When such a powerful site decides to give its users excepts from books from English libraries only, the danger of a unipolar worldview dominated by the English language and American culture is real.
The French National Library is no search engine. It does not want to compete with Google. But the French National Library has its own digitalisation project going on, and would like see those books in Google results when they are relevant, too, instead of only those of English-speaking libraries.
The more books from the more different countries and cultures are included in Google's results, the less Google's results can be considered subjective from a cultural point of view.
After all, neutrality is an important feature of search engines. Remember how much fuss Slashdot used to make of MSN Search's response to a Linux query?
It allows Apache to serve ASP.NET pages by proxying the requests to a slightly modified version of our XSP called mod-mono-server that is installed along with XSP.
It doesn't work on the Windows version of Apache yet, but work is in progress to make that work, too.
Of course binary doesn't equal proprietary. Those are two completely different concepts.
PNG is a binary format. It isn't proprietary, though. And although I can't immediately find a text-based proprietary format, such formats are not impossible (although arguably easier to reverse-engineer than binary proprietary formats).
But if the XML is really such a problem, I suggest the simple solution. Compressing XML with a simple and open algorithm like gzip or bzip2, is the way to go. XML usually compresses very easily.
Well, if the PR department came up with the medical record analogy, they were doing a much better job than usual.
I like the analogy:
enabling the customer to download music which can only be heard by means of software which prevents the music to be copied in order to protect the copyright holder's rights is analogous to enabling the doctor to mail medical records which can only be read by software which prevents the record to be forwarded in order to protect the patient's rights.
For it has exactly the same flaws:
From a cryptographic viewpoint, it doesn't work either. You provide the doctor with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext, otherwise he can't read the records. And if he doesn't have cracking tools, he can take a photograph of your screen with the medical records, and mail them.
Their might be good reasons why that doctor wants to (legally) forward these records, just like there exists fair use of media content, often blocked by DRM. Maybe the doctor wants to send the files to his other account, where he has more storage. Maybe the costomer just wants to make a back-up of the music he bought.
In short, I wouldn't mind if software asks This song is copyrighted and as far as I can tell you're not the copyright holder. Giving copies away might be illegal. Are you sure you want to proceed the copying? [Yes] [No] [Cancel] when I try to copy a marked song, just as I wouldn't mind software that asks There's a medical record attached. Forwarding it to non-autorised peoply might hurt the patient's privacy. Are you sure you want to proceed the forwarding? [Yes] [No]. But the functionality should still be there for the circumstances in which the action is justified.
Those who want to illegaly "crack" the content, will find a way, anyhow.
Imagine you're a photographer. Professional or hobbyist, I don't care. You have made thousands of pictures; they all are on your hard drive.
Imagine you're lazy. (Maybe you don't have to imagine that.) You don't want to describe your photos, you don't want to label them. The only metadata associated to your photos is date and time.
Imagine you're looking for a particular photo. You know where you'va taken it, you know what is on it, you can remember the subject, the color shades, etc. You just can't remember exactly when you took that picture. How do you search for it?
Well, you quickly make a drawing in which you try to (sort of) replicate colors and shapes. And you let your computer search for "similar" graphics.
Such software exists already (for quite some time). There's a beta Free software project (GNU licenced) called imgseek. Current version: 0.8.4. I haven't tried it, I don't know how good it is. But this screenshot looks impressive.
Why should I install more badly designed MS software then I have too?
You don't.
First of all, the.NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with. The reason Microsoft released so much crap over the years, is probably because all their best programmers were working on.NET.
Secondly, their exist free (as in free software) alternatives. Mono is the best-known one, an other is DotGNUPortable.NET. But they're not 100 % complete yet, so I don't know if this Paint.NET will work.
The trouble for Mozilla's ad campaign is that about 1,000 of the contributors didn't follow instructions in submitting their names. Now Davis is going through the list manually and contacting contributors who submitted Web addresses, company names, joke names and the like to clarify how they want to be listed in the ad.
Now I can understand the delay.
After all, would we really like to see Osama bin Laden support Firefox in the New York Times?
The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.
For the record...
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard. Call it "outdated" if you like but if it works, it works, right?
W3C's HTML validator finds in the current front page 164 errors. (I had to save the page locally on my hard disk, and validate the uploaded file. Trying to validate the URL http://slashdot.org/ had 403 Forbidden as a result.)
So, the current Slashdot is not in the "outdated" HTML 3.2 standard. There's no problem with an older HTML version, although I prefer XHTML. The problem is it is not valid HTML 3.2.
The Britannica's essays are signed and historically have included authors like Einstein and Freud.
Which is exactly why Wikipedia is often a better encyclopedia than Brittanica.
Experts or authorities in a field aren't always right. They are often conservative and have reservations with new theories, schools of thought and methodologies, even if these new theories aren't disproved yet (or turn out to be right).
Wikipedia's NPOV policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly. That doesn't mean a single unbiased, "objective", "authorative" point of view. It means that an article should represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct.
To reach that goal, the everybody-can-edit-and-is-encouraged to way is remarkebly effective, even though it is not perfect, as the experiment shows.
In the software universe, something similar to the Borg from "Star Trek" seems to be at work. It's called open source software distributed under an agreement known as General Public License (GPL).
If you recall, the Borg are "Star Trek" bad guys. They're basically evil bureaucrats with skin problems, who assimilate every species they come in contact with throughout the universe. Societies are wiped out. Individual thought and creativity are extinguished as individuals are absorbed into a collective.
Something similar could be said of GPL-based open source software.
Since Slashdot depicts Microsoft's Bill Gates as Borg (see the topic icons of this story above), I think this particular piece of FUD is rather interesting.
So I got out my ruler and measured the posters, and found them to be exactly 2 feet by 3 feet...
Here in (metric) Europe, the commonly used paper/poster size that comes closest is 59.4 cm by 84.1 cm.
Those numbers don't sound like round numbers in metric, do they?
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
Anybody know if there are any plans to adapt Life the Universe and Everything to the big screen? I always wondered what ultra-violent and infradead looked like...
You can listen to BBC Radio 4 live on the Internet, and you can listen to the last episode of every programme, which means you'll probably be able to listen to the first episode of the new series all week.
If you're in the United Kingdom, you can actually use your radio to listen to BBC Radio 4. 92 MHz or 95 MHz FM, or 198 kHz AM (LW).
Slashdot Mirror
- a cleaning powder
It is also- an ancient Greek king in Homer's Iliad. Well actually two:
- Ajax the lesser of Locrian Ajax, son of Oileus, king of Locris
- Ajax the Great or Telamonian Ajax, son of Telamon, king of Salamis
- a Dutch football (in the soccer sense) team of Amsterdam, already mentioned
- several ships of the Royal Navy
- as already mentioned, a place in Ontario, Canada, named after one ot these ships
- a character on the animated televion series Duckman
- a car (actually several models)
- several companies
- a Californian boiler company
- a Dutch fire security company.
- a buzzword for a combination of technologies, see this Slashdot story.
Given the enormous number of different things one name can denote, it should't be any wonder there are actually people making money finding (unused) trademark-names for products.- a cleaning powder
It is alsoRead the fucking article.
It's not that the Americans are doing it - it's just that the Americans are doing it with English books only, for now, without any garantee that they will do it with books in other languages later.
For now, Google partners with the New York public library and university libraries at Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Oxford.
As you probably know, Google is the Internet's primary search engine. This does give Google lots of power. So far, I don't have the feeling Google abused that power. Google says it has a "Don't be evil" policy.
When such a powerful site decides to give its users excepts from books from English libraries only, the danger of a unipolar worldview dominated by the English language and American culture is real.
The French National Library is no search engine. It does not want to compete with Google. But the French National Library has its own digitalisation project going on, and would like see those books in Google results when they are relevant, too, instead of only those of English-speaking libraries.
The more books from the more different countries and cultures are included in Google's results, the less Google's results can be considered subjective from a cultural point of view.
After all, neutrality is an important feature of search engines. Remember how much fuss Slashdot used to make of MSN Search's response to a Linux query?
On Linux, you can use the Apache module mod_mono .
It is available on the Mono project's download page.
It allows Apache to serve ASP.NET pages by proxying the requests to a slightly modified version of our XSP called mod-mono-server that is installed along with XSP.
It doesn't work on the Windows version of Apache yet, but work is in progress to make that work, too.
And
should rather be Yes, I did preview. I just did it blindly.Of course binary doesn't equal proprietary. Those are two completely different concepts.
PNG is a binary format. It isn't proprietary, though. And although I can't immediately find a text-based proprietary format, such formats are not impossible (although arguably easier to reverse-engineer than binary proprietary formats).
But if the XML is really such a problem, I suggest the simple solution. Compressing XML with a simple and open algorithm like gzip or bzip2, is the way to go. XML usually compresses very easily.
Well, if the PR department came up with the medical record analogy, they were doing a much better job than usual.
I like the analogy: enabling the customer to download music which can only be heard by means of software which prevents the music to be copied in order to protect the copyright holder's rights is analogous to enabling the doctor to mail medical records which can only be read by software which prevents the record to be forwarded in order to protect the patient's rights. For it has exactly the same flaws:
In short, I wouldn't mind if software asks This song is copyrighted and as far as I can tell you're not the copyright holder. Giving copies away might be illegal. Are you sure you want to proceed the copying? [Yes] [No] [Cancel] when I try to copy a marked song, just as I wouldn't mind software that asks There's a medical record attached. Forwarding it to non-autorised peoply might hurt the patient's privacy. Are you sure you want to proceed the forwarding? [Yes] [No]. But the functionality should still be there for the circumstances in which the action is justified.
Those who want to illegaly "crack" the content, will find a way, anyhow.
Imagine you're a photographer. Professional or hobbyist, I don't care. You have made thousands of pictures; they all are on your hard drive.
Imagine you're lazy. (Maybe you don't have to imagine that.) You don't want to describe your photos, you don't want to label them. The only metadata associated to your photos is date and time.
Imagine you're looking for a particular photo. You know where you'va taken it, you know what is on it, you can remember the subject, the color shades, etc. You just can't remember exactly when you took that picture. How do you search for it?
Well, you quickly make a drawing in which you try to (sort of) replicate colors and shapes. And you let your computer search for "similar" graphics.
Such software exists already (for quite some time). There's a beta Free software project (GNU licenced) called imgseek . Current version: 0.8.4. I haven't tried it, I don't know how good it is. But this screenshot looks impressive.
You don't.
First of all, the .NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with. The reason Microsoft released so much crap over the years, is probably because all their best programmers were working on .NET.
Secondly, their exist free (as in free software) alternatives. Mono is the best-known one, an other is DotGNU Portable.NET. But they're not 100 % complete yet, so I don't know if this Paint.NET will work.
Next, Coca-Cola will sue Pepsi Cola over the use of the word Cola.
I expected something more visionary in an article that tries to predict the future of Digital Audio.
I intended to suggest headphones that reduce unwanted ambient sounds by cancelling it out with destructive interference or something like it.
But, somewhat to my surprise, Wikipedia told me that Noise-cancelling headphones already exist.
So why haven't I heard of them? Are they disponible everywhere around the world? Are they too expensive? Are they effective?
Actually, it depends entirely on the politics of the movie studios (content companies).
Without content, no format can make it. No matter how cheap or technically superior the format may be.
To these content companies, price and quality might matter a bit. But there are other factors in their politics.
Now I can understand the delay.
After all, would we really like to see Osama bin Laden support Firefox in the New York Times?
Apart from standard/basic spreadsheet functionality, "Solver" is definately the most useful feature.
For those who don't know it: you ask the computer to compute which value a certain cell should have in order for another cell to have a certain value.
An interesting read.
The shape of the ship is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a shoe.
There are some GNOME bounties, one of which is worth US$ 2000, for those who implement some features integrating Gaim with GNOME.
W3C's HTML validator finds in the current front page 164 errors. (I had to save the page locally on my hard disk, and validate the uploaded file. Trying to validate the URL http://slashdot.org/ had 403 Forbidden as a result.)
So, the current Slashdot is not in the "outdated" HTML 3.2 standard. There's no problem with an older HTML version, although I prefer XHTML. The problem is it is not valid HTML 3.2.
A while ago, somebody already worked out how it should look like, i.e. what the XHTML output [view source] could/should be.
So, is this going to be implemented in Slashcode?
Which is exactly why Wikipedia is often a better encyclopedia than Brittanica.
Experts or authorities in a field aren't always right. They are often conservative and have reservations with new theories, schools of thought and methodologies, even if these new theories aren't disproved yet (or turn out to be right).
Wikipedia's NPOV policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly. That doesn't mean a single unbiased, "objective", "authorative" point of view. It means that an article should represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct.
To reach that goal, the everybody-can-edit-and-is-encouraged to way is remarkebly effective, even though it is not perfect, as the experiment shows.
A: Benedict adhemarvandamme@hotmail .com
Thanks!
Talking about robot-like behaviour... How about this spin?
Since Slashdot depicts Microsoft's Bill Gates as Borg (see the topic icons of this story above), I think this particular piece of FUD is rather interesting.
Here in (metric) Europe, the commonly used paper/poster size that comes closest is 59.4 cm by 84.1 cm.
Those numbers don't sound like round numbers in metric, do they?
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
There are, as far as I know, no plans so far to make other Hitchhiker's Guide movies besides *the* the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.
And the article mentioned how long the plans for that movie existed without ever getting past the planning stage: a decade.
Luckily, the project seems to be getting somewhere. The cast is known, and Slashdot even covered an interview that the screenwriter had with himself.
Still, that movie is far from ready yet. So don't get your hopes up about a sequel movie any time soon.
British Summer Time, which is UTC + 1.
You can listen to BBC Radio 4 live on the Internet, and you can listen to the last episode of every programme, which means you'll probably be able to listen to the first episode of the new series all week.
If you're in the United Kingdom, you can actually use your radio to listen to BBC Radio 4. 92 MHz or 95 MHz FM, or 198 kHz AM (LW).