=
(= x y) is true if and only x and y are numerically equal.
equal
As a rule of thumb, (equal x y) is true if their printed representations are the same (i.e. if they look the same when printed). Strictly, x and y are equal if and only if they are structurally isomorphic, but for present purposes, the rule of thumb is sufficient.
eq
(eq x y) is true if and only if they are the same object (in most cases, this means the same object in memory).
eql
(eql x y) is true if and only if they are either eq or they are numbers of the same type and value.
So what Microsoft is trying to patent is known in LISP as (not (eq a b)) for a long time already:(
Anybody remembers SDMI and their watermarking? It was touted as a solution for everything in the same way and failed miserably. Obviously MPAA does not learn from the mistakes of others and Philips goes where the money is (even though the stuff is doomed from start, somebody pays the research, no?).
Well, the problem is that it CAN be enabled - either by a stupid user or buggy application. We saw quite a few such hacks with security zones in MSIE, didn't we? Such as viruses or spyware lowering the security settings for MSIE as one of their first actions. Running ActiveX applets is also at user's discretion, albeit a bit easier and is it a good thing? I do not think so.
Essentially you are giving an unsuspecting user a rope to hang himself again and again with something like this - for the convenience of a developer:( Why to have all that elaborate scheme with managed code when you are blowing holes into it right away to accomodate insecure code.
Yeah, right - the same problem as with signed ActiveX - once a buffer overflow in the trusted code is found, your security is a fair game - the attacker has to only persuade e.g. your browser to load the buggy but trusted code. The managed languages like C# and Java were invented exactly with the purpose to prevent this kind of holes.
To me this looks like a similar problem as allowing running native code via ActiveX. Yeah, we have permissions, signing and what ever - how much does it take for a trusted but buggy ActiveX applet to be exploited?
Huge mistake, IMHO. And do not compare this to JNI - I am no Java expert, but AFAIK you simply cannot call JNI functions from something like web applet by design, whereas here it is on the discretion of the app developer.
Well, the problem is that the guy was notified but ignored it (or rather told the lawyers to get lost). Therefore, he cannot reasonably claim, that he wasn't aware of illegality of the linked files (and he didn't claim that).
I think that the morale of the story is that dealing in shady stuff is bad for your karma, even if it is not criminal act as such. You never know how it could be twisted and bent to get you in trouble. It finally hinges on the opinion of the court and that may not be in your favor.
Well, no. I have read the judgement and although I am not a lawyer, the interpretation is something like this:
1) The appelate court cleared the student, saying that linking to the files is not criminal act as such (i.e. not a direct copyright infringement). The court also threw out the 100 000 NOK fine imposed by the lower court.
2) BUT! The appelate court found the activity of the student as deplorable because he knew that the files were posted online illegaly. Therefore the court imposed a lower fine of 15000NOK (actually proposed by the defendant as the upper limit, based on the poor damage proving by the recording industry).
So, hyperlinks are not illegal, however be careful what you are linking to. If you know that the content is not legit, you are acting in bad faith and that counts as well if somebody sues you.
It is sort of King's Solomon decision - let's have both sides have something, because this was the first case of it's kind in Norway and the law is not clear. Similar cases were in Sweden and Danemark, the swedish case cleared the defendant, the danish one was convicted.
Well, this is easier said than done. You can try to do therapy with somebody, however it will have an effect if and only if he/she wants to change. Otherwise it is a waste of time and money.
Most people are in prisons not because they want, but because they were forcibly locked up there by state. That is not very conducive to rehabilitation programs, such activities are usually used only as an opportunity to get out of the cell.
IMHO, many people that are sent to prisons and other correctional facilities do not belong there at all. E.g. if you lock up a teen which got caught with a dose or two of drugs for the first time, that will certainly not help his/her future life prospects. Such kids should go to the rehabilitation program, not behind bars. That way you could avoid the problem of the therapy in prisons altogether.
Indeed, however how long do you think that it would take to notice and fix it ? The phishers are not likely to go after small companies, which are using services of such ISPs. They are going after banks, eBay, gambling sites and such - these are usually multihomed, with multiple redundant and load-balanced DNS servers. Such attack would be noticed immediately and probably limited in effect because of the redundancy of the service.
Sorry folks, but this is so overblown that it is incredible. Similar to the recent "Evil twin" story.
Does anybody really think that compromising a root DNS server will suddenly redirect customers of e.g. Citibank to a phishers site and it wouldn't be immediately noticed ? C'mon:
- DNS is distributed and any change in DNS takes a while to propagate (on the order of days). Moreover, more and more sites are switching for digitally signed updates to DNS, so bogus updates have no chance to go through.
- Do you really think that e.g. a bank or eBay would not notice that somebody hijacked their domain? The only think a potential phisher would achieve is to attract a very close attention to himself and very quickly at that.
More credible threat are tricks like changing the hosts file, however with that we are in the domain of common adware/spyware which hijacks the browsers on Windows routinely.
Finally, any bank worth my money does not use just a stupid username/password for authentication! Most European banks have as a standard feature a challenge/response mechanism (in addition to the username/password pair).
Some banks even go that far, that they issue you a smartcard with a pocket "calculator", which generates correct responses to the challenges from the bank. The smartcard is used as a seed for this and is protected with its own PIN that you have to enter before typing in the challenge code from the bank. The codes transmitted are usable just once, so they are completely useless to the phisher.
Oh the mindless scaremongering...
Do you know that there are KVM switches which have ethernet/IP access ? I.e. you do not have to physically sit there with keyboard and monitor and work from the comfort of your desktop instead. E.g. Tron
Another good solution are the built-in consoles - 1U tall, you can pull it out as a drawer from the rack and open it as a laptop. It has a full size keyboard, some pointing device (trackball or trackpad) and a built-in LCD. Like this for example: rack console kit
So, no need to lug a laptop around. Not to mention that pro gear has a serial console capability (yes, PCs too, not only high-end Unix stuff), which allow you to see even the booting process and change the BIOS settings. Connecting this to a standard terminal server is a no-brainer.
Mindstorms do not work with IRDA protocols, they use something more like a conventional remote control. No chance to use that with IRDA device - different modulation, different carrier, completely different cirquitry. Even the photodiodes and LEDs are usually different for IRDA and remote controls.
Moreover, I just wonder why not to release a Palm with Linux OS outright ? Sharp has shown that it can be done and that it works fine (unless you screw it up with non-existent marketing and support). Who is going to develop for clunky PalmOS APIs, where every semi-serious piece of code has to be a workaround for a cludge around a bug that was supposed to be patch for something from the original PalmPilot ? That probably explains why so many companies are jumping ship to WinCE devices nowadays.
They did something similar with OS5 and it was such a pain in the back to develop for that you still have very few apps actually using the capabilities of the hardware to the full potential. Mainly because of the concept of "armlets" which are needed to run any ARM native code on OS5 - yes, you got it right - you are still running Dragonball code in OS5, even if the app needs it to just launch one giant armlet.
The assertion that development tools are free is a joke - yeah, you get free tools, however last time I checked, e.g. POSE (Palm emulator) still didn't support the various extensions on the newer Palms and didn't emulate the ARM code at all. And without emulator, the development is pretty much stillborn - how are you going to debug your application, unless you have expensive HW debugger from Palm ?
I hope that they keep only the GUI which was a bit clunky to use from a developer point of view but tuned for small screens and toss the internals so that the developers will write new code for the Linux kernel natively. However, since they want to make money off licensing that PalmOS layer, this is most likely not going to happen - PalmOS would slowly die in such case.
Sorry Palm, but no more PalmOS HW for me unless you get your act together and release something sensible - supporting standard HW (compact flash, bluetooth anybody ?), with decent networking (not that expensive crashing piece of crap in Tungten C) and for reasonable price.
What a load of bull... Sorry folks, but many people here either do not know what they are talking about (standard Slashdot) or are just simply wrong.
Steam as spyware - you can refuse participation in the survey and no data are collected. Everything is disclosed to you in cca three lines legible to everybody (unless you are illiterate). How this qualifies as spyware is a mystery to me. Why was the parent modded as "interesting" ??
Expiration, disabling the game and such - actually, if you want to just play the single player game (there is no multiplayer, BTW, just CounterStrike: Source bundled), you need to activate the game once and then do not need to connect to Steam. You can play in "offline" mode without problem. So, even if Valve goes under, you can still play.
For CounterStrike that's another matter, the strict checks are necessary evil to help stem the rampant cheating known from the older version.
No-CD cracks - well, that would be interesting. I have a DVD edition of the game and to have to insert it each time is annoying (especially since it installed cca 4GB os stuff on disk already). I guess a No-CD update will be released later.
So stop screaming "rip-off", nobody forced you to buy the game. The Steam requirements were known for a long time and I am really not sorry at all for the freeloaders. I really do not get why many people seems to think that they are entitled to play the game without paying for it.
Actually/bin/sh is *not* stripped down - there wasn't anything to begin with! The shell is so bare-bones because it is the original Bourne shell (+- some fixes). There was no readline, not tab completion, not even proper line editting at the time when the shell was created.
You know what ? Your government will probably do two things:
- since this is a corporate welfare program for Boeing, Raytheon etc. it will be defended as useful, because it creates jobs
- if there is nobody to fire the missiles to be shot down, Pentagon invents some other super expensive program that the lasers will have to keep watch upon, because it's reliability will be even worse - what if some super-duper ICBM fired itself and threatened to blow up DC ? We need a laser to stop it, of course !
I can only agree with this. I have C760 Zaurus (more than one year old model!) and the PocketPC world is just now catching up with the display resolution, memory and hardware in general. And still no machines with keyboards in sight.
Combined with piss-poor software like Pocket Outlook unable to use SSL (still!), no proper IMAP support and extremely expensive software ($50 USD for a calculator which costs at most $20 for Palm and is free for Zaurus?) it is really no match. Moreover, if you want a decent keyboard, no dice. Get an external one, which will stop working when the next device is out, because of different connectors or absent drivers.
For example Ko/Pi (port of excellent Korganizer to Zaurus) is by far the best PIM tool you can have on any PDA and it is free (both as beer and freedom) to boot. I used the DateBk 5.x from Pimlico on Palm, that was decent, but not as good. The standard Pocket Outlook does not even come close to this. Moreover, the file format is trivial to synchronize and standard (vCalendar), so no crazy 3rdparty apps are needed for this.
If Sharp shipped their machines with these applications pre-installed instead of the stock stuff (which is decent, however made for Japanese market and doesn't work so well for Europeans or Americans) and you didn't have to spend few hours setting the thing up from command line (yep,/bin/bash on PDA...), it would take the high end market by storm. Unfortunately their marketing outside Japan was like throwing out a dead fish - "here you have it, do whatever you want with it..."
And Palm - I started as a Handspring user, I still have my Visor Deluxe (and it works!). Great little machine. Then I had a Sony Clie (expensive mistake) and Tungsten C (even more expensive lemon). Finally I got the Zaurus and I never looked back.
In the Palm OS world innovation was only about incompatibility (Palm OS 4.x, 5.x...), proprietary extensions (hello, Sony ?), crashes (WiFi on Tungsten C) and basically turning from bad to worse with each model - for example Tungsten T was in metal case but high-end Tungsten C was completely in plastic case, which was losing the paint just by rubbing it by your fingers. Moreover, general lack of periferals, extremely poor networking abilities and general fragility of PalmOS killed it for me.
So if you are looking for a great PDA, get one of the Zaurus models. There are companies importing them from Japan and localizing them into English for you. You will definitelly not regret it.
We big. Our army the largest. We not need anybody.
C'mon, please... With this logic I wonder why the US is such a staunch member of e.g. WIPO, World Bank, UN and signatory of many other treaties (e.g. Geneva convention, although your old/new administration would probably prefer not to be...)
The treaties are not there just to profit from them, they impose some obligations as well. You cannot have one and not the other - i.e. you have to trade some part of your super duper sovereignity for the benefits - in this case for cleaner environment.
I am taking offense with this comment. I am not American, neither H-1B visa holder and with such xenophobic attitude I will definitely not look for one.
Did you realize that those failures you described are first of all management failures rushing far from mature product to the market ? And the management is rarely consisting of H-1B visa holders, just the opposite - they are all Americans.
I am from the former Eastern Bloc and I was working for an outsourcing company for a while (for a German partner). The amounts of craptacular code written by supposedly superior Western programmers (and American too - one of the largest US jeans makers is using our software to design and cut jeans) were something incredible. So stop this elitist and xenophobic bullshit, please.
If you are unable to compete, either on salary or more like on quality terms, well, tough for you. Either adapt or die. It is the same for us, because the Indians and Chinese have even lower salaries than former Easterners. However, we are not whining and crying in a corner that those H-1Bs took our jobs, we are trying to outcompete them on things they cannot do. Try to do the same instead of this crap, OK ? Capitalism works both ways, you know.
Actually a lot better (faster and more accurate) than the older Sphinx2 engine which was written in *gasp* C!
Which probably has zero to do with its speed. But, I will get back to why being java is dumb.
It has a lot do with C, in fact. I had the "pleasure" to modify the original Sphinx2 engine, it was written in quite old C in very messy style, pointers pointing everywhere. Really ugly stuff. Java doesn't make it so easy to make such mess.
You don't make any sense at all. Writing something in Java does not make it bug free. We know for a fact that Java is bloated and generally slow(er) when compared to well writen C or C++ code. You climbed a pole and left a note to be sure we cut the pole down.
Dare to give some solid numbers ? Or is it just general handwawing in the sense "everybody knows that...". There was an article on Slashdot not so long time ago proving just the opposite. Sphinx is *not* a GUI application with the horrible SWING library. It is intended to be used as a server, not so much for embedding - again you do not know what you are talking about. If you tried the engine and were familiar with the task, you will not talk about "using" it in the sense of some library you want to link with. It is just not designed that way - try to embed something that loads data in hundreds of megabytes (and not because of Java - the C version was the same, it is the fundamental way how it works).
The biggest reason to write it in C (ideally) or C++ is so that it can actually be used. No one wants to have to use a JVM in their C, C++, Pascal, Python, Perl, etc., project to use this code. In effect, they greatly reduced the value of this package to world by coding it in Java. If they had coded it in C++ or especially C, just about every language, including Java, would benefit. Not to mention, performance would probably be better and there is little doubt, the memory footprint would be much, much, much smaller.
Nonsense. Why many games use embedded scripting engines ? Perl, Python, Guille, Lisp even Java (!!!) are used in this way, because the to code high-level algorithms (think AI) in C/C++ is pain. It just makes sense and people do not have problems with embedding VMs. Almost all recent games include some kind of scripting language (and VM).
And again, you obviously do not know what are you talking about - Sphinx is intended as background (server) task, not a library. You can talk to it using C/C++/whatever code via socket and it is platform independent to boot. And speed is really not an issue, you should test/profile it before you make over-general statements about something having to be slow just because it is Java (or Lisp or whatever high-level language). If you need a small, embeddable speech rec. engine, Sphinx is not for you. If you need it for what it was intended for, Java is completely irrelevant or even an advantage (think platform independence - these things are deployed not only on Linux/Windows desktops).
I see, so fat people should go out of their way to make themselves fatter. After all, they are already fat. That makes no sense at all.
No, it is about that, that I am not going to swim over Atlantic just because it is cool, I will rather take a boat or a plane. The size of the JVM is negligible compared to the data the engine processes. The advantage of writing it in Java are simply larger than saving 10MB of memory used , when the running engine routinely needs 256MB+ of heap for the data.
Well, I don't know about all that, but the simple facts and common sense seem to be pushing you hard, from your seemingly illogical position.
If you tried to measure and familiarize yourself with technology you are bashing first, then the "illogical" position would be perfectly understandable. That is also common sense.
Hello, did actually any of you Java bashers actually try the Sphinx4 engine ? I tried it and it is pretty good. Actually a lot better (faster and more accurate) than the older Sphinx2 engine which was written in *gasp* C! Or are we bashing a project just because it is written in "slow and bloated" Java ?
I think some people should open their eyes, otherwise the world will leave you behind while you are happily consoling each other how Java is slow and unusable. Wake up, folks!
To people which argument about hand writing C and assembly - well, you obviously didn't try to implement any of the algorithms (like hidden Markov models or the statistical searches) used in speech recognition. It is pain in the butt to do it even in Java, but at least you do not have the pointer mess you would have in C/C++. The engine has a good performance already, I am not sure what you would gain by rewriting it, except of bugs (the older Sphinx2 was for sure buggy as hell).
Something about the memory footprint. Java can have a large memory footprint, however with speech recognition, you will always have it. Just the accoustic models for one language can be easily in the order of several hundreds of megabytes. Memory footprint of Java is completely irrelevant here.
And before somebody compares Sphinx with speech "recognition" on you mobile phone or in your car - be aware, that you are comparing scateboard with a Concorde here. Sphinx family of engines are intended for recognition of continuous, large vocabuly speech and to be speaker independent. Your phone/car is small vocabulary, single words and speaker dependent - i.e. completely different problem. You cannot think about Sphinx as something "to have on some device". It is more intended to act as a speech recognition server on a dedicated machine e.g. for a large call center or ticket reservation system. I guess it could be used also in KDE for the KAccessibility purposes, but it is a bit heavy for that (especially with the large datasets).
So next time, before you start spouting BS about Java and applications written in it, at least check the facts. People will not see you as a complete idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
From Lisp primer:
= (= x y) is true if and only x and y are numerically equal.
equal As a rule of thumb, (equal x y) is true if their printed representations are the same (i.e. if they look the same when printed). Strictly, x and y are equal if and only if they are structurally isomorphic, but for present purposes, the rule of thumb is sufficient.
eq (eq x y) is true if and only if they are the same object (in most cases, this means the same object in memory).
eql (eql x y) is true if and only if they are either eq or they are numbers of the same type and value.
So what Microsoft is trying to patent is known in LISP as (not (eq a b)) for a long time already :(
Anybody remembers SDMI and their watermarking? It was touted as a solution for everything in the same way and failed miserably. Obviously MPAA does not learn from the mistakes of others and Philips goes where the money is (even though the stuff is doomed from start, somebody pays the research, no?).
Essentially you are giving an unsuspecting user a rope to hang himself again and again with something like this - for the convenience of a developer :( Why to have all that elaborate scheme with managed code when you are blowing holes into it right away to accomodate insecure code.
To me this looks like a similar problem as allowing running native code via ActiveX. Yeah, we have permissions, signing and what ever - how much does it take for a trusted but buggy ActiveX applet to be exploited?
Huge mistake, IMHO. And do not compare this to JNI - I am no Java expert, but AFAIK you simply cannot call JNI functions from something like web applet by design, whereas here it is on the discretion of the app developer.
I think that the morale of the story is that dealing in shady stuff is bad for your karma, even if it is not criminal act as such. You never know how it could be twisted and bent to get you in trouble. It finally hinges on the opinion of the court and that may not be in your favor.
1) The appelate court cleared the student, saying that linking to the files is not criminal act as such (i.e. not a direct copyright infringement). The court also threw out the 100 000 NOK fine imposed by the lower court.
2) BUT! The appelate court found the activity of the student as deplorable because he knew that the files were posted online illegaly. Therefore the court imposed a lower fine of 15000NOK (actually proposed by the defendant as the upper limit, based on the poor damage proving by the recording industry).
So, hyperlinks are not illegal, however be careful what you are linking to. If you know that the content is not legit, you are acting in bad faith and that counts as well if somebody sues you.
It is sort of King's Solomon decision - let's have both sides have something, because this was the first case of it's kind in Norway and the law is not clear. Similar cases were in Sweden and Danemark, the swedish case cleared the defendant, the danish one was convicted.
Most people are in prisons not because they want, but because they were forcibly locked up there by state. That is not very conducive to rehabilitation programs, such activities are usually used only as an opportunity to get out of the cell.
IMHO, many people that are sent to prisons and other correctional facilities do not belong there at all. E.g. if you lock up a teen which got caught with a dose or two of drugs for the first time, that will certainly not help his/her future life prospects. Such kids should go to the rehabilitation program, not behind bars. That way you could avoid the problem of the therapy in prisons altogether.
Indeed, however how long do you think that it would take to notice and fix it ? The phishers are not likely to go after small companies, which are using services of such ISPs. They are going after banks, eBay, gambling sites and such - these are usually multihomed, with multiple redundant and load-balanced DNS servers. Such attack would be noticed immediately and probably limited in effect because of the redundancy of the service.
Does anybody really think that compromising a root DNS server will suddenly redirect customers of e.g. Citibank to a phishers site and it wouldn't be immediately noticed ? C'mon:
- DNS is distributed and any change in DNS takes a while to propagate (on the order of days). Moreover, more and more sites are switching for digitally signed updates to DNS, so bogus updates have no chance to go through.
- Do you really think that e.g. a bank or eBay would not notice that somebody hijacked their domain? The only think a potential phisher would achieve is to attract a very close attention to himself and very quickly at that.
More credible threat are tricks like changing the hosts file, however with that we are in the domain of common adware/spyware which hijacks the browsers on Windows routinely.
Finally, any bank worth my money does not use just a stupid username/password for authentication! Most European banks have as a standard feature a challenge/response mechanism (in addition to the username/password pair).
Some banks even go that far, that they issue you a smartcard with a pocket "calculator", which generates correct responses to the challenges from the bank. The smartcard is used as a seed for this and is protected with its own PIN that you have to enter before typing in the challenge code from the bank. The codes transmitted are usable just once, so they are completely useless to the phisher. Oh the mindless scaremongering ...
Another good solution are the built-in consoles - 1U tall, you can pull it out as a drawer from the rack and open it as a laptop. It has a full size keyboard, some pointing device (trackball or trackpad) and a built-in LCD. Like this for example: rack console kit
So, no need to lug a laptop around. Not to mention that pro gear has a serial console capability (yes, PCs too, not only high-end Unix stuff), which allow you to see even the booting process and change the BIOS settings. Connecting this to a standard terminal server is a no-brainer.
Mindstorms do not work with IRDA protocols, they use something more like a conventional remote control. No chance to use that with IRDA device - different modulation, different carrier, completely different cirquitry. Even the photodiodes and LEDs are usually different for IRDA and remote controls.
Works, free, nice
Moreover, I just wonder why not to release a Palm with Linux OS outright ? Sharp has shown that it can be done and that it works fine (unless you screw it up with non-existent marketing and support). Who is going to develop for clunky PalmOS APIs, where every semi-serious piece of code has to be a workaround for a cludge around a bug that was supposed to be patch for something from the original PalmPilot ? That probably explains why so many companies are jumping ship to WinCE devices nowadays.
They did something similar with OS5 and it was such a pain in the back to develop for that you still have very few apps actually using the capabilities of the hardware to the full potential. Mainly because of the concept of "armlets" which are needed to run any ARM native code on OS5 - yes, you got it right - you are still running Dragonball code in OS5, even if the app needs it to just launch one giant armlet.
The assertion that development tools are free is a joke - yeah, you get free tools, however last time I checked, e.g. POSE (Palm emulator) still didn't support the various extensions on the newer Palms and didn't emulate the ARM code at all. And without emulator, the development is pretty much stillborn - how are you going to debug your application, unless you have expensive HW debugger from Palm ?
I hope that they keep only the GUI which was a bit clunky to use from a developer point of view but tuned for small screens and toss the internals so that the developers will write new code for the Linux kernel natively. However, since they want to make money off licensing that PalmOS layer, this is most likely not going to happen - PalmOS would slowly die in such case.
Sorry Palm, but no more PalmOS HW for me unless you get your act together and release something sensible - supporting standard HW (compact flash, bluetooth anybody ?), with decent networking (not that expensive crashing piece of crap in Tungten C) and for reasonable price.
Steam as spyware - you can refuse participation in the survey and no data are collected. Everything is disclosed to you in cca three lines legible to everybody (unless you are illiterate). How this qualifies as spyware is a mystery to me. Why was the parent modded as "interesting" ??
Expiration, disabling the game and such - actually, if you want to just play the single player game (there is no multiplayer, BTW, just CounterStrike: Source bundled), you need to activate the game once and then do not need to connect to Steam. You can play in "offline" mode without problem. So, even if Valve goes under, you can still play.
For CounterStrike that's another matter, the strict checks are necessary evil to help stem the rampant cheating known from the older version.
No-CD cracks - well, that would be interesting. I have a DVD edition of the game and to have to insert it each time is annoying (especially since it installed cca 4GB os stuff on disk already). I guess a No-CD update will be released later.
So stop screaming "rip-off", nobody forced you to buy the game. The Steam requirements were known for a long time and I am really not sorry at all for the freeloaders. I really do not get why many people seems to think that they are entitled to play the game without paying for it.
Actually /bin/sh is *not* stripped down - there wasn't anything to begin with! The shell is so bare-bones because it is the original Bourne shell (+- some fixes). There was no readline, not tab completion, not even proper line editting at the time when the shell was created.
- since this is a corporate welfare program for Boeing, Raytheon etc. it will be defended as useful, because it creates jobs
- if there is nobody to fire the missiles to be shot down, Pentagon invents some other super expensive program that the lasers will have to keep watch upon, because it's reliability will be even worse - what if some super-duper ICBM fired itself and threatened to blow up DC ? We need a laser to stop it, of course !
Mindboggling ...
Combined with piss-poor software like Pocket Outlook unable to use SSL (still!), no proper IMAP support and extremely expensive software ($50 USD for a calculator which costs at most $20 for Palm and is free for Zaurus?) it is really no match. Moreover, if you want a decent keyboard, no dice. Get an external one, which will stop working when the next device is out, because of different connectors or absent drivers.
For example Ko/Pi (port of excellent Korganizer to Zaurus) is by far the best PIM tool you can have on any PDA and it is free (both as beer and freedom) to boot. I used the DateBk 5.x from Pimlico on Palm, that was decent, but not as good. The standard Pocket Outlook does not even come close to this. Moreover, the file format is trivial to synchronize and standard (vCalendar), so no crazy 3rdparty apps are needed for this.
If Sharp shipped their machines with these applications pre-installed instead of the stock stuff (which is decent, however made for Japanese market and doesn't work so well for Europeans or Americans) and you didn't have to spend few hours setting the thing up from command line (yep, /bin/bash on PDA ...), it would take the high end market by storm. Unfortunately their marketing outside Japan was like throwing out a dead fish - "here you have it, do whatever you want with it ..."
And Palm - I started as a Handspring user, I still have my Visor Deluxe (and it works!). Great little machine. Then I had a Sony Clie (expensive mistake) and Tungsten C (even more expensive lemon). Finally I got the Zaurus and I never looked back.
In the Palm OS world innovation was only about incompatibility (Palm OS 4.x, 5.x ...), proprietary extensions (hello, Sony ?), crashes (WiFi on Tungsten C) and basically turning from bad to worse with each model - for example Tungsten T was in metal case but high-end Tungsten C was completely in plastic case, which was losing the paint just by rubbing it by your fingers. Moreover, general lack of periferals, extremely poor networking abilities and general fragility of PalmOS killed it for me.
So if you are looking for a great PDA, get one of the Zaurus models. There are companies importing them from Japan and localizing them into English for you. You will definitelly not regret it.
C'mon, please ... With this logic I wonder why the US is such a staunch member of e.g. WIPO, World Bank, UN and signatory of many other treaties (e.g. Geneva convention, although your old/new administration would probably prefer not to be ...)
The treaties are not there just to profit from them, they impose some obligations as well. You cannot have one and not the other - i.e. you have to trade some part of your super duper sovereignity for the benefits - in this case for cleaner environment.
Argh, borked the link. It should be http://vrlab.epfl.ch/Projects/lifeplus.html
Jan
BTW, Lifeplus is finished already, check out the other projects on our web site.
Regards,
Jan
Did you realize that those failures you described are first of all management failures rushing far from mature product to the market ? And the management is rarely consisting of H-1B visa holders, just the opposite - they are all Americans.
I am from the former Eastern Bloc and I was working for an outsourcing company for a while (for a German partner). The amounts of craptacular code written by supposedly superior Western programmers (and American too - one of the largest US jeans makers is using our software to design and cut jeans) were something incredible. So stop this elitist and xenophobic bullshit, please.
If you are unable to compete, either on salary or more like on quality terms, well, tough for you. Either adapt or die. It is the same for us, because the Indians and Chinese have even lower salaries than former Easterners. However, we are not whining and crying in a corner that those H-1Bs took our jobs, we are trying to outcompete them on things they cannot do. Try to do the same instead of this crap, OK ? Capitalism works both ways, you know.
Regards, jan
And again, you obviously do not know what are you talking about - Sphinx is intended as background (server) task, not a library. You can talk to it using C/C++/whatever code via socket and it is platform independent to boot. And speed is really not an issue, you should test/profile it before you make over-general statements about something having to be slow just because it is Java (or Lisp or whatever high-level language). If you need a small, embeddable speech rec. engine, Sphinx is not for you. If you need it for what it was intended for, Java is completely irrelevant or even an advantage (think platform independence - these things are deployed not only on Linux/Windows desktops).
No, it is about that, that I am not going to swim over Atlantic just because it is cool, I will rather take a boat or a plane. The size of the JVM is negligible compared to the data the engine processes. The advantage of writing it in Java are simply larger than saving 10MB of memory used , when the running engine routinely needs 256MB+ of heap for the data. If you tried to measure and familiarize yourself with technology you are bashing first, then the "illogical" position would be perfectly understandable. That is also common sense.I think some people should open their eyes, otherwise the world will leave you behind while you are happily consoling each other how Java is slow and unusable. Wake up, folks!
To people which argument about hand writing C and assembly - well, you obviously didn't try to implement any of the algorithms (like hidden Markov models or the statistical searches) used in speech recognition. It is pain in the butt to do it even in Java, but at least you do not have the pointer mess you would have in C/C++. The engine has a good performance already, I am not sure what you would gain by rewriting it, except of bugs (the older Sphinx2 was for sure buggy as hell).
Something about the memory footprint. Java can have a large memory footprint, however with speech recognition, you will always have it. Just the accoustic models for one language can be easily in the order of several hundreds of megabytes. Memory footprint of Java is completely irrelevant here.
And before somebody compares Sphinx with speech "recognition" on you mobile phone or in your car - be aware, that you are comparing scateboard with a Concorde here. Sphinx family of engines are intended for recognition of continuous, large vocabuly speech and to be speaker independent. Your phone/car is small vocabulary, single words and speaker dependent - i.e. completely different problem. You cannot think about Sphinx as something "to have on some device". It is more intended to act as a speech recognition server on a dedicated machine e.g. for a large call center or ticket reservation system. I guess it could be used also in KDE for the KAccessibility purposes, but it is a bit heavy for that (especially with the large datasets).
So next time, before you start spouting BS about Java and applications written in it, at least check the facts. People will not see you as a complete idiot.
Well, I think that they had shown you what they are willing to pay for your editor, not Home Site Builder. That's a big difference.