I have worked on language technology tools, and wordnet is slightly helpful but it requires a *great* deal more work to make it a useful proofing tool. If you can find an army of computational linguists to work cheaply then maybe...
Australian Broadcasting Commission started repeating the entire series (at least extant episodes) last year at the traditional screening time of 6pm, M-Th. We've just gotten up to the first of the Jon Pertwee stories.
He was in an episode of The League of Gentlemen, if that counts.
Full listing here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001172/
Eccelston is 3 months younger than the actual show. Dr Who started 11/63, he's born 2/64.
eBay's feedback system is pretty effective. A combintation of eBay feedback and how the seller represents the goods can really help you determine how legit the seller is.
For feedback under a thousand items I don't pay this much attention any more. I see some dealers in books floating items way under value and then coming in with a scam bid at the last minute to rescue the item from being sold too low. The item gets relisted a week or so later, and the seller gets fabulous feedback from the fake buyer. Is eBay interested? Of course not?
Yep. I've reported bootleg Mp3 CDs from Russia that contain every album by particular artists (that I collect). eBay's "Safe Harbor" indicate they are not interested in reports from anyone else except the owner of the copyright material.
Those items alone blow eBay's figures of only "2000" fraudulent items into the stratosphere.
You lose a lot of credibility by misspelling "grammar" everywhere:-). Obviously you haven't used the Office grammar checker in a long time either as you miss a lot of the features. It sounds like you're using the pre-Microsoft version they used to license from a third party.
I am very familiar with wordnet, but it's not something that can be easily used by most casual thesaurus users.
The proofing tools CD also gives you a Dutch grammar-checker, thesaurus, hyphenator and some other tools. Most of these costs far more to develop than a spell-checker.
Contrary to popular opinion, a spell-checker involves much more than a standard spelling list. You will also need either/both language model tools like a stemmer or agglutinator, OR a list of strings that includes every derivative form of a word (plurals, tenses, and other constructions). The spell-checking code also has to handle many special cases of text and punctuation, and then it has to have suitable heuristics for determining suggestions based on keyboard layouts and common keying errors. Good spell-checkers also deal with high frequency names as well. They won't be on your government lists.
The code for every spell-checker language is different, and then you have all the other tools with independent code. Admittedly you could write a very bare-bones white-space delimited spell-checker but that gets you very little feature-wise, and still requires an enormous word list.
Of course if say the Dutch proofing tools were included with English Office out of the box (requiring another CD to fit the overflow) then every non-Dutch user would ascribe that to Microsoft "bloat".
However if you can find a set of third party tools to do the job and it's cheaper then that's great! Not many languages have a range of affordable offerings.
Microsoft pays thousands of contractors all over the world to do translation, and to supply language tools in dozens of languages.
Here's the thing: the contractors are often NOT VERY GOOD. They either do poor translations, or they (deliberately?) incorporate sexist/racist content in their work. How do you check this? Well you try to find more people who are competent in the English source technical material and in the other language. The pool of such people is not great. Do I hear protests? Sorry but really there are a lot of translators who just don't cut it because they are not technically qualified.
In some countries the only pool of people available for such translation work for government/education or in the media. They are probably the same people used for OSS projects.
It's all very well to think of Microsoft as an amorphous entity with an infinite supply of human resources in all of these languages, but realistically no company, no government has this.
All the spell-checkers in Office (except English) are sourced from 3rd party companies, mostly based in Europe. In fact, the Belgian(?) company Lernout & Hauspie was the source for many of the European language proofing tools.
The Microsoft Proofing Tools bundle is extremely cheap for what you get. Other companies charge more for badly executed spell-checkers than Microsoft does for proofing tools (spelling, grammar, thesaurus, word breakers, speech engines, handwriting recognizers, hyphenators etc) in dozens of languages.
Do you think these things are cheap to produce? EVERY language has to be handled uniquely, so that means many experts in EVERY different language are involved. It's not cheaper to produce tools for small-population languages 0 it's more expensive as the resources are more limited.
Most of the English-speaking countries of the world use UK English spellings. Consider UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong,...
If only the same effort were put into educating users about incredibly subtle technical issues as went into castigating Microsoft for trying to put out a product that is simple enough for them to use... I know we all love being martyrs by spending all our free time helping neighbours, colleaguqes, family, acquaintances set up computers, and we'd really like to extend that to giving them options to change their shell, IP stack, media player etc at a whim. Wouldn't life be beautiful if we could all just do that? No time for wars, just endless whining about configuration options.
Have you seen the shit that OEMs install on computers? They whine from dawn to dusk about the right to do this and then put absolute crap all over the hard drive, start menu etc: software with poor user interfaces, bugs galore. Let the OEMs install Real and QT on the machines they sell but FOR ONCE they should support this software. So much software is supposed to be supported by OEMs but when you call them, they attempt to weasel out of by saying it's someone else's problem (usually Microsoft).
Give me a break.
And if the US is allowed to hold non-US citizens under retrospective laws, why is it so reluctant to (a) participate in a global criminal court; or (b) allow extradition of US citizens to foreign military courts for grievous cases of friendly fire (thinking back to first Gulf war).
Surely murder and manslaughter are crimes in US territories too?
I'd rather put more work into MusicXML rather than damn it from the outset. The limitations in Finale (and Sibelius) plus versioning problems means there is limited appeal for storing music descriptions thus.
Remember also that MIDI is not designed as a notation format and that programs reading from it generally have to supply rests etc by interpolation/guesswork. So in some respects MusicXML might be considered "less lean" than MIDI, but the result is an unambiguous rendering of the composer's intent.
Including Real Networks products in Windows would break the European Union (or member states)laws for privacy. So either they allow that to go unchallenged or they force Real to release a player that is not full of spyware and ads.
As someone pointed out, Bilbo in The Hobbit is about the same age as Frodo in LoTR, so you'd want someone who looks about as old as Elijah Wood. Of course, for marketing demographics and slash-writers, with no Aragorn stubble or fey Legolas, you'll want the major character to have more sex-appeal than a heavily made-up Ian Holm.
The only clear reason for an operating system and productivity company to make a video codec is as a means to tie consumers into their technology.
If Microsoft believes their codec is more efficient, then there are benefits down the line for more efficient operation on different platforms.
As for the other comments, please understand the distinction between a codec (that has been submitted to a standards body) and a player. Your comment is confused rather than insightful.
Eliza: Why is the endless game of seeing how many different ways you could type a sentence before the computer realized what you were talking about, your favorite part? Does your mother feel the same way?
However, it disconcerts me that they are also applying for a patent in this area instead of engaging the community through a consortium-like committee
I think other companies' rush to the patent office before rushing to raid Microsoft's cash-coffers has demonstrated to Microsoft that it cannot afford to do anything else but follow the same route. As a public company I am sure that its shareholders would question why Microsoft did *not* seek patent-protection for any new work (regardless of actual merit).
Consortium-like committees in this space tend to fall into two camps:
1) if it's dull throw the problem over to Microsoft completely (e.g. the TWAIN committee, so named because it never met)
2) if it's new and cool, they hate any input from Microsoft.
Now if MS were to include a competing format say, Quicktime or RealVideo in their OS, OR, make the wma format open
Do you really think either Apple or Real Networks would want Microsoft to have their formsts into Windows? They might ask for a royalty (which would be passed onto every Windows purchaser) or they might prefer that you download their really annoying players which bug you for upgrades or with advertisements EVERY SINGLE TIME you play something.
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I have worked on language technology tools, and wordnet is slightly helpful but it requires a *great* deal more work to make it a useful proofing tool. If you can find an army of computational linguists to work cheaply then maybe...
Australian Broadcasting Commission started repeating the entire series (at least extant episodes) last year at the traditional screening time of 6pm, M-Th. We've just gotten up to the first of the Jon Pertwee stories.
He was in an episode of The League of Gentlemen, if that counts. Full listing here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001172/ Eccelston is 3 months younger than the actual show. Dr Who started 11/63, he's born 2/64.
eBay's feedback system is pretty effective. A combintation of eBay feedback and how the seller represents the goods can really help you determine how legit the seller is.
For feedback under a thousand items I don't pay this much attention any more. I see some dealers in books floating items way under value and then coming in with a scam bid at the last minute to rescue the item from being sold too low. The item gets relisted a week or so later, and the seller gets fabulous feedback from the fake buyer. Is eBay interested? Of course not?
Yep. I've reported bootleg Mp3 CDs from Russia that contain every album by particular artists (that I collect). eBay's "Safe Harbor" indicate they are not interested in reports from anyone else except the owner of the copyright material. Those items alone blow eBay's figures of only "2000" fraudulent items into the stratosphere.
You lose a lot of credibility by misspelling "grammar" everywhere :-). Obviously you haven't used the Office grammar checker in a long time either as you miss a lot of the features. It sounds like you're using the pre-Microsoft version they used to license from a third party.
I am very familiar with wordnet, but it's not something that can be easily used by most casual thesaurus users.
The proofing tools CD also gives you a Dutch grammar-checker, thesaurus, hyphenator and some other tools. Most of these costs far more to develop than a spell-checker.
Contrary to popular opinion, a spell-checker involves much more than a standard spelling list. You will also need either/both language model tools like a stemmer or agglutinator, OR a list of strings that includes every derivative form of a word (plurals, tenses, and other constructions). The spell-checking code also has to handle many special cases of text and punctuation, and then it has to have suitable heuristics for determining suggestions based on keyboard layouts and common keying errors. Good spell-checkers also deal with high frequency names as well. They won't be on your government lists.
The code for every spell-checker language is different, and then you have all the other tools with independent code. Admittedly you could write a very bare-bones white-space delimited spell-checker but that gets you very little feature-wise, and still requires an enormous word list.
Of course if say the Dutch proofing tools were included with English Office out of the box (requiring another CD to fit the overflow) then every non-Dutch user would ascribe that to Microsoft "bloat".
However if you can find a set of third party tools to do the job and it's cheaper then that's great! Not many languages have a range of affordable offerings.
Microsoft pays thousands of contractors all over the world to do translation, and to supply language tools in dozens of languages.
Here's the thing: the contractors are often NOT VERY GOOD. They either do poor translations, or they (deliberately?) incorporate sexist/racist content in their work. How do you check this? Well you try to find more people who are competent in the English source technical material and in the other language. The pool of such people is not great. Do I hear protests? Sorry but really there are a lot of translators who just don't cut it because they are not technically qualified.
In some countries the only pool of people available for such translation work for government/education or in the media. They are probably the same people used for OSS projects.
It's all very well to think of Microsoft as an amorphous entity with an infinite supply of human resources in all of these languages, but realistically no company, no government has this.
All the spell-checkers in Office (except English) are sourced from 3rd party companies, mostly based in Europe. In fact, the Belgian(?) company Lernout & Hauspie was the source for many of the European language proofing tools. The Microsoft Proofing Tools bundle is extremely cheap for what you get. Other companies charge more for badly executed spell-checkers than Microsoft does for proofing tools (spelling, grammar, thesaurus, word breakers, speech engines, handwriting recognizers, hyphenators etc) in dozens of languages. Do you think these things are cheap to produce? EVERY language has to be handled uniquely, so that means many experts in EVERY different language are involved. It's not cheaper to produce tools for small-population languages 0 it's more expensive as the resources are more limited.
Most of the English-speaking countries of the world use UK English spellings. Consider UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, ...
Yeah and I'm waiting for a computer that'll do everything EXCEPT actually decode Nazi war codes.
If only the same effort were put into educating users about incredibly subtle technical issues as went into castigating Microsoft for trying to put out a product that is simple enough for them to use... I know we all love being martyrs by spending all our free time helping neighbours, colleaguqes, family, acquaintances set up computers, and we'd really like to extend that to giving them options to change their shell, IP stack, media player etc at a whim. Wouldn't life be beautiful if we could all just do that? No time for wars, just endless whining about configuration options.
Have you seen the shit that OEMs install on computers? They whine from dawn to dusk about the right to do this and then put absolute crap all over the hard drive, start menu etc: software with poor user interfaces, bugs galore. Let the OEMs install Real and QT on the machines they sell but FOR ONCE they should support this software. So much software is supposed to be supported by OEMs but when you call them, they attempt to weasel out of by saying it's someone else's problem (usually Microsoft). Give me a break.
And if the US is allowed to hold non-US citizens under retrospective laws, why is it so reluctant to (a) participate in a global criminal court; or (b) allow extradition of US citizens to foreign military courts for grievous cases of friendly fire (thinking back to first Gulf war). Surely murder and manslaughter are crimes in US territories too?
I'd rather put more work into MusicXML rather than damn it from the outset. The limitations in Finale (and Sibelius) plus versioning problems means there is limited appeal for storing music descriptions thus. Remember also that MIDI is not designed as a notation format and that programs reading from it generally have to supply rests etc by interpolation/guesswork. So in some respects MusicXML might be considered "less lean" than MIDI, but the result is an unambiguous rendering of the composer's intent.
For a moment I thought this was referring to a move from Australia to USA.
Including Real Networks products in Windows would break the European Union (or member states)laws for privacy. So either they allow that to go unchallenged or they force Real to release a player that is not full of spyware and ads.
As someone pointed out, Bilbo in The Hobbit is about the same age as Frodo in LoTR, so you'd want someone who looks about as old as Elijah Wood. Of course, for marketing demographics and slash-writers, with no Aragorn stubble or fey Legolas, you'll want the major character to have more sex-appeal than a heavily made-up Ian Holm.
I don't think Ian Holm would be appropriate since Bilbo is MUCH younger in The Hobbit.
The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights...
Like when everything in front of me goes blue suddenly...?
The only clear reason for an operating system and productivity company to make a video codec is as a means to tie consumers into their technology.
If Microsoft believes their codec is more efficient, then there are benefits down the line for more efficient operation on different platforms. As for the other comments, please understand the distinction between a codec (that has been submitted to a standards body) and a player. Your comment is confused rather than insightful.
Eliza: Why is the endless game of seeing how many different ways you could type a sentence before the computer realized what you were talking about, your favorite part? Does your mother feel the same way?
I'm waiting for Pong or Lemonade Stand on X-Box. I want a force-feedback jolt every time someone puts money in my hand for a lemonade
However, it disconcerts me that they are also applying for a patent in this area instead of engaging the community through a consortium-like committee I think other companies' rush to the patent office before rushing to raid Microsoft's cash-coffers has demonstrated to Microsoft that it cannot afford to do anything else but follow the same route. As a public company I am sure that its shareholders would question why Microsoft did *not* seek patent-protection for any new work (regardless of actual merit). Consortium-like committees in this space tend to fall into two camps: 1) if it's dull throw the problem over to Microsoft completely (e.g. the TWAIN committee, so named because it never met) 2) if it's new and cool, they hate any input from Microsoft.
Do you really think either Apple or Real Networks would want Microsoft to have their formsts into Windows? They might ask for a royalty (which would be passed onto every Windows purchaser) or they might prefer that you download their really annoying players which bug you for upgrades or with advertisements EVERY SINGLE TIME you play something.