That's one reason that 100Hz TV's were so popular in the UK. They are slowly being phased out in favour of LCD ones, but 100Hz is a drastic improvement.
Also, most new broadcasts in the UK are digital - analogue satellite and cable were phased out years ago in favour of DVB, and we are just about getting nationwide coverage of DVB-T, giving 30 or so free digital channels.
Admittedly, the quality isn't as good as HDTV - when I saw HDTV in a US bar last time I was out there I was pretty much shocked at the detail - but it is pretty damned impressive compared with analogue transmissions. It also makes what I get in US hotel rooms look very poor - something not helped by the ridiculously large and square TV that is always in the room!
SpamAssassin does two things to determine the language of a message - ngram analysis and header analysis.
It uses the "textcat" perl module to do n-gram analysis of the text which it compares to a statistical model of different languages. Certain sequences of characters are more likely in one language than another, and the model supposedly represents this accurately. You also need a sufficiently good training set that accurately represents the messages you which to classify later. The problem with this approach is that the more languages you wish to identify, the more data you need in order to get a classification - short messages generally fail or come back with nonsense.
Additionally, this can break down for spam because frequently many of the words are obfuscated, and because spam is littered with redundant HTML tags which confuse things. However, it is possible to train the tool using spam in each language too. The last time I looked at TextCat the training set was quite small though.
Bottom line is that if it works, it works quite well, but on many messages it fails so you need to fall back on something else.
Spamassassin also looks at the character encoding used, and tries to determine a locale for the encoding. You can use this to (naively) assign a language. Lots of spam doesn't contain a valid character set encoding, relying on the users MUA to choose the right encoding based on user locale etc. (and no, you can't use this to identify spam as there are plenty of legitimate MUAs out there that describe non-7bit encodings text as ASCII!).
I would assume so. Here in the UK phone rental is anything from £10 to £11.75 (around $20?) for a basic package, where you pay for all calls except evenings and weekends. Calls during the day are then anything up to around $6 an hour for a standard national rate call (Cable providers offer cheaper calls etc).
We can pay extra, usually something like £25 ($45?) a month and get most of our local and national rate calls included in the rental. However, this doesn't cover the cost of calls to companies that have 0845 and 0870 type numbers - we have to pay the normal rate for those regardless of the package we have. Most companies have them as they get paid a percentage of the call cost.
In 1998/1999 I can remember regularly paying £100 ($180?) a month phone calls just for local call dialup internet access, which was only guaranteed to work at a maximum of 14.4kbaud. Not nice!
I think you are on to something big here - you could make a lot of money by patenting an algorithm that can convert a photograph into an SVG. Photographers would love you! Now a 3megapixel image could be scaled to print out the size of a skyscraper! woot!!!
Really...
I'll bite anyway in case you weren't being a "Jovial Jackass" (love that one!):
There are several wiki articles on installing AMD64 Xgl on the latest Ubuntu Dapper flight, but only one of them works fairly well, and not on 100% of systems. Support on AMD64 for various cards is flakey. I know several people that are what I'd call Linux veterans (10+ years of hardcore linux use) that have not found it particularly easy to get working, and several beginners that flat out gave up and went back to Windows (partly due to the lack of popular media codecs and the Flash plugin).
Yes, it's possible to get it to work by fixing stuff, and this is cutting edge, but it's far from easy and scares people away from trying.
It may be charging, but it's still a long long way from offering everything Oracle can offer. That said, Oracle is still quite lacking in its support for Indic and Arabic language handling, so maybe Postgres can accelerate in this area?
I can relate to this. My father has problems trying to browse the internet (typing URLs into the google box, struggles with online forums etc). This is a man that used to design and build a lot of analogue and digital electronics equipment in the 70's and 80's, including 4 and 8bit microprocessor systems. When he took early retirement in the early 90's he stayed away from computers, and he's now getting back into things, but it's taking a while.
When I sat him in front of Ubuntu for the first time he took to it like a duck to water. He could do everything he wanted to, like on Windows, but more importantly he felt confident enough to use the synaptic package manager and start playing with the command line - things he'd never do on Windows.
The only my parents aren't using Linux on their computer at the moment is that my mother is a teacher, and none of the schools software will run on Linux. Once she retires I think I'll be switching them over; I can more easily remotely install software for them that way, and make sure their machine is up to date with updates etc.
Your VCR doesn't automatically adjust itself when a show changes timeslots.
Actually, yes it does. In the UK we have this with "PDC" (Programme Delivery Control)
Your VCR doesn't know the difference between a new episode and a rerun.
Not entirely sure about that, but for the main part, no it doesn't. I think that possibly PDC and Videoplus contain this information so some people have the ability.
Your VCR doesn't know that some shows appear on multiple channels.
In the UK this basically doesn't happen, but some can be set to record all episodes on a particular channel of a programme. Given our programming, that's enough.
Your VCR doesn't delete old shows to make room for new recordings.
No, but I'd insert new cassettes. If I was away from home and unable to change cassettes I'd feel extremely unhappy that I was worrying how to record more than 8 hours worth of material tbh.
In short, your VCR is old and busted. PVRs like TiVo and MythTV are the new hotness.
Sure - I totally agree. I just don't think it's something worthy of a patent; it's a pretty obvious derivation of existing products IMO. I can also control my VCR via infrared, and certain devices (satellite receiver etc) can control VCR this way too, meaning that I now get the use of the EPG and scheduling facilities in the receiver.
$5 a gallon? You are having a laugh right? that's still quite a bit cheaper than I pay in the UK (recently filled up at 96.9pence/litre = approx $6.50 per US gallon)! The general idea is sound though; I don't drive half as much as I would if fuel was cheaper, but then I'm generally depressed at the awful way British society is being transformed that I really have no desire to go anywhere either. Perhaps you need a good dose of chavism in the US?:-)
I don't see much difference between a tool that lets me schedule television shows to record than the timer facility in my VCR really. To me, tivo was an obvious extension to the things people were doing on PCs with WinTV cards way before TiVo came out. Admittedly we relied on Teletext program schedules, but there was software which could parse the listings and trigger capture of shows of interest. Live TV pausing wasn't an option then because the machines couldn't cope with playback and recording simultaneously, but that was only a matter of time.
You know, I'm not so sure it was innovative. Buffers have been required for digital video ever since day one, and all this is really doing is implementing a variable length buffer.
I've seen video tape recorders that can do exactly what these PVRs do aswell - the tape passes the record heads into a "silo", where it packs up much like a dot matrix printer cartridge. When the user wishes to resume playback it resumes by pulling tape out of the silo.
And that's ignoring the ability of Unix to cat data from a device into a file and then cat the file into another device as it's still recording (monitoring log files anyone?). I'm surprised the judge ruled this way tbh - the patent should have been cancelled.
...how else are you supposed to explain that you make use of enterprise applications to leverage collective synergy to think outside the box and formulate key objectives into a win-win game plan with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an all-around initiative to drive up productivity?
Since when has a Slashdot poster having an opinion mean that they are right? I think most believe they, and they alone, are right.
Anyway, I'm right because I think longer and more carefully than all of you. I am trained in logic and philosophy. I'm right because I got my opinion from the Slashdot, and now my opinion is that the Earth is flat. I am particularly good at building on false premises, and after further studying Slashdot I know everyone else is a moron. This means you wouldn't understand the way I feel even if we did a Vulcan mind meld, so I must be right.
I work in the UK as a civil servant and my department has quite a large take up of open source software - everything from MySQL through JBoss, Eclipse, Ant, and Firefox. Running on a variety of operating systems, including Linux and *BSD (as well as the usual commercial suspects).
Tools for the job, and supportability are key, not what the developers wore. Hell, most of our own devs wear jeans!
I cost my employer close to £100K a year, yet my salary is less than a third of that. Most of the extra costs go on training, accomodation costs (services, heating, etc), employment taxes, pensions, and providing me with the IT I need to do my job.
I imagine that most jobs are the same. Pretty much every job has overheads...
Re:Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 0, Troll
But nobody in the "real world" (ie outside of Geekshire) uses Open Document format, so who cares?
This doesn't surprise me. The bass player in my corporate function band owns a guitar shop. It is often cheaper for him to buy guitars from stores in the US, have them shipped over, and then pay import taxes than it is to buy at trade prices from the UK distributers.
That, plus the fact that larger stores are getting much better deals on products than the little stores on prices as well as product range is killing smaller stores in the UK. eg certain large manufacturers insist he stocks a certain number of xyz products, and wont issue him with other stock until they are sold - even though he knows there is no market for that product here. Sucks.
Actually, this is exactly what my employer enforces. Every user that uses the internet signs that they will abide by the rules, and it is a potential disciplinary offense if it is found you have not.
Any employer that doesn't enforce this on their staff is insane, especially if your typical desktop workstations are internet enabled. The last thing you want is clueless losers pasting insider knowledge to forums, or installing trojans/keyloggers that transmit anything to the big bad internet...
Slashdot Mirror
That's one reason that 100Hz TV's were so popular in the UK. They are slowly being phased out in favour of LCD ones, but 100Hz is a drastic improvement.
Also, most new broadcasts in the UK are digital - analogue satellite and cable were phased out years ago in favour of DVB, and we are just about getting nationwide coverage of DVB-T, giving 30 or so free digital channels.
Admittedly, the quality isn't as good as HDTV - when I saw HDTV in a US bar last time I was out there I was pretty much shocked at the detail - but it is pretty damned impressive compared with analogue transmissions. It also makes what I get in US hotel rooms look very poor - something not helped by the ridiculously large and square TV that is always in the room!
We've had that for years in the UK with our land lines. BT rock.
SpamAssassin does two things to determine the language of a message - ngram analysis and header analysis.
It uses the "textcat" perl module to do n-gram analysis of the text which it compares to a statistical model of different languages. Certain sequences of characters are more likely in one language than another, and the model supposedly represents this accurately. You also need a sufficiently good training set that accurately represents the messages you which to classify later. The problem with this approach is that the more languages you wish to identify, the more data you need in order to get a classification - short messages generally fail or come back with nonsense.
Additionally, this can break down for spam because frequently many of the words are obfuscated, and because spam is littered with redundant HTML tags which confuse things. However, it is possible to train the tool using spam in each language too. The last time I looked at TextCat the training set was quite small though.
Bottom line is that if it works, it works quite well, but on many messages it fails so you need to fall back on something else.
Spamassassin also looks at the character encoding used, and tries to determine a locale for the encoding. You can use this to (naively) assign a language. Lots of spam doesn't contain a valid character set encoding, relying on the users MUA to choose the right encoding based on user locale etc. (and no, you can't use this to identify spam as there are plenty of legitimate MUAs out there that describe non-7bit encodings text as ASCII!).
I would assume so. Here in the UK phone rental is anything from £10 to £11.75 (around $20?) for a basic package, where you pay for all calls except evenings and weekends. Calls during the day are then anything up to around $6 an hour for a standard national rate call (Cable providers offer cheaper calls etc).
We can pay extra, usually something like £25 ($45?) a month and get most of our local and national rate calls included in the rental. However, this doesn't cover the cost of calls to companies that have 0845 and 0870 type numbers - we have to pay the normal rate for those regardless of the package we have. Most companies have them as they get paid a percentage of the call cost.
In 1998/1999 I can remember regularly paying £100 ($180?) a month phone calls just for local call dialup internet access, which was only guaranteed to work at a maximum of 14.4kbaud. Not nice!
...I thought that said Transylvania - I was getting worried for Dracula!
That isn't the default in Win2K either - you have to enable it in just the same way.
I think you are on to something big here - you could make a lot of money by patenting an algorithm that can convert a photograph into an SVG. Photographers would love you! Now a 3megapixel image could be scaled to print out the size of a skyscraper! woot!!! Really...
Haha :-)
I'll bite anyway in case you weren't being a "Jovial Jackass" (love that one!):
There are several wiki articles on installing AMD64 Xgl on the latest Ubuntu Dapper flight, but only one of them works fairly well, and not on 100% of systems. Support on AMD64 for various cards is flakey. I know several people that are what I'd call Linux veterans (10+ years of hardcore linux use) that have not found it particularly easy to get working, and several beginners that flat out gave up and went back to Windows (partly due to the lack of popular media codecs and the Flash plugin).
Yes, it's possible to get it to work by fixing stuff, and this is cutting edge, but it's far from easy and scares people away from trying.
Now get Xgl working on AMD64 (or any of the other things broken on AMD64 for that matter) and see if you feel the same way.
It may be charging, but it's still a long long way from offering everything Oracle can offer. That said, Oracle is still quite lacking in its support for Indic and Arabic language handling, so maybe Postgres can accelerate in this area?
Plane, whoosh, head, over?
I can relate to this. My father has problems trying to browse the internet (typing URLs into the google box, struggles with online forums etc). This is a man that used to design and build a lot of analogue and digital electronics equipment in the 70's and 80's, including 4 and 8bit microprocessor systems. When he took early retirement in the early 90's he stayed away from computers, and he's now getting back into things, but it's taking a while.
When I sat him in front of Ubuntu for the first time he took to it like a duck to water. He could do everything he wanted to, like on Windows, but more importantly he felt confident enough to use the synaptic package manager and start playing with the command line - things he'd never do on Windows.
The only my parents aren't using Linux on their computer at the moment is that my mother is a teacher, and none of the schools software will run on Linux. Once she retires I think I'll be switching them over; I can more easily remotely install software for them that way, and make sure their machine is up to date with updates etc.
Actually, yes it does. In the UK we have this with "PDC" (Programme Delivery Control)
Your VCR doesn't know the difference between a new episode and a rerun.Not entirely sure about that, but for the main part, no it doesn't. I think that possibly PDC and Videoplus contain this information so some people have the ability.
Your VCR doesn't know that some shows appear on multiple channels.In the UK this basically doesn't happen, but some can be set to record all episodes on a particular channel of a programme. Given our programming, that's enough.
Your VCR doesn't delete old shows to make room for new recordings.No, but I'd insert new cassettes. If I was away from home and unable to change cassettes I'd feel extremely unhappy that I was worrying how to record more than 8 hours worth of material tbh.
In short, your VCR is old and busted. PVRs like TiVo and MythTV are the new hotness.Sure - I totally agree. I just don't think it's something worthy of a patent; it's a pretty obvious derivation of existing products IMO. I can also control my VCR via infrared, and certain devices (satellite receiver etc) can control VCR this way too, meaning that I now get the use of the EPG and scheduling facilities in the receiver.
$5 a gallon? You are having a laugh right? that's still quite a bit cheaper than I pay in the UK (recently filled up at 96.9pence/litre = approx $6.50 per US gallon)! The general idea is sound though; I don't drive half as much as I would if fuel was cheaper, but then I'm generally depressed at the awful way British society is being transformed that I really have no desire to go anywhere either. Perhaps you need a good dose of chavism in the US? :-)
I don't see much difference between a tool that lets me schedule television shows to record than the timer facility in my VCR really. To me, tivo was an obvious extension to the things people were doing on PCs with WinTV cards way before TiVo came out. Admittedly we relied on Teletext program schedules, but there was software which could parse the listings and trigger capture of shows of interest. Live TV pausing wasn't an option then because the machines couldn't cope with playback and recording simultaneously, but that was only a matter of time.
You know, I'm not so sure it was innovative. Buffers have been required for digital video ever since day one, and all this is really doing is implementing a variable length buffer.
I've seen video tape recorders that can do exactly what these PVRs do aswell - the tape passes the record heads into a "silo", where it packs up much like a dot matrix printer cartridge. When the user wishes to resume playback it resumes by pulling tape out of the silo.
And that's ignoring the ability of Unix to cat data from a device into a file and then cat the file into another device as it's still recording (monitoring log files anyone?). I'm surprised the judge ruled this way tbh - the patent should have been cancelled.
...how else are you supposed to explain that you make use of enterprise applications to leverage collective synergy to think outside the box and formulate key objectives into a win-win game plan with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an all-around initiative to drive up productivity?
Not everyone gets all the sexual release they need with their spouse. Not everyone is in a relationship with a matched sex drive.
Haven't you seen annotations ?
Since when has a Slashdot poster having an opinion mean that they are right? I think most believe they, and they alone, are right.
Anyway, I'm right because I think longer and more carefully than all of you. I am trained in logic and philosophy. I'm right because I got my opinion from the Slashdot, and now my opinion is that the Earth is flat. I am particularly good at building on false premises, and after further studying Slashdot I know everyone else is a moron. This means you wouldn't understand the way I feel even if we did a Vulcan mind meld, so I must be right.
This sounds like FUD to me.
I work in the UK as a civil servant and my department has quite a large take up of open source software - everything from MySQL through JBoss, Eclipse, Ant, and Firefox. Running on a variety of operating systems, including Linux and *BSD (as well as the usual commercial suspects).
Tools for the job, and supportability are key, not what the developers wore. Hell, most of our own devs wear jeans!
I cost my employer close to £100K a year, yet my salary is less than a third of that. Most of the extra costs go on training, accomodation costs (services, heating, etc), employment taxes, pensions, and providing me with the IT I need to do my job.
I imagine that most jobs are the same. Pretty much every job has overheads...
But nobody in the "real world" (ie outside of Geekshire) uses Open Document format, so who cares?
This doesn't surprise me. The bass player in my corporate function band owns a guitar shop. It is often cheaper for him to buy guitars from stores in the US, have them shipped over, and then pay import taxes than it is to buy at trade prices from the UK distributers. That, plus the fact that larger stores are getting much better deals on products than the little stores on prices as well as product range is killing smaller stores in the UK. eg certain large manufacturers insist he stocks a certain number of xyz products, and wont issue him with other stock until they are sold - even though he knows there is no market for that product here. Sucks.
Actually, this is exactly what my employer enforces. Every user that uses the internet signs that they will abide by the rules, and it is a potential disciplinary offense if it is found you have not.
Any employer that doesn't enforce this on their staff is insane, especially if your typical desktop workstations are internet enabled. The last thing you want is clueless losers pasting insider knowledge to forums, or installing trojans/keyloggers that transmit anything to the big bad internet...