Actually, most of the crappy writeups on Amazon are provided by the publisher, not Amazon at all. You're only looking at Amazon-originated content in the 'editorial reviews' section of a book page if it says 'Amazon.com' at the top. If it says 'From the Publisher', or 'Book Description', it's the publisher that provided it. This does, it must be said, stretch the definition of 'editorial reviews' somwehat.
Oh, and the books Amazon promotes on its front page, or on section header pages, under headings like 'what we're reading this month' - Amazon doesn't put them there off its own bat - it's done in co-operation with publishers, with publishers buying placements with virtual money called 'co-operative marketing funds', which are allocated on the basis of how much money the publishers' books made for the ookstore the previous year. Same deal with physical bookstores of course - spend co-op money, and you can get your books 'face out' on the shelf (cover showing, rather than spine), or onto an 'end-cap' (a display shelf at the end of a row), or even onto a table display.
A short time working in publishing is a great way to disabuse yourself of the notion that book stores know or care anything about the books they sell...
What's more important is using this system in situations like WETA digital's Massive - the program that co-ordinates the battle sequences in Lord of the Rings. Instead of having thousands of orcs choosing among a few motion capture patterns to make up a charge of 30000 uruk-hai, they could have autonomous agents that actually know how to walk, and run, and get up after they trip over a dead body, or jump over the body of a fallen comrade, or whatever...
tell the system you want it to work out the best way for 30000 orcs to get from the top of this hill to the bottom of the hill, with as few of them tripping over and getting trampled to death as possible, and hey presto - you have a crowd simulator to beat all crowd simulators.
If working is a privilege, why do they have to pay me to do it?
Employing ME is a privilege, not a right - and you have to pay me a fair sum for my time, enough so I don't go and spend my time working for someone else, or (heaven forbid) spend my time doing things for my own benefit, such as spending time with loved ones.
The ball is not just in my court, it's also in the court of my employer.
These 'virtues and vices' seem to form the basis for his ethical AI system... able to detect 'wantonness' and respond with 'graciousness', perhaps. It's an intriguing approach to the problem, but it seems somehow hollow.
So, er... with this guy holding the patent on ethical AI, if you want to build an artificial intelligence without having to pay him license fees, you're left having to make unethical AI?
> Advertisers don't seem to be vandalizing each others' billboards right now
Must be nice to live in a city without fly posting. Maybe it's not a problem where you are.
Most posters that are left up on bus stops or pavement signs in the city I live in (I'm in the UK) don't last long before some club flyer or get rich quick scheme is posted over the front of it. And it seems to be going legit - because 'the kids' are out looking for posted flyers advertising club nights ('DJ Spoonboy - Miss Missile - MC Donald - Spank @ The Love Zone - Every Thursday' etc.), 'proper' advertisers are starting to play their game - Charlie's Angels 2 was presaged by a huge fly posting campaign. Most new singles and albums are advertised on fly posters. I guess it reaches the audience they're after.
But it does amount to a physical kind of pop-up spam, and it's worse because it has no close button. Still, for the most part they're only covering up other ads. And phone boxes. And telephone junction boxes. And walls. And windows.
What this made me think was, you could install large banks of hard drives into the cargo holds of planes and the back of express long distance trains, and plug them into fast backbone connections whenever they're stationary. This would then let the internet route data that doesn't need low latency connections (such as FTPing terabyte files, where it doesn't matter if you receive the first packet now, because you're not going to be able to use the file until the last packet has arrived anyway) onto the storage devices, ready to be flown across an ocean or zipped up a trainline to some point nearer where it's going, where it'll continue on its way...
You'd probably need some TCP extension that allowed a host to mark a group of packets as 'part of a block' - so that all parts of the same block get routed the same way, and routers know how big the block is, and can calculate the fastest way to get the whole block to its destination. So, an FTP server, on receiving a request for a multi-terabyte file, would stream out packet after packet, all addressed to the client, with a block identifier telling routers that they belong to a consignment of 15TB, say. Now, a router starts receiving these packets, and thinks 'what's the best way to get 15TB to there?', and if the costs and speeds work in its favour, pumps them onto a hard drive in the hold of a plane that's taking off in fifteen minutes.
Now, meanwhile, you'd also want the server to send another packet - not marked as being part of the big block - to the client telling it that the file is being sent - otherwise, your client's going to time out its connection.
When the plane lands, the packets are streamed off the hard drive, and routing continues as normal.
Well, I dunno - might be a way to allow the net to handle demand for moving large files without requiring a massive increase in fibre bandwidth...
The thing is, much as I'd love to believe that the only thing to blame for people snapping and going on killing sprees is a little mental imbalance encouraged by unfortunate social influences (bullying, family breakdown, whatever), I can't help thinking that, deep down, there's a problem with violence in culture. Movies are probably the worst offender, followed swiftly by TV, and computer games are, to be fair, just following along that same path that's been trodden before. The issue is that in so many films, series and games, the message is 'violence solves problems. Nobody else will help you, help yourself. When you or your family is threatened, you can't rely on the man to look out for you - get a gun, and go get the bad guys'.
It's a message which is imprinted into kids from a very young age - you don't have to be watching a schwarzenegger movie to see the same ethical standards being applied. Plenty of kids movies involve going and taking out the bad guys (look at home alone for a great example). And of course, computer games have followed the tradition. Max Payne - cracking game - is morally one of the bleakest entertainment experiences I've ever had. That's fine - I can appreciate it on a level with a film like Taxi Driver or, hell, a play like Romeo and Juliet - an exploration of the moral experiences of a man forced by society and circumstances to become a killer. That's a justifiable theme from time to time.
but we're talking about pretty much every movie, every game, every TV series. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer - great writing, acting, etc. - but occasionally, I just wish there was a portrayal of another solution to life's problems than kicking demon ass. To be fair, Joss Whedon's talked at length about the responsibility of writers to their audiences and he does 'get it' far more than most. I just find it sad that even he's not immune.
The more ingrained this message is in cinema and games, the harder it gets to teach children that violence isn't the way to solve things, that they can rely on authority figures to help them out, that they can turn to teachers, parents, the police if things are bad.
So I don't feel we can give video games, TV, or movies a completely clean bill of health. They share a portion of the blame - they're part of the social fabric that makes these things possible.
Did you visit the linked dictionary? I appreciate that it was in German, but... it's limited, to say the least, and based only on previous HP books.
I was particularly concerned with the terminology encountered in the course of translating this book - they need a mechanism for agreeing and standardising translations of such terms across every block of the book, and I saw no reference to such a mechanism.
people are perfectly capable of getting their heads around 'technical lingo'. Is it truly more complicated to understand that computer processor speed is measured in megahertz (or sometimes gigahertz) than it is to understand that car engine capacities are measured in litres (or sometimes CCs)? I don't think so. And it's no harder for people to appreciate that while more CCs generally == more power, other factors (weight, powertrain, aerodynamics, gearbox) have an ultimate effect on the performance of a car. So I don't think most people will have problems getting their head around the fact that more megahertz == good, but that other factors can affect how powerful a computer is.
That said, my eyes glaze over when motorheads start talking about torque and power ratings and valve timings. Similarly, I think plenty of non techies are perfectly entitled to glaze over when they hear people talking about frontside bus speeds, memory latency, and second level cache speeds.
But there's no excuse for taking a kind of 'oo, I don't know anything about these computer thingummies, how many megahertz per second does that hard drive get?' attitude - that should be as worthy of derision as someone saying 'how many horsepower per hour can I get in the trunk of this car?'
It's NOT that hard, and it's as important a set of cultural knowledge for survival in the modern world.
If there's one field whose jargon seriously needs sorting out, it's personal finance. Now there's a profession that loves its acronyms and obscure vocabulary....
In Harry Potter, you've got such a range of made-up terms, words which are invented by the author, some of which need to be given translations, that you can't expect individual translators working on five-page sections to be able to maintain any kind of consistency.
For example, in Order of the Phoenix, Rowling invents a plant with a latin-sounding name, Mimbulus mimbletonia. What should this be rendered as in German? In English, it has resonance with words like 'mumble', uses the common English surname/town suffix '-ton', and it even refers back to to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner's use of the word 'mimble'. Different translators will approach the task of selecting a German equivalent differently. Some will leave it as is, others will try to select a different latin name that conjures similar imagery in a German mind.
Then you have Rowling's love of writing vocal tics, speech impediments, and dialect (hagrid's speech, for example), which basically requires her to have the character's voice in her head as she transcribes how he speaks. A hundred different German translators can't be expected to have the same 'hagrid's voice' in their mind as they imagine him speaking German, so you'll effectively find his accent changing from page to page as different translators render his speech.
I really can't see this effort producing a half-decent translation job.
Of course, your somewhat bizarre German aside (the occasional english word in there makes me think you might have used BabelFish to generate this text), you're actually providing the best argument against the (thankfully relatively few) slashdotters on this thread who think that there's nothing wrong with a community-led translation of a book. It is possible for somebody, in translating a book, to add or change material substantially. In distributing their translation of the Harry Potter book, this group would be claiming that their translation was a faithful reproduction of J.K. Rowling's original work - but if they had added or altered material in the process (even to the extent of adding pornographic material, as you so amusingly suggest...), they could be doing Ms Rowling something of a disservice in the eyes of Germans who read that translation.
This is why copyright protects an author's right over derivative works, including translations - it should be up to the author/publisher to select who is allowed to make the official translation, giving them some means to control what is put out in the author's name in other languages.
And not just the architecture of the web server, but the architecture of the entire platform. But specifically looking at the architecture of Apache versus the architecture of IIS, you'll immediately see that the goals of the two pieces of software are not the same. Look at things like IIS's metabase - the structural details of the server's configuration are kept in an in-memory data structure, which is easily modified while the server is running. Apache, in contrast, reads its configuration at startup, and uses it to determine which modules of code are loaded, and how they are used to process requests - fixing the behavior of the web server at startup.
IIS follows typical MS enterprise software design - it has to interface with COM, and the NT security model, and active directory, and the registry, and a million other systems, all in the name of integration, and enterprise management. Apache doesn't have PHBs telling it that it needs another way for the metabase to be edited, or a new instrumentation API, or whatever else a particular large customer asked for - and can get on with just providing its facilities cleanly.
That's why IIS has so many more security holes, even if it does (as may or may not be the case) have the same raw coding error rate as Apache.
Remember, we aren't talking about a security vulnerability here - we're talking about the circumvention of software controls placed into the XBox. Very different kettle of fish.
Ethics don't really enter into it - if I work out a way to increase the accelleration of my Ford Taurus tenfold with nitro, I'm not going to get very far sending messages to Ford saying 'give me a load of money for doing all this engineering work, or I'll release the specs to the public'. Now, in that instance ford wouldn't necessarily feel threatened by you publishing that information - that's because auto companies have a very different attitude to sale of hardware to the IT industry, I guess - but the point I'm making is that MS didn't want anybody to do this, so why do you expect MS to pay when someone does?
Read ALL of the words in their demands. They asked to be kept indemnified in case of legal proceedings against them - that's a big deal in itself. They asked for Microsoft to pay them money. They asked for jobs, for crying out loud.
Yes, they asked for MS to acknowledge open use of the XBox platform, too, but that was only one of their demands.
It's little different to approaching Coca Cola saying you've found out their secret recipe, and you've worked out how to make it taste better (although you had to operate an unlicensed particle accellerator to do some of your technical analysis, so the government might not be too happy with you). At this point, you ask for reimbursement of your expenses, indemnification against the potential government prosecution, and a job on their food science team helping them improve their recipe. Or you'll blow the whole gaff and go public with the secret recipe - and the trick for making it better...
The thing is, in that situation, you could get what you want, but you won't get it by threatening them.
Seriously, your suggestion is deeply naive in its assumptions about how languages work.
The problem of translation is not one of translating nouns - that's pretty easy, provided you can pick the nouns out from all the other stuff that goes into a sentence, and handle the slightly tricky case of plurals. Mind, finding nouns isn't that easy - in that last sentence, the words 'handle', 'can' and 'pick' aren't nouns, but in another they could be. The tough part is when you start to handle the structural elements of sentences - prepositional clauses, adjectival associations, and verb phrases. Bear in mind that in most European languages, nouns have the property of 'gender' (masculine, feminine, sometimes neuter), and that the gender of a noun affects the spelling of adjectives and articles which are used in association with it. So, a translator from English to such a language has to figure out which adjectives relate to which nouns, work out what to translate the noun as in the given context, figure out the noun's gender, translate the adjectives, alter the spelling of the adjectives to match the gender, and that's before it's even worked out what order to put the words in. Throw in verb tenses, and it gets very bad - English is great at these: 'What I would have been doing, had I gone there, was playing tennis', for example, contains three separate verb phrases (and only one simple noun), each of which consists of at least a verb plus an auxiliary verb, and communicates a huge amount of detail about when and whether the activity described took place. Most other languages don't have so many complex tense/mood forms as English, but they have their own complexities.
In other words, translation generally relies on dismantling sentences, figuring out the deep semantic structure, then porting that semantic structure to the foreign language.
That gets you the first level - literal translation. Translation of idiomatic phrases, choice of which word to use to represent a particular concept depending on context, and adjustment of language style for the kind of communication being tanslated are all second level tasks that sometimes build on that first level, and in some ways override it. I was reasonably competent at this level in translation between English and German after studying it for seven years, and spending a fair amount of time in Germany. Computer programs can't do this yet, and it'll take a great deal of AI research to get them to that level. When you realise that many European languages employ different forms of the word for 'you' depending on the relationship between the person saying it ant the person they're referring to, you might realise that it may not be possible to perform this kind translation at all, without true AI on a scale capable of learning enough social context to understand the relationships between parties in the text it's translating.
Above this level is real, literary translation - where you translate poetry, song lyrics, and works of literature, with a sensitivity to cultural translation, communicating the emotions present in the mind of a native reader of the text in one language to a reader of the text in the translated language. That's true translation, and it's pure art - as much a creative act as writing the original work is. It will never be mechanised unless we create an artificial intelligence equal to a human mind.
First level translation can, more or less, be mechanised - it has been by BabelFish, for example. But, as most people who've used the fish know, its translation works best on well structured, formal sentences. Give it informal, slangy text, and it'll stand no chance. It can't even handle my sample sentence above about tennis - it appears nobody's taught it the english subunctive mood - so it's not really even reached that level yet.
The IM context is a terrible one for translation. Obviously there are slang terms aplenty, but it's the structural issues that make me think it's untr
It's one thing to phone up MS and say 'I've found out something you might like to know about and keep secret', and another to phone up and say 'I've got some information you might like to know about and keep secret - and I'd like you to pay me money, indemnify me against legal consequences, and give me a job - or I'll release it to the public'.
The fact that when they were ignored, they carried out the implicit threat of releasing the information (implicit in their suggestion that they'd sign an NDA in exchange for money), makes it look like blackmail to me.
It's the demand for personal gain that makes the threat of disclosure into blackmail.
Because of course the one thing suicidal terrorists planning to crash a plane into a city fear, its that the FAA/FCC will come down on their ass. Severely.
... makes me realise that in amongst all this talk of photon-momentum and reductions in frequency of departing photons, that I have no idea what the actual mechanism is that's involved in taking a little packet of energy travelling at the speed of light in one direction, and turning it around so it flies back the way it came.
Presumably, when a photon passes in amongst the surface of the mirror, it interacts with the particles in some way that causes it to turn around. I don't exactly think the photons just hit the nucleus of some atom and ricochet off - I'm guessing some repulsive force coming from electron shells or nuclei must be involved somewhere, but since the photon has to always be travelling at the speed of light, we're not talking about the photon gradually slowing down as it approaches.
Surely its the detail of this interaction that actually transfers momentum and energy from photon to mirror... not some theoretical inelastic collision transferring momentum and energy. The effects we see as conservation of energy and momentum at the macro level must be the result of some kind of particle interaction at the subatomic scale...
Are you sure resolution doesn't make any difference to you? I mean, try switching your 21" monitor to 640x480 and see just how far your vast screen real-estate stretches then...
I've heard this argument from people before and I just don't understand it.
Pulling up a large drawing on a 15" screen at 1600x1200 will show you exactly the same amount of data as 1600x1200 on your 21" screen, it'll take just as long to scroll around. I appreciate that text might be a little harder to read, but that's not the point you were making - you were saying that the extra screen space is what gives you room to display more of your picture - and text sizes can usually be fixed so increasing resolution doesn't make the UI illegible. It's not screen space, it's pixels that matter. I presume in your CAD world, that you can zoom in or out of an image to show a particular portion on the screen at a time. On a higher resolution screen, you'll find that when you look at the same portion of the image on the screen, the definition is improved. That should make it easier on your eyes, not harder.
Screens shouldn't get harder to look at at higher resolution - just change your display settings in your OS of choice to ensure fonts scale to a legible size regardless of the number of pixels behind them, and you should be fine.
If it's a flicker problem, then your quibble is with the underlying monitor technlogy, not the resolution. If you find it hard to focus on 120DPI pixels (which you'll get on a good 21" monitor at about 1960x1600 pixels) at normal working distance from your screen, though, you probably need glasses for close work. A 120DPI pixel is about the size of a grain of sand, and most people should be able to pick one of those out against a contrasting background at reading distance without any trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most of the crappy writeups on Amazon are provided by the publisher, not Amazon at all. You're only looking at Amazon-originated content in the 'editorial reviews' section of a book page if it says 'Amazon.com' at the top. If it says 'From the Publisher', or 'Book Description', it's the publisher that provided it. This does, it must be said, stretch the definition of 'editorial reviews' somwehat.
Oh, and the books Amazon promotes on its front page, or on section header pages, under headings like 'what we're reading this month' - Amazon doesn't put them there off its own bat - it's done in co-operation with publishers, with publishers buying placements with virtual money called 'co-operative marketing funds', which are allocated on the basis of how much money the publishers' books made for the ookstore the previous year. Same deal with physical bookstores of course - spend co-op money, and you can get your books 'face out' on the shelf (cover showing, rather than spine), or onto an 'end-cap' (a display shelf at the end of a row), or even onto a table display.
A short time working in publishing is a great way to disabuse yourself of the notion that book stores know or care anything about the books they sell...
> There will always be rogue states that will provide an internet haven in the same way they provide a banking haven
That, of course, puts Switzerland onto the axis of evil list.
What's more important is using this system in situations like WETA digital's Massive - the program that co-ordinates the battle sequences in Lord of the Rings. Instead of having thousands of orcs choosing among a few motion capture patterns to make up a charge of 30000 uruk-hai, they could have autonomous agents that actually know how to walk, and run, and get up after they trip over a dead body, or jump over the body of a fallen comrade, or whatever...
tell the system you want it to work out the best way for 30000 orcs to get from the top of this hill to the bottom of the hill, with as few of them tripping over and getting trampled to death as possible, and hey presto - you have a crowd simulator to beat all crowd simulators.
stenography? You think Bin Laden is hiding orders for terror cells in the shorthand recordings of court proceedings?
Or perhaps you mean steganography - the science of hiding dinosaurs in pictures. Or something.
If working is a privilege, why do they have to pay me to do it?
Employing ME is a privilege, not a right - and you have to pay me a fair sum for my time, enough so I don't go and spend my time working for someone else, or (heaven forbid) spend my time doing things for my own benefit, such as spending time with loved ones.
The ball is not just in my court, it's also in the court of my employer.
Blimey - just reading his specification, and he doesn't half go on.
He also seems to have the world's largest captive collection of abstract nouns. Here's a few from that spec document:
Nostalgia, Hero Worship, Glory, Prudence, Providence, Faith, Grace, Beauty, Tranquility, Ecstasy, Guilt, Blame, Honor, Justice, Liberty, Hope, Free Will, Truth, Equality, Bliss, Desire, Approval, Dignity, Temperance, Civility, Charity, Magnanimity, Goodness, Love, Joy, Worry, Concern, Integrity, Fortitude, Austerity, Decency, Equanimity, Wisdom, Peace, Harmony, Laziness, Treachery, Negligence, Vindictiveness, Infamy, Insurgency, Dishonor, Vengeance, Prodigality, Betrayal, Slavery, Despair, Wrath, Ugliness, Tyranny, Hypocrisy, Anger, Abomination, Prejudice, Perdition, Apathy, Spitefulness, Indifference, Malice, Foolishness, Gluttony, Caprice, Cowardice, Vulgarity, Avarice, Cruelty, Antagonism, Oppression, Evil, Persecution, Cunning, Hatred, Iniquity, Belligerence, Turpitude, Poignance, Adoration, Culpability, Censure, Exaltation, Circumspect, Uprightness, Equitableness, Bountifulness, Devotion, Freedom, Fairness, Blessings, Charm, Conscience, Credence, Serenity, Happiness, Brotherhood, Contentment, Passion, Admiration, Apprehension, Caring, Respect, Continence, Probity, Bravery, Courtesy, Kindness, Forbearance, Scruples, Graciousness, Benevolence, Patience, Shrewdness, Affection, Gladness, Amity, Concordance, Sloth, Mutiny, Carelessness, Retaliation, Notoriety, Rebellion, Ignominy, Retribution, Profligacy, Treason, Bondage, Desperation, Disgrace, Vileness, Subjugation, Mendacity, Fury, Abhorrence, Bigotry, Pernicity, Dispassion, Grudgingness, Callousness, Malevolence, Crassness, Lechery, Fickleness, Pusillanimity, Rudeness, Greed, Wantonness, Contentiousness, Brutality, Wickedness, Torment, Ruthlessness, Meanness, Depravity, Atrocity, Fiendishness.
These 'virtues and vices' seem to form the basis for his ethical AI system... able to detect 'wantonness' and respond with 'graciousness', perhaps. It's an intriguing approach to the problem, but it seems somehow hollow.
So, er... with this guy holding the patent on ethical AI, if you want to build an artificial intelligence without having to pay him license fees, you're left having to make unethical AI?
Is that ethical?
> Advertisers don't seem to be vandalizing each others' billboards right now
Must be nice to live in a city without fly posting. Maybe it's not a problem where you are.
Most posters that are left up on bus stops or pavement signs in the city I live in (I'm in the UK) don't last long before some club flyer or get rich quick scheme is posted over the front of it. And it seems to be going legit - because 'the kids' are out looking for posted flyers advertising club nights ('DJ Spoonboy - Miss Missile - MC Donald - Spank @ The Love Zone - Every Thursday' etc.), 'proper' advertisers are starting to play their game - Charlie's Angels 2 was presaged by a huge fly posting campaign. Most new singles and albums are advertised on fly posters. I guess it reaches the audience they're after.
But it does amount to a physical kind of pop-up spam, and it's worse because it has no close button. Still, for the most part they're only covering up other ads. And phone boxes. And telephone junction boxes. And walls. And windows.
Ah well.
What this made me think was, you could install large banks of hard drives into the cargo holds of planes and the back of express long distance trains, and plug them into fast backbone connections whenever they're stationary. This would then let the internet route data that doesn't need low latency connections (such as FTPing terabyte files, where it doesn't matter if you receive the first packet now, because you're not going to be able to use the file until the last packet has arrived anyway) onto the storage devices, ready to be flown across an ocean or zipped up a trainline to some point nearer where it's going, where it'll continue on its way...
You'd probably need some TCP extension that allowed a host to mark a group of packets as 'part of a block' - so that all parts of the same block get routed the same way, and routers know how big the block is, and can calculate the fastest way to get the whole block to its destination. So, an FTP server, on receiving a request for a multi-terabyte file, would stream out packet after packet, all addressed to the client, with a block identifier telling routers that they belong to a consignment of 15TB, say. Now, a router starts receiving these packets, and thinks 'what's the best way to get 15TB to there?', and if the costs and speeds work in its favour, pumps them onto a hard drive in the hold of a plane that's taking off in fifteen minutes.
Now, meanwhile, you'd also want the server to send another packet - not marked as being part of the big block - to the client telling it that the file is being sent - otherwise, your client's going to time out its connection.
When the plane lands, the packets are streamed off the hard drive, and routing continues as normal.
Well, I dunno - might be a way to allow the net to handle demand for moving large files without requiring a massive increase in fibre bandwidth...
> ... concrete tunnels ... In a vacuum. ... travel ... at greater than mach speeds
I have news for you. The speed of sound in a vacuum is zero.
The thing is, much as I'd love to believe that the only thing to blame for people snapping and going on killing sprees is a little mental imbalance encouraged by unfortunate social influences (bullying, family breakdown, whatever), I can't help thinking that, deep down, there's a problem with violence in culture. Movies are probably the worst offender, followed swiftly by TV, and computer games are, to be fair, just following along that same path that's been trodden before. The issue is that in so many films, series and games, the message is 'violence solves problems. Nobody else will help you, help yourself. When you or your family is threatened, you can't rely on the man to look out for you - get a gun, and go get the bad guys'.
It's a message which is imprinted into kids from a very young age - you don't have to be watching a schwarzenegger movie to see the same ethical standards being applied. Plenty of kids movies involve going and taking out the bad guys (look at home alone for a great example). And of course, computer games have followed the tradition. Max Payne - cracking game - is morally one of the bleakest entertainment experiences I've ever had. That's fine - I can appreciate it on a level with a film like Taxi Driver or, hell, a play like Romeo and Juliet - an exploration of the moral experiences of a man forced by society and circumstances to become a killer. That's a justifiable theme from time to time.
but we're talking about pretty much every movie, every game, every TV series. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer - great writing, acting, etc. - but occasionally, I just wish there was a portrayal of another solution to life's problems than kicking demon ass. To be fair, Joss Whedon's talked at length about the responsibility of writers to their audiences and he does 'get it' far more than most. I just find it sad that even he's not immune.
The more ingrained this message is in cinema and games, the harder it gets to teach children that violence isn't the way to solve things, that they can rely on authority figures to help them out, that they can turn to teachers, parents, the police if things are bad.
So I don't feel we can give video games, TV, or movies a completely clean bill of health. They share a portion of the blame - they're part of the social fabric that makes these things possible.
Did you visit the linked dictionary? I appreciate that it was in German, but... it's limited, to say the least, and based only on previous HP books.
I was particularly concerned with the terminology encountered in the course of translating this book - they need a mechanism for agreeing and standardising translations of such terms across every block of the book, and I saw no reference to such a mechanism.
people are perfectly capable of getting their heads around 'technical lingo'. Is it truly more complicated to understand that computer processor speed is measured in megahertz (or sometimes gigahertz) than it is to understand that car engine capacities are measured in litres (or sometimes CCs)? I don't think so. And it's no harder for people to appreciate that while more CCs generally == more power, other factors (weight, powertrain, aerodynamics, gearbox) have an ultimate effect on the performance of a car. So I don't think most people will have problems getting their head around the fact that more megahertz == good, but that other factors can affect how powerful a computer is.
That said, my eyes glaze over when motorheads start talking about torque and power ratings and valve timings. Similarly, I think plenty of non techies are perfectly entitled to glaze over when they hear people talking about frontside bus speeds, memory latency, and second level cache speeds.
But there's no excuse for taking a kind of 'oo, I don't know anything about these computer thingummies, how many megahertz per second does that hard drive get?' attitude - that should be as worthy of derision as someone saying 'how many horsepower per hour can I get in the trunk of this car?'
It's NOT that hard, and it's as important a set of cultural knowledge for survival in the modern world.
If there's one field whose jargon seriously needs sorting out, it's personal finance. Now there's a profession that loves its acronyms and obscure vocabulary....
In Harry Potter, you've got such a range of made-up terms, words which are invented by the author, some of which need to be given translations, that you can't expect individual translators working on five-page sections to be able to maintain any kind of consistency.
For example, in Order of the Phoenix, Rowling invents a plant with a latin-sounding name, Mimbulus mimbletonia. What should this be rendered as in German? In English, it has resonance with words like 'mumble', uses the common English surname/town suffix '-ton', and it even refers back to to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner's use of the word 'mimble'. Different translators will approach the task of selecting a German equivalent differently. Some will leave it as is, others will try to select a different latin name that conjures similar imagery in a German mind.
Then you have Rowling's love of writing vocal tics, speech impediments, and dialect (hagrid's speech, for example), which basically requires her to have the character's voice in her head as she transcribes how he speaks. A hundred different German translators can't be expected to have the same 'hagrid's voice' in their mind as they imagine him speaking German, so you'll effectively find his accent changing from page to page as different translators render his speech.
I really can't see this effort producing a half-decent translation job.
Of course, your somewhat bizarre German aside (the occasional english word in there makes me think you might have used BabelFish to generate this text), you're actually providing the best argument against the (thankfully relatively few) slashdotters on this thread who think that there's nothing wrong with a community-led translation of a book. It is possible for somebody, in translating a book, to add or change material substantially. In distributing their translation of the Harry Potter book, this group would be claiming that their translation was a faithful reproduction of J.K. Rowling's original work - but if they had added or altered material in the process (even to the extent of adding pornographic material, as you so amusingly suggest...), they could be doing Ms Rowling something of a disservice in the eyes of Germans who read that translation.
This is why copyright protects an author's right over derivative works, including translations - it should be up to the author/publisher to select who is allowed to make the official translation, giving them some means to control what is put out in the author's name in other languages.
One word: architecture.
And not just the architecture of the web server, but the architecture of the entire platform. But specifically looking at the architecture of Apache versus the architecture of IIS, you'll immediately see that the goals of the two pieces of software are not the same. Look at things like IIS's metabase - the structural details of the server's configuration are kept in an in-memory data structure, which is easily modified while the server is running. Apache, in contrast, reads its configuration at startup, and uses it to determine which modules of code are loaded, and how they are used to process requests - fixing the behavior of the web server at startup.
IIS follows typical MS enterprise software design - it has to interface with COM, and the NT security model, and active directory, and the registry, and a million other systems, all in the name of integration, and enterprise management. Apache doesn't have PHBs telling it that it needs another way for the metabase to be edited, or a new instrumentation API, or whatever else a particular large customer asked for - and can get on with just providing its facilities cleanly.
That's why IIS has so many more security holes, even if it does (as may or may not be the case) have the same raw coding error rate as Apache.
Remember, we aren't talking about a security vulnerability here - we're talking about the circumvention of software controls placed into the XBox. Very different kettle of fish.
Ethics don't really enter into it - if I work out a way to increase the accelleration of my Ford Taurus tenfold with nitro, I'm not going to get very far sending messages to Ford saying 'give me a load of money for doing all this engineering work, or I'll release the specs to the public'. Now, in that instance ford wouldn't necessarily feel threatened by you publishing that information - that's because auto companies have a very different attitude to sale of hardware to the IT industry, I guess - but the point I'm making is that MS didn't want anybody to do this, so why do you expect MS to pay when someone does?
Read ALL of the words in their demands. They asked to be kept indemnified in case of legal proceedings against them - that's a big deal in itself. They asked for Microsoft to pay them money. They asked for jobs, for crying out loud.
Yes, they asked for MS to acknowledge open use of the XBox platform, too, but that was only one of their demands.
It's little different to approaching Coca Cola saying you've found out their secret recipe, and you've worked out how to make it taste better (although you had to operate an unlicensed particle accellerator to do some of your technical analysis, so the government might not be too happy with you). At this point, you ask for reimbursement of your expenses, indemnification against the potential government prosecution, and a job on their food science team helping them improve their recipe. Or you'll blow the whole gaff and go public with the secret recipe - and the trick for making it better...
The thing is, in that situation, you could get what you want, but you won't get it by threatening them.
do you speak any language, other than English?
Seriously, your suggestion is deeply naive in its assumptions about how languages work.
The problem of translation is not one of translating nouns - that's pretty easy, provided you can pick the nouns out from all the other stuff that goes into a sentence, and handle the slightly tricky case of plurals. Mind, finding nouns isn't that easy - in that last sentence, the words 'handle', 'can' and 'pick' aren't nouns, but in another they could be. The tough part is when you start to handle the structural elements of sentences - prepositional clauses, adjectival associations, and verb phrases. Bear in mind that in most European languages, nouns have the property of 'gender' (masculine, feminine, sometimes neuter), and that the gender of a noun affects the spelling of adjectives and articles which are used in association with it. So, a translator from English to such a language has to figure out which adjectives relate to which nouns, work out what to translate the noun as in the given context, figure out the noun's gender, translate the adjectives, alter the spelling of the adjectives to match the gender, and that's before it's even worked out what order to put the words in. Throw in verb tenses, and it gets very bad - English is great at these: 'What I would have been doing, had I gone there, was playing tennis', for example, contains three separate verb phrases (and only one simple noun), each of which consists of at least a verb plus an auxiliary verb, and communicates a huge amount of detail about when and whether the activity described took place. Most other languages don't have so many complex tense/mood forms as English, but they have their own complexities.
In other words, translation generally relies on dismantling sentences, figuring out the deep semantic structure, then porting that semantic structure to the foreign language.
That gets you the first level - literal translation. Translation of idiomatic phrases, choice of which word to use to represent a particular concept depending on context, and adjustment of language style for the kind of communication being tanslated are all second level tasks that sometimes build on that first level, and in some ways override it. I was reasonably competent at this level in translation between English and German after studying it for seven years, and spending a fair amount of time in Germany. Computer programs can't do this yet, and it'll take a great deal of AI research to get them to that level. When you realise that many European languages employ different forms of the word for 'you' depending on the relationship between the person saying it ant the person they're referring to, you might realise that it may not be possible to perform this kind translation at all, without true AI on a scale capable of learning enough social context to understand the relationships between parties in the text it's translating.
Above this level is real, literary translation - where you translate poetry, song lyrics, and works of literature, with a sensitivity to cultural translation, communicating the emotions present in the mind of a native reader of the text in one language to a reader of the text in the translated language. That's true translation, and it's pure art - as much a creative act as writing the original work is. It will never be mechanised unless we create an artificial intelligence equal to a human mind.
First level translation can, more or less, be mechanised - it has been by BabelFish, for example. But, as most people who've used the fish know, its translation works best on well structured, formal sentences. Give it informal, slangy text, and it'll stand no chance. It can't even handle my sample sentence above about tennis - it appears nobody's taught it the english subunctive mood - so it's not really even reached that level yet.
The IM context is a terrible one for translation. Obviously there are slang terms aplenty, but it's the structural issues that make me think it's untr
'If you meet these requests, we'll sign an NDA', implies 'if you don't meet these requests, we're going public'.
If they had no intention of publishing the exploit,
1) why offer to sign an NDA?
2) why publish the exploit?
It's one thing to phone up MS and say 'I've found out something you might like to know about and keep secret', and another to phone up and say 'I've got some information you might like to know about and keep secret - and I'd like you to pay me money, indemnify me against legal consequences, and give me a job - or I'll release it to the public'.
The fact that when they were ignored, they carried out the implicit threat of releasing the information (implicit in their suggestion that they'd sign an NDA in exchange for money), makes it look like blackmail to me.
It's the demand for personal gain that makes the threat of disclosure into blackmail.
Because of course the one thing suicidal terrorists planning to crash a plane into a city fear, its that the FAA/FCC will come down on their ass. Severely.
XML has a nice, well defined, widely agreed language for writing schemas for complex data structures.
That's the bit I thought might be useful for this purpose.
... makes me realise that in amongst all this talk of photon-momentum and reductions in frequency of departing photons, that I have no idea what the actual mechanism is that's involved in taking a little packet of energy travelling at the speed of light in one direction, and turning it around so it flies back the way it came.
Presumably, when a photon passes in amongst the surface of the mirror, it interacts with the particles in some way that causes it to turn around. I don't exactly think the photons just hit the nucleus of some atom and ricochet off - I'm guessing some repulsive force coming from electron shells or nuclei must be involved somewhere, but since the photon has to always be travelling at the speed of light, we're not talking about the photon gradually slowing down as it approaches.
Surely its the detail of this interaction that actually transfers momentum and energy from photon to mirror... not some theoretical inelastic collision transferring momentum and energy. The effects we see as conservation of energy and momentum at the macro level must be the result of some kind of particle interaction at the subatomic scale...
Are you sure resolution doesn't make any difference to you? I mean, try switching your 21" monitor to 640x480 and see just how far your vast screen real-estate stretches then...
I've heard this argument from people before and I just don't understand it.
Pulling up a large drawing on a 15" screen at 1600x1200 will show you exactly the same amount of data as 1600x1200 on your 21" screen, it'll take just as long to scroll around. I appreciate that text might be a little harder to read, but that's not the point you were making - you were saying that the extra screen space is what gives you room to display more of your picture - and text sizes can usually be fixed so increasing resolution doesn't make the UI illegible. It's not screen space, it's pixels that matter. I presume in your CAD world, that you can zoom in or out of an image to show a particular portion on the screen at a time. On a higher resolution screen, you'll find that when you look at the same portion of the image on the screen, the definition is improved. That should make it easier on your eyes, not harder.
Screens shouldn't get harder to look at at higher resolution - just change your display settings in your OS of choice to ensure fonts scale to a legible size regardless of the number of pixels behind them, and you should be fine.
If it's a flicker problem, then your quibble is with the underlying monitor technlogy, not the resolution. If you find it hard to focus on 120DPI pixels (which you'll get on a good 21" monitor at about 1960x1600 pixels) at normal working distance from your screen, though, you probably need glasses for close work. A 120DPI pixel is about the size of a grain of sand, and most people should be able to pick one of those out against a contrasting background at reading distance without any trouble.