Posts by xjy

Daleks

He himself said nothing, it was his dvd with classic Dr Whos and the Daleks were intoning w-e s-h-a-l-l e-x-t-e-r-m-i-n-a-t-e y-o-u . Obviously resonated with the security peeps.

Anyway, the only way to survive a trip to the land of the brave and home of the free is to switch everything off and go zombie during the journey. Name rank and number is all. No jokes, no smiles, no thinking, no silent insubordination, no emotion. Zombie role: big polished shoes, white socks, an ulcer, and BO.

Once you're thru the gate, though, way-hay!!

(Paris, showing us how to think during the trip...)

Eternal Copyright

Brilliant idea! Now suppose we backdate all the revenues owed, as we must, and charge reasonable interest on unpaid dues, as we must, then I think God stands to haul in a few billions for the Bible. Fortunately for me, I just registered an account in His name and have legit fully notarized Authority from Him to act as His financial agent. Of course We shall be taking action to recover moneys hijacked from Us by way of music, novels, works of art, films etc over the past couple of millennia.

Sour streaming

Great delicacy!

No warning label provided or needed.

However, the open under water tip is useful to reduce some of the aromatic vapour in the air in the presence of novices. No risk of an explosion.

It's eaten seasonally at the end of the summer, and it's a northern delight, with an epicentre on the coast near Umeå. Eaten with tasty small potatoes, crispbread and onions, accompanied by milk and/or akvavit.

A sour streaming party is a very cheerful event, and worth it for the story alone, although the reward for the connaissour is probably only comparable to truffles.

Writers, unions, outsourcing

The reason American unions are so fucked up is that American workers can be as radically militant as anyone else, so the bosses and their political and media thugs have devoted quite incredible resources and ingenuity to a non-stop and ongoing war against them and those representing their interests. Class war. In the screwed up tug-of-war known as BOURGEOIS democracy, the workers/unions are the invisible dark matter that determines how the thing moves. Invisible to the public, except as bogey men, the workers and their resistance to impoverishment and dehumanization are what keeps the "advanced" countries semi-"civilized".

Writers and journalists are at the interface of analysing, presenting and representing our life and culture. Poor bastards. They hack away squandering any gifts they might have to gorify their masters. And if work is short, they too stand hopefully in line, ready to craft lies for a crust of bread.

As for foreign workers "stealing our jobs", that's a hoot. The world market is international and global in essence, but not in form. The form is national and parochial. If "our" workers weren't obstructed by this stupid decaying nationalism and its travel and communication restrictions, they'd be working with "their" workers to sort things out. There are no "foreign" workers, just workers living under foreign bosses and hogtied by alien red tape. Workers with foreign bosses don't want to lower "our" wages and conditions, they want to copy and then leapfrog them!!

The capitalist's world is dog eat dog, the worker's world is a collective fry-up.

Boom-bang-a-bang

Maybe if they fire the projectile at the inhouse nuclear plant they obviously use to power the thing they could kill two turkeys with one bolt.And this is going on at the same time as civilians are being chivvied about saving power...

Just imagine if the resources squandered here were put to intelligent people-friendly use, and the "scientists" deployed to create and prioritize such beneficial usages for deprived areas in both rich and poor countries. It isn't hard to do.

Tide coming in

After playing on the wide open "beach" it thought was its own for ever, Micro$aft will soon get drownded if it doesn't head back for the real shore very quickly. Doesn't take many respectable establishment bodies taking a step like this before all the rest follow suit. A parliament here, a police force there, and Glub Glub Glub... Bill G has a fantastic sense of timing!

half-a-million bucks a unit

Don't really need to sell too many of these to rake in the revenues. And it sounds like the real work is in preparing the assembly manual - most of the bits and pieces will be lying around in the plant. Nice piece of gear - but is it hot-swappable?

Unlocked phone = lost sale NOT

This is like Micro$aft and Windows. Lots of armwaving about how terrible the "piracy" is, but lots of behind-the-scenes glee at how the piracy makes market share even more formidable. Every pirate user is someone who is locked into the system, and will be hard to move away to any competitor. This is the "dark matter" in the computer universe that prevents Linux from expanding the way it would if there wasn't any freeloading. Russia, China, India.

And MS and Ballmer are always ready to give their poison away for next to nothing if it's necessary to stop say a national or local government from going open source.

It's also like the Catholic Church. No sinners - no Pope.

The dialectic of light and dark.

New world in spite of ourselves

It's a question of reproducing a work of art. So we need to look at where art is today. And it's not where it can be controlled by rich guys controlling expensive hardware that gives them a monopoly on reproduction. In some niches, like big bronze reproductions of big prestigeous statues, this is still a bit true, but in terms of music and performing arts, not at all. So we're back to the origin - it's the performance and the collective experience of music, theatre etc that's real, and all the rest is reproduction.

Painting has given us a lesson here. The "original" - say a Van Gogh or a Titian - needs to be monopolized like mad, surrounded by security and all the signals of wealth and power involved at that scale. The reproductions scale all the way from a real artist's recreation (expensive, and jealously watched over) via a decent print to a cheapo postcard. And the postcard only costs what it does because of the material labour required to get the image on the card and into the shop.

The labour required to reproduce a piece of music at the decent print level is thoroughly socialized today. Masses of people can record that well, more can put it online, and almost everyone can download it.

Same goes for words in a book, of course, except that the process of reproduction is perhaps more zealously protected by publishers and scanning is still a bit of an art. Once the basic transfer of ink to electrons has been done though, the bat is out of the cage, and flits where it likes.

In a nutshell, our technology in relation to art is way ahead of our social competence in managing it - cos we live in a crappy decaying capitalist system that's outlived itself by at least five decades.

Time to see ourselves as one collective, the human race, working for and with one another. From No holds barred to No bars hold.

Knock down Ginger

At last!

Knock down Ginger meets Hi-Tech and a beautiful bouncing baby is born...

What a translation corpus is useful for

Translation software that's any good doesn't provide an out-of-the-spout final version. It provides useful suggestions for words, phrases and sentences, and the translator selects what's appropriate and puts it all into acceptable shape. Translations into English should sound English, etc. Nothing tires or puts a reader off more than non-idiomatic or inconsistent usage. This even goes for stuff that's crap in the original - the translation should read like English crap etc unless you're being paid extra to de-crap it.

That's why this kind of offer is a great step forward. It provides real translators with real suggestions provably used in real cases. Nothing there to stop anyone coming up with anything better.

Out-of-the-spout versions are very hit and miss. The only people who can really make full use of them are those who know the original language and can decipher some of the oddities arising from over-literal translations and misunderstood contexts. More than a page of this for a stranger to the original language is usually mind-numbing enough to bring the reading to a halt, unless you're driven by an extraordinary passion for the topic.

There are a couple of problems with huge corpuses like this, though, that have nothing to do with gobbledegook. The first is the need for constant cultivation - pruning, editing etc, to weed out possible errors and focus on the useful alternatives so that a translator isn't overwhelmed by a deluge of not very useful suggestions. Another is the need to keep terminology precise and up-to-date. A third is more technical - a capability to segment a sentence into useful bits and pieces so that phrases and words are matched rather than just full sentences. Translators who used DejaVu as against Trados translation memory software are constantly thankful for the greater flexibility DV offers in this respect.

Finally, we should be aware of the de-skilling of translation as a profession that is going on. Trados software in particular is time and again used by translation agencies to gouge translators and push rates down. On the other hand, there are still one or two clients around who appreciate that a good translation is worth its weight in gold. They don't want monkey jabber, so they don't pay peanuts. (Note for the business-minded - the time taken to make a crap translation acceptable usually exceeds the time needed to get a good translation in the first place, if the translators know their onions.

Politics not technology

Supplying technology like this is a charity solution. The problems facing the people in exploited countries are political, and can't be solved by charity. However, the impact of any useful technology, however it's acquired - like pens and paper, or literacy - in a fertile political setting can be explosive. Brazil is a perfect example of this, with excellent theory and even some practice in place for getting the most out of the desire of poor people to empower themselves. Like Freire's work.

Like China, Brazil could easily design and manufacture its own solutions to technological challenges. But to do this it would need to throw out the multinational leeches (who try and threaten workers in Sao Paulo with "outsourcing" their jobs to the poor north-east of the same country), and repudiate its fake debts to the imperialist banks. While Lula is president this won't happen, and Brazil will just be another India. Damn it all, haircuts cost you more in Sao Paulo than they do in f**king Epsom.

The Amazon isn't a puddle in the street, but charity would like us to see the problem of international poverty in that way. Fortunately the people on the sharp end of imperialist gouging are more realistic about charity than those of us in the first world who just get ground down by the blunt end.

drivers drivers and more drivers...

What has got up my nose using Linux is the trouble I've had getting the video to work as it should. Neither time I've dived in has my monitor worked with the out of the box Linux installation. And finding Linux drivers is much harder than finding Windows drivers. Until I get a good Mac again, I only need Windows for one specialist program that's dongled, Linux will do the rest for me. And most of it installed on top of Windows to make a useful dual boot machine - but until your monitor works without ripping your nails off, you're gonna shy away from trying the software out just to see how it feels. Oh, and updating system stuff shouldn't fuck things up that worked before... at least not without patient and cheerful explanations and remedies being easily available.

So this partnership is a damn good idea. The more the merrier. And more focus on installation and the first-time user experience

Chavs rule, so do Macs, so does Essex Woman

I'd like to be a Chav Fan Boy (sounds like a Soho restaurant - yum!) - you not only get to be a filmstar like Ali G Innit, but you're allowed to use a Mac and get to be with Essex Woman - not much into perfume mind, cos the only the things she'll put behind her ears are her heels...

This thread reads like a nerd's convention

Tweak this. Remove this or that component and tap three times. Command line override. Keep a spare DOS floppy handy. Rejig the network configuration. Check the motherboard's component specs against the OS standard specs. Pimp the ride with this or that 3rd party enhancer. Don't carry liquids or nail scissors. Did you fill in the form correctly? Ah, you're using 96 octane and it should be 98. Wrong psi in the tires :-)

Never seen so many clones (Vista/M$ defenders) looking so different from each other. Not just old flavours of M$ to choose between now but multiple permutations of Vista depending on software and hardware versions.

Bill Gates got out while the going was a bit better than it is now.

mental arithmetic - speed maths

A simple and fun way of astounding people if you like cribbage is set out in the Trachtenberg approach to "speed math" - see for example

http://www.speed-math.com/

or buy the book at Amazon for ten dollars:

http://www.amazon.com/Speed-System-Basic-Mathematics-Trachtenberg/dp/0285629166/ref=ed_oe_p

Language freaks and interpreters can astound people in the same way. Like conjurers. Or stenographers, or superfast typists, or piano prodigies. People are amazing. We've hardly scratched the surface of what we're capable of internalizing and manipulating in terms of patterns of numbers, relationships, movements etc.

Basically it's in all of us. So stop emptying yourself of skill and potential and realize you're full of more than shit. Merry Xmas.

changing capitalism from within

So many Americans - and not just them - believe that "capitalism" is the only possible form of human society, ever, so we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of initiative, either, improbably, from bloated caps themselves, or more likely through pressure from below - as one woman was quoted saying recently: "Our society is capitalist, so we have to get rid of these bad things (like pollution etc) in a capitalist way", presumably meaning "we'll force the fuckers to make clean energy and call it capitalism whatever the outcome..."

Otherwise known as "in the dark, all cats are grey..."

Siberia = Mars... NOT

Irkutsk is hardly in a chilly part of Siberia :-)

While it's very cold there from November to March (av. below -10C), it's above zero from April to October, and above 8C av from April to September. And the city has the same latitude (cough n spit) as London. It gets a lot of sunshine (av over 5h a day from March to October) and not much rain. So the cooling for M$ would be best in the ground or the lake taken year-round.

Given good cabling it's got excellent potential for reaching into China and Korea (and extending to Japan), maybe south-east Asia, and, more dubiously, India. Not to forget the opportunities offered by Siberia itself (Novosibirsk etc).

Great geopolitical choice for M£, and a bit worrying for the rest of us, given oil and gas pipelining issues and the political power games connected with this.

The effort they put into crippling everything!

Doncha love capitalism! The technology to beam culture, debate, news and entertainment everywhere has been available for over a decade. So what do the leaders of our society do with it?? Cripple, strangle, maim, shred, manacle, bin and gouge! Every innovation is riddled with depleted uranium dum-dum bullets. Freedom of thought, exchange of experience and ideas, globalization of progress MY ARSE!

Corporate greed against consumers, citizens, taxpayers and humanity. Backed by lickspittle government stooges. The system of private profit has never been in such open and obvious conflict with the public interest as today.

This issue of publicly funded programming being made available internationally could be solved by reciprocal agreements between publicly funded producers, all license payers being able to access such material from any producer regardless of origin. No-brainer.

But at the moment it's being crushed by deliberate government sabotage. Public producers are FORBIDDEN to compete effectively with private ones. That would be unfair on the poor darlings. Universal access to public programming would naturally wipe out the ad-ridden shit being sprayed over us all today.

The message of today is not "Big Brother is watching you" - that's old stuff... it's "You are watching Big Brother". The mind-forged manacles grip tighter...

valuable thread!!!

Lots of useful advice here - and a nice tone to most of the contributions. The usual blinkered bile though from the Windozers who used to hate GUIs when their homogenized world only offered DOS. Makes you wonder if they're paid for their efforts or just born boneheads.

It's good that M$ monopoly gouging is called a tax. Shouldn't be long before capitalist profit itself is labelled a billionaires' tax (especially in places like the ex-USSR, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand which have seen the rise in prices and fall in services accompanying privatization). Open Source and Science show that cooperation and openness get things done and stand up well against the pressures applied by the big corporations and their running dog government goons. Even some governments are getting out from under the lead blanket.

The M$ man of war was never solid oak, but now it's wormier and spongier than ever. Every Linux enthusiast represents a growth node of family members and mates, too. And just think about the number of slightly older Windoze machines screaming out for replacement with Vista hardware OR a Linux system... Just think...

It WILL happen here AGAIN AND AGAIN

Latest news is that New Labour contractions will soon be leading to SECURITY checks at over 260 stations in Britain, SECURITY officers at centres of mass assembly in every municipality, and MORE SECURITY for everybody through SECURE SECURITY information on everyone entering and leaving the UK, some 90 pieces of info. If you've got any spare cash, invest it in SECURITY securities, the SECURITY industry is sure to EXPLODE any day now.

Meantime the unemployed (ie sponging layabouts) should be forced to volunteer as training material for the cops to practise profiling, herding, and unarmed compulsion on. No giros for refuseniks. Trusted individuals discovered among the material could be encouraged to join the cops, thus killing several sick jokes with one Taser.

Like Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto, anyone refusing to obey the orders of the MAN IN UNIFORM, or not looking happy, should be classified (for ever) as terrorists and dealt with on the spot.

At last

With a bit of luck, as this thing nears completion over the next couple of years, we'll be seeing a lot of desperate copycats jumping on the bandwagon. The same way as next year should probably see a huge increase in small-scale wind turbines and solar generators for domestic and small business use. Fun watching an explosion in ultra-slow-motion like this...

Bribery

Since the procurement obviously came a long way to be loaded with Mandriva in the first place, then it was overturned at a fairly high level in the hierarchy. Which means the number of bribes was necessarily small, allowing for a greater sum in each case.

An excellent problem for maths students - optimal government level to maximize individual bribe lure while minimizing total cost of bribery (TCB).