Comment Re:we have it in pdf, but not in epub (Score 1) 48
Right on, thanks! Looks like they also just officially released epub and mobi versions.
Comment Re:we have it in pdf, but not in epub (Score 1) 48
Anyone have tips on how to actually produce a decent-looking epub ebook with pandoc or latex2html/Calibre?
I tried several incantations of pandoc, none of which produced more than gibberish. For example: pandoc -w epub -o Open-Advice.epub -S -s Open-Advice.tex
latex2html got much further (generated a real HTML book), but it had tons of munged words. I didn't bother trying to munge the mess to epub.
From what I can tell, the conversion tools can help, but the source text really has to have epub in mind if that is to be a useful build target.
Comment Good Luck, Rob! (Score 1) 1521
Hey there, it was great working with you. We haven't spoke much in the last 10 years because life has become busy, but it was great to have worked with you in the early days, getting Slashcode 1.0 and then 2.0 released, trying to find ways to cache before memcached, removing the variable "$shit" from the code-- those were the days. I know it must be incredibly hard to come to a close for something you created. Good luck with whatever you do!
Comment Re:Partial yes (Score 1) 3
Awesome, thanks!
And I totally agree understand that forking is a last resort, and can be far more complex socially than legally.
A Second Lessig Fair-Use Video Is Suppressed By WMG 187
Bios_Hakr points out an ironic use of the DMCA: for the second time, a video tutorial on fair use that Larry Lessig uploaded to YouTube has been muzzled. This time the sound has been pulled from the video; last time the video was taken off of YouTube. (Video and sound for the new "webside chat" can be experienced together on BlipTV.) Both times, Warner Music Group was the party holding copyright on a song that Lessig used in an unarguably fair-use manner. TechDirt is careful not to assume that an actual DMCA takedown notice was issued, on the likelihood that Google's automatic copyright-violation detectors did the deed. "The unintended consequences of asking tool providers [e.g., Google] to judge what is and what is not copyright infringement lead to tremendous problems with companies shooting first and asking questions later. They are silencing speech, on the threat that it might infringe on copyright. This is backwards. We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas — not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn't know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright."
Comment Lively discussion (Score 1) 335
I could use some Yerba Mate. Writing books is exhausting, and I will soon be done. I will be able to sleep. Hooray!
I'm glad to have triggered some discussion here. I just want to improve MySQL, that's all.
Comment Gobby Slashdotted? (Score 1) 125
Dang, looks like perhaps the Gobby Web site went down under the load. Anyone have a mirror? I just set up a Gobby server and want my coworkers using Windows and Mac to be able to try it out, if clients exist for those platforms.
Comment Wireless Broadband (Score 1) 336
I'm part owner of a wireless broadband provider. We use Alvarion equipment to deliver high speed internet from a local mountain top in southern New Hampshire. Much better than satellite because the distance the signal has to travel is only 6 miles vs. 30k from a satellite, which has bad latency.
If you can get a leased line, look at splitting up the costs by then being a small community broadband provider, as one of my partners did prior to us merging with his company.
Submission + - The History of the Apple II (gamasutra.com)
Matt Barton writes: "Gamasutra is running our feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of he greatest games and developers of all time. We discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima."
Submission + - MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing (schedulesdirect.org) 1
An anonymous reader writes: A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers "expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year." This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously on slashdot.
Comment It's not April 1st! (Score 1, Redundant) 308
I thought the news about E17 was out on April Fools day!
Journal Journal: Right Thumb Tendonitis
Comment The Myth of Labor (Score 1) 31
As a former Computational Linguistics student, I'd say the main problem is either the lack of computational power or the lack of manual labour. Ie.: even a very well defined liguistic area needs to be defined with too many rules (in a complex system) or needs too much data and CPU time (in a brute force) to be feaible, commercially viable, interesting in the Turing-sense... too much effort to just make it work.
This is a very popular opinion, conirmed by the amount of money corporations through at manual processes like taxonomy maintenance and training, but it's out of date. There are several scalable, commercially viable approaches that do not require manual labor or prohivitive processing to be feasible.
Google News is an example of a large-scale application built with automated NLP. Think Tank 23 makes a NLP-based, ad-hoc categorization engine that powers, among other sites, the Waypath Project.
Talk about a killer app!
This is a very popular opinion, conirmed by the amount of money corporations through at manual processes like taxonomy maintenance and training, but it's out of date. There are several scalable, commercially viable approaches that do not require manual labor or prohivitive processing to be feasible.
Google News is an example of a large-scale application built with automated NLP. Think Tank 23 makes a NLP-based, ad-hoc categorization engine that powers, among other sites, the Waypath Project.
Talk about a killer app!
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