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Archive for October, 2003

AP:

Tuesday, October 28th, 2003

AP: Shareholders Approve Palm Unit’s Spinoff. “Palm, now joined by rival Handspring, will be renamed palmOne Inc. The spun off division, which develops the Palm operating system, had already been acting independently as a subsidiary for more than a year and will remain as PalmSource Inc. [...] Beginning Wednesday, PalmSource stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol PSRC, and the new combined company of Palm and Handspring, under the new ticker symbol PLMO.”

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George Lakoff on how conservatives are using language to shape issues.

Tuesday, October 28th, 2003

George Lakoff on how conservatives are using language to shape issues. Small example, regarding Schwarzenegger’s immediate and resounding popularity with conservatives:

He didn’t have to say a word! He just had to stand up there, and he represents Mr. Discipline. He knows what’s right and wrong, and he’s going to take it to the people. He’s not going to ask permission, or have a discussion, he’s going to do what needs to be done, using force and authority. His very persona represents what conservatives are about.

Fire, women, conservative thinktanks…

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I mean, maybe they scanned all the pages.

Monday, October 27th, 2003

I mean, maybe they scanned all the pages. What do I know? Dave has it on some authority that indeed the pages were scanned, by cheap foreign labor. I’m used to feeling guilty about consuming goods and products created in sweatshops; I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard of sweatshop-produced data.

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Todd wonders why I haven’t mentioned Amazon’s fulltext searching of their books.

Sunday, October 26th, 2003

Todd wonders why I haven’t mentioned Amazon’s fulltext searching of their books. Here’s what I told him:

Re: Amazon’s searching: I’m a little less impressed with the whole arduous book-scanning endeavor, because, frankly, I doubt they scanned a single page. I figure almost all the books you can search, all the books that Amazon’s selling, are in current print, which means that their publishers are rolling paper pulp under rubber offset printing rollers right now. The rubber is transferred ink by a lithography plate wrapped around another roller; the lithoplate was etched by exposing it to UV light (could be visible light; this process varies depending on the chemicals used on the surface of the plate) underneath a photonegative of the page printed on celluloid; the negative was generated by a digital printer (dye, or ink, or laser), from digital prepress data (PostScript, generated by Quark or TeX or whatever).

So, basically, the publishers have the text of all these books in digital form already. It’s just a matter of Amazon getting a hold of the files, and this falls under the umbrella of business development, which is truly a terrifying and magical force. (There’s some postproduction required to extract the text, build the search engine, blah blah, but this is more straightforward. You can license or buy technology to cover almost all of that.)

I have to admit that the public availability of these texts is a really interesting development; the corpus linguist in me, for example, is delighted at the opportunity to analyze so much text in an automated fashion.

Except, of course, you’re not allowed to do that. So, you know, I’m less excited. In fact, as it turns out, I really don’t have much use for the service, in its current form, at all. So I haven’t used the service, yet.

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It turns out that Daylight Saving time ended on the same day that the first serious cold front came through Houston.

Sunday, October 26th, 2003

It turns out that Daylight Saving time ended on the same day that the first serious cold front came through Houston. Last week, 6:00 PM meant 80° and afternoon sunlight. Today it means 50° and a sky dark as pitch.

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Not that I like the Marlins, but thank you, Florida.

Sunday, October 26th, 2003

Not that I like the Marlins, but thank you, Florida.

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Rain!

Saturday, October 25th, 2003

Rain! Blessed rain! Don’t stop, don’t ever stop!

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  • dsandler: The Simplify concept is one I've been thinking about for a while (ever since we bridged our DAAP servers around at PalmSource in '01 or so). Nov 20 2008
  • dsandler: Playing with simplifymedia.com (username 'dsandler', natch) Nov 20 2008
  • dsandler: Attempting to steer the giant superfreighter that is my life. Nov 19 2008
  • dsandler: Actually, this game turned out to be pretty well attended. Apparently Rockets fans are just fashionably late. Nov 19 2008