Group items tagged

"Babelfish 101 (also appliable to the Google translator) Babelfish is not a little polyglot genius lurking in your computer or in cyberspace Babelfish is A computer program made of lists of words and phrases in different languages complex, but not all-covering, rules applied to these lists in order to produce translations Babelfish will not give you a publishable or even editable version of your text in another language analyse and render correctly complex sentence structures always choose the meaning you had it mind if two or more words have the same spelling confuse two words due to approximate memory Babelfish will produce apparent gibberish give you a rough idea of what someone else's original text is about Therefore, when dealing with Babelfish, you must use commonsense Don't use Babelfish to produce a translation into another language, especially if you don't know that language If you know others will use Babelfish to read you, use simple sentence structure and avoid terms that can have several meanings If you read something absurd or outrageous in a Babelfish translation, don't immediately attribute the absurdity or outrage to the author. Try to guess from the context what the author might have meant Compare what the author might have meant with what you know of Babelfish's limitations, to see if these limitations are the likely cause of the apparent absurdity or outrage be wary of commonsense The author may indeed have expressed something that would baffle you even if you both used the same language: because your cultural references are different, because s/he is using irony because (make your own list) ask when in doubt ;-)" Avevo scritto questo post su un blog del Digital Divide Network (DDN) che non c'è più. Questa è la copia salvata sull'Internet Archive il 13 agosto 2007

"Author: Andy Carvin , EDC Center for Media & Community | December 7th, 2004 You may have noticed recently that lots of websites now contain little graphical buttons with the word XML on them. For example: XML button When you click on the button, all you see is a bunch of jumbled text and computer code. What's this all about? It's an RSS feed, and they're changing the way people access the Internet. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technical format that allows online publishers to share and distribute their content to other websites or individual Internet users. It's commonly used for distributing headlines on news websites. Bloggers use it to distribute summaries of their blog entries as well. RSS is written in the Internet coding language known as XML, which is why you see RSS buttons labeled that way. If a website publishes an RSS page, commonly known as an RSS "feed," this feed will contain summaries of all the recent articles posted on that site. For example, Yahoo News publishes news related to world headlines, national news, sports, etc. These you can all read by going to the Yahoo website. But they also publish RSS feeds for each of these subjects. Each RSS feed contains a summary of the most recent news stories posted. Similarly, the Digital Divide Network publishes RSS feeds for our news headlines, events listings and other content on our website. I even have my own RSS feed for articles that I publish on my personal blog, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. But why do RSS feeds look like a jumbled mess when I click on them with most Web browsers? It's because RSS feeds are meant to be read by machines rather than people. Software and websites can understand the data contained in RSS feeds and make it available to people on personalized websites, through software known as news aggregators, even through email. So when you aggregate RSS feeds, you're having a computer collect content from many different websites and organize them in a convenient pla

Linkato in http://iamarf.org/2013/04/20/racconti-ltis13/ , commento 42. RSS come empowerment.