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# Talkback

### Talkback:124/smith.html

[ In reference to "Build a Six-headed, Six-user Linux System" in LG#124 ]

Chad Van Maele [chadvm at gmail.com]

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 15:40:13 +0000

I've tried and tried and I can't get this to work, I'm using Debian/etch, xorg 7.3, and xdm. When try to start the X server manually, seat0 works ok, but I've had varying success with seat1, sometimes it starts, but not on the same vt, so monitor0 goes black, or it will start on the same vt, but no window manager will start, the mouse and keyboard work ok though. I've looked at an exhaustive amount of other howto's, but most of them are outdated, saying I need Xephyr to do it. I've gone to irc.freenode.net and went to #xorg, but no one there even talks at all, just a bunch of IRC trolls I guess. I don't know where to look for help anymore, so I'm writing this email. I don't want to be a bother, but I just don't know what else to do. Thanks.

    --
    Chad Van Maele
    http://www.tshirthell.com/store/link.php?id=RGlvbml4

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/2.20kB) ]

### Talkback:155/xkcd.html

[ In reference to "XKCD" in LG#155 ]

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 18:22:43 +0100

XKCD Improving the Internet ... Yet Again http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/09/1618235&from=rss

The real story is here: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33807

### Talkback:155/lg_tips.html

[ In reference to "2-Cent Tips" in LG#155 ]

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:01:08 +0100

[[[ This is specifically a followup to the thread http://linuxgazette.net/155/misc/lg/two_cent_tip__download_whole_directory_as_zip_file.html -- Kat ]]]

2008/9/16 Silas S. Brown <ssb22@cam.ac.uk>:

    >
    > You shuld be able to use Gradint as well if you
    > can find someone to record the words and
    > phrases for you.

I wanted to mention this at the time, but I couldn't find the link: http://shtooka.net/ is a project aimed at just this idea - of providing pronunciations of words in various languages.

[ Thread continues here (5 messages/8.93kB) ]

### Talkback:152/srinivasan.html

[ In reference to "A Slightly Advanced Introduction to Vim" in LG#152 ]

Eric Deschamps [erdesc at free.fr]

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:46:31 +0200

Hi,

I guess there is another error on this document.

In the section "Miscellaneous Commands"

    		 Shift+j (or J) - This will brings up the previous line to the end of the current.

It should be : This brings up the next line to the end of the current, shouldn't it ?

Best Regards,

Eric

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.39kB) ]

### Talkback: [LG 86] 2c Tips #20

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:33:58 +0100

[[[ This is clearly the wrong Talkback link, but after some serious searching of the LG archives, I can't find the source anywhere. It may be from some (rare) unpublished recent material. Lacking a better subject line, I've opted to retain the (inaccurate) original it was sent in as. -- Kat ]]]

2008/3/10 Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net>:

    > Oh, heck - the classic "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
    > weak"/"The vodka is good but the meat is rotten" problem is going to be
    > with us for a long, long time.

Turns out that example is false, according to the MT Book (http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/MTBook/):

    There was/is an MT system which translated The spirit is willing,
    but the flesh is weak into the Russian equivalent of The vodka is
    good, but the steak is lousy, and hydraulic ram into the French
    equivalent of water goat. MT is useless.

    The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that
    it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication.
    In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any
    MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is
    willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956,
    but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America
    which could translate from English into Russian  until much more
    recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had
    concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other
    way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest
    are the translation of French  avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or
    `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans
    le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as
    easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show
    that MT is useless.

For our own ins, the previous release of our Catalan-English translator mistranslates 'Fidel Castro' (I requested that 'Faithful Castrate be the release name for 0.8.4, but was unsuccessful); the current versions of en-ca and en-es both mistranslate the Catalan and Spanish versins of 'International Monetary Fund' to something like 'Worldwide Bottom Fund' - which might be more accurate in the current climate, but still - which I fixed last week (you don't need to speak a language to work on MT, but it helps).

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Published in Issue 156 of Linux Gazette, November 2008

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