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About meDvorak expands his bonehead repertoire
John Dvorak is this tech columnist who usually spends his time writing idiotic articles about how Apple is doomed, or Microsoft needs to throw away XP and Vista and go back to Windows 2000, or the future of computers is obviously wearable smart machines shaped like underpants. Great for getting the hits up on his publications, but not exactly informed.
Now, joy of joys, he’s gotten into my game! In Machine Translation: I’m Sick of Waiting (also available here), he writes:
The way I see it, if computers can now play a credible world-class game of chess, then they should be able to translate complex sentences written in the world’s major languages. They should be able to translate to and from English, to and from French, and to and from Russian. I eventually expect a translation to and from Chinese and Japanese, too. Exactly what’s the hangup?
We have the computing power to make this work, so why don’t governments all demand it? Throw $10 billion at the problem, and I bet it is resolved sooner rather than later. $10 billion is less than the cost of one month of the Iraq war, just for comparison.
Yes, John, living human languages are exactly like a game with a fixed set of rules and a finite numper of possible moves at any one time. Er, wait. No they aren’t. They’re flexible, the people who use them can use them incorrectly and still communicate effectively, they’re constantly gaining new words and losing forgotten ones.
If $10 billion is enough to create a machine with the communicative power of a human brain, you can bet that Google or Microsoft or some other big player would have spent that money a long time ago, and would be reaping the rewards right now . . . either that or trying to turn the brain off before it launched the missiles and killed the human parasites on the planet. So you can see how wise that idea would be.
The best part of his article is the final para:
The computer revolution began a half-century ago. We should have been able to solve this problem by now. What we need is government resolve, because private industry can’t seem to manage it.
That’s right folks, you heard it here first! Government researchers can do it. Because when you’re part of a bureaucracy that mandates the concealment of the portion of the anatomy at the “rear of the human body . . . between two imaginary lines, one on each side of the body (the ‘outside lines’), which outside lines are perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and which perpendicular outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each nate meets the outer side of each leg” instead of telling strippers in Pennsylvania to keep their butts covered up then you know all about the innermost secrets of human communication.
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One Response to “Dvorak expands his bonehead repertoire”
Posted by: Cailin Coilleach - 09/20/2006
Nice to see you blogging more often these days
And forget about silly Dvorak.
I think I’ll safely steer away from the article you referenced. I’ve never been a great fan of Dvorak (or Dvorak-bashing), simply because the fellow seems quite backwards. Seems like a waste of time to put too much energy/effort into stuff by/about him
Just breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out
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