You sure have a point there, but it does not work this way.
You make it sound like a conspiracy of sorts.
Once China is dependant on revenue from outside for its (toys/software programming/you name it), then it is difficult to act erratically, and deprive itself of the revenue.
See, capital is very selfish and wary. Once it sees instability, it runs away to safer havens.
Look at the USofA's relationship with Pakistan and India for example, when it comes to invading Afghanistan, a dictator like Prevez Musharraf is ideal, because he can allow troops,...etc. without asking a parliament. When it comes to outsourcing, it is India that gets the money, because it is a democracy with stability.
Two of my kids are in the same age group. Each has computer in their room. I installed Mandrake (first 9.1, then 10.0) on it about 9 months ago. They use it for homework, Neopets, games, playing MP3, and chatting with friends (using GAIM). I even introduced them to FreeCiv the other day and they played it for a while (and understood what a server and a client is,...etc).
Homework and important stuff is stored on a server and directories are shared via NFS.
They complain every now and then that such and such site does not work (Shockwave or MS specific ActiveX perhaps), but they can do most of the Windows stuff on it.
The computers are second hand Pentium II bought on the cheap.
I don't have to deal with spyware, viruses, or spend big money on games, software,...etc.
Apple does not provide "just" BSD. They have heavily customized (in fact forked) BSD and build that wonderful GUI, installation, configuration,...etc. on top of it. Third party ISVs know that they have to deal with only a finite set of variables on the OS. Mac OS X is not available on any other hardware architecture than what Apple makes. They have a limited set of supported peripherals,...etc. This gives the users much fewer surprises from incompatibilities and such.
On the other hand, HP just makes the hardware. There are endless aftermarket peripherals available for it (granted much less than a desktop). They do not have their own fork of SuSE, nor any special GUI on top of it. Hence, one can get SuSE from anywhere, and run it on any hardware, and it would not be much different from HP's offering (apart from being pre-installed, usable by the masses, and perhaps certain features configured specifically for their hardware).
Apple is playing at a different level than HP.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linux and has been runnig it myself for years. But this comparison is Apples to HPs.
Coming somewhat late in the discussion, but here goes anyway.
One possibility that was not discussed so far, despite 230+ posts already, is that the FBI were snooping on these people suspecting terrorism (thanks to the Patriot Act), but they could not find anything terrorist about them, but stumbled upon the DDoS thing.
What makes me suspect that is that the CEO is a Moroccan, and not a citizen of the USA. Perhaps because he was an Arab (and perhaps Muslim), and involved in computers/internet, and had communicated with hackers (er... crackers). All this may have made him a ripe target for being monitored. Thanks to profiling...
I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
Ah. STREAMS. Yes.
I recall a case from some 8 years ago on UNIX System V Release 4, which is a direct parent of Solaris. This problem is not really solely STREAMS, but when its limitations is combined with poor programming, that is the result.
A transaction processing application was written in a way that is less than optimal. Every user had one process allocated to them handling the traffic from the terminal (via front end processors multiplexing connections from X.25 to TCP/IP), and then the transaction was placed on a queue. The response was taken by the terminal process from a queue, and sent to the user.
The goal was to support 1200 simultaneous logged in active users.
Everytime we loaded the system with 800 users, we could not exceed that, and the system ran out of a certain resource (memory? Don't remember.)
Part of the code was in C, and the programmer who wrote it decided to get each character from the front end processor using getchar(), and send it using putchar().
After a few agonizing nights, and calls to support, we found out that each character was sent internally in a STREAMS header that was 512 bytes long. So, with 800 simulater users firing transactions consisting of a few hundred characters each, you can see that there were lots of 512 byte messages going on in the kernel.
The solution was simple: do the data receive/send in chunks. Problem solved. A story from the trenches, because it hit a nerve.
English is more dynamic, accepting of change, and evolving fast, because of many reasons, including:
It is the language of superpowers for the last two centuries. Whether it was Britian and later America, the language of the powerful always gets more exposure, because of trade, literature,...etc. It is interesting to note that civilizations almost never start with the literary language being their own, but something else (e.g. in early Rome, Greek was the literary language, for the Turkish Ottomans and the Mughal Emperors of India, it was Persian. Even England after William the Conqueror spoke mainly French. Richard The Lionheart did not speak a single word of English! Amazing. Later, as the civilization gets more powerful, it often adopts a purposeful effort of making the national language the official language for business, literature,...etc., often with a massive translation effort as well.
The English speakers (USA, Britian, Canada, Australia,...etc.) are not under a siege mentality about their language
It is the language of technology and new things. Since most of the inventions in the technology field were from the wealthy superpower (USA), they were published in English. Even research from other cultures eventually got adopted by the USA (by immigration [e.g. Einstein, Werner von Braun, Fermi,...etc.], capital investment, commercialization, popularization,...etc.)
Now, coming back to the French, they are under a siege mentality. You see this in what you stated about the Academie Francaise, which is a language police of sorts. You see the same in Quebec as well.
This mentality is not productive to say the least, and could add to the cultural and linguistic isolation the French feel.
So going back to the original articles about those tribes in South America and in Africa: I think that the lack of certain concepts in their language is due to a lack of need for these concepts to develop, not the other way round.
I myself speak (and think!) fluently two very different languages.
Languages (at least the living ones), do not exist in a vacuum. One learns a language (or a dialect like in your case) in a cultural context (e.g. American English late 20th century, mainly in a business environment). So, as he learns the language, he also learns the culture.
Every culture evolved its linguistics to fit the environment, as they go. For example, in classical Arabic, there are names for different parts of the pit of a date (e.g. the integument between the flesh and the pit, the small round mark where the first leaves sprout, and the "filling material" in the furrow). These names are not in everyday use in modern Arabic. Similarly, in Canada, there are names for various forms of frozen H2O as it falls from the sky (sleet, black ice, icicle, snow, flurries, freezing rain,...etc.). If you go up north to the Inuits (Eskimos to the rest of you non-Canadians), then you have more names.
Similarly, several names have evolved for concepts, ideas, products and services that did not exist before, such as email, internet, web, instant messaging, Slashdot,..etc. These are mainly in English, since many of these things evolved in the USA first.
The same applies for the invention of the word "million", only when numbers that high were needed in trade.
So, I think that the needs of society cause new terms in their language to be invented, as opposed to the original article's assertion that the lack of a term causes that concept to no exist.
Both examples that assert the hypothesis that language define thoughts are from primitive hunter/gatherer societies.
These two societies are not agrarian or mercantile, and therefore have no need for trade, storage, accounting,...etc.
Therefore, the need for numbers greater than two does not exist. One could argue that because there is no need, the concept of numbers did not arise.
Think about the concept and word "million". It only developed in pre-Renaissance Italy (AFAIK). Prior to that, cultures expressed it as "a thousand thousand". Only in the 20th century has the larger trillion,...etc. developed.
As an aside, language do differ in many aspects.
Some languages are more precise than others in one area, while not being so precise in other areas. For example, whereas in English we have singular (e.g. site) and plural (sites), Arabic for example has singular, dual and plural. Also, there is a different dual and plural forms for masculine and feminine.
On the other hand, there is no concept of "he/she/it" in Arabic, everything is either masculine or feminine, even inanimate objects.
If you have an open WiFi LAN at home, and someone surfs kiddie porn, you are liable. Or if he does something else illegal like cracking into a bank, or whatever. That was my point.
There was a case here in Canada last year, namely in Toronto, where the cop stopped some youth in a car going the wrong way in one-way street.
To the cop's surprise, this guy had his pants down (i.e. naked from the waist down) in the car, and a laptop with WiFi in it. He was war driving that neighborhood.
Had he not gone against the traffic, he would not have been caught at all...
So, the threat is real. If someone choses to open their wireless LAN to outsiders, then he should know the risks.
Same thing applies if you run a message board or web site then it becomes a mouth piece for hate speech or terrorism or whatever. If you know the risks and chose to do this regardless, then be prepared for the consequences.
You know what? When I started writing the list above, the examples, I included Canada, and the issue of Quebec soverignty, as the first example, then I deleted that line before I posted it because it is too close to home (I am in Canada myself).
I guess it is a matter of taste... I cannot stand it either, but some swear it is better than the fabled ambrosia.
But my point is: THEY ARE INDEED IDENTICAL. One culture (Greeks) took it from the other (Ottomans). However, just calling it "Turkish" (as the rest of the world calls it) is so offensive to some Greek, even though they gained independance some 1.5 centuries ago from the Ottomans...
An example of a hot button issue that is very emotionally charged for the insiders and seems ridiculous to the outsiders.
Just goes to show how emotionally charged some issues are for some people, and how "outsiders" to the culture/group/issue fail to see how big the issue is, as explained in a previous post.
First of all, when a company hires a contractor to do something, and then release it in the company's name, the company is responsible, not the contractor. They should have reviewed it and checked it, like any other software. If they did, and this slipped by, they are at fault. If they did not do a review then they are also at fault.
Second, an internal Muslim employee alerted them to the problem, and they ignored it, and still pushed it to the market.
Third, only after three months they received a complaint did they act, but this time blaming the Japanese.
I can't see how this is a "success for Microsoft's process management"?
Yeah, that happened for sure. I don't understand the over reaction by the Saudis, but it is perhaps oversensitivity to the issue or something.
It did not happen in every case where Muslim armies conquered though, since there are lots of pre-Islamic churches in Syria, Egypt,...etc. still exist today.
You have to also remember that it also happened the other way, the mosques in Spain and Portugal were turned into churches as the Catholics too them over. Many of the church towers in Spain have a Moorish / North African architecture because of this.
That was before the conquest of Constantinople, and perhaps a reaction as well?
But, put yourself in their shoes and see how it looks. As trivial as a map may look, there are political implications behind it. For example, in this case, an area inhabited by a ethno-linguistic minority asserts its independance, although the de facto situation is that this is within the bounds of a soverign state. What is worse, is that they see this as a conspiracy from more powerful countries to assert the reverse of the status quo.
Some issues appear really trivial, but are really sensitive/contentious in other countries/cultures. Here are some examples:
Go to Greece and ask for "Turkish" coffee, and the most likely situation is that they will not serve you. You may even receive a lecture from the waiter too. Even mentioning the Turkish culture in an academic or historical sense to some Greeks will cause them to lose thier calm. The same can be true with Armenians too.
Calling the Persian Gulf "Persian" for the Arab states on the West coast of it. The Arabic name is "Gulf of the Arabs".
Every culture has those "hot button" issues.
There are many other cases I am sure, but you get the idea...
The big problem with the Zeitgeist stats, from what I've heard, is that they only recorded the same IP address once.
I can relate to that. Forget home users for a moment. The company where I am employed has some 30,000 employees worldwide. All of them go out of the corporate network on ONE SINGLE IP ADDRESS.
Now that is a possible reason of why Google pulled them down.
In the early 90s, there was this hot debate about RISC vs. CISC, and the merits of each,...etc.
This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
Regarding the number of chips out there, AMD is not really different from Intel, at least it is instruction set compatible. Maybe this will change a bit in the 64-bit versions, but not right now. PowerPC is a good architecture, but not so wide spread. Outside of some IBM servers, and the 3% that is Apple's share, they are not used much.
Without religion, we would have far less barbaric acts.
But history shows otherwise: For example, the Soviet Union and many Communist Bloc countries were expressedly atheistic and anti-religion. They practiced oppression and genocide just as bad as the religious folk.
Also, there is Gengis Khan as someone above pointed out. If you look at Timur Leng (Tamerlane), he mostly fought and slaughtered fellow Muslims without any religious justification at all. Even the US fought fellow Christians in the Civil War.
If you go back in history a few millenia, the ancient polytheistic civilizations (Egypt, Babylon, Phoenecia, Rome, Greece,...etc.) rarely if ever fought each other over religion. They even borrowed gods from each other. It was always some other ideology that dehumanized the others, barbarians vs. civilization, freedom vs. oppression, justice vs. injustice, beleiver vs. infidel, wealth, land,...etc.
Point is: humans were always like that and will continue to be like that. A reason will be made up if one does not exist.
I migrated to from Outlook Express to Thunderbird about two months ago.
This was just after I migrated from MS IE to Firefox 0.9. The motive was the serious security issues with Microsoft products. I also installed OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 to run all FOSS applications.
Thunderbird did a fine job migrating. Of course, I started by backing up my mail folders to the home server. Thunderbird imported all my old mail without a problem, except that it fudged a "From " header for every message, with funny dates, such as the year 1969,...etc.
It also migrated my account settings correctly and my address book. I was not concerned about the address book that much, since I back it up to Yahoo Address book anyway, and can retrieve it from there.
Now my email is in mbox format, and I back it up to the server where I can grep in it to find stuff (although it has CR/LF format, and not just NL). My email is not hostage to Microsoft format anymore.
Thunderbird functionality is OK, but my gripe is that it is bloated. Granted, my machine is a PII-300 128MB (I know, I know!), but still, I do not run Thunderbird all the time. Just when I need to check email, and when mutt on the server is not sufficient, and to periodically retrieve my POP mail and back it up.
For the same reason, in part, democracy was invented: not to rely on the goodwill of a person, even if they are a benevolent dictator. Because, simply, the next dictator may not be so benevolent. Relying on the goodwill alone can cause serious problems in the future, namely, the abuse of power by those who hold it.
Heck, even democracy as implemented in the USA today has shown it has serious flaws. The Administration, together with a Congress and Senate of the same political inclination can be too powerful and detrimental to civil liberties, and the whole democratic process.
This applies equally to politics and to businesses. We cannot rely on the goodwill of the current holder of power. The next guy in his place may be malevolent.
I agree that some terms today, in various fields have been misused or ambiguated to the extent that they lost their original meaning completely, and come to be something completely different.
Terms like : "gay" (used to be 'happy', 'merry', but now means male homosexual), or "the war or terrorism", or "Islamism", or that GNU/Linux should be used instead of just Linux, or "hacker vs. cracker", or this "Intellectual Property". These are just a few of them, and there are lots more I am sure.
The problem is: language changes over time, for better or for worse. It is a fact of life.
It is often a losing battle trying to educate the masses that the term is wrong, and it does not mean what it now means. However, the fact is, the meaning of the word has changed, and insisting on alternate use contrary to what the masses use is often futile. The only resort in such cases is : "get over it", and "deal with it".
I generally agree with you. Let me add a few points:
You are right that Microsoft did not start the PC revolution that almost killed IBM, and later converted it in the humble giant. They were at the right place at the right time, and "sourced" an OS for the IBM PC (QDOS) from another company. They were a UNIX for PC (Xenix) shop (and Basic interpreter,...etc.) up until then.
I meant that they came in later after the then evil empire IBM tried to turn the PC proprietary by the Microchannel architecture (MCA) and OS/2. Then Compaq decided to not play catchup and innovate, and were in the market with the first 386 based on the then standard architecture. Microsoft had a fall out with IBM, and gave OS/2 to them, and decided to go it with Windows, then the rest was history.
Microsoft may well have been a "bad" company, but they were seen by many as a force against the bigger evil (IBM) at the time. Something to undermine the monopoly of the big bad guy at the time. Sort of like the flawed mentality of: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". This happens in day to day relationship, in politics, and world affairs, as well as in business.
I agree with you that this chorus is often childish. Like some funny posters like to put it : "All this is confusing! So, is [company] now evil or not?"
But the truth of the matter is: companies, like people, and societies, go thru phases and stages.
Look at IBM for example. If Microsoft is today's evil incarnate of the tech world, IBM was exactly that for decades (1970s, and 80s in particular). They bullied competition, and bankrupted them. They invented FUD, and practiced it widely. They were arrogant to customers. They were expensive,..etc....etc. ad nauseum. Until a new comer underdog called Microsoft caused the PC revolution, and Client / Server architecture was in vogue (this was pre-web days remember). They almost died. But they emerged from the experience humbled, and became a gentler giant.
They even embraced Open Source of late, and are loved by the geek community, if only for not being the monopolistic bully they used to be.
Meanwhile, Microsoft transmogrified from a geek new comer to an evil giant. Perhaps Linux and Open Source will transform them in the future, and a humbled gentle giant will emerge in the future. But who will be the next evil empire? Google perhaps? The darling of geeks now? Who knows...
Anyway, I digressed a bit. My main point is that companies change over time. Being indebted to a company because it invented this or innovated that in the past is blind loyalty. That a company did good (or bad) in one phase, does not mean that they will contine to be so forever, nor that we should pledge eternal allegiance (or eternal revulsion) to it forever.
Take that one level further and think of your high school friends (and bullies), and how they turned out to be.
Take that one level more and think about societies, and how Britain used to be an empire, and now just a progressive democracy. Or how America used to be perceived as a beacon of freedom and opportunity, and how many perceive it now as an evil empire bent on domination, and receding into oppression externally and internally,...etc.
Back to Sun now. Yes, they did all what you say, and perhaps more. However, what is important is not to use the present to foreshadow the past, nor vice versa. Our view has to be balanced, and see past, present and future.
The same applies to ESR (Eric S. Raymond), Red Hat, Google, IBM, SCO,...etc. People, societies and companies come into vogue then fall from grace. Such is life my friend...
Slashdot Mirror
You sure have a point there, but it does not work this way.
You make it sound like a conspiracy of sorts.
Once China is dependant on revenue from outside for its (toys/software programming/you name it), then it is difficult to act erratically, and deprive itself of the revenue.
See, capital is very selfish and wary. Once it sees instability, it runs away to safer havens.
Look at the USofA's relationship with Pakistan and India for example, when it comes to invading Afghanistan, a dictator like Prevez Musharraf is ideal, because he can allow troops, ...etc. without asking a parliament. When it comes to outsourcing, it is India that gets the money, because it is a democracy with stability.
Think about it a bit ...
Two of my kids are in the same age group. Each has computer in their room. I installed Mandrake (first 9.1, then 10.0) on it about 9 months ago. They use it for homework, Neopets, games, playing MP3, and chatting with friends (using GAIM). I even introduced them to FreeCiv the other day and they played it for a while (and understood what a server and a client is, ...etc).
Homework and important stuff is stored on a server and directories are shared via NFS.
They complain every now and then that such and such site does not work (Shockwave or MS specific ActiveX perhaps), but they can do most of the Windows stuff on it.
The computers are second hand Pentium II bought on the cheap.
I don't have to deal with spyware, viruses, or spend big money on games, software, ...etc.
The comparison is flawed.
Apple does not provide "just" BSD. They have heavily customized (in fact forked) BSD and build that wonderful GUI, installation, configuration, ...etc. on top of it. Third party ISVs know that they have to deal with only a finite set of variables on the OS. Mac OS X is not available on any other hardware architecture than what Apple makes. They have a limited set of supported peripherals, ...etc. This gives the users much fewer surprises from incompatibilities and such.
On the other hand, HP just makes the hardware. There are endless aftermarket peripherals available for it (granted much less than a desktop). They do not have their own fork of SuSE, nor any special GUI on top of it. Hence, one can get SuSE from anywhere, and run it on any hardware, and it would not be much different from HP's offering (apart from being pre-installed, usable by the masses, and perhaps certain features configured specifically for their hardware).
Apple is playing at a different level than HP.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linux and has been runnig it myself for years. But this comparison is Apples to HPs.
Coming somewhat late in the discussion, but here goes anyway.
One possibility that was not discussed so far, despite 230+ posts already, is that the FBI were snooping on these people suspecting terrorism (thanks to the Patriot Act), but they could not find anything terrorist about them, but stumbled upon the DDoS thing.
What makes me suspect that is that the CEO is a Moroccan, and not a citizen of the USA. Perhaps because he was an Arab (and perhaps Muslim), and involved in computers/internet, and had communicated with hackers (er ... crackers). All this may have made him a ripe target for being monitored. Thanks to profiling...
I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
Ah. STREAMS. Yes.
I recall a case from some 8 years ago on UNIX System V Release 4, which is a direct parent of Solaris. This problem is not really solely STREAMS, but when its limitations is combined with poor programming, that is the result.
A transaction processing application was written in a way that is less than optimal. Every user had one process allocated to them handling the traffic from the terminal (via front end processors multiplexing connections from X.25 to TCP/IP), and then the transaction was placed on a queue. The response was taken by the terminal process from a queue, and sent to the user.
The goal was to support 1200 simultaneous logged in active users.
Everytime we loaded the system with 800 users, we could not exceed that, and the system ran out of a certain resource (memory? Don't remember.)
Part of the code was in C, and the programmer who wrote it decided to get each character from the front end processor using getchar(), and send it using putchar().
After a few agonizing nights, and calls to support, we found out that each character was sent internally in a STREAMS header that was 512 bytes long. So, with 800 simulater users firing transactions consisting of a few hundred characters each, you can see that there were lots of 512 byte messages going on in the kernel.
The solution was simple: do the data receive/send in chunks. Problem solved. A story from the trenches, because it hit a nerve.
Very similar to running out of GDI on Win9X.
No, not the same.
Sodium is a metal that reacts vigorously with water releasing hydrogen. Chlorine is a toxic gas with a distinct smell and chemically active too.
Sodium Chloride is table salt.
See?
Thanks for the reply.
I agree with you.
English is more dynamic, accepting of change, and evolving fast, because of many reasons, including:
Now, coming back to the French, they are under a siege mentality. You see this in what you stated about the Academie Francaise, which is a language police of sorts. You see the same in Quebec as well.
This mentality is not productive to say the least, and could add to the cultural and linguistic isolation the French feel.
So going back to the original articles about those tribes in South America and in Africa: I think that the lack of certain concepts in their language is due to a lack of need for these concepts to develop, not the other way round.
I guess I did not make my point clear.
I myself speak (and think!) fluently two very different languages.
Languages (at least the living ones), do not exist in a vacuum. One learns a language (or a dialect like in your case) in a cultural context (e.g. American English late 20th century, mainly in a business environment). So, as he learns the language, he also learns the culture.
Every culture evolved its linguistics to fit the environment, as they go. For example, in classical Arabic, there are names for different parts of the pit of a date (e.g. the integument between the flesh and the pit, the small round mark where the first leaves sprout, and the "filling material" in the furrow). These names are not in everyday use in modern Arabic. Similarly, in Canada, there are names for various forms of frozen H2O as it falls from the sky (sleet, black ice, icicle, snow, flurries, freezing rain, ...etc.). If you go up north to the Inuits (Eskimos to the rest of you non-Canadians), then you have more names.
Similarly, several names have evolved for concepts, ideas, products and services that did not exist before, such as email, internet, web, instant messaging, Slashdot, ..etc. These are mainly in English, since many of these things evolved in the USA first.
The same applies for the invention of the word "million", only when numbers that high were needed in trade.
So, I think that the needs of society cause new terms in their language to be invented, as opposed to the original article's assertion that the lack of a term causes that concept to no exist.
Thanks for your reply.
Both examples that assert the hypothesis that language define thoughts are from primitive hunter/gatherer societies.
These two societies are not agrarian or mercantile, and therefore have no need for trade, storage, accounting, ...etc.
Therefore, the need for numbers greater than two does not exist. One could argue that because there is no need, the concept of numbers did not arise.
Think about the concept and word "million". It only developed in pre-Renaissance Italy (AFAIK). Prior to that, cultures expressed it as "a thousand thousand". Only in the 20th century has the larger trillion, ...etc. developed.
As an aside, language do differ in many aspects.
Some languages are more precise than others in one area, while not being so precise in other areas. For example, whereas in English we have singular (e.g. site) and plural (sites), Arabic for example has singular, dual and plural. Also, there is a different dual and plural forms for masculine and feminine.
On the other hand, there is no concept of "he/she/it" in Arabic, everything is either masculine or feminine, even inanimate objects.
He is not hypthetical. This really happened.
If you have an open WiFi LAN at home, and someone surfs kiddie porn, you are liable. Or if he does something else illegal like cracking into a bank, or whatever. That was my point.
There was a case here in Canada last year, namely in Toronto, where the cop stopped some youth in a car going the wrong way in one-way street.
To the cop's surprise, this guy had his pants down (i.e. naked from the waist down) in the car, and a laptop with WiFi in it. He was war driving that neighborhood.
Had he not gone against the traffic, he would not have been caught at all ...
So, the threat is real. If someone choses to open their wireless LAN to outsiders, then he should know the risks.
Same thing applies if you run a message board or web site then it becomes a mouth piece for hate speech or terrorism or whatever. If you know the risks and chose to do this regardless, then be prepared for the consequences.
You know what? When I started writing the list above, the examples, I included Canada, and the issue of Quebec soverignty, as the first example, then I deleted that line before I posted it because it is too close to home (I am in Canada myself).
Just goes to prove the point ...
I guess it is a matter of taste ... I cannot stand it either, but some swear it is better than the fabled ambrosia.
But my point is: THEY ARE INDEED IDENTICAL. One culture (Greeks) took it from the other (Ottomans). However, just calling it "Turkish" (as the rest of the world calls it) is so offensive to some Greek, even though they gained independance some 1.5 centuries ago from the Ottomans...
An example of a hot button issue that is very emotionally charged for the insiders and seems ridiculous to the outsiders.
Just goes to show how emotionally charged some issues are for some people, and how "outsiders" to the culture/group/issue fail to see how big the issue is, as explained in a previous post.
Are you serious?
First of all, when a company hires a contractor to do something, and then release it in the company's name, the company is responsible, not the contractor. They should have reviewed it and checked it, like any other software. If they did, and this slipped by, they are at fault. If they did not do a review then they are also at fault.
Second, an internal Muslim employee alerted them to the problem, and they ignored it, and still pushed it to the market.
Third, only after three months they received a complaint did they act, but this time blaming the Japanese.
I can't see how this is a "success for Microsoft's process management"?
Yeah, that happened for sure. I don't understand the over reaction by the Saudis, but it is perhaps oversensitivity to the issue or something.
It did not happen in every case where Muslim armies conquered though, since there are lots of pre-Islamic churches in Syria, Egypt, ...etc. still exist today.
You have to also remember that it also happened the other way, the mosques in Spain and Portugal were turned into churches as the Catholics too them over. Many of the church towers in Spain have a Moorish / North African architecture because of this.
That was before the conquest of Constantinople, and perhaps a reaction as well?
I agree that it is a problem.
But, put yourself in their shoes and see how it looks. As trivial as a map may look, there are political implications behind it. For example, in this case, an area inhabited by a ethno-linguistic minority asserts its independance, although the de facto situation is that this is within the bounds of a soverign state. What is worse, is that they see this as a conspiracy from more powerful countries to assert the reverse of the status quo.
Some issues appear really trivial, but are really sensitive/contentious in other countries/cultures. Here are some examples:
Every culture has those "hot button" issues.
There are many other cases I am sure, but you get the idea ...
The big problem with the Zeitgeist stats, from what I've heard, is that they only recorded the same IP address once.
I can relate to that. Forget home users for a moment. The company where I am employed has some 30,000 employees worldwide. All of them go out of the corporate network on ONE SINGLE IP ADDRESS.
Now that is a possible reason of why Google pulled them down.
In the early 90s, there was this hot debate about RISC vs. CISC, and the merits of each, ...etc.
This has all died out now, with CISC (read: Intel) coming out as a winner.
Regarding the number of chips out there, AMD is not really different from Intel, at least it is instruction set compatible. Maybe this will change a bit in the 64-bit versions, but not right now. PowerPC is a good architecture, but not so wide spread. Outside of some IBM servers, and the 3% that is Apple's share, they are not used much.
Without religion, we would have far less barbaric acts.
But history shows otherwise: For example, the Soviet Union and many Communist Bloc countries were expressedly atheistic and anti-religion. They practiced oppression and genocide just as bad as the religious folk.
Also, there is Gengis Khan as someone above pointed out. If you look at Timur Leng (Tamerlane), he mostly fought and slaughtered fellow Muslims without any religious justification at all. Even the US fought fellow Christians in the Civil War.
If you go back in history a few millenia, the ancient polytheistic civilizations (Egypt, Babylon, Phoenecia, Rome, Greece, ...etc.) rarely if ever fought each other over religion. They even borrowed gods from each other. It was always some other ideology that dehumanized the others, barbarians vs. civilization, freedom vs. oppression, justice vs. injustice, beleiver vs. infidel, wealth, land, ...etc.
Point is: humans were always like that and will continue to be like that. A reason will be made up if one does not exist.
I migrated to from Outlook Express to Thunderbird about two months ago.
This was just after I migrated from MS IE to Firefox 0.9. The motive was the serious security issues with Microsoft products. I also installed OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 to run all FOSS applications.
Thunderbird did a fine job migrating. Of course, I started by backing up my mail folders to the home server. Thunderbird imported all my old mail without a problem, except that it fudged a "From " header for every message, with funny dates, such as the year 1969, ...etc.
It also migrated my account settings correctly and my address book. I was not concerned about the address book that much, since I back it up to Yahoo Address book anyway, and can retrieve it from there.
Now my email is in mbox format, and I back it up to the server where I can grep in it to find stuff (although it has CR/LF format, and not just NL). My email is not hostage to Microsoft format anymore.
Thunderbird functionality is OK, but my gripe is that it is bloated. Granted, my machine is a PII-300 128MB (I know, I know!), but still, I do not run Thunderbird all the time. Just when I need to check email, and when mutt on the server is not sufficient, and to periodically retrieve my POP mail and back it up.
You raise an interesting point.
For the same reason, in part, democracy was invented: not to rely on the goodwill of a person, even if they are a benevolent dictator. Because, simply, the next dictator may not be so benevolent. Relying on the goodwill alone can cause serious problems in the future, namely, the abuse of power by those who hold it.
Heck, even democracy as implemented in the USA today has shown it has serious flaws. The Administration, together with a Congress and Senate of the same political inclination can be too powerful and detrimental to civil liberties, and the whole democratic process.
This applies equally to politics and to businesses. We cannot rely on the goodwill of the current holder of power. The next guy in his place may be malevolent.
Thank you.
I agree that some terms today, in various fields have been misused or ambiguated to the extent that they lost their original meaning completely, and come to be something completely different.
Terms like : "gay" (used to be 'happy', 'merry', but now means male homosexual), or "the war or terrorism", or "Islamism", or that GNU/Linux should be used instead of just Linux, or "hacker vs. cracker", or this "Intellectual Property". These are just a few of them, and there are lots more I am sure.
The problem is: language changes over time, for better or for worse. It is a fact of life.
It is often a losing battle trying to educate the masses that the term is wrong, and it does not mean what it now means. However, the fact is, the meaning of the word has changed, and insisting on alternate use contrary to what the masses use is often futile. The only resort in such cases is : "get over it", and "deal with it".
I generally agree with you. Let me add a few points:
You are right that Microsoft did not start the PC revolution that almost killed IBM, and later converted it in the humble giant. They were at the right place at the right time, and "sourced" an OS for the IBM PC (QDOS) from another company. They were a UNIX for PC (Xenix) shop (and Basic interpreter, ...etc.) up until then.
I meant that they came in later after the then evil empire IBM tried to turn the PC proprietary by the Microchannel architecture (MCA) and OS/2. Then Compaq decided to not play catchup and innovate, and were in the market with the first 386 based on the then standard architecture. Microsoft had a fall out with IBM, and gave OS/2 to them, and decided to go it with Windows, then the rest was history.
Microsoft may well have been a "bad" company, but they were seen by many as a force against the bigger evil (IBM) at the time. Something to undermine the monopoly of the big bad guy at the time. Sort of like the flawed mentality of: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". This happens in day to day relationship, in politics, and world affairs, as well as in business.
I agree with you that this chorus is often childish. Like some funny posters like to put it : "All this is confusing! So, is [company] now evil or not?"
But the truth of the matter is: companies, like people, and societies, go thru phases and stages.
Look at IBM for example. If Microsoft is today's evil incarnate of the tech world, IBM was exactly that for decades (1970s, and 80s in particular). They bullied competition, and bankrupted them. They invented FUD, and practiced it widely. They were arrogant to customers. They were expensive, ..etc. ...etc. ad nauseum. Until a new comer underdog called Microsoft caused the PC revolution, and Client / Server architecture was in vogue (this was pre-web days remember). They almost died. But they emerged from the experience humbled, and became a gentler giant.
They even embraced Open Source of late, and are loved by the geek community, if only for not being the monopolistic bully they used to be.
Meanwhile, Microsoft transmogrified from a geek new comer to an evil giant. Perhaps Linux and Open Source will transform them in the future, and a humbled gentle giant will emerge in the future. But who will be the next evil empire? Google perhaps? The darling of geeks now? Who knows ...
Anyway, I digressed a bit. My main point is that companies change over time. Being indebted to a company because it invented this or innovated that in the past is blind loyalty. That a company did good (or bad) in one phase, does not mean that they will contine to be so forever, nor that we should pledge eternal allegiance (or eternal revulsion) to it forever.
Take that one level further and think of your high school friends (and bullies), and how they turned out to be.
Take that one level more and think about societies, and how Britain used to be an empire, and now just a progressive democracy. Or how America used to be perceived as a beacon of freedom and opportunity, and how many perceive it now as an evil empire bent on domination, and receding into oppression externally and internally, ...etc.
Back to Sun now. Yes, they did all what you say, and perhaps more. However, what is important is not to use the present to foreshadow the past, nor vice versa. Our view has to be balanced, and see past, present and future.
The same applies to ESR (Eric S. Raymond), Red Hat, Google, IBM, SCO, ...etc. People, societies and companies come into vogue then fall from grace. Such is life my friend...