The New Party is a grassroots, progressive political party that's working toward progressive goals starting small, in local elections. I think it complements the Greens very well. The Greens go for the Presidency with a high-profile candidate and thereby garner much publicity. The NP takes the slower, but more lasting approach. The complement each other well by attacking the problem at both ends.
If we keep that up (i.e. voting for who'll cause the least damage), we'll eventually end up ruined, but it'll take longer. No thanks! At some point, we must stand up and demand a President who'll do good, not just the least damage. The longer we wait, the more damage we'll have to undo.
Let's put this idiotic notion to bed, shall we? First of all, how much of a role does the Federal government really play in the treatment of gays, blacks, unionists, women, et cetera? The problems of racism, sexism, homophobia stem from the attitudes of individuals, and to fix them, hundreds of millions of individuals will need to change their attitudes. The government can encourage one way or the other, but all-out mind control is way out of its reach. And even government encouragement can fail. Witness the incredible backlash against Affirmative Action.
So I have to ask, will a Bush administration cause people who believe in tolerance, an integrated society, who are committed to abolishing social injustice to suddenly change their minds and become white supremacists? Hardly! Will a Gore administration cause the KKK to doff their sheets and love all of their fellow humans? Yeah, right!
Secondly, I have to ask: What has Clinton/Gore done to further the causes of gays? The Defense of Marriage Act. "Don't ask, don't tell." Blacks? Welfare "reform.". The continued War on Drugs. Unionists? Supported the corporations. Women? Hmm, well, at least they didn't hurt feminist causes.
Third, many Nader supporters are dedicated to continuing their efforts well beyond election day, participating in the "daily citizenship" Nader calls for. That's the kind of thing that's going to bring about real improvements in this country, NOT voting for the guy who'll do less damage.
Funny that despite the "punative" tax on wealth, it remains popular. Or perhaps I've just not met any of the legion of people who have decided to remain poor in protest of the progressive income tax?
If I continue to vote Democrat, even as the Democratic leaders do less and less that represents my views,
they have no reason to do anything but take my vote for granted. If you never vote for the candidate you want, you will never get that candidate.
Period.
Oh sure, the inheritance tax is certainly an issue, but it makes for a pretty poor argument to bully people into voting for Gore, that's fer damn sure! Since Mr. Brin's letter sounds just that one note, with a bit of insult-your-audience harmonics, it's a pretty poor essay.
Certainly, I agree about the diamond-shaped social structure. That's a good metaphor, too. But I can hardly agree that the inheritance tax is the only thing holding it together! Sure, eliminating the inheritance tax may be a step in the wrong direction. Then again, plenty of people argue that it's not. Who knows? I posit that a decent implied social contract, a relative abundance of wealth, and not least, a representative government are the chemical bonds holding the diamond together, not certain policies regarding said wealth.
Consequently, it's the threats to those bonds that give this election and political climate its urgency. Witness: The rise of multi-national corporations that care little for the well-being of the USA. Witness: The incredible concentration of wealth in a vanishingly small segment of our population. Witness: How representative government is eroded when the corporations control the media, and the wealth controls the politicians. They can take our rights away, and never tell us until it's too late!
I had decided to vote for Nader earlier in this election season, but one simple event so thoroughly cemented my support for him that there's no way I can even consider voting for Gore (not to mention Bush). That simple event was the physical exclusion of Ralph Nader from the auditorium where the second debate was held. This shows just how far the mighty have fallen. Both the Democrats and Republicans (who run the debates) are so beholden to their corporate masters, that they see nothing wrong with violating the civil rights of a man who threatens their hegemony. And do we hear about it in the the 'free' press? Hardly. Even though it happened again, last night in St. Louis.
You see, on such issues, issues that really matter, the Republicrats are the same party. Both now represent increased corporate control of government. Both now represent the increased influence of money in politics. Therefore, it makes no difference that Bush calls for repeal of the inheritance tax, and Gore doesn't. Once money rules in the White House and the Capitol, the inheritance tax will fall, and the only difference between Bush and Gore is how soon.
The forces of wealth already have chipped away at our rights with the effective repeal of the Fourth Amendment in the War on (Certain Unpopular) Drugs, allowing the WTO to override our health and safety laws, with the DMCA, with 'free' media outlets that don't cover abuses by the ruling parties or only cover the hooligans rather than the principled protesters and human-rights abuses they suffered in Seattle and Prague, and in myriad other ways.
So go ahead, vote for Gore, I can't make up your mind for you. But take a look at the man and his record. A good, long, critical look at his record.
I think the question here is why do you bother? The biggest disappointment of the Clinton-Gore administration wasn't Clinton's lies about sex. The biggest disappointment of the Clinton-Gore administration is that both of them turned out to be Republicans! (WTO, NAFTA, welfare "reform," DOMA, etc.) So maybe Gore takes a few different stands than Bush right now, but if he wins, the Democrats will see that this drift toward the right is A-OK with Democratic voters, and continue the rightward drift. Then in a few years, Democratic candidates will be no different than Bush is now.
Therefore, I'm voting for Nader. If that means Gore loses a significant chunk of votes and Bush wins, I'll consider it an "electoral bitch-slap" to the Democratic Party, and a reminder that they can't stop representing progressive views and still get progressives' votes.
Michael Moore said it right: A VOTE FOR GORE IS A VOTE FOR BUSH.
For example, you used to be able to count on the left supporting labor. But now you've got Bill Clinton and Al Gore supporting trade with China.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
Yes, it appears true that the public perception of the political spectrum is bounded by only by the prominent politicians of the day. I consider Bill Clinton and Al Gore right-of-center. (c.f. Defense of Marriage Act, welfare "reform," trade issues, Joseph Lieberman) But they're (barely) left of the Republicans, so they get to define "The Left" in the public eye.
Bah! That's why I'm voting for Ralph Nader. Sure, he won't win, but then I don't have to feel filthy voting for Gore, and a strong Nader showing would bring a powerful leftist voice back to the political stage.
Aye, there's the rub! Where do we get congresspeople that will get rid of the DMCA? For if the MPAA can't get satisfaction in the judiciary, their lobbyists will certainly descend upon the legislature to get written into law that which they couldn't get in court. To combat this, we'd need a concerted effort by a concerned citizenry to elect more representatives immune to the scent of greenbacks. The representatives we've got are the ones who passed such odious laws in the first place!
I'm glad somebody asked about Freedows, so I can get that told-you-so feeling.:-) I said years ago that it wouldn't happen. Aside from the impression that I got that it was conceived by a young man with a lot of ambition, no code, and very little idea of wherefore he spoke, the Freedows project never had any prima facie credibility. Really, with the WINE project chugging along for years, and the folks at ARDI working so hard on Executor, the idea that somebody could come along with a magic bullet in the form of a "cache kernel" and seamlessly emulate not only Windows and MacOS, but a whole host of other operating systems and even 8-bit computer hardware seemed, well, absurd. As for the future, I think Freedows will continue to go nowhere. I'm guessing developers aren't jumping on it because it doesn't seem at all feasible.
The thing is, which operating systems support it? And how much work do you need to do?
These two questions are quite closely related. If your operating system supports Unicode well, your level of extra work ranges from none to a little bit for programs that work with text (like word processors). Text processing programs often need to work with whitespace and case. Luckily, the Unicode Consortium offers small databases of the characters that are whitespace, and those which have counterparts in other cases. These are probably built into an operating system with good Unicode support.
At the other extreme, an operating system that doesn't have any Unicode support is going to require a lot of extra work from you, the developer. Sometimes, you can use the ASCII-compatible UTF-8 encoding to slip Unicode through OS functions that work on ASCII, but you'll probably most often end up working with Unicode internals to your program, and then interfacing with the OS in ASCII and/or its native character set. Display of non-native scripts is going to be the hardest part. If your host OS at least supports TrueType fonts, your program then must find out how the glyphs are encoded in the fonts to get the proper glyphs for display. This method works for XFree86 displays. If your host OS only has a font system geared toward its native character set, well, you're in for a world of pain extending it. And of course, for real Unicode support, you'll need to write a text display system that supports at least the Unicode directionality hints...
But what are the pitfalls? What do you have to be aware of? What makes it different than talking to ASCII?
First off, you have the issue of internal representation of characters. Do you choose UTF-8? If your program deals mostly with English characters, UTF-8 is the smallest. It's also more compute-intensive, as the characters are variable width. How about UCS2? It's uses 16-bit wide characters, and thus more space for English scripts, though each character is a fixed width. You do have to process it looking for surrogate character pairs when displaying text, though. Then there's also UCS4, where each character is 32 bits. That uses a lot more storage, but each character is exactly 32-bit (i.e. not variable width, nor are there any surrogates).
Once you've chosen your storage format, you have to take into account things like case, directionality, composed characters, compatibility characters, and invalid characters. Unicode has three cases: uppercase, lowercase, and ``titlecase''. Titlecase is there to distinguish phrases with the first letter of each word capitalized. This is actually important for some characters, such as the Latin character ``Dz''. (``DZ'' vs. ``Dz'' vs. ``dz'') Composed characters are glyphs such as ``é'' that have their own Unicode character, but can also be formed by ``e'' plus an acute accent. These are often included for compatibility with legacy character sets. Other compatibility characters are characters that correspond to the same glyph as another Unicode character, but are included as part of a range of Unicode values taken from a legacy character set. Then there are some Unicode characters that are considered invalid, such as a high or low surrogate character appearing alone.
This is all very different than ASCII, where you can play tricks like uppercasing a string by bit twiddling. With Unicode, you need a database to look up which characters have counterparts in other cases and what those equivalents are, you need to keep track of what's whitespace, you need to keep track of what's considered a decimal digit, and you need to know what's an invalid character.
How do you make your API display the characters in the right fonts?
You use a display system that handles it for you!;-)
Seriously, this is difficult. The world's scripts are rather diverse. There are the right-to-left scripts, right-to-left scripts with left-to-right decimal numbers embedded, top to bottom scripts, and (if you're really a gonzo coder) Ancient Egyptian changes direction with each line! In addition to directionality, there are complex rules for rendering combined diacritical marks properly. Some scripts of course combine characters, and render them differently when combined. And of course, ligatures, funky punctation, and text styles. There's a lot to take into account.
I recommend picking up ``The Unicode Standard Version 3.0'' for more information. It's an invaluable resource for anybody dealing with Unicode.
But what does it really mean for Joe Q. Developer?
IMHO, what it means is that software developers ought to put some effort into standard (free, open source!) toolkits that handle the guts of Unicode processing and display, so that we can all put in a little bit of effort on it once, rather than trying to wrestle with Unicode support in every project.
I bought an MP3 Anywhere kit, and told a friend about it and he bought one. Neither of us can get the thing to work without wicked interference. The MouseRemote can be a bit finicky, and its receiver picks up spurious mouse movements all the time.
Basically, with the just-barely-adequate quality of their goods and their sleazy public image (I've seen phone psychic ads with more class!), I'm resolved to do no further business with X-10.
Amiga is about ideas and the most loyal computer community on earth. Give the AMIGA a chance!!!
I've powered on my Amiga only once since 1998, and that's because I thought I'd have an easier time configuring Miami for my new cable modem. (Wrong-- FreeBSD was easier.) I check in with amiga.org every once in a while, and read the stories on Slashdot, but I haven't felt nostalgic for the Amiga scene for longer than two minutes at a stretch, and this comment about sums up why.
"Amiga is about ideas"-- so true and so false! True: The remaining Amiga community frustrated me so because "somebody should" syndrome had firmly taken hold by 1996. With most of the talented programmers fled to greener (as in money) pastures, the on-line community was full of those who vehemently disclaimed any programming talent, but were full of ideas (mostly aped from other platforms) that "somebody should" implement. Obviously, all these ideas remained just ideas. This, of course, intimately related to the False: Some of the biggest ideas of our time didn't even make a dent in the collective Amiga consciousness. Linux. GNU. Open source. "Bloated." "Too complicated." Such cries I heard often, even while AROS languished with too few developers. As is typical, the Amiga dogma didn't allow for people changing the rules of the game. (Seems it took ex-Amigans coming back from the Linux side to give the open-source AmigaOS idea some steam.)
Not satisfied with any of the alternatives and not willing to do a damn thing about it, it's no wonder Amigans are "the most loyal computer community on earth." Sure, I'll give the new Amiga a chance, just like I gave FreeBSD a chance. But if the attitude of the user community is the same, I can't say as I'll like it.
(DISCLAIMER: I am tired, and this article ain't exactly light reading, so I haven't finished reading it. However...)
This article strikes me as the work of a strongly partisan capitalist trying to intellectually savage a movement that doesn't fit his little worldview. To wit, his breakdown of free software into different categories, i.e. software written on company time vs. software written as recreation vs. software intentionally created by a company, et cetera. Once software is in the pool of free software, it's free software. How does it matter how it got there? This distinction strikes me as having about as much relevance as which river carried a particular drop of water into Lake Superior!
But that's not the worst of it. In the expository section, Meyer states that we shouldn't judge an ideology on the merits of its proponents, like we shouldn't despise the Autobahnen just because the Nazis built them. So why then does he expend the effort of many paragraphs and a few ancedotes (and even a little implicit Red-baiting) attacking Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond? (And attacking Raymond for his gun control views, no less!) It has little relevence to the free software concept, by Meyer's own admission. Sure, he does point out that he's attacking free software by attacking two of its proponents, but he lamely says (to paraphrase) "it's valid because they're such visible leaders." By that logic, closed-source, commercial software has inherent ethical flaws because Microsoft was/is a respected, highly visible leader in that field.
Oh yes, and I had to laugh at Meyer's odd little interjection that it's unethical for the Free Software Foundation to use the word "free" because it's so highly valued by many people. It's a completely unsupported argument, in an article that otherwise takes great pains to back all its positions with a great length of words. And where's the hue and cry over Microsoft's (or any car company's, or freakin' RC Cola's) use of the word "freedom?" At least the FSF states very clearly what it means by "free."
Anyway, I'll come back and read the rest of this article after I've had a nap. I'll even try to keep an open mind (I promise!), but it'll be hard because the first section of this article is brimming with that most famous of biological waste products.
If anybody is interested in a little bit of further information, check out the Smith group web site for a bit of background and a brief description of the sequencing process. Also, that biotech company is Third Wave Technologies.
I saw this demo on the Atari 800 long before I'd heard of Amiga. Only years later did I make the connection between the Boing! and Boink! demos with their red-and-white checkered, bouncing balls. How appropriate, considering both machines had the same designer work on them. Ah, nostalgia. I'll have to dig up a copy of that demo on the 'net, if possible, and let the Atari 800 emulator chew on it....
...is that both the HGP and Celera are mapping the genome of a small, homogenous population of people. In order to be really useful in the medical field, they'll need ways to sequence the genes of individual patients quickly and cheaply. However, as I understand it, Celera is using a `shotgun' approach to sequencing, i.e. chop up whole strands of DNA, sequence the bits and try to fit them together like some demented jigsaw puzzle that has overlapping, redundant pieces. This method dispenses with the time-consuming finishing process which would result in high-quality sequence data. In essense, Celera is making a rough draft, hence the comment that their data is more valuable when combined with HGP data. Now, this method is good for getting a rough-draft sequence done quickly, but doesn't really apply to the goal I mentioned above: quickly and cheaply sequencing genes from individual patients. This may be why Celera is so hung up on protecting their database; if they haven't developed any quick, cheap, accurate sequencing methods, the database is their only asset! (At least in terms of the human genome.) If this is so, I really have no sympathy for them. If this is not so, somebody please correct me.
Okay, so change it to: "These crimes were the high-tech equivalent of physically breaking into a business and photocopying valuable documents from a locked file cabinet..."
In this case, the victim still has their property. And in some cases (picking locks), you can get in and out without damage to the victim's property at all. So how's that different?
According to Apple's filesystem layout documents, they have a pretty keen little setup (IMHO): There's/System for the base operating system files,/Local for user apps and files on the local machine, and/Network for network-wide apps and files. Accordingly, user home directories live in/Local/Users or/Network/Users.
I'm sure you can have a.bashrc and a.exrc, if you want. MacOS X should handle.dotfiles the same way as Unix: by leaving them to individual programs to use and manage. When you get right down to it, the only built-in support for.dotfiles in Unix is that `ls' doesn't list them by default.
Why does this hurt our case? It shows a heck of a lot of people out here in Net-land care passionately about the issue, and if this many people care this passionately, maybe there's something to our case? It's all about spin, sure the MPAA lawyers can spin it as a bunch of lawless hackers, but clever EFF lawyers can spin it as civil disobedience for a good cause.
Granted, these are all uses of the Internet, but how about the case that they're delineated enough to call them "continents of the Internet Planet?" Perhaps I haven't browsed far and wide enough, but it seems to me that "X-Net," "InfoNet" and "BuyNet" are all completely part of "The Corporate Internet" and subservient to its needs. And I'd say the majority of "CultureNet" is the same way, with the majority of the remainder consisting of people illegally trading the products of Culture(tm). Even with the others, to say they're seperate is a bit odd. What, geeks, gamers, and Jeses-freaks don't buy crap, look at naughty pictures, or work at corporations? I'm sorry, I just don't see this rampant Balkanization this brief article posits.
Sure, you, me, and a good portion of all Slashdotters are geeks. We feel, deep down, that we can appeal to a lot of people on a rational and intellectual level, even though our conscious mind knows it isn't true. Sounds to me like that's the problem with the opposition to library net-filters there in Holland. You're fighting gut-level emotional grandstanding with a reasoned argument. You can try to fight these people by bringing up incomprehensible legal challenges, But What About The Children, Jamie?
Instead, as the old saying goes, fight fire with fire. Instead of coming off as slightly cowed by their self-righteous indignation, start ripping into 'em using their own tactics! Insinuate that it's only the lousy parents that can't supervise their kids; they probably let that infernal idiot-box television raise their kids, too! See, they're too wrapped up in their own in their own lives to care about their kids. Y'know, after all, that only kids of poor moral fiber caused by lack of love from their parents go looking for porn. Be sure to drop hints that only Godless Commie pinkos don't care about the First Amendment, too. Invoke the specters of Stalin and Mao, if needed. And never, ever listen to their arguments and try to counter them. That's only a sign of weakness. Ignore their arguments as the worthless waste of breath that they are, and plow ahead with your own agenda.
Once you put the pro-filtering side on the defensive and make their argument look as weak as it really is, only then will you start to change a lot of people's minds.
(The worst part about this message is that I'm less than half joking.)
I wonder if perhaps there's a political motivation behind these attacks? This sort of terrorism worked quite well for the Unabomber, i.e. hit 'em where it hurts in order to get a high enough profile in the media to get your message heard. Without such a dramatic way of getting attention (or a lot of money), it's hard to be heard by a significant number of people.
Well, at least I hope that's the motive, because otherwise it's really freakin' pointless....
Slashdot Mirror
The New Party is a grassroots, progressive political party that's working toward progressive goals starting small, in local elections. I think it complements the Greens very well. The Greens go for the Presidency with a high-profile candidate and thereby garner much publicity. The NP takes the slower, but more lasting approach. The complement each other well by attacking the problem at both ends.
If we keep that up (i.e. voting for who'll cause the least damage), we'll eventually end up ruined, but it'll take longer. No thanks! At some point, we must stand up and demand a President who'll do good, not just the least damage. The longer we wait, the more damage we'll have to undo.
Let's put this idiotic notion to bed, shall we? First of all, how much of a role does the Federal government really play in the treatment of gays, blacks, unionists, women, et cetera? The problems of racism, sexism, homophobia stem from the attitudes of individuals, and to fix them, hundreds of millions of individuals will need to change their attitudes. The government can encourage one way or the other, but all-out mind control is way out of its reach. And even government encouragement can fail. Witness the incredible backlash against Affirmative Action.
So I have to ask, will a Bush administration cause people who believe in tolerance, an integrated society, who are committed to abolishing social injustice to suddenly change their minds and become white supremacists? Hardly! Will a Gore administration cause the KKK to doff their sheets and love all of their fellow humans? Yeah, right!
Secondly, I have to ask: What has Clinton/Gore done to further the causes of gays? The Defense of Marriage Act. "Don't ask, don't tell." Blacks? Welfare "reform.". The continued War on Drugs. Unionists? Supported the corporations. Women? Hmm, well, at least they didn't hurt feminist causes.
Third, many Nader supporters are dedicated to continuing their efforts well beyond election day, participating in the "daily citizenship" Nader calls for. That's the kind of thing that's going to bring about real improvements in this country, NOT voting for the guy who'll do less damage.
Funny that despite the "punative" tax on wealth, it remains popular. Or perhaps I've just not met any of the legion of people who have decided to remain poor in protest of the progressive income tax?
Oh sure, the inheritance tax is certainly an issue, but it makes for a pretty poor argument to bully people into voting for Gore, that's fer damn sure! Since Mr. Brin's letter sounds just that one note, with a bit of insult-your-audience harmonics, it's a pretty poor essay.
Certainly, I agree about the diamond-shaped social structure. That's a good metaphor, too. But I can hardly agree that the inheritance tax is the only thing holding it together! Sure, eliminating the inheritance tax may be a step in the wrong direction. Then again, plenty of people argue that it's not. Who knows? I posit that a decent implied social contract, a relative abundance of wealth, and not least, a representative government are the chemical bonds holding the diamond together, not certain policies regarding said wealth.
Consequently, it's the threats to those bonds that give this election and political climate its urgency. Witness: The rise of multi-national corporations that care little for the well-being of the USA. Witness: The incredible concentration of wealth in a vanishingly small segment of our population. Witness: How representative government is eroded when the corporations control the media, and the wealth controls the politicians. They can take our rights away, and never tell us until it's too late!
I had decided to vote for Nader earlier in this election season, but one simple event so thoroughly cemented my support for him that there's no way I can even consider voting for Gore (not to mention Bush). That simple event was the physical exclusion of Ralph Nader from the auditorium where the second debate was held. This shows just how far the mighty have fallen. Both the Democrats and Republicans (who run the debates) are so beholden to their corporate masters, that they see nothing wrong with violating the civil rights of a man who threatens their hegemony. And do we hear about it in the the 'free' press? Hardly. Even though it happened again, last night in St. Louis.
You see, on such issues, issues that really matter, the Republicrats are the same party. Both now represent increased corporate control of government. Both now represent the increased influence of money in politics. Therefore, it makes no difference that Bush calls for repeal of the inheritance tax, and Gore doesn't. Once money rules in the White House and the Capitol, the inheritance tax will fall, and the only difference between Bush and Gore is how soon.
The forces of wealth already have chipped away at our rights with the effective repeal of the Fourth Amendment in the War on (Certain Unpopular) Drugs, allowing the WTO to override our health and safety laws, with the DMCA, with 'free' media outlets that don't cover abuses by the ruling parties or only cover the hooligans rather than the principled protesters and human-rights abuses they suffered in Seattle and Prague, and in myriad other ways.
So go ahead, vote for Gore, I can't make up your mind for you. But take a look at the man and his record. A good, long, critical look at his record.
I think the question here is why do you bother? The biggest disappointment of the Clinton-Gore administration wasn't Clinton's lies about sex. The biggest disappointment of the Clinton-Gore administration is that both of them turned out to be Republicans! (WTO, NAFTA, welfare "reform," DOMA, etc.) So maybe Gore takes a few different stands than Bush right now, but if he wins, the Democrats will see that this drift toward the right is A-OK with Democratic voters, and continue the rightward drift. Then in a few years, Democratic candidates will be no different than Bush is now.
Therefore, I'm voting for Nader. If that means Gore loses a significant chunk of votes and Bush wins, I'll consider it an "electoral bitch-slap" to the Democratic Party, and a reminder that they can't stop representing progressive views and still get progressives' votes.
Michael Moore said it right: A VOTE FOR GORE IS A VOTE FOR BUSH.
Aye, there's the rub! Where do we get congresspeople that will get rid of the DMCA? For if the MPAA can't get satisfaction in the judiciary, their lobbyists will certainly descend upon the legislature to get written into law that which they couldn't get in court. To combat this, we'd need a concerted effort by a concerned citizenry to elect more representatives immune to the scent of greenbacks. The representatives we've got are the ones who passed such odious laws in the first place!
I'm glad somebody asked about Freedows, so I can get that told-you-so feeling. :-)
I said years ago that it wouldn't happen. Aside from the impression that I got that it was conceived by a young man with a lot of ambition, no code, and very little idea of wherefore he spoke, the Freedows project never had any prima facie credibility. Really, with the WINE project chugging along for years, and the folks at ARDI working so hard on Executor, the idea that somebody could come along with a magic bullet in the form of a "cache kernel" and seamlessly emulate not only Windows and MacOS, but a whole host of other operating systems and even 8-bit computer hardware seemed, well, absurd.
As for the future, I think Freedows will continue to go nowhere. I'm guessing developers aren't jumping on it because it doesn't seem at all feasible.
These two questions are quite closely related. If your operating system supports Unicode well, your level of extra work ranges from none to a little bit for programs that work with text (like word processors). Text processing programs often need to work with whitespace and case. Luckily, the Unicode Consortium offers small databases of the characters that are whitespace, and those which have counterparts in other cases. These are probably built into an operating system with good Unicode support.
At the other extreme, an operating system that doesn't have any Unicode support is going to require a lot of extra work from you, the developer. Sometimes, you can use the ASCII-compatible UTF-8 encoding to slip Unicode through OS functions that work on ASCII, but you'll probably most often end up working with Unicode internals to your program, and then interfacing with the OS in ASCII and/or its native character set. Display of non-native scripts is going to be the hardest part. If your host OS at least supports TrueType fonts, your program then must find out how the glyphs are encoded in the fonts to get the proper glyphs for display. This method works for XFree86 displays. If your host OS only has a font system geared toward its native character set, well, you're in for a world of pain extending it. And of course, for real Unicode support, you'll need to write a text display system that supports at least the Unicode directionality hints...
First off, you have the issue of internal representation of characters. Do you choose UTF-8? If your program deals mostly with English characters, UTF-8 is the smallest. It's also more compute-intensive, as the characters are variable width. How about UCS2? It's uses 16-bit wide characters, and thus more space for English scripts, though each character is a fixed width. You do have to process it looking for surrogate character pairs when displaying text, though. Then there's also UCS4, where each character is 32 bits. That uses a lot more storage, but each character is exactly 32-bit (i.e. not variable width, nor are there any surrogates).
Once you've chosen your storage format, you have to take into account things like case, directionality, composed characters, compatibility characters, and invalid characters. Unicode has three cases: uppercase, lowercase, and ``titlecase''. Titlecase is there to distinguish phrases with the first letter of each word capitalized. This is actually important for some characters, such as the Latin character ``Dz''. (``DZ'' vs. ``Dz'' vs. ``dz'') Composed characters are glyphs such as ``é'' that have their own Unicode character, but can also be formed by ``e'' plus an acute accent. These are often included for compatibility with legacy character sets. Other compatibility characters are characters that correspond to the same glyph as another Unicode character, but are included as part of a range of Unicode values taken from a legacy character set. Then there are some Unicode characters that are considered invalid, such as a high or low surrogate character appearing alone.
This is all very different than ASCII, where you can play tricks like uppercasing a string by bit twiddling. With Unicode, you need a database to look up which characters have counterparts in other cases and what those equivalents are, you need to keep track of what's whitespace, you need to keep track of what's considered a decimal digit, and you need to know what's an invalid character.
You use a display system that handles it for you! ;-)
Seriously, this is difficult. The world's scripts are rather diverse. There are the right-to-left scripts, right-to-left scripts with left-to-right decimal numbers embedded, top to bottom scripts, and (if you're really a gonzo coder) Ancient Egyptian changes direction with each line! In addition to directionality, there are complex rules for rendering combined diacritical marks properly. Some scripts of course combine characters, and render them differently when combined. And of course, ligatures, funky punctation, and text styles. There's a lot to take into account.
I recommend picking up ``The Unicode Standard Version 3.0'' for more information. It's an invaluable resource for anybody dealing with Unicode.
IMHO, what it means is that software developers ought to put some effort into standard (free, open source!) toolkits that handle the guts of Unicode processing and display, so that we can all put in a little bit of effort on it once, rather than trying to wrestle with Unicode support in every project.
I bought an MP3 Anywhere kit, and told a friend about it and he bought one. Neither of us can get the thing to work without wicked interference. The MouseRemote can be a bit finicky, and its receiver picks up spurious mouse movements all the time.
Basically, with the just-barely-adequate quality of their goods and their sleazy public image (I've seen phone psychic ads with more class!), I'm resolved to do no further business with X-10.
I've powered on my Amiga only once since 1998, and that's because I thought I'd have an easier time configuring Miami for my new cable modem. (Wrong-- FreeBSD was easier.) I check in with amiga.org every once in a while, and read the stories on Slashdot, but I haven't felt nostalgic for the Amiga scene for longer than two minutes at a stretch, and this comment about sums up why.
"Amiga is about ideas"-- so true and so false! True: The remaining Amiga community frustrated me so because "somebody should" syndrome had firmly taken hold by 1996. With most of the talented programmers fled to greener (as in money) pastures, the on-line community was full of those who vehemently disclaimed any programming talent, but were full of ideas (mostly aped from other platforms) that "somebody should" implement. Obviously, all these ideas remained just ideas. This, of course, intimately related to the False: Some of the biggest ideas of our time didn't even make a dent in the collective Amiga consciousness. Linux. GNU. Open source. "Bloated." "Too complicated." Such cries I heard often, even while AROS languished with too few developers. As is typical, the Amiga dogma didn't allow for people changing the rules of the game. (Seems it took ex-Amigans coming back from the Linux side to give the open-source AmigaOS idea some steam.)
Not satisfied with any of the alternatives and not willing to do a damn thing about it, it's no wonder Amigans are "the most loyal computer community on earth." Sure, I'll give the new Amiga a chance, just like I gave FreeBSD a chance. But if the attitude of the user community is the same, I can't say as I'll like it.
This article strikes me as the work of a strongly partisan capitalist trying to intellectually savage a movement that doesn't fit his little worldview. To wit, his breakdown of free software into different categories, i.e. software written on company time vs. software written as recreation vs. software intentionally created by a company, et cetera. Once software is in the pool of free software, it's free software. How does it matter how it got there? This distinction strikes me as having about as much relevance as which river carried a particular drop of water into Lake Superior!
But that's not the worst of it. In the expository section, Meyer states that we shouldn't judge an ideology on the merits of its proponents, like we shouldn't despise the Autobahnen just because the Nazis built them. So why then does he expend the effort of many paragraphs and a few ancedotes (and even a little implicit Red-baiting) attacking Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond? (And attacking Raymond for his gun control views, no less!) It has little relevence to the free software concept, by Meyer's own admission. Sure, he does point out that he's attacking free software by attacking two of its proponents, but he lamely says (to paraphrase) "it's valid because they're such visible leaders." By that logic, closed-source, commercial software has inherent ethical flaws because Microsoft was/is a respected, highly visible leader in that field.
Oh yes, and I had to laugh at Meyer's odd little interjection that it's unethical for the Free Software Foundation to use the word "free" because it's so highly valued by many people. It's a completely unsupported argument, in an article that otherwise takes great pains to back all its positions with a great length of words. And where's the hue and cry over Microsoft's (or any car company's, or freakin' RC Cola's) use of the word "freedom?" At least the FSF states very clearly what it means by "free."
Anyway, I'll come back and read the rest of this article after I've had a nap. I'll even try to keep an open mind (I promise!), but it'll be hard because the first section of this article is brimming with that most famous of biological waste products.
If anybody is interested in a little bit of further information, check out the Smith group web site for a bit of background and a brief description of the sequencing process. Also, that biotech company is Third Wave Technologies.
Hey, this isn't a spelling flame, but it's "G-A-T-T-A-C-A". It's a subtle joke...
I saw this demo on the Atari 800 long before I'd heard of Amiga. Only years later did I make the connection between the Boing! and Boink! demos with their red-and-white checkered, bouncing balls. How appropriate, considering both machines had the same designer work on them.
Ah, nostalgia. I'll have to dig up a copy of that demo on the 'net, if possible, and let the Atari 800 emulator chew on it....
...is that both the HGP and Celera are mapping the genome of a small, homogenous population of people. In order to be really useful in the medical field, they'll need ways to sequence the genes of individual patients quickly and cheaply. However, as I understand it, Celera is using a `shotgun' approach to sequencing, i.e. chop up whole strands of DNA, sequence the bits and try to fit them together like some demented jigsaw puzzle that has overlapping, redundant pieces. This method dispenses with the time-consuming finishing process which would result in high-quality sequence data. In essense, Celera is making a rough draft, hence the comment that their data is more valuable when combined with HGP data.
Now, this method is good for getting a rough-draft sequence done quickly, but doesn't really apply to the goal I mentioned above: quickly and cheaply sequencing genes from individual patients. This may be why Celera is so hung up on protecting their database; if they haven't developed any quick, cheap, accurate sequencing methods, the database is their only asset! (At least in terms of the human genome.)
If this is so, I really have no sympathy for them. If this is not so, somebody please correct me.
Okay, so change it to: "These crimes were the high-tech equivalent of physically breaking into a business and photocopying valuable documents from a locked file cabinet..."
In this case, the victim still has their property. And in some cases (picking locks), you can get in and out without damage to the victim's property at all. So how's that different?
I'm sure you can have a .bashrc and a .exrc, if you want. MacOS X should handle .dotfiles the same way as Unix: by leaving them to individual programs to use and manage. When you get right down to it, the only built-in support for .dotfiles in Unix is that `ls' doesn't list them by default.
Anyhoo, check out their filesystem layout doc at the MacOS X developer site.
Oh yeah, one day they'll `get' it and these problems will be no more. But it's gonna get a whole hell of a lot worse before then....
Why does this hurt our case? It shows a heck of a lot of people out here in Net-land care passionately about the issue, and if this many people care this passionately, maybe there's something to our case? It's all about spin, sure the MPAA lawyers can spin it as a bunch of lawless hackers, but clever EFF lawyers can spin it as civil disobedience for a good cause.
Granted, these are all uses of the Internet, but how about the case that they're delineated enough to call them "continents of the Internet Planet?" Perhaps I haven't browsed far and wide enough, but it seems to me that "X-Net," "InfoNet" and "BuyNet" are all completely part of "The Corporate Internet" and subservient to its needs. And I'd say the majority of "CultureNet" is the same way, with the majority of the remainder consisting of people illegally trading the products of Culture(tm).
Even with the others, to say they're seperate is a bit odd. What, geeks, gamers, and Jeses-freaks don't buy crap, look at naughty pictures, or work at corporations? I'm sorry, I just don't see this rampant Balkanization this brief article posits.
Instead, as the old saying goes, fight fire with fire. Instead of coming off as slightly cowed by their self-righteous indignation, start ripping into 'em using their own tactics! Insinuate that it's only the lousy parents that can't supervise their kids; they probably let that infernal idiot-box television raise their kids, too! See, they're too wrapped up in their own in their own lives to care about their kids. Y'know, after all, that only kids of poor moral fiber caused by lack of love from their parents go looking for porn. Be sure to drop hints that only Godless Commie pinkos don't care about the First Amendment, too. Invoke the specters of Stalin and Mao, if needed. And never, ever listen to their arguments and try to counter them. That's only a sign of weakness. Ignore their arguments as the worthless waste of breath that they are, and plow ahead with your own agenda.
Once you put the pro-filtering side on the defensive and make their argument look as weak as it really is, only then will you start to change a lot of people's minds.
(The worst part about this message is that I'm less than half joking.)
Well, at least I hope that's the motive, because otherwise it's really freakin' pointless....