The fact that there are many networks is not, by itself, the problem. It's a fun thing to joke about, but not truly bad.
The truly bad thing is that as of March 2017 there is not one network that is secure, reliable, and popular.
Non-free-software networks WhatsApp, Kik, Allo, Facebook, Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, etc., are not secure by definition. I don't trust a word of what WhatsApp is saying about Signal-protocol security. It's not just about my safety from government surveillance—I am even more concerned about processing of my data by marketing companies who want to learn who I am to improve their sales (or political campaigns—it's quite the same thing).
Signal is Free software, and it's widely recognized as secure, but it's not reliable because many people complain that messages are delivered slowly or not at all, and it's not popular. Also, it doesn't have much of a bot API, and it's becoming important these days. Finally, its partnership with WhatsApp is truly puzzling.
Telegram is partly, but not completely, Free software, and it's more reliable and popular than Signal, but not very much so. Personally, I love it for the features, like channels, groups, bot API, and cloud storage, but I acknowledge it has problems. (Most of my friends are on WhatsApp, and those of them who tried Telegram all said that Telegram's features are better.)
Wire is kind-of curious, but very unpopular.
What I really wish is that Mozilla stopped all its activities except developing Firefox on desktop and Android (I'm talking about pointless stuff like the recent rebranding, Webmaker, overblown international conferences, etc.), and then acquired Telegram or Signal and focused all of its non-Firefox efforts on one of them. If it acquires Telegram, it should make it fully Free software. If it acquires Signal, it should invest in its reliability and popularity.
But the “cnet.com” link in the title works correctly. Here’s the URL: http://www.cnet.com/news/game-developer-barbie-gets-it-right-by-being-cool-and-capable/
It's much smaller than the one in English, but it's there. The best part: you and your friends can improve it. It's a wiki, which means that you can improve it yourself - add as many articles as you want, as long as they are relevant to the encyclopedia, and edit the existing articles. You can even teach the children themselves to edit, thus making sure that they know that it's possible to type in Odia on computers.
I'm super-passionate about making the editions of Wikipedia in various languages better, so please contact me if you have more questions.
How nice of him to take his children to the most peaceful country in the Middle East. To show them war he could take them to actual Syria, rather then "Occupied Syria", which is actually called Golan Heights. Though I readily admit that it's occupied somewhat illegally, it has been peaceful since 1967.
Of course, he is a responsible father, and he wouldn't take his children to a place that is actually dangerous. It's a shame that he'll probably tell them uninformed propaganda about Israel. Oh well.
Reality is even more interesting if you care to check facts on the ground.
Atheists are frequently accused of having no moral code to live by. This hardly holds water - many atheists are essentially moral people even if they don't live by a religious book. Furthermore, religious morals are frequently contradictory and hurtful to many, so their worth is dubious.
That said, there is a moral rule on which all religious and secular cultures and systems of thought seem to agree, at least nominally: "One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated".
Do you accept this rule as a good basis for a common human moral code? Would you collaborate with religious leaders in promoting this idea?
For variety, consider some Soviet science fiction.
The author with the most neutral and universal appeal, especially to young people, is probably Kir Bulychev.
The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are more brainy. They are immensely popular among Russian-speaking geeks and hackers. You may have heard about the film "Stalker" and "The Inhabited Island", which are based on their novels.
The more communist authors are Alexander Belyayev and Ivan Yefremov. Despite the political angle of many of their works they were translated into English and other languages and well-regarded outside of the USSR. They honestly imagined that the future would be communist - this is an important point that you should consider telling your students.
Get over it. All GNU/Linux distributions bundle a browser, an office suite, a photo editing program and a bunch of compilers with an OS, nobody says that it's anti-competitive and it doesn't help GNU/Linux to gain market share.
Microsoft bundles with their OS a crappy browser that breaks web interoperability and locks people on Windows, 'cuz they think they need those crappy nonstandard sites - yes, those still exist in 2009; now that's a problem.
Tatarstan is not tiny - it is one of the most populous and important regions of Russia. Its capital Kazan is one of the most important cities in Russia.
Tatarstan is not independent - it is an autonomy within the Russian Federation.
Tatarstan is not a former Russian republic - see above.
Search YouTube for "The Truth According To Wikipedia". It's 50 minutes, but well worth watching, if only to learn that there are people as stupid as Andrew Keen.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but none of these fonts don't have any support for any languages except the most common European ones.
They support Latin characters with some extensions, enough for most of Europe, but ignoring Vietnamese and many other languages.*
They support Cyrillic with very little extensions, so Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Belarusians can use them, but the emerging economies of Kazakhstan and Tatarstan and other post-Soviet regions are left behind.
And they also support Greek. And that's it.
All these are absent: Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, Devanagari, Tamil. Hundreds of millions of people in countries with important IT industries can't benefit from these fonts. This is so 1997. As if Unicode never happened and the world is still stuck with ASCII and ISO-8859. As if successful and massively multilingual Unicode-based projects, such as Wikipedia don't exist. Essentially, nothing has changed since 1997, except that the letters look arguably nicer.
One of the great things about the good old Arial, Tahoma, Courier New and Times New Roman was that they included a rather rich set of scripts outside the default European domain. It may not make a lot of sense from the point of view of typography traditionalists, as the people who developed the original Times typeface, for example, didn't have Hebrew and Thai in mind; But it is very convenient for a lot of people around the globe to write a document in Times New Roman and then to send them to people without worrying that the recipient won't have the necessary font.
That's just one of the reasons why i don't expect the transition to those new fonts to be quick.
* That includes native languages of Nigeria. Keeping Nigerians away from computers may prove as a sensible strategy...
I'm not an avid mobile device user, but i did have a rather nice experience with Minimo once. A relative of mine was bragging about his brand new Mobile Windows device at a family meal recently and showed off how well it works with GPS and connects to the neighbours' WiFi.
Well, i'm not a fan of IE and Windows, so i asked him to let me play around with the device a little and immediately headed to getfirefox.com. There i quickly found Minimo. The installation was rather slow and the application took forever to load in comparison to mobile IE, but it opened websites very well. The really amazing part is that it opened websites in Hebrew perfectly, while IE was an utter failure at rendering bidirectional Hebrew text. So, quite surprisingly, i had a strong point convincing people to switch to Mozilla and free software in general.
So - maybe Minimo was half-baked, but it probably was a great experiment.
(To be fair, regular PC Windows version of IE handles Hebrew well.)
I can understand the hack value, but why, for the love of God, would i want to run binary Linux apps on Windows? Didn't they have anything better to waste four years on?
There are some binary Windows apps, which could make life easier (albeit somewhat unethical in FSF terms) for Linux users, such as MS Office and IE6, and AFAIK that's what WINE is for (although i've never had the dire need to actually try it). But vice versa??
All the FOSS Linux apps that are source portable - OpenOffice, Perl, Mozilla, SVN, Audacity etc. - already found their success on the Windows platform. Is someone weird enough to make an application which is binary-only *and* Linux-only?
Lawrence Lessig is saying just that for many years and he acknowledges that it is mostly in harmony with Richard Stallman's ideas. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright, but a constructive reform.
Oh. I haven't got the whole grasp of the Perl 6 hyperoperators yet. I thought that they are syntax sugar for clever operations with multiple arrays, such as
(1, 2, 3) >>+ (5, 7, 9)
But in any case, it even strengthens my original claim: Perl 6 seems to be the first mainstream programming language design with implicit multi-threading in the core syntax and not an external module (like in Perl 5) or a standard library class (like in Java).
(Of course, different people have different definitions of "mainstream".)
If this design is implemented successfully, it might just happen that in the multi-core world Perl 6's pervasive multi-threading will outweigh its other performance problems and become Perl 6's killer app.
No, but thanks for the link. I'm pretty out of the C world since about 1998 - i code almost exclusively in Perl (5), which explains my Perl bias.
OpenMP seems nice, but the charm with the Perl 6 junctions idea (if and when it is implemented; i haven't tried the latest Pugs build yet), is that the programmer doesn't even know that he's writing multi-threaded code. And that's something.
Perl 6 (as it is designed) introduces a new concept of "junctions", which are a bit like arrays, but can be used in clever ways. One useful way is:
if ($fruit == ("apple"|"orange"|"pear")) {
print "sweet!"; }
But another intriguing way of using the junction will be parallel loops -
for ("apple"|"orange"|"pear") {
eat($_); }... and instead of doing three consecutive eat's -
eat("apple"); eat("orange"); eat("pear");
the interpreter will run 3 threads, each with the eat() function.
As the whole of Perl 6, this design is not finalized. Maybe it won't be like that at all. And of course threading is all non-safe and stuff.
But having threads in a vanilla for loop, instead of setting up thread with clever functions, modules, etc. is something new. If it will happen and unsuspecting programmers will just use it, hey - that'd be something special.
It's true that usually so-called "Communist" governments are actually single-party dictatorships, but as strange as it sounds, the communist government of Kerala was actually democratically elected* and it can be removed at the next elections. Kerala is not USSR or North Korea.
India is not a perfect democracy, but it wouldn't tolerate any of its states becoming an outright single-party dictatorship.
(* It must be noted that this piece of knowledge comes from Wikipedia, so you don't have to trust it.)
Is this the RIAA?
Or is this the MPAA?
Or is this the DMCA?
I thought it was the USofA!
(singalong to the melody of The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK")
Re:The brave new world
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
Bidi HTML rendering is of course great, but not enough. I admit i haven't tried running it yet (don't currently have access to a Linux machine:( ), so maybe i'm just talking bullshit and correct me if i'm wrong, but AFAIK:
1. Qt/KDE doesn't yet support true BIDI input and selection.
2. The Hebrew po (translation) files for KDE seem to be visually ordered, which means that stuff like button/widget/dialog labels, window captions etc are not truly reordered.
3. Again, _correct me if i'm wrong_, but it seems that in current KDE beta widget placing in a window is left-to-right and it's hard-coded. In a completely internationalized system the direction of the entire window/dialog/whatever should be localizable. Pango seems to already get it right; compare the screenshots: Pango (look at the end of the page) and KDE (notice the colons at the wrong side of the labels).
Now i don't mean to diss KDE; the opposite is true: i love it, i just wished for a long time that they developed a complete bidi solution. Now that both Qt/KDE and Gnome/Pango are both clean GPL they can easily share code and will really speed things up.
Comon, all you whiners, the license war is over! Think about the great possibilities now that Qt is completely free. First and foremost - the huge technical win: Now Qt/KDE and any other GPL application can share code and that is basically the the main goal of GPL. Example: Gnome has a new emerging i18n library codenamed Pango, which has features not present in Qt, such as complete bidirectional languages support. Now Pango can easily used with KDE and finally free the speakers of Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Pashto, Uighur, Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic and a lot of other languages from Windows and Mac OS's which until now were the only ones to support them properly. And it's just one example (it happens to be quite relevant to me, as i need Hebrew and Arabic browser and office apps).
Linux ruling the desktop? Yes, now it seems closer than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that there are many networks is not, by itself, the problem. It's a fun thing to joke about, but not truly bad.
The truly bad thing is that as of March 2017 there is not one network that is secure, reliable, and popular.
Non-free-software networks WhatsApp, Kik, Allo, Facebook, Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, etc., are not secure by definition. I don't trust a word of what WhatsApp is saying about Signal-protocol security. It's not just about my safety from government surveillance—I am even more concerned about processing of my data by marketing companies who want to learn who I am to improve their sales (or political campaigns—it's quite the same thing).
Signal is Free software, and it's widely recognized as secure, but it's not reliable because many people complain that messages are delivered slowly or not at all, and it's not popular. Also, it doesn't have much of a bot API, and it's becoming important these days. Finally, its partnership with WhatsApp is truly puzzling.
Telegram is partly, but not completely, Free software, and it's more reliable and popular than Signal, but not very much so. Personally, I love it for the features, like channels, groups, bot API, and cloud storage, but I acknowledge it has problems. (Most of my friends are on WhatsApp, and those of them who tried Telegram all said that Telegram's features are better.)
Wire is kind-of curious, but very unpopular.
What I really wish is that Mozilla stopped all its activities except developing Firefox on desktop and Android (I'm talking about pointless stuff like the recent rebranding, Webmaker, overblown international conferences, etc.), and then acquired Telegram or Signal and focused all of its non-Firefox efforts on one of them. If it acquires Telegram, it should make it fully Free software. If it acquires Signal, it should invest in its reliability and popularity.
Broken for me, too—it's just <a>!
But the “cnet.com” link in the title works correctly. Here’s the URL: http://www.cnet.com/news/game-developer-barbie-gets-it-right-by-being-cool-and-capable/
Wikipedia is available in Odia.
It's much smaller than the one in English, but it's there. The best part: you and your friends can improve it. It's a wiki, which means that you can improve it yourself - add as many articles as you want, as long as they are relevant to the encyclopedia, and edit the existing articles. You can even teach the children themselves to edit, thus making sure that they know that it's possible to type in Odia on computers.
I'm super-passionate about making the editions of Wikipedia in various languages better, so please contact me if you have more questions.
How nice of him to take his children to the most peaceful country in the Middle East. To show them war he could take them to actual Syria, rather then "Occupied Syria", which is actually called Golan Heights. Though I readily admit that it's occupied somewhat illegally, it has been peaceful since 1967.
Of course, he is a responsible father, and he wouldn't take his children to a place that is actually dangerous. It's a shame that he'll probably tell them uninformed propaganda about Israel. Oh well.
Reality is even more interesting if you care to check facts on the ground.
Michael Bolton? Don't exaggerate. More like Sandi Thom.
Hello.
Atheists are frequently accused of having no moral code to live by. This hardly holds water - many atheists are essentially moral people even if they don't live by a religious book. Furthermore, religious morals are frequently contradictory and hurtful to many, so their worth is dubious.
That said, there is a moral rule on which all religious and secular cultures and systems of thought seem to agree, at least nominally: "One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated".
Do you accept this rule as a good basis for a common human moral code? Would you collaborate with religious leaders in promoting this idea?
For variety, consider some Soviet science fiction.
The author with the most neutral and universal appeal, especially to young people, is probably Kir Bulychev.
The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are more brainy. They are immensely popular among Russian-speaking geeks and hackers. You may have heard about the film "Stalker" and "The Inhabited Island", which are based on their novels.
The more communist authors are Alexander Belyayev and Ivan Yefremov. Despite the political angle of many of their works they were translated into English and other languages and well-regarded outside of the USSR. They honestly imagined that the future would be communist - this is an important point that you should consider telling your students.
OK, Microsoft bundles a browser with the OS.
Bundles-schmundles.
Get over it. All GNU/Linux distributions bundle a browser, an office suite, a photo editing program and a bunch of compilers with an OS, nobody says that it's anti-competitive and it doesn't help GNU/Linux to gain market share.
Microsoft bundles with their OS a crappy browser that breaks web interoperability and locks people on Windows, 'cuz they think they need those crappy nonstandard sites - yes, those still exist in 2009; now that's a problem.
I don't want to hear about the bundling anymore.
Tatarstan is not tiny - it is one of the most populous and important regions of Russia. Its capital Kazan is one of the most important cities in Russia.
Tatarstan is not independent - it is an autonomy within the Russian Federation.
Tatarstan is not a former Russian republic - see above.
Andrew Keen is a fucking idiot.
Much like Chris Cornell, who can only speak in Audioslave lyrics, Andrew Keen can only speak in non-sequiturs.
Want some proof?
Search YouTube for "The Truth According To Wikipedia". It's 50 minutes, but well worth watching, if only to learn that there are people as stupid as Andrew Keen.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but none of these fonts don't have any support for any languages except the most common European ones.
They support Latin characters with some extensions, enough for most of Europe, but ignoring Vietnamese and many other languages.*
They support Cyrillic with very little extensions, so Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Belarusians can use them, but the emerging economies of Kazakhstan and Tatarstan and other post-Soviet regions are left behind.
And they also support Greek. And that's it.
All these are absent: Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, Devanagari, Tamil. Hundreds of millions of people in countries with important IT industries can't benefit from these fonts. This is so 1997. As if Unicode never happened and the world is still stuck with ASCII and ISO-8859. As if successful and massively multilingual Unicode-based projects, such as Wikipedia don't exist. Essentially, nothing has changed since 1997, except that the letters look arguably nicer.
One of the great things about the good old Arial, Tahoma, Courier New and Times New Roman was that they included a rather rich set of scripts outside the default European domain. It may not make a lot of sense from the point of view of typography traditionalists, as the people who developed the original Times typeface, for example, didn't have Hebrew and Thai in mind; But it is very convenient for a lot of people around the globe to write a document in Times New Roman and then to send them to people without worrying that the recipient won't have the necessary font.
That's just one of the reasons why i don't expect the transition to those new fonts to be quick.
* That includes native languages of Nigeria. Keeping Nigerians away from computers may prove as a sensible strategy...
I'm not an avid mobile device user, but i did have a rather nice experience with Minimo once. A relative of mine was bragging about his brand new Mobile Windows device at a family meal recently and showed off how well it works with GPS and connects to the neighbours' WiFi.
Well, i'm not a fan of IE and Windows, so i asked him to let me play around with the device a little and immediately headed to getfirefox.com. There i quickly found Minimo. The installation was rather slow and the application took forever to load in comparison to mobile IE, but it opened websites very well. The really amazing part is that it opened websites in Hebrew perfectly, while IE was an utter failure at rendering bidirectional Hebrew text. So, quite surprisingly, i had a strong point convincing people to switch to Mozilla and free software in general.
So - maybe Minimo was half-baked, but it probably was a great experiment.
(To be fair, regular PC Windows version of IE handles Hebrew well.)
Linux was picked up in significant numbers if you ask me, but Microsoft didn't release MS-Word for Linux.
So either these numbers are not significant for Microsoft, or they have something else on their mind.
I can understand the hack value, but why, for the love of God, would i want to run binary Linux apps on Windows? Didn't they have anything better to waste four years on?
There are some binary Windows apps, which could make life easier (albeit somewhat unethical in FSF terms) for Linux users, such as MS Office and IE6, and AFAIK that's what WINE is for (although i've never had the dire need to actually try it). But vice versa??
All the FOSS Linux apps that are source portable - OpenOffice, Perl, Mozilla, SVN, Audacity etc. - already found their success on the Windows platform. Is someone weird enough to make an application which is binary-only *and* Linux-only?
Or am i missing something?
Supaplex!
What else is new?
Lawrence Lessig is saying just that for many years and he acknowledges that it is mostly in harmony with Richard Stallman's ideas. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright, but a constructive reform.
Lessig's "Free Culture" is one of the best books i ever read: http://www.free-culture.cc/
Oh. I haven't got the whole grasp of the Perl 6 hyperoperators yet. I thought that they are syntax sugar for clever operations with multiple arrays, such as
(1, 2, 3) >>+ (5, 7, 9)
But in any case, it even strengthens my original claim: Perl 6 seems to be the first mainstream programming language design with implicit multi-threading in the core syntax and not an external module (like in Perl 5) or a standard library class (like in Java).
(Of course, different people have different definitions of "mainstream".)
If this design is implemented successfully, it might just happen that in the multi-core world Perl 6's pervasive multi-threading will outweigh its other performance problems and become Perl 6's killer app.
No, but thanks for the link. I'm pretty out of the C world since about 1998 - i code almost exclusively in Perl (5), which explains my Perl bias.
OpenMP seems nice, but the charm with the Perl 6 junctions idea (if and when it is implemented; i haven't tried the latest Pugs build yet), is that the programmer doesn't even know that he's writing multi-threaded code. And that's something.
Perl 6 (as it is designed) introduces a new concept of "junctions", which are a bit like arrays, but can be used in clever ways. One useful way is:
... and instead of doing three consecutive eat's -
if ($fruit == ("apple"|"orange"|"pear")) {
print "sweet!";
}
But another intriguing way of using the junction will be parallel loops -
for ("apple"|"orange"|"pear") {
eat($_);
}
eat("apple");
eat("orange");
eat("pear");
the interpreter will run 3 threads, each with the eat() function.
As the whole of Perl 6, this design is not finalized. Maybe it won't be like that at all. And of course threading is all non-safe and stuff.
But having threads in a vanilla for loop, instead of setting up thread with clever functions, modules, etc. is something new. If it will happen and unsuspecting programmers will just use it, hey - that'd be something special.
It's true that usually so-called "Communist" governments are actually single-party dictatorships, but as strange as it sounds, the communist government of Kerala was actually democratically elected* and it can be removed at the next elections. Kerala is not USSR or North Korea.
India is not a perfect democracy, but it wouldn't tolerate any of its states becoming an outright single-party dictatorship.
(* It must be noted that this piece of knowledge comes from Wikipedia, so you don't have to trust it.)
Survival of the fittest it is, and the fittest in this case of endless finger-pointing and forkind seems to be ... Microsoft.
I wonder what animal would O'Reilly put on their edition of "Dianetics". A clam? Or maybe a termite?
Is this the RIAA?
Or is this the MPAA?
Or is this the DMCA?
I thought it was the USofA!
(singalong to the melody of The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK")
Bidi HTML rendering is of course great, but not enough. I admit i haven't tried running it yet (don't currently have access to a Linux machine :( ), so maybe i'm just talking bullshit and correct me if i'm wrong, but AFAIK:
1. Qt/KDE doesn't yet support true BIDI input and selection.
2. The Hebrew po (translation) files for KDE seem to be visually ordered, which means that stuff like button/widget/dialog labels, window captions etc are not truly reordered.
3. Again, _correct me if i'm wrong_, but it seems that in current KDE beta widget placing in a window is left-to-right and it's hard-coded. In a completely internationalized system the direction of the entire window/dialog/whatever should be localizable. Pango seems to already get it right; compare the screenshots: Pango (look at the end of the page) and KDE (notice the colons at the wrong side of the labels).
Now i don't mean to diss KDE; the opposite is true: i love it, i just wished for a long time that they developed a complete bidi solution. Now that both Qt/KDE and Gnome/Pango are both clean GPL they can easily share code and will really speed things up.
Comon, all you whiners, the license war is over! Think about the great possibilities now that Qt is completely free. First and foremost - the huge technical win: Now Qt/KDE and any other GPL application can share code and that is basically the the main goal of GPL. Example: Gnome has a new emerging i18n library codenamed Pango, which has features not present in Qt, such as complete bidirectional languages support. Now Pango can easily used with KDE and finally free the speakers of Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Pashto, Uighur, Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic and a lot of other languages from Windows and Mac OS's which until now were the only ones to support them properly. And it's just one example (it happens to be quite relevant to me, as i need Hebrew and Arabic browser and office apps).
Linux ruling the desktop? Yes, now it seems closer than ever.
Thank you, TrollTech.