To be a skilled programmer, you MUST know how a computer works at the fundamental level.
But why assume that everyone in the intro class is there to become a "skilled programmer?" How about science or math majors there so they'll be able to write some small apps when they need to? Or history or sociology majors who need to satisfy a science requirement or just like computers and think learning to code a little would be fun?
Oh dear, oh dear... He was talking about the annual report, not the stock. Such a shame, you sounded so knowledgable too.
I have to admit I read "Buy a share, get one free!" in disbelief a couple times before realizing what was meant. After all, annual reports are always free! (Download here or I'm sure they'll send you a hard copy for free.)
I've never tried it but at my work they distribute TunnelBuilder to Mac users who want to VPN. It runs on OS 9 - I don't know what the OS X status is.
As always, a simple Google search turns up plenty of alternatives. (Ashley Laurent, IntraPort, a Cisco OS X client.) As frequently happens, it doesn't seem like the questioner did the slightest homework before coming here.
You know, what's funny is that for years the one voice against this sort of concession of American sovereignty was Jesse Helms. Of course, all right-thinking people denounced him for his Neanderthal beliefs since everything international had to be good. After all, we're the worst country in the world so any power we cede to foreign countries has to be a net gain, right?
Now that it's become fashionably leftish to oppose "globalization" as mindlessly as it was once pursued, it would be nice if protesters would acknowledge Jesse for keeping the lonely faith through the '80s and '90s.
The reason Dr. Shorter uses exact terminology to discuss illnesses is because he's a medical doctor, not a person that relies on anecdotal evidence.
Yes, but the article uses "carpal tunnel syndrome" and "RSI" interchangeably, as though one is the entirety of the other. Let's say that keyboard use has no effect on carpal tunnel syndrome. I don't see where that supports a headline of "Repetitive stress pain was just 'hysteria'" except for anecdotal stements from Shorter like "The whole RSI thing has sort of evaporated in a cloud of smoke." (Can we see some numbers on that?) To me, it seems entirely consistent with the results here that keyboard use does cause the kind of injuries popularly called "carpal tunnel"; but not true carpal tunnel syndrome.
Hell, Shorter even says "[people should not abandon their expensive office chairs and keyboard trays, because many office workers report having neck, arm and upper back pain, even if they do not have carpal tunnel syndrome.] I think having a properly set up work station and so forth is still very important."
Incidentally (and this also applies to the AC who responded), I am a scientist, I understand the difference between anecdotes and statistically valid samples and I don't claim that my wife's opinions are proof of anything. But Shorter strikes me as similar to the people who claim that soft tissue pain is the result of fibromyalgia, TMJ, sexual abuse or whatever: his career is psychosomatic pain and here's a diffuse condition that he can claim to explain. My job is to read assertions and try to poke holes in them. (That's probably why 90% of my Slashdot posts are argumnetative challenges to the posted article.)
So, one hand is in pain, and she's hitting you with the other one?! Time for some serious mariage consuling, here.
I'm reminded of a recent New York Times article about efforts to improve marital stability in the Bible Belt. I quote:
Besides Sara, now 17, Mark and Cathryn Hinderliter have a daughter, Greta, who is 3. The couple agree that their marriage is working. Still, they have problems, and Ms. Hinderliter has insisted on working them out in sessions with a marriage counselor, who is also an evangelical Christian. ''How do you do this right?'' she said. ''Well, basically, I think you just communicate until your knuckles bleed.''
I'd like to see Dr. Shorter tell my wife that the pain is all in her head. You'd have to surgically remove her hands from his throat.
On the other hand, what struck me about the article was the emphasis on carpal tunnel syndrome. My impression is that very few people have that. The term is used as shorthand for RSI injuries in general, much as people talk about having "the flu" when they get a cold. Tendonitis is far more common, in my experience -- I'd like to have seen that discussed in this context.
Gideon (with that name, everyone's going to think it's a GNOME app, for better or worse) is far from usable.
The current KDevelop, or the 1.4 branch from CVS, is definitely worth a look. It's free, is pretty full-featured, integrates well with the excellent Qt Designer and is quite competitive with the commercial offerings. (Although I haven't seen Kylix.)
Also Qt is cross-platform (although the Windows version isn't under a free license) and it's superbly documented and supported, unlike most of the other Linux favorites.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Web Bugs And Corporate Policy
on
Web Bug Detector
·
· Score: 1
Small clarification: "except that in this case the troll got a +3 and the editor got a +5" referred to a statement in my initial post that "those of us who sometimes read at -1 have seen this subject raised and modded down, and then addressed by Slashdot editors who are then modded down by angry trolls." I'm not arguing about who should have gotten more points.
All you people submitting questions -- this isn't a Slashdot interview! Ask them here!
Every time there's a headline here with the words "interview" or "ask" people start frantically posting questions. I confess I've been guilty of that a couple of times myself...;-)
(Original subject: First "This Is Not A/. Interview!" Post! Apparently that trips the lameness filter.)
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Re:Web Bugs And Corporate Policy
on
Web Bug Detector
·
· Score: 1
Well, except that in this case the troll got a +3 and the editor got a +5, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Given that the original article is all about the horrors of 1x1 transparent GIFs, wouldn't it make more sense to include an official statement of what Anover/OSDN/whateveritwasthen is doing than for Jamie to make evasive answers when a question is too pointed to simply ignore?
direct links to posts don't work on archived articles
Re:Web Bugs And Corporate Policy
on
Web Bug Detector
·
· Score: 3
Richard Smith writes: "Any company that uses Web bugs on their site should say so clearly in their privacy policies and explain the following: why they are being used, what data is sent by a bug, who gets the data, and what they are doing with it," he added.
The submitter writes: It would seem our beloved slashdot has them as well.
Of course, a number of Slashdot readers were already familiar with this topic -- those of us who sometimes read at -1 have seen this subject raised and modded down, and then addressed by Slashdot editors who are then modded down by angry trolls. Or you can read about it on one of the troll web sites.
And this is the way all information about Slashdot is handled. Why did moderation go completely nuts a month ago? The only official word was in a -1 post from Michael buried in a -1 thread. Beyond that, you have to read (site whose name I won't mention to avoid getting 200 idiot sporks and crapflooders on my case) to find out what's going on. As always, security through obscurity doesn't work; it only confines the information to the people you least want to have it.
The bottom line, though, is that it comes down to trust. There's never been an official explanation of what the web bugs here do but while I don't, for instance, trust the editors to have any concept of what it means to be logically or ethically consistent, I do believe that they wouldn't do anything outrageous to my privacy.
I was going to make exactly the same point. The economics of an Apache vs IIS decision are different from Oracle vs whatever free solution, and both are wildly different from replacing Windows desktop boxes with Linux.
Beyond the fact that case by case analyses are easier to make, you'll also a) come across as much more convincing because you won't seem like a zealot with a hammer looking for nails and b) the results of your employer's acting on your recommendations are less likely to generate a fiasco that overshadows all your wins.
It's called a "social contract" but I don't think it's a legally enforceable license. Needless to say though, IANAL -- anyone knowledgable want to settle this? Hawk? Bruce Perens? That lawyer who was interviewed the other day?
We're talking about lies, spoofing, and trolling, not censoring sensible criticisms and reasonable technical arguments.
I would be strongly in favor of such a policy. What disturbed me about much of that list thread, and about a lot of comments I've seen on the site, is that the concern was at least as much about "Where are the Solaris packages?" and "Nautilus is unusably slow." -type posts as it was about "KDE rulz" garbage.
Eazel, in particular, seems to have developed a culture that regards anyone expressing opinions less glowing than those in their press releases as a laugahable kook, to be consigned to the flames mailing list or eavel.com.
You need to do some research into the numerical accuracy of Excel (any search engine will do).
I admit I did not know that. Here's a good link, for those who are interested. Personally, at the point where I need lots of significant digits for my regression fits I'd use real statistical software but your point is well taken.
I've battled with the VBA environment in Excel before, and it flat-out sucks... it's crash happy, slow and frankly dreadful.
I don't have the slightest idea about that. Still, for what I use Excel for -- and that's far more than making tables -- it performs really well. If the free office suites could touch it in quality, usability and polish, Linux would be on desktops everywhere.
Well, there is a large difference between the president or CEO or whatever his title is nowadays, Steve Ballmer, representing MSFT, calling an entire movement a cancer, in a very public announcement. Joe Schmoe, on slashdot, venting his rage against some company doesn't even compare.
True. (Although I think Richard Stallman venting his rage does compare.) But my point is that Joe Schmoe's ranting about Micro$hit makes me unsympathetic to his trauma when a Microsoft statement jars his feelings.
The Linux / free software / open source movements are completely suffused with hatred and ridicule for Microsoft. You're not seriously arguing that, are you? I really don't see where any of those factions are in a position to accuse Microsoft of meanspiritedness.
And finally, STOP! associating everybody on slashdot as having only one mentality! We're all different people.
That's always the answer to accusations of hypocracy and hopefully, that's what going on here. Personally, I'm skeptical that there's little overlap between the posters who have been spewing FUD and nonsense about Microsoft all these years and the ones who are so upset with Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer. Or between, say, the posters who complain when record labels pursue Napster and ask why they don't go after the users who are breaking the rules and the ones who flip out when the labels demand that those users be kicked.
But forget the posters -- there's just one group of editors, right? The ones who are posting all the "Ohmigod, Craig Mundie said something bad about Linux!" stories are the same ones who've been leading the anti-Microsoft crusade for years. Or is the CmdrTaco who plays Diablo II and Black & White different from the one who claims he can't view QuickTime files?
There is NO one slashdot ideology here, so stop assuming it!
Is there a single point of view shared by all readers? No, of course not. Does the Slashdot editorial team select stories and add editorial comments according to a well-defined, if heavily self-contradictory, ideology? It seems clear enough to me that that's the case.
First we get mad when MS calls us a 'cancer'. Then we call MS an evil, unkillable menace.
Yeah, the level of emotional tenderness around here always surprises me. There's the neverending stream of rage and hatred directed at Microsoft. They're evil! We hate them! We're going to destroy them! I mean, look at the freaking icon for Microsoft articles!
But as soon as anyone at Microsoft voices a criticism of Linux or free software, everyone turns into a bunch of traumatized crybabies. Of course, as it happens:
The vast majority of Slashdot readers are running Windows/IE
The editors seem to spend more time playing Windows-only games than they do with anything related to Unix
Jon Katz, last we heard, had abandoned Linux and gone back to his Mac. I'd guess he probably wrote this rant in Word; certainly not on a free system. (Jon, since you're the one editor who actually reads comments, let me know if I'm wrong.)
It's funny that I'm one of the big MS defenders here. As it happens, I haven't touched a Windows box in months and I have far more code in any Linux distribution than any 20 Slashbots together. (16 of whom, as I said, are reading this in WIndows.) But I have no objection to using MS products when they're superior to the alternatives (MacOS IE) or simply flat-out excellent (Excel). And I can't stand the smugness, self-righteousness and outright dishonesty in the Microsoft bashing around here.
In another chapter from the can-dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it-dept., I notice that the GNOME developers, who built their position in large part by an endless stream of anti-KDE FUD are now considering disabling reader comments in Gnotices. Partly because of crapflooders, mostly because they're opposed to allowing any negative messages to be expressed.
Zico, you forgot about that other cornerstone of Slashdot legal theory: if you make something into a song, poem or T-shirt, it is no longer subject to any sort of regulation. (Why, just yesterday we had an article purporting to support this.)
BTW, for those who think either of these are really sound legal theories, the answer to the "code as free speech" question gives an ecellent, thorough explanation of why that's not so.
However, that's not to say that Mac OS X is truly uncrashable. (Yet.) We appear to be somewhat lucky on the stability end, whereas some other hapless customers are not. For instance, take Tony Smith over at The Register; the poor man nearly reached his wit's end trying to keep his Mac OS X-loaded blue and white G3 from taking frequent and unplanned trips to Crashville. (Spookily enough, Tony's crashes left him with "nothing but a blank, mid-blue screen"-- is Apple hard at work reverse-engineering Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death?) After multiple reinstalls, he eventually figured out what was causing his grief: an aftermarket PCI ATI Radeon graphics card, which he determined was not supported. Replacing it with his original OEM Rage 128 card left his system solid as a rock. Or so he thought.
Once he got around to reinstalling his third-party fonts, his crashes came back. And so, by adding one font at a time, he was eventually able to isolate the real cause of all his woes: "a single Star Trek symbol font... OS X doesn't like it one little bit." So while Mac OS X is able to use his zippy Radeon card after all, Tony will sadly have to boot back into Mac OS 9 whenever he wants to stick the Starfleet Insignia into one of his party invitations. Now that's a problem that Apple's really going to have to fix before Mac OS X will ever catch on as a mainstream operating system.
In fairness to OS X, I think it was actually application crashes -- the font wasn't bringing the system down.
I'm stating my impression about what they do accept (that Chinese users and standards bodies are far less troubled about Unicode than is the author) and speculating on why that might be (that out-of-the-box support to edit ancient texts in Word is more important to a scholar than to the vast majority of users).
I planned to read this through before posting. I really did. But then, in the second paragraph I hit:
Wieger's seminal book about the characters and construction of China, published in 1915, was to become the defacto source against which all others would (and still should) be compared - with several caveats. Amongst these is a noticeable bias on his part against Taoism which becomes more evident in his analysis of the Tao Tsang (i.e., Taoist Canon of Official Writings [written 'DaoZang' in the PinYin Romanization of Mainland China] )
and I decided to skim the rest.
To summarize, for those whose eyes completely glazed over, his point is that Unicode doesn't sufficiently cover the full range of Chinese characters and that not using a larger set is a result of a longstanding Western prejudice that the Chinese don't need so many characters.
Now, I'm not Chinese so my opinion counts for little here, but my impression is that Unicode isn't nearly as controversial as he makes it out. His analogy "To express it in Western terms, how would English-speakers like it if we were suddenly restricted to an alphabet which is missing five or six of its letters because they could be considered "similar" (such as "M" and "N" sounding and looking so much like each other) and too "complex" ("Q" and "X" - why, they are the nothing more a fancier "C" and an "Z")." ignores the fact that Chinese orthography has a tradition of simplification and variants. I suspect Unicode is a lot more upsetting to a "reference writer specializing in rare Taoist religious texts and medical works" than to ordinary Chinese users who want to run Photoshop or put their wedding pictures on a web page.
I don't think Apple's more extreme claims of superior performance based on a handful of carefully selected Photoshop filters are to be taken seriously. But I think it is legitimate to assume use of the G4's Altivec extensions, given that Code Warrior and other tools used in MacOS development support them with virtually no added effort. Performing benchmarks with gcc misses a huge part of the G4's performance advantage, one that any normal Mac user's performance-sensitive apps would be using.
While I've been typing this, I bet at least five people have already pointed out the same thing...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
There wasn't any "caving in." For better or worse, that's what Gartner does. They're not Consumer Reports.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
But why assume that everyone in the intro class is there to become a "skilled programmer?" How about science or math majors there so they'll be able to write some small apps when they need to? Or history or sociology majors who need to satisfy a science requirement or just like computers and think learning to code a little would be fun?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I have to admit I read "Buy a share, get one free!" in disbelief a couple times before realizing what was meant. After all, annual reports are always free! (Download here or I'm sure they'll send you a hard copy for free.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
As always, a simple Google search turns up plenty of alternatives. (Ashley Laurent, IntraPort, a Cisco OS X client.) As frequently happens, it doesn't seem like the questioner did the slightest homework before coming here.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Now that it's become fashionably leftish to oppose "globalization" as mindlessly as it was once pursued, it would be nice if protesters would acknowledge Jesse for keeping the lonely faith through the '80s and '90s.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Yes, but the article uses "carpal tunnel syndrome" and "RSI" interchangeably, as though one is the entirety of the other. Let's say that keyboard use has no effect on carpal tunnel syndrome. I don't see where that supports a headline of "Repetitive stress pain was just 'hysteria'" except for anecdotal stements from Shorter like "The whole RSI thing has sort of evaporated in a cloud of smoke." (Can we see some numbers on that?) To me, it seems entirely consistent with the results here that keyboard use does cause the kind of injuries popularly called "carpal tunnel"; but not true carpal tunnel syndrome.
Hell, Shorter even says "[people should not abandon their expensive office chairs and keyboard trays, because many office workers report having neck, arm and upper back pain, even if they do not have carpal tunnel syndrome.] I think having a properly set up work station and so forth is still very important."
Incidentally (and this also applies to the AC who responded), I am a scientist, I understand the difference between anecdotes and statistically valid samples and I don't claim that my wife's opinions are proof of anything. But Shorter strikes me as similar to the people who claim that soft tissue pain is the result of fibromyalgia, TMJ, sexual abuse or whatever: his career is psychosomatic pain and here's a diffuse condition that he can claim to explain. My job is to read assertions and try to poke holes in them. (That's probably why 90% of my Slashdot posts are argumnetative challenges to the posted article.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I'm reminded of a recent New York Times article about efforts to improve marital stability in the Bible Belt. I quote:
Besides Sara, now 17, Mark and Cathryn Hinderliter have a daughter, Greta, who is 3. The couple agree that their marriage is working. Still, they have problems, and Ms. Hinderliter has insisted on working them out in sessions with a marriage counselor, who is also an evangelical Christian.
''How do you do this right?'' she said. ''Well, basically, I think you just communicate until your knuckles bleed.''
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
On the other hand, what struck me about the article was the emphasis on carpal tunnel syndrome. My impression is that very few people have that. The term is used as shorthand for RSI injuries in general, much as people talk about having "the flu" when they get a cold. Tendonitis is far more common, in my experience -- I'd like to have seen that discussed in this context.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
The current KDevelop, or the 1.4 branch from CVS, is definitely worth a look. It's free, is pretty full-featured, integrates well with the excellent Qt Designer and is quite competitive with the commercial offerings. (Although I haven't seen Kylix.)
Also Qt is cross-platform (although the Windows version isn't under a free license) and it's superbly documented and supported, unlike most of the other Linux favorites.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Every time there's a headline here with the words "interview" or "ask" people start frantically posting questions. I confess I've been guilty of that a couple of times myself... ;-)
(Original subject: First "This Is Not A /. Interview!" Post! Apparently that trips the lameness filter.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
direct links to posts don't work on archived articles
You have to use anchors, like this.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
"Any company that uses Web bugs on their site should say so clearly in their privacy policies and explain the following: why they are being used, what data is sent by a bug, who gets the data, and what they are doing with it," he added.
The submitter writes:
It would seem our beloved slashdot has them as well.
Of course, a number of Slashdot readers were already familiar with this topic -- those of us who sometimes read at -1 have seen this subject raised and modded down, and then addressed by Slashdot editors who are then modded down by angry trolls. Or you can read about it on one of the troll web sites.
And this is the way all information about Slashdot is handled. Why did moderation go completely nuts a month ago? The only official word was in a -1 post from Michael buried in a -1 thread. Beyond that, you have to read (site whose name I won't mention to avoid getting 200 idiot sporks and crapflooders on my case) to find out what's going on. As always, security through obscurity doesn't work; it only confines the information to the people you least want to have it.
The bottom line, though, is that it comes down to trust. There's never been an official explanation of what the web bugs here do but while I don't, for instance, trust the editors to have any concept of what it means to be logically or ethically consistent, I do believe that they wouldn't do anything outrageous to my privacy.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Beyond the fact that case by case analyses are easier to make, you'll also a) come across as much more convincing because you won't seem like a zealot with a hammer looking for nails and b) the results of your employer's acting on your recommendations are less likely to generate a fiasco that overshadows all your wins.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I would be strongly in favor of such a policy. What disturbed me about much of that list thread, and about a lot of comments I've seen on the site, is that the concern was at least as much about "Where are the Solaris packages?" and "Nautilus is unusably slow." -type posts as it was about "KDE rulz" garbage.
Eazel, in particular, seems to have developed a culture that regards anyone expressing opinions less glowing than those in their press releases as a laugahable kook, to be consigned to the flames mailing list or eavel.com.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I admit I did not know that. Here's a good link, for those who are interested. Personally, at the point where I need lots of significant digits for my regression fits I'd use real statistical software but your point is well taken.
I've battled with the VBA environment in Excel before, and it flat-out sucks... it's crash happy, slow and frankly dreadful.
I don't have the slightest idea about that. Still, for what I use Excel for -- and that's far more than making tables -- it performs really well. If the free office suites could touch it in quality, usability and polish, Linux would be on desktops everywhere.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
True. (Although I think Richard Stallman venting his rage does compare.) But my point is that Joe Schmoe's ranting about Micro$hit makes me unsympathetic to his trauma when a Microsoft statement jars his feelings.
The Linux / free software / open source movements are completely suffused with hatred and ridicule for Microsoft. You're not seriously arguing that, are you? I really don't see where any of those factions are in a position to accuse Microsoft of meanspiritedness.
And finally, STOP! associating everybody on slashdot as having only one mentality! We're all different people.
That's always the answer to accusations of hypocracy and hopefully, that's what going on here. Personally, I'm skeptical that there's little overlap between the posters who have been spewing FUD and nonsense about Microsoft all these years and the ones who are so upset with Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer. Or between, say, the posters who complain when record labels pursue Napster and ask why they don't go after the users who are breaking the rules and the ones who flip out when the labels demand that those users be kicked.
But forget the posters -- there's just one group of editors, right? The ones who are posting all the "Ohmigod, Craig Mundie said something bad about Linux!" stories are the same ones who've been leading the anti-Microsoft crusade for years. Or is the CmdrTaco who plays Diablo II and Black & White different from the one who claims he can't view QuickTime files?
There is NO one slashdot ideology here, so stop assuming it!
Is there a single point of view shared by all readers? No, of course not. Does the Slashdot editorial team select stories and add editorial comments according to a well-defined, if heavily self-contradictory, ideology? It seems clear enough to me that that's the case.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Yeah, the level of emotional tenderness around here always surprises me. There's the neverending stream of rage and hatred directed at Microsoft. They're evil! We hate them! We're going to destroy them! I mean, look at the freaking icon for Microsoft articles!
But as soon as anyone at Microsoft voices a criticism of Linux or free software, everyone turns into a bunch of traumatized crybabies. Of course, as it happens:
- The vast majority of Slashdot readers are running Windows/IE
- The editors seem to spend more time playing Windows-only games than they do with anything related to Unix
- Jon Katz, last we heard, had abandoned Linux and gone back to his Mac. I'd guess he probably wrote this rant in Word; certainly not on a free system. (Jon, since you're the one editor who actually reads comments, let me know if I'm wrong.)
It's funny that I'm one of the big MS defenders here. As it happens, I haven't touched a Windows box in months and I have far more code in any Linux distribution than any 20 Slashbots together. (16 of whom, as I said, are reading this in WIndows.) But I have no objection to using MS products when they're superior to the alternatives (MacOS IE) or simply flat-out excellent (Excel). And I can't stand the smugness, self-righteousness and outright dishonesty in the Microsoft bashing around here.In another chapter from the can-dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it-dept., I notice that the GNOME developers, who built their position in large part by an endless stream of anti-KDE FUD are now considering disabling reader comments in Gnotices. Partly because of crapflooders, mostly because they're opposed to allowing any negative messages to be expressed.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
BTW, for those who think either of these are really sound legal theories, the answer to the "code as free speech" question gives an ecellent, thorough explanation of why that's not so.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
However, that's not to say that Mac OS X is truly uncrashable. (Yet.) We appear to be somewhat lucky on the stability end, whereas some other hapless customers are not. For instance, take Tony Smith over at The Register; the poor man nearly reached his wit's end trying to keep his Mac OS X-loaded blue and white G3 from taking frequent and unplanned trips to Crashville. (Spookily enough, Tony's crashes left him with "nothing but a blank, mid-blue screen"-- is Apple hard at work reverse-engineering Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death?) After multiple reinstalls, he eventually figured out what was causing his grief: an aftermarket PCI ATI Radeon graphics card, which he determined was not supported. Replacing it with his original OEM Rage 128 card left his system solid as a rock. Or so he thought.
Once he got around to reinstalling his third-party fonts, his crashes came back. And so, by adding one font at a time, he was eventually able to isolate the real cause of all his woes: "a single Star Trek symbol font... OS X doesn't like it one little bit." So while Mac OS X is able to use his zippy Radeon card after all, Tony will sadly have to boot back into Mac OS 9 whenever he wants to stick the Starfleet Insignia into one of his party invitations. Now that's a problem that Apple's really going to have to fix before Mac OS X will ever catch on as a mainstream operating system.
In fairness to OS X, I think it was actually application crashes -- the font wasn't bringing the system down.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I'm stating my impression about what they do accept (that Chinese users and standards bodies are far less troubled about Unicode than is the author) and speculating on why that might be (that out-of-the-box support to edit ancient texts in Word is more important to a scholar than to the vast majority of users).
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Wieger's seminal book about the characters and construction of China, published in 1915, was to become the defacto source against which all others would (and still should) be compared - with several caveats. Amongst these is a noticeable bias on his part against Taoism which becomes more evident in his analysis of the Tao Tsang (i.e., Taoist Canon of Official Writings [written 'DaoZang' in the PinYin Romanization of Mainland China] )
and I decided to skim the rest.
To summarize, for those whose eyes completely glazed over, his point is that Unicode doesn't sufficiently cover the full range of Chinese characters and that not using a larger set is a result of a longstanding Western prejudice that the Chinese don't need so many characters.
Now, I'm not Chinese so my opinion counts for little here, but my impression is that Unicode isn't nearly as controversial as he makes it out. His analogy "To express it in Western terms, how would English-speakers like it if we were suddenly restricted to an alphabet which is missing five or six of its letters because they could be considered "similar" (such as "M" and "N" sounding and looking so much like each other) and too "complex" ("Q" and "X" - why, they are the nothing more a fancier "C" and an "Z")." ignores the fact that Chinese orthography has a tradition of simplification and variants. I suspect Unicode is a lot more upsetting to a "reference writer specializing in rare Taoist religious texts and medical works" than to ordinary Chinese users who want to run Photoshop or put their wedding pictures on a web page.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
While I've been typing this, I bet at least five people have already pointed out the same thing... ;-)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.