No, Bill Gates is currently in a live show on German television (topic: globalization), smiling like that guy in the Userfriendly cartoon, telling everybody how great competition is and carefully avoiding to answer questions about the MS trials and how MS uses their market dominance to crush smaller enterprises...
Going to the website linked from the main article I found out about the meaning of 'i18n'. But my point is that important, larger projects shouldn't make any assumptions about people knowing these abbreviations (especially in the title), a bit of English should be the greatest common denominator. In other words, I don't think i18n or L10N are well-established, but that's just me. BTW, that Mozilla link was very interesting! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a sun.com Java link where they discuss _their_ implementation of character sets, calendar types etc., I lost that one;-(
Great... Who is choosing these names? My first thought (not being a native speaker, although I wonder if that matters) was about a Linux distribution for adults only! Seriously, I'm not sure this kind of 'slang' or whatever you may call it is appropriate for larger projects. Us lamers from other countries just don't get it!
Windows 5 aka 2000 aka whatever will have a "Run as..." command in its start menu, which will let you do things as an administrator. MS will also start supporting disk quota. Looks like they're finally catching up to that '30 year old UNIX technology', as they put it on their Linux myths page!
Compression is made up of modelling and coding. The coding step transforms a sequence of probability values between 0 and 1 to a bit stream which must obviously have the property that you can recreate the original probabilities from it. Huffman coding is optimal iff each probability can be represented as 2^(-k), k being >= 1. This is a very rare case, all prob. values must be 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc. So, other coders like arithmetic coding beat Huffman most of the time. Unfortunately, there are nasty patents on ar. coding, that's why JPEG files using arithmetic coding (they're possible) are not in general use although they give about 5 to 10 percent improvement in compression over the widely used Huffman JPEG's.
I see your point but I think the original poster was talking about finding failures in the news stories that are discussed, not about topics like licenses where there is no 'right' and 'wrong', just opinions. If a linked news story contains flaws, they're usually found fast and get named by the slashdot community, that's the positive thing. Reading both the news stories and the comments, one can learn a lot.
From http://www.pez.com/HTML/Pezinfo.html: We hope that you enjoy our site and find it informative and resourceful. We also invite you to visit the many other PEZ related web sites created by some very talented and dedicated PEZ collectors. So, they obviously like the PEZ fan homepages, but I'm really not sure how to make a PEZ fan homepage (yuck, people really have weird hobbies) without using the trademarks. Maybe someone can clear this up?!
The show has been on for ages, and there were arguments between Carter (producer) and Duchovny (Mulder) on money, that's why Duchovny left. He'd left earlier, but it seems he didn't have much success with his movie career. It's different for Anderson, who hasn't played big parts but who was pretty successful at them (according to the critics; see this site for more on Anderson). I think they'll make more movies because the overall money/time ratio is better;-)
Didn't MS announce to use XML as the format of choice for at least Word? What about it? I don't have Office 2000... It would be great for everybody and seems very much unlike their usual policy of hiding the formats / internals (as recommended in the Halloween papers).
This is so poor! The complexity of the Linux operating system and cumbersome nature of the existing GUI's would make retraining end-users a huge undertaking and would add significant cost They must have never heard of KDE or GNOME - and by the way - how do you work on an NT system over the network? Anything like X Windows (very old technology) never found its way into the modern NT operating system. example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? That's an easy one, let's do it like Microsoft - invent some certificate and give it away to everybody who wants it. Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process. In contrast, no Linux products are listed on the U.S. Government's evaluated product list. C2 level means nothing, and they only accomplished it with no network and floppy disk. All in all, this page is FUD at its worst (or best, from whatever point of view you see it). Listen to any experienced NT administrator and the pile of problems they have and you're not likely to get into NT. The whole page is just a sign that MS is feeling the heat.
IMHO, the important point about games is the artwork (level designs, 3D modeling), the sounds and the music - you'll need non-geek type of folks to do this kind of work, and those few people who are capable are making a living from it.
From the coding point of view, you still need a good game engine, which must be adjusted often in relatively short periods of time as the modern graphics hardware changes quickly. The making of a good computer game is different from producing a compiler or shell utilities... And before Open GL there was hardly a way to make it platform-independent - can't estimate Carmack's work high enough in this respect, looking at those unsupported *ix ports being around for several earlier id games.
At last in the year 2038, there'll be a lot of Linux hype again, with all those grandpas being dragged from their porches to get the Y2038 bugs in that *#!@ operating system fixed that the enterprises are running their networking and database software on...
But hey, who would've thought the OS would still be used by then?!
Maybe there'll also be some mainstream media, explaining what Linux is and the most important terminology - "source code, that is how you tell computers what to do...". And the audience will wonder: "But can't you just... talk to them? Like usually?".
You're right, for C it's the same thing. But Delphi is, for better or worse, in the hands of one company, and they can make changes if they want.
As an example - Sun's Java RTL may not be perfect (Date etc. are really crappy, even in 1.2), but at least you'll find stuff easily - java.io.* really contains what you might guess. And it's platform-independent - the File class has canRead / canWrite predicates, no Get/SetFileAttributes that deal with integers whose meaning is different for Unix, Mac, Windows and whatever platform people may come up with in the future.
Now that Delphi enters a second platform, I'd simply wish Borland would take this into consideration. They still can offer support for platform-specific stuff like a function that returns valid drives under Win32 and another function that returns current user's home directory under *ix. A well-designed RTL will port easier to other systems, too.
I hope Borland will use the opportunity of a new platform to bring the runtime library of Delphi into a new structure - it's a horrible mess.
A thin layer around Win32 API functions that has most things you need, but you won't find it. Date / time functions, string functions, file search, everything in SysUtils. The Windows.pas source code files is larger than 1 MB and has everything from drive type detection to thread synchronization.
Probably they will not do it because they want people to be able to compile their projects without changes. Sigh...
The good thing is that many Windows applications written in Delphi can be simply recompiled (well, at least in theory) and then run on Linux. That's a good thing (tm) because it makes Linux more attractive - the more applications available the better.
Delphi developers can offer their customers a new platform without doing too much - they will be glad about this, they might sell more copies of their software.
Linux gets another popularity boost from the well-known effect of 'wow - the xyz enterprise which is pretty important in the business has Linux support now'.
And about the 'Linux doesn't need Borland' - there still is no RAD tool that matches Borland's products. Period. Clicking together apps may not be the most sophisticated thing to do, but that's what they need out there in the real world - sometimes.
On another matter - please note that while everybody who accesses slashdot.org probably has a rudimentary understanding of English (at least 'first post' is part of it;-)), the vocabulary in use should remain of the kind that can be looked up with a dictionary in case of doubt. Frankly, I had no idea what the N-word could be unless I read the linked article. Babelfish can't help here either! I'm sure in the U.S. everybody knows what the N-word means, but don't take it for granted with all of the gazillion slashdot readers from around the world. It is the same with the abbreviation NAACP, but from the introductory text it became at least clear that it is a group that fights against racial hatred and the linked article explained it in detail. So, please remember us readers from abroad when you post any kind of abbreviations or slang language!
Forgive my ignorance about domain registration, but why can't whatever body controls it just refuse to allow offensive names.
I also thought about that when I read the other comments on what a shame it is (and it indeed is!)that an organization like the NAACP must / does spend money on offensive domain names. However, if you start thinking about it, it's almost impossible to draw the line. It comes down to your cultural, sociological, religious and whatever other background to define 'offensive'. With a worldwide medium like the Internet you can't keep everyone happy.
The problem with geostationary satellites is that while they stay at the same spot (viewed from earth), they must keep the specific distance you were talking about, which is > 30000 km. At that distance, you can broadcast television signals, but you can't have the same level of detail as from a satellite that is in an orbit only a couple of hundred kilometers. That's why there usually is a 'time frame' of some minutes for satellites that fly low and are designed for spying into people's backyards (the exact time frame should be dependent on the distance from earth I guess, the higher it is positioned, the longer you can observe the same spot).
For TeX, which was created at a time when open source was unheard of and giving software away for free quite unusual. He spent ten years on it (and quite a number of $2.56 cheques;-)) and delivered a high-quality product running on about any platform. TeX and additional software are used all over the world.
CNN treated information as it came from NATO headquarters 'with care', they learnt from the Gulf war. It wasn't presented as facts, only as reports from one side. And they interviewed Yugoslav officials all the time, in world news, in panels of Larry King live etc. CNN is too US-specific to be a real worldwide news station, but you must be more careful if you try to brand them as the pushing-for-war evil media giants.
You (and others) seem to have misunderstood the term 'dumb' as I used it.
I was referring to the often-heard prejudice that people under the rule of a dictatorship, which are often poor countries as well, must be dumb because they don't organize against it, protest and oust their leaders.
This is nonsense as they must fear for their lives / freedom if they do.
I think there's a difference between countries where on the one hand you (and your complete village) may be wiped out because you are part of an ethnic minority / belong to a certain religion / were just in the way and on the other hand a country where some wrong-lead politicians attempt to implement weird things, but where citizens learn about it in the news, can discuss it in public and choose to contact their congressman (or the non-US equivalent) without having to fear repression. If you don't see that difference, I'm sorry. Go ask a Chinese dissident.
I'm pretty sure we will see news of this kind happen many times more (not only related to children) - the internet and its possibilities (fast information interchange, difficulties to filter/control content) must be a threat for any kind of anti-democratic government. People in 'unfree' countries aren't dumb, but they don't have ways to inform themselves except for the government-ruled media (see Iraq, Serbia etc.). So the Internet can help people forming an opinion on political questions that is made up on the basis of facts, not propaganda. Unfortunately, access to the Internet is restricted already by the simple fact that even a low-cost PC is not affordable in many countries, even without artificial intervention by governments. Hopefully, this will change. As long as access is only possible at a couple of internet cafes, control is still relatively easy, you simply have to close them for whatever reason you come up with (drugs dealers etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
No, Bill Gates is currently in a live show on German television (topic: globalization), smiling like that guy in the Userfriendly cartoon, telling everybody how great competition is and carefully avoiding to answer questions about the MS trials and how MS uses their market dominance to crush smaller enterprises...
Going to the website linked from the main article I found out about the meaning of 'i18n'. But my point is that important, larger projects shouldn't make any assumptions about people knowing these abbreviations (especially in the title), a bit of English should be the greatest common denominator. In other words, I don't think i18n or L10N are well-established, but that's just me. BTW, that Mozilla link was very interesting! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a sun.com Java link where they discuss _their_ implementation of character sets, calendar types etc., I lost that one ;-(
Great... Who is choosing these names? My first thought (not being a native speaker, although I wonder if that matters) was about a Linux distribution for adults only! Seriously, I'm not sure this kind of 'slang' or whatever you may call it is appropriate for larger projects. Us lamers from other countries just don't get it!
Windows 5 aka 2000 aka whatever will have a "Run as..." command in its start menu, which will let you do things as an administrator. MS will also start supporting disk quota. Looks like they're finally catching up to that '30 year old UNIX technology', as they put it on their Linux myths page!
Can you tell what number of RC5 blocks you completed at the different clocking rates every day?
Compression is made up of modelling and coding. The coding step transforms a sequence of probability values between 0 and 1 to a bit stream which must obviously have the property that you can recreate the original probabilities from it. Huffman coding is optimal iff each probability can be represented as 2^(-k), k being >= 1. This is a very rare case, all prob. values must be 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc. So, other coders like arithmetic coding beat Huffman most of the time. Unfortunately, there are nasty patents on ar. coding, that's why JPEG files using arithmetic coding (they're possible) are not in general use although they give about 5 to 10 percent improvement in compression over the widely used Huffman JPEG's.
I see your point but I think the original poster was talking about finding failures in the news stories that are discussed, not about topics like licenses where there is no 'right' and 'wrong', just opinions. If a linked news story contains flaws, they're usually found fast and get named by the slashdot community, that's the positive thing. Reading both the news stories and the comments, one can learn a lot.
From http://www.pez.com/HTML/Pezinfo.html:
We hope that you enjoy our site and find it informative and resourceful. We also invite you to visit the many other PEZ related web sites created by some very talented and dedicated PEZ collectors.
So, they obviously like the PEZ fan homepages, but I'm really not sure how to make a PEZ fan homepage (yuck, people really have weird hobbies) without using the trademarks. Maybe someone can clear this up?!
The show has been on for ages, and there were arguments between Carter (producer) and Duchovny (Mulder) on money, that's why Duchovny left. He'd left earlier, but it seems he didn't have much success with his movie career. It's different for Anderson, who hasn't played big parts but who was pretty successful at them (according to the critics; see this site for more on Anderson). I think they'll make more movies because the overall money/time ratio is better ;-)
Didn't MS announce to use XML as the format of choice for at least Word? What about it? I don't have Office 2000... It would be great for everybody and seems very much unlike their usual policy of hiding the formats / internals (as recommended in the Halloween papers).
This is so poor!
The complexity of the Linux operating system and cumbersome nature of the existing GUI's would make retraining end-users a huge undertaking and would add significant cost
They must have never heard of KDE or GNOME - and by the way - how do you work on an NT system over the network? Anything like X Windows (very old technology) never found its way into the modern NT operating system.
example how many certified engineers are there for Linux?
That's an easy one, let's do it like Microsoft - invent some certificate and give it away to everybody who wants it.
Every member of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 3.5 has been evaluated at either a C2 level under the U.S. Government's evaluation process or at a C2-equivalent level under the British Government's ITSEC process. In contrast, no Linux products are listed on the U.S. Government's evaluated product list.
C2 level means nothing, and they only accomplished it with no network and floppy disk.
All in all, this page is FUD at its worst (or best, from whatever point of view you see it). Listen to any experienced NT administrator and the pile of problems they have and you're not likely to get into NT. The whole page is just a sign that MS is feeling the heat.
IMHO, the important point about games is the artwork (level designs, 3D modeling), the sounds and the music - you'll need non-geek type of folks to do this kind of work, and those few people who are capable are making a living from it.
From the coding point of view, you still need a good game engine, which must be adjusted often in relatively short periods of time as the modern graphics hardware changes quickly. The making of a good computer game is different from producing a compiler or shell utilities... And before Open GL there was hardly a way to make it platform-independent - can't estimate Carmack's work high enough in this respect, looking at those unsupported *ix ports being around for several earlier id games.
At last in the year 2038, there'll be a lot of Linux hype again, with all those grandpas being dragged from their porches to get the Y2038 bugs in that *#!@ operating system fixed that the enterprises are running their networking and database software on...
But hey, who would've thought the OS would still be used by then?!
Maybe there'll also be some mainstream media, explaining what Linux is and the most important terminology - "source code, that is how you tell computers what to do...".
And the audience will wonder: "But can't you just... talk to them? Like usually?".
;-)
You're right, for C it's the same thing. But Delphi is, for better or worse, in the hands of one company, and they can make changes if they want.
As an example - Sun's Java RTL may not be perfect (Date etc. are really crappy, even in 1.2), but at least you'll find stuff easily - java.io.* really contains what you might guess. And it's platform-independent - the File class has canRead / canWrite predicates, no Get/SetFileAttributes that deal with integers whose meaning is different for Unix, Mac, Windows and whatever platform people may come up with in the future.
Now that Delphi enters a second platform, I'd simply wish Borland would take this into consideration. They still can offer support for platform-specific stuff like a function that returns valid drives under Win32 and another function that returns current user's home directory under *ix. A well-designed RTL will port easier to other systems, too.
I hope Borland will use the opportunity of a new platform to bring the runtime library of Delphi into a new structure - it's a horrible mess.
A thin layer around Win32 API functions that has most things you need, but you won't find it. Date / time functions, string functions, file search, everything in SysUtils. The Windows.pas source code files is larger than 1 MB and has everything from drive type detection to thread synchronization.
Probably they will not do it because they want people to be able to compile their projects without changes. Sigh...
Are they going to port their compiler technology (which is quite good) or just lam off of gcc and free pascal?
I don't think they'll use Free Pascal - it only supports Delphi 2 features and they want to develop the next version of Delphi for Win32 and Linux.
The good thing is that many Windows applications written in Delphi can be simply recompiled (well, at least in theory) and then run on Linux. That's a good thing (tm) because it makes Linux more attractive - the more applications available the better.
Delphi developers can offer their customers a new platform without doing too much - they will be glad about this, they might sell more copies of their software.
Linux gets another popularity boost from the well-known effect of 'wow - the xyz enterprise which is pretty important in the business has Linux support now'.
And about the 'Linux doesn't need Borland' - there still is no RAD tool that matches Borland's products. Period. Clicking together apps may not be the most sophisticated thing to do, but that's what they need out there in the real world - sometimes.
On another matter - please note that while everybody who accesses slashdot.org probably has a rudimentary understanding of English (at least 'first post' is part of it ;-)), the vocabulary in use should remain of the kind that can be looked up with a dictionary in case of doubt. Frankly, I had no idea what the N-word could be unless I read the linked article. Babelfish can't help here either! I'm sure in the U.S. everybody knows what the N-word means, but don't take it for granted with all of the gazillion slashdot readers from around the world. It is the same with the abbreviation NAACP, but from the introductory text it became at least clear that it is a group that fights against racial hatred and the linked article explained it in detail. So, please remember us readers from abroad when you post any kind of abbreviations or slang language!
Forgive my ignorance about domain registration, but why can't whatever body controls it just refuse to allow offensive names.
I also thought about that when I read the other comments on what a shame it is (and it indeed is!)that an organization like the NAACP must / does spend money on offensive domain names.
However, if you start thinking about it, it's almost impossible to draw the line. It comes down to your cultural, sociological, religious and whatever other background to define 'offensive'. With a worldwide medium like the Internet you can't keep everyone happy.
The problem with geostationary satellites is that while they stay at the same spot (viewed from earth), they must keep the specific distance you were talking about, which is > 30000 km. At that distance, you can broadcast television signals, but you can't have the same level of detail as from a satellite that is in an orbit only a couple of hundred kilometers. That's why there usually is a 'time frame' of some minutes for satellites that fly low and are designed for spying into people's backyards (the exact time frame should be dependent on the distance from earth I guess, the higher it is positioned, the longer you can observe the same spot).
For TeX, which was created at a time when open source was unheard of and giving software away for free quite unusual. He spent ten years on it (and quite a number of $2.56 cheques ;-)) and delivered a high-quality product running on about any platform. TeX and additional software are used all over the world.
CNN treated information as it came from NATO headquarters 'with care', they learnt from the Gulf war. It wasn't presented as facts, only as reports from one side. And they interviewed Yugoslav officials all the time, in world news, in panels of Larry King live etc. CNN is too US-specific to be a real worldwide news station, but you must be more careful if you try to brand them as the pushing-for-war evil media giants.
You (and others) seem to have misunderstood the term 'dumb' as I used it.
I was referring to the often-heard prejudice that people under the rule of a dictatorship, which are often poor countries as well, must be dumb because they don't organize against it, protest and oust their leaders.
This is nonsense as they must fear for their lives / freedom if they do.
I think there's a difference between countries where on the one hand you (and your complete village) may be wiped out because you are part of an ethnic minority / belong to a certain religion / were just in the way and on the other hand a country where some wrong-lead politicians attempt to implement weird things, but where citizens learn about it in the news, can discuss it in public and choose to contact their congressman (or the non-US equivalent) without having to fear repression. If you don't see that difference, I'm sorry. Go ask a Chinese dissident.
I'm pretty sure we will see news of this kind happen many times more (not only related to children) - the internet and its possibilities (fast information interchange, difficulties to filter/control content) must be a threat for any kind of anti-democratic government.
People in 'unfree' countries aren't dumb, but they don't have ways to inform themselves except for the government-ruled media (see Iraq, Serbia etc.). So the Internet can help people forming an opinion on political questions that is made up on the basis of facts, not propaganda. Unfortunately, access to the Internet is restricted already by the simple fact that even a low-cost PC is not affordable in many countries, even without artificial intervention by governments. Hopefully, this will change. As long as access is only possible at a couple of internet cafes, control is still relatively easy, you simply have to close them for whatever reason you come up with (drugs dealers etc.).