Yawn. Whatever. If you honestly believe it's preferable for a couple hundred thousand people to have to each individually hit a search engine to look up one sentence worth of background information than for the editor of a news site to add that one sentence to the original story and save everyone the hours of combined extra work, well, more power to you, I guess. I'd rather read three articles in a given amount of time than read one and go prowling around the net trying to figure out what the hell it's talking about, but maybe that's me.
As for laziness, guilty as charged and proud of it. Larry Wall's quote on the three virtues of a programmer is spot on. (I'd paste it here, but you can find it via Google, so I'd better not spoil the fun.)
My knowledge of Japanese is almost nil, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I have a friend who studied Japanese for four years in college, lived over there for a few years, and is now learning Mandarin. It seems like the Japanese background is helpful but not to the extent that, say, knowing Spanish makes it a lot easier to learn Italian.
The meanings of a lot of the written characters are the same as the Japanese kanji, but of course the pronunciation is usually unrelated. She says there are a few constructs the two languages have borrowed from each other (measure words that are based on the shapes of the objects being counted, for example) but for the most part they're not very closely related languages so there's still a steep learning curve.
Most people have no reason to spend time learning about the available choices of vector-based illustration software. Slashdot's crowd is diverse enough that short of stuff like Firefox or Linux, it's not a good idea to assume that most people here have clue one about any particular piece of software.
BTW, I don't mean that in a condescending way; it's just a consequence of specialization and it's human nature to assume everyone has some passing interest in the stuff that fascinates or occupies us. I'm sure the proteomics folks here could rattle off half a dozen names of very cool molecular modeling apps, but as someone who spends his days writing Java web applications, not one of those names would ring any kind of bell for me. In return I expect most of the proteomics crowd has never heard of Tapestry or Wicket or the JSP Standard Template Library.
Now if only we could get the editors to realize they ought to include descriptions of the stuff they're posting about. It would not have been so much burden, I think, to add the words "vector illustration tool" right before the name of the program, especially since the editor edited the story anyway to add a comment to the end.
I started learning Mandarin earlier this year in part because I think the winds are blowing in such a way as to make it a useful job skill in the not-too-distant future. Also because it's fun and challenging, and because I want to spend time traveling in rural China. Here are some resources for folks who want to dip their toes in.
"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.
For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.
If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.
The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.
For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.
For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.
What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!
until such time as they can get leading foreign scientists to relocate to China
You mean relocate back to China? There are an awful lot of bright Chinese expats working in other countries.
As for the broader point... I'm not sure which ridiculous extreme is actually better for the growth of a technological base: "Copy whatever you want, who cares if the originator doesn't get a dime" as in China, or "Don't write that code, there might be a ludicrous patent you'll have to spend $10 million getting declared invalid" as in the US. Certainly one can point to US industries such as the Hollywood movie business(*) that wouldn't exist today without rampant violation of intellectual property laws in the past.
Personally, I think China is going to give the west a rather solid run for its money in software. Our fervor for ever-stronger intellectual property laws is a legislative gun with which we're taking repeated potshots in the direction of our feet. I've been involved in IP disputes on both sides, and they are almost always big wastes of time and money that don't end up benefitting anyone but the lawyers. To the extent that Chinese companies won't have to suffer from that overhead, they'll be in stronger competitive positions. All of their web sites will have one-click ordering, one can assume.
Finally, the "they're just copying our stuff" point was a pretty common accusation leveled at Japan in the 80s and early 90s, if memory serves. It seems to have proven itself untrue over the years, and I have every expectation the same will be true of China.
(*) The reason the movie studios are in Hollywood is that they didn't want to pay royalties to Edison Labs for use of Edison's patented film production equipment. So the early would-be studio bosses headed west, where they'd be able to strike it rich before the folks on the east coast could track them down to demand payment. For some reason you don't find that little factoid on any of the movie studios' "history of Hollywood" web pages. Reference.
Let's be realistic, China doesn't even really pretend to care about any law other than what it creates, and even that is flimsy as there are numerous loopholes for the state to get out of trouble with.
In other words, it's a country with a big enough military to defend itself and a vibrant enough economy to risk pissing some of its partners off. Every country that has the power to do so follows that path at some point. China and the US are the current obvious examples but you don't have to look too far in history to find plenty of others.
Ha! I hope you have better luck with that than I did. (My specific situation is solved thanks to some helpful Slashdotters, but people shouldn't have to post to Slashdot to install a new font!)
I'm a big movie buff, but nowadays I usually only make it out to the theater three or four times a year. Usually all I'll go see is big "event" movies where I can get together with a group of ten friends who've all been waiting to see that particular movie. It's as much about the hanging out with friends as about seeing the movie; we have a group dinner in line (man, do other people look jealous when we're sitting there relaxing and eating tasty Indian food) and hang out afterwards.
If I just want to see a movie, forget it. All the advantages other people have posted are overwhelming: I can watch in my bathrobe, the furniture is much more comfortable, Netflix is more convenient, no people sitting behind me repeating the dialogue to each other or kicking my seat, I can pause if I have to use the restroom, I can turn off the subtitles if the movie is in a foreign language I speak, there are often neat DVD extras to watch if I really enjoy the film... the list goes on.
Home video killed drive-in movies in the US; there are a few left here and there, but nowhere near the number I remember when I was a kid. I think it'll do the same to regular theaters, especially as more and more people get large high-def flatscreens and the "better picture and sound" argument becomes less convincing. That's what I did; my TV is a 9-foot-wide screen and a front projector, and the picture quality is better than most of the local movie theaters. And given the price of movie tickets around here, my setup has probably already paid for itself!
Pfft. I bet you're one of those poseurs who wants to run Linux on your desktop PC and have the sound system just work, too. Who do you think you are, Jamie Zawinski?
PasswordMaker is open source and comes with a plain JavaScript implementation you can put on your own web page and use from browsers other than Firefox.
Losing your password to a phisher is a complete impossibility if you use a tool to auto-generate your passwords based on the domain name and a master password. PasswordMaker is my favorite for Firefox; there are others too. To me this approach is far preferable to keeping a password-protected vault of passwords, because you don't have to carry the vault around with you.
It's more secure, too. Software isn't fooled by Unicode character set spoofing -- two Unicode characters may render to the same glyph in a particular font and thus be indistinguishable to a human, but they'll generate different inputs to a password generator's hash function. That means you'll give the phishing site a password that's only valid for the phishing site's domain, not for the domain they're imitating.
Obviously you have to choose a really good master password, and preferably you're using software that needs additional settings (e.g. PasswordMaker's "l33t level") to generate the correct output. It's easier to remember one excellent master password than 500 mediocre individual passwords.
Thanks for the informative message! That helps clarify things. Putting fonts in my ~/.fonts directory does seem like it works more often than not, but not 100% of the time. The example I linked to in the article is one of the failures. I've put it in my ~/.fonts directory (as well as in a couple of system fonts directories listed in the/etc/fonts config files) in PCF and BDF and FON formats and nothing seems to notice it. If it weren't for the fact that it works in xterm I would have just assumed the font file was corrupt in some way. (Which maybe it is, in some way that xterm doesn't mind.)
My reason for posting the article is less about getting this particular font installed than about understanding why it's not working, of course. Are you aware of any diagnostics I can look at that might shed light on the matter?
You mean the one that tells me to go download the updated, converted version of ProFont and install it? Great advice, or it would be if ProFont were the font I wanted to install, which it isn't. Sadly, there is no such modified version of the Sheldon font I prefer, so that thread (which I'd already read, thanks) is of no use to me other than mentioning that there's "some kind of encoding messup."
And in any event even if there were a version of the right font, that wouldn't help me know what to do the next time I came across a font that didn't work. Which is really the larger point of the posting here.
of course that will be tough when Microsoft copies all of Firefox's features in the next release of IE.
Oh, don't worry, by then I'm sure Firefox will have copied even more of Opera's features.
Tabbed browsing was a good first feature to copy, but now Opera has native SVG support, a voice-recognition UI, and a nifty bookmarking system that saves excerpts of the bookmarked pages. Come on, Firefox guys, what are you waiting for? I want my open-source innovation!
(I will now patiently await my Flamebait moderation.)
I agree with that too. Over time I've been moving my retirement savings into foreign investments (mostly Asian, though I like Brazil and a few others too.)
I'm hardly the first to observe that if South Korea and China decide the US has gotten itself so far in debt that there's no choice but to default on some of the bonds they're holding, they'll sell that debt off and the dollar will go down the toilet. At which point, well, things will suck globally, but they'll suck a bit less for people whose life savings aren't in dollar-denominated instruments.
At this point I'm happier holding yuan than greenbacks. That was not the case five years ago. But now I'm assuming China will let its currency float in advance of devaluing the dollar; they'd be idiots to stay pegged to a currency they're about to torpedo!
The prospect of all this saddens me deeply. I love a lot of things about my country and what it stands for (even today, though less so now than it used to.) But patriotic fervor and self-righteousness are no substitute for sound policy and fiscal responsibility, and I'm afraid we've discarded the latter to focus completely on the former.
I'm afraid that we will be trying to play fair while others won't
That is, if you consider software patents "playing fair." I consider them more like "playing stupid" and frankly as a country we deserve to fall hard on our ass if we keep making dumb decisions that limit our own freedom to think.
That's what software patents are, at the end of the day; software is just a representation of a thought process (have you ever stepped through code in your head?), and patents say, "Sorry, you're not allowed to solve problem X using mental model Y because person Z filed some paperwork on it already."
I consider the Chinese, and now Indian, approach to these matters far more realistic and I believe we'll see those two countries pull ahead of us in software for that reason among others.
A decade or two from now if you want to browse the source code for the latest nifty application, you better shuo putonghua.
Hollywood doesn't need to bother making good films any more.
Any more? When did they? Have you seen a truly representative sample of old movies, or just the ones that were good enough to remain popular decades afterwards?
Hibernate's second-level cache can't be used in the context of multiple web applications hitting the same database from separate JVMs. Not the same thing as saying Hibernate can't be used with multiple web applications.
If your web apps are all in the same JVM you can use a JVM-wide cache. If they're not, it's trivial to turn off the second-level cache entirely (hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=false in hibernate.properties). More effort, but higher performance, is to configure Hibernate's cache usage on a per-class basis, which could be a win if only a subset of your tables are modified by other software.
Weak. And I say that as a moderate who has voted for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens in recent elections, so I have no particular axe to grind.
Lower taxes, state's rights, and free trade have never been considered traditional liberal values, at least not any time in the last 50 years, so it's hardly surprising that you find liberal politicians working against those goals. And since when have liberal politicians made proclamations of personal morality a primary message of their campaigns?
Liberals have their tropes, to be sure, and you can find plenty of politicians abandoning their stated principles on the left. That doesn't mean the right isn't doing it. If anything, conservatives should by the very definition of the word "conservative" be much more concerned with upholding their traditional values. I see those values (a lot of which I agree with) falling by the wayside and it saddens me.
Slashdot Mirror
As for laziness, guilty as charged and proud of it. Larry Wall's quote on the three virtues of a programmer is spot on. (I'd paste it here, but you can find it via Google, so I'd better not spoil the fun.)
The meanings of a lot of the written characters are the same as the Japanese kanji, but of course the pronunciation is usually unrelated. She says there are a few constructs the two languages have borrowed from each other (measure words that are based on the shapes of the objects being counted, for example) but for the most part they're not very closely related languages so there's still a steep learning curve.
"Thank you, Timothy, for adding an explanation of what the heck ZigBee is." That was very pleasant to see.
Err, make that "JSP Standard Tag Library." Must have been snorting too much C++ lately.
BTW, I don't mean that in a condescending way; it's just a consequence of specialization and it's human nature to assume everyone has some passing interest in the stuff that fascinates or occupies us. I'm sure the proteomics folks here could rattle off half a dozen names of very cool molecular modeling apps, but as someone who spends his days writing Java web applications, not one of those names would ring any kind of bell for me. In return I expect most of the proteomics crowd has never heard of Tapestry or Wicket or the JSP Standard Template Library.
Now if only we could get the editors to realize they ought to include descriptions of the stuff they're posting about. It would not have been so much burden, I think, to add the words "vector illustration tool" right before the name of the program, especially since the editor edited the story anyway to add a comment to the end.
"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.
For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.
If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.
The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.
For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.
For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.
Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.
What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!
As for the broader point... I'm not sure which ridiculous extreme is actually better for the growth of a technological base: "Copy whatever you want, who cares if the originator doesn't get a dime" as in China, or "Don't write that code, there might be a ludicrous patent you'll have to spend $10 million getting declared invalid" as in the US. Certainly one can point to US industries such as the Hollywood movie business(*) that wouldn't exist today without rampant violation of intellectual property laws in the past.
Personally, I think China is going to give the west a rather solid run for its money in software. Our fervor for ever-stronger intellectual property laws is a legislative gun with which we're taking repeated potshots in the direction of our feet. I've been involved in IP disputes on both sides, and they are almost always big wastes of time and money that don't end up benefitting anyone but the lawyers. To the extent that Chinese companies won't have to suffer from that overhead, they'll be in stronger competitive positions. All of their web sites will have one-click ordering, one can assume.
Finally, the "they're just copying our stuff" point was a pretty common accusation leveled at Japan in the 80s and early 90s, if memory serves. It seems to have proven itself untrue over the years, and I have every expectation the same will be true of China.
(*) The reason the movie studios are in Hollywood is that they didn't want to pay royalties to Edison Labs for use of Edison's patented film production equipment. So the early would-be studio bosses headed west, where they'd be able to strike it rich before the folks on the east coast could track them down to demand payment. For some reason you don't find that little factoid on any of the movie studios' "history of Hollywood" web pages. Reference.
In other words, it's a country with a big enough military to defend itself and a vibrant enough economy to risk pissing some of its partners off. Every country that has the power to do so follows that path at some point. China and the US are the current obvious examples but you don't have to look too far in history to find plenty of others.
Ha! I hope you have better luck with that than I did. (My specific situation is solved thanks to some helpful Slashdotters, but people shouldn't have to post to Slashdot to install a new font!)
Their names are Judith Miller and Matt Cooper.
Feel free to look up the same story on Google News if you want other sources. There are hundreds of articles about it.
So much for the fourth estate.
Which would then need to be terraformed.
If I just want to see a movie, forget it. All the advantages other people have posted are overwhelming: I can watch in my bathrobe, the furniture is much more comfortable, Netflix is more convenient, no people sitting behind me repeating the dialogue to each other or kicking my seat, I can pause if I have to use the restroom, I can turn off the subtitles if the movie is in a foreign language I speak, there are often neat DVD extras to watch if I really enjoy the film... the list goes on.
Home video killed drive-in movies in the US; there are a few left here and there, but nowhere near the number I remember when I was a kid. I think it'll do the same to regular theaters, especially as more and more people get large high-def flatscreens and the "better picture and sound" argument becomes less convincing. That's what I did; my TV is a 9-foot-wide screen and a front projector, and the picture quality is better than most of the local movie theaters. And given the price of movie tickets around here, my setup has probably already paid for itself!
Pfft. I bet you're one of those poseurs who wants to run Linux on your desktop PC and have the sound system just work, too. Who do you think you are, Jamie Zawinski?
PasswordMaker is open source and comes with a plain JavaScript implementation you can put on your own web page and use from browsers other than Firefox.
It's more secure, too. Software isn't fooled by Unicode character set spoofing -- two Unicode characters may render to the same glyph in a particular font and thus be indistinguishable to a human, but they'll generate different inputs to a password generator's hash function. That means you'll give the phishing site a password that's only valid for the phishing site's domain, not for the domain they're imitating.
Obviously you have to choose a really good master password, and preferably you're using software that needs additional settings (e.g. PasswordMaker's "l33t level") to generate the correct output. It's easier to remember one excellent master password than 500 mediocre individual passwords.
My reason for posting the article is less about getting this particular font installed than about understanding why it's not working, of course. Are you aware of any diagnostics I can look at that might shed light on the matter?
And in any event even if there were a version of the right font, that wouldn't help me know what to do the next time I came across a font that didn't work. Which is really the larger point of the posting here.
Oh, don't worry, by then I'm sure Firefox will have copied even more of Opera's features.
Tabbed browsing was a good first feature to copy, but now Opera has native SVG support, a voice-recognition UI, and a nifty bookmarking system that saves excerpts of the bookmarked pages. Come on, Firefox guys, what are you waiting for? I want my open-source innovation!
(I will now patiently await my Flamebait moderation.)
Good plan!
I'm hardly the first to observe that if South Korea and China decide the US has gotten itself so far in debt that there's no choice but to default on some of the bonds they're holding, they'll sell that debt off and the dollar will go down the toilet. At which point, well, things will suck globally, but they'll suck a bit less for people whose life savings aren't in dollar-denominated instruments.
At this point I'm happier holding yuan than greenbacks. That was not the case five years ago. But now I'm assuming China will let its currency float in advance of devaluing the dollar; they'd be idiots to stay pegged to a currency they're about to torpedo!
The prospect of all this saddens me deeply. I love a lot of things about my country and what it stands for (even today, though less so now than it used to.) But patriotic fervor and self-righteousness are no substitute for sound policy and fiscal responsibility, and I'm afraid we've discarded the latter to focus completely on the former.
As an American, I agree. My country is far too full of itself for its own good. Arrogance and pushiness are not virtues.
That's what software patents are, at the end of the day; software is just a representation of a thought process (have you ever stepped through code in your head?), and patents say, "Sorry, you're not allowed to solve problem X using mental model Y because person Z filed some paperwork on it already."
I consider the Chinese, and now Indian, approach to these matters far more realistic and I believe we'll see those two countries pull ahead of us in software for that reason among others.
A decade or two from now if you want to browse the source code for the latest nifty application, you better shuo putonghua.
Sturgeon's Law is not a new development.
If your web apps are all in the same JVM you can use a JVM-wide cache. If they're not, it's trivial to turn off the second-level cache entirely (hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=false in hibernate.properties). More effort, but higher performance, is to configure Hibernate's cache usage on a per-class basis, which could be a win if only a subset of your tables are modified by other software.
Lower taxes, state's rights, and free trade have never been considered traditional liberal values, at least not any time in the last 50 years, so it's hardly surprising that you find liberal politicians working against those goals. And since when have liberal politicians made proclamations of personal morality a primary message of their campaigns?
Liberals have their tropes, to be sure, and you can find plenty of politicians abandoning their stated principles on the left. That doesn't mean the right isn't doing it. If anything, conservatives should by the very definition of the word "conservative" be much more concerned with upholding their traditional values. I see those values (a lot of which I agree with) falling by the wayside and it saddens me.