But just swap from english to mandarin, because its the most spoken language in the world.
The most spoken native language, maybe. But English is spoken by 1.9 billion people.
It is even being pushed hard in China, actually. If you go to a large Chinese city you will likely be amazed at how much English you see, even on government-produced materials (street signs, etc.)
And if you're going to talk about widely spoken native languages, bear in mind that in much of China, Mandarin (though it's taught in schools) is not the local native language either. There are jokes making fun of the Mandarin mistakes native Cantonese speakers often make, for example.
effectively using 8 cores usually requires talented programmers who have mastered multithreaded programming.
But ineffectively using 8 cores can be done by any dumbass with a C# compiler or a book on the pthreads library. Which is why we actually will need 8 cores.
I always try to remember what will happen more than a few seconds later. I never can, which says to me it's just a momentary brain malfunction.
But I've met people who were convinced it was some kind of mystical supernatural experience. I wonder what they'd say if they found out that the experience can now be reproduced at will in a lab.
I also wonder how people who believe that consciousness exists in some spooky realm outside the body manage to explain the effects of alcohol or the sudden personality shifts and loss of mental abilities that sometimes result from head trauma, but that's a (slightly) different topic.
It has the distinction of being possibly the best planned series of any kind in history.
Well -- and I say this as the person who runs the most popular B5 fansite on the net -- that's only true if you limit yourself to American TV. Asian TV has been doing huge but limited-run serial dramas for decades, well before B5.
I remember when B5 was on the air and I mentioned the whole "story arc" thing to a Singaporean coworker. He looked at me like I was crazy: "So? Half the shows back home are like that." Since then I've watched several Chinese TV shows and I have to say he was right; not to diminish B5 in the least, but some of those shows have every bit as much foreshadowing and plot twistiness. (But usually, in the case of fantasy stories, much cheesier special effects than B5 at its worst.)
I don't think the bush admin or the right wing realize that the terrorists' goal is not to 'defeat us' but to spread confusion, fear, division, and dissarray.
I think they realize that perfectly well. You are presupposing that thwarting the terrorists' objectives is the primary goal of the Bush administration. If you instead assume that their objective is to maximize their own power and their cohorts' profit, then it becomes quite obvious that they get there fastest by playing into the terrorists' hands with this sort of stuff.
A scared nation is a nation that's more susceptible to suggestion and control. An effective, sensible response to the threat of terrorism would breed confidence, not uncertainty, so you are never going to see it. By spreading uncertainty they make their claims of absolute certainty much more appealing. Any port in a storm, and all that. This has worked in democracies before and it will work again long after the US has either emerged from this situation or fallen by the wayside.
The proposal does not take effect until enough states have signed on that they total more than half of the electoral votes. There is thus no advantage to cheating before the agreement kicks in, because until that threshold is reached, there's nothing to cheat on -- the proposal doesn't do anything early on.
And once you have more than half of the electoral votes covered by this system, it is completely irrelevant whether the remaining states sign up. So there is also no issue with getting all 50 states to agree; there is nothing to be gained by trying to bring the stragglers on board once the threshold is reached.
The "getting the electors to vote for the right guy" thing is a matter of states choosing electors differently. Signing on to this proposal would mean a binding commitment on the part of a state to make whatever changes were required to its elector selection process. Each state is free to define its own procedures for choosing electors.
Speaking as a Californian, I would strongly prefer this system to the one we have now, even if it meant my state's electoral votes sometimes go to a candidate I despise. In any winner-take-all electoral system that's going to happen sometimes anyway. The thing you have to realize is, this proposal will increase, not decrease, the value of big-state residents' votes. Right now the vote of a Wyoming resident has much more weight in a presidential election than my vote does. If I were to move there, all of a sudden my opinion about the direction of the country would be more significant even though nothing about me would have changed other than my location. That to me does not make for a healthy political system.
A company that builds a networking infrastructure that runs through public land and has government-enforced monopoly powers (e.g. most cable companies have exclusive contracts with the cities they serve, such that a second cable provider is forbidden by law to set up shop) should accept some conditions in return for the use of public resources.
If we were talking about an actual free market with no externally imposed restrictions, I'd be right there with you. But the fact of the matter is, my cable and phone companies do not have to buy the land they dig up at will to lay cables, and my local government grants them a competition-free marketplace by legal decree. Not exactly a level playing field to begin with.
why do all these posts turn into Windows vs Linux arguments, usually sprouted by people who know not much, or nothing at all, about linux.
They don't do so nearly as often as you think, actually. They turn into arguments made by people who you assume know nothing about Linux. But that says more about your assumptions than about the other people.
How many of your apps have shipped as part of a major Linux distro for the better part of a decade?
I have to call bullshit on this one. The areas in which Windows is better than Linux for a nontechnical user are a lot more numerous than just games. I know this firsthand: I tried to replace XP with Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop about six months ago and ended up giving up after a week of screwing with it. (And I am not a nontechnical user.) She does not play any games on her laptop. Here's what I spent that week trying to get working:
Asian input methods. My girlfriend is from Taiwan and sends email to her friends back home, but she primarily wants her computer to be English-language. In Windows, getting Chinese input to work on an English install of the OS takes, oh, roughly 90 seconds or so of clicking around in the control panel UI, and once enabled it works perfectly in virtually every common modern desktop application. Linux, not so much -- please edit your X configuration, please do one thing if you're running GNOME and something else if you're running KDE, oh, and by the way, don't expect to be able to enter Chinese characters when you run an app since most of them either don't handle alternate input methods at all or are only compatible with the input system you aren't using. (I am not blowing smoke on this -- Mark Shuttleworth specifically mentioned lousy Asian input support as one of the reasons he wanted to delay the next Ubuntu release.)
Media playing. Bitch all you want about how it's the fault of patents or closed formats from evil companies, the fact of the matter is that you can browse the web on a Windows machine and expect to be able to watch most of the video you come across, and listen to most of the music you come across. Linux? Well, if you're willing to violate the law, and you happen to know how to configure your system to install packages from nonstandard repositories, you can hack together support for some of the common formats. Not all of them, but hey, you didn't really want to watch that movie preview, did you?
Device support. Just try hooking up, say, a Canon scanner (I have one; it works fine on my Mac and my Windows boxes, but it's a doorstop when I'm running Linux.) Again, is this the fault of Linux per se? Maybe not. As a nontechnical user do I care whose fault it is when I want to scan something I could scan when I was running Windows? Nope.
Fonts. The ones that come with all the Linux distros I've tried are clunky, and they vary in size between font families in odd ways that make a lot of Web pages look funny. Yep, I know all about the Microsoft Core Fonts package. It is not installed by default. It is not in the default repositories on a new system. If I am a nontechnical user it is therefore nigh-irrelevant.
Okay, that's probably enough. The point is that there's more wrong than just games. I completely agree that if all you want to do is read simple HTML email and visit non-multimedia web sites, you don't want to listen to music or watch DVDs, you don't have any devices other than a keyboard, mouse and monitor, you only want to input text in one language, and you never need to trade Word documents or Excel spreadsheets with someone who cares what the formatting looks like, then Linux on the desktop is definitely ready for your nontechnical-user needs!
The US isn't uncivilized simply because someone on the left wing is in disagreement with the current administration. Our entire code of laws and ethics is based around a civil society.
And if only we could get the current administration to pay attention to our entire code of laws and ethics, we'd be in good shape!
Maybe I'm just a pinko leftie traitor who should be waterboarded until I see the light, but it seems to me that administrations that pay attention to the laws of the land generally don't have their initiatives declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and are rarely handed opinions that include justices writing on the record that the administration may be guilty of war crimes. Just a thought.
Then again, there are still people who are convinced McCarthy was a hero, so I guess there will be people who think it's a fine, moral, upstanding thing to split legal hairs over exactly who is exempt from cruel and unusual punishment.
And yes, it's splitting hairs. Please imagine the Founding Fathers, sitting around drafting the Bill of Rights. "Hey, Benjamin, you think all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, or is it just U.S. citizens?" "Are you kidding, Thomas? Foreigners aren't real people. Fuck due process. Whip 'em till their backs bleed, fine by me!"
If you were told that the only way you could have an ability such as telapthy would be to eliminate your attachments and improve your moral quality (given a moral standard of course), would you set out in achieving it?
Or what if you were told that the only way you could have that ability would be to maximize your attachments and jettison your sense of morality completely?
About equally likely in my opinion.
Re:This is why I don't use GIMP
on
Beginning GIMP
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Something the open source community needs to understand.
Well, actually, no it doesn't. Some open-source developers don't care if their stuff is used by one person or ten million, as long as it does what they want it to -- they don't have to have a minimum number of customers to stay in business. If a given open-source program doesn't work as well for you as a commercial app, those developers are just as happy if you use the commercial app; you won't drive them into bankruptcy by taking your business elsewhere.
You may say, "With an attitude like that, their software will never be widely used!" To which I say... yep, you got my point exactly: it might not be, and that's no problem because wide usage is not the metric by which those open-source developers measure their success.
(Please note that I was careful above to say that this is true of some developers. Some do care about wide usage. But "the open source community" does not speak with one voice on this topic.)
Feeding the troll, perhaps, but if by "most of their money" you mean less than 1% of gross domestic product, then perhaps you would care to explain your innovative new system of mathematics to the rest of us.
Instead of manually pushing pixels in photoshop, the artist is now writing custom functions.. and it probably takes an equal amount of time to finalize.
True, but the point is you only have to do that once and you can use it in a bunch of different games (and even on several generations of platforms, if your future games are written in the same language). Hand-drawn environments tend to be less reusable.
Hey, Firefox developers: I can spell just fine on my own, thanks. I don't need my Web browser chewing (even more) memory just so it can incorrectly flag the technical terms and proper names I enter into Web forms.
I agree with other posters. This should have remained an extension. Avoiding this kind of bloat is why Firefox forked from the Mozilla Suite in the first place. If you need spell checking, great, install it. But don't force it down the throats of people who have no use for it.
The opensource mentality isn't as strong there as other parts of the country and world.
As someone who has worked in the valley for nearly 20 years, I have to wonder what evidence you have to support that idea. It certainly runs counter to my experience here. At more than one of my jobs I have been not only allowed, but encouraged by my management to open-source software I've written on company time. (Not everything I've written, of course, but stuff that is not part of the company's core business.)
If you mean "a commercial product for which the vendor has decided to release source code," then sure, it's going to concentrate where the tech companies are. If you mean "a volunteer/hobby project that isn't associated with a company," I'd expect the map to be much more diffuse. I know I've gotten contributions from all over the world when I've run open source projects in the past.
That said, Silicon Valley does have a much higher concentration of computer people than just about anywhere else in the world. So if there is a relatively constant percentage of developers who contribute to open source projects, naturally you'll find the most open source contributors wherever you find the most developers in general.
Nice generalization, but sadly not really true. From TFA:
The CRA has eight objectives, which notably include "to ensure that government policy and legislation recognize that copyright is fundamentally about the rights of creators"
In other words, this is a group that specifically says it's out to reduce the rights of the public, since the original conception of copyright is that it's a way to balance the rights of creators and the public for the greater good. This has its roots in English common law: the Statute of Anne in 1709 established the idea of limited terms for copyrights, the idea being that previously copyrighted material should become public material after a time.
This group wants to go from "the point of copyright is to benefit society" to "the point of copyright is to benefit creators." Kind of a fundamental difference that one can in good conscience oppose without wanting to screw over any artists.
He considered establishing (or rather, expanding) his own foundation, but after looking at what that would take, decided that giving the money to the Gates Foundation would be more effective. That's all in the article, which you might want to check out.
The Gates Foundation is mostly funding public health initiatives of various sorts at the moment. So the FSF and EFF would probably not fare any better than they would if they tried to get money from the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society.
With the exception of those few cases where an author has decided to pull a work from production, the whole concept of something being "out of print" is, to my thinking, something of an abuse of the legal monopoly of copyright protection, especially given the greater-than-a-human-lifetime spans of copyrights these days. A piece of music will typically go out of print after only a small percentage of its copyright period, and for the rest of that period, neither the original creator nor the public can get any value out of it. Not because both sides don't want to, but because they have no way to do so after rights have been signed over to a publisher.
The whole "orphaned works" problem is a special case of this phenomenon.
It also encourages piracy. A few weeks ago I was looking for a particular piece of foreign music from the early 90s. I searched lots of stores, both used and new, for a copy of the album in question. A few stores had it in their listings but, you guessed it, "out of print." I wasted hours looking for a legitimate copy of the music. Then I went to a pirate MP3 search engine and found it within minutes. If there were some way for me to buy it, I would. (I have no good way of tracking down the artist to send her a small payment.) I was fully ready to pay import CD prices to get it. And if it should come back into print at some point, I will buy it. Meanwhile, I get to enjoy it thanks to piracy.
Now, I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm robbing the artist here, getting a copy of her song without her permission -- but do you honestly think most out-of-print musicians say, "I'm so glad nobody can get my music any more! When I signed that contract for my album I really hoped the publisher would stop selling it some day. I'd rather nobody listen to my old music than someone listen to it when there's no way for them to pay me."
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Can you sue over designs that are so obnoxious they cause you to go blind?
The most spoken native language, maybe. But English is spoken by 1.9 billion people.
It is even being pushed hard in China, actually. If you go to a large Chinese city you will likely be amazed at how much English you see, even on government-produced materials (street signs, etc.)
And if you're going to talk about widely spoken native languages, bear in mind that in much of China, Mandarin (though it's taught in schools) is not the local native language either. There are jokes making fun of the Mandarin mistakes native Cantonese speakers often make, for example.
I'll be interested to hear your perspective on that issue in 10 years or so. At what point do you plan to become stuck in your ways?
whoIsTheProblem(wrongdoer,whistleblower) {
....if isLiberalAccordingToHannity(wrongdoer)
........return wrongdoer
....if isLiberalAccordingToHannity(whistleblower)
........return whistleblower
....throw LookOverThereItsATerroristException
}
But ineffectively using 8 cores can be done by any dumbass with a C# compiler or a book on the pthreads library. Which is why we actually will need 8 cores.
But I've met people who were convinced it was some kind of mystical supernatural experience. I wonder what they'd say if they found out that the experience can now be reproduced at will in a lab.
I also wonder how people who believe that consciousness exists in some spooky realm outside the body manage to explain the effects of alcohol or the sudden personality shifts and loss of mental abilities that sometimes result from head trauma, but that's a (slightly) different topic.
I remember when B5 was on the air and I mentioned the whole "story arc" thing to a Singaporean coworker. He looked at me like I was crazy: "So? Half the shows back home are like that." Since then I've watched several Chinese TV shows and I have to say he was right; not to diminish B5 in the least, but some of those shows have every bit as much foreshadowing and plot twistiness. (But usually, in the case of fantasy stories, much cheesier special effects than B5 at its worst.)
A scared nation is a nation that's more susceptible to suggestion and control. An effective, sensible response to the threat of terrorism would breed confidence, not uncertainty, so you are never going to see it. By spreading uncertainty they make their claims of absolute certainty much more appealing. Any port in a storm, and all that. This has worked in democracies before and it will work again long after the US has either emerged from this situation or fallen by the wayside.
And once you have more than half of the electoral votes covered by this system, it is completely irrelevant whether the remaining states sign up. So there is also no issue with getting all 50 states to agree; there is nothing to be gained by trying to bring the stragglers on board once the threshold is reached.
The "getting the electors to vote for the right guy" thing is a matter of states choosing electors differently. Signing on to this proposal would mean a binding commitment on the part of a state to make whatever changes were required to its elector selection process. Each state is free to define its own procedures for choosing electors.
Speaking as a Californian, I would strongly prefer this system to the one we have now, even if it meant my state's electoral votes sometimes go to a candidate I despise. In any winner-take-all electoral system that's going to happen sometimes anyway. The thing you have to realize is, this proposal will increase, not decrease, the value of big-state residents' votes. Right now the vote of a Wyoming resident has much more weight in a presidential election than my vote does. If I were to move there, all of a sudden my opinion about the direction of the country would be more significant even though nothing about me would have changed other than my location. That to me does not make for a healthy political system.
If we were talking about an actual free market with no externally imposed restrictions, I'd be right there with you. But the fact of the matter is, my cable and phone companies do not have to buy the land they dig up at will to lay cables, and my local government grants them a competition-free marketplace by legal decree. Not exactly a level playing field to begin with.
They don't do so nearly as often as you think, actually. They turn into arguments made by people who you assume know nothing about Linux. But that says more about your assumptions than about the other people.
How many of your apps have shipped as part of a major Linux distro for the better part of a decade?
- Asian input methods. My girlfriend is from Taiwan and sends email to her friends back home, but she primarily wants her computer to be English-language. In Windows, getting Chinese input to work on an English install of the OS takes, oh, roughly 90 seconds or so of clicking around in the control panel UI, and once enabled it works perfectly in virtually every common modern desktop application. Linux, not so much -- please edit your X configuration, please do one thing if you're running GNOME and something else if you're running KDE, oh, and by the way, don't expect to be able to enter Chinese characters when you run an app since most of them either don't handle alternate input methods at all or are only compatible with the input system you aren't using. (I am not blowing smoke on this -- Mark Shuttleworth specifically mentioned lousy Asian input support as one of the reasons he wanted to delay the next Ubuntu release.)
- Media playing. Bitch all you want about how it's the fault of patents or closed formats from evil companies, the fact of the matter is that you can browse the web on a Windows machine and expect to be able to watch most of the video you come across, and listen to most of the music you come across. Linux? Well, if you're willing to violate the law, and you happen to know how to configure your system to install packages from nonstandard repositories, you can hack together support for some of the common formats. Not all of them, but hey, you didn't really want to watch that movie preview, did you?
- Device support. Just try hooking up, say, a Canon scanner (I have one; it works fine on my Mac and my Windows boxes, but it's a doorstop when I'm running Linux.) Again, is this the fault of Linux per se? Maybe not. As a nontechnical user do I care whose fault it is when I want to scan something I could scan when I was running Windows? Nope.
- Fonts. The ones that come with all the Linux distros I've tried are clunky, and they vary in size between font families in odd ways that make a lot of Web pages look funny. Yep, I know all about the Microsoft Core Fonts package. It is not installed by default. It is not in the default repositories on a new system. If I am a nontechnical user it is therefore nigh-irrelevant.
Okay, that's probably enough. The point is that there's more wrong than just games. I completely agree that if all you want to do is read simple HTML email and visit non-multimedia web sites, you don't want to listen to music or watch DVDs, you don't have any devices other than a keyboard, mouse and monitor, you only want to input text in one language, and you never need to trade Word documents or Excel spreadsheets with someone who cares what the formatting looks like, then Linux on the desktop is definitely ready for your nontechnical-user needs!Maybe I'm just a pinko leftie traitor who should be waterboarded until I see the light, but it seems to me that administrations that pay attention to the laws of the land generally don't have their initiatives declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and are rarely handed opinions that include justices writing on the record that the administration may be guilty of war crimes. Just a thought.
Then again, there are still people who are convinced McCarthy was a hero, so I guess there will be people who think it's a fine, moral, upstanding thing to split legal hairs over exactly who is exempt from cruel and unusual punishment.
And yes, it's splitting hairs. Please imagine the Founding Fathers, sitting around drafting the Bill of Rights. "Hey, Benjamin, you think all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, or is it just U.S. citizens?" "Are you kidding, Thomas? Foreigners aren't real people. Fuck due process. Whip 'em till their backs bleed, fine by me!"
About equally likely in my opinion.
You may say, "With an attitude like that, their software will never be widely used!" To which I say... yep, you got my point exactly: it might not be, and that's no problem because wide usage is not the metric by which those open-source developers measure their success.
(Please note that I was careful above to say that this is true of some developers. Some do care about wide usage. But "the open source community" does not speak with one voice on this topic.)
Feeding the troll, perhaps, but if by "most of their money" you mean less than 1% of gross domestic product, then perhaps you would care to explain your innovative new system of mathematics to the rest of us.
It depends on what the meaning of the word "on" is. When you see "war on terror" it's like "he's on drugs" or "girl on girl."
I agree with other posters. This should have remained an extension. Avoiding this kind of bloat is why Firefox forked from the Mozilla Suite in the first place. If you need spell checking, great, install it. But don't force it down the throats of people who have no use for it.
As someone who has worked in the valley for nearly 20 years, I have to wonder what evidence you have to support that idea. It certainly runs counter to my experience here. At more than one of my jobs I have been not only allowed, but encouraged by my management to open-source software I've written on company time. (Not everything I've written, of course, but stuff that is not part of the company's core business.)
Do you have some numbers to back that claim up?
That said, Silicon Valley does have a much higher concentration of computer people than just about anywhere else in the world. So if there is a relatively constant percentage of developers who contribute to open source projects, naturally you'll find the most open source contributors wherever you find the most developers in general.
Here you go -- some basic economic principles for your edification.
In other words, this is a group that specifically says it's out to reduce the rights of the public, since the original conception of copyright is that it's a way to balance the rights of creators and the public for the greater good. This has its roots in English common law: the Statute of Anne in 1709 established the idea of limited terms for copyrights, the idea being that previously copyrighted material should become public material after a time.
This group wants to go from "the point of copyright is to benefit society" to "the point of copyright is to benefit creators." Kind of a fundamental difference that one can in good conscience oppose without wanting to screw over any artists.
He considered establishing (or rather, expanding) his own foundation, but after looking at what that would take, decided that giving the money to the Gates Foundation would be more effective. That's all in the article, which you might want to check out.
The Gates Foundation is mostly funding public health initiatives of various sorts at the moment. So the FSF and EFF would probably not fare any better than they would if they tried to get money from the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society.
The whole "orphaned works" problem is a special case of this phenomenon.
It also encourages piracy. A few weeks ago I was looking for a particular piece of foreign music from the early 90s. I searched lots of stores, both used and new, for a copy of the album in question. A few stores had it in their listings but, you guessed it, "out of print." I wasted hours looking for a legitimate copy of the music. Then I went to a pirate MP3 search engine and found it within minutes. If there were some way for me to buy it, I would. (I have no good way of tracking down the artist to send her a small payment.) I was fully ready to pay import CD prices to get it. And if it should come back into print at some point, I will buy it. Meanwhile, I get to enjoy it thanks to piracy.
Now, I'm sure someone will tell me how I'm robbing the artist here, getting a copy of her song without her permission -- but do you honestly think most out-of-print musicians say, "I'm so glad nobody can get my music any more! When I signed that contract for my album I really hoped the publisher would stop selling it some day. I'd rather nobody listen to my old music than someone listen to it when there's no way for them to pay me."