You need a tri-band GSM phone produced for the Asian market. Chances are, you will have to order it over the internet.
Fortunately, if you get a service provider in the US that has GSM service, you should get a SIM card which can be put into any GSM phone in the world.
You need tri-band because the US operates on a funny frequency (ie. different than Europe and Asia -- or the whole Asian landmass if you think of it that way).
Remember also, that the Chinese cellphone market is the largest in the world, so just about every model of cellphone available anywhere is available in China with Chinese software. I have yet to see one that cannot switch to English.
Having both Chinese and Japanese support is a tougher one because the Japanese market is technologically very ahead of everywhere else, and they do not use software or hardware that is compatible with other countries' standards to my knowledge. All the Japanese phones I have seen appear to support English, as well.
I have not used it, but if Motorola's A760 can be configured, there is the possbility that you could get both Chinese and Japanese running on it. It is possible with a Zaurus, but you need a terminal to do it. If the A760 does not allow access to config files, it would be impossible.
Dorm students at Northern Illinois University are testing a legal file downloading service.
Which is to say that all other downloading is "illegal", right?
This is the problem with the current debate. It seems that "file downloading" has become "illegal" in general because of the political campaigns by the RIAA/MPAA to change the way we think. This is more than a little wrong. Just because the *AAs say it is wrong or illegal, does not make it so. These are the same people who claimed that Spiderman [I] did not make any money so they would not have to pay Stan Lee.
All file sharing systems, yes, including P2P, are capable of and indeed to share lots of legal files every day. There is no "system" for legal downloads. All systems can carry legal downloads.
This is a system for controlled sales of *AAs products. Warning. Lanugage, when used in the wrong way, can be hazardous to your freedom.
I guess I know why I felt hesitant about buying a webcam now... Well, that and the picture quality sucks, and I have to worry about which ones are supported in Linux, and I cannot think of any particular use for having one.
Why is it that my "2MB" Hotmail account claims to be 75% full when I have 0.75MB of mail stored (I know this because I have had pretty much the same messages in there as I did before the upgrade to 2MB)?
I think they are just going to lie about it. Like they do with everything else.
In any case, I would like to see this tested when they unveil it (like Kevin Rose
did with Gmail).
I hope this does not get modded a troll because I do not intend it that way, but I am incensed at the stupidity of this, and I have to vent. It appears that Mac users will defend anything Apple does. I wonder if they would defend a contract with the Devil so long as Jobs signed it.
Quotes like this border on fantastic:
One poster, Rich Mertz, wrote: "You people are wrong, wrong, wrong. If we wanted 'choices' like yours, they wouldn't have to be foisted on us. Most of us, given a real choice, would rather see you and your tactics go away. 'Competition' doesn't give you any right to reverse-engineer when you feel like it, but come down on those that hack into your IP rights. It's theft, pure and simple."
This guy is actually defending DRM. He is defending Apple's "right" to have a monopoly over him, to charge him monopoly rents, to decide what music he can and cannot listen to and when and where he can and cannot listen to it. What is wrong with this guy?
I am glad to have a bunch of overzealous Mac users supporting monopolistic organizations like the RIAA, MPAA, and, oh yes, Apple in their endeavours to control all access to and distribution of knowledge. This statement sounds like something Darl McBride would say, but this Mac user does not have MS paying him millions to say it. What a moron. If all Mac users are like this, it just proves that thinking different is resigning oneself to slavery.
You know, I would believe a lot of that stuff Mac users say about Macs being amazing pieces of machinery and that Mac users were special and artistic if it were not for stupid crap like this. This is obviously proof that Mac users are more than happy slaves and suckers to corporate swindling. And they actively defend it. This destroys all my idealism associated with Mac users as being somehow different.
It will take nothing less than the complete elimination of DRM.
People will not change formats unless the new format is more convenient than traditional books. DRM makes books inconvenient and eliminates the benefits of having electronic versions of books.
If you cannot cut and paste interesting passages and send them to your friends, why would you give up the smell of paper?
Why would you want 50 books in your pocket if you knew that you would have to pay a fee every time you accessed one of them?
Why would you want a dedicated device that did not allow you to move the book to your computer at home or at work (whenever and however many times you wanted)?
Why would you want a book that would become inaccessible to you the next you upgraded your (MS) OS or when the company that produced your reader went out of business?
Why would you want something that exposed you to Federal litigation if you tried to access it outside the bounds of a long unreadable license?
Why would you want a copy of a public domain work with an ominous copyright notice attached to it? (My copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica actually has a copyright notice attached to the Constitution of the United States of America).
There are numerous benefits to electronic formats, but the vast majority of those benefits are eliminated by DRM. I doubt anybody will switch until those benefits are allowed. The publishers need to find another business model... like editorial consulting or something where they would derive their revenue from helping authors and not monopolizing information. But I will definitely die of old age before that happens.
Please explain to me why this cannot be done with proprietary software, as well. It appears that this is a problem with software, not open or closed source.
Also, if the trojaned code were found -- by most people in the free software community -- it would most likely be reported. Contrast this with proprietary software where they have a financial interest in keeping such bugs a secret. Moreover, does the military, whether they have the expertise or not, even have permission to go through the code in a proprietary application?
Who is to say that not one programmer at Microsoft is not a spy for the Chinese or Russian government? A single programmer could easily insert a "3-4 line" trojan without being noticed. Even if it crashed the operating system occasionally, it probably would not get fixed at Microsoft. Why would you expect anything more from other outfits with short term dealines?
I have to agree with this and to add that if the Patriot Act was used, I do not care what sort of criminal this guy might have been. He is innocent to me.
I agree that the government should track and jail scumbags. This guy sounds like a real scumbag. However, there is a reason we have the rights we were given in the Constitution, and the FBI is wrong to make use of inappropriate laws in order to make it more convenient to catch someone. I really do not care if the guy has a rap sheet that streches from Texas to Canada. Copyright infringement is not a terrorist act (even if Jack Valenti may think so).
Hangul was promulgated by the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, Sejong the Great, after being developed under his guidance by a team of researchers.... The system was completed in 1443 or January 1444, and published in 1446 in a document, Hunmin Jeongeum, after which the alphabet was named. The publication date of Hunmin jeongeum, October 9, is Hangul Day in South Korea (Its North Korean equivalent is on January 15).
...
King Sejong intended Hangul to be a suplement to Hanja, to be used primarily to educate people who did not know Hanja (hence the name Hunmin Jeongeum, which means "Correct Sounds for the Education of the People" in Sino-Korean). At that time, only male members of the aristocracy (Yangban) learned to read and write Hanja; since all written material was only available in Hanja, most Koreans were effectively illiterate. Hangul faced heavy opposition by the literate elite, who believed Hanja to be the only legitimate writing system.
So, basically, until 1443 or 1444, the Koreans did write with Chinese characters which are otherwise known as Hanja (Korean), Kanji (Japanese), or HanZi (Chinese). The statements about literacy need to be taken with a grain of salt because most Western scholars tend to compare Asian literacy incorrectly with their own alphabetic concepts of literacy.
Hangul was not developed as a replacement for Hanja. Rather, it was developed as a way to teach the proper reading of Hanja in school. So, yes, HanZi, or Kanji, or Hanja, or whatever you want to call them (they all represent the same two Chinese characters) were the proper writing system in Korea, and yes, if Koreans were more literate in Chinese characters today, one could learn written communication in four national languages at once (not to mention all the various "dialects" of China, which are actually distinct languages).
Comparable scripts to Hangul are Hiragana, Katakana, Nü Shu, ZhuYin (BoPoMoFo), and the Vietnamese Chu Nom. PinYin romanization is also used in mainland China in the teaching of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the same way as Hangul was originally intended to be used.
You are both correct and incorrect. Let me go through your message blow by blow:
About half of English vocabulary comes from French, not "Latin" which you call it - the term you are looking for is "Romance" languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese)
While you are technically correct that the term Latin is supposed to apply only to the dead language formerly spoken by the Romans, I deliberately chose to call those languages "Latin" languages because I see nothing but natural evolution and regional accents separating them from their ancestor. I see Latin as a living language embodied in regional accents colored by contact with other languages. French is the German flavor of Latin, Spanish is the Arabic flavor of Latin, and Italian is the Greek flavor of Latin (more or less). They are only "Romance Languages" if Latin truly did die. However, these languages are the result of uninterrupted speech since the Roman Empire, so I see no reason to call Latin "dead".
Yes, you are correct that French is the "language" that English absorbed the majority of its borrowed vocabulary from. However, I chose to say "Latin" because I was (again) considering these Latin or Romance "languages" to be one language. So, with French taken as a dialect, English got those words from Latin.
and while they are closely related they are not significantly more so than many of the Germanic languages (English, various Scandinavian/Nordic languages, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Yiddish etc.) are related to each other.
I would like to see some statistical analysis of this. All I have to offer is anecdotal experience, but thats better than a naked, unsupported statement.
I have spoken English my entire life and am fluent in several dialects. I have never been able to make the slightest sense of German. However, upon becoming conversant in Spanish, I was able to communicate with Italian and Portugese speakers with a little extra effort and concentration. When I was in Spain I frequently observed French and Italian speakers who could not speak a word of Spanish manage to conduct whatever business they wanted to conduct. From what I have seen, there are bigger differences between Brazilian Portugese and Portugese Portugese than between Spanish and Portugese Portugese. The only one that was significantly difficult was French.
As a Norwegian speaker who also knows German reasonably well I can relatively easily read Dutch, for instance. And of course Swedish, Danish and Norwegian is so closely related most speakers of any of them can understand all three.
This backs up the point of my original post that many languages exist in groups where knowledge of one is sufficient for a basic understanding of the others. However, this point you made is more interesting because English makes a rather absurd distinction here that I have never quite understood: The distinction between German and Dutch.
Germans call themselves "Deutch", so what is the real difference between "Dutch" people and "Deutch" people? This is a slight accent difference at best. So, to claim you speak Dutch and Deutch is like claiming you speak English and English. Yes, I know there are some differences between the two. There are differences between the speech in Hamburg and Berlin, as well.
These all really demonstrate one thing about Europe. People seem to think that language and nationality are the same thing. Languages cover larger areas than most tiny European countries, so there are actually less languages in Europe than currently claimed.
Oh, and Vietnamese was never written using Kanji, at least not by any large part of the population.
The Vietnamese script used Ch~'u N^om (apologies to any Vietnamese speakers if I got the accents wrong and said something rude:-) ) until missionaries introduced a latin based script (tho
So, if your friend or parent is in, say, India, will you just call them? I would say this is a very useful tool for travellers of any kind. Even college students who go out of state should find this useful.
The reason the two go together is cause it is about communication, and IM servers provide an easy way to find people (easy as compared to memorizing phone numbers). Also, whether or not you are using voice, you still need text messaging to send links and files because communication is no longer limited to speech.
By the way, file sharing already works (for MSN, at least). The only thing that is missing (from what most people are used to with p2p) is a search tool and persistent shared directories. Right now direct transfers involve actively sending files.
In this particular case, however, your problem is simplified by the fact that you probably already studied at least one Latin language in school. If one can speak Spanish, one can learn to understand written Portugese (even the Brazilian flavor) in a relatively short period of time. The grammar and most of the vocabulary is the same with some pronunciation and spelling differences. In fact, something like 60% of English vocabulary is Latin. Really, Latin is only one language.
If Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese were still written exclusively with Kanji, this problem would be solved in a different but similarly useful way.
In that case, if you learned English, Latin, and Kanji, you could pretty much talk to at least 80-90% of the people on the Net in one language or the other. You could not write poetry, but you could communicate.
English-speaking users are complaining that the service is intended to be in English.
Intended by whom? Since when are discussion forums "intended" or "required" to be exclusively in English. Is enabling communication not the point of the Internet?
If these were French Canadians talking about "language preservation" in Canada, most English speakers would think they were absurd. Now, when the situation is reversed, English speakers think they have the right to behave in the same absurd way.
These English speaking Orkut users are really being unfair. The fact that they cannot read Portugese is a result of the English speakers' ignorance and not the fault of the Portugese speakers. The Portugese speakers should be able to post in any language they like. If the English speakers do not like it, they can learn Portugese or use translation software to get an idea of what was said.
These English speakers had better get a clue. Online, you are exposed to the whole world, not just your boondock neighborhood. People speak lots of languages. If they choose to remain ignorant, they should not blame others for that chosen ignorance.
I have never heard this anecdote, and heard that Minix was used as the development environment for Linux. I also am somewhat perplexed as to how Linus wrote an operating system kernel without having a working operating system on his own machine. Perhaps since he could not run a text editor, he manipulated the inodes by hand with a hand magnet?
Okay, fair enough, my memory more than a little incorrect on that whole issue. It appears from his book that he wrote a terminal emulator in Minix. This terminal emulator could boot from a floppy and connect to a remote Unix system without Minix. Minix was, however, the environment he wrote it in. When he decided to add disk access to the emulator, it appears to have become what could be termed an operating system.
At this point, it appears that his program could: read from the keyboard, write to the monitor, write to the modem, read from the modem. When he wanted POSIX file I/O, the terminal emulator became something else. Implementing the POSIX calls changed the nature of his project. He then ported Bash and GCC over to his emulator, and it was released as v.0.01. That is not many functions for an operating system. While very complex, the system could not do much ("Running the shell was basically all you could do."). This means that the rest of Linux was written in this bare environment (assuming Linus did not reinstall Minix). Yes, this means in the absence of a text editor. Back in the Apple II days we used to write programs without text editors, too.
This is a chicken and egg argument. How did operating systems come about in the absence of operating systems and text editors? How did Bill Gates write his first OS for whatever that hobby computer he had? These first OSs were certainly not written in fancy text editors.
Some quotes from his book:
[Just for Fun page 61]
The computer came with a cut-down version of DOS. I wanted to run Minix, the Unix variant,... The cost was $169 plus taxes, plus conversion factor, plus whatever. I thought it was outrageous at the time. Frankly, I still do.
Minix finally arrived on a Friday afternoon, and I installed it that night. It required feeding sixteen floppy disks into the computer. The entire weekend was devoted to getting accustomed to the new system. I learned what I liked about the operating system--and, more importantly, what I didn't like. I tried to compensate for its shortcomings by downloading programs that I had gotten used to from the university computer. In all, it took me a month or more to make this my own system.
Andrew Tanenbaum, the professor in Amsterdam who wrote Minix, wanted to keep the operating system as a teaching aid. So it
[Just for Fun page 62]
had been crippled on purpose, in bad ways. There were patches to Minix--improvements, that is--including a well-known patch made by a hacker in Australia named Bruce Evans, who was the God of Minix 386. His improvement made Minix much more usable on a 386. Before even getting the computer I had been following the Minix newsgroups online, so I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to run his enhanced version. But because of the licensing situation, you had to buy the real version of Minix and then do a lot of work to bootstrap Evans's patches. It was a fairly major thing to do.
There were a number of features that disappointed me with Minix. The biggest letdown was terminal emulation, which was important because it was the program I used to connect to the university computer. I relied upon terminal emulation whenever I wanted to dial up the university's computer to either work on the powerful Unix computer or just go online.
So I began a project to create my own terminal emulation program. I didn't want to do the project under Minix, but instead to do it at the bare hardware level. This terminal emulation project would also be a great opportunity to learn how the 386 hardware worked.
3) In my opinion, you wrote Unix (UNICS) from scratch. In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer that insists that Linus had the Unix code (the Lyon's Book) and Minix code. Without those two, who could not have even come close to writing Linux. I hate to ask such a bare-knuckle question, but I really feel that this part of history is very gray. [Empasis mine]
This was a question Ken Brown asked while interviewing for his book. He obviously made his decision before he asked any questions at all.
Tannenbaum also said that Ken Brown had not read any of the available books on the history of Unix. It looks like AdTI and SCO are working together on this. Then again, maybe SCO is just grabbing at straws tossed out by AdTI. Either way, this has to be targeted at the ignorant (read: politicians).
The funny thing is that these "theories" do not take into account the classic and widely known Linux anecdote which was Linus' very motivation for writing Linux: He did not even have working MINIX binaries when he wrote Linux because he had accidently overwritten his harddrive. So, he had two choices: buy MINIX again or write his own OS. That is a far cry from having possession of the MINIX source code.
Final Note: It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then. It was a text based console with disc access. I doubt Ken Brown or SCO would have called it an operating system back then (this is not to say it was not amazing, just that these mud slingers cannot imagine a non GUI system -- they are lawyers, after all).
Microsoft's complaint claims that this is "an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought..."
It looks like Bill really does have aspirations for the position of Big Brother.
I suppose MS's DRM will prevent these "excess[es] in freedom of speech and freedom of thought" in the future. Thank you Bill for protecting us harmless sheep from such extremes in speech and thought.
Canon has so far said little on the hack but certainly cannot be happy with its potential effect on sales. This is, however, a reality that more corporations are having to confront.
Really? So, corporations have the right to lie to the consumer about what they are selling? Is that not called false advertising? Do corporations have the right to lie in order to make the customer think that two products with the same hardware are fundamentally different and charge more money? Is that not fraud?
This reminds me of floppy discs in the 80's. They would have "single-sided" and "double-sided" floppy discs at different prices. They acted as if the double-sided discs were some sort of new technology and released them later at higher prices. In reality, all discs were double sided. The only thing they lacked was a write-protect hole in the side of the disc jacket. Anyone with a hole punch could have had a double-sided disc at "single-sided" prices.
What is wrong about this is that the disc manufacturers were lying to their customers. This is fraud. At the time, I had a hard time believing the manufacturers were not investigated or punished for this sort of actvity. Now, for some reason, some people think that this sort of criminal activity is okay.
It is Canon's customers that should be angry. Both those that purchased the $500 version (for getting hardware they could have gotten for much less), and the those that purchased the "entry-level" version (for getting sold an intentionally crippled camera). Canon lied to all of them.
So, what, then, is the "reality that more corporations are having to confront"? Is it the reality that they need to have some accountability to their customers? Is it the reality that they have to tell the truth?
Freedom of Information Act Request
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Defense Mapping Agency, which now appears to be called the
National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency, has been making detailed maps of the Earth for about half a century now. You might be able to put in a FOIA request for satellite images and maps in the possession of the agency. Technically, these maps and images made with public money should be free for any citizen of the US to obtain.
Among other points, the study directly challenges Linus Torvalds (news - web sites)' claim to be the inventor of Linux (news - web sites). In one of the few extensive studies on the source of open source code, Kenneth Brown, president of AdTI, traces the free software movement over three decades
By this logic, MSWindows and MacOS were invented by Xerox. Notice how they do not speak about the fact that only the kernel was invented by Linus. They also leave out the fact that just because something can run Unix programs does not make it Unix and the fact that running Unix programs does not magically change the OS into Unix.
This quote is fun, too:
"The report," according to Gregory Fossedal, a Tocqueville senior fellow, "raises important questions that all developers and users of open source code must face. While you cannot group all open source programmers and programs together; many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights, while others speak of intellectual property rights with open contempt."
Who cares if programmers have "open contempt" for "intellectual property"? Abiding by the law is not the same as agreeing with it. Since when does everybody have to believe that all laws are good? Is this a communist system where no dissent is allowed? I hope we still have the freedom to think and say what we want.
To this day, we have a serious attribution problem in software development because people have chosen to scrupulously borrow or imitate Unix.
They are trying to say "borrowing = stealing". Even copyright (as opposed to maritime) piracy is not theft.
This article is really a work of art. The fact that someone could say this about Linux and not the BSDs, which are genetic unices, blows my mind. Then again, the BSDs have already cleared themselves in court.
Fair enough, I was relying upon hearsay. However, I just looked at a coworker's Sony PalmOS device today, and that did not have a webbrowser, either.
Here is another huge question: Do you have to pay to add a webbrowser? If you do, that is the same as a webbrowser being unavailable for PalmOS because it is free on other platforms.
You could claim it has already been paid for on other platforms, but I would not buy a Palm device (with a slower processor and less memory) only to find out I had to plop down another fifty bucks for a silly piece of software that would be included on another platform (and in a post 1996 world should be included on all computers, anyway).
For the record, I have yet to meet anyone who uses a PalmOS device for anything outside of traditional PDA functions, such as scheduling. Perhaps Palm just is not getting the message out, but either way, even salesmen do not know that webbrowsers are avaible for PalmOS devices.
So, while I do not know about the use of a PalmOS device, I do know why I never bought one, and that is what I was commenting on.
Slashdot Mirror
You need a tri-band GSM phone produced for the Asian market. Chances are, you will have to order it over the internet.
Fortunately, if you get a service provider in the US that has GSM service, you should get a SIM card which can be put into any GSM phone in the world.
You need tri-band because the US operates on a funny frequency (ie. different than Europe and Asia -- or the whole Asian landmass if you think of it that way).
Remember also, that the Chinese cellphone market is the largest in the world, so just about every model of cellphone available anywhere is available in China with Chinese software. I have yet to see one that cannot switch to English.
Having both Chinese and Japanese support is a tougher one because the Japanese market is technologically very ahead of everywhere else, and they do not use software or hardware that is compatible with other countries' standards to my knowledge. All the Japanese phones I have seen appear to support English, as well.
I have not used it, but if Motorola's A760 can be configured, there is the possbility that you could get both Chinese and Japanese running on it. It is possible with a Zaurus, but you need a terminal to do it. If the A760 does not allow access to config files, it would be impossible.
I hope this helps.
This is the problem with the current debate. It seems that "file downloading" has become "illegal" in general because of the political campaigns by the RIAA/MPAA to change the way we think. This is more than a little wrong. Just because the *AAs say it is wrong or illegal, does not make it so. These are the same people who claimed that Spiderman [I] did not make any money so they would not have to pay Stan Lee.
All file sharing systems, yes, including P2P, are capable of and indeed to share lots of legal files every day. There is no "system" for legal downloads. All systems can carry legal downloads.
This is a system for controlled sales of *AAs products. Warning. Lanugage, when used in the wrong way, can be hazardous to your freedom.
I guess I know why I felt hesitant about buying a webcam now... Well, that and the picture quality sucks, and I have to worry about which ones are supported in Linux, and I cannot think of any particular use for having one.
Yeah, you would not want to find that you were Beavis and Butthead and listening to some obese trailor trash lady's butt all night at US$5 per minute.
Why is it that my "2MB" Hotmail account claims to be 75% full when I have 0.75MB of mail stored (I know this because I have had pretty much the same messages in there as I did before the upgrade to 2MB)?
I think they are just going to lie about it. Like they do with everything else.
In any case, I would like to see this tested when they unveil it (like Kevin Rose did with Gmail).
I hope this does not get modded a troll because I do not intend it that way, but I am incensed at the stupidity of this, and I have to vent. It appears that Mac users will defend anything Apple does. I wonder if they would defend a contract with the Devil so long as Jobs signed it.
Quotes like this border on fantastic:
This guy is actually defending DRM. He is defending Apple's "right" to have a monopoly over him, to charge him monopoly rents, to decide what music he can and cannot listen to and when and where he can and cannot listen to it. What is wrong with this guy?I am glad to have a bunch of overzealous Mac users supporting monopolistic organizations like the RIAA, MPAA, and, oh yes, Apple in their endeavours to control all access to and distribution of knowledge. This statement sounds like something Darl McBride would say, but this Mac user does not have MS paying him millions to say it. What a moron. If all Mac users are like this, it just proves that thinking different is resigning oneself to slavery.
You know, I would believe a lot of that stuff Mac users say about Macs being amazing pieces of machinery and that Mac users were special and artistic if it were not for stupid crap like this. This is obviously proof that Mac users are more than happy slaves and suckers to corporate swindling. And they actively defend it. This destroys all my idealism associated with Mac users as being somehow different.
It will take nothing less than the complete elimination of DRM.
People will not change formats unless the new format is more convenient than traditional books. DRM makes books inconvenient and eliminates the benefits of having electronic versions of books.
If you cannot cut and paste interesting passages and send them to your friends, why would you give up the smell of paper?
Why would you want 50 books in your pocket if you knew that you would have to pay a fee every time you accessed one of them?
Why would you want a dedicated device that did not allow you to move the book to your computer at home or at work (whenever and however many times you wanted)?
Why would you want a book that would become inaccessible to you the next you upgraded your (MS) OS or when the company that produced your reader went out of business?
Why would you want something that exposed you to Federal litigation if you tried to access it outside the bounds of a long unreadable license?
Why would you want a copy of a public domain work with an ominous copyright notice attached to it? (My copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica actually has a copyright notice attached to the Constitution of the United States of America).
There are numerous benefits to electronic formats, but the vast majority of those benefits are eliminated by DRM. I doubt anybody will switch until those benefits are allowed. The publishers need to find another business model... like editorial consulting or something where they would derive their revenue from helping authors and not monopolizing information. But I will definitely die of old age before that happens.
Please explain to me why this cannot be done with proprietary software, as well. It appears that this is a problem with software, not open or closed source.
Also, if the trojaned code were found -- by most people in the free software community -- it would most likely be reported. Contrast this with proprietary software where they have a financial interest in keeping such bugs a secret. Moreover, does the military, whether they have the expertise or not, even have permission to go through the code in a proprietary application?
Who is to say that not one programmer at Microsoft is not a spy for the Chinese or Russian government? A single programmer could easily insert a "3-4 line" trojan without being noticed. Even if it crashed the operating system occasionally, it probably would not get fixed at Microsoft. Why would you expect anything more from other outfits with short term dealines?
I have to agree with this and to add that if the Patriot Act was used, I do not care what sort of criminal this guy might have been. He is innocent to me.
I agree that the government should track and jail scumbags. This guy sounds like a real scumbag. However, there is a reason we have the rights we were given in the Constitution, and the FBI is wrong to make use of inappropriate laws in order to make it more convenient to catch someone. I really do not care if the guy has a rap sheet that streches from Texas to Canada. Copyright infringement is not a terrorist act (even if Jack Valenti may think so).
Wikipedia's history of the Hangul script (scroll down to "History"):
So, basically, until 1443 or 1444, the Koreans did write with Chinese characters which are otherwise known as Hanja (Korean), Kanji (Japanese), or HanZi (Chinese). The statements about literacy need to be taken with a grain of salt because most Western scholars tend to compare Asian literacy incorrectly with their own alphabetic concepts of literacy.Hangul was not developed as a replacement for Hanja. Rather, it was developed as a way to teach the proper reading of Hanja in school. So, yes, HanZi, or Kanji, or Hanja, or whatever you want to call them (they all represent the same two Chinese characters) were the proper writing system in Korea, and yes, if Koreans were more literate in Chinese characters today, one could learn written communication in four national languages at once (not to mention all the various "dialects" of China, which are actually distinct languages).
Comparable scripts to Hangul are Hiragana, Katakana, Nü Shu, ZhuYin (BoPoMoFo), and the Vietnamese Chu Nom. PinYin romanization is also used in mainland China in the teaching of the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the same way as Hangul was originally intended to be used.
You are both correct and incorrect. Let me go through your message blow by blow:
While you are technically correct that the term Latin is supposed to apply only to the dead language formerly spoken by the Romans, I deliberately chose to call those languages "Latin" languages because I see nothing but natural evolution and regional accents separating them from their ancestor. I see Latin as a living language embodied in regional accents colored by contact with other languages. French is the German flavor of Latin, Spanish is the Arabic flavor of Latin, and Italian is the Greek flavor of Latin (more or less). They are only "Romance Languages" if Latin truly did die. However, these languages are the result of uninterrupted speech since the Roman Empire, so I see no reason to call Latin "dead".
Yes, you are correct that French is the "language" that English absorbed the majority of its borrowed vocabulary from. However, I chose to say "Latin" because I was (again) considering these Latin or Romance "languages" to be one language. So, with French taken as a dialect, English got those words from Latin.
I would like to see some statistical analysis of this. All I have to offer is anecdotal experience, but thats better than a naked, unsupported statement.
I have spoken English my entire life and am fluent in several dialects. I have never been able to make the slightest sense of German. However, upon becoming conversant in Spanish, I was able to communicate with Italian and Portugese speakers with a little extra effort and concentration. When I was in Spain I frequently observed French and Italian speakers who could not speak a word of Spanish manage to conduct whatever business they wanted to conduct. From what I have seen, there are bigger differences between Brazilian Portugese and Portugese Portugese than between Spanish and Portugese Portugese. The only one that was significantly difficult was French.
This backs up the point of my original post that many languages exist in groups where knowledge of one is sufficient for a basic understanding of the others. However, this point you made is more interesting because English makes a rather absurd distinction here that I have never quite understood: The distinction between German and Dutch.
Germans call themselves "Deutch", so what is the real difference between "Dutch" people and "Deutch" people? This is a slight accent difference at best. So, to claim you speak Dutch and Deutch is like claiming you speak English and English. Yes, I know there are some differences between the two. There are differences between the speech in Hamburg and Berlin, as well.
These all really demonstrate one thing about Europe. People seem to think that language and nationality are the same thing. Languages cover larger areas than most tiny European countries, so there are actually less languages in Europe than currently claimed.
So, if your friend or parent is in, say, India, will you just call them? I would say this is a very useful tool for travellers of any kind. Even college students who go out of state should find this useful.
The reason the two go together is cause it is about communication, and IM servers provide an easy way to find people (easy as compared to memorizing phone numbers). Also, whether or not you are using voice, you still need text messaging to send links and files because communication is no longer limited to speech.
By the way, file sharing already works (for MSN, at least). The only thing that is missing (from what most people are used to with p2p) is a search tool and persistent shared directories. Right now direct transfers involve actively sending files.
In this particular case, however, your problem is simplified by the fact that you probably already studied at least one Latin language in school. If one can speak Spanish, one can learn to understand written Portugese (even the Brazilian flavor) in a relatively short period of time. The grammar and most of the vocabulary is the same with some pronunciation and spelling differences. In fact, something like 60% of English vocabulary is Latin. Really, Latin is only one language.
If Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese were still written exclusively with Kanji, this problem would be solved in a different but similarly useful way.
In that case, if you learned English, Latin, and Kanji, you could pretty much talk to at least 80-90% of the people on the Net in one language or the other. You could not write poetry, but you could communicate.
This statement is incredible:
Intended by whom? Since when are discussion forums "intended" or "required" to be exclusively in English. Is enabling communication not the point of the Internet?If these were French Canadians talking about "language preservation" in Canada, most English speakers would think they were absurd. Now, when the situation is reversed, English speakers think they have the right to behave in the same absurd way.
These English speaking Orkut users are really being unfair. The fact that they cannot read Portugese is a result of the English speakers' ignorance and not the fault of the Portugese speakers. The Portugese speakers should be able to post in any language they like. If the English speakers do not like it, they can learn Portugese or use translation software to get an idea of what was said.
These English speakers had better get a clue. Online, you are exposed to the whole world, not just your boondock neighborhood. People speak lots of languages. If they choose to remain ignorant, they should not blame others for that chosen ignorance.
Okay, fair enough, my memory more than a little incorrect on that whole issue. It appears from his book that he wrote a terminal emulator in Minix. This terminal emulator could boot from a floppy and connect to a remote Unix system without Minix. Minix was, however, the environment he wrote it in. When he decided to add disk access to the emulator, it appears to have become what could be termed an operating system.
At this point, it appears that his program could: read from the keyboard, write to the monitor, write to the modem, read from the modem. When he wanted POSIX file I/O, the terminal emulator became something else. Implementing the POSIX calls changed the nature of his project. He then ported Bash and GCC over to his emulator, and it was released as v.0.01. That is not many functions for an operating system. While very complex, the system could not do much ("Running the shell was basically all you could do."). This means that the rest of Linux was written in this bare environment (assuming Linus did not reinstall Minix). Yes, this means in the absence of a text editor. Back in the Apple II days we used to write programs without text editors, too.
This is a chicken and egg argument. How did operating systems come about in the absence of operating systems and text editors? How did Bill Gates write his first OS for whatever that hobby computer he had? These first OSs were certainly not written in fancy text editors.
Some quotes from his book:
Ken Brown in an email message to Dennis Ritchie:
This was a question Ken Brown asked while interviewing for his book. He obviously made his decision before he asked any questions at all.Tannenbaum also said that Ken Brown had not read any of the available books on the history of Unix. It looks like AdTI and SCO are working together on this. Then again, maybe SCO is just grabbing at straws tossed out by AdTI. Either way, this has to be targeted at the ignorant (read: politicians).
The funny thing is that these "theories" do not take into account the classic and widely known Linux anecdote which was Linus' very motivation for writing Linux: He did not even have working MINIX binaries when he wrote Linux because he had accidently overwritten his harddrive. So, he had two choices: buy MINIX again or write his own OS. That is a far cry from having possession of the MINIX source code.
Final Note: It is not like the Linux kernel was doing 3D graphics back then. It was a text based console with disc access. I doubt Ken Brown or SCO would have called it an operating system back then (this is not to say it was not amazing, just that these mud slingers cannot imagine a non GUI system -- they are lawyers, after all).
I suppose MS's DRM will prevent these "excess[es] in freedom of speech and freedom of thought" in the future. Thank you Bill for protecting us harmless sheep from such extremes in speech and thought.
it is about time! Thank you BBC.
Why do they not just disable links to outside pages entirely? It is experimental, right? So why have links to other websites at all?
Links could create a bogus page like:
Internal links within the wiki could be preserved.This reminds me of floppy discs in the 80's. They would have "single-sided" and "double-sided" floppy discs at different prices. They acted as if the double-sided discs were some sort of new technology and released them later at higher prices. In reality, all discs were double sided. The only thing they lacked was a write-protect hole in the side of the disc jacket. Anyone with a hole punch could have had a double-sided disc at "single-sided" prices.
What is wrong about this is that the disc manufacturers were lying to their customers. This is fraud. At the time, I had a hard time believing the manufacturers were not investigated or punished for this sort of actvity. Now, for some reason, some people think that this sort of criminal activity is okay.
It is Canon's customers that should be angry. Both those that purchased the $500 version (for getting hardware they could have gotten for much less), and the those that purchased the "entry-level" version (for getting sold an intentionally crippled camera). Canon lied to all of them.
So, what, then, is the "reality that more corporations are having to confront"? Is it the reality that they need to have some accountability to their customers? Is it the reality that they have to tell the truth?
The Defense Mapping Agency, which now appears to be called the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency, has been making detailed maps of the Earth for about half a century now. You might be able to put in a FOIA request for satellite images and maps in the possession of the agency. Technically, these maps and images made with public money should be free for any citizen of the US to obtain.
Wow, that is some really amazing FUD:
By this logic, MSWindows and MacOS were invented by Xerox. Notice how they do not speak about the fact that only the kernel was invented by Linus. They also leave out the fact that just because something can run Unix programs does not make it Unix and the fact that running Unix programs does not magically change the OS into Unix.This quote is fun, too:
Who cares if programmers have "open contempt" for "intellectual property"? Abiding by the law is not the same as agreeing with it. Since when does everybody have to believe that all laws are good? Is this a communist system where no dissent is allowed? I hope we still have the freedom to think and say what we want. They are trying to say "borrowing = stealing". Even copyright (as opposed to maritime) piracy is not theft.This article is really a work of art. The fact that someone could say this about Linux and not the BSDs, which are genetic unices, blows my mind. Then again, the BSDs have already cleared themselves in court.
Good job, MS.
Fair enough, I was relying upon hearsay. However, I just looked at a coworker's Sony PalmOS device today, and that did not have a webbrowser, either.
Here is another huge question: Do you have to pay to add a webbrowser? If you do, that is the same as a webbrowser being unavailable for PalmOS because it is free on other platforms.
You could claim it has already been paid for on other platforms, but I would not buy a Palm device (with a slower processor and less memory) only to find out I had to plop down another fifty bucks for a silly piece of software that would be included on another platform (and in a post 1996 world should be included on all computers, anyway).
For the record, I have yet to meet anyone who uses a PalmOS device for anything outside of traditional PDA functions, such as scheduling. Perhaps Palm just is not getting the message out, but either way, even salesmen do not know that webbrowsers are avaible for PalmOS devices.
So, while I do not know about the use of a PalmOS device, I do know why I never bought one, and that is what I was commenting on.