I do not think there will be a lingua franca beyond English. Simply because we have reached the global stage, there is no exterior influence that would cause is to switch to another language. But, of course, English has yet to evolve considerably under, this time, a whole planet of influences and locutors.
That was LOGICAL... Do we really need EXTERNAL influence to change something?
Imagine 300 milion Chinese jumping the border with Russia. How many years before Russian will be extinct? (for comparison see the populations Russians took from their homes and send to die in Siberia).
Geez. Think that you lifetime is nothing compared with the history of man... before you proclame the universality and foreverness of something.
You can see that on Wall Street: Past performance is not guarantee for future results.
Well... You are misleading consumption for production... If it were about beer it would be true (in a big enough interval (3 mos) nobody can drink more beer that is produced), but information is different: I put up a web page and thousands of people are reading it.
Keep in mind that America has the biggest number of internet connections/computer per capita than any other country in the world (Luxembourg/Monaco need not apply). THAT makes a difference.
Re:What about VA/MD residents?
on
Fighting UCITA
·
· Score: 1
That doesn't help because: -1. a company doesn't have to have a phisically presence in a state to say that "this agreement is governed by laws of..."
-2. "big software interests" actually have big lobbies.
Well, I certainly thank M$ for allowing me to buy a 1GHz Athlon/PIII with 256Mb RAM and 40Gb HDD for the price of a 386/2Mb/40Mb because all that bloated software requirements... (Imagine a web browser that requires 100Mb of disk space... can you see it? (Hint: it is involved in certain trial))
But I don't thank M$ for the M$-tax: try to buy a laptop, _ANY_ laptop and you have to pay the M$ tax: Win 9x, Office, whatever crap they want to put into. Buy a (win)modem and try to make it work for linux/freebsd/whatever. And yes, I am willing to trade 10% of my unused 80% CPU cycles to browse the web in order to save $50.
I like to play games, and I LIKE Age of Empires. I'd like to play it on LINUX. Why should I be constrained to Windows or Mac?
The big empires in the history maybe brought some peace for their inhabitants... but that peace was after they were conquered and imposed by force. And they failed on the long term.
I certainly want integration... But that integration does not mean that we have to give up the freedom to reject bad software or to reject one component (like in the game... windoze crashes so I want to play my game on linux).
This is a mix... probably I am not completely woken up.
Well, a solution to this would be "themeable" GUIs: and I am not speaking about colors of the window borders, but about placement of controls.
However, if you are considering the 65% people who still have the default theme in Windows and 00:00 blinking on their VCR... that would be useless. And also think about the HelpDesk... it would be crazy.
If the software producer will generate a couple of themes and allow them to be changed easily...
I think it is "themeable" GUI is a concept too advanced for the current users.
There are more categories to think about: "casual" vs. "regular" user, "dumb" vs. "smart"...
VI is a very good example of a _poor_ interface for a novice/dumb user but a _good_ interface for the power/regular user.
Remember the Zen: "The hill with a sunny half has a dark half".
Re:Not So Overwhelming, After All...
on
ATI Radeon 256
·
· Score: 1
Well, I for one I am _much_ happier with the ATI software DVD player than the DXR3 "hardware" DVD decoder from Creative Labs.
I have a Xpert99 board (Rage128, 8Mb RAM, AGP 2x) on a... VIA board and AMD K6-2/380MHz.
The ATI player is stable (I can watch several movies in sequence) while the Creative Labs one crashes two or three times during a movie:(
Plus the ATI player has much better contrast and colors (on the same monitor).
And ATI released some libs for accelerated X and DVD playback for linux. I don't know how far they got with those though...
Re:Atoms aren't electrons aren't atoms
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
You are missing the following point: In the atom age the information was tied to atoms. You want the information, you have to take it with the atoms and you have to give some atoms for it.
As Stallman pointed out: you can not copy boots. But you can copy boot designs...
The problem is that the middleman (arghhh... the middleman) which used to take the information from the creator and tie it to atoms took the most atoms in return.
And they feel they are losing ground to MP3 and TXT/XML and they don't want to because: 1. if they allow you to freely copy around information, they lose their whole purpose because the creators can distribute the information themselves 2. if they can restrict you from copying it around they survive with the following bonuses: a) they can force you to buy two copies of the same book (home/office) b) deny you the ability to sell the book at half price c) deny you the ability to buy a book at half price d) track your habits like a marked wild
I don't intend to flame but apparently you lived under a rock for the last years.
As you see the technological advancements are going faster and faster asking question never asked and the way they are answered will shape our future. Insofar only there is a small light sched on how the things will go in the future.
However the only ones who see that light are visionaries. But these visions might turn into [mb]ilions and the corporations are keeping an eye on them enacting laws that right now look harmless but when we will get there will see that all the land was already taken. And we will be at the mercy of those corporations.
And yes, to most regular people these laws look pointless or harmless but when we will realize what's going on we will be like sheeps at the end of the slaughter tunnel.
THINK OUT OF YOUR BOX. Out of your regular Job -> McDonald/PizzaHut -> Blockbuster -> Bed -> Job... circle.
I think you missed one point: the fact that you have a patent on that gadget means that YOU have to track down the guys who are infringing upon it and YOU have to SUE them to get some compensation.
Imagine the amount of money you have to spend on lawyers in a battle against a rich man/company.
You will end up settling and giving your patent away so you can pay the lawyers...
And how much it cost to watch the big markets (USA, UK, Germany, France) to see if a product identical to you is not selling there?
Everything boils down to how much money you can spend.
Nope. I suppose he actually meant AdvFS, the file system used in Digital Unix / Compaq Tru64. It has journaling (metadata + data, if I remember well).
That's a nice filesystem... I powered off the Digital workstation some times without any problems (Yes, there was a period when I was typing "help" at the prompt 8(!).
Please excuse me but C plus Linux Kernel is way harder to understand and learn... till the point you can modify something, compared to English.
[I don't think I need to prove it statistically:)]
So, it's fine for average Joe (or Mowgli (sorry it's the only generic indian name I can think of)) to have the library software localized in English but if he is willing to hack that code... he needs much more than to be able to read the comments.
And by the way, why stop to indian if we start to translate the comments? Chineze, Mexican, French, German comes to mind.
And let's suppose that decides to translate all the comments in the aforementioned languages: all development has to stop while all the comments are done.
Have you ever looked to a piece of comment hanging above a piece a code and those two saying completely different stories? If English comments tends to be outdated, what can we expect about multilanguage...?
There is a very good argument up somewhere that even that average (indian)Joe will have access to a web in hindi[1-18] he will not be able to access the rest of it and I cannot imagine milions of translators translating it for him...
In an unusually deep round of cuts, the chip vendor slashed the price of its 500-MHz Mobile Pentium III processor by 54 percent, from $530 to $245, according to information on Intel's Web site. Prices of 450-MHz and 400-MHz versions of the chip also fell sharply, by as much as 46 percent.
And later on...
The price cuts could translate into savings of as much as $100 on the price of a typical Pentium III notebook PC, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Celeron notebook prices may also come down slightly, though probably not by as much.
Can anybody explain me how by cutting the price on a component by $200 the price of the whole goes down by $100?
I never thought I'd be the one coming to BGates' defense, but... do you know how much money BG gave to charities last year? I read the other day that it was something like $16 BILLION!
OH, yes... $16 Billion in MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. What use can make the charities of Microsoft Software?
His huge donation was compared with Carnegie's. But Carnegie donated money to schools so they can buy books or whatever they might think it's useful, not some milion tons of steel.
Sure his company may make crappy software, but I would say that he has done more for improving the world that we live in than, say, RMS, ESR, or any of the other idols of the/. "community"
Like what? Morality is not at all important to you? Businesses and business models come and go, but mankind needs something more than just money.
As one coming from Europe, this country is strange: everyone is trying to make the most money out of anyone else: your neighbour, brother... makes no difference.
How long it will take until the map will be something private?
I just saw a couple of weeks ago a big sign in the continuation of a big street saying that from that point on, the traffic is no longer public.
But looking up and down the street, I can not see any difference...
ZIP codes are not the property of USPS... It's just a mean to slice the country in easy pieces.
I don't own my house address... I just happen to use it. I can not sell it to you.
But I cannot stop thinking that one day some wise guy will buy from the government all the rights to the name of my street and I will have to pay him royalties for using it on my mails.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... There is a paper I read some time ago where a guy went to great lengths (100 pages or so) to describe all the problems/issues with C++.
Any inteligent enough person can make up quickly 10 reasons to like a thing and 10 reasons to dislike it.
Like a philosopher once said: "Any idiot thinks that if the world will be guided after HIS ideas everything would be better".
I do not think there will be a lingua franca beyond English. Simply because we have reached the global stage, there is no exterior influence that would cause is to switch to another language. But, of course, English has yet to evolve considerably under, this time, a whole planet of influences and locutors.
That was LOGICAL... Do we really need EXTERNAL influence to change something?
Imagine 300 milion Chinese jumping the border with Russia. How many years before Russian will be extinct? (for comparison see the populations Russians took from their homes and send to die in Siberia).
Geez. Think that you lifetime is nothing compared with the history of man... before you proclame the universality and foreverness of something.
You can see that on Wall Street: Past performance is not guarantee for future results.
People do think redundant. People don't think using the binary logic or even n-ary logic (for n maximum number of synapses a neuron can have).
And what about literature? Poetry?
With a logical language all will become programs we will be testing for validity and correctness.
And how about music, picture? Will we be able to feel/think them before we express them for the enlightenment of the others?
Have you read 1984? Newspeak... You will not be able to think things outside you language.
I certainly do think that we WILL need a universal language. However we have to build it so it will not do more harm than good.
Well... as somebody posted here at least this was the impression of Greeks, Romans, French... for some 500 years.
Or do you think that America will rule forever?
!The history is repeating only for those who didn't learn it!
Well... You are misleading consumption for production... If it were about beer it would be true (in a big enough interval (3 mos) nobody can drink more beer that is produced), but information is different: I put up a web page and thousands of people are reading it.
Keep in mind that America has the biggest number of internet connections/computer per capita than any other country in the world (Luxembourg/Monaco need not apply). THAT makes a difference.
That doesn't help because: ..."
-1. a company doesn't have to have a phisically presence in a state to say that "this agreement is governed by laws of
-2. "big software interests" actually have big lobbies.
Hmm... Micro$oft?
Yeah... your "normal rule of the market" has a BIG exception. An probably many others...
Well, I certainly thank M$ for allowing me to buy a 1GHz Athlon/PIII with 256Mb RAM and 40Gb HDD for the price of a 386/2Mb/40Mb because all that bloated software requirements... (Imagine a web browser that requires 100Mb of disk space... can you see it? (Hint: it is involved in certain trial))
But I don't thank M$ for the M$-tax: try to buy a laptop, _ANY_ laptop and you have to pay the M$ tax: Win 9x, Office, whatever crap they want to put into. Buy a (win)modem and try to make it work for linux/freebsd/whatever. And yes, I am willing to trade 10% of my unused 80% CPU cycles to browse the web in order to save $50.
I like to play games, and I LIKE Age of Empires. I'd like to play it on LINUX. Why should I be constrained to Windows or Mac?
The big empires in the history maybe brought some peace for their inhabitants... but that peace was after they were conquered and imposed by force. And they failed on the long term.
I certainly want integration... But that integration does not mean that we have to give up the freedom to reject bad software or to reject one component (like in the game... windoze crashes so I want to play my game on linux).
This is a mix... probably I am not completely woken up.
Well, a solution to this would be "themeable" GUIs: and I am not speaking about colors of the window borders, but about placement of controls.
However, if you are considering the 65% people who still have the default theme in Windows and 00:00 blinking on their VCR... that would be useless. And also think about the HelpDesk... it would be crazy.
If the software producer will generate a couple of themes and allow them to be changed easily...
I think it is "themeable" GUI is a concept too advanced for the current users.
Well, it's not about "novice" vs. "power" users.
There are more categories to think about: "casual" vs. "regular" user, "dumb" vs. "smart"...
VI is a very good example of a _poor_ interface for a novice/dumb user but a _good_ interface for the power/regular user.
Remember the Zen: "The hill with a sunny half has a dark half".
Well, I for one I am _much_ happier with the ATI software DVD player than the DXR3 "hardware" DVD decoder from Creative Labs. I have a Xpert99 board (Rage128, 8Mb RAM, AGP 2x) on a ... VIA board and AMD K6-2/380MHz.
The ATI player is stable (I can watch several movies in sequence) while the Creative Labs one crashes two or three times during a movie :(
Plus the ATI player has much better contrast and colors (on the same monitor).
And ATI released some libs for accelerated X and DVD playback for linux. I don't know how far they got with those though...
You are missing the following point: In the atom age the information was tied to atoms. You want the information, you have to take it with the atoms and you have to give some atoms for it.
As Stallman pointed out: you can not copy boots. But you can copy boot designs...
The problem is that the middleman (arghhh... the middleman) which used to take the information from the creator and tie it to atoms took the most atoms in return.
And they feel they are losing ground to MP3 and TXT/XML and they don't want to because:
1. if they allow you to freely copy around
information, they lose their whole purpose
because the creators can distribute the
information themselves
2. if they can restrict you from copying it
around they survive with the following
bonuses:
a) they can force you to buy two copies of
the same book (home/office)
b) deny you the ability to sell the book
at half price
c) deny you the ability to buy a book at
half price
d) track your habits like a marked wild
everything should be free
Can you read the constitution? Can you read the GPL? Can you make the distinction between speech and beer?
Yup. We have TXT, HTML, XML.
What we need is FREE (as in freedom) HARDWARE.
The fact that it was/will be cracked does not matter.
As long as it is illegal, a lot of people will abstain from it.
I don't intend to flame but apparently you lived under a rock for the last years.
...
As you see the technological advancements are going faster and faster asking question never asked and the way they are answered will shape our future. Insofar only there is a small light sched on how the things will go in the future.
However the only ones who see that light are visionaries. But these visions might turn into [mb]ilions and the corporations are keeping an eye on them enacting laws that right now look harmless but when we will get there will see that all the land was already taken. And we will be at the mercy of those corporations.
And yes, to most regular people these laws look pointless or harmless but when we will realize what's going on we will be like sheeps at the end of the slaughter tunnel.
THINK OUT OF YOUR BOX. Out of your regular Job -> McDonald/PizzaHut -> Blockbuster -> Bed -> Job
circle.
Think the world your kids will live in.
Yeah right!
I think you missed one point: the fact that you have a patent on that gadget means that YOU have to track down the guys who are infringing upon it and YOU have to SUE them to get some compensation.
Imagine the amount of money you have to spend on lawyers in a battle against a rich man/company.
You will end up settling and giving your patent away so you can pay the lawyers...
And how much it cost to watch the big markets (USA, UK, Germany, France) to see if a product identical to you is not selling there?
Everything boils down to how much money you can spend.
The previous comment is Misrated!
I don't understand why this article is "Funny" instead of "Insightful".
With Netscape 4.7/Win98 I used to have an uptime of roughly four hours before it would chew all my
system resources and I had to kill it (or Windows).
The new version, however, freezes my machine every 15 minutes.
#$%#$@%#$%#$@%#$%$#... NO CARRIER
"trade protectionism" ? Against WHAT?
It would be understandable if there were a major OS supplier in Europe (sorry, SUSE, there is a long way to go), but there isn't one... to _protect_.
Nope. I suppose he actually meant AdvFS, the file system used in Digital Unix / Compaq Tru64. It has journaling (metadata + data, if I remember well).
That's a nice filesystem... I powered off the Digital workstation some times without any problems (Yes, there was a period when I was typing "help" at the prompt 8(!).
Please excuse me but C plus Linux Kernel is way harder to understand and learn... till the point you can modify something, compared to English.
:)]
[I don't think I need to prove it statistically
So, it's fine for average Joe (or Mowgli (sorry it's the only generic indian name I can think of)) to have the library software localized in English but if he is willing to hack that code... he needs much more than to be able to read the comments.
And by the way, why stop to indian if we start to translate the comments? Chineze, Mexican, French, German comes to mind.
And let's suppose that decides to translate all the comments in the aforementioned languages: all development has to stop while all the comments are done.
Have you ever looked to a piece of comment hanging above a piece a code and those two saying completely different stories? If English comments tends to be outdated, what can we expect about multilanguage...?
There is a very good argument up somewhere that even that average (indian)Joe will have access to a web in hindi[1-18] he will not be able to access the rest of it and I cannot imagine milions of translators translating it for him...
And yes, my mother tongue is not English.
From the article:
In an unusually deep round of cuts, the chip vendor slashed the price of its 500-MHz Mobile Pentium III processor by 54 percent, from $530 to $245, according to information on Intel's Web site. Prices of 450-MHz and 400-MHz versions of the chip also fell sharply, by as much as 46 percent.
And later on...
The price cuts could translate into savings of as much as $100 on the price of a typical Pentium III notebook PC, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Celeron notebook prices may also come down slightly, though probably not by as much.
Can anybody explain me how by cutting the price on a component by $200 the price of the whole goes down by $100?
Hmmmm....
Sixteen COMPONENTS not MODULES.
I presume the 288 guy has 8 such "components".
I never thought I'd be the one coming to BGates' defense, but... do you know how much money BG gave to charities last year? I read the other day that it was something like $16 BILLION!
/. "community"
OH, yes... $16 Billion in MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. What use can make the charities of Microsoft Software?
His huge donation was compared with Carnegie's. But Carnegie donated money to schools so they can buy books or whatever they might think it's useful, not some milion tons of steel.
Sure his company may make crappy software, but I would say that he has done more for improving the world that we live in than, say, RMS, ESR, or any of the other idols of the
Like what? Morality is not at all important to you? Businesses and business models come and go, but mankind needs something more than just money.
As one coming from Europe, this country is strange: everyone is trying to make the most money out of anyone else: your neighbour, brother... makes no difference.
.sig send $2 at ...
How long it will take until the map will be something private?
I just saw a couple of weeks ago a big sign in the continuation of a big street saying that from that point on, the traffic is no longer public.
But looking up and down the street, I can not see any difference...
ZIP codes are not the property of USPS... It's just a mean to slice the country in easy pieces.
I don't own my house address... I just happen to use it. I can not sell it to you.
But I cannot stop thinking that one day some wise guy will buy from the government all the rights to the name of my street and I will have to pay him royalties for using it on my mails.
It's just crazy.
If you want to see my