Americans are not permitted to think themselves better than anyone. As a matter of fact, Americans are always worse.
Americans can certainly think themselves better. But it is hopelessly naive to think the American government is any better, human-rights wise, than the governments of the places they are invading/bombing.
Pakistan was an Islamic nation to begin with in 1947. Zia-Al-Huq with the tacit and monetary support of the Saudi and American governments dragged the country, its foreign policy and its strategic direction into a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam along the lines of the Wahhabists in the late 1970s. This is obvious in how they chose who they armed in Afghanistan, how they created the Taliban from the orphans of the war there, the slow seepage of Saudi style cloistering of women behind high walls and burqas.
So the Pakistani people are paying twice for American government policy decisions. Once for being saddled with the fundamentalism imported from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and very much alive to this day. And again by fiery barely discriminate death from the skies and the chaos of a decade of hostilities as the American government tries to clean up Blowback.
My question was really regarding Christian rule vs Islamic rule. Did say the Caliphate or the Ottomans have the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition? Essentially where the clergy controlled what could and could not be done/said and had an elaborate mechanism of repression in place?
With my limited knowledge it seems to me Christians essentially rebalanced the balance of power in their religion because their clergy was just too powerful and repressive.
Is that Islam has not undergone a process analogous to the Enlightenment.
Question: Wasn't the Enlightenment essentially a rebellion of the Christian laity against their clergy, primarily because Christianity was so stifling. Has Islam ever been that stifling except in small pockets, much of them quite recently?
Shouldn't the real-question be whether FF should move to the new JS engine or not, right? Thats where much of the speed-up that Chrome is seeing seems to be from...
The leader of one country calling for another country to be "wiped off the map" doesn't give you pause? I understand he said "Israel is a stain on the map that will fade away with time" or something to that effect. "Wiped off the map" is a very convenient Axis of Evil promoting translation.
Theres a fortune message that captures what I feel about the C vs AL programming debate: "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language".
In my experience, one cannot truly understand C without knowing AL programming. C is like a thin macro layer of sorts over the AL underneath. C is a systems/low-level language because it abstracts what most contemporary processors can do in non-privileged mode - access memory, evaluate expressions, change the flow of execution, make sub-routine calls. C does not provide I/O features or knowledge of any device semantics other than the CPU. Therefore to understand C one must know what it assumes the canonical processor can do - one must know atleast one AL well. I know atleast 4 ALs well and I feel I understand C better for it.
Further, to understand or define UNIX on an ISA - even at the application level - one needs to not only know C, but also the ABI - the implementation of linking calling and register use conventions - for that ISA. Try making sense of a core-dump - especially a core-dump from a production site where debug symbols would have been stripped - without knowledge of C and the underlying AL conventions used.
To me C & AL together define UNIX on an ISA. So without AL, I'd feel pretty ignorant.
I'll rephrase my query: Do you have any sources that show this was the main beef? Did the bombers claim this was their main beef? As far as I can tell they wanted Spain out of Iraq. That was their main stated beef.
Even though you did not ask for it, here's my advice re study of our ancient texts. Don't spend too much time fixating on the Vedas. If you want to read the really interesting stories in Hindu mythology, read the Puranas. If it's Hindu philosophy you are after, read the Upanishads.
Oh no - I was merely interested in it for the that fact that its a nice raw sort-of-racist text. It seems honest and it is an important part of India's culture. I'm not interested in Hinduism at all.
As i've said earlier I am not an expert in any of these areas, so you would be better off finding a guru to guide you on this path
Oh no, I don't need a guru - just someone who appreciates Sanskrit without all the religious frills. To me Sanskrit is something that we should preserve and propagate. Considering its the basis for the phonetics - if not the grammar - of a whole lot of Indian languages North and South - I really do want to get into Panini's head without the religious overtones. I reside in Chennai and its really hard for me to gush about Sanskrit without accusations of being a Northie-lover or a Brahmin-asslicker thrown my way!:-) But I have a thick skin.
You sounded like a good candidate for an occasional "gee-whiz-does-Sanskrit-really-all-achieve-that" sort of mail. I don't subscribe to the guru funda at all.
Hello AC,
The link was so I would not look like I was claiming any Sanskrit knowledge:-) I admit the sentence did not make much sense in Griffith's translation. Could you point me/us to other translations of the Vedas - especially the Rig Veda?
Actually I would really like to correspond with someone who knows Sanskrit. I am a major fan of it myself and being from a CompSci background, consider it one of the sub-continent's major technical/mathematical achievements. Strangely, I discovered Sanskrit through Chomsky (via the Chomsky Heirarchy) who had nice things to say about a certain Panini! Until then I always associated Sanskrit with Brahamanism - how embarassing. Do mail me at djskpv@REMOVE.THIS.yahoo.com - I would be much obliged. I wish Sanskrit would be introduced to kids outside its sacred-language context.
As for the fundie label, I really think we shouldn't stoop to the ad hominem attacks of the out-of-India crowd. Most of them aren't fundamentalist in my opinion. They just cannot stand up to their patriotism being questioned. Oh well!
Do mail me the links or if you'ld rather remain anonymous, post them to this thread.
I don't see the overt incest you mention and as for the cattle thieving, well there is a very thin line between a warrior and a thief - even by todays standards.
Frankly, I don't understand what the point of bringing these lines up was.
Hello tinker_taylor,
I have been on some of the Indology lists for sometime now and the European historians there are well aware of the racial bias of their predecessors.
They have consistently maintained that the data available from archaelogy(both in and around Eurasia) and linguistics point to a migration of Aryan culture from the West to the East. Note the emphasis on culture. For example the Brits hardly interbred with the locals but their language and cultural norms are our publicly eschewed norms of today. They did not change our genetic makeup but our values about decency, marriage, human rights are all derived from them. And yes - this is exactly how the racist European historians of old saw it. It doesn't mean it's not true.
The astronomical data that the out-of-India side keeps using requires the assumption of extremely accurate measurements by the Rig Vedic bards' contemporaries.
Showing how another theory could be biased does not in anyway decrease its credibility or more importantly increase the credibility of your own arguments.
Me, I work on UNIX kernels for a living. I needed to create posters for an IP Expo where my work was to be demo'ed. The InkScape UI was so natural that after a couple of experiments I managed to make exactly what I wanted.
I even moved my desktop to Gentoo after that - and have been tracking InkScape ever since.
I needed to create posters and had just one day to do it. I browsed around for a vector-graphics based drawing tool, hit up on inkscape, tried really hard to compile it and its pieces, but couldn't.
After some more browsing I realize gentoo supports inkscape-0.41 in its portage collection. So I download the gentoo boot-CD and after 2hrs gentoo is ready. In another 2 hrs inkscape-0.41 is ready.
I now had to "learn" inkscape. After about two hours I was comfortable with it. Not obviously intuitive, but intuitive alright. In another four hours the poster was done.
I suppose the delay slot in the SPARC ISA is also not really necessary. Yes?
other architectures made fewer assumptions like this and did much better in the long run (mips, powerpc).
When you say they did much better, what do you mean? Did the ISA limit the creation of faster processors? Did the ISA limit possible compiler optimizations? Once again, could you point me to a comparison of ISAs?
I realize its harder to code for the SPARC ISA and a lot of what it exports are assumptions from a certain era that do not hold. But did this really contribute to it being less successful? Is the SPARC less successful?
powerpc was able to take advantage of new developments in silicon without having to lug around old cruft...sparc has baggage (register windows) which are no longer architectural wins.
Could you point me to documentation that explains why SPARC's register-windows scheme is harder to implement in todays technologies?
two instructions to load a single 32 bit value and _five_ for a 64 bit value(!).
This is true of the SPARC too. Infact I think its true of all fixed width instruction ISAs. I understand compilers very rarely need to load 32 or 64bit immediate values into registers. Addresses can usually be generated using PC relative addressing, no?
Anyways do post links or point me to documentation that describes the difficulties in implementing the SPARC ISA on todays technologies.
From my reading of what Linus has said, hes not saying reverse-engineering is a bad thing.
Hes just saying that in this case, this particular bit of reverse-enginnering is useless and could end up in corrupting the Linux BK repository state irreversibly.
Linus' basic argument is that BK is so cool a technology, Tridgel should not be allowed to wreck it. Hes just angry that Tridgel, in his zeal to "reverse-engineer", has done more harm to the state of technology than good.
FireWire host-controllers in PCs are symmetric as far as I know, so you could theoretically have a PC behave like a FireWire drive (i.e. speak SBP2). The protocol itself is a form of RDMA - which means FireWire controllers export their hosts as addressable 48bit memory ranges. Should be symmetric.
USB host-controller in PCs are different. In USB, only the host-controller can bus-master - i.e. initiate transactions on the USB bus - no other device on the bus can. I believe this is specified in the protocol itself. The protocol allows for a smart host-controller and dumb devices. One master and the rest slaves.
This might become clearer if you examine the terminology. The ports closest to the host-controller are said to belong to the "root hub". USB provides for a tree architecture, rooted at the host-controller's ports.
This means that you cannot connect two PCs back-back through their USB ports and say run PPP over them. AFAIK host-controllers in PCs do not have a slave mode that they can be switched to.
The PC emulating a hard-disk has to be able to become a slave to show up as a device.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans are not permitted to think themselves better than anyone. As a matter of fact, Americans are always worse.
Americans can certainly think themselves better. But it is hopelessly naive to think the American government is any better, human-rights wise, than the governments of the places they are invading/bombing.
Pakistan was an Islamic nation to begin with in 1947. Zia-Al-Huq with the tacit and monetary support of the Saudi and American governments dragged the country, its foreign policy and its strategic direction into a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam along the lines of the Wahhabists in the late 1970s. This is obvious in how they chose who they armed in Afghanistan, how they created the Taliban from the orphans of the war there, the slow seepage of Saudi style cloistering of women behind high walls and burqas.
So the Pakistani people are paying twice for American government policy decisions. Once for being saddled with the fundamentalism imported from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and very much alive to this day. And again by fiery barely discriminate death from the skies and the chaos of a decade of hostilities as the American government tries to clean up Blowback.
veliath
Isn't Astrology given as an example of a field that is more science like than ID simply because it can be falsified while ID cannot?
veliath
My question was really regarding Christian rule vs Islamic rule. Did say the Caliphate or the Ottomans have the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition? Essentially where the clergy controlled what could and could not be done/said and had an elaborate mechanism of repression in place?
With my limited knowledge it seems to me Christians essentially rebalanced the balance of power in their religion because their clergy was just too powerful and repressive.
Is that Islam has not undergone a process analogous to the Enlightenment.
Question: Wasn't the Enlightenment essentially a rebellion of the Christian laity against their clergy, primarily because Christianity was so stifling. Has Islam ever been that stifling except in small pockets, much of them quite recently?
...those peace loving muslims, eh?
One Muslim group makes a threat and suddenly an entire religious following is tarred?
Would you want Christians/Americans/Europeans judged by their most intolerant's utterances?
Seriously, what the fuck is with these people? Isn't it time to move into the 21st century with the rest of us?
I suppose when you people decide to move, these people have to move as well.
Solaris is an example of an OS that *doesn't* do this
Are you sure? When the child modifies its globals or anything in its heap, the memory has to be COWed.
Shouldn't the real-question be whether FF should move to the new JS engine or not, right? Thats where much of the speed-up that Chrome is seeing seems to be from...
veliath
But its okay to sing "Bomb Iran, Bomb Iran". Heck, you will even be rewarded with a Presidential nomination...
veliath
Theres a fortune message that captures what I feel about the C vs AL programming debate: "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language".
In my experience, one cannot truly understand C without knowing AL programming. C is like a thin macro layer of sorts over the AL underneath. C is a systems/low-level language because it abstracts what most contemporary processors can do in non-privileged mode - access memory, evaluate expressions, change the flow of execution, make sub-routine calls. C does not provide I/O features or knowledge of any device semantics other than the CPU. Therefore to understand C one must know what it assumes the canonical processor can do - one must know atleast one AL well. I know atleast 4 ALs well and I feel I understand C better for it.
Further, to understand or define UNIX on an ISA - even at the application level - one needs to not only know C, but also the ABI - the implementation of linking calling and register use conventions - for that ISA. Try making sense of a core-dump - especially a core-dump from a production site where debug symbols would have been stripped - without knowledge of C and the underlying AL conventions used.
To me C & AL together define UNIX on an ISA. So without AL, I'd feel pretty ignorant.
veliath
I'll rephrase my query: Do you have any sources that show this was the main beef? Did the bombers claim this was their main beef? As far as I can tell they wanted Spain out of Iraq. That was their main stated beef.
veliath
:-)
Ditto!
You sounded like a good candidate for an occasional "gee-whiz-does-Sanskrit-really-all-achieve-that" sort of mail. I don't subscribe to the guru funda at all.
veliath
:-)
The link was so I would not look like I was claiming any Sanskrit knowledge:-) I admit the sentence did not make much sense in Griffith's translation. Could you point me/us to other translations of the Vedas - especially the Rig Veda?
Actually I would really like to correspond with someone who knows Sanskrit. I am a major fan of it myself and being from a CompSci background, consider it one of the sub-continent's major technical/mathematical achievements. Strangely, I discovered Sanskrit through Chomsky (via the Chomsky Heirarchy) who had nice things to say about a certain Panini! Until then I always associated Sanskrit with Brahamanism - how embarassing. Do mail me at djskpv@REMOVE.THIS.yahoo.com - I would be much obliged. I wish Sanskrit would be introduced to kids outside its sacred-language context.
As for the fundie label, I really think we shouldn't stoop to the ad hominem attacks of the out-of-India crowd. Most of them aren't fundamentalist in my opinion. They just cannot stand up to their patriotism being questioned. Oh well!
Do mail me the links or if you'ld rather remain anonymous, post them to this thread.
Thank you,
veliath
Here is the link to the Griffith translations of the hymn: I don't see the overt incest you mention and as for the cattle thieving, well there is a very thin line between a warrior and a thief - even by todays standards.
Frankly, I don't understand what the point of bringing these lines up was.
veliath
:-)
I have been on some of the Indology lists for sometime now and the European historians there are well aware of the racial bias of their predecessors.
They have consistently maintained that the data available from archaelogy(both in and around Eurasia) and linguistics point to a migration of Aryan culture from the West to the East. Note the emphasis on culture. For example the Brits hardly interbred with the locals but their language and cultural norms are our publicly eschewed norms of today. They did not change our genetic makeup but our values about decency, marriage, human rights are all derived from them. And yes - this is exactly how the racist European historians of old saw it. It doesn't mean it's not true.
The astronomical data that the out-of-India side keeps using requires the assumption of extremely accurate measurements by the Rig Vedic bards' contemporaries.
Showing how another theory could be biased does not in anyway decrease its credibility or more importantly increase the credibility of your own arguments.
veliath
:-)
I even moved my desktop to Gentoo after that - and have been tracking InkScape ever since.
veliath
PS: I own an E-20:-)
My anecdote:
I needed to create posters and had just one day to do it. I browsed around for a vector-graphics based drawing tool, hit up on inkscape, tried really hard to compile it and its pieces, but couldn't.
After some more browsing I realize gentoo supports inkscape-0.41 in its portage collection. So I download the gentoo boot-CD and after 2hrs gentoo is ready. In another 2 hrs inkscape-0.41 is ready.
I now had to "learn" inkscape. After about two hours I was comfortable with it. Not obviously intuitive, but intuitive alright. In another four hours the poster was done.
Thank you inkscape and gentoo!
veliath
veliath
When you say they did much better, what do you mean? Did the ISA limit the creation of faster processors? Did the ISA limit possible compiler optimizations? Once again, could you point me to a comparison of ISAs?
I realize its harder to code for the SPARC ISA and a lot of what it exports are assumptions from a certain era that do not hold. But did this really contribute to it being less successful? Is the SPARC less successful?
Thank you,
veliath
Could you point me to documentation that explains why SPARC's register-windows scheme is harder to implement in todays technologies?
This is true of the SPARC too. Infact I think its true of all fixed width instruction ISAs. I understand compilers very rarely need to load 32 or 64bit immediate values into registers. Addresses can usually be generated using PC relative addressing, no?
Anyways do post links or point me to documentation that describes the difficulties in implementing the SPARC ISA on todays technologies.
veliath
Hes just saying that in this case, this particular bit of reverse-enginnering is useless and could end up in corrupting the Linux BK repository state irreversibly.
Linus' basic argument is that BK is so cool a technology, Tridgel should not be allowed to wreck it. Hes just angry that Tridgel, in his zeal to "reverse-engineer", has done more harm to the state of technology than good.
veliath
:-)
USB host-controller in PCs are different. In USB, only the host-controller can bus-master - i.e. initiate transactions on the USB bus - no other device on the bus can. I believe this is specified in the protocol itself. The protocol allows for a smart host-controller and dumb devices. One master and the rest slaves.
This might become clearer if you examine the terminology. The ports closest to the host-controller are said to belong to the "root hub". USB provides for a tree architecture, rooted at the host-controller's ports.
This means that you cannot connect two PCs back-back through their USB ports and say run PPP over them. AFAIK host-controllers in PCs do not have a slave mode that they can be switched to.
The PC emulating a hard-disk has to be able to become a slave to show up as a device.
veliath
djskpv at yahoo dot com