"affordable" internet access in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?! *ROTFL*
Internet access in North Korea is restricted to a handful of carefully selected government officials as an intelligence gathering tool. Most of the rest of them have probably never even heard of it.
Matter of fact, I think you may have the most shut out and the most connected countries in the planet, both on that peninsula. Burma's a possible competitor for the bottom, though.
Wow, you must have found the real internet cafes. When I was there (2000), I went to "PC bangs". I don't recall any of them serving food, and I got a bit of a culture shock reading the signs that said, in Korean, "minors are forbidden to smoke", and breathing the smoke produced by all the presumed non-minors. But they were all 1,000 won an hour, which was (still is) in the neighborhood of $1.
Actually, one place I went into was $1.25 or $1.50. At first I balked at paying higher than I had gotten used to. Then I realized I was whining about less than a dollar, and I paid.
Mod up. "Open source" in theory means it can be compiled on Linux on any architecture, but a quick look through some of the pages didn't turn up any info on how to go about compiling it for yourself, let alone explicit consideration of Linux on other architectures.
Also no mention of how it plays Flash files. Does it work as a front end for (the proprietary) MM Flash Player, or does it include its own open-source implementation for the SWF format? This is the major thing I've been missing since switching to Linux on PPC; if there were now a working OS SWF player, that would be awesome.
I'm afraid you didn't segue very well into that sentence, so I'm really not sure what you meant, but if you meant "SourceForge should get signed up for this somehow", then that's the first thing I thought of when I read the post.
Every SourceForge email I get to my Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] account ends up in my Bulk folder, and every time, I click the "Not Spam" button on it, but to no avail. Apparently some people think it's just easier to make email they signed up for go away by marking it as spam than by unsubscribing from the service, to the detriment of the other users of that service.
I don't know if Hotmail+SourceForge users are affected by this, but regardless, there are doubtless a lot of legitimate services that are pigeonholed because a sufficient percentage of users are misevaluating the emails from those services. It would be unfortunate if some totally non-marketing companies/orgs had to pay to make sure this didn't happen, and it still wouldn't help my old prof, meesh, who likes to send mass e-mails to all her old students, putting their names in the Bcc: field so that they don't get a 10k message with 8k of addresses and 2k of content (no explicit To: field? Must be spam!) but it would be better than nothing.
Your response depends on a particular interpretation of the term "Chinese Languages". Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Gan are examples of dialects of Chinese, which can all be written with the same character set because the grammar and vocabulary are nearly identical.
But if you read "Chinese languages" as "languages spoken in China", things get interesting. Uighur, Evenki, Bouyei, and Tibetan are all non-Chinese languages spoken mainly in China, which can't even remotely be written with the Chinese character set.
An earlier poster posted about political obstacles to Microsoft localizing their software in minority languages in certain countries, giving Catalunya in Spain as his example. M$ did ultimately produce a Catalan version of their software, because the existence of a good OpenOffice.org Catalan localization, and also in part, I would argue, because, there are limits to how much Spain, a Western, democratic country, can do to prevent something like this.
Compare that to China, however, which has shown the willingness to ban Disney in its entirety if Disney went ahead with plans to broadcast a documentary on Tibet that mentioned that a lot of Tibetans aren't completely happy with the arrangement they have with the Chinese (which arrangement could be described as "AYBABTU"). If Microsoft developers were seen trying to work with Tibetans to make something that would promote Tibetan interests by helping them communicate in their own language (and they might think it worthwhile, with more than 1 million speakers and potential users), China would have a shitfit and take some serious action against Microsoft.
No, I guess I didn't look at the site in question (which was, nevertheless, army.com). So substitute "the maintainers of army.com" for "Army" in my post, and then bitch at the parent of my other post.
Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU PHP/3.0.18 on Linux is the answer.
So someone was probably in the distortion field you mentioned -- though the Army could have switched between then and now, and if it was switching from OS X, going to Linux wouldn't have been hard.
At the time of this writing, the single search result from clicking on that link is... the parent of that post!
I must say they indexed that page pretty damned quick. I almost wonder if someone at MSN is having fun with this comment page, and thought, "Man, I gotta get that page indexed so we can all have a good laugh."
Astro also comes from Greek. The difference is "astro-" means "star", while "cosmo-" means "space/universe". Since the earliest astronauts didn't go to other stars (come to think of it, neither have any others since), the word "cosmonaut" would probably have been a better choice; in addition, we wouldn't have this silly policy that gives two people two different names for the same job based on the nationality of said person (unless the Russians had decided they wanted to use a different word from that the USians were using).
He is firm on proprietary software; he won't use anything that doesn't given him the freedoms he considers important. But the GPL is designed not merely to provide those freedoms, but to aid in getting those freedoms to other works.
And again, this does not mean he condemns the use of software that is not GPL-compatible or copyleft; check out the FSF listings of GPL-incompatible Free Software licenses. In the comments of many of these, the Apache 1.1 License, for example, they say things like "We urge you not to use the Apache licenses for software you write. However, there is no reason to avoid running programs that have been released under this license, such as Apache."
You're the first poster I've seen mention what I consider the major drawback to running Linux on a PPC versus on an x86: NO COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE. No Flash player. No Real Player. No Yahoo Messenger (yes, there's Gaim, but it doesn't do things like file transfer, last I checked, while the official Yahoo messenger presumably does). JDK is still at 1.3.1 (or at least, later versions from Gentoo won't install on my box); that's sort of a commercial software problem.
Flash is really the big one. Yeah, sometimes it's nice to be able to have a nice, quiet page instead of all these blinky, well, flashy ads, but there's some great stuff out there for flash -- Lonely Astronaut, Homestar Runner, etc. -- which I'm missing out on. Or, not missing out on, if I feel like rebooting to OS X (haven't been able to get MOL to see the network).
Mod parent up! First thing I did when I reached the comment page was to search for "dildo".
I'm going to add credibility (and risk losing karma) by not posting anonymously. This is a serious proposal. Besides, you know the dildo makers are going to jump on this.
[This space reserved for jokes involving the phrase "jump on this"]
Yes, but if the WWF can pull it off, so can we. Besides, in six months you'll forget there ever was any other name.
So they'll be able to get Spolsky to say something really nice about Firefox like he already did for Firebird? I imagine that if Joel on Software readers forget it was ever called Firebird, it will be because they forgot Joel endorsed it.
I strongly suspect that Firebird usership has creeped past the usual hardcore anti-Microsoft AND looking-for-the-bleeding-edge technologists, out to a larger slice of the general populace that might not be so patient with all these name changes, and who might be more inclined to try something if someone famous says it's good.
As a footnote, I do expect Gentoo to come in the lead of the Linux distros having tried them all and found it the fastest in empircal testing.
Even more so if the Gentoo people manage to compile their stuff with the Intel compiler. Everyone I've talked to says they see speedups of around 100% when apps are compiled with that thing.
I don't know, however, if it's possible to emerge Gentoo apps with icc instead of gcc. I'm using Gentoo on PPC, so it'd be hard for me to test:-).
I guess you're right. My Dad called me up one day and told me he had visited a site and found out it needed a "plugin". He went looking for "plugins", and had so much trouble figuring out whether one plugin was just as good as another, as well as installing the plugin or plugins he had gotten for free, that he actually bought a plugin. Because this was all done while I was out of the room (well, I live in another state), I don't know what plugin that was, but I feel fairly sure it was Real.
I told him (after the fact) that he should probably never have to buy a plugin for ordinary Web usage, but there you have it.
I have a sneaking suspicion this was some kind of joke either about corrupted video streams or the parent poster's run-on, difficult- (but-not-that-difficult-) to-understand post.
To me it doesn't say anything about what distros people are or are not using. How do all these servers without distro names tell you everyone's leaving Red Hat? Is Red Hat the one where you can't change the info broadcast by the web server?
you have an army of users literally chomping at the bit
Man, post links to some pictures of these users! I guess you were speaking figuratively when you said "army", though, which is too bad, because an army of users chomping at the bit would be double cool!
Gosh, I don't know. The Israeli gov't accounts for 4% of MS Israel's business. That's just MS Israel. And we're just talking about the Finance Ministry, which is just a part of the Gov't. I think this is tangible movement, but I wouldn't call it snowballing.
FLOSS has for several years been "about to hit it big", but every time I see a report on OpenOffice.org or StarOffice, it's "it works pretty well, but MS Word sometimes has problems opening its documents... nice effort, but I'll stick with my M$, thanks", and similar for GNU/Linux. Yes, more media outlets have been reporting on it -- instead of saying "Linux? What's that?" the public are now saying "Linux? Why bother?"
Oh, and the parent poster said "at least", not "at last". FWIW:-)
The NECPowerMate Eco is an environmentally friendly desktop PC. Principal among its features is its very low power consumption. This would give you some (though not all) of the advantages of a desktop computer with the power consumption of a laptop.
Or buy an Apple; they're relatively efficient as well.
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"cromulent"... there's another word I never heard before I came to Springfield.
"affordable" internet access in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?! *ROTFL*
Internet access in North Korea is restricted to a handful of carefully selected government officials as an intelligence gathering tool. Most of the rest of them have probably never even heard of it.
Matter of fact, I think you may have the most shut out and the most connected countries in the planet, both on that peninsula. Burma's a possible competitor for the bottom, though.
Wow, you must have found the real internet cafes. When I was there (2000), I went to "PC bangs". I don't recall any of them serving food, and I got a bit of a culture shock reading the signs that said, in Korean, "minors are forbidden to smoke", and breathing the smoke produced by all the presumed non-minors. But they were all 1,000 won an hour, which was (still is) in the neighborhood of $1.
Actually, one place I went into was $1.25 or $1.50. At first I balked at paying higher than I had gotten used to. Then I realized I was whining about less than a dollar, and I paid.
Gotta add that word to my dictionary!
Mod up. "Open source" in theory means it can be compiled on Linux on any architecture, but a quick look through some of the pages didn't turn up any info on how to go about compiling it for yourself, let alone explicit consideration of Linux on other architectures.
Also no mention of how it plays Flash files. Does it work as a front end for (the proprietary) MM Flash Player, or does it include its own open-source implementation for the SWF format? This is the major thing I've been missing since switching to Linux on PPC; if there were now a working OS SWF player, that would be awesome.
I'm afraid you didn't segue very well into that sentence, so I'm really not sure what you meant, but if you meant "SourceForge should get signed up for this somehow", then that's the first thing I thought of when I read the post.
Every SourceForge email I get to my Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] account ends up in my Bulk folder, and every time, I click the "Not Spam" button on it, but to no avail. Apparently some people think it's just easier to make email they signed up for go away by marking it as spam than by unsubscribing from the service, to the detriment of the other users of that service.
I don't know if Hotmail+SourceForge users are affected by this, but regardless, there are doubtless a lot of legitimate services that are pigeonholed because a sufficient percentage of users are misevaluating the emails from those services. It would be unfortunate if some totally non-marketing companies/orgs had to pay to make sure this didn't happen, and it still wouldn't help my old prof, meesh, who likes to send mass e-mails to all her old students, putting their names in the Bcc: field so that they don't get a 10k message with 8k of addresses and 2k of content (no explicit To: field? Must be spam!) but it would be better than nothing.
But the sink itself is ROTFLIAO!
Your response depends on a particular interpretation of the term "Chinese Languages". Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Gan are examples of dialects of Chinese, which can all be written with the same character set because the grammar and vocabulary are nearly identical.
But if you read "Chinese languages" as "languages spoken in China", things get interesting. Uighur, Evenki, Bouyei, and Tibetan are all non-Chinese languages spoken mainly in China, which can't even remotely be written with the Chinese character set.
An earlier poster posted about political obstacles to Microsoft localizing their software in minority languages in certain countries, giving Catalunya in Spain as his example. M$ did ultimately produce a Catalan version of their software, because the existence of a good OpenOffice.org Catalan localization, and also in part, I would argue, because, there are limits to how much Spain, a Western, democratic country, can do to prevent something like this.
Compare that to China, however, which has shown the willingness to ban Disney in its entirety if Disney went ahead with plans to broadcast a documentary on Tibet that mentioned that a lot of Tibetans aren't completely happy with the arrangement they have with the Chinese (which arrangement could be described as "AYBABTU"). If Microsoft developers were seen trying to work with Tibetans to make something that would promote Tibetan interests by helping them communicate in their own language (and they might think it worthwhile, with more than 1 million speakers and potential users), China would have a shitfit and take some serious action against Microsoft.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=army.com is what to do to learn the answer to that question, and
Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU PHP/3.0.18 on Linux is the answer.
So someone was probably in the distortion field you mentioned -- though the Army could have switched between then and now, and if it was switching from OS X, going to Linux wouldn't have been hard.
At the time of this writing, the single search result from clicking on that link is... the parent of that post!
I must say they indexed that page pretty damned quick. I almost wonder if someone at MSN is having fun with this comment page, and thought, "Man, I gotta get that page indexed so we can all have a good laugh."
For those who missed it, the parent put a space between "XFree" and "86". Indeed, it does work, and returns about 3525 results.
Astro also comes from Greek. The difference is "astro-" means "star", while "cosmo-" means "space/universe". Since the earliest astronauts didn't go to other stars (come to think of it, neither have any others since), the word "cosmonaut" would probably have been a better choice; in addition, we wouldn't have this silly policy that gives two people two different names for the same job based on the nationality of said person (unless the Russians had decided they wanted to use a different word from that the USians were using).
You're the first poster I've seen mention what I consider the major drawback to running Linux on a PPC versus on an x86: NO COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE. No Flash player. No Real Player. No Yahoo Messenger (yes, there's Gaim, but it doesn't do things like file transfer, last I checked, while the official Yahoo messenger presumably does). JDK is still at 1.3.1 (or at least, later versions from Gentoo won't install on my box); that's sort of a commercial software problem.
Flash is really the big one. Yeah, sometimes it's nice to be able to have a nice, quiet page instead of all these blinky, well, flashy ads, but there's some great stuff out there for flash -- Lonely Astronaut, Homestar Runner, etc. -- which I'm missing out on. Or, not missing out on, if I feel like rebooting to OS X (haven't been able to get MOL to see the network).
Mod parent up! First thing I did when I reached the comment page was to search for "dildo".
I'm going to add credibility (and risk losing karma) by not posting anonymously. This is a serious proposal. Besides, you know the dildo makers are going to jump on this.
[This space reserved for jokes involving the phrase "jump on this"]
Won't this confuse people?
Yes, but if the WWF can pull it off, so can we. Besides, in six months you'll forget there ever was any other name.
So they'll be able to get Spolsky to say something really nice about Firefox like he already did for Firebird? I imagine that if Joel on Software readers forget it was ever called Firebird, it will be because they forgot Joel endorsed it.
I strongly suspect that Firebird usership has creeped past the usual hardcore anti-Microsoft AND looking-for-the-bleeding-edge technologists, out to a larger slice of the general populace that might not be so patient with all these name changes, and who might be more inclined to try something if someone famous says it's good.
Even more so if the Gentoo people manage to compile their stuff with the Intel compiler. Everyone I've talked to says they see speedups of around 100% when apps are compiled with that thing.
I don't know, however, if it's possible to emerge Gentoo apps with icc instead of gcc. I'm using Gentoo on PPC, so it'd be hard for me to test
I guess you're right. My Dad called me up one day and told me he had visited a site and found out it needed a "plugin". He went looking for "plugins", and had so much trouble figuring out whether one plugin was just as good as another, as well as installing the plugin or plugins he had gotten for free, that he actually bought a plugin. Because this was all done while I was out of the room (well, I live in another state), I don't know what plugin that was, but I feel fairly sure it was Real.
I told him (after the fact) that he should probably never have to buy a plugin for ordinary Web usage, but there you have it.
I have a sneaking suspicion this was some kind of joke either about corrupted video streams or the parent poster's run-on, difficult- (but-not-that-difficult-) to-understand post.
Dammit, me too! If a woman seems interested in me, I start thinking, "OK, what's wrong with her?" Doesn't happen that often, though.
To me it doesn't say anything about what distros people are or are not using. How do all these servers without distro names tell you everyone's leaving Red Hat? Is Red Hat the one where you can't change the info broadcast by the web server?
you have an army of users literally chomping at the bit
Man, post links to some pictures of these users! I guess you were speaking figuratively when you said "army", though, which is too bad, because an army of users chomping at the bit would be double cool!
Gosh, I don't know. The Israeli gov't accounts for 4% of MS Israel's business. That's just MS Israel. And we're just talking about the Finance Ministry, which is just a part of the Gov't. I think this is tangible movement, but I wouldn't call it snowballing.
:-)
FLOSS has for several years been "about to hit it big", but every time I see a report on OpenOffice.org or StarOffice, it's "it works pretty well, but MS Word sometimes has problems opening its documents... nice effort, but I'll stick with my M$, thanks", and similar for GNU/Linux. Yes, more media outlets have been reporting on it -- instead of saying "Linux? What's that?" the public are now saying "Linux? Why bother?"
Oh, and the parent poster said "at least", not "at last". FWIW
The NEC PowerMate Eco is an environmentally friendly desktop PC. Principal among its features is its very low power consumption. This would give you some (though not all) of the advantages of a desktop computer with the power consumption of a laptop.
Or buy an Apple; they're relatively efficient as well.