Actually, I was forgetting that I was talking about AT&T. However, that is the point I was trying to make, and I'm glad that it got across despite myerror. Thanks.
Fine, it's disinformation. Languages with thousands of users: Cunieform and Hieroglyphic Egyptian are used by thousands of scholars; Coptic, which is being reencoded, is used by the Coptic church, etc., etc. And yes, I know Chinese isn't a closed system: but the current repertoire of Chinese at any point in time is a closed system, while the future repertoire is unbounded only on one side (the repertoire of Chinese can only increase, never decrease, even though the repertoire of one user community might decrease).
The IP on Linux the kernel isn't owned by SCO, it's owned by Linus Torvalds and the contributing developers to the Linux kernel as licensed under the GPL. SCO's license doesn't cover what Sun can do with the GPL. So unless they are saying that SCO's license to Sun permits Sun to add SCO code to Linux and release that code under the GPL, Sun would have to release the product with SCO code in it under a different license, which Linux won't allow. Now if it is true that SCO's license to Sun makes it ok for them to add SCO code to Linux and rerelease under the GPL, then that code is GPLed the moment Sun releases it and anyone - including IBM - can use it. So either SCO gave away the store to Sun, or Sun - or the author of the piece - is confused about what is and isn't Linux and what the GPL stands for.
Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, also said that a broad software-license deal struck with AT&T in the late 1990s allowed the company to inject whatever code it wanted into the Linux kernel. Schwartz pledged to indemnify its customers against any lawsuits by the SCO Group or another supplier.
I'm hoping that the author of the piece confused Linux and UNIX, and not Jonathan Schwartz, as I don't see how a deal struck with AT&T could be relevant to Linux, which isn't AT&T's IP.
I'm also wondering what form the "indemnifying" would take. Maybe just a guarantee that if Mad Hatter licenses are invalidated by the SCO lawsuit, Sun will provide an alternative UNIX operating system?
Which makes me wonder... SCO keeps claiming (hard to keep track of, because their goal posts move frequently) that the infringing code CANT be taken out. So I suspect they will make claims against 2.2 as well.
This is why I asked. If the infringing code came in in 2.4, then 2.2-based systems should be clean. If it came in before then, then when? By whom?
I'm doing that. Use OS X with the Unicode precomposed settings, Lucida Grande, and TextEdit. You won't be able to do it properly with Word. Post an address where I can email you and I'll send you information (I don't want my email address or website on Slashdot).
UTF-16 encodes all the characters in Unicode. You're thinking of the Basic Multilingual Plane. And no, the BMP is not enough. For instance, Mycenaean scholars (and there are thousands of them) need the encoding of Linear B to create electronic editions of their texts. And Chinese speakers (and there are over a billion of them) need the extra space for rarer words, etc.
The second paragraph here is FUD. There are plenty of languages with thousands of users that aren't encoded in Unicode yet - not because there is no demand, but because the process of reducing them to an encoding is more complex than with alphabetic and syllabic scripts. Indeed, one could not say that Chinese is yet fully encoded.
There's a long section in the Economist about two weeks ago on the Central Asian Republics with one article that talks about the politics of water there. The Aral Sea is drying up because the irrigations systems of the countries along the rivers that feed it are horrendously inefficient, and because the water system as a whole in the region is poorly managed. Unfortunately, with one megalomaniacal ruler in Turkmenistan, and a whole host of other political solipsists in the region, this isn't likely to change in the near future.
David Packard is also the primary sponsor of the Packard Humanities Institute, which is involved in computerizing classical Roman texts, and is I suspect a sponsor of the TLG, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
All of your other comments show real knowledge of Linear A and Linear B. [That's a compliment.] Also, the Maurice Pope book is highly recommended.
Linear B is about as good at representing Greek as katakana is at representing English. Like katakana, Linear B is a consonant+vowel syllabary; like English, Greek has a large repertoire of consonant clusters. Sometimes double consonants are treated as they are in katakana, by representing say tro- as to-ro- , sometimes they are left out (especially trailing sigmas). Also, there are Greek consonants that are poorly represented in Linear B: there's even the fact that the signs for r*- are used for l*- in common! Linear B also doesn't represent the aspirations: so th*- (which in ancient Greek is translated as t'h, not as it is later as an eth) becomes t*-.
This does not, by the way, mean that the language behind Linear A is related to Japanese! But I'm sure I could make an argument that would convince the members of a USENET newsgroup that it is, based on the tiny amount of evidence provided here: and the fact that Japan is so far away from Crete wouldn't be an objection, as many scholars think that Japanese is related to the Uralic-Altaic languages, and Turkish, which is spoken on the shores of the Aegean today and until the 19th century was widely spoken in Crete, is a Uralic-Altaic language. (The giant gaping holes in the argument are obvious to anyone who knows a little history, e.g., knows that the Turks and other Altaic peoples only came into the area in the Middle Ages - Scythian was probably an Indo-European language - that writing systems are transmitted wholly independently of languages, etc. The point in the beginning was to show that Linear B shows all the features of a writing system for one language adopted for another or others, as katakana is a writing system based upon Japanese phonology but used for non-Japanese languages, but I wanted to also show how easy it is to come up with what sounds superficially like a good linguistic argument to laymen who don't have a background in historical linguistics).
Misread the nesting in the emails, that's true. So you're right that "Agamemnon" cannot be taken to represent views typical of those who accept Fauconau's view. However, the original comment stands, that a decryption of a single text is very unlikely. I've read other decryptions that claimed it to be Greek. They all fall apart. So permit me to be skeptical, as someone with a degree in the subject (and not in the reading of tightly nested USENET arguments), of the claims that Fauconau's work represent a decipherment.
Nope, not yet. Egyptian hieroglyphic is a very complex writing system, and the scholarship simply isn't ready to deal with Unicode encoding. Assyrian and Sumerian Cuneiform are in the same boat (the cuneiform syllabaries, like Old Persian, are much easier to deal with). They're making a great deal of progress, though, and eventually you'll see Egyptian Hieroglyphic joining the currently encoded "dead" scripts. See the roadmap at http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/
Yes, though buried in the previous poster's comment, there is a truth. The generation after Henry saw sudden shifts of power back and forth between Catholics and Protestants: from Edward, to Mary, to Elizabeth (bypassing the whole Jane Grey issue for the moment). Elizabeth faced a big Catholic coup attempt. Even in the time of James' grandson James II, who was Catholic, there was always the possibility that the English church might be forced back by a Catholic monarch or some kind of coup - but William of Orange was brought in and a bloodless coup (the "Glorious Revolution") assured the status of the Church of England from then on. So the KJV was definitely part of a strenuous effort on James's part to maintain a separate, Protestant CoE.
From what I see from the link provided, Faucounau's "plausible approach" has nothing to recommend it as scholarship. Maybe the book itself is better, but I've read enough "plausible approaches" to the Phaistos disk to be skeptical of any attempt to decipher a single-text script.
One of the big proponents on the net of Faucounau's work (according to the link provided) is a fellow named Grapheus, whose scholarship is best illustrated by the following:
All the Olympian Gods including Poseidon and Dionysus have been identified
in Greek Linear B inscriptions and the original kings whose ancestor cults
their worship was based on have been identified in Greek Linear A
inscriptions which corroborate the accounts of Diodorus and other Greek
historians as to when and where they ruled.
Linear A is not Greek. It's undeciphered. The rest of this comment is equally ill-informed. Noone takes this kind of Euhermistic approach to Greek mythology seriously, except maybe the lunatic fringe.
Comparing this to Ventris's decipherment of Linear B is like comparing a script kiddie hack to BSD.
Try telling that to a manager. Just try it. Or, if you wish, I can tell you what the response will be - in the absolute best case scenario, perfect world utopia, you will get a blank stare. From there it is all downhill.
Exactly. When I was doing web design, for one customer I designed a beautiful, XHTML Strict site with incredibly low bandwidth requirements. The customer didn't think it was "snazzy" enough, and eventually had a graphic designer do a page design that was so agonizingly slow that I can't imagine anyone ever actually waited for an entire page to load.
Because they're users. The average user doesn't understand a listserv command, and just sends a message "Hey, could somebody unsubscribe me from this list?" to the posting (and not the request) address.
1. Don't blame the developers for what marketing told them to do.
2. I doubt that there were that many developers required to change a preference setting (to kill popups) and add an AOL icon. These are mostly Mozilla developers.
15% or more of our employees use Netscape as their default browser. Most are afraid to use Mozilla because it's perceived as beta software (they're not very computer-savvy). I had to push-upgrade them all to 7 from 4.7 because they wanted to stay at 4.7
What indications led you to believe that film was supposed to be an art?
I dunno, probably the intensity of the steps scene in Eisenstien's Potemkin, the sublimity of Kelvin's final vision of Earth in Tarkovsky's Solaris, Wender's angels watching over a divided Berlin in Wings of Desire . . ..
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I was forgetting that I was talking about AT&T. However, that is the point I was trying to make, and I'm glad that it got across despite myerror. Thanks.
Fine, it's disinformation. Languages with thousands of users: Cunieform and Hieroglyphic Egyptian are used by thousands of scholars; Coptic, which is being reencoded, is used by the Coptic church, etc., etc. And yes, I know Chinese isn't a closed system: but the current repertoire of Chinese at any point in time is a closed system, while the future repertoire is unbounded only on one side (the repertoire of Chinese can only increase, never decrease, even though the repertoire of one user community might decrease).
but I don't get what your objection is.
The IP on Linux the kernel isn't owned by SCO, it's owned by Linus Torvalds and the contributing developers to the Linux kernel as licensed under the GPL. SCO's license doesn't cover what Sun can do with the GPL. So unless they are saying that SCO's license to Sun permits Sun to add SCO code to Linux and release that code under the GPL, Sun would have to release the product with SCO code in it under a different license, which Linux won't allow. Now if it is true that SCO's license to Sun makes it ok for them to add SCO code to Linux and rerelease under the GPL, then that code is GPLed the moment Sun releases it and anyone - including IBM - can use it. So either SCO gave away the store to Sun, or Sun - or the author of the piece - is confused about what is and isn't Linux and what the GPL stands for.
Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, also said that a broad software-license deal struck with AT&T in the late 1990s allowed the company to inject whatever code it wanted into the Linux kernel. Schwartz pledged to indemnify its customers against any lawsuits by the SCO Group or another supplier.
I'm hoping that the author of the piece confused Linux and UNIX, and not Jonathan Schwartz, as I don't see how a deal struck with AT&T could be relevant to Linux, which isn't AT&T's IP.
I'm also wondering what form the "indemnifying" would take. Maybe just a guarantee that if Mad Hatter licenses are invalidated by the SCO lawsuit, Sun will provide an alternative UNIX operating system?
Neither. I'd rather that those who read my website not realize I'm slumming on Slashdot. :-)
Which makes me wonder... SCO keeps claiming (hard to keep track of, because their goal posts move frequently) that the infringing code CANT be taken out. So I suspect they will make claims against 2.2 as well.
This is why I asked. If the infringing code came in in 2.4, then 2.2-based systems should be clean. If it came in before then, then when? By whom?
Are they only talking about Linux 2.4? If so, is there a reason for that?
Spielberg Katzenberg Geffen (as in David Geffen, the record company exec).
I'm doing that. Use OS X with the Unicode precomposed settings, Lucida Grande, and TextEdit. You won't be able to do it properly with Word. Post an address where I can email you and I'll send you information (I don't want my email address or website on Slashdot).
UTF-16 encodes all the characters in Unicode. You're thinking of the Basic Multilingual Plane. And no, the BMP is not enough. For instance, Mycenaean scholars (and there are thousands of them) need the encoding of Linear B to create electronic editions of their texts. And Chinese speakers (and there are over a billion of them) need the extra space for rarer words, etc.
The second paragraph here is FUD. There are plenty of languages with thousands of users that aren't encoded in Unicode yet - not because there is no demand, but because the process of reducing them to an encoding is more complex than with alphabetic and syllabic scripts. Indeed, one could not say that Chinese is yet fully encoded.
Yes, slashdot does have a particular endianness - based upon whatever the base encoding of the database is.
There's a long section in the Economist about two weeks ago on the Central Asian Republics with one article that talks about the politics of water there. The Aral Sea is drying up because the irrigations systems of the countries along the rivers that feed it are horrendously inefficient, and because the water system as a whole in the region is poorly managed. Unfortunately, with one megalomaniacal ruler in Turkmenistan, and a whole host of other political solipsists in the region, this isn't likely to change in the near future.
David Packard is also the primary sponsor of the Packard Humanities Institute, which is involved in computerizing classical Roman texts, and is I suspect a sponsor of the TLG, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
All of your other comments show real knowledge of Linear A and Linear B. [That's a compliment.] Also, the Maurice Pope book is highly recommended.
Linear B is about as good at representing Greek as katakana is at representing English. Like katakana, Linear B is a consonant+vowel syllabary; like English, Greek has a large repertoire of consonant clusters. Sometimes double consonants are treated as they are in katakana, by representing say tro- as to-ro- , sometimes they are left out (especially trailing sigmas). Also, there are Greek consonants that are poorly represented in Linear B: there's even the fact that the signs for r*- are used for l*- in common! Linear B also doesn't represent the aspirations: so th*- (which in ancient Greek is translated as t'h, not as it is later as an eth) becomes t*-.
This does not, by the way, mean that the language behind Linear A is related to Japanese! But I'm sure I could make an argument that would convince the members of a USENET newsgroup that it is, based on the tiny amount of evidence provided here: and the fact that Japan is so far away from Crete wouldn't be an objection, as many scholars think that Japanese is related to the Uralic-Altaic languages, and Turkish, which is spoken on the shores of the Aegean today and until the 19th century was widely spoken in Crete, is a Uralic-Altaic language. (The giant gaping holes in the argument are obvious to anyone who knows a little history, e.g., knows that the Turks and other Altaic peoples only came into the area in the Middle Ages - Scythian was probably an Indo-European language - that writing systems are transmitted wholly independently of languages, etc. The point in the beginning was to show that Linear B shows all the features of a writing system for one language adopted for another or others, as katakana is a writing system based upon Japanese phonology but used for non-Japanese languages, but I wanted to also show how easy it is to come up with what sounds superficially like a good linguistic argument to laymen who don't have a background in historical linguistics).
Misread the nesting in the emails, that's true. So you're right that "Agamemnon" cannot be taken to represent views typical of those who accept Fauconau's view. However, the original comment stands, that a decryption of a single text is very unlikely. I've read other decryptions that claimed it to be Greek. They all fall apart. So permit me to be skeptical, as someone with a degree in the subject (and not in the reading of tightly nested USENET arguments), of the claims that Fauconau's work represent a decipherment.
Nope, not yet. Egyptian hieroglyphic is a very complex writing system, and the scholarship simply isn't ready to deal with Unicode encoding. Assyrian and Sumerian Cuneiform are in the same boat (the cuneiform syllabaries, like Old Persian, are much easier to deal with). They're making a great deal of progress, though, and eventually you'll see Egyptian Hieroglyphic joining the currently encoded "dead" scripts. See the roadmap at http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/
Yes, though buried in the previous poster's comment, there is a truth. The generation after Henry saw sudden shifts of power back and forth between Catholics and Protestants: from Edward, to Mary, to Elizabeth (bypassing the whole Jane Grey issue for the moment). Elizabeth faced a big Catholic coup attempt. Even in the time of James' grandson James II, who was Catholic, there was always the possibility that the English church might be forced back by a Catholic monarch or some kind of coup - but William of Orange was brought in and a bloodless coup (the "Glorious Revolution") assured the status of the Church of England from then on. So the KJV was definitely part of a strenuous effort on James's part to maintain a separate, Protestant CoE.
From what I see from the link provided, Faucounau's "plausible approach" has nothing to recommend it as scholarship. Maybe the book itself is better, but I've read enough "plausible approaches" to the Phaistos disk to be skeptical of any attempt to decipher a single-text script.
One of the big proponents on the net of Faucounau's work (according to the link provided) is a fellow named Grapheus, whose scholarship is best illustrated by the following:
All the Olympian Gods including Poseidon and Dionysus have been identified in Greek Linear B inscriptions and the original kings whose ancestor cults their worship was based on have been identified in Greek Linear A inscriptions which corroborate the accounts of Diodorus and other Greek historians as to when and where they ruled.
Linear A is not Greek. It's undeciphered. The rest of this comment is equally ill-informed. Noone takes this kind of Euhermistic approach to Greek mythology seriously, except maybe the lunatic fringe.
Comparing this to Ventris's decipherment of Linear B is like comparing a script kiddie hack to BSD.
It also has nothing to do with the RIAA. The spectrum is much more closely regulated in the UK than it is here. That's all there is to it.
Try telling that to a manager. Just try it. Or, if you wish, I can tell you what the response will be - in the absolute best case scenario, perfect world utopia, you will get a blank stare. From there it is all downhill.
Exactly. When I was doing web design, for one customer I designed a beautiful, XHTML Strict site with incredibly low bandwidth requirements. The customer didn't think it was "snazzy" enough, and eventually had a graphic designer do a page design that was so agonizingly slow that I can't imagine anyone ever actually waited for an entire page to load.
Because they're users. The average user doesn't understand a listserv command, and just sends a message "Hey, could somebody unsubscribe me from this list?" to the posting (and not the request) address.
1. Don't blame the developers for what marketing told them to do.
2. I doubt that there were that many developers required to change a preference setting (to kill popups) and add an AOL icon. These are mostly Mozilla developers.
15% or more of our employees use Netscape as their default browser. Most are afraid to use Mozilla because it's perceived as beta software (they're not very computer-savvy). I had to push-upgrade them all to 7 from 4.7 because they wanted to stay at 4.7
What indications led you to believe that film was supposed to be an art?
I dunno, probably the intensity of the steps scene in Eisenstien's Potemkin, the sublimity of Kelvin's final vision of Earth in Tarkovsky's Solaris, Wender's angels watching over a divided Berlin in Wings of Desire . . . .
Word doesn't do this itself, though; it needs EndNote to do it. What we need is an OO EndNote replacement. Desperately.