We will not discuss the Cirth, the angular letters seen in the inscription on Balin's tomb. The Cirth are also called runes, while Tengwar is translated as "letters".
I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?
If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 (here as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).
(/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)
I believe MS gives those freebies to counter the reach of the OSS/Software Libre movement in universities.
For instance, I was initiated into Linux, Emacs etc because a certain programming course required it;the lecturer developed a grade-tracking software, and didn't want to port that to Windows, so all our labs were done in Linux. We learnt all those Emacs keyboard tricks from seniors in the span of a week (before we discovered what the Vi versus Emacs flame was all about).
So yes, at least in the bigger, older universities, Linux/Unix is already an established thing with full community participation.
The 2001 Census data has information on Houses, Household Amenities and Assets in India and has very interesting findings. It seems there are some 2.4 million places of worship in the country, as against 1.5 million schools and colleges and a mere 600,000 hospitals and dispensaries. No wonder there is so much unnecessary religious strife.
My ancestral village has 121 (Hindu) temples, 3 (Muslim) mosques, one (Christian) church, and five ancient Buddhist sites, in addition to about 10 or so secondary schools, two junior colleges, and, I believe, a recently set-up engineering college. There's a government health center somewhere, in addition to a couple (may be 5 or 6) privately-run hospitals and dispensaries. And yeah, there's one police station with three constables and one Sub-Inspector.
No, we never had riots as far as anyone can remember.
Before you read the 2001 Census Report, or that shiny worthless rag, India Today, may I point out to a more useful site on logical fallacies? In particular, you'll note the similarity between your implied reasoning ("India has more religious structures than schools or hospitals. It also has a lot of religious strife. Therefore, the large number of religious structures causes strife.") and a logical fallacy called coincidental correlation.
By way of proof, I recommend Ashish Nandy's excellent tome, Exiled At Home, to really understand communal strife in India. Here's a short thesis:- 'Communal' riots are among the most secular phenomena in modern India. They have more to do with oppurtunistic politicians (of all religions, obviously), and a police force badly in need of reform, rather than heightened religiosity, or even, that Great Indian Distraction, Ayodhya.
Video-conferencing for education, which is what's really mentioned in the article, has taken off in a big way in this part of the world. MIT offers webcast lectures to graduate students in Singapore, just as Eidenhoven, Georgia Tech and others do. Carnegie Mellon also has a similar programme in India.
The Indian President, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, was a tenured lecturer at the Anna University before getting elected as a President; I remember reading somewhere that he still gives lectures to students in Madras through video-conferencing.
There was an earlier case where, again, Dr Kalam apparently got doctors in Hyderabad to consult, check and finally operate on an eight-year-old kid in Agartala with a heart problem. (They, of course, flew the doctors in for the operation).
That said, I know many doctors back in India, many of them in the hospital that did the actual surgery, and most of them don't quite believe that video-conferencing will revolutionise their work. Just doesn't happen; the doctors I met love the technology, but they really would like to meet their patients f2f.
A better question, then, would be "How effective is video-conferencing for medical consultations and education?". Your poser will, rightly I might add, draw emotional responses on nations ("Hey, India has the world's biggest graduate population!", or something like that), rather than sane responses effective use of technology, which, IMHO, is the real question here.
Seriously though, there's a lot of hype about Indian tech, some of it is plain stupid. You're right; doesn't help one bit by the fact that most people here are geeks, and geeks by nature are baggard about themselves.
Indeed, if we go all electronic, it's an Indian, or at the best, a sociological achievement; the world's largest administrative exercise has finally discovered 20 year old technology. Nothing more, nothing less.
Interesting most posters here think you are American;-), but the short answer is that India is a very big country. Like I said earlier, we're one-sixth of all humanity.
Which is to say, that those country-wide stats often give a very skewed picture; for instance, the state I was born, Kerala, has 100% literacy, and health-levels that match European standards. And yet, as a country, we rank 127 on the UN Development scale, primarily because of bad literacy levels in the North and in the tribal belt in the centre.
Then again, this is not quite bleeding edge technology; as I pointed out earlier, the voting machines are at least a generation old.
As someone who is studying technology deployment in India, I disagree.
Back in India, we face the same problems as any other democracy; heck, I'll argue that we face more lobbyists and well-entrenched groups than you Americans do. The ongoing 'debate' over the tax reform is a perfect example; the central government has been trying to move all the 25 states into a uniform VAT zone for the last 8 or so years without any succcess. Grapevine has it that a solution is possible only in 2005, well after the next round of general elections. We are, after all, one-sixth of all humanity; there's bound to be someone somewhere who doesn't like something for some reason.
The electronic voting machines also had significant problems in deployment; if I remember correctly, they were developed way back in the 80's itself, at the (government-owned) Electronic Corporation of India Ltd (the products webpage doesn't mention voting machines, so I could be wrong on the company) There were just too many groups resisting technology; as followers of Indian politics will note, elections in the 80's and 90's were invariably accompanied by booth-capturing, rigging and voter impersonation. Goondas (that's Indian English for the American 'rowdy') patronised by political parties would often take over polling booths, and stuff ballot papers in them. If you really wanted to vote on Election Day, you'd want to vote early in the day itself; not only to avoid the crowd, and violence if any, but also because someone else would have already voted under your name. And then, there'd be those political clashes, electoral violence, bomb blasts... an endless tyranny making a mockery of our constitutional values.
Obviously, the situation needed some strong action and, as I recall, the then Election Commissioner, Mr TN Seshan (who was and still is a sort of middle-class Indian hero), strongly asserted his Commission's independence from the government de jour, by the following measures:-
a)Paramilitary Forces:- Not many Indians realise this, but elections in India see the world's largest peacetime movement of troops. All elections these days, unless they are the sub-province-level Panchayat elections, are actually conducted by the federal paramilitary battalions, the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) etc, and not the state police, who report to the government of the day and, therefore, presumably are not to be trusted.[1]
b) Behavioural Changes:- For a month or so before the actual elections exercise, the Commission enforces a so-called "Model Code of Conduct" on all political parties; among other things, the contestants can't promise soft bribes for their constituents. Compliance is entirely voluntary; the Commission can't, for instance, pull someone up for breaking the Code, but then, which contestant in his right mind would want to be caught on the wrong side of his constituents' ire?
This was certainly the case between 1991 and 1995/6, until elections were announced in the teeny-weeny state of Goa, bringing us to step (c), technology.
c) Technology:- Only after the above two easy-sounding, but difficult-to-implement steps did the Election Commission turn to technology. Even there there has been significant backlash; as I recall, there were many states that were tardy in issuing voter ID's. And even in that, the voter ID's are technologically-minimal; they are basically laminated printouts of a voter's digital pic, his name, address, date of birth, and the EC's hologram.
The end result is a vastly improved electoral process. Booth capturing and rigging will now completely vanish, even if it's only because the goondas haven't as yet figured out how to crack the voting machine. And then, there are obvious questions as to the quality of the nincompoops we elect.
The point is on productivity and ease-of-coding. I've worked with both platforms now, and frankly, would prefer Java hands down, but I must admit that VB/VS.net makes things very easy for you.
That is, if you stick to coding only calls that have been documented.:-)
(The other complaint for me is the relative sizes of developer communities; out here, while there's always someone around offering help in Java, you have to persistently google to solve your.Net queries)
English is not a language... [because it]... is a large collection of idiomatic expressions that changes quite rapidly
Fair enough, English changes rapidly alright, but how would you define a language? A set of logical syntactic and semantic rules that haven't changed for the past few thousand years? I can think of only two languages like that, Latin and Sanskrit.
Nope, I can't agree with your assertion; language is much more than mere (unchanging) grammar. In many multi-cultural places, it is a strong factor for socio-political identities; throughout history, communities have fought against great powers to assert their linguistic identities.
Stop harping on Americans for being largely mono-lingual. "Why didn't the Romans learn the local languages when they controlled Europe? Because they didn't have to." If every state spoke a different language, which would be more akin to Europe, then there would be need.
Of course, like in other countries, most of these languages will probably end up as an anthropologist's museum specimens, but really, mono-lingualism of most educated Americans is not because you speak only English in the US. It's mostly because the numbers of other languages aren't quite there.
Which brings us to a very interesting conjecture; I'm no American, (nor have I visited the area in question, so I appreciate responses on this) but if I may hazard a guess, by 2030's, learning Spanish will be essential to live in most of south and south-western US. That is to say, I assert that the current pre-dominance of English in the US is only a historical accident, one that will change with shifting demographics.
Not quite. While Dr Och might not have popular American literature, the vast majority of published writings are still copyright unprotected, and can be easily harvested.
For instance, consider all the modded-up responses to this very story [to remove certain graphically-descriptive ASCII art that keeps popping up in -1 comments;-) ].
Not trying to troll here, but I really don't know why everyone seems to complicate a very simple thing. You are given a certain legal-sounding document (GPL, EULA etc) when you take (that is, download, buy, copy or otherwise grab a copy) of a certain piece of data (whether software, movie, music, book etc). If you break that, under existing law, you have done something illegal. As simple as that.
Now, I'll be the first person to admit that I have collected music and other stuff from Kazaa, Napster and other P2P networks, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm breaking the law, and the consequences of that might not be entirely positive.
Ha! My ZX Spectrum+ with 128KB of RAM can beat yours anytime!
Seriously, I still have my system, and occassionally open it up for old time's sake; was a pleasure working in a platform where most (all?) commercial software was available on audio tapes and more importantly (for/.-tters, at least), was mostly open source.
The Phonographic Association, or whatever you've got out there in the UK, has gone on record saying that it wont sue Kazaa users for now, but that it'll keep that option open for later.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no Tolkein expert, but can anyone tell me if "runes" here correspond to the actual, real world runes, that is, letters of the ancient Runic alphabet?
If they are, then typing them is no difficult feat, given that there are fonts available (as the page I linked to shows), and the fact that the alphabet is already recognised by the Unicode 2.0 (here as well it seems, although I'm too lazy to actually check it).
(/.-tters from the Indian sub-continent will, of course, note the irony in being able to effortlessly type obscure ancient and artificial scripts, while struggling for normal, regular, alive Indic languages)
For instance, I was initiated into Linux, Emacs etc because a certain programming course required it;the lecturer developed a grade-tracking software, and didn't want to port that to Windows, so all our labs were done in Linux. We learnt all those Emacs keyboard tricks from seniors in the span of a week (before we discovered what the Vi versus Emacs flame was all about).
So yes, at least in the bigger, older universities, Linux/Unix is already an established thing with full community participation.
Damn, that was corny. Mod me down please.
No, we never had riots as far as anyone can remember.
Before you read the 2001 Census Report, or that shiny worthless rag, India Today, may I point out to a more useful site on logical fallacies? In particular, you'll note the similarity between your implied reasoning ("India has more religious structures than schools or hospitals. It also has a lot of religious strife. Therefore, the large number of religious structures causes strife.") and a logical fallacy called coincidental correlation.
By way of proof, I recommend Ashish Nandy's excellent tome, Exiled At Home, to really understand communal strife in India. Here's a short thesis:- 'Communal' riots are among the most secular phenomena in modern India. They have more to do with oppurtunistic politicians (of all religions, obviously), and a police force badly in need of reform, rather than heightened religiosity, or even, that Great Indian Distraction, Ayodhya.
Video-conferencing for education, which is what's really mentioned in the article, has taken off in a big way in this part of the world. MIT offers webcast lectures to graduate students in Singapore, just as Eidenhoven, Georgia Tech and others do. Carnegie Mellon also has a similar programme in India.
The Indian President, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, was a tenured lecturer at the Anna University before getting elected as a President; I remember reading somewhere that he still gives lectures to students in Madras through video-conferencing.
There was an earlier case where, again, Dr Kalam apparently got doctors in Hyderabad to consult, check and finally operate on an eight-year-old kid in Agartala with a heart problem. (They, of course, flew the doctors in for the operation).
That said, I know many doctors back in India, many of them in the hospital that did the actual surgery, and most of them don't quite believe that video-conferencing will revolutionise their work. Just doesn't happen; the doctors I met love the technology, but they really would like to meet their patients f2f.
A better question, then, would be "How effective is video-conferencing for medical consultations and education?". Your poser will, rightly I might add, draw emotional responses on nations ("Hey, India has the world's biggest graduate population!", or something like that), rather than sane responses effective use of technology, which, IMHO, is the real question here.
Precisely why he presumably thinks that was the best post ever. There's still hope for the rest of all.
Naah, I'll pass. :-)
Read the sentence completely. I said the goondas haven't figured out how to rig as yet. :-)
(Sorry, bad joke, mod me down if you wish :-D)
Seriously though, there's a lot of hype about Indian tech, some of it is plain stupid. You're right; doesn't help one bit by the fact that most people here are geeks, and geeks by nature are baggard about themselves.
Indeed, if we go all electronic, it's an Indian, or at the best, a sociological achievement; the world's largest administrative exercise has finally discovered 20 year old technology. Nothing more, nothing less.
(I'm Indian, btw)
Which is to say, that those country-wide stats often give a very skewed picture; for instance, the state I was born, Kerala, has 100% literacy, and health-levels that match European standards. And yet, as a country, we rank 127 on the UN Development scale, primarily because of bad literacy levels in the North and in the tribal belt in the centre.
Then again, this is not quite bleeding edge technology; as I pointed out earlier, the voting machines are at least a generation old.
Back in India, we face the same problems as any other democracy; heck, I'll argue that we face more lobbyists and well-entrenched groups than you Americans do. The ongoing 'debate' over the tax reform is a perfect example; the central government has been trying to move all the 25 states into a uniform VAT zone for the last 8 or so years without any succcess. Grapevine has it that a solution is possible only in 2005, well after the next round of general elections. We are, after all, one-sixth of all humanity; there's bound to be someone somewhere who doesn't like something for some reason.
The electronic voting machines also had significant problems in deployment; if I remember correctly, they were developed way back in the 80's itself, at the (government-owned) Electronic Corporation of India Ltd (the products webpage doesn't mention voting machines, so I could be wrong on the company) There were just too many groups resisting technology; as followers of Indian politics will note, elections in the 80's and 90's were invariably accompanied by booth-capturing, rigging and voter impersonation. Goondas (that's Indian English for the American 'rowdy') patronised by political parties would often take over polling booths, and stuff ballot papers in them. If you really wanted to vote on Election Day, you'd want to vote early in the day itself; not only to avoid the crowd, and violence if any, but also because someone else would have already voted under your name. And then, there'd be those political clashes, electoral violence, bomb blasts... an endless tyranny making a mockery of our constitutional values.
Obviously, the situation needed some strong action and, as I recall, the then Election Commissioner, Mr TN Seshan (who was and still is a sort of middle-class Indian hero), strongly asserted his Commission's independence from the government de jour, by the following measures:-
a)Paramilitary Forces:-
Not many Indians realise this, but elections in India see the world's largest peacetime movement of troops. All elections these days, unless they are the sub-province-level Panchayat elections, are actually conducted by the federal paramilitary battalions, the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) etc, and not the state police, who report to the government of the day and, therefore, presumably are not to be trusted.[1]
b) Behavioural Changes:-
For a month or so before the actual elections exercise, the Commission enforces a so-called "Model Code of Conduct" on all political parties; among other things, the contestants can't promise soft bribes for their constituents. Compliance is entirely voluntary; the Commission can't, for instance, pull someone up for breaking the Code, but then, which contestant in his right mind would want to be caught on the wrong side of his constituents' ire?
This was certainly the case between 1991 and 1995/6, until elections were announced in the teeny-weeny state of Goa, bringing us to step (c), technology.
c) Technology:-
Only after the above two easy-sounding, but difficult-to-implement steps did the Election Commission turn to technology. Even there there has been significant backlash; as I recall, there were many states that were tardy in issuing voter ID's. And even in that, the voter ID's are technologically-minimal; they are basically laminated printouts of a voter's digital pic, his name, address, date of birth, and the EC's hologram.
The end result is a vastly improved electoral process. Booth capturing and rigging will now completely vanish, even if it's only because the goondas haven't as yet figured out how to crack the voting machine. And then, there are obvious questions as to the quality of the nincompoops we elect.
That, however, shouldn't d
That is, if you stick to coding only calls that have been documented. :-)
(The other complaint for me is the relative sizes of developer communities; out here, while there's always someone around offering help in Java, you have to persistently google to solve your .Net queries)
Fair enough, English changes rapidly alright, but how would you define a language? A set of logical syntactic and semantic rules that haven't changed for the past few thousand years? I can think of only two languages like that, Latin and Sanskrit.
Nope, I can't agree with your assertion; language is much more than mere (unchanging) grammar. In many multi-cultural places, it is a strong factor for socio-political identities; throughout history, communities have fought against great powers to assert their linguistic identities.
Actually, there are 329 languages spoken in the United States, many of which are spoken only in the US and nowhere else.Of course, like in other countries, most of these languages will probably end up as an anthropologist's museum specimens, but really, mono-lingualism of most educated Americans is not because you speak only English in the US. It's mostly because the numbers of other languages aren't quite there.
Which brings us to a very interesting conjecture; I'm no American, (nor have I visited the area in question, so I appreciate responses on this) but if I may hazard a guess, by 2030's, learning Spanish will be essential to live in most of south and south-western US. That is to say, I assert that the current pre-dominance of English in the US is only a historical accident, one that will change with shifting demographics.
For instance, consider all the modded-up responses to this very story [to remove certain graphically-descriptive ASCII art that keeps popping up in -1 comments ;-) ].
Used to be like that, but now I'm fine. Occassionally need short bursts of music though; helps getting me started off.
Now, I'll be the first person to admit that I have collected music and other stuff from Kazaa, Napster and other P2P networks, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm breaking the law, and the consequences of that might not be entirely positive.
The Brit Association has already said that it won't sue users for now. There have been legal blusters elsewhere though. Hope this helps.
Optimists have flash-mobbed /.'s discussion!
Hehe, good call. Nice link too, thanks.
It's a bit like saying this book is the Bible.
Seriously, I still have my system, and occassionally open it up for old time's sake; was a pleasure working in a platform where most (all?) commercial software was available on audio tapes and more importantly (for /.-tters, at least), was mostly open source.
Yup, realised that after I posted the thing, sorry. :-)
You sure this is the SEC's site?
Forgot where I read that sorry; cant give links.