Yes, but Stallman was also doing a great amount of Lisp Machine work for LMI. Specifically, Symbolics was trying to shake off a prior agreement to share code with LMI. Stallman duplicated the new features from scratch for LMI, working around the clock. I believe he was their main programmer at the time. He didn't make Lisp history like the others did with Scheme or Common Lisp, but he was deeply a Lisp guy at that time, and wanted the GNU system to support two languages: C and Lisp. In fact, GNU Emacs was written because he wanted a powerful editor, and knew that Lisp was the best way to accomplish that extensibility. Now systems running GNU (Linux) use so many different languages that people have almost forgotten about the Lisp side of things, sadly.
You really think that the managers who do outsourcing really care about democracy in the particular third world country they contract out to? You really think they care about secrets and confidentiality? The whole idea of outsourcing is that it's raw, cheap labor, quality be damned. So far they haven't cared if the contractors keep all the source code, or just patch together new code from Google search results. No CFO is going to read this short USA Today article and infer that they should stop outsourcing, and instead invest in local employees, just because the Indian government has access to Google. That's just naive.
I'm not sure if you caught this, but SCO was defeated in court principally by IBM, one of the largest international corporations on the planet. They got pummeled, and the major reason it happened was because IBM had its powerful team of highly-paid lawyers. If a company like SCO pursued you or I for litigation, we would be raped financially by them. The court system only works for those who have the money to fund its high costs, similar to the patent system.
Alexander the Great did basically conquer Afghanistan and brought the Hellenistic culture there. After this, there was significant Indian influence, and the Afghan region was closely affiliated with the Indian states and could be described as Greco-Indian. There were two significant kingdoms, that of Bactria and Sogdiana. Although Zoroastrianism was popular in more ancient times, Buddhism became the proper religion later, and Afghanistan contributed to the unique Greco-Buddhist art and culture that influenced India so much later. Buddhist monks traveling from the general region of Afghanistan played a very important role in bringing Buddhism to China. This is in part why the Buddhism in China was a bit closer to that of Central Asia than that of central India. It was basically due to monks like these from Afghanistan who came along the Silk Road.
The culture of bearded Muslims only came much later, and the culture may have had little resemblance to what we now know as Afghanistan. Although the Romans beat much of Europe into a bloody pulp, they did not go very far in the East, only about as far as present-day Iraq. The Greeks had gone further, and so there was still Greek and Indian culture mutually impacting one another in this area, still basically untouched by the Roman Empire.
While I've seen China do a lot of innovative things, one thing I've learned from Western scientists working in China is that you should Verify first, before trusting.
Remember, the normal response to any question there is "Yes", even when they intend to do absolutely nothing.
The website hosting the code is right here: http://code.taobao.org. It's not a press release, they actually have the files hosted on a special site they made just for distribution. There isn't a whole lot to be skeptical of. Also, from what I understand, Taobao is a private enterprise, not part of the Chinese government or anything. Of course, they will still need to comply with the government, but their basic motivations are not the same.
For those unaware, Taobao is like the eBay of China. Few Chinese have an international credit card (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, etc.), and instead the Chinese banks issue Union Pay cards, which are specific only to China. Because they use Union Pay cards, everything is basically different, and Taobao is really the de facto place to shop online for the Chinese.
The way the filtering often works is based on the content of the page. If it finds an unacceptable string, it will give the user a "time-out" from the website for a few minutes. Then the user can go back later and access the site, but trying the same thing will result in another time-out. This isn't so common with Google search results, but it does happen, and even with sites like Wikipedia.
Most Google Images search results will not display any thumbnail. I always assumed that the Chinese government would block the individual Google servers hosting the thumbnail images, but that the servers often change so it would only be partial. Controversial images would probably not be viewable.
However, the relationship between the Chinese people and their government is quite different from what most Slashdotters would expect. Most Chinese people will only say good things about the government, and won't even disagree with the Internet filtering. I've had discussions with people in China about this a number of times. It's definitely not a "government vs. the people" view that we are so accustomed to in the U.S.
"I don't use Adobe Reader, so why would anyone else need to? Why can't everyone just change to something else?"
Sorry, but the vast majority of users have Adobe Reader installed to view PDF files, and they will not know why or how they should change to something else. Add to that the fact that the security of shitty-but-popular popular affects us all by proxy, and these things really do matter.
It's like saying, "Well, I don't care about malicious JavaScript and ActiveX in Internet Explorer, because I use Firefox on Linux. Who needs that other crap?" Most other people are just going to use default garbage, and the entire Internet is impacted by this.
Still, there are always Slashdot posts in the vein, "I don't use software X, I use software Y, so it doesn't matter." It's a naive and self-centered view of the world that unrealistically assumes that because a particular geeky reader found a way around a problem, that it has ceased to become a problem, or that the entire world should then follow this in emulation. Wake up, the world is bigger than the basement you inhabit.
Re:its not expensive to make an album
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I take it you have never discussed these matters with hard-working gigging musicians, then? That they should not only travel at a loss to build up popularity, but also are not entitled to enough profit from their albums to fit the bill for a recording studio, even if they become popular? Being a musician isn't the same as being a starving painter living in a loft, you know. Equipment costs real money. To produce music costs real money.
Have you ever tried to record an album with a laptop? You know, even a good microphone will cost hundreds of dollars, much less good studio monitors. Then there is the matter of an interface for recording. But I'm guessing you think that noisy on-board Taiwanese crap is good enough for that. And what software would you use? Sorry, but in the real world there are standards of quality, and those dictate a recording studio, even an amateur recording studio in one's home -- but no matter what, that takes real money. Even if a band has great equipment and are experts at production, they will still go to a studio just for the acoustics of the environment, if nothing else.
And who would master the album? The musicians? Most do not have such ability, and a professional is needed. By the way, there are these things called "professionals" -- people who specialize in something and become very good at what they do. Then in order to take advantage of their skill and experience, you give them this thing called "money", and they do something that you cannot do yourself. Try visiting a forum of musicians, and tell them what you just told me. "All you need is a laptop", and they would put you in place very quickly. You are living in a fantasy world, and real solutions will not be found until people acknowledge certain realities.
"Screw the artist, they should work for nothing and then also pay to produce work that I will download for nothing. Maybe someday I will go to a concert so I don't feel like the prick that I am." This attitude on Slashdot gets tiring, and is clearly not sufficient to completely replace the old system. Yes, the old system is broken, but the new one doesn't even make sense, and seems to just be fueled by greedy nerds who are desperate to justify their actions, which are based solely on crass convenience.
Re:the rules of economics still applies
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There is a thing, though, called an original content creator, and that person is not in infinite supply. These people should be able to earn a minimal living if they produce quality material enjoyed by a significant number of people. The problem is that limited original content meets unlimited bandwidth and file sharing.
Maybe a writer produces a book -- a great novel that took him years, like Lord of the Rings, but with blackjack and hookers. Everyone loves this book, but people just grab the PDF from BitTorrent. "Book publishing is not a service I need. I can readily download the PDF scan." Yet, they want to benefit and enjoy the fruits of this person's hard work. Some alternate method needs to be created to allow creative people to make a profit of some kind.
Or imagine it is the 1980's, and a musician produces an album on tape. Only one person actually buys it, and the rest copy it from him. Now the musician only profits for part of one sale. The listeners could easily respond, "Tape production is not a service I need. I can readily copy tapes easily." Yet, the service is actually the initial production of the music, which is not free and takes significant time and effort. That sharing becomes a black hole, sucking up any effort that was put into producing the original product.
I don't see solution to this, really, and I have yet to hear a good one from the Slashdot crowd. Some people will say, "Then they shouldn't produce albums, just play live!" Yet, it seems that people still want to listen to albums and enjoy them, they just don't want to pay for any of the effort that went into making them. More effort needs to be put into solutions that will allow starving artists to get the means to be able to make that initial product at least.... Recording studios are not free, and it is very expensive to obtain all the required equipment to emulate one.
These people live at the factory. They share a room with a bunch of other employees. Just like in the universities, where the students share a flat with 5-10 other students. The conditions at some of these places are often terrible, where a wooden board is a "bed", and people are expected to work 60-80 hours per week. There is no real separation of their work and their "home life", if it may be characterized as such. Even peasants in China living 100-200 years ago didn't need to live such pitiful lives. They could actually work the land, have family life, and be poor but generally happy. It was the same in Europe before the industrial revolution threw children and their mothers into dirty factories to scrape up a few coins. It was only at that time, that people needed to literally fight for labor reforms to get the most basic rights.
In Communist China, we have a few different ways of getting around this. One of them is to use a special kit that attaches to an inkjet printer, to be able to add large amounts of ink easily to a printer. Another is to use generic ink that is cheaper than the official HP stuff. Another major way is by simply not using inkjet printers. They are so wasteful and messy to deal with that it's better without them. Most people don't buy their own printer, and just go to a local computer shop for printing. These little hole-in-the-wall shops are all over the place, and just have a few big printers and a few old computers inside that may be used. This is good enough for most people, and these places would be nice to have in the U.S. as well.
I ended up buying a little HP B&W LaserJet for cheap (around $140). In Linux it has no real special features at all, and I set it to simply throw away print jobs with errors. If I didn't get a particular document, I know that it didn't go through. That means that nothing ever gets stuck, and there are no hassles or options to mess with. It just works, and I never need to worry about toner, since I just print text. It's the perfect no-hassle printer. As for the quality, it's so much better than a random inkjet printer that it isn't even funny. It can print with the same text quality as a nice book, which is great for XeTeX and high quality fonts (Junicode ftw!).
Printing from inkjets is just throwing your money at the wind.
I also cut my teeth on Linux with Slackware and used it for years, and it's the only reason I learned what I did about Linux. After switching to Ubuntu, I naturally got lazy and now I barely know what is happening on my own system. I can't remember the last time I compiled my own kernel, or really dug through "/etc" to figure out what everything does. That quote about Slackware has been around for a long time, and it has really earned the reputation as being THE distro to learn if you want to understand Linux. Its design is so clean and simple that it isn't nearly as intimidating as some people would expect. It also gives you a true appreciation for the elegance of the Unix design. Slackware is old school, from the era of beige boxes and Linux people who did things the old Unix way. It comes from the best place in the Linux tradition.
Patrick ("The Man") is also a stand-up guy who has been doing basically everything for the distro from the very beginning. He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain. He also gave Slackware the Subgenius trappings, and is otherwise a true long-haired geek who really GETS the Unix philosophy and does things the Right Way.
Good grief, everything is a "cloud" now. Have some servers on a rack? Those aren't servers, that's a cloud! It's like some retards took a Cisco networking diagram, and went crazy when they realized that everything could be simplified into one of the "clouds".
Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago when it was so obvious that chips with large numbers of cores were the future. These cloud solutions are just a stupid name for the same old monolithic crap. It doesn't scale and isn't modular in a Unixy way. Modern applications just suck because they're so inflexible. Why can I do so many things from a little text terminal, but I can't easily script the behavior of my web browser without special add-ons? Why aren't modern applications flexible like this, with simple interfaces for communicating with other programs? Where is the equivalent of a shell pipe, in modern applications? It's like somebody threw away all the lessons of the past, and said "But this is the new way, we don't need the old way, because this is new." Fuck that, computing should be better than this. It should be better than these stupid clouds and old piece-of-shit reinvent-the-wheel C and C++ programs with buffer overflows and other ancient problems. Or the HTML / Javascript / whatever jerry-rigged "web applications" that run on some opaque "cloud" that a random company has. Why is it that languages like Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for so long, and nobody learns from them or uses them? It's like the chips keep getting faster and faster, and people keep getting dumber and dumber.
Yeah, some assholes use Tor for BitTorrent, and it's awful for the network. Then people like me who live behind the Great Firewall of China, get slower-than-molasses browsing of censored web sites (terrible things like Google Pages, Blogger, anything from Taiwan, any page containing a string the PRC doesn't like, etc.). The main use for such work-arounds is usually just for my own research and education, and this is the basic reason that Tor exists. Users who run BitTorrent through Tor are really abusing what is basically a charity for people who need it.
Well, I'm 24 and I used the command-line only for years on old 14-inch monitors when I was in high school, and only had a stack of old 486's (1991 HP Vectra ftw!). I primarily used Slackware, Debian, and NetBSD. After I got a 14.4k serial modem, I wrote PPP scripts for dialing into my ISP, and I was cruising the web in style at 14.4kbps on Lynx, also using Links sometimes for its better table handling. When you're just an everyman with a 14.4k connection, you really curse the huge page loads of modern websites. 150k for one webpage? Really?
If there are those who are curious about whether it's difficult or not to only use text, it really isn't, and it's so much less distracting. In fact, when you get bored, the natural thing to do is to play around with programming, just because there aren't all the shiny distractions to go bury yourself in. It forces you to learn the basic filesystem structure, and where important files are located. In this regard, the simplicity of Slackware was really excellent to work with. Ultimately, though, it won't make you a big Unix hacker to never use a GUI. It's just one interface that some people may happen to prefer.
I've used Unix systems since I was 13 or so, but to be honest I've never really hacked open source C programs, despite knowing C. I feel ashamed of that, and that I would be a better programmer if I took the time to figure out some other programs, but when I was younger I always assumed it was over my head. Now in retrospect, I realize that the C language really is as simple as K&R taught it to be, and the only difficult things are the libraries and styles used for coding. I wonder if many other young people are like me in this regard -- long-time Linux users who know the traditional Unix command-line tools inside and out, but never get their hands messy with C?
So if everyone in the world agreed that murder was wrong, and could decide on a definition of murder, then that would make it so absolutely? That wouldn't just be a consensus of considerations, but would instead simply be? And what would make that so?
If it really does work that way, then what about aliens who visit us one day? Would this apply to them too? What if they start eating human beings, and we tell them it's absolutely immoral, but they reply that everyone on their planet agrees that it's fine to eat other species for the meat, hair, and fashionable scrotum skin-bags?
Alright, so what is morally correct, then, rather than what is merely considered morally correct? Whatever you think is so, I suppose? And what is the real basis for that? Is there a magic book somewhere I can find on what is the absolute standard for morality? And if so, who wrote it?
As far as I know it, morality is basically something that is considered by its very nature, by individual minds. Energy waves and empty space have no morality.
Alright, I'll bite. Perl is so byzantine that its creators can barely write a compiler for the next version of it. Perl is so byzantine that its syntax can be meaningfully compared with the sloppy mess called the English language. Perl is so byzantine that most of the people using Perl left it for Python a decade ago. Perl is so byzantine that its syntax is almost half as bad as Haskell's.;-)
It seems like Perl is a byproduct of another era, when being "quicker to write than C" was a big feature. Since anyone can just use Python and read an easy "spam and eggs" tutorial, and do most of the same things with cleaner syntax, what is the big draw? The Lisps had all the advanced features long ago, and the other friendlier "scripting languages" are here to stay. What's the future of Perl? Can it really survive as a popular hacker language like it was 10-15 years ago?
As a resident of China, I can tell you that in this country, basketball is by far the number one sport. NBA is extremely popular, as are American basketball shoes from Nike, Adidas, etc. Considering this is the favorite sport of the world's most populous country, it's hardly an American sport. In China, there is even a Chinese nickname for LeBron James that everyone is familiar with. In fact, there are nine Chinese nicknames for him in common use in China.
King James, LeBron, LBJ, LRJ, James the Great, Ray Pa dragon, The Great, James, Old Beijing
Basketball is much more popular here than it ever was in the U.S.
Also, when I was visiting Japan, baseball was by far the most popular sport, played by just about every boy after school.
The world is a lot bigger than the U.S. and Europe.
An accent wouldn't change "clear" to "cular". No corresponding change in the pronunciation of the letters in "clear" can give you "cular" without making the English language indecipherable. It isn't due to an "accent" any more than saying "libary" is due to an accent, or any of the other mispronunciations that ignorant people use because they never read, write, or consider the spellings of the words they use. No matter which accent you happen to have, it is possible to both say words correctly, and to mispronounce them.
What is a shell without tab complete?!? Even Windows supports it.
What is a shell without tab completion? A traditional shell (get off my lawn). Tab completion was simply not available in shells for much of the history of Unix. Stepping away from the Linux world, it's quite common today to still find shells without tab completion.
Right, the last time Slashdot changed, it was just for a "new" layout. And the new layout just looked like the old layout, but with crawling JavaScript. The butt ugly pine-green-on-white was never even questioned. To get some volunteer graphic designers together for a new conceptual look would have made too much sense.
Also, Arial? WTF, Slashdot? At least pick Verdana or Georgia in the stylesheets, two decent web fonts that ship with Windows. And why haven't we ever been able to post limited pre-formatted snippets of code? Not to mention some sort of glyph coverage beyond ASCII...?
They began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so in the face of pain. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats' feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not. "Their attention was solely focused on consuming food," says Kenny.
Assuming that rats and humans are somewhat similar in their responses, this paints a really sickening and embarrassing picture of fat people. Although they are harmed physically by their obesity, they continue at their own detriment. Maybe they really are like the obese rats who continue to eat food in the face of physical pain, when the healthier rats have been scared away.
This is basically true. I live in China and I have asked my co-workers and several classes of students about it. The adults aren't really surprised by any of it, but that might be a little different among the tech crowd. Some of my students were concerned about Google leaving, as most of them do use Google and prefer it. However, most said they would just use Baidu.
Although they may dislike how things worked out, or disagree with the government's actions, the overall legitimacy of the government is rarely called into question. People are more interested in fixing the problems in their government. The basic reason is that they think the only way to prosper as a country is to work together, like China is a big family including the government, and this mindset is deeply set in many people. It's not all "government vs. the people" everywhere in the world. There are a few people who are pro-democracy advocates, but they are typically pro-everything-western Christians. Most people I have talked to will remark that democracy isn't appropriate for China, and that it is fundamentally different from western countries.
The fact is that people aren't too concerned about issues like this over here. They are too busy living their lives, and the whole Web as they know it is basically different. They don't use YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, or any of the normal sites. Only around 1% use Wikipedia. It's a totally different game here, where the number of QQ users is larger than the entire U.S. population.
After Google moved to Hong Kong, a teacher asked me about it, and I explained it to her. Then I told her that they moved because the mainland and Hong Kong have different laws. She replied back playfully with, "... maybe. Maybe they do," pretending to look a little nervous, and then laughing playfully. It's not all evil empire stuff over here. People roll their eyes at a lot of it, and everyone knows that the government can't control so much. There are too many people, so it's just like controlled chaos, with aspirations of harmony.
In some ways it's freer than the U.S. because there are so few people to enforce the laws or keep things in check. If a cop is going too slow, cars will honk their horns obnoxiously at him, swerve around him into the oncoming lane to pass him up, and generally just treat him like another asshole on the road. In the U.S., the cops are on your ass just for going through a yellow light too late. The American public is nothing for authorities to fear, but the Chinese public is much bigger and more powerful. In many ways it's difficult to imagine a government like the U.S. has, able to maintain the peace with 1.3 billion people.
A much better example of communism would be the short-lived anarcho-communist Spain. Real communist states are often short-lived and collapse into oligarchies or dictatorships due to the instability of the country post-revolution. Spain was a working but short-lived example of the closest thing there has been to communism as advocated by Marx and others. George Orwell traveled to Spain and fought alongside the anarchists / communists there, against the fascists.
For all the right-winger paranoids who like to quote Orwell, it might be interesting for them to learn that he was a socialist fighter in Spain, who recorded his experiences there in Homage to Catalonia.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but Stallman was also doing a great amount of Lisp Machine work for LMI. Specifically, Symbolics was trying to shake off a prior agreement to share code with LMI. Stallman duplicated the new features from scratch for LMI, working around the clock. I believe he was their main programmer at the time. He didn't make Lisp history like the others did with Scheme or Common Lisp, but he was deeply a Lisp guy at that time, and wanted the GNU system to support two languages: C and Lisp. In fact, GNU Emacs was written because he wanted a powerful editor, and knew that Lisp was the best way to accomplish that extensibility. Now systems running GNU (Linux) use so many different languages that people have almost forgotten about the Lisp side of things, sadly.
You really think that the managers who do outsourcing really care about democracy in the particular third world country they contract out to? You really think they care about secrets and confidentiality? The whole idea of outsourcing is that it's raw, cheap labor, quality be damned. So far they haven't cared if the contractors keep all the source code, or just patch together new code from Google search results. No CFO is going to read this short USA Today article and infer that they should stop outsourcing, and instead invest in local employees, just because the Indian government has access to Google. That's just naive.
I'm not sure if you caught this, but SCO was defeated in court principally by IBM, one of the largest international corporations on the planet. They got pummeled, and the major reason it happened was because IBM had its powerful team of highly-paid lawyers. If a company like SCO pursued you or I for litigation, we would be raped financially by them. The court system only works for those who have the money to fund its high costs, similar to the patent system.
Alexander the Great did basically conquer Afghanistan and brought the Hellenistic culture there. After this, there was significant Indian influence, and the Afghan region was closely affiliated with the Indian states and could be described as Greco-Indian. There were two significant kingdoms, that of Bactria and Sogdiana. Although Zoroastrianism was popular in more ancient times, Buddhism became the proper religion later, and Afghanistan contributed to the unique Greco-Buddhist art and culture that influenced India so much later. Buddhist monks traveling from the general region of Afghanistan played a very important role in bringing Buddhism to China. This is in part why the Buddhism in China was a bit closer to that of Central Asia than that of central India. It was basically due to monks like these from Afghanistan who came along the Silk Road.
The culture of bearded Muslims only came much later, and the culture may have had little resemblance to what we now know as Afghanistan. Although the Romans beat much of Europe into a bloody pulp, they did not go very far in the East, only about as far as present-day Iraq. The Greeks had gone further, and so there was still Greek and Indian culture mutually impacting one another in this area, still basically untouched by the Roman Empire.
The website hosting the code is right here: http://code.taobao.org. It's not a press release, they actually have the files hosted on a special site they made just for distribution. There isn't a whole lot to be skeptical of. Also, from what I understand, Taobao is a private enterprise, not part of the Chinese government or anything. Of course, they will still need to comply with the government, but their basic motivations are not the same.
For those unaware, Taobao is like the eBay of China. Few Chinese have an international credit card (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, etc.), and instead the Chinese banks issue Union Pay cards, which are specific only to China. Because they use Union Pay cards, everything is basically different, and Taobao is really the de facto place to shop online for the Chinese.
The way the filtering often works is based on the content of the page. If it finds an unacceptable string, it will give the user a "time-out" from the website for a few minutes. Then the user can go back later and access the site, but trying the same thing will result in another time-out. This isn't so common with Google search results, but it does happen, and even with sites like Wikipedia.
Most Google Images search results will not display any thumbnail. I always assumed that the Chinese government would block the individual Google servers hosting the thumbnail images, but that the servers often change so it would only be partial. Controversial images would probably not be viewable.
However, the relationship between the Chinese people and their government is quite different from what most Slashdotters would expect. Most Chinese people will only say good things about the government, and won't even disagree with the Internet filtering. I've had discussions with people in China about this a number of times. It's definitely not a "government vs. the people" view that we are so accustomed to in the U.S.
"I don't use Adobe Reader, so why would anyone else need to? Why can't everyone just change to something else?"
Sorry, but the vast majority of users have Adobe Reader installed to view PDF files, and they will not know why or how they should change to something else. Add to that the fact that the security of shitty-but-popular popular affects us all by proxy, and these things really do matter.
It's like saying, "Well, I don't care about malicious JavaScript and ActiveX in Internet Explorer, because I use Firefox on Linux. Who needs that other crap?" Most other people are just going to use default garbage, and the entire Internet is impacted by this.
Still, there are always Slashdot posts in the vein, "I don't use software X, I use software Y, so it doesn't matter." It's a naive and self-centered view of the world that unrealistically assumes that because a particular geeky reader found a way around a problem, that it has ceased to become a problem, or that the entire world should then follow this in emulation. Wake up, the world is bigger than the basement you inhabit.
I take it you have never discussed these matters with hard-working gigging musicians, then? That they should not only travel at a loss to build up popularity, but also are not entitled to enough profit from their albums to fit the bill for a recording studio, even if they become popular? Being a musician isn't the same as being a starving painter living in a loft, you know. Equipment costs real money. To produce music costs real money.
Have you ever tried to record an album with a laptop? You know, even a good microphone will cost hundreds of dollars, much less good studio monitors. Then there is the matter of an interface for recording. But I'm guessing you think that noisy on-board Taiwanese crap is good enough for that. And what software would you use? Sorry, but in the real world there are standards of quality, and those dictate a recording studio, even an amateur recording studio in one's home -- but no matter what, that takes real money. Even if a band has great equipment and are experts at production, they will still go to a studio just for the acoustics of the environment, if nothing else.
And who would master the album? The musicians? Most do not have such ability, and a professional is needed. By the way, there are these things called "professionals" -- people who specialize in something and become very good at what they do. Then in order to take advantage of their skill and experience, you give them this thing called "money", and they do something that you cannot do yourself. Try visiting a forum of musicians, and tell them what you just told me. "All you need is a laptop", and they would put you in place very quickly. You are living in a fantasy world, and real solutions will not be found until people acknowledge certain realities.
"Screw the artist, they should work for nothing and then also pay to produce work that I will download for nothing. Maybe someday I will go to a concert so I don't feel like the prick that I am." This attitude on Slashdot gets tiring, and is clearly not sufficient to completely replace the old system. Yes, the old system is broken, but the new one doesn't even make sense, and seems to just be fueled by greedy nerds who are desperate to justify their actions, which are based solely on crass convenience.
There is a thing, though, called an original content creator, and that person is not in infinite supply. These people should be able to earn a minimal living if they produce quality material enjoyed by a significant number of people. The problem is that limited original content meets unlimited bandwidth and file sharing.
Maybe a writer produces a book -- a great novel that took him years, like Lord of the Rings, but with blackjack and hookers. Everyone loves this book, but people just grab the PDF from BitTorrent. "Book publishing is not a service I need. I can readily download the PDF scan." Yet, they want to benefit and enjoy the fruits of this person's hard work. Some alternate method needs to be created to allow creative people to make a profit of some kind.
Or imagine it is the 1980's, and a musician produces an album on tape. Only one person actually buys it, and the rest copy it from him. Now the musician only profits for part of one sale. The listeners could easily respond, "Tape production is not a service I need. I can readily copy tapes easily." Yet, the service is actually the initial production of the music, which is not free and takes significant time and effort. That sharing becomes a black hole, sucking up any effort that was put into producing the original product.
I don't see solution to this, really, and I have yet to hear a good one from the Slashdot crowd. Some people will say, "Then they shouldn't produce albums, just play live!" Yet, it seems that people still want to listen to albums and enjoy them, they just don't want to pay for any of the effort that went into making them. More effort needs to be put into solutions that will allow starving artists to get the means to be able to make that initial product at least.... Recording studios are not free, and it is very expensive to obtain all the required equipment to emulate one.
These people live at the factory. They share a room with a bunch of other employees. Just like in the universities, where the students share a flat with 5-10 other students. The conditions at some of these places are often terrible, where a wooden board is a "bed", and people are expected to work 60-80 hours per week. There is no real separation of their work and their "home life", if it may be characterized as such. Even peasants in China living 100-200 years ago didn't need to live such pitiful lives. They could actually work the land, have family life, and be poor but generally happy. It was the same in Europe before the industrial revolution threw children and their mothers into dirty factories to scrape up a few coins. It was only at that time, that people needed to literally fight for labor reforms to get the most basic rights.
In Communist China, we have a few different ways of getting around this. One of them is to use a special kit that attaches to an inkjet printer, to be able to add large amounts of ink easily to a printer. Another is to use generic ink that is cheaper than the official HP stuff. Another major way is by simply not using inkjet printers. They are so wasteful and messy to deal with that it's better without them. Most people don't buy their own printer, and just go to a local computer shop for printing. These little hole-in-the-wall shops are all over the place, and just have a few big printers and a few old computers inside that may be used. This is good enough for most people, and these places would be nice to have in the U.S. as well.
I ended up buying a little HP B&W LaserJet for cheap (around $140). In Linux it has no real special features at all, and I set it to simply throw away print jobs with errors. If I didn't get a particular document, I know that it didn't go through. That means that nothing ever gets stuck, and there are no hassles or options to mess with. It just works, and I never need to worry about toner, since I just print text. It's the perfect no-hassle printer. As for the quality, it's so much better than a random inkjet printer that it isn't even funny. It can print with the same text quality as a nice book, which is great for XeTeX and high quality fonts (Junicode ftw!).
Printing from inkjets is just throwing your money at the wind.
I also cut my teeth on Linux with Slackware and used it for years, and it's the only reason I learned what I did about Linux. After switching to Ubuntu, I naturally got lazy and now I barely know what is happening on my own system. I can't remember the last time I compiled my own kernel, or really dug through "/etc" to figure out what everything does. That quote about Slackware has been around for a long time, and it has really earned the reputation as being THE distro to learn if you want to understand Linux. Its design is so clean and simple that it isn't nearly as intimidating as some people would expect. It also gives you a true appreciation for the elegance of the Unix design. Slackware is old school, from the era of beige boxes and Linux people who did things the old Unix way. It comes from the best place in the Linux tradition.
Patrick ("The Man") is also a stand-up guy who has been doing basically everything for the distro from the very beginning. He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain. He also gave Slackware the Subgenius trappings, and is otherwise a true long-haired geek who really GETS the Unix philosophy and does things the Right Way.
Good grief, everything is a "cloud" now. Have some servers on a rack? Those aren't servers, that's a cloud! It's like some retards took a Cisco networking diagram, and went crazy when they realized that everything could be simplified into one of the "clouds".
Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago when it was so obvious that chips with large numbers of cores were the future. These cloud solutions are just a stupid name for the same old monolithic crap. It doesn't scale and isn't modular in a Unixy way. Modern applications just suck because they're so inflexible. Why can I do so many things from a little text terminal, but I can't easily script the behavior of my web browser without special add-ons? Why aren't modern applications flexible like this, with simple interfaces for communicating with other programs? Where is the equivalent of a shell pipe, in modern applications? It's like somebody threw away all the lessons of the past, and said "But this is the new way, we don't need the old way, because this is new." Fuck that, computing should be better than this. It should be better than these stupid clouds and old piece-of-shit reinvent-the-wheel C and C++ programs with buffer overflows and other ancient problems. Or the HTML / Javascript / whatever jerry-rigged "web applications" that run on some opaque "cloud" that a random company has. Why is it that languages like Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for so long, and nobody learns from them or uses them? It's like the chips keep getting faster and faster, and people keep getting dumber and dumber.
Yeah, some assholes use Tor for BitTorrent, and it's awful for the network. Then people like me who live behind the Great Firewall of China, get slower-than-molasses browsing of censored web sites (terrible things like Google Pages, Blogger, anything from Taiwan, any page containing a string the PRC doesn't like, etc.). The main use for such work-arounds is usually just for my own research and education, and this is the basic reason that Tor exists. Users who run BitTorrent through Tor are really abusing what is basically a charity for people who need it.
Well, I'm 24 and I used the command-line only for years on old 14-inch monitors when I was in high school, and only had a stack of old 486's (1991 HP Vectra ftw!). I primarily used Slackware, Debian, and NetBSD. After I got a 14.4k serial modem, I wrote PPP scripts for dialing into my ISP, and I was cruising the web in style at 14.4kbps on Lynx, also using Links sometimes for its better table handling. When you're just an everyman with a 14.4k connection, you really curse the huge page loads of modern websites. 150k for one webpage? Really?
If there are those who are curious about whether it's difficult or not to only use text, it really isn't, and it's so much less distracting. In fact, when you get bored, the natural thing to do is to play around with programming, just because there aren't all the shiny distractions to go bury yourself in. It forces you to learn the basic filesystem structure, and where important files are located. In this regard, the simplicity of Slackware was really excellent to work with. Ultimately, though, it won't make you a big Unix hacker to never use a GUI. It's just one interface that some people may happen to prefer.
I've used Unix systems since I was 13 or so, but to be honest I've never really hacked open source C programs, despite knowing C. I feel ashamed of that, and that I would be a better programmer if I took the time to figure out some other programs, but when I was younger I always assumed it was over my head. Now in retrospect, I realize that the C language really is as simple as K&R taught it to be, and the only difficult things are the libraries and styles used for coding. I wonder if many other young people are like me in this regard -- long-time Linux users who know the traditional Unix command-line tools inside and out, but never get their hands messy with C?
So if everyone in the world agreed that murder was wrong, and could decide on a definition of murder, then that would make it so absolutely? That wouldn't just be a consensus of considerations, but would instead simply be? And what would make that so?
If it really does work that way, then what about aliens who visit us one day? Would this apply to them too? What if they start eating human beings, and we tell them it's absolutely immoral, but they reply that everyone on their planet agrees that it's fine to eat other species for the meat, hair, and fashionable scrotum skin-bags?
Alright, so what is morally correct, then, rather than what is merely considered morally correct? Whatever you think is so, I suppose? And what is the real basis for that? Is there a magic book somewhere I can find on what is the absolute standard for morality? And if so, who wrote it?
As far as I know it, morality is basically something that is considered by its very nature, by individual minds. Energy waves and empty space have no morality.
Alright, I'll bite. Perl is so byzantine that its creators can barely write a compiler for the next version of it. Perl is so byzantine that its syntax can be meaningfully compared with the sloppy mess called the English language. Perl is so byzantine that most of the people using Perl left it for Python a decade ago. Perl is so byzantine that its syntax is almost half as bad as Haskell's. ;-)
It seems like Perl is a byproduct of another era, when being "quicker to write than C" was a big feature. Since anyone can just use Python and read an easy "spam and eggs" tutorial, and do most of the same things with cleaner syntax, what is the big draw? The Lisps had all the advanced features long ago, and the other friendlier "scripting languages" are here to stay. What's the future of Perl? Can it really survive as a popular hacker language like it was 10-15 years ago?
Basketball is much more popular here than it ever was in the U.S.
Also, when I was visiting Japan, baseball was by far the most popular sport, played by just about every boy after school.
The world is a lot bigger than the U.S. and Europe.
An accent wouldn't change "clear" to "cular". No corresponding change in the pronunciation of the letters in "clear" can give you "cular" without making the English language indecipherable. It isn't due to an "accent" any more than saying "libary" is due to an accent, or any of the other mispronunciations that ignorant people use because they never read, write, or consider the spellings of the words they use. No matter which accent you happen to have, it is possible to both say words correctly, and to mispronounce them.
P.S. vernacular != dialect != accent.
What is a shell without tab complete?!? Even Windows supports it.
What is a shell without tab completion? A traditional shell (get off my lawn). Tab completion was simply not available in shells for much of the history of Unix. Stepping away from the Linux world, it's quite common today to still find shells without tab completion.
Right, the last time Slashdot changed, it was just for a "new" layout. And the new layout just looked like the old layout, but with crawling JavaScript. The butt ugly pine-green-on-white was never even questioned. To get some volunteer graphic designers together for a new conceptual look would have made too much sense.
Also, Arial? WTF, Slashdot? At least pick Verdana or Georgia in the stylesheets, two decent web fonts that ship with Windows. And why haven't we ever been able to post limited pre-formatted snippets of code? Not to mention some sort of glyph coverage beyond ASCII...?
Assuming that rats and humans are somewhat similar in their responses, this paints a really sickening and embarrassing picture of fat people. Although they are harmed physically by their obesity, they continue at their own detriment. Maybe they really are like the obese rats who continue to eat food in the face of physical pain, when the healthier rats have been scared away.
This is basically true. I live in China and I have asked my co-workers and several classes of students about it. The adults aren't really surprised by any of it, but that might be a little different among the tech crowd. Some of my students were concerned about Google leaving, as most of them do use Google and prefer it. However, most said they would just use Baidu.
Although they may dislike how things worked out, or disagree with the government's actions, the overall legitimacy of the government is rarely called into question. People are more interested in fixing the problems in their government. The basic reason is that they think the only way to prosper as a country is to work together, like China is a big family including the government, and this mindset is deeply set in many people. It's not all "government vs. the people" everywhere in the world. There are a few people who are pro-democracy advocates, but they are typically pro-everything-western Christians. Most people I have talked to will remark that democracy isn't appropriate for China, and that it is fundamentally different from western countries.
The fact is that people aren't too concerned about issues like this over here. They are too busy living their lives, and the whole Web as they know it is basically different. They don't use YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, or any of the normal sites. Only around 1% use Wikipedia. It's a totally different game here, where the number of QQ users is larger than the entire U.S. population.
After Google moved to Hong Kong, a teacher asked me about it, and I explained it to her. Then I told her that they moved because the mainland and Hong Kong have different laws. She replied back playfully with, "... maybe. Maybe they do," pretending to look a little nervous, and then laughing playfully. It's not all evil empire stuff over here. People roll their eyes at a lot of it, and everyone knows that the government can't control so much. There are too many people, so it's just like controlled chaos, with aspirations of harmony.
In some ways it's freer than the U.S. because there are so few people to enforce the laws or keep things in check. If a cop is going too slow, cars will honk their horns obnoxiously at him, swerve around him into the oncoming lane to pass him up, and generally just treat him like another asshole on the road. In the U.S., the cops are on your ass just for going through a yellow light too late. The American public is nothing for authorities to fear, but the Chinese public is much bigger and more powerful. In many ways it's difficult to imagine a government like the U.S. has, able to maintain the peace with 1.3 billion people.
A much better example of communism would be the short-lived anarcho-communist Spain. Real communist states are often short-lived and collapse into oligarchies or dictatorships due to the instability of the country post-revolution. Spain was a working but short-lived example of the closest thing there has been to communism as advocated by Marx and others. George Orwell traveled to Spain and fought alongside the anarchists / communists there, against the fascists.
Spanish Revolution
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
For all the right-winger paranoids who like to quote Orwell, it might be interesting for them to learn that he was a socialist fighter in Spain, who recorded his experiences there in Homage to Catalonia.