They were both great series, really. The ancient Wing Commander games (1 & 2) were mostly a 2D affair, and they simply can't compare in depth or complexity. I believe the technology was too limited at the time to really let them open up a whole sci-fi world to the player. They did have a cartoony fun side to them, though, and were certainly enjoyable. They paved the way for the next wave of space combat sims.
However, before the really big Wing Commander game came out (WC3 with Mark Hamill), there was a space of time in which the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games were released. Those games were a huge step forward, by including full 3D environments that included high resolution (for those days) at very reasonable performance on a modest system. There were a large number of missions, different craft, and of course STAR WARS! Back when Star Wars was still awesome -- before the "Special Editions" and crappy prequels. Back when the three movies you bought on VHS were the same as what was released originally in the theaters. I think some Slashdotters are starting to forget how cool Star Wars was back then. To fly in an imperial fighter, chasing after Rebel X-Wings and those damn fast A-Wings, after the music kicked in was awesome.
Then Wing Commander 3 came out, and it was just a whole different ballgame. In some ways it was a simpler game with more cinematics, but the resolution and realism of the whole thing made it pretty much THE space combat sim to beat. As a kid, I was just thrilled to be able to play a game like this at full speed at the nice resolution. For any boy with an imagination, it was amazing.
I guess all three phases were special in their own ways, but to me, the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games really opened up a whole different world, and gave a sense of freedom that I haven't experienced in any earlier games. Wing Commander 3 added a nice story and extra realism that really set the bar high after that for space combat sims. For those who never played these games from the golden age of space combat, they are certainly worth a go today. Unfortunately WC3 is 4 CD-ROM's of data, due to the AVI files. The TIE Fighter game easily fits on one CD-ROM, though.
This is very common in other countries as well. I'd venture to guess that it is the most common method in developing countries. I discussed this once with Uzbek and Nepalese students who couldn't understand why other students were bothered when they wanted to copy answers from them. I mentioned that the other person had to do work to study the material and learn it, but they wouldn't have any of that. I was really taken aback by the attitude and by the lack of basic educational spirit reflected in it. "Why learn anything, when you can just copy from someone else?"
In China, I also see that many students just memorize English sentences and regurgitate them like robots to get a good grade. This is not just a bad teaching habit here, but rather the standard way of teaching. Give students a dialogue and then have them regurgitate it later. "If they can pronounce everything correctly, they must know what it all means."
The U.S. has many problems, but I think two good things we have are a sense of educational honesty, and good sensibilities about fairness and loyalty. I still believe we are generally good-natured and honest people, but our culture is often naive, and this hurts us (and others) in many ways.
It is not true that they are worthless without evidence. They are not only cultural and historical treasures, but may be preserved for a later date when evidence has been found. And even if they are never found to be accurate about history, they can still tell us about a culture and its people.
As for Little Red Riding Hood, I do not know if that is true or not. However, if it is, that is simply one example of how a story may change. However, TFA is an example of how a story did not, and it was indeed very valuable information that lead directly to the meteorite crater. Hardly "worthless" in this case. If they had dismissed it as such because there was no prior evidence, they would never have discovered the evidence that made it so valuable.
Another example is the Chinese Shang dynasty, which western scholars simply assumed was mythical, and criticized others as naive for believing that the ancient Chinese would have such accurate records about the past. That is, until archaeologists found ancient turtle bones from the period inscribed with the names of the same kings in the ancient records. There is always such a trend in academia for scholars to toss aside ancient knowledge as pure myth.
I wonder how many "myths" have such a basis in true events? I'm reminded of the "hobbit humans" story where the native people had stories about them that had been passed down reliably for thousands of years. It seems that in our rush to be certain about our world, we are often too eager to dismiss the ideas of ancient people. It is unfortunate as well, because they cannot defend themselves, so they are especially easy prey for academics looking for notoriety.
It's only $300, and I believe the websites need to be hosted in China. They want to stop people from making porn in China (viewed as exploiting local women), and they don't care so much about people simply viewing porn on foreign sites. $300 is the monthly salary for many Chinese, if that puts it into perspective. It's difficult to say whether what class that is, though, because incomes are all over the place. Maybe it's a working class salary.
As an American living in China, it pains me to see this sort of hysterical nonsense on Slashdot all the time. China is the new Evil Empire, apparently. Scream "fascist" all you want, but you and most other westerners do not understand Chinese civilization or the role that government has traditionally played in it. Then again, maybe the U.S. should "pre-empt" their errors, and save China from the Chinese.:-P
The basic reason that the Chinese do not allow porn is that they believe that it demeans women. This goes back to the revolution, in which women were eager to participate to get some basic equality with men. You can argue that women have a choice, but in poor provinces, you can bet that it would be akin to prostitution, where young women are basically forced into the lifestyle because they have no other options.
Chinese society is quite conservative about sex, or at least it has that appearance. For example, it isn't unheard of to hear of a foreigner beaten into a coma for deflowering local girls. In a country where virginity is prized and sex can almost be like a contract for marriage, that sort of thing isn't taken lightly. In the same way, if Chinese people think their women are being debased (as in porn), they tend to get very angry.
I am not going to try to explain 5000 years of Chinese civilization to you, or explain every way that it is different from the West, but I would encourage Slashdotters to read this article from the LA Times. It explains quite a bit about the role of government in China and how the West has gotten it wrong with predicting that China would become more like them (developing a rights tradition, embracing democracy, etc.).
Bushido Blade was awesome, and it is still among the most, if not the most, realistic deadly fighting game ever made. Its simplicity came from its realism, so the complexity that it had was all related to how you were actually fighting. For instance, which stance you were in, or the way you swing your blade. The realistic simplicity also let it break out into three dimensions, so it was one of the very first fighting games to really allow you to run wherever you wanted (not just the lame side-stepping that fighting games still often use). It's still certainly worth a spin for those of you who (for some reason) still play PS1. Just a simple fight between two players in the bamboo forest is tense. There are only a few (sometimes one) unblocked swings between your character and its death.
Of course, most people were more interested in playing Tekken and Mortal Kombat with their fireballs and snap-your-neck-to-take-away-20%-of-your-health type moves. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that, but Bushido Blade showed that the simplicity of realism can give developers room for real substance in the gameplay.
That's awesome. Mintty is exactly what I always wanted for Cygwin: a PuTTY style native Windows terminal with Unicode, no X prerequisite, etc.
Re:I was never really impressed
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Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Cygwin isn't meant to give you all the Linux or Windows system features, just provide a full-featured POSIX emulation layer (at its core, just one DLL), and programs compiled for that. You may still need to use Windows utilities to access Windows-specific features that have no POSIX implementation. However, the important thing is that it basically gives Unix developers a common platform, so anything developed for general Unix systems will compile on Cygwin's POSIX emulation layer.
Since Cygwin basically throws you into a command shell, it really does require an understanding of the fundamentals of Unix/Linux systems and how to work effectively in a shell. For example, I doubt many users of Slackware or NetBSD would have any substantial complaints about Cygwin. As someone who used Cygwin for years in a corporate environment where I could not use Linux, it was a godsend. I could spend my whole day working in Cygwin without having to mess with Windows development environments. Being able to throw together a bash script that uses grep, sed, awk, etc. is so nice for a stranded Linux user. However, many people do not learn the basic utilities anymore, even basic things such as customizing a login shell.
If there is a weak point in the Cygwin interactive experience, in my opinion it comes from the fact that the default Windows terminal program is used, which is slow and generally terrible compared to the modern Linux terminal apps. Maybe someday there will be a fast and full-featured replacement. But as it is, the Windows terminal is basically sluggish early 90's cruft that just isn't up to the task. Not a fault of Cygwin, but still a problem when running any such programs on Windows.
You are reinventing Buddhism, actually, which is mostly what the Matrix copies as well. The Buddha taught 2500 years ago that you don't have a body, the entire world is an illusion, and that mind is the only reality that human beings have ever experienced, or could even hypothetically ever experience. That all reality is observable through eight consciousnesses, some of which are associated with sense organs, and others which are more fundamental. There is a complete model of the mind all of its faculties, including the conception of thoughts. At the most fundamental level is a consciousness that is the complete non-duality of mind and matter.
If you want the details, the consciousness-only school developed them in India and then in China. However, most academics cannot understand the texts because they are heavily dependent on logic, technical terminology, and a model of the mind based on empirical observation of thoughts and phenomena in meditation. However, if anyone is interested, the basic text is quite short and is called the Sandhirnirmocana Sutra. However, the most technical text in English, is the book written by the Chinese master Xuanzang Treatise on the Perfection of Consciousness-only. Even for Lisp or Haskell-breathing intellectual programmers, these texts should prove quite challenging. And I fear westerners who pride themselves on their understanding of western philosophy would have no chance at all. There are extremely few people who read and understand this material, sadly.
I find Taoism lacking, often; For example, I have never heard of a working civilization that based its thought in Taoism. Nonetheless, the fact of its wisdom is undeniable.
The Dao De Jing is difficult to understand at times for a few reasons. One is because most translations are shallow and most translators do not clearly understand the language or meanings of the words. In some ways, James Legge's early translation from the 19th century is still one of the best because he had assistance from a Chinese master. In the future I will make my own translation, but it must be done very carefully to fully bring out the meaning. Another reason for the difficulty is that the culture and learning of ancient China is vastly different from that of modern people in the west. And another reason is that many people come with prior conceptions of what they want the Dao De Jing to be, mostly coming from western notions of naturalism and transcendentalism.
Tao Te Ching 18
When the great Tao is declined,
The doctrines of humanity (jen) and righteousness (yi) arose,
In other words, when people forget the path of true righteousness, they grasp after contrived notions of it by talking about "humanity" and "righteousness." If they were still good, they would simply be humane and righteous, and the talk would be unnecessary. Therefore, the necessity of talking about these things is symptomatic of fallen morality. That is not to say that speaking of these things is necessarily wrong, just that it is low wisdom and understanding.
When knowledge and wisdom appeared,
There emerged great hypocrisy.
The wisdom that Laozi advocates is wisdom and knowledge based on desirelessness, silence, and non-action. It is a meditative wisdom and knowing that arises naturally from a mental state of clarity and stillness. Other forms of so-called "wisdom" and "knowledge" are all contrived in comparison. This is quite different from the popular notions of wisdom in western civilization. However, it is the basis of all high eastern philosophies and religions.
When the six family relationships are not in harmony,
There will be the advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children.
Again, there is no need to talk about filial piety and family relationships if they are naturally harmonious. They would silently develop and continue naturally on their own accord. Contrived efforts to educate others and impose these things on others is indicative of the people and the culture having fallen from their previous higher wisdom and harmony.
When a country is in disorder,
There will be praise of loyal ministers.
Laozi is again pointing out that there is no need for praise when things are going well. Insecurity, disloyalty, and disorder lead people to value praise and flattery. However, this does not reflect true sincerity.
At the time the Dao De Jing was written, the ruler of every Chinese state wanted to be a "sage-king", and talk of righteousness and virtue was cheap. They wanted to gain legitimacy with various forms of contrived virtue. Reclusive sages were critical of this, pointing out that these actions were the symptoms of a sick and disorderly culture. In its own time and place, the literary style of the Dao De Jing and the references would have been understood. However, when the language of China was unified, the standard for literature was now expansive and more verbose. Old writings such as the Dao De Jing later seemed rough and difficult because they used literary styles specific to the states they originated in.
No, religion is not taboo unless you work in government. Elected officials have to at least pretend to be stuffy atheists, but they are often not.
However, religions have to be approved by the government and there are organizations that regulate them to make the government feel better. For example, Buddhism, Daoism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and some others are approved.
The government respects Buddhist sites and mountains, and even donates vast amounts of money to build temples and monuments for tourism and bragging rights (among East Asian countries).
In imperial China, the ideal for developing strategies and large plans as the emperor, was to carefully consider any foreseeable impacts over the course of 500 years. Of course, not every decision was actually made with this sort of wisdom, but it was certainly the ideal and the way rulers and scholars were educated.
Long term thinking is something we largely lack today in government, even in our ideals of governance, and it's dangerously short-sighted. This leads to not only shoddy patchwork and disasters like New Orleans, but larger cultural instability as well, which leads to disasters of its own.
I don't know of any big news sites that are blocked in China. I regularly read articles from the NY Times and the LA Times websites, along with a variety of others (including Slashdot). The big blogging sites are blocked, though, as are YouTube, Facebook, etc. The government here really isn't concerned with the established western media, though. Also, it certainly is nice to use BitTorrent without any worries about the MAFIAA sending me scary letters.
In some ways China is a freer country than the U.S. For example, if I'm sick I can simply visit a doctor and it doesn't cost much. In the U.S., I was afraid to go in for a checkup because I couldn't afford any real treatment. If I want to buy a cell phone, I don't get a monthly bill, I can just go to any store and buy extra minutes to put on it. I can pay $90 per year for a 2M DSL line, and I never see a bill for that either. And besides that, life is so much simpler here that it's really relaxing. Add that to the fact that I'm one of 1.3 billion people in this country, and nobody is going to bother me. Nobody is going to screw with my life, sue me, give me tickets, etc. They have bigger fish to fry, so there is never anything to really worry about. To me, that's the freedom I really care about -- a simple, anonymous, affordable lifestyle.
There are so many things in the U.S. that people consider to be freedom, like owning a gun, that people just go nuts over. They don't have any bearing in reality, so even though people generally have quite a bit of money, their daily lives still suck and they're still miserable.
I live in China, and most of the time English Wikipedia works fine. However, there are occasional times when I will search for something, and the whole site will be unreachable for a few minutes. Today I went to this page: Maitreya, and before the page could fully load, my connection was mysteriously reset. I was frustrated, but eventually I could connect again and other Wikipedia pages were accessible. Just to check to make sure there really was something strange, I just tried accessing the page again after several hours of otherwise-functional Wikipedia access. Same thing, and now I can't reach Wikipedia again! And now after a few minutes, I'm reading about other things without a problem. But I still have not been able to access the Maitreya page.
This leads me to believe that there is a proxy that uses dynamic filtering that watches web page contents. "Maitreya" is a really tame page, and it's just about a Buddhist figure, and I never have any other problems with normal religious pages. However, there have been several movements and cults throughout history where the member will claim to be Maitreya (the future Buddha). There is a section on the Maitreya page that covers this ugly / strange side, so I'm guessing that any talk about cults may have the clamp on it. The way pages are filtered is pretty strange here. For example, half of the Google Images results will typically be missing. This may be because the government tries to only block out image results, but Google constantly adds new servers to host them.
You can forget about Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, etc. They are all blocked here, but nobody cares in China because they use different websites. It's more of a pain in the ass than anything -- it's not really going to comprehensively censor anything, but it certainly makes using the Web a more frustrating and needlessly-limiting experience for any foreigners.
The big thing now being pushed by the government in China is morality, and I actually agree with that emphasis. That is, taking the high road of governance and focusing on culture rather than overt methods of control and regulation. This idea is totally in harmony with China's ancient humanistic culture and the original teachings of Confucianism and Daoism. However, contrived morality by means of censorship is not really encouraging people to be kinder, more caring, or otherwise more ethical. It is not going to help people to develop notions of justice or equality, or to nurture individual consciousness of one's own actions.
These other professions predate IT, and passed through an era when organizations and unions were used to protect professionals. We never developed that by banding together and developing reasonable standards, so now we have to compete with Java monkeys from third world countries who just cut and paste code. They will just keep nodding their heads if they don't understand something, and they have no real understanding of programming or how a computer works. Instead of a few engineers designing something beautiful, it's just hoards of ignorant slaves stacking bricks to build crude pyramids.
The antithesis of this is classical rigorous computer science with sophisticated languages that require intelligence (i.e. even just simple recursion) such as the Lisp languages. In the beginning of MIT's "Wizard Book" (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), there is this quote:
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."
With all of this nonsense going on -- the competition, the lack of respect, downsizing, etc. -- I just don't think there are many computing positions that even allow for real fun and experimentation anymore. The sense of adventure that computing enjoyed in past decades is starting to fade. I guess the PHB's have actually started to drive people away from it.
After having my life turned upside down a few times, I've grown to appreciate a balanced life that allows me to relax and enjoy myself. Life is too short to work overtime, and a job is only what you do to put a roof over your head. If women also care about this balance, they're probably smart to do so.
I read recently in China Daily that the fines for companies that commit copyright infringement are usually less than $10,000 USD. This is several times as much in relative terms in China, but still a slap on the wrist for companies here. However, if you knew how Chinese companies, government officials, and the police work together to keep each other happy, it would blow your little Slashdotter minds. Suffice it to say, it's all about give and take here, and then of course who you know.
This often seems like a society of people who collectively think copyright and IP is irrelevant, and don't have anything to fear from the armies of U.S. lawyers. There are different economic rules at play, and that's something that most people have not begun to really consider. Little real respect for artificial ownership over ideas and intangibles -- it's an interesting idea, and I don't know fully what to think of it or how it will play out. I have to wonder what will happen in the long term when the yuan starts to rise and China becomes even more economically powerful. If the U.S. can't rely on copyright and IP, that may be very damaging to certain U.S. businesses that rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. Disney).
the Chinese portion of anything is going to deny it's theft and call the original coders liars. The Chinese are great about this, the government mindset is embedded in the younger citizens - such as "We do not filter our Internet access, we have a few routing issues."
Yeah, right.
Have you even visited China, or are you just talking out of your ass? Let me guess, you think that everything is cheap and ripped off here too, right? As someone who moved to China from the U.S., and who works with young Chinese people every day, let me clue you into something: you hear a lot of nonsense and propaganda about China, and there are a lot of assumptions that are wrong. Fortunately for people like you, not enough Chinese people can speak English fluently to slap stuff like this down on Slashdot. That's why there's an enormous gap in English sources about all things related to China, and a couple popular misconceptions get repeated ad nauseum because nobody bothers to read about China or come here. So you and the rest know...
* Everyone in China knows that certain sites are blocked * Most blocked sites are English anyways * People don't really care because their Chinese stuff works fine
As for the whole political situation, most educated people here see the problems with American democracy and economics and realize it's not the right way for them. They do complain about many problems with the government, and most people are actually resentful toward the rich (unlike in the U.S. where everyone calls them "successful" and wants to kiss their asses). The newspapers will happily report on these topics, and people can definitely voice their opinions about a number of issues. If you think that's not enough, try voicing certain views critical of capitalism or business in American papers and see how far you get.
As for topics like Tibet, most Chinese only know the other half of the story that you didn't hear. That is, Tibet was basically a serfdom where the temples and a few wealthy individuals owned all the land, and people were bound to them. They had to pay extremely high taxes, had no education, and they had their eyes gouged out or their hands chopped off if they committed crimes (by Buddhist monks even), which you can easily find photos of. They couldn't even marry without permission from the land owner, and they generally lived in abject poverty (and still do). Tibet probably deserves independence, but most Americans only think that Tibet was a magical fairy land where everyone was happy until the big bad Chinese came. In reality, most peoples' lives there suck now, but they sucked before too. Just like the Chinese have something to lose if Tibet became independent, the monks lost a lot of privilege too, so make what you will of that.
So you see, you are just hearing the other side of the propaganda. You are being duped by political forces that are often more pervasive than the Chinese government could ever hope to be, because Americans don't even know that they are hearing bullshit. Market forces just control the whole thing, and keep the true puppet masters of the country safe. They don't need to do anything forceful because the system works to quietly keep people quiet about certain things. If we could occupy their markets tomorrow and profit from them, you can bet that the American media would magically fall in love with China in a heartbeat.
You are misunderstanding the purpose of "copyleft" licenses like the GPL and CC Attrib-ShareAlike. These were created to cleverly manipulate the concept of copyrights to ensure certain freedoms for everyone, not simply to protect the interests of the copyright holder. When a company like this is sued for violating the GPL, it is principally for denying certain freedoms to everyone else. I'm sorry I have to quote the Wikipedia article for this subject on Slashdot (you people should all know this stuff, get off my lawn, etc.), but:
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.
Recently it's been popular on Slashdot to call out everyone here for being a hypocrite without considering the actual differences in the purposes of ordinary copyrights and the "copyleft" licenses. So there you have it, do you remember the basics of free software now, Slashdot?
They'd rather have content producers they control promoting socialist morality [china-consulate.org] instead of foreigners with silly ideas like voting (universal sufferage/if you can breathe you can vote...not like wise Confucian sages ruling because they're the smartest and therefore obviously the best [at least in the eyes of the Confucian sages]).
1. The "Confucians" of the last thousand years are better described as Neo-Confucians, and they would be better described as intellectuals than sages. From Zhu Xi on, the most important works of Confucianism began to be interpreted in a very selective way to reinforce certain attempts by rulers to further their own selfish goals. These people were not Confucians in the classical sense because they did not teach individual consciousness and self-cultivation. It's for this reason that they can only be considered intellectuals.
2. The philosophy of Confucius did not exist as a separate school from Daoism originally, and they only became distinguished in the Han Dynasty when people began to reinterpret the original texts and take on partisan roles. In fact, originally each state had its own prized texts, specialties, and literary styles.
3. The teachings of Confucius stress the cultivation of the person as being the starting point of everything, and the notion of the "Great Harmony" in society comes from everyone putting this into practice, not from rulers exerting power over others. You can verify this very easily by reading the Great Learning, which is the shortest and most essential Confucian book on governance.
4. The Chinese government vilified, and still does to some extent, anything related to Confucianism, which to them is synonymous with traditionalism and conservatism. They need to, to justify their own place in society. However, in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the teachings of Confucius played a humanist role in society by emphasizing individual consciousness and essential human kindness ("ren", or benevolence).
It's sad that nobody reads the essential works of Confucianism. Scholars are only now starting to recognize that there is a huge discrepancy between the contents of the Confucian classics and what they had presumed for so long. Sadly, anyone who bothered to spend a short amount of time reading the original sources could have learned these things easily.
Actually, I can't reach TPB here in China. So where is this distributed solution that doesn't rely on monolithic tracking sites? If I can't find these links on a web site (sites are easily blocked here), how can I find something I want, and download it with BitTorrent? This is the problem I'm talking about. The BitTorrent technology is really nice, but in some ways, older technologies are not so encumbered. If I load a traditional P2P system that uses Gnutella or some other network, there is not this same problem searching for files.
We've known for years that BitTorrent has this weakness of relying on tracking sites that can be shut down or blocked. As far as I know, nobody has come up with a de facto distributed, anonymous replacement for trackers. Now some of the biggest BT trackers have gone down or been blocked. Does anyone know of efforts to solve this, and how they stack up?
Living in China myself, I can access a few BT trackers in English, so that's fine for me. But of course the native Chinese use their own sites, just like they use their own search engine (Bai Du) and their own IM client (QQ). The government here can easily block out the biggest BT sites, just like they block out Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, and many other popular western sites. Tor is slower than molasses, sometimes taking up to a minute to display a page here, so that really isn't a replacement, and anonymous web proxies aren't a long-term solution.
"IBM has released a new mainframe server that doesn't include its z/OS operating system. This Enterprise Linux Server line supports Red Hat or Suse."
There is a big difference between a mainframe and a high-end server. Why would someone buy a mainframe if they didn't need the reliability and special features of a mainframe? Aren't these really the selling points of the Z-series over the P-series, for example? Usually the P-series and I-series systems are also touted for virtualization, and tend to be less expensive. Can someone distinguish the big difference between these lines now? Traditionally, from what I remember, P-series was AIX, I-Series was AS/400, and Z-series was z/OS and other mainframe OS's. Of course, IBM has been offering Linux on all of them for quite awhile now.
Why would anyone want to use a glorified VB clone? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Python and Ruby programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Perl for 20+ years, and they'll still be using it for 20+ years after Ruby and Python are a distant memory.
Why would anyone want to use a glorified Unix Shell? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Perl programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Lisp for 50+ years, and they'll still be using it for 50+ years after Perl is a distant memory.
GNU Emacs basically grew out of the MIT AI Lab environment, and specifically the preference that RMS had for Lisp over languages like C. It's also notable that much of Emacs is written in C, and Emacs Lisp is a minimalist Lisp dialect of its own, mainly for text editing functionality. Emacs Lisp is similar to the modern practice of embedding a scripting language in an application.
Stumpwm, on the other hand, is an environment written completely in Common Lisp. As such, it runs with the same language that a Lisp programmer prefers to program applications in, and even with the same Lisp. For example, a typical Lisp programmer who uses SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) will have stumpwm running in SBCL, and can also have an instance of Emacs running SLIME, a highly interactive Lisp environment, which also interacts with SBCL through sockets. From there, he can make stumpwm additions in real time, write a new app, or create a new system script all in the same SLIME environment with the same Lisp running.
There is also the notable social phenomenon of stumpwm growing out of the general popularity surge that Common Lisp has had in recent years, whereas Emacs Lisp always stuck out to Unix people as being a funny thing to have in an editor.
Actually, while this Common Lisp paradigm differs from that of GNU Emacs and Emacs Lisp, it's very similar to what the Lisp machines did in the 1980's. However, their entire systems were like this, so any part of it could be modified at any time. They even had Emacs clones written entirely in Lisp. It was all done with a sophisticated object system, and was quite impressive. With languages like C, none of this is really possible.
Slashdot Mirror
They were both great series, really. The ancient Wing Commander games (1 & 2) were mostly a 2D affair, and they simply can't compare in depth or complexity. I believe the technology was too limited at the time to really let them open up a whole sci-fi world to the player. They did have a cartoony fun side to them, though, and were certainly enjoyable. They paved the way for the next wave of space combat sims.
However, before the really big Wing Commander game came out (WC3 with Mark Hamill), there was a space of time in which the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games were released. Those games were a huge step forward, by including full 3D environments that included high resolution (for those days) at very reasonable performance on a modest system. There were a large number of missions, different craft, and of course STAR WARS! Back when Star Wars was still awesome -- before the "Special Editions" and crappy prequels. Back when the three movies you bought on VHS were the same as what was released originally in the theaters. I think some Slashdotters are starting to forget how cool Star Wars was back then. To fly in an imperial fighter, chasing after Rebel X-Wings and those damn fast A-Wings, after the music kicked in was awesome.
Then Wing Commander 3 came out, and it was just a whole different ballgame. In some ways it was a simpler game with more cinematics, but the resolution and realism of the whole thing made it pretty much THE space combat sim to beat. As a kid, I was just thrilled to be able to play a game like this at full speed at the nice resolution. For any boy with an imagination, it was amazing.
I guess all three phases were special in their own ways, but to me, the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games really opened up a whole different world, and gave a sense of freedom that I haven't experienced in any earlier games. Wing Commander 3 added a nice story and extra realism that really set the bar high after that for space combat sims. For those who never played these games from the golden age of space combat, they are certainly worth a go today. Unfortunately WC3 is 4 CD-ROM's of data, due to the AVI files. The TIE Fighter game easily fits on one CD-ROM, though.
This is very common in other countries as well. I'd venture to guess that it is the most common method in developing countries. I discussed this once with Uzbek and Nepalese students who couldn't understand why other students were bothered when they wanted to copy answers from them. I mentioned that the other person had to do work to study the material and learn it, but they wouldn't have any of that. I was really taken aback by the attitude and by the lack of basic educational spirit reflected in it. "Why learn anything, when you can just copy from someone else?"
In China, I also see that many students just memorize English sentences and regurgitate them like robots to get a good grade. This is not just a bad teaching habit here, but rather the standard way of teaching. Give students a dialogue and then have them regurgitate it later. "If they can pronounce everything correctly, they must know what it all means."
The U.S. has many problems, but I think two good things we have are a sense of educational honesty, and good sensibilities about fairness and loyalty. I still believe we are generally good-natured and honest people, but our culture is often naive, and this hurts us (and others) in many ways.
It is not true that they are worthless without evidence. They are not only cultural and historical treasures, but may be preserved for a later date when evidence has been found. And even if they are never found to be accurate about history, they can still tell us about a culture and its people.
As for Little Red Riding Hood, I do not know if that is true or not. However, if it is, that is simply one example of how a story may change. However, TFA is an example of how a story did not, and it was indeed very valuable information that lead directly to the meteorite crater. Hardly "worthless" in this case. If they had dismissed it as such because there was no prior evidence, they would never have discovered the evidence that made it so valuable.
Another example is the Chinese Shang dynasty, which western scholars simply assumed was mythical, and criticized others as naive for believing that the ancient Chinese would have such accurate records about the past. That is, until archaeologists found ancient turtle bones from the period inscribed with the names of the same kings in the ancient records. There is always such a trend in academia for scholars to toss aside ancient knowledge as pure myth.
I wonder how many "myths" have such a basis in true events? I'm reminded of the "hobbit humans" story where the native people had stories about them that had been passed down reliably for thousands of years. It seems that in our rush to be certain about our world, we are often too eager to dismiss the ideas of ancient people. It is unfortunate as well, because they cannot defend themselves, so they are especially easy prey for academics looking for notoriety.
It's only $300, and I believe the websites need to be hosted in China. They want to stop people from making porn in China (viewed as exploiting local women), and they don't care so much about people simply viewing porn on foreign sites. $300 is the monthly salary for many Chinese, if that puts it into perspective. It's difficult to say whether what class that is, though, because incomes are all over the place. Maybe it's a working class salary.
As an American living in China, it pains me to see this sort of hysterical nonsense on Slashdot all the time. China is the new Evil Empire, apparently. Scream "fascist" all you want, but you and most other westerners do not understand Chinese civilization or the role that government has traditionally played in it. Then again, maybe the U.S. should "pre-empt" their errors, and save China from the Chinese. :-P
The basic reason that the Chinese do not allow porn is that they believe that it demeans women. This goes back to the revolution, in which women were eager to participate to get some basic equality with men. You can argue that women have a choice, but in poor provinces, you can bet that it would be akin to prostitution, where young women are basically forced into the lifestyle because they have no other options.
Chinese society is quite conservative about sex, or at least it has that appearance. For example, it isn't unheard of to hear of a foreigner beaten into a coma for deflowering local girls. In a country where virginity is prized and sex can almost be like a contract for marriage, that sort of thing isn't taken lightly. In the same way, if Chinese people think their women are being debased (as in porn), they tend to get very angry.
I am not going to try to explain 5000 years of Chinese civilization to you, or explain every way that it is different from the West, but I would encourage Slashdotters to read this article from the LA Times. It explains quite a bit about the role of government in China and how the West has gotten it wrong with predicting that China would become more like them (developing a rights tradition, embracing democracy, etc.).
Article: Understanding China
Bushido Blade was awesome, and it is still among the most, if not the most, realistic deadly fighting game ever made. Its simplicity came from its realism, so the complexity that it had was all related to how you were actually fighting. For instance, which stance you were in, or the way you swing your blade. The realistic simplicity also let it break out into three dimensions, so it was one of the very first fighting games to really allow you to run wherever you wanted (not just the lame side-stepping that fighting games still often use). It's still certainly worth a spin for those of you who (for some reason) still play PS1. Just a simple fight between two players in the bamboo forest is tense. There are only a few (sometimes one) unblocked swings between your character and its death.
Of course, most people were more interested in playing Tekken and Mortal Kombat with their fireballs and snap-your-neck-to-take-away-20%-of-your-health type moves. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that, but Bushido Blade showed that the simplicity of realism can give developers room for real substance in the gameplay.
That's awesome. Mintty is exactly what I always wanted for Cygwin: a PuTTY style native Windows terminal with Unicode, no X prerequisite, etc.
Cygwin isn't meant to give you all the Linux or Windows system features, just provide a full-featured POSIX emulation layer (at its core, just one DLL), and programs compiled for that. You may still need to use Windows utilities to access Windows-specific features that have no POSIX implementation. However, the important thing is that it basically gives Unix developers a common platform, so anything developed for general Unix systems will compile on Cygwin's POSIX emulation layer.
Since Cygwin basically throws you into a command shell, it really does require an understanding of the fundamentals of Unix/Linux systems and how to work effectively in a shell. For example, I doubt many users of Slackware or NetBSD would have any substantial complaints about Cygwin. As someone who used Cygwin for years in a corporate environment where I could not use Linux, it was a godsend. I could spend my whole day working in Cygwin without having to mess with Windows development environments. Being able to throw together a bash script that uses grep, sed, awk, etc. is so nice for a stranded Linux user. However, many people do not learn the basic utilities anymore, even basic things such as customizing a login shell.
If there is a weak point in the Cygwin interactive experience, in my opinion it comes from the fact that the default Windows terminal program is used, which is slow and generally terrible compared to the modern Linux terminal apps. Maybe someday there will be a fast and full-featured replacement. But as it is, the Windows terminal is basically sluggish early 90's cruft that just isn't up to the task. Not a fault of Cygwin, but still a problem when running any such programs on Windows.
You are reinventing Buddhism, actually, which is mostly what the Matrix copies as well. The Buddha taught 2500 years ago that you don't have a body, the entire world is an illusion, and that mind is the only reality that human beings have ever experienced, or could even hypothetically ever experience. That all reality is observable through eight consciousnesses, some of which are associated with sense organs, and others which are more fundamental. There is a complete model of the mind all of its faculties, including the conception of thoughts. At the most fundamental level is a consciousness that is the complete non-duality of mind and matter.
If you want the details, the consciousness-only school developed them in India and then in China. However, most academics cannot understand the texts because they are heavily dependent on logic, technical terminology, and a model of the mind based on empirical observation of thoughts and phenomena in meditation. However, if anyone is interested, the basic text is quite short and is called the Sandhirnirmocana Sutra. However, the most technical text in English, is the book written by the Chinese master Xuanzang Treatise on the Perfection of Consciousness-only. Even for Lisp or Haskell-breathing intellectual programmers, these texts should prove quite challenging. And I fear westerners who pride themselves on their understanding of western philosophy would have no chance at all. There are extremely few people who read and understand this material, sadly.
I find Taoism lacking, often; For example, I have never heard of a working civilization that based its thought in Taoism. Nonetheless, the fact of its wisdom is undeniable.
The Dao De Jing is difficult to understand at times for a few reasons. One is because most translations are shallow and most translators do not clearly understand the language or meanings of the words. In some ways, James Legge's early translation from the 19th century is still one of the best because he had assistance from a Chinese master. In the future I will make my own translation, but it must be done very carefully to fully bring out the meaning. Another reason for the difficulty is that the culture and learning of ancient China is vastly different from that of modern people in the west. And another reason is that many people come with prior conceptions of what they want the Dao De Jing to be, mostly coming from western notions of naturalism and transcendentalism.
Tao Te Ching 18
When the great Tao is declined, The doctrines of humanity (jen) and righteousness (yi) arose,
In other words, when people forget the path of true righteousness, they grasp after contrived notions of it by talking about "humanity" and "righteousness." If they were still good, they would simply be humane and righteous, and the talk would be unnecessary. Therefore, the necessity of talking about these things is symptomatic of fallen morality. That is not to say that speaking of these things is necessarily wrong, just that it is low wisdom and understanding.
When knowledge and wisdom appeared, There emerged great hypocrisy.
The wisdom that Laozi advocates is wisdom and knowledge based on desirelessness, silence, and non-action. It is a meditative wisdom and knowing that arises naturally from a mental state of clarity and stillness. Other forms of so-called "wisdom" and "knowledge" are all contrived in comparison. This is quite different from the popular notions of wisdom in western civilization. However, it is the basis of all high eastern philosophies and religions.
When the six family relationships are not in harmony, There will be the advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children.
Again, there is no need to talk about filial piety and family relationships if they are naturally harmonious. They would silently develop and continue naturally on their own accord. Contrived efforts to educate others and impose these things on others is indicative of the people and the culture having fallen from their previous higher wisdom and harmony.
When a country is in disorder, There will be praise of loyal ministers.
Laozi is again pointing out that there is no need for praise when things are going well. Insecurity, disloyalty, and disorder lead people to value praise and flattery. However, this does not reflect true sincerity.
At the time the Dao De Jing was written, the ruler of every Chinese state wanted to be a "sage-king", and talk of righteousness and virtue was cheap. They wanted to gain legitimacy with various forms of contrived virtue. Reclusive sages were critical of this, pointing out that these actions were the symptoms of a sick and disorderly culture. In its own time and place, the literary style of the Dao De Jing and the references would have been understood. However, when the language of China was unified, the standard for literature was now expansive and more verbose. Old writings such as the Dao De Jing later seemed rough and difficult because they used literary styles specific to the states they originated in.
No, religion is not taboo unless you work in government. Elected officials have to at least pretend to be stuffy atheists, but they are often not.
However, religions have to be approved by the government and there are organizations that regulate them to make the government feel better. For example, Buddhism, Daoism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and some others are approved.
The government respects Buddhist sites and mountains, and even donates vast amounts of money to build temples and monuments for tourism and bragging rights (among East Asian countries).
In imperial China, the ideal for developing strategies and large plans as the emperor, was to carefully consider any foreseeable impacts over the course of 500 years. Of course, not every decision was actually made with this sort of wisdom, but it was certainly the ideal and the way rulers and scholars were educated.
Long term thinking is something we largely lack today in government, even in our ideals of governance, and it's dangerously short-sighted. This leads to not only shoddy patchwork and disasters like New Orleans, but larger cultural instability as well, which leads to disasters of its own.
I don't know of any big news sites that are blocked in China. I regularly read articles from the NY Times and the LA Times websites, along with a variety of others (including Slashdot). The big blogging sites are blocked, though, as are YouTube, Facebook, etc. The government here really isn't concerned with the established western media, though. Also, it certainly is nice to use BitTorrent without any worries about the MAFIAA sending me scary letters.
In some ways China is a freer country than the U.S. For example, if I'm sick I can simply visit a doctor and it doesn't cost much. In the U.S., I was afraid to go in for a checkup because I couldn't afford any real treatment. If I want to buy a cell phone, I don't get a monthly bill, I can just go to any store and buy extra minutes to put on it. I can pay $90 per year for a 2M DSL line, and I never see a bill for that either. And besides that, life is so much simpler here that it's really relaxing. Add that to the fact that I'm one of 1.3 billion people in this country, and nobody is going to bother me. Nobody is going to screw with my life, sue me, give me tickets, etc. They have bigger fish to fry, so there is never anything to really worry about. To me, that's the freedom I really care about -- a simple, anonymous, affordable lifestyle.
There are so many things in the U.S. that people consider to be freedom, like owning a gun, that people just go nuts over. They don't have any bearing in reality, so even though people generally have quite a bit of money, their daily lives still suck and they're still miserable.
I live in China, and most of the time English Wikipedia works fine. However, there are occasional times when I will search for something, and the whole site will be unreachable for a few minutes. Today I went to this page: Maitreya, and before the page could fully load, my connection was mysteriously reset. I was frustrated, but eventually I could connect again and other Wikipedia pages were accessible. Just to check to make sure there really was something strange, I just tried accessing the page again after several hours of otherwise-functional Wikipedia access. Same thing, and now I can't reach Wikipedia again! And now after a few minutes, I'm reading about other things without a problem. But I still have not been able to access the Maitreya page.
This leads me to believe that there is a proxy that uses dynamic filtering that watches web page contents. "Maitreya" is a really tame page, and it's just about a Buddhist figure, and I never have any other problems with normal religious pages. However, there have been several movements and cults throughout history where the member will claim to be Maitreya (the future Buddha). There is a section on the Maitreya page that covers this ugly / strange side, so I'm guessing that any talk about cults may have the clamp on it. The way pages are filtered is pretty strange here. For example, half of the Google Images results will typically be missing. This may be because the government tries to only block out image results, but Google constantly adds new servers to host them.
You can forget about Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, etc. They are all blocked here, but nobody cares in China because they use different websites. It's more of a pain in the ass than anything -- it's not really going to comprehensively censor anything, but it certainly makes using the Web a more frustrating and needlessly-limiting experience for any foreigners.
The big thing now being pushed by the government in China is morality, and I actually agree with that emphasis. That is, taking the high road of governance and focusing on culture rather than overt methods of control and regulation. This idea is totally in harmony with China's ancient humanistic culture and the original teachings of Confucianism and Daoism. However, contrived morality by means of censorship is not really encouraging people to be kinder, more caring, or otherwise more ethical. It is not going to help people to develop notions of justice or equality, or to nurture individual consciousness of one's own actions.
The antithesis of this is classical rigorous computer science with sophisticated languages that require intelligence (i.e. even just simple recursion) such as the Lisp languages. In the beginning of MIT's "Wizard Book" (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs), there is this quote:
With all of this nonsense going on -- the competition, the lack of respect, downsizing, etc. -- I just don't think there are many computing positions that even allow for real fun and experimentation anymore. The sense of adventure that computing enjoyed in past decades is starting to fade. I guess the PHB's have actually started to drive people away from it.
After having my life turned upside down a few times, I've grown to appreciate a balanced life that allows me to relax and enjoy myself. Life is too short to work overtime, and a job is only what you do to put a roof over your head. If women also care about this balance, they're probably smart to do so.
I read recently in China Daily that the fines for companies that commit copyright infringement are usually less than $10,000 USD. This is several times as much in relative terms in China, but still a slap on the wrist for companies here. However, if you knew how Chinese companies, government officials, and the police work together to keep each other happy, it would blow your little Slashdotter minds. Suffice it to say, it's all about give and take here, and then of course who you know.
This often seems like a society of people who collectively think copyright and IP is irrelevant, and don't have anything to fear from the armies of U.S. lawyers. There are different economic rules at play, and that's something that most people have not begun to really consider. Little real respect for artificial ownership over ideas and intangibles -- it's an interesting idea, and I don't know fully what to think of it or how it will play out. I have to wonder what will happen in the long term when the yuan starts to rise and China becomes even more economically powerful. If the U.S. can't rely on copyright and IP, that may be very damaging to certain U.S. businesses that rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. Disney).
the Chinese portion of anything is going to deny it's theft and call the original coders liars. The Chinese are great about this, the government mindset is embedded in the younger citizens - such as "We do not filter our Internet access, we have a few routing issues."
Yeah, right.
Have you even visited China, or are you just talking out of your ass? Let me guess, you think that everything is cheap and ripped off here too, right? As someone who moved to China from the U.S., and who works with young Chinese people every day, let me clue you into something: you hear a lot of nonsense and propaganda about China, and there are a lot of assumptions that are wrong. Fortunately for people like you, not enough Chinese people can speak English fluently to slap stuff like this down on Slashdot. That's why there's an enormous gap in English sources about all things related to China, and a couple popular misconceptions get repeated ad nauseum because nobody bothers to read about China or come here. So you and the rest know...
* Everyone in China knows that certain sites are blocked
* Most blocked sites are English anyways
* People don't really care because their Chinese stuff works fine
As for the whole political situation, most educated people here see the problems with American democracy and economics and realize it's not the right way for them. They do complain about many problems with the government, and most people are actually resentful toward the rich (unlike in the U.S. where everyone calls them "successful" and wants to kiss their asses). The newspapers will happily report on these topics, and people can definitely voice their opinions about a number of issues. If you think that's not enough, try voicing certain views critical of capitalism or business in American papers and see how far you get.
As for topics like Tibet, most Chinese only know the other half of the story that you didn't hear. That is, Tibet was basically a serfdom where the temples and a few wealthy individuals owned all the land, and people were bound to them. They had to pay extremely high taxes, had no education, and they had their eyes gouged out or their hands chopped off if they committed crimes (by Buddhist monks even), which you can easily find photos of. They couldn't even marry without permission from the land owner, and they generally lived in abject poverty (and still do). Tibet probably deserves independence, but most Americans only think that Tibet was a magical fairy land where everyone was happy until the big bad Chinese came. In reality, most peoples' lives there suck now, but they sucked before too. Just like the Chinese have something to lose if Tibet became independent, the monks lost a lot of privilege too, so make what you will of that.
So you see, you are just hearing the other side of the propaganda. You are being duped by political forces that are often more pervasive than the Chinese government could ever hope to be, because Americans don't even know that they are hearing bullshit. Market forces just control the whole thing, and keep the true puppet masters of the country safe. They don't need to do anything forceful because the system works to quietly keep people quiet about certain things. If we could occupy their markets tomorrow and profit from them, you can bet that the American media would magically fall in love with China in a heartbeat.
Recently it's been popular on Slashdot to call out everyone here for being a hypocrite without considering the actual differences in the purposes of ordinary copyrights and the "copyleft" licenses. So there you have it, do you remember the basics of free software now, Slashdot?
1. The "Confucians" of the last thousand years are better described as Neo-Confucians, and they would be better described as intellectuals than sages. From Zhu Xi on, the most important works of Confucianism began to be interpreted in a very selective way to reinforce certain attempts by rulers to further their own selfish goals. These people were not Confucians in the classical sense because they did not teach individual consciousness and self-cultivation. It's for this reason that they can only be considered intellectuals.
2. The philosophy of Confucius did not exist as a separate school from Daoism originally, and they only became distinguished in the Han Dynasty when people began to reinterpret the original texts and take on partisan roles. In fact, originally each state had its own prized texts, specialties, and literary styles.
3. The teachings of Confucius stress the cultivation of the person as being the starting point of everything, and the notion of the "Great Harmony" in society comes from everyone putting this into practice, not from rulers exerting power over others. You can verify this very easily by reading the Great Learning, which is the shortest and most essential Confucian book on governance.
4. The Chinese government vilified, and still does to some extent, anything related to Confucianism, which to them is synonymous with traditionalism and conservatism. They need to, to justify their own place in society. However, in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the teachings of Confucius played a humanist role in society by emphasizing individual consciousness and essential human kindness ("ren", or benevolence).
It's sad that nobody reads the essential works of Confucianism. Scholars are only now starting to recognize that there is a huge discrepancy between the contents of the Confucian classics and what they had presumed for so long. Sadly, anyone who bothered to spend a short amount of time reading the original sources could have learned these things easily.
Actually, I can't reach TPB here in China. So where is this distributed solution that doesn't rely on monolithic tracking sites? If I can't find these links on a web site (sites are easily blocked here), how can I find something I want, and download it with BitTorrent? This is the problem I'm talking about. The BitTorrent technology is really nice, but in some ways, older technologies are not so encumbered. If I load a traditional P2P system that uses Gnutella or some other network, there is not this same problem searching for files.
We've known for years that BitTorrent has this weakness of relying on tracking sites that can be shut down or blocked. As far as I know, nobody has come up with a de facto distributed, anonymous replacement for trackers. Now some of the biggest BT trackers have gone down or been blocked. Does anyone know of efforts to solve this, and how they stack up?
Living in China myself, I can access a few BT trackers in English, so that's fine for me. But of course the native Chinese use their own sites, just like they use their own search engine (Bai Du) and their own IM client (QQ). The government here can easily block out the biggest BT sites, just like they block out Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, and many other popular western sites. Tor is slower than molasses, sometimes taking up to a minute to display a page here, so that really isn't a replacement, and anonymous web proxies aren't a long-term solution.
There is a big difference between a mainframe and a high-end server. Why would someone buy a mainframe if they didn't need the reliability and special features of a mainframe? Aren't these really the selling points of the Z-series over the P-series, for example? Usually the P-series and I-series systems are also touted for virtualization, and tend to be less expensive. Can someone distinguish the big difference between these lines now? Traditionally, from what I remember, P-series was AIX, I-Series was AS/400, and Z-series was z/OS and other mainframe OS's. Of course, IBM has been offering Linux on all of them for quite awhile now.
Why would anyone want to use a glorified VB clone? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Python and Ruby programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Perl for 20+ years, and they'll still be using it for 20+ years after Ruby and Python are a distant memory.
Why would anyone want to use a glorified Unix Shell? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Perl programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Lisp for 50+ years, and they'll still be using it for 50+ years after Perl is a distant memory.
Now get off my lawn.
GNU Emacs basically grew out of the MIT AI Lab environment, and specifically the preference that RMS had for Lisp over languages like C. It's also notable that much of Emacs is written in C, and Emacs Lisp is a minimalist Lisp dialect of its own, mainly for text editing functionality. Emacs Lisp is similar to the modern practice of embedding a scripting language in an application.
Stumpwm, on the other hand, is an environment written completely in Common Lisp. As such, it runs with the same language that a Lisp programmer prefers to program applications in, and even with the same Lisp. For example, a typical Lisp programmer who uses SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) will have stumpwm running in SBCL, and can also have an instance of Emacs running SLIME, a highly interactive Lisp environment, which also interacts with SBCL through sockets. From there, he can make stumpwm additions in real time, write a new app, or create a new system script all in the same SLIME environment with the same Lisp running.
There is also the notable social phenomenon of stumpwm growing out of the general popularity surge that Common Lisp has had in recent years, whereas Emacs Lisp always stuck out to Unix people as being a funny thing to have in an editor.
Actually, while this Common Lisp paradigm differs from that of GNU Emacs and Emacs Lisp, it's very similar to what the Lisp machines did in the 1980's. However, their entire systems were like this, so any part of it could be modified at any time. They even had Emacs clones written entirely in Lisp. It was all done with a sophisticated object system, and was quite impressive. With languages like C, none of this is really possible.