There are a few good tiling window managers that make this a breeze. To some degree it depends on which language you prefer. The following screen shots are from stumpwm, a window manager written entirely in Common Lisp. It has the added benefit of being programmable while it is running, so you can interact with, and test, any new additions or modifications in real time. Anything you want to do like sending windows one place or another, or binding different features to different keys, can be done very easily in a window manager like this. It's very capable out of the box, and it is meant to be extendible arbitrarily due to the powerful programming language it uses.
There is also a window manager that has some similar features called xmonad, but it is written in Haskell, so it has a bit of a syntactic learning curve if that matters to you.
On a side note, it's interesting that the proliferation of Lisp, Haskell, and other powerful functional programming languages has created a demand for a different kind of window manager that is written in, and can be extended with, the language. It's almost as if programmers began to see the limitations of static, C/C++ programmed environments after they started using these languages, and then started to build up new environments more suitable for high-level programming. Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional Unix way of always running back to the C languages?
There's still an entire world of people who think in terms of Windows-only and shareware. They're living in a 90's time warp, really. Never mind that C is inherently dangerous to use for scripting (not to mention primitive), or that there are smaller, freer web servers out there.... Some people feel compelled to reinvent the wheel, and then feel like heroes when they only pack in a few advertisements or dial home every once in awhile. People who don't know any better will still use it.
It's very good publicity for the computing power of their console. It's probably better than any lame ad campaign they could do -- natural marketing. "Hey look, our game consoles are being used as a supercomputer by the most advanced military on Earth!" Then it's talked about on all the tech sites, and probably in some magazines and newspapers. That's certainly worth the bit of money they could lose.
Besides, who knows what price they're actually paying? As a previous poster pointed out, current retail PS3's can't run Linux. That means the USAF is probably special ordering them from Sony, and probably paying a higher price as a result.
There is only one written language called "Chinese". Within that language, there are some simplified characters and traditional characters. Most mainland Chinese know mostly simplified forms (only of certain characters), and most other Chinese use the elaborate or traditional forms. This is basically due to the mainland Chinese effort to improve literacy by teaching primarily simplified characters when possible. However, they are just different forms for the words, and were used side-by-side historically in Chinese writing (simplified forms as shorthand for traditional forms). So yes, there is a Chinese written language, and it is certainly not non-existent. In fact, it was the lingua franca of the Far East, used commonly in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam much in the same way that Latin was in the West.
If you are referring to Mandarin / Cantonese / any-other-dialect, those are only spoken differences that vary everywhere in China, and even from village to village some people may not be able to understand each other. They don't dictate any written differences whatsoever because Chinese characters are usually ideographic, expressing a particular idea rather than the sound that represents it. For example, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan may write something the exact same way, but the pronunciation will be very different.
Accordingly, you will notice that there is no "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" option in any text translation tool.
Actually, I believe that the terms of the BSD license do not restrict a developer from adding another license such as the GPL, to a software project. This would not remove the BSD license, but still effectively change the terms of subsequent modifications. In the words of Theo de Raadt:
GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back.
Personally, I think this is one weakness of relying on "do whatever you want" licenses like BSD and MIT. Linux can always use BSD and GPL'd code, but the BSD devs want to stick with BSD for their kernels and other projects whenever possible.
The reason unix has always required root access in order to install software isn't because that's the way things should be, it's because there hasn't been another way to make it secure. Now, if you trust the distro's repos, you can safely let users install those signed packages. This is similar to (but more secure than) Mac OS X's policy of letting users install and uninstall but not modify app bundles.
The reason was simply because a user didn't have the privileges to change anything (by default) outside his/her own home directory and the system temporary directory. That is the way it should be -- only changing files that you have permission to change. Allowing users to add or remove software packages in / and/usr is beyond ridiculous. This is why users who want to install software packages themselves, can only install them to their own home directories, so they don't interfere with other users. The only sensible approach is one such as this, where users can only install software where they have permission to do so.
If the Fedora people really want to fix things, they could work on making their packages easy to install into the users' home folders, so users don't have to use the "configure prefix" to change things around, and then compile from source. That sort of user software installation is perfectly reasonable, and completely in line with the overarching concepts of Unix security.
Resident Evil and a number of other action/adventure and RPG games from the mid to late 90's innovated this, albeit in a much more limited way. Character enters a room, switch to another image. Character progresses further into the room, switch to a more appropriate angle. All the environments are pre-rendered, and 3D characters play around in them as though they are real-time. It always looked good on the PS1, and I admired the simplicity of the method and its impressive results. It looks like they are just making natural extensions to it, by streaming the images over the Internet in real-time, so the various elements can all be updated on a rendering farm. I wonder how efficient it will be, though, and what sort of compromises will be made? Obviously, streaming high-res images in real-time is an excellent way to devour massive amounts of bandwidth....
I never understood why people were so keen to move away from isometric perspectives and pre-rendered backgrounds? As long as the angles are good, they can really help to present the game in a well-crafted and artful way.
For those of you who jumped onto the Linux boat in the Ubuntu era, Mandriva / Mandrake is mostly a hold-over from the days when Red Hat Linux was the biggest Linux distribution around. Red Hat was still a little difficult for some users, so Mandrake was based off Red Hat with more of a focus on polish and ease of use for desktop systems... Maybe similar to the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. Like Ubuntu, Mandrake was very important, and if someone needed an easy Linux distro, Mandrake Linux was almost the standard.
I still remember ordering Mandrake and Slackware CD's through the mail because they were too big to download on a 56k connection. For a few dollars any number of companies would burn disks as send them through the mail. It wasn't standard for everyone to have broadband, or to be able to do updates through the Internet. In retrospect, Linux was certainly clumsier, rougher, and less stable on the desktop. A quick spin with Mandrake Linux 7 can show you how radically the Linux desktop experience has changed in the last nine years.
This clumsy user experience was also responsible for turning many Linux geeks away from the "bloated" desktop environments and more toward bare metal distributions such as Slackware and Debian, along with minimalist window managers, xterms, and other such tools. In my case, after struggling with Red Hat and Mandrake, I found the simplicity of Slackware to actually be easier, and lived over in that world for the next 7-8 years until Ubuntu really started to shine. I am sure there are many other Slashdotters who have had similar experiences in their years with Linux.
You are assuming that the difference between one font and another is purely presentation, and that the user already has adequate fonts available. For those who do not deal with fonts often and the technical needs of many websites, here is an example.
For romanized Indic text (used in many translations of Hindu and Buddhist literature), a number of Unicode letters and diacritics are needed that go well beyond the characters typically used in Western European languages (for example, IAST). Each platform has different fonts available by default that may handle these characters. Linux has the DejaVu fonts and Apple has Lucida Grande, but Microsoft only has Microsoft Sans Serif, which is the ugly cousin of Arial. In this font, there are no real italics, and the "fake italics" used look hideous because the slant is so exaggerated that they are painful to read. Any website text rendered in this font absolutely stinks for readability and for aesthetics.
I would like to be able to use a standard method of offering a font such as Linux Libertine or DejaVu Sans, that renders acceptably under Windows (most fonts don't), and have that handled in a streamlined way. Otherwise, I am forced to either make web pages that render as ugly as sin under Windows, or put up an optional page that explains how a user can download the font and manually install it. Both of these options are unacceptable for diacritics that should be so standard by now. Microsoft has really dropped the ball on Unicode support in its fonts, and web developers are left to try to cobble together solutions. The only other alternative is to only provide PDF's made with XeTeX, but PDF is no replacement for a web page.
Most/. readers are happy with a few ANSI characters, as long as they can see some code examples in their web browser, and as long as it renders English correctly, but there is a whole world of people who have entirely different needs.
If it is pronounced "chee" why not spell it "chee?"
Why must we bind ourselves to a transliteration table that winds up producing words that are pronounced nothing like how they are spelled, and further bastardize the English language?
It's dumb. Nothing good comes of it.
"Qi" is pronounced as it is spelled. The "Q" letter is defined to make a "CH" sound in Pinyin ("CH" is a similar but slightly different sound in Pinyin). The "I" is defined to make an "EE" sound along with its respective inflection (sometimes marked with diacritics or by numbers). As for bastardizing the English language, it has nothing to do with the English language. It's a romanization of Chinese -- that is, a system for writing spoken Chinese with the Latin alphabet (not the English pronunciation of it). The previous Wades-Giles system was closer to English in its pronunciations ("Qi" was spelled "Ch'i"), but it was abandoned a few decades ago.
Suffice it to say, the people who developed Pinyin over 50 years ago did so to alleviate the problems of using the more English-friendly phonetic systems. Going back to them would be a huge mistake, as the English pronunciation of the alphabet can not cover spoken Chinese accurately.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Why do I get the sense that even in 1976, Bill Gates was a small, petty person with a sense of entitlement? It's no wonder that Microsoft turned out the way it did.
You are confusing government policy with human culture. Chinese culture has no native rights tradition (or native communist tradition), and instead focuses on individual consciousness, especially in the native philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism. Even laws are viewed as failures of the government and its people. These traditions view society in terms of the individual, rather than advocating overt methods of government control and social change. Over time, people began accepting western ideas about rights, communism, and other things, but these are in no way Chinese ideas because they are only foreign imports.
That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony.http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ By the way, what exactly are you talking about? Chinese have had a turbulent history, so what? We shouldn't be critical of the current Chinese government because 40 million have died at the hands of its predecessor with whom (on paper at least) it shares the same ideology? I don't understand what your point is.
Yes, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights reflects the western "rights" tradition. You think that just because a document exists in an international peacekeeping organization, that it's really a part of other cultures and accurately reflects their values? If so, that's pretty naive.
My point is that using "rights" as the benchmark of civilization is necessarily a skewed perspective that does not account for cultural needs and differences.
I also mentioned the extreme amount of violence in China's recent history to contrast it with our own country's, which has not had any invasions or sustained any real violence on anywhere near the same scale. The average American Slashdotter is likely to have a very different perspective, in which it seems reasonable to view WoW-deprivation as some sort of evil government tyranny.
Being oblivious to these major historical and cultural differences just feeds into the collective ignorance of everyone here. To me, a real nerd should be smarter than that, and be more informed about history and culture rather than just modern technology.
That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. Considering that over 40 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward," and countless more before that in previous wars and revolutions, we don't have the same perspective on stability that they do. The coastal city of Ningbo, for example, was bombed with the bubonic plague by the Japanese during World War II. The amount of violence and upheaval that the Chinese have faced in the last hundred years is incredible, and sometimes I think that we Slashdotters would do well to relax and give them some time to sort things out (it is their own country, after all). They have a 5000 year old civilization, after all, and things aren't going to implode because pimply-faced teenage kids have to do martial arts rather than play World of Warcraft.
Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.
LaTeX has limited fonts, but if you use XeTeX (which uses LaTeX), you can not only use all the LaTeX stuff, but also any TrueType or OpenType font, and native unicode support as well. This is a godsend for typesetting anything that includes words or characters not in English, or just for people who are picky about typography. My personal favorite font is the open source SIL Gentium family, which is not only much more beautiful and readable than Times, but contains a fuller character set that makes it compatible with many more languages. Once you start writing documents with XeTeX and nicer fonts, you see how lacking word processors are for good typography and well-structured documents, and how self-limiting the concept is.
For newcomers to LaTeX and XeTeX, including packages and specifying options can be a bit time-consuming when you just want to get started with a basic A4-sized document. Here is the basic XeTeX file template I use for simple stuff. I'm picky about margins, line spacing, fonts, etc. so you know that it's a safe place to start out.
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Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
The following is from a book called Understanding This Chinese Generation, by Nan Huaijin, a very famous Confucian scholar and Buddhist master in China. Not only does it discuss this subject of American-style democracy being wrong for Chinese culture, but it also exposes a keen understanding of the U.S. government's inseparable ties to powerful economic forces. Intelligent and educated Chinese actually have a very sober view of the American system that is difficult to get from within it. This book was written years ago as well, so it is all the more impressive and prescient. We seldom hear the views of educated and intelligent Chinese, so/.'ers would do well to read this and understand his perspective.
Four years back I had a series of conversations with an American graduate student studying in China. Our discussions, which he transcribed and planned on translating into English, focused on issues relating to Western and Chinese culture. On one occasion, when the issue of freedom and democracy came up, I remarked, "In our modern era America alone carries the flag of Western cultural glory, championing democracy and freedom. But what Americans like to call democracy and freedom is actually the 'American style of democracy and freedom.' Although this style is by no means suitable for most other people and places, it is especially inappropriate for the five thousand year old culture of China. However, not only do Americans not understand this fact, but you also refuse to even consider its possibility. So your good intentions and American style of democracy and freedom are matched by an equally powerful response of antipathy wherever they turn up."
"What exactly do you mean when you say the American style of democracy and freedom," he asked. I replied, "The answer requires quite a complex discussion of two hundred years of contributing factors, from the founding of your country to the present. To summarize though, from the eighteenth century to the present, as America's forefathers flocked to the New World, they carried with them the culture of the European industrial revolution. However, coming from many different countries such as England, France, Germany, and Austria they carried with them the unique cultural perspectives of their individual ethnic backgrounds. These perspectives, combined with an ideological inclination toward the promotion of the general welfare, helped form the spiritual foundation of your nation â" 'of the people, by the people, and for the people.' However, regardless of what shape it assumes, hiding in the framework of liberalism and democracy has been the secret ingredient of the market forces that drive industry and commerce. This was true at the birth of your nation, and after two hundred years remains true to this very day. To be honest, the behind-the-scenes bosses who actually manage your democratic politics are inseparable from the capitalist and commercial industrial complex which surrounds them. Yes its true! Even today, America's territorial ambitions abroad have been quite limited. However, the same thing cannot be said of your desire to occupy foreign markets. This hidden agenda, when added to the tangle of your democratic politics and an unsophisticated provincial populace, has resulted in hesitation, inconsistency, and fence-sitting on the international scene. If you really want to live up to your superpower status, you must combine your international political experience with an in-depth study of the Chinese classic The Spring And Autumn Annals. Only then will you grasp the righteous principle of 'restoring the nation and insuring its posterity.'" Having returned home, today this American colleague has begun teaching The Spring and Autumn Annals and its related commentaries at Harvard University.
Since at least 1998 they have had that same ugly, ugly layout and worthless lists of Linux distros. It's like a crystallization of what was wrong with the OSS community in the 90's. Want to use Linux? No problem, here's a big list of distros that will be completely meaningless to you. Ubuntu is in there, but it's down at the bottom, way below Slackware and MkLinux, which (for all you know) are more popular and easier to use than it. This site was an epic failure in the 90's, and it still is, unfortunately. It's a shame, too, because it could be much better if they just threw out all the old stuff and started from scratch with something simple.
Ummm.... not really true. It's because the Falun Gong ideology clashes with the government. Also, they have shown that they can organize people to protest against the government, and I think you know what the Chinese government like to do with activists.
Ethics in Falun Dafa basically consist of "truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance." These are simple principles that everyone agrees on that have nothing to do with political or religious ideology. Also, there was a long stretch in the 1990's when Falun Dafa was not only permitted by the government, but was actively encouraged by it for health reasons. For around a decade, it was quite popular among Chinese qigong practitioners in China, but relatively unheard of in the West. However, in 1999, in response to a widely-read and controversial article by an academic criticizing qigong and Falun Dafa in general, there was a silent and peaceful protest that basically consisted of practitioners showing up to practice Falun Dafa together in solidarity. When the government saw this disruption of "national unity", they began to assess Falun Dafa as a threat since it has one leader, Li Hongzhi, who is the divine and de facto head of it all. Since that time, widespread persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners has gone on, and Li Hongzhi fled China to the U.S. where he lives now. Nothing much has changed in the last ten years.
Falun Dafa is not really a religion in itself or just a qigong practice, though. It's actually something in between -- a blend of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy with modern views on qigong, and even some things about UFO's and pyramids that are unique to Chinese culture. Li Hongzhi is the irreplaceable leader who disseminated the practice in China (purportedly from hermit masters), but there is no previous history of the practice in China, and many of the views are uniquely modern qigong-based ideas. For example, Li says that he gives all practitioners a qiji ("energy mechanism") in the form of the Falun Dafa symbol, which is installed into their lower dan tian ("energy field") point. This falun qiji ("wheel of dharma energy mechanism") is said to continuously rotate, giving out energy. These sort of ideas blend a host of folk beliefs, ideas about meditation, and modern qigong ideas in a very unique way. When considering past Buddhist and Taoist cultivation methods, both exoteric and esoteric, there is really nothing similar to it, or a way that it fits in with them.
Around ten years ago when it was a big thing, I read Zhuan Falun and the other books available by Li Hongzhi. In retrospect after reading Buddhist sutras and Daoist classics, I think that Falun Dafa is strange and not very effective when compared to the esoteric methods of Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Shingon, or the pure exoteric methods of Zen, Tiantai, Nichiren, Pure Land, and so on. Even practicing the very simple Pure Land mantra "Namo Amitofo" is a far more effective method that will be better for energy and health, and will result in greater meditative ability.
I'm still waiting for the game about Vietnam where the Vietcong are portrayed as covert freedom fighters, and the Americans are the evil imperialists who napalm villages and destroy your countryside with Agent Orange. That's a game I've wanted to play for years, but I'm sure that even after decades, America wouldn't have the stomach for it. I wonder if the same people who want this game to be published would also advocate a Vietnam game like this?
He is an extremist in some ways, but stick around and watch... His advice seems so impractical and difficult to reconcile, and people here bash him for being difficult, but he's usually right. He has strong principles that usually clash with the current reality, but they're very logical and consistent. He's a little crazy, but he's really the lone prophet of the open source community who doesn't compromise or sacrifice his values. Even if you don't agree with his outlook, it's extremely beneficial to have him advocating a consistent position that has been so important for open source and free software.
Wow, I could almost cut the smugness in your post with a knife. Apparently people who *really* use computers like to configure everything about them. These people are "advanced" or "power users", while everyone else is a retard or just a normal "user".
There are many people such as myself who have used plenty of window managers and desktop environments, and who like them to mostly stay out of the way. I don't want to endlessly configure my shiny little windows. If I want to do "real work", then I'll open up a terminal window and use Bash or Python. I'm sure there are plenty of other Slashdotters who take this same approach, judging by the relative popularity here of Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu.
And really, if you're obsessing about features in your GUI, are you really doing "real work"? The people I see who really care so much about that stuff are often just geeks who like to sit in their rooms and tinker with Linux, not people who are actually doing programming or sysadmin work on it.
East Asian texts tend to be preserved in their respective languages as well, rather than in translations into English and other foreign languages. CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association), for example, is a freely-available massive collection of over 4400 Buddhist texts in their entirety, many of which are 1500+ year old translations from Sanskrit. Some of these texts are quite massive as well, encyclopedic in scope with thousands of pages. Only a very tiny fraction of these has ever been translated into English, but they are all freely available in Chinese.
More than 99% of the world, actually. The U.K. is truly tiny in the larger scheme of things. For some perspective....
World population: 6.77 billion
U.K. population: 66 million (<1%)
U.S. population: 306 million (~4.5%)
P.R.C. population: 1.3+ billion (~20%)
Also, I'm willing to bet that the majority of the rest of the world has no clue what BitTorrent is or why it matters (in the larger scheme of things, does it?).
Haven't the originals and the parodies gotten old yet? And more importantly, why aren't Linux enthusiasts doing something truly new and original that highlights the strong points of Linux and OSS? Ubuntu and the other desktop distros have done a great job these last few years, but I think the Linux community still on a whole still lacks some creativity, originality, and artistic talent that would really help desktop Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few good tiling window managers that make this a breeze. To some degree it depends on which language you prefer. The following screen shots are from stumpwm, a window manager written entirely in Common Lisp. It has the added benefit of being programmable while it is running, so you can interact with, and test, any new additions or modifications in real time. Anything you want to do like sending windows one place or another, or binding different features to different keys, can be done very easily in a window manager like this. It's very capable out of the box, and it is meant to be extendible arbitrarily due to the powerful programming language it uses.
stumpwm tiling across five monitors at different resolutions
There is also a window manager that has some similar features called xmonad, but it is written in Haskell, so it has a bit of a syntactic learning curve if that matters to you.
xmonad tiling across three monitors
On a side note, it's interesting that the proliferation of Lisp, Haskell, and other powerful functional programming languages has created a demand for a different kind of window manager that is written in, and can be extended with, the language. It's almost as if programmers began to see the limitations of static, C/C++ programmed environments after they started using these languages, and then started to build up new environments more suitable for high-level programming. Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional Unix way of always running back to the C languages?
There's still an entire world of people who think in terms of Windows-only and shareware. They're living in a 90's time warp, really. Never mind that C is inherently dangerous to use for scripting (not to mention primitive), or that there are smaller, freer web servers out there.... Some people feel compelled to reinvent the wheel, and then feel like heroes when they only pack in a few advertisements or dial home every once in awhile. People who don't know any better will still use it.
It's very good publicity for the computing power of their console. It's probably better than any lame ad campaign they could do -- natural marketing. "Hey look, our game consoles are being used as a supercomputer by the most advanced military on Earth!" Then it's talked about on all the tech sites, and probably in some magazines and newspapers. That's certainly worth the bit of money they could lose.
Besides, who knows what price they're actually paying? As a previous poster pointed out, current retail PS3's can't run Linux. That means the USAF is probably special ordering them from Sony, and probably paying a higher price as a result.
There is only one written language called "Chinese". Within that language, there are some simplified characters and traditional characters. Most mainland Chinese know mostly simplified forms (only of certain characters), and most other Chinese use the elaborate or traditional forms. This is basically due to the mainland Chinese effort to improve literacy by teaching primarily simplified characters when possible. However, they are just different forms for the words, and were used side-by-side historically in Chinese writing (simplified forms as shorthand for traditional forms). So yes, there is a Chinese written language, and it is certainly not non-existent. In fact, it was the lingua franca of the Far East, used commonly in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam much in the same way that Latin was in the West.
If you are referring to Mandarin / Cantonese / any-other-dialect, those are only spoken differences that vary everywhere in China, and even from village to village some people may not be able to understand each other. They don't dictate any written differences whatsoever because Chinese characters are usually ideographic, expressing a particular idea rather than the sound that represents it. For example, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan may write something the exact same way, but the pronunciation will be very different.
Accordingly, you will notice that there is no "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" option in any text translation tool.
Personally, I think this is one weakness of relying on "do whatever you want" licenses like BSD and MIT. Linux can always use BSD and GPL'd code, but the BSD devs want to stick with BSD for their kernels and other projects whenever possible.
The reason unix has always required root access in order to install software isn't because that's the way things should be, it's because there hasn't been another way to make it secure. Now, if you trust the distro's repos, you can safely let users install those signed packages. This is similar to (but more secure than) Mac OS X's policy of letting users install and uninstall but not modify app bundles.
The reason was simply because a user didn't have the privileges to change anything (by default) outside his/her own home directory and the system temporary directory. That is the way it should be -- only changing files that you have permission to change. Allowing users to add or remove software packages in / and /usr is beyond ridiculous. This is why users who want to install software packages themselves, can only install them to their own home directories, so they don't interfere with other users. The only sensible approach is one such as this, where users can only install software where they have permission to do so.
If the Fedora people really want to fix things, they could work on making their packages easy to install into the users' home folders, so users don't have to use the "configure prefix" to change things around, and then compile from source. That sort of user software installation is perfectly reasonable, and completely in line with the overarching concepts of Unix security.
Resident Evil and a number of other action/adventure and RPG games from the mid to late 90's innovated this, albeit in a much more limited way. Character enters a room, switch to another image. Character progresses further into the room, switch to a more appropriate angle. All the environments are pre-rendered, and 3D characters play around in them as though they are real-time. It always looked good on the PS1, and I admired the simplicity of the method and its impressive results. It looks like they are just making natural extensions to it, by streaming the images over the Internet in real-time, so the various elements can all be updated on a rendering farm. I wonder how efficient it will be, though, and what sort of compromises will be made? Obviously, streaming high-res images in real-time is an excellent way to devour massive amounts of bandwidth....
I never understood why people were so keen to move away from isometric perspectives and pre-rendered backgrounds? As long as the angles are good, they can really help to present the game in a well-crafted and artful way.
For those of you who jumped onto the Linux boat in the Ubuntu era, Mandriva / Mandrake is mostly a hold-over from the days when Red Hat Linux was the biggest Linux distribution around. Red Hat was still a little difficult for some users, so Mandrake was based off Red Hat with more of a focus on polish and ease of use for desktop systems... Maybe similar to the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. Like Ubuntu, Mandrake was very important, and if someone needed an easy Linux distro, Mandrake Linux was almost the standard.
I still remember ordering Mandrake and Slackware CD's through the mail because they were too big to download on a 56k connection. For a few dollars any number of companies would burn disks as send them through the mail. It wasn't standard for everyone to have broadband, or to be able to do updates through the Internet. In retrospect, Linux was certainly clumsier, rougher, and less stable on the desktop. A quick spin with Mandrake Linux 7 can show you how radically the Linux desktop experience has changed in the last nine years.
This clumsy user experience was also responsible for turning many Linux geeks away from the "bloated" desktop environments and more toward bare metal distributions such as Slackware and Debian, along with minimalist window managers, xterms, and other such tools. In my case, after struggling with Red Hat and Mandrake, I found the simplicity of Slackware to actually be easier, and lived over in that world for the next 7-8 years until Ubuntu really started to shine. I am sure there are many other Slashdotters who have had similar experiences in their years with Linux.
You are assuming that the difference between one font and another is purely presentation, and that the user already has adequate fonts available. For those who do not deal with fonts often and the technical needs of many websites, here is an example.
/. readers are happy with a few ANSI characters, as long as they can see some code examples in their web browser, and as long as it renders English correctly, but there is a whole world of people who have entirely different needs.
For romanized Indic text (used in many translations of Hindu and Buddhist literature), a number of Unicode letters and diacritics are needed that go well beyond the characters typically used in Western European languages (for example, IAST). Each platform has different fonts available by default that may handle these characters. Linux has the DejaVu fonts and Apple has Lucida Grande, but Microsoft only has Microsoft Sans Serif, which is the ugly cousin of Arial. In this font, there are no real italics, and the "fake italics" used look hideous because the slant is so exaggerated that they are painful to read. Any website text rendered in this font absolutely stinks for readability and for aesthetics.
I would like to be able to use a standard method of offering a font such as Linux Libertine or DejaVu Sans, that renders acceptably under Windows (most fonts don't), and have that handled in a streamlined way. Otherwise, I am forced to either make web pages that render as ugly as sin under Windows, or put up an optional page that explains how a user can download the font and manually install it. Both of these options are unacceptable for diacritics that should be so standard by now. Microsoft has really dropped the ball on Unicode support in its fonts, and web developers are left to try to cobble together solutions. The only other alternative is to only provide PDF's made with XeTeX, but PDF is no replacement for a web page.
Most
If it is pronounced "chee" why not spell it "chee?"
Why must we bind ourselves to a transliteration table that winds up producing words that are pronounced nothing like how they are spelled, and further bastardize the English language?
It's dumb. Nothing good comes of it.
"Qi" is pronounced as it is spelled. The "Q" letter is defined to make a "CH" sound in Pinyin ("CH" is a similar but slightly different sound in Pinyin). The "I" is defined to make an "EE" sound along with its respective inflection (sometimes marked with diacritics or by numbers). As for bastardizing the English language, it has nothing to do with the English language. It's a romanization of Chinese -- that is, a system for writing spoken Chinese with the Latin alphabet (not the English pronunciation of it). The previous Wades-Giles system was closer to English in its pronunciations ("Qi" was spelled "Ch'i"), but it was abandoned a few decades ago.
Suffice it to say, the people who developed Pinyin over 50 years ago did so to alleviate the problems of using the more English-friendly phonetic systems. Going back to them would be a huge mistake, as the English pronunciation of the alphabet can not cover spoken Chinese accurately.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Why do I get the sense that even in 1976, Bill Gates was a small, petty person with a sense of entitlement? It's no wonder that Microsoft turned out the way it did.
You are confusing government policy with human culture. Chinese culture has no native rights tradition (or native communist tradition), and instead focuses on individual consciousness, especially in the native philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism. Even laws are viewed as failures of the government and its people. These traditions view society in terms of the individual, rather than advocating overt methods of government control and social change. Over time, people began accepting western ideas about rights, communism, and other things, but these are in no way Chinese ideas because they are only foreign imports.
That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ By the way, what exactly are you talking about? Chinese have had a turbulent history, so what? We shouldn't be critical of the current Chinese government because 40 million have died at the hands of its predecessor with whom (on paper at least) it shares the same ideology? I don't understand what your point is.
Yes, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights reflects the western "rights" tradition. You think that just because a document exists in an international peacekeeping organization, that it's really a part of other cultures and accurately reflects their values? If so, that's pretty naive.
My point is that using "rights" as the benchmark of civilization is necessarily a skewed perspective that does not account for cultural needs and differences.
I also mentioned the extreme amount of violence in China's recent history to contrast it with our own country's, which has not had any invasions or sustained any real violence on anywhere near the same scale. The average American Slashdotter is likely to have a very different perspective, in which it seems reasonable to view WoW-deprivation as some sort of evil government tyranny.
Being oblivious to these major historical and cultural differences just feeds into the collective ignorance of everyone here. To me, a real nerd should be smarter than that, and be more informed about history and culture rather than just modern technology.
That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. Considering that over 40 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward," and countless more before that in previous wars and revolutions, we don't have the same perspective on stability that they do. The coastal city of Ningbo, for example, was bombed with the bubonic plague by the Japanese during World War II. The amount of violence and upheaval that the Chinese have faced in the last hundred years is incredible, and sometimes I think that we Slashdotters would do well to relax and give them some time to sort things out (it is their own country, after all). They have a 5000 year old civilization, after all, and things aren't going to implode because pimply-faced teenage kids have to do martial arts rather than play World of Warcraft.
Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.
LaTeX has limited fonts, but if you use XeTeX (which uses LaTeX), you can not only use all the LaTeX stuff, but also any TrueType or OpenType font, and native unicode support as well. This is a godsend for typesetting anything that includes words or characters not in English, or just for people who are picky about typography. My personal favorite font is the open source SIL Gentium family, which is not only much more beautiful and readable than Times, but contains a fuller character set that makes it compatible with many more languages. Once you start writing documents with XeTeX and nicer fonts, you see how lacking word processors are for good typography and well-structured documents, and how self-limiting the concept is.
For newcomers to LaTeX and XeTeX, including packages and specifying options can be a bit time-consuming when you just want to get started with a basic A4-sized document. Here is the basic XeTeX file template I use for simple stuff. I'm picky about margins, line spacing, fonts, etc. so you know that it's a safe place to start out.
-
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
%%
% XeTeX packages
%%
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
%%
% Formatting packages
%%
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[vcentering,dvips]{geometry}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\geometry{papersize={8.5in,11in},total={6.5in,8.8in}}
\pdfpagewidth 8.5in
\pdfpageheight 11in
% 10pt font: 1.15
% 11pt font: 1.1
\setstretch{1.1}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium Basic}
\begin{document}
Some text...
\end{document}
Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
The following is from a book called Understanding This Chinese Generation, by Nan Huaijin, a very famous Confucian scholar and Buddhist master in China. Not only does it discuss this subject of American-style democracy being wrong for Chinese culture, but it also exposes a keen understanding of the U.S. government's inseparable ties to powerful economic forces. Intelligent and educated Chinese actually have a very sober view of the American system that is difficult to get from within it. This book was written years ago as well, so it is all the more impressive and prescient. We seldom hear the views of educated and intelligent Chinese, so /.'ers would do well to read this and understand his perspective.
Four years back I had a series of conversations with an American graduate student studying in China. Our discussions, which he transcribed and planned on translating into English, focused on issues relating to Western and Chinese culture. On one occasion, when the issue of freedom and democracy came up, I remarked, "In our modern era America alone carries the flag of Western cultural glory, championing democracy and freedom. But what Americans like to call democracy and freedom is actually the 'American style of democracy and freedom.' Although this style is by no means suitable for most other people and places, it is especially inappropriate for the five thousand year old culture of China. However, not only do Americans not understand this fact, but you also refuse to even consider its possibility. So your good intentions and American style of democracy and freedom are matched by an equally powerful response of antipathy wherever they turn up."
"What exactly do you mean when you say the American style of democracy and freedom," he asked. I replied, "The answer requires quite a complex discussion of two hundred years of contributing factors, from the founding of your country to the present. To summarize though, from the eighteenth century to the present, as America's forefathers flocked to the New World, they carried with them the culture of the European industrial revolution. However, coming from many different countries such as England, France, Germany, and Austria they carried with them the unique cultural perspectives of their individual ethnic backgrounds. These perspectives, combined with an ideological inclination toward the promotion of the general welfare, helped form the spiritual foundation of your nation â" 'of the people, by the people, and for the people.' However, regardless of what shape it assumes, hiding in the framework of liberalism and democracy has been the secret ingredient of the market forces that drive industry and commerce. This was true at the birth of your nation, and after two hundred years remains true to this very day. To be honest, the behind-the-scenes bosses who actually manage your democratic politics are inseparable from the capitalist and commercial industrial complex which surrounds them. Yes its true! Even today, America's territorial ambitions abroad have been quite limited. However, the same thing cannot be said of your desire to occupy foreign markets. This hidden agenda, when added to the tangle of your democratic politics and an unsophisticated provincial populace, has resulted in hesitation, inconsistency, and fence-sitting on the international scene. If you really want to live up to your superpower status, you must combine your international political experience with an in-depth study of the Chinese classic The Spring And Autumn Annals. Only then will you grasp the righteous principle of 'restoring the nation and insuring its posterity.'" Having returned home, today this American colleague has begun teaching The Spring and Autumn Annals and its related commentaries at Harvard University.
There is also an interesting passage abo
Since at least 1998 they have had that same ugly, ugly layout and worthless lists of Linux distros. It's like a crystallization of what was wrong with the OSS community in the 90's. Want to use Linux? No problem, here's a big list of distros that will be completely meaningless to you. Ubuntu is in there, but it's down at the bottom, way below Slackware and MkLinux, which (for all you know) are more popular and easier to use than it. This site was an epic failure in the 90's, and it still is, unfortunately. It's a shame, too, because it could be much better if they just threw out all the old stuff and started from scratch with something simple.
Ummm.... not really true. It's because the Falun Gong ideology clashes with the government. Also, they have shown that they can organize people to protest against the government, and I think you know what the Chinese government like to do with activists.
Ethics in Falun Dafa basically consist of "truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance." These are simple principles that everyone agrees on that have nothing to do with political or religious ideology. Also, there was a long stretch in the 1990's when Falun Dafa was not only permitted by the government, but was actively encouraged by it for health reasons. For around a decade, it was quite popular among Chinese qigong practitioners in China, but relatively unheard of in the West. However, in 1999, in response to a widely-read and controversial article by an academic criticizing qigong and Falun Dafa in general, there was a silent and peaceful protest that basically consisted of practitioners showing up to practice Falun Dafa together in solidarity. When the government saw this disruption of "national unity", they began to assess Falun Dafa as a threat since it has one leader, Li Hongzhi, who is the divine and de facto head of it all. Since that time, widespread persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners has gone on, and Li Hongzhi fled China to the U.S. where he lives now. Nothing much has changed in the last ten years.
Falun Dafa is not really a religion in itself or just a qigong practice, though. It's actually something in between -- a blend of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy with modern views on qigong, and even some things about UFO's and pyramids that are unique to Chinese culture. Li Hongzhi is the irreplaceable leader who disseminated the practice in China (purportedly from hermit masters), but there is no previous history of the practice in China, and many of the views are uniquely modern qigong-based ideas. For example, Li says that he gives all practitioners a qiji ("energy mechanism") in the form of the Falun Dafa symbol, which is installed into their lower dan tian ("energy field") point. This falun qiji ("wheel of dharma energy mechanism") is said to continuously rotate, giving out energy. These sort of ideas blend a host of folk beliefs, ideas about meditation, and modern qigong ideas in a very unique way. When considering past Buddhist and Taoist cultivation methods, both exoteric and esoteric, there is really nothing similar to it, or a way that it fits in with them.
Around ten years ago when it was a big thing, I read Zhuan Falun and the other books available by Li Hongzhi. In retrospect after reading Buddhist sutras and Daoist classics, I think that Falun Dafa is strange and not very effective when compared to the esoteric methods of Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Shingon, or the pure exoteric methods of Zen, Tiantai, Nichiren, Pure Land, and so on. Even practicing the very simple Pure Land mantra "Namo Amitofo" is a far more effective method that will be better for energy and health, and will result in greater meditative ability.
I'm still waiting for the game about Vietnam where the Vietcong are portrayed as covert freedom fighters, and the Americans are the evil imperialists who napalm villages and destroy your countryside with Agent Orange. That's a game I've wanted to play for years, but I'm sure that even after decades, America wouldn't have the stomach for it. I wonder if the same people who want this game to be published would also advocate a Vietnam game like this?
He is an extremist in some ways, but stick around and watch... His advice seems so impractical and difficult to reconcile, and people here bash him for being difficult, but he's usually right. He has strong principles that usually clash with the current reality, but they're very logical and consistent. He's a little crazy, but he's really the lone prophet of the open source community who doesn't compromise or sacrifice his values. Even if you don't agree with his outlook, it's extremely beneficial to have him advocating a consistent position that has been so important for open source and free software.
Wow, I could almost cut the smugness in your post with a knife. Apparently people who *really* use computers like to configure everything about them. These people are "advanced" or "power users", while everyone else is a retard or just a normal "user".
There are many people such as myself who have used plenty of window managers and desktop environments, and who like them to mostly stay out of the way. I don't want to endlessly configure my shiny little windows. If I want to do "real work", then I'll open up a terminal window and use Bash or Python. I'm sure there are plenty of other Slashdotters who take this same approach, judging by the relative popularity here of Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu.
And really, if you're obsessing about features in your GUI, are you really doing "real work"? The people I see who really care so much about that stuff are often just geeks who like to sit in their rooms and tinker with Linux, not people who are actually doing programming or sysadmin work on it.
East Asian texts tend to be preserved in their respective languages as well, rather than in translations into English and other foreign languages. CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association), for example, is a freely-available massive collection of over 4400 Buddhist texts in their entirety, many of which are 1500+ year old translations from Sanskrit. Some of these texts are quite massive as well, encyclopedic in scope with thousands of pages. Only a very tiny fraction of these has ever been translated into English, but they are all freely available in Chinese.
More than 99% of the world, actually. The U.K. is truly tiny in the larger scheme of things. For some perspective....
World population: 6.77 billion
U.K. population: 66 million (<1%)
U.S. population: 306 million (~4.5%)
P.R.C. population: 1.3+ billion (~20%)
Also, I'm willing to bet that the majority of the rest of the world has no clue what BitTorrent is or why it matters (in the larger scheme of things, does it?).
Haven't the originals and the parodies gotten old yet? And more importantly, why aren't Linux enthusiasts doing something truly new and original that highlights the strong points of Linux and OSS? Ubuntu and the other desktop distros have done a great job these last few years, but I think the Linux community still on a whole still lacks some creativity, originality, and artistic talent that would really help desktop Linux.
Shit, I forgot to post anonymously.