If Stallman pulls this mess, the next version of Linux will certainly be out from under the GPL, but it'll be largely toolchainless for a while. FreeBSD is my main strategy.
I daresay calming down and learning about the situation should be your "main strategy" instead of this bizarre paranoia. Stallman isn't out to get you. He's no evil genius who plans on taking over the world. Even the most ardent of GPL critics do not think he has malicious motives of appropriating others' code (especially seeing as he hardly codes anymore). Stallman began the GNU project as a crusade against software hoarders. He wanted all software to be as usuable and redistributable as it was in the glorious world of 70's academia. So why do you think Stallman will all of the sudden turn around and do the very thing against which he has sacrified for twenty years?
Yes, I know there is original literature in Esperanto, but is there any really good original literature in Esperanto?
William Auld, a poet from Scotland who writes exclusively in Esperanto, has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Similarly, the "Iberian school" of Esperanto writer has been the subject of several studies. And then there's Tibor Sekelj, an anthropologist whose works were written originally in Esperanto and translated to numerous national languages.
There is bad literature in Esperanto, just like every language, but there are also pearls which stand out not just within Esperanto, but within world literature as a whole. The poet Mauro Nervi, for example, continually amazes me.
Esperanto's grammatical structure is much closer to non-Indo-European languages than Spanish or English. Also, because Zamenhof spoke Hebrew, there are so very exotic things in the language like the affixes "ig" and "i". While the vocabulary is of course derived from Romance and Slavic languages, learning Esperanto is a good first step to tacking an agglutinative language like Hungarian or Finnish, and the ability to generally make up new words would prepare one for Mandarin.
I learned Esperanto in 1996 and it has proven very useful. I travelled through Europe several times, staying at no cost at the homes of Esperantists, and finally moved there for good by first working for an Esperanto youth organisation in Holland. It's been a ticket to lower-cost travel, a genuinely international social life, and ironically more effective learning of national languages.
For those who would say that learning English or Mandarin is more important because there are more speakers, the traveller to, for example, Chile can't just call up any English speaker there and request free lodging and hospitality. With Esperanto, however, that's pretty common. In spite of the smaller number of speakers, Esperanto is much more useful for travel.
However, Esperanto is pretty useless if you spend all your time in the US. A lot of American Esperantists, though, end up leaving the US like I did after they learn the language because it's a ticket to a much more diverse and interesting world.
I don't understand why this was modded down, and it was going to be my response as well. The era of paying for music is over. People are already getting used to the idea of music and movies being free through P2P services. Sure, you might get a better experience if you buy the album with its art and CD-quality sound, and seeing a film in the theatre is a much more enjoyable experience than DiVX, but these new legal services don't offer anything that P2P doesn't. Their restrictions and the idea of paying for music seem unacceptable, and they cannot compete.
The first is that I'm a nerd and I want to use a cutting-edge standard. I imagine that that is a big motivation for a lot of XHTML users.
The second is that I'm a big LaTeX fan and its system of separating appearance from content really appeals to me. XHTML does the same for the web. One can concentrate on just putting information in there, and then can keep visual appearance in a separate place and easily replace it site-wide if necessary. A consequence of this is that the site's content is available to visually-impaired users. Some months ago Slashdot did an interview with a web-accesibility guru, and from that story it became evident that if one writes good, conforming XHTML from the beginning, it doesn't take much extra effort for the blind to be able to enjoy its content.
Hickson's essay - whose gist is now over a year old - takes a pragmatic view: don't use XHTML because IE doesn't handle the ideal MIME type yet. It makes sense for more pedestrian sites to continue to use HTML 4.01. But for those who have personal sites whose visitors will mostly be using Mozilla or another browser that can handle application/xhtml+html, there's really no reason not to start using XHTML.
SIL is a Christian organisation which advocates sending missionaries to some of the world's most fragile cultures. I don't think that indigenous populations - not to mention the Muslim world for example - would appreciate using the system created by such a polemical organisation.
Most amateur radio regulations aren't decided by the US, but by international treaties. The code requirement was dropped from international convention a few years, so now the US is free to remove it from the FCC regs. Ciphers, on the other hand, remain forbidden.
No, because doing away with the root filesystem, user stuff in/home, config files in/etc, and so forth would break a number of Unix standards Linux's big advantage of being able to run many Unix apps (if you compile from source) would disappear.
Storage will apparently be an interface to the existing real filesystem. Joe User won't know the difference.
While in the Den Haag central station a few days ago, some fool lit up a spliff next to three cops. They promptly asked him to put it out, cited the law against possession when he didn't, and then handcuffed him and led him away. While Holland's tendency to prosecute is much less than in other countries, smoking a joint in front of a police officer is bad idea.
UnuMondo, who has lived in Holland for a while
All jobs that can be moved overseas all in the name of increased profits will be if nothing is done to stop it This is erasing the middle class! Without a middle class, most capitalistic economies will colapse!
The middle class is not being erased, it is merely being transferred. The computer programmers in India who are receiving these new jobs are the new middle class of that country.
This is also a case of leveling the playing field. America's "middle class" would actually be considered the upper class by most countries. Globalisation is good because it brings everyone to the same level by dropping some (Americans) and raising others (Indians, for example). This may be a painful process for the time being, but after several decades there will not be terrible problems with income disparity that exists now. Remember. in the long run free markets are always the best means of allocating resources.
You'll have to be a bit more specific about what you need. Now, since GNUstep is fully object-oriented, you can always subclass existing text classes if you need something more. I invite you to the #gnustep IRC channel on Freenet if you have any questions about the API.
I agree. I came across GNUstep two months ago and was amazed by its incredibly simple API. I quickly made my first app, Charmap, a character map which uses Unicode.org's standards files to provide a wealth of information about any character. This was easy and fast because GNUstep provided solid Unicode/UTF-8 support from the start. While for example GTK was a pain to use until 2.0 with regards to non-Latin scripts, GNUstep at the same time had one of the most advanced string classes.
Not only is GNUstep concise and simple, but because Apple's Cocoa is also an implementation of the OPENSTEP standard, one can use Cocoa docs in GNUstep programming. This allows the programmer to tap into abundant resources online and in print.
If you're interested in what's going on in the GNUstep world, my favourite resource is www.gnustep.us, which lists the latest news and updates.
I hope I don't sound like a karma whore, I'm just super-enthused about a fantastic API that doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Whoa, don't be so quick to recommend The Mother Tongue. It has been blasted for urban legends, oversimplications, and typos on nearly every page. Check out the reviews at Amazon.com to see how wrong the book really is. Bryson, who doesn't speak any language besides English and is not a professional linguist, dares to make sure preposterous statements as "Russian has no words for efficiency, engagement ring, or have fun". Bleh.
LILO is being phased out by many distributers and users because 1) GRUB is the official GNU bootloader and is not as Linux-centric as LILO, and 2) LILO doesn't have anything that GRUB is missing.
Slashdot Mirror
If Stallman pulls this mess, the next version of Linux will certainly be out from under the GPL, but it'll be largely toolchainless for a while. FreeBSD is my main strategy.
I daresay calming down and learning about the situation should be your "main strategy" instead of this bizarre paranoia. Stallman isn't out to get you. He's no evil genius who plans on taking over the world. Even the most ardent of GPL critics do not think he has malicious motives of appropriating others' code (especially seeing as he hardly codes anymore). Stallman began the GNU project as a crusade against software hoarders. He wanted all software to be as usuable and redistributable as it was in the glorious world of 70's academia. So why do you think Stallman will all of the sudden turn around and do the very thing against which he has sacrified for twenty years?
Yes, I know there is original literature in Esperanto, but is there any really good original literature in Esperanto?
William Auld, a poet from Scotland who writes exclusively in Esperanto, has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Similarly, the "Iberian school" of Esperanto writer has been the subject of several studies. And then there's Tibor Sekelj, an anthropologist whose works were written originally in Esperanto and translated to numerous national languages.There is bad literature in Esperanto, just like every language, but there are also pearls which stand out not just within Esperanto, but within world literature as a whole. The poet Mauro Nervi, for example, continually amazes me.
Esperanto's grammatical structure is much closer to non-Indo-European languages than Spanish or English. Also, because Zamenhof spoke Hebrew, there are so very exotic things in the language like the affixes "ig" and "i". While the vocabulary is of course derived from Romance and Slavic languages, learning Esperanto is a good first step to tacking an agglutinative language like Hungarian or Finnish, and the ability to generally make up new words would prepare one for Mandarin.
I learned Esperanto in 1996 and it has proven very useful. I travelled through Europe several times, staying at no cost at the homes of Esperantists, and finally moved there for good by first working for an Esperanto youth organisation in Holland. It's been a ticket to lower-cost travel, a genuinely international social life, and ironically more effective learning of national languages.
For those who would say that learning English or Mandarin is more important because there are more speakers, the traveller to, for example, Chile can't just call up any English speaker there and request free lodging and hospitality. With Esperanto, however, that's pretty common. In spite of the smaller number of speakers, Esperanto is much more useful for travel.
However, Esperanto is pretty useless if you spend all your time in the US. A lot of American Esperantists, though, end up leaving the US like I did after they learn the language because it's a ticket to a much more diverse and interesting world.
I don't understand why this was modded down, and it was going to be my response as well. The era of paying for music is over. People are already getting used to the idea of music and movies being free through P2P services. Sure, you might get a better experience if you buy the album with its art and CD-quality sound, and seeing a film in the theatre is a much more enjoyable experience than DiVX, but these new legal services don't offer anything that P2P doesn't. Their restrictions and the idea of paying for music seem unacceptable, and they cannot compete.
I use XHTML on my site for two reasons.
The first is that I'm a nerd and I want to use a cutting-edge standard. I imagine that that is a big motivation for a lot of XHTML users.
The second is that I'm a big LaTeX fan and its system of separating appearance from content really appeals to me. XHTML does the same for the web. One can concentrate on just putting information in there, and then can keep visual appearance in a separate place and easily replace it site-wide if necessary. A consequence of this is that the site's content is available to visually-impaired users. Some months ago Slashdot did an interview with a web-accesibility guru, and from that story it became evident that if one writes good, conforming XHTML from the beginning, it doesn't take much extra effort for the blind to be able to enjoy its content.
Hickson's essay - whose gist is now over a year old - takes a pragmatic view: don't use XHTML because IE doesn't handle the ideal MIME type yet. It makes sense for more pedestrian sites to continue to use HTML 4.01. But for those who have personal sites whose visitors will mostly be using Mozilla or another browser that can handle application/xhtml+html, there's really no reason not to start using XHTML.
SIL is a Christian organisation which advocates sending missionaries to some of the world's most fragile cultures. I don't think that indigenous populations - not to mention the Muslim world for example - would appreciate using the system created by such a polemical organisation.
Most amateur radio regulations aren't decided by the US, but by international treaties. The code requirement was dropped from international convention a few years, so now the US is free to remove it from the FCC regs. Ciphers, on the other hand, remain forbidden.
No, because doing away with the root filesystem, user stuff in /home, config files in /etc, and so forth would break a number of Unix standards Linux's big advantage of being able to run many Unix apps (if you compile from source) would disappear.
Storage will apparently be an interface to the existing real filesystem. Joe User won't know the difference.
While in the Den Haag central station a few days ago, some fool lit up a spliff next to three cops. They promptly asked him to put it out, cited the law against possession when he didn't, and then handcuffed him and led him away. While Holland's tendency to prosecute is much less than in other countries, smoking a joint in front of a police officer is bad idea. UnuMondo, who has lived in Holland for a while
All jobs that can be moved overseas all in the name of increased profits will be if nothing is done to stop it This is erasing the middle class! Without a middle class, most capitalistic economies will colapse! The middle class is not being erased, it is merely being transferred. The computer programmers in India who are receiving these new jobs are the new middle class of that country. This is also a case of leveling the playing field. America's "middle class" would actually be considered the upper class by most countries. Globalisation is good because it brings everyone to the same level by dropping some (Americans) and raising others (Indians, for example). This may be a painful process for the time being, but after several decades there will not be terrible problems with income disparity that exists now. Remember. in the long run free markets are always the best means of allocating resources.
You'll have to be a bit more specific about what you need. Now, since GNUstep is fully object-oriented, you can always subclass existing text classes if you need something more. I invite you to the #gnustep IRC channel on Freenet if you have any questions about the API.
I agree. I came across GNUstep two months ago and was amazed by its incredibly simple API. I quickly made my first app, Charmap, a character map which uses Unicode.org's standards files to provide a wealth of information about any character. This was easy and fast because GNUstep provided solid Unicode/UTF-8 support from the start. While for example GTK was a pain to use until 2.0 with regards to non-Latin scripts, GNUstep at the same time had one of the most advanced string classes.
Not only is GNUstep concise and simple, but because Apple's Cocoa is also an implementation of the OPENSTEP standard, one can use Cocoa docs in GNUstep programming. This allows the programmer to tap into abundant resources online and in print.
If you're interested in what's going on in the GNUstep world, my favourite resource is www.gnustep.us, which lists the latest news and updates. I hope I don't sound like a karma whore, I'm just super-enthused about a fantastic API that doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Whoa, don't be so quick to recommend The Mother Tongue. It has been blasted for urban legends, oversimplications, and typos on nearly every page. Check out the reviews at Amazon.com to see how wrong the book really is. Bryson, who doesn't speak any language besides English and is not a professional linguist, dares to make sure preposterous statements as "Russian has no words for efficiency, engagement ring, or have fun". Bleh.
LILO is being phased out by many distributers and users because 1) GRUB is the official GNU bootloader and is not as Linux-centric as LILO, and 2) LILO doesn't have anything that GRUB is missing.
Um, you know Brazilians speak Portugese, not Spanish.
I also find giFT a great service. It's mostly Linux users apparently, so plenty of oggs and a great deal of music for nerds like ourselves.