Right, forgot a small addition: if I understand correctly, a significant part of US industry and engineering already use the metric system, so there would not be a large infrastructure problem.
Both Canada and the United Kingdom have officialised the metric system very recently, and it's in the process of public adoption now...
They're industrialised, adoption isn't easy, but it certainly isn't impossible. Most of Europe just switched to the Euro, after all, and it seems that the advantages of having a standard currency far outweigh a few months of having to calculate. Having a committed government helps.
By the way, the UK changed its entire currency system in 1971 from the old Pound/Shilling/Pence system to decimal.
It's legal in the USA to use the metric system for everything, too. Who can dispute the beauty of a rational, unified standard system of measurement? ^.-
There's no good reason to go to the expense and trouble of switching from English to metric all at once.
Well, it's about the only way for it to work. The metric system has already been standard in the US for several generations and people still seem to use nothing but unwieldy units from the middle-ages and whatever-base-fractions.
Most importantly, switching to metric would allow you to actually understand and be understood by people from (the rest of) the civilised world. Same applies for temperatures in Fahrenheit degrees, which no-one uses outside the USA anymore, and hardly anyone understands. I was actually recently amazed to notice that there were kitchen appliances in the USA displaying temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit...
Come on, if even Japan, which uses an incompatible mobile phone system and 110V sockets, uses the metric system, it shouldn't be difficult to follow the British lead (they invented these units) and switch...;-)
I'm sure a lot of people here are used to using standard units in science anyway...wouldn't it be nice to have units that relate logically to Degrees Kelvin, Amperes, Volts, Joules, Litres...? ^-^
As for myself, I do at times buy a CD from an unlistened to band, if I've heard good reviews, or heard them mentioned as resembling bands I like... I'll rarely do that at new-album standard prices though.
It was a joke, you fool.
Apparently you really can't count on people not breaking the law, if tossing about the idea in conversation where it's a logical conclusion (but certainly not expected to be applied) is construed as encouragement...
I like my man pages, thank you very much.:-)
That and a documentation system that doesn't reply "contact your system administrator" for every vaguely serious problem...
when Microsoft fixes it, it gets better for everyone
Quite. But you have to wait until they fix it. And you have to do everything their way (which relativises the concept of "better" in this context).
That's the problem, and that's why Windows is so inflexible. (Too) many things are built right into the OS.
This is the opposite of GNU/Linux systems, which are based on a philosophy of freedom of choice. I'd hazard that the Windows philosophy, too, is the exact opposite : limitation of the user's choice (which especially rankles when the stuff that's chosen for you is so bad).
Indeed, it isn't impeding on people's privacy (unless you don't want the person on the other side of the guy's cell phone to hear you). It is, however, impeding on their personal space to fill it with your own conversation. This can be especially out of place in a concert hall, museum, waiting room, church, recording studio...
It is sad that people's lack of consideration or manners (enforced consideration) creates a market for these jammers - I hear some museums in Europe deploy these (illegally), by the way.
On the other hand, I believe there is definitely a justification for jamming systems that can "filter" calls (eg emergency numbers), though this would also require doctors to have special numbers/phones... ...and the system would collapse as soon as "important businessmen" could purchase non-blockable numbers, bringing it all to square one. Hmm.
Anyway, one can only hope that all these reactions will - along with the spread of mobile telephony - create some kind of cell-phone etiquette, which will in turn render scrambling useless.
Linux is code, not a living thing: it does not drop balls on anything.
Neither is Linux an OS. It is a POSIX-like kernel used by a number of OSs, and does not include any other software.
As such there is no such thing as "the Linux installer". Every distribution has its own installer (usually developed by their own staff), which is entirely independent of the kernel, Linux.
As for "dropping the ball", SATA support had been up and running for a long time in the 2.5.* development kernels, and is now in Linux 2.6.* (which if you look at the title is the subject of this story, though it doesn't appear to even remotely be the subject of your post).
It is probable the distributions you have tried did not include a 2.6.* version of Linux, nor the patch for the 2.4.* versions that has been mentioned here. I believe the Fedora Core 1 distribution does include Linux 2.6 : you may have better luck with that one.
This said, please either refrain from criticizing the developers for nonexistent failures and situations they are not responsible for, or go trumpet your ignorance elsewhere.
well, the people who'd be in a position to read old NASA code in 2043 would *not* be "somebody of the street", so if it does remain in use, I'm pretty sure the current level of abstraction will make it easy for the specialists of the day to interpret (especially if it remains POSIXish with a C heritage).
This isn't 60s-era machine code, after all. Today's Linux uses mostly C (not that hard) as far as programs are concerned, and many of today's open standards are in a pinch human-parsable, like XML.
Well, I won't call myself authoritative, but having spent a month in Japan with people who needed their denshijisho rather often in order to communicate with me, I didn't hear "denshijiten" a single time... (though this was indeed in the Kansai area) I suspect that jisho is in fact more common usage in spoken language, jiten being more formal and the "correct" term for the product.
As for stroke order, don't go around scaring prospective japanophiles please.:-) It's very logical really - I've studied Japanese for less than four months, and I can rather reliably reproduce characters of over 12 strokes if they contain the more basic elements : the rules are mostly respected, except for rarer cases such as migi/hidari, kanarazu, etc, and of course characters based on them, but in those cases it's only needed to learn the stroke order of that particular radical. I'm rather sure you could precisely learn Kakijun in a year or so - I haven't even had the luxury of a full-time university education in Japanese (as a lowly Information Science second-year I have 35-hour weeks). As a reference, I've been using Hadamitzky and Durmous' "Kanjji and Kana", which by the way has an excellent introduction.
As for online dictionaries, for the beginner to intermediate, Jim Breen's WWJDIC is an invaluable resource, with example sentences and (yes) stroke order for most all the joyo kanji.
Oh and just to nitpick, Tokyoben does exist as a dialect distinct from standard Nihongo, as far as my humble knowledge goes.
>the leftwing element of slashdot Heh.:-) That's amusing if nothing else. But lower your rifle for now.
Seriously, I am not a communist, though my political stance is *entirely irrelevant* to the issue, just as it is with most FOSS advocates -- contrarily to what SCO would like to have public opinion believe. As for lack of sources : I seem to recall reading Darl McBride mention communism in this respect in a recent interview to a newsmagazine (The Economist I think), or at the very least, hint not-so-subtly towards most Americans' (though unfortunately you come across that elsewhere as well) paranoid fear of communism in the hopes that it will lower public respect of Free Software. For myself I am not -emphatically not- "describing business/economics" here - merely emitting a partial and personal opinion on the way it is most often done in today's software market ; a market I choose to act in (this is one of the bases of capitalism, and not endangered by FOSS ideas) by not contributing to the omnipresence of proprietary software (the business model of which explicitly seeks to bind customers to a certain vendor by numerous varieties of coercion, e.g. standard setting by virtue of a quasi-monopoly, please refer to Halloween Documents for examples [1]), but supporting Free initiatives.
As for "eaten up with socialist thought"... Do you miss the easy manichean days of the Cold War, or...? Slashdot never seemed politically biased to me, unless it was in favor of democracy and the liberties gained since the French Revolution; nothing to be afraid of (as if Socialism was).
[1]http://opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.ph p
Well, the thing is that SCO wants to create a parallel between Free and Open Source Software supporters and pirates in the minds of lawmakers and magistrates...
They do this by capitalizing on the fact that FOSS is often distributed free of charge (these people don't want to pay for things!), the fact that FOSS is in some ways a threat on the usual, exploitative way of doing business (they care about other things than profit => they are dangerous / dirty communists / hoping to undermine Capitalism|America|Freedom to squeeze megabucks out of credulous customers), the negative mass-culture image of the word "Hacker", and other things yet... but most of all, ignorance.
Your gall impresses me, to the extent that I doubt whether you are really serious in posting this. In what way are abstract mathematics, music, or astronomy the sole creation of western civilisation? What justifies your ridiculous "The adored Chinese worldview" ? No one here has suggested anything as idiotic as an absolute classification of superiority between civilisations (an extremely vague term, by the way). The current situation in China which you cite as an example of the failure of its "worldview" (please define) has more to do with the universal weaknesses of Men before power and the madness of leaders than to the Chinese culture's imaginary lack of abstraction. Anyone who has in the least studied the Chinese writing system knows that its capacity for abstraction is indeed impressive, which leads to its designation as ideograms and never pictograms (though neither are accurate). This is a system that has been used to write works of extroardinary philosophical value with success, and that has not hindered its users in having had for some time the most culturally and artistically productive culture in the world (while us Europeans were playing with spears in the mud), or the invention of paper, gunpowder, refined medicine... I would dare say that actually, some of the "advancement" of Western culture might be attributable to its very recklessness in the face of the rest of the World. I personally think it indisputable that it is a positive concept to posess a cultural bias that does not place Mankind at the very center of things. As for your "Middle Kingdom" quip, I would hazard that the greater part of your post above is itself rather arrogant and self-centered ("in your book" is what matters, right?), and puts you in rather a delicate position to admonish a name which comes from an ancient cultural and geographic situation which has been shared by all cultures (The Odyssey, for example, took on the task of ordering the world outside Ancient Greece, based on its differences from the norm, being the home culture of its author). This is all however laughable when compared to the arresting courage and/or total lack of thought which doubtless let you describe Chinese culture (and all non-Western ones?) as "primitive". We are all impressed.
If you listen to a live performance by a *good* band, you'll notice it's practically a new album in itself : because of the mix of musicians/instruments, the state of mind of the artist at the moment they perform, all their songs will, live, cease being part of a particular album and become part of that performance. So your last dichotomy is a false one - if you consider an artist who would make albums so that they would be meant as *one* work. A concert set is *not* a mix tape.
Yes, There's also Sting's "The Soul Cages", which has varied music, but a recurring theme and consistence in the instruments' arrangements. Even without the crossfading an album can indeed be a complete work.
Amen. There are indeed albums that are ridiculous to tear apart... Add to those Rush as well as Mike Oldfield's "tubular bells" : two 28-minute tracks, and all pure bliss (unless you hated it, in which case it's just pure talent).
Surely, most classical music handed down to us is High Art, but you don't appear to have read much about the lives of classical composers... Mozart and Vivaldi, for example, spent their lives composing for other people, and their livelihoods (as with many others) hinged on their music's popularity. As great as they may have been, they ended up buried in the same poor people's cemetery in Austria, without even a marked grave, because the tides of popular appreciation ahd turned, and noone would subsidize their genius anymore (maybe that's what we need nowadays --- more mecenes?). The market for music hasn't changes, it's just grown to more layers of the population.
Oh and lastly, as a music-lover myself, I rather resent your objectification of music : I find it of striking obviousness that were we to dictate our "customers'" first-degree wishes to artists, we would get bad music - which is what happens when music executives tailor a joke performer to the market (hello, ricky and britney.) No "customer" would have asked for "Dark Side of the Moon". And it is the best sold (concept) album of our time, but more importantly a work of genius.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, forgot a small addition: if I understand correctly, a significant part of US industry and engineering already use the metric system, so there would not be a large infrastructure problem.
Well, not so fast.
Both Canada and the United Kingdom have officialised the metric system very recently, and it's in the process of public adoption now...
They're industrialised, adoption isn't easy, but it certainly isn't impossible. Most of Europe just switched to the Euro, after all, and it seems that the advantages of having a standard currency far outweigh a few months of having to calculate. Having a committed government helps.
By the way, the UK changed its entire currency system in 1971 from the old Pound/Shilling/Pence system to decimal.
It's legal in the USA to use the metric system for everything, too. Who can dispute the beauty of a rational, unified standard system of measurement? ^.-
Well, it's about the only way for it to work. The metric system has already been standard in the US for several generations and people still seem to use nothing but unwieldy units from the middle-ages and whatever-base-fractions.
Most importantly, switching to metric would allow you to actually understand and be understood by people from (the rest of) the civilised world. Same applies for temperatures in Fahrenheit degrees, which no-one uses outside the USA anymore, and hardly anyone understands. I was actually recently amazed to notice that there were kitchen appliances in the USA displaying temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit...
Come on, if even Japan, which uses an incompatible mobile phone system and 110V sockets, uses the metric system, it shouldn't be difficult to follow the British lead (they invented these units) and switch... ;-)
I'm sure a lot of people here are used to using standard units in science anyway...wouldn't it be nice to have units that relate logically to Degrees Kelvin, Amperes, Volts, Joules, Litres...? ^-^
The question, I will assume, was rhetorical :-)
As for myself, I do at times buy a CD from an unlistened to band, if I've heard good reviews, or heard them mentioned as resembling bands I like... I'll rarely do that at new-album standard prices though.
It was a joke, you fool. Apparently you really can't count on people not breaking the law, if tossing about the idea in conversation where it's a logical conclusion (but certainly not expected to be applied) is construed as encouragement...
Quite. But you have to wait until they fix it. And you have to do everything their way (which relativises the concept of "better" in this context).
That's the problem, and that's why Windows is so inflexible. (Too) many things are built right into the OS.
This is the opposite of GNU/Linux systems, which are based on a philosophy of freedom of choice. I'd hazard that the Windows philosophy, too, is the exact opposite : limitation of the user's choice (which especially rankles when the stuff that's chosen for you is so bad).
You are indeed pontificating.
Indeed, it isn't impeding on people's privacy (unless you don't want the person on the other side of the guy's cell phone to hear you). It is, however, impeding on their personal space to fill it with your own conversation. This can be especially out of place in a concert hall, museum, waiting room, church, recording studio...
...and the system would collapse as soon as "important businessmen" could purchase non-blockable numbers, bringing it all to square one. Hmm.
It is sad that people's lack of consideration or manners (enforced consideration) creates a market for these jammers - I hear some museums in Europe deploy these (illegally), by the way.
On the other hand, I believe there is definitely a justification for jamming systems that can "filter" calls (eg emergency numbers), though this would also require doctors to have special numbers/phones...
Anyway, one can only hope that all these reactions will - along with the spread of mobile telephony - create some kind of cell-phone etiquette, which will in turn render scrambling useless.
Just a bit of reality-reminding here:
Linux is code, not a living thing: it does not drop balls on anything.
Neither is Linux an OS. It is a POSIX-like kernel used by a number of OSs, and does not include any other software.
As such there is no such thing as "the Linux installer". Every distribution has its own installer (usually developed by their own staff), which is entirely independent of the kernel, Linux.
As for "dropping the ball", SATA support had been up and running for a long time in the 2.5.* development kernels, and is now in Linux 2.6.* (which if you look at the title is the subject of this story, though it doesn't appear to even remotely be the subject of your post).
It is probable the distributions you have tried did not include a 2.6.* version of Linux, nor the patch for the 2.4.* versions that has been mentioned here. I believe the Fedora Core 1 distribution does include Linux 2.6 : you may have better luck with that one.
This said, please either refrain from criticizing the developers for nonexistent failures and situations they are not responsible for, or go trumpet your ignorance elsewhere.
well, the people who'd be in a position to read old NASA code in 2043 would *not* be "somebody of the street", so if it does remain in use, I'm pretty sure the current level of abstraction will make it easy for the specialists of the day to interpret (especially if it remains POSIXish with a C heritage). This isn't 60s-era machine code, after all. Today's Linux uses mostly C (not that hard) as far as programs are concerned, and many of today's open standards are in a pinch human-parsable, like XML.
Well, I won't call myself authoritative, but having spent a month in Japan with people who needed their denshijisho rather often in order to communicate with me, I didn't hear "denshijiten" a single time... (though this was indeed in the Kansai area) I suspect that jisho is in fact more common usage in spoken language, jiten being more formal and the "correct" term for the product. :-) It's very logical really - I've studied Japanese for less than four months, and I can rather reliably reproduce characters of over 12 strokes if they contain the more basic elements : the rules are mostly respected, except for rarer cases such as migi/hidari, kanarazu, etc, and of course characters based on them, but in those cases it's only needed to learn the stroke order of that particular radical.
As for stroke order, don't go around scaring prospective japanophiles please.
I'm rather sure you could precisely learn Kakijun in a year or so - I haven't even had the luxury of a full-time university education in Japanese (as a lowly Information Science second-year I have 35-hour weeks). As a reference, I've been using Hadamitzky and Durmous' "Kanjji and Kana", which by the way has an excellent introduction.
As for online dictionaries, for the beginner to intermediate, Jim Breen's WWJDIC is an invaluable resource, with example sentences and (yes) stroke order for most all the joyo kanji.
Oh and just to nitpick, Tokyoben does exist as a dialect distinct from standard Nihongo, as far as my humble knowledge goes.
>the leftwing element of slashdot :-) That's amusing if nothing else. But lower your rifle for now.
h p
Heh.
Seriously, I am not a communist, though my political stance is *entirely irrelevant* to the issue, just as it is with most FOSS advocates -- contrarily to what SCO would like to have public opinion believe.
As for lack of sources : I seem to recall reading Darl McBride mention communism in this respect in a recent interview to a newsmagazine (The Economist I think), or at the very least, hint not-so-subtly towards most Americans' (though unfortunately you come across that elsewhere as well) paranoid fear of communism in the hopes that it will lower public respect of Free Software.
For myself I am not -emphatically not- "describing business/economics" here - merely emitting a partial and personal opinion on the way it is most often done in today's software market ; a market I choose to act in (this is one of the bases of capitalism, and not endangered by FOSS ideas) by not contributing to the omnipresence of proprietary software (the business model of which explicitly seeks to bind customers to a certain vendor by numerous varieties of coercion, e.g. standard setting by virtue of a quasi-monopoly, please refer to Halloween Documents for examples [1]), but supporting Free initiatives.
As for "eaten up with socialist thought"... Do you miss the easy manichean days of the Cold War, or...?
Slashdot never seemed politically biased to me, unless it was in favor of democracy and the liberties gained since the French Revolution; nothing to be afraid of (as if Socialism was).
[1]http://opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.p
Well, the thing is that SCO wants to create a parallel between Free and Open Source Software supporters and pirates in the minds of lawmakers and magistrates...
They do this by capitalizing on the fact that FOSS is often distributed free of charge (these people don't want to pay for things!), the fact that FOSS is in some ways a threat on the usual, exploitative way of doing business (they care about other things than profit => they are dangerous / dirty communists / hoping to undermine Capitalism|America|Freedom to squeeze megabucks out of credulous customers), the negative mass-culture image of the word "Hacker", and other things yet... but most of all, ignorance.
Your gall impresses me, to the extent that I doubt whether you are really serious in posting this.
In what way are abstract mathematics, music, or astronomy the sole creation of western civilisation? What justifies your ridiculous "The adored Chinese worldview" ? No one here has suggested anything as idiotic as an absolute classification of superiority between civilisations (an extremely vague term, by the way).
The current situation in China which you cite as an example of the failure of its "worldview" (please define) has more to do with the universal weaknesses of Men before power and the madness of leaders than to the Chinese culture's imaginary lack of abstraction.
Anyone who has in the least studied the Chinese writing system knows that its capacity for abstraction is indeed impressive, which leads to its designation as ideograms and never pictograms (though neither are accurate). This is a system that has been used to write works of extroardinary philosophical value with success, and that has not hindered its users in having had for some time the most culturally and artistically productive culture in the world (while us Europeans were playing with spears in the mud), or the invention of paper, gunpowder, refined medicine...
I would dare say that actually, some of the "advancement" of Western culture might be attributable to its very recklessness in the face of the rest of the World.
I personally think it indisputable that it is a positive concept to posess a cultural bias that does not place Mankind at the very center of things. As for your "Middle Kingdom" quip, I would hazard that the greater part of your post above is itself rather arrogant and self-centered ("in your book" is what matters, right?), and puts you in rather a delicate position to admonish a name which comes from an ancient cultural and geographic situation which has been shared by all cultures (The Odyssey, for example, took on the task of ordering the world outside Ancient Greece, based on its differences from the norm, being the home culture of its author).
This is all however laughable when compared to the arresting courage and/or total lack of thought which doubtless let you describe Chinese culture (and all non-Western ones?) as "primitive". We are all impressed.
If you listen to a live performance by a *good* band, you'll notice it's practically a new album in itself : because of the mix of musicians/instruments, the state of mind of the artist at the moment they perform, all their songs will, live, cease being part of a particular album and become part of that performance. So your last dichotomy is a false one - if you consider an artist who would make albums so that they would be meant as *one* work. A concert set is *not* a mix tape.
Yes, There's also Sting's "The Soul Cages", which has varied music, but a recurring theme and consistence in the instruments' arrangements. Even without the crossfading an album can indeed be a complete work.
isn't the one song that's on the radio proverbially the worst song on the album? :)
Amen. There are indeed albums that are ridiculous to tear apart... Add to those Rush as well as Mike Oldfield's "tubular bells" : two 28-minute tracks, and all pure bliss (unless you hated it, in which case it's just pure talent).
Surely, most classical music handed down to us is High Art, but you don't appear to have read much about the lives of classical composers... Mozart and Vivaldi, for example, spent their lives composing for other people, and their livelihoods (as with many others) hinged on their music's popularity. As great as they may have been, they ended up buried in the same poor people's cemetery in Austria, without even a marked grave, because the tides of popular appreciation ahd turned, and noone would subsidize their genius anymore (maybe that's what we need nowadays --- more mecenes?).
The market for music hasn't changes, it's just grown to more layers of the population.
Oh and lastly, as a music-lover myself, I rather resent your objectification of music : I find it of striking obviousness that were we to dictate our "customers'" first-degree wishes to artists, we would get bad music - which is what happens when music executives tailor a joke performer to the market (hello, ricky and britney.)
No "customer" would have asked for "Dark Side of the Moon". And it is the best sold (concept) album of our time, but more importantly a work of genius.