I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL. For that matter, Creative Commons-Share Alike isn't either.
GFDL requires for something to currently be under copyright in order for the share-alike aspect of it to be enforceable and to propagate further on. If Wikipedia continues to accept these incompatible donations or incorporate public domain works, Wikipedia as a whole becomes polluted. Claiming GFDL is claiming a kind of copyright, but the parts that are actually public domain or CC-SA can't be claimed by GFDL and this could lead problems with lack of respect of Wikipedia GFDL...
Or maybe the hell with Wikipedia's license or anyone else's. As long as you're not using someone else's content, no one is going to sue...
You're absolutely right. In Taiwan, you see the same clustering effects with most of the semiconductor fabs (TSMC, UMC), chip designers, flat panel manufacturers, electronics designers all clustered around Hsinchu and the Hsinchu Science Park. Taiwan's "Silicon Valley" or technology hub is Hsinchu.
In Taipei, about one hour north, there are a growing number of software firms.
In Tainan, in southern Taiwan, there also is a cluster of flat panel and solar green energy firms.
Note though, that compared to many other parts of the world, Taiwan is a fairly small place. On top of that, the high speed rail shrinks the distance between all the major cities so that the whole island in some way could legitimately be considered one large cluster. There certainly has been a spreading out of firms from Hsinchu to Taoyuan (30 minutes north) and Taipei (1 hour north), besides the clusters in central and southern Taiwan.
(Off topic, there are also a bunch of clusters for precision tools, bicycles, and many other industries! But I suppose none of those could possibly be conducted over internet)
they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other, not the OLPC project.
Asus is a Taiwanese brand. So is Acer (Aspire One). As you pointed out, US companies Dell and HP are also active in this segment. Everyone outsources to China, almost completely through Taiwanese contract manufacturing firms. But at least for now, the PC/laptop market doesn't have any significant Chinese players other than Lenovo. Minor point, FYI.
Man, I wish so bad I could mod you up. I have libertarian leanings, but it's crazy how people romanticize the past. I saw the 150 years ago and 60 years ago and wanted to puke. Are those the new code words for "states rights"?
Zontar, your position "not exactly an angel" is basically in other words, that he wasn't great, but he wasn't so bad. If you read about the history of Taiwan, you will see that, actually, he was really bad. That's why I suggested you take a look at those links or do your own research on Taiwanese history.
Let me give you an example. When Chiang and the KMT came to Taiwan, they systematically tried to eradicate all things that weren't "Chinese". This includes Aboriginal culture, Minnan culture (a Chinese culture), Hakka culture (a Chinese culture), culture left behind by Japanese colonialism. The destroyed tons of architecture that they thought wasn't Chinese looking and replaced it with Northern Chinese imitations (funny thing was--a lot of what they destoryed was Southern Chinese architecture!). They tried to eradicate Taiwanese when it is a Chinese language that preserves a lot of vocabulary from the Tang Dynasty and when Mandarin is some kind of weird mix of northern Chinese and Manchurian.
Slave-labor camp is the wrong terminology to be using. If you really know Chinese history, you know that actually they believed in what they were doing at the time. It's like the Nazi's in Germany. The ideology just swept up an entire country that was starving and pissed off and it was how they thought they could make things better.
Mao's China vs Chiang's China is a false dichotomy. The mistake was allowing so much power to be concentrated in the hands of a single person, and I'm no libertarian, but hell, ideology wasn't the problem--it was hero-worship and being all swept up by this idea that government could and should go and change all the fundamental things of people's lives. The mistake was thinking that government should be controlling things like culture and language.
It happened in Mao's China and it happened in Chiang's China and in Chiang's Taiwan. If it weren't for a few key economic reforms (especially by his son, who despite his economic record was overall also an asshole), free "China" wouldn't have been much better off than Communist China.
First of all, the Chinese Nationalists (the Chinese KMT) had the same Stalinist training as the Communists and their power structure was an authoritarian one party-state monster that the Communists also later evolved into.
Second, regardless of the fact that Chiang was more interested in killing Communists than stopping the rape and pillage of China by the Japanese.
Third, we have a pretty good idea of what Chiang is like when he isn't facing the pressure of war because when he and his thugs came to Taiwan (which was then in political limbo after Japan gave it up as a colony after WWII), he had all the room and power to implement his ideas of an "ideal state".
This is but a very small glimpse of Chiang at peace:
So maybe the whole problem is that it's not for profit. Maybe non-profit is the way to go when you are coming up with a vision and getting donors.
But maybe you should ask PC manufacturers like Asus (manufacturer of the OLPC), people that, oh, I dunno, know a little something about logistics, cost management, customer service to put up bids when you actually want to get it done instead of running everything yourself.
Like what is the problem here. It seems that they had no idea or experience in doing logistics, order fulfillment, customer service. They can't pay professionals to do this? They are funded. They have to pay people to do this anyway. It's like the "not invented here" problem for the non-profit "industry".
Inter-intelligibility among your so-called Chinese dialects are generally worse than among Romance languages (really). So you're really talking about a language family, though for political reasons, people will try to convince you that they are "just" dialects of the same language.
There ARE dialects of Mandarin (what pretty much everyone learns in school in China these days). People in northern China and southern China, for example, have very different accents. Taiwan's Mandarin is pretty distinctive, and there are variations in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the southeast Asia region as a whole as well.
Well if you haven't quite digested that first piece of information yet, it's pretty misleading to say that they all share the same writing system. Most dialects aren't written at all (they are really writing Mandarin), and a Cantonese newspaper (the arts section, written in vernacular, i.e. Cantonese), would be pretty unintelligible to Mandarin only speakers. Sharing a large amount of characters gives you more than just sharing, say, the Latin alphabet, because of the meaning associated with each one, but again, it's not enough to allow you to just know all the words.
So... you are against IBM-compatible PCs too? Compaq was started by reverse engineering the IBM PC, which innovative though it was, was made from off-the-shelf components. It's pretty much the same deal with Apple too, which is why the reverse engineering works. Clean-room reverse engineering is perfectly legal, and if you're against that kind of thing, you're also probably pro-DRM too.
Just wanted to say I totally had a similar experience but with MSG. I'm not really sure about aspartame since I don't chew gum, eat snacks, or drink anything besides water or juice, but basically, I moved to East Asia for a while and was getting headaches every single day after meals. Besides the headaches, I would experience deep, deep sugar cravings, occasional blurry vision, and fatigue generally leading to a afternoon nap. I went to see a bunch of doctors--I thought these symptoms sounded like onset of diabetes; they told me I was stressed.
I started doing my own experimenting as well, taking almost all flavorings out of my diet (including stuff like salt that I was pretty sure I could handle) and slowly adding stuff back in one at a time. The culprit? MSG.
Sure, as another poster replied, it doesn't really mean that everyone else has this problem (I don't know anyone who gets the headaches though some people feel the thirst). The way that everyone falls asleep right after lunch out here while I no longer have any urge whatsoever to nap does make me think it is doing something to other people. But after my personal experience with MSG, I too wonder what the hell else is out there that could be doing stuff to me that I can't feel and everyone else dismisses as nothing, even though it is affecting a small but significant portion of the population.
Are you going to try to monetize wikinote? What are your goals?
I'm not against monetization, but if I don't understand what the provider is getting out of it, it makes me uneasy about using the service even if I like the service.
The article mentioned large corporations as being part of the problem in Iraq. Any specific suggestions on how the situation can be made better?
Make a prediction--are we going to win? Will pulling out help?
Since the announcement of Google's Pinyin Input System on April 4th, 2007, Google has received large amounts of feedback and suggestions. Among those, we are especially concerned about suspicions of the origins of the vocabulary database for Google's Input System. During the testing stage, indeed, it included non-Google data. We are willing to face this problem and, thus, apologize to both our users and Sohu.
We have simultaneously taken action, this Sunday, April 8th, 2007, noontime, we have completed the second release of Google's Pinyin Input System (Google Input Method version 1.0.17.0). We have taken 2 days to completely update the vocabulary database. The current vocabulary database has been produced from the large amount of search data that Google has accumulated over many years. We welcome users and those in industry to continue to watch over/inspect our upgrade.
Google itself will, and hopes that others in the search industry can continue to work hard to improve all aspects of [Chinese] input methods, create new, practical functions, provide more to users, and give them better experiences
Last, once again, we want to express our apologizes to our users and to Sohu!
Pidgin can also refer to another pidgin in Hawaii, that was a result of mixing Japanese, Chinese languages, Hawaiian (sorry I can't remember what it's really called), and English.
One of the Asian American studies professors at Columbia speaks it. He's like nth generation Japanese American and grew up in Hawaii.
Here's one case already of "modifying" the data. It was approved in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, and Taiwan. It's hard to imagine how Taiwan gets left out, plus an and gets inserted between Mexico and the Philippines. Well, hard to imagine until you remember that there are tons of people that would like to pretend independent, democratic Taiwan is a part of authoritarian China.
Actually, that wasn't his first bit of political idiocy. In the 80's he wrote an alarmist, nativist fiction book called Rising Sun on how the Japanese (whose economy at that time was trucking) were going to overtake the US. The epilogue included an explicit commentary where he basically said, "This was fiction, but I'm not kidding. You really should hate the Japanese because they are taking away the American manufacturing base." Oh the horrors, an economic successful country that isn't the U.S. Looking back, it really seems silly doesn't it? For all its flaws, the US economy has steadily grown at a rate faster than much of Europe. Our manufacturing base continues to shrink, but these days, it's going to China, and more to the point, so what?
His political commentary has a record of being foolish.
Yes, and not only that, but that Taiwan is NOT China is really important to its 23 million citizens. Taiwan is a democracy that has its own armies, controls its own borders, directly elects its own president, legislature...
Sure, there are some reasons, unrelated to the fact that China constantly blares that it owns Taiwan and will p8wn Taiwan if Taiwan or anyone else says otherwise, but they are not good ones, and if there was ever a good guy--bad guy David vs. Goliath if you ever saw one situation, Taiwan is it.
So please. Taiwan is NOT China. Quanta is a Taiwanese company that may happen to do a lot of business in China. Still, it is not the same thing and it's an important distinction to make.
In Taiwan, broadband is common, cheap, and readily available, but there is nothing "old style" about BBS at all. It's like a Craigslist but actually used by 99% of all college students and a very large number of people under 30. You can rent an apartment, find someone to go to a weird movie with, look for a job, talk about politics, post your new novel (all of these are real examples)... pretty much the ultimate message board, only very fast, very comprehensive, and with mass appeal.
The good thing is that the Taiwan thinks that solar energy is one of the next big things and is investing heavily in growing their solar panel industry. If Taiwan is making it, don't worry, it will get to below $1 per watt.
How hard would it be to beam wifi from neighboring countries into China, Iran, Burma, etc? Of course, it'd have to be a lot, but it's better than nothing right? Let's say in the case of China, beam from Hong Kong, Jinmen, maybe even Taiwan. Maybe just provide the complement of what's in China, i.e. all the websites that China censors. Any ideas?
Excuse, who is doing the exoticising? It says "the Chinese have a saying", not "some unknown freakish race", not "those weirdos out east", and not "Orientals". Is this weirder than saying "the Irish have a saying" or "around here, we say"? Like they say your words say more about you than who you're talking about.
My take--this is a bullshit rumor, and they float the high number out there just so when someone REALLY offers $300 million, no one balks and everyone thinks it's actually CHEAP.
That's not true. You only get a patent on the molecule. If you make a slight alteration, then you can extend the patent again, which IS something that's broken with this area of the patent system. But in general, patenting drugs has sparked great amounts of innovation, while software patenting does not seem to have sparked any at all. Get your facts straight and look at the big picture. They're not broken in the same way, and that's why the article was just fluff. If you noticed, the story was even duped, but the second time the story was properly given a summary that pointed out what it said that's different than what's usually said in the slashdot comment echo-chamber.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL. For that matter, Creative Commons-Share Alike isn't either.
GFDL requires for something to currently be under copyright in order for the share-alike aspect of it to be enforceable and to propagate further on. If Wikipedia continues to accept these incompatible donations or incorporate public domain works, Wikipedia as a whole becomes polluted. Claiming GFDL is claiming a kind of copyright, but the parts that are actually public domain or CC-SA can't be claimed by GFDL and this could lead problems with lack of respect of Wikipedia GFDL...
Or maybe the hell with Wikipedia's license or anyone else's. As long as you're not using someone else's content, no one is going to sue...
You're absolutely right. In Taiwan, you see the same clustering effects with most of the semiconductor fabs (TSMC, UMC), chip designers, flat panel manufacturers, electronics designers all clustered around Hsinchu and the Hsinchu Science Park. Taiwan's "Silicon Valley" or technology hub is Hsinchu.
In Taipei, about one hour north, there are a growing number of software firms.
In Tainan, in southern Taiwan, there also is a cluster of flat panel and solar green energy firms.
Note though, that compared to many other parts of the world, Taiwan is a fairly small place. On top of that, the high speed rail shrinks the distance between all the major cities so that the whole island in some way could legitimately be considered one large cluster. There certainly has been a spreading out of firms from Hsinchu to Taoyuan (30 minutes north) and Taipei (1 hour north), besides the clusters in central and southern Taiwan.
(Off topic, there are also a bunch of clusters for precision tools, bicycles, and many other industries! But I suppose none of those could possibly be conducted over internet)
they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other, not the OLPC project.
Asus is a Taiwanese brand. So is Acer (Aspire One). As you pointed out, US companies Dell and HP are also active in this segment. Everyone outsources to China, almost completely through Taiwanese contract manufacturing firms. But at least for now, the PC/laptop market doesn't have any significant Chinese players other than Lenovo. Minor point, FYI.
Man, I wish so bad I could mod you up. I have libertarian leanings, but it's crazy how people romanticize the past. I saw the 150 years ago and 60 years ago and wanted to puke. Are those the new code words for "states rights"?
Zontar, your position "not exactly an angel" is basically in other words, that he wasn't great, but he wasn't so bad. If you read about the history of Taiwan, you will see that, actually, he was really bad. That's why I suggested you take a look at those links or do your own research on Taiwanese history.
Let me give you an example. When Chiang and the KMT came to Taiwan, they systematically tried to eradicate all things that weren't "Chinese". This includes Aboriginal culture, Minnan culture (a Chinese culture), Hakka culture (a Chinese culture), culture left behind by Japanese colonialism. The destroyed tons of architecture that they thought wasn't Chinese looking and replaced it with Northern Chinese imitations (funny thing was--a lot of what they destoryed was Southern Chinese architecture!). They tried to eradicate Taiwanese when it is a Chinese language that preserves a lot of vocabulary from the Tang Dynasty and when Mandarin is some kind of weird mix of northern Chinese and Manchurian.
Slave-labor camp is the wrong terminology to be using. If you really know Chinese history, you know that actually they believed in what they were doing at the time. It's like the Nazi's in Germany. The ideology just swept up an entire country that was starving and pissed off and it was how they thought they could make things better.
Mao's China vs Chiang's China is a false dichotomy. The mistake was allowing so much power to be concentrated in the hands of a single person, and I'm no libertarian, but hell, ideology wasn't the problem--it was hero-worship and being all swept up by this idea that government could and should go and change all the fundamental things of people's lives. The mistake was thinking that government should be controlling things like culture and language.
It happened in Mao's China and it happened in Chiang's China and in Chiang's Taiwan. If it weren't for a few key economic reforms (especially by his son, who despite his economic record was overall also an asshole), free "China" wouldn't have been much better off than Communist China.
First of all, the Chinese Nationalists (the Chinese KMT) had the same Stalinist training as the Communists and their power structure was an authoritarian one party-state monster that the Communists also later evolved into.
Second, regardless of the fact that Chiang was more interested in killing Communists than stopping the rape and pillage of China by the Japanese.
Third, we have a pretty good idea of what Chiang is like when he isn't facing the pressure of war because when he and his thugs came to Taiwan (which was then in political limbo after Japan gave it up as a colony after WWII), he had all the room and power to implement his ideas of an "ideal state".
This is but a very small glimpse of Chiang at peace:
228 Incident
White Terror
There are many, many other asshole things that Chiang Kai-shek did, but for that, you could grab a Taiwanese history book.
So maybe the whole problem is that it's not for profit. Maybe non-profit is the way to go when you are coming up with a vision and getting donors.
But maybe you should ask PC manufacturers like Asus (manufacturer of the OLPC), people that, oh, I dunno, know a little something about logistics, cost management, customer service to put up bids when you actually want to get it done instead of running everything yourself.
Like what is the problem here. It seems that they had no idea or experience in doing logistics, order fulfillment, customer service. They can't pay professionals to do this? They are funded. They have to pay people to do this anyway. It's like the "not invented here" problem for the non-profit "industry".
Inter-intelligibility among your so-called Chinese dialects are generally worse than among Romance languages (really). So you're really talking about a language family, though for political reasons, people will try to convince you that they are "just" dialects of the same language. There ARE dialects of Mandarin (what pretty much everyone learns in school in China these days). People in northern China and southern China, for example, have very different accents. Taiwan's Mandarin is pretty distinctive, and there are variations in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the southeast Asia region as a whole as well. Well if you haven't quite digested that first piece of information yet, it's pretty misleading to say that they all share the same writing system. Most dialects aren't written at all (they are really writing Mandarin), and a Cantonese newspaper (the arts section, written in vernacular, i.e. Cantonese), would be pretty unintelligible to Mandarin only speakers. Sharing a large amount of characters gives you more than just sharing, say, the Latin alphabet, because of the meaning associated with each one, but again, it's not enough to allow you to just know all the words.
So... you are against IBM-compatible PCs too? Compaq was started by reverse engineering the IBM PC, which innovative though it was, was made from off-the-shelf components. It's pretty much the same deal with Apple too, which is why the reverse engineering works. Clean-room reverse engineering is perfectly legal, and if you're against that kind of thing, you're also probably pro-DRM too.
Absolutely fucking awesome post. Seldom seen these days on Slashdot.
Just wanted to say I totally had a similar experience but with MSG. I'm not really sure about aspartame since I don't chew gum, eat snacks, or drink anything besides water or juice, but basically, I moved to East Asia for a while and was getting headaches every single day after meals. Besides the headaches, I would experience deep, deep sugar cravings, occasional blurry vision, and fatigue generally leading to a afternoon nap. I went to see a bunch of doctors--I thought these symptoms sounded like onset of diabetes; they told me I was stressed. I started doing my own experimenting as well, taking almost all flavorings out of my diet (including stuff like salt that I was pretty sure I could handle) and slowly adding stuff back in one at a time. The culprit? MSG. Sure, as another poster replied, it doesn't really mean that everyone else has this problem (I don't know anyone who gets the headaches though some people feel the thirst). The way that everyone falls asleep right after lunch out here while I no longer have any urge whatsoever to nap does make me think it is doing something to other people. But after my personal experience with MSG, I too wonder what the hell else is out there that could be doing stuff to me that I can't feel and everyone else dismisses as nothing, even though it is affecting a small but significant portion of the population.
Are you going to try to monetize wikinote? What are your goals?
I'm not against monetization, but if I don't understand what the provider is getting out of it, it makes me uneasy about using the service even if I like the service.
The article mentioned large corporations as being part of the problem in Iraq. Any specific suggestions on how the situation can be made better? Make a prediction--are we going to win? Will pulling out help?
Since the announcement of Google's Pinyin Input System on April 4th, 2007, Google has received large amounts of feedback and suggestions. Among those, we are especially concerned about suspicions of the origins of the vocabulary database for Google's Input System. During the testing stage, indeed, it included non-Google data. We are willing to face this problem and, thus, apologize to both our users and Sohu. We have simultaneously taken action, this Sunday, April 8th, 2007, noontime, we have completed the second release of Google's Pinyin Input System (Google Input Method version 1.0.17.0). We have taken 2 days to completely update the vocabulary database. The current vocabulary database has been produced from the large amount of search data that Google has accumulated over many years. We welcome users and those in industry to continue to watch over/inspect our upgrade. Google itself will, and hopes that others in the search industry can continue to work hard to improve all aspects of [Chinese] input methods, create new, practical functions, provide more to users, and give them better experiences Last, once again, we want to express our apologizes to our users and to Sohu!
That's really cool.
Pidgin can also refer to another pidgin in Hawaii, that was a result of mixing Japanese, Chinese languages, Hawaiian (sorry I can't remember what it's really called), and English.
One of the Asian American studies professors at Columbia speaks it. He's like nth generation Japanese American and grew up in Hawaii.
Here's one case already of "modifying" the data. It was approved in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, and Taiwan. It's hard to imagine how Taiwan gets left out, plus an and gets inserted between Mexico and the Philippines. Well, hard to imagine until you remember that there are tons of people that would like to pretend independent, democratic Taiwan is a part of authoritarian China.
Actually, that wasn't his first bit of political idiocy. In the 80's he wrote an alarmist, nativist fiction book called Rising Sun on how the Japanese (whose economy at that time was trucking) were going to overtake the US. The epilogue included an explicit commentary where he basically said, "This was fiction, but I'm not kidding. You really should hate the Japanese because they are taking away the American manufacturing base." Oh the horrors, an economic successful country that isn't the U.S. Looking back, it really seems silly doesn't it? For all its flaws, the US economy has steadily grown at a rate faster than much of Europe. Our manufacturing base continues to shrink, but these days, it's going to China, and more to the point, so what? His political commentary has a record of being foolish.
Yes, and not only that, but that Taiwan is NOT China is really important to its 23 million citizens. Taiwan is a democracy that has its own armies, controls its own borders, directly elects its own president, legislature... Sure, there are some reasons, unrelated to the fact that China constantly blares that it owns Taiwan and will p8wn Taiwan if Taiwan or anyone else says otherwise, but they are not good ones, and if there was ever a good guy--bad guy David vs. Goliath if you ever saw one situation, Taiwan is it. So please. Taiwan is NOT China. Quanta is a Taiwanese company that may happen to do a lot of business in China. Still, it is not the same thing and it's an important distinction to make.
In Taiwan, broadband is common, cheap, and readily available, but there is nothing "old style" about BBS at all. It's like a Craigslist but actually used by 99% of all college students and a very large number of people under 30. You can rent an apartment, find someone to go to a weird movie with, look for a job, talk about politics, post your new novel (all of these are real examples)... pretty much the ultimate message board, only very fast, very comprehensive, and with mass appeal.
Oh, and they're all free and free of advertising.
http://www.ptt.cc/index.html (sorry, Chinese only).
The good thing is that the Taiwan thinks that solar energy is one of the next big things and is investing heavily in growing their solar panel industry. If Taiwan is making it, don't worry, it will get to below $1 per watt.
Is it trolling if you're not American but write a post that attempts to mislead people into believing you are?
How hard would it be to beam wifi from neighboring countries into China, Iran, Burma, etc? Of course, it'd have to be a lot, but it's better than nothing right? Let's say in the case of China, beam from Hong Kong, Jinmen, maybe even Taiwan. Maybe just provide the complement of what's in China, i.e. all the websites that China censors. Any ideas?
Excuse, who is doing the exoticising? It says "the Chinese have a saying", not "some unknown freakish race", not "those weirdos out east", and not "Orientals". Is this weirder than saying "the Irish have a saying" or "around here, we say"? Like they say your words say more about you than who you're talking about.
My take--this is a bullshit rumor, and they float the high number out there just so when someone REALLY offers $300 million, no one balks and everyone thinks it's actually CHEAP.
That's not true. You only get a patent on the molecule. If you make a slight alteration, then you can extend the patent again, which IS something that's broken with this area of the patent system. But in general, patenting drugs has sparked great amounts of innovation, while software patenting does not seem to have sparked any at all. Get your facts straight and look at the big picture. They're not broken in the same way, and that's why the article was just fluff. If you noticed, the story was even duped, but the second time the story was properly given a summary that pointed out what it said that's different than what's usually said in the slashdot comment echo-chamber.