I don't understand. There were two major manufacturers of CPUs and two major manufacturers of GPUs before the merger, exactly the same number as after the merger. Where is your problem exactly?
I personally see problems elsewhere. One example is ebay, the online auction monopoly, being allowed to not only buy paypal, but also disallow any other payment system...
Why is this even a question. There is an entire language designed for education. Give the kids a logo textbook! Well, ok, I am joking, but I would not be if logo got some decent upgrades! For example instead of a triangular "turtle" you could have a cool 3d photorealistic turtle of unspecified gender and... wait for it... four elephants on top of it, holding a disk!
Hahaha! That was similar to my reaction when I opened the page with my 26" portrait oriented monitor. I said "yeah! take that! landscape mode suckers!". I was waiting to say that for over a year...
Too bad I found the video boring... but it still fills my entire screen so I can see its boring-ness in all its glory!
Are you sure it's so inefficient? The Chinese writing system has allowed people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects and even different languages to communicate in written form for thousands of years.
I had heard that many times so I also thought this was the main reason for keeping the writing system. However, it was later explained to me that it is no longer very true. As you say, Mandarin being the standard is just one reason. Moreover when you say that Cantonese can be read by a Mandarine speaker, that is only for one form of formal Cantonese writing. Colloquial Cantonese and especially Hong Kong Cantonese cannot be read by non-Cantonese speakers. So writing is not that universal.
You mean like what the PRC did when it left traditional characters to the few interested in studying culture and promulgated simplified characters to the masses, causing literacy to shoot up?
There you go. But it was a small step, it is still logographic.
I don't know, Greece is pretty western compared to China. Western ideas of Democracy, birthplace of Western Philosophy, source of much of the Western literary canon.
Let's say it is the easternmost west...
What was suggested in this thread was not an improvement, but a complete replacement of one system with another, which is quite another matter and may well be culturally destructive.
I don't understand why a replacement of the everyday communication method can be culturally destructive when the old writing system is not abolished. The ancient corpus is still available for everyone to study and build upon.
How can you be so sure? Your main counter-example was a culture which changed its writing system back when it didn't have millennia of written culture, but only a century or two.
First of all it was not a century or two for the switch to alphabetic. It was 6-7 centuries, which, for the people of the era would seem like forever (they did not have archaeology). And the point is that they continued to adopt advances that were made to writing systems.
There is no Chinese alphabet. Chinese writing is not an alphabetic system. You don't do much for your argument when you show such ignorance on the basic terminology of discussion.
Ok, in a big post I used once the incorrect term "Chinese alphabet"... Well, when you usually talk about alphabetic scripts the words "alphabet" "script" and even writing system mean the same thing so it was my mistake. I don't think you can accuse me much of ignorance of basic terminology given the entire post, I did try to avoid using "alphabet" even for the syllabic script that I mentioned.
Average length of an english word: 5 letters. Each letter fits easily in 5 bits. So, 25 bits total. Average length of a chinese word: 2.2 hanzi. I will be kind and make that 2 hanzi. You need knowledge of over 3000 hanzi just for simple texts, if you want more technical or classical etc you need more than 6000. That takes 13 bits for each character. Compression can be applied to both, this was just a quick raw comparison. So, you mistakenly assume 1 alphabetic character = 1 ideographic character when it obviously is not. It takes much more time to draw, much more space to store and much, much, MUCH more time to learn. You should be considering hanzi = half word and not letter. Also homonyms is not script dependent. There are languages with alphabetic scripts that have few or no homonyms (or homographs which is what you mean here). Plus, there is the reverse problem with ideograms, e.g. Kanji have multiple pronunciations (on, kun...). The only thing efficient about ideographic scripts is that after you have invested in learning them, reading might be faster for you, however for both alphabetic & ideographic scripts you can train to reach speeds that start to be faster that what you can comprehend.
Wow, you really addressed my post well. You must be a master debater?:) Let me make things a little clearer to you. I WROTE A HUGE EFFING post about how the problem is that some consider the alphabet as a big part of the culture, when it should be a tool for the language (which itself is a big part of the culture) and you come back with arguments of the type "clean up your own culture" and crap like that. It is obviously not a matter of "incomprehensibility" to others. When your writing system needs over a decade of study to master, it automatically excludes poor population that cannot afford that much time. It means that you should seriously consider whether everyone has to learn this system just to be able to read their mail. And obviously nobody else (and most certainly not I) can impose such a thing. It was simply an observation of how holding on to tradition for too long and for not really good reasons can have negative effects (in this case to literacy and efficiency of communication in general). Hopefully some people in the right places will realize it (because there already are Chinese people who realize it) and try to do something about it. You know, if they don't simply adopt something like latin/pinyin for their daily communication but instead invent something (see Koreans in gp post), wouldn't it be *adding* to the culture for those who consider writing part of it? Oh, and cheers for trying some ethnic name calling tactics in your post - I hope you are not over 15 years old...
Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.
Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture. Yes, language is always part of the culture, but the writing system is viewed by most of the rest of the world as a tool for recording the language. If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it. Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level? And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this. In fact I come, from another really old culture and I can read 2500 year old texts as they are pretty close to the language I speak now, including a similar alphabet. How is this a counter-example if my own language has kept the same alphabet for thousands of years? Well, it hasn't. The earliest Greek (at least the earliest identified) was written in the Linear B script which is part syllabic, part ideographic. Around the 9th century B.C.E. the Ancient Greek alphabet was adopted, probably because the Hellenic people of the time recognized that the Phoenicians had developed a much better writing system and so they adapted it to their language. This is the earliest alphabet I can hope to read, however apart from some letters being dropped due to misuse, it continue to adopt advances in writing systems. So, it quickly became left to right instead of left->right->left (boustrophedon) etc, then it started to have spaces between words, then it got the lower case variant and so on. Now you might say that I am proposing to the Chinese what felt right to my ancestors. However I have good experience of most current writing systems as it was my job at some point to implement text entry in most of the worlds writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean..even Klingon. And that actually brings me to Korean. Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line. Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap. You won't destroy millennia of Chinese culture by starting to use something simple for every day communication. It is not just my opinion, many other cultures agree, including cultures that already used the Chinese alphabet, so there might be some truth to that.
I don't get it, are you using NFS or Samba? Which one are you complaining about? Of course given that both are being used extensively by millions of systems, I would guess you are really complaining about your NAS or your desktop?
Teachbook appears to be a social/community website, close to the area of what Facebook does. I would think that the "teachbook" name was chosen on purpose to be "facebook for teachers/teaching". Well, you can't do that without facebook going after you. IANAL so I don't know if facebook can or should prevail, but it seems to me that they sort of have a point. Now, contrast this to a previous action of facebook: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/10/facebook-placebook/ They went after a startup travel website, i.e. a site for you to book vacations in the places you visit called... well... placebook! I mean who better for the name placebook than a site where you book... places... The site in question had, in the end, to back down and change their name to triptrace: http://blog.triptrace.com/2010/08/19/we-tell-the-world-placebook-is-now-triptrace/ . Now THAT was ridiculous.
Risking Star Wars fan-boy lynching, your comment is spot on! Although I will wait for a 3D blu-ray edition before adding it to my collection, as I thought the 3D in this particular film was a big part of the experience. I try to avoid buying the same movie multiple times although I can't avoid it some times (e.g. most of my hd-dvds/blu-rays were in my dvd collection...)
Yeah, because all self-respecting coders has this driving urge to reinvent the wheel whenever they're met with an already functional and documented piece of code.
Really? Phewww! I thought I was among few paranoid enough to not trust anything I haven't implemented myself from scratch. Good thing to hear all self-respecting coders work like that and I am not a minority! I mean, it was kind of obvious, how can you trust a library or sample code some unknown guy wrote when you yourself, the master developer, can do the optimal implementation yourself.
Have you considered the possibility that moving data through the sata cable creates an electromagnetic field that might interfere with a nearby analog component? I didn't think so.
Actually, mr. smartass, I was originally concluding my post by saying something like "unless they are testing by wrapping the sata cable around the DAC components", but I thought it was superfluous. I mean, you have all these power cables going around and if you remember Ampere's Law, the em field is proportional to the current. Not to mention that traditionally, the SATA cable carrying insignificant current goes to the edge of the motherboard while you have at least one power cable feeding the CPU dozens of Amps...
What the hell are you talking about? What terminations and EMI?? The cable connects the hard disk to the hard disk controller, it either does successfuly (like any $1 sata cable that is not broken) or does not (the broken cable), and from then on the audio data has to go get processed/decoded/whatever and at some point passed on the the Digital to Analog converter. ONLY FROM THEN ON does quality of electronics/cables etc matter. There are some things that are simple as 1-2-3 that you can certainly write off.
Ehmm, actually it doesn't work! Those guys that hang around areas where the "equator line" is a tourist attraction are just scammers. The Coriolis effect is so minuscule compared to the other forces during the experiment that it has no effect. The aforementioned scammers have learned how by slightly tilting and/or moving the bucket (or "rigging" it) they can "help" the water rotate the way they want. Yes, IAAP...
Don't laugh about things like that. It is a fact that there are minerals and other stuff in our water supply and in our oxygen supply causing rainbows and such. There are god knows what things oozing out of the ground nowadays, 20 years ago we never noticed their effects so predominately. Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qFdbUEq5s
That's the "mystery"? Why the white iPhone 4 was delayed? OMG, this is serious! We should get the Interpol involved ASAP! Wait, that's not enough, let's also get some mystery writers working on solving this too! Better yet, we have to try and get Mr. Holmes, even if it has to be through some time/reality vortex. Or even better, we could tune the time/reality vortex to 24th century ST universe and get Lt. Cmdr Data as Holmes!
Even the life of an astronaut is pretty boring, they mostly carefully follow checklists that other people have written.
Yeah, you mean like the checklist designed by ground engineers that the Apollo 13 crew followed to fit the air filter canisters from the command module... Oh, wait...
I am at a loss lately with Intel model numbers, so I didn't get it. Is the 286 the one without the turbo core, or the one lacking VT-x? Oh, maybe it is the one with integrated graphics?
I was thinking about posting something pun-less so I could have you guys going nuts rereading the post over and over to find the pun, but then I decided against it. Or did I?
You got modded insightful? My N900 charges via a USB cable. It charges at 1200mA with the fast Nokia charger, at 500mA with the slow Nokia charger or PC USB port and at what appears around 300mA with a $2 Chinese car charger. And they certainly don't charge third parties to provide them with secret recipes on how to make the chargers work. Or naw... you are right, Apple never does anything wrong, just uncool people complaining about everything...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand. There were two major manufacturers of CPUs and two major manufacturers of GPUs before the merger, exactly the same number as after the merger. Where is your problem exactly?
I personally see problems elsewhere. One example is ebay, the online auction monopoly, being allowed to not only buy paypal, but also disallow any other payment system...
Why is this even a question. There is an entire language designed for education. Give the kids a logo textbook! ... wait for it ... four elephants on top of it, holding a disk!
Well, ok, I am joking, but I would not be if logo got some decent upgrades! For example instead of a triangular "turtle" you could have a cool 3d photorealistic turtle of unspecified gender and
Hahaha!
That was similar to my reaction when I opened the page with my 26" portrait oriented monitor. I said "yeah! take that! landscape mode suckers!". I was waiting to say that for over a year...
Too bad I found the video boring... but it still fills my entire screen so I can see its boring-ness in all its glory!
Are you sure it's so inefficient? The Chinese writing system has allowed people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects and even different languages to communicate in written form for thousands of years.
I had heard that many times so I also thought this was the main reason for keeping the writing system. However, it was later explained to me that it is no longer very true. As you say, Mandarin being the standard is just one reason. Moreover when you say that Cantonese can be read by a Mandarine speaker, that is only for one form of formal Cantonese writing. Colloquial Cantonese and especially Hong Kong Cantonese cannot be read by non-Cantonese speakers. So writing is not that universal.
You mean like what the PRC did when it left traditional characters to the few interested in studying culture and promulgated simplified characters to the masses, causing literacy to shoot up?
There you go. But it was a small step, it is still logographic.
I don't know, Greece is pretty western compared to China. Western ideas of Democracy, birthplace of Western Philosophy, source of much of the Western literary canon.
Let's say it is the easternmost west...
What was suggested in this thread was not an improvement, but a complete replacement of one system with another, which is quite another matter and may well be culturally destructive.
I don't understand why a replacement of the everyday communication method can be culturally destructive when the old writing system is not abolished. The ancient corpus is still available for everyone to study and build upon.
How can you be so sure? Your main counter-example was a culture which changed its writing system back when it didn't have millennia of written culture, but only a century or two.
First of all it was not a century or two for the switch to alphabetic. It was 6-7 centuries, which, for the people of the era would seem like forever (they did not have archaeology). And the point is that they continued to adopt advances that were made to writing systems.
There is no Chinese alphabet. Chinese writing is not an alphabetic system. You don't do much for your argument when you show such ignorance on the basic terminology of discussion.
Ok, in a big post I used once the incorrect term "Chinese alphabet"... Well, when you usually talk about alphabetic scripts the words "alphabet" "script" and even writing system mean the same thing so it was my mistake. I don't think you can accuse me much of ignorance of basic terminology given the entire post, I did try to avoid using "alphabet" even for the syllabic script that I mentioned.
Average length of an english word: 5 letters. Each letter fits easily in 5 bits. So, 25 bits total.
Average length of a chinese word: 2.2 hanzi. I will be kind and make that 2 hanzi. You need knowledge of over 3000 hanzi just for simple texts, if you want more technical or classical etc you need more than 6000. That takes 13 bits for each character.
Compression can be applied to both, this was just a quick raw comparison.
So, you mistakenly assume 1 alphabetic character = 1 ideographic character when it obviously is not. It takes much more time to draw, much more space to store and much, much, MUCH more time to learn. You should be considering hanzi = half word and not letter.
Also homonyms is not script dependent. There are languages with alphabetic scripts that have few or no homonyms (or homographs which is what you mean here). Plus, there is the reverse problem with ideograms, e.g. Kanji have multiple pronunciations (on, kun...).
The only thing efficient about ideographic scripts is that after you have invested in learning them, reading might be faster for you, however for both alphabetic & ideographic scripts you can train to reach speeds that start to be faster that what you can comprehend.
Wow, you really addressed my post well. You must be a master debater? :)
Let me make things a little clearer to you.
I WROTE A HUGE EFFING post about how the problem is that some consider the alphabet as a big part of the culture, when it should be a tool for the language (which itself is a big part of the culture) and you come back with arguments of the type "clean up your own culture" and crap like that.
It is obviously not a matter of "incomprehensibility" to others.
When your writing system needs over a decade of study to master, it automatically excludes poor population that cannot afford that much time. It means that you should seriously consider whether everyone has to learn this system just to be able to read their mail.
And obviously nobody else (and most certainly not I) can impose such a thing. It was simply an observation of how holding on to tradition for too long and for not really good reasons can have negative effects (in this case to literacy and efficiency of communication in general). Hopefully some people in the right places will realize it (because there already are Chinese people who realize it) and try to do something about it. You know, if they don't simply adopt something like latin/pinyin for their daily communication but instead invent something (see Koreans in gp post), wouldn't it be *adding* to the culture for those who consider writing part of it?
Oh, and cheers for trying some ethnic name calling tactics in your post - I hope you are not over 15 years old...
Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture.
Actually, that's the whole problem right there. The only reason to keep the spectacularly inefficient Chinese writing system is to consider it part of the culture. Yes, language is always part of the culture, but the writing system is viewed by most of the rest of the world as a tool for recording the language. If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it. Sure the fact that it looks pretty and/or elaborate compared to other writing systems means it is easier to categorize as part of your culture, but how about leaving it to the few who are interested in studying culture and adopting a more efficient system that is easier to learn thus can increase the literacy level? ..even Klingon. And that actually brings me to Korean. Koreans are an example of people who used the chinese writing system. Well, over 500 years ago they decided they had enough and invented Hangeul, which is a really interesting writing system. In fact, the Korean writing system is alphabetic, with the letters arranged in syllable squares. The result is that they still look nice, perhaps even similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, yet they have all the benefits of the alphabetic scripts, plus my Korean friends swear that the syllable arrangement allows them to read even faster than if they were arranged in a line.
And I am not exactly another "Westerner" who doesn't know what culture is saying this. In fact I come, from another really old culture and I can read 2500 year old texts as they are pretty close to the language I speak now, including a similar alphabet. How is this a counter-example if my own language has kept the same alphabet for thousands of years? Well, it hasn't. The earliest Greek (at least the earliest identified) was written in the Linear B script which is part syllabic, part ideographic. Around the 9th century B.C.E. the Ancient Greek alphabet was adopted, probably because the Hellenic people of the time recognized that the Phoenicians had developed a much better writing system and so they adapted it to their language. This is the earliest alphabet I can hope to read, however apart from some letters being dropped due to misuse, it continue to adopt advances in writing systems. So, it quickly became left to right instead of left->right->left (boustrophedon) etc, then it started to have spaces between words, then it got the lower case variant and so on.
Now you might say that I am proposing to the Chinese what felt right to my ancestors. However I have good experience of most current writing systems as it was my job at some point to implement text entry in most of the worlds writing systems, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Wow, I went off course somewhere but the point is that considering an improvement of your writing system as a violation of your culture is really a handicap. You won't destroy millennia of Chinese culture by starting to use something simple for every day communication. It is not just my opinion, many other cultures agree, including cultures that already used the Chinese alphabet, so there might be some truth to that.
I might be missing something here, but isn't this code always distributed as part of something (seems like glibc in particular)? What's the big deal?
I don't get it, are you using NFS or Samba? Which one are you complaining about?
Of course given that both are being used extensively by millions of systems, I would guess you are really complaining about your NAS or your desktop?
Teachbook appears to be a social/community website, close to the area of what Facebook does. I would think that the "teachbook" name was chosen on purpose to be "facebook for teachers/teaching". Well, you can't do that without facebook going after you. IANAL so I don't know if facebook can or should prevail, but it seems to me that they sort of have a point.
Now, contrast this to a previous action of facebook: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/10/facebook-placebook/
They went after a startup travel website, i.e. a site for you to book vacations in the places you visit called... well... placebook! I mean who better for the name placebook than a site where you book... places... The site in question had, in the end, to back down and change their name to triptrace: http://blog.triptrace.com/2010/08/19/we-tell-the-world-placebook-is-now-triptrace/ . Now THAT was ridiculous.
There's always money in the Banana Stand!
Risking Star Wars fan-boy lynching, your comment is spot on!
Although I will wait for a 3D blu-ray edition before adding it to my collection, as I thought the 3D in this particular film was a big part of the experience. I try to avoid buying the same movie multiple times although I can't avoid it some times (e.g. most of my hd-dvds/blu-rays were in my dvd collection...)
Yeah, because all self-respecting coders has this driving urge to reinvent the wheel whenever they're met with an already functional and documented piece of code.
Really? Phewww! I thought I was among few paranoid enough to not trust anything I haven't implemented myself from scratch. Good thing to hear all self-respecting coders work like that and I am not a minority! I mean, it was kind of obvious, how can you trust a library or sample code some unknown guy wrote when you yourself, the master developer, can do the optimal implementation yourself.
Have you considered the possibility that moving data through the sata cable creates an electromagnetic field that might interfere with a nearby analog component? I didn't think so.
Actually, mr. smartass, I was originally concluding my post by saying something like "unless they are testing by wrapping the sata cable around the DAC components", but I thought it was superfluous. I mean, you have all these power cables going around and if you remember Ampere's Law, the em field is proportional to the current. Not to mention that traditionally, the SATA cable carrying insignificant current goes to the edge of the motherboard while you have at least one power cable feeding the CPU dozens of Amps...
What the hell are you talking about? What terminations and EMI?? The cable connects the hard disk to the hard disk controller, it either does successfuly (like any $1 sata cable that is not broken) or does not (the broken cable), and from then on the audio data has to go get processed/decoded/whatever and at some point passed on the the Digital to Analog converter. ONLY FROM THEN ON does quality of electronics/cables etc matter.
There are some things that are simple as 1-2-3 that you can certainly write off.
Ehmm, actually it doesn't work!
Those guys that hang around areas where the "equator line" is a tourist attraction are just scammers.
The Coriolis effect is so minuscule compared to the other forces during the experiment that it has no effect. The aforementioned scammers have learned how by slightly tilting and/or moving the bucket (or "rigging" it) they can "help" the water rotate the way they want.
Yes, IAAP...
I think the point is that he both has and has not heard of Schrödinger...
Don't laugh about things like that. It is a fact that there are minerals and other stuff in our water supply and in our oxygen supply causing rainbows and such. There are god knows what things oozing out of the ground nowadays, 20 years ago we never noticed their effects so predominately.
Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qFdbUEq5s
That's the "mystery"? Why the white iPhone 4 was delayed?
OMG, this is serious! We should get the Interpol involved ASAP!
Wait, that's not enough, let's also get some mystery writers working on solving this too!
Better yet, we have to try and get Mr. Holmes, even if it has to be through some time/reality vortex.
Or even better, we could tune the time/reality vortex to 24th century ST universe and get Lt. Cmdr Data as Holmes!
Even the life of an astronaut is pretty boring, they mostly carefully follow checklists that other people have written.
Yeah, you mean like the checklist designed by ground engineers that the Apollo 13 crew followed to fit the air filter canisters from the command module... Oh, wait...
I am at a loss lately with Intel model numbers, so I didn't get it. Is the 286 the one without the turbo core, or the one lacking VT-x? Oh, maybe it is the one with integrated graphics?
Oh really? Wait until Cameron shoots "Casablancas" (AKA Casablanca 2) in glorious 3D, and then we'll talk!
I was thinking about posting something pun-less so I could have you guys going nuts rereading the post over and over to find the pun, but then I decided against it. Or did I?
You got modded insightful?
My N900 charges via a USB cable. It charges at 1200mA with the fast Nokia charger, at 500mA with the slow Nokia charger or PC USB port and at what appears around 300mA with a $2 Chinese car charger.
And they certainly don't charge third parties to provide them with secret recipes on how to make the chargers work.
Or naw... you are right, Apple never does anything wrong, just uncool people complaining about everything...
I'd like full use of my 200Hz 3D-ready display you insensitive clod!