True enough, but it's relatively easy to write a program and distribute it anonymously, and will remain so. Once the crack is available, it will spread like wildfire.
We know how this works, because "DRM" is just a new word for the hair-brained copy protection schemes that so many gaming manufacturers worked out in the 80s. For many, many, geeks, breaking security is an intellectual exercise, and it's ridiculous to think that the security won't be broken -- regardless of whether or not the law of the land says that copyright circumvention is legal or not. Once a crack is produced, it will be released, and sites like Slashdot or whatever the equivalent of the day is will link to it, and voila! the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the company responsible for the DRM scheme sank into it (DRM is a hard problem) will go down the drain.
People on Slashdot love to say that it's not about preventing all copying, just preventing most copying -- that Joe User or whatever it's fashionable to call him these days will not be willing to go to the trouble of bypassing DRM. I disagree with this. First of all, once the initial crack has been produced, someone will put a user friendly front end on it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone writes a generic anti-DRM program that uses a plugin architecture so that people interested in the cracking can just write a plugin and be done with it. Hell, the anti-DRM program could even auto-update itself. All of this is trivially easy to do. And do not underestimate the frustration that users will feel when they try to play their music on their new music player or on their computer after reinstalling the operating system only to be told that they aren't allowed to. "I'm sorry, you're not licensed to play this track on this device." What the hell does that mean? I want to play my music!
Enter google. Joe User searches for "I'm sorry, you're not licensed to play this track on this device" and do you really think he won't be led to the necessary program? And in the event that a generic anti-DRM program with a plugin architecture is produced, do you think he won't download it? Hell, he downloads a hundred different spyware laden screensaver and mouse pointer extension programs a day, he won't even think twice! And if it works, he will tell his friends about it, just like my dad's friends used to tell him about the new dual VCR they bought that got around the silly VHS copy protection schemes!
I agree that banning religion is a woefully stupid idea that has never worked, but don't you think you're picking a relatively extreme example in Pol Pot? Pol Pot was less concerned about religion and consumerism than he was about extermination of all of Cambodia's urban dwellers. In his words, "the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea only needs 1 million Cambodians" -- when you're a country that had a population of 6 million in 1976, that's a little bit of a frightening notion.
Lots of people have attempted to ban Religion (or at least actively discourage it) and reduce consumerism, as that is one of the cornerstones of Marxist philosophy. No matter how much you may dislike communism as a concept, picking Pol Pot for your example of a typical communist is a little bit weasely -- the guy made Hitler look nice.
I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree in principle that redefining words in a weasely way is essentially an underhanded tactic to influence people's interpretation of a situation and should be opposed at all costs, but your assertion that "The human mind uses words(=symbols) to understand the universe. Change the word, you change the universe." is essentially a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggested that language influences thought -- that essentially, the language you speak affects your worldview in a profound and important way. This hypothesis is now universally rejected by linguists and psychologists, because extensive study has been made of peoples who speak languages radically different from the dominant Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages spoken today, and those peoples exhibit no statistically significant differences in their interpretation of reality.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was very interesting and lots of people believed it to be true. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
For example, people used to say things like "the fact that the masculine gender dominates the female gender in french plural constructions is evidence that sexist thought is conditioned in the minds of french people," or to take an English example, "the fact that the correct English personal pronoun to use to refer to a person whose gender is not known is 'he' evidences that the very language we speak encourages the oppression of women." Unfortunately, lots of languages have no gender (like say, Finnish or Chinese), and yet these societies have been historically just as sexist as French and English society. Conversely, in colloquial communication the use of the third person plural pronoun "they" has largely replaced the use of "he" when refering to someone whose sex is unknown -- and yet sexism persists in all English speaking countries.
Or to take an example from F/OSS, since we're on Slashdot -- there is no distinction in English between "Free" (as in Freedom) and "Free" (as in beer) and yet, somehow, most everyone on Slashdot makes this distinction regularly, and it only takes a second to explain the distinction to pretty much anyone. If Orwellian Newspeak were in fact linguistically feasible (the concept of newspeak was very much based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was widely held to be true in 1948), English-speakers would be unable to grasp the difference between Freedom and 'a transaction in which one thing is transfered to another person without an exchange of money, goods, or services.' And yet we can, and we do.
Language is certainly very important, but don't overestimate its importance. One of the main focuses in Linguistics nowadays (especially because of Chomsky) is the study of how exactly human language exposes the way humans organize their thoughts -- and not the other way around.
Whatever, AC. I'll freely admit that I missed the South Park reference -- I don't watch South Park (not so much because I don't think it's funny, but rather because it isn't on TV in China, which is where I live) -- but your attempt to out-linguist me as it were is rather ill-placed, because I know my shit.
The fact that "more retroflex" sounds exist in other languages (like Mandarin) does not mean that retroflex is not a valid place of articulation in English, and most acedemic literature refers to the English r as a retroflex r. From a page at the University of Manitoba's Linguistics Department (scroll down to the "retroflex" heading):
We have been calling the [r] sound of English a retroflex. Yet the symbol for it appears in the IPA chart in the dental-alveolar-postalveolar mega-column. The English R-sound (the non-"bunched" version) certainly counts as an apico-postalveolar and has a legitimate claim on the symbol even without a retracted diacritic. The tongue tip is certainly more curled back for an [r] than for any other sound of English. But the amount the tongue is curled back isn't too impressive when compared with languages which have a whole set of true retroflexes (e.g., languages of Australia or India). In some languages, retroflexes are so extreme that the tongue tip touches the hard palate or contact is made by the underside of the tongue tip.
Your categorizing 'r' as an alveolar approximant is not incorrect, but then neither is my characterization of it as retroflex.
Of course, in this situation one could argue that because I am going on about the confusion of l and r, yours is the better characterization in this situation... but Mandarin has an active distinction between r and l (in no dialects that I am familiar with are the two sounds in non-contrastive distribution, although in some southern dialects n and l are non-contrastive). Which means that they confuse l and r about as often as a French or Italian person does, which is to say, never.
Because their retroflex r actually manifests itself uniquely in syllable final positions (with the notable exception of some phrases in Beijing dialect, where elision takes place, and the retroflex could be meaningfully analysed as occupying the initial position), they do sometimes have problems pronouncing r when it occurs at the beginning of a word (such as river, which sometimes comes out as wiver.) This only happens with speakers making a concerted effort to reproduce the "proper" english pronunciation, however. Most "naive" attempts at pronunciation will have Mandarin speakers replacing the difficult syllable initial r with their own r (a retroflex fricative), much as French speakers (like my parents) will replace the English r with a uvular r in their speech, the former being too difficult to pronounce.
To recap, your characterization is correct, but mine is as well, although I admit yours is more useful in this context, and, as I mentioned earlier, Chinese speakers never confuse r and l, even though someone cracks a stupid joke about it in literally every China related thread.
Goddamn it, the Chinese do not confuse r and l, the Japanese (and to a lesser extent the Koreans) do. Mandarin is in fact one of the few widely spoken languages out there that actually has a retroflex r (the r in English, which is exceptionally hard for most people to pronounce, even Europeans.)
I think Engrish is funny, but it's the Japanese that speak it, not the Chinese. Of course, to most white westerners there's no difference whatsoever between the two cultures.
Maybe you think being racist and ignorant is funny, but I don't.
Illegitimate? Whatever, dude. The Chinese are, with the exception of Americans, the most patriotic people I've ever come into contact with -- nationalist fervor is so ingrained here it's absolutely frightening. They're not interested in revolt and on the whole are happy with the status quo. They love their country and go on and on about it. Really. If there were a vote tomorrow there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP would win.
During the Chinese civil war, the Communist party was overwhelmingly supported by the people.
Your assertion that non-democratic societies are illegitimate suggests that most societies in history have been illegitimate. I'm not sure that's a particularly useful definition of legitimacy.
The only person who doesn't have money to buy these cheaper goods are people in the affected industry. These people comprise a laughably small percentage of America's economy. So yeah, some industry gets un-protected and consequently the price of the goods produced by that industry fall to the world price. This of course reduces local supply, which had previously been artificially inflated by the higher price guaranteed by the protectionist economy. Since the "local supply" is a bunch of local companies, the people working for those local companies get the axe. It's true.
But how were those workers getting paid in the first place? Their salaries were siphoned from the US consumer, who was effectively told to pay a higher price than everyone else in the world for an equivalent good or service just because of the government's protectionist policies.
Since everyone here is so concerned about IT, let's move away from that for a moment and look at sugar. Sugar is a protected commodity in the US, and American consumers pay a higher price for sugar than the prevailing world price as result of that -- the amount of extra money paid by consumers per year is several billion dollars. This amounts to you losing 50 or so dollars of your hard-earned income every year to prop up an industry comprised mostly of suppliers that would be unable to compete in the global marketplace.
Now, 50 dollars per person isn't much... not enough to get the laws repealed. But consider: the essential issue here is that the suppliers of sugar in the US only supply as much as they do because of the inflated price (law of supply), and would supply less if there were no protectionism (with the remainder of local demand being satisfied by international suppliers that are currently "protected" out of the US market place).
If this policy were overturned today, everyone in the US would have more spending money, except for the sugar people -- lots of them would be out of a job. You can bet they'd complain about that, but would you? You're not in sugar, after all, and sugar is hardly an essential sector for the US. You'd have more money to spend as a result of them losing their jobs.
What you need to realize here is that most people in the US are not in IT, and they do not care about your job or your job security. If they are paying higher prices for your services than your international competitors, they are losing money. This means they don't have extra spending power to buy the things they want.
So your little response: "Yes, but what good are 'cheap goods' when you don't have any money to buy them with?" is silly, because if all of IT gets outsourced tomorrow and cheaper prices ensue, everyone in the US that doesn't work in IT (most of the US) will have more money to buy cheaper goods.
Just like sugar.
Do you understand how this reasoning works?
Your little retort is a non-starter, unless somehow everything in the US were outsourced in favor of cheaper international producers. But that's not possible, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is specialisation: the US does some things better (read: cheaper) than other places do, and these sectors will never be shipped overseas, because to do so would cost more, not less. The second reason is foreign exchange markets. To buy a good shipped overseas, you must first obtain the local currency. So if you want to buy goods produced in Mexico, for example, you must use dollars to buy pesos, and the increased demand in pesos will drive the value of the peso up relative to the dollar, making Mexican goods more expensive for American consumers. The more this occurs, the more dependence there is on Mexican products, the more expensive those products become, until -- get this -- it becomes cheaper to just produce them locally.
And you can bet your ass that in an unregulated market, someone somewhere is going to try to take advantage of that to make money. Ergo, a factory opens up in the US as soon as that happens.
It's been a while since evolutionary biology, but if I recall correctly, the high numbers of passenger pigeons were one of the main reasons that people at the time were so unconcerned about killing them. Unfortunately, as it turns out, passenger pigeons cannot survive in small flocks -- they require huge (we're talking really big, like in excess of a few hundred thousand birds) to survive. I can't remember exactly why this is (or if we even know) but it turned out that once a flock was small enough, the pigeons died on their own.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a flock of passenger pigeons apparently could darken the American sky. People would fire shotguns in the air and then go collect the fallen birds that were sure to have been hit. People thought nothing of killing them because they were so numerous.
I'm not sure humans were even responsible for killing more than 20 or 30 percent of them (still a large number, granted.) The rest died due to an evolutionary dependence on large social groups, which turned out to be a weakness that they could not overcome in the short period humans hunted them.
This is probably what the OP meant when he lumped them in with Dodo birds.
I hate to be a Grammar Nazi (actually, I don't, but whatever;p), but if you're going to actually go to the trouble of italicizing a word, you should probably make sure it's the word you want to use.
Here's a run-down:
to: The one you wanted. A preposition (going to market), as well as the English infinitive market (I have to go).
too: Also, as well, as in "me too", "Will you give me a blowjob too?" It might help to think of it has having two Os because it typically describes actions that will happen several times (I'll take a bath, too.)
two: The number 2.
Hope that helps.
(As an aside, I had originally tried to use a definition list <dd>... </dd> for the above markup, but it didn't display properly at all in Firefox, making me think the CSS for the site is borked in this regard.)
This is true with some markets -- even many markets -- but not with all markets by any stretch of the imagination. I would suggest reviewing your university Economics text. Economies of scale are not significant in all markets -- some markets actually experience diseconomies of scale (usually related to bureaucratic overhead, which increases with organization size), no scaling effect, or some combination of these.
In actuality, all of this is far more complex than it seems. DragonWriter (the OP) hit the nail on the head exactly -- perfectly competitive markets with non-existant or very low barriers to entry regulate themselves beautifully but in the real world many markets are not of this type, something that Libertarians seem to constantly overlook -- not out of malice, I think, but out of a desire to see the world in simplified and elegant terms (a prejudice I fully understand, and one I think geeks in particular are easily seduced by). In reality things are very messy and not at all as simple as they should be.
My personal view is that in cases where the market is likely to regulate itself, it should be allowed to regulate itself. However, in this case, we are looking at a market with extremely high barriers to entry (to become a telco you have to lay your own fiber, be in bed with the government, etc) and one which is essentially non-competitive (most areas are served by only one or perhaps two providers). This market is inherently oligopolistic, and will not self-regulate. Price fixing is easy and there is great incentive for the companies to do it. Barriers to entry are high so you and I cannot realistically express our dissatisfaction with the status quo by starting a new telco to compete with the existing one (notice my use of the singular here).
It is clear, in this instance, that the market will not regulate itself.
Economists disagree on how to best serve the economy in this situation, but regulation is a widely accepted (and proven) method. It has drawbacks, certainly (government inefficiency, possible legislative loopholes, etc) but is overall far preferable to the alternative.
Some markets are not free markets by their nature -- in this situation, for the magic of western economics to work, the playing field must be artificially evened.
It's true. "Good enough" is just that for most people, especially when there is real or perceived learning curve penalty associated with switching. For example, the vast majority of geeks on Slashdot probably know that Dvorak is better than QWERTY for English typists in almost all respects -- less repetitive motion injury, the ability to type faster, etc. But despite the fact that everyone knows this, many people don't bother switching to Dvorak. Why?
For most people, it just doesn't seem worth it. I made the switch and think it was worth it -- but I have a very hard time convincing most geeks to actually do it. They just nod their heads and say, "yeah, I've heard Dvorak is better" and talk about how they wouldn't mind switching, and then never do.
The probable reason they don't is because during the switch period there is a substantial loss in productivity. Now in actuality, if you limit yourself to just Dvorak it doesn't take very long to learn to type at a reasonable 40wpm -- I learned it in less than a week with a typing tutor. From there, your speed accelerates rapidly. But the change, however fast, is frustrating, and it proves to be too big an obstacle to overcome for most people.
What many geeks don't realize is that despite our insistance that Firefox, OpenOffice, and whatever other MS-replacement we push have similar interfaces to the programs they aim to replace, for many non-technically savvy users even small superficial changes represent a big challenge to overcome. Consider how many people on Slashdot post about their inability to get their parents or friends to switch without resorting to the (extremely popular) IE skin for Firefox.
Unfortunately, just like Dvorak vs. QWERTY, for the vast majority of people it is not arguments about technical merit that convince, but rather arguments about lost productivity, security, and compatibility. In the case of the first, the incumbent always wins -- there is no productivity loss associated with staying with IE in the minds of most people. Security is the main place Firefox constantly thrashes IE and it should come as no surprise that the press (especially the non-technical press) focus most on this when discussing Firefox. For compatibility, again, IE wins, by virtue of being the dominant browser.
It is therefore important from an evangelism perspective that Firefox actually be more secure than IE and remain so, that it be easy enough to use that people who actually try it are not put off (I think this has been achieved rather well), and that it strive to be compatible with as many sites as possible (this also has been done remarkably well in the west at least, largely due to standards-adherence evangelism -- good work guys. In Asia it's a no go.)
Realistically I think that Firefox really, really needs to push security from a marketing standpoint -- and importantly it has to actually be more secure. This is the avenue by which it can conquer. Most people will not begin using Firefox on their own, and if you install it on their computer and tell them to try it they'll still click on the little blue e. But if it is far more secure (which is currently the case), more and more corporate networks will mandate it for security reasons, and what people use at work they'll use at home, too.
Not to mention that security has classically been a Microsoft weak point, which with their slow release cycle will probably remain a weak point.
Mandarin vs. Cantonese is a non issue. The only people who are able to speak Cantonese and not Mandarin are in Hong Kong (and that number is decreasing rapidly, as the importance of trade with the mainland increases) or in various isolated communities in other countries (which often speak relatively non-standard dialects of Cantonese at home, and some other more common language on the street -- for example, Toishanese in SF Chinatown.)
There are many speakers of Cantonese, of course -- it's one of the major sintic languages -- but on the mainland it has fangyan status and is not taught in school, and with the exception of media coming out of HK (movies, music, etc) it basically gets no official exposure.
I have been told that in small villages in the south it is not uncommon to find schools taught in the local language, due to a lack of qualified teachers who both speak proper Mandarin and are willing to lead the life of a village teacher. The government takes the pragmatic approach in this case and considers education in a non-official language to be better than no education at all. But the books, teaching materials, dictionaries, and so on, all use pinyin to show the pronunciation of a character, which is based on the pronunciation of the dialect spoken in Beijing -- so children are exposed from an early age to how a character should be pronounced even if they themselves (and their teacher) is not able to faithfully represent the required sounds in the "official" way.
When you add radio, television, film, and all other forms of media to the mix -- all of these are in Mandarin, as noted, with the exception of some HK stuff that finds its way into mainly Guangdong province -- it should be no surprise that children are speaking Mandarin better than their parents (for example, in Shanghai, it is not uncommon to find young children who cannot speak Shanghainese well at all -- and if they can, they are generally only heard speaking it to their parents, prefering to use Mandarin to talk to friends, as it is the language enforced at school.)
Whether all of this is right or not is up for discussion, but it is important to realize that with the introduction of standardized education, television, and radio, national languages can replace local ones very quickly. For example, at the end of WW2, most French people still either did not speak French at home or spoke some wacky dialect that was only vaguely mutually intelligible with the "official" dialect of Paris and Tours. My great grandmother could not speak French well -- in Picardie they all spoke Chti, which I can sort of understand but most certainly cannot speak. Similarly, throughout the south people spoke not French but Occitan, a language that is now nearly dead (although a dialect of it lives on in Spain as Catalan, where it has official language status). In Bretagne they spoke Breton, which is actually mutually intelligible with Welsh, and well examples of this sort abound. Nowadays many of these local languages are either extinct or very near it.
In the old days in Northern Germany vast swaths of people spoke Plattdeutsch (ik snakk platt!) which was at one point so important a language that many of the "German" loan-words in Swedish are in fact Plattdeutsch in origin (if you speak German and have ever been in a Dorf where old people snakk platt, you'll know what I mean when I say that understanding Platt is a bit like understanding Dutch -- not much. At all.) Nowadays most people speak Hochdeutsch.
I mean, literally every country has examples like this.
The local languages in China are unfortunately doomed to extinction in the same way that most of Europe's languages have died in the last century.
Cantonese may be an exception, because of its status as an official language in Hong Kong, but even there nowadays everyone is learning Mandarin.
Mandarin is prettier anyway, but rather harder to pronounce properly.
You are completely incorrect. Mandarin is spoken as a native language by more people than speak English as a second language. A simple Google search will demonstrate that there are roughly 800 million native speakers of Mandarin today, and over 1 billion speakers (including people who speak it as a second language). By contrast, there are only 500 million or so speakers of English in the world today, which includes people who speak English as a second language. I know, you're thinking to yourself, what about India? In reality only the educated in India speak English well enough to be considered fluent by any standard -- and with poverty as widespread as it is in that nation, it should be hardly surprising that most people there are not really conversant enough to be considered real secondary speakers.
I didn't mean to imply they did it exclusively in general, but rather that in this particular instance, they were the ones that did it. I can see how the title might have been misleading. Mac fanboys, like Linux fanboys, Free Software fanboys (I fall into this category), and other Fanboy groups are prone to reacting very negatively to anything that goes against their world view. In this case, we have another "iTMS killer" story from yet another company pledging to produce something better than iTunes -- there's no reason to believe that they will succeed where countless others have failed, and for many of the reasons outlined elsewhere in the comments (the ubiquity of the iPod, Apple's refusal to license Fairplay, etc) it seems exceedingly unlikely that they will. From my (admittedly emotionally detached perspective) this is a pretty ho-hum story. Despite this, there are quite a few "outraged" responses from the most vocal of the Mac fanboy crowd, particularly over the claim that "some guy that has seen the new store in action says it's better than iTunes" and other such marketing mumbo-jumbo (which is all it is -- think of any up and coming product you've ever seen advertised. There's nearly always some bought and paid for actor talking about how good soon-to-be-on-the-market product XYZ is.)
This story is not fud and never was: it's simply a Microsoft press release, which probably doesn't belong on Slashdot to begin with. Had it been about anything non Apple-related, I'm willing to bet most folks here would yawn and not even think of labeling it as fud. But because they are Mac fanboys and it's about big bad MS claiming they'll produce something better than iTMS, everyone gets all defensive.
From my perspective, it seems clear that it'll be a cold day in hell when MS produces something better than iTMS, and there's no reason at all to get worked up about them playing peacock with the market. But I'm not emotionally invested in the superiority of iTMS -- as a free software fanboy I think all DRM is evil and use ogg vorbis exclusively for my own encoding needs. So I think in this case I can play the part of a relatively unbiased outsider.
This is true, unfortunately. Even here in Beijing, where most young people have parents or relatives who were involved or knew people who were involved in the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not uncommon for them to not know what "6-4" means.
Of course, when you actually know something about the incident, it becomes very tiring listening to people parroting it in the west. What western power has not done something similar at some point or another? For example, in my parent's generation, the My Lai incident in Vietnam was a major, major deal, and yet most people in my generation probably have no idea what it is. Similarly, in my US World History class the 27 million soviet soldiers who gave their lives opposing Hitler were not even mentioned -- the only reason I even knew about them is because my German grandfather had first hand experience running from them, and yet somehow I was taught that the US and the UK did all the heavy lifting in the European theatre.
Other examples abound. Up until very recently, the Taiwanese government had an extremely active censor on the 228 incident, refering to a massacre that occurred on February 28th, 1947, in which the Guomindang essentially murdered between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending on whose estimates you believe. The Tiananmen Square incident occurred much more recently -- in 1989 -- and the government already admits that it was "a mistake" (I live in China). The 228 incident was buried by the Taiwanese for more than 40 years (it is now a national holiday on Taiwan.)
The Japanese refuse, for reasons of face, to own up to the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst afronts to human decency the world has ever seen, and many Japanese I've spoken to have never heard of it, or if they have, are not aware of the implications. The Japanese government refuses to allow its inclusion in Japanese history books used for education, and the current Japanese PM makes frequent visits to the Yakusuni shrine, where he pays his respects to the convicted war criminals who were responsible for the Rape and many other similar atrocities.
There's the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British military gunned down 400 peaceful indian protestors, many of them women and children, who were sitting in a walled enclosure and had no means to escape the guns. At this point we're going back a ways in history, but how many British kids are fully aware of the implications of this incident?
It's also a little bit frustrating to hear the Tiananmen Square incident portrayed as a pro-democracy movement when that was really only part of it. It was, in fact, a relatively disorganized gathering of people with wildly different goals. Gorbachev was visting Beijing at the time, and for those of you that remember the timeframe this was around the time that he was pushing Perestroika in the USSR (judged by essentially everyone except some Americans to be a catastrophic failure in the long run.) The faction of students protesting the government were pushing for more transparency and more reforms, including but not limited to democratic and economic reforms. But they weren't the only ones there, nor were they the only ones murdered -- but because the other group (comprising roughly half of the people present) were not pro-democracy agitators, they are never mentioned in the west (their deaths, presumably, are not important.)
The other half were anti-reformists, primarily workers who had enjoyed good and stable conditions under pork barrell socialism and who were suffering under Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms, as they were unable to compete in an increasingly deregulated market place (similar to the anti-globalisation wonks we have nowadays.) They wanted a return to pre-1980s Maoist China! Can you believe it?
How could these two wildly seperate groups get along, given that they had such completely different aims (more reforms, versus less?) The answer is simply that they appealed to nationalistic fervor. They got together and sang the Inte
I'm noticing this a lot lately, but this is one of the most glaring examples. Someone out there has tagged an article in which Microsoft pledges to compete with iTMS as "fud". "FUD" is an acronym that stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" and refers to the practice of deliberately spreading misinformation about a competitor's product in order to convince customers that switching would not be beneficial. The character of said misinformation is typically the sort that inpires fear (ie, "Early adopters of the Macintosh experienced extreme losses in productivity, pushing many small business owners into bankruptcy"), uncertainty (ie, "It's not clear that switching to the Macintosh is worth the cost anyway, studies show the Mac is quite expensive and offers no tangible benefits over MS Windows"), and doubt (ie, "Company XYZ failed to lose productivity when they switched to the Mac for some tasks, their representatives said, but they didn't switch all workstations and the ones they did switch were the ones used by effeminate hello-kitty product designers who used them primarily in the design of advertisements directed at the SF Castro district community. The question you need to ask yourself is, does your company fit this particular niche for which Macintoshes are ideally suited?")
Obviously there are probably better examples of FUD (U and D in particular overlap somewhat).
This is rather like the lamentable practice that some losers have of abusing the moderation system to bury posts they disagree with. Troll and Flamebait do not mean I disagree, nor does Overrated. When you disagree with a post or a story, the proper response is to REPLY. Let's face it, the reason we all come to Slashdot is for the comments. The days when Slashdot was the place to get current news are long gone -- there are a host of other sites that post this stuff days earlier, fail to dupe, and care about accuracy more than sensationalism. The reason that I don't read these much (and my guess is that it's the same for 90% of the rest of Slashdot) is because regardless of how many spelling mistakes there are in the story submission here, the comments are filled with lucid and interesting analyses of anything and everything.
I guess what this means is that you have a choice: you can either be a coward and use loaded tags or abuse the Troll/Flaimbait mods to comment, or you can actually post content that will help keep Slashdot interesting and the Slashdot masses informed.
Despite what everyone says about "the hive mind" and "getting modded down for going against the grain", I personally have never experienced this phenomenon. Have you ever noticed that nearly every lucidly written post that goes against established mantras and includes the magic line "I'll probably be modded down for this" makes it to +5? The whiners who go on and on about how "The Slashbots are against me!@@!!11one" usually can't write worth squat and such fail to inspire any reaction other than "You're stupid" from the Moderators. It's true that the reverse is not true, which is sad: some twat who clearly didn't pass elementary school English can write "M$ is the suxor! Lin0x is the win@!!" and get to +5 if he posts early enough, but despite this unfortunate reality the truth of the matter is that you can post wildly unpopular opinions and get modded up if you phrase your ideas in an interesting, informative, and non-flamebait way.
Since I'm going on about not abusing the tagging and moderation system, it's only appropriate that this be modded Offtopic, which it is. Mods, do your worst.
Sure he will. Or did you think he'll somehow manage to avoid all the computers that are on the internet but connected via a US backbone (ie, telco?) We invented the internet and sadly many of the world's most popular sites and servers are still hosted on US soil (which means they are connected to the net by a US telco, and will thus be subject to net non-neutrality, should it become a reality.)
This is one of the many reasons this net non-neutrality stuff is so dangerous: it will affect far more than just US citizens. You might think that this will create an economic incentive for US companies to relocate to Europe or elsewhere -- and in some cases it might, taking US jobs with it. But in most cases, the business people will take a long hard look at their market and realize that most of their customers are Americans -- and no matter where your server is, if an American wants to access you site, your packets need to traverse US telco lines. So not just American businesses will be affected, but anybody that wants American access. Americans spend more money and save less than essentially anyone else on the planet -- in the words of the Economist, the world is addicted to American demand. Net non-neutrality will have far reaching economic implications not just at home but abroad, as well.
No, an upper case K signifies degrees Kelvin. The SI prefix kilo is always written as a lower case k, at least by knowledgeable people (it is worth noting that this rarely includes the marketing people who do the ads for electronic equipment, however). You are correct that bits and bytes are differentiated by case, though. kbps is kilobits per second, kBps is kilobytes per second.
As you pointed out, of course, essentially no one uses kBps for network speeds, for historical reasons, so if you see a 512k connection or a 2M connection or whatever, the implicit unit ommitted for brevity is bits and not bytes.
If somewhere, someone did have an explosives fetish, I imagine it would be to do with the inherant danger of inserting a stick of dynamite into a bodily orifice.
As someone who has lived in China for a long time and was formerly a mathematician, I think that your statement is sort of ridiculous. For one thing, as others have pointed out, saying "some race is good at math" as if being good at math were something in your blood is silly. Having said that, the Chinese (as in, those from China) are, unfortunately, overwelmingly bad at Math. In ancient times the Chinese innovated quite competitively but this hasn't been true for a long time. Since I just took issue with your equating mathematical ability with racial characteristics, you can probably guess that there's another reason, and as it happens, I am prepared to qualify my statements.
The Chinese school system (and in ancient times, the scholar system, which stratified society into a "scholar class" and the "masses") is completely and utterly innovation stifling. It emphasises testing and memorization above all else, and curiosity and individuality are systematically beaten out of students. No snide comments about communism, please, it has nothing to do with that (any mathematician will tell you that the Soviet Union produced a metric tonne of talented mathematicians, my advisor was one). Chinese students memorize everything. Because I speak Chinese and love math, I have tutored quite a number of high school and university undergraduate students in math and the simple reason that they suck at it is they basically cannot wrap their head around proofs.
Proofs are difficult for most people at first, but you have to understand that the way a typical mainland Chinese kid approaches math is by memorizing every formula in his math textbook and then trying as best he can to choose the one that "works" with the problem he is presented. He does not do this because he stupid: he does this because the Chinese standardized testing system reinforces the behaviour. The exam problems are expressly designed so that various formulas are the "keys" to the problem, that is, answering the (usually multiple choice) question correctly relies on your ability to quickly recall one formula (perhaps two) and plug the numbers in effectively. So many problems are presented and so little time is given that no time for derivation or logic is really provided. Because of this, essentially every Chinese kid can recite from memory a whole host of trigonometric identities without having the faintest idea why they work or how to derive them, even when the derivation is relatively simple.
Because there's so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the west these days and on Slashdot in particular, I want to reiterate for a moment and say that this is not an inherent failure in the Chinese kids themselves -- they are not stupid -- but they are completely crippled by their education system. From day one they memorize everything. They memorize entire passages written in old Chinese and are asked to reproduced them from memory at exam time -- I've been told by several kids here in Beijing that writing even one character wrong is essentially equivalent to forfeiting the entire problem. These are not 3 line passages folks: we're talking two or three pages of old Chinese. Imagine being told at 17 to memorize 3 pages of Beowulf. That's what we're talking about.
The thing is (as any drama major will tell you) memorization, like all things, gets easier with practice. And from day one (when I first arrived in China I moonlighted as a Kindergarten teacher, so I have some first hand experience here) kids are memorizing stuff, from poems to proverbs to Chinese characters. It becomes easy for them, and over the years they depend on it more and more. The worst part is, high school and lower division level mathematics (if it can be called that) presents problems (like doing integrals or calculating derivatives) that lend themselves well to the "memorize a formula" method. And so Chinese kids tend to do exceptionally well in these courses, and then mistakenly assume they are good at math. This is in fact not
You know you read too much Slashdot when you feel like you're getting unreasonable amounts of pressure not to use proprietary software, hehe. Take a chill pill mate, no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. Proprietary software is there and you're welcome to buy it or rip it off if it suits you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a free software zealot and don't use and Microsoft products at all, at work or at home, and Firefox is my primary browser, but don't you think you're being a little unfair by picking this particular example? For one, many of Firefox's "killer features" were actually Opera innovations -- Firefox's primary innovation is its extensible architecture. Tabbed browsing etc existed first in a number of other browsers (I don't even think Opera was first.) I don't use Opera (not free) but this is my understanding.
Then, as strange as it may seem, some good features were actually copied from IE to Firefox -- for example, everytime Firefox blocks a popup or notifies you that a plugin is missing, it does so with an unobtrusive little bar at the top of the screen which does not interfere with your browsing experience. This was an IE innovation, ironically. I seem to remember that the different colored URL-entry field background for https and such were also IE innovations (they came with XP SP2 I think -- I'm sort of fuzzy because as I said I don't use any of these products, at all).
Let's also not forget that while IE's CSS support is not stellar by today's standards, Microsoft pretty much invented CSS -- good CSS support on Netscape didn't happen until Mozilla made it a priority (that is, Netscape 6). IE 5 (which was released more than a decade ago) supported large amounts of CSS2 when no one else did. Microsoft dropped the ball and stopped CSS development (IE 6 added very few features and fixed very few bugs), but it's worth noting that had IE 5 not supported CSS as well as it did, we probably wouldn't have the ability to seperate feature from content as well as we do.
It's funny to look at it that way. IE 5 and 6 are shitty browsers by today's standards, there's no doubt -- but when you consider their release dates, they were miles ahead of everything else out there. I remember being forced to use Netscape 4 in those days, because nothing else was available for Linux. Given that I essentially had to use a non-free product if I wanted to browse the web graphically, I know that I would have prefered to use IE 5, definitely. Alas the UNIX version only ran on SUNs (there was a UNIX version, did you know?)
I personally don't like MS's products, but sometimes I think people on Slashdot would do well to read RMS's article, "Is Microsoft the Great Satan?" Microsoft's corporate practices are a result of its monopoly status and the proprietary software industry as a whole. Any other company in the same position would act essentially the same way, so picking on Microsoft specifically all the time is sort of futile, I think.
Of course that's going against the general Slashdot meme, but for all its evil, MS has produced some ok products, if you're willing to look past their proprietariness. And they have innovated, it's wrong to say the haven't. Software is like math, you know... that Newton quote is appropriate: "If I have seen further it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Everyone always copies everyone else's ideas. That's how it should be. Apple copied from Xerox, Microsoft copies from Apple, Apple copies from CMU and FreeBSD, NeXT, Be, Amiga, and even Microsoft. GNOME and KDE copy from all of these too.
This is the whole reason that proprietary software in general and patents in particular must be opposed -- we all are "guilty" of copying ideas. When everyone does it, perhaps it's time to rethink whether it's right or wrong. I likened software to math: as it stands a mathematician publishes his ideas in a peer-reviewed journal and everyone benefits, including the mathematician himself. Everyone is able to learn from his innovations and his mistakes. But if math worked the way software works these days -- and algorithms are essentially just math, lest we forget -- all journal articles would be owned by private entities that would do their damndest to make sure tha
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True enough, but it's relatively easy to write a program and distribute it anonymously, and will remain so. Once the crack is available, it will spread like wildfire.
We know how this works, because "DRM" is just a new word for the hair-brained copy protection schemes that so many gaming manufacturers worked out in the 80s. For many, many, geeks, breaking security is an intellectual exercise, and it's ridiculous to think that the security won't be broken -- regardless of whether or not the law of the land says that copyright circumvention is legal or not. Once a crack is produced, it will be released, and sites like Slashdot or whatever the equivalent of the day is will link to it, and voila! the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the company responsible for the DRM scheme sank into it (DRM is a hard problem) will go down the drain.
People on Slashdot love to say that it's not about preventing all copying, just preventing most copying -- that Joe User or whatever it's fashionable to call him these days will not be willing to go to the trouble of bypassing DRM. I disagree with this. First of all, once the initial crack has been produced, someone will put a user friendly front end on it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone writes a generic anti-DRM program that uses a plugin architecture so that people interested in the cracking can just write a plugin and be done with it. Hell, the anti-DRM program could even auto-update itself. All of this is trivially easy to do. And do not underestimate the frustration that users will feel when they try to play their music on their new music player or on their computer after reinstalling the operating system only to be told that they aren't allowed to. "I'm sorry, you're not licensed to play this track on this device." What the hell does that mean? I want to play my music!
Enter google. Joe User searches for "I'm sorry, you're not licensed to play this track on this device" and do you really think he won't be led to the necessary program? And in the event that a generic anti-DRM program with a plugin architecture is produced, do you think he won't download it? Hell, he downloads a hundred different spyware laden screensaver and mouse pointer extension programs a day, he won't even think twice! And if it works, he will tell his friends about it, just like my dad's friends used to tell him about the new dual VCR they bought that got around the silly VHS copy protection schemes!
Face it, DRM is doomed.
Oh yeah, as opposed to the US, where you're in prison because you're black.
Unless of course you get a simple majority in case of purely internal affairs, which I believe covers chess-banning.
I agree that banning religion is a woefully stupid idea that has never worked, but don't you think you're picking a relatively extreme example in Pol Pot? Pol Pot was less concerned about religion and consumerism than he was about extermination of all of Cambodia's urban dwellers. In his words, "the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea only needs 1 million Cambodians" -- when you're a country that had a population of 6 million in 1976, that's a little bit of a frightening notion.
Lots of people have attempted to ban Religion (or at least actively discourage it) and reduce consumerism, as that is one of the cornerstones of Marxist philosophy. No matter how much you may dislike communism as a concept, picking Pol Pot for your example of a typical communist is a little bit weasely -- the guy made Hitler look nice.
I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree in principle that redefining words in a weasely way is essentially an underhanded tactic to influence people's interpretation of a situation and should be opposed at all costs, but your assertion that "The human mind uses words(=symbols) to understand the universe. Change the word, you change the universe." is essentially a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggested that language influences thought -- that essentially, the language you speak affects your worldview in a profound and important way. This hypothesis is now universally rejected by linguists and psychologists, because extensive study has been made of peoples who speak languages radically different from the dominant Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages spoken today, and those peoples exhibit no statistically significant differences in their interpretation of reality.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was very interesting and lots of people believed it to be true. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
For example, people used to say things like "the fact that the masculine gender dominates the female gender in french plural constructions is evidence that sexist thought is conditioned in the minds of french people," or to take an English example, "the fact that the correct English personal pronoun to use to refer to a person whose gender is not known is 'he' evidences that the very language we speak encourages the oppression of women." Unfortunately, lots of languages have no gender (like say, Finnish or Chinese), and yet these societies have been historically just as sexist as French and English society. Conversely, in colloquial communication the use of the third person plural pronoun "they" has largely replaced the use of "he" when refering to someone whose sex is unknown -- and yet sexism persists in all English speaking countries.
Or to take an example from F/OSS, since we're on Slashdot -- there is no distinction in English between "Free" (as in Freedom) and "Free" (as in beer) and yet, somehow, most everyone on Slashdot makes this distinction regularly, and it only takes a second to explain the distinction to pretty much anyone. If Orwellian Newspeak were in fact linguistically feasible (the concept of newspeak was very much based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was widely held to be true in 1948), English-speakers would be unable to grasp the difference between Freedom and 'a transaction in which one thing is transfered to another person without an exchange of money, goods, or services.' And yet we can, and we do.
Language is certainly very important, but don't overestimate its importance. One of the main focuses in Linguistics nowadays (especially because of Chomsky) is the study of how exactly human language exposes the way humans organize their thoughts -- and not the other way around.
Whatever, AC. I'll freely admit that I missed the South Park reference -- I don't watch South Park (not so much because I don't think it's funny, but rather because it isn't on TV in China, which is where I live) -- but your attempt to out-linguist me as it were is rather ill-placed, because I know my shit.
The fact that "more retroflex" sounds exist in other languages (like Mandarin) does not mean that retroflex is not a valid place of articulation in English, and most acedemic literature refers to the English r as a retroflex r. From a page at the University of Manitoba's Linguistics Department (scroll down to the "retroflex" heading):
Your categorizing 'r' as an alveolar approximant is not incorrect, but then neither is my characterization of it as retroflex.
Of course, in this situation one could argue that because I am going on about the confusion of l and r, yours is the better characterization in this situation... but Mandarin has an active distinction between r and l (in no dialects that I am familiar with are the two sounds in non-contrastive distribution, although in some southern dialects n and l are non-contrastive). Which means that they confuse l and r about as often as a French or Italian person does, which is to say, never.
Because their retroflex r actually manifests itself uniquely in syllable final positions (with the notable exception of some phrases in Beijing dialect, where elision takes place, and the retroflex could be meaningfully analysed as occupying the initial position), they do sometimes have problems pronouncing r when it occurs at the beginning of a word (such as river, which sometimes comes out as wiver.) This only happens with speakers making a concerted effort to reproduce the "proper" english pronunciation, however. Most "naive" attempts at pronunciation will have Mandarin speakers replacing the difficult syllable initial r with their own r (a retroflex fricative), much as French speakers (like my parents) will replace the English r with a uvular r in their speech, the former being too difficult to pronounce.
To recap, your characterization is correct, but mine is as well, although I admit yours is more useful in this context, and, as I mentioned earlier, Chinese speakers never confuse r and l, even though someone cracks a stupid joke about it in literally every China related thread.
Goddamn it, the Chinese do not confuse r and l, the Japanese (and to a lesser extent the Koreans) do. Mandarin is in fact one of the few widely spoken languages out there that actually has a retroflex r (the r in English, which is exceptionally hard for most people to pronounce, even Europeans.)
I think Engrish is funny, but it's the Japanese that speak it, not the Chinese. Of course, to most white westerners there's no difference whatsoever between the two cultures.
Maybe you think being racist and ignorant is funny, but I don't.
Illegitimate? Whatever, dude. The Chinese are, with the exception of Americans, the most patriotic people I've ever come into contact with -- nationalist fervor is so ingrained here it's absolutely frightening. They're not interested in revolt and on the whole are happy with the status quo. They love their country and go on and on about it. Really. If there were a vote tomorrow there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP would win.
During the Chinese civil war, the Communist party was overwhelmingly supported by the people.
Your assertion that non-democratic societies are illegitimate suggests that most societies in history have been illegitimate. I'm not sure that's a particularly useful definition of legitimacy.
The only person who doesn't have money to buy these cheaper goods are people in the affected industry. These people comprise a laughably small percentage of America's economy. So yeah, some industry gets un-protected and consequently the price of the goods produced by that industry fall to the world price. This of course reduces local supply, which had previously been artificially inflated by the higher price guaranteed by the protectionist economy. Since the "local supply" is a bunch of local companies, the people working for those local companies get the axe. It's true.
But how were those workers getting paid in the first place? Their salaries were siphoned from the US consumer, who was effectively told to pay a higher price than everyone else in the world for an equivalent good or service just because of the government's protectionist policies.
Since everyone here is so concerned about IT, let's move away from that for a moment and look at sugar. Sugar is a protected commodity in the US, and American consumers pay a higher price for sugar than the prevailing world price as result of that -- the amount of extra money paid by consumers per year is several billion dollars. This amounts to you losing 50 or so dollars of your hard-earned income every year to prop up an industry comprised mostly of suppliers that would be unable to compete in the global marketplace.
Now, 50 dollars per person isn't much... not enough to get the laws repealed. But consider: the essential issue here is that the suppliers of sugar in the US only supply as much as they do because of the inflated price (law of supply), and would supply less if there were no protectionism (with the remainder of local demand being satisfied by international suppliers that are currently "protected" out of the US market place).
If this policy were overturned today, everyone in the US would have more spending money, except for the sugar people -- lots of them would be out of a job. You can bet they'd complain about that, but would you? You're not in sugar, after all, and sugar is hardly an essential sector for the US. You'd have more money to spend as a result of them losing their jobs.
What you need to realize here is that most people in the US are not in IT, and they do not care about your job or your job security. If they are paying higher prices for your services than your international competitors, they are losing money. This means they don't have extra spending power to buy the things they want.
So your little response: "Yes, but what good are 'cheap goods' when you don't have any money to buy them with?" is silly, because if all of IT gets outsourced tomorrow and cheaper prices ensue, everyone in the US that doesn't work in IT (most of the US) will have more money to buy cheaper goods.
Just like sugar.
Do you understand how this reasoning works?
Your little retort is a non-starter, unless somehow everything in the US were outsourced in favor of cheaper international producers. But that's not possible, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is specialisation: the US does some things better (read: cheaper) than other places do, and these sectors will never be shipped overseas, because to do so would cost more, not less. The second reason is foreign exchange markets. To buy a good shipped overseas, you must first obtain the local currency. So if you want to buy goods produced in Mexico, for example, you must use dollars to buy pesos, and the increased demand in pesos will drive the value of the peso up relative to the dollar, making Mexican goods more expensive for American consumers. The more this occurs, the more dependence there is on Mexican products, the more expensive those products become, until -- get this -- it becomes cheaper to just produce them locally.
And you can bet your ass that in an unregulated market, someone somewhere is going to try to take advantage of that to make money. Ergo, a factory opens up in the US as soon as that happens.
It's been a while since evolutionary biology, but if I recall correctly, the high numbers of passenger pigeons were one of the main reasons that people at the time were so unconcerned about killing them. Unfortunately, as it turns out, passenger pigeons cannot survive in small flocks -- they require huge (we're talking really big, like in excess of a few hundred thousand birds) to survive. I can't remember exactly why this is (or if we even know) but it turned out that once a flock was small enough, the pigeons died on their own.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a flock of passenger pigeons apparently could darken the American sky. People would fire shotguns in the air and then go collect the fallen birds that were sure to have been hit. People thought nothing of killing them because they were so numerous.
I'm not sure humans were even responsible for killing more than 20 or 30 percent of them (still a large number, granted.) The rest died due to an evolutionary dependence on large social groups, which turned out to be a weakness that they could not overcome in the short period humans hunted them.
This is probably what the OP meant when he lumped them in with Dodo birds.
I hate to be a Grammar Nazi (actually, I don't, but whatever ;p), but if you're going to actually go to the trouble of italicizing a word, you should probably make sure it's the word you want to use.
Here's a run-down:
Hope that helps.
(As an aside, I had originally tried to use a definition list <dd> ... </dd> for the above markup, but it didn't display properly at all in Firefox, making me think the CSS for the site is borked in this regard.)
This is true with some markets -- even many markets -- but not with all markets by any stretch of the imagination. I would suggest reviewing your university Economics text. Economies of scale are not significant in all markets -- some markets actually experience diseconomies of scale (usually related to bureaucratic overhead, which increases with organization size), no scaling effect, or some combination of these.
In actuality, all of this is far more complex than it seems. DragonWriter (the OP) hit the nail on the head exactly -- perfectly competitive markets with non-existant or very low barriers to entry regulate themselves beautifully but in the real world many markets are not of this type, something that Libertarians seem to constantly overlook -- not out of malice, I think, but out of a desire to see the world in simplified and elegant terms (a prejudice I fully understand, and one I think geeks in particular are easily seduced by). In reality things are very messy and not at all as simple as they should be.
My personal view is that in cases where the market is likely to regulate itself, it should be allowed to regulate itself. However, in this case, we are looking at a market with extremely high barriers to entry (to become a telco you have to lay your own fiber, be in bed with the government, etc) and one which is essentially non-competitive (most areas are served by only one or perhaps two providers). This market is inherently oligopolistic, and will not self-regulate. Price fixing is easy and there is great incentive for the companies to do it. Barriers to entry are high so you and I cannot realistically express our dissatisfaction with the status quo by starting a new telco to compete with the existing one (notice my use of the singular here).
It is clear, in this instance, that the market will not regulate itself.
Economists disagree on how to best serve the economy in this situation, but regulation is a widely accepted (and proven) method. It has drawbacks, certainly (government inefficiency, possible legislative loopholes, etc) but is overall far preferable to the alternative.
Some markets are not free markets by their nature -- in this situation, for the magic of western economics to work, the playing field must be artificially evened.
It's true. "Good enough" is just that for most people, especially when there is real or perceived learning curve penalty associated with switching. For example, the vast majority of geeks on Slashdot probably know that Dvorak is better than QWERTY for English typists in almost all respects -- less repetitive motion injury, the ability to type faster, etc. But despite the fact that everyone knows this, many people don't bother switching to Dvorak. Why?
For most people, it just doesn't seem worth it. I made the switch and think it was worth it -- but I have a very hard time convincing most geeks to actually do it. They just nod their heads and say, "yeah, I've heard Dvorak is better" and talk about how they wouldn't mind switching, and then never do.
The probable reason they don't is because during the switch period there is a substantial loss in productivity. Now in actuality, if you limit yourself to just Dvorak it doesn't take very long to learn to type at a reasonable 40wpm -- I learned it in less than a week with a typing tutor. From there, your speed accelerates rapidly. But the change, however fast, is frustrating, and it proves to be too big an obstacle to overcome for most people.
What many geeks don't realize is that despite our insistance that Firefox, OpenOffice, and whatever other MS-replacement we push have similar interfaces to the programs they aim to replace, for many non-technically savvy users even small superficial changes represent a big challenge to overcome. Consider how many people on Slashdot post about their inability to get their parents or friends to switch without resorting to the (extremely popular) IE skin for Firefox.
Unfortunately, just like Dvorak vs. QWERTY, for the vast majority of people it is not arguments about technical merit that convince, but rather arguments about lost productivity, security, and compatibility. In the case of the first, the incumbent always wins -- there is no productivity loss associated with staying with IE in the minds of most people. Security is the main place Firefox constantly thrashes IE and it should come as no surprise that the press (especially the non-technical press) focus most on this when discussing Firefox. For compatibility, again, IE wins, by virtue of being the dominant browser.
It is therefore important from an evangelism perspective that Firefox actually be more secure than IE and remain so, that it be easy enough to use that people who actually try it are not put off (I think this has been achieved rather well), and that it strive to be compatible with as many sites as possible (this also has been done remarkably well in the west at least, largely due to standards-adherence evangelism -- good work guys. In Asia it's a no go.)
Realistically I think that Firefox really, really needs to push security from a marketing standpoint -- and importantly it has to actually be more secure. This is the avenue by which it can conquer. Most people will not begin using Firefox on their own, and if you install it on their computer and tell them to try it they'll still click on the little blue e. But if it is far more secure (which is currently the case), more and more corporate networks will mandate it for security reasons, and what people use at work they'll use at home, too.
Not to mention that security has classically been a Microsoft weak point, which with their slow release cycle will probably remain a weak point.
Mandarin vs. Cantonese is a non issue. The only people who are able to speak Cantonese and not Mandarin are in Hong Kong (and that number is decreasing rapidly, as the importance of trade with the mainland increases) or in various isolated communities in other countries (which often speak relatively non-standard dialects of Cantonese at home, and some other more common language on the street -- for example, Toishanese in SF Chinatown.)
There are many speakers of Cantonese, of course -- it's one of the major sintic languages -- but on the mainland it has fangyan status and is not taught in school, and with the exception of media coming out of HK (movies, music, etc) it basically gets no official exposure.
I have been told that in small villages in the south it is not uncommon to find schools taught in the local language, due to a lack of qualified teachers who both speak proper Mandarin and are willing to lead the life of a village teacher. The government takes the pragmatic approach in this case and considers education in a non-official language to be better than no education at all. But the books, teaching materials, dictionaries, and so on, all use pinyin to show the pronunciation of a character, which is based on the pronunciation of the dialect spoken in Beijing -- so children are exposed from an early age to how a character should be pronounced even if they themselves (and their teacher) is not able to faithfully represent the required sounds in the "official" way.
When you add radio, television, film, and all other forms of media to the mix -- all of these are in Mandarin, as noted, with the exception of some HK stuff that finds its way into mainly Guangdong province -- it should be no surprise that children are speaking Mandarin better than their parents (for example, in Shanghai, it is not uncommon to find young children who cannot speak Shanghainese well at all -- and if they can, they are generally only heard speaking it to their parents, prefering to use Mandarin to talk to friends, as it is the language enforced at school.)
Whether all of this is right or not is up for discussion, but it is important to realize that with the introduction of standardized education, television, and radio, national languages can replace local ones very quickly. For example, at the end of WW2, most French people still either did not speak French at home or spoke some wacky dialect that was only vaguely mutually intelligible with the "official" dialect of Paris and Tours. My great grandmother could not speak French well -- in Picardie they all spoke Chti, which I can sort of understand but most certainly cannot speak. Similarly, throughout the south people spoke not French but Occitan, a language that is now nearly dead (although a dialect of it lives on in Spain as Catalan, where it has official language status). In Bretagne they spoke Breton, which is actually mutually intelligible with Welsh, and well examples of this sort abound. Nowadays many of these local languages are either extinct or very near it.
In the old days in Northern Germany vast swaths of people spoke Plattdeutsch (ik snakk platt!) which was at one point so important a language that many of the "German" loan-words in Swedish are in fact Plattdeutsch in origin (if you speak German and have ever been in a Dorf where old people snakk platt, you'll know what I mean when I say that understanding Platt is a bit like understanding Dutch -- not much. At all.) Nowadays most people speak Hochdeutsch.
I mean, literally every country has examples like this.
The local languages in China are unfortunately doomed to extinction in the same way that most of Europe's languages have died in the last century.
Cantonese may be an exception, because of its status as an official language in Hong Kong, but even there nowadays everyone is learning Mandarin.
Mandarin is prettier anyway, but rather harder to pronounce properly.
You are completely incorrect. Mandarin is spoken as a native language by more people than speak English as a second language. A simple Google search will demonstrate that there are roughly 800 million native speakers of Mandarin today, and over 1 billion speakers (including people who speak it as a second language). By contrast, there are only 500 million or so speakers of English in the world today, which includes people who speak English as a second language. I know, you're thinking to yourself, what about India? In reality only the educated in India speak English well enough to be considered fluent by any standard -- and with poverty as widespread as it is in that nation, it should be hardly surprising that most people there are not really conversant enough to be considered real secondary speakers.
Of course a simple google search will verify all of this, but since this is Slashdot and people are lazy, here is a rather involved article on the topic.
I will grant that at the rate people are learning English these days, English may one day pass Mandarin, but it's going to take a while.
I didn't mean to imply they did it exclusively in general, but rather that in this particular instance, they were the ones that did it. I can see how the title might have been misleading. Mac fanboys, like Linux fanboys, Free Software fanboys (I fall into this category), and other Fanboy groups are prone to reacting very negatively to anything that goes against their world view. In this case, we have another "iTMS killer" story from yet another company pledging to produce something better than iTunes -- there's no reason to believe that they will succeed where countless others have failed, and for many of the reasons outlined elsewhere in the comments (the ubiquity of the iPod, Apple's refusal to license Fairplay, etc) it seems exceedingly unlikely that they will. From my (admittedly emotionally detached perspective) this is a pretty ho-hum story. Despite this, there are quite a few "outraged" responses from the most vocal of the Mac fanboy crowd, particularly over the claim that "some guy that has seen the new store in action says it's better than iTunes" and other such marketing mumbo-jumbo (which is all it is -- think of any up and coming product you've ever seen advertised. There's nearly always some bought and paid for actor talking about how good soon-to-be-on-the-market product XYZ is.)
This story is not fud and never was: it's simply a Microsoft press release, which probably doesn't belong on Slashdot to begin with. Had it been about anything non Apple-related, I'm willing to bet most folks here would yawn and not even think of labeling it as fud. But because they are Mac fanboys and it's about big bad MS claiming they'll produce something better than iTMS, everyone gets all defensive.
From my perspective, it seems clear that it'll be a cold day in hell when MS produces something better than iTMS, and there's no reason at all to get worked up about them playing peacock with the market. But I'm not emotionally invested in the superiority of iTMS -- as a free software fanboy I think all DRM is evil and use ogg vorbis exclusively for my own encoding needs. So I think in this case I can play the part of a relatively unbiased outsider.
I read at -1. Slashdot's moderation system is good as far as it goes, but too much interesting stuff doesn't make it through. Plus, trolls are funny.
This is true, unfortunately. Even here in Beijing, where most young people have parents or relatives who were involved or knew people who were involved in the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not uncommon for them to not know what "6-4" means.
Of course, when you actually know something about the incident, it becomes very tiring listening to people parroting it in the west. What western power has not done something similar at some point or another? For example, in my parent's generation, the My Lai incident in Vietnam was a major, major deal, and yet most people in my generation probably have no idea what it is. Similarly, in my US World History class the 27 million soviet soldiers who gave their lives opposing Hitler were not even mentioned -- the only reason I even knew about them is because my German grandfather had first hand experience running from them, and yet somehow I was taught that the US and the UK did all the heavy lifting in the European theatre.
Other examples abound. Up until very recently, the Taiwanese government had an extremely active censor on the 228 incident, refering to a massacre that occurred on February 28th, 1947, in which the Guomindang essentially murdered between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending on whose estimates you believe. The Tiananmen Square incident occurred much more recently -- in 1989 -- and the government already admits that it was "a mistake" (I live in China). The 228 incident was buried by the Taiwanese for more than 40 years (it is now a national holiday on Taiwan.)
The Japanese refuse, for reasons of face, to own up to the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst afronts to human decency the world has ever seen, and many Japanese I've spoken to have never heard of it, or if they have, are not aware of the implications. The Japanese government refuses to allow its inclusion in Japanese history books used for education, and the current Japanese PM makes frequent visits to the Yakusuni shrine, where he pays his respects to the convicted war criminals who were responsible for the Rape and many other similar atrocities.
There's the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British military gunned down 400 peaceful indian protestors, many of them women and children, who were sitting in a walled enclosure and had no means to escape the guns. At this point we're going back a ways in history, but how many British kids are fully aware of the implications of this incident?
It's also a little bit frustrating to hear the Tiananmen Square incident portrayed as a pro-democracy movement when that was really only part of it. It was, in fact, a relatively disorganized gathering of people with wildly different goals. Gorbachev was visting Beijing at the time, and for those of you that remember the timeframe this was around the time that he was pushing Perestroika in the USSR (judged by essentially everyone except some Americans to be a catastrophic failure in the long run.) The faction of students protesting the government were pushing for more transparency and more reforms, including but not limited to democratic and economic reforms. But they weren't the only ones there, nor were they the only ones murdered -- but because the other group (comprising roughly half of the people present) were not pro-democracy agitators, they are never mentioned in the west (their deaths, presumably, are not important.)
The other half were anti-reformists, primarily workers who had enjoyed good and stable conditions under pork barrell socialism and who were suffering under Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms, as they were unable to compete in an increasingly deregulated market place (similar to the anti-globalisation wonks we have nowadays.) They wanted a return to pre-1980s Maoist China! Can you believe it?
How could these two wildly seperate groups get along, given that they had such completely different aims (more reforms, versus less?) The answer is simply that they appealed to nationalistic fervor. They got together and sang the Inte
I'm noticing this a lot lately, but this is one of the most glaring examples. Someone out there has tagged an article in which Microsoft pledges to compete with iTMS as "fud". "FUD" is an acronym that stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" and refers to the practice of deliberately spreading misinformation about a competitor's product in order to convince customers that switching would not be beneficial. The character of said misinformation is typically the sort that inpires fear (ie, "Early adopters of the Macintosh experienced extreme losses in productivity, pushing many small business owners into bankruptcy"), uncertainty (ie, "It's not clear that switching to the Macintosh is worth the cost anyway, studies show the Mac is quite expensive and offers no tangible benefits over MS Windows"), and doubt (ie, "Company XYZ failed to lose productivity when they switched to the Mac for some tasks, their representatives said, but they didn't switch all workstations and the ones they did switch were the ones used by effeminate hello-kitty product designers who used them primarily in the design of advertisements directed at the SF Castro district community. The question you need to ask yourself is, does your company fit this particular niche for which Macintoshes are ideally suited?")
Obviously there are probably better examples of FUD (U and D in particular overlap somewhat).
This is rather like the lamentable practice that some losers have of abusing the moderation system to bury posts they disagree with. Troll and Flamebait do not mean I disagree, nor does Overrated. When you disagree with a post or a story, the proper response is to REPLY. Let's face it, the reason we all come to Slashdot is for the comments. The days when Slashdot was the place to get current news are long gone -- there are a host of other sites that post this stuff days earlier, fail to dupe, and care about accuracy more than sensationalism. The reason that I don't read these much (and my guess is that it's the same for 90% of the rest of Slashdot) is because regardless of how many spelling mistakes there are in the story submission here, the comments are filled with lucid and interesting analyses of anything and everything.
I guess what this means is that you have a choice: you can either be a coward and use loaded tags or abuse the Troll/Flaimbait mods to comment, or you can actually post content that will help keep Slashdot interesting and the Slashdot masses informed.
Despite what everyone says about "the hive mind" and "getting modded down for going against the grain", I personally have never experienced this phenomenon. Have you ever noticed that nearly every lucidly written post that goes against established mantras and includes the magic line "I'll probably be modded down for this" makes it to +5? The whiners who go on and on about how "The Slashbots are against me!@@!!11one" usually can't write worth squat and such fail to inspire any reaction other than "You're stupid" from the Moderators. It's true that the reverse is not true, which is sad: some twat who clearly didn't pass elementary school English can write "M$ is the suxor! Lin0x is the win@!!" and get to +5 if he posts early enough, but despite this unfortunate reality the truth of the matter is that you can post wildly unpopular opinions and get modded up if you phrase your ideas in an interesting, informative, and non-flamebait way.
Since I'm going on about not abusing the tagging and moderation system, it's only appropriate that this be modded Offtopic, which it is. Mods, do your worst.
Sure he will. Or did you think he'll somehow manage to avoid all the computers that are on the internet but connected via a US backbone (ie, telco?) We invented the internet and sadly many of the world's most popular sites and servers are still hosted on US soil (which means they are connected to the net by a US telco, and will thus be subject to net non-neutrality, should it become a reality.)
This is one of the many reasons this net non-neutrality stuff is so dangerous: it will affect far more than just US citizens. You might think that this will create an economic incentive for US companies to relocate to Europe or elsewhere -- and in some cases it might, taking US jobs with it. But in most cases, the business people will take a long hard look at their market and realize that most of their customers are Americans -- and no matter where your server is, if an American wants to access you site, your packets need to traverse US telco lines. So not just American businesses will be affected, but anybody that wants American access. Americans spend more money and save less than essentially anyone else on the planet -- in the words of the Economist, the world is addicted to American demand. Net non-neutrality will have far reaching economic implications not just at home but abroad, as well.
It's incredible how short sighted it all is.
No, an upper case K signifies degrees Kelvin. The SI prefix kilo is always written as a lower case k, at least by knowledgeable people (it is worth noting that this rarely includes the marketing people who do the ads for electronic equipment, however). You are correct that bits and bytes are differentiated by case, though. kbps is kilobits per second, kBps is kilobytes per second.
As you pointed out, of course, essentially no one uses kBps for network speeds, for historical reasons, so if you see a 512k connection or a 2M connection or whatever, the implicit unit ommitted for brevity is bits and not bytes.
Cheers...
You imagine....
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.
As someone who has lived in China for a long time and was formerly a mathematician, I think that your statement is sort of ridiculous. For one thing, as others have pointed out, saying "some race is good at math" as if being good at math were something in your blood is silly. Having said that, the Chinese (as in, those from China) are, unfortunately, overwelmingly bad at Math. In ancient times the Chinese innovated quite competitively but this hasn't been true for a long time. Since I just took issue with your equating mathematical ability with racial characteristics, you can probably guess that there's another reason, and as it happens, I am prepared to qualify my statements.
The Chinese school system (and in ancient times, the scholar system, which stratified society into a "scholar class" and the "masses") is completely and utterly innovation stifling. It emphasises testing and memorization above all else, and curiosity and individuality are systematically beaten out of students. No snide comments about communism, please, it has nothing to do with that (any mathematician will tell you that the Soviet Union produced a metric tonne of talented mathematicians, my advisor was one). Chinese students memorize everything. Because I speak Chinese and love math, I have tutored quite a number of high school and university undergraduate students in math and the simple reason that they suck at it is they basically cannot wrap their head around proofs.
Proofs are difficult for most people at first, but you have to understand that the way a typical mainland Chinese kid approaches math is by memorizing every formula in his math textbook and then trying as best he can to choose the one that "works" with the problem he is presented. He does not do this because he stupid: he does this because the Chinese standardized testing system reinforces the behaviour. The exam problems are expressly designed so that various formulas are the "keys" to the problem, that is, answering the (usually multiple choice) question correctly relies on your ability to quickly recall one formula (perhaps two) and plug the numbers in effectively. So many problems are presented and so little time is given that no time for derivation or logic is really provided. Because of this, essentially every Chinese kid can recite from memory a whole host of trigonometric identities without having the faintest idea why they work or how to derive them, even when the derivation is relatively simple.
Because there's so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the west these days and on Slashdot in particular, I want to reiterate for a moment and say that this is not an inherent failure in the Chinese kids themselves -- they are not stupid -- but they are completely crippled by their education system. From day one they memorize everything. They memorize entire passages written in old Chinese and are asked to reproduced them from memory at exam time -- I've been told by several kids here in Beijing that writing even one character wrong is essentially equivalent to forfeiting the entire problem. These are not 3 line passages folks: we're talking two or three pages of old Chinese. Imagine being told at 17 to memorize 3 pages of Beowulf. That's what we're talking about.
The thing is (as any drama major will tell you) memorization, like all things, gets easier with practice. And from day one (when I first arrived in China I moonlighted as a Kindergarten teacher, so I have some first hand experience here) kids are memorizing stuff, from poems to proverbs to Chinese characters. It becomes easy for them, and over the years they depend on it more and more. The worst part is, high school and lower division level mathematics (if it can be called that) presents problems (like doing integrals or calculating derivatives) that lend themselves well to the "memorize a formula" method. And so Chinese kids tend to do exceptionally well in these courses, and then mistakenly assume they are good at math. This is in fact not
You know you read too much Slashdot when you feel like you're getting unreasonable amounts of pressure not to use proprietary software, hehe. Take a chill pill mate, no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. Proprietary software is there and you're welcome to buy it or rip it off if it suits you.
Cheers...
Don't get me wrong, I'm a free software zealot and don't use and Microsoft products at all, at work or at home, and Firefox is my primary browser, but don't you think you're being a little unfair by picking this particular example? For one, many of Firefox's "killer features" were actually Opera innovations -- Firefox's primary innovation is its extensible architecture. Tabbed browsing etc existed first in a number of other browsers (I don't even think Opera was first.) I don't use Opera (not free) but this is my understanding.
Then, as strange as it may seem, some good features were actually copied from IE to Firefox -- for example, everytime Firefox blocks a popup or notifies you that a plugin is missing, it does so with an unobtrusive little bar at the top of the screen which does not interfere with your browsing experience. This was an IE innovation, ironically. I seem to remember that the different colored URL-entry field background for https and such were also IE innovations (they came with XP SP2 I think -- I'm sort of fuzzy because as I said I don't use any of these products, at all).
Let's also not forget that while IE's CSS support is not stellar by today's standards, Microsoft pretty much invented CSS -- good CSS support on Netscape didn't happen until Mozilla made it a priority (that is, Netscape 6). IE 5 (which was released more than a decade ago) supported large amounts of CSS2 when no one else did. Microsoft dropped the ball and stopped CSS development (IE 6 added very few features and fixed very few bugs), but it's worth noting that had IE 5 not supported CSS as well as it did, we probably wouldn't have the ability to seperate feature from content as well as we do.
It's funny to look at it that way. IE 5 and 6 are shitty browsers by today's standards, there's no doubt -- but when you consider their release dates, they were miles ahead of everything else out there. I remember being forced to use Netscape 4 in those days, because nothing else was available for Linux. Given that I essentially had to use a non-free product if I wanted to browse the web graphically, I know that I would have prefered to use IE 5, definitely. Alas the UNIX version only ran on SUNs (there was a UNIX version, did you know?)
I personally don't like MS's products, but sometimes I think people on Slashdot would do well to read RMS's article, "Is Microsoft the Great Satan?" Microsoft's corporate practices are a result of its monopoly status and the proprietary software industry as a whole. Any other company in the same position would act essentially the same way, so picking on Microsoft specifically all the time is sort of futile, I think.
Of course that's going against the general Slashdot meme, but for all its evil, MS has produced some ok products, if you're willing to look past their proprietariness. And they have innovated, it's wrong to say the haven't. Software is like math, you know... that Newton quote is appropriate: "If I have seen further it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Everyone always copies everyone else's ideas. That's how it should be. Apple copied from Xerox, Microsoft copies from Apple, Apple copies from CMU and FreeBSD, NeXT, Be, Amiga, and even Microsoft. GNOME and KDE copy from all of these too.
This is the whole reason that proprietary software in general and patents in particular must be opposed -- we all are "guilty" of copying ideas. When everyone does it, perhaps it's time to rethink whether it's right or wrong. I likened software to math: as it stands a mathematician publishes his ideas in a peer-reviewed journal and everyone benefits, including the mathematician himself. Everyone is able to learn from his innovations and his mistakes. But if math worked the way software works these days -- and algorithms are essentially just math, lest we forget -- all journal articles would be owned by private entities that would do their damndest to make sure tha