The Karma supported Ogg (I had one before the harddrive crashed, I poured some ethanol on the street to commemorate its passing). It's a shame (if true) that Rio is continuing to support Ogg.
First of all, there is a valid issue with what he's doing with XChat, but it has nothing to do with money.
I've seen a lot of posts here that appear to mostly have issues with his selling copies of XChat. As many people have pointed out, there is nothing in the GPL that prohibits selling Free Software; a number of companies make their living this way (Redhat, for one).
All the GPL requires is that you provide the source when you provide the binary. Because said source is under the GPL, it can still be modified, redistributed, given away for free, etc. This tends to drive the cost of GPL'd software to zero, which is why we're used to GPL'd software being free: if I provide a free program to someone for money, he can then redistribute it for free; he is completely within his rights.
The issue people are having stems from the fact that while the Linux source is available, the Windows source (or at least, the complete Windows source) is not. Now, if he were the author of the entire suite, or at least the legal copyright holder, he would be within his rights to relicense XChat at his discretion. The issue is that he probably isn't. Many people have contributed to XChat over the years.
Now, I say "probably" because we're on murky legal ground here. When you contribute a patch to a program, and don't provide a license to go with said patch, are you simply licensing your copyrighted modifications under the then-license of the program, or are you actually transfering the copyright of your work to the program's author?
Smart groups that care about this (the Linux kernel, MySQL, etc) force the issue one way or the other by making it explicit. The Linux kernel requires that all submissions be licensed under a GPL compatible license, and do not mandate (or even encourage) transfer of copyright. MySQL, on the other hand, requires that developers transfer copyright to MySQL AB.
In XChat's case, nothing was ever concretely specified. Now, in terms of "intent", one could make a convincing emotional argument that the developers who contributed to XChat over the years and didn't include a license with their patch (likely all or nearly all of them) would not have wanted their code relicensed. The question is, in a court of law, would they be able to make a legal argument? I agree with them. Peter is in the wrong in a karma kind of way. But from a lawyer's perspective, patches made to a program, fixes, that sort of thing, stuff donated without an explicit license: how is that dealt with?
If they decide that patches contributed without a license are "gifts" that Peter can use with impunity, then he is not in violation of the GPL: as the sole copyright holder, he can change the license, nothing illegal is being done.
If they decide that patches are implicitly licensed under the same license as the program to which they were donated (in this case, the GPL), but that they retain copyright, Peter is in violation.
As you can see, this is not as cut and dry as we would hope it would be.
As an aside, I think that Peter can make money and make everyone happy. Linux is easy to develop for, but Windows is not. Building a windows program is often difficult. Peter doesn't have to make building it easy. In fact, he could probably license the build scripts and project files he personally uses to build the windows version under some restrictive license; no one says he needs to distribute those. He could provide the code, allowing anyone who really, really cared to build the windows version themselves.
But because building stuff on Windows is a pain, dev tools cost money and don't come with the OS, etc, etc, I would bet that a lot of people would be willing to fork a bit of cash out for a built copy of Windows.
It's like with OpenBSD; Theo retains a non-BSD copyright on the layout of the OpenBSD CDs; therefore, copying the CD is a violation of his copyright. You can make your own ISO if you're really so cheap (many people do) or you can buy his
That's a good point. If he had truly been directing his post at people who failed chemistry, he would have presented a much less technical explanation.
Perhaps I should have taken a different stance.
At any rate, I agree with your assessment of the situation. I guess I was the one responding emotionally to an accusation of deliberate jargon usage. People who ask us questions about math and then fail to understand our answers often resort to such name-calling. But in this case it doesn't look like it was name calling. So for that I appologize.
Still, I'll stand by my original point regarding learning new things. But by the spirit of your post it doesn't seem like you disagree with me, just with the OP's intent. So I think we're on the same page.
No one is talking about me, or the individual consumer; we're talking about government contracts. In this case, the Chinese government is the consumer, and Microsoft is the corp vying for the contract.
So I don't really understand what "And you would trust the current Chinese government more than you would MS?..." has to do with it.
If the Chinese government goes Linux, this will put a great deal of pressure on corporations wanting to interact with the Chinese government to make a similar switch.
The crap about the Chinese government spying on its own people is completely irrelevant. But I suspect you knew that.
This is not true of most phones in Hong Kong, because in Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese. There is no official romanization system for Cantonese.
On the mainland, Hanyu Pinyin is the standard romanization system for Mandarin and all phones support pinyin-based input systems. I've owned several Nokias and they all also do a 5-stroke based system, which I guess could be useful if you run into a character you don't know, but how often does that happen.
In Taiwan I guess they might use Wade Giles, ZhuYin, or some other crack ass system to input Mandarin.
The term "Chinese" is misleading. It's probably best just not to use it. Lots of characters commonly used in Cantonese are rather rare in Mandarin (like mouth + 5 + mouth, meaning 'not' in Cantonese, and nothing at all in Mandarin).
Unless he's learning Cantonese, or he's Taiwanese and has political issues with Pinyin, it's probably easier for him to get mainland chinese or singaporean firmware. Entering by stroke is a pain in the butt.
Most pinyin capable phones can enter by stroke in the way you describe, but why on earth would you want to?
Nowadays, computers are really rather like telephones -- they are tools that facilitate communication. With a working IT infrastructure, hospitals can be networked, allowing doctors to transfer medical data relevant to patients to specialists at home and abroad, and they have access to a great deal of the world's information. And these days, thanks to FOSS and Moore's Law, "good-enough" computers can be had on the cheap.
Your post is essentially like saying, "What do they need telephones for? They still have problems feeding themselves!", as if having the former were a prerequisite for having the latter. Economic investment results in economic growth, which betters the lives of the common people.
Problems should be attacked in parallel, not sequentially.
My sibling posts say the same thing I'm going to: the true advantage of Free Software is freedom. But let me explain why.
Microsoft is seen worldwide as a very successful American corporation. This is not surprising, because, well, it is. Many countries (China in particular) are nervous about allowing an American corporation to control their IT infrastructure with so many little black boxes.
The Chinese government did not choose to move towards OSS because it likes Linux's interface more, or because it costs less than MS. It's moving in that direction because Linux, and all free software, is trustworthy. Cost doesn't factor in. With Linux, they have an enterprise level operating system that scales to absurd numbers of processors that can be audited and modified. A starting point, if you will. They know there are no backdoors because they can take a look.
Microsoft and Sun and most of the big guys offer "Shared Source" like systems that seem to offer the same deal, but it isn't the same at all. Because while you're welcome to take a look at the source, you're not free to change it. And with a vendor comes vendor lock-in; for example, suppose the Chinese government buys MS's bit and goes for Windows instead of Linux, using MS's shared source initiative as a means to "look through" the code. They do this, and build their entire infrastructure on MS solutions. Write their documents in Word. Etc. After a few years of this, MS could just stop offering the Shared Source initiative. Stop allowing their code to be audited. And by then, the Chinese gov't is screwed, big time. They know they should dump MS, but they can't; their whole country runs on the stuff, depends on its proprietary formats, etc.
But Linux will always be free. There is no evil American corporation controlling it, possibly putting backdoors into its software to steal your most precious secrets. Because its source is open and documented, there can be no format lock-in.
For foreign governments with no reason to trust the US or anything that comes out of it, the fact that Linux is free as in freedom, rather than free as in cost, is the true selling point.
As an aside, your point about Linux requiring sysadmins, support (and thus actually costing money and not being truly for-free) etc is a non-starter. This is trivially true of all software. Microsoft/Sun/etc software also have maintenance and support costs. Unless you're saying that the cost of obtaining MS/Sun/etc software PLUS the cost of maintaining it over a long period of time is lower than just the cost of maintaining a free system, you have no point. If you are saying that, it's just MS's "lower TCO" argument in disguise, which has been dissected here a million times and which not many of us believe, so I won't bother ripping into it.
Well, to be pedantic, other software development models can (and have) been able to overcome such barriers as localized software for non-european languages (I presume when you said non-latin you really meant languages that use a non-latin script; English, in particular, is non-latin, so you can't have actually meant non-latin).
There's nothing stopping most corporations from supporting languages like Chinese and Thai except laziness, pure and simple. OSS has had the edge in this arena for two reasons:
No profit motive. It has classically not been profitable to support languages spoken in third world countries, or in countries where the population was relatively small. Because OSS developers don't care about money (usually), this doesn't matter.
Developed over the internet in an open way. This has allowed developers speaking minority languages to "scratch their itch" and localize apps they use frequently. In a corporate model, this doesn't work because a) techies hired in Europe or the US don't usually completely understand the complexities of non-roman scripts, etc. and b) closed source means that translation by users has not generally been feasible.
Consider though: for point 1, a profit motive is developing. China, India, Thailand, etc are actually becoming markets that software companies care about being a part of, if only to keep Linux and OSS from getting a hold there.
For point 2, outsourcing is guaranteeing that there are lots of folks in the third world collaborating closely with company in question, meaning that access to native speakers of problem languages is becoming less of a problem. It's not just outsourcing, it's globalization as a whole.
In my opinion, the corps will never be able to compete with Free Software on the localization front, because all it takes to get a free program localized is someone annoyed enough by it not being. Still, the lead we have right now on the important languages will probably be closed. We'll still win when it comes to software available in Twi, Esperanto, Breton, and other "minority" languages, but you can bet that the corps aren't going to let us have China and India without a fight.
While the GP's post may have had a bit of a "look how much I know" feel to it, I suspect that your reaction to his use of "jargon" which with you are not familiar is an emotional rather than rational one. We always feel stupid when people speak to us about subjects we know little about (relative to them) as if "everyone understands it". Anyone who has ever been exposed to experts in a field other than their own has experienced this.
But as a mathematician, I understand that to properly express a problem, one must develop a language to describe it. To put this in CS terms, someone once said that if you lay out your data structures correctly, algorithms just fall into place, and that your code practically writes itself. The catch is, designing good data structures is no small feat, and much thought goes into it, and understanding the motivation is not always easy if you aren't really familiar with the problem.
In Math, we often joke (in a haha only serious kind of way) that our discipline is more linguistic than anything else. In a sense, math is simply "jargon", which as far as I can tell is the term used by laypeople threatened by big words for terminology with which they aren't familiar. There's really not much more to it than that; arrange your definitions properly, word them carefully, and the proofs just come.
Chemistry, physics, biology, and even sciences such as sociology and psychology all do the same sorts of things. I took o-chem in school and we used the term steric hinderance a lot, but the term "moiety" I either never learned or didn't remember. So I looked it up.
If the GP had been piling layer upon layer of complexity into his post, forcing the reader to master advanced organic chemistry concepts before being able to understand what he meant, I think he could rightly be accused of jargonism. But here, he used three or four terms with which you might be unfamiliar, all of which are trivial to look up.
I would have expected that a culture (slashdot) so connected to RTFM and CS, which probably has more technical jargon than any other scientific discipline, would know how to look up a few terms outside of their field.
Instead, you just bitch. Learning is a two way street, you know. You actually have to make an effort sometimes. Now you know what steric hinderance is. You've learned something, and if he hadn't used the term, you wouldn't know. This is not bad. You should thank him.
Oh come now. The reason people (and by this I mean lawyers, not lay-people who are either for or against guns and twist language to work in their favor) are confused about the 2nd amendment is because it is worded vaguely. It combines those two clauses in an awkward way, leaving their relationship to each other up to interpretation. And it's perfectly ok (even insightful!) of you to express your interpretation of a shoddily worded clause in the constitution, and express your views on why your interpretation is correct.
But, my own views on gun control not withstanding (let's just say that I like being able to go shoot a gun when I want), the rest of your post is pure blather. The reason people are confused about the second amendment is the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated clauses. Why bother talking about a militia, if the entire point of the amendment is to guarantee the people the right to bear arms? Why not just say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"? No confusion there.
The point is, the only reason people think that "the people" might mean "a well regulated militia" is because the founding fathers bothered to mention it. Notice that in all the other amendments, they don't. This essentially makes application of "the people == a well regulated militia" logic to other amendments ridiculous.
So while your points about the 2nd amendment are insightful, the rest of your post is just hysterical yammering, and doesn't support your argument well at all -- if anything, it makes it sound like you're so incredibly dense that you can't understand why lawyers might think the people means a well regulated militia, or people participating in a militia, or whatever. Whether you agree with this is something else entirely.
The best way to argue a point is to do it rationally. You failed on that. Not doing the pro-gun crowd a great service there. And for what it's worth, I'm pro-gun.
Quoth the poster: ... or even Microsft to use chalk to display speech
Oh great, that's all we need. Corporations pasting advertisements on the sidewalk and claiming it's based on "free speech", and doesn't constitute vandalism because you can wash the chalk off.
Or even better, they could write anti-Linux messages on the sidewalk and claim it was constitutionally protected political speech (ie, "Only Commies use Linux! Are you a pinko?")
With regards to this guy, though, my view is this: you don't have a right to write on other people's property, whether it is in "removable" chalk or in spray paint. In this case, the surface in question "belongs" to NYC, and essentially, what they allow people to write on the sidewalk is up to them to decide. Clearly, Microsoft using the argument that "all the little kids can draw on the sidewalk, why can't we draw anti-Linux FUD? It's discrimination based on message!" would be right. It absolutely is discrimination based on message. But I think most people here would recognize that it is in the city's best interest not to have advertisements pasted all over the city.
So really, it comes down to discretion.
As I agree with the cyclist's political viewpoint, I want to say that he should be allowed to post his views unharassed, and in fact, before reading your post, thought just that. But the point about MS made me think: obviously, at the end of the day, someone needs to decide what is appropriate and what isn't. Sometimes, the person making that decision won't agree with you, and that will always suck. But do we want this to be regulated by law? How would you do that? Ok, the MS advertising issue could easily be patched: no advertisements. But what about anti-Linux FUD? Or anti-Apple, or anti-Sun, or any other competitor? That's not promotion of one's product.
How do you legislate that? Remember, in our corporatist society, corporations are citizens in the eyes of the law. They have every right to do what an individual would do.
In the end, there isn't an easy solution to this. The cyclist spreading "bush sux" messages is not much different from "linux sux" or "<insert anything> sux", really. Where do you draw the line?
When you get charged with being a terrorist for whatever absurd reason they come up with -- that word gets thrown around more and more lightly, perhaps you haven't noticed -- and they strip one of those rights because you're a "thug", how will you feel?
The whole point of innocent until proven guilty is just that, innocent until proven guilty. And if there exists such overwhelming evidence against a terrorist thug that there's no question that he's guilty, so much so that law enforcement feels justified in treating him like a criminal before he's been convicted, what's the harm in letting him have a lawyer? I mean, I realize that lawyers are sometimes able to weasel sleazy clients out of their rightful punishment, on technicalities, etc, but a terrorist? A real terrorist?
I mean, the whole point is that there's evidence, right? There should be trouble convicting him. Why bother taking his rights away? Due process will do it, just as effectively.
Unless, of course, you're worried the courts in the USA will acquit him... in which case, it sounds like there might be just a little bit of doubt. All the more reason for due process.
You know, when I was like 14 I thought lesbians were totally hot. Then it turned out that my gf at the time was a lesbian. She came out of the closet, you know, while we were together. I was supportive and all, but let me tell you something about lesbians:
They don't like men.
See, all it takes is a threesome with two chicks, watching them make out and then realizing that they have absolutely no interest in you whatsoever. The threesome is just an excuse, you know, to experiment. You're the odd man out. They don't want your penis.
Men often seem to think that the two girls making out are just waiting for someone to come in and give them a dose of the dick. But they aren't. They really aren't. Porn lies, man. It lies.
Since then, I have found two girls making out only slightly more arousing than two guys sucking each other off, which is to say, pretty much not at all. When your gf leaves you for a girl, you'll understand.
And actually, I'm not sure that American culture is more supportive of gay women than men. While your point is a good one, you know, that lesbian sex dominates many straight men's fantasies, and so, living in a patriarchy as we do, this translates to greater acceptance of lesbianism, I think that this is actually rather limited. Because men's fantasies involve hot "lip-stick" lesbians making out; the mullet-having truck driver who can bench more than you can on the other side of the spectrum is rather less accepted.
Now, that's just a steryotype. I used to hang out at the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) center at my university because a lot of my friends were gay, and I can definitely say that lots af gay people don't fit any of the steryotypes out there. But having said that, the mullet-having truck driver lesbian does indeed exist. And she is even more marginalized than the flaming queen who just screams "bottom" at you with every squeally effeminate utterance and high pitched laugh he emits.
So yes, in a sense, lesbians are accepted, but only if they consent to being fantasies for straight men, ie, conforming to our social norms for female behaviour: effeminate, cute, sexy. If men can get off on the idea of her eating her best girlfriend out, she's "ok." But if she's a "diesel dyke", well, the answer is "hell no" for most of society.
Whereas these days, gay guys are accepted much more, whether they're straight acting or whether they're queens. Sure, homophobia runs rampant, but look at how the media portrays gay men (Will and Grace) versus how the media portrays gay women (Chasing Amy). In Will & Grace, we have the classic "fem" guy. Accepted. In Chasing Amy, all the gay girls are hot (from a straight guy's perspective).
But lesbian women are out to attract other lesbian women, not straight men with a girl-on-girl fetish. So they don't necessarily conform to the same standards of beauty as straight girls do. These women are anything but accepted by society.
It's a shame, really. Go to a gay-straight alliance meeting sometime and see how you can help promote understanding. The relationship between lesbians and straight men especially is rather tenuous, because there's so much misunderstanding. It wouldn't hurt to help bridge the gap.
It depends on your POV. The problem with Flash is that it is a non-standards compliant web extension. While admittedly in heavy use, incorporating flash into a W3C standards compliant HTML document is an extremely large pain in the butt, though technically possible with some less-than-clean hackery. With GIF (and APNG) it's as simple as an IMG tag.
Other than the patent issues (which are admittedly almost a non-issue now, as they've expired in many countries already and will soon in the others), GIF is a rather limited format. It has unfortunate palette restrictions, it doesn't support alpha-transparency, and it actually doesn't compress very well, unless your file is very small (like, 1x1 pixel:p).
Flash is proprietary, closed, hard to embed in documents in a standards compliant way, a plug-in that doesn't run on lots of platforms and browsers, etc. Plus, it's rather feature-rich, and complete overkill for most small animations.
GIF was/is patent encumbered, doesn't make use of a lot of the smarter compression and image technology we have today, etc. When GIF first came around, lots of people's displays were only capable of displaying 256 color VGA. That is no longer the case. And while it's more difficult to see the immediate utility of alpha-transparency in an animated image, it could be useful (perhaps) to allow people to make, for example "morphing" text that can be placed on any color/image background, or just in general to make any moving image "fit" into the background. Even Flash does not do this well.
So in sum, Flash is proprietary overkill, and GIF sucks. Ergo, APNG fills a niche.
Personally, though, I hate animated BS on websites.
... a lossy PNG could even be read by a PNG viewer without modifications
I doubt this. Here's why.
I'm not totally aware of how PNG compression works, but because it is lossless, I would assume that it is an intelligently compressed bitmap. That is to say, the decoder is a decompressor, really, that extracts data.
In a lossy format, however, the decoder actually extrapolates the information that isn't there. See, decoding an image always results in a bitmap, but with PNG/GIF the entire bitmap is encoded in the file (lossless) while with JPEG, only certain "hints" are encoded, and the decoder doesn't just decompress, but "guesses" the missing points from the "hints" in the format.
The point is that a lossless decoder is doing much less work than a lossy one; so it stands to reason that a lossless PNG decoder (decompressor) would be unable to decode a lossy format, because that required "extra" functionality is not present.
So it would be impossible to create lossy PNG without changing the decoder. Of course, if my logic is incorrect, I wouldn't mind it being pointed out to me.
Australian's means "belonging to Australian", which makes no sense without an article (an Australian's, for example) because a possessive requires a noun to modify. If 'Australian' were a proper noun like Gertrude or Octavia, it might work. But it isn't.
I presume that you meant "Australians", the plural. This form is common in most dialects of English and admittedly shares the same pronunciation as the possessive in many cases, though not generally the same spelling. Note that it does not have an apostrophe.
As you know, apostrophes in English most commonly mark the omission of a letter. In this case that letter is most likely 'e', and is left over from the Germanic declension system present in Old English but which has since mostly disappeared. Interestingly, the genetive case of Old English evolved into a clitic, meaning that the possessive in Modern English is not a declension.
This announcement has been brought to you by GNAA, the Grammar Nazi Association of American (Australia?).
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The Karma supported Ogg (I had one before the harddrive crashed, I poured some ethanol on the street to commemorate its passing). It's a shame (if true) that Rio is continuing to support Ogg.
You're getting it wrong. Every odd numbered Star Trek sucks ass. Let's take a look, shall we? Evens:
Conversely, the odds:
Convinced now?
Doubtful. There's more money in selling out.
He's actually quoting "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", if you didn't realize.
You know you read too much slashdot when you type 'cache' instead of 'cash'. Gads.
First of all, there is a valid issue with what he's doing with XChat, but it has nothing to do with money.
I've seen a lot of posts here that appear to mostly have issues with his selling copies of XChat. As many people have pointed out, there is nothing in the GPL that prohibits selling Free Software; a number of companies make their living this way (Redhat, for one).
All the GPL requires is that you provide the source when you provide the binary. Because said source is under the GPL, it can still be modified, redistributed, given away for free, etc. This tends to drive the cost of GPL'd software to zero, which is why we're used to GPL'd software being free: if I provide a free program to someone for money, he can then redistribute it for free; he is completely within his rights.
The issue people are having stems from the fact that while the Linux source is available, the Windows source (or at least, the complete Windows source) is not. Now, if he were the author of the entire suite, or at least the legal copyright holder, he would be within his rights to relicense XChat at his discretion. The issue is that he probably isn't. Many people have contributed to XChat over the years.
Now, I say "probably" because we're on murky legal ground here. When you contribute a patch to a program, and don't provide a license to go with said patch, are you simply licensing your copyrighted modifications under the then-license of the program, or are you actually transfering the copyright of your work to the program's author?
Smart groups that care about this (the Linux kernel, MySQL, etc) force the issue one way or the other by making it explicit. The Linux kernel requires that all submissions be licensed under a GPL compatible license, and do not mandate (or even encourage) transfer of copyright. MySQL, on the other hand, requires that developers transfer copyright to MySQL AB.
In XChat's case, nothing was ever concretely specified. Now, in terms of "intent", one could make a convincing emotional argument that the developers who contributed to XChat over the years and didn't include a license with their patch (likely all or nearly all of them) would not have wanted their code relicensed. The question is, in a court of law, would they be able to make a legal argument? I agree with them. Peter is in the wrong in a karma kind of way. But from a lawyer's perspective, patches made to a program, fixes, that sort of thing, stuff donated without an explicit license: how is that dealt with?
If they decide that patches contributed without a license are "gifts" that Peter can use with impunity, then he is not in violation of the GPL: as the sole copyright holder, he can change the license, nothing illegal is being done.
If they decide that patches are implicitly licensed under the same license as the program to which they were donated (in this case, the GPL), but that they retain copyright, Peter is in violation.
As you can see, this is not as cut and dry as we would hope it would be.
As an aside, I think that Peter can make money and make everyone happy. Linux is easy to develop for, but Windows is not. Building a windows program is often difficult. Peter doesn't have to make building it easy. In fact, he could probably license the build scripts and project files he personally uses to build the windows version under some restrictive license; no one says he needs to distribute those. He could provide the code, allowing anyone who really, really cared to build the windows version themselves.
But because building stuff on Windows is a pain, dev tools cost money and don't come with the OS, etc, etc, I would bet that a lot of people would be willing to fork a bit of cash out for a built copy of Windows.
It's like with OpenBSD; Theo retains a non-BSD copyright on the layout of the OpenBSD CDs; therefore, copying the CD is a violation of his copyright. You can make your own ISO if you're really so cheap (many people do) or you can buy his
That's a good point. If he had truly been directing his post at people who failed chemistry, he would have presented a much less technical explanation.
Perhaps I should have taken a different stance.
At any rate, I agree with your assessment of the situation. I guess I was the one responding emotionally to an accusation of deliberate jargon usage. People who ask us questions about math and then fail to understand our answers often resort to such name-calling. But in this case it doesn't look like it was name calling. So for that I appologize.
Still, I'll stand by my original point regarding learning new things. But by the spirit of your post it doesn't seem like you disagree with me, just with the OP's intent. So I think we're on the same page.
Cheers!
No one is talking about me, or the individual consumer; we're talking about government contracts. In this case, the Chinese government is the consumer, and Microsoft is the corp vying for the contract.
..." has to do with it.
So I don't really understand what "And you would trust the current Chinese government more than you would MS?
If the Chinese government goes Linux, this will put a great deal of pressure on corporations wanting to interact with the Chinese government to make a similar switch.
The crap about the Chinese government spying on its own people is completely irrelevant. But I suspect you knew that.
If you speak Chinese, they're rather more civil.
This is not true of most phones in Hong Kong, because in Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese. There is no official romanization system for Cantonese.
On the mainland, Hanyu Pinyin is the standard romanization system for Mandarin and all phones support pinyin-based input systems. I've owned several Nokias and they all also do a 5-stroke based system, which I guess could be useful if you run into a character you don't know, but how often does that happen.
In Taiwan I guess they might use Wade Giles, ZhuYin, or some other crack ass system to input Mandarin.
The term "Chinese" is misleading. It's probably best just not to use it. Lots of characters commonly used in Cantonese are rather rare in Mandarin (like mouth + 5 + mouth, meaning 'not' in Cantonese, and nothing at all in Mandarin).
Unless he's learning Cantonese, or he's Taiwanese and has political issues with Pinyin, it's probably easier for him to get mainland chinese or singaporean firmware. Entering by stroke is a pain in the butt.
Most pinyin capable phones can enter by stroke in the way you describe, but why on earth would you want to?
Nowadays, computers are really rather like telephones -- they are tools that facilitate communication. With a working IT infrastructure, hospitals can be networked, allowing doctors to transfer medical data relevant to patients to specialists at home and abroad, and they have access to a great deal of the world's information. And these days, thanks to FOSS and Moore's Law, "good-enough" computers can be had on the cheap.
Your post is essentially like saying, "What do they need telephones for? They still have problems feeding themselves!", as if having the former were a prerequisite for having the latter. Economic investment results in economic growth, which betters the lives of the common people.
Problems should be attacked in parallel, not sequentially.
My sibling posts say the same thing I'm going to: the true advantage of Free Software is freedom. But let me explain why.
Microsoft is seen worldwide as a very successful American corporation. This is not surprising, because, well, it is. Many countries (China in particular) are nervous about allowing an American corporation to control their IT infrastructure with so many little black boxes.
The Chinese government did not choose to move towards OSS because it likes Linux's interface more, or because it costs less than MS. It's moving in that direction because Linux, and all free software, is trustworthy. Cost doesn't factor in. With Linux, they have an enterprise level operating system that scales to absurd numbers of processors that can be audited and modified. A starting point, if you will. They know there are no backdoors because they can take a look.
Microsoft and Sun and most of the big guys offer "Shared Source" like systems that seem to offer the same deal, but it isn't the same at all. Because while you're welcome to take a look at the source, you're not free to change it. And with a vendor comes vendor lock-in; for example, suppose the Chinese government buys MS's bit and goes for Windows instead of Linux, using MS's shared source initiative as a means to "look through" the code. They do this, and build their entire infrastructure on MS solutions. Write their documents in Word. Etc. After a few years of this, MS could just stop offering the Shared Source initiative. Stop allowing their code to be audited. And by then, the Chinese gov't is screwed, big time. They know they should dump MS, but they can't; their whole country runs on the stuff, depends on its proprietary formats, etc.
But Linux will always be free. There is no evil American corporation controlling it, possibly putting backdoors into its software to steal your most precious secrets. Because its source is open and documented, there can be no format lock-in.
For foreign governments with no reason to trust the US or anything that comes out of it, the fact that Linux is free as in freedom, rather than free as in cost, is the true selling point.
As an aside, your point about Linux requiring sysadmins, support (and thus actually costing money and not being truly for-free) etc is a non-starter. This is trivially true of all software. Microsoft/Sun/etc software also have maintenance and support costs. Unless you're saying that the cost of obtaining MS/Sun/etc software PLUS the cost of maintaining it over a long period of time is lower than just the cost of maintaining a free system, you have no point. If you are saying that, it's just MS's "lower TCO" argument in disguise, which has been dissected here a million times and which not many of us believe, so I won't bother ripping into it.
There's nothing stopping most corporations from supporting languages like Chinese and Thai except laziness, pure and simple. OSS has had the edge in this arena for two reasons:
- No profit motive. It has classically not been profitable to support languages spoken in third world countries, or in countries where the population was relatively small. Because OSS developers don't care about money (usually), this doesn't matter.
- Developed over the internet in an open way. This has allowed developers speaking minority languages to "scratch their itch" and localize apps they use frequently. In a corporate model, this doesn't work because a) techies hired in Europe or the US don't usually completely understand the complexities of non-roman scripts, etc. and b) closed source means that translation by users has not generally been feasible.
Consider though: for point 1, a profit motive is developing. China, India, Thailand, etc are actually becoming markets that software companies care about being a part of, if only to keep Linux and OSS from getting a hold there.For point 2, outsourcing is guaranteeing that there are lots of folks in the third world collaborating closely with company in question, meaning that access to native speakers of problem languages is becoming less of a problem. It's not just outsourcing, it's globalization as a whole.
In my opinion, the corps will never be able to compete with Free Software on the localization front, because all it takes to get a free program localized is someone annoyed enough by it not being. Still, the lead we have right now on the important languages will probably be closed. We'll still win when it comes to software available in Twi, Esperanto, Breton, and other "minority" languages, but you can bet that the corps aren't going to let us have China and India without a fight.
Of course, even if they fight, we'll still win.
While the GP's post may have had a bit of a "look how much I know" feel to it, I suspect that your reaction to his use of "jargon" which with you are not familiar is an emotional rather than rational one. We always feel stupid when people speak to us about subjects we know little about (relative to them) as if "everyone understands it". Anyone who has ever been exposed to experts in a field other than their own has experienced this.
But as a mathematician, I understand that to properly express a problem, one must develop a language to describe it. To put this in CS terms, someone once said that if you lay out your data structures correctly, algorithms just fall into place, and that your code practically writes itself. The catch is, designing good data structures is no small feat, and much thought goes into it, and understanding the motivation is not always easy if you aren't really familiar with the problem.
In Math, we often joke (in a haha only serious kind of way) that our discipline is more linguistic than anything else. In a sense, math is simply "jargon", which as far as I can tell is the term used by laypeople threatened by big words for terminology with which they aren't familiar. There's really not much more to it than that; arrange your definitions properly, word them carefully, and the proofs just come.
Chemistry, physics, biology, and even sciences such as sociology and psychology all do the same sorts of things. I took o-chem in school and we used the term steric hinderance a lot, but the term "moiety" I either never learned or didn't remember. So I looked it up.
If the GP had been piling layer upon layer of complexity into his post, forcing the reader to master advanced organic chemistry concepts before being able to understand what he meant, I think he could rightly be accused of jargonism. But here, he used three or four terms with which you might be unfamiliar, all of which are trivial to look up.
I would have expected that a culture (slashdot) so connected to RTFM and CS, which probably has more technical jargon than any other scientific discipline, would know how to look up a few terms outside of their field.
Instead, you just bitch. Learning is a two way street, you know. You actually have to make an effort sometimes. Now you know what steric hinderance is. You've learned something, and if he hadn't used the term, you wouldn't know. This is not bad. You should thank him.
Oh come now. The reason people (and by this I mean lawyers, not lay-people who are either for or against guns and twist language to work in their favor) are confused about the 2nd amendment is because it is worded vaguely. It combines those two clauses in an awkward way, leaving their relationship to each other up to interpretation. And it's perfectly ok (even insightful!) of you to express your interpretation of a shoddily worded clause in the constitution, and express your views on why your interpretation is correct.
But, my own views on gun control not withstanding (let's just say that I like being able to go shoot a gun when I want), the rest of your post is pure blather. The reason people are confused about the second amendment is the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated clauses. Why bother talking about a militia, if the entire point of the amendment is to guarantee the people the right to bear arms? Why not just say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"? No confusion there.
The point is, the only reason people think that "the people" might mean "a well regulated militia" is because the founding fathers bothered to mention it. Notice that in all the other amendments, they don't. This essentially makes application of "the people == a well regulated militia" logic to other amendments ridiculous.
So while your points about the 2nd amendment are insightful, the rest of your post is just hysterical yammering, and doesn't support your argument well at all -- if anything, it makes it sound like you're so incredibly dense that you can't understand why lawyers might think the people means a well regulated militia, or people participating in a militia, or whatever. Whether you agree with this is something else entirely.
The best way to argue a point is to do it rationally. You failed on that. Not doing the pro-gun crowd a great service there. And for what it's worth, I'm pro-gun.
Quoth the poster:
... or even Microsft to use chalk to display speech
Oh great, that's all we need. Corporations pasting advertisements on the sidewalk and claiming it's based on "free speech", and doesn't constitute vandalism because you can wash the chalk off.
Or even better, they could write anti-Linux messages on the sidewalk and claim it was constitutionally protected political speech (ie, "Only Commies use Linux! Are you a pinko?")
With regards to this guy, though, my view is this: you don't have a right to write on other people's property, whether it is in "removable" chalk or in spray paint. In this case, the surface in question "belongs" to NYC, and essentially, what they allow people to write on the sidewalk is up to them to decide. Clearly, Microsoft using the argument that "all the little kids can draw on the sidewalk, why can't we draw anti-Linux FUD? It's discrimination based on message!" would be right. It absolutely is discrimination based on message. But I think most people here would recognize that it is in the city's best interest not to have advertisements pasted all over the city.
So really, it comes down to discretion.
As I agree with the cyclist's political viewpoint, I want to say that he should be allowed to post his views unharassed, and in fact, before reading your post, thought just that. But the point about MS made me think: obviously, at the end of the day, someone needs to decide what is appropriate and what isn't. Sometimes, the person making that decision won't agree with you, and that will always suck. But do we want this to be regulated by law? How would you do that? Ok, the MS advertising issue could easily be patched: no advertisements. But what about anti-Linux FUD? Or anti-Apple, or anti-Sun, or any other competitor? That's not promotion of one's product.
How do you legislate that? Remember, in our corporatist society, corporations are citizens in the eyes of the law. They have every right to do what an individual would do.
In the end, there isn't an easy solution to this. The cyclist spreading "bush sux" messages is not much different from "linux sux" or "<insert anything> sux", really. Where do you draw the line?
When you get charged with being a terrorist for whatever absurd reason they come up with -- that word gets thrown around more and more lightly, perhaps you haven't noticed -- and they strip one of those rights because you're a "thug", how will you feel?
... in which case, it sounds like there might be just a little bit of doubt. All the more reason for due process.
The whole point of innocent until proven guilty is just that, innocent until proven guilty. And if there exists such overwhelming evidence against a terrorist thug that there's no question that he's guilty, so much so that law enforcement feels justified in treating him like a criminal before he's been convicted, what's the harm in letting him have a lawyer? I mean, I realize that lawyers are sometimes able to weasel sleazy clients out of their rightful punishment, on technicalities, etc, but a terrorist? A real terrorist?
I mean, the whole point is that there's evidence, right? There should be trouble convicting him. Why bother taking his rights away? Due process will do it, just as effectively.
Unless, of course, you're worried the courts in the USA will acquit him
You know, when I was like 14 I thought lesbians were totally hot. Then it turned out that my gf at the time was a lesbian. She came out of the closet, you know, while we were together. I was supportive and all, but let me tell you something about lesbians:
They don't like men.
See, all it takes is a threesome with two chicks, watching them make out and then realizing that they have absolutely no interest in you whatsoever. The threesome is just an excuse, you know, to experiment. You're the odd man out. They don't want your penis.
Men often seem to think that the two girls making out are just waiting for someone to come in and give them a dose of the dick. But they aren't. They really aren't. Porn lies, man. It lies.
Since then, I have found two girls making out only slightly more arousing than two guys sucking each other off, which is to say, pretty much not at all. When your gf leaves you for a girl, you'll understand.
And actually, I'm not sure that American culture is more supportive of gay women than men. While your point is a good one, you know, that lesbian sex dominates many straight men's fantasies, and so, living in a patriarchy as we do, this translates to greater acceptance of lesbianism, I think that this is actually rather limited. Because men's fantasies involve hot "lip-stick" lesbians making out; the mullet-having truck driver who can bench more than you can on the other side of the spectrum is rather less accepted.
Now, that's just a steryotype. I used to hang out at the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) center at my university because a lot of my friends were gay, and I can definitely say that lots af gay people don't fit any of the steryotypes out there. But having said that, the mullet-having truck driver lesbian does indeed exist. And she is even more marginalized than the flaming queen who just screams "bottom" at you with every squeally effeminate utterance and high pitched laugh he emits.
So yes, in a sense, lesbians are accepted, but only if they consent to being fantasies for straight men, ie, conforming to our social norms for female behaviour: effeminate, cute, sexy. If men can get off on the idea of her eating her best girlfriend out, she's "ok." But if she's a "diesel dyke", well, the answer is "hell no" for most of society.
Whereas these days, gay guys are accepted much more, whether they're straight acting or whether they're queens. Sure, homophobia runs rampant, but look at how the media portrays gay men (Will and Grace) versus how the media portrays gay women (Chasing Amy). In Will & Grace, we have the classic "fem" guy. Accepted. In Chasing Amy, all the gay girls are hot (from a straight guy's perspective).
But lesbian women are out to attract other lesbian women, not straight men with a girl-on-girl fetish. So they don't necessarily conform to the same standards of beauty as straight girls do. These women are anything but accepted by society.
It's a shame, really. Go to a gay-straight alliance meeting sometime and see how you can help promote understanding. The relationship between lesbians and straight men especially is rather tenuous, because there's so much misunderstanding. It wouldn't hurt to help bridge the gap.
It depends on your POV. The problem with Flash is that it is a non-standards compliant web extension. While admittedly in heavy use, incorporating flash into a W3C standards compliant HTML document is an extremely large pain in the butt, though technically possible with some less-than-clean hackery. With GIF (and APNG) it's as simple as an IMG tag.
:p).
Other than the patent issues (which are admittedly almost a non-issue now, as they've expired in many countries already and will soon in the others), GIF is a rather limited format. It has unfortunate palette restrictions, it doesn't support alpha-transparency, and it actually doesn't compress very well, unless your file is very small (like, 1x1 pixel
Flash is proprietary, closed, hard to embed in documents in a standards compliant way, a plug-in that doesn't run on lots of platforms and browsers, etc. Plus, it's rather feature-rich, and complete overkill for most small animations.
GIF was/is patent encumbered, doesn't make use of a lot of the smarter compression and image technology we have today, etc. When GIF first came around, lots of people's displays were only capable of displaying 256 color VGA. That is no longer the case. And while it's more difficult to see the immediate utility of alpha-transparency in an animated image, it could be useful (perhaps) to allow people to make, for example "morphing" text that can be placed on any color/image background, or just in general to make any moving image "fit" into the background. Even Flash does not do this well.
So in sum, Flash is proprietary overkill, and GIF sucks. Ergo, APNG fills a niche.
Personally, though, I hate animated BS on websites.
Quoth the parent:
I doubt this. Here's why.
I'm not totally aware of how PNG compression works, but because it is lossless, I would assume that it is an intelligently compressed bitmap. That is to say, the decoder is a decompressor, really, that extracts data.
In a lossy format, however, the decoder actually extrapolates the information that isn't there. See, decoding an image always results in a bitmap, but with PNG/GIF the entire bitmap is encoded in the file (lossless) while with JPEG, only certain "hints" are encoded, and the decoder doesn't just decompress, but "guesses" the missing points from the "hints" in the format.
The point is that a lossless decoder is doing much less work than a lossy one; so it stands to reason that a lossless PNG decoder (decompressor) would be unable to decode a lossy format, because that required "extra" functionality is not present.
So it would be impossible to create lossy PNG without changing the decoder. Of course, if my logic is incorrect, I wouldn't mind it being pointed out to me.
Quoth Pan T. Hose:
In a word, no.
Your point would have more weight if it were possible for people's opinions of John Howard to be affected negatively.
By this I mean that he's already as low as he can go, not that he enjoys such popular support that people will never think ill of him.
haha, I suck.
Australian's means "belonging to Australian", which makes no sense without an article (an Australian's, for example) because a possessive requires a noun to modify. If 'Australian' were a proper noun like Gertrude or Octavia, it might work. But it isn't.
I presume that you meant "Australians", the plural. This form is common in most dialects of English and admittedly shares the same pronunciation as the possessive in many cases, though not generally the same spelling. Note that it does not have an apostrophe.
As you know, apostrophes in English most commonly mark the omission of a letter. In this case that letter is most likely 'e', and is left over from the Germanic declension system present in Old English but which has since mostly disappeared. Interestingly, the genetive case of Old English evolved into a clitic, meaning that the possessive in Modern English is not a declension.
This announcement has been brought to you by GNAA, the Grammar Nazi Association of American (Australia?).