developing a local file system is nice, and i'm glad people are working on it. but what's much more interesting to me - and i think more generally useful - would be a better protocol for talking to said file systems. VFS is better than the more direct stuff that predates it, but it's still a nightmare. 9P, the file system protocol in Plan 9, is wonderful to work with. if we could get a better way to talk to file systems, doing work on file systems would become much, much easier.
the likely side effect of user-level file systems would be a huge win for the system as a whole. loopback NFS? ick.
9P patches have existed for BSD at various points. it's not hard, and it'd be a big win.
...any highly-specific FS introduced to date has been a huge flop.
i call bull. specialized file systems have been a huge success. lots of commercial database applications use specialized file systems to achieve peak performance. google's published a very interesting paper on the design of their custom file system. these things are only a "flop" in that they don't take over the world - but that's not their goal! they're specialized.
Is "modern" music that which is envisioned by the likes of Corgan, where expression is free in it's entirety, or is it that which rakes in the cash?
this is a stupid false distinction. first of all, the quality of music (like art and code) is not related to whether you try to give it away or not. second, U2 (giving them the benefit of the doubt for the moment in assuming this isn't just a publicity stunt) is endorsing modern music (or at least modern music distribution, which seems to have somehow gotten conjoined by folks like you and the Pumpkins) by saying they don't want the online version - the "modern" version - to be stuck with a crap, lower-quality version than would eventually come out in stores, and they don't want to relegate fans who'd get music that way to said bad quality. instead, they're looking to make sure that people who want to get the tracks online have a way to do so without compromising on quality. they fact that they (and the RIAA, sadly) make money off it is irrelevant to the above.
or, wait... is that only information that isn't about you? public space surveillance? big friggin' deal. like in most every case, what's important is who can get the info, and what they do with it. the FOIA or something similar better cover these laws, for example. that's a fight worth fighting.
1) i'd have accepted your first assertion if you'd said "most" instead of "almost all". take a walk through some of the country's larger chinatowns, for starters. beyond that, you're forgetting the original post's argument: that geography somehow inhibits americans' learning another language. your point doesn't impact my issue with that argument.
2 + 3) just for kicks, i went to expidia and asked for a flight from Kansas (you didn't say where you lived, and Kansas was the first thing that came to mind for "the middle of nowhere") to Quito, for about 10 days. Continental does if for $599, 8hr on the dot (7hr 27min return). this was my first shhot. to be fair, now that i'm writing this it occurs to me that things are probably worse from, say, South Dakota, but the rationale in the grandparent is pretty thin, especially as an excuse for americans as a whole.
4) Total agreement. but school-fluent gets you real-world conversational, at least, in all the languages i know real-world fluent non-english speakers in (that's quite a few).
6) can i assume this is unrelated to my #6? if not, i'm now quite confused.
So, this leads to a problem, how to communicate with the world. We all have different native languages. Well there has been, and is, a solution.
this is false. the problem as stated - how to communicate with the world - is not solved by the speaker using English, nor any other given language. it is, most likely, an intractable problem. it likely gives you the best approximation currently available, but that's a very different statement.
being able to do business in the local language is a huge advantage. i work for a company with customers in a few dozen countries, and six continents (no mobile phone providers based in Antarctica, as far as we know). language skills are a - if not the - primary hiring criteria. we've had a number of customers tell us that they stay with us even when we mess up because our competition doesn't have staff that speaks their language well. if you go in assuming you can do business in english, just because everyone involved understands it, you're gonna get eaten. every large company understands the value of local knowledge, language being the most important point.
also, on your "english is the international second language" point. i recently got to travel to Prague, in the Czech Republic. it was really interesting being in a place where the most common second language wasn't english, but german. english and french (thanks to the russians) showed up with pretty much equal frequency after that.
1) if you have to fly somewhere to hear a different language, you don't live on either coast, in a city, in any state along our southern border or much of our northern one, nor within driving distance of same.
2) if it costs you >$700 to get somewhere on a plane where they speak a different language, you need a new airline. i've taken trips to central/south american and western european countries with lower round-trip cost than that. recently.
3) same with transit time. unless you're flying by hot air balloon, getting from any major US airport to brazil is well under 24 hours. getting to japan doesn't take that long.
4) why do you believe you need to go where the language you'd like to learn to speak is the "national language" (when such a thing exists) to learn it? growing up, my parents had a housekeeper. she and her family were portuguese. were i interested (and less lazy), i could have learned all the portuguese i needed from them. i have friends who were fluent in spanish before ever going to a spanish-speaking country. we have this thing called "school". check it out, it's neat.
5) even assuming you justify not speaking another language (and you needn't actually try very hard - "i don't care" or "i can't be bothered" is actually fine justification if you live in a primarily mono-lingual community), the original post was about the expectation that people in other countries speak english. first time i was in a spanish-speaking community for a few days, i quickly learned how to say "i'm sorry, i don't speak spanish" and "do you speak english?".
6) you don't "land" if you're driving.
as an aside, we went on vacation with the above-mentioned portuguese family once, to their family home in portugal. amazing trip. they stayed longer than us, and after we left went to a resort on the coast. when i was talking to the kid roughly my age upon his return, he recounted a story about being unable to speak portuguese to the wait staff because they only spoke english. sigh.
(DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs)
wow... how did he manage to get the '80s and '90s off?
or was he working for the company with the three-letter acronym between PARC and HP? he better enjoy his current job while he's got it, because on this trend, he's only got one more employer left (and i have a hard time imagining Alan Kay working for X!).
Given that few of your existing applications will work in Longhorn...
this remains to be seen, and is speculation at this point. keep in mind people were talking about how stupid MS was for giving up compatibility when NT came out, and again when XP was announced. in the NT case, the issues just weren't as big as people expected - most software ran fine - and in the XP case, MS made the system much more compatible than initially expected. most software anyone cared about from the Win95 world ran fine on both NT and XP. not all, but most. there's a lot of time between now and when Longhorn comes out.
...why not learn Linux?
and here's the bigger point. just because the version of Word you've got doesn't run (let's assume that for argument's sake) doesn't mean MS won't have a brand-new, super-spiffy version of Word to sell you. sure, OpenOffice/Koffice/whoever will pick up some converts who don't want to spend the money, but most people'll just go with what they know. much shorter application learning curve.
i think you're right in observing that there's a good opportunity here, but nothings' going to come of it if we rest on the reasoning you've presented. the open source alternatives have a long way to go. i use OpenOffice regularly, but i'm also familiar with current (and old) MS Office versions. i use OOo on principle - i don't want to give MS any money - but i've got no delusions that i'm using an inferior software product as a result.
(i actually think Koffice is much better, and pretty close in quality, but i'm on a mac and the version there is quite buggy)
i think you're right. Hurd was started because of the desire for a free vaguely unix-like OS. linux took care of that. Hurd's architecture was modeled after Plan 9 (except not as good), because Plan 9 wasn't free or open. that's taken care of, too. i'm surprised at how much attention Hurd still gets. just go work on the real things.
I always wanted to mess around the code on a simple, yet an operating system you could DO something with.
i highly recommend you check out Plan 9 and/or Inferno. they both come originally from the same Bell Labs group that originally developed unix. they're extremely well-written, with very good code readability and code size/functionality ratio. for serious study, there's an excellent book (PDF available, but you'll have to search the mailing list archives for details) annotating the source of (a slightly outdated version of) the kernel, in the style of the Lions book. both are under active development, and Inferno's had (limited) commercial uptake. i know at least two universities that have used them in OS courses. seriously tight systems.
Plan 9 also has the "distinction" of being the primary inspiration for Hurd, started because Plan 9 was not then free. Plan 9 and Inferno are now both open source, and Plan 9 is also OSI-style Open Source.
further, there are other instances of solid lines in the original (maintained by the SCO version) that don't indicate common source code. Plan 9, for example, is shown to be a fork off Research Unix v8. at best this is an "inspired by" type of link, as not only is there no code, but the counter-example of "compatibility" doesn't even hold up - they weren't.
i'm also not sure the placement of the fork is accurate - i think it should fork off some time between v9 and v10, but i'm seeking confirmation - but that's not really relevant.
the point is the chart's just being used as a nice visual aid for SCO - the "link" is entirely their own fabrication.
ironically, this is, i think, the big underlying motivation to go (aside from the cash, which is just dumb). people don't want to be a statistic: they don't want to die of heart disease in the 55-65 range, or consume 19 cheeseburgers a month, or whatever tonight's evening news statistic is. people use statistics to try to understand very large numbers, very large sets of data. like incidence of colon cancer in adult males, or depression in middle-aged mothers, or whatever. people don't use statistics to talk about civilian contractor abductions, because you'd be talking about like 0.00001% of the US population, maybe. or 0.1% of the US population in the middle ease (1 in 1000?). people don't use statistics for that because it's rare, and the names stick out, and can stick in your memory.
i must be hallucinating the one on my desk right now. or the one going into our colo today. huh. could be, i guess - they're loud enough to induce mental effects...
Re:Keyboard update suggestions
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
you want an old Sun keyboard. they had two columns of five (six?) keys on the left hand side. i don't remember all of them, but they included at least cut, copy, paste, select, and help.
so, somebody has thought of this. the issue was that less and less apps could be bothered supporting them over time, in the face of the fact that not everyone had one of these keyboards and everyone had key-combination shortcuts. there's also a good reason why they were alternately called the Sun Battleship Keyboard or Sun Aircraft Carrier Keyboard - they were friggin' huge.
Did you just call Mindstorms "childish"? Ohh... you and i are gonna' have words, mate!:-)
i actually got paid for a week to reconstruct a lego clock model without instructions. then another few weeks playing with software for it. it was good times.
The reaction you're seeing isn't about wanting Apple to have a monopoly at all. I own an iPod (which i'm thrilled with), but i don't want them to have a monopoly on mp3 players, either. But the reaction here is based on other things. First, based on nearly everything else they produce, we're all kinda assuming an iPod knock-off made by MS will, well, suck. Second, MS has this nasty habit of trying to dominate and own any market they enter, so this is bad for variety. Apple's got a hit product and an aggressive ad campaign, sure, but they're still well under 50% market share (as of their last published numbers, anyway). Not even close to a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
they are?
can my SGI get in on this action? it's feeling lonely.
i'd invite my Alpha, too, but it ran off years ago with a couple of new-model game consoles. slut.
developing a local file system is nice, and i'm glad people are working on it. but what's much more interesting to me - and i think more generally useful - would be a better protocol for talking to said file systems. VFS is better than the more direct stuff that predates it, but it's still a nightmare. 9P, the file system protocol in Plan 9, is wonderful to work with. if we could get a better way to talk to file systems, doing work on file systems would become much, much easier.
the likely side effect of user-level file systems would be a huge win for the system as a whole. loopback NFS? ick.
9P patches have existed for BSD at various points. it's not hard, and it'd be a big win.
s/god/ken/
ironic?
(please don't sue me!)
woodie guthrie is so trying to climb out of his grave right now.
"Feed me, Seymour!"
Remember, Information wants to be Free!
or, wait... is that only information that isn't about you? public space surveillance? big friggin' deal. like in most every case, what's important is who can get the info, and what they do with it. the FOIA or something similar better cover these laws, for example. that's a fight worth fighting.
1) i'd have accepted your first assertion if you'd said "most" instead of "almost all". take a walk through some of the country's larger chinatowns, for starters. beyond that, you're forgetting the original post's argument: that geography somehow inhibits americans' learning another language. your point doesn't impact my issue with that argument.
2 + 3) just for kicks, i went to expidia and asked for a flight from Kansas (you didn't say where you lived, and Kansas was the first thing that came to mind for "the middle of nowhere") to Quito, for about 10 days. Continental does if for $599, 8hr on the dot (7hr 27min return). this was my first shhot. to be fair, now that i'm writing this it occurs to me that things are probably worse from, say, South Dakota, but the rationale in the grandparent is pretty thin, especially as an excuse for americans as a whole.
4) Total agreement. but school-fluent gets you real-world conversational, at least, in all the languages i know real-world fluent non-english speakers in (that's quite a few).
6) can i assume this is unrelated to my #6? if not, i'm now quite confused.
being able to do business in the local language is a huge advantage. i work for a company with customers in a few dozen countries, and six continents (no mobile phone providers based in Antarctica, as far as we know). language skills are a - if not the - primary hiring criteria. we've had a number of customers tell us that they stay with us even when we mess up because our competition doesn't have staff that speaks their language well. if you go in assuming you can do business in english, just because everyone involved understands it, you're gonna get eaten. every large company understands the value of local knowledge, language being the most important point.
also, on your "english is the international second language" point. i recently got to travel to Prague, in the Czech Republic. it was really interesting being in a place where the most common second language wasn't english, but german. english and french (thanks to the russians) showed up with pretty much equal frequency after that.
1) if you have to fly somewhere to hear a different language, you don't live on either coast, in a city, in any state along our southern border or much of our northern one, nor within driving distance of same.
2) if it costs you >$700 to get somewhere on a plane where they speak a different language, you need a new airline. i've taken trips to central/south american and western european countries with lower round-trip cost than that. recently.
3) same with transit time. unless you're flying by hot air balloon, getting from any major US airport to brazil is well under 24 hours. getting to japan doesn't take that long.
4) why do you believe you need to go where the language you'd like to learn to speak is the "national language" (when such a thing exists) to learn it? growing up, my parents had a housekeeper. she and her family were portuguese. were i interested (and less lazy), i could have learned all the portuguese i needed from them. i have friends who were fluent in spanish before ever going to a spanish-speaking country. we have this thing called "school". check it out, it's neat.
5) even assuming you justify not speaking another language (and you needn't actually try very hard - "i don't care" or "i can't be bothered" is actually fine justification if you live in a primarily mono-lingual community), the original post was about the expectation that people in other countries speak english. first time i was in a spanish-speaking community for a few days, i quickly learned how to say "i'm sorry, i don't speak spanish" and "do you speak english?".
6) you don't "land" if you're driving.
as an aside, we went on vacation with the above-mentioned portuguese family once, to their family home in portugal. amazing trip. they stayed longer than us, and after we left went to a resort on the coast. when i was talking to the kid roughly my age upon his return, he recounted a story about being unable to speak portuguese to the wait staff because they only spoke english. sigh.
or was he working for the company with the three-letter acronym between PARC and HP? he better enjoy his current job while he's got it, because on this trend, he's only got one more employer left (and i have a hard time imagining Alan Kay working for X!).
i think you're right in observing that there's a good opportunity here, but nothings' going to come of it if we rest on the reasoning you've presented. the open source alternatives have a long way to go. i use OpenOffice regularly, but i'm also familiar with current (and old) MS Office versions. i use OOo on principle - i don't want to give MS any money - but i've got no delusions that i'm using an inferior software product as a result.
(i actually think Koffice is much better, and pretty close in quality, but i'm on a mac and the version there is quite buggy)
i think you're right. Hurd was started because of the desire for a free vaguely unix-like OS. linux took care of that. Hurd's architecture was modeled after Plan 9 (except not as good), because Plan 9 wasn't free or open. that's taken care of, too. i'm surprised at how much attention Hurd still gets. just go work on the real things.
Plan 9 also has the "distinction" of being the primary inspiration for Hurd, started because Plan 9 was not then free. Plan 9 and Inferno are now both open source, and Plan 9 is also OSI-style Open Source.
further, there are other instances of solid lines in the original (maintained by the SCO version) that don't indicate common source code. Plan 9, for example, is shown to be a fork off Research Unix v8. at best this is an "inspired by" type of link, as not only is there no code, but the counter-example of "compatibility" doesn't even hold up - they weren't.
i'm also not sure the placement of the fork is accurate - i think it should fork off some time between v9 and v10, but i'm seeking confirmation - but that's not really relevant.
the point is the chart's just being used as a nice visual aid for SCO - the "link" is entirely their own fabrication.
so, yeah: don't be a statistic.
i must be hallucinating the one on my desk right now. or the one going into our colo today. huh. could be, i guess - they're loud enough to induce mental effects...
you want an old Sun keyboard. they had two columns of five (six?) keys on the left hand side. i don't remember all of them, but they included at least cut, copy, paste, select, and help.
so, somebody has thought of this. the issue was that less and less apps could be bothered supporting them over time, in the face of the fact that not everyone had one of these keyboards and everyone had key-combination shortcuts. there's also a good reason why they were alternately called the Sun Battleship Keyboard or Sun Aircraft Carrier Keyboard - they were friggin' huge.
Did you just call Mindstorms "childish"? Ohh... you and i are gonna' have words, mate! :-)
i actually got paid for a week to reconstruct a lego clock model without instructions. then another few weeks playing with software for it. it was good times.
Their doctors tell them to, yeah, but just like on earth, nobody actually does.
The reaction you're seeing isn't about wanting Apple to have a monopoly at all. I own an iPod (which i'm thrilled with), but i don't want them to have a monopoly on mp3 players, either. But the reaction here is based on other things. First, based on nearly everything else they produce, we're all kinda assuming an iPod knock-off made by MS will, well, suck. Second, MS has this nasty habit of trying to dominate and own any market they enter, so this is bad for variety. Apple's got a hit product and an aggressive ad campaign, sure, but they're still well under 50% market share (as of their last published numbers, anyway). Not even close to a monopoly.