The solution is easy according to an anonymous physicist. I showed him
the problem and it took him 2 min to do this. He laughed when I told
him this is a multi-billion dollar cipher system.
If (no. of eqns.) >= (no. of variables), the equations are
solvable.
Apparently any 1st year maths student can do this. This is not the
best method however and using a matrix to solve for lambda is the best
way, so he says. By the way it took me about 2 hours brute forcing it
by logical trial and error using pen and paper.
The best way to learn a language is to use it. The easiest way is to
make Japanese friends or actually live there. This can be difficult
for some people who prefer to do things alone, however. From what
I have read I think the grandparent falls into the latter category.
I can't really speak from the same perspective because Japanese is
something that came to me naturally. Though I can speak from my
experience when I was learning Korean and Mandarin. Perhaps like the grandparent,
I fell into the tegory who do things alone. Though remember
that this is doing things the hard way. It has its benefits but learning Japanese will be at a much slower rate than otherwise. I found both
Korean and Mandarin hard at first until I actually sat down and made an
effort to learn them. It took a lot of academic discipline. One of the
things that made a huge difference though was a cassette tape based
learning that I used for Mandarin. Also learning whole phrases by daily
repetition helped. I did have teachers and they were helpful in
steering me in the right direction and pointing out mistakes such
as grammar, but bulk of the learning came from actually practicing the
languages physically by daily repetitions (vocal and writing), speaking,
writing and by translating.
One of the first steps to do is to get some decent beginner level text
books. I saw a few being suggested here in slashdot and they are good
books. Then learn Hiragana (the gojyu-on). Get hold of cassette tapes
or mp3s that pronounces them vertically down the column (a-i-u-e-o)
and a set that pronounces them horizontally (a-ka-sa-ta-na). You
can do this right now on day 1. Practice it vocally each day and
don't stop the daily practice until you get onto the 2nd grade Kanji.
Learn simple phrases from books/online/anime/tapes/whatever and again
practice them. Practice writing Hiragana. The text books should teach
you all the correct strokes. Getting a transparent paper and just
writing over the template given in the book about 10 to 50 times will
improve your calligraphy skills. (This may sound harsh but its a lot less
compared with a calligraphy master that practices a single Kanji 1000
times minimum. As soon as he gets it wrong he starts the counter from
0 and repeats until 1000 consecutive correct forms are written!)
I'd say go for it and keep at it. Keep it motivated and watch anime
and learn those phrases no matter how ridiculous it may sound.
The key is daily practice. Learn like Naruto where he practices
his skills each day to perfection. It will take at least a few years
even at intense learning levels but the rewards are definitely worth it.
This $100 laptop has in its design a way for it to work in a
P2P fashion by acting as frame/packet/both forwarders. (Now will this cause signal loops?) To connect to places outside its
pool all it needs is a single access point that acts as a
router per school/village/block that connects to a copper
wire. Though in this case I'm very worried about effects of
constantly being exposed to source of radiation transmitting
so close to the body.
This $100 laptop would not work universally in all
situations. Though I'm sure there will be places where
something like this would be of much benefit.
In my particular example poverty was caused by war and bad
government. The telecoms expertise was definitely there. The copper wire trunk line infrastructure was there as well.
Even if the infrastructure isn't there, maybe they can
come up with ingenious ways to exchange information. For
example by giving their memory cards to the to the teacher on
his visit to the city and let him download information
for them.
This thing isn't just a normal laptop like a replacement for a
typewriter. Its got some wifi capability. In other words you
can call this a Short Distance Packet Radio Transceiver Digital
Data or whatever...
Throughout history radios have proven to be of enormous value.
Extreme of these cases are warfare. Its been proven time and
time again that radios improve the way people do things.
I'm sure with a bit of mod these things could have a module
for voice communication. Then all you need is somebody clever
that could provide trunk links between pools of wifi
communities.
I have personally been to a situation where laptops like this
would have been of enormous value. I've been to this place
where the locals didn't have continuous electricity or even
clean water. There were a lot of aid agencies operating there.
The adults were poor and stank a lot and looked like they only had
one set of clothing to wear (although many of them were highly
educated). The kids on the other hand were different. They had
clean clothing to wear and even uniforms, rucksacks (probably filled
with books and stationary) and looked better fed (thanks to aid
agencies?). One thing they didn't have was access to computers. There
were computer shops dotted around but there was no way ordinary locals
would be able to afford these. Most of their customers were foreigners
sent to help them. Now a laptop like this would have certainly helped
a lot, especially those kids. They seemed to show a keen interest in
technology, too. I remember when I opened up my laptop
(running SuSE by the way) on a lay-by. These locals were staring at
it in fascination where normally they would give us bitter looks or
even spit in the ground on one occasion.
At the least I see this situation as a geek helping other not so
fortunate geeks. If it helps non-geeks then that would be a bonus.
There was no link anywhere on the live.com main page that leads to a tutorial of searching syntax. On experimentation
though, it did have similarities with Google search syntax.
I've tried the following with success:
" - " negation
" OR " either or
" AND " and
" site:{URL} " search within this site
Using "site:live.com" gave me some interesting results.
The UI is quite innovative. Though I highly doubt I would be using it much, as it would force the usage of Javascript.
It broke in less than 5 minutes. The site had to be restarted with a new tab when it crashed. It happened when the back button was pressed on the image search. The local search was a disaster. Deer Park couldn't render it properly and the map was spilling out all over the place.
Overall it seemed to survive the slashdot effect (Netcraft says it runs on IIS). It does what it says on the tin, a search engine. Its buggy and its slow but it did find the things I was looking for in about 10 min of usage (Apart from the help on searching syntax.). Also it has at least has some crude advanced searching syntax. However its not something that I would use heavily.
Though I have to wonder if we're talking about the same Wizardry game. The one I
'm thinking of [wikipedia.org] came out in 1981, not 1987
The Japanese version is a port of the original version. During the late 80s it was ported to
PC98 series (Sorry its Japanese.) by company called ASCII (Which owns Famitsu by the way). It came in 5" floppy and you had to abuse the silver write protect sticker so the characters don't get erased if things went wrong. The ported version had the same line art maze but the graphics for the characters and loot were much improved. They became more intricate and colourful with finer pixels and better fonts. Its style was kinda like a mixture of John Howe
and anime. The main maze window was located in the middle of the screen just like the x86 version. The modifications made it much more immersive compared with the x86 version and had a more mature feel to it.
Later on Wizardry was ported to MSX and NES in 1987. I can't really
confirm the version for NES as I don't recall it ever being released.
The one I played on SNES had beautiful BGM, added castle and town
graphics and walls were filled with patters resembling the style of Wizardry
6.
Typically Japanese gamers don't just go for the gameplay. Characters,
style, packaging, storyline and anime is important as well as peripheral
franchise products such as magazines, novels, comics, figurines etc.
Wizardry is no exception. If the Apple ][ version had been ported as it
was it wouldn't have so successful in Japan.
One of my all time favouries is Hydlide because this was what
started the genre called action RPGs but this is not on the charts.
Probably because it was never released for NES or SNES. My next
favourite is action RPG called Ys which is at No. 52. I played both
books 1 and 2 (PC88 version) when it came out in the late 80s. It made such an
impression on me (Just like when Aerith died in FF7.) that it still
haunts/curses me to this day.
It really does not make any sense at all for anybody in a developer position to complain about the kernel being bloated when it can be pruned to suite their needs. If I were to take the article at face value it means Sam Greenblatt is a complete moro^H^H^H^H purist who thinks along the lines of 640K ought to be enough for everyone. I wouldn't like to think
of him that way because if thats true the implications would be far ominous than I could imagine.
So I'm guessing the real agenda is hidden between the words. I have several possible lines that makes sense.
!! Warning !!
What follows are wild speculations.
Use your own judgement on this.
CA might be wanting to change how the kernel is distributed and about who
is going to pay for it. In other words CA wants to pass on the buck onto Linus to produce a server branch and a desktop branch of the kernel, because they don't want to hire an extra worker to do the job. Hence their gripe.
Or
I got this idea from this quote from TFA.
But CA's Greenblatt disagreed, saying that other virtualization technologies, such as one from VMware Inc., in Palo Alto, Calif., currently fill the virtualization role.
For some unknown reason CA don't want to have Xen embedded into the kernel. Not because of the bloat. Remember the kernel can be pruned. Also its assumed in this case hiring an extra hand isn't a problem. Maybe
Greenblatt has a friend working at VMware.
Or
This is a promotion for Xen meant to improve its awareness amongst the community. disguised as a a controversial statement.
I did a word count on the two portions of the article. First half of the article about bloated kernel and the second half of the article about Xen. The results are quite revealing.
$ wc -c first_half
1621
$ wc -c second_half
2030
OMG! more than half the article is about Xen!
Not that its a bad thing to promote Xen. I actually like it. Although I don't think a good software needs to do any kind of covert promotion to be particularly popular.
Anybody else have a better explanation that makes sense?
BTW my kernel is just over 2 Megs on Gentoo.
$ du -h kernel*
2.1M kernel-2.6.11-hardened-r1
All is not lost. You can't speak Japanese but fortunately you have two bilingual assistants. Both of them are going to be useful.
Stick to coding and leave the translation to the translators. However make their job easier by prioritising what needs to be translated first ie. GUI. Also make sure the template that needs to be translated is kept concise, neat, and easily understood.
With regards to above, expect your translators to really screw up your source code. So be ready for some emergency debugging.
Learn Japanese customs and its cultures. Learn simple polite greetings and etiquettes. This is important. Eg. CmdrTacosan, bowing, being polite etc. Also the Japanese may like to see you working slightly longer and a bit harder than the rest of your team. Don't forget there are slight regional variations.
Lastly don't forget that your main job is to be a project leader. Don't let the enormity of the task lead you astray.
IANAGOC (I am not a guru of cryptology). I think what this means is that you can tell a skimpy clad up-for-it busty prime number from a mile away. Traditionally you had to weigh, measure, calculate etc to tell if a prime was really a hot young chick and not a result of 10 pints of alycyhol. Now just by looking at what congruence each number gives you can judge whether its a prime or not. (I can't say for certain because the article is short on details of what these patterns are.)
I don't really know what method of cryptanalysis is used for breaking the RSA, but suppose if you can weed out the non-prime numbers you can drastically reduce the amount of calculations needed.
If you know better and think I'm wrong please do correct me and join in the discussion before any damage is done.
If any of you are wondering what the Japanese site is talking about, here is a
crude transation.
It has been 16 years since "AKIRA", the latest theatrical anime by
the world renowed creator Otomo Katsuhiro
has finally arrived! Took 9 years in making and a budget of
2.4 billion Yen (23 billion US dollars). Epic story "Steam Boy" is a hard-core blood-boiling fantasy-science-adventure-action-drama the world has been waiting for.
The stage is 19th century England. The time when steam engine began
to dominate the industry. Now a freak discovery which brings together
the advance of science and the ambitions of mankind is about to be
born.
One day a boy born in a family of inventors called Ray is given
a mysterious metallic sphere by his grandfather.
At that instant Ray would become embroiled in a horrifying intrigue and
adventure. This metallic sphere is the freak discovery called steamball.
It is full of energy that has never been seen before. Is this great dicovery a
miracle that would bring happiness
or is this the work of the devil? Relentless pursuits by a vast organisation wanting to possess the steamball. The conflicts between
Ray's father Eddie and Lloyd the grandfather flare up over their
differences of beliefs on ideals of science. Then there is Scarlett,
the daughter of an extreamly wealthy family, who appears before Ray.
Various characters interwine and take the story to a climax never
before seen.
This work gives a feeling as if entering a world of paintings, aiming
to be an appealing nostalgic adventure film. Written with
overwhelming amout of craftsmanship using 18000 cells, drawn
elaborately with both digital and hand illustrations.
The constant pursuit and evasion. Steam mecha that appear in air,
sea and land. The many exciting adventures. It is an ultimate film
that has everything of
animator, manga writer, and film director Otomo Katsuhiro. This is
"Steamboy". Cutting edge but at the same time nostalgic and full of
surprises is the new Otomo world. Coming to you soon.
No you are right on this one. Its not really community based and I am no fan of commercial distros, but the question is how much are they going to give back to the community. I believe CJK support has a lot to catch up on compared with the rest of FOSS projects. So much so that anything is better than nothing.
In the CJK world there aren't enough i10n developers for the amount of work that needs to be done. (Yes there are some exceptions like Mozilla that is lucky enough to have whole teams of active i10n developers.) I'm hoping that this would at least contribute to make more resources availble for the CJK development as a whole. Make available more translated documentation, CJK compatible packages, and truly pre-configured one-click-to-CJK distributions.
Also its a good way to let people in CJK countries know there is a better alternative out there. I feel optimistic and believe that FOSS awareness is improving. Though not all of them are equally bad there is still a lot to be desired. For instance many popular web sites in Japan still use commercial-consumer-centric-OS's Shift-JIS character encoding despite availability of UTF-8 and ISO-2022-JP.
Blogs are a good place to nurture the next generation of writers. The writing styles of bloggers may be of lower quality in a classical sense at present. However this does not mean that bloggers will never adopt such styles or techniques. Nor does it mean bloggers will not improve their writing with time. I'm sure Shakespeare did not start blurting out poetry as soon as he was born. Similarly I doubt the Bronte sisters could have become good writers without writing for fun when they were young. I think we will start seeing some exceptional writers emerging as a result of blogging.
Michael Gorman says in TFA that he doubts many bloggers are "in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts." To me this is an unfair comment. Gorman attributes the poor writing skills and undisciplined techniques of bloggers to poor reading skills. I differ on this point. Poor writing skills does not equate to poor reading skills nor intellectual capacity as shown by postings on Slashdot! Blogs aren't a formal medium for communication. As a result there is no requirement for a blogger to adhere to a disciplined style of writing. Also as consumers most of us are brought up to be readers but not necessarily writers. So it will take some time before bloggers adjust to being writers.
The best way to be a good writer is to actually practice writing something. Blogs are a fun way for people to do just that.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like whats been proven is that a doughnut != sphere.
The solution is easy according to an anonymous physicist. I showed him the problem and it took him 2 min to do this. He laughed when I told him this is a multi-billion dollar cipher system.
Apparently any 1st year maths student can do this. This is not the best method however and using a matrix to solve for lambda is the best way, so he says. By the way it took me about 2 hours brute forcing it by logical trial and error using pen and paper.
What about TicS ?
The best way to learn a language is to use it. The easiest way is to make Japanese friends or actually live there. This can be difficult for some people who prefer to do things alone, however. From what I have read I think the grandparent falls into the latter category.
I can't really speak from the same perspective because Japanese is something that came to me naturally. Though I can speak from my experience when I was learning Korean and Mandarin. Perhaps like the grandparent, I fell into the tegory who do things alone. Though remember that this is doing things the hard way. It has its benefits but learning Japanese will be at a much slower rate than otherwise. I found both Korean and Mandarin hard at first until I actually sat down and made an effort to learn them. It took a lot of academic discipline. One of the things that made a huge difference though was a cassette tape based learning that I used for Mandarin. Also learning whole phrases by daily repetition helped. I did have teachers and they were helpful in steering me in the right direction and pointing out mistakes such as grammar, but bulk of the learning came from actually practicing the languages physically by daily repetitions (vocal and writing), speaking, writing and by translating.
One of the first steps to do is to get some decent beginner level text books. I saw a few being suggested here in slashdot and they are good books. Then learn Hiragana (the gojyu-on). Get hold of cassette tapes or mp3s that pronounces them vertically down the column (a-i-u-e-o) and a set that pronounces them horizontally (a-ka-sa-ta-na). You can do this right now on day 1. Practice it vocally each day and don't stop the daily practice until you get onto the 2nd grade Kanji. Learn simple phrases from books/online/anime/tapes/whatever and again practice them. Practice writing Hiragana. The text books should teach you all the correct strokes. Getting a transparent paper and just writing over the template given in the book about 10 to 50 times will improve your calligraphy skills. (This may sound harsh but its a lot less compared with a calligraphy master that practices a single Kanji 1000 times minimum. As soon as he gets it wrong he starts the counter from 0 and repeats until 1000 consecutive correct forms are written!)
I'd say go for it and keep at it. Keep it motivated and watch anime and learn those phrases no matter how ridiculous it may sound. The key is daily practice. Learn like Naruto where he practices his skills each day to perfection. It will take at least a few years even at intense learning levels but the rewards are definitely worth it.
This $100 laptop has in its design a way for it to work in a P2P fashion by acting as frame/packet/both forwarders. (Now will this cause signal loops?) To connect to places outside its pool all it needs is a single access point that acts as a router per school/village/block that connects to a copper wire. Though in this case I'm very worried about effects of constantly being exposed to source of radiation transmitting so close to the body.
This $100 laptop would not work universally in all situations. Though I'm sure there will be places where something like this would be of much benefit.
In my particular example poverty was caused by war and bad government. The telecoms expertise was definitely there. The copper wire trunk line infrastructure was there as well.
Even if the infrastructure isn't there, maybe they can come up with ingenious ways to exchange information. For example by giving their memory cards to the to the teacher on his visit to the city and let him download information for them.
This thing isn't just a normal laptop like a replacement for a typewriter. Its got some wifi capability. In other words you can call this a Short Distance Packet Radio Transceiver Digital Data or whatever...
Throughout history radios have proven to be of enormous value. Extreme of these cases are warfare. Its been proven time and time again that radios improve the way people do things. I'm sure with a bit of mod these things could have a module for voice communication. Then all you need is somebody clever that could provide trunk links between pools of wifi communities.
I have personally been to a situation where laptops like this would have been of enormous value. I've been to this place where the locals didn't have continuous electricity or even clean water. There were a lot of aid agencies operating there. The adults were poor and stank a lot and looked like they only had one set of clothing to wear (although many of them were highly educated). The kids on the other hand were different. They had clean clothing to wear and even uniforms, rucksacks (probably filled with books and stationary) and looked better fed (thanks to aid agencies?). One thing they didn't have was access to computers. There were computer shops dotted around but there was no way ordinary locals would be able to afford these. Most of their customers were foreigners sent to help them. Now a laptop like this would have certainly helped a lot, especially those kids. They seemed to show a keen interest in technology, too. I remember when I opened up my laptop (running SuSE by the way) on a lay-by. These locals were staring at it in fascination where normally they would give us bitter looks or even spit in the ground on one occasion.
At the least I see this situation as a geek helping other not so fortunate geeks. If it helps non-geeks then that would be a bonus.
There was no link anywhere on the live.com main page that leads to a tutorial of searching syntax. On experimentation though, it did have similarities with Google search syntax. I've tried the following with success:
Using "site:live.com" gave me some interesting results.
The UI is quite innovative. Though I highly doubt I would be using it much, as it would force the usage of Javascript. It broke in less than 5 minutes. The site had to be restarted with a new tab when it crashed. It happened when the back button was pressed on the image search. The local search was a disaster. Deer Park couldn't render it properly and the map was spilling out all over the place.
Overall it seemed to survive the slashdot effect (Netcraft says it runs on IIS). It does what it says on the tin, a search engine. Its buggy and its slow but it did find the things I was looking for in about 10 min of usage (Apart from the help on searching syntax.). Also it has at least has some crude advanced searching syntax. However its not something that I would use heavily.
The Japanese version is a port of the original version. During the late 80s it was ported to PC98 series (Sorry its Japanese.) by company called ASCII (Which owns Famitsu by the way). It came in 5" floppy and you had to abuse the silver write protect sticker so the characters don't get erased if things went wrong. The ported version had the same line art maze but the graphics for the characters and loot were much improved. They became more intricate and colourful with finer pixels and better fonts. Its style was kinda like a mixture of John Howe and anime. The main maze window was located in the middle of the screen just like the x86 version. The modifications made it much more immersive compared with the x86 version and had a more mature feel to it.
Later on Wizardry was ported to MSX and NES in 1987. I can't really confirm the version for NES as I don't recall it ever being released. The one I played on SNES had beautiful BGM, added castle and town graphics and walls were filled with patters resembling the style of Wizardry 6.
Typically Japanese gamers don't just go for the gameplay. Characters, style, packaging, storyline and anime is important as well as peripheral franchise products such as magazines, novels, comics, figurines etc. Wizardry is no exception. If the Apple ][ version had been ported as it was it wouldn't have so successful in Japan.
One of my all time favouries is Hydlide because this was what started the genre called action RPGs but this is not on the charts. Probably because it was never released for NES or SNES. My next favourite is action RPG called Ys which is at No. 52. I played both books 1 and 2 (PC88 version) when it came out in the late 80s. It made such an impression on me (Just like when Aerith died in FF7.) that it still haunts/curses me to this day.
It really does not make any sense at all for anybody in a developer position to complain about the kernel being bloated when it can be pruned to suite their needs. If I were to take the article at face value it means Sam Greenblatt is a complete moro^H^H^H^H purist who thinks along the lines of 640K ought to be enough for everyone. I wouldn't like to think of him that way because if thats true the implications would be far ominous than I could imagine.
So I'm guessing the real agenda is hidden between the words. I have several possible lines that makes sense.
!! Warning !!
What follows are wild speculations.
Use your own judgement on this.
CA might be wanting to change how the kernel is distributed and about who is going to pay for it. In other words CA wants to pass on the buck onto Linus to produce a server branch and a desktop branch of the kernel, because they don't want to hire an extra worker to do the job. Hence their gripe.
Or
I got this idea from this quote from TFA.
For some unknown reason CA don't want to have Xen embedded into the kernel. Not because of the bloat. Remember the kernel can be pruned. Also its assumed in this case hiring an extra hand isn't a problem. Maybe Greenblatt has a friend working at VMware.
Or
This is a promotion for Xen meant to improve its awareness amongst the community. disguised as a a controversial statement.
I did a word count on the two portions of the article. First half of the article about bloated kernel and the second half of the article about Xen. The results are quite revealing.
$ wc -c first_half
1621
$ wc -c second_half
2030
OMG! more than half the article is about Xen!
Not that its a bad thing to promote Xen. I actually like it. Although I don't think a good software needs to do any kind of covert promotion to be particularly popular.
Anybody else have a better explanation that makes sense?
BTW my kernel is just over 2 Megs on Gentoo.
$ du -h kernel*
2.1M kernel-2.6.11-hardened-r1
All is not lost. You can't speak Japanese but fortunately you have two bilingual assistants. Both of them are going to be useful.
Stick to coding and leave the translation to the translators. However make their job easier by prioritising what needs to be translated first ie. GUI. Also make sure the template that needs to be translated is kept concise, neat, and easily understood.
With regards to above, expect your translators to really screw up your source code. So be ready for some emergency debugging.
Learn Japanese customs and its cultures. Learn simple polite greetings and etiquettes. This is important. Eg. CmdrTacosan, bowing, being polite etc. Also the Japanese may like to see you working slightly longer and a bit harder than the rest of your team. Don't forget there are slight regional variations.
Lastly don't forget that your main job is to be a project leader. Don't let the enormity of the task lead you astray.
IANAGOC (I am not a guru of cryptology). I think what this means is that you can tell a skimpy clad up-for-it busty prime number from a mile away. Traditionally you had to weigh, measure, calculate etc to tell if a prime was really a hot young chick and not a result of 10 pints of alycyhol. Now just by looking at what congruence each number gives you can judge whether its a prime or not. (I can't say for certain because the article is short on details of what these patterns are.)
I don't really know what method of cryptanalysis is used for breaking the RSA, but suppose if you can weed out the non-prime numbers you can drastically reduce the amount of calculations needed.
If you know better and think I'm wrong please do correct me and join in the discussion before any damage is done.
If any of you are wondering what the Japanese site is talking about, here is a crude transation.
It has been 16 years since "AKIRA", the latest theatrical anime by the world renowed creator Otomo Katsuhiro has finally arrived! Took 9 years in making and a budget of 2.4 billion Yen (23 billion US dollars). Epic story "Steam Boy" is a hard-core blood-boiling fantasy-science-adventure-action-drama the world has been waiting for.
The stage is 19th century England. The time when steam engine began to dominate the industry. Now a freak discovery which brings together the advance of science and the ambitions of mankind is about to be born.
One day a boy born in a family of inventors called Ray is given a mysterious metallic sphere by his grandfather. At that instant Ray would become embroiled in a horrifying intrigue and adventure. This metallic sphere is the freak discovery called steamball. It is full of energy that has never been seen before. Is this great dicovery a miracle that would bring happiness or is this the work of the devil? Relentless pursuits by a vast organisation wanting to possess the steamball. The conflicts between Ray's father Eddie and Lloyd the grandfather flare up over their differences of beliefs on ideals of science. Then there is Scarlett, the daughter of an extreamly wealthy family, who appears before Ray. Various characters interwine and take the story to a climax never before seen.
This work gives a feeling as if entering a world of paintings, aiming to be an appealing nostalgic adventure film. Written with overwhelming amout of craftsmanship using 18000 cells, drawn elaborately with both digital and hand illustrations. The constant pursuit and evasion. Steam mecha that appear in air, sea and land. The many exciting adventures. It is an ultimate film that has everything of animator, manga writer, and film director Otomo Katsuhiro. This is "Steamboy". Cutting edge but at the same time nostalgic and full of surprises is the new Otomo world. Coming to you soon.
No you are right on this one. Its not really community based and I am no fan of commercial distros, but the question is how much are they going to give back to the community. I believe CJK support has a lot to catch up on compared with the rest of FOSS projects. So much so that anything is better than nothing.
In the CJK world there aren't enough i10n developers for the amount of work that needs to be done. (Yes there are some exceptions like Mozilla that is lucky enough to have whole teams of active i10n developers.) I'm hoping that this would at least contribute to make more resources availble for the CJK development as a whole. Make available more translated documentation, CJK compatible packages, and truly pre-configured one-click-to-CJK distributions.
Also its a good way to let people in CJK countries know there is a better alternative out there. I feel optimistic and believe that FOSS awareness is improving. Though not all of them are equally bad there is still a lot to be desired. For instance many popular web sites in Japan still use commercial-consumer-centric-OS's Shift-JIS character encoding despite availability of UTF-8 and ISO-2022-JP.
Blogs are a good place to nurture the next generation of writers. The writing styles of bloggers may be of lower quality in a classical sense at present. However this does not mean that bloggers will never adopt such styles or techniques. Nor does it mean bloggers will not improve their writing with time. I'm sure Shakespeare did not start blurting out poetry as soon as he was born. Similarly I doubt the Bronte sisters could have become good writers without writing for fun when they were young. I think we will start seeing some exceptional writers emerging as a result of blogging.
Michael Gorman says in TFA that he doubts many bloggers are "in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts." To me this is an unfair comment. Gorman attributes the poor writing skills and undisciplined techniques of bloggers to poor reading skills. I differ on this point. Poor writing skills does not equate to poor reading skills nor intellectual capacity as shown by postings on Slashdot! Blogs aren't a formal medium for communication. As a result there is no requirement for a blogger to adhere to a disciplined style of writing. Also as consumers most of us are brought up to be readers but not necessarily writers. So it will take some time before bloggers adjust to being writers.
The best way to be a good writer is to actually practice writing something. Blogs are a fun way for people to do just that.