I think everyone who's been involved in the creation and evolution (even as a user) of all Open Source software should mark this day in their calendars and celebrate it every year as The Day We Arrived.
This is a historic day--the day the other guy blinked for the first time. The war isn't over by any means, but the enemy can see the way it's going.
Congratulations, everyone.
So people want to understand computers using metaphors from their pre-computer life. Fine.
I have two kids, one is six, the other is three and they have had no pre-computer life. Their threshold for what is 'easy' is amazing. They routinely change Win98 screen resolution and colour depth (to play games that are too dumb to do this for them). They picked this up from just watching me and they've evolved an instinctive understanding of what is hapenning 'inside' the computer when they do this.
A lot of what we are talking about here is going to be stood on it's head when this generation grows up. They're going to want the 'real' world to conform to computer metaphors rather than the other way around.
This would have to be exactly on the equator, so India, Sri Lanka, Singapore or the Phillipines are out. Maybe an artificial island in mid-Atlantic, conveniently close to the US. Surely, if a 50 km. building could be done, a synthetic island shouldn't be too much trouble.
Of course, it need not be close to the US, market-wise. It's awfully presumptuous to assume that in fifty years the US will still be rich enough (or stable enough) to afford or need this. Maybe, when the time comes, the Chinese will get to decide where they want to put their space elevator.
Whether it would need a heat shield or not depends purely on the speed and not on whether it's in free fall and accelerating.
And if the cable were severed at any except a very low altitude, the outer portion wouldn't 'just stay there', it would go spinning out like a slingshot. Read the article, it says clearly that the CG of the entire structure needs to be at GEO, so there would have to be a counterweight 'outside' to achieve this.
Hey! maybe I just invented a new form of space propulsion (build a space elevator, then blow up the cable). Recommend a good patent lawyer, anyone?:)
English is not required in schools in India. (I'm an Indian, schooled in India). It's a different matter that most schools perceived as 'good' not only teach English but also teach everything else like science and arts in English.
This is probably a colonial hangover but clearly a great advantage for those who can afford an English education. There's a strong business and employment bias against those who can't handle English but almost everyone I know would rather learn English and join in rather than struggle to change the world.
One could ignore your not including MySQL and PHP in your insightful list to prove your point of English-speakers inventing the technology, but then you must at least drop Python too.
Oh, and ever heard of this Finnish guy who did something about a Unix-like kernel or something? Some name from the Peanuts comics, I think...
This debate vanishes if you stop and consider the pointlessness of using the word 'dominant' in this context. You are right, a majority of the material on the web will be in English, but for my money, this is the way things will turn out:
A majority of business websites, including those made by Mandarin/Hindi/Spanish speakers will be in English
After-hours/entertainment/'culture' sites will probably follow the population distribution of native speakers of the various languages--Mandarin will probably be the largest eventually.
Please note that I'm a Hindi-speaker living in India. All of my professional life is conducted in English, but just about 20-30% of the entertainment/culture that I consume is in English. And this is more-or-less true of almost everyone I know.
Eric Raymond's typically well-argued Why Python? piece in the May 2000 Linux Journal has this to say about Perl Syntax: Larger project size seemed to magnify some of Perl's annoyances into serious, continuing problems. The syntax that had seemed merely eccentric at a hundred lines began to seem like a nigh-impenetrable hedge of thorns at a thousand. ``More than one way to do it'' lent flavor and expressiveness at a small scale, but made it significantly harder to maintain consistent style across a wider code base. And many of the features that were later patched into Perl to address the complexity-control needs of bigger programs (objects, lexical scoping, ``use strict'', etc.) had a fragile, jerry-rigged feel about them. He makes a strong case for (more or less) abandoning Perl for Python, specially for new programmers. Since the world needs a lot more programmers than there are now, the learning-curve argument is probably the strongest one against Perl (only in a Perl vs. Python context though). Specially when it comes from Eric Raymond!
Heard of Chechenya, Mr. Belits? And I'm not even mentioning Czecho, Hungary and everything else since those were the adventures of a different country. Chechenya, however, is happening right now.
Anyway, that's not the point. One would expect The Slashdot Culture to be as intolerant of (all) overlarge and/or overpowerful countries as it is of overlarge and overpowerful software companies.
Curiously, that doesn't appear to be the case. Maybe, that's because once you swap software companies with countries, Slashdot's predominantly American population is roughly in the same position as Microsoft employees are in any debate about the software industry.
Supposedly, Amex's backend looks out for a very small ($1-2) purchase followed immediately by a very large one. Card fraudsters do a test run with a small purchase and scale it up if it works. Someone caught doing a tiny heist could talk their way out of it. I seem to remember reading in some Fortune-type magazine that this pattern was first detected by a neural net but maybe that was just hype.
Buy an Alcatel. You can pop out the battery pack and replace it with AA alkalines. Wonder why every phone maker (and notebook maker) doesn't do this simple thing. I've kept my Alcatel going on alkalines for days on off-the-track trips.
Slashdot Mirror
I think everyone who's been involved in the creation and evolution (even as a user) of all Open Source software should mark this day in their calendars and celebrate it every year as The Day We Arrived. This is a historic day--the day the other guy blinked for the first time. The war isn't over by any means, but the enemy can see the way it's going. Congratulations, everyone.
So people want to understand computers using metaphors from their pre-computer life. Fine. I have two kids, one is six, the other is three and they have had no pre-computer life. Their threshold for what is 'easy' is amazing. They routinely change Win98 screen resolution and colour depth (to play games that are too dumb to do this for them). They picked this up from just watching me and they've evolved an instinctive understanding of what is hapenning 'inside' the computer when they do this. A lot of what we are talking about here is going to be stood on it's head when this generation grows up. They're going to want the 'real' world to conform to computer metaphors rather than the other way around.
This would have to be exactly on the equator, so India, Sri Lanka, Singapore or the Phillipines are out. Maybe an artificial island in mid-Atlantic, conveniently close to the US. Surely, if a 50 km. building could be done, a synthetic island shouldn't be too much trouble. Of course, it need not be close to the US, market-wise. It's awfully presumptuous to assume that in fifty years the US will still be rich enough (or stable enough) to afford or need this. Maybe, when the time comes, the Chinese will get to decide where they want to put their space elevator.
Whether it would need a heat shield or not depends purely on the speed and not on whether it's in free fall and accelerating. And if the cable were severed at any except a very low altitude, the outer portion wouldn't 'just stay there', it would go spinning out like a slingshot. Read the article, it says clearly that the CG of the entire structure needs to be at GEO, so there would have to be a counterweight 'outside' to achieve this. Hey! maybe I just invented a new form of space propulsion (build a space elevator, then blow up the cable). Recommend a good patent lawyer, anyone?:)
English is not required in schools in India. (I'm an Indian, schooled in India). It's a different matter that most schools perceived as 'good' not only teach English but also teach everything else like science and arts in English. This is probably a colonial hangover but clearly a great advantage for those who can afford an English education. There's a strong business and employment bias against those who can't handle English but almost everyone I know would rather learn English and join in rather than struggle to change the world.
One could ignore your not including MySQL and PHP in your insightful list to prove your point of English-speakers inventing the technology, but then you must at least drop Python too. Oh, and ever heard of this Finnish guy who did something about a Unix-like kernel or something? Some name from the Peanuts comics, I think...
- A majority of business websites, including those made by Mandarin/Hindi/Spanish speakers will be in English
- After-hours/entertainment/'culture' sites will probably follow the population distribution of native speakers of the various languages--Mandarin will probably be the largest eventually.
Please note that I'm a Hindi-speaker living in India. All of my professional life is conducted in English, but just about 20-30% of the entertainment/culture that I consume is in English. And this is more-or-less true of almost everyone I know.Eric Raymond's typically well-argued Why Python? piece in the May 2000 Linux Journal has this to say about Perl Syntax: Larger project size seemed to magnify some of Perl's annoyances into serious, continuing problems. The syntax that had seemed merely eccentric at a hundred lines began to seem like a nigh-impenetrable hedge of thorns at a thousand. ``More than one way to do it'' lent flavor and expressiveness at a small scale, but made it significantly harder to maintain consistent style across a wider code base. And many of the features that were later patched into Perl to address the complexity-control needs of bigger programs (objects, lexical scoping, ``use strict'', etc.) had a fragile, jerry-rigged feel about them. He makes a strong case for (more or less) abandoning Perl for Python, specially for new programmers. Since the world needs a lot more programmers than there are now, the learning-curve argument is probably the strongest one against Perl (only in a Perl vs. Python context though). Specially when it comes from Eric Raymond!
Anyway, that's not the point. One would expect The Slashdot Culture to be as intolerant of (all) overlarge and/or overpowerful countries as it is of overlarge and overpowerful software companies.
Curiously, that doesn't appear to be the case. Maybe, that's because once you swap software companies with countries, Slashdot's predominantly American population is roughly in the same position as Microsoft employees are in any debate about the software industry.
Supposedly, Amex's backend looks out for a very small ($1-2) purchase followed immediately by a very large one. Card fraudsters do a test run with a small purchase and scale it up if it works. Someone caught doing a tiny heist could talk their way out of it. I seem to remember reading in some Fortune-type magazine that this pattern was first detected by a neural net but maybe that was just hype.
Buy an Alcatel. You can pop out the battery pack and replace it with AA alkalines. Wonder why every phone maker (and notebook maker) doesn't do this simple thing. I've kept my Alcatel going on alkalines for days on off-the-track trips.