While I do want defragmentation of technical and scientific research (imagine the duplication that occurs given that lack of a unified scientific research dependency tree), I specifically qualified myself with "...as a second language." A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck, not to mention probably a dozen generations in the future before it would happen. But realistically the future global language of Earth is probably going to be Arabic, Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. I can't remember to attribute this quote/sentiment accurately but here it goes... "The war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers..." I also can't speak to the accuracy of the claims in the following link, but they are thought provoking and worth a watch/read. http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-eu...
> "A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck"
Diversity is great, but a world in which everyone can fluently converse with everyone else would be the exact opposite of boring. In fact, I would say that this sort of universal communication would be great because diversity is great; it would allow all of those different cultures to share their cultures with others, with greater ease.
Of course the best of both worlds is a world where everyone is multilingual, with everyone sharing at least one language with every other person. I think this is more likely than a world in which Arabic is the universal language. I think that the increasing coverage and accuracy of machine translation will create a synthetic/"soft" version of the universally multilingual scenario. Right now machine translation is still fairly shit (although still serviceable!), but I don't think that will be the case in 50 years.
I would love a world where most people can communicate with everybody regardless of "native" tongue and that would prolly lead to a new golden era of mankind in creative and humanitarian areas. Not so much in science I suppose. They already talk to each other fine. The trend certainly seems to be english taking over. Which is fine since it is such an expressive language beatutiful in ways. All other major langs will probably remain and you guys will look kind of silly only knowing the "global" language but in time latin american culture will catch up with you and spanish and potrugeese will be your second lanugages. Maby they already are?
As a native Arabic speaker, I think you're incredibly wrong about Arabic ever becoming a dominant language world-wide. There are several reasons for this.
First, Arabic itself is an incredibly fragmented language. Almost every country or region that speaks it has its own colloquial version of it which may or may not be mutually intelligible. As a Lebanese person I can understand Syrians fairly easily, Jordanians with a bit of straining and the other person speaking slightly slower than usual, Egyptians with a lot of straining and speaking slowly and Saudis not at all. Theoretically, we could communicate using the formal(written) Arabic, but most people, especially newer generations, tend to suck at that as it's a much more difficult language that's learned only in the context of school and pretty much almost never used outside, at least in Lebanon, that is. The colloquial languages are to the formal Arabic as French/Spanish/Italian are to Latin, basically.
Second, all good universities I know of in the region teach in English or French rather than Arabic. Though the trend is tipping towards English of late. This is because most of the region was put either under British or French mandate after the Ottomans were ousted during WW1. This was detrimental in many ways which I won't go into, but one of the good things that came out of it was that they established many schools and universities. In fact, most of the good ones I know were founded by French, British or American missionaries during that period.
Third, well, the internet(and media in general), English is the dominant language in media most people consume. I learned English from watching cartoons as kid. I've almost never stepped foot in an English speaking country(except for a couple of weeks in the U.S. 2 years ago) and yet I can speak, and write, with almost native proficiency.
While I agree to what you're saying, the use of Arabic is not disappearing in the rest of the Arab world as in parts of Lebanon. Some Lebanese see themselves as "non-Arabs", when Lebanese are nothing but Arabs. Those who are in an identity struggle are using French and English mostly, and can't speak Arabic well. I have Lebanese relatives, and some words they say in Arabic are really heavy Arabic words that even we don't use. They still avoid saying that it is indeed, Arabic.
I am Palestinian-Jordanian and I do understand almost all slang accents fairly well. The only one I have trouble with is the Moroccan/Algerian. I understand it as long as they do not inject French or Berber words and speak slowly.
The levant accents are extremely similar that the gulf cannot really differentiate between Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Palestinian (although we see them as distinct and can pick up which accent is spoken from just a word or two). The same phenomenon is seen in the gulf. Iraq is pretty distinct, yet closer to the gulf. Everyone understands Egypt as it is pretty close to Standard Arabic (just like the Levant), although its quirks have become known through songs, movies and shows which are dominated by Egyptians.
As for Standard (or Classical) Arabic, everyone in Jordan (or most of the Arab world) who went through some sort of schooling can speak it, and understand it perfectly. The news, newspapers and any formal event is given in proper Arabic. All Arabic literature, books, and writings are also in Standard Arabic.
My point is, while I agree with you that the use of Arabic is degrading, I doubt it will ever be overtaken by French or English (depending on where you live). English and French are being seen as a symbol of being educated, and those who are uneducated try to speak English or French (albeit terribly). Some who like to show off, or have some sort of identity struggle, rely heavily on French or English. Outside of these insecurities, Arabic is pretty much always in use.
I agree with you on all of the points you listed. However, while all Arabs can understand the formal Arabic perfectly, many struggle to write it or express themselves in it, and that is not just a case of identity crisis.
I consider myself an Arab -- whether I'm proud of that is another issue, but there is not identity crisis. I can understand the news, read the newspaper, official documents, etc, etc, but I would not even dream of replying to a comment in Arabic as I can so easily do in English, and not just because I can't touch-type it, but because I would fail at expressing even simple ideas without a lot of struggling, trying to remember words that differ from the colloquial or(and especially) proper grammar.
While the case of Lebanese people is a bit extreme in this regard, all Arabs are slowly following suit in this regard.
You see, I was not saying that Arabic is so far gone now that nobody uses it, or even that not everybody in the Arab world uses it, that was not the point. I was only commenting on a trend. The parent poster suggested that Arabic was on a course to become dominant worldwide and I find that a laughable idea given the current state of it and its trend(slowly) into oblivion to be replaced by many colloquial languages that simplify the grammar and incorporate foreign languages into it the way this happened with Latin.
I don't know if the claims on the birth rates amongst Muslims is true, but even if they are, are you sure you're not talking about birth rates amongst Muslims and Muslim-majority countries as opposed to Arabic speakers?
An overwhelming majority of the Muslims are not Arab and do not speak Arabic [1].
I'm curious why you think that Arabic is so predestined to be "the" language of the future. I'm saying that, as the number of people who speak English (840 million) is four times as many as the number who speak Arabic (221 million). That's not even including the lack of mutual intelligibility between different flavors of Arabic.
Some other HN comment I can't remember mentioned this:
A logistic curve looks a lot like an exponential curve if you can only see the "start" of it ;-)
I don't think it is something to fear if it is true. It's just a trend that is talked about. I don't personally care what demographics make up the future population.
Quite the opposite is happening in the long term throughout the Arab World and neighboring regions. As we speak, Iran (speaks Farsi) is presently at fertility rates below the rate of replenishment.
> Considering most of the world use a left to right latin script, I don't see how arabic would spread more effectively than English.
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Population dynamics have nothing to do with the dynamics of memes. People are just vehicles for knowledge and ideas. Just because they receive some knowledge and ideas soon after birth, it doesn't mean they have to keep them. Just like they don't have to keep their religion or their "default" sexual orientation.
The people that will control what ideas win will be the ones controlling the media, social networks and communication channels. It doesn't matter if they are just 0.1% of the general population, their ideas will mater more than the ones of the 99.9%. And considering the kinds of ideas that float in the minds of some people, like the "the war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers" aberration (why do people even think of "war", there is no war, just a peaceful competition among ideas that float from one mind to another, there simply is nothing to fight for, ain't this obvious to all?!), I prefer this situation!
I don't think this is a solution. We should work to defragment the technology world. A better option is for Arabic speakers to learn English as a second Language. And for English speakers to learn Arabic as a second language but ultimately program in English. There is a similar problem with Chinese and the Chinese web, they might have some great resources tutorials and libraries but we don't know about them. I'll trade someone English and Ruby if you teach me Arabic.
Yes, the sample program is an infinite loop, and therefore impractical. I'd add that copying the Ruby syntax, based around Latin script, for programming in another script isn't practical. Programming language grammars tend to evolved from the lexical tokens used by them.
Would not it be better to latinize Arabic, as the Taiwanese and Phillipines have done with their languages. For computer input a LTR language built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior.
The written form of Gulf Arabic used for sending text messages (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet ) uses most of the 10 digits for extra vowels as well as the 26 Latin letters.
It's much more complex than that with all the various ligatures, combining forms, diacriticals, etc, not to mention another 50 or so characters that are used in other lanaguges that use the arabic script, but aren't arabic-the-language.
The written script has applications other than computer input. "Standardising" it into some variant of the latin alphabet would make it simpler and less rich. Suitable for a computer perhaps but that's not all languages are about. Other things too, Arabic calligraphy is arguably one of the most intricate forms of art out there and latinising the language would negatively impact that.
No, they've opted for a different modern world. The insistence on latinate scripts and learning english echo strongly colonialist rhetoric from past eras.
The present hegemonic doctrines of fundamentalist Islam are a product of "modern civilized society". The Iranian revolution was in 1979 (and Iran was a prosperous, modern industrial country at the time - it is not so prosperous these days what with sanctions and so forth).
Sayyid Qutb wrote Milestones in 1964, drawing inspiration from mass popular movements - religious and secular - of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is probably the single most influential text for Islamism (it was even, despite differences of sect, translated into Farsi by Khomeini, as I understand it). For Qutb, submission to Sharia law would unleash a new golden age of progress - it was secularism, rather, which was holding us back.
It's nonsense, yes. But it is modern nonsense. Separating modernity from the ongoing contestation of its meaning is the purest nonsense of all.
tl;dr - islamic fundamentalism is perfectly compatible with computers and stuff.
I agree with you, but if you want a really small and really intuitive alphabet check out Korean. It's so simple you can learn how to use to spell in 'english' phonetically in about 2 hours. It's -that- simple.
> built around a relatively small alphabet is simply superior.
How? With a smaller alphabet, words can tend to comprise of more letters; with a larger alphabet, words can tend to comprise of fewer letters. It might be that smaller is better in this case for storing text efficiently, but I don't see how it obviously follows.
I have seen a video of - I can't seem to find it - someone using a sort of keyboard, only smaller. She would use fewer key presses to type in English than on a standard keyboard, because she was typing in one grapheme at a time, or something like that.
Do the Chinese really think of Mandarin as containing discrete characters? Or do they consider the signs as compositions of each other? I haven't tried writing Chinese or something like that with some input device. Have you?
I think it's great that efforts like this accentuate how quickly tools degrade when they are fed input that falls outside of the ASCII-range. Efforts to build better, language-agnostic (or not English-specific) tools bubbles up the technology stack to the end users, to whom it's a unreasonable and unrealistic (and to my mind a bad idea) to demand that they should just learn English.
I also think that programmers should be able to have some support for their own languages when it comes to doing programming, but I guess that opinion won't win me any favors here.
I think it's interesting the URL citation does not actually include the URL. It seems like the title of the article and the domain. Why is the exact URL of the resource is not important?
I could certainly include it, but doing so is not usually required for MLA, APA or Chicago citations, and it would in many cases, make the citation really long.
I think that the reference makes sense as far as longevity. How often do links to a specific page change? Very often. How often do domains change? Not as often. MLA and other style guides are generally written with print in mind, not links directly to content being cited.
Sites that want their content linked, reused and cited should use some sort of permalinking strategy. I don't think we should have a unverifiable citation because a publication does not follow sound link generation strategies. Provenance of the information is what we seek, citing a journal who doesn't provide a time proof way to access the resource should not be cited.
I don't agree with not having local repairmen as being a real showstopper. Any new system requires training: fire building, hut building, brick making. They need to factor training into the roll out of the technology, and don't focus on training men, take the women and grandmothers, train them first. RE: The barefoot movement in India: http://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy Tell a mother she doesn't have to walk 6 hours for dirty water, she will learn to fix whatever is necessary given the right training and availability of tools/material.
Agreed, it's probably the opposite. Folks that are struggling out of necessary tend to have respectable DIY artisans that are very resourceful and creative in the truest sense of hacker. (When you don't have much, your ability to think of creative solutions based on what you have becomes very acute.)
One difference that I am aware of is that OpenTransactions uses the Bitcoin blockchain and the other two are supposed to have their own blockchain. But it's hard to get details of how these things are supposed to work.
It's not hard. It's time consuming. Scouring 9 different semi-curated resources to develop a clear and concise comparison of the 3 is quite a task, a task someone should take on if any of these technologies are to become mainstream. How would you summarize the differences between them?
If you are able to extract concrete, detailed information about these things from their wiki, blog and forum, congratulations. I can't. It all sounds pretty vague to me.
This exactly. I think part of the problem is that each of these projects has a corporate backer, Monetas, sponsoring Open Transaction is building a business around the platform. There is some incentive to keep the best doco closed source. There is a slim to none chance that the only documentation Monetas is using is available publicly. I spent some time setting up an opentransactions server, but could never spend enough time/research to get a production server up.
What we need to know is when a given system was patched, that would tell you who knew what when. Is the Google fork of OpenSSL publicly maintained? Has anyone identified the commit that introduced the "bug"?
Stiff, I think you answered your own question. Intel HIRES them, open source projects don't generally hire people. They sit around and wait for someone to contribute. Are you truly surprised that a volunteer created software is not as rigorously tested as software created by Intel?
I had some problems expressing what bothers me clearly and edited the comment heavily, perhaps it makes more sense now. You're right it is not that surprising, but it's still disappointing that even the most rudimentary best practices are not adopted. Have a look at sqllite for comparison, also an open source project, also in C, certainly less mission critical, and what a difference:
sqlite does not seem less mission critical to me, and definitely relied on funding:
"D. Richard Hipp designed SQLite in the spring of 2000 while working for General Dynamics on contract with the United States Navy.[7] Hipp was designing software used on board guided missile destroyers" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sqlite#History
I work for a very large company that relies on a fork (with contributions back upstream) of SQLite for a majority of its massive enterprise SOA. It is not just unpaid volunteers keeping that project going.
What do you consider when choosing SQLite issues to assigns resources? I would guess it would start with issues relevant to your roadmap. If that's the case with most enterprise FOSS contributors, they most likely trusted the features of OpenSSL they were using. Thus no reason to go poking around that section of the code. It's understandable why a team might choose to not perform an ad-hoc security audit of features that pass specs, even more so when such an audit requires niche expertise. We can hope this bug changes that attitude and more enterprises with the resources and knowledge start performing security and encryption audits. Just as your buildings have security guards, we need proactive and preemptive audits of at least the most common libraries is use, flagging of software that implement unaudited encryption libraries. A Travis CI like badge on GitHub for these audit metrics would bring attention to the problem. We could call it EncryptCI. Maybe this already exists?
Being FOSS doesn't have to mean relying on volunteers. Linux is mostly written by paid developers; why isn't OpenSSL, considering its reach in the commercial world?
Both, as they provide the bulk of the code. It would be more illuminating to examine where the unpaid volunteers contribute. My guess would be device drivers, but I don't know.
You should check out Zoneminder: https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder The development has been re-started and the project seems to be shaping up very well, I'm using it as well as many others.
I have looked at Zoneminder, but I am hesitant on which hardware capture card to purchase. And I don't know the hardware requirements on recording (and streaming) eight feeds.
