No new thing under the sun
Same ole same ole...
When I entered my third year at OSU, I started
studying Modern Chinese. I've always been interested in languages and had just
finished two tradition-breaking years of Ancient Greek—the tradition being
the one that engineers do not study foreign languages. I had entered the
College of Engineering to major in Computer and Information Science but had
realized halfway through my sophomore year that being (and staying) there was
equivalent to trying to force a round peg into a square hole, and so had
commenced a transfer to the College of Arts and Sciences to double major in
Computer Science and Linguistics. (Eventually I dropped CIS entirely and
graduated with a BA in Linguistics only, but that's a story for another
time.)
The Greek courses would have covered my foreign language requirement, but I was anxious to learn something new (and preferably exotic), so I settled on Chinese. (The other major contender was Arabic—where in the Garden of Forking Paths might I be today if I'd chosen it instead?) Thus began two oftentimes trying but always interesting years of exploration; the remove of two thousand years and role of their civilization in the formation of our own makes it easy for us to overlook the fact that the Greeks lived in a very different world, however familiar; the Chinese are from a completely other planet.
With the exception of an American professor and an American TA, all the instructors I had at OSU were native Chinese. Two of the professors—a very nice married couple, Eugene and Nora Ching—had come to the US via Taiwan (if I remember correctly); there may have been one or two Taiwanese TAs, but for the most part they were graduate students from the PRC. I never noticed any sign of the friction inherently possible in such a situation, but it might have been that they were just that good at keeping any hidden.
While I don't believe there was any conscious attempt at indoctrination on the part of the TAs, I came away from those two years with a sense that Modern China—evils of Communism notwithstanding—was a brave social experiment, wherein would be forged a New Human Being; that 50 years of Revolution had indeed effected a change in the basic nature of base old Homo sapiens.
Yeah, I was pretty naive.
Fast forward a few years. I had just completed my first year in the doctorate program at University of Tsukuba and, to celebrate this achievement, was going off on a three-week trip around China with a Japanese friend who had just completed his first year at ToDai. While public events (Tian'anmen) and my own observations during the intervening years had tempered my old enthusiasm for China The Country, I was still really excited to be going, to at last be able to see the Chinese People where they lived.
Talk about eye-openers.
I won't go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that the suspicion that there might not be any New Human Being in China, which had arisen from my personal experiences with mainlanders and been strengthened when the people failed to rise up in support of the students at Tian'anmen (which event also made me a firm believer in the adage "A people gets the government it deserves"), was transformed into a certainty (in my mind at least) by those three weeks. 50 years is nothing compared to thousands of years of culture. Or millions of years of evolution?
Now, to what purpose these reminiscences?
A while back on AreaV1 I asked Scott Anderson (and the group) what browser and word processor he uses; I have yet to receive a reply, probably because it didn't seem like I was being serious. But there was a serious point (or two) to the question.
My answers would be (for all their remaining problems) OmniWeb and Nisus Writer Express. Both are, as you are no doubt aware, commercial applications. And both of which I have paid for and am a registered user of. (Well, to be completely honest, I haven't paid for OmniWeb 5.0 yet, because I keep waiting for them to stop already with the free-for-a-month upgrades! Seems every time I'm getting down to my last few days and start thinking about purchasing licenses [yes, plural], they put out a new upgrade and I'm set for another month....I can't believe I'm complaining about someone upgrading their product! Rationalization, right?) So one point is this: All past I'm-more-free-software-than-RMS-himself posturing aside, I'm not against paying for software in principle.
The version of OmniWeb I'm using on this machine (PowerBook G4) is 5.1 beta 5, so in a sense I'm taking part in a beta test. I also took part in the NWX beta test before they released Version 1.0. In neither case has any NDA been required, even though, presumably, the potential for someone trying to take the apps apart and learn something vital is as great as for Marten(tm) during its alpha test. (Or did I miss the point of the NDA?) It seems there's a serious issue of trust involved. Not to mention the general attitude toward potential future users. (All symptomatic, perhaps? Isn't it said that people who aren't trusting of others are that way because they don't feel trustworthy themselves? Or is that just pop psych? The question of the appropriateness of members of an open-source group devoted to a common goal going off and creating a commercial application for the same purpose isn't really worth debating, I suppose, since people are free to do what they want barring legal restrictions. But I will ask this: If they themselves didn't feel there was something questionable to their actions, why then did they wait so late—until it was practically fait accompli—to tell the group what they were doing?) And I still don't know what to make of the "maybe a demo but maybe not" indecisiveness. (It's the difficulty of limiting the demo, time- or function-wise, am I right? Well...some (many?) of the group may buy just to see what you've got—including me?!?—but if you don't provide a demo you'd better have a damned impressive section on the website if you expect newcomers to bite.)
Anyway, however things turn out, it appears that it is still pretty much business as usual. The ideals of the open source revolution and the alternatives it provides remain lost on many, evidently. The times, they may be changin', but the way of doing things certainly hasn't.
Same ole same ole.
Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes for what should prove a most interesting New Year!
The Greek courses would have covered my foreign language requirement, but I was anxious to learn something new (and preferably exotic), so I settled on Chinese. (The other major contender was Arabic—where in the Garden of Forking Paths might I be today if I'd chosen it instead?) Thus began two oftentimes trying but always interesting years of exploration; the remove of two thousand years and role of their civilization in the formation of our own makes it easy for us to overlook the fact that the Greeks lived in a very different world, however familiar; the Chinese are from a completely other planet.
With the exception of an American professor and an American TA, all the instructors I had at OSU were native Chinese. Two of the professors—a very nice married couple, Eugene and Nora Ching—had come to the US via Taiwan (if I remember correctly); there may have been one or two Taiwanese TAs, but for the most part they were graduate students from the PRC. I never noticed any sign of the friction inherently possible in such a situation, but it might have been that they were just that good at keeping any hidden.
While I don't believe there was any conscious attempt at indoctrination on the part of the TAs, I came away from those two years with a sense that Modern China—evils of Communism notwithstanding—was a brave social experiment, wherein would be forged a New Human Being; that 50 years of Revolution had indeed effected a change in the basic nature of base old Homo sapiens.
Yeah, I was pretty naive.
Fast forward a few years. I had just completed my first year in the doctorate program at University of Tsukuba and, to celebrate this achievement, was going off on a three-week trip around China with a Japanese friend who had just completed his first year at ToDai. While public events (Tian'anmen) and my own observations during the intervening years had tempered my old enthusiasm for China The Country, I was still really excited to be going, to at last be able to see the Chinese People where they lived.
Talk about eye-openers.
I won't go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that the suspicion that there might not be any New Human Being in China, which had arisen from my personal experiences with mainlanders and been strengthened when the people failed to rise up in support of the students at Tian'anmen (which event also made me a firm believer in the adage "A people gets the government it deserves"), was transformed into a certainty (in my mind at least) by those three weeks. 50 years is nothing compared to thousands of years of culture. Or millions of years of evolution?
Now, to what purpose these reminiscences?
A while back on AreaV1 I asked Scott Anderson (and the group) what browser and word processor he uses; I have yet to receive a reply, probably because it didn't seem like I was being serious. But there was a serious point (or two) to the question.
My answers would be (for all their remaining problems) OmniWeb and Nisus Writer Express. Both are, as you are no doubt aware, commercial applications. And both of which I have paid for and am a registered user of. (Well, to be completely honest, I haven't paid for OmniWeb 5.0 yet, because I keep waiting for them to stop already with the free-for-a-month upgrades! Seems every time I'm getting down to my last few days and start thinking about purchasing licenses [yes, plural], they put out a new upgrade and I'm set for another month....I can't believe I'm complaining about someone upgrading their product! Rationalization, right?) So one point is this: All past I'm-more-free-software-than-RMS-himself posturing aside, I'm not against paying for software in principle.
The version of OmniWeb I'm using on this machine (PowerBook G4) is 5.1 beta 5, so in a sense I'm taking part in a beta test. I also took part in the NWX beta test before they released Version 1.0. In neither case has any NDA been required, even though, presumably, the potential for someone trying to take the apps apart and learn something vital is as great as for Marten(tm) during its alpha test. (Or did I miss the point of the NDA?) It seems there's a serious issue of trust involved. Not to mention the general attitude toward potential future users. (All symptomatic, perhaps? Isn't it said that people who aren't trusting of others are that way because they don't feel trustworthy themselves? Or is that just pop psych? The question of the appropriateness of members of an open-source group devoted to a common goal going off and creating a commercial application for the same purpose isn't really worth debating, I suppose, since people are free to do what they want barring legal restrictions. But I will ask this: If they themselves didn't feel there was something questionable to their actions, why then did they wait so late—until it was practically fait accompli—to tell the group what they were doing?) And I still don't know what to make of the "maybe a demo but maybe not" indecisiveness. (It's the difficulty of limiting the demo, time- or function-wise, am I right? Well...some (many?) of the group may buy just to see what you've got—including me?!?—but if you don't provide a demo you'd better have a damned impressive section on the website if you expect newcomers to bite.)
Anyway, however things turn out, it appears that it is still pretty much business as usual. The ideals of the open source revolution and the alternatives it provides remain lost on many, evidently. The times, they may be changin', but the way of doing things certainly hasn't.
Same ole same ole.
Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes for what should prove a most interesting New Year!
Posted: Sat - December 25, 2004 at 11:08 AM |
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Published On: Feb 05, 2005 06:04 AM
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Published On: Feb 05, 2005 06:04 AM