VIA releases open source Xorg driver [LWN.net]

VIA releases open source Xorg driver

Posted Aug 30, 2008 6:47 UTC (Sat) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469)
In reply to: VIA releases open source Xorg driver by nhippi
Parent article: VIA releases open source Xorg driver

first of all: all european languages are somewhat similar to each other. especially the latin-derived/influenced one. and they all share one script.

so please don't compare the spanish/english situation to a chinese/english situation.

much more difficult is the culture. European or in general 'western' culture is fundemantally different in so many ways. And you cannot really understand a different language without understanding a bit of the culture, too.

I'm not just referring to actual 'culture of the people' but also corporate and industry culture.

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Chinese <> English/Western culture differences

Posted Aug 30, 2008 13:51 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

I was raised with exposure to other cultures, African, European, USian,
but nothing eastern, so it has always intrigued me.

Consider just one thing by itself, how characters translate into words
and what assumptions one makes about the world based on that from a very
early age, as they learn to read, etc. I can't help but think that were
I to read/write a language where a character was a word and a word was a
character, I'd likely have a very different viewpoint on the world and
how it worked and what made it tick, based on that alone. Not wrong,
just very very different. Certainly, logic is logic, but one's
assumptions and axioms would surely be very different if one were used to
thinking of individual characters as having the meaning of words, and
perhaps extending that to one's assumptions of how the world in general
worked.

So yes, I can certainly see how culture and world-view would
be /entirely/ different, and that it could and would seriously affect
one's ability to participate in the to this point mostly western FLOSS
community across a cultural gap of that degree.

Hiring Harald Welte as a liaison will certainly benefit both Via and the
FLOSS community as each side learns to work better with the other,
without causing or taking unnecessary offense, while learning to see
things from the vantage point of an entirely different world-view.

That said, as a purely practical matter, until they started making this
very serious effort, I certainly didn't feel obligated to buy Via, any
more than I felt obligated to buy MSI when I visited their site
researching mobos, and found everything, from the docs to the BIOS flash
packages, in MS executable, probably self-extracting-executable-zip,
format. (Yes, I /did/ write them an email, telling them exactly why they
were getting crossed off my list in terms of further consideration.) Via
could do its thing and I could do mine, and if they didn't make it easy
to do mine, well, there were other products to buy. Simple as that.

But I'm glad that's changing as it's nice to have choices! =:^)

Duncan

Chinese <> English/Western culture differences

Posted Aug 30, 2008 21:11 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Chinese logograms (which I guess is what you're thinking of) don't really quite have a word-symbol equivalence. You could compare them to the prefixes and suffixes (often stolen from Latin or Greek) which are used to coin some new words in English, e.g. take television, it's one English word, but there are two meaningful components, "tele" and "vision". Most Chinese words are made up of more than one logogram*. As in English, sometimes the resulting word assembled in this way takes on a meaning very different from the literal reading of the component parts.

When importing words from other languages to Chinese a phonetic transliteration is often used, where the characters are chosen based on how they sound, rather than what they mean. The beverage "Coca-cola" is represented 可口可乐. Visually this could also be a short phrase, but no literate Chinese person would make that mistake.

[Grr, LWN previews seem to be broken for Unicode input, the above is U+53EF U+53E3 U+53EF U+4E50]

* And the logograms are themselves often made up of several components, which were originally, thousands of years ago, pictures directly representing ideas or objects.

Documentation as (self-extracting) .exe files?

Posted Aug 31, 2008 1:58 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I've come across a few of those, and just out of boredom once I tried unzip(1) on them... and it unpacked the contents fine.