Kaixo! On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 05:55:18AM -0700, Elvis Presley wrote:
>> [...] It would be perfectly ok to provide only very minimalistic kernel >> support (even simpler and lighter than the current one) and have a user > > Or none at all. No, some kernel support is needed; to be able to print things on screen when something goes bad before the loading of a full fledged terminal emulator. Or for boot in single mode, without anything mounted, etc. Simply, to print the oops kernel messages you don't need a fancy terminal. > Conclusion: vterms and xterms are redundant, so there is no good reason to run > them both at the same time. And xterms are more flexible. Yes, but there is a big difference: xterms need a running X terminal; vterms don't. > Still, the keyboards are the same, so both could share the same, better(=X) > 'keymaps' fsm. The way the keyboards are handled is quite different (on X11 there is a high hardware abstraction; while the linux keyboard on console interacts directly with the kernel. > 512(=2**9) character glyphs in the vterm character buffer would be plenty for > my purposes: Yes, but not for everybody. > polytonic) and Cyrillic, but I'd have to be able to chose the unicode > characters I want, and map them to glyphs in the console-font. That's doable. There are tools to do that. You need also to make file that maps each glyph of the font to a unicode value (you see here why such system is not suitable for scripts where a unicode character isn't mapped to a single glyph), and include that file into the created font. > I meant to say "utf-8". The irony is that utf-8 also blew up the Latin-1 > characters. Now everything (but English) is twice the size. (That's not true, > only the accented vowels are.) And some are 3 bytes long, and some other are 4 bytes long,... But who cares? What matters is the ability to type any letter used in any human written language. That is a very huge improvement. > > > Why do Greek newspapers still use ISO 8859-7? > >> For the same reason that a majority of English language web sites >> still use windows-1252, I suppose. > > I guess we'll have to ask them. I mean, they didn't "choose" iso-8859-7; they just used it at a time when it was the only encoding, then just continued using it; and they will use unicode, without even realizing that, when they will upgrade their programs. The choice of the character set is becoming more and more a moot point. > http://www.dolnet.ta-nea.gr/ is still producing alot of new material, [unknown adress] > and their mix is text-oriented. > > I thought it might be because they were using web authoring tools > based on the older, national character set. Yes, exactly my point: their use of iso-8859-7 is not the result of a choice, but the result of a non-choice; they simply don't care to adress the issue, and they use and will use whatever the tools will produce. >>> Is there a version of Linux which runs as a Microsoft Window (not cygwin)? > > > ?? What you say doesn't make sense. (you can on the other hand run an > operating system inside of a virtual computer box inside another operating > system) > > I should have asked, "Is there a version of Microsoft Windows which will run > a copy of Linux?" It doesn't make any more sense in the other way either :) Both MS-Windows and Linux are operating systems, you can run one, or the other, not one inside the other; they are built in order to run at the very bottom in direct interaction with the hardware. They can be run inside an emulated hardware box, but not as normal programs. > Microsoft describes Windows as a "virtual-machine" operating > system, and DOS does, indeed, run, as an operating system in a window. I never read of MS-Windows described as a "virtual-machine"... And what runs "in a window" is in fact command.com, which is the equivalent (in much less powerful) of /bin/bash > I assume a VxD would map/share the PC hardware, controlled by Windows, > to the device drivers in the Linux kernel. No. the linux kernel needs direct access to the hardware. What you need is to emulate an entire system, like vmware does > Did you know Microsoft has removed unicode support from their accessory > program, Wordpad, in Windows XP? That seems particularly stupid a move. > I got started on an IBM 1170 in 1973. It was an ebcdic machine, but who > noticed. We punched our Fortran programs on cards (that would be a Hollerith > code). And ascii has won the competition, des pite the fact that DBCDIC was more computer-friendly, and faster on slow computers (as less bit changes were needed to pass from one value to the other). As computers improve their capacities, the computer-friendliness doesn't count anymore, what counts is the user-friendliness; that is why the fact that there may be some size increase when switching to utf-8 doesn't count; nowadays hard disk are huge; what counts is that utf-8 gives the user much more power. Also, the size of plain text is small compared to other data. You can look at wikipedia project for an example of that; all languages choose to use utf-8; one of the few ones still not using it is the English one; and that means users are forced to use HTML entities for anything outside iso-8859-1, which means in fact that the actual size of the text is actually *bigger* than what it would be in plain utf-8. But anyway, the size of the text is orders of magnitude smaller than the cumulative size of images. The reason they didn't switch yet is they are afraid to break something during the conversion; but it will happen anyway, because demand for it is stronger and stronger. In other words, the sooner you adopt utf-8, the better. -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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