On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 02:42:17PM +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
a network where it's the most common language spoken by their fellow admins, particularly when their machine is in a position to pose a security risk to others' machines and networks.
"fellow admins" ? What, the admins they:
* hang out with in their city? * on irc? * in a newsgroup? * through IM type clients?
Are you deliberately avoiding the point? I thought it was fairly clear that "fellow admins" in this case referred to other admins, in other parts of the world in addition to their own.
Wanting people to speak English because the internet and computing in general was invented by Americans - well, guess we're all going to have to speak Chinese since they invented gunpowder.
And here you go again arguing a non-point. I specifically stated that it didn't matter whether it was English or not. I never mentioned Americans having anything to do with my argument. If the Internet had been created in Germany and, as it grew around the world, German became the language most used to communicate about operational issues, as an admin I would be happy to learn German. It would make my life that much easier (and that of those with whom I needed to interact).
You want a globally-self-regulating internet, yet you want English to be the "standard language" ?
Ignoring that I never shared my feelings on a globally-self-regulating Internet, I don't see how these two are contradictory anyway. A standard doesn't -have- to be adhered to, it just makes things difficult when it's not. You can make TCP behave any way you like on your machine. You just won't be able to talk to too many other machines with it if you do. And, once again, I don't care if it's English or not. I just think it would be good to have a standard.
A common language for internet operations would be a good thing. Now, how do you encourage people to learn and speak it?
What more encouragement is necessary? If I become part of a large community which, for the most part, communicates in a common way, that fact by itself will certainly encourage me to learn it. Why would I want to potentially exclude myself by not doing so?
As a fun thought experiment - imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you had to learn Chinese (and you obviously didn't speak it!), but you couldn't move to Chinese. Everyone around you still speaks English (so you don't get the practice/exposure needed) but you get net-related emails in Chinese. Some of your software is written in Chinese, but all the modern stuff has an English option.
Well, as above, if there were some motivating factor encouraging me to do so, I would feel fine. Are you suggesting that Chinese could become a "common language" on the Internet? How China-centric of you.
This is my last post on the topic.
Mine as well. -c