HTML tags that used to mean "bold" and "italics" have been redefined (in current WhatWG HTML and W3C HTML5) to be semantic tags referencing traditional typographic conventions
Yes, that is what I am referring to. There are now authorities who are stating that italics and bold have semantic meaning of themselves in some contexts, through established patterns of use in the Real World. This is grammatically sound since in English correct grammar is descriptive of general usage at any time (so what is correct grammar changes as the language evolves.)
The problem that needs addressing is that there are many potential wiki participants who can use italics (for instance) appropriately but who may not be aware of the more subtle differences between italicizing a foreign word, italicizing the name of a boat, italicizing to add emphasis, and italicizing some random phrase that needs to look a little different just because doing so would in some way add a little more meaning to the text. As in OMG! Shinies!!! certain kinds of interjections, etc.
I think what I am proposing is using the hierarchal menu-submenu-subsubmenu capabilities of a GUI interface to make it possible for more participants to be comfortable with wiki participation by allowing each to use "correct" typographical conventions at the level of their own understanding. Someone who knows that Queen Elizabeth II (the boat) and n'est pas? (a foreign phrase) should be italicised is using English correctly. Someone else might know an even more correct way to mark that up, but that should not negate the first person's usage.
Obviously I have not thought this out completely. It seems like my thinking about this is part of a paradigm shift with regard to English grammar: that instead of grammar being a binary thing of right and wrong usage, it is perhaps better to think of it as a hierarchy where there is a continuum that handles the concepts of acceptable grammar, good grammar, better grammar, and better than better grammar. And obviously I am blending "typography" in with "grammar" here.
I think it is noteworthy that italics and bold are gaining recognition as semantic markups, a change in thinking since an earlier day when they were regarded as strictly stylistic. This change probably irritates most language purists, but language purists should not be using Internet English anyway. That's what Latin is for: a nice, dead language that does not cause suffering to OCD grammar nazis.
One approach that I think would work would be to limit wikitext to a minimum subset of HTML tags, then use drop-down macros or snippet selectors to get more specific through attributes. A user case:
Alice uses wikitext italics to add emphasis to a phrase in one line of her entry, and uses italics again in another line for a foreign word. Bob edits the article later, selects the first use of italics and with a drop down menu he adds title='emphasis'. He selects the second use and adds title='foreign word or phrase', again with the drop down menu. When Carol reads the article, she hovers on the each italicized piece and is shown in unequivocal fashion why the italics were used. She edits Bob's edit, changing 'foreign word or phrase' to 'french' by using a submenu of the drop downs.
It would be fairly easy to extend the wiki engine with an option that would recognize ' ' {emphasis} . . . ' ' and render it as <em> . ..</em> rather than <i title='emphasis' >...</i>. I think this should be optional and done at the rendering stage, since I think that would better serve the whole range of users from casual high school use through formal academic use.
One of the core concepts of wikitext is that stylistic things are handled by the wiki engine. This assures consistency over, say, the million pages of Wikipedia. It also makes it possible to serve out "pages" to special purpose browsers, like audio output, braille printers, cell phones, etc.
The wikitext needs to be limited to semantic mark-up. "This is a headline. This is a paragraph. This is an emphasized phrase in the paragraph. This is table." That kind of thing. Let the wiki engine decide how these should be styled. Use the wiki engine's templates or themes to change that style across the board to whatever you want.
I have been doing a bit of work with wikis lately and have maintained a personal wiki as a kind of PIM, journal, and notebook for several years. In my experience, the GUI for a wiki should be a lot simpler than that of a word processor. I understand why Wikimedia wants to develop one (or probably several, one for each of several types of input devices) but I do not really care how they go about it.
What I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO SEE is Wikimedia providing good support to wiki Creole. This is a standardized wikitext that would make it easier to transfer content between wiki engines. It is also in several ways more readable in raw form than Wikimedia's native wikitext.
For me, a very important aspect of wikis is that wikitext is actually readable in raw form in any text editor, which is not true for HTML with its tag soup problems. Being able to read and write wikitext in a light duty text editor like gedit, Kate, or notepad++ is great when documenting complex Gimp images as they are being developed, or keeping notes while creating 3D models or animations, or probably a host of other things where the bulk of the computer resources are being used in the primary work and you don't want a massive word processor using up RAM and CPU cycles.
It is not "-WebKit-radius-border". It is -webkit-border-radius. Point being that author of TFA either does not know what he is talking about or due to laziness, drugs, ignorance or some other reason is not expressing himself clearly.
This use of a browser-specific prefix is the convention adopted by WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera that has allowed early versions of what was to become the CSS3 standard border-radius to be put in the hands of web developers before the final specification was locked down and signed off on. It has allowed the following CSS to work:
someblock {/* "." used merely to show indentation */
.../* the lack of an equivalent interim ms phrasing puts a lot of extra
...... work on the web developer and any more, a lot of them are not
...... bothering to pander to Microsoft since it no longer has a large
..... share of many website's intended audiences. */
}
This is a future-proof construction: when the CSS3 border-radius tag was finalized, every browser version that understood CSS3 started using the first line; older versions continued to be supported. Until that time, each browser version would use the line that it understood and ignore the others. This worked great for all browsers except MSIE, which required a lot of fussy hacking because, basically, it has been an inferior product. Not conforming to established industry standards. Inferior by that criterion, at least.
Judging by this discussion, Microsoft needs to do two things to retain any kind of relevancy at all. First, it needs to avoid worrying its little head about how WebKit or Mozilla or Opera is developing interim mechanisms for CSS3 and HTML5 not-ready-for-prime-time items and just focus on making their own stuff work in a standards compliant way. And, gee, maybe they could adopt the industry standard for stuff
that is not yet compliant for some reason, and use a -ms- prefix where appropriate.
But before Microsoft even does that, it should get a copy of HTML5 For Dummies and study it a bit, since it clearly explains all the above.
Now for those for whom English is a second language, AND native English speakers who have never learned to use the language properly, realize that the word "writes" can take either of two distinct meanings in this context:
1. In both the context of written discussion as well as the more general context of broad English usage, "writes" means the same thing as the newer word "authors" means: "to write" or "to author" means to construct new sentences and paragraphs using alphanumeric characters.
2. In the specific context of written discussion only-- not in the general case-- "writes" means to contribute a piece of text to the discussion. The origin of the text is not a part of the concept. The word "contributes" is an exact synonym and in formal writing (to use yet another definition of "write") it is probably always the better choice.
But slashdot is not formal writing and because there are so many ESL participants, the use shorter words is better than polysylabic ones. Using "writes" as a synonym for "contributes" is the more appropriate choice. And in this sense, it says only that someone contributed some text, without implying that the text was an original creation.
The summary is not plagiarism. This is most especially evident to anyone who goes from RTFS to RTFA and sees that TFS is a repetition.
Yeah, if you include "downwards" as a direction. Under Ballmer's leadership, Microsoft has been steadily losing market share and mind share across its entire product line.
When he took over he built a powerful suite of enterprise applications which allowed the Windows server to keep moving up market and owning a greater share of the enterprise software budget.
When Ballmer took over, he inherited the wealth of the Windows OS, that of MS Office, and that of MS Exchange. Vast chunks of that wealth have evaporated under his leadership. What is really telling is that much of the damage done to the corporation was not done by other businesses, but by communities of developers who do not think in terms of "return on investment" or even "profit"-- most likely most of them could not even define such common business terms. But despite their lack of business acumen these communities-- Apache Foundation, Mozilla, et. al.-- have appropriately used copyright laws to change the nature of the software market that Microsoft once dominated.
And they are not even doing it on purpose. What is bringing Microsoft to its knees is just the unintended consequences of a bunch of developer hobbyists who are not in it for the money. Ballmer fails to even see that, let alone failing to steer his company away from the inevitable shipwreck that lies ahead on its current course.
Now he's driving through a ubiquitous computing interface which will allow Microsoft to be functional on a huge range of hardware.
It is impossible to imagine any way in which a "ubiquitous computing interface" is going to compete with HTML5's approach of allowing each kind of specialized computer to have the interface that works best in its situation, and to use a standardized, interface-agnostic communications protocol to transfer information between devices.
Ballmer is irrelevant. He is increasingly using the Microsoft behometh to attempt to find and sell costly solutions to problems that already have freely available solutions because they have already been solved by the FOSS communities.
It leads to a question of ownership: when we bought Windows, did we buy it "as is" without upgrades? Or buy into a stream of upgrades, possibly for a limited time?
Ah, better watch it there. That last bit sounds very much like what the owner gets when he chooses Ubuntu, Red Hat / Fedora, or several other Linux distros-- except the stream of upgrades with those has no time limit. I'm guessing that you really don't want potential Windows buyers to be thinking about such things.
There might be more to parent post than just "4+ Funny".
Ballmer has become increasingly vulnerable. Basically, nobody much likes having a potty-mouthed, chair-throwing monkey dancer as a CEO, either inside or outside the corporation. He got the job not because he rose up through the ranks or had demonstrable skills but because he was Gates' chief sycophant, loyal to the core. It is long past time for him to be replaced by someone who can steer the monster resources of Microsoft in an appropriate direction, rather than just sitting there in the driver's seat while the huge earth-mover rumbles around without a definite direction.
By encouraging his most likely internal replacement to leave the company, Ballmer has done the one thing he could do that most reduces his risks of getting tossed out like a chair. There is no question that Microsoft lost a valuable asset when Sinofsky walked, but his continued presence as Win8 becomes a success would have been a major personal threat to Ballmer.
I fully agree with parent post. I, too, have read the whole story and I find it is highly realistic. Unpleasant, but definitely real. So not like Libertarianism at all.
There is a much more succinct way to make parent post's point: There are currently way too many college graduates who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
I am unsure whether parent post is itself an example of this. It does seem to be using a lot of verbiage in a pattern that is associated with undergraduates who are more interested in passing the course than in learning the subject. That's the "baffle 'em with bullsh*t" pattern.
So the take-away on this is that charities should be outlawed since they put a heavier burden on the conservatives who as a group have lower incomes, and taxes with government disbursements should be used instead, since this more fairly distributes the burden across the higher income liberals as well as the conservatives.
Yeah, that makes sense. At least it makes sense in being a reasonable inference from the stipulated findings of Mr Brooks.
But somehow I doubt that is the conclusion that the poster and Mr Brooks draw from those same findings.
Perhaps using Latin badly looks foolish; I could not say. I do not know enough Latin to judge the quality of its usage.
But I can say that watching someone tumble off their unicycle of language snobbery does not look foolish at all. It raises mixed emotions of revulsion and antipathy. With all due respect to your language skills, reading parent post was a horrible experience.
Some languages have prescriptive grammars: you do it this way because that's the rule. Latin and ancient greek are that way, mostly because they are dead languages that can no longer change.
English has a descriptive grammar: you do it this way because that's the way it is done. That is one of the reasons it has emerged as the global language of the Internet, and one of the very few languages that sees more use among non-native speakers than among those who were raised with it.
The thing about descriptive grammars is that the way it is done changes over time. The model for correct usage is a bell shaped curve where there are always new ways of saying things that are gaining acceptance and ways that are becoming increasingly archaic and losing acceptance. It is a fluid grammar. Almost a creole.
Attaching this to parent post solely because of p.p.'s signature line.
The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux...
I have puzzled over this response for about a day, and I still do not understand it. It seems to be from when the world was younger, like maybe ten years ago.
If the limitation is EAC, there is no limitation as it runs under the latest versions of Wine. You would not even need a Windows virtual machine; you could do it all in a basic Linux distro like one of the *buntus. But an even better solution would be to use a native Linux ripper like Audacity (Link is to the Wikipedia article which is an unbiased review of the software).
The only reason to stick with EAC as far as I can tell is the magical belief that if you do not spend big bucks on the software, it cannot be any good. That's a fallacy. It would be much more accurate to say that successful companies that charge big bucks for their software have very good marketing departments.
UbuntuStudio is a spinoff of Ubuntu designed specifically for high demand audio and visual work. It includes a very low latency kernel so that capture from microphones and other analog sources is extremely accurate. Worth looking into.
What is wrong with putting a low overhead Linux distro on all the boxes, and continuing to run WinXP in a virtual machine? That looks like a low cost and highly secure way to go forward.
I volunteered at Free Geek, a computer recycler / refurbisher, years ago when "fat caps" on the motherboard was a frequent reason for computers to be sent there. AIR, the problem was a lot of counterfit components being sold to reputable manufacturers. There were several big name manufacturers involved. Something like that could be happening in the router market. Going with the lowest bidder for the components is still important in low margin markets.
Another possibility is that a kid in the neighborhood is collecting the innards of smoke detectors as part of his unofficial science project, and is storing them too close to your house. A radioactive environment will shorten the life of capacitors and other components. Have you noticed whether any of your kids glow in the dark?
I suggest you rethink your concerns about charging a lot.
It might only take an hour of your time to do the set-up, but that is in addition to the several years you have put in to learning what to do, and the many hours per week that you are spending on keeping up with the technology. Think upon this punchline to an old joke:
Itemized billing for a Big Iron computer repair, circa 1970:
Photography is an art; and unless you are claiming to be doing photojournalism, where accuracy is important, adjusting an image to capture what you want to convey is part of the process.
Above is true but does not go far enough, it is not the whole truth. Even in photojournalism and perfectly accurate photos, images can and should be composed in the viewfinder and diddled as needed in processing to best convey what the photographer feels is important.
The only truly accurate photos are the forensic ones taken at crime scenes, those of OR-7 when he trips a shutter release during his search for a girl friend, and those from the security cameras at your favorite store. Oh, some scientific photos, but not many. Most use false colors and other manipulations to bring out truths that otherwise would be missed.
Sir, you are implying that I cannot photoshop with the Gimp.
I CAN most definitely photoshop with the Gimp. I can do a better job of photoshopping with the Gimp than most persons can do with Photoshop. And I can always do it at less cost.
You are most definitely wrong, Sir. Photoshop is entirely unnecessary for photoshopping.
Yes. In fact there is nothing less aerodynamic than a dead goose. You can't even throw it as far as you could throw a stone of the same weight.
But a goose that has all its computer and control functions working properly! Now there you have something that can fly in close formation with other birds at high speed, and even land and take off in formation.
So, yeah, flying cars can be done. No cause yet to give up on that dream.
Another possibility is that the Air Force never intended to develop a saucer prototype. It could be that these "designs" were disinformation left where Soviet agents could discover them.
The timing is right for this being part of the effort to divert attention from the Air Force's super-secret Blackbird program. The Blackbird became operational in the 1960s and development began in the latter part of the 1950s. By the 1970s, after some 15 years of service, the Soviet Union was apparently aware that the USA had something that could go really high, really fast, and take lots of photos, but apparently they still had no clue about the design. That suggests that the Air Force had done a really good job of hiding the production of lots of titanium parts, etc-- capitalizing on the UFO craziness of the times would have been an excellent ploy.
And it is clear that releasing some of the documents used in disinformation strategems is part of the declassification process. However I do not believe there is anything that requires the US Government to say what was disinformation and what was factual. I rather think that they would leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Does anyone know the more recent history of the Blackbird? IIRC, the program was terminated around 1998, then there was talk about reactivating them for a time when we got into the Bush wars, and that's the last I remember hearing about it. Are any of these planes still flying?
Yes, I fully concur. For those who may be too young to have participated in the formulation of the Primary Masculine Koan, I present it in its mature form:
If a man is making an assertion aloud while walking in a forest, and there are no women around, is he still wrong?
Ponder upon that, and weep for the deficiencies of your gender.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML tags that used to mean "bold" and "italics" have been redefined (in current WhatWG HTML and W3C HTML5) to be semantic tags referencing traditional typographic conventions
Yes, that is what I am referring to. There are now authorities who are stating that italics and bold have semantic meaning of themselves in some contexts, through established patterns of use in the Real World. This is grammatically sound since in English correct grammar is descriptive of general usage at any time (so what is correct grammar changes as the language evolves.)
The problem that needs addressing is that there are many potential wiki participants who can use italics (for instance) appropriately but who may not be aware of the more subtle differences between italicizing a foreign word, italicizing the name of a boat, italicizing to add emphasis, and italicizing some random phrase that needs to look a little different just because doing so would in some way add a little more meaning to the text. As in OMG! Shinies!!! certain kinds of interjections, etc.
I think what I am proposing is using the hierarchal menu-submenu-subsubmenu capabilities of a GUI interface to make it possible for more participants to be comfortable with wiki participation by allowing each to use "correct" typographical conventions at the level of their own understanding. Someone who knows that Queen Elizabeth II (the boat) and n'est pas? (a foreign phrase) should be italicised is using English correctly. Someone else might know an even more correct way to mark that up, but that should not negate the first person's usage.
Obviously I have not thought this out completely. It seems like my thinking about this is part of a paradigm shift with regard to English grammar: that instead of grammar being a binary thing of right and wrong usage, it is perhaps better to think of it as a hierarchy where there is a continuum that handles the concepts of acceptable grammar, good grammar, better grammar, and better than better grammar. And obviously I am blending "typography" in with "grammar" here.
apologies for getting wordy. Need more coffee....
I think it is noteworthy that italics and bold are gaining recognition as semantic markups, a change in thinking since an earlier day when they were regarded as strictly stylistic. This change probably irritates most language purists, but language purists should not be using Internet English anyway. That's what Latin is for: a nice, dead language that does not cause suffering to OCD grammar nazis.
One approach that I think would work would be to limit wikitext to a minimum subset of HTML tags, then use drop-down macros or snippet selectors to get more specific through attributes. A user case:
Alice uses wikitext italics to add emphasis to a phrase in one line of her entry, and uses italics again in another line for a foreign word. Bob edits the article later, selects the first use of italics and with a drop down menu he adds title='emphasis'. He selects the second use and adds title='foreign word or phrase', again with the drop down menu. When Carol reads the article, she hovers on the each italicized piece and is shown in unequivocal fashion why the italics were used. She edits Bob's edit, changing 'foreign word or phrase' to 'french' by using a submenu of the drop downs.
It would be fairly easy to extend the wiki engine with an option that would recognize ' ' {emphasis} . . . ' ' and render it as <em> . . .</em> rather than <i title='emphasis' > ...</i>. I think this should be optional and done at the rendering stage, since I think that would better serve the whole range of users from casual high school use through formal academic use.
One of the core concepts of wikitext is that stylistic things are handled by the wiki engine. This assures consistency over, say, the million pages of Wikipedia. It also makes it possible to serve out "pages" to special purpose browsers, like audio output, braille printers, cell phones, etc.
The wikitext needs to be limited to semantic mark-up. "This is a headline. This is a paragraph. This is an emphasized phrase in the paragraph. This is table." That kind of thing. Let the wiki engine decide how these should be styled. Use the wiki engine's templates or themes to change that style across the board to whatever you want.
I have been doing a bit of work with wikis lately and have maintained a personal wiki as a kind of PIM, journal, and notebook for several years. In my experience, the GUI for a wiki should be a lot simpler than that of a word processor. I understand why Wikimedia wants to develop one (or probably several, one for each of several types of input devices) but I do not really care how they go about it.
What I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO SEE is Wikimedia providing good support to wiki Creole. This is a standardized wikitext that would make it easier to transfer content between wiki engines. It is also in several ways more readable in raw form than Wikimedia's native wikitext.
For me, a very important aspect of wikis is that wikitext is actually readable in raw form in any text editor, which is not true for HTML with its tag soup problems. Being able to read and write wikitext in a light duty text editor like gedit, Kate, or notepad++ is great when documenting complex Gimp images as they are being developed, or keeping notes while creating 3D models or animations, or probably a host of other things where the bulk of the computer resources are being used in the primary work and you don't want a massive word processor using up RAM and CPU cycles.
It is not "-WebKit-radius-border". It is -webkit-border-radius. Point being that author of TFA either does not know what he is talking about or due to laziness, drugs, ignorance or some other reason is not expressing himself clearly.
This use of a browser-specific prefix is the convention adopted by WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera that has allowed early versions of what was to become the CSS3 standard border-radius to be put in the hands of web developers before the final specification was locked down and signed off on. It has allowed the following CSS to work: someblock { /* "." used merely to show indentation */
... border- radius: 1em; /* CSS3 standard */
... -moz-border-radius: 1em; /* Mozilla interim */
... -webkit-border-radius: 1em; /* Webkit interim */
... -o-border-radius: 1 em; /* Opera interim */
... /* the lack of an equivalent interim ms phrasing puts a lot of extra
...... work on the web developer and any more, a lot of them are not
...... bothering to pander to Microsoft since it no longer has a large
..... share of many website's intended audiences. */ }
This is a future-proof construction: when the CSS3 border-radius tag was finalized, every browser version that understood CSS3 started using the first line; older versions continued to be supported. Until that time, each browser version would use the line that it understood and ignore the others. This worked great for all browsers except MSIE, which required a lot of fussy hacking because, basically, it has been an inferior product. Not conforming to established industry standards. Inferior by that criterion, at least.
Judging by this discussion, Microsoft needs to do two things to retain any kind of relevancy at all. First, it needs to avoid worrying its little head about how WebKit or Mozilla or Opera is developing interim mechanisms for CSS3 and HTML5 not-ready-for-prime-time items and just focus on making their own stuff work in a standards compliant way. And, gee, maybe they could adopt the industry standard for stuff that is not yet compliant for some reason, and use a -ms- prefix where appropriate.
But before Microsoft even does that, it should get a copy of HTML5 For Dummies and study it a bit, since it clearly explains all the above.
Re-read the introductory line to TFSummary:
An anonymous reader writes
Now for those for whom English is a second language, AND native English speakers who have never learned to use the language properly, realize that the word "writes" can take either of two distinct meanings in this context:
1. In both the context of written discussion as well as the more general context of broad English usage, "writes" means the same thing as the newer word "authors" means: "to write" or "to author" means to construct new sentences and paragraphs using alphanumeric characters.
2. In the specific context of written discussion only-- not in the general case-- "writes" means to contribute a piece of text to the discussion. The origin of the text is not a part of the concept. The word "contributes" is an exact synonym and in formal writing (to use yet another definition of "write") it is probably always the better choice.
But slashdot is not formal writing and because there are so many ESL participants, the use shorter words is better than polysylabic ones. Using "writes" as a synonym for "contributes" is the more appropriate choice. And in this sense, it says only that someone contributed some text, without implying that the text was an original creation.
The summary is not plagiarism. This is most especially evident to anyone who goes from RTFS to RTFA and sees that TFS is a repetition.
He has picked a direction.
Yeah, if you include "downwards" as a direction. Under Ballmer's leadership, Microsoft has been steadily losing market share and mind share across its entire product line.
When he took over he built a powerful suite of enterprise applications which allowed the Windows server to keep moving up market and owning a greater share of the enterprise software budget.
When Ballmer took over, he inherited the wealth of the Windows OS, that of MS Office, and that of MS Exchange. Vast chunks of that wealth have evaporated under his leadership. What is really telling is that much of the damage done to the corporation was not done by other businesses, but by communities of developers who do not think in terms of "return on investment" or even "profit"-- most likely most of them could not even define such common business terms. But despite their lack of business acumen these communities-- Apache Foundation, Mozilla, et. al.-- have appropriately used copyright laws to change the nature of the software market that Microsoft once dominated.
And they are not even doing it on purpose. What is bringing Microsoft to its knees is just the unintended consequences of a bunch of developer hobbyists who are not in it for the money. Ballmer fails to even see that, let alone failing to steer his company away from the inevitable shipwreck that lies ahead on its current course.
Now he's driving through a ubiquitous computing interface which will allow Microsoft to be functional on a huge range of hardware.
It is impossible to imagine any way in which a "ubiquitous computing interface" is going to compete with HTML5's approach of allowing each kind of specialized computer to have the interface that works best in its situation, and to use a standardized, interface-agnostic communications protocol to transfer information between devices.
Ballmer is irrelevant. He is increasingly using the Microsoft behometh to attempt to find and sell costly solutions to problems that already have freely available solutions because they have already been solved by the FOSS communities.
It leads to a question of ownership: when we bought Windows, did we buy it "as is" without upgrades? Or buy into a stream of upgrades, possibly for a limited time?
Ah, better watch it there. That last bit sounds very much like what the owner gets when he chooses Ubuntu, Red Hat / Fedora, or several other Linux distros-- except the stream of upgrades with those has no time limit. I'm guessing that you really don't want potential Windows buyers to be thinking about such things.
There might be more to parent post than just "4+ Funny".
Ballmer has become increasingly vulnerable. Basically, nobody much likes having a potty-mouthed, chair-throwing monkey dancer as a CEO, either inside or outside the corporation. He got the job not because he rose up through the ranks or had demonstrable skills but because he was Gates' chief sycophant, loyal to the core. It is long past time for him to be replaced by someone who can steer the monster resources of Microsoft in an appropriate direction, rather than just sitting there in the driver's seat while the huge earth-mover rumbles around without a definite direction.
By encouraging his most likely internal replacement to leave the company, Ballmer has done the one thing he could do that most reduces his risks of getting tossed out like a chair. There is no question that Microsoft lost a valuable asset when Sinofsky walked, but his continued presence as Win8 becomes a success would have been a major personal threat to Ballmer.
I fully agree with parent post. I, too, have read the whole story and I find it is highly realistic. Unpleasant, but definitely real. So not like Libertarianism at all.
.
.
Nope. Not much room for fantasy in that story.
There is a much more succinct way to make parent post's point: There are currently way too many college graduates who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
I am unsure whether parent post is itself an example of this. It does seem to be using a lot of verbiage in a pattern that is associated with undergraduates who are more interested in passing the course than in learning the subject. That's the "baffle 'em with bullsh*t" pattern.
So the take-away on this is that charities should be outlawed since they put a heavier burden on the conservatives who as a group have lower incomes, and taxes with government disbursements should be used instead, since this more fairly distributes the burden across the higher income liberals as well as the conservatives.
Yeah, that makes sense. At least it makes sense in being a reasonable inference from the stipulated findings of Mr Brooks.
But somehow I doubt that is the conclusion that the poster and Mr Brooks draw from those same findings.
Perhaps using Latin badly looks foolish; I could not say. I do not know enough Latin to judge the quality of its usage.
But I can say that watching someone tumble off their unicycle of language snobbery does not look foolish at all. It raises mixed emotions of revulsion and antipathy. With all due respect to your language skills, reading parent post was a horrible experience.
Some languages have prescriptive grammars: you do it this way because that's the rule. Latin and ancient greek are that way, mostly because they are dead languages that can no longer change.
English has a descriptive grammar: you do it this way because that's the way it is done. That is one of the reasons it has emerged as the global language of the Internet, and one of the very few languages that sees more use among non-native speakers than among those who were raised with it.
The thing about descriptive grammars is that the way it is done changes over time. The model for correct usage is a bell shaped curve where there are always new ways of saying things that are gaining acceptance and ways that are becoming increasingly archaic and losing acceptance. It is a fluid grammar. Almost a creole.
Attaching this to parent post solely because of p.p.'s signature line.
The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux...
I have puzzled over this response for about a day, and I still do not understand it. It seems to be from when the world was younger, like maybe ten years ago.
If the limitation is EAC, there is no limitation as it runs under the latest versions of Wine. You would not even need a Windows virtual machine; you could do it all in a basic Linux distro like one of the *buntus. But an even better solution would be to use a native Linux ripper like Audacity (Link is to the Wikipedia article which is an unbiased review of the software).
The only reason to stick with EAC as far as I can tell is the magical belief that if you do not spend big bucks on the software, it cannot be any good. That's a fallacy. It would be much more accurate to say that successful companies that charge big bucks for their software have very good marketing departments.
UbuntuStudio is a spinoff of Ubuntu designed specifically for high demand audio and visual work. It includes a very low latency kernel so that capture from microphones and other analog sources is extremely accurate. Worth looking into.
What is wrong with putting a low overhead Linux distro on all the boxes, and continuing to run WinXP in a virtual machine? That looks like a low cost and highly secure way to go forward.
You are probably on to something here.
I volunteered at Free Geek, a computer recycler / refurbisher, years ago when "fat caps" on the motherboard was a frequent reason for computers to be sent there. AIR, the problem was a lot of counterfit components being sold to reputable manufacturers. There were several big name manufacturers involved. Something like that could be happening in the router market. Going with the lowest bidder for the components is still important in low margin markets.
Another possibility is that a kid in the neighborhood is collecting the innards of smoke detectors as part of his unofficial science project, and is storing them too close to your house. A radioactive environment will shorten the life of capacitors and other components. Have you noticed whether any of your kids glow in the dark?
I'm kidding with that last, of course. Sort of.
.or we can cut out the inefficient middle man and use that power directly instead of converting it into hydrocarbons.
Yeah! Electric cars with windmills on top! A brilliant solution, Sir!
$99.00 a month. Well within the reach of a blogger who is claiming to make money off their blog.
Good point.
I suggest you rethink your concerns about charging a lot.
It might only take an hour of your time to do the set-up, but that is in addition to the several years you have put in to learning what to do, and the many hours per week that you are spending on keeping up with the technology. Think upon this punchline to an old joke:
Itemized billing for a Big Iron computer repair, circa 1970:
Total amount due: $1,000.00
Tweaking adjustment screw: $1.00
Knowing which screw to tweak: $999.00
How many dollar bills are you pushing into that wire each month to keep it open?
Commercial grade broadband is not an option for most of us 99%
Photography is an art; and unless you are claiming to be doing photojournalism, where accuracy is important, adjusting an image to capture what you want to convey is part of the process.
Above is true but does not go far enough, it is not the whole truth. Even in photojournalism and perfectly accurate photos, images can and should be composed in the viewfinder and diddled as needed in processing to best convey what the photographer feels is important.
The only truly accurate photos are the forensic ones taken at crime scenes, those of OR-7 when he trips a shutter release during his search for a girl friend, and those from the security cameras at your favorite store. Oh, some scientific photos, but not many. Most use false colors and other manipulations to bring out truths that otherwise would be missed.
Sir, you are implying that I cannot photoshop with the Gimp.
I CAN most definitely photoshop with the Gimp. I can do a better job of photoshopping with the Gimp than most persons can do with Photoshop. And I can always do it at less cost.
You are most definitely wrong, Sir. Photoshop is entirely unnecessary for photoshopping.
Yes. In fact there is nothing less aerodynamic than a dead goose. You can't even throw it as far as you could throw a stone of the same weight.
But a goose that has all its computer and control functions working properly! Now there you have something that can fly in close formation with other birds at high speed, and even land and take off in formation.
So, yeah, flying cars can be done. No cause yet to give up on that dream.
Another possibility is that the Air Force never intended to develop a saucer prototype. It could be that these "designs" were disinformation left where Soviet agents could discover them.
The timing is right for this being part of the effort to divert attention from the Air Force's super-secret Blackbird program. The Blackbird became operational in the 1960s and development began in the latter part of the 1950s. By the 1970s, after some 15 years of service, the Soviet Union was apparently aware that the USA had something that could go really high, really fast, and take lots of photos, but apparently they still had no clue about the design. That suggests that the Air Force had done a really good job of hiding the production of lots of titanium parts, etc-- capitalizing on the UFO craziness of the times would have been an excellent ploy.
And it is clear that releasing some of the documents used in disinformation strategems is part of the declassification process. However I do not believe there is anything that requires the US Government to say what was disinformation and what was factual. I rather think that they would leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Does anyone know the more recent history of the Blackbird? IIRC, the program was terminated around 1998, then there was talk about reactivating them for a time when we got into the Bush wars, and that's the last I remember hearing about it. Are any of these planes still flying?
Yes, I fully concur. For those who may be too young to have participated in the formulation of the Primary Masculine Koan, I present it in its mature form:
If a man is making an assertion aloud while walking in a forest, and there are no women around, is he still wrong?
Ponder upon that, and weep for the deficiencies of your gender.