I agree. Heck, Sumer wasn't a city; it was a coalition of city-states. And the game focused primarily on the "state" part, rather than the city. You are the emperor. You're ruling your people. Whether those people were all gathered together into one city, or spread across a wider region wasn't really relevant to the game. You could just as easily have been, say, a count in medieval times, ruling your county. In fact, one of the main elements of the game was deciding how much of your grain to plant, which isn't exactly an activity associated with cities.
I'd say that this game was closer to being the origin of empire-building games like Civ than to city-building games like Sim City.
Hear me out. I know git is more popular—I prefer it myself—but mercurial has a much simpler conceptual model, is easier to learn, and offers nearly all of the benefits of git.
With git you really need to learn about the difference between "add" and "commit" and how the staging area works. That's a very useful feature, but it also complicates the teaching, and for basic day-to-day stuff, doesn't offer huge benefits. And git just has _so_ many commands. They're powerful, but intimidating to a newbie.
Mercurial, on the other hand, has most of the power of git, but it's a lot more straightforward for the most part. The lack of a fast-forward capability means you end up with a lot more merge commits in your history, but that's not a huge deal. At least not at first. And its fairly easy to migrate from mercurial to git later, once your team is more comfortable with the way the system works. So it's not like you're making a lifetime commitment.
Mercurial is less powerful than git overall, but it's a great introduction to the whole model of DVCS. And for day-to-day stuff, mercurial is definitely more than adequate.
Both git and mercurial are vastly superior to svn, especially for performance. Having to make network round trips for all but the most basic examinations of history is a serious disadvantage of svn. If you're just testing a script, for example, a bibisect can be many orders of magnitude faster with git or mercurial. And you can do it even if you're sitting in a hotel room and don't want to pay the outrageous wifi fees. You don't need a network at all. Using SVN in this day and age is simply inexcusable. There are absolutely no benefits—only disadvantages.
If you just want to get up and running with a vcs that will offer great benefits with minimal floundering while people learn the ins and outs of the system, mercurial is a pretty darn good place to start. If you have a little more time to spare getting everyone up to speed, though, it might be just as well to leap straight to git. *shrug*
And each derived from context where it is ambiguous.
No, there's nothing ambiguous about it. The word you're searching in vain for is polysemy. Means that a word has multiple meanings. (Related to semantics, the study of meaning.) It's a common feature of words in many languages, particularly English. And there frequently is no "most common meaning". There's nothing ambiguous about, e.g., using "can" as a verb vs. a noun, because it's impossible to confuse them in context.
If you really think that "kills one in ten" is the most common meaning of "decimate", though, then it should be easy for you to find some examples of people using it in that sense. Real examples of real people using it that sense, not something you made up. I contend that it hasn't been used to mean that for at least a century. If you just google the word itself, you'll mostly get definitions and people discussing the word. I'm looking for examples of them using the word in what you seem to be claiming is the most common sense. I've checked Google books and Google news, and I can't find a single example. Just find me one, and I'll be impressed (though one example will hardly prove your point).
In this case, there's no ambiguity. It's just wrong. People type "alot" frequently and have no idea what "fewer" means.
Define "wrong". If it's wrong, why does it appear in every dictionary? Including the OED? (Even if they don't list it first, for whatever reason.) Dictionaries don't list things that are "just wrong". They don't list "alot", for example. So, why should I trust you, some random person on the Internet, over actual lexicographers and linguists, who all disagree with you?
(And "alot" is a spelling mistake, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Standardized spelling is much more recent than words having meaning. Words have had meanings for probably tens of thousands of years, if not more. Standardized spelling is only a couple of centuries old. There's a lot of reasons that spelling doesn't shift the way meanings do, but that's getting off topic, and it's really not my field. Bottom line: bad analogy.)
As for "fewer", pretty much everyone knows exactly what it means. The word that cause confusion is "less". Some idiots believe that because "fewer" is only used with countable nouns, that that means that "less" can only be used with non-countable nouns. That would make sense if the words were designed to complement each other, but they're weren't designed, and they're completely unrelated. Less is much older and has been used with both countable and uncountable nouns for over a thousand years. Claiming that it's "wrong" to say "10 items or less" is simple linguistic ignorance. Saying "10 items or fewer" is also acceptable, of course, but more stilted.
Any more dumb linguist superstitions you want to throw at me? No splitting infinitives? No ending sentences with prepositions?
The Oxford Online Dictionary is made by the same people who make the OED. The main differences are that the online version is slightly more up-to-date, and has a slightly lower bar for including neologisms. (Those may migrate to the OED if they prove to have some staying power.)
They too go in order from the top down where there is no ambiguity.
What do you mean "in order?" In order of what? The meanings have to go in some order. The OED generally lists meanings in order by age. Other dictionaries frequently list more common meanings above more rare ones, but they're not particularly consistent about it. (Especially since that's a hard thing to measure, even with the modern technology that is revolutionizing the study of language.) And in no dictionary does listing a meaning second (or fifteenth) mean it's wrong.
If the newer meaning were "wrong", it wouldn't be listed at all. If it were colloquial, it would be listed as colloquial. If it were slang, it would be listed as slang. Ditto for nonstandard, dialect, archaic, etc. It's listed as none of those things, in any dictionary. That's because it's not only not wrong, it's perfectly standard.
Heck, if you look up "bit", you'll see a bunch of meanings. A small amount. A piece of metal that goes in a horse's mouth. The business end of a drill. A binary digit. Are all-but-the-first wrong there? Sheesh!
So if I can change just one person's mind, it's one more point for our team.
Yuck. Certainly not my team. I will fight you on the beaches, I will fight you on the landing grounds. I will fight you on the fields and in the streets. I will fight you on the hills. I shall never surrender.
You think my hypothetical scenario is implausible? Try imagining if Kim Kardashian looked at a pink dress and said, on TV, that it was chartreuse. If you don't find that thought as sadly believable as it is chilling, well, I'm nothing but envious.
I think if that happened, social media would instantly be full of people mocking her, just as they mocked Jessica Simpson for the Chicken-of-the-Sea incident. And if social media didn't instantly fill up with mockery, I would say that that demonstrates that the current meaning of the word is not important enough to bother preserving (much like "terrific" or "decimate"—we survived the change in meaning of those terms just fine).
Frankly, I don't see much difference between someone who insists that decimate must mean one-in-ten, and someone who insists that chartreuse is pink. They're both idiots, they're both wrong, and they both have a minor potential to influence the language in possibly-unfortunate ways. Different types of idiots, admittedly, but both still idiots whose influence is mostly bad.
So yes, if you're honestly suggesting that decimate should still only mean kill-one-in-ten, then my respect for you is equal to my respect for Kim Kardashian.
The OED lists its definitions in historical order. The Oxford Online Dictionary, by comparison, lists "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage"as the first definition, and only has "kill one in ten" as the second definition. Which is marked as "historical". It also includes a usage note that says, "This sense has been superseded by the later, more general sense."
Wiktionary lists the historical meaning first, but also presents evidence suggesting that this sense is basically never used any more, except when complaining about the change in meaning (at least in the British National Corpus): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
You're about 400 years too late on the "literally" thing, and much later than that on "decimate". If you're really concerned with nipping things in the bud, you might go for some more recent potential changes. Like singular "you" instead of "thou/thee", and maybe "terrific" for things that don't cause terror.
Simple fact: people don't like being misunderstood, so the circumstances under which your highly contrived chartreuse-means-pink example might arise are basically nonexistent!
Re:Tell your friends OpenOffice is dead. Seriously
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"'E's not dead! 'E's resting! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.":)
As I said, "dead" is a mild exaggeration, but close enough that trying to explain the difference isn't worth it. "Lost their funding, lost most of their developers, haven't been able to release even a bug-fix for a major security hole, let alone an actual new release with new features, and only clinging to a vague semblance of life because a handful of folks got way too emotionally invested, and spent way too much time telling everyone that AOO was guaranteed to beat the pants off LO, and simply can't swallow enough pride to admit they were wrong, and it's over...but not actually dead," is just not as succinct.
I'll stick with my version, especially when talking to non-technical folks.:)
I think I saw that problem addressed in the release notes for V5. In any case, you do realize you're complaining about something that MSO can't do at all, right? (Powerpoint is not part of MSO.):)
Impress is definitely not LO's strong point, though. Most of the focus is still on Writer and Calc, and Calc has some big quirks that are going to require some restructuring. Nevertheless, the speed at which LO is improving is really astounding, compared to its predecessor. It's almost as if welcoming developers, and encouraging contributions, and spending time on code cleanup to avoid letting the technical debt get out of hand is more effective than trying to keep outside developers at arms length, and generally ignoring contributions unless (or even if) the developers are willing to jump through insane numbers of hoops, and generally just letting the code slowly rot.
It's not perfect yet, by any means, but it's a lot better than it was, and improving at an unprecedented rate.
(If you're referring to the recent libg++5 transition, that was a little tricky, I admit. I had to stop doing updates for a while, till things got sorted out, but that only seemed to take about a week. And had nothing to do with systemd.)
Tell your friends OpenOffice is dead. Seriously!
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, we can argue all day about the relative merits of LO vs. MSO. That's nice and all, and I don't really care which one you prefer. That's up to you. But there's still something important we should be doing; even those of us who prefer MSO. Tell your friends that OpenOffice is dead, and they should look for LibreOffice instead!
OpenOffice is the name that people know. It's been around for years. And a lot of people have tried it and found it satisfactory. You'd be surprised. And a lot of these people don't know about LibreOffice. Some of them may even still be using OOo. (I had one friend-of-a-friend who had been puzzled by the lack of updates for the last several years, but had never bothered to investigate further.)
Now, claiming that OpenOffice is actually dead may be a mild exaggeration, but I think it's close enough to true to make it worth saying. The project seems to have lost most of its IBM support, which is really the only thing that gave it any hope, post-Oracle. It operated without a release manager for nearly a year, and recently lost its project lead. It's been being distributed with a known security vulnerability since April, and they haven't even been able to put together a point-fix release, let alone a full new release! That's an effectively-dead project.
Open Office is dead! Tell your friends to get LibreOffice instead, if they're interested in something like that!
Forget about whether you think LO is adequate or not. Forget about whether it fits your needs. Tell your friends that they should get LO instead of OO! If you're on social media, post something there. Let people know about LO. I think you'll be stunned to find how many of your not-so-geeky friends are quietly running AOO or even OOo, and really need to know that they should switch to LO!
For me, it's been an optional update that fixes minor problems, and hasn't introduced any challenges. But I'm foolish enough to run boring-old Debian instead of whatever hot, new flavor of the month is out there. Debian made the glibc transition painless while the rest of the Linux world was screaming, and they seem to be doing the same with systemd.
Actually, I've been having that conversation more often recently, not because I think I should (I don't keep track of what goes on in the Windows world), but because people who know I run Linux have been approaching me. My advice remains the same:try switching to open source apps first (LibreOffice, etc.), and make sure you're comfortable with them before you even think about switching the main OS. A few people are so mad about Win10, though, that they've been insisting on more. So then I say, "get a live CD or thumbdrive system, and seriously, try it before you commit."
They're honestly stunned that I'm not trying to proselytize the system I use and persuade them all that they should convert immediately. But honestly, the ones who try it my way, and still end up deciding to switch tend to be a lot happier. As do the ones who end up not switching. It's a win all around!:)
Huh. It's not the templates that bother me; it's the bazillions of obscure macros you're expected to use to make sure that your code works on dozens of broken compilers I don't care about, and which come with 37 different definitions that all depend on the exact release of compiler you're using and it's almost impossible to figure out which one is actually in use, and half the time, if you're using a decent, up-to-date compiler, you can't even tell if you've got all the macros you need in the right places, because your compiler is too smart to even need those macros, so your code doesn't actually work right with other compilers that are supposedly supported by the libraries you're using.
The template stuff is relatively easy if you have a decent modern compiler.
Tell that to all the C libraries I link to from C++ programs.
Until someone is motivated to create C++ wrappers for every C library I might possibly want to use, I don't see any way to get away from some use of pointers. And so, until that mythical day, I think having some guidelines for pointer use in C++ is a good thing. Especially if the first one is:don't use raw pointers if there's any reasonable alternative.:)
(Of course, I could limit myself to languages where you cannot use a C library until someone creates a wrapper for it, but that seems unnecessarily restrictive.)
Debian doesn't exactly have a default. If you use netinst, the desktop task offers a selection of subtasks, including Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, and LXDE. Choosing the one (or ones) you want is the matter of clicking a checkbox—not exactly something that requires a great deal of effort. If you don't use netinst, then you can choose between several different Disc 1s; one each for the different desktops. Although each of those offers the same set of choices, in case you want to install more than one DE.
In any case, the popcon pages show a graph of historical data which doesn't seem to support your supposition.
Most of the reviews of Cinnamon I've read point out that it really doesn't do anything that gnome-shell can't easily do since "classic" mode was added (circa v. 3.8). Not that there's anything wrong with using Cinnamon if that's the only possible mode you'll ever want. Me, I've been experimenting with different modes of gnome-shell, and Ilike it. (The ability to experiment.) Haven't yet actually tried Cinnamon.
That's why I included the recently used numbers, and not just the install numbers. The recently used numbers are based on atime. If people aren't using those programs, the atime won't get updated, and they won't be marked as recently used.
There's multiple reasons why a DE or WM might be installed but not recently used. I have three DEs and a handful of separate WMs installed on my system, which I occasionally use for testing and experimentation. But mostly they sit there because I'm not motivated to delete them or use them.
When looking at the big picture, no, you don't exist. The huge majority (we're talking over 90%) of Linux desktop users are now using Unity, KDE, or XFCE, or MATE, or one of the many other window managers that exist. GNOME 3 and Cinnamon users like you are irrelevant, given your small number.
And your evidence for this amazing claim is...?
The Debian popcon results certainly seem to suggest otherwise:
(When looking at those numbers, you have to take into account the fact that a lot of Debian systems are servers, and don't have X11 installed at all.)
Of course Debian isn't representative of the whole world, but it is generally among the most popular systems, and one that has a disproportionate number of experienced users compared to systems like Ubuntu or Mint. Users who like choice. And they seem to be mostly choosing Gnome 3.
Factoring in Ubuntu and Mint, well, Ubuntu users will heavily use Unity, but there's still a lot using Gnome or KDE or Xfce. Plus, Unity is basically Gnome with a replacement for gnome-shell. And Mint users will most likely be using Cinnamon (which probably makes it a lot more popular than you suggest) or KDE. So those will likely balance out the strong Gnome lead we see on Debian. But as a rough estimate, I think it's safe to say that Gnome 3 is easily in the same ballpark as KDE and Unity. And the Debian results certainly suggest that Gnome 3 is more popular among experienced users than a lot of people like to claim. Which matches what I've been hearing:that many people have been going back to Gnome since 3.8 finally gave us "classic" mode.
(I tried to go through the Ubuntu popcon results, but they don't seem to be as well organized or easy to search, and I gave up in frustration. Feel free to check the numbers yourself. I think you may be surprised at how high in the rankings gnome-shell is, though. Mint doesn't support popcon at this point in time.)
I'd try to factor in Fedora, but Ihave no idea how to estimate what's going on in that part of the world. But I'd say your "over 90%" claim is on pretty shaky ground. (To describe it with more politeness than it probably deserves.)
The people who want to bitch are usually the first and most frequent to post. That doesn't mean they're representative of the whole population. I'm pretty happy with Gnome 3 now, although I admit I did switch to Xfce for a while when it first came out. Aside from enabling focus-follows-mouse (which is something I have to tweak in every environment), I haven't even mucked about with the defaults very much.
Indeed, I switched to Xfce when Gnome3 first came out, but between hearing that 3.10 was much improved and the fact that Xfce was struggling with my (admittedly bizarre) sound setup, I gave Gnome another try, and have been quite happy with it for many months now.
But I do see the puppies' point. Write a creative, innovative, well-written book? Get an award, unless your political tone or personal politics are right-wing.
And yet Brandon Sanderson, current leader of the Sad Puppies, actually won a Hugo just two years ago!
Write a good yarn with spaceships and ray guns and wizards and shit? No award.
Funny, seems to me like the last several winners (at least for Best Novel) have all been good yarns with spaceships and ray guns and wizards and shit. (Where "and shit" is defined as other classic SF elements like time travel.)
* 2014's Ancillary Justice was a classic space opera full of spaceships and rayguns. I actually approached this one with caution, because I'd heard people say it was all about gender politics, and I don't like being lectured to, even by people I agree with. I'm not a fan of preachy SF, even when it's preaching for my side. To my surprise, the only thing even resembling "gender politics" was an artificial creature pretending to be human who had a hard time figuring out when to use "he"vs. "she", because artificial creatures don't have sexes. It reminded me more of my own troubles trying to remember whether a table is male or female in Spanish than anything to do with politics.I was very pleasantly surprised by this one!
* 2013's Redshirts was a lighthearted comedy parodying Star Trek. Yes, John Scalzi is the Puppies nominee for Most Evil Writer Evar!!1!, but this was a fun, easy read, without a whiff of politics. (And it won the same year that Sanderson won, so I think it's pretty hard to say that the voters were choosing authors based on their personal politics.)
* 2012's Among Others was a pastoral fantasy set in 1970s Britain. It did have a message, but not exactly a political one. The protagonist was a young girl who discovers she has some magic powers and can see elves and stuff. And she's a huge nerd who reads science fiction every spare minute, and goes on and on and on about her favorite authors, like Heinlein and Asimov and other greats of the era (some of whom are not well remembered today). So, the message was:old SF is good! I actually found it a little too preachy on the topic, and I suspect that the message did help it win the award. Still...not exactly what the Puppies seem to be talking about though. In fact, I suspect they'd thoroughly agree with the message, if they were willing to read something written by a gu-u-ur-ul.:)
* 2011's Blackout/All Clear was a story about time-travelers studying WWII London, who get stuck. Connie Willis is a great writer, and, while this was a bit dark, it was still a page turner. The only message I saw was "Nazis are bad"; something I think few people would disagree with. (If you do disagree, please don't tell me. I want to retain some faint faith in humanity.)
I have to go all the way back to 2010 to find something that even had a strong political element. There were two winners that year. The Windup Girl was a post-disaster technothriller, full of fancy biotech, and insofar as it had a message, it seemed to be pro-science / anti-politics. The right probably hated that the disaster was climate change, but the left probably hated its positive portrayals of GMOs. (And the Slashdot crowd should love its anti-patent message.) As for The City &The City, well, yes, China Mieville is an extreme uberleftie, but the main message I saw in this book was:life under a Soviet-style dictatorship sucks. Which is not exactly something I'd expect the Puppies to disagree with.:)
Write complete dreck but make the main character a genderqueer half-Mexican half-African American differently-abled merperson? Award!
Huh. I must have missed that one. Was it one of the short stories? I'm willing
Spite? Sure. (Though anger might be a more appropriate term.) Politically motivated? I'm sure some were, but a whole lot of people were simply pissed off by the abuse of the nominating process. If I'd been voting, I would have been just as tempted to vote down a far-left slate out of spite (if there'd been one) as I would have been to vote down the far-right slate. As far as I'm concerned, the bad behavior here was creating a slate and persuading people to vote for those specific items sight-unseen rather than voting for what they honestly liked. The politics of the people who did it is irrelevant. And bad behavior deserves to be punished, no matter who does it.
As far as I'm concerned, a bunch of political fanatics of some flavor or other tried to shit on an award I admire and respect and have occasionally voted in many times over the last several decades. I like science fiction, I don't give a crap about political fanatics of any type, I think those assholes got what they deserved, and I'd say exactly the same if they were SJWs instead of SIWs.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Heck, Sumer wasn't a city; it was a coalition of city-states. And the game focused primarily on the "state" part, rather than the city. You are the emperor. You're ruling your people. Whether those people were all gathered together into one city, or spread across a wider region wasn't really relevant to the game. You could just as easily have been, say, a count in medieval times, ruling your county. In fact, one of the main elements of the game was deciding how much of your grain to plant, which isn't exactly an activity associated with cities.
I'd say that this game was closer to being the origin of empire-building games like Civ than to city-building games like Sim City.
Hear me out. I know git is more popular—I prefer it myself—but mercurial has a much simpler conceptual model, is easier to learn, and offers nearly all of the benefits of git.
With git you really need to learn about the difference between "add" and "commit" and how the staging area works. That's a very useful feature, but it also complicates the teaching, and for basic day-to-day stuff, doesn't offer huge benefits. And git just has _so_ many commands. They're powerful, but intimidating to a newbie.
Mercurial, on the other hand, has most of the power of git, but it's a lot more straightforward for the most part. The lack of a fast-forward capability means you end up with a lot more merge commits in your history, but that's not a huge deal. At least not at first. And its fairly easy to migrate from mercurial to git later, once your team is more comfortable with the way the system works. So it's not like you're making a lifetime commitment.
Mercurial is less powerful than git overall, but it's a great introduction to the whole model of DVCS. And for day-to-day stuff, mercurial is definitely more than adequate.
Both git and mercurial are vastly superior to svn, especially for performance. Having to make network round trips for all but the most basic examinations of history is a serious disadvantage of svn. If you're just testing a script, for example, a bibisect can be many orders of magnitude faster with git or mercurial. And you can do it even if you're sitting in a hotel room and don't want to pay the outrageous wifi fees. You don't need a network at all. Using SVN in this day and age is simply inexcusable. There are absolutely no benefits—only disadvantages.
If you just want to get up and running with a vcs that will offer great benefits with minimal floundering while people learn the ins and outs of the system, mercurial is a pretty darn good place to start. If you have a little more time to spare getting everyone up to speed, though, it might be just as well to leap straight to git. *shrug*
And each derived from context where it is ambiguous.
No, there's nothing ambiguous about it. The word you're searching in vain for is polysemy. Means that a word has multiple meanings. (Related to semantics, the study of meaning.) It's a common feature of words in many languages, particularly English. And there frequently is no "most common meaning". There's nothing ambiguous about, e.g., using "can" as a verb vs. a noun, because it's impossible to confuse them in context.
If you really think that "kills one in ten" is the most common meaning of "decimate", though, then it should be easy for you to find some examples of people using it in that sense. Real examples of real people using it that sense, not something you made up. I contend that it hasn't been used to mean that for at least a century. If you just google the word itself, you'll mostly get definitions and people discussing the word. I'm looking for examples of them using the word in what you seem to be claiming is the most common sense. I've checked Google books and Google news, and I can't find a single example. Just find me one, and I'll be impressed (though one example will hardly prove your point).
In this case, there's no ambiguity. It's just wrong. People type "alot" frequently and have no idea what "fewer" means.
Define "wrong". If it's wrong, why does it appear in every dictionary? Including the OED? (Even if they don't list it first, for whatever reason.) Dictionaries don't list things that are "just wrong". They don't list "alot", for example. So, why should I trust you, some random person on the Internet, over actual lexicographers and linguists, who all disagree with you?
(And "alot" is a spelling mistake, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Standardized spelling is much more recent than words having meaning. Words have had meanings for probably tens of thousands of years, if not more. Standardized spelling is only a couple of centuries old. There's a lot of reasons that spelling doesn't shift the way meanings do, but that's getting off topic, and it's really not my field. Bottom line: bad analogy.)
As for "fewer", pretty much everyone knows exactly what it means. The word that cause confusion is "less". Some idiots believe that because "fewer" is only used with countable nouns, that that means that "less" can only be used with non-countable nouns. That would make sense if the words were designed to complement each other, but they're weren't designed, and they're completely unrelated. Less is much older and has been used with both countable and uncountable nouns for over a thousand years. Claiming that it's "wrong" to say "10 items or less" is simple linguistic ignorance. Saying "10 items or fewer" is also acceptable, of course, but more stilted.
Any more dumb linguist superstitions you want to throw at me? No splitting infinitives? No ending sentences with prepositions?
The Oxford Online Dictionary is made by the same people who make the OED. The main differences are that the online version is slightly more up-to-date, and has a slightly lower bar for including neologisms. (Those may migrate to the OED if they prove to have some staying power.)
They too go in order from the top down where there is no ambiguity.
What do you mean "in order?" In order of what? The meanings have to go in some order. The OED generally lists meanings in order by age. Other dictionaries frequently list more common meanings above more rare ones, but they're not particularly consistent about it. (Especially since that's a hard thing to measure, even with the modern technology that is revolutionizing the study of language.) And in no dictionary does listing a meaning second (or fifteenth) mean it's wrong.
If the newer meaning were "wrong", it wouldn't be listed at all. If it were colloquial, it would be listed as colloquial. If it were slang, it would be listed as slang. Ditto for nonstandard, dialect, archaic, etc. It's listed as none of those things, in any dictionary. That's because it's not only not wrong, it's perfectly standard.
Heck, if you look up "bit", you'll see a bunch of meanings. A small amount. A piece of metal that goes in a horse's mouth. The business end of a drill. A binary digit. Are all-but-the-first wrong there? Sheesh!
So if I can change just one person's mind, it's one more point for our team.
Yuck. Certainly not my team. I will fight you on the beaches, I will fight you on the landing grounds. I will fight you on the fields and in the streets. I will fight you on the hills. I shall never surrender.
You think my hypothetical scenario is implausible? Try imagining if Kim Kardashian looked at a pink dress and said, on TV, that it was chartreuse. If you don't find that thought as sadly believable as it is chilling, well, I'm nothing but envious.
I think if that happened, social media would instantly be full of people mocking her, just as they mocked Jessica Simpson for the Chicken-of-the-Sea incident. And if social media didn't instantly fill up with mockery, I would say that that demonstrates that the current meaning of the word is not important enough to bother preserving (much like "terrific" or "decimate"—we survived the change in meaning of those terms just fine).
Frankly, I don't see much difference between someone who insists that decimate must mean one-in-ten, and someone who insists that chartreuse is pink. They're both idiots, they're both wrong, and they both have a minor potential to influence the language in possibly-unfortunate ways. Different types of idiots, admittedly, but both still idiots whose influence is mostly bad.
So yes, if you're honestly suggesting that decimate should still only mean kill-one-in-ten, then my respect for you is equal to my respect for Kim Kardashian.
The OED lists its definitions in historical order. The Oxford Online Dictionary, by comparison, lists "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage"as the first definition, and only has "kill one in ten" as the second definition. Which is marked as "historical". It also includes a usage note that says, "This sense has been superseded by the later, more general sense."
http://www.oxforddictionaries....
Collins Dictionary also has the one-in-ten meaning listed second: http://www.collinsdictionary.c...
As does dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.co...
Wiktionary lists the historical meaning first, but also presents evidence suggesting that this sense is basically never used any more, except when complaining about the change in meaning (at least in the British National Corpus): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
You're about 400 years too late on the "literally" thing, and much later than that on "decimate". If you're really concerned with nipping things in the bud, you might go for some more recent potential changes. Like singular "you" instead of "thou/thee", and maybe "terrific" for things that don't cause terror.
Simple fact: people don't like being misunderstood, so the circumstances under which your highly contrived chartreuse-means-pink example might arise are basically nonexistent!
"'E's not dead! 'E's resting! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major." :)
As I said, "dead" is a mild exaggeration, but close enough that trying to explain the difference isn't worth it. "Lost their funding, lost most of their developers, haven't been able to release even a bug-fix for a major security hole, let alone an actual new release with new features, and only clinging to a vague semblance of life because a handful of folks got way too emotionally invested, and spent way too much time telling everyone that AOO was guaranteed to beat the pants off LO, and simply can't swallow enough pride to admit they were wrong, and it's over...but not actually dead," is just not as succinct.
I'll stick with my version, especially when talking to non-technical folks. :)
I think I saw that problem addressed in the release notes for V5. In any case, you do realize you're complaining about something that MSO can't do at all, right? (Powerpoint is not part of MSO.) :)
Impress is definitely not LO's strong point, though. Most of the focus is still on Writer and Calc, and Calc has some big quirks that are going to require some restructuring. Nevertheless, the speed at which LO is improving is really astounding, compared to its predecessor. It's almost as if welcoming developers, and encouraging contributions, and spending time on code cleanup to avoid letting the technical debt get out of hand is more effective than trying to keep outside developers at arms length, and generally ignoring contributions unless (or even if) the developers are willing to jump through insane numbers of hoops, and generally just letting the code slowly rot.
It's not perfect yet, by any means, but it's a lot better than it was, and improving at an unprecedented rate.
Funny, that's exactly what I am running.
(If you're referring to the recent libg++5 transition, that was a little tricky, I admit. I had to stop doing updates for a while, till things got sorted out, but that only seemed to take about a week. And had nothing to do with systemd.)
Ok, we can argue all day about the relative merits of LO vs. MSO. That's nice and all, and I don't really care which one you prefer. That's up to you. But there's still something important we should be doing; even those of us who prefer MSO. Tell your friends that OpenOffice is dead, and they should look for LibreOffice instead!
OpenOffice is the name that people know. It's been around for years. And a lot of people have tried it and found it satisfactory. You'd be surprised. And a lot of these people don't know about LibreOffice. Some of them may even still be using OOo. (I had one friend-of-a-friend who had been puzzled by the lack of updates for the last several years, but had never bothered to investigate further.)
Now, claiming that OpenOffice is actually dead may be a mild exaggeration, but I think it's close enough to true to make it worth saying. The project seems to have lost most of its IBM support, which is really the only thing that gave it any hope, post-Oracle. It operated without a release manager for nearly a year, and recently lost its project lead. It's been being distributed with a known security vulnerability since April, and they haven't even been able to put together a point-fix release, let alone a full new release! That's an effectively-dead project.
Open Office is dead! Tell your friends to get LibreOffice instead, if they're interested in something like that!
Forget about whether you think LO is adequate or not. Forget about whether it fits your needs. Tell your friends that they should get LO instead of OO! If you're on social media, post something there. Let people know about LO. I think you'll be stunned to find how many of your not-so-geeky friends are quietly running AOO or even OOo, and really need to know that they should switch to LO!
You, sir or madam, win the thread! :D
For me, it's been an optional update that fixes minor problems, and hasn't introduced any challenges. But I'm foolish enough to run boring-old Debian instead of whatever hot, new flavor of the month is out there. Debian made the glibc transition painless while the rest of the Linux world was screaming, and they seem to be doing the same with systemd.
Actually, I've been having that conversation more often recently, not because I think I should (I don't keep track of what goes on in the Windows world), but because people who know I run Linux have been approaching me. My advice remains the same:try switching to open source apps first (LibreOffice, etc.), and make sure you're comfortable with them before you even think about switching the main OS. A few people are so mad about Win10, though, that they've been insisting on more. So then I say, "get a live CD or thumbdrive system, and seriously, try it before you commit."
They're honestly stunned that I'm not trying to proselytize the system I use and persuade them all that they should convert immediately. But honestly, the ones who try it my way, and still end up deciding to switch tend to be a lot happier. As do the ones who end up not switching. It's a win all around!:)
"Entirely light-based". Somehow, I suspect that matter is involved somewhere here too. Building something out of just photons seems a bit unlikely.
What? This is Slashdot! I can be a pedantic nerd if I want! :D
Huh. It's not the templates that bother me; it's the bazillions of obscure macros you're expected to use to make sure that your code works on dozens of broken compilers I don't care about, and which come with 37 different definitions that all depend on the exact release of compiler you're using and it's almost impossible to figure out which one is actually in use, and half the time, if you're using a decent, up-to-date compiler, you can't even tell if you've got all the macros you need in the right places, because your compiler is too smart to even need those macros, so your code doesn't actually work right with other compilers that are supposedly supported by the libraries you're using.
The template stuff is relatively easy if you have a decent modern compiler.
Tell that to all the C libraries I link to from C++ programs.
Until someone is motivated to create C++ wrappers for every C library I might possibly want to use, I don't see any way to get away from some use of pointers. And so, until that mythical day, I think having some guidelines for pointer use in C++ is a good thing. Especially if the first one is:don't use raw pointers if there's any reasonable alternative. :)
(Of course, I could limit myself to languages where you cannot use a C library until someone creates a wrapper for it, but that seems unnecessarily restrictive.)
Debian doesn't exactly have a default. If you use netinst, the desktop task offers a selection of subtasks, including Gnome, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, and LXDE. Choosing the one (or ones) you want is the matter of clicking a checkbox—not exactly something that requires a great deal of effort. If you don't use netinst, then you can choose between several different Disc 1s; one each for the different desktops. Although each of those offers the same set of choices, in case you want to install more than one DE.
In any case, the popcon pages show a graph of historical data which doesn't seem to support your supposition.
Most of the reviews of Cinnamon I've read point out that it really doesn't do anything that gnome-shell can't easily do since "classic" mode was added (circa v. 3.8). Not that there's anything wrong with using Cinnamon if that's the only possible mode you'll ever want. Me, I've been experimenting with different modes of gnome-shell, and Ilike it. (The ability to experiment.) Haven't yet actually tried Cinnamon.
That's why I included the recently used numbers, and not just the install numbers. The recently used numbers are based on atime. If people aren't using those programs, the atime won't get updated, and they won't be marked as recently used.
There's multiple reasons why a DE or WM might be installed but not recently used. I have three DEs and a handful of separate WMs installed on my system, which I occasionally use for testing and experimentation. But mostly they sit there because I'm not motivated to delete them or use them.
When looking at the big picture, no, you don't exist. The huge majority (we're talking over 90%) of Linux desktop users are now using Unity, KDE, or XFCE, or MATE, or one of the many other window managers that exist. GNOME 3 and Cinnamon users like you are irrelevant, given your small number.
And your evidence for this amazing claim is...?
The Debian popcon results certainly seem to suggest otherwise:
* gnome-shell: 30% installed, 18% recently used.
* kde-runtime: 19% installed, 11% recently used.
* xfce4-panel: 14% installed, 7.6% recently used.
* lxde-common:5.6% installed, 2.5% recently used.
* mate-panel: 4.6% installed, 2.3% recently used.
* cinnamon: 3.5% installed, 1.6% recently used.
* Unity: not available for Debian.
(When looking at those numbers, you have to take into account the fact that a lot of Debian systems are servers, and don't have X11 installed at all.)
Of course Debian isn't representative of the whole world, but it is generally among the most popular systems, and one that has a disproportionate number of experienced users compared to systems like Ubuntu or Mint. Users who like choice. And they seem to be mostly choosing Gnome 3.
Factoring in Ubuntu and Mint, well, Ubuntu users will heavily use Unity, but there's still a lot using Gnome or KDE or Xfce. Plus, Unity is basically Gnome with a replacement for gnome-shell. And Mint users will most likely be using Cinnamon (which probably makes it a lot more popular than you suggest) or KDE. So those will likely balance out the strong Gnome lead we see on Debian. But as a rough estimate, I think it's safe to say that Gnome 3 is easily in the same ballpark as KDE and Unity. And the Debian results certainly suggest that Gnome 3 is more popular among experienced users than a lot of people like to claim. Which matches what I've been hearing:that many people have been going back to Gnome since 3.8 finally gave us "classic" mode.
(I tried to go through the Ubuntu popcon results, but they don't seem to be as well organized or easy to search, and I gave up in frustration. Feel free to check the numbers yourself. I think you may be surprised at how high in the rankings gnome-shell is, though. Mint doesn't support popcon at this point in time.)
I'd try to factor in Fedora, but Ihave no idea how to estimate what's going on in that part of the world. But I'd say your "over 90%" claim is on pretty shaky ground. (To describe it with more politeness than it probably deserves.)
The people who want to bitch are usually the first and most frequent to post. That doesn't mean they're representative of the whole population. I'm pretty happy with Gnome 3 now, although I admit I did switch to Xfce for a while when it first came out. Aside from enabling focus-follows-mouse (which is something I have to tweak in every environment), I haven't even mucked about with the defaults very much.
Indeed, I switched to Xfce when Gnome3 first came out, but between hearing that 3.10 was much improved and the fact that Xfce was struggling with my (admittedly bizarre) sound setup, I gave Gnome another try, and have been quite happy with it for many months now.
But I do see the puppies' point. Write a creative, innovative, well-written book? Get an award, unless your political tone or personal politics are right-wing.
And yet Brandon Sanderson, current leader of the Sad Puppies, actually won a Hugo just two years ago!
Write a good yarn with spaceships and ray guns and wizards and shit? No award.
Funny, seems to me like the last several winners (at least for Best Novel) have all been good yarns with spaceships and ray guns and wizards and shit. (Where "and shit" is defined as other classic SF elements like time travel.)
* 2014's Ancillary Justice was a classic space opera full of spaceships and rayguns. I actually approached this one with caution, because I'd heard people say it was all about gender politics, and I don't like being lectured to, even by people I agree with. I'm not a fan of preachy SF, even when it's preaching for my side. To my surprise, the only thing even resembling "gender politics" was an artificial creature pretending to be human who had a hard time figuring out when to use "he"vs. "she", because artificial creatures don't have sexes. It reminded me more of my own troubles trying to remember whether a table is male or female in Spanish than anything to do with politics.I was very pleasantly surprised by this one!
* 2013's Redshirts was a lighthearted comedy parodying Star Trek. Yes, John Scalzi is the Puppies nominee for Most Evil Writer Evar!!1!, but this was a fun, easy read, without a whiff of politics. (And it won the same year that Sanderson won, so I think it's pretty hard to say that the voters were choosing authors based on their personal politics.)
* 2012's Among Others was a pastoral fantasy set in 1970s Britain. It did have a message, but not exactly a political one. The protagonist was a young girl who discovers she has some magic powers and can see elves and stuff. And she's a huge nerd who reads science fiction every spare minute, and goes on and on and on about her favorite authors, like Heinlein and Asimov and other greats of the era (some of whom are not well remembered today). So, the message was:old SF is good! I actually found it a little too preachy on the topic, and I suspect that the message did help it win the award. Still...not exactly what the Puppies seem to be talking about though. In fact, I suspect they'd thoroughly agree with the message, if they were willing to read something written by a gu-u-ur-ul. :)
* 2011's Blackout/All Clear was a story about time-travelers studying WWII London, who get stuck. Connie Willis is a great writer, and, while this was a bit dark, it was still a page turner. The only message I saw was "Nazis are bad"; something I think few people would disagree with. (If you do disagree, please don't tell me. I want to retain some faint faith in humanity.)
I have to go all the way back to 2010 to find something that even had a strong political element. There were two winners that year. The Windup Girl was a post-disaster technothriller, full of fancy biotech, and insofar as it had a message, it seemed to be pro-science / anti-politics. The right probably hated that the disaster was climate change, but the left probably hated its positive portrayals of GMOs. (And the Slashdot crowd should love its anti-patent message.) As for The City &The City, well, yes, China Mieville is an extreme uberleftie, but the main message I saw in this book was:life under a Soviet-style dictatorship sucks. Which is not exactly something I'd expect the Puppies to disagree with. :)
Write complete dreck but make the main character a genderqueer half-Mexican half-African American differently-abled merperson? Award!
Huh. I must have missed that one. Was it one of the short stories? I'm willing
Spite? Sure. (Though anger might be a more appropriate term.) Politically motivated? I'm sure some were, but a whole lot of people were simply pissed off by the abuse of the nominating process. If I'd been voting, I would have been just as tempted to vote down a far-left slate out of spite (if there'd been one) as I would have been to vote down the far-right slate. As far as I'm concerned, the bad behavior here was creating a slate and persuading people to vote for those specific items sight-unseen rather than voting for what they honestly liked. The politics of the people who did it is irrelevant. And bad behavior deserves to be punished, no matter who does it.
As far as I'm concerned, a bunch of political fanatics of some flavor or other tried to shit on an award I admire and respect and have occasionally voted in many times over the last several decades. I like science fiction, I don't give a crap about political fanatics of any type, I think those assholes got what they deserved, and I'd say exactly the same if they were SJWs instead of SIWs.