You know, if you had any education, you would easily notice the difference between sentences like "The premise of predialectic materialism suggests that expression comes from the collective unconscious" and something written by a pomo-head. Both 'dialectical materialism' and 'collective unconcious' are clearly defined (although the latter doesn't seem to exist), and every "scholar" can see that the concepts can't be used like that.
The reason why you can't tell how many such essays you've had to read is, of course, that you've had to read exactly none, and it would totally spoil your joke if you told us.
So basically, you're being a pretentious fucktard by trying to fool people into believing you're smart enough to discover, all by your own hard work, that postmodernism is a bunch of meaningless pseudo-randomly generated junk. It probably is, for the most part, but you don't know anything about it.
Most of the apps I use regularly are more or less rock solid. I don't remember the last time one of them crashed -- before today. Today, Kopete has crashed at least 4 times, Firefox and Konqueror both crashed once each. And now neither Kopete nor Gaim will connect to MSN.
Coincidence?
Or maybe it was because I upgraded half of KDE's libraries without restarting KDE. An April Fools upgrade?
debian:~# apt-get install vote Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.
Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
vote: Depends: living-distro but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages
Yes, like TeX, Windows should have a versioning system approaching pi. TeX is currently at v. 3.141592, and so is Windows, but because of a buffer overflow it would really be 3.15.8734. Windows 2000 was because of a really hairy miscalculation of a division by zero error added to that. Trust me, you don't want to know.
1.) The dialog that appears asking for an admin password to install software. Directly ripped from OS X.
Actually, this has been available in Windows XP as well. But since everyone runs as admin anyway, it's probably not very well known. That leads to one of the more interesting news items, though: In Longhorn, Microsoft will introduce the new least privileged user account (LUA), which is basically a secure code compartment in which most application code will typically run. When trusted applications need administrator-level access, they can temporarily run in Protected Admin mode.
As for ripping off, I think the similarity between Aero's back and forward buttons and the KDE Crystal icon set's is rather striking. Microsoft's version does look a tiny bit better, though.
I'm just as tired of all the anything-Apple-plugs.
People here should like Linux because it's open and hackable. That's a very geek specific selling point, but guess what site this is? To us geeks, the iPod Shuffle is as interesting as a pair of shoes: We might need it if we have to leave the house, but it's not worth paying attention to. An mp3 player with a proper OS, though... but I don't thing the time has come for one yet. But soon, we may see players with wlan and web based interface for remote access (and I think Apple will be among the first, since they already make the Airport Express, but they probably chose to interface only with iTunes). A player like that will need an OS, and Linux with a web server and Samba is a fair choice.
Of course it's not the only option. Poisoning the water supply could be far more effective, and probably easier to get away with. It doesn't make a great game plot, though. And it's hard work (you need lots of poison). Or, for the less ambitious, a well placed bomb could just do the trick.
So maybe it's a good thing that games take the most spectacular but least effective route for killing people. If the kid actually gave some thought to his murders instead of just going on a FPS rampage, he could've had more success. So computer games may once again have saved thousands of lives.
But then again, he might have just chosen his strategy from the available weapons and transportation vehicles. As they say: If all you've got are your legs and some guns (and a chainsaw!), all problems look like Doom.
I just tested it on my laptop, a G3 266 with 320 MB RAM running Linux 2.6.11.2 (configured and compiled by me), and the system slowed down to a crawl after about 15 seconds. 5 seconds after that, it had recovered without me doing anything. Seems like runaway processes are killed automatically. Nice way to test how fast your system can eat all available swap, though.
English might be better suited for GUI descriptions than some other languages, but I sort of disagree with your points 3 and 4. Of course, you're not going to have a bad translation when there is no such thing, but you can have a bad choice of metaphors, or mixed metaphors. Your first example can be used here: File is both a noun and a verb, so it would be more meaningful if we didn't discard the metaphor of the file when we save something. Saving is, in fact, the act of creating or managing the file, i.e. filing. Personally, I think it would be better, both linguistically and logically, to say that you file the document (or picture or whatever you're working on). But what do I know, I'm not a native English speaker.
As for a translation being better than the original, think of it as the possibility of a C program being better (or worse) than the prototype programmed in Python. It's how well the expression works that matters, not the semantic similarity to the original. If my first example was sound (and I'm not sure it is), a good translator would fix it in the localized version. Of course, this didn't happen in Norwegian, and we "lagre" (= save, store) files instead of "arkivér", which would make more sense.
Learning English is generally a good thing, but well translated software certainly has its place. The examples you mention show the opposite: remapping keys and translating proper names creates confusion, especially for the bilingual user.
My impression, however, is that one reason why somewhat competent users don't like software in their native language is because they don't really see that the English words they are already used to are all metaphors, but this becomes painfully obvious -- and weird -- when they see it in their native language. But the metaphor can be important for understanding how the UI is supposed to work. A child learning both computer use and English as a foreign language at the same time might be better off learning the localized metaphor for Firefox's 'tabs' and the everyday meanings of the word 'tab' in English.
Good translators can be hard to find, though. Especially if they are supposed to work for free.
Oh yes, it was bad publicity, but Linux managed fine. The lawsuit was, in the end, obviously frivolous, and proved only that there's actual money behind Linux. And money is the only thing that makes Windows a "safe" bet. Microsoft has lost many lawsuits, and will continue to do so as long as the US patent system is in its current state. Windows is also a security nightmare. Windows safe? No. But it's not going away soon.
(and re: your sig -- why not use a dictionary: R'egime \R['e]`gime"\ (r?`zh?m"), n. [F. See {Regimen}.]
1. Mode or system of rule or management; character of government, or of the prevailing social system.)
You had coal mines? Son, when I was your age, the dinosaurs still roamed, and we had no coal. Neither could we move rocks to count with, because any movement would alarm the tyrannosaurus. No, we had to calculate by planetary movement, which took its fair time. And we hadn't discovered Plato and whatever all those modern planets are called, oh no... We had 7 planets, including the moon -- barely enough for ASCII.
Uranus wasn't such a big joke back then, when we had to wait years just to spell its name. But we never complained.
CaptCanuk's Boss asks: I've been charged with finding a qualified employee to handle big computer purchases. Now that most tech jobs are shipped to India, qualified personell in USA and Canada should be easy to find, but my employees aren't even capable of browsing Dell's web pages. I've tried everyone at my company, but they just scratch themselves and make loud screeching noises, then get back to reading Slashdot. So I ask: Where are those mythical competent workers? On the moon? Because they sure as hell aren't posting to "Ask Slashdot".
Yes, and it's also a well known fact that the Prescott was originally developed as a response to the old Slashdot "hot grits"-troll. Even the name Prescott is a rot-random-number obfuscation of the name Portman -- complete with speling error (the extra t at the end) to satisfy the most demanding troll.
I nominate LyX. It's not that different from the WYSIWYTYMG interface of Word, WP, OO Writer etc., but the differences stand out and makes you notice them and learn why they are there. And the main difference is forced consistency, normally a good thing when writing documents.
Good comment. In my experience, though, the computer (and teh intarweb especially) is a huge distraction device, and too much distraction isn't good.
When I wrote my thesis, I just couldn't get my work done at home, with my Athlon XP desktop computer and broadband internet connection. The problem was solved when I got a lousy old laptop and did my work at the uni, with no internet connection available at my desk. For distraction, I picked up smoking, and had a break every hour or two. Luckily, both my supervisor and a friend doing a PhD were heavy smokers, so I met them quite often, and learned a lot.
So what I'm saying is basically that smoking is good, err... social distracion is probably better to get work done than the distraction of running apt-get update (which I'm doing just now). People need breaks, not interruptions. I've more or less quit smoking now.
There is something wrong with the Gnome menu: the 'Internet' command has a submenu. The concept 'Internet' is tied to the browser in the average Joe's mind. So it should have been that 'Internet' should open Firefox/Mozilla. When one is on the Internet, 99.99% is on some browser.
Oh, come on. To many users, the monitor (or the keyboard) is the computer, and the computer chassis is the hard drive. There's no reason to adopt the language of the incompetent -- if you do, how will they ever learn? How will they know how to get help when "the internet" stops working? Your suggestion is stupid on so many levels that it's scary.
Names are important to be able to discriminate between different things. Therefore, Firefox is called Firefox to avoid confusion with MSIE and Opera, and it's not called Internet to avoid confusion with the network cable or modem. Just imagine doing phone support if you not only stop naming things, but give them wrong names that are already clearly defined to be something else.
Quicktime is open, and it's also a much better container than pure MPEG (or avi, which is just unsuitable for modern codecs). ASF/WMV are proprietary and patented.
Since you obviously use Windows, do a search for 'Quicktime alternative' to get around having to use Apple's Quicktime Player. MPlayer, vlc, xine et al support Quicktime as well. http://www.openquicktime.org/ has a nice library you can use.
Hopefully, someone else can comment on the quality of Ogg as a container format for video.
No, not really, but I was afraid my comment would be taken as an obvious troll (stating Linux == communism), and I didn't want that. On the other hand, the disclaimer made it possible for me to call the moderators powerhungry pigs, and I found that to be more fun than the actual comment, which was quite lame (and I apologize for that, but my comment had to be made).
Unfortunately, the karma system does not make for interesting comments, nor interesting discussion: Post early, and post obvious, and you have +5, informative. Post something well thought out, and you're usually to late to contribute to the discussion, and too late to be modded up.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if you had any education, you would easily notice the difference between sentences like "The premise of predialectic materialism suggests that expression comes from the collective unconscious" and something written by a pomo-head. Both 'dialectical materialism' and 'collective unconcious' are clearly defined (although the latter doesn't seem to exist), and every "scholar" can see that the concepts can't be used like that.
The reason why you can't tell how many such essays you've had to read is, of course, that you've had to read exactly none, and it would totally spoil your joke if you told us.
So basically, you're being a pretentious fucktard by trying to fool people into believing you're smart enough to discover, all by your own hard work, that postmodernism is a bunch of meaningless pseudo-randomly generated junk. It probably is, for the most part, but you don't know anything about it.
Every day is Apple Fool's day!
Most of the apps I use regularly are more or less rock solid. I don't remember the last time one of them crashed -- before today. Today, Kopete has crashed at least 4 times, Firefox and Konqueror both crashed once each. And now neither Kopete nor Gaim will connect to MSN.
Coincidence?
Or maybe it was because I upgraded half of KDE's libraries without restarting KDE. An April Fools upgrade?
(Nah, I use Debian Sid on my computers)
Yes, like TeX, Windows should have a versioning system approaching pi. TeX is currently at v. 3.141592, and so is Windows, but because of a buffer overflow it would really be 3.15.8734. Windows 2000 was because of a really hairy miscalculation of a division by zero error added to that. Trust me, you don't want to know.
As for ripping off, I think the similarity between Aero's back and forward buttons and the KDE Crystal icon set's is rather striking. Microsoft's version does look a tiny bit better, though.
I'm just as tired of all the anything-Apple-plugs.
... but I don't thing the time has come for one yet. But soon, we may see players with wlan and web based interface for remote access (and I think Apple will be among the first, since they already make the Airport Express, but they probably chose to interface only with iTunes). A player like that will need an OS, and Linux with a web server and Samba is a fair choice.
People here should like Linux because it's open and hackable. That's a very geek specific selling point, but guess what site this is? To us geeks, the iPod Shuffle is as interesting as a pair of shoes: We might need it if we have to leave the house, but it's not worth paying attention to. An mp3 player with a proper OS, though
Of course it's not the only option. Poisoning the water supply could be far more effective, and probably easier to get away with. It doesn't make a great game plot, though. And it's hard work (you need lots of poison). Or, for the less ambitious, a well placed bomb could just do the trick.
So maybe it's a good thing that games take the most spectacular but least effective route for killing people. If the kid actually gave some thought to his murders instead of just going on a FPS rampage, he could've had more success. So computer games may once again have saved thousands of lives.
But then again, he might have just chosen his strategy from the available weapons and transportation vehicles. As they say: If all you've got are your legs and some guns (and a chainsaw!), all problems look like Doom.
I just tested it on my laptop, a G3 266 with 320 MB RAM running Linux 2.6.11.2 (configured and compiled by me), and the system slowed down to a crawl after about 15 seconds. 5 seconds after that, it had recovered without me doing anything. Seems like runaway processes are killed automatically. Nice way to test how fast your system can eat all available swap, though.
No. I've played with fork bombs in Windows with SFU or Cygwin, and they didn't bring down the system. Seems like there was a sane ulimit on processes.
:|:& };:" (without the quotes) on your bash prompt to see if you are vulnerable.
Try ":(){
English might be better suited for GUI descriptions than some other languages, but I sort of disagree with your points 3 and 4. Of course, you're not going to have a bad translation when there is no such thing, but you can have a bad choice of metaphors, or mixed metaphors. Your first example can be used here: File is both a noun and a verb, so it would be more meaningful if we didn't discard the metaphor of the file when we save something. Saving is, in fact, the act of creating or managing the file, i.e. filing. Personally, I think it would be better, both linguistically and logically, to say that you file the document (or picture or whatever you're working on). But what do I know, I'm not a native English speaker.
As for a translation being better than the original, think of it as the possibility of a C program being better (or worse) than the prototype programmed in Python. It's how well the expression works that matters, not the semantic similarity to the original. If my first example was sound (and I'm not sure it is), a good translator would fix it in the localized version. Of course, this didn't happen in Norwegian, and we "lagre" (= save, store) files instead of "arkivér", which would make more sense.
Yes, it's wednesday, alright.
Learning English is generally a good thing, but well translated software certainly has its place. The examples you mention show the opposite: remapping keys and translating proper names creates confusion, especially for the bilingual user.
My impression, however, is that one reason why somewhat competent users don't like software in their native language is because they don't really see that the English words they are already used to are all metaphors, but this becomes painfully obvious -- and weird -- when they see it in their native language. But the metaphor can be important for understanding how the UI is supposed to work. A child learning both computer use and English as a foreign language at the same time might be better off learning the localized metaphor for Firefox's 'tabs' and the everyday meanings of the word 'tab' in English.
Good translators can be hard to find, though. Especially if they are supposed to work for free.
It would be nice if someone did something like this to the CherryOS "developers".
Oh yes, it was bad publicity, but Linux managed fine. The lawsuit was, in the end, obviously frivolous, and proved only that there's actual money behind Linux. And money is the only thing that makes Windows a "safe" bet. Microsoft has lost many lawsuits, and will continue to do so as long as the US patent system is in its current state. Windows is also a security nightmare. Windows safe? No. But it's not going away soon.
(and re: your sig -- why not use a dictionary:
R'egime \R['e]`gime"\ (r?`zh?m"), n. [F. See {Regimen}.]
1. Mode or system of rule or management; character of government, or of the prevailing social system.)
It's a rift in the time-space continuum.
You had coal mines? Son, when I was your age, the dinosaurs still roamed, and we had no coal. Neither could we move rocks to count with, because any movement would alarm the tyrannosaurus. No, we had to calculate by planetary movement, which took its fair time. And we hadn't discovered Plato and whatever all those modern planets are called, oh no... We had 7 planets, including the moon -- barely enough for ASCII.
Uranus wasn't such a big joke back then, when we had to wait years just to spell its name. But we never complained.
CaptCanuk's Boss asks: I've been charged with finding a qualified employee to handle big computer purchases. Now that most tech jobs are shipped to India, qualified personell in USA and Canada should be easy to find, but my employees aren't even capable of browsing Dell's web pages. I've tried everyone at my company, but they just scratch themselves and make loud screeching noises, then get back to reading Slashdot. So I ask: Where are those mythical competent workers? On the moon? Because they sure as hell aren't posting to "Ask Slashdot".
Yes, and it's also a well known fact that the Prescott was originally developed as a response to the old Slashdot "hot grits"-troll. Even the name Prescott is a rot-random-number obfuscation of the name Portman -- complete with speling error (the extra t at the end) to satisfy the most demanding troll.
Oh, imagine a beow%&"$%ü@ [no carrier]
I nominate LyX. It's not that different from the WYSIWYTYMG interface of Word, WP, OO Writer etc., but the differences stand out and makes you notice them and learn why they are there. And the main difference is forced consistency, normally a good thing when writing documents.
It does need to upgrade its look, though.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX
Of course this might have something to do with how the stock market works:
Good comment. In my experience, though, the computer (and teh intarweb especially) is a huge distraction device, and too much distraction isn't good.
... social distracion is probably better to get work done than the distraction of running apt-get update (which I'm doing just now). People need breaks, not interruptions. I've more or less quit smoking now.
When I wrote my thesis, I just couldn't get my work done at home, with my Athlon XP desktop computer and broadband internet connection. The problem was solved when I got a lousy old laptop and did my work at the uni, with no internet connection available at my desk. For distraction, I picked up smoking, and had a break every hour or two. Luckily, both my supervisor and a friend doing a PhD were heavy smokers, so I met them quite often, and learned a lot.
So what I'm saying is basically that smoking is good, err
Names are important to be able to discriminate between different things. Therefore, Firefox is called Firefox to avoid confusion with MSIE and Opera, and it's not called Internet to avoid confusion with the network cable or modem. Just imagine doing phone support if you not only stop naming things, but give them wrong names that are already clearly defined to be something else.
Quicktime is open, and it's also a much better container than pure MPEG (or avi, which is just unsuitable for modern codecs). ASF/WMV are proprietary and patented.
Since you obviously use Windows, do a search for 'Quicktime alternative' to get around having to use Apple's Quicktime Player. MPlayer, vlc, xine et al support Quicktime as well. http://www.openquicktime.org/ has a nice library you can use.
Hopefully, someone else can comment on the quality of Ogg as a container format for video.
Oh, yes. Karma is very important.
No, not really, but I was afraid my comment would be taken as an obvious troll (stating Linux == communism), and I didn't want that. On the other hand, the disclaimer made it possible for me to call the moderators powerhungry pigs, and I found that to be more fun than the actual comment, which was quite lame (and I apologize for that, but my comment had to be made).
Unfortunately, the karma system does not make for interesting comments, nor interesting discussion: Post early, and post obvious, and you have +5, informative. Post something well thought out, and you're usually to late to contribute to the discussion, and too late to be modded up.