I'm not telling you about your own language. I'm telling you about classical Greek. Unless you're really old, you speak modern Greek. Languages do change over the centuries, as your spelling illustrates.
Also, we're not just talking about Greek, we're also talking about the weird conventions English has for handling non-Latin alphabets. So your claim for superior knowledge would be irrelevant even if it weren't fallacious.
Wrong. The Greek spelling is omicron kappa tau omega pi omicron upsilon sigma. Greek has its own alphabet and transliterating to the Latin alphabet is purely a matter of convention. Your transliteration assumes that Greek letters are equivalent to the Latin letters they most resemble. That would be too easy!
In English, Greek loan words are always spelled using a phonetic convention. Hence "-ous" becomes "-us". Kappa is never transliterated as k (don't ask me why) but as C. Hence "cinema" instead of "kinema".
The Romans didn't use K until they conquered Greece and started reading a lot of Greek. Then they used K for Greek words and C otherwise. That's why we have two "kuh" letters.
So the presence of C identifies "octopus" as a Greek word! Strange, but true.
As for Linux: We all know it's not Latin. Lighten up, this thread is supposed to be humorous.
What's correct is what the vast majority of people do. Incorrect! If that were true, all the common idioms that most people use would be "correct". Most people use double negatives, but try putting one in your English class essay!
In theory, "correct" English is the language used by the most educated people. But since those people can't quite agree as to exactly what it is, it's pretty much a myth.
...as long as people can tell what is being said, there isn't really a good reason to argue too much about it. But a key purpose of the rules is to facilitate communication. If you don't get at least a little anal about grammatical rules, it's darn easy to be misunderstood. Or at least sound silly: "Walking up the stairs, the clock struck 3."
The Rules serve another purpose: to help identify the "literate" Elite and distinguish them from the "illiterate" multitude. I don't suppose you consider that a valid reason to worry about grammatical rules (I certainly don't) but it is the main reason people do.
Some prescriptivists with a Classical fetish in the past have promoted words like "cacti", but the reality is that "cactuses" is perfectly acceptable modern English. In general, I agree with you. However, "cactus" is sort of different because it's not Classical Latin, it's Scientific Latin. If you said "cactus" to a Roman, he wouldn't have thought you were talking about a thorny succulent, because he never would have seen one — it's a New World plant. In Classical Latin, "cactus" refers to the cardoon.
The modern usage comes from Linnaeus's arbitrary appropriation of the word to describe a quite different family of plants. So your prescriptivist would be a nonclassical type.
Of course, it's still silly and pretentious to say "cacti".
Whenever people hear a word that ends with "s" (or that sounds like it should), they assume that there's some silly grammatical rule that they need to know about. There is a rule, but it's so hard to follow, you shouldn't even try.
Here's the rule: a lot of words that end with "-us" (not all of them! more on that in a moment) are borrowed from Latin. In that language, a noun ending with "-us" is a singluar form (dominus, lord; servus, slave) that takes a plural form ending in "-i" (domini, lords; servi, slaves). In theory, it's more "correct" to use foreign inflections with foreign words. So instead of "octopuses", "styluses", and "circuses", people say "octopi", "styli", and "circi".
No, wait, nobody says "circi", do they? It's the "correct" usage, because it's a Latin word, but the established usage is "circuses".
The other examples I gave are commonly used, but are in no sense "correct". "Octopus" does not come from Latin: it's a Greek word, and the Greek plural is "octopods". "Stylus" is Latin, but it's misspelled Latin: the Romans spelled it "stilus". It got changed to "stylus" because somebody thought it was somehow derived from the Greek word "stylos". But it's not, so the "correct" way to refer to that thing that comes with your PDA is "stilus" and "stili".
But to heck with being "correct". It's the tar baby of the literate. Just use the rules you learned in grade school and be done with it.
Funny you should mention Chamberlain. People tend to assume that he avoided going to war with Hitler because he was a wimp. Thing is, when Hitler first emerged as a threat, the UK was in no position to challenge him. On top of that, there was a lot of anti-war sentiment that didn't go away until Hitler showed his true colors — several times. By playing the wimp, Chamberlain bought the Allies time to rearm. Of course, they squandered that advantage when the war actually started, but that's another issue.
There's also the little detail that many leading politicos in Chamberlain's Conservative Party considered Hitler a hero. These were the guys in the House of Commons who booed Churchill the first time he entered the House as Prime Minister. Eventually, they became politically irrelevent, but until they did, any Conservative PM who had gone against Hitler would have been out of office faster than you can say "jackboot".
Now, we don't have a lot of Islamists in U.S. politics, but aside from that, we're pretty much in the same spot now the Brits were then. It's true our armed forces are way better than theirs were, but between our global committments and the Iraq tarbaby, we've nothing to spare. Even if we did have the troops to spare, we've gone and used up all our credibility with our recent fuckups. Starting another war would turn us into absolute pariahs.
And here's one thing that really bugs me: how can we tell Iran that they can't have nukes when we have thousands. Which we are not only making no move to draw down, we are actually planning to increase
One other thing: are you willing to pay all the extra taxes it would take to cover a third war? It's true that we've been running the first two on credit, but that's playing bloody hell with the value of the dollar. So I think we should assume we're at our credit limit.
So don't bash poor Neville. At least he knew his limitations.
That's the theory. But I've already cited a couple of projects where it turned out not to be true in practice. And that's not even including ReiserFS.
I'm curious, do you guys have corporate sponsorship? Is the key maintainer a paid position? If so, that kind of proves my point. If not, then you guys are definitely an exception, and I'm very curious to know how you managed to keep the effort going for so long.
Ooh, you switched to Java and your software was 16 times less efficient! Gosh, that Java really sucks!
No, wait, that figure is meaningless. As you said yourself, some those extra 4700 systems were needed to handle the growth of your company. How many? How many page hits per machine were you serving when you had 300 machines, and how many when you had 5000.
Perhaps switching to Java made you less efficient. Perhaps it made you more efficient. Perhaps it had no effect at all. The statistics you tell us nothing about that.
C/C++ fastest way to execute web apps but also more difficult If all your web apps are faster with C/C++, you must run some very strange web apps. The efficiency of C++ comes from the fact that it compiles to machine code. Machine code only has an advantage when the CPU is the bottleneck. What kind of web application is CPU bound? Network and disk, more likely.
And indeed, your experience differs a lot from that of thousands of web developers. Perl in particular had been called the Duct Tape of the Internet.
Speaking of Perl, I notice that your complaint it is not that it's slow, but that it's hard to support. That's a legitimate complaint, but it says nothing about the relative efficiency of scripting languages.
I can't comment on RoR, but your generalization about scripting languages represents a standard misconception. A native code platform isn't automatically more efficient than one that's based on an interpreter or a virtual machine. If you need to do something that hogs the CPU for extended periods (such as scientific number crunching) then yeah, you want to use C+ or Fortran or something else that compiles to native code. (Though some VM designers claim they can beat native code with on-the-fly optimization.) But for a typical web application, the CPU time used by scripts that generate the pages is not a big bottleneck. Here's an example you may be familiar with.
The common assumption that this tech scales down to an individual level is a bad one. I'm not an expert, but I've heard experts say that, for example, the kind of windmill an individual can afford to build in his back yard will never pay back the energy that went into building it. I don't mean that it won't be economic (though that's also true) I mean that the energy costs that went into fabricating the components, putting them together, and keeping the thing working will typically exceed the energy that comes out of the windmill during its normal life span.
On the other hand, if a dozen individuals get together and build a big windmill in a really windy area...
Ok, my food argument is dumb. Still, anybody can get into a situation that they can't get out of on their own. You could break a leg, be mobile enough to catch rabbits indefinitely but not mobile enough to hobble back to civilization. Saying, "if you don't hear from me in a couple days I must be dead" is dumb.
I stand corrected. Still, it's childish to complain that you get nothing back from your taxes. You can argue that you don't get back everything you should; I don't disagree with that in principle, though I'd probably disagree with most tax whiners on details.
Cops are writing speeding tickets because speeders kill people. Near where I live, an old couple got run down by somebody just recently. (And yes, they were on the sidewalk.) I've had a few close calls myself. I live on a street that's a favored shortcut. There are kids living on my block, and there's an elementary school on the other side of the street. If the cops weren't writing tickets, there's a group of taxpayers (including me) they'd soon hear from.
Government may be doing a bad job, but it's still better than no government at all. If you don't believe me, try moving to Somalia. Taxes are very low there, because there's no government to collect them. Alas, life is just a little unpleasant.
But even if we had a government that was free of waste and corruption (that's pretty much a contradiction in terms), narcissistic bozos like you would still complain. To you, government is only worth having when it does exactly what you want it to do. Grownups know better.
Perhaps you're right about the withholding (though my last bonus was only withheld at my usual withholding rate). Perhaps the guy's accountant is doing a good job, and he just saw the withholding and didn't think it through. Or maybe he doesn't even have an accountant — in which case it's his own damn fault that he's overtaxed.
I don't agree with anything you said, but I'm not going to argue those points, because that's not what we're talking about. TPP asked "If I can't get rescued for free, why should I pay taxes?" I responded by pointing out all the things taxes do pay for. Even if taxes are too high (and dude, U.S. taxes are amongst the lowest in the developed world), that's not an argument that we shouldn't pay taxes at all.
Dude, you seriously need to fire your accountant. Nobody pays 50% income tax any more. And why on earth is your legal residence in a high-tax state if you're hardly ever there? George Bush the First has his legal residence in Texas (no state income tax at all) where he hardly ever goes any more. The cute part is that his legal residence is a hotel room where he hasn't stayed for years.
Now, to answer your question "why the fuck are you taxing me". Well, OK, maybe you deserve free search and rescue. But only a tiny part of your taxes goes to toward emergency services. A good chunk goes to things like roads (you own a car, right?) education (OK, you already got yours, but where's that fancy job of yours if there's no ongoing supply of well-educated new hires?) law enforcement (having a mugger arrested is free) food inspection (you eat, right?) and a lot of other stuff I'm sure you actually use.
Actually, the biggest single item you get from your taxes is a military establishment that costs more than the rest of the world's combined. I happen to think we could do without that, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on that issue.
He said "if I don't show up in a day or two, then I'm dead". My mistake. I thought he was claiming the magical ability to conjure up food, when he's actually claiming the magical ability to transport himself past any obstacle.
Right, so if your plane crashes in the mountains where there's no food but plenty of water, you better hope somebody finds you in one week. The idea that anybody can be as self-reliant as Nodar thinks he is is pure fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not telling you about your own language. I'm telling you about classical Greek. Unless you're really old, you speak modern Greek. Languages do change over the centuries, as your spelling illustrates.
Also, we're not just talking about Greek, we're also talking about the weird conventions English has for handling non-Latin alphabets. So your claim for superior knowledge would be irrelevant even if it weren't fallacious.
Wrong. The Greek spelling is omicron kappa tau omega pi omicron upsilon sigma. Greek has its own alphabet and transliterating to the Latin alphabet is purely a matter of convention. Your transliteration assumes that Greek letters are equivalent to the Latin letters they most resemble. That would be too easy!
In English, Greek loan words are always spelled using a phonetic convention. Hence "-ous" becomes "-us". Kappa is never transliterated as k (don't ask me why) but as C. Hence "cinema" instead of "kinema".
The Romans didn't use K until they conquered Greece and started reading a lot of Greek. Then they used K for Greek words and C otherwise. That's why we have two "kuh" letters.
So the presence of C identifies "octopus" as a Greek word! Strange, but true.
As for Linux: We all know it's not Latin. Lighten up, this thread is supposed to be humorous.
For example?
In theory, "correct" English is the language used by the most educated people. But since those people can't quite agree as to exactly what it is, it's pretty much a myth.
...as long as people can tell what is being said, there isn't really a good reason to argue too much about it. But a key purpose of the rules is to facilitate communication. If you don't get at least a little anal about grammatical rules, it's darn easy to be misunderstood. Or at least sound silly: "Walking up the stairs, the clock struck 3."The Rules serve another purpose: to help identify the "literate" Elite and distinguish them from the "illiterate" multitude. I don't suppose you consider that a valid reason to worry about grammatical rules (I certainly don't) but it is the main reason people do.
The modern usage comes from Linnaeus's arbitrary appropriation of the word to describe a quite different family of plants. So your prescriptivist would be a nonclassical type.
Of course, it's still silly and pretentious to say "cacti".
Whenever people hear a word that ends with "s" (or that sounds like it should), they assume that there's some silly grammatical rule that they need to know about. There is a rule, but it's so hard to follow, you shouldn't even try.
Here's the rule: a lot of words that end with "-us" (not all of them! more on that in a moment) are borrowed from Latin. In that language, a noun ending with "-us" is a singluar form (dominus, lord; servus, slave) that takes a plural form ending in "-i" (domini, lords; servi, slaves). In theory, it's more "correct" to use foreign inflections with foreign words. So instead of "octopuses", "styluses", and "circuses", people say "octopi", "styli", and "circi".
No, wait, nobody says "circi", do they? It's the "correct" usage, because it's a Latin word, but the established usage is "circuses".
The other examples I gave are commonly used, but are in no sense "correct". "Octopus" does not come from Latin: it's a Greek word, and the Greek plural is "octopods". "Stylus" is Latin, but it's misspelled Latin: the Romans spelled it "stilus". It got changed to "stylus" because somebody thought it was somehow derived from the Greek word "stylos". But it's not, so the "correct" way to refer to that thing that comes with your PDA is "stilus" and "stili".
But to heck with being "correct". It's the tar baby of the literate. Just use the rules you learned in grade school and be done with it.
Funny you should mention Chamberlain. People tend to assume that he avoided going to war with Hitler because he was a wimp. Thing is, when Hitler first emerged as a threat, the UK was in no position to challenge him. On top of that, there was a lot of anti-war sentiment that didn't go away until Hitler showed his true colors — several times. By playing the wimp, Chamberlain bought the Allies time to rearm. Of course, they squandered that advantage when the war actually started, but that's another issue.
There's also the little detail that many leading politicos in Chamberlain's Conservative Party considered Hitler a hero. These were the guys in the House of Commons who booed Churchill the first time he entered the House as Prime Minister. Eventually, they became politically irrelevent, but until they did, any Conservative PM who had gone against Hitler would have been out of office faster than you can say "jackboot".
Now, we don't have a lot of Islamists in U.S. politics, but aside from that, we're pretty much in the same spot now the Brits were then. It's true our armed forces are way better than theirs were, but between our global committments and the Iraq tarbaby, we've nothing to spare. Even if we did have the troops to spare, we've gone and used up all our credibility with our recent fuckups. Starting another war would turn us into absolute pariahs.
And here's one thing that really bugs me: how can we tell Iran that they can't have nukes when we have thousands. Which we are not only making no move to draw down, we are actually planning to increase
One other thing: are you willing to pay all the extra taxes it would take to cover a third war? It's true that we've been running the first two on credit, but that's playing bloody hell with the value of the dollar. So I think we should assume we're at our credit limit.
So don't bash poor Neville. At least he knew his limitations.
That's the theory. But I've already cited a couple of projects where it turned out not to be true in practice. And that's not even including ReiserFS.
I'm curious, do you guys have corporate sponsorship? Is the key maintainer a paid position? If so, that kind of proves my point. If not, then you guys are definitely an exception, and I'm very curious to know how you managed to keep the effort going for so long.
Ooh, you switched to Java and your software was 16 times less efficient! Gosh, that Java really sucks!
No, wait, that figure is meaningless. As you said yourself, some those extra 4700 systems were needed to handle the growth of your company. How many? How many page hits per machine were you serving when you had 300 machines, and how many when you had 5000.
Perhaps switching to Java made you less efficient. Perhaps it made you more efficient. Perhaps it had no effect at all. The statistics you tell us nothing about that.
And indeed, your experience differs a lot from that of thousands of web developers. Perl in particular had been called the Duct Tape of the Internet.
Speaking of Perl, I notice that your complaint it is not that it's slow, but that it's hard to support. That's a legitimate complaint, but it says nothing about the relative efficiency of scripting languages.
Twitter is a well-known Slashdot troll. It's news to me, though, that he uses RoR. I guess all his sockpuppets are automated!
I can't comment on RoR, but your generalization about scripting languages represents a standard misconception. A native code platform isn't automatically more efficient than one that's based on an interpreter or a virtual machine. If you need to do something that hogs the CPU for extended periods (such as scientific number crunching) then yeah, you want to use C+ or Fortran or something else that compiles to native code. (Though some VM designers claim they can beat native code with on-the-fly optimization.) But for a typical web application, the CPU time used by scripts that generate the pages is not a big bottleneck. Here's an example you may be familiar with.
Huh. I seem to have committed the very sin I accused you of. Sorry.
Still, I don't recall seeing any equivalent of nicheclips 30 years ago.
Yes, but could you escape from Mall of America?
The common assumption that this tech scales down to an individual level is a bad one. I'm not an expert, but I've heard experts say that, for example, the kind of windmill an individual can afford to build in his back yard will never pay back the energy that went into building it. I don't mean that it won't be economic (though that's also true) I mean that the energy costs that went into fabricating the components, putting them together, and keeping the thing working will typically exceed the energy that comes out of the windmill during its normal life span.
On the other hand, if a dozen individuals get together and build a big windmill in a really windy area...
Ok, my food argument is dumb. Still, anybody can get into a situation that they can't get out of on their own. You could break a leg, be mobile enough to catch rabbits indefinitely but not mobile enough to hobble back to civilization. Saying, "if you don't hear from me in a couple days I must be dead" is dumb.
I stand corrected. Still, it's childish to complain that you get nothing back from your taxes. You can argue that you don't get back everything you should; I don't disagree with that in principle, though I'd probably disagree with most tax whiners on details.
Cops are writing speeding tickets because speeders kill people. Near where I live, an old couple got run down by somebody just recently. (And yes, they were on the sidewalk.) I've had a few close calls myself. I live on a street that's a favored shortcut. There are kids living on my block, and there's an elementary school on the other side of the street. If the cops weren't writing tickets, there's a group of taxpayers (including me) they'd soon hear from.
Government may be doing a bad job, but it's still better than no government at all. If you don't believe me, try moving to Somalia. Taxes are very low there, because there's no government to collect them. Alas, life is just a little unpleasant.
But even if we had a government that was free of waste and corruption (that's pretty much a contradiction in terms), narcissistic bozos like you would still complain. To you, government is only worth having when it does exactly what you want it to do. Grownups know better.
Perhaps you're right about the withholding (though my last bonus was only withheld at my usual withholding rate). Perhaps the guy's accountant is doing a good job, and he just saw the withholding and didn't think it through. Or maybe he doesn't even have an accountant — in which case it's his own damn fault that he's overtaxed.
I don't agree with anything you said, but I'm not going to argue those points, because that's not what we're talking about. TPP asked "If I can't get rescued for free, why should I pay taxes?" I responded by pointing out all the things taxes do pay for. Even if taxes are too high (and dude, U.S. taxes are amongst the lowest in the developed world), that's not an argument that we shouldn't pay taxes at all.
Sorry dude, Domino's no longer provides helicopter service.
Dude, you seriously need to fire your accountant. Nobody pays 50% income tax any more. And why on earth is your legal residence in a high-tax state if you're hardly ever there? George Bush the First has his legal residence in Texas (no state income tax at all) where he hardly ever goes any more. The cute part is that his legal residence is a hotel room where he hasn't stayed for years.
Now, to answer your question "why the fuck are you taxing me". Well, OK, maybe you deserve free search and rescue. But only a tiny part of your taxes goes to toward emergency services. A good chunk goes to things like roads (you own a car, right?) education (OK, you already got yours, but where's that fancy job of yours if there's no ongoing supply of well-educated new hires?) law enforcement (having a mugger arrested is free) food inspection (you eat, right?) and a lot of other stuff I'm sure you actually use.
Actually, the biggest single item you get from your taxes is a military establishment that costs more than the rest of the world's combined. I happen to think we could do without that, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on that issue.
OK, you've convinced me, you know what you're doing. But that's not the issue. Which is: would you project survive if you got hit by a truck?
Right, so if your plane crashes in the mountains where there's no food but plenty of water, you better hope somebody finds you in one week. The idea that anybody can be as self-reliant as Nodar thinks he is is pure fantasy.