And yours, my friend, is a very, very limited demographic.
I consider myself a very technically savvy person with respect to the standard population - I can program in C/C++, Java, VB, and can generally pick up similar languages quickly enough to Hello World, and probably even get something useful done. I built my own desktop, and have built computers for several other people. I completed the first several classes (receiving good grades) in the computer science department at my undergraduate institution. I prefer writing my papers in Latex, or failing that, OpenOffice. However, I'm not an IT professional - I'm a graduate student in an non-technical field - and so I don't have time to keep track of half a dozen different libraries or a variety of languages. I certainly don't have time to go rooting through someone else's code, no matter how well commented, to find places where I can extend their program, or places where I can fix outstanding bugs.
So, in spite of what I would consider a very strong background in computers for someone not professionally working in the IT field, I don't think I would ever dream of "fixing whatever problems I perceive" in some random piece of open sources software. And in fact, I think there are probably a lot more people like me, who have some limited competence with programming, computers, etc, but who are not nearly on the level of being able to actually contribute to or modify open source projects, than there are like you, who are content to spend their free time hunting down bugs in someone else's code. I think a lot more people are interested in the free(as in beer) than the free(as in speech) aspects of OSS.
Actually, I did this same price comparison just this December, and the thing that made the biggest difference was that Lenovo was having a sale. When all things were said and done, the Lenovo T60, with the winter sale, was probably $3-400 cheaper than a similarly equipped macbook (and it came in black for no extra charge). The problem is, I've never seen Apple have the same kind of seasonal sales. In fact, I wasn't even considering a Lenovo until a friend mentioned that they have an annual December discount.
I will say this though, having made the purchase: though the specs are otherwise similar, the screens on MacBooks are VERY nice, especially compared to the screens on the 14" T60s.
I agree completely with the parent - Linux is PERFECT for grandmothers, for example, since they won't have any cause to install anything, beyond the initial install. But when it comes to adding new programs, or hardware and drivers, it can be a mess.
It might be a good exercise to imagine what would happen if Linux was treated in the same way as a Windows upgrade by the press. PC magazines and online sites would be filled with probably mediocre reviews: "It gives a lot of power over the computer, but configuration problems are a nightmare. The package install system is interesting, but could use some work."
If Linux had the same level of coverage as a new Windows version, I think there would be a lot more negative press. A lot of the current negative press w.r.t. Vista could be applied to Linux as well: Doesn't work out of the box with all new systems(for any number of reasons), has a lot of stuff you don't necessarily need. However, the relatively small distribution of Linux, coupled with its highly technically competent user base, has shielded it in a lot of ways from very valid criticism in the press.
that is, unless they vote too and see the same ballot.
Of course, you can have variations, but that almost makes the whole system flawed- what if (deliberately or otherwise) the information on which ballots are associated with which keys is lost or confused? Suddenly, you have so much ink covered paper...
The problem with this method, if you read through the PDFs, is that it rests on the secrecy of the final form of the ballot. If this is perfectly secret, it is indeed impossible for the voters receipt to prove how they voted. However, if the form of the ballot is NOT secret (i.e. someone votes, looks at the ballot and reports that to someone outside the polling station) then it's entirely possible to recover how the person with the receipt voted. The problem with this whole method is that the "secret", i.e. the structure of the ballot, must necessarily be public. The potential solution to this is to make random variants of the ballots(like tests where there are multiple copies with the same sets of questions and answers, but in different oder), but then the vote is not necessarily recoverable and this reduces the transparency of problems like the infamous florida butterfly debacle. Then again, at least the votes would have been more evenly distributed among non-Democratic candidates...
Basically, this whole system does not seem terribly impressive.
This is why we need a -1 "Bitchy" mod category: this post really isn't terribly insightful, and as others have pointed out, few browsers can withstand hundreds of open ANYTHING. It's hard to design anything to withstand the absolutely worst scenario.
I've had my share of problems with Firefox's memory usage, but I find 2.0 has done a reasonable job of addressing some of these concerns - the runaway memory usage seems to have been reduced significantly, and I'm rarely finding the 300MB+ memory usage that I had before. Even with the new features, Firefox is taking up less memory than before.
Actually, the Arabic to English seems to be the problem- deleting the "THE FUCK" from your practice sentence, Google produces a pretty good Arabic sentence, "The leaving of the country is desired immediately"(this is a literal translation, a looser translation would be "Please leave the country now"), which is more or less exactly how I would have translated that personally. The only problem is that if you remove the "please" from your sentence, google produces garbage("The leaving of our country now", a sentence fragment)- it doesn't seem to understand command forms.
IAAGSIAS: I am a graduate student in Arabic Studies.
Perhaps if he has trouble using an iPod in the car due to poor eyesight, he might want to avoid driving entirely. Cars tend to be less forgiving than iPods...
One thing people focus on way too much here is INSTALLING linux. Perhaps this is because it has been a problem in the past, but I personally have installed two distros(Mandrake when it was Mandrake 10 Community or whatever, and Fedora Core 2), and had little trouble. In fact, if all I did was write simple text documents in OpenOffice and cruise the internet, I would have been perfectly fine. I'm a rather competent computer user(I can program in a few languages, I've taken some CS courses at a world class university, I'm writing a thesis in LaTeX)versus the general populace. However, I quickly found that Linux is NOT easy for a beginner, but it's NOT from a perspective of setting up the distro itself.That part is easy.
See, the current problem with Linux is not how to get linux on your computer- it's like installing any other OS, and very similar to installing windows. The problem with linux comes when you want to install anything else on top of it. Installation of things that don't come with your distrobution of choice can be an amazing, extremely painful headache, something which is extremely rare in current versions of Windows(indeed, often TOO easy in the case of adware).
Usually when people criticize linux on the basis of installation of things, they are greeted with shouts of "use apt-get!" and similar programs. The problem with apt-get(and command lines in general) is that they're not remotely discoverable- you can't determine what the options are for input. Sure, GUI interfaces can be confusing, but even the most obtuse adventure game of an interface has a nicely limited number of possibilities. When I fire up apt-get, on the other hand, I have no idea what to type. "apt-get webbrowser"? "apt-get firefox"? What will the response be? Can I be sure it'll give me a version of firefox I want? The only way to have any clue is to google it, which is immensly irritating and that amount of effort could go to downloading the program and running it. (I will note that when it does work the way you want, apt-get is f***ing amazing. Its really darn cool)
Othertimes, especially for anything slightly more obscure, one ends up hunting the internet for various libraries which are inexplicably NOT distributed with other things- I've had to hunt for 5 different sets of libraries for a program, then some of them conflicted with eachother or something, and I was unable in the end, after a couple hours of effort, to run the program I wanted.(This seems to apply for much open-source software in general, even programs that run on Windows- Gimp for windows, for example, requires me to install GTK myself, instead of simply packing everything into a neat installer which is the norm for most more commercial windows programs, or even windows-only freeware)
The other end of things, uninstalling, is similarly difficult to understand- I didn't find anything that seemed to easily remove programs in the same way as a per-program uninstall file does, or even Window's Install Remove Programs dialog.
Hence, I felt that if I never, ever wanted to add anything to Linux, I would be fine- making it great for giving a computer illiterate family member who only does very specific things on their computer. However, it's right crappy for someone who knows a bit more about computers, wants to install things on their own, and generally make changes to the computer in the same way you would with a Windows box.
My $.02
PS- And, wtf, I can't add things to the application menu in Gnome? Jigga-what?
The above comment is obviously a joke, but it's also being pedantic...BUT WRONG.
The word is ACTUALLY "ka3k" (slashdot isn't terribly Arabic friendly here, or I'd write it out in the actual characters), where 3 = a voiced pharyngeal fricative. It's darn tricky for english speakers to pronounce, but amusingly makes the word sound even more like the rather dirty english (semi)homophone than the parent's mistaken transcription. It has the added advantage of sounded much like a sound from the movie Deepthroat.
The word is refers to a type of cookie(or any of a variety of types of cookies) typically eaten during holidays. This(http://www.khayma.com/sweets/kak.htm) is a picture of holiday cookies, though if they're filled with dates they'd be more likely to be called "ma3muul"(at least in Jordan)
And right now is a great time to eat ka3k, seeing as it's Ramadan.
Re:The show will need local humor appeal
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 1
Here's a joke I was told in Jordan. Of course, not a joke you'd tell in a public manner(i.e. on television)
The newly appointed Jordanian Minister of Public Works and Development decides that he needs to get an idea of how to do his job, so he goes to Syria, to meet with his counterpart there. The day he arrives, he's taken from construction site to construction site, shown all the various projects that are going on. But in the evening, the Syrian minister takes him to his house, and its amazing- a vast mansion, servants, beautiful gardens and flowing fountains. The perplexed Jordanian minister asks the Syrian, "I know your country is quite poor- how can you have such a large house?" The Syrian replies, "See that dam there? See those roads? See that hospital? Over the years, slowly, slowly, I took a little from each, and built this mansion" The Jordanian thinks about this, and returns to his country. A year later, the Syrian minister decides to go to Jordan, and when he goes to the Jordanian minister's house, he's amazed- its a huge mansion in Abdoun, one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the city. Its also immense, with more servants than residents. The startled Syrian minister asks his counterpart, "How can you build this after only a year of working as a minister?" The Jordanian points into the distance, and asks the Syrian, "See that bridge?" The Syrian looks all around, and replies, "I don't see a thing!" The Jordanian minister smiles, and says, "Exactly"
The middle east also has their own set of "blond" jokes, though they're generally centered around people from certain villages- each country has a village where people are seen as particularly dumb- in Jordan, it's the town of Tafila, in Palestine it's Hebron, in Syria it's Hama.
An example: Q: What did the man from Hebron put his space heater outside his house? A: Because colder outside than inside
There are similar jokes(some about language, etc, that won't come over well in English) None of these would work well in a Simpsons framework, per se, and most governments I daresay would be loath to propogate them too much anyway.
Of more interest might be that it actually probably disproves Chomsky's theories of language acquisition, which rest of a basis of prior/innate facility for language acquisition which is based on prior knowledge of some sort(i.e. Universal Grammar, his most famous contribution to linguistics) in the brains of language learners, while this program works with no prior knowledge and only a statistical framework.
So Chomsky might not be too happy, as this program could potentially disprove his life's work.
Wow, amazingly, every poster on this subject has managed to completely miss the point.
Note that things in [] below are ASCII IPA. And if you don't know IPA, you probably shouldn't be commenting on a lot of this stuff anyway.
The parent, however, gets close- indeed, "should've" gets realized (in my dialect at least) as [S^d^f](or [S^d^v]) while instances of "of" are often like "heard of" [h3rd^f](or [h3rd^v]), so is not inconceivable to think that spelling them the same way is a good idea(like spelling "knight" "night", or more logically "nite" like "lite")
This whole article and thread are basically revolving around something very different than just matters of spelling. What is the issue is that the spoken English language is quickly evolving away from the written, with some dialects(Black English Vernacular) differing even more than others. This creates a diglossia, where what you speak is different from what you write, very much like the Arabic language, which is united by a single written language but has numerous, often non-mutually intelligible spoken dialects.
Also, what the article parent totally misses is that the internet is a very casual sphere, and the elevated writing needed in the work place, etc, is unnecessary here- even in Arabic, most people write in colloquial arabic on message boards, rather than the specifically more formal standard arabic you'd use on a job application, in an essay, etc.
So perhaps, indeed, the terrorists are winning. Soon our language will resemble theirs... Alex
What I was contemplating a while ago, as I was reaching the age of 18, is that until that point I was legally unfit to sign a contract(at least in the states)- hence, a EULA. But considering that a large number of users of computer programs, and presumably a large number of the people who install and click through the EULA, are all under 18, and therefore legally unable to bind themselves to a contract.
Nobody's mentioned this, as far as I see, but it seems like a particularly interesting threat to EULAs. I mean, with any other contract they'd ask you, "Are you legally able to sign this?" because there are people there holding the pens whose vested interest is in making a legitimate contract. But since EULAs are automated, its a different matter, and means that probably a huge number of them haven't been agreed to legally.
Or Apogee gave away the first episode of Pharoh's Tomb, and you had to buy the succeeding episodes- that was their primary business model for dozens of games- Commander Keen, Duke Nukem(the original, GOOD ones that weren't just a pimply teenager's wet dream), Spy Hunter. It was an industry wide practice- hardly specific to ID and Doom, which came at the tail end of the shareware years.
So yes, even in the example cited, shareware is hardly a new model.
My biggest problem with the version of Gnome that I use(2.4.?) is that window focus is handled extremely poorly - if I click on any part of the window EXCEPT the task bar, the window doesn't gain focus, whereas in Windows and KDE, the default is to give a window focus no matter where you click, which is much more reasonable. I'm open to suggestions to fix this problem- I'm forced to use Gnome if I want to play music, since Xmms inexplicably doesn't work in KDE. If its not a user configurable option, I think it would be nice if this was fixed in the newer versions of Gnome.
Also, regarding the debates about the spacial mode file browsing, I wonder why nobody has entered the idea of tree based browsers into the debate. I don't use the "My Computer" style of file browsing- the "Explorer" program, with a panel for a tree based view, works much better for me, and seems like a more reasonable standard than either the classic or the spacial style browsers.
hmm, we live in a police state yet we have the worst crime in the western world? you are aware that in a police state like Singapore or the soviet union in its hay day or China under Mao, the crime rate was nearly zero.
we are far from a police state.
And to think, all those regimes have WAY more crimes that a person could be arrested for - makes it even more impressive.
The most irritating aspect of this is the increase in low quality rental DVDs- while VHS videos can be viewed an extremely large number of times, when you have dozens of people watching the same DVD, many of whom have no clue as to the proper care and maintainance of them, the quality drops quickly. I've yet to rent a DVD that didn't skip due to scratches/pock marks, etc.
It would help if you had a clue what you were talking about. Extensive training with guns, knives, and "common items"? Do YOU know how to do this? Do you, despite being the inventor of "chi fist" even know which martial arts specialize in knife fighting and the relevant differences between them? Or do you simply intend to enroll them in your nonsense martial art?
If you really want your kids to grow up knowing how to handle themselves reasonably, I recommend enrolling them in something other than Karate or Tae Kwon Do which have been recommended here. Young adults aren't going to be able to hit that hard - either enroll them in Escrima if you're seriously afraid for their safety so they can learn knife defense, or let them do something like Judo where their ability to hit won't influence the outcome of an encounter as much. And when they get older, enroll them at wrestling in school - I've seen seasoned wrestlers give black belts in Jujitsu a hard time.
Teach your kids something useful, but know what you're doing first.
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Sure they could just build another bridge instead?
Mod parent up.
As a fairly normal college student, I think that most people in a 9AM lecture aren't wearing proper pants, let alone hauling around a gun.
And yours, my friend, is a very, very limited demographic.
I consider myself a very technically savvy person with respect to the standard population - I can program in C/C++, Java, VB, and can generally pick up similar languages quickly enough to Hello World, and probably even get something useful done. I built my own desktop, and have built computers for several other people. I completed the first several classes (receiving good grades) in the computer science department at my undergraduate institution. I prefer writing my papers in Latex, or failing that, OpenOffice. However, I'm not an IT professional - I'm a graduate student in an non-technical field - and so I don't have time to keep track of half a dozen different libraries or a variety of languages. I certainly don't have time to go rooting through someone else's code, no matter how well commented, to find places where I can extend their program, or places where I can fix outstanding bugs.
So, in spite of what I would consider a very strong background in computers for someone not professionally working in the IT field, I don't think I would ever dream of "fixing whatever problems I perceive" in some random piece of open sources software. And in fact, I think there are probably a lot more people like me, who have some limited competence with programming, computers, etc, but who are not nearly on the level of being able to actually contribute to or modify open source projects, than there are like you, who are content to spend their free time hunting down bugs in someone else's code. I think a lot more people are interested in the free(as in beer) than the free(as in speech) aspects of OSS.
Actually, I did this same price comparison just this December, and the thing that made the biggest difference was that Lenovo was having a sale. When all things were said and done, the Lenovo T60, with the winter sale, was probably $3-400 cheaper than a similarly equipped macbook (and it came in black for no extra charge). The problem is, I've never seen Apple have the same kind of seasonal sales. In fact, I wasn't even considering a Lenovo until a friend mentioned that they have an annual December discount.
I will say this though, having made the purchase: though the specs are otherwise similar, the screens on MacBooks are VERY nice, especially compared to the screens on the 14" T60s.
I agree completely with the parent - Linux is PERFECT for grandmothers, for example, since they won't have any cause to install anything, beyond the initial install. But when it comes to adding new programs, or hardware and drivers, it can be a mess.
It might be a good exercise to imagine what would happen if Linux was treated in the same way as a Windows upgrade by the press. PC magazines and online sites would be filled with probably mediocre reviews: "It gives a lot of power over the computer, but configuration problems are a nightmare. The package install system is interesting, but could use some work."
If Linux had the same level of coverage as a new Windows version, I think there would be a lot more negative press. A lot of the current negative press w.r.t. Vista could be applied to Linux as well: Doesn't work out of the box with all new systems(for any number of reasons), has a lot of stuff you don't necessarily need. However, the relatively small distribution of Linux, coupled with its highly technically competent user base, has shielded it in a lot of ways from very valid criticism in the press.
that is, unless they vote too and see the same ballot.
Of course, you can have variations, but that almost makes the whole system flawed- what if (deliberately or otherwise) the information on which ballots are associated with which keys is lost or confused? Suddenly, you have so much ink covered paper...
The problem with this method, if you read through the PDFs, is that it rests on the secrecy of the final form of the ballot. If this is perfectly secret, it is indeed impossible for the voters receipt to prove how they voted. However, if the form of the ballot is NOT secret (i.e. someone votes, looks at the ballot and reports that to someone outside the polling station) then it's entirely possible to recover how the person with the receipt voted. The problem with this whole method is that the "secret", i.e. the structure of the ballot, must necessarily be public. The potential solution to this is to make random variants of the ballots(like tests where there are multiple copies with the same sets of questions and answers, but in different oder), but then the vote is not necessarily recoverable and this reduces the transparency of problems like the infamous florida butterfly debacle. Then again, at least the votes would have been more evenly distributed among non-Democratic candidates...
Basically, this whole system does not seem terribly impressive.
That was startlingly lame- it doesn't even look scary, nor is its voice terribly spooky. 0 stars out of five.
This is why we need a -1 "Bitchy" mod category: this post really isn't terribly insightful, and as others have pointed out, few browsers can withstand hundreds of open ANYTHING. It's hard to design anything to withstand the absolutely worst scenario.
I've had my share of problems with Firefox's memory usage, but I find 2.0 has done a reasonable job of addressing some of these concerns - the runaway memory usage seems to have been reduced significantly, and I'm rarely finding the 300MB+ memory usage that I had before. Even with the new features, Firefox is taking up less memory than before.
Actually, the Arabic to English seems to be the problem- deleting the "THE FUCK" from your practice sentence, Google produces a pretty good Arabic sentence, "The leaving of the country is desired immediately"(this is a literal translation, a looser translation would be "Please leave the country now"), which is more or less exactly how I would have translated that personally. The only problem is that if you remove the "please" from your sentence, google produces garbage("The leaving of our country now", a sentence fragment)- it doesn't seem to understand command forms.
IAAGSIAS: I am a graduate student in Arabic Studies.
Perhaps if he has trouble using an iPod in the car due to poor eyesight, he might want to avoid driving entirely. Cars tend to be less forgiving than iPods...
One thing people focus on way too much here is INSTALLING linux. Perhaps this is because it has been a problem in the past, but I personally have installed two distros(Mandrake when it was Mandrake 10 Community or whatever, and Fedora Core 2), and had little trouble. In fact, if all I did was write simple text documents in OpenOffice and cruise the internet, I would have been perfectly fine. I'm a rather competent computer user(I can program in a few languages, I've taken some CS courses at a world class university, I'm writing a thesis in LaTeX)versus the general populace. However, I quickly found that Linux is NOT easy for a beginner, but it's NOT from a perspective of setting up the distro itself.That part is easy.
See, the current problem with Linux is not how to get linux on your computer- it's like installing any other OS, and very similar to installing windows. The problem with linux comes when you want to install anything else on top of it. Installation of things that don't come with your distrobution of choice can be an amazing, extremely painful headache, something which is extremely rare in current versions of Windows(indeed, often TOO easy in the case of adware).
Usually when people criticize linux on the basis of installation of things, they are greeted with shouts of "use apt-get!" and similar programs. The problem with apt-get(and command lines in general) is that they're not remotely discoverable- you can't determine what the options are for input. Sure, GUI interfaces can be confusing, but even the most obtuse adventure game of an interface has a nicely limited number of possibilities. When I fire up apt-get, on the other hand, I have no idea what to type. "apt-get webbrowser"? "apt-get firefox"? What will the response be? Can I be sure it'll give me a version of firefox I want? The only way to have any clue is to google it, which is immensly irritating and that amount of effort could go to downloading the program and running it. (I will note that when it does work the way you want, apt-get is f***ing amazing. Its really darn cool)
Othertimes, especially for anything slightly more obscure, one ends up hunting the internet for various libraries which are inexplicably NOT distributed with other things- I've had to hunt for 5 different sets of libraries for a program, then some of them conflicted with eachother or something, and I was unable in the end, after a couple hours of effort, to run the program I wanted.(This seems to apply for much open-source software in general, even programs that run on Windows- Gimp for windows, for example, requires me to install GTK myself, instead of simply packing everything into a neat installer which is the norm for most more commercial windows programs, or even windows-only freeware)
The other end of things, uninstalling, is similarly difficult to understand- I didn't find anything that seemed to easily remove programs in the same way as a per-program uninstall file does, or even Window's Install Remove Programs dialog.
Hence, I felt that if I never, ever wanted to add anything to Linux, I would be fine- making it great for giving a computer illiterate family member who only does very specific things on their computer. However, it's right crappy for someone who knows a bit more about computers, wants to install things on their own, and generally make changes to the computer in the same way you would with a Windows box.
My $.02
PS- And, wtf, I can't add things to the application menu in Gnome? Jigga-what?
I'm sorry, but as per our termination clause, your OSTG membership has been recinded.
We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Smarty pants.
The above comment is obviously a joke, but it's also being pedantic...BUT WRONG.
The word is ACTUALLY "ka3k" (slashdot isn't terribly Arabic friendly here, or I'd write it out in the actual characters), where 3 = a voiced pharyngeal fricative. It's darn tricky for english speakers to pronounce, but amusingly makes the word sound even more like the rather dirty english (semi)homophone than the parent's mistaken transcription. It has the added advantage of sounded much like a sound from the movie Deepthroat.
The word is refers to a type of cookie(or any of a variety of types of cookies) typically eaten during holidays. This(http://www.khayma.com/sweets/kak.htm) is a picture of holiday cookies, though if they're filled with dates they'd be more likely to be called "ma3muul"(at least in Jordan)
And right now is a great time to eat ka3k, seeing as it's Ramadan.
Here's a joke I was told in Jordan. Of course, not a joke you'd tell in a public manner(i.e. on television)
The newly appointed Jordanian Minister of Public Works and Development decides that he needs to get an idea of how to do his job, so he goes to Syria, to meet with his counterpart there. The day he arrives, he's taken from construction site to construction site, shown all the various projects that are going on. But in the evening, the Syrian minister takes him to his house, and its amazing- a vast mansion, servants, beautiful gardens and flowing fountains. The perplexed Jordanian minister asks the Syrian, "I know your country is quite poor- how can you have such a large house?" The Syrian replies, "See that dam there? See those roads? See that hospital? Over the years, slowly, slowly, I took a little from each, and built this mansion" The Jordanian thinks about this, and returns to his country.
A year later, the Syrian minister decides to go to Jordan, and when he goes to the Jordanian minister's house, he's amazed- its a huge mansion in Abdoun, one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the city. Its also immense, with more servants than residents. The startled Syrian minister asks his counterpart, "How can you build this after only a year of working as a minister?" The Jordanian points into the distance, and asks the Syrian, "See that bridge?" The Syrian looks all around, and replies, "I don't see a thing!" The Jordanian minister smiles, and says, "Exactly"
The middle east also has their own set of "blond" jokes, though they're generally centered around people from certain villages- each country has a village where people are seen as particularly dumb- in Jordan, it's the town of Tafila, in Palestine it's Hebron, in Syria it's Hama.
An example: Q: What did the man from Hebron put his space heater outside his house? A: Because colder outside than inside
There are similar jokes(some about language, etc, that won't come over well in English) None of these would work well in a Simpsons framework, per se, and most governments I daresay would be loath to propogate them too much anyway.
Of more interest might be that it actually probably disproves Chomsky's theories of language acquisition, which rest of a basis of prior/innate facility for language acquisition which is based on prior knowledge of some sort(i.e. Universal Grammar, his most famous contribution to linguistics) in the brains of language learners, while this program works with no prior knowledge and only a statistical framework.
So Chomsky might not be too happy, as this program could potentially disprove his life's work.
Wow, amazingly, every poster on this subject has managed to completely miss the point.
Note that things in [] below are ASCII IPA. And if you don't know IPA, you probably shouldn't be commenting on a lot of this stuff anyway.
The parent, however, gets close- indeed, "should've" gets realized (in my dialect at least) as [S^d^f](or [S^d^v]) while instances of "of" are often like "heard of" [h3rd^f](or [h3rd^v]), so is not inconceivable to think that spelling them the same way is a good idea(like spelling "knight" "night", or more logically "nite" like "lite")
This whole article and thread are basically revolving around something very different than just matters of spelling. What is the issue is that the spoken English language is quickly evolving away from the written, with some dialects(Black English Vernacular) differing even more than others. This creates a diglossia, where what you speak is different from what you write, very much like the Arabic language, which is united by a single written language but has numerous, often non-mutually intelligible spoken dialects.
Also, what the article parent totally misses is that the internet is a very casual sphere, and the elevated writing needed in the work place, etc, is unnecessary here- even in Arabic, most people write in colloquial arabic on message boards, rather than the specifically more formal standard arabic you'd use on a job application, in an essay, etc.
So perhaps, indeed, the terrorists are winning. Soon our language will resemble theirs...
Alex
What I was contemplating a while ago, as I was reaching the age of 18, is that until that point I was legally unfit to sign a contract(at least in the states)- hence, a EULA. But considering that a large number of users of computer programs, and presumably a large number of the people who install and click through the EULA, are all under 18, and therefore legally unable to bind themselves to a contract.
Nobody's mentioned this, as far as I see, but it seems like a particularly interesting threat to EULAs. I mean, with any other contract they'd ask you, "Are you legally able to sign this?" because there are people there holding the pens whose vested interest is in making a legitimate contract. But since EULAs are automated, its a different matter, and means that probably a huge number of them haven't been agreed to legally.
Just an interesting though.
Or Apogee gave away the first episode of Pharoh's Tomb, and you had to buy the succeeding episodes- that was their primary business model for dozens of games- Commander Keen, Duke Nukem(the original, GOOD ones that weren't just a pimply teenager's wet dream), Spy Hunter. It was an industry wide practice- hardly specific to ID and Doom, which came at the tail end of the shareware years.
So yes, even in the example cited, shareware is hardly a new model.
You've obviously never had to write a proposal for human subjects research...
My biggest problem with the version of Gnome that I use(2.4.?) is that window focus is handled extremely poorly - if I click on any part of the window EXCEPT the task bar, the window doesn't gain focus, whereas in Windows and KDE, the default is to give a window focus no matter where you click, which is much more reasonable. I'm open to suggestions to fix this problem- I'm forced to use Gnome if I want to play music, since Xmms inexplicably doesn't work in KDE. If its not a user configurable option, I think it would be nice if this was fixed in the newer versions of Gnome.
Also, regarding the debates about the spacial mode file browsing, I wonder why nobody has entered the idea of tree based browsers into the debate. I don't use the "My Computer" style of file browsing- the "Explorer" program, with a panel for a tree based view, works much better for me, and seems like a more reasonable standard than either the classic or the spacial style browsers.
The most irritating aspect of this is the increase in low quality rental DVDs- while VHS videos can be viewed an extremely large number of times, when you have dozens of people watching the same DVD, many of whom have no clue as to the proper care and maintainance of them, the quality drops quickly. I've yet to rent a DVD that didn't skip due to scratches/pock marks, etc.
It would help if you had a clue what you were talking about. Extensive training with guns, knives, and "common items"? Do YOU know how to do this? Do you, despite being the inventor of "chi fist" even know which martial arts specialize in knife fighting and the relevant differences between them? Or do you simply intend to enroll them in your nonsense martial art?
If you really want your kids to grow up knowing how to handle themselves reasonably, I recommend enrolling them in something other than Karate or Tae Kwon Do which have been recommended here. Young adults aren't going to be able to hit that hard - either enroll them in Escrima if you're seriously afraid for their safety so they can learn knife defense, or let them do something like Judo where their ability to hit won't influence the outcome of an encounter as much. And when they get older, enroll them at wrestling in school - I've seen seasoned wrestlers give black belts in Jujitsu a hard time.
Teach your kids something useful, but know what you're doing first.