I taught US history to college freshmen while a graduate student (just finished the MA this fall), and I found that I *could not* get my students to believe that Microsoft's version of English is incorrect. This is in regards to Micro$oft's grammar checker's incorrect usage of that/which, and other similar problems. My students believed that if the Micro$oft checkers (spell, grammar, thesaurus) told them to do something, it must be right. When I marked them off for it, they complained (though I clearly told them at the beginning of the term to turn *off* the grammar checker and use a real thesaurus).
Now, always before Micro$oft has just been lacking; they have not intentionally tried to sway the way the English language is used. One can forgive computer software for being less perfect than a real human, because language is not an easy thing anyway. However, to intentionally try to change the use of the language so as to be "less offensive" is absurd. I told my students they should be careful with word choice, as sometimes things have connotations they may not expect. Still, the ultimate choice of wording needs to rest with the individual, and any authority that declares certain words *unacceptable*, whether they be "fuck", "ass", "breast", "terrorist" or "liberal", needs to be boycotted. Our freedom of speech is our most important right.
I got a 20u cabinet that I use at home for my Sun Netra X1 and my Linux boxen. I highly recommend these types of racks for home use: locks on the front and back, and quite good both for network/telecom and for machines. My specific rack was dumped by a Dutch company when its use was expired, for an experimental disk project with HP. They can be found used in all sorts of places, and they are very cheap. Used 19" racks are usually good enough for home use. Just keep your eyes open for companies' old "junk", especially companies that do lots of research and development of hardware.
I could not part with my home rack...
This question is essentially the same question originally put forth by Michele Foucault and other post-modern thinkers about thirty years ago. The belief is that the language in which one speaks shapes one's thinking according to the words, actions, and ideas it conveys. English and German have both been viewed as very functional and hence scientific languages, limiting the artistic potential of them. French is often viewed as a more artistic language, as is Japanese. This case is strongly supported by the writings of geniuses such as James Joyce, who in order to completely express the brilliance of his mind would use up to fifty languages simultaneously.
Each language has a unique set of metaphors and idioms, which shapes the thinking of the speakers of that language. Does this take away from individual free will? Does our language predestine us to be certain types of people? That is a huge question, one that ties intricately into all contemporary endeavors such as programming. Most post-modernists have arrived at the conclusion that though one's language does predispose one to a certain type of thinking and that other types may be more difficult, it is possible to bridge that gap. Ultimately, fluency in multiple languages gives people a much wider range of idioms with which to think. I know I was surprised with some of the interesting new ideas that made more sense once I came to understand French and German, though I am not by any means fluent in either.
I recommend that anybody interested in such theoretical questions read the writings of Michele Foucault, and that to see an excellent case study for the usefulness of multilingualism, one read James Joyce (be sure to have lots of translation dictionaries around).
Merci,
Tom
I think the egotism and the individual arrogance of these recent posts is pathetic. A waiter's job (just like anybody's job) is his or her JOB, not his SOUL. Some customers are sure that since they control the waiter's TIP that they control the PERSON. Those are the people that get on waiters' nerves. No person is any other person's "GOD" to quote the last post. Rather, they are just other people, on the other side of the transaction. Tips are an expected part of the price of eating out, and people who can not afford to tip properly should not go out to eat. Your 15% WILL help the waiter pay your rent; it WILL NOT leave the waiter eternally grateful to you or forever in your debt.
Right or wrong, most waiters have very little stake in the restaurant itself. They work as independent agents. As the restaurant essentially pays them nothing, the restaurant is really only providing them with a place in which to do their business, much like an office building provides companies with a place to do their business. The customer's only power over the waiter is the tip. Hence, if you, the customer, piss off the waiter, he/she has the right to make the choice that your pathetic tip isn't worth dealing with your lording over them. Once they have made the decision to forego your tip, you have no control over them, and no amount of bitching to their managers will change that. Hence, if you want good service, you need to be courteous and understanding, and give a generous tip, just as you expecting them to be courteous and understanding and provide you with good service. It IS a two-way street, and the power-dynamics go both ways. All you are to the server is a possible revenue stream. All they are to you is a go-between with the chefs.
Re:No one deserves "tips" just for DOING THEIR JOB
on
The Virtual Tip Jar
·
· Score: 1
Clearly you've never been a waiter. Originally, back say 50 years ago, tips were an optional way to say thank you to somebody who was paid fairly well by a company. Today however, waiters and other "tipped" jobs get no money from the establishment. Before becoming successful, I was a waiter at a resataurant in a resort town. THe establishment paid $2.33 an hour at a time when minimum wage was $5.15. Restaurants are allowed to pay below minimum wages because a 10% minimum tip is considered mandatory by the government. Usually my paychecks didn't even cover the tax on my real wages, the tips. Hence, my paychecks read like this: "$0.00--Non-negotiable". How would you like to get that on your paycheck when there are assholes out there who are expected to give at least 10% and stiff you on it? Essentially, waiters are NOT paid to do their job. THey rely on tips to pay their rent.
Mythology and the computer world...
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
I am a doctoral student in history besides being a UNIX sysadmin. The closed loop of the academic world is very similar to the closed loop of the computer world. Human thought works on the notion of myth. In order to bring chaos to one's world, one develops a myth, which may or may not have basis in "truth". This whole series of posts is nothing but a closed-loop community arguing about how to form their myths. Computer people as a whole are NOT hard-working, and computer people as a whole are NOT lazy. Computer people as a whole are nothing. Each individual is different. The narcissistic notion that one is somehow a harder worker and deserves what s/he gets if it is good but does not deserve it if it is bad is utterly wrong. Egotism and arrogance are never acceptable social interactions. To return to my original point, IT people are generally very sure that they are the Luke Skywalkers and that everybody else is an emperor or at least a Darth Vader. The truth is, the world is not that two-sided. There are a million different shades of gray, and IT people as a group cannot be categorized. A myth of computer people has been formed, and the vastly white, protestant middle class males who have formed the core of the culture will serve their own interests. Nearly everybody works hard for a living, and the ones who build cars or fill potholes certainly have more of a right to claim hard work than anybody who stares at a computer all day and types. I have seen this exact argument in the academic community. Admit it, your jobs are cushy, easy and fun. Same as academics. Your myth is only partly based in reality.
I'm sorry, I was slightly flawed in my last reply. At a viewing area of 9x15 (the minimum needed to show the text full-size with internal margins) you would need a diagonal of 17.5". I guess you could only get two full-size pages on this screen if you eliminated all margins. THen you would have 9x13, which has a diagonal of 15". Of course the problem is that without margins text is very hard to read, no matter how clear it is. That's the problem with all online text (take for example this commentary). Without margins there is no whitespace to focus your eyes on the text, leading to eyestrain. Notice that the most expensive books have the biggest margins, hence making them the easiest to read.
This screen does in fact only have a 16.3" diagonal. Perhaps they mean it can hold two pages of text side-by-side if we ignore the one-inch outside margins. Then they only need 9x15 (std. page is 6.5x9 of text, so that's 9x13, plus the 2" for the inside margins). Then there would be more than enough screen size. This monitor could hold two pages of text side-by-side in full-size as long as you don't need the margins.
re the statement that if it were 100ppi you could get 8 "pieces of paper" on the screen in a size you could actually read: If you decrease the resolution you will fit less text on the screen, not more. Hence, if it can fit two full pages at the max res (2560x2048), then at half that (actually 1/4 because it's two dimensions) (100 ppi translates to 1280x1024 in this context) then you will not quite have enough space to display one sheet of paper, though it will be mighty clear. Higher resolution is always good because even if you choose to run a 2560x2048 capable display at a lower resolution it will look better than a display that can only handle 1280x1024, since the former would use 4 pixels to represent every "pixel" in 1280x1024, whereas the latter will use only one pixel for every "pixel" in the same mode. Four small dots more closely approximate a square than one large dot, so images will appear sharper at lower resolutions. There is never a good reason to choose to buy a lower-resolution display if you can afford the higher-resolution types, because higher-res displays approximate low resolutions much better than low-res types.
Slashdot Mirror
I taught US history to college freshmen while a graduate student (just finished the MA this fall), and I found that I *could not* get my students to believe that Microsoft's version of English is incorrect. This is in regards to Micro$oft's grammar checker's incorrect usage of that/which, and other similar problems. My students believed that if the Micro$oft checkers (spell, grammar, thesaurus) told them to do something, it must be right. When I marked them off for it, they complained (though I clearly told them at the beginning of the term to turn *off* the grammar checker and use a real thesaurus).
Now, always before Micro$oft has just been lacking; they have not intentionally tried to sway the way the English language is used. One can forgive computer software for being less perfect than a real human, because language is not an easy thing anyway. However, to intentionally try to change the use of the language so as to be "less offensive" is absurd. I told my students they should be careful with word choice, as sometimes things have connotations they may not expect. Still, the ultimate choice of wording needs to rest with the individual, and any authority that declares certain words *unacceptable*, whether they be "fuck", "ass", "breast", "terrorist" or "liberal", needs to be boycotted. Our freedom of speech is our most important right.
I got a 20u cabinet that I use at home for my Sun Netra X1 and my Linux boxen. I highly recommend these types of racks for home use: locks on the front and back, and quite good both for network/telecom and for machines. My specific rack was dumped by a Dutch company when its use was expired, for an experimental disk project with HP. They can be found used in all sorts of places, and they are very cheap. Used 19" racks are usually good enough for home use. Just keep your eyes open for companies' old "junk", especially companies that do lots of research and development of hardware. I could not part with my home rack...
This question is essentially the same question originally put forth by Michele Foucault and other post-modern thinkers about thirty years ago. The belief is that the language in which one speaks shapes one's thinking according to the words, actions, and ideas it conveys. English and German have both been viewed as very functional and hence scientific languages, limiting the artistic potential of them. French is often viewed as a more artistic language, as is Japanese. This case is strongly supported by the writings of geniuses such as James Joyce, who in order to completely express the brilliance of his mind would use up to fifty languages simultaneously.
Each language has a unique set of metaphors and idioms, which shapes the thinking of the speakers of that language. Does this take away from individual free will? Does our language predestine us to be certain types of people? That is a huge question, one that ties intricately into all contemporary endeavors such as programming. Most post-modernists have arrived at the conclusion that though one's language does predispose one to a certain type of thinking and that other types may be more difficult, it is possible to bridge that gap. Ultimately, fluency in multiple languages gives people a much wider range of idioms with which to think. I know I was surprised with some of the interesting new ideas that made more sense once I came to understand French and German, though I am not by any means fluent in either.
I recommend that anybody interested in such theoretical questions read the writings of Michele Foucault, and that to see an excellent case study for the usefulness of multilingualism, one read James Joyce (be sure to have lots of translation dictionaries around). Merci, Tom
I think the egotism and the individual arrogance of these recent posts is pathetic. A waiter's job (just like anybody's job) is his or her JOB, not his SOUL. Some customers are sure that since they control the waiter's TIP that they control the PERSON. Those are the people that get on waiters' nerves. No person is any other person's "GOD" to quote the last post. Rather, they are just other people, on the other side of the transaction. Tips are an expected part of the price of eating out, and people who can not afford to tip properly should not go out to eat. Your 15% WILL help the waiter pay your rent; it WILL NOT leave the waiter eternally grateful to you or forever in your debt. Right or wrong, most waiters have very little stake in the restaurant itself. They work as independent agents. As the restaurant essentially pays them nothing, the restaurant is really only providing them with a place in which to do their business, much like an office building provides companies with a place to do their business. The customer's only power over the waiter is the tip. Hence, if you, the customer, piss off the waiter, he/she has the right to make the choice that your pathetic tip isn't worth dealing with your lording over them. Once they have made the decision to forego your tip, you have no control over them, and no amount of bitching to their managers will change that. Hence, if you want good service, you need to be courteous and understanding, and give a generous tip, just as you expecting them to be courteous and understanding and provide you with good service. It IS a two-way street, and the power-dynamics go both ways. All you are to the server is a possible revenue stream. All they are to you is a go-between with the chefs.
Clearly you've never been a waiter. Originally, back say 50 years ago, tips were an optional way to say thank you to somebody who was paid fairly well by a company. Today however, waiters and other "tipped" jobs get no money from the establishment. Before becoming successful, I was a waiter at a resataurant in a resort town. THe establishment paid $2.33 an hour at a time when minimum wage was $5.15. Restaurants are allowed to pay below minimum wages because a 10% minimum tip is considered mandatory by the government. Usually my paychecks didn't even cover the tax on my real wages, the tips. Hence, my paychecks read like this: "$0.00--Non-negotiable". How would you like to get that on your paycheck when there are assholes out there who are expected to give at least 10% and stiff you on it? Essentially, waiters are NOT paid to do their job. THey rely on tips to pay their rent.
I am a doctoral student in history besides being a UNIX sysadmin. The closed loop of the academic world is very similar to the closed loop of the computer world. Human thought works on the notion of myth. In order to bring chaos to one's world, one develops a myth, which may or may not have basis in "truth". This whole series of posts is nothing but a closed-loop community arguing about how to form their myths. Computer people as a whole are NOT hard-working, and computer people as a whole are NOT lazy. Computer people as a whole are nothing. Each individual is different. The narcissistic notion that one is somehow a harder worker and deserves what s/he gets if it is good but does not deserve it if it is bad is utterly wrong. Egotism and arrogance are never acceptable social interactions. To return to my original point, IT people are generally very sure that they are the Luke Skywalkers and that everybody else is an emperor or at least a Darth Vader. The truth is, the world is not that two-sided. There are a million different shades of gray, and IT people as a group cannot be categorized. A myth of computer people has been formed, and the vastly white, protestant middle class males who have formed the core of the culture will serve their own interests. Nearly everybody works hard for a living, and the ones who build cars or fill potholes certainly have more of a right to claim hard work than anybody who stares at a computer all day and types. I have seen this exact argument in the academic community. Admit it, your jobs are cushy, easy and fun. Same as academics. Your myth is only partly based in reality.
I'm sorry, I was slightly flawed in my last reply. At a viewing area of 9x15 (the minimum needed to show the text full-size with internal margins) you would need a diagonal of 17.5". I guess you could only get two full-size pages on this screen if you eliminated all margins. THen you would have 9x13, which has a diagonal of 15". Of course the problem is that without margins text is very hard to read, no matter how clear it is. That's the problem with all online text (take for example this commentary). Without margins there is no whitespace to focus your eyes on the text, leading to eyestrain. Notice that the most expensive books have the biggest margins, hence making them the easiest to read.
This screen does in fact only have a 16.3" diagonal. Perhaps they mean it can hold two pages of text side-by-side if we ignore the one-inch outside margins. Then they only need 9x15 (std. page is 6.5x9 of text, so that's 9x13, plus the 2" for the inside margins). Then there would be more than enough screen size. This monitor could hold two pages of text side-by-side in full-size as long as you don't need the margins.
re the statement that if it were 100ppi you could get 8 "pieces of paper" on the screen in a size you could actually read: If you decrease the resolution you will fit less text on the screen, not more. Hence, if it can fit two full pages at the max res (2560x2048), then at half that (actually 1/4 because it's two dimensions) (100 ppi translates to 1280x1024 in this context) then you will not quite have enough space to display one sheet of paper, though it will be mighty clear. Higher resolution is always good because even if you choose to run a 2560x2048 capable display at a lower resolution it will look better than a display that can only handle 1280x1024, since the former would use 4 pixels to represent every "pixel" in 1280x1024, whereas the latter will use only one pixel for every "pixel" in the same mode. Four small dots more closely approximate a square than one large dot, so images will appear sharper at lower resolutions. There is never a good reason to choose to buy a lower-resolution display if you can afford the higher-resolution types, because higher-res displays approximate low resolutions much better than low-res types.