Why bother with extensions at all? On my Linux computer, I have all my Ogg Vorbis music with filenames like "Nochnye Snajpery/2004 - SMS/16. 1/2 chasa na vojnu", and my filemanager and music player work out from the contents that it's an Ogg Vorbis player. Same deal occurs with my movies, so I have a video clip named "Nochnye Snajpery/2002 - Ty darila mne rozy". I don't know and don't care what format it's in, ROX-Filer works out it's a movie, and mplayer works out the format...
For my part, I only choose to use extensions when I'm going to have lots of files in one directory with the same name, like "essay.tex", "essay.toc", "essay.aux", "essay.pdf" etc. And I *never* launch a program, then open a file; the filemanager always does it.
(For some reason, neither ROX-Filer nor the "file" command line utility can't work MP3's out without the.mp3 extension. But music players can. If anyone knows what magic I could tell my computer to work them out, I'd be happy)
I do not understand what sort of mind encourages one to tell a person to kill someone, just because of a job they've aided trespass. He's never killed anyone, whereas you could easily have just made yourself morally, and potentially legally,[*] responsible in any right-thinking person's mind for his suicide. If you do not think so, you are much, much worse than him and should look at yourself before criticising others.
[*]: Where I come frome, it is quite rightly illegal to encourage or help someone to kill themselves.
No, by "PostScript program", the Raven was referring to a program written in PostScript, i.e. blah.ps, not a program which interprets them. You could send a file to a printer which has an infinite loop in it and it would not stop.
And, being Latin and not French, you pronounce it as if it was English, so it rhymes with "the jury" (three syllables), not at all like "de jour" (two syllables). A confusing pair of words, but once you know everything there is about them, they keep themselves well apart.
Oh, that seems comparatively benign to some things I've heard happening on Linux systems. At least, assuming that all the damage was contained to the temp user and places it could write to. Malware on a friend's box somehow was able to escalate privileges from a regular user and rooted the whole system.
(My temporary accounts always have decent passwords, although not for any particular reason; just because typing in and remembering decent passwords is for me as easy as typing in and remembering "easy" passwords. This, I suppose, is good reason to keep up the practice;)
By referring to there being "no 'stable' version of Gentoo", the author was not talking about having stable packages, but having stable package versions. e.g. with Debian Stable, packages don't change version. When a security hole is discovered, they patch the version in Stable, backporting it from upstream if necessary & convenient. (This is a large part of where the disagreement between Mozilla and Debian stems: Debian wants to keep packages at the same version for years at a time, Mozilla wants everyone to use the latest stable version.)
This is a part of why I switched away from Gentoo eventually to Debian; I got sick of dealing with package versions changing. I want a secure and easy-to-manage desktop, not one with all the latest stable packages. (Also because it was easier to get Debian working on all my sometimes esoteric hardware than Gentoo.)
In Australia, only cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents. So when something costs $1.96 and I pay by cash, I pay $1.95, but if I paid by card, I'd pay $1.96. (In practice, many places price things in five cent increments anyway; the US $1.99 becomes Australian $1.95, for instance. Supermarkets and service stations and other places where you're expected to buy a lot of stuff obviously are still priced in cents (or fractional cents).)
I come from Australia, so I don't often see US notes. But when I do, they seem cheap and old fashioned. For godsake, it's money made out of paper! You can tear it! You get that in Monopoly, not from banks. We got rid of it ten or more years ago, and yet the most powerful economy in the world still uses it... (Incidentally, the Kiwis get their money printed on plastic in Australia too, and when I've seen their money it's seemed cheap and like toy money. Even tho our money is printed in the very same building.)
No, no-one calls 20c coins "fifths". The Australian and New Zealand divisions of coins come from the pre-decimilised system: 10c was 1 shilling, 20c was two shillings and 50c was five shillings (and one dollar was 10 shillings, two dollars was a pound, five cents was sixpence). At least in Australia, coins don't have nicknames; if you want to talk of a five-cent coin you say exactly that.
What *I* want to know, is if Kiwis have got rid of their five cent coins (an innovation I hope we in Australia follow!) has anyone reverted to calling 10 cents "one shilling":)
Making yourself look stupid while trying to make someone else look stupid? Two can play at that game!
Both of my grandfathers are dead. Neither were murdered. No human caused those deaths. Therefore, no human has caused any other death. Fact that climate change wasn't caused by people in the past doesn't mean we're not causing some now...
Compare this to Australia and Europe, where there is as much urban sprawl as the worst parts of the US but every road has a sidewalk, every set of lights has a crosswalk, and foot bridges and tunnels are commonplace.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but not every road has a footpath in Australia, actually. Some minor roads in new suburbs lack them, but usually these are no through roads so you can easily walk on the grass or road without a worry. Some very major roads in suburbs also lack them, but usally they go nowhere on a scale a pedestrian would usually use. (Nevertheless, walking the hour to/from the nearest train station I've needed to do on weekends---no buses in the afternoon---when I lived in the outer south-east of Melbourne was quite uncomfortable. The first time, I gave up and tried to cut through the suburb, but the fact that all the roads are crescents or winding 'drives' or go nowhere make it very hard to navigate.)
Regular grids are just as important to pedestrians as footpaths.
This results in two things: getting in your car to go get milk and bread is considered lazy and, as a result, there's lots of small "corner stores" to get milk and bread almost everywhere people live.
Again, these seem to be rarer than they'd need to be to walk to them in new suburbs. And in inner suburbs, they're overpriced. So I get on my bike and ride to the supermarket:) [Having grown up near enough the city that it was possible to walk to an overpriced milkbar, I am of the view that driving to go by milk is lazy.]
The outer suburbs, even in Australia, are no place to have a family.
I have found copy protected "CDs" to be so completely transparent that I don't bother caring any more; every single copy protected "CD" I've ever bought has ripped perfectly on my computer. (Of course, that was incontrovertibly illegal, or at least a civil offense. And so is ripping uncopyprotected CDs where I come from. But I didn't realise it at the time;)
keyboards should be ABCDE.. instead of QWERTY: we learn the alphabet much earlier than we learn how to use keyboards.
That doesn't follow; the keyboard layout should be optimised for typing (and then all keyboards would be basically the same), not for being learnt the first time. If you're a touch-typer, and you've had exposure to some of the new layouts that have the Insert/Delete/Home/End/... block aranged vertically instead of horizontally, or that has them all shifted down a row with the PrintScreen/Scroll Lock/Pause keys on the top row, isn't that incredibly annoying?
CPUs (x86 blah) should be big endian instead of little endian: this helps a lot when you dump a memory and try to read the result.
I don't understand what you're trying to convey with the first sencence, but I should think most people who work with numbers (finance and software workers, etc.) punch numbers the same way -- not differently.
When I'm typing numbers on my keyboard's keypad, I put my middle finger on the five and touch type: The height, size, resistence, depth of travel etc. all make this a great way of entering numbers on this device.
When I'm using my mobile phone's buttons, I use my thumb; if I'm using a regular phone, I use my index finger. The buttons are frequently irregularly spaced, too large or too small, or don't have a good amount of travel; using my thumb on my mobile also allows me to use one finger.
So... mode of entry is for me substantially different.
As for does it make a difference... ? I'd say no (i.e. you're right). I've obviously memorised the positions on my keyboard. At work, when I have to manually type in prices on the EFTPOS machine (which has a phone layout, and the same sort of buttons as a cordless phone), I frequently mistype prices. I doubt a customer would appreciate being charged $98 for something that was actually $32...
Unfortunately, this is a battle very much already lost...
In practice, are these various brackets going to be contrasted? Is a program that uses two different brackets that look almost the same likely to be written? I imagine also that people are able to use a larger font when it's necessary (but before then, I would probably stop using hard-to-contrast letters).
I'm certainly not saying that we should be using them when it's hard to contrast, just when it provides a benefit. The ability to use Unicode characters is not the obligation to use ones you can't distinguish...
(FWIW, I've never found greek letters particularly difficult to contrast from Roman (aside from the identical caps --- but who'd use them?), even when set in a fixed-width low res font. Probably the use of Greek characters in Roman scholarly work for centuries has helped them to keep apart.)
Torvalds uses a PPC/Linux machine that was built as a Mac, yes. I don't know if you can call them Macs when they don't have Mac OS on them. Adobe doesn't release Flash for PPC/Linux, so that rules out him (and, for that matter, me).
I still don't have a choice. Torvalds still can't view that video of him on his own computer. Even aside from the fact that Adobe won't support anyone but mainstream Wintel/Mac/x86/Linux people, Flash is about the worst choice for distributing movies. Flash is for scalable vector animations with sound. It's like using SVG to distribute a photo!
By the way, just lest anyone thing Nouveau and Gnash are the sort of thing only "RMS-wannabe free software fanbois" would want, us people using Linux on PPC (and we count Torvalds among our ranks!) have no binaries blobs available from NVidia and no binary flash players available from Adobe. Nouveau and Gnash are absolutely essential for us to be able to keep up.
Umm... still doesn't work from PPC/Linux. And considering that's the platform Torvalds develops on, you'd think they could at least release the video in a format he could watch from his own computer. It's not hard to release a video in MPEG format people!
Hmm... I thought they had: There was certainly a bruhaha about it when really bad Aqua themes came out. Although perhaps that was only concern about calling them "Aqua".
(Back when I ran Windows on my computer, I used to run a window manager thing replacement that made Windows' window management essentially the same as some pre-OSX version of the Mac OS. ISTR it even moved the menubar up to the top of the screen for most programs. I don't think Apple ever had any problems with that program, but inter-Jobs they were a different company. I always thought the pre-OSX user interface was very nice both in look and in feel—when I finally bought an iMac G5 I was disappointed at how different it had become and how much it had lost. No doubt I'm the only... Now it runs GNU/Linux;)
Not, of course, that the pinch interface is new either. Is there anything in the iPhone that is new, or is it just Apple doing what they do best—combining a whole lot of great but pre-existing ideas, well, into a single unified package?
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"Nochnye Snajpery/2004 - SMS/16. 1/2 chasa na vojnu"
Evidently that "1/2" was meant to be the half symbol. It doesn't represent a folder boundary like the rest.
Why bother with extensions at all? On my Linux computer, I have all my Ogg Vorbis music with filenames like "Nochnye Snajpery/2004 - SMS/16. 1/2 chasa na vojnu", and my filemanager and music player work out from the contents that it's an Ogg Vorbis player. Same deal occurs with my movies, so I have a video clip named "Nochnye Snajpery/2002 - Ty darila mne rozy". I don't know and don't care what format it's in, ROX-Filer works out it's a movie, and mplayer works out the format...
.mp3 extension. But music players can. If anyone knows what magic I could tell my computer to work them out, I'd be happy)
For my part, I only choose to use extensions when I'm going to have lots of files in one directory with the same name, like "essay.tex", "essay.toc", "essay.aux", "essay.pdf" etc. And I *never* launch a program, then open a file; the filemanager always does it.
(For some reason, neither ROX-Filer nor the "file" command line utility can't work MP3's out without the
I guess that's ok
I do not agree with what he has done. Strangely, I can vehemently disagree with someone or what they've done without wanting their death.
I do not understand what sort of mind encourages one to tell a person to kill someone, just because of a job they've aided trespass. He's never killed anyone, whereas you could easily have just made yourself morally, and potentially legally,[*] responsible in any right-thinking person's mind for his suicide. If you do not think so, you are much, much worse than him and should look at yourself before criticising others.
[*]: Where I come frome, it is quite rightly illegal to encourage or help someone to kill themselves.
No, by "PostScript program", the Raven was referring to a program written in PostScript, i.e. blah.ps, not a program which interprets them. You could send a file to a printer which has an infinite loop in it and it would not stop.
And, being Latin and not French, you pronounce it as if it was English, so it rhymes with "the jury" (three syllables), not at all like "de jour" (two syllables). A confusing pair of words, but once you know everything there is about them, they keep themselves well apart.
Oh, that seems comparatively benign to some things I've heard happening on Linux systems. At least, assuming that all the damage was contained to the temp user and places it could write to. Malware on a friend's box somehow was able to escalate privileges from a regular user and rooted the whole system.
;)
(My temporary accounts always have decent passwords, although not for any particular reason; just because typing in and remembering decent passwords is for me as easy as typing in and remembering "easy" passwords. This, I suppose, is good reason to keep up the practice
By referring to there being "no 'stable' version of Gentoo", the author was not talking about having stable packages, but having stable package versions. e.g. with Debian Stable, packages don't change version. When a security hole is discovered, they patch the version in Stable, backporting it from upstream if necessary & convenient. (This is a large part of where the disagreement between Mozilla and Debian stems: Debian wants to keep packages at the same version for years at a time, Mozilla wants everyone to use the latest stable version.)
This is a part of why I switched away from Gentoo eventually to Debian; I got sick of dealing with package versions changing. I want a secure and easy-to-manage desktop, not one with all the latest stable packages. (Also because it was easier to get Debian working on all my sometimes esoteric hardware than Gentoo.)
Can you provide more information? What purpose was your computer (desktop, server, ...)? do you know how it got infected? that kind of thing...
In Australia, only cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents. So when something costs $1.96 and I pay by cash, I pay $1.95, but if I paid by card, I'd pay $1.96. (In practice, many places price things in five cent increments anyway; the US $1.99 becomes Australian $1.95, for instance. Supermarkets and service stations and other places where you're expected to buy a lot of stuff obviously are still priced in cents (or fractional cents).)
I come from Australia, so I don't often see US notes. But when I do, they seem cheap and old fashioned. For godsake, it's money made out of paper! You can tear it! You get that in Monopoly, not from banks. We got rid of it ten or more years ago, and yet the most powerful economy in the world still uses it... (Incidentally, the Kiwis get their money printed on plastic in Australia too, and when I've seen their money it's seemed cheap and like toy money. Even tho our money is printed in the very same building.)
:)
It's all what you're used to
No, no-one calls 20c coins "fifths". The Australian and New Zealand divisions of coins come from the pre-decimilised system: 10c was 1 shilling, 20c was two shillings and 50c was five shillings (and one dollar was 10 shillings, two dollars was a pound, five cents was sixpence). At least in Australia, coins don't have nicknames; if you want to talk of a five-cent coin you say exactly that.
:)
What *I* want to know, is if Kiwis have got rid of their five cent coins (an innovation I hope we in Australia follow!) has anyone reverted to calling 10 cents "one shilling"
'Informative'?! I think this guy was gunning for 'Funny'.
Making yourself look stupid while trying to make someone else look stupid? Two can play at that game!
Both of my grandfathers are dead. Neither were murdered. No human caused those deaths. Therefore, no human has caused any other death. Fact that climate change wasn't caused by people in the past doesn't mean we're not causing some now...
Compare this to Australia and Europe, where there is as much urban sprawl as the worst parts of the US but every road has a sidewalk, every set of lights has a crosswalk, and foot bridges and tunnels are commonplace.
:) [Having grown up near enough the city that it was possible to walk to an overpriced milkbar, I am of the view that driving to go by milk is lazy.]
Sorry to burst your bubble, but not every road has a footpath in Australia, actually. Some minor roads in new suburbs lack them, but usually these are no through roads so you can easily walk on the grass or road without a worry. Some very major roads in suburbs also lack them, but usally they go nowhere on a scale a pedestrian would usually use. (Nevertheless, walking the hour to/from the nearest train station I've needed to do on weekends---no buses in the afternoon---when I lived in the outer south-east of Melbourne was quite uncomfortable. The first time, I gave up and tried to cut through the suburb, but the fact that all the roads are crescents or winding 'drives' or go nowhere make it very hard to navigate.)
Regular grids are just as important to pedestrians as footpaths.
This results in two things: getting in your car to go get milk and bread is considered lazy and, as a result, there's lots of small "corner stores" to get milk and bread almost everywhere people live.
Again, these seem to be rarer than they'd need to be to walk to them in new suburbs. And in inner suburbs, they're overpriced. So I get on my bike and ride to the supermarket
The outer suburbs, even in Australia, are no place to have a family.
I have found copy protected "CDs" to be so completely transparent that I don't bother caring any more; every single copy protected "CD" I've ever bought has ripped perfectly on my computer. (Of course, that was incontrovertibly illegal, or at least a civil offense. And so is ripping uncopyprotected CDs where I come from. But I didn't realise it at the time ;)
keyboards should be ABCDE.. instead of QWERTY: we learn the alphabet much earlier than we learn how to use keyboards.
:P
That doesn't follow; the keyboard layout should be optimised for typing (and then all keyboards would be basically the same), not for being learnt the first time. If you're a touch-typer, and you've had exposure to some of the new layouts that have the Insert/Delete/Home/End/... block aranged vertically instead of horizontally, or that has them all shifted down a row with the PrintScreen/Scroll Lock/Pause keys on the top row, isn't that incredibly annoying?
CPUs (x86 blah) should be big endian instead of little endian: this helps a lot when you dump a memory and try to read the result.
Mine is
I don't understand what you're trying to convey with the first sencence, but I should think most people who work with numbers (finance and software workers, etc.) punch numbers the same way -- not differently.
... mode of entry is for me substantially different.
... ? I'd say no (i.e. you're right). I've obviously memorised the positions on my keyboard. At work, when I have to manually type in prices on the EFTPOS machine (which has a phone layout, and the same sort of buttons as a cordless phone), I frequently mistype prices. I doubt a customer would appreciate being charged $98 for something that was actually $32...
When I'm typing numbers on my keyboard's keypad, I put my middle finger on the five and touch type: The height, size, resistence, depth of travel etc. all make this a great way of entering numbers on this device.
When I'm using my mobile phone's buttons, I use my thumb; if I'm using a regular phone, I use my index finger. The buttons are frequently irregularly spaced, too large or too small, or don't have a good amount of travel; using my thumb on my mobile also allows me to use one finger.
So
As for does it make a difference
Unfortunately, this is a battle very much already lost...
In practice, are these various brackets going to be contrasted? Is a program that uses two different brackets that look almost the same likely to be written? I imagine also that people are able to use a larger font when it's necessary (but before then, I would probably stop using hard-to-contrast letters).
I'm certainly not saying that we should be using them when it's hard to contrast, just when it provides a benefit. The ability to use Unicode characters is not the obligation to use ones you can't distinguish...
(FWIW, I've never found greek letters particularly difficult to contrast from Roman (aside from the identical caps --- but who'd use them?), even when set in a fixed-width low res font. Probably the use of Greek characters in Roman scholarly work for centuries has helped them to keep apart.)
Torvalds uses a PPC/Linux machine that was built as a Mac, yes. I don't know if you can call them Macs when they don't have Mac OS on them. Adobe doesn't release Flash for PPC/Linux, so that rules out him (and, for that matter, me).
I still don't have a choice. Torvalds still can't view that video of him on his own computer. Even aside from the fact that Adobe won't support anyone but mainstream Wintel/Mac/x86/Linux people, Flash is about the worst choice for distributing movies. Flash is for scalable vector animations with sound. It's like using SVG to distribute a photo!
By the way, just lest anyone thing Nouveau and Gnash are the sort of thing only "RMS-wannabe free software fanbois" would want, us people using Linux on PPC (and we count Torvalds among our ranks!) have no binaries blobs available from NVidia and no binary flash players available from Adobe. Nouveau and Gnash are absolutely essential for us to be able to keep up.
Umm... still doesn't work from PPC/Linux. And considering that's the platform Torvalds develops on, you'd think they could at least release the video in a format he could watch from his own computer. It's not hard to release a video in MPEG format people!
Hmm... I thought they had: There was certainly a bruhaha about it when really bad Aqua themes came out. Although perhaps that was only concern about calling them "Aqua".
(Back when I ran Windows on my computer, I used to run a window manager thing replacement that made Windows' window management essentially the same as some pre-OSX version of the Mac OS. ISTR it even moved the menubar up to the top of the screen for most programs. I don't think Apple ever had any problems with that program, but inter-Jobs they were a different company. I always thought the pre-OSX user interface was very nice both in look and in feel—when I finally bought an iMac G5 I was disappointed at how different it had become and how much it had lost. No doubt I'm the only... Now it runs GNU/Linux;)
Not, of course, that the pinch interface is new either. Is there anything in the iPhone that is new, or is it just Apple doing what they do best—combining a whole lot of great but pre-existing ideas, well, into a single unified package?