After the last (June?) version of Ubuntu was released, I installed it onto one of my computers, which had previously been running Debian 'etch'. I have no idea what the respective versions of Apache, MySQL or PHP were (I installed it onto my desktop, as I'm led to believe that's what Ubuntu is best suited for), but I do know my versions of software like Rhythmbox actually went backwards. Old bugs resurfaced, and the very features that meant I was actually happy to use various Gnome-based programs were once again lost.
It's not a disadvantage of Debian that they have concurrently available old but supported packages as well as the latest and greatest. Most operating systems only have one or the other.
Why is that 'for shame'? Debian tries to respect Mozilla's requests about their logo and trade mark, and you criticise Debian for doing precisely what Mozilla wants, and call them hypocritical, even though they're doing precisely what they want others to do with respect to their own trademarks? Consider projects like Debian Hardened or whatever that have been asked to rename themselves because they weren't Debian.
I don't think Debian is in competition with anyone, least of all Firefox. As far as I can tell, Debian does things because Debian alone considers them to be better. No-one seriously interested in Debian will think it doesn't come with a Firefox-equivalent browser just because it doesn't come with a browser named Firefox: this sort of thing will be clearly mentioned, and in any case, unlike on Windows it's easy to find and run all the Web Browsers on Debian so you'll be able to tell what you want (tho, personally, I cannot understand what madness encourages anyone to use Firefox except on Windows).
Also, I run Debian on my desktop and I know others who do, so it is not 'non-existent'. It might be a vanishingly small minority, but that's different from not existing.
GoboLinux has used/Users (and/Depot,/Mount,/System,/Files,/Programs) since I think the first version in 2003. I don't think this was 'to align with Mac OS X', though, but simply because the creators were changing the directory structure anyway. Note that/Programs is different from the Mac's/Applications, so they weren't blindly copying.
Distributions based around GNUStep (which have generally gone nowhere) I think have also used a similar directory structure, obviously for the same reason as Mac OS X: to align with NeXTSTEP. But don't quote me on this one!:)
Personally I don't think it's that important on Windows or *nix, GUIs for which almost always direct you to your home directory on almost all occasions; only someone who knows what they're doing anyway should be poking in the root. And on *nix directories relative to your home are often displayed with the ~ notation, so something that apparently displays the full pathname only begins with ~. On the other hand, to do anything on a new Mac you have to go first to the root, then to Users, then to your home directory.
As regards Microsoft choosing 'C:\Documents and Settings' or 'C:\Users', I don't really think that makes a difference in ability-to-switch. Otherwise they could never have made the change themselves! I think things like having multiple root folders is a lot worse, and for that reason they'll never switch them.
I think that its you who has a very limited understanding of how the senses—you mistakenly call them 'elements'—work. I am perfectly capable of hearing the difference between a sound coming from behind me and a sound coming from in front of me. As the sound contacts my eardrums, it'll contact one earlier than the other; my brain can interpret that. The shape of my ear serves (partially) to distort sounds coming from particular regions; my brain knows that, accounts for it, and can interpret it. If the soundwave is more than about 20 or 30 cm long so that it can get around my head, my brain is also fully capable of working out which direction the sound must be coming from by virtue of the phase of the wave as it reaches each ear. The frequencies involved in a particular sound are transmitted independently from my cochlea to my brain.
On the other hand, have you never seen one of those optical illusions where an object of one color is put against one background, and against another, and looks like it's of two different colors? (or, at least, shades)? Although the information is basically separate while it travels from our eyes to our brain, the eyes only receive the information, and the nerves only transmit the data. But the brain puts it back together again, and is charged with the job of interpreting it, and that's where these optical illusions occur! Regardless of what you think, it is a known fact that for everybody we interpret colors with respect to contrasts. And no, your golden retriever and your ad hom attacks aren't likely to influence my interpretation of color on screen, but the color of my widgets might. (You see, it's also where we're looking that counts; the extreme periphery counts less than the dead centre.)
And in the relevant case, the extent to which vision is 'maskable' isn't hugely different from the extent to which sound is maskable. In both cases you'll need an opaque/soundproofed object, and in the particular case of having to mask a UI object that's influencing my interpretation of color, I'll need to cover up something I'm regularly using!
Your limited understanding of the way the sight works is like someone saying 'Oh, it hardly matters that the CPU causes random packets intended for the first network interface to go to second one; they're separate cards, plugged into separate PCI slots with separate network capables'.
Next time, I would make sure I'm right before making personal attacks at others; and while I'm not running my own business, I very much doubt I would be making personal attacks in a public forum if I was advertising one of my products.
Primitive types don't have to be an abomination in any language. You simply forbid something like 'a' + 3 from being valid syntax, and that solves one part of the problem. Creating a Character class in C++ would not be as efficient, and it can be, and do the right thing. And (worse) it means that all those things that are defined for chars, I have to define again. (I'm a little confused about where your 2.my_int_method() comment is meant to go; being able to do that sounds like it's merging the boundaries between the primative int type and a higher-level Int class, which makes it even less strongly typed in my mind. But I've been doing some programming in C++.Net this year (not worked with C++ before for anything non-trivial), and have been doing things like 2.ToString() and wondering why it works. Is that a C++ thing, or a.Net add-on like the ^ pointers? Is it syntactic sugar, or is 2 actually an object?)
Regarding Haskell, it's not such a pain because you rarely work with things you know to be Ints or Doubles like you do in C++. Instead, you work with typeclasses. Typing the literal `3' doesn't get you a 3::Integer, it gets you a 3::(Num t => t),[*] so it could be an Integer, but it could be a Float, or it could be a user-defined type; we don't know yet (and might never), and so long as everything's compatible, we might as well never know. It achieves the same thing but in a different way.
[*]: I have no idea if this is valid syntax or not.
I was thinking more about the way two completely different things (like chars and ints) can be converted between. (Well, converting between '1' and 1 without casting wouldn't surprise me too much in the way that converting between 3.0 and 3 doesn't; but in C++ as in C you can use the same bit of memory as both '1' and... 0x31 iirc.)
Incidentally, I'm not actually sure that Haskell does do implicit typecasting; I don't know it well enough, but rather than being an integer, the literal 3 has the type of (Num t) => t, which means that it has the type of anything that's a number, kinda (the typeclass Num is a bit like an abstract class in Java which things like Ints, Integers, Doubles, Fractional (itself a typeclass) and the like implement). (+) has the type of (Num a) => a -> a -> a, which means it takes two numbers of the same type and yields a third number of that type. If you then go off and try to add up two numbers of different types, Haskell freaks:
Prelude> (3::Int) + 3.1
<interactive>:1:11:
No instance for (Fractional Int)
arising from the literal `3.1' at <interactive>:1:11-13
Probable fix: add an instance declaration for (Fractional Int)
In the second argument of `(+)', namely `3.1'
In the definition of `it': it = (3:: Int) + 3.1
or even:
Prelude> (3::Int) + (3::Integer)
<interactive>:1:12:
Couldn't match `Int' against `Integer'
Expected type: Int
Inferred type: Integer
In the expression: 3:: Integer
In the second argument of `(+)', namely `(3:: Integer)'
where 'Int' is a fairly run-of-the-mill int, but 'Integer' is more like a lispy bignum. Obviously the typeclass serve a similar function as implicit conversion or type weakness, as well as being something for poor object-oriented brains like mine to latch onto and say 'that's like home!'.
For loosely typed,... I haven't tried... that functional language that is so popular these days, but I will get around to it.
I'm not sure which you're referring to, but most non-lispy functional languages (that I know of) are actually strongly typed. For instance, Haskell is so strongly & statically typed that you don't always need to specify the types of a function or variable; it is obvious from the context that it takes only these types as arguments, and will only return this type.
On the other hand, I've never really thought of C++ as being particularly strongly typed. More strongly typed than some languages yeah, but you can still treat chars as ints... (My C++ isn't very good, and I've managed to get various typing errors at run time causing problems. If it were strongly typed, they'd all've been caught at compile time.)
They wrote a Word document called ChangeLog.txt and it's corrupt? Perhaps they should rename the file to ChangeLog.doc. I don't think Windows is smart enough yet to work out the type of a file from its type, rather than its name.
Windows has improved, and that many (but not all) of the problems aren't from windows, but from the layers of shit that people pile on it (Norton, I'm looking directly at you).
Now, I'll admit that I 'haven't used Windows since Win98', so I might be a little bit off, but as I understand it you need to install firewalls and antivirus and antispyware utilities in order to keep Windows half secure, otherwise people on the great wide internet install layers of shit and Windows goes to hell. But if you do install firewalls and antivirus and antispyware utilities, then that constitutes 'layers of shit' and Windows goes to hell.
So either (a) Windows has improved so that it's safe when insulated from the great wide, but not significantly (because nowadays how many home computers are standalone?), and so it's still shit or (b) I misunderstand you.
(Now, even in the case that I misunderstand you, there seems to be a lot of spyware-laden antispyware utilities available on the Internet. On my Debian boxes, it's reasonably easy to determine whether a piece of software can be trusted, and software can't just randomly install itself, and even if it could, it can't touch the operating system because I don't need root privileges to run games or whatever. So I don't think, even if Debian came to be ran by random Joe Sixpacks, I'll ever need antispyware software. Doesn't it strike you as a problem with Windows that it does? You actually need extra software to stop unwanted software installing itself on your computer!)
Ach! That explains the extra 'o'. I'd wondered about it--I didn't think Dutch went in for double letters in open syllables. On the other hand, it's rather inconsiderate of the Dutch for not using umlauts on about half of their o's. We English-speakers need some reason to laugh at you|them!
Just to let you know, it's not actually 'Vi iMproved', but 'Vi IMproved', and the correct capitalisation is 'VIM', not 'ViM'; or at least, if you load it with no files it announces itself as 'VIM - Vi IMproved'.
I'm being picky, but camel case has been known to make people's eyes fall out. (I'm also exaggerating.)
Norway is not a part of the EU because they don't agree with all their laws (fishing ones are the main cause for concern I think). Norway certainly doesn't adopt all EU laws by default.
Are you aware of any (presumably research or hobbyist) operating systems that are "based on" managed code? I've heard of some that are based on (variants of) languages that are (usually) garbage collected, like LISP Machines and House (written in Haskell)--but wouldn't they essentially have to manage their own memory, so that they aren't managed environments at a kernel-level except maybe in an abstract sense?
I'm over twenty, and I can hear sounds at least in the vicinity of 20 kHz (I've never done a proper test, but playing sounds out of speakers that are meant to be 20 kHz and that others can't hear, I can. It is difficult to determine whether I can hear higher than that--most speakers, audio file formats and so forth around aren't designed to reach 20 kHz, let alone higher! (The common 44.1 kHz sample rate can theoretically safely record up to 22 kHz, but in reality the cut-off (which, like our ears', is gradual) is below that, so that absolutely nothing remains above that frequency.)
High-pitched noises are very annoying in general. They tend to be artificial (as in, speech or birds sounds or the sound of a book falling are all much lower, whereas the sound of a tv or a transformer are up in this range) and so they're either "pink noise" or sine waves, and both are very ugly. If it's designed to be annoying--god, I cannot understand why this sort of a thing should be legal!
The people who make these devices are plain and simple arses, and it's obvious they can't here 'em. Just because their test subjects don't move off straight away doesn't mean it's uncomfortable straight away.
"the government made them do it due to all the coal pollution"
I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but I point this one out because for those of us who don't pronounce "do" and "due" the same (I say them as "doo" and "jew" respectively), it can be really hard to understand.
Linux communities that have actually criticized companies for releasing software on Linux but not making their source code available as though it's some kind of expectation!
Umm... It is some sort of expectation. I know you were saying you weren't trying to make a judgement, but you did. I can't remember the number of times I've had a piece of software (on Windows, the Mac or GNU/Linux) that hasn't worked according to my desires and thought "hm, I'll just change this little bit here--oh, wait, no code". It annoys me to run non-free software; I expect the software I run to have source code available. For some people, free software is just a matter of ethics, but for many others, it's more than that; it's a matter of pragmatics and ease-of-mind and -use.
Also, there's just the fact that most of the current GNU/Linux user-base does actually care about the difference between free/open and non-free/closed software. After all, why would so many of them have used GNU/Linux if they didn't? Why shouldn't they complain? It's like saying the Vatican shouldn't complain if Buddhists tried to put pamphlets throughout the Vatican City.
Now, mind I wouldn't criticise a company for releasing non-free software on Linux; I simply wouldn't use it, at least, not after the first time it bugged me because of it. (Of course, one of my main machines is a PowerPC, and I like to use the same software wherever I go...)
My reading of Slashdot is that we all want to keep technology out of voting. In particular, my reading of us for'ners is that pen on paper is the way to go. You can have essentially complete results that same night, especially for the trivially simple FPTP system you Americans use.
(OTOH, in Australia, the Senate results are counted by computer, but the vote's done pen-on-paper --- the process of counting would be so complex to do it by hand it's just not feasible. Even still, Senate results aren't finalised till weeks after the election. I understand the votes are mostly entered by foreign working-holiday type people.)
Thanks for the dickens though... If I had to pick a character to model myself after.. it would probably be Scrooge.... PRE ghostly encounter.
You have learnt nothing, then? I do not understand the way Americans have a tendency to be Christian as well as selfish. Jesus said to love one another as he has loved us, Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to fit through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, he didn't say God helps those who help themself. (I don't mean to accuse you of being a hypocritical Christian if you're not one; regardless of whether or not you are one, I still do not understand the way it happens.)
Umm... but in America, can't you vote in Primaries that allow you to decide whether you get vile reprehensible scumbags or not? In Australia, every so often it is suggested that we should implement the "American System", referring to all members of the public in an electorate voting in Primaries to decide who represents a party at the next election. (y'See, we keep having this problem with factional infighting between the factions of the major parties (which internally are something like coalitions, and don't always get on well with themselves).)
You know what I hate most about Firefox tho, don't you? Back when Internet Explorer was the only browser anyone used, I could use Galeon just fine. Once in a blue moon did I came across a site that didn't work or told me I was a retard for not using IE... just occasionally, something might've been out of alignment. Now with Firefox so popular, I keep bumping into sites that tell me "You must use Internet Explorer or Firefox to view this site". But I'm running Galeon! It uses the very same bloody rendering engine as Firefox. In fact, on my system it's currently (annoyingly---I don't use Firefox because I hate it) linked to the Firefox libs, not the Mozilla ones. Pages under Firefox would render exactly identically to how they do under Galeon, if I had Firefox configured the same way as I have Galeon configured.
Honestly, if there's one feature I'd love Firefox to have: It's to default to never again sending the "User-Agent" header. It's the worst, most divisive header in the world. This should've been obvious when IE first put in the word "compatible".
Huh? I never changed the scenario---well, not enough to create an error message where one didn't exist before.
I said in the first place (I also like my music files to accurately contain the name of the track, so a song like "Where is everybody?" becomes "(maybe the artists name, album etc. -) 03 - Where is everybody?.ogg": My original scenario as written included a question mark. Even if I hadn't added these extra characters, like quotes or colons (the backslashes were just in the error message, not in the original), the question mark is still enough for it to fail. Still, the names of my music does often include apostrophes and colons, and as you confused me I thought I'd through together an example that used all sorts of characters from the same box.
Slashdot Mirror
After the last (June?) version of Ubuntu was released, I installed it onto one of my computers, which had previously been running Debian 'etch'. I have no idea what the respective versions of Apache, MySQL or PHP were (I installed it onto my desktop, as I'm led to believe that's what Ubuntu is best suited for), but I do know my versions of software like Rhythmbox actually went backwards. Old bugs resurfaced, and the very features that meant I was actually happy to use various Gnome-based programs were once again lost.
It's not a disadvantage of Debian that they have concurrently available old but supported packages as well as the latest and greatest. Most operating systems only have one or the other.
Why is that 'for shame'? Debian tries to respect Mozilla's requests about their logo and trade mark, and you criticise Debian for doing precisely what Mozilla wants, and call them hypocritical, even though they're doing precisely what they want others to do with respect to their own trademarks? Consider projects like Debian Hardened or whatever that have been asked to rename themselves because they weren't Debian.
Mod parent down, fud pure and simple.
I don't think Debian is in competition with anyone, least of all Firefox. As far as I can tell, Debian does things because Debian alone considers them to be better. No-one seriously interested in Debian will think it doesn't come with a Firefox-equivalent browser just because it doesn't come with a browser named Firefox: this sort of thing will be clearly mentioned, and in any case, unlike on Windows it's easy to find and run all the Web Browsers on Debian so you'll be able to tell what you want (tho, personally, I cannot understand what madness encourages anyone to use Firefox except on Windows).
Also, I run Debian on my desktop and I know others who do, so it is not 'non-existent'. It might be a vanishingly small minority, but that's different from not existing.
GoboLinux has used /Users (and /Depot, /Mount, /System, /Files, /Programs) since I think the first version in 2003. I don't think this was 'to align with Mac OS X', though, but simply because the creators were changing the directory structure anyway. Note that /Programs is different from the Mac's /Applications, so they weren't blindly copying.
:)
Distributions based around GNUStep (which have generally gone nowhere) I think have also used a similar directory structure, obviously for the same reason as Mac OS X: to align with NeXTSTEP. But don't quote me on this one!
Personally I don't think it's that important on Windows or *nix, GUIs for which almost always direct you to your home directory on almost all occasions; only someone who knows what they're doing anyway should be poking in the root. And on *nix directories relative to your home are often displayed with the ~ notation, so something that apparently displays the full pathname only begins with ~. On the other hand, to do anything on a new Mac you have to go first to the root, then to Users, then to your home directory.
As regards Microsoft choosing 'C:\Documents and Settings' or 'C:\Users', I don't really think that makes a difference in ability-to-switch. Otherwise they could never have made the change themselves! I think things like having multiple root folders is a lot worse, and for that reason they'll never switch them.
I think that its you who has a very limited understanding of how the senses—you mistakenly call them 'elements'—work. I am perfectly capable of hearing the difference between a sound coming from behind me and a sound coming from in front of me. As the sound contacts my eardrums, it'll contact one earlier than the other; my brain can interpret that. The shape of my ear serves (partially) to distort sounds coming from particular regions; my brain knows that, accounts for it, and can interpret it. If the soundwave is more than about 20 or 30 cm long so that it can get around my head, my brain is also fully capable of working out which direction the sound must be coming from by virtue of the phase of the wave as it reaches each ear. The frequencies involved in a particular sound are transmitted independently from my cochlea to my brain.
On the other hand, have you never seen one of those optical illusions where an object of one color is put against one background, and against another, and looks like it's of two different colors? (or, at least, shades)? Although the information is basically separate while it travels from our eyes to our brain, the eyes only receive the information, and the nerves only transmit the data. But the brain puts it back together again, and is charged with the job of interpreting it, and that's where these optical illusions occur! Regardless of what you think, it is a known fact that for everybody we interpret colors with respect to contrasts. And no, your golden retriever and your ad hom attacks aren't likely to influence my interpretation of color on screen, but the color of my widgets might. (You see, it's also where we're looking that counts; the extreme periphery counts less than the dead centre.)
And in the relevant case, the extent to which vision is 'maskable' isn't hugely different from the extent to which sound is maskable. In both cases you'll need an opaque/soundproofed object, and in the particular case of having to mask a UI object that's influencing my interpretation of color, I'll need to cover up something I'm regularly using!
Your limited understanding of the way the sight works is like someone saying 'Oh, it hardly matters that the CPU causes random packets intended for the first network interface to go to second one; they're separate cards, plugged into separate PCI slots with separate network capables'.
Next time, I would make sure I'm right before making personal attacks at others; and while I'm not running my own business, I very much doubt I would be making personal attacks in a public forum if I was advertising one of my products.
Primitive types don't have to be an abomination in any language. You simply forbid something like 'a' + 3 from being valid syntax, and that solves one part of the problem. Creating a Character class in C++ would not be as efficient, and it can be, and do the right thing. And (worse) it means that all those things that are defined for chars, I have to define again. (I'm a little confused about where your 2.my_int_method() comment is meant to go; being able to do that sounds like it's merging the boundaries between the primative int type and a higher-level Int class, which makes it even less strongly typed in my mind. But I've been doing some programming in C++.Net this year (not worked with C++ before for anything non-trivial), and have been doing things like 2.ToString() and wondering why it works. Is that a C++ thing, or a .Net add-on like the ^ pointers? Is it syntactic sugar, or is 2 actually an object?)
Regarding Haskell, it's not such a pain because you rarely work with things you know to be Ints or Doubles like you do in C++. Instead, you work with typeclasses. Typing the literal `3' doesn't get you a 3::Integer, it gets you a 3::(Num t => t),[*] so it could be an Integer, but it could be a Float, or it could be a user-defined type; we don't know yet (and might never), and so long as everything's compatible, we might as well never know. It achieves the same thing but in a different way.
[*]: I have no idea if this is valid syntax or not.
I was thinking more about the way two completely different things (like chars and ints) can be converted between. (Well, converting between '1' and 1 without casting wouldn't surprise me too much in the way that converting between 3.0 and 3 doesn't; but in C++ as in C you can use the same bit of memory as both '1' and ... 0x31 iirc.)
:: Int) + 3.1
:: Integer :: Integer)'
Incidentally, I'm not actually sure that Haskell does do implicit typecasting; I don't know it well enough, but rather than being an integer, the literal 3 has the type of (Num t) => t, which means that it has the type of anything that's a number, kinda (the typeclass Num is a bit like an abstract class in Java which things like Ints, Integers, Doubles, Fractional (itself a typeclass) and the like implement). (+) has the type of (Num a) => a -> a -> a, which means it takes two numbers of the same type and yields a third number of that type. If you then go off and try to add up two numbers of different types, Haskell freaks:
Prelude> (3::Int) + 3.1
<interactive>:1:11:
No instance for (Fractional Int)
arising from the literal `3.1' at <interactive>:1:11-13
Probable fix: add an instance declaration for (Fractional Int)
In the second argument of `(+)', namely `3.1'
In the definition of `it': it = (3
or even:
Prelude> (3::Int) + (3::Integer)
<interactive>:1:12:
Couldn't match `Int' against `Integer'
Expected type: Int
Inferred type: Integer
In the expression: 3
In the second argument of `(+)', namely `(3
where 'Int' is a fairly run-of-the-mill int, but 'Integer' is more like a lispy bignum. Obviously the typeclass serve a similar function as implicit conversion or type weakness, as well as being something for poor object-oriented brains like mine to latch onto and say 'that's like home!'.
For loosely typed, ... I haven't tried ... that functional language that is so popular these days, but I will get around to it.
I'm not sure which you're referring to, but most non-lispy functional languages (that I know of) are actually strongly typed. For instance, Haskell is so strongly & statically typed that you don't always need to specify the types of a function or variable; it is obvious from the context that it takes only these types as arguments, and will only return this type.
On the other hand, I've never really thought of C++ as being particularly strongly typed. More strongly typed than some languages yeah, but you can still treat chars as ints... (My C++ isn't very good, and I've managed to get various typing errors at run time causing problems. If it were strongly typed, they'd all've been caught at compile time.)
They wrote a Word document called ChangeLog.txt and it's corrupt? Perhaps they should rename the file to ChangeLog.doc. I don't think Windows is smart enough yet to work out the type of a file from its type, rather than its name.
Windows has improved, and that many (but not all) of the problems aren't from windows, but from the layers of shit that people pile on it (Norton, I'm looking directly at you).
Now, I'll admit that I 'haven't used Windows since Win98', so I might be a little bit off, but as I understand it you need to install firewalls and antivirus and antispyware utilities in order to keep Windows half secure, otherwise people on the great wide internet install layers of shit and Windows goes to hell. But if you do install firewalls and antivirus and antispyware utilities, then that constitutes 'layers of shit' and Windows goes to hell.
So either (a) Windows has improved so that it's safe when insulated from the great wide, but not significantly (because nowadays how many home computers are standalone?), and so it's still shit or (b) I misunderstand you.
(Now, even in the case that I misunderstand you, there seems to be a lot of spyware-laden antispyware utilities available on the Internet. On my Debian boxes, it's reasonably easy to determine whether a piece of software can be trusted, and software can't just randomly install itself, and even if it could, it can't touch the operating system because I don't need root privileges to run games or whatever. So I don't think, even if Debian came to be ran by random Joe Sixpacks, I'll ever need antispyware software. Doesn't it strike you as a problem with Windows that it does? You actually need extra software to stop unwanted software installing itself on your computer!)
Or PPC/Linux. PDFs are a lot more compatible, and they can be printed.
Ach! That explains the extra 'o'. I'd wondered about it--I didn't think Dutch went in for double letters in open syllables. On the other hand, it's rather inconsiderate of the Dutch for not using umlauts on about half of their o's. We English-speakers need some reason to laugh at you|them!
Just to let you know, it's not actually 'Vi iMproved', but 'Vi IMproved', and the correct capitalisation is 'VIM', not 'ViM'; or at least, if you load it with no files it announces itself as 'VIM - Vi IMproved'.
I'm being picky, but camel case has been known to make people's eyes fall out. (I'm also exaggerating.)
Norway is not a part of the EU because they don't agree with all their laws (fishing ones are the main cause for concern I think). Norway certainly doesn't adopt all EU laws by default.
Are you aware of any (presumably research or hobbyist) operating systems that are "based on" managed code? I've heard of some that are based on (variants of) languages that are (usually) garbage collected, like LISP Machines and House (written in Haskell)--but wouldn't they essentially have to manage their own memory, so that they aren't managed environments at a kernel-level except maybe in an abstract sense?
I'm over twenty, and I can hear sounds at least in the vicinity of 20 kHz (I've never done a proper test, but playing sounds out of speakers that are meant to be 20 kHz and that others can't hear, I can. It is difficult to determine whether I can hear higher than that--most speakers, audio file formats and so forth around aren't designed to reach 20 kHz, let alone higher! (The common 44.1 kHz sample rate can theoretically safely record up to 22 kHz, but in reality the cut-off (which, like our ears', is gradual) is below that, so that absolutely nothing remains above that frequency.)
High-pitched noises are very annoying in general. They tend to be artificial (as in, speech or birds sounds or the sound of a book falling are all much lower, whereas the sound of a tv or a transformer are up in this range) and so they're either "pink noise" or sine waves, and both are very ugly. If it's designed to be annoying--god, I cannot understand why this sort of a thing should be legal!
The people who make these devices are plain and simple arses, and it's obvious they can't here 'em. Just because their test subjects don't move off straight away doesn't mean it's uncomfortable straight away.
"the government made them do it due to all the coal pollution"
I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but I point this one out because for those of us who don't pronounce "do" and "due" the same (I say them as "doo" and "jew" respectively), it can be really hard to understand.
Linux communities that have actually criticized companies for releasing software on Linux but not making their source code available as though it's some kind of expectation!
Umm... It is some sort of expectation. I know you were saying you weren't trying to make a judgement, but you did. I can't remember the number of times I've had a piece of software (on Windows, the Mac or GNU/Linux) that hasn't worked according to my desires and thought "hm, I'll just change this little bit here--oh, wait, no code". It annoys me to run non-free software; I expect the software I run to have source code available. For some people, free software is just a matter of ethics, but for many others, it's more than that; it's a matter of pragmatics and ease-of-mind and -use.
Also, there's just the fact that most of the current GNU/Linux user-base does actually care about the difference between free/open and non-free/closed software. After all, why would so many of them have used GNU/Linux if they didn't? Why shouldn't they complain? It's like saying the Vatican shouldn't complain if Buddhists tried to put pamphlets throughout the Vatican City.
Now, mind I wouldn't criticise a company for releasing non-free software on Linux; I simply wouldn't use it, at least, not after the first time it bugged me because of it. (Of course, one of my main machines is a PowerPC, and I like to use the same software wherever I go...)
My reading of Slashdot is that we all want to keep technology out of voting. In particular, my reading of us for'ners is that pen on paper is the way to go. You can have essentially complete results that same night, especially for the trivially simple FPTP system you Americans use.
(OTOH, in Australia, the Senate results are counted by computer, but the vote's done pen-on-paper --- the process of counting would be so complex to do it by hand it's just not feasible. Even still, Senate results aren't finalised till weeks after the election. I understand the votes are mostly entered by foreign working-holiday type people.)
Thanks for the dickens though... If I had to pick a character to model myself after.. it would probably be Scrooge.... PRE ghostly encounter.
You have learnt nothing, then? I do not understand the way Americans have a tendency to be Christian as well as selfish. Jesus said to love one another as he has loved us, Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to fit through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, he didn't say God helps those who help themself. (I don't mean to accuse you of being a hypocritical Christian if you're not one; regardless of whether or not you are one, I still do not understand the way it happens.)
Mmm... banananana.... Please spare a slice for a poor banana-deprived Australian!
Umm... but in America, can't you vote in Primaries that allow you to decide whether you get vile reprehensible scumbags or not? In Australia, every so often it is suggested that we should implement the "American System", referring to all members of the public in an electorate voting in Primaries to decide who represents a party at the next election. (y'See, we keep having this problem with factional infighting between the factions of the major parties (which internally are something like coalitions, and don't always get on well with themselves).)
Why don't you buy a copy then? Even if this track is crap, it gives a better chance that a decent track will be released DRM free in the near future.
You know what I hate most about Firefox tho, don't you? Back when Internet Explorer was the only browser anyone used, I could use Galeon just fine. Once in a blue moon did I came across a site that didn't work or told me I was a retard for not using IE ... just occasionally, something might've been out of alignment. Now with Firefox so popular, I keep bumping into sites that tell me "You must use Internet Explorer or Firefox to view this site". But I'm running Galeon! It uses the very same bloody rendering engine as Firefox. In fact, on my system it's currently (annoyingly---I don't use Firefox because I hate it) linked to the Firefox libs, not the Mozilla ones. Pages under Firefox would render exactly identically to how they do under Galeon, if I had Firefox configured the same way as I have Galeon configured.
Honestly, if there's one feature I'd love Firefox to have: It's to default to never again sending the "User-Agent" header. It's the worst, most divisive header in the world. This should've been obvious when IE first put in the word "compatible".
Huh? I never changed the scenario---well, not enough to create an error message where one didn't exist before.
I said in the first place (I also like my music files to accurately contain the name of the track, so a song like "Where is everybody?" becomes "(maybe the artists name, album etc. -) 03 - Where is everybody?.ogg": My original scenario as written included a question mark. Even if I hadn't added these extra characters, like quotes or colons (the backslashes were just in the error message, not in the original), the question mark is still enough for it to fail. Still, the names of my music does often include apostrophes and colons, and as you confused me I thought I'd through together an example that used all sorts of characters from the same box.