Actually, anything in the free-software world could be just as authoritative as Apple's Style Guidelines can be. Apple does not enforce their style guidelines in any method, and developers are free to design software that does not behave according to the guidelines. The style guidelines are enforced by the users: They choose which software they'll run and badger the developers enough that most software does follow the guidelines.
Likewise, if enough users choose to predominately use software that follows Gnome's HIG, then most software will be developed to follow it. Of course, that's less likely to happen in the free software world because many users of software have different priorities from Mac users, so much software will exist to cater for these users with diverse requirements.
(I'm not saying that HIGs are bad. Lots of software is made much more usable by following HIGs to a greater or lesser degree. But I don't think Emacs and Vim users would be nearly as productive if it followed Apple's Style guidelines to a tee.)
I suppose we might agree completely on this front, actually. Still, I tend to find that programs that want to intergrate with Gnome are a lot more consistent than other programs I use, so I'm not sure the lack of a benevolent dictator has really hurt much. It's more the fact that people haven't always cared (and still often don't care!) so much about Mac-style usability.
I'm not sure. I don't recall saying they should, so I'll give my opinions on two possible interpretations of your post.
GNU/Linux has enough users that it's either feature-complete or has enough users that it can become feature complete in the not-too-distant future for most people (even if not for everyone), so from the perspective of benefit to the operating systems, more users aren't necessary (IMHO). I think it would be much better if 100 per cent of users switched to a free operating system, but I'd be as happy for that to occur by Microsoft (and Apple, et al.) changing their licensing terms and conditions than by them changing from Windows (Mac OS, etc.) to GNU/Linux. Or they could also switch to FreeBSD, or one of those operating systems based on non-GNU tools (etc.) but a Linux kernel.
As to why users should switch to a Free operating system, that can't be answered in terms of features of an operating system, even though this is why I would suggest you use GNU/Linux. If you're interested in that, you could read the GNU Project's Philosophy pages, but seeing as you're a Slashdotter, I imagine you already know the arguments (even if you disagree with them).
You seem to have misinterpreted my post. Completely understandable; we come from diverse backgrounds.
As long as there are people who (from my perspective) are more willing to be bullied by Microsoft than learn a different system, distributions based on GNU/Linux will not be seen as suitable by all users. Most manufacturers do not go all-out in trying to make their products 100 per cent acceptible to 100 per cent of users; if they did, then Windows would already be Free software (i.e. Windows, a product considered to have a monopoly, is not acceptible to me and enough others that there's alternatives, which I use; Microsoft have also indicated that they're not interested in catering to my needs/desires).
In order for GNU/Linux to be accepted by a large-enough proportion of the marketplace, it doesn't need to be perfectly identical, merely broadly similar (i.e. with a graphical user interface) and fully-feature enough (e.g. with enough graphical control-panel type programs). I've seen enough users who range from nervous of computers to comfortable with Windows who have found GNU/Linux suitable for their purposes; some of them use it on their own computers happily enough (relative to their Windows experience).
The point is--even if manufactures of a product want people to use their product, they don't necessarily want every single person, individually, to want to use their product. So sn0wflake might have some issues with GNU/Linux-based operating systems that prevent him from using them, but it doesn't need to be written so that *sn0wflake* wants to use it, any more than it should be written so that *I* want to use it. It just needs to be written so that enough people want to use it. (I also think that most companies distributing GNU/Linux are not under the delusion that they (as individual companies, not as all companies that distribute GNU/Linux) can obtain a monopoly of the home user market like Microsoft currently have, so their idea of a "enough users" is probably somewhat different from Microsoft's).
It's the animation. I don't care about anything else whatsoever (as long as its decent). Sure, I don't care about the fact that if I was an American, and insane, I could get a credit card from some random company I've never heard of before. But I can live with some small part of my screen saying that, if it only just said it! But no! It goes on and says half a sentence. Then flashes, and says another half a sentence. Then flashes, and has another half-a-sentence. I just wanted to read the text that went around the ad!
Also it seems to me that nowadays most GNU/Linux desktops indicate what a file is, rather than what it claims to be. Under Gnome (at least under one configuration) it won't even let you run the file if there's a dangerous disparity.
How un-Windows-like can you make KDE? Can you get rid of menubars (I know you can detatch them, but I prefer uncomplicated applications that only use right-click menus when they have to)? Can you get rid of the start-bar down the bottom? Can you make the filemanager behave like a file-manager should, and the webbrowser like a webbrowser, and act as two separate and distinct programs? (my prefs for webbrowsing are completely the opposite of what I want for file managing, but KDE didn't seem to understand (amongst others) I wanted new-window-on-button-one/ same-window-on-button-two when browsing files, and same-tab-on-button-one/ new-tab-on-button-two). Can you use drag-and-drop to save, instead of using a hard-to-navigate and never-remembering-the-right place file picker? Can you make it use your prefs as soon as you pick them, instead of after you've chosen Apply?
I'm not trying to say "hah, you can't do this in KDE", I'm trying to say "I've tried to use KDE every now-and-then, and could never find ways to deal with these problems. I'd like to be wrong, but only so I can actually use some of the world of KDE, not because I'm frustrated with what I have". (Also, there's nothing inheritely wrong with copying---the desktop I prefer is/started as a copy of another less-well-known one. I just don't like what KDE's chosen to copy.)
Actually, 'aren't' in this context could easily be a contraction of 'am not' -> amnt -> ant -> a:nt (like 'aunt') which is homophonous with 'aren't' in non-rhotic dialects and was then borrowed based on its orthography by rhotic dialects like American English. American English used to borrow a lot of changes from American English. (See also 'can't' which has a similar pronounciation.)
Just a couple of points: Languages today aren't grammatically simpler than they used to be. Many languages have whittled down old case systems with more cases to ones with less (or, as in English, none), and similar things have happened to verbs. Meanwhile, though, those same languages have done horrible things to their word order, prepositional and modal/auxilliary verb systems. What's the difference between 'shall', 'will', 'going to' and 'gonna' when expressing something in the future? And that's only four options. Furthermore, languages like Finnish have actually increased the number of cases they have at the same time as English and French have reduced them.
Secondly, the concept of a unified Ural-Altaic language group is not really that well accepted. The languages do have similar aspects to their grammar, but that doesn't mean the languages are related (I'm quite sceptical of the article this article is based on). As for Finnish and Hungarian having no common words, I'm not sure what you mean. No words that are pronounced the same? Well, English and French don't, but there's very many words that you can trace a relationship between, either for borrowings (which are about 800-years-separated) or from inheritance (which are many, mayn more). Of course, Finnish and Hungarian have fewer if any borrowings between them, but they do have a reasonable amount of shared vocabulary.
Uniquely well? I think not. Windows 95 introduced the command 'start' which I loved for the while I was using it. GNUstep has the command 'openapp' which is almost equivalent to MacOS X's 'open' because it's another implementation of OpenStep. ROX-Filer also has the rommand 'rox' which when called with no argument starts a filer window in your home, but when started with a filename will open that file, the same as clicking on it.
Mars has a sea-level? I don't mean to sound overcorrect or anything, but isn't the comparison you draw inaccurate? If you got rid of all the water from Earth and tried making a comparable measurement you might find that the tallest mountain on Earth was more than 9 km off the replacement for sealevel, I would've thought. I doubt it'd increase three times, though; but what I'm more saying is how comparable are the two figures? (I really don't know; it might be that the sea is only a hundred metres deep on average and that make the 9 km 9.1 km, which really is still 9 km...)
Justified text and nice hyphenation—a la LaTeX— are the keys to avoiding space lost to word-wrapping. (The combination because one on its own is hard to read and ugly.)
You can, I'm told, buy one from pckeyboard.com. I understand they're just the same as the originals, just made nowadays. I don't know if they contain that mainy function keys though.
This, I assume, is similar to the clause we have with Closer Economic Relations between Aus and NZ, that means that anything that comes from those islands is ours.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by your last comment, but if you mean you want a graphical file manager you can control pretty well with your keyboard, then ROX-Filer might be nearer what you want.
You can easily browse to a different folder with the keyboard; just type / and then edit the path (with tab completion) to where you want to be. If you want to enter a single command, you can just type ! then the command, or quickly open an xterm here by typing x for more complicated commands.
It's not perfect; I don't think it's possible to move or copy files without using the mouse or using the ! command box. You might find it more suitable than using Nautilus. (Or you might not: Nautilus might support all of these things, it's been some time since I've tried to use the Gnome file manager—version 1.2 or something—and it's changed a lot since then.)
(Those keybinds I've given mightn't be defaults, actually. You might need to investigate the right-click menu to find out (and change) them.)
A couple of points: At a time like this when we are threatened by terrorism, we should be much more concerned about preserving our freedoms. Particularly you in the US, for whom we outside ought to have a significant amount of respect for, given your groundbreaking efforts a few hundred years ago in such fields as federalism, democracy, and a sense of entitlement to our fundamental human rights. Australia in particular owes a particular cultural debt to you, and it pains us (or at least me) to see what you've done with your rights. At least I don't need a pseudo-passport to move around in my own country yet.
(2) Ten minutes shouldn't make a huge difference. If being delayed ten minutes at the security check-in delays people, you were already running late, and so you're to blame, not the freak ahead of you going slowly. You're actually being annoyed by a lot of nothing; ten minutes at the security check-in or ten minutes in the lounge, what's it matter?
Yes. I have—not much, I'll admit, but it mostly got in my way. X-based systems don't work that way. They work a different way, and it happens to be one that I reckon is superior. (Personally, I don't care whay program I'm running. I care what I'm doing. When a system highlights the program at the expense of the task, I get annoyed. Macs do that, an awful lot.)
OS X also has some similar behavior with some programs, and it (amongst other things) got in my way enough that I piked and installed GNU/Linux on my iMac G5.
I'm not saying the X/Gimp system works for everyone, because it doesn't. But it does work for some people, and that's half the reason these other systems exist (if open source development is going to take us to the same place that commercial software was ten years ago, how is it a superior development model?). (The other half being that they're free.)
Part of the reason the palette system works in MacOS Classic is that when you bring an application to the front in Classic, you bring *all* its windows to the front, not just the one you clicked on. Applications were in "layers." This means you'd never have a situation where you could see your image, but not see your toolbar. That's changed in OS X, and it never existed in Linux or Windows.
Part of the reason it worked my arse! That only gets in the way of it working. Why would you have multiple windows if you want them all to behave as a single one? You might as well just have a single window.
The Gimp's interface in combination with most window managers gives me the flexibility to have any windows in any order. This means that I can have a window open as a reference from one program behind the window I'm working on, but in front of everything else. If we lose this, using the Gimp will feel like using a horrible pile of sludge.
If they change the interface to be more like Photoshop, I and many others will be very pissed off. The Gimp does have some useability problems, but these are usually oversights than actual integral problems with the design. The single window interface makes it really difficult to work with two programs at once.
Mach is a microkernel; it doesn't do much, just sits around looking pretty.
Much of Darwin—Mac OS X's kernel—is based on FreeBSD's kernel. It's basically got a single monolithic unix server sitting on top of the Mach microkernel. So it's reasonable to say the kernel consists of (Mach + FreeBSD-based stuff).
(I don't like Apple software. I thought I would, and I tried to--I tried more than $2000 to--but then I failed and just put GNU/Linux onto my iMac G5.)
Actually, Hollywood has enough money that they can pay the US Government to convince/force other Governments to act like mere colonies. Take a look at Australia since 2001, for instance. "Indepedent foreign (trade, copyright, patent,...) policy" is not a concept our Government understands any more.
Most words used in English are from Old English and Old Norse, actually, not Old French. For instance, in your first paragraph, you have 33 words from Old English plus 'spell', which in this sense comes from Old French but is ultimately from a Germanic language. Of the rest: point < OFr, just < OFr, connection < La, minor < La, epiphany < OFr/La, common < OFr, irregular < La.
When you re-align your sources of analysis and data to more pseudoscientific discourse, of course, your proportion of lexemes deriving from alternative languages increases. But that's not how we speak in everyday conversation, fortunately:)
However, our orthographical tradition does derive from the Old French one, but in 11th century French, their speech was a lot closer to their writing than it is now. Likewise, in 11th century English, their speech was a lot closer to their writing than it is now. But in some cases, words were deliberately spelt unphonetically. For instance, in the handwriting used to write both Old French and Middle English, a sequence of i, u, n, and m were indistinguishable (all just vertical lines—they hadn't invented the dot on top of i's yet), so to help the word 'ton' look obvious, they used an O instead of a U. We kept some of them, but we dropped others. Anyway, you're French theory doesn't work because if you read the French-derived English words like French, they don't sound a thing like recognisable! If you get my, ahem, 'pwahng':)
And in the meantime, some English writers did things the French didn't do. The silent B in 'debt' is there because it was considered important that the link to the Latin word debitum was clear, and the S in 'island' was added because people mistakenly thought it was derived from the Latin word insula (it wasn't, it came from Old English/Scandinavian sources).
No, the real cause in both English and French is that we try and write our language like it was pronounced a few hundred years ago. (Tibetan's worse than English, Icelandic's about as bad as French and not quite as bad as English, both of these languages have orthographies little changed over hundreds of years.)
The reason commoner words are spelt less phonetically is because you're more likely to say them, and they're more like to be in unstressed syllables, so they're more likely to have their pronunciation changed. (Also, oddities in odder words are more likely to be replaced by a spelling pronuncation; 'waistcoat' used to be prononuced 'wesket', or the way 'forehead' is sometimes prononuced as 'four-hed' instead of 'forrud'.)
(About lengual—probably you're trying to spell 'lingual', and trying to mean either 'linguistic' or 'orthographic'.)
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Actually, anything in the free-software world could be just as authoritative as Apple's Style Guidelines can be. Apple does not enforce their style guidelines in any method, and developers are free to design software that does not behave according to the guidelines. The style guidelines are enforced by the users: They choose which software they'll run and badger the developers enough that most software does follow the guidelines.
Likewise, if enough users choose to predominately use software that follows Gnome's HIG, then most software will be developed to follow it. Of course, that's less likely to happen in the free software world because many users of software have different priorities from Mac users, so much software will exist to cater for these users with diverse requirements.
(I'm not saying that HIGs are bad. Lots of software is made much more usable by following HIGs to a greater or lesser degree. But I don't think Emacs and Vim users would be nearly as productive if it followed Apple's Style guidelines to a tee.)
I suppose we might agree completely on this front, actually. Still, I tend to find that programs that want to intergrate with Gnome are a lot more consistent than other programs I use, so I'm not sure the lack of a benevolent dictator has really hurt much. It's more the fact that people haven't always cared (and still often don't care!) so much about Mac-style usability.
I'm not sure. I don't recall saying they should, so I'll give my opinions on two possible interpretations of your post.
GNU/Linux has enough users that it's either feature-complete or has enough users that it can become feature complete in the not-too-distant future for most people (even if not for everyone), so from the perspective of benefit to the operating systems, more users aren't necessary (IMHO). I think it would be much better if 100 per cent of users switched to a free operating system, but I'd be as happy for that to occur by Microsoft (and Apple, et al.) changing their licensing terms and conditions than by them changing from Windows (Mac OS, etc.) to GNU/Linux. Or they could also switch to FreeBSD, or one of those operating systems based on non-GNU tools (etc.) but a Linux kernel.
As to why users should switch to a Free operating system, that can't be answered in terms of features of an operating system, even though this is why I would suggest you use GNU/Linux. If you're interested in that, you could read the GNU Project's Philosophy pages, but seeing as you're a Slashdotter, I imagine you already know the arguments (even if you disagree with them).
See also my response to Adam Weeden.
You seem to have misinterpreted my post. Completely understandable; we come from diverse backgrounds.
As long as there are people who (from my perspective) are more willing to be bullied by Microsoft than learn a different system, distributions based on GNU/Linux will not be seen as suitable by all users. Most manufacturers do not go all-out in trying to make their products 100 per cent acceptible to 100 per cent of users; if they did, then Windows would already be Free software (i.e. Windows, a product considered to have a monopoly, is not acceptible to me and enough others that there's alternatives, which I use; Microsoft have also indicated that they're not interested in catering to my needs/desires).
In order for GNU/Linux to be accepted by a large-enough proportion of the marketplace, it doesn't need to be perfectly identical, merely broadly similar (i.e. with a graphical user interface) and fully-feature enough (e.g. with enough graphical control-panel type programs). I've seen enough users who range from nervous of computers to comfortable with Windows who have found GNU/Linux suitable for their purposes; some of them use it on their own computers happily enough (relative to their Windows experience).
The point is--even if manufactures of a product want people to use their product, they don't necessarily want every single person, individually, to want to use their product. So sn0wflake might have some issues with GNU/Linux-based operating systems that prevent him from using them, but it doesn't need to be written so that *sn0wflake* wants to use it, any more than it should be written so that *I* want to use it. It just needs to be written so that enough people want to use it. (I also think that most companies distributing GNU/Linux are not under the delusion that they (as individual companies, not as all companies that distribute GNU/Linux) can obtain a monopoly of the home user market like Microsoft currently have, so their idea of a "enough users" is probably somewhat different from Microsoft's).
Is my point clearer this time?
So the entire point of GNU/Linux is to convert you from Windows to it? Sounds more than a little bit arrogant.
No, tho it could result in the Gnome or KDE desktops becoming more like Windows.
It's the animation. I don't care about anything else whatsoever (as long as its decent). Sure, I don't care about the fact that if I was an American, and insane, I could get a credit card from some random company I've never heard of before. But I can live with some small part of my screen saying that, if it only just said it! But no! It goes on and says half a sentence. Then flashes, and says another half a sentence. Then flashes, and has another half-a-sentence. I just wanted to read the text that went around the ad!
Also it seems to me that nowadays most GNU/Linux desktops indicate what a file is, rather than what it claims to be. Under Gnome (at least under one configuration) it won't even let you run the file if there's a dangerous disparity.
How un-Windows-like can you make KDE? Can you get rid of menubars (I know you can detatch them, but I prefer uncomplicated applications that only use right-click menus when they have to)? Can you get rid of the start-bar down the bottom? Can you make the filemanager behave like a file-manager should, and the webbrowser like a webbrowser, and act as two separate and distinct programs? (my prefs for webbrowsing are completely the opposite of what I want for file managing, but KDE didn't seem to understand (amongst others) I wanted new-window-on-button-one/ same-window-on-button-two when browsing files, and same-tab-on-button-one/ new-tab-on-button-two). Can you use drag-and-drop to save, instead of using a hard-to-navigate and never-remembering-the-right place file picker? Can you make it use your prefs as soon as you pick them, instead of after you've chosen Apply?
I'm not trying to say "hah, you can't do this in KDE", I'm trying to say "I've tried to use KDE every now-and-then, and could never find ways to deal with these problems. I'd like to be wrong, but only so I can actually use some of the world of KDE, not because I'm frustrated with what I have". (Also, there's nothing inheritely wrong with copying---the desktop I prefer is/started as a copy of another less-well-known one. I just don't like what KDE's chosen to copy.)
Actually, 'aren't' in this context could easily be a contraction of 'am not' -> amnt -> ant -> a:nt (like 'aunt') which is homophonous with 'aren't' in non-rhotic dialects and was then borrowed based on its orthography by rhotic dialects like American English. American English used to borrow a lot of changes from American English. (See also 'can't' which has a similar pronounciation.)
Just a couple of points: Languages today aren't grammatically simpler than they used to be. Many languages have whittled down old case systems with more cases to ones with less (or, as in English, none), and similar things have happened to verbs. Meanwhile, though, those same languages have done horrible things to their word order, prepositional and modal/auxilliary verb systems. What's the difference between 'shall', 'will', 'going to' and 'gonna' when expressing something in the future? And that's only four options. Furthermore, languages like Finnish have actually increased the number of cases they have at the same time as English and French have reduced them.
Secondly, the concept of a unified Ural-Altaic language group is not really that well accepted. The languages do have similar aspects to their grammar, but that doesn't mean the languages are related (I'm quite sceptical of the article this article is based on). As for Finnish and Hungarian having no common words, I'm not sure what you mean. No words that are pronounced the same? Well, English and French don't, but there's very many words that you can trace a relationship between, either for borrowings (which are about 800-years-separated) or from inheritance (which are many, mayn more). Of course, Finnish and Hungarian have fewer if any borrowings between them, but they do have a reasonable amount of shared vocabulary.
Uniquely well? I think not. Windows 95 introduced the command 'start' which I loved for the while I was using it. GNUstep has the command 'openapp' which is almost equivalent to MacOS X's 'open' because it's another implementation of OpenStep. ROX-Filer also has the rommand 'rox' which when called with no argument starts a filer window in your home, but when started with a filename will open that file, the same as clicking on it.
Mars has a sea-level? I don't mean to sound overcorrect or anything, but isn't the comparison you draw inaccurate? If you got rid of all the water from Earth and tried making a comparable measurement you might find that the tallest mountain on Earth was more than 9 km off the replacement for sealevel, I would've thought. I doubt it'd increase three times, though; but what I'm more saying is how comparable are the two figures? (I really don't know; it might be that the sea is only a hundred metres deep on average and that make the 9 km 9.1 km, which really is still 9 km...)
Justified text and nice hyphenation—a la LaTeX— are the keys to avoiding space lost to word-wrapping. (The combination because one on its own is hard to read and ugly.)
You can, I'm told, buy one from pckeyboard.com. I understand they're just the same as the originals, just made nowadays. I don't know if they contain that mainy function keys though.
This, I assume, is similar to the clause we have with Closer Economic Relations between Aus and NZ, that means that anything that comes from those islands is ours.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by your last comment, but if you mean you want a graphical file manager you can control pretty well with your keyboard, then ROX-Filer might be nearer what you want.
You can easily browse to a different folder with the keyboard; just type / and then edit the path (with tab completion) to where you want to be. If you want to enter a single command, you can just type ! then the command, or quickly open an xterm here by typing x for more complicated commands.
It's not perfect; I don't think it's possible to move or copy files without using the mouse or using the ! command box. You might find it more suitable than using Nautilus. (Or you might not: Nautilus might support all of these things, it's been some time since I've tried to use the Gnome file manager—version 1.2 or something—and it's changed a lot since then.)
(Those keybinds I've given mightn't be defaults, actually. You might need to investigate the right-click menu to find out (and change) them.)
Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Apparently: I've met many a Windows-user who's petrified of installing software, but I've never had any difficulty with running apt-get.
Just to point out: the G in Gnome stands for GNU; it's a GNU subproject.
A couple of points: At a time like this when we are threatened by terrorism, we should be much more concerned about preserving our freedoms. Particularly you in the US, for whom we outside ought to have a significant amount of respect for, given your groundbreaking efforts a few hundred years ago in such fields as federalism, democracy, and a sense of entitlement to our fundamental human rights. Australia in particular owes a particular cultural debt to you, and it pains us (or at least me) to see what you've done with your rights. At least I don't need a pseudo-passport to move around in my own country yet.
(2) Ten minutes shouldn't make a huge difference. If being delayed ten minutes at the security check-in delays people, you were already running late, and so you're to blame, not the freak ahead of you going slowly. You're actually being annoyed by a lot of nothing; ten minutes at the security check-in or ten minutes in the lounge, what's it matter?
Yes. I have—not much, I'll admit, but it mostly got in my way. X-based systems don't work that way. They work a different way, and it happens to be one that I reckon is superior. (Personally, I don't care whay program I'm running. I care what I'm doing. When a system highlights the program at the expense of the task, I get annoyed. Macs do that, an awful lot.)
OS X also has some similar behavior with some programs, and it (amongst other things) got in my way enough that I piked and installed GNU/Linux on my iMac G5.
I'm not saying the X/Gimp system works for everyone, because it doesn't. But it does work for some people, and that's half the reason these other systems exist (if open source development is going to take us to the same place that commercial software was ten years ago, how is it a superior development model?). (The other half being that they're free.)
Part of the reason the palette system works in MacOS Classic is that when you bring an application to the front in Classic, you bring *all* its windows to the front, not just the one you clicked on. Applications were in "layers." This means you'd never have a situation where you could see your image, but not see your toolbar. That's changed in OS X, and it never existed in Linux or Windows.
Part of the reason it worked my arse! That only gets in the way of it working. Why would you have multiple windows if you want them all to behave as a single one? You might as well just have a single window.
The Gimp's interface in combination with most window managers gives me the flexibility to have any windows in any order. This means that I can have a window open as a reference from one program behind the window I'm working on, but in front of everything else. If we lose this, using the Gimp will feel like using a horrible pile of sludge.
If they change the interface to be more like Photoshop, I and many others will be very pissed off. The Gimp does have some useability problems, but these are usually oversights than actual integral problems with the design. The single window interface makes it really difficult to work with two programs at once.
Mach is a microkernel; it doesn't do much, just sits around looking pretty.
Much of Darwin—Mac OS X's kernel—is based on FreeBSD's kernel. It's basically got a single monolithic unix server sitting on top of the Mach microkernel. So it's reasonable to say the kernel consists of (Mach + FreeBSD-based stuff).
(I don't like Apple software. I thought I would, and I tried to--I tried more than $2000 to--but then I failed and just put GNU/Linux onto my iMac G5.)
Actually, Hollywood has enough money that they can pay the US Government to convince/force other Governments to act like mere colonies. Take a look at Australia since 2001, for instance. "Indepedent foreign (trade, copyright, patent, ...) policy" is not a concept our Government understands any more.
Most words used in English are from Old English and Old Norse, actually, not Old French. For instance, in your first paragraph, you have 33 words from Old English plus 'spell', which in this sense comes from Old French but is ultimately from a Germanic language. Of the rest: point < OFr, just < OFr, connection < La, minor < La, epiphany < OFr/La, common < OFr, irregular < La.
:)
:)
When you re-align your sources of analysis and data to more pseudoscientific discourse, of course, your proportion of lexemes deriving from alternative languages increases. But that's not how we speak in everyday conversation, fortunately
However, our orthographical tradition does derive from the Old French one, but in 11th century French, their speech was a lot closer to their writing than it is now. Likewise, in 11th century English, their speech was a lot closer to their writing than it is now. But in some cases, words were deliberately spelt unphonetically. For instance, in the handwriting used to write both Old French and Middle English, a sequence of i, u, n, and m were indistinguishable (all just vertical lines—they hadn't invented the dot on top of i's yet), so to help the word 'ton' look obvious, they used an O instead of a U. We kept some of them, but we dropped others. Anyway, you're French theory doesn't work because if you read the French-derived English words like French, they don't sound a thing like recognisable! If you get my, ahem, 'pwahng'
And in the meantime, some English writers did things the French didn't do. The silent B in 'debt' is there because it was considered important that the link to the Latin word debitum was clear, and the S in 'island' was added because people mistakenly thought it was derived from the Latin word insula (it wasn't, it came from Old English/Scandinavian sources).
No, the real cause in both English and French is that we try and write our language like it was pronounced a few hundred years ago. (Tibetan's worse than English, Icelandic's about as bad as French and not quite as bad as English, both of these languages have orthographies little changed over hundreds of years.)
The reason commoner words are spelt less phonetically is because you're more likely to say them, and they're more like to be in unstressed syllables, so they're more likely to have their pronunciation changed. (Also, oddities in odder words are more likely to be replaced by a spelling pronuncation; 'waistcoat' used to be prononuced 'wesket', or the way 'forehead' is sometimes prononuced as 'four-hed' instead of 'forrud'.)
(About lengual—probably you're trying to spell 'lingual', and trying to mean either 'linguistic' or 'orthographic'.)