I wasn't saying anything about degradation, I was just saying that we seem to find it difficult. Personally I'd be more than happy if we actually spelt in some way that vaguely represented the way we spoke, instead of the random collection of letters that we call words. (There's a lot of rules, and I know most of them, but they're only useful for reading, and it requires a lot of unnecessary knowledge about the history of English over the last five hundred or more years. Which is patently stupid.)
What I was saying was that I think for common words like 'they're', we have that encoded in our brain as just the sound, which we need then to convert to the spelling. This obviously is conflicted by other options. On the other hand, with rarer words that we're more likely to come across in written form, we're more likely to encode them with their spelling equal to their pronunciation, so there's less to go wrong. Of course, that's just based on the spelling mistakes you're likely to see, not on any proper research.
It's just a pity that it's the commoner words that have the stupider spellings, ’cos they're the ones most likely to irregul'y reduce in pronunciation. Fortunately, they're also the ones 'texting teens' are more like to write, and, consequently, correct the spelling of in the long term:) Maybe you're right, though; maybe we're stuck with this muck of a spelling system. Some languages get away without a word for 'spell'. Some languages don't even spell their homonyms different. But that's too hard for a poor Englishspeaker's brain to decode, or something, at read-time.
Not quite yet. If the Liberal Government gets one of its many wishes, however, it will make it harder to. The Government is investigating the possibility of passing legislation that will make it illegal to anonymously criticise the government, at least during election campaigns.
(The wording is such that you'd think the actual aim of the legislation was to make it easier to check up on people's vested interests when advocating one political party or the other. At the ends of our ads by political parties, there's a message 'Authorised by [Representative] for [Political Party/Government], [Address]'. It's a dispicable extension of that to much, much more legislation, because of websites like johnhowardlies.com
Umm... Pardon me, but firstly, I take exception to your presumption that places outside of America are also America. This is part of a European short-sightedness that leads them to believe that all parts of the world not in Europe are either America, or do not exist. I, as an Australian who has never set foot out of this country, am most certainly not an American, but I still refer to America as 'America'.
Secondly, where else in the world is called 'America'? I can find nowhere. There's a continent called 'North America', another called 'South America'; there's even a region called 'Central America'. Perhaps you wish to take the sum of them? Then you have many options: the Americas (there is, after all, more than one of them!); the Western Hemisphere; the New World.
Using 'America' in its conventional and long-standard way of referring to originally the British Colonies there, and now the United States, is also very useful. There's no word for people who hail from the US other than 'American'. Its a damn fine adjective and derived noun for things coming from the US.
If you don't allow us English speakers to do what we want, you're taking away a word (leaving something with no clear and simple way to be referred to) to make it a member of a set of already three synonyms.
(Any argument that because 'South America' has the word 'America' in its name, it must be a subset of 'America' is sadly mistaken, and does not fully understand the English language. If that were the case, it would be 'southern America'. Being called 'South America' means it's a place, that's South, which derives its name from 'America' (in a less specific definition). Such can be seen in many place. New South Wales was not so named because a section of the Bristol Channel was reclaimed for Wales; on the contrary, it's in a very different part of the world. The North Island wasn't so named because it's the North part of Island; on the contrary, it's an Island that's South (of what? who knows?). This is not a hard-and-fast rule that no-where named North (Place) is simply the northern part of (Place), just that you cannot infer from a name North (Place) that it is the northern part of (Place).)
It is logical. I wasn't saying that there was necessarily anything wrong with it. I googled the GPO box number because I reckoned it was unlikely that Linus would own it, and I wanted to know who was doing this on his behalf.
But because Linux Australia (a group who some here have questioned the legitimacy of) own it, it means the OP's assurances of the safety of this are, perhaps, ill-founded.
In any case, like I said before, I don't know if this means anything. It's probably completely above board, but that the trademark registration bears Linus's name doesn't mean it's safe.
linux.org.au has been a registered domain name for some years. Back before broadband, I found the supplier for my first Linux CD, Red Hat 5.1 when it was fresh, through it. (I think the CDs cost about $10, which took me a while to save up for. I was in year 7 or 8 at the time:)
The webpage looks drastically different, though, and it's possible that over the years the membership has changed so that it's no longer there for Linux users, but there to extort the name. I don't really know what my opinion should be.
The GP said a webdesigner would prefer their users to use anything but IE, not that a webdesigner would want to write their websites for anyone but IE users.
Probably he realises that the majority of any audience is IE users, but that doesn't make writing webpages which use advanced CSS, XHTML and other features easier in IE. You still have to write non-standard code, or not do things you otherwise could've.
It's like Netscape 4, back in the day. Many people used it, but damn we were all happy when they stopped.
Well, by the intended rules, "its" isn't an exception, it's just that most people don't know the intended rule and also that homophones involving grammatical words like "their", "where" etc. seem to be difficult for English speakers to sort out (more complicated words seem to be easier—probably something to do with rarer words being more likely to be encoded in our brain along with the spelling/being more likely to see the spelling of rarer words than hear the word).
Of course, I doubt that EFL speakers will have a great influence on our orthography. More likely is that some generation of English speakers somewhere, having grown up reading and writing SMSes and on the Internet and in other environments where proper spelling isn't so important, will not bother being too picky as they grow up. Perhaps also computers (in a more general sense) will help this along as digital dictionaries pick up on misspellings but are still able to provide the intended word, and other things like that. (Microsoft may also help—their spellchecker is worse than useless in Australia so many people just completely ignore it's suggestions.) It just needs to be one city to begin with, but it'll spread. That's my prediction for the day, grounded in absolutely nothing.
That being said, I understand that written and spoken French are so different grammatically that they might as well be different languages, so maybe there isn't any hope anyway...
As for punctuating quotes—for the sort of sentence you quoted, you're likely to see the same sort of punctuation everywhere (regardless of what the rules said). It's in non-narrative sentences like 'Click the green button that says "frog".' that you're going to see the punctuation in the semantically-intended place. Well, that's my experience as an Australian at least, maybe they do it differently in Britain.
Your rule for Singular/ending-in-s is wrong. Or rather, it's right in many circumstances, but it's an overgeneralisation that doesn't hold for all contexts in all Englishes.
In particular: Biblical names ending in -s often simply take an apostrophe (e.g. Jesus' suffering). Also, for many people/in many dialects, if the -s at the end sounds like it's a plural marker (typically in names like Jones, Torvalds, but not in class), you simply add the apostrophe. To such people, Jonezuz or Torvaldzuz sound weird (to say the least). You don't have to be an old, conservative prescriptivist to speak like that; I'm merely twenty-one, but it's by far the most common pronunciation in my speech and my experience.
Also, in the case of pronouns, you almost never use an apostrophe (instead going straight to the -s), with the exception of one's and a handful of neologisms like that's which probably aren't likely to find themselves into any writing which a grammar Nazi is likely to criticise (when you should write whose).
Seeing as Darwin is free and runs on generic hardware, and seeing as it's OS X's kernel, couldn't any hardware limitation be avoided simply by installing OS X on a standard Darwin system? That's how I installed Ubuntu on my iMac G5: I used Yellow Dog's Linux kernel to boot the install and subsequent installed system.
I don't know if there's some special way of avoiding this that Apple could use, which is why I ask the question. You'd probably also need a custom bootloader because OS X isn't as flexible (by design) as GNU/Linux systems are, but that couldn't take more than a week for a skilled and motivated hobbiest.
Often when you embed a font in a document, you actually embed the truetype, postscript whatever source of the file, not just the output. That source is essentially a computer program; you could extract it and edit it, run it to generate images etc.
In fact, a comparison to an embedded game is more accurate. An early 32-bit version of Excel—95 or 97, I can't remember which—came complete with a complex easter egg (a 3D flight-sim type environment). This was an embedded program which generated images that were subsequently displayed onscreen for short periods of time before changing. As with fonts, the end user could change what would be displayed on screen (e.g. you could turn left, or with a font you could change the size it is displayed at or the resolution it's rendered to). We would have no problem accepting that, had the easter egg been based on a GPLed app, then Excel should be GPLed, too.
A way out would be the argument that you're just distributing the software to generate the images (i.e. the font files) alongside your creation, though the distributed file happens to be a single file (much like a the version of Opera for Linux is distributed as a single file (a bz2-compressed tarball, I think)). There are differences between the distribution of a software package with an embedded game (that it renders) and a document that a font that a 3rd party application renders and combines.
Note also that if the font's LGPLed, even if you change it, you shouldn't have a problem, because the source code to TTF and PS fonts is, basically, the TTF or PS font itself.
I'm not a lawyer and had never heard of this problem before today.
Actually, as I understand it, in Australia it makes America look like speed cameras are a novel invention.
I was watching a doco once (designed for a US audience, of course) on Autobahns in Germany, and one thing they mentioned, as if it were an outrageous novelty that no-one else had thought of yet, was that they have automated speed cameras. (I spoke to some Americans about this afterwards, and apparently there are parts of America where they have them, but there's states where they're against the law. That struck me as bizarre. Why would a state voluntarily legislate to limit its power? After reading this article, I think I can understand the intended meaning.)
As a Melburnian, I've lived with the Victorian speed cameras all my driving life (which is admittedly short; I'm still no my P's till October this year). So I take it all for granted, and I do sometimes speed but I've not yet been caught. But I still wouldn't mind terribly if this was extented to our fine southern jurisdiction!
Linux version 2.2, at least, didn't specify the GPL version, so that you can use any (including GPL v1). This presumably carries through; it's only 2.4-and-later additions that are difficult. Of course, 2.4-and-later additions are incredibly important to desktop users, so...
Apple began to "come along and revolutionise the desktop environment" before Linux was a spark in Linus' eye. Almost all the technology that is MacOS X was either in the classic Mac operating systems or (for the majority) in NeXTSTEP back in the late 1980s. They just jazzed up its look a bit and switched parts of the kernel. It took NeXTSTEP over a decade to get to the stage it (as MacOS X) was in in 2001. Why should you expect a much more poorly-funded group of programmers to do the same in half that time?
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other similar operating systems, however, have been designed with a different userbase in mind. Clearly, they excel in that domain. More recently (beginning after your six-years-ago date), desktop environments have either attempted either to court a different userbase (e.g. Gnome) or they have become so good that they are able to be attractive to that different userbase (e.g. KDE). Considering where they came from, and where we've suddenly expected them to go, Free desktops have made outstanding progress.
Aside from that, there will be no 'year of desktop Linux'. It will just be that over time, a relatively large proportion of non-geeks will come to use Free desktops.
Ah. I'd kinda forgotten about the irritation it causes under Windows, and kind-of assumed that everyone who complained did so because of an 'ugly' and unnecessary Microsoft logo gracing their keyboards.
See now, that doesn't bother me that much. I use Dvorak as well, you see, so if I'm using another keyboard, it's only an extra couple of keys to switch internally. I'm probably going to type in a couple letter-keys wrong, and then get the backspace wrong once, and then I'll be set. Gears me up nice and quick for the switchover, in fact:)
Also, my laptop keyboard had the ~ next to F12, so it's much closer to where I've come to expect it, over on the far side of the keyboard. (It seems to be de rigueur on laptops to put ~ in random positions.)
Also, backslash finds itself in random positions on various keyboards anyway, with L-shaped enter keys and flat enter keys and L-shaped enter keys with big backspaces and the backslash down next to right-slash...
I have a Sun Type 6 USB Unix keyboard, which gives me proper key placement of my control key, as well as giving me every key I could possibly want (also in their proper positions). It's multicolored (grey on the function/modifier/doing keys, white on the typing keys) which I love because all monochrome keyboards I've ever had the displeasure of using have felt horrible. (Admittedly this isn't clicky, but it still looks special, so it's nicer:)
Of the various other keys it has in a different place is the backspace key, which is right above the Enter key, next to the close square bracket ] key. When I first got this keyboard, this became an instant hit with me, because I keep changing my mind halfway through a word, or mispell something (I tried typing 'keep' as 'ckeep' before). Having the backspace key in that more accessible position is just so useful. IIRC, the Happy Hacker keyboard puts it in the usual spot?
I've never got why people find Windows keys to be incredibly annoying. Map them to meta/super/hyper and you get a key that does something useful, which you wouldn't've had otherwise. The menu key is also usefully mapped as a compose key so that you can type special characters (which English uses in spades if you want to type proper punctuation) easily. I suppose the glyphs are a bit annoying, but my Windows keys are marked with diamonds, so that bothers me not, neither!
I was contemplating buying a Happy Hacker keyboard, but could never justify the cost for a keyboard without a dedicated number pad (having used a laptop as my main box for a while, I got quite used to the deficiency—but I always knew it was a deficiency, and nothing but!).
Pardon me; I only recently got this keyboard, and needed to brag about it.
There certainly are those who claim that the US didn't become a democracy till the 20th century. Just because Americans claim that they were democratic from the get-go doesn't mean they necessarily were, at least by our modern understanding of the term.
As for the Magna Carta, your parent poster didn't say it was the first Bill of Rights of the sort the US Amendments are. I read him as saying the idea of democracy and people's rights (rather than king's rights) didn't fall asleep between the classical democracies and the modern ones.
The US didn't re-invent something that hadn't been seen since the classical greek ages, and certainly they had some intention of imitating the British system of government they were reacting against. Consider, for instance, the comparison between the Senate and the House of Lords, or the 18th century King and the US President. It was just part of the same evolution that had been going on since 1066 when the French tried to impose their system on the English. A radical step forward, aye, but not so radical as to have to go back two thousand-plus-years.
I would agree with you pretty much spot on. I bought an iMac G5 about the same time ago, and I've since put GNU/Linux back on.
This despite the fact that Linux doesn't run very well on iMac G5s. No sound, no sleep stuff, no fan control (though now it's the middle of winter in the sensible half of the world, it just sounds like the middle of summer when I was running Mac OS X).
GNU/Linux has native support for things like multiple desktops (I find Codetek was sorely lacking despite the $40 fee, and it was probably the best of the lot) or sloppy focus. Copy-and-paste works properly GNU/Linux/X. You can get decent browsers to run on GNU/Linux, but I searched high and low on OS X, but disappointed at every turn. It also has a file manage that works the way it should and doesn't feel like an ungodly cross between half a dozen different ideas for human-computer interaction. It also has a default theme that doesn't suck. And even if it did, you can change it trivially.
Sure, GNU/Linux can feel thrown together (and particu'ly my current setup), because to a large extent it is. Sure, it misses out on (useful) eyecandy. Sure, it doesn't have brilliant driver support for things like 3D graphics card or exotic hardware (though for the vast array of hardware it does support, it's more plug-and-play than I remember Windows).
Also, the fact that many graphic designers use MacOS X means that the best themes tend to be MacOS X creations. You need to install some piece of shareware to get them to run, though.
That's not a complete list of my grievances with MacOS X. And I'm not saying GNU/Linux is perfect for everyone--yet. But penguins and apples just don't compare.
While reading that, I thought you were suggesting that if they pause while scrolling, we should touch their chin, squint their eyes, furrow their brows etc.! Maybe you should comment your English:)
I think the most important thing about commenting code is that you shouldn't have to read the code to understand the comments, because the comment's written in such poor English that it's almost worse than useless.
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I wasn't saying anything about degradation, I was just saying that we seem to find it difficult. Personally I'd be more than happy if we actually spelt in some way that vaguely represented the way we spoke, instead of the random collection of letters that we call words. (There's a lot of rules, and I know most of them, but they're only useful for reading, and it requires a lot of unnecessary knowledge about the history of English over the last five hundred or more years. Which is patently stupid.)
:) Maybe you're right, though; maybe we're stuck with this muck of a spelling system. Some languages get away without a word for 'spell'. Some languages don't even spell their homonyms different. But that's too hard for a poor Englishspeaker's brain to decode, or something, at read-time.
:P
What I was saying was that I think for common words like 'they're', we have that encoded in our brain as just the sound, which we need then to convert to the spelling. This obviously is conflicted by other options. On the other hand, with rarer words that we're more likely to come across in written form, we're more likely to encode them with their spelling equal to their pronunciation, so there's less to go wrong. Of course, that's just based on the spelling mistakes you're likely to see, not on any proper research.
It's just a pity that it's the commoner words that have the stupider spellings, ’cos they're the ones most likely to irregul'y reduce in pronunciation. Fortunately, they're also the ones 'texting teens' are more like to write, and, consequently, correct the spelling of in the long term
Pardon me
Um... I don't get what's wrong?
Not quite yet. If the Liberal Government gets one of its many wishes, however, it will make it harder to. The Government is investigating the possibility of passing legislation that will make it illegal to anonymously criticise the government, at least during election campaigns.
(The wording is such that you'd think the actual aim of the legislation was to make it easier to check up on people's vested interests when advocating one political party or the other. At the ends of our ads by political parties, there's a message 'Authorised by [Representative] for [Political Party/Government], [Address]'. It's a dispicable extension of that to much, much more legislation, because of websites like johnhowardlies.com
Umm... Pardon me, but firstly, I take exception to your presumption that places outside of America are also America. This is part of a European short-sightedness that leads them to believe that all parts of the world not in Europe are either America, or do not exist. I, as an Australian who has never set foot out of this country, am most certainly not an American, but I still refer to America as 'America'.
Secondly, where else in the world is called 'America'? I can find nowhere. There's a continent called 'North America', another called 'South America'; there's even a region called 'Central America'. Perhaps you wish to take the sum of them? Then you have many options: the Americas (there is, after all, more than one of them!); the Western Hemisphere; the New World.
Using 'America' in its conventional and long-standard way of referring to originally the British Colonies there, and now the United States, is also very useful. There's no word for people who hail from the US other than 'American'. Its a damn fine adjective and derived noun for things coming from the US.
If you don't allow us English speakers to do what we want, you're taking away a word (leaving something with no clear and simple way to be referred to) to make it a member of a set of already three synonyms.
(Any argument that because 'South America' has the word 'America' in its name, it must be a subset of 'America' is sadly mistaken, and does not fully understand the English language. If that were the case, it would be 'southern America'. Being called 'South America' means it's a place, that's South, which derives its name from 'America' (in a less specific definition). Such can be seen in many place. New South Wales was not so named because a section of the Bristol Channel was reclaimed for Wales; on the contrary, it's in a very different part of the world. The North Island wasn't so named because it's the North part of Island; on the contrary, it's an Island that's South (of what? who knows?). This is not a hard-and-fast rule that no-where named North (Place) is simply the northern part of (Place), just that you cannot infer from a name North (Place) that it is the northern part of (Place).)
Just for the record, Canada doesn't take the style 'Dominion of' any more. They're just Canada.
It is logical. I wasn't saying that there was necessarily anything wrong with it. I googled the GPO box number because I reckoned it was unlikely that Linus would own it, and I wanted to know who was doing this on his behalf.
But because Linux Australia (a group who some here have questioned the legitimacy of) own it, it means the OP's assurances of the safety of this are, perhaps, ill-founded.
In any case, like I said before, I don't know if this means anything. It's probably completely above board, but that the trademark registration bears Linus's name doesn't mean it's safe.
Checking the GPO Box, it seems it's owned by Linux Australia, Inc., not the Linus Torvalds we know and feel ambivalent about.
Does that mean anything? I, for one, don't know.
linux.org.au has been a registered domain name for some years. Back before broadband, I found the supplier for my first Linux CD, Red Hat 5.1 when it was fresh, through it. (I think the CDs cost about $10, which took me a while to save up for. I was in year 7 or 8 at the time :)
The webpage looks drastically different, though, and it's possible that over the years the membership has changed so that it's no longer there for Linux users, but there to extort the name. I don't really know what my opinion should be.
The GP said a webdesigner would prefer their users to use anything but IE, not that a webdesigner would want to write their websites for anyone but IE users.
Probably he realises that the majority of any audience is IE users, but that doesn't make writing webpages which use advanced CSS, XHTML and other features easier in IE. You still have to write non-standard code, or not do things you otherwise could've.
It's like Netscape 4, back in the day. Many people used it, but damn we were all happy when they stopped.
Well, by the intended rules, "its" isn't an exception, it's just that most people don't know the intended rule and also that homophones involving grammatical words like "their", "where" etc. seem to be difficult for English speakers to sort out (more complicated words seem to be easier—probably something to do with rarer words being more likely to be encoded in our brain along with the spelling/being more likely to see the spelling of rarer words than hear the word).
Of course, I doubt that EFL speakers will have a great influence on our orthography. More likely is that some generation of English speakers somewhere, having grown up reading and writing SMSes and on the Internet and in other environments where proper spelling isn't so important, will not bother being too picky as they grow up. Perhaps also computers (in a more general sense) will help this along as digital dictionaries pick up on misspellings but are still able to provide the intended word, and other things like that. (Microsoft may also help—their spellchecker is worse than useless in Australia so many people just completely ignore it's suggestions.) It just needs to be one city to begin with, but it'll spread. That's my prediction for the day, grounded in absolutely nothing.
That being said, I understand that written and spoken French are so different grammatically that they might as well be different languages, so maybe there isn't any hope anyway...
As for punctuating quotes—for the sort of sentence you quoted, you're likely to see the same sort of punctuation everywhere (regardless of what the rules said). It's in non-narrative sentences like 'Click the green button that says "frog".' that you're going to see the punctuation in the semantically-intended place. Well, that's my experience as an Australian at least, maybe they do it differently in Britain.
Your rule for Singular/ending-in-s is wrong. Or rather, it's right in many circumstances, but it's an overgeneralisation that doesn't hold for all contexts in all Englishes.
In particular: Biblical names ending in -s often simply take an apostrophe (e.g. Jesus' suffering). Also, for many people/in many dialects, if the -s at the end sounds like it's a plural marker (typically in names like Jones, Torvalds, but not in class), you simply add the apostrophe. To such people, Jonezuz or Torvaldzuz sound weird (to say the least). You don't have to be an old, conservative prescriptivist to speak like that; I'm merely twenty-one, but it's by far the most common pronunciation in my speech and my experience.
Also, in the case of pronouns, you almost never use an apostrophe (instead going straight to the -s), with the exception of one's and a handful of neologisms like that's which probably aren't likely to find themselves into any writing which a grammar Nazi is likely to criticise (when you should write whose).
Seeing as Darwin is free and runs on generic hardware, and seeing as it's OS X's kernel, couldn't any hardware limitation be avoided simply by installing OS X on a standard Darwin system? That's how I installed Ubuntu on my iMac G5: I used Yellow Dog's Linux kernel to boot the install and subsequent installed system.
I don't know if there's some special way of avoiding this that Apple could use, which is why I ask the question. You'd probably also need a custom bootloader because OS X isn't as flexible (by design) as GNU/Linux systems are, but that couldn't take more than a week for a skilled and motivated hobbiest.
No. The circumstances are different.
Often when you embed a font in a document, you actually embed the truetype, postscript whatever source of the file, not just the output. That source is essentially a computer program; you could extract it and edit it, run it to generate images etc.
In fact, a comparison to an embedded game is more accurate. An early 32-bit version of Excel—95 or 97, I can't remember which—came complete with a complex easter egg (a 3D flight-sim type environment). This was an embedded program which generated images that were subsequently displayed onscreen for short periods of time before changing. As with fonts, the end user could change what would be displayed on screen (e.g. you could turn left, or with a font you could change the size it is displayed at or the resolution it's rendered to). We would have no problem accepting that, had the easter egg been based on a GPLed app, then Excel should be GPLed, too.
A way out would be the argument that you're just distributing the software to generate the images (i.e. the font files) alongside your creation, though the distributed file happens to be a single file (much like a the version of Opera for Linux is distributed as a single file (a bz2-compressed tarball, I think)). There are differences between the distribution of a software package with an embedded game (that it renders) and a document that a font that a 3rd party application renders and combines.
Note also that if the font's LGPLed, even if you change it, you shouldn't have a problem, because the source code to TTF and PS fonts is, basically, the TTF or PS font itself.
I'm not a lawyer and had never heard of this problem before today.
LOL!
Actually, as I understand it, in Australia it makes America look like speed cameras are a novel invention.
I was watching a doco once (designed for a US audience, of course) on Autobahns in Germany, and one thing they mentioned, as if it were an outrageous novelty that no-one else had thought of yet, was that they have automated speed cameras. (I spoke to some Americans about this afterwards, and apparently there are parts of America where they have them, but there's states where they're against the law. That struck me as bizarre. Why would a state voluntarily legislate to limit its power? After reading this article, I think I can understand the intended meaning.)
As a Melburnian, I've lived with the Victorian speed cameras all my driving life (which is admittedly short; I'm still no my P's till October this year). So I take it all for granted, and I do sometimes speed but I've not yet been caught. But I still wouldn't mind terribly if this was extented to our fine southern jurisdiction!
Linux version 2.2, at least, didn't specify the GPL version, so that you can use any (including GPL v1). This presumably carries through; it's only 2.4-and-later additions that are difficult. Of course, 2.4-and-later additions are incredibly important to desktop users, so...
Because cider actually tastes nice, whereas beer is a revolting drink that should be outlawed for crimes to tastebuds.
(I assume that Strongbow is not cider for the puposes of the original generalisation.)
Apple began to "come along and revolutionise the desktop environment" before Linux was a spark in Linus' eye. Almost all the technology that is MacOS X was either in the classic Mac operating systems or (for the majority) in NeXTSTEP back in the late 1980s. They just jazzed up its look a bit and switched parts of the kernel. It took NeXTSTEP over a decade to get to the stage it (as MacOS X) was in in 2001. Why should you expect a much more poorly-funded group of programmers to do the same in half that time?
GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other similar operating systems, however, have been designed with a different userbase in mind. Clearly, they excel in that domain. More recently (beginning after your six-years-ago date), desktop environments have either attempted either to court a different userbase (e.g. Gnome) or they have become so good that they are able to be attractive to that different userbase (e.g. KDE). Considering where they came from, and where we've suddenly expected them to go, Free desktops have made outstanding progress.
Aside from that, there will be no 'year of desktop Linux'. It will just be that over time, a relatively large proportion of non-geeks will come to use Free desktops.
Ah. I'd kinda forgotten about the irritation it causes under Windows, and kind-of assumed that everyone who complained did so because of an 'ugly' and unnecessary Microsoft logo gracing their keyboards.
See now, that doesn't bother me that much. I use Dvorak as well, you see, so if I'm using another keyboard, it's only an extra couple of keys to switch internally. I'm probably going to type in a couple letter-keys wrong, and then get the backspace wrong once, and then I'll be set. Gears me up nice and quick for the switchover, in fact :)
Also, my laptop keyboard had the ~ next to F12, so it's much closer to where I've come to expect it, over on the far side of the keyboard. (It seems to be de rigueur on laptops to put ~ in random positions.)
Also, backslash finds itself in random positions on various keyboards anyway, with L-shaped enter keys and flat enter keys and L-shaped enter keys with big backspaces and the backslash down next to right-slash...
I have a Sun Type 6 USB Unix keyboard, which gives me proper key placement of my control key, as well as giving me every key I could possibly want (also in their proper positions). It's multicolored (grey on the function/modifier/doing keys, white on the typing keys) which I love because all monochrome keyboards I've ever had the displeasure of using have felt horrible. (Admittedly this isn't clicky, but it still looks special, so it's nicer :)
Of the various other keys it has in a different place is the backspace key, which is right above the Enter key, next to the close square bracket ] key. When I first got this keyboard, this became an instant hit with me, because I keep changing my mind halfway through a word, or mispell something (I tried typing 'keep' as 'ckeep' before). Having the backspace key in that more accessible position is just so useful. IIRC, the Happy Hacker keyboard puts it in the usual spot?
I've never got why people find Windows keys to be incredibly annoying. Map them to meta/super/hyper and you get a key that does something useful, which you wouldn't've had otherwise. The menu key is also usefully mapped as a compose key so that you can type special characters (which English uses in spades if you want to type proper punctuation) easily. I suppose the glyphs are a bit annoying, but my Windows keys are marked with diamonds, so that bothers me not, neither!
I was contemplating buying a Happy Hacker keyboard, but could never justify the cost for a keyboard without a dedicated number pad (having used a laptop as my main box for a while, I got quite used to the deficiency—but I always knew it was a deficiency, and nothing but!).
Pardon me; I only recently got this keyboard, and needed to brag about it.
I'm actually surprised you *did* get modded down. I blood useful and relevant link, and it got modded as troll.
This is why I give troll mods a +6 modifier.
There certainly are those who claim that the US didn't become a democracy till the 20th century. Just because Americans claim that they were democratic from the get-go doesn't mean they necessarily were, at least by our modern understanding of the term.
As for the Magna Carta, your parent poster didn't say it was the first Bill of Rights of the sort the US Amendments are. I read him as saying the idea of democracy and people's rights (rather than king's rights) didn't fall asleep between the classical democracies and the modern ones.
The US didn't re-invent something that hadn't been seen since the classical greek ages, and certainly they had some intention of imitating the British system of government they were reacting against. Consider, for instance, the comparison between the Senate and the House of Lords, or the 18th century King and the US President. It was just part of the same evolution that had been going on since 1066 when the French tried to impose their system on the English. A radical step forward, aye, but not so radical as to have to go back two thousand-plus-years.
I would agree with you pretty much spot on. I bought an iMac G5 about the same time ago, and I've since put GNU/Linux back on.
This despite the fact that Linux doesn't run very well on iMac G5s. No sound, no sleep stuff, no fan control (though now it's the middle of winter in the sensible half of the world, it just sounds like the middle of summer when I was running Mac OS X).
GNU/Linux has native support for things like multiple desktops (I find Codetek was sorely lacking despite the $40 fee, and it was probably the best of the lot) or sloppy focus. Copy-and-paste works properly GNU/Linux/X. You can get decent browsers to run on GNU/Linux, but I searched high and low on OS X, but disappointed at every turn. It also has a file manage that works the way it should and doesn't feel like an ungodly cross between half a dozen different ideas for human-computer interaction. It also has a default theme that doesn't suck. And even if it did, you can change it trivially.
Sure, GNU/Linux can feel thrown together (and particu'ly my current setup), because to a large extent it is. Sure, it misses out on (useful) eyecandy. Sure, it doesn't have brilliant driver support for things like 3D graphics card or exotic hardware (though for the vast array of hardware it does support, it's more plug-and-play than I remember Windows).
Also, the fact that many graphic designers use MacOS X means that the best themes tend to be MacOS X creations. You need to install some piece of shareware to get them to run, though.
That's not a complete list of my grievances with MacOS X. And I'm not saying GNU/Linux is perfect for everyone--yet. But penguins and apples just don't compare.
While reading that, I thought you were suggesting that if they pause while scrolling, we should touch their chin, squint their eyes, furrow their brows etc.! Maybe you should comment your English :)
I think the most important thing about commenting code is that you shouldn't have to read the code to understand the comments, because the comment's written in such poor English that it's almost worse than useless.