Programming's really hard, so I've given it up(except to modify programs that shit me, which is all of them). Anyone can learn it though, if they're determined to.
It's possible someone had remapped your Sun keyboard because they wanted backspace in a more normal location. `~ is after all in the same place you described, and the key sizes are all the same. I love my Sun keyboard and ancient type 5 mouse. (The mouse is ugly as fuck, but I find it more ergonomic than ergonomic mice because it has finger rests.)
The reason for this is that they recognise most Brits are smart enough to understand words even when they're spelt differently from what they expect. Plus most people probably won't even notice the difference until its brought to their attention. And now many of use are used to distinguishing between circular discs and data-storing disks. A CD is a disc-shaped disk. The British version of Firefox is awful! (Then again, any version of Firefox is awful.)
An an English speaker who comes from far, far away from America, and comes with a set of geographical skills, I must inform you that there is no continent of America. There is a country called America, and a continent called North America and another continent called South America. North and South America are more easily distinguished than Europe and Asia but if you do happen to need a word to link them together, English has plenty of terms like "the New World"[*] and "the Americas". We don't make much use of them, though, because there's little need.
[*]: Which sometimes includes other places, but it's relatively common that if you want to talk about North and South America together, your discussion will also be relevant to Australia and other such places.
They had laptops or typewriters with function and modifier keys in the 19th century?
Indeed. I'm surprised an idiot article writer wrote that, more surprised that an idiot article submitter copied it, and completely unsurprised that an idiot Slashdot editor left it in. The keyboard has changed immensely since the 19th century. About the only things that haven't are the placement of the alphabetic keys and the offset alignment. And even those things have changed in non-US and specialist contexts often enough.
Aside from the presence of function and modifier keys, we have the massive change in semantics of capslock, shift, backspace and enter keys. We have the number pad. We have the insert etc. key block. We have the navigation keys. We have keyboards made out of radically different materials. A keyboard today would be recognisable to a 19th century typist or typewriter manufacturer, but they would still need to relearn how to use the thing and wouldn't follow you for five seconds when you described how they worked.
o add insult to injury, in this braindead keyboard design, the \| key typically consumes the left half of where backspace is supposed to be, meaning you'll accidentally hit enter instead of \|, and then you'll go to correct your mistake and then you'll accidentally hit \| instead of backspace!
Unfortunately you're wrong. The European design is even worse: if you start with a homerow enter key and work from there: First you consume the location of the \| key, as you say. Then, the \| key consumes the beginning of the Enter key, not the backspace key. Hence, whenever you want to type enter, you accidentally hit \|, and whenever you want to type \|, you hit Enter. It's the most brilliantest keyboard layout any beaurocrat ever came up with. It does have one redeeming feature: the backspace key is the same size and place as ever. But whoever designed the layout clearly never thought for a minute about how you actually type, key frequencies, human morphology and other matters that are trivial to the whole keyboard design thing.
Sun does a couple other dumb things though, like make backspace 5 times harder to hit.
How? I find it easier to hit, because it's closer. I search out and pay excessive amounts of money for Sun keyboards partly because of that feature. (It was a real problem, though, when I moved to Europe, and now I type "\" when I want enter and enter when I want backspace. But European keyboards are the stupidest things to walk the face of the planet, and no amount of "but we need to type ä and ç" justifies having keys you never use like # nearer/easier than keys you use multiple types a day like ß and Enter. And the shape/placement of the Enter key, have I complained about that yet? My god...)
We turned a blind eye when it was done to Africa, India, China, South America, Central America, the Middle East, Australia & South East Asia...
You obviously have a poor grasp of history. Anglo-Saxons didn't "turn a blind eye": they were in the forefront of the whole colonisation thing. (BTW: You missed North America and Europe in your list, unless the Amerinds and Irish are horseflies.) You also have a poor understanding of contemporary societies if you think Anglo-Saxons are in any way unique in that regard; in fact, Anglo-Saxons societies—contemporary and historical—are some of the least racist societies to have ever existed in multicultural contexts.
In any case, you are a deluded fool and no longer entertain me.
Sometimes staying at home is no longer an option. You really think mailing, petitioning or even just talking to your member of parliament has any effect? Professional politicians have no time for us normal folk unless we promote their agendas. Otherwise they couldn't give a flying fuck, and any sort of 'freedom' you try to express will be dealt with swiftly and severely by the state authorities.
Anglo-Saxon countries are nowhere near that point. Plus, it's usually more effective if you don't talk directly to your local member, but you talk to the public at large. Enough people make a fuss about some series/pattern of changes, and they will slow down and stop and eventually even reverse. Anglo-Saxon countries are amongst the best in this regard (if not the best) because we've used this model for generations and we expect it to work.
In any case, I'm not sure what strawman Anglo-Saxon countries your trying to criticise in your last paragraph. Anglo-Saxon censorship is aimed at preventing harmful media (e.g. child porn) and protecting the innocent (e.g. some countries ban reporting the name of certain categories of people charged with a crime, and penalise slander). They are nothing like a repressive censorship regime, especially when compared to the policies of other countries around today. Your other claims are similarly — well, downright bizarre.
It is funny that you seem to be able to consider Australia and Singapore equal, as "getting worse". Of course, you have to ask the question of worse from what standard. In Australia, you can pretty much say whatever you want. We have a two party government with multiparty oversight. Singapore engages in real censorship and has never had a change in government. In Singapore, the government largely decides where you live. If you are a foreign temporary worker in Singapore, you are not allowed to live in the same residence as a Singaporean citizen or permanent resident, and if you are a female you have to have six-monthly pregnancy checks. The OP complains about a future English national ID card. Singapore has a national ID card. Australia doesn't.
Also, regarding your "not too bad, probably following X downhill"s: This means that country is not free enough to behave independently. I would rather be "getting worse" which means "capable of independently getting better, and therefore within my power to help change" than "probably following X downhill" meaning "incapable of independently getting better, and therefore necessarily less free".
The OP is better off staying in his home country where he has a political voice and learning how to use it. Anglo-Saxon countries are largely free. You will be hard-pressed to find anywhere better.
(Personally, I would rather he advocated for the dissolution of some of these larger countries into smaller regions; the governments would be less powerful as a consequence, and so the people within them would be relatively more free.) Running is not the answer!
It shows a willingness and an expectation of limited personal contact. You want to make offers and overtures that are simple and not unlimited in scope.
Thanks, I think that's exactly the sort of information I wanted. Maybe it should've been obvious, but if it were obvious to me, it wouldn't've been a problem! (The rest of the post's great too, but that is the diamond that makes the others look like rocks.)
Thanks for your advice. I'll try looking at that book. And incorporating your advice rather than doing what I did today when I met a nice girl and then we went our separate ways without so much as getting her name. (Not a problem I have exclusively with girls; most friends of either sex I have I have solely because they thought I was interesting enough to be bothered talking to again. I just usually wait till I bump into interesting people again.)
If you think things are going well, and you feel a spark, initiate some kind of physical encounter. Start with casual touch (putting your hand on her shoulder, or on the small of her back), then move up to less casual from there
I've been able to get up to that point on a number of occasions, but never actually had any sort of touch. Just touching another person is awkward for me; the notion of deliberately touching a girl is almost terrifying. For the last most-of-a-year I've been living in Europe where a standard greeting is to kiss on the cheeks. But this hasn't really got rid of the awkwardness; although I can do it somewhat, it's just another safe point-of-contact like the handshake.
Can you give some advice on *how* this contact actually happens. How do you get yourself into the position that putting your hand on her shoulder or touching her lower back is actually physically possible?
I don't expect you to solve my awkwardness/fears: but if I can see how it's meant to happen, I can usually get over myself. I used to be socially awkward, then I pretended I wasn't, and now I'm at the centre of a number of groups. I used to hate warm weather (which is a problem in a city when it's often above 30 deg. C), then I decided I loved it, and I did. I had no idea whether-or-not I liked eggplant, someone asked me if I did when I was ordering it (to try) in a restaurant, and I said I did: so I did/do. I have a lot of free will/power to change my mind. (That said, I'm still much too scared to eat tomato—but that has the advantages of being a topic of conversation when necessary.)
The other thing I can't do is start a conversation/revive a dead one. I can kinda make it clear I want a conversation (i.e. not creepily, but just by using the normal sort of start-up "hey how are you" thing that results in a conversation when I'm talking to people with better social skills than me). That basically puts me at a disadvantage—as I said, I can have a conversation with people with better social skills than me, but not with people who have the same level or worse. (In fact, I often seem to be the centre of attention, a skill I've somewhat developed to allow me to control the attention given to me. It is much better than my previous approach of staying on the walls.) I have got some ideas recently, and it will be necessary to try them out soon.
This has been a great thread for me today, because I started out thinking my life was crap, and now I've written this and I've realised it's not, I just need to work on it.
Look, nobody is asking you to become Windows or OSX. Nobody is asking you to give up the bazillion different distros out there. Just have a common, stable, and backwards compatible undercarriage that software developers and hardware manufacturers can target so that it doesn't matter if I use Xandros and you use CentOS and the guy down the street is running Gentoo, that any company can release a program or driver and know that for now and the long term across the board it will "just work", that's all. I bet if you had a stable and solid undercarriage that worked across the board that a lot more companies would seriously consider releasing their products and drivers for Linux. And that is good for everybody, right?
Linux has a stable and solid undercarriage that works across the board. The problem is that software companies want to distribute binaries to end users, but that's not how Linux works. In Linux, you distribute source code to distributors, and distributors give binaries to end users. Any experience Linux user knows this gives you a better system than Windows. It's more consistent and easier to use than Windows insofar as end-user administration is concerned: almost all the software on my computer is installed and updated in one consistent way, so I don't need to care about that. It also eliminates the brandname obsession so you don't get six million different icons in that system tray and more brandnames than the US PTO database in the Programs menu.
Source code is excellently future proof. Release your drivers under the GPL2 and if they're good enough they'll get put into the source code and no-one will ever need to worry again. The evidence that this is how it works is all the drivers in Linux and the packages included in the distribution of your choice. The secret to a good Linux experience is to write code that Debian and Red Hat and SuSE are happy to include and let them deal with the distribution-specific parts. They really, really do want to.
There's no advantage to Linux's users to make it more helpful to corporations who want to go outside the standard behavior patterns. So why would they help make it do that? Linux's way is more user-friendly and with Ubuntu so well recognised it's becoming more and more popular amongst non-geeks. Windows will dominate the future for some time to come, but companies not used to Linux will have to adapt or give up a growing market of younger consumers.
(But audio on Linux is probably about as good as Windows 3.1. It's so complex and ancient and well I hate it. Of course, of the three problems which annoy me wrt sound [Skype, Flash, Praat], two are binary blobs.)
In fact, wxWidgets lets you create a program that has a native look and feel on one platform, and a strong foreign accent on the other two. Now, that's better than using XUL on Linux or Gtk on the Mac, but it's not the same as native/native/native, and if you have a choice between the two, the best option is always to write the GUI three times.
(If it were native three times, then your conclusion—that you should write the GUI three times, if you have the resources—would be false.)
The answer to that is trivial. It's not up to individual software packages to define a unique visual experience. MacOS with its diversity of toolkits and configurable UI experience is hard for me to use;[1] and least with Linux is obvious how you can avoid all non-Gtk+ 2 apps. (Well, I use xterm and xpdf and Skype: the first two precisely because they have almost no UI experience at all, and Skype because I have no choice.) Linux-on-the-desktop is really basically two words: Gtk/Gnome and Qt/KDE. Once you account for that, there are standard APIs that are standard.
I really thought this was all such obvious facts that I was surprised when you said your "Chrome on Linux" thing. I ought to know by now that my idea of "obvious fact" isn't the same as everyones given how popular Firefox with its very own, uniquely-behaving gui toolkit is.
[1]: I don't care about the underlying mechanisms of the toolkits, but I do care that when I click on one program, it brings it forward & passes the click through, but when I click on another, it doesn't.
Whoever modded that insightful is a fool. Maybe he's right, but he's added one word to the conversation, which was in answer to a rhetorical question. That's not insightful. If anything, it's inciteful. Moderations aren't about how much you agree with the speaker, but about how much they add to the discussion: especially the insightful mod.
It appears common phonology. Optimality theory, in particular, was what I was thinking about with notations based on what's convenient in TeX (for instance the fancy/doubled greater than signs for "is more harmonic than" and dominates only ever seem to be done right in mss. produced in TeX, not Word.
I've also seen a number of books clearly typeset in TeX, although it's unclear whether they were done by the author or just a really lazy publisher.
TeX is all over linguistics. Even the things people have tried to hide what they've done them in, still manage to scream "LaTeX", and certain notational conventions in some subfields seem to be based on what was convenient to do in LaTeX.
Insightful? Beating a dead horse more like it. The sort of computer these things are going in will be in a separate category of devices than your workstation. Want a superfast box for graphical modelling? Buy a workstation. Want a lightweight, low consumption computer to access the internet at a cafe? Buy a netbook.
It's already like that. You'll find most big-enough computer companies are happy to sell you servers and workstations and desktops and laptops. They'll even give you specs if you know enough to know what's important in your workstation. We're just adding another category. It's not the end of the world, and it's not the end of graphical modelling.
Although, to the extent your point is that the article was an overexaggeration, well, it's slashdot. What do you expect? I'm going to have to stop visiting it again...
As I read through the article (I know, I've already violated Slashdot's law, but anyway)
Omg you're so witty. It's not like someone else hasn't already made that joke before. But wait! There seems to be a law on Slashdot that no-one will make an original joke, but instead reuse them. You're still in compliance with that law.
It's actually the treatment for a condition my dad has. It ain't great for everything, but it's most definitely still used today. (You should also give blood every three months or so unless you have some medical condition. Not because it's good for your health, but because it's good for the health of people in car accidents, certain genetic disorders, and plenty of other people. But it will be god for your health, because it'll let you know if you have not enough (or too much) iron and your blood pressure.)
Posting a link can't be disgusting, or wrong or bad. It is the content that is foul not the link.
Why? What you've done is given me an opinion, without trying to justify it. Not useful in an argument, if you're arguing with me, I know you're opinion is different from mine!
Censoring achieves nothing. The foul site is still there, just not available to everyone.
So people become less likely to produce it in future, that's simple economics. Additionally, if I can access all the child porn I want, it probably makes me think "this isn't so bad". If I have to go meet big guys with guns, I realise I'm doing something wrong.
"Responsible media" reduces things to sound-bytes and incomplete, and often completely misunderstood, information. If you really want to understand what's going on, it takes getting past "responsible media" to get the real information and make an informed decision.
That doesn't sound like responsible media. The first isn't responsible, the second's neither responsible, nor media. I don't have time to go through lists of facts. Responsible media is there to collate the information for me.
This isn't irresponsible - it's factual.
What, like those are opposite poles? This is the sort of knee-jerk I've tried to warn you against. Responsible media includes an element of self-censorship. If you're Australian, you probably haven't noticed that newspapers don't like showing shots of dead bodies. I certainly haven't. But it's taboo. They might say "the body was mutilated beyond all recognition", but they don't show the photo they have access to. They do in other countries, where dead bodies aren't taboo in the same way.
It's factual, the exact way the body was mutilated happened. A textual description probably has necessarily more subjectivity than a photo would have. But it's not irresponsible. I don't need to see the dead body. I've seen real dead bodies twice in my life: one grandfather (done up for a viewing), one grandmother (on her hospital bed, maybe two hours dead). That's enough for me.
Apparently the media is responsible enough to know that I don't need to see these dead people. Wikileaks was being irresponsible when they posted something that is universally taboo: links to child porn. I'm willing to bet you all the money I have no newspaper would knowingly publish an ad for child porn, even if the ad was evidence in a particular case.
That's the very idea of responsible media. It's not drowning us in facts or evidence, it's giving us the right information to understand the situation. One single link to a legal website would've been enough to discredit the firewall. Responsibility would say, if you don't want to see something, you shouldn't show it to others. They could easily have said "at least x per cent of links are to benign sites such as blah, blah, blah", because most links clearly state what's behind them.
They didn't. They linked to child porn, and the police reckoned that's worth investigating, and I reckon it's unacceptable. I don't think it's worth locking them in jail and throwing away the key, but I do think it's worth inconveniencing them and warning them that they're playing with fire. If they've been warned already, it's worth a penalty.
Slashdotters too often think right and wrong are black and white. Providing a link to a website is not criminal, they think: but society has deemed providing instructions on how to commit suicide is wrong. Information wants to be free, they say, but we've decided that particular combinations of one and zero can't be distributed, because they represent child porn.
I'm not making some knee-jerk reaction. I used to have your kind of view, it's just information. Now, I understand more about what we need and I understand more about my own culture and even the place of culture in real life. It isn't necessary for all information to be out there. People aren't computers and we don't behave like them. The only similarity, really, is that we both process information and can use it to control our actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Programming's really hard, so I've given it up(except to modify programs that shit me, which is all of them). Anyone can learn it though, if they're determined to.
It's possible someone had remapped your Sun keyboard because they wanted backspace in a more normal location. `~ is after all in the same place you described, and the key sizes are all the same. I love my Sun keyboard and ancient type 5 mouse. (The mouse is ugly as fuck, but I find it more ergonomic than ergonomic mice because it has finger rests.)
The reason for this is that they recognise most Brits are smart enough to understand words even when they're spelt differently from what they expect. Plus most people probably won't even notice the difference until its brought to their attention. And now many of use are used to distinguishing between circular discs and data-storing disks. A CD is a disc-shaped disk. The British version of Firefox is awful! (Then again, any version of Firefox is awful.)
An an English speaker who comes from far, far away from America, and comes with a set of geographical skills, I must inform you that there is no continent of America. There is a country called America, and a continent called North America and another continent called South America. North and South America are more easily distinguished than Europe and Asia but if you do happen to need a word to link them together, English has plenty of terms like "the New World"[*] and "the Americas". We don't make much use of them, though, because there's little need.
[*]: Which sometimes includes other places, but it's relatively common that if you want to talk about North and South America together, your discussion will also be relevant to Australia and other such places.
They had laptops or typewriters with function and modifier keys in the 19th century?
Indeed. I'm surprised an idiot article writer wrote that, more surprised that an idiot article submitter copied it, and completely unsurprised that an idiot Slashdot editor left it in. The keyboard has changed immensely since the 19th century. About the only things that haven't are the placement of the alphabetic keys and the offset alignment. And even those things have changed in non-US and specialist contexts often enough.
Aside from the presence of function and modifier keys, we have the massive change in semantics of capslock, shift, backspace and enter keys. We have the number pad. We have the insert etc. key block. We have the navigation keys. We have keyboards made out of radically different materials. A keyboard today would be recognisable to a 19th century typist or typewriter manufacturer, but they would still need to relearn how to use the thing and wouldn't follow you for five seconds when you described how they worked.
o add insult to injury, in this braindead keyboard design, the \| key typically consumes the left half of where backspace is supposed to be, meaning you'll accidentally hit enter instead of \|, and then you'll go to correct your mistake and then you'll accidentally hit \| instead of backspace!
Unfortunately you're wrong. The European design is even worse: if you start with a homerow enter key and work from there: First you consume the location of the \| key, as you say. Then, the \| key consumes the beginning of the Enter key, not the backspace key. Hence, whenever you want to type enter, you accidentally hit \|, and whenever you want to type \|, you hit Enter. It's the most brilliantest keyboard layout any beaurocrat ever came up with. It does have one redeeming feature: the backspace key is the same size and place as ever. But whoever designed the layout clearly never thought for a minute about how you actually type, key frequencies, human morphology and other matters that are trivial to the whole keyboard design thing.
Sun does a couple other dumb things though, like make backspace 5 times harder to hit.
How? I find it easier to hit, because it's closer. I search out and pay excessive amounts of money for Sun keyboards partly because of that feature. (It was a real problem, though, when I moved to Europe, and now I type "\" when I want enter and enter when I want backspace. But European keyboards are the stupidest things to walk the face of the planet, and no amount of "but we need to type ä and ç" justifies having keys you never use like # nearer/easier than keys you use multiple types a day like ß and Enter. And the shape/placement of the Enter key, have I complained about that yet? My god...)
I assume ...
You assume wrongly.
We turned a blind eye when it was done to Africa, India, China, South America, Central America, the Middle East, Australia & South East Asia...
You obviously have a poor grasp of history. Anglo-Saxons didn't "turn a blind eye": they were in the forefront of the whole colonisation thing. (BTW: You missed North America and Europe in your list, unless the Amerinds and Irish are horseflies.) You also have a poor understanding of contemporary societies if you think Anglo-Saxons are in any way unique in that regard; in fact, Anglo-Saxons societies—contemporary and historical—are some of the least racist societies to have ever existed in multicultural contexts.
In any case, you are a deluded fool and no longer entertain me.
Sometimes staying at home is no longer an option. You really think mailing, petitioning or even just talking to your member of parliament has any effect? Professional politicians have no time for us normal folk unless we promote their agendas. Otherwise they couldn't give a flying fuck, and any sort of 'freedom' you try to express will be dealt with swiftly and severely by the state authorities.
Anglo-Saxon countries are nowhere near that point. Plus, it's usually more effective if you don't talk directly to your local member, but you talk to the public at large. Enough people make a fuss about some series/pattern of changes, and they will slow down and stop and eventually even reverse. Anglo-Saxon countries are amongst the best in this regard (if not the best) because we've used this model for generations and we expect it to work.
In any case, I'm not sure what strawman Anglo-Saxon countries your trying to criticise in your last paragraph. Anglo-Saxon censorship is aimed at preventing harmful media (e.g. child porn) and protecting the innocent (e.g. some countries ban reporting the name of certain categories of people charged with a crime, and penalise slander). They are nothing like a repressive censorship regime, especially when compared to the policies of other countries around today. Your other claims are similarly — well, downright bizarre.
It is funny that you seem to be able to consider Australia and Singapore equal, as "getting worse". Of course, you have to ask the question of worse from what standard. In Australia, you can pretty much say whatever you want. We have a two party government with multiparty oversight. Singapore engages in real censorship and has never had a change in government. In Singapore, the government largely decides where you live. If you are a foreign temporary worker in Singapore, you are not allowed to live in the same residence as a Singaporean citizen or permanent resident, and if you are a female you have to have six-monthly pregnancy checks. The OP complains about a future English national ID card. Singapore has a national ID card. Australia doesn't.
Also, regarding your "not too bad, probably following X downhill"s: This means that country is not free enough to behave independently. I would rather be "getting worse" which means "capable of independently getting better, and therefore within my power to help change" than "probably following X downhill" meaning "incapable of independently getting better, and therefore necessarily less free".
The OP is better off staying in his home country where he has a political voice and learning how to use it. Anglo-Saxon countries are largely free. You will be hard-pressed to find anywhere better.
(Personally, I would rather he advocated for the dissolution of some of these larger countries into smaller regions; the governments would be less powerful as a consequence, and so the people within them would be relatively more free.) Running is not the answer!
It shows a willingness and an expectation of limited personal contact. You want to make offers and overtures that are simple and not unlimited in scope.
Thanks, I think that's exactly the sort of information I wanted. Maybe it should've been obvious, but if it were obvious to me, it wouldn't've been a problem! (The rest of the post's great too, but that is the diamond that makes the others look like rocks.)
Thanks for your advice. I'll try looking at that book. And incorporating your advice rather than doing what I did today when I met a nice girl and then we went our separate ways without so much as getting her name. (Not a problem I have exclusively with girls; most friends of either sex I have I have solely because they thought I was interesting enough to be bothered talking to again. I just usually wait till I bump into interesting people again.)
If you think things are going well, and you feel a spark, initiate some kind of physical encounter. Start with casual touch (putting your hand on her shoulder, or on the small of her back), then move up to less casual from there
I've been able to get up to that point on a number of occasions, but never actually had any sort of touch. Just touching another person is awkward for me; the notion of deliberately touching a girl is almost terrifying. For the last most-of-a-year I've been living in Europe where a standard greeting is to kiss on the cheeks. But this hasn't really got rid of the awkwardness; although I can do it somewhat, it's just another safe point-of-contact like the handshake.
Can you give some advice on *how* this contact actually happens. How do you get yourself into the position that putting your hand on her shoulder or touching her lower back is actually physically possible?
I don't expect you to solve my awkwardness/fears: but if I can see how it's meant to happen, I can usually get over myself. I used to be socially awkward, then I pretended I wasn't, and now I'm at the centre of a number of groups. I used to hate warm weather (which is a problem in a city when it's often above 30 deg. C), then I decided I loved it, and I did. I had no idea whether-or-not I liked eggplant, someone asked me if I did when I was ordering it (to try) in a restaurant, and I said I did: so I did/do. I have a lot of free will/power to change my mind. (That said, I'm still much too scared to eat tomato—but that has the advantages of being a topic of conversation when necessary.)
The other thing I can't do is start a conversation/revive a dead one. I can kinda make it clear I want a conversation (i.e. not creepily, but just by using the normal sort of start-up "hey how are you" thing that results in a conversation when I'm talking to people with better social skills than me). That basically puts me at a disadvantage—as I said, I can have a conversation with people with better social skills than me, but not with people who have the same level or worse. (In fact, I often seem to be the centre of attention, a skill I've somewhat developed to allow me to control the attention given to me. It is much better than my previous approach of staying on the walls.) I have got some ideas recently, and it will be necessary to try them out soon.
This has been a great thread for me today, because I started out thinking my life was crap, and now I've written this and I've realised it's not, I just need to work on it.
Call me dumb, but I don't get it. The only thing I find there is references to your own post.
Look, nobody is asking you to become Windows or OSX. Nobody is asking you to give up the bazillion different distros out there. Just have a common, stable, and backwards compatible undercarriage that software developers and hardware manufacturers can target so that it doesn't matter if I use Xandros and you use CentOS and the guy down the street is running Gentoo, that any company can release a program or driver and know that for now and the long term across the board it will "just work", that's all. I bet if you had a stable and solid undercarriage that worked across the board that a lot more companies would seriously consider releasing their products and drivers for Linux. And that is good for everybody, right?
Linux has a stable and solid undercarriage that works across the board. The problem is that software companies want to distribute binaries to end users, but that's not how Linux works. In Linux, you distribute source code to distributors, and distributors give binaries to end users. Any experience Linux user knows this gives you a better system than Windows. It's more consistent and easier to use than Windows insofar as end-user administration is concerned: almost all the software on my computer is installed and updated in one consistent way, so I don't need to care about that. It also eliminates the brandname obsession so you don't get six million different icons in that system tray and more brandnames than the US PTO database in the Programs menu.
Source code is excellently future proof. Release your drivers under the GPL2 and if they're good enough they'll get put into the source code and no-one will ever need to worry again. The evidence that this is how it works is all the drivers in Linux and the packages included in the distribution of your choice. The secret to a good Linux experience is to write code that Debian and Red Hat and SuSE are happy to include and let them deal with the distribution-specific parts. They really, really do want to.
There's no advantage to Linux's users to make it more helpful to corporations who want to go outside the standard behavior patterns. So why would they help make it do that? Linux's way is more user-friendly and with Ubuntu so well recognised it's becoming more and more popular amongst non-geeks. Windows will dominate the future for some time to come, but companies not used to Linux will have to adapt or give up a growing market of younger consumers.
(But audio on Linux is probably about as good as Windows 3.1. It's so complex and ancient and well I hate it. Of course, of the three problems which annoy me wrt sound [Skype, Flash, Praat], two are binary blobs.)
In fact, wxWidgets lets you create a program that has a native look and feel on one platform, and a strong foreign accent on the other two. Now, that's better than using XUL on Linux or Gtk on the Mac, but it's not the same as native/native/native, and if you have a choice between the two, the best option is always to write the GUI three times.
(If it were native three times, then your conclusion—that you should write the GUI three times, if you have the resources—would be false.)
The answer to that is trivial. It's not up to individual software packages to define a unique visual experience. MacOS with its diversity of toolkits and configurable UI experience is hard for me to use;[1] and least with Linux is obvious how you can avoid all non-Gtk+ 2 apps. (Well, I use xterm and xpdf and Skype: the first two precisely because they have almost no UI experience at all, and Skype because I have no choice.) Linux-on-the-desktop is really basically two words: Gtk/Gnome and Qt/KDE. Once you account for that, there are standard APIs that are standard.
I really thought this was all such obvious facts that I was surprised when you said your "Chrome on Linux" thing. I ought to know by now that my idea of "obvious fact" isn't the same as everyones given how popular Firefox with its very own, uniquely-behaving gui toolkit is.
[1]: I don't care about the underlying mechanisms of the toolkits, but I do care that when I click on one program, it brings it forward & passes the click through, but when I click on another, it doesn't.
Whoever modded that insightful is a fool. Maybe he's right, but he's added one word to the conversation, which was in answer to a rhetorical question. That's not insightful. If anything, it's inciteful. Moderations aren't about how much you agree with the speaker, but about how much they add to the discussion: especially the insightful mod.
It appears common phonology. Optimality theory, in particular, was what I was thinking about with notations based on what's convenient in TeX (for instance the fancy/doubled greater than signs for "is more harmonic than" and dominates only ever seem to be done right in mss. produced in TeX, not Word.
I've also seen a number of books clearly typeset in TeX, although it's unclear whether they were done by the author or just a really lazy publisher.
TeX is all over linguistics. Even the things people have tried to hide what they've done them in, still manage to scream "LaTeX", and certain notational conventions in some subfields seem to be based on what was convenient to do in LaTeX.
Insightful? Beating a dead horse more like it. The sort of computer these things are going in will be in a separate category of devices than your workstation. Want a superfast box for graphical modelling? Buy a workstation. Want a lightweight, low consumption computer to access the internet at a cafe? Buy a netbook.
It's already like that. You'll find most big-enough computer companies are happy to sell you servers and workstations and desktops and laptops. They'll even give you specs if you know enough to know what's important in your workstation. We're just adding another category. It's not the end of the world, and it's not the end of graphical modelling.
Although, to the extent your point is that the article was an overexaggeration, well, it's slashdot. What do you expect? I'm going to have to stop visiting it again...
As I read through the article (I know, I've already violated Slashdot's law, but anyway)
Omg you're so witty. It's not like someone else hasn't already made that joke before. But wait! There seems to be a law on Slashdot that no-one will make an original joke, but instead reuse them. You're still in compliance with that law.
Bloodletting was good.
It's actually the treatment for a condition my dad has. It ain't great for everything, but it's most definitely still used today. (You should also give blood every three months or so unless you have some medical condition. Not because it's good for your health, but because it's good for the health of people in car accidents, certain genetic disorders, and plenty of other people. But it will be god for your health, because it'll let you know if you have not enough (or too much) iron and your blood pressure.)
Posting a link can't be disgusting, or wrong or bad. It is the content that is foul not the link.
Why? What you've done is given me an opinion, without trying to justify it. Not useful in an argument, if you're arguing with me, I know you're opinion is different from mine!
Censoring achieves nothing. The foul site is still there, just not available to everyone.
So people become less likely to produce it in future, that's simple economics. Additionally, if I can access all the child porn I want, it probably makes me think "this isn't so bad". If I have to go meet big guys with guns, I realise I'm doing something wrong.
"Responsible media" reduces things to sound-bytes and incomplete, and often completely misunderstood, information. If you really want to understand what's going on, it takes getting past "responsible media" to get the real information and make an informed decision.
That doesn't sound like responsible media. The first isn't responsible, the second's neither responsible, nor media. I don't have time to go through lists of facts. Responsible media is there to collate the information for me.
This isn't irresponsible - it's factual.
What, like those are opposite poles? This is the sort of knee-jerk I've tried to warn you against. Responsible media includes an element of self-censorship. If you're Australian, you probably haven't noticed that newspapers don't like showing shots of dead bodies. I certainly haven't. But it's taboo. They might say "the body was mutilated beyond all recognition", but they don't show the photo they have access to. They do in other countries, where dead bodies aren't taboo in the same way.
It's factual, the exact way the body was mutilated happened. A textual description probably has necessarily more subjectivity than a photo would have. But it's not irresponsible. I don't need to see the dead body. I've seen real dead bodies twice in my life: one grandfather (done up for a viewing), one grandmother (on her hospital bed, maybe two hours dead). That's enough for me.
Apparently the media is responsible enough to know that I don't need to see these dead people. Wikileaks was being irresponsible when they posted something that is universally taboo: links to child porn. I'm willing to bet you all the money I have no newspaper would knowingly publish an ad for child porn, even if the ad was evidence in a particular case.
That's the very idea of responsible media. It's not drowning us in facts or evidence, it's giving us the right information to understand the situation. One single link to a legal website would've been enough to discredit the firewall. Responsibility would say, if you don't want to see something, you shouldn't show it to others. They could easily have said "at least x per cent of links are to benign sites such as blah, blah, blah", because most links clearly state what's behind them.
They didn't. They linked to child porn, and the police reckoned that's worth investigating, and I reckon it's unacceptable. I don't think it's worth locking them in jail and throwing away the key, but I do think it's worth inconveniencing them and warning them that they're playing with fire. If they've been warned already, it's worth a penalty.
Slashdotters too often think right and wrong are black and white. Providing a link to a website is not criminal, they think: but society has deemed providing instructions on how to commit suicide is wrong. Information wants to be free, they say, but we've decided that particular combinations of one and zero can't be distributed, because they represent child porn.
I'm not making some knee-jerk reaction. I used to have your kind of view, it's just information. Now, I understand more about what we need and I understand more about my own culture and even the place of culture in real life. It isn't necessary for all information to be out there. People aren't computers and we don't behave like them. The only similarity, really, is that we both process information and can use it to control our actions.