My brain doesn't distinguish between German and Japanese, it merely rates them as "not English."
I noticed this two, but in a different way. When I first started learning Japanese, I kept coming out with French. Nowadays, if I try to speak French, I keeping coming out with Japanese:-)
In the early stages of learning Japanese, it actually seemed to improve my French ability. I guess I was giving the "foreign language" bit of my brain a work-out. My reaction to hearing a foreign language has changed from (a) ignore it, to (b) try to parse it as Japanese.
Maybe the human brain is basically bilingual:-) But I'm sure there are plenty of trilingual people who would disagree with that idea. I wonder how it feels to be them?
I actually was wondering if this was a troll while I was reading it... parts of it read like text generated by a Markov chains... syntactically correct but semantically nonsense. There used to be (still are?) crapflooders on IMDb whose reviews were very similar in comprehensibility to this.
But then I realised it's Baldrson, and the penny dropped. Most trolls are indistinguishable from idiots, but Baldrson is a genius who's indistinguishable from a troll. I think he comes from a parallel universe where his beard is considered normal.
Someone needs to get Baldrson and ESR alone in a room together. I'm intrigued to know whether they'd fight or make out. But what if the combined comedy facial hair reached critical mass? Is it worth the risk?
If Kerry is elected, all those Bush supporters will be able to stay in their alternative reality, and never face the fact that they were lied to. The Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate, and they'll be able to blame it all on Kerry.
There will come a point in the next 4 years where Iraq is so monumentally, catastrophically, disasterously fucked up that even Fox News will have to admit it. If Bush is the president when that happens, then Bush supporters will have to face reality, and their wrath will be Biblical. Bush will be put to the question, and with luck some of his chronies may even face jail time.
To put in another way, if Kerry is elected, Bush and his chronies will get off scott-free. Some of them will even re-appear in a future Republican administration. The only way the guilty will pay for their crimes is if they are given enough rope.
The number of people who will buy it just because it's open is very small. But then, the same could be said of Linux. Linux succeeds because of the secondary benefits of being open. So the success of this card will depend on how well those secondary benefits work out. I don't think there's much middle ground here; it's either going to be a huge success, or a huge failure.
There's a lot of people here saying "noone cares about 2D". I don't know what 3D web browser they're using to make these comments, but I'd certainly like my 2D web browser to render anti-aliased text a bit faster.
Here's my requirements list:
Proper stability. I used to think NVIDIA was bad at this, but then I tried ATI. Am I the only one who gets the impression that if I looked at an ATI chip through a microscope, I'd see a bunch of microscopic duct tape?
Shit-hot anti-aliased text rendering.
XVideo extension (colourspace conversion and scaling)
DVI out. Why are DVI cards more expensive than analogue cards? Thinking about this makes my head hurt.
apt-gettable drivers.
I'd actually buy if all these features were still alpha quality, as long as I was convinced that they were going to be properly supported down the road.
It's interesting that even closed-source proprietary Windows drivers have riced-up unofficial forks. Think about that. People want to tweak their drivers so much that they're prepared to do illegal binary patching to do it. The demand for tweakable video cards is clearly there, but its an open question whether you can tap into it.
I think it's worth trying just for the excitement. It could start a paradigm shift in the graphics industry. Or it could flop dead. Sign me up!
It's not censorship if you're stopping someone speaking in your living room. Censorship has to involve at least three parties:
The party with something to say
The party prepared to listen
The party hindering 1. from speaking to 2.
If 2. doesn't want to listen to 1., that's not censorship.
I think in this era when we have the BSA running around doing "raids", media outlets completely ignoring presidential candidates, and the RIAA and MPAA sueing everyone in sight, it should be evident to even the densest libertarian that censorship is not just a government perogative.
Note: I am not opposed to censorship, only government-backed censorship.
Oh good, for a moment there I thought you might be one of those free-speech loons.
I'm sure I'll be greatly relieved, when they come to take my words from me, that at least it isn't the government doing it. After all, that would be bad.
Laws (theoretically) just reduce crime (but, obviously not in all cases).
Uh... no. Laws can only increase crime (since something isn't a crime until it's made illegal). Laws are (mostly) intended to reduce undesirable activity, for some definition of "undesirable". If there were no laws, there'd be no crime, but there'd be lots of undesirable activity.
You could make an argument that something like a wiretapping law is intended to reduce one kind of crime (privacy) by increasing another (wiretapping non-compliance) and thus could overall result in a reduction of crime. But it's a stretch.
No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.
I'd have to disagree with this. I've been using Debian exclusively for years, but I still feel I benefit from the existance of other distributions.
Different distributions have different goals. Debian by itself would probably never have developed automatic hardware detection.
Different distributions have different development and testing methodologies. This diversity of methods leads to stabler and more diverse software.
Experimentation. Do I want to compile all my software from source? Hell, no! Do I want someone else to try it, fix the problems that arise, and note where it gives real improvements? Hell, yes!
Security through diversity. Exploits written for Red Hat systems frequently don't work out-of-the-box on Debian. It buys me a little more time to get them patched.
Suckage insurance. Even the best projects sometime become teh suck. Should Debian take a detour down that well-trodden path, I know there are other cool alternatives I could switch to.
In the case of commercial distributions, you also get insurance against your vendor going insane (cf. Caldera)
In short, you don't need to use a lot of distributions to benefit from their existance.
Most people want working implementations. Conformance is one element of this. How many people here set the POSIX_ME_HARDER environment variable in their shell?
It's the techies that want an open source Java so they can muck it up.
On the contrary, the techies have had incompatible open source Java implementations for years. We'd quite like a compatible one now. Tah.
I'm sorry to tell you, but Sun is doing the right thing here.
I know it's a burden bringing the truth to us poor misguided techies, but please don't let it get you down. We'll never learn if we don't have our intelligence insulted on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying I can scorn you all I like and you won't yet mad?
Yay!
Oddly, it never occurred to me that the pronunciation of arerugii was different from the English. Maybe there are benefits in not knowing German :-)
At least your Japanese friend has passed the first hurdle, which is to admit that L and R are actually different sounds :-)
Japanese people consider the pronunciation of "earth" and "arse" to be identical. This caused me great problems when I was installing my refrigerator.
In the early stages of learning Japanese, it actually seemed to improve my French ability. I guess I was giving the "foreign language" bit of my brain a work-out. My reaction to hearing a foreign language has changed from (a) ignore it, to (b) try to parse it as Japanese.
Maybe the human brain is basically bilingual :-) But I'm sure there are plenty of trilingual people who would disagree with that idea. I wonder how it feels to be them?
That is WAY BETTER than the lameass vid that prompted this article. The editors should add it to the blurb.
Never bloody works for me at all.
I actually was wondering if this was a troll while I was reading it... parts of it read like text generated by a Markov chains... syntactically correct but semantically nonsense. There used to be (still are?) crapflooders on IMDb whose reviews were very similar in comprehensibility to this.
But then I realised it's Baldrson, and the penny dropped. Most trolls are indistinguishable from idiots, but Baldrson is a genius who's indistinguishable from a troll. I think he comes from a parallel universe where his beard is considered normal.
Someone needs to get Baldrson and ESR alone in a room together. I'm intrigued to know whether they'd fight or make out. But what if the combined comedy facial hair reached critical mass? Is it worth the risk?
I read it as GIF. Just say no to GIF pornography! I think I still have dithering burnt into my retinas from 1995!
There will come a point in the next 4 years where Iraq is so monumentally, catastrophically, disasterously fucked up that even Fox News will have to admit it. If Bush is the president when that happens, then Bush supporters will have to face reality, and their wrath will be Biblical. Bush will be put to the question, and with luck some of his chronies may even face jail time.
To put in another way, if Kerry is elected, Bush and his chronies will get off scott-free. Some of them will even re-appear in a future Republican administration. The only way the guilty will pay for their crimes is if they are given enough rope.
Tell your friends: Vote Bush on November 2nd.
[ This is not a troll. Check my posting history! ]
I can break this down into three possibilities:
- The freedoms we think are important actually don't matter, or
- We are somehow failing to properly communicate with our politicians, or
- We have no power
So which is it? Maybe we should have a vote?There's a lot of people here saying "noone cares about 2D". I don't know what 3D web browser they're using to make these comments, but I'd certainly like my 2D web browser to render anti-aliased text a bit faster.
Here's my requirements list:
- Proper stability. I used to think NVIDIA was bad at this, but then I tried ATI. Am I the only one who gets the impression that if I looked at an ATI chip through a microscope, I'd see a bunch of microscopic duct tape?
- Shit-hot anti-aliased text rendering.
- XVideo extension (colourspace conversion and scaling)
- DVI out. Why are DVI cards more expensive than analogue cards? Thinking about this makes my head hurt.
- apt-gettable drivers.
I'd actually buy if all these features were still alpha quality, as long as I was convinced that they were going to be properly supported down the road.It's interesting that even closed-source proprietary Windows drivers have riced-up unofficial forks. Think about that. People want to tweak their drivers so much that they're prepared to do illegal binary patching to do it. The demand for tweakable video cards is clearly there, but its an open question whether you can tap into it.
I think it's worth trying just for the excitement. It could start a paradigm shift in the graphics industry. Or it could flop dead. Sign me up!
- The party with something to say
- The party prepared to listen
- The party hindering 1. from speaking to 2.
If 2. doesn't want to listen to 1., that's not censorship.I think in this era when we have the BSA running around doing "raids", media outlets completely ignoring presidential candidates, and the RIAA and MPAA sueing everyone in sight, it should be evident to even the densest libertarian that censorship is not just a government perogative.
I'm sure I'll be greatly relieved, when they come to take my words from me, that at least it isn't the government doing it. After all, that would be bad.
Yeah, sadly it seems you're more likely to get moderated up for cut n' pasting the article than actually making an original contribution around here.
Still, keep up the good work.
I'm going home.
Jeez, why do I never have mod points when I need them?
GO!
invites@mailinator.com
Last one to get an invite is a stinky maynard!
And BTUs? British Thermal Units? Why do you hate America?
You could make an argument that something like a wiretapping law is intended to reduce one kind of crime (privacy) by increasing another (wiretapping non-compliance) and thus could overall result in a reduction of crime. But it's a stretch.
- Different distributions have different goals. Debian by itself would probably never have developed automatic hardware detection.
- Different distributions have different development and testing methodologies. This diversity of methods leads to stabler and more diverse software.
- Experimentation. Do I want to compile all my software from source? Hell, no! Do I want someone else to try it, fix the problems that arise, and note where it gives real improvements? Hell, yes!
- Security through diversity. Exploits written for Red Hat systems frequently don't work out-of-the-box on Debian. It buys me a little more time to get them patched.
- Suckage insurance. Even the best projects sometime become teh suck. Should Debian take a detour down that well-trodden path, I know there are other cool alternatives I could switch to.
- In the case of commercial distributions, you also get insurance against your vendor going insane (cf. Caldera)
In short, you don't need to use a lot of distributions to benefit from their existance.Most people want working implementations. Conformance is one element of this. How many people here set the POSIX_ME_HARDER environment variable in their shell?
On the contrary, the techies have had incompatible open source Java implementations for years. We'd quite like a compatible one now. Tah.
I know it's a burden bringing the truth to us poor misguided techies, but please don't let it get you down. We'll never learn if we don't have our intelligence insulted on a regular basis.