I ran into this problem last fall. All the sites that i visited that claimed to have a java implementation... well, it turns out they only works in IE, on windows.
I've found that pokerroom.com has a Java implementation that works just fine with Safari on my powerbook. I'm not sure about Linux.
Also, Victoria's Poker has an OS X client (not Linux, but hey), but it really chews up the processor on my powerbook pretty good. I abandoned it for Pokerroom recently because the Java works so well on the Mac.
Well, inasmuch as the desire to know is part of our (humans) nature, knowing is an end in itself. That is, knowledge doesn't have to be useful as a means to an end to be worth pursuing. That's just the way we are. Knowledge often *is* useful, of course, but it doesn't have to be.
While I'm fascinated by the rovers on Mars and finding out what's there, is that really the best way to spend $400 million (not just dollars but resources)?
It's important to remember that when NASA spends USD 400M to learn about Mars, it's not as if they're dumping that money into a big pit, and then expecting to be given the information in exchange. They're paying contractors, vendors, and hosts of other private individuals and businesses for their time and efforts. The money is injected directly into the economy, which is a Good Thing. People often talk (though the parent didn't) about how the money spent on projects like this could go toward feeding the hungry or some other (admittedly) noble thing. Well, you might argue that NASA is (indirectly) feeding the hungry by giving millions of dollars of contract work to companies.
Yeah, I knew that wouldn't go over well. But certainly you don't believe what you've said here. You're telling me that you've never used the words "good", "better" or "best" do describe something? You don't think that anything is better than anything else? At all?
Why do we continue software development? Because we're trying to make better software. Better perhaps for one application or another, or in one field or another, granted. But if we're not at least *trying* to make better software, then we're wasting our time.
I chose the OS example because I thought surely geeks would understand that one thing could be better than another. Maybe not.
Or, to quote one of John Cusack's characters, "How can it be bullshit to state a preference?"
Because your "preference" may be uninformed, and therefore not really a preference at all. You might have what a connoisseur would call "bad taste" in something because you've never experienced the best. That's what Barry was talking about in the quote (to which Cusack's character responded the above); he had good taste in music. I know that concept sounds terribly undemocratic and elitist to our modern ears, but here's an example that many of us can relate to:
Several years ago, mid-nineties, I read about Linux. I thought, "what could some other operating system do that Windows doesn't do for me now? I'm perfectly happy here in Windows." A few years later, someone with better "taste" in operating systems suggested that I try Linux. He said I'd be convinced if I just tried it. So I did, and my computing world was transformed. I got out of my MS box, and explored, and found that I didn't really "prefer" Windows to the others, because I was uninformed about the others. So, my preference was bullshit. Or rather, it wasn't a preference at all.
Similar thing happened with good wine. I used to "prefer" to drink shit wine because the other stuff was expensive and I couldn't tell the difference. But someone with good taste in wine introduced me to how to tell the difference between good and bad wine, and now I mostly drink good stuff, and I'm damn glad about it.
Of course, granted there are endless arguments among connoisseurs about what the best is. But I'm just answering the question, "how can it be bullshit to state a preference?"
That said, Dick was right about Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.:)
I bet the amount of money they'll save in bandwidth (and related wasted time by people who are actual using said bandwidth for something important) from not having everyone and their mother connected to Kazaa more then makes up for the cost of the deal they've worked out with napster.
Until they provide a campus service for providing software cracks, porn, and dvd rips, they won't even *begin* to see cost savings on bandwidth due to people not using Kazaa.
Well what are you supposed to do, then? Tell people to move their homes out of harm's way?
My point was that since property sustains the most damage, moving people out wouldn't do much to reduce the overall damage done.
That said, I'm with you: I'm not sure *what* we ought to do if we had information about an earthquake a few months or weeks in advance. I was just replying to a fellow who thought that telling people to leave town was the right thing to do. For the reasons that I gave and many more that I didn't give (looting marathon, anyone?), I didn't think that having an entire metropolitan area leave town for a weekend would be such a good idea.
There will never be 100% accurate weather prediction.
It might be safer to say "never" if you qualify it with "using contemporary methods and technology".
People who say never about things (space travel, e.g.) are often proven wrong later (sometimes *much* later) because they were thinking in terms of contemporary methods and technology.
That said, I tend to agree with you. If not never, then not for a very long time.:)
As in, hey two weeks from friday, leave the area for a day or two.
Earthquakes (in modern cities like LA, for example) cause far more damage to property than to people.
[Of course, the recent earthquake in Bam was an exception to this in that property was destroyed *and* people were killed, both because of the magnitude of the quake and the fact that most of the city was built without much insight into earthquake engineering.]
Advice like leaving the city for a day or two won't do much to mitigate the effects of a major quake in a modern city, I'm afraid. It would actually probably make things worse (for the most part) by adding traffic snarls on broken roadways to the list of post-quake problems.
Oh, very good catch, thanks. Of course you're right. Coghill translates haunchebones as 'haunches'. My text was from three lines below the one you were quoting.
Queynte is, of course, a much more interesting word. It means (as an adjective) 'exquisite' or 'pleasing' on one hand, and something like 'wily' or 'cunning' on the other. Middle English did have a word 'cunte', so I'm not sure queynte, as much as it sounds like it, is the direct ancestor of our modern vulgarity. But the modern word doesn't have nearly the subtlety nor range of usage as 'queynte'.
It also means (as a participle) 'quenched', and provides a nice rhyme for itself in the Knight's tale:
But sodeynly she saugh a sighte queynte, For right anon oon of the fyres queynte,
But suddenly she saw a quaint sight, For right at once one of the fires quenched,
There is clearly no sexual pun available here in the Knight's Tale as there is in your text from the Miller's Tale.
It would be very hard to translate your passage "caughte hire by the queynte" into modern English with the same subtlety that the middle English word provides, which is, I imagine a good reason not to translate the text with the vulgarity you suggested. I've seen it translated 'puss' and 'crotch' in that passage, with its rhyming counterpart translated as 'crafty'. But it still lacks the pun that Chaucer intended.
He made a grab and caught her by the quim And said, 'Unless I have my will of you
Of course, you're just giving the Nevill Coghill 'translation' of the original Middle English; the original doesn't really carry the same sense:
And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones, And seyde, "Lemman, love me al atones,
(which reads as)
And held her hard by the thigh, And said, "Dear, love me all at once,"
That's not to say that the Miller's tale isn't raunchy; it most certainly is. But that particular word doesn't translate with quite the vulgarity as Mr. Coghill suggests.
No, maintaining. The way Atkins works (she tells me) is in phases. Some of the other posts on this story seem to corroborate. After you've lost the weight you want to lose, you gradually re-introduce certain healthy carbs until you're maintaining the weight that you're comfortable with. So, while it's not the hard-core "no carbs" diet that most people associate with Atkins, it is a later phase of the same diet.
[I can't believe I'm having an exchange with someone named AssFace, whose homepage is something about a clown's Johnson. My wife will love it.;) ]
Not true. My wife is an Atkins eater, and she's quite healthy. 5'10" and 140, runs three days per week, takes care of three little kids all day, looks great. She says she's never felt better that when she eats low-carb (NOT no-carb, btw).
'Course, what do I know? I've been 5'11", 165 since I was 16 years old, and have never been on a diet.;)
This thing could have been some sort of combination Time Machine/Transmogrifier/Fountain of Youth, but if it only had Windows drivers, we'd have to find a way to bring in the holy war and complain about it.
As far as lighting goes, suburbanites have an insane fear of dark streets. They'll gladly pay until their entire environment is brightly lit.
Funny, deciding that a whole group of people behave/act/think one way is often considered "racism" (or some other -ism), and is strictly forbidden, except when that group is whites, males, suburbanites, or some other group not on the national Do Not Insult list.
If it isn't fair to say that someone "throws like a girl," then it just isn't fair to take all people that live between 15 and 40 miles of an urban area (suburbia) and start talking about what they're like as a group. Or if it IS fair (I've got no problem with generalizations, because lots of them are true), let's not make certain ones taboo.
The main problem that the umps have is not that it might replace them, but that it might not really be more accurate than them. This quote is from the article (which is the little clicky linky thing that you often find in the story text...we should all try clicking it sometime!):
"Even if (the computer operators) were experienced umpires, this system would not work because it's based on a single frontal photograph in comparison with the 3-D, real-time view of the umpire," Gibson said.
In addition, many batters move during the course of the pitch, which an umpire sees and weighs in determining the strike zone, he said.
See, each time a batter steps to the plate, the system has to be calibrated for that batter's particular size, crouch, stance angle, etc. But that calibration is only done once (at the beginning of the at bat), and it's done by...a human being, just like the umpires. And often, this operator, while he may know the system, doesn't understand the game of baseball.
So the umpires' beef is not that they don't want to be evaluated, it's just a question of whether the measuring stick is really doing a better job than they can do standing right behind the plate.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran into this problem last fall. All the sites that i visited that claimed to have a java implementation ... well, it turns out they only works in IE, on windows.
I've found that pokerroom.com has a Java implementation that works just fine with Safari on my powerbook. I'm not sure about Linux.
Also, Victoria's Poker has an OS X client (not Linux, but hey), but it really chews up the processor on my powerbook pretty good. I abandoned it for Pokerroom recently because the Java works so well on the Mac.
Belloc
Great. Now using a Mac will be considered to be probable cause.
Actually, you make it sound like just being an FBI guy is probable cause.
Belloc
To what end do we use the answer to the question?
Well, inasmuch as the desire to know is part of our (humans) nature, knowing is an end in itself. That is, knowledge doesn't have to be useful as a means to an end to be worth pursuing. That's just the way we are. Knowledge often *is* useful, of course, but it doesn't have to be.
While I'm fascinated by the rovers on Mars and finding out what's there, is that really the best way to spend $400 million (not just dollars but resources)?
It's important to remember that when NASA spends USD 400M to learn about Mars, it's not as if they're dumping that money into a big pit, and then expecting to be given the information in exchange. They're paying contractors, vendors, and hosts of other private individuals and businesses for their time and efforts. The money is injected directly into the economy, which is a Good Thing. People often talk (though the parent didn't) about how the money spent on projects like this could go toward feeding the hungry or some other (admittedly) noble thing. Well, you might argue that NASA is (indirectly) feeding the hungry by giving millions of dollars of contract work to companies.
Belloc
The trash stays where it is, need a haxie for getting it on the desktop.
Right on cue, today's edition of macosxhints.com comes to the rescue.
There IS no "better".
Yeah, I knew that wouldn't go over well. But certainly you don't believe what you've said here. You're telling me that you've never used the words "good", "better" or "best" do describe something? You don't think that anything is better than anything else? At all?
Why do we continue software development? Because we're trying to make better software. Better perhaps for one application or another, or in one field or another, granted. But if we're not at least *trying* to make better software, then we're wasting our time.
I chose the OS example because I thought surely geeks would understand that one thing could be better than another. Maybe not.
Belloc
Or, to quote one of John Cusack's characters, "How can it be bullshit to state a preference?"
:)
Because your "preference" may be uninformed, and therefore not really a preference at all. You might have what a connoisseur would call "bad taste" in something because you've never experienced the best. That's what Barry was talking about in the quote (to which Cusack's character responded the above); he had good taste in music. I know that concept sounds terribly undemocratic and elitist to our modern ears, but here's an example that many of us can relate to:
Several years ago, mid-nineties, I read about Linux. I thought, "what could some other operating system do that Windows doesn't do for me now? I'm perfectly happy here in Windows." A few years later, someone with better "taste" in operating systems suggested that I try Linux. He said I'd be convinced if I just tried it. So I did, and my computing world was transformed. I got out of my MS box, and explored, and found that I didn't really "prefer" Windows to the others, because I was uninformed about the others. So, my preference was bullshit. Or rather, it wasn't a preference at all.
Similar thing happened with good wine. I used to "prefer" to drink shit wine because the other stuff was expensive and I couldn't tell the difference. But someone with good taste in wine introduced me to how to tell the difference between good and bad wine, and now I mostly drink good stuff, and I'm damn glad about it.
Of course, granted there are endless arguments among connoisseurs about what the best is. But I'm just answering the question, "how can it be bullshit to state a preference?"
That said, Dick was right about Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.
Belloc
Hard to believe someone with UID 623 got duped.
Right, because we all know that IQ is inversely proportional to UID.
Belloc
We are apt of borg. RPM is futile. You will be dpkg'ed.
As long as we're being obligatory, I, for one, welcome Deb and Ian, our new apt overlords.
Belloc
I bet the amount of money they'll save in bandwidth (and related wasted time by people who are actual using said bandwidth for something important) from not having everyone and their mother connected to Kazaa more then makes up for the cost of the deal they've worked out with napster.
Until they provide a campus service for providing software cracks, porn, and dvd rips, they won't even *begin* to see cost savings on bandwidth due to people not using Kazaa.
Belloc
Well what are you supposed to do, then? Tell people to move their homes out of harm's way?
My point was that since property sustains the most damage, moving people out wouldn't do much to reduce the overall damage done.
That said, I'm with you: I'm not sure *what* we ought to do if we had information about an earthquake a few months or weeks in advance. I was just replying to a fellow who thought that telling people to leave town was the right thing to do. For the reasons that I gave and many more that I didn't give (looting marathon, anyone?), I didn't think that having an entire metropolitan area leave town for a weekend would be such a good idea.
Belloc
There will never be 100% accurate weather prediction.
:)
It might be safer to say "never" if you qualify it with "using contemporary methods and technology".
People who say never about things (space travel, e.g.) are often proven wrong later (sometimes *much* later) because they were thinking in terms of contemporary methods and technology.
That said, I tend to agree with you. If not never, then not for a very long time.
Belloc
As in, hey two weeks from friday, leave the area for a day or two.
Earthquakes (in modern cities like LA, for example) cause far more damage to property than to people.
[Of course, the recent earthquake in Bam was an exception to this in that property was destroyed *and* people were killed, both because of the magnitude of the quake and the fact that most of the city was built without much insight into earthquake engineering.]
Advice like leaving the city for a day or two won't do much to mitigate the effects of a major quake in a modern city, I'm afraid. It would actually probably make things worse (for the most part) by adding traffic snarls on broken roadways to the list of post-quake problems.
Belloc
They also have a plan to use pulsars to see just how imperfect the atomic clocks are.
Terrific. So how do they check the pulsars? Or is it just turtles all the way down?
Belloc
From that page: Redhat's patent lawyer's name is "Mark H. Webbink". I guess Samuel G. Internetman wasn't able to take the case?
Belloc
Oh, very good catch, thanks. Of course you're right. Coghill translates haunchebones as 'haunches'. My text was from three lines below the one you were quoting.
Queynte is, of course, a much more interesting word. It means (as an adjective) 'exquisite' or 'pleasing' on one hand, and something like 'wily' or 'cunning' on the other. Middle English did have a word 'cunte', so I'm not sure queynte, as much as it sounds like it, is the direct ancestor of our modern vulgarity. But the modern word doesn't have nearly the subtlety nor range of usage as 'queynte'.
It also means (as a participle) 'quenched', and provides a nice rhyme for itself in the Knight's tale:
But sodeynly she saugh a sighte queynte,
For right anon oon of the fyres queynte,
But suddenly she saw a quaint sight,
For right at once one of the fires quenched,
There is clearly no sexual pun available here in the Knight's Tale as there is in your text from the Miller's Tale.
It would be very hard to translate your passage "caughte hire by the queynte" into modern English with the same subtlety that the middle English word provides, which is, I imagine a good reason not to translate the text with the vulgarity you suggested. I've seen it translated 'puss' and 'crotch' in that passage, with its rhyming counterpart translated as 'crafty'. But it still lacks the pun that Chaucer intended.
Interesting discussion.
Belloc
He made a grab and caught her by the quim
And said, 'Unless I have my will of you
Of course, you're just giving the Nevill Coghill 'translation' of the original Middle English; the original doesn't really carry the same sense:
And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones,
And seyde, "Lemman, love me al atones,
(which reads as)
And held her hard by the thigh,
And said, "Dear, love me all at once,"
That's not to say that the Miller's tale isn't raunchy; it most certainly is. But that particular word doesn't translate with quite the vulgarity as Mr. Coghill suggests.
Belloc
Is she losing weight?
;) ]
No, maintaining. The way Atkins works (she tells me) is in phases. Some of the other posts on this story seem to corroborate. After you've lost the weight you want to lose, you gradually re-introduce certain healthy carbs until you're maintaining the weight that you're comfortable with. So, while it's not the hard-core "no carbs" diet that most people associate with Atkins, it is a later phase of the same diet.
[I can't believe I'm having an exchange with someone named AssFace, whose homepage is something about a clown's Johnson. My wife will love it.
Belloc
Only works if you are fat
;)
Not true. My wife is an Atkins eater, and she's quite healthy. 5'10" and 140, runs three days per week, takes care of three little kids all day, looks great. She says she's never felt better that when she eats low-carb (NOT no-carb, btw).
'Course, what do I know? I've been 5'11", 165 since I was 16 years old, and have never been on a diet.
Belloc
Unfortunately, Windows drivers only at this time.
This thing could have been some sort of combination Time Machine/Transmogrifier/Fountain of Youth, but if it only had Windows drivers, we'd have to find a way to bring in the holy war and complain about it.
Slashbots: One. Track. Mind.
Belloc
Right, because we all know that 9 data points is statistically significant.
Here's a few extra (useful) links: free lamo - adrian support site
And of course...the rallying cry of these websites is...
Remember A.Lamo!!
Belloc
Correct, but I'd venture that most software would suffer from that, not just M$ Office.
Strange, I can open any document that I've created between 1989 & 2003 with any version of my word processor suite.
God love ya, vi & tex.
Belloc
As far as lighting goes, suburbanites have an insane fear of dark streets. They'll gladly pay until their entire environment is brightly lit.
Funny, deciding that a whole group of people behave/act/think one way is often considered "racism" (or some other -ism), and is strictly forbidden, except when that group is whites, males, suburbanites, or some other group not on the national Do Not Insult list.
If it isn't fair to say that someone "throws like a girl," then it just isn't fair to take all people that live between 15 and 40 miles of an urban area (suburbia) and start talking about what they're like as a group. Or if it IS fair (I've got no problem with generalizations, because lots of them are true), let's not make certain ones taboo.
Belloc
Two words:
Lah-hoo. Zah-hers.
The main problem that the umps have is not that it might replace them, but that it might not really be more accurate than them. This quote is from the article (which is the little clicky linky thing that you often find in the story text...we should all try clicking it sometime!):
"Even if (the computer operators) were experienced umpires, this system would not work because it's based on a single frontal photograph in comparison with the 3-D, real-time view of the umpire," Gibson said.
In addition, many batters move during the course of the pitch, which an umpire sees and weighs in determining the strike zone, he said.
See, each time a batter steps to the plate, the system has to be calibrated for that batter's particular size, crouch, stance angle, etc. But that calibration is only done once (at the beginning of the at bat), and it's done by...a human being, just like the umpires. And often, this operator, while he may know the system, doesn't understand the game of baseball.
So the umpires' beef is not that they don't want to be evaluated, it's just a question of whether the measuring stick is really doing a better job than they can do standing right behind the plate.
Belloc