Or maybe about the cost of ensuring purity. If bottled water was allowed all the impurities that petrol has, there would be a health scare serious enough to make people realise just how silly the SARS one is...
(One of my personal bugbears. No-one can agree on the right number of spaces to indent by, it's hard to keep exactly the right number, and it looks silly when you code in a proportional font, as I like to. But if you use a single tab for each indent level, then everything Just Works; in many editors you can set how you want the tab to appear, and they're granular enough to be easy to get right.)
In fact, it sounds as if the indentation thing is to Python what the one-button mouse is to Apple: something that's actually not a bad idea in context, but which people get hung up about so much that they can't see through it to the important stuff? (And which is bound to be mentioned by trolls every time the subject occurs...)
I much prefer the brushed metal look -- I use Metallifizer to add it to as many other apps as possible. By being that bit darker, I find it easier on the eye than the brightness of Aqua's paper look, the smoothness is also more comfortable than those ugly horizontal lines, and the lack of colour less distracting.
Of course, I'm not trying to persuade you to prefer brushed metal too -- it's a matter of personal preference, and you like what you like. But don't assume that everyone else hates it too, because I don't:)
I imagine that in British English, "baroque" is pronounced "buh-rahk", sort of rhyming with "Bach" or "clock"?
To rhyme with 'clock'. ('Bach' is pronounced completely differently, with the vowel of 'bath', and a proper Germanic 'chhh' final consonant.)
Or at least, to rhyme with how we say 'clock'... which of course doesn't tell you very much about how we say that word, either! (It's at times like this that I wish I knew the International Phonetic Alphabet...) In British English, 'rock' and 'clock' etc. have a low, short vowel that's not much like the long, open one I've heard in American English.
Maybe it's because I'm British; but 'baroque' and 'broke' sound quite different; they share no vowels, and don't even have the same number of syllables!
Do they sound much more alike in other accents, or is it just a very lame pun?
Indeed. If music marketing did not exist, we'd probably have to invent it -- in fact, if all existing marketers were all stopped tomorrow, I'd bet money that some other way of marketing music would develop, and rapidly.
When most people hear music, the actual sound is only a small part of what they're hearing. They're also hearing the packaging and artwork, the names and titles, the artist name(s) and appearance, any videos, promotional artwork and advertising, and more nebulous material such as their image (effectively, the sum total of all you're heard about them in the media, interviews you've seen or heard, their attitudes and claims, what your friends say about them, what's said about them by celebrities and personalities you respect... and also your own preconceptions, opinions of their previous work, comparisons and associations with other artists... the list is long.)
Suppose if I played you a piece of music you'd never heard before, with no information at all about it at all. Now suppose instead that I play you the same piece of music, but first tell you the band name. Immediately, you associate that with their image, with that whole plethora of impressions, connections, and unconscious associations; and it affects what you hear. You actually hear something different, and respond differently to the sound as a result.
Of course, different people will have different associations and responses. But comfort is a powerful one; most people like to stick to familiar images. (Otherwise people would seek out new artists, and quality of music would become more important than a big name.) Why else do people who use file-sharing programs stick mainly to the same old artists and titles?
For example: 4 is the only one which takes that number of letters when written in English. 30 is the only who that's the number of days in a month. And so on.
(Presumably, they were talking about horizontal or rotational symmetry? Otherwise, depending on the font, '30', '10', and '18' might also qualify. In fact, in some fonts, '8' wouldn't qualify for rotational symmetry...)
You're probably right - I'm sure more real maths is done by writing on blackboards, paper, or whatever, than by sitting and staring.
Not that pure thinking isn't import to, of course. It's probably like coding: the actual coding is done at a keyboard, even if the important ideas come elsewhere.
Just trying to forestall the inevitable flood of posts claiming that the article itself is ironic in some unintended way, that the Slashdot post is somehow ironic, that they're deliberately displaying irony, or that some other poster is being ironic, intentionally or otherwise. Chances are, it's not. Please disperse. There is nothing to see here. Go and learn what the word means, and then make your post - if it's still valid, which it probably isn't.
Why are you sorry? All three of the definitions there support my point, as do all the other dictionaries I consulted before posting.
If something has a value that is 'inestimable', 'too great to be measured', 'incalculable', 'beyond estimation', or however you phrase it, then there's simply nothing to compare. One object's value can't be 'more incalculable', or 'further beyond estimation' than another. If you can't measure it, estimate or calculate it, then you can't compare it.
'More invaluable' is, as I said, a meaningless phrase.
('Inflammable' is a different case, with a very differenthistory.)
I'm really sorry about this, but as a fully paid-up member of the Campaign for Real Pedantry (CaRP), I can't let 'more invaluable' go. DNS could become 'more valuable'. But invaluable means incapable of being valued; something is either invaluable or it's not - it can't be more invaluable, in the same way that something can't be more unique or more dead.
[fx: gives in] Why does it need BOTH AC and DC? That's a major disadvantage, isn't it, needing both mains and battery power (or a separate power adapter)?
Don't worry. I'm 4x obsolete - still running a 2x500MHz G4!
OTOH, to be realistic for a moment (sorry!), this machine's still plenty fast enough for pretty much everything I do with it, so I don't worry. Nice though it is to think of being 'the fastest' and the shiniest, it's real-world usage that matters, and for which you must justify the cost.
In which terms, I'm quite happy actually, and only a very tiny bit jealous:)
Ah. That I don't know. And of course that's the bit that's susceptible to errors.Â
As I said, I haven't noticed a single false positive in the mail it's trapped for me. If it possible that different ISPs use BrightMail's info in different ways? Is it too late to ask if anyone knows any more about this?
In my experience, it's caught spams probably into 5 figures by now, of which I've personally checked probably over a thousand, absolutely none of which were spam. And
BrightMail's method can only find spam. Their honeypots have absolutely no legitimate use, so all the mail they get must be spam: untargetted, mass mailing, to an unchecked, harvested list of addresses. Assuming BrightMail then blocks only those mails, then I don't see how it can be blocking legitimate mail as well.
Are you sure we're talking about the same system? Maybe your ISP used some other filtering as well as BrightMail?
BrightMail, too. My ISP uses it - it traps about 70% of my spam. The great thing is that it has no false positives, so it just shunts every spam it identifies off to a separate mailbox which you need never bother with - you don't spend time or bandwith downloading it. (A few times a year I take a look at the stuff it's recently trapped just to check, but there's never been a single valid mail.)
Erm... whoops, my fault; I was thinking of diff. How embarrassing. Anyway, that can internally strip whitespace before comparing lines; see the -w and -b options.
Maybe this would be a good time to promote a publisher that releases stuff in open formats: Fictionwise. Some of their stuff is only available in DRMed M$ or Adobe formats, but much of it is a range of formats including Palm 'Doc', which is freely convertible to/from plain text. Yes, they're selling them - though the prices are quite reasonable. I've bought quite a few books and stories from them. (For one thing, the typography is far better than some of the file-shared stuff: proof-read, proper punctuation, paragraphing, chaptering, italics, &c) If you want to show support for open formats, why not pay them a visit? (Disclaimer: I've no connection, &c, &c...)
Of course, the benefits of open formats aren't limited to being able to use them on any platform. For example, I can convert American spelling to British, fix errors, improve the typography with smart quotes, add automatic bookmarks, &c. And I can easily quote sections in correspondence.
And to all the folks who are saying "I don't like reading ebooks, therefore they're crap," just remember that different folks have different preferences. Personally, for a long time I've read more on the screen of my Psion than I do on paper. I find that once you get into a story, you become less aware of the medium (just as you don't have to stop and think about turning the pages of a dead-tree book). The backlight means I don't have to have good lighting, and can even read in the dark! And provided you pick a suitable font, I find it easy enough on the eyes. Another advantage is that I always have my library with me. (About 50MB of books.) I don't need to carry my current book with me, or plan ahead.
I'm not saying that they're for everyone, just don't assume that they're dying simply because you don't like them.
While such actions may make you feel better, will they actually be having any practical effect at all? Even if many UnixWare users get inconvenienced by this (which seems doubtful), aren't they more likely to see it as a failing of the Open Source community, rather than of SCO? And SCO themselves have hardly shown any concern for the community, so changes to some OSS apps aren't exactly likely to have them running for their cheque book, now, are they?
The main effects of this will simply be to waste developers' time removing SCO support. And if this business gets cleared up, it'll waste even more reinstating it.
In short, isn't this about as impractical, ill-thought-out, short-sighted, and above all immature as adding "Freedom" to the title?
Slashdot Mirror
"Ground control? Disable the soft wall, or we kill one passenger every minute!"
Or maybe about the cost of ensuring purity. If bottled water was allowed all the impurities that petrol has, there would be a health scare serious enough to make people realise just how silly the SARS one is...
(One of my personal bugbears. No-one can agree on the right number of spaces to indent by, it's hard to keep exactly the right number, and it looks silly when you code in a proportional font, as I like to. But if you use a single tab for each indent level, then everything Just Works; in many editors you can set how you want the tab to appear, and they're granular enough to be easy to get right.)
In fact, it sounds as if the indentation thing is to Python what the one-button mouse is to Apple: something that's actually not a bad idea in context, but which people get hung up about so much that they can't see through it to the important stuff? (And which is bound to be mentioned by trolls every time the subject occurs...)
Of course, I'm not trying to persuade you to prefer brushed metal too -- it's a matter of personal preference, and you like what you like. But don't assume that everyone else hates it too, because I don't :)
To rhyme with 'clock'. ('Bach' is pronounced completely differently, with the vowel of 'bath', and a proper Germanic 'chhh' final consonant.)
Or at least, to rhyme with how we say 'clock'... which of course doesn't tell you very much about how we say that word, either! (It's at times like this that I wish I knew the International Phonetic Alphabet...) In British English, 'rock' and 'clock' etc. have a low, short vowel that's not much like the long, open one I've heard in American English.
Do tell. I'm dying to know - don't leave us all in suspense like this!
Maybe it's because I'm British; but 'baroque' and 'broke' sound quite different; they share no vowels, and don't even have the same number of syllables!
Do they sound much more alike in other accents, or is it just a very lame pun?
When most people hear music, the actual sound is only a small part of what they're hearing. They're also hearing the packaging and artwork, the names and titles, the artist name(s) and appearance, any videos, promotional artwork and advertising, and more nebulous material such as their image (effectively, the sum total of all you're heard about them in the media, interviews you've seen or heard, their attitudes and claims, what your friends say about them, what's said about them by celebrities and personalities you respect... and also your own preconceptions, opinions of their previous work, comparisons and associations with other artists... the list is long.)
Suppose if I played you a piece of music you'd never heard before, with no information at all about it at all. Now suppose instead that I play you the same piece of music, but first tell you the band name. Immediately, you associate that with their image, with that whole plethora of impressions, connections, and unconscious associations; and it affects what you hear. You actually hear something different, and respond differently to the sound as a result.
Of course, different people will have different associations and responses. But comfort is a powerful one; most people like to stick to familiar images. (Otherwise people would seek out new artists, and quality of music would become more important than a big name.) Why else do people who use file-sharing programs stick mainly to the same old artists and titles?
For example: 4 is the only one which takes that number of letters when written in English. 30 is the only who that's the number of days in a month. And so on.
(Presumably, they were talking about horizontal or rotational symmetry? Otherwise, depending on the font, '30', '10', and '18' might also qualify. In fact, in some fonts, '8' wouldn't qualify for rotational symmetry...)
Not that pure thinking isn't import to, of course. It's probably like coding: the actual coding is done at a keyboard, even if the important ideas come elsewhere.
And no, this post isn't being ironic, either.
If something has a value that is 'inestimable', 'too great to be measured', 'incalculable', 'beyond estimation', or however you phrase it, then there's simply nothing to compare. One object's value can't be 'more incalculable', or 'further beyond estimation' than another. If you can't measure it, estimate or calculate it, then you can't compare it.
'More invaluable' is, as I said, a meaningless phrase.
('Inflammable' is a different case, with a very different history.)
I'm really sorry about this, but as a fully paid-up member of the Campaign for Real Pedantry (CaRP), I can't let 'more invaluable' go. DNS could become 'more valuable'. But invaluable means incapable of being valued; something is either invaluable or it's not - it can't be more invaluable, in the same way that something can't be more unique or more dead.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
Erm, sorry, but does that list the names that are permitted, or the ones that aren't?
[fx: resists]
[fx: gives in] Why does it need BOTH AC and DC? That's a major disadvantage, isn't it, needing both mains and battery power (or a separate power adapter)?
Erm, unless, erm, it means either AC or DC...
OTOH, to be realistic for a moment (sorry!), this machine's still plenty fast enough for pretty much everything I do with it, so I don't worry. Nice though it is to think of being 'the fastest' and the shiniest, it's real-world usage that matters, and for which you must justify the cost.
In which terms, I'm quite happy actually, and only a very tiny bit jealous :)
Ah. That I don't know. And of course that's the bit that's susceptible to errors.Â
As I said, I haven't noticed a single false positive in the mail it's trapped for me. If it possible that different ISPs use BrightMail's info in different ways? Is it too late to ask if anyone knows any more about this?
- In my experience, it's caught spams probably into 5 figures by now, of which I've personally checked probably over a thousand, absolutely none of which were spam. And
- BrightMail's method can only find spam. Their honeypots have absolutely no legitimate use, so all the mail they get must be spam: untargetted, mass mailing, to an unchecked, harvested list of addresses. Assuming BrightMail then blocks only those mails, then I don't see how it can be blocking legitimate mail as well.
Are you sure we're talking about the same system? Maybe your ISP used some other filtering as well as BrightMail?BrightMail, too. My ISP uses it - it traps about 70% of my spam. The great thing is that it has no false positives, so it just shunts every spam it identifies off to a separate mailbox which you need never bother with - you don't spend time or bandwith downloading it. (A few times a year I take a look at the stuff it's recently trapped just to check, but there's never been a single valid mail.)
Erm... whoops, my fault; I was thinking of diff. How embarrassing. Anyway, that can internally strip whitespace before comparing lines; see the -w and -b options.
Wasn't the whole point of the hashing to avoid visual inspection, and so bypass the 'contamination' of people that SCO could claim?
Okay, so you compress all whitespace sequences to a single space before computing the hash. Come on, grep solved this one years ago.
Of course, the benefits of open formats aren't limited to being able to use them on any platform. For example, I can convert American spelling to British, fix errors, improve the typography with smart quotes, add automatic bookmarks, &c. And I can easily quote sections in correspondence.
And to all the folks who are saying "I don't like reading ebooks, therefore they're crap," just remember that different folks have different preferences. Personally, for a long time I've read more on the screen of my Psion than I do on paper. I find that once you get into a story, you become less aware of the medium (just as you don't have to stop and think about turning the pages of a dead-tree book). The backlight means I don't have to have good lighting, and can even read in the dark! And provided you pick a suitable font, I find it easy enough on the eyes. Another advantage is that I always have my library with me. (About 50MB of books.) I don't need to carry my current book with me, or plan ahead.
I'm not saying that they're for everyone, just don't assume that they're dying simply because you don't like them.
The main effects of this will simply be to waste developers' time removing SCO support. And if this business gets cleared up, it'll waste even more reinstating it.
In short, isn't this about as impractical, ill-thought-out, short-sighted, and above all immature as adding "Freedom" to the title?