If spelling changes then we'll no longer be able to read Shakespeare's plays...
Why? Shakespeare belonged to a generation which had no cultural requirement for consistent spelling, especially where the interests of poetry were better served by a particular linguistic form. He didn't even spell his own name consistently.
Your quotation from Chaucer is hardly incomprehensible. If you read it aloud phonetically (never mind the spelling), it makes sense. Additionally, anyone who has some grasp of modern German will recognise gramattical structures such as "yfalle" as equivalent to "gefallen", so you get the idea of how the tenses work.
But if anyone here has an easy way to learn Old English (Anglo-Saxon) I'd be happy to know of it. I'va made a few attempts, but so far I've found it a bit impenetrable.
Sure. There's no doubt that violins made along a similar pattern will sound approximately similar to an independent observer.
But to the player, the difference can be quite profound. I am a violinist, and love well-made istruments of any vintage, but there is nothing that says modern instrumnts are in any way inferior to classic Italian achines.
Also keep in mind consumers of classical music prefer the sound of a modern violin. the tension of the strings has increased meaningfully over the centuries and so has the pitch. So a Stradivarius isn't really built to handle the tension or modern strings.
This isn't exactly true. Nearly all 18th-century violins have been radically overhauled to meet 19th-century standards for sound projection. The neck was re-cut to bend back to allow for greater string tension, which also had to be absorbed by a heavier bass-bar under the left foot of the bridge.
But this aside, the majority of violin players still tend to use gut strings (usually wound with silver) by preference. Synthetic strings can work well on some instruments, but YMMV. On my own instruments, I have had some success with synthetics on the middle strings.
I still think I'd rather watch Kill Bill then listen to classical music.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but at least try out Bach (the Musician's Composer)'s sonatas/partitas for unacompanied violin, or the sonatas for violin and harpsichord.
Of course, this music is not classical, but baroque - but this is another part of your education.
How often do you have to directly contact a wholesaler, as a retail consumer?
If you've ever lived/worked in rural Australia, you'll have found that it's quite common to have to deal directly with Telstra, since they own all the phone lines and exchanges. Doesn't matter who's selling you the bandwidth.
...since TFA actually has some justification for this figure.
Yes, but what TFA conveniently neglects to mention is that if you funnel every single http request through the same government-administered pipe, something is going to block up. It doesn't matter whether or not the site you request is blocked. Just having to ask is enough.
Given that our governments have a long history of messing things up, you can bet your ass that if the filter does get implemented it will be hopelessly underfunded and under-resourced, and we will be the ones who suffer as a result, at least while Sen. Conroy is communications minister. He is such an arrogant prick, he will never admit that he got it all wrong.
I don't know if that criticism is still as frequent - or valid - as it was back in ye olde days.
I'm pleased to say it's not. Back in the days when it was StarOffice, and a few years subsequent to that, there were some disgraceful latencies, especially in the glacial start-up time.
That seems to have been pretty much fixed, and responsiveness is at least as good as any MSOffice installation I have seen. I don't have formal benchmarks here, but for instance on this oldish 2.16 GHz Macbook I have a copy of Office 2004 (rarely used but patched up to date) and the current version of NeoOffice. NeoOffice starts up in 1/2 the 18-second time MS Word does. Once running, there is no perceptible lag, so I'm happy enough.
Back in the early '80s I worked a couple of contracts at a certain large Burroughs site in London where a jumped-up middle-manager did indeed get fired for buying IBM. He thought he was trying to "make his mark" and bring the company into the real world. As it was, he managed to find out something about the Real World of unemployment queues in Thatcher's Britain - which is to say he probably never got another job again.
So use Jabber. For that matter, there's also... yada yada...
In fact, the only advantage that Skype has over these is that people already have Skype.
Yes, I am perfectly well aware these alternatives exist. But whether you like it or not, you can't just write off the fact that Skype has so much saturation in the VOIP market (and to a lesser extent IM) that you might as well concede that Skype is as pervasive as Microsoft in its own way. (Disclaimer: I use no Microsoft products at all.)
I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, but many, or indeed most [sigh] of my acquaintances are not, and Skype offers a convenient and relatively intuitive communication channel that covers most bases very well.
I acknowledge that Skype has many faults, but you can't force everybody to change just because you insist on sitting on your high horse and insisting that anyone who disagrees is a moron. All that will achieve is a reputation for being an arrogant asshole.
SIP is indeed free (in some cases), but it does not offer a way for you or your contacts to indicate whether they are available or willing to accept calls. And the integrated IM client is useful if you can't be bothered running a full IRC session, especially if your contacts are not au fait with IRC.
I have yet to see a Firewire device and only have seen a few PCs with Firewire ports.
A few years ago when I had my first iPod, I used to get random disconnects and overruns over the USB2 interface when hooked up to my Linux box. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard which included a convenient firewire port, and I was able to hook it up with no problems.
Now I have a machine with plenty of firewire ports and they never get used. I guess Firewire will still be useful for people with oldish camcorders or external HDDs, but apart from that I suspect it's gone the way of Betamax.
Of course, this now means that ALSA must be recompiled every time I upgrade the kernel. And I honestly can't hear any difference between the older OSS drivers and the ALSA ones.
Well, that should stand to reason. If you upgrade your kernel, the modules you built for your old kernel won't work (they usually can't even be found by the new kernel unless you force it).
I've always built my own kernels (heavily stripped down, because I'm that sort of person), and I haven't needed to rebuild ALSA separately for a very long time - like I can remember doing it, but I think not less than about 7 years ago, at some point when new ALSA releases were a bit behind in inclusion with the kernel. Back in the days when I first started playing with Linux (about 1995) sound was often a problem, and OSS was right in the middle of it. There are lots of reasons why OSS has been deprecated since, and I don't miss it one bit.
I'm curious as to what chipset your sound system is.
The fact that it is 2009 and there are still audio issues on Linux is telling, however.
The simple fact is that for most people there are no audio issues. The majority of name-brand chipsets do what's most usually needed out of the box on most sane distributions.
If you need your hardware to do strange or recondite things, then it's perfectly natural to have to look further. That applies just as much on Windows as anywhere else.
That's sort of why I just keep using my old Audigy 2 ZS. I haven't actually had any problems as such with most other on-board chipsets, but the Audigy cards in most of their various incarnations are just so damn good. The main reason I bought mine was to digitise my old vinyl LP collection - a project which is still ongoing.
At the time it gave the best bang for your buck in 24-bit sound, and I've never regretted it since. Of course, sooner or later I might find myself stuck with a motherboard without any PCI slots, in which case I'll be in trouble...
It's one thing for the author to heap blame or praise on either website design, but I might have a few words to say about the design of the site TFA is published on. It even makes Slashdot's design look good, and that's saying something.
MS will be glad to know there will at least be one new developer for the Zune;-)
I'm not so sure Microsoft would care. They clearly aren't serious about marketing the product anyway - otherwise the zune would have been made available beyond the shores of the US.
I fail to understand their motives for developing a product to compete against the iPod and failing to use their marketing clout to sell it worldwide.
Well, Apple decided some time ago that we needed that so-called "genius" in iTunes.
But I wonder if they've managed to boost his IQ. The first time (and the last) I asked the Genius to put together a playlist, he made a godawful fuckup of it, suggesting any number of more appropriate names. Such as Moron. Or Cretin. Perhaps Fuckwit.
When they sell your info it's spyware
When they post it on slashdot it's a community-based monitoring tool
Maybe so. But you could think about it this way: The survey is only of Windows systems because those are the only ones insecure enough to run the software. Or Windows users are so habituated to spyware that one more such program won't make any difference.
*ducks*
Seriously, though, all TFA really tells us is that Windows users don't upgrade their software much, and mostly buy brand-name machines on a list headed by Dell. Nothing that any of us couldn't have surmised from a quick glance around any university or public library. Nothing to see here, move on...
Slashdot Mirror
... and the astute reader will note that I spelt "grammatical" wrong. ;-)
If spelling changes then we'll no longer be able to read Shakespeare's plays...
Why? Shakespeare belonged to a generation which had no cultural requirement for consistent spelling, especially where the interests of poetry were better served by a particular linguistic form. He didn't even spell his own name consistently.
Your quotation from Chaucer is hardly incomprehensible. If you read it aloud phonetically (never mind the spelling), it makes sense. Additionally, anyone who has some grasp of modern German will recognise gramattical structures such as "yfalle" as equivalent to "gefallen", so you get the idea of how the tenses work.
But if anyone here has an easy way to learn Old English (Anglo-Saxon) I'd be happy to know of it. I'va made a few attempts, but so far I've found it a bit impenetrable.
Unleash the anecdotes!
Sure. There's no doubt that violins made along a similar pattern will sound approximately similar to an independent observer.
But to the player, the difference can be quite profound. I am a violinist, and love well-made istruments of any vintage, but there is nothing that says modern instrumnts are in any way inferior to classic Italian achines.
Also keep in mind consumers of classical music prefer the sound of a modern violin. the tension of the strings has increased meaningfully over the centuries and so has the pitch. So a Stradivarius isn't really built to handle the tension or modern strings.
This isn't exactly true. Nearly all 18th-century violins have been radically overhauled to meet 19th-century standards for sound projection. The neck was re-cut to bend back to allow for greater string tension, which also had to be absorbed by a heavier bass-bar under the left foot of the bridge.
But this aside, the majority of violin players still tend to use gut strings (usually wound with silver) by preference. Synthetic strings can work well on some instruments, but YMMV. On my own instruments, I have had some success with synthetics on the middle strings.
I still think I'd rather watch Kill Bill then listen to classical music.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but at least try out Bach (the Musician's Composer)'s sonatas/partitas for unacompanied violin, or the sonatas for violin and harpsichord.
Of course, this music is not classical, but baroque - but this is another part of your education.
How often do you have to directly contact a wholesaler, as a retail consumer?
If you've ever lived/worked in rural Australia, you'll have found that it's quite common to have to deal directly with Telstra, since they own all the phone lines and exchanges. Doesn't matter who's selling you the bandwidth.
...since TFA actually has some justification for this figure.
Yes, but what TFA conveniently neglects to mention is that if you funnel every single http request through the same government-administered pipe, something is going to block up. It doesn't matter whether or not the site you request is blocked. Just having to ask is enough.
Given that our governments have a long history of messing things up, you can bet your ass that if the filter does get implemented it will be hopelessly underfunded and under-resourced, and we will be the ones who suffer as a result, at least while Sen. Conroy is communications minister. He is such an arrogant prick, he will never admit that he got it all wrong.
Cool. I can just imagine the kids yelling "Daddy, I wanna T-Rex!" :-)
I don't know if that criticism is still as frequent - or valid - as it was back in ye olde days.
I'm pleased to say it's not. Back in the days when it was StarOffice, and a few years subsequent to that, there were some disgraceful latencies, especially in the glacial start-up time.
That seems to have been pretty much fixed, and responsiveness is at least as good as any MSOffice installation I have seen. I don't have formal benchmarks here, but for instance on this oldish 2.16 GHz Macbook I have a copy of Office 2004 (rarely used but patched up to date) and the current version of NeoOffice. NeoOffice starts up in 1/2 the 18-second time MS Word does. Once running, there is no perceptible lag, so I'm happy enough.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM..."
Back in the early '80s I worked a couple of contracts at a certain large Burroughs site in London where a jumped-up middle-manager did indeed get fired for buying IBM. He thought he was trying to "make his mark" and bring the company into the real world. As it was, he managed to find out something about the Real World of unemployment queues in Thatcher's Britain - which is to say he probably never got another job again.
Anyone who reflects on the halcyon days of '70s quality control has never driven a car made by British Leyland.
But a lot of people seem to prefer keeping the flash, even if it compromises function a bit.
Yup. Slashcode is an excellent example of this. [sigh]
I think you missed his point: if Office 2007 sucks balls, then it is amazing. If I had known it did that, I might switch from OOo. ;-)
So use Jabber. For that matter, there's also... yada yada...
In fact, the only advantage that Skype has over these is that people already have Skype.
Yes, I am perfectly well aware these alternatives exist. But whether you like it or not, you can't just write off the fact that Skype has so much saturation in the VOIP market (and to a lesser extent IM) that you might as well concede that Skype is as pervasive as Microsoft in its own way. (Disclaimer: I use no Microsoft products at all.)
I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, but many, or indeed most [sigh] of my acquaintances are not, and Skype offers a convenient and relatively intuitive communication channel that covers most bases very well.
I acknowledge that Skype has many faults, but you can't force everybody to change just because you insist on sitting on your high horse and insisting that anyone who disagrees is a moron. All that will achieve is a reputation for being an arrogant asshole.
SIP is indeed free (in some cases), but it does not offer a way for you or your contacts to indicate whether they are available or willing to accept calls. And the integrated IM client is useful if you can't be bothered running a full IRC session, especially if your contacts are not au fait with IRC.
I have yet to see a Firewire device and only have seen a few PCs with Firewire ports.
A few years ago when I had my first iPod, I used to get random disconnects and overruns over the USB2 interface when hooked up to my Linux box. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard which included a convenient firewire port, and I was able to hook it up with no problems.
Now I have a machine with plenty of firewire ports and they never get used. I guess Firewire will still be useful for people with oldish camcorders or external HDDs, but apart from that I suspect it's gone the way of Betamax.
Of course, this now means that ALSA must be recompiled every time I upgrade the kernel. And I honestly can't hear any difference between the older OSS drivers and the ALSA ones.
Well, that should stand to reason. If you upgrade your kernel, the modules you built for your old kernel won't work (they usually can't even be found by the new kernel unless you force it).
I've always built my own kernels (heavily stripped down, because I'm that sort of person), and I haven't needed to rebuild ALSA separately for a very long time - like I can remember doing it, but I think not less than about 7 years ago, at some point when new ALSA releases were a bit behind in inclusion with the kernel. Back in the days when I first started playing with Linux (about 1995) sound was often a problem, and OSS was right in the middle of it. There are lots of reasons why OSS has been deprecated since, and I don't miss it one bit.
I'm curious as to what chipset your sound system is.
The fact that it is 2009 and there are still audio issues on Linux is telling, however.
The simple fact is that for most people there are no audio issues. The majority of name-brand chipsets do what's most usually needed out of the box on most sane distributions.
If you need your hardware to do strange or recondite things, then it's perfectly natural to have to look further. That applies just as much on Windows as anywhere else.
That's sort of why I just keep using my old Audigy 2 ZS. I haven't actually had any problems as such with most other on-board chipsets, but the Audigy cards in most of their various incarnations are just so damn good. The main reason I bought mine was to digitise my old vinyl LP collection - a project which is still ongoing.
At the time it gave the best bang for your buck in 24-bit sound, and I've never regretted it since. Of course, sooner or later I might find myself stuck with a motherboard without any PCI slots, in which case I'll be in trouble...
It's one thing for the author to heap blame or praise on either website design, but I might have a few words to say about the design of the site TFA is published on. It even makes Slashdot's design look good, and that's saying something.
But you defined yourself several posts earlier as a fanatic. One thing that defines a fanatic is that his reasoning is unsound.
MS will be glad to know there will at least be one new developer for the Zune ;-)
I'm not so sure Microsoft would care. They clearly aren't serious about marketing the product anyway - otherwise the zune would have been made available beyond the shores of the US.
I fail to understand their motives for developing a product to compete against the iPod and failing to use their marketing clout to sell it worldwide.
Actually, aside from secure facilities (nuclear, DoD, etc)...I've never heard of a place that forbade by rule a camera phone.
Courtrooms? And I've worked in a number of offices where visitors are asked to remove the battery from their phones before entering the building.
Well, Apple decided some time ago that we needed that so-called "genius" in iTunes.
But I wonder if they've managed to boost his IQ. The first time (and the last) I asked the Genius to put together a playlist, he made a godawful fuckup of it, suggesting any number of more appropriate names. Such as Moron. Or Cretin. Perhaps Fuckwit.
When they sell your info it's spyware
When they post it on slashdot it's a community-based monitoring tool
Maybe so. But you could think about it this way: The survey is only of Windows systems because those are the only ones insecure enough to run the software. Or Windows users are so habituated to spyware that one more such program won't make any difference.
*ducks*
Seriously, though, all TFA really tells us is that Windows users don't upgrade their software much, and mostly buy brand-name machines on a list headed by Dell. Nothing that any of us couldn't have surmised from a quick glance around any university or public library. Nothing to see here, move on...