> Stdidiot is where you tell the user verbose output of what you are doing > including positive affirmation!
The right place for this stuff to go is standard output; what we need is a standardized centralized way for the user to change one setting in one place and have all applications see it and know how simple/verbose/newbieish the user wants everything to be. We could call it the user experience level and abbreviate it UXL for full buzzword compliance. New user accounts could start with the UXL set to 0 by default, which means "the user is slightly more intelligent than lettuce but has less experience using computers". At a UXL of 0, the desktop would consist of four big icons -- one for "read email", one for "surf the web", one for "turn off computer", and one labelled "advanced", which would prompt the user "Are you ready for more options?" and (if yes) raise the UXL to 1. At a UXL of 0, the web browser would have three buttons on the toolbar -- Back, Print, and Search. At UXL of 1 the address bar would appear. And so on. As users gain experience, they'd keep raising their UXL setting, which would cause more advanced options to appear in the menus, preference dialogs, and so on. Command-line apps could read the setting too. If the user raises the UXL to 3 or so, a command prompt window would become available, but all the command-line apps would be set to a hyperverbose mode wherein they explain exactly what they're going to do, do it, and then tell the user what they did. Raising the UXL would ease off the more annoying aspects of this; raising the UXL high enough would eventually land you with old-school Unix-style behaviors. Given a high _enough_ UXL, rm would not prompt "Are you sure", and standard globbing would be expanded into full regular-expression pattern matching (a la Perl) and so on. It would need to be well-documented exactly what you should set your UXL to in order to get the "old", pre-UXL behavior. (128 seems like a nice number...) Users past a certain level could directly set their UXL to a specific number and also could set up their app launchers to change the UXL within that application's environment (similar to running an app chrooted or sudoed or whatever) so as to have different UXLs for different apps.
It should also be easy to set the UXL back down, so that users who raise it too much too quickly aren't stuck at sea, so to speak. I'm thinking (at the lower UXLs anyway) big fat buttons on the desktop for "More Advanced" and "More Simple".
> > Being able to have a different resolution and color depth for each > > workspace (virtual desktop, essentially) was really *useful*, and there > > were other useful things. > > That would only slow things down.
Not necessarily. If you have a remotely decent monitor, there's no problem. (If you don't, then just don't set up your workspaces to have different resolutions and colour depths. It would of course be an optional feature, and any time you add a new workspace it defaults to the same settings as the previous workspace.)
> Many PC displays in wide use blank the screen for two whole seconds when > the video card sends a signal that it's about to change the resolution or > color depth. In addition, many PC displays such as LCDs can run well only > at one specific resolution.
These are only problems with inferior video hardware. Okay, so if you have cheesy video hardware, then don't use the feature. Arguing that including the feature for people who can use it would "only slow things down" is like arguing that X should only support 640x480, since some monitors can't display better. Higher resolutions are undeniably useful if you have the hardware to support them, and the same is true for having different resolutions on different desktops. Indeed, while XFree doesn't currently support having _desktops_ with different resolutions, it _does_ support _zooming_ into your desktop by using a lower-res video mode (hold ctrl and alt and hit + or - sometime), and nobody complains that this feature "only slows things down". If your video hardware isn't up to it, then nobody's making you use the feature.
> > I certainly wouldn't want to try to use my Linux/XFree/Gnome system with > > only 128MB of RAM. > > Users of GNU/Linux on smaller computers can switch to a desktop environment > that eats less RAM. Users of Microsoft Windows on smaller computers don't > have that choice.
Sure they do. Okay, so besides just the desktop environment and window manager they'd also have to switch out the rest of the OS, because it's all integrated, but they're free to do that if they choose. (Yes, it would be nice of OEMs didn't all want to sell you Windows whether you're going to use it or not, but that's a separate issue.) I don't think it's reasonable to expect current versions of everything to always run just fine on hardware of any age. Sure, the current version of Windows doesn't do so well on a five-year-old computer. News flash: it's intended to be run on a _current_ computer, not a five-year-old one. The five-year-old computer presumably has an existing operating system; it doesn't need a new one. Non-geeks don't feel the need to be "up-to-date" all the time; in fact, most end users are quite adverse to upgrades. As for geeks, we know how to add RAM;-)
Also, from an end-user perspective, switching from Gnome to twm is at _least_ as big a change as switching from Windows to (say) KDE on Linux. Under the hood it's a much smaller change, of course, but the change to the end-user-visible portions of the interface is at least as great, if not greater. The Gnome and KDE default setups have a thing that's real similar to the start menu, a task list, and something that looks a lot like the system tray and has a clock -- just like Windows, more or less. twm (by default) has[1] manual window placement and no panel (windows iconify instead, sort of like in Windows 3.1), among other differences. What's the default way to get a list of apps (like the start menu), middle-click on the wallpaper, IIRC?
So I don't think it's quite fair to say that with Linux/XFree you have the option to switch GUIs but with Windows you don't; you can switch from Windows to Linux/XFree, if you are so inclined, and any complaint you raise about barrier to entry, learning new
> Five years of being a Linux weenie and I still remember almost everything > about DOS. Oy.
Indeed. I bet if you gave me a list of DOS commands and I had to categorize them off the top of my head according to whether they were builtins, COMs, EXEs or BATch files, I'd probably get at least 80% of them right. I think part of the reason I remember DOS so well is because it was inherently a small and simple system. Today's OSes provide a lot more functionality, and that makes them more complex. DOS left most of the functionality to third-party apps. Especially the older versions of DOS (prior to version 5). I've been fooling around with Linux since 1998, and it's been my main system both at home and at work since circa 2001, but if you gave me a list of commands and asked me which ones are bash builtins and which ones are scripts or aliases and which ones are compiled binaries, I wouldn't know most of them.
Anyway, back to the help command: I agree that the DOS 6 help command is a good model to look at, in terms of improving current help systems. Also the VMS help system is pretty good and worth looking at. The problem with man is that you have to know what the command is called before you can look it up. There's apropos, but there's no discoverability there and it's harder to spell and longer to type than help and (perhaps the worst thing) it gives you a bunch of irrelevant non-command stuff like system calls and other things a user doesn't need to know about. For example, let's say I want to know the *nix equivalent of the DOS command MEM. So I try typing mem just in case it's that simple, then also try memory, but no dice. So I fire up apropos and get... 314 lines of response. So I pipe that into less and start reading, and I will eventually find out about free, but this is NOT an ideal interface.
Of course, the free command is one of the twenty or so commands that I wouldn't need to find out about this way because I'd have already read about it in a *nix-command-line tutorial, but there are other commands, not quite so common as to be listed in an introductory tutorial but still useful enough that the user might want to discover them. Things like screen for example. (Yes, the DOS 6 help tells you about stuff like e.g., dosshell.)
So yeah, even for someone who started fooling with Debian in 1998, a help command similar to the one in DOS 6 would be a welcome improvement.
1. Acrobat Reader ignores my system colour settings and displays the document
with black text on a white background. I'll go snowblind in two minutes.
This is a deal-breaker for me; it's not just about what I want to do; I
*cannot* read long documents in this format. (My eyes are more sensitive
to light than average; it's an accessibility requirement for me that I
be able to enforce a toned-down color scheme for everything.) 2. Acrobat Reader ignores my font settings and displays the text in whatever
ugly and hard-to-read font the author chose. 3. Acrobat Reader requires me to scroll to the bottom of each page, then
hit the next page button and *scroll back up to the top*. I can't just
scroll smoothly through the document like I can with a web page. I am
continually amazed that Adobe apparently continues to think this is a
reasonable user interface; I've seen better user interfaces designed by
high-school students creating "programs" in PowerPoint for English class. 4. Searching never works right in Acrobat Reader, and frequently text
selection and clipboard operations don't work properly either, so that
if I wanted to (say) quote a snippet of the article that I want to talk
about on slashdot, I'd have to retype it. What is this, 1982? I want
my clipboard, not excuses. 5. If I want to increase the text size, I have to just zoom in, and then
I'll end up with a horizontal scrollbar and need to scroll back and forth
as I read each line. If I want fewer words per line for easier reading,
I'm fresh out. 6. What's so wrong with HTML, which is actually very widely supported,
that people feel the need to go looking for other formats to write
their web documents in?
Windows is not the problem. User-ignorance is a problem, but it's not the big
problem either. It's what's installed/configured. Here are some tips:
Get RID of Outlook. Don't just tell them not to use it.
Make it *gone*. (Yes, if they have WinXP this takes some doing.
It will save you time in the long run. An ounce of prevention
and all that. Do it.)
As far as what to replace it with, my parents
are quite happy with Pegasus.
Make Mozilla the default browser and get the IE icon off the desktop.
Disable unrequested windows and disallow scripts from messing with
the toolbars and statusbar and stuff. Install plugins that you
consider safe and then delete the default/null plugin so that
they won't get prompted to install more plugins.
Get rid of Outlook.
In the start menu, create a hidden folder (so that you can get to it
but mom and dad won't) and put everything into it that's dangerous or
powerful, such as the MSIE shortcut, Windows Update (which opens MSIE),
the shortcut to regedit, and so on and so forth. Don't worry about
the command prompt, though; if your parents are anything like mine
they won't do anything with that.
Get rid of Outlook.
Yes, give them OpenOffice. Go systematically though the options,
though, and change the horrible defaults to sensible settings so
that mom and dad won't tear their hair out. In particular, you
probably want to turn off number recognition in tables, and you
almost certainly want to uncheck almost everything in the
autocorrect/autoformat options dialog. Associate OO.o with
MS Office document extensions, even if they have MS Office.
Get rid of Outlook.
Put logic in autoexec.bat that merges a registry file that cleans
unwanted stuff out of the Run registry keys. In particular, you
do NOT want instant messaging software running at system startup,
and this is the only way I know to keep it from doing that if it's
ever used at all. If you need to protect against random new
entries in these keys, then you need something more complex than
a batch file; a Perl script ought to do the trick.
Get rid of Outlook.
Put them behind an IP Masquerade gateway (or some comparable form
of NAT) so that their PC is not addressable from the internet.
Get rid of Outlook.
Yes, some user training will also help. The primary thing to
train them not to do is download and install random software from
questionable sources. Trojans and adware are your biggest worries
here. If you're good about installing software to perform any
tasks that they think they need to do, and if the software you
select and install is always good and easy to use, they hopefully
should learn to trust you about not installing random junk.
> I'm constantly told that I have an extremely high intelligence.
> I always feel like I should know so much more, though.
Intelligence and knowledge are different things. You gradually lose a lot of
your intelligence as you age, but you gain knowledge and understanding and so
are able to compensate. You can also gain thinking skills.
> Do you, the Slashdot readers, know of any ways to improve ones brain power?
Brain power? No, not as such.
The brain (the physical organ between your ears) is mostly
affected by your body chemistry, so apart from the usual medical advice (eat
a ballanced diet, get enough sleep, don't do crack,...) there's not a great
deal you can do.
However, you can exercise your *mind*. Read books that are at or above your
reading level, books that make you think. (Specific examples? If you haven't
read Godel, Escher, Bach yet, I can recommend that. The Bible is good for a
number of readings. Knuth's book on surreal number theory is good. Read
some Interactive Fiction, too. Curses, for example, and (if you really want
to stretch) Spider and Web.)
Memorization is a learned skill. I don't know how many times people have
told me, "I can't memorize". What they mean is, "I've never memorized."
Very few people are blessed with a photographic memory; everyone else has
to learn to memorize. Pick out a nice five-page passage you like from a
good book, and make yourself learn it word-for-word until you can recite
it verbatim with no errors. You start out with just the first sentence
and work your way up. Oh, and you have to periodically review what you
already know (just say it through once each time; if you don't have any
trouble, you can double the time until the next review of that materiel).
Memorization gets easier with practice, and continues to get
easier with practice the more you practice it. It's possible to get to
the point where you can memorize a medium-density page of information in
fifteen minutes flat, and this is a *really* useful skill to have. It's
also possible to store entire books in your mind. No, your brain doesn't
get full and start forgetting stuff. (Short-term memory works that way,
but long-term memory doesn't.) There's a girl in my church who can quote
all of John, Ephesians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Jonah, and six chapters of
Daniel, and she's not even particularly bright (in fact, she's probably
LD); she just took the trouble to learn how to memorize and then spent
some time doing a bit of it.
Of course, there are other useful thinking skills besides (and, some
would say, now that we have computers, more useful than) memorization.
Practice analysis and discernment. Learn to pick apart everything you
read, including fiction, and evaluate it in terms of the quality of the
writing, stylistic issues, the author's sociopolitical worldview and
how that influences the writing (especially with nonfiction, but yes,
even with fiction), the originality (or not) of the plot, the quality
of the character development, and so on and so forth. Write in-depth
reviews.
Speaking of which... write. I don't mean (necessarily) professionally,
but write. Not just "creative" writing, either; write essays. For fun.
Make yourself put together and write from an outline, and then make
yourself revise your writing repeatedly until the original draft
looks like poor writing by comparison. This is good exercise, and
it develops another useful skill.
Languages are a great way to go too. Learn computer languages,
foreign languages, dead languages,... Learn ones that are
significantly different from your native language. The (somewhat
old now) book,
How to Learn Any Language (Barry Farber) is one I would recommend -- but don't
just read the book; learn some la
> according to MS, an operating system *MUST* include the following: > a) GUI b) web browser
Most distributions ship with these things in OSS land too.
> c) media player
Okay, *that* is annoying. I don't want CDs to be played by the same app that opens PNG images, darnit!
> d) text editor
Most OSes have included a text editor since time out of mind, certainly before there was a company called Microsoft. Actually, Microsoft's OSes ship with a much smaller number of text editors than average. (There's EDIT.COM, notepad.exe, and the textarea widget that gets used by various applications -- that's three, the way I count, and they really need to include a more capable one for power users.)
Okay, e and g are unnecessary. f was pioneered by Be, and although the filesystem is not the most significant thing Be innovated, it sure would be nice if more OS designers would look at the BeOS and copy its useful features. Being able to have a different resolution and color depth for each workspace (virtual desktop, essentially) was really *useful*, and there were other useful things.
> h) severely restricted CLI At least MS never shipped an OS with *no* CLI like certain other vendors.
> i) device driver incompatibilities Since most of their drivers are written by the hardware vendors, it's hard to blame them for this one. You could say that they should fix this by writing their own drivers, but there's an awefully wide range of hardware they'd have to write them for. Most other OSes that don't have this problem achieve their lack of this problem by having tighter control over the hardware, since the hardware is made by the same people as the OS. There are certain notable exceptions to this, but I think what e.g. Linux has in terms of drivers that are included with the OS should be considered a major achievement; it might not be fair to hold all systems to that standard. Very few proprietary systems, if any, ship with drivers included with the OS for as wide a range of hardware. Solaris runs on a narrower range of hardware; so does OpenVMS; so does OS X; so does AIX; so does virtually everything, except for Windows, which relies on the hardware to come with a driver disk or the user to retrieve drivers from the hardware manufacturer's website. (Drivers are included with the OS for some hardware yes, but not for as wide a range as with Linux.) The BSDs have also done remarkably well, but still, that's basically two systems (since the BSDs can share driver code among one another and so for these purposes count mostly as one), and there are quite a number of other systems that give the lie to any supposition that this is the norm; it's not the norm -- it's the exception.
> j) minimum 128M memory footprint Oh, waaah. 640k is no longer enough for anyone; get over it, already. I certainly wouldn't want to try to use my Linux/XFree/Gnome system with only 128MB of RAM. Gah, I'd waste an hour a day (in little thirty-second chunks) waiting for things to swap in and out. No, man, give me some RAM. I want twice as many Megabytes of RAM as the number of Megahertz in the CPU clock speed. I want the luxury of leaving windows open with stuff halfway done while I do something else -- even if the app in question is big, like OpenOffice. I want the luxury of leaving my database running all the time, so I don't have to start it up to use it. If two different apps that I use happen to want two different RDBMS backends, I want the luxury of running both at the same time without worrying about it. I want the luxury of using gdmflexiserver to have multiple GUI login sessions at the same time. I want the luxury of working in Gimp with an image large enough to fill an entire 8.5x11 page at a decent print resolution. I want to do all that and not
> At what point does a bios become an operating system
This is old, old news. There were 8-bit micros in the seventies that, if no OS was present on removable media (floppy, cartridge, whatever) at boot time, they would go into ROM BASIC and you could just use that. (These were systems that didn't support hard drives.) Some systems continued to do this as late as the 80286 era (and some of these did support hard drives, but they were theoretically optional).
Now, the ROM BASIC on these old systems didn't support today's peripherals, of course (PCI? Heck, some of these were before ISA), but it supported some of what was available at the time. This is perhaps a modernization of the concept, but the concept itself is nowhere near new.
> > When a Windows vulnerability is patched, > > You misspelled if.
Indeed. This is particularly relevant since we're currently discussing a local privilege escalation vulnerability. Windows has had a local privilege escalation vulnerability publically known for quite a long while now that Microsoft has publically stated they will not fix. (Google for "shatter attack".) They can't fix it easily because the fix would have to change the Win32 API in a way that would break large numbers of applications, including e.g. almost all antivirus software. Backward compatibility is more important.
Of course, this (and any local priv escalation) is only a really big deal if it can be combined with a trivial remote exploit that doesn't by itself give privs. So, you want to patch it before a trivial remote exploit comes out.
> I don't have hard data to prove this, but I believe that the following > two points are true: (1) there are more good guys than bad guys, or > otherwise society as we know it wouldn't exist; and (2) good guys are > smarter than bad guys, because our current social organization tends to > favor being honest. Good guys get good salaries, bad guys are sent to jail.
You're heading in the right direction with this reasoning, but the details of your conclusions are off. First, there aren't really more good guys than bad guys. You'd reach that conclusion by assuming that anyone who's not a good guy is a bad guy, but in fact most people don't give a rip about security one way or the other. They have other things to think about.
Second, it's not _exactly_ true that good guys are smarter than bad guys. What is true is that there are a lot of bad guys who don't have their stuff together -- but there are a few who do, and they're very smart, much smarter than the average good guy and probably smarter than most of the smart good guys too. These are the real professional crackers. The teeming masses of security bad guys however are just fooling around, which is why despite that most of those who do concern themselves with security issues are bad guys, it _seems_ like there are more good guys -- because the baddies who are just fooling around don't get much accomplished. They waste most of their time trying to impress other bad guys, keeping secrets from one another, and so on and so forth. The good guys also can openly share information (patches and whatnot) with anyone, and so even the ones who dabble can have access to real information, so they have a tendency to be more effective than similarly underdevoted bad guys.
> our current social organization tends to favor being honest. Good guys > get good salaries, bad guys are sent to jail.
This is true, but it's also mostly irrelevant. Most bad guys don't choose to be bad guys because it pays better. There are exceptions, of course, but most have other motivations. Often it just boils down to depravity.
However, many or most bad guys don't have the strength of character to make themselves do things when they don't feel like it today, and so consequently they're not as dedicated and therefore not as effective as they would be. Again, there are exceptions.
> it says something that the GameCube was easier to convert to than Windows
Was it really easier, or did it get done first for some other reason, such as because it was more compelling? I mean, we're accustomed to the idea of using Linux on low-end hardware as a server platform, so porting an RDBMS to it makes a sort of (weird) sense, but Windows is inherently a desktop platform; the only people who use Windows on servers are people who are so MS-only that they'll also use MS SQL Server. There's very little niche there for an OSS RDBMS. Okay, sure, there are people who use a desktop system to test and develop stuff that will end up on a server, but they can usually get by with MySQL. I'm not sure I really see the need to port PostgreSQL to Windows; they're pretty much used in completely different scenerios.
> Where can we draw the line? In my opinion 100/1000 distros is unimaginable. > 10 is not that bad a number.
There actually are several hundred, but only a dozen or so actually matter, and only really seven or so are "major" distros. Besides Mandrake, there's RedHat/Fedora/PinkTie/Whatever, Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Knoppix, and maybe another one or two I forgot. Then there are a handful of minor distros that are nevertheless relevant (TurboLinux, Yellow Dog, LFS if you classify that as a distro, microcontroller Linux, and so on.)
Most of the several hundred others can be classified into one of several categories. A lot of them are niche-specialty items (e.g., specially geared for teaching learning-disabled children using touchscreen technology -- you know the sort of distros I mean). Some are custom distros mastered by and for one particular organization or company as a house brand ("University of Jonesville Linux"). There are also variations on various of the major distros ("like Knoppix, but with Gnome instead of KDE", or "Like Mandrake, but as a LiveCD"), and some lean-and-mean distros are geared toward basically running one application or small set of applications on the minimum possible resources (e.g., a tiny firewall distro, a dinky webserver distro, tomsrtbt, and so on). These all have their usefullness, but none of them are anything most users need to know or care about. (Okay, an argument could be made for everyone needing to know about tomsrtbt, but Knoppix has taken over most of its niche these days; still, if you count it, that only adds one more minor distro to the list.)
# Volvo will never actually take this car into production, of course. # But many of the ideas hatched by the female think-tank may still appear # in more conventional Volvos, as well as in other cars within the group.
I'm thinking ideas like the seats and stuff, and maybe moving the windshield washer fluid fill spot over by the fuel tank fill spot, are the ones that will get included in other models, probably not the hood design.
> I dont know, working as a linux admin for MS? Sac-religeous?
I'd do it, under the right circumstances. Make money working with Linux? Yeah, I'd do it. (Not right now; I'm fine where I am at the moment. But I mean in general, I don't have anything against the very idea.) For a while. Maybe some good would come of it, even. Perhaps, they might clone some useful features from OSS into Windows. That would be good for all the Windows users out there. Maybe for example they could sign a deal with ActiveState and ship their "server" offerings with Perl out of the box. That would be good for all concerned -- good for Microsoft, good for their users, good for the Perl community. Maybe they finally take the hint and code up some panel drawer functionality (a la Gnome) for Windows Explorer.
In summary, good things can come from Microsoft having a Linux lab and testing out some competing software. They might learn something.
How easy is install in a multiboot scenerio?
on
FreeBSD Based Live CDs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I tried to install OpenBSD (also FreeBSD and NetBSD) and was unable to get past the disklabel process. Now, there are some things about my setup that may have been making it hard, but in the same scenerio I was able to get other systems installed (e.g., Mandrake, BeOS), and I failed to get BSD working. One of the things I suspect may have been a problem is that I was trying to put it on my "spare" partition that I was keeping open at the time for fooling around with installing various things just for a few days to play with. (Then I'd install something different after a while...) This partition was something like the third primary partition on the IDE secondary master driver, or something like that, and was probably past the 1024th cyllinder. Also I needed to keep the primary master MBR for PowerBoot (a third-party boot manager) and so could not put the BSD bootloader there.
Now, this was over a year ago, and I intend to try again soon, hoping that some things have been ironed out in newer versions. A FreeBSD LiveCD sure sounds like a good opportunity for me. I'll be giving one a try.
> FYI, there's another initiative to develop a fully Ruby-based operating > system (including the kernel), though one wonder when -- if ever -- this > project will deliver something usable.
The mere existence of the initiative, as anything other than a joke, increases my interest in Ruby a thousandfold. I've been passing on learning Ruby because I've been figuring it's Yet Another Language With Perl Envy, but if these people understand the importance of writing an operating system in a VHLL and throwing out all the legacy C code, then I'm going to have to pay some closer attention to the language they want to do it in. Maybe they've got something after all.
> once wireless and other alternative technologies abound
Satellite wireless broadband is fairly available. I can get it here, where DSL is not available. However, it's only good for downstream, which rather limits its usefulness as far as I'm concerned. I could download ISOs instead of buying CDs from cheapbytes.com, but I could not, for example, do X11 forwarding to my work system from home or to my home system from work. So it's not worth the outrageous price they want to charge for it. Also, there are compatibility issues depending on what OS you use.
Quite. I'd drop $50 a month without blinking, if it would get me 1Mbps up and down, even if the ping times suck. I don't live in a city anywhere near the size of Cinci, though, and can't even buy DSL here yet, so I'm not going to be holding my breath.
> And by the way, Cinncinati drivers don't hold a candle to Boston drivers > for badness. The only place I've found worse is DC, and that's due to > drivers diplomatic immunity.
I know a guy who claims the world's worst drivers live in Buenos Aires. He tells horror stories about people doing eighty mph on roads we'd consider unfit for vehicular travel. Also he says that when there's a train, the drivers on both sides of the tracks will position their cars as close to the tracks as possible, filling all lanes, shoulders, everything, and then when the train is gone everyone just tries to go forward.
Sweep is the more general verb that applies whether you're using a vacuum, a broom, or whatever. (But not a wet-mop; then you'd be mopping.) It's easier to say and to spell than "vacuum", so it tends to be used somewhat more often in most of the midwestern US (at least). "Sweep" (and "sweeper" for the equipment) is definitely more common than "vacuum" throughout most of Ohio, northern Indiana, and western Michigan; I'm not sure how far beyond those areas this usage extends, but it's definitely not particular to just Cincinnati.
> and they leave out "to be", for instance, "the carpet needs swept".
I don't think that's an ellision of an infinitive; I think it's rather a use of the past participial form as a predicate adjective. Some places prefer to use the present participial form ("the carpet needs sweeping" -- this seems to be particularly prominent in the UK), but in most of Ohio (at least) the past participial form is more common in this construct.
If it were an elided infinitive, one would expect to see infinitives elided in other circumstances (e.g., infinitives of completion), but the construction in question always seems to occur with linking verbs. So I think it's a participle used as a predicate adjective. If you can think of a verb whose past participial form differs in pronunciation from its infinitive form, I'll try out the sound of that verb's forms in this construct and let you know which one sounds "right" to my ear. (I've lived in Ohio long enough (and in enough different parts of Ohio) to know that Bucyrus is pronounced with one syllable and Mohican with two, that "Ohio" doesn't have any long O sounds in it, what a sammich is, and what you get when you put a red wig on ET[1]. I've also lived in Indiana and Michigan enough to know what's peculiar to Ohio and what's not.)
> Uh, putting chili on spaghetti? > Having a city park graced by golden statues of winged pigs? > Having each of the following: a first rate art museum, a first rate > botanical garden, and a first rate zoo?
Despite being from Ohio, the only one of these things I was aware of is the zoo. (It _is_ a quite good zoo, though. The only other decent zoo in the state is the Cleveland Metroparks one, but the Cinci zoo is better. The bug building is particularly interesting; most zoos don't have that.)
I thought the major thing Cincinatti was known for is one of the long-term losingest teams in football. But I'm not really a sports geek, so perhaps I'm getting it confused with another city?
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> Stdidiot is where you tell the user verbose output of what you are doing
> including positive affirmation!
The right place for this stuff to go is standard output; what we need is a
standardized centralized way for the user to change one setting in one place
and have all applications see it and know how simple/verbose/newbieish the
user wants everything to be. We could call it the user experience level and
abbreviate it UXL for full buzzword compliance. New user accounts could start
with the UXL set to 0 by default, which means "the user is slightly more
intelligent than lettuce but has less experience using computers". At a UXL
of 0, the desktop would consist of four big icons -- one for "read email", one
for "surf the web", one for "turn off computer", and one labelled "advanced",
which would prompt the user "Are you ready for more options?" and (if yes)
raise the UXL to 1. At a UXL of 0, the web browser would have three buttons
on the toolbar -- Back, Print, and Search. At UXL of 1 the address bar would
appear. And so on. As users gain experience, they'd keep raising their UXL
setting, which would cause more advanced options to appear in the menus,
preference dialogs, and so on. Command-line apps could read the setting too.
If the user raises the UXL to 3 or so, a command prompt window would become
available, but all the command-line apps would be set to a hyperverbose mode
wherein they explain exactly what they're going to do, do it, and then tell
the user what they did. Raising the UXL would ease off the more annoying
aspects of this; raising the UXL high enough would eventually land you with
old-school Unix-style behaviors. Given a high _enough_ UXL, rm would not
prompt "Are you sure", and standard globbing would be expanded into full
regular-expression pattern matching (a la Perl) and so on. It would need to
be well-documented exactly what you should set your UXL to in order to get
the "old", pre-UXL behavior. (128 seems like a nice number...) Users past
a certain level could directly set their UXL to a specific number and also
could set up their app launchers to change the UXL within that application's
environment (similar to running an app chrooted or sudoed or whatever) so as
to have different UXLs for different apps.
It should also be easy to set the UXL back down, so that users who raise it
too much too quickly aren't stuck at sea, so to speak. I'm thinking (at the
lower UXLs anyway) big fat buttons on the desktop for "More Advanced" and
"More Simple".
> > Being able to have a different resolution and color depth for each
;-)
> > workspace (virtual desktop, essentially) was really *useful*, and there
> > were other useful things.
>
> That would only slow things down.
Not necessarily. If you have a remotely decent monitor, there's no problem.
(If you don't, then just don't set up your workspaces to have different
resolutions and colour depths. It would of course be an optional feature,
and any time you add a new workspace it defaults to the same settings as
the previous workspace.)
> Many PC displays in wide use blank the screen for two whole seconds when
> the video card sends a signal that it's about to change the resolution or
> color depth. In addition, many PC displays such as LCDs can run well only
> at one specific resolution.
These are only problems with inferior video hardware. Okay, so if you have
cheesy video hardware, then don't use the feature. Arguing that including the
feature for people who can use it would "only slow things down" is like arguing
that X should only support 640x480, since some monitors can't display better.
Higher resolutions are undeniably useful if you have the hardware to support
them, and the same is true for having different resolutions on different
desktops. Indeed, while XFree doesn't currently support having _desktops_
with different resolutions, it _does_ support _zooming_ into your desktop by
using a lower-res video mode (hold ctrl and alt and hit + or - sometime), and
nobody complains that this feature "only slows things down". If your video
hardware isn't up to it, then nobody's making you use the feature.
> > I certainly wouldn't want to try to use my Linux/XFree/Gnome system with
> > only 128MB of RAM.
>
> Users of GNU/Linux on smaller computers can switch to a desktop environment
> that eats less RAM. Users of Microsoft Windows on smaller computers don't
> have that choice.
Sure they do. Okay, so besides just the desktop environment and window
manager they'd also have to switch out the rest of the OS, because it's all
integrated, but they're free to do that if they choose. (Yes, it would be
nice of OEMs didn't all want to sell you Windows whether you're going to
use it or not, but that's a separate issue.) I don't think it's reasonable
to expect current versions of everything to always run just fine on hardware
of any age. Sure, the current version of Windows doesn't do so well on a
five-year-old computer. News flash: it's intended to be run on a _current_
computer, not a five-year-old one. The five-year-old computer presumably
has an existing operating system; it doesn't need a new one. Non-geeks don't
feel the need to be "up-to-date" all the time; in fact, most end users are
quite adverse to upgrades. As for geeks, we know how to add RAM
Also, from an end-user perspective, switching from Gnome to twm is at
_least_ as big a change as switching from Windows to (say) KDE on Linux.
Under the hood it's a much smaller change, of course, but the change to the
end-user-visible portions of the interface is at least as great, if not
greater. The Gnome and KDE default setups have a thing that's real similar
to the start menu, a task list, and something that looks a lot like the
system tray and has a clock -- just like Windows, more or less. twm (by
default) has[1] manual window placement and no panel (windows iconify
instead, sort of like in Windows 3.1), among other differences. What's
the default way to get a list of apps (like the start menu), middle-click
on the wallpaper, IIRC?
So I don't think it's quite fair to say that with Linux/XFree you have the
option to switch GUIs but with Windows you don't; you can switch from Windows
to Linux/XFree, if you are so inclined, and any complaint you raise about
barrier to entry, learning new
> Five years of being a Linux weenie and I still remember almost everything
> about DOS. Oy.
Indeed. I bet if you gave me a list of DOS commands and I had to categorize
them off the top of my head according to whether they were builtins, COMs,
EXEs or BATch files, I'd probably get at least 80% of them right. I think
part of the reason I remember DOS so well is because it was inherently a
small and simple system. Today's OSes provide a lot more functionality, and
that makes them more complex. DOS left most of the functionality to
third-party apps. Especially the older versions of DOS (prior to version 5).
I've been fooling around with Linux since 1998, and it's been my main system
both at home and at work since circa 2001, but if you gave me a list of
commands and asked me which ones are bash builtins and which ones are scripts
or aliases and which ones are compiled binaries, I wouldn't know most of them.
Anyway, back to the help command: I agree that the DOS 6 help command is
a good model to look at, in terms of improving current help systems. Also
the VMS help system is pretty good and worth looking at. The problem with
man is that you have to know what the command is called before you can look
it up. There's apropos, but there's no discoverability there and it's harder
to spell and longer to type than help and (perhaps the worst thing) it gives
you a bunch of irrelevant non-command stuff like system calls and other
things a user doesn't need to know about. For example, let's say I want to
know the *nix equivalent of the DOS command MEM. So I try typing mem just
in case it's that simple, then also try memory, but no dice. So I fire up
apropos and get... 314 lines of response. So I pipe that into less and
start reading, and I will eventually find out about free, but this is NOT
an ideal interface.
Of course, the free command is one of the twenty or so commands that I
wouldn't need to find out about this way because I'd have already read about
it in a *nix-command-line tutorial, but there are other commands, not quite
so common as to be listed in an introductory tutorial but still useful enough
that the user might want to discover them. Things like screen for example.
(Yes, the DOS 6 help tells you about stuff like e.g., dosshell.)
So yeah, even for someone who started fooling with Debian in 1998, a help
command similar to the one in DOS 6 would be a welcome improvement.
> And what is wrong with reading a PDF?
1. Acrobat Reader ignores my system colour settings and displays the document
with black text on a white background. I'll go snowblind in two minutes.
This is a deal-breaker for me; it's not just about what I want to do; I
*cannot* read long documents in this format. (My eyes are more sensitive
to light than average; it's an accessibility requirement for me that I
be able to enforce a toned-down color scheme for everything.)
2. Acrobat Reader ignores my font settings and displays the text in whatever
ugly and hard-to-read font the author chose.
3. Acrobat Reader requires me to scroll to the bottom of each page, then
hit the next page button and *scroll back up to the top*. I can't just
scroll smoothly through the document like I can with a web page. I am
continually amazed that Adobe apparently continues to think this is a
reasonable user interface; I've seen better user interfaces designed by
high-school students creating "programs" in PowerPoint for English class.
4. Searching never works right in Acrobat Reader, and frequently text
selection and clipboard operations don't work properly either, so that
if I wanted to (say) quote a snippet of the article that I want to talk
about on slashdot, I'd have to retype it. What is this, 1982? I want
my clipboard, not excuses.
5. If I want to increase the text size, I have to just zoom in, and then
I'll end up with a horizontal scrollbar and need to scroll back and forth
as I read each line. If I want fewer words per line for easier reading,
I'm fresh out.
6. What's so wrong with HTML, which is actually very widely supported,
that people feel the need to go looking for other formats to write
their web documents in?
Windows is not the problem. User-ignorance is a problem, but it's not the big problem either. It's what's installed/configured. Here are some tips:
> I'm constantly told that I have an extremely high intelligence.
> I always feel like I should know so much more, though.
Intelligence and knowledge are different things. You gradually lose a lot of your intelligence as you age, but you gain knowledge and understanding and so are able to compensate. You can also gain thinking skills.
> Do you, the Slashdot readers, know of any ways to improve ones brain power?
Brain power? No, not as such. The brain (the physical organ between your ears) is mostly affected by your body chemistry, so apart from the usual medical advice (eat a ballanced diet, get enough sleep, don't do crack, ...) there's not a great
deal you can do.
However, you can exercise your *mind*. Read books that are at or above your reading level, books that make you think. (Specific examples? If you haven't read Godel, Escher, Bach yet, I can recommend that. The Bible is good for a number of readings. Knuth's book on surreal number theory is good. Read some Interactive Fiction, too. Curses, for example, and (if you really want to stretch) Spider and Web.)
Memorization is a learned skill. I don't know how many times people have told me, "I can't memorize". What they mean is, "I've never memorized." Very few people are blessed with a photographic memory; everyone else has to learn to memorize. Pick out a nice five-page passage you like from a good book, and make yourself learn it word-for-word until you can recite it verbatim with no errors. You start out with just the first sentence and work your way up. Oh, and you have to periodically review what you already know (just say it through once each time; if you don't have any trouble, you can double the time until the next review of that materiel).
Memorization gets easier with practice, and continues to get easier with practice the more you practice it. It's possible to get to the point where you can memorize a medium-density page of information in fifteen minutes flat, and this is a *really* useful skill to have. It's also possible to store entire books in your mind. No, your brain doesn't get full and start forgetting stuff. (Short-term memory works that way, but long-term memory doesn't.) There's a girl in my church who can quote all of John, Ephesians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Jonah, and six chapters of Daniel, and she's not even particularly bright (in fact, she's probably LD); she just took the trouble to learn how to memorize and then spent some time doing a bit of it.
Of course, there are other useful thinking skills besides (and, some would say, now that we have computers, more useful than) memorization. Practice analysis and discernment. Learn to pick apart everything you read, including fiction, and evaluate it in terms of the quality of the writing, stylistic issues, the author's sociopolitical worldview and how that influences the writing (especially with nonfiction, but yes, even with fiction), the originality (or not) of the plot, the quality of the character development, and so on and so forth. Write in-depth reviews.
Speaking of which... write. I don't mean (necessarily) professionally, but write. Not just "creative" writing, either; write essays. For fun. Make yourself put together and write from an outline, and then make yourself revise your writing repeatedly until the original draft looks like poor writing by comparison. This is good exercise, and it develops another useful skill.
Languages are a great way to go too. Learn computer languages, foreign languages, dead languages, ... Learn ones that are
significantly different from your native language. The (somewhat
old now) book,
How to Learn Any Language (Barry Farber) is one I would recommend -- but don't
just read the book; learn some la
> according to MS, an operating system *MUST* include the following:
> a) GUI b) web browser
Most distributions ship with these things in OSS land too.
> c) media player
Okay, *that* is annoying. I don't want CDs to be played by the same app
that opens PNG images, darnit!
> d) text editor
Most OSes have included a text editor since time out of mind, certainly
before there was a company called Microsoft. Actually, Microsoft's OSes
ship with a much smaller number of text editors than average. (There's
EDIT.COM, notepad.exe, and the textarea widget that gets used by various
applications -- that's three, the way I count, and they really need to
include a more capable one for power users.)
> e) solitaire f) metadata filesystem g) NSA backdoors
Okay, e and g are unnecessary. f was pioneered by Be, and although the
filesystem is not the most significant thing Be innovated, it sure would
be nice if more OS designers would look at the BeOS and copy its useful
features. Being able to have a different resolution and color depth for
each workspace (virtual desktop, essentially) was really *useful*, and
there were other useful things.
> h) severely restricted CLI
At least MS never shipped an OS with *no* CLI like certain other vendors.
> i) device driver incompatibilities
Since most of their drivers are written by the hardware vendors, it's hard
to blame them for this one. You could say that they should fix this by
writing their own drivers, but there's an awefully wide range of hardware
they'd have to write them for. Most other OSes that don't have this problem
achieve their lack of this problem by having tighter control over the
hardware, since the hardware is made by the same people as the OS. There
are certain notable exceptions to this, but I think what e.g. Linux has in
terms of drivers that are included with the OS should be considered a major
achievement; it might not be fair to hold all systems to that standard. Very
few proprietary systems, if any, ship with drivers included with the OS for
as wide a range of hardware. Solaris runs on a narrower range of hardware;
so does OpenVMS; so does OS X; so does AIX; so does virtually everything,
except for Windows, which relies on the hardware to come with a driver disk
or the user to retrieve drivers from the hardware manufacturer's website.
(Drivers are included with the OS for some hardware yes, but not for as wide
a range as with Linux.) The BSDs have also done remarkably well, but still,
that's basically two systems (since the BSDs can share driver code among one
another and so for these purposes count mostly as one), and there are quite
a number of other systems that give the lie to any supposition that this is
the norm; it's not the norm -- it's the exception.
> j) minimum 128M memory footprint
Oh, waaah. 640k is no longer enough for anyone; get over it, already.
I certainly wouldn't want to try to use my Linux/XFree/Gnome system with
only 128MB of RAM. Gah, I'd waste an hour a day (in little thirty-second
chunks) waiting for things to swap in and out. No, man, give me some RAM.
I want twice as many Megabytes of RAM as the number of Megahertz in the
CPU clock speed. I want the luxury of leaving windows open with stuff
halfway done while I do something else -- even if the app in question is
big, like OpenOffice. I want the luxury of leaving my database running all
the time, so I don't have to start it up to use it. If two different apps
that I use happen to want two different RDBMS backends, I want the luxury of
running both at the same time without worrying about it. I want the luxury
of using gdmflexiserver to have multiple GUI login sessions at the same time.
I want the luxury of working in Gimp with an image large enough to fill an
entire 8.5x11 page at a decent print resolution. I want to do all that and
not
> At what point does a bios become an operating system
This is old, old news. There were 8-bit micros in the seventies that, if
no OS was present on removable media (floppy, cartridge, whatever) at boot
time, they would go into ROM BASIC and you could just use that. (These were
systems that didn't support hard drives.) Some systems continued to do this
as late as the 80286 era (and some of these did support hard drives, but
they were theoretically optional).
Now, the ROM BASIC on these old systems didn't support today's peripherals,
of course (PCI? Heck, some of these were before ISA), but it supported some
of what was available at the time. This is perhaps a modernization of the
concept, but the concept itself is nowhere near new.
> The only comparison that could have been made is between the GameCube
> and the x86.
Right, and of course it's already running on x86 just fine.
> > When a Windows vulnerability is patched,
>
> You misspelled if.
Indeed. This is particularly relevant since we're currently discussing a
local privilege escalation vulnerability. Windows has had a local privilege
escalation vulnerability publically known for quite a long while now that
Microsoft has publically stated they will not fix. (Google for "shatter
attack".) They can't fix it easily because the fix would have to change
the Win32 API in a way that would break large numbers of applications,
including e.g. almost all antivirus software. Backward compatibility is
more important.
Of course, this (and any local priv escalation) is only a really big deal if
it can be combined with a trivial remote exploit that doesn't by itself give
privs. So, you want to patch it before a trivial remote exploit comes out.
> I don't have hard data to prove this, but I believe that the following
> two points are true: (1) there are more good guys than bad guys, or
> otherwise society as we know it wouldn't exist; and (2) good guys are
> smarter than bad guys, because our current social organization tends to
> favor being honest. Good guys get good salaries, bad guys are sent to jail.
You're heading in the right direction with this reasoning, but the details of
your conclusions are off. First, there aren't really more good guys than bad
guys. You'd reach that conclusion by assuming that anyone who's not a good
guy is a bad guy, but in fact most people don't give a rip about security one
way or the other. They have other things to think about.
Second, it's not _exactly_ true that good guys are smarter than bad guys.
What is true is that there are a lot of bad guys who don't have their stuff
together -- but there are a few who do, and they're very smart, much smarter
than the average good guy and probably smarter than most of the smart good
guys too. These are the real professional crackers. The teeming masses of
security bad guys however are just fooling around, which is why despite that
most of those who do concern themselves with security issues are bad guys,
it _seems_ like there are more good guys -- because the baddies who are just
fooling around don't get much accomplished. They waste most of their time
trying to impress other bad guys, keeping secrets from one another, and so
on and so forth. The good guys also can openly share information (patches
and whatnot) with anyone, and so even the ones who dabble can have access
to real information, so they have a tendency to be more effective than
similarly underdevoted bad guys.
> our current social organization tends to favor being honest. Good guys
> get good salaries, bad guys are sent to jail.
This is true, but it's also mostly irrelevant. Most bad guys don't choose
to be bad guys because it pays better. There are exceptions, of course, but
most have other motivations. Often it just boils down to depravity.
However, many or most bad guys don't have the strength of character to make
themselves do things when they don't feel like it today, and so consequently
they're not as dedicated and therefore not as effective as they would be.
Again, there are exceptions.
> it says something that the GameCube was easier to convert to than Windows
Was it really easier, or did it get done first for some other reason, such as
because it was more compelling? I mean, we're accustomed to the idea of using
Linux on low-end hardware as a server platform, so porting an RDBMS to it makes
a sort of (weird) sense, but Windows is inherently a desktop platform; the only
people who use Windows on servers are people who are so MS-only that they'll
also use MS SQL Server. There's very little niche there for an OSS RDBMS.
Okay, sure, there are people who use a desktop system to test and develop stuff
that will end up on a server, but they can usually get by with MySQL. I'm not
sure I really see the need to port PostgreSQL to Windows; they're pretty much
used in completely different scenerios.
An object-oriented assembly language -- what, you mean like zasm?
> Where can we draw the line? In my opinion 100/1000 distros is unimaginable.
> 10 is not that bad a number.
There actually are several hundred, but only a dozen or so actually matter,
and only really seven or so are "major" distros. Besides Mandrake, there's
RedHat/Fedora/PinkTie/Whatever, Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Knoppix,
and maybe another one or two I forgot. Then there are a handful of minor
distros that are nevertheless relevant (TurboLinux, Yellow Dog, LFS if you
classify that as a distro, microcontroller Linux, and so on.)
Most of the several hundred others can be classified into one of several
categories. A lot of them are niche-specialty items (e.g., specially geared
for teaching learning-disabled children using touchscreen technology -- you
know the sort of distros I mean). Some are custom distros mastered by and
for one particular organization or company as a house brand ("University of
Jonesville Linux"). There are also variations on various of the major
distros ("like Knoppix, but with Gnome instead of KDE", or "Like Mandrake,
but as a LiveCD"), and some lean-and-mean distros are geared toward basically
running one application or small set of applications on the minimum possible
resources (e.g., a tiny firewall distro, a dinky webserver distro, tomsrtbt,
and so on). These all have their usefullness, but none of them are anything
most users need to know or care about. (Okay, an argument could be made for
everyone needing to know about tomsrtbt, but Knoppix has taken over most of
its niche these days; still, if you count it, that only adds one more minor
distro to the list.)
> On the other hand, the UN should step in and limit the number of options
> when buying toothpaste. That decision has become mindboggling.
Toothpaste is a scam. (A harmless scam that doesn't cost you much, but a
scam.) You can brush with tapwater and get the same benefits as with paste.
# Volvo will never actually take this car into production, of course.
# But many of the ideas hatched by the female think-tank may still appear
# in more conventional Volvos, as well as in other cars within the group.
I'm thinking ideas like the seats and stuff, and maybe moving the windshield
washer fluid fill spot over by the fuel tank fill spot, are the ones that will
get included in other models, probably not the hood design.
> I dont know, working as a linux admin for MS? Sac-religeous?
I'd do it, under the right circumstances. Make money working with Linux?
Yeah, I'd do it. (Not right now; I'm fine where I am at the moment. But
I mean in general, I don't have anything against the very idea.) For a
while. Maybe some good would come of it, even. Perhaps, they might clone
some useful features from OSS into Windows. That would be good for all the
Windows users out there. Maybe for example they could sign a deal with
ActiveState and ship their "server" offerings with Perl out of the box.
That would be good for all concerned -- good for Microsoft, good for their
users, good for the Perl community. Maybe they finally take the hint and
code up some panel drawer functionality (a la Gnome) for Windows Explorer.
In summary, good things can come from Microsoft having a Linux lab and
testing out some competing software. They might learn something.
I tried to install OpenBSD (also FreeBSD and NetBSD) and was unable to get past
the disklabel process. Now, there are some things about my setup that may have
been making it hard, but in the same scenerio I was able to get other systems
installed (e.g., Mandrake, BeOS), and I failed to get BSD working. One of the
things I suspect may have been a problem is that I was trying to put it on my
"spare" partition that I was keeping open at the time for fooling around with
installing various things just for a few days to play with. (Then I'd install
something different after a while...) This partition was something like the
third primary partition on the IDE secondary master driver, or something like
that, and was probably past the 1024th cyllinder. Also I needed to keep the
primary master MBR for PowerBoot (a third-party boot manager) and so could not
put the BSD bootloader there.
Now, this was over a year ago, and I intend to try again soon, hoping that some
things have been ironed out in newer versions. A FreeBSD LiveCD sure sounds
like a good opportunity for me. I'll be giving one a try.
> FYI, there's another initiative to develop a fully Ruby-based operating
> system (including the kernel), though one wonder when -- if ever -- this
> project will deliver something usable.
The mere existence of the initiative, as anything other than a joke, increases
my interest in Ruby a thousandfold. I've been passing on learning Ruby because
I've been figuring it's Yet Another Language With Perl Envy, but if these
people understand the importance of writing an operating system in a VHLL
and throwing out all the legacy C code, then I'm going to have to pay some
closer attention to the language they want to do it in. Maybe they've got
something after all.
> once wireless and other alternative technologies abound
Satellite wireless broadband is fairly available. I can get it here, where
DSL is not available. However, it's only good for downstream, which rather
limits its usefulness as far as I'm concerned. I could download ISOs instead
of buying CDs from cheapbytes.com, but I could not, for example, do X11
forwarding to my work system from home or to my home system from work. So
it's not worth the outrageous price they want to charge for it. Also, there
are compatibility issues depending on what OS you use.
> Nice? Nice??
Quite. I'd drop $50 a month without blinking, if it would get me 1Mbps up
and down, even if the ping times suck. I don't live in a city anywhere near
the size of Cinci, though, and can't even buy DSL here yet, so I'm not going
to be holding my breath.
> And by the way, Cinncinati drivers don't hold a candle to Boston drivers
> for badness. The only place I've found worse is DC, and that's due to
> drivers diplomatic immunity.
I know a guy who claims the world's worst drivers live in Buenos Aires. He
tells horror stories about people doing eighty mph on roads we'd consider
unfit for vehicular travel. Also he says that when there's a train, the
drivers on both sides of the tracks will position their cars as close to
the tracks as possible, filling all lanes, shoulders, everything, and then
when the train is gone everyone just tries to go forward.
> If you know a place where the grass truly is greener, let me know.
Oooh, I can answer this one! According to Erma Bombeck, the grass is
always greener right over the septic tank. HTH.HAND.
> they say "sweep" rather than "vacuum"
Sweep is the more general verb that applies whether you're using a vacuum,
a broom, or whatever. (But not a wet-mop; then you'd be mopping.) It's
easier to say and to spell than "vacuum", so it tends to be used somewhat
more often in most of the midwestern US (at least). "Sweep" (and "sweeper"
for the equipment) is definitely more common than "vacuum" throughout most
of Ohio, northern Indiana, and western Michigan; I'm not sure how far beyond
those areas this usage extends, but it's definitely not particular to just
Cincinnati.
> and they leave out "to be", for instance, "the carpet needs swept".
I don't think that's an ellision of an infinitive; I think it's rather a use
of the past participial form as a predicate adjective. Some places prefer to
use the present participial form ("the carpet needs sweeping" -- this seems
to be particularly prominent in the UK), but in most of Ohio (at least) the
past participial form is more common in this construct.
If it were an elided infinitive, one would expect to see infinitives elided
in other circumstances (e.g., infinitives of completion), but the construction
in question always seems to occur with linking verbs. So I think it's a
participle used as a predicate adjective. If you can think of a verb whose
past participial form differs in pronunciation from its infinitive form, I'll
try out the sound of that verb's forms in this construct and let you know
which one sounds "right" to my ear. (I've lived in Ohio long enough (and in
enough different parts of Ohio) to know that Bucyrus is pronounced with one
syllable and Mohican with two, that "Ohio" doesn't have any long O sounds in
it, what a sammich is, and what you get when you put a red wig on ET[1].
I've also lived in Indiana and Michigan enough to know what's peculiar to
Ohio and what's not.)
[1] Dorothy Fuldheim
> Uh, putting chili on spaghetti?
> Having a city park graced by golden statues of winged pigs?
> Having each of the following: a first rate art museum, a first rate
> botanical garden, and a first rate zoo?
Despite being from Ohio, the only one of these things I was aware of is the
zoo. (It _is_ a quite good zoo, though. The only other decent zoo in the
state is the Cleveland Metroparks one, but the Cinci zoo is better. The
bug building is particularly interesting; most zoos don't have that.)
I thought the major thing Cincinatti was known for is one of the long-term
losingest teams in football. But I'm not really a sports geek, so perhaps
I'm getting it confused with another city?