Indeed. Web browsers have generally not been on my list of applications that are permitted to play sound, ever since the capability to play MIDI was introduced in Netscape. Why would anyone want that? I do NOT want random websites that I look at to be able to decide what sound comes out of my speakers. I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.
Businesses just raise their prices to compensate. The people who really get hurt are the people who make just a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage, because they've worked hard to get raises. Guess what happens to their raises when minimum wage goes up and drives inflation? Yeah.
With that said, I'm surprised California minimum wage wasn't already more than $15/hour. In real terms, that might actually be _lower_ than minimum wage in the Midwest. I say might, because it depends somewhat on exactly what you're buying. Electronics, for instance, are generally the same price nationwide, so your minimum wage job in California could buy a lot more iPhones than an equivalent minimum wage job in Ohio. OTOH, if you are mostly buying food and housing, you'd be better off with $5 an hour in Indiana than $15 an hour in Southern California. So figuring out an exact purchasing power ratio for the general case is not really possible. But anyway, my point is, $15/hour sounds high if you live in a place with a reasonable cost of living, but it's really not high in LA. Money's just worth less out there.
"Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out."
Stripping away the spin, updates will come out as soon as they're ready (which is probably a good thing on the whole), and business users will have to test and deploy them at that time, whenever it happens, rather than having a monthly scheduled day to do so.
That "option to set their own update cycle" spin is nonsense. If you do that, every single security fix Microsoft ever rolls out goes public days or weeks before you get it -- like what happens when a zero-day goes public and it takes Microsoft several days or weeks to get the fix out, but it'll be like that for you for every single security update ever. Yeah, no, that is not the way any reasonable large business is going to handle it.
This means effectively, if you are a large company, you will really need to have people on call or otherwise available every day in case an update comes out. But, in 2015, are there any large businesses left that *don't* already have IT people on the clock every day? I see this as Microsoft catching up with the reality that at this point large businesses *do* have IT people on staff full time -- they *have* to have them -- and everyone, including the large businesses, is put unnecessarily at risk when security updates that are ready to roll out are held back to wait for a certain day of the month. It does mean occasionally an IT department's going to have to reschedule a day full of department meetings and team-building exercises to test and deploy an update that just came out, but it's worth it.
So it's the right thing to do, but Microsoft's spin is so much nonsense.
You should move to Galion. You'd be happy here. We're under some kind of exotic grandfather clause from Hell that has prevented us from ever joining the twentieth century and getting fluoride in our water, even to this day. So we don't have it.
And actually, if you can get past the crazy high dental bills and somewhat low educational standards, Galion *is* a fairly nice place to live, in many other respects.
I live in Ohio. We have 3.x and even 4.x quakes, I'm told, "all the time" (albeit, not nearly as often as California).
I've never felt an earthquake, nor do I know anyone who has ever felt one of these 3.x or 4.x quakes. Back in the eighties (I want to say '86 maybe) we had a 5.x, which of course was all over the news for weeks. I knew several people who claimed to have felt that one, including my father. Invariably, they were sitting at the time, and not on a padded surface like a couch or recliner, either. People who were outdoors walking around at the time -- including me -- felt nothing. We could only hear about it later and envy our friends who had actually experienced this amazing once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
I don't doubt that it's/theoretically/ possible to feel a 3.0, under perfect laboratory conditions. But under normal real-world conditions, there's no way you're ever going to notice it. It's way too subtle.
I don't know about modern German, but in Bach's time any keyboard instrument would be called a Klavier.
However, you are certainly correct about the Well-Tempered Clavier being by design particularly suited, more than any of Bach's other music, to newer instruments that were more closely approaching the modern piano than anything that had come before. That's the whole point of the piece, in fact.
> I went to Bach's childhood home and they have a number of his harpsichords
Yes, but those harpsichords were probably all justly intoned for a particular key (not necessarily all for the/same/ particular key, mind you). Well tempered instruments were a relatively new thing in Bach's time, and the instrument most widely associated with well temperament (and later perfectly equal temperament) is the pianoforte.
Most of Bach's works would be better performed on some other instrument -- violin, harpsichord, or in a few cases the pipe organ. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the exception. More than anything else Bach wrote, it really does belong on the piano.
The more you study Bach's work, the more you get the impression that he didn't really prefer one instrument over another. The man routinely took pieces that had been originally written for one instrument and reworked them for another. He made violin pieces work on the harpsichord, harpsichord pieces on the pipe organ, organ pieces on the violin, whatever. He really seems to have been more interested in the music itself than in the specific acoustic properties of any particular instrument.
Besides that, of all the works Bach wrote, the WTC specifically is probably the best suited for pianoforte. Virtually every other keyboard instrument available in Bach's time was tuned to a just intonation in almost every case, making them unsuitable to play this particular piece. A justly intoned harpsichord (or a set of justly intoned violins for that matter) would be fine for BWV1079 or 1080, but it clearly wouldn't work at all for WTC.
At least they've improved the performance of using.zip files in Windows Explorer. Back when they first introduced that, it was *awful*. If the zipfile contained more than a couple of dozen files, copying them out took an amazingly long time. (It's still not as fast as some other software that works with.zip files, e.g. info-zip; but it's way more reasonable now than it used to be. It's no longer bad enough to drive me to put the.zip file on a USB 2.0 flash drive and hand-carry it to a Linux box to unzip it and hand-carry the contents back and copy them from the USB 2.0 flash drive to the Windows computer -- at one time, this was actually significantly faster than using Explorer's zipfile support, if the zipfile had a lot of small files in it.)
> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.
I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.
When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.
Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)
Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)
For practical purposes, you can think of libuncursed as the display layer of NetHack 4, replacing an older curses library that NitroHack used, which in turn replaced the extensive and rather complicated set of platform-specific user interfaces NetHack 3.4.3 used, which were never entirely consistent with one another, due to being separately maintained.
libnethack is distributed with the game, as part of it, and I think it is even linked in statically by default. Yes, it was written as a highly-generalized support library, so that it *could* be used by other projects if desired and could probably even be made a dynamic library. But if all you want to do is build and run NetHack 4, that doesn't matter.
But in any case the original question from the Dev Team is about what to do in the vanilla codebase that may eventually lead to a new vanilla release (with a number yet to be announced, but 3.6 is probable; the number 3.5 will not be used for reasons explained on nethack.org). The vanilla codebase does not use libuncursed and in a number of additional ways is far more similar to 3.4.3 than it is to NetHack 4.
Although, the NetHack 4 devs are probably following this thread as well and may also implement Unicode in a larger way. (Unicode graphics for map display are already supported there, but things like player names, fruit names, object names, and level annotations are still treated as ASCII, I think, the same as in 3.4.3.)
Another thing not mentioned in the post is that the Dev Team is known to have already implemented some Unicode support, using wchar_t, which you can find in the leaked code (a tarball made from the tip of the dev team's internal repository from a few months ago now), if you hunt down a copy of that. But apparently they have not entirely settled on that implementation as the final solution.
Get ready for the big one. If we have an earthquake because of this, it could measure, 3.0, 3.5, maybe even 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale. People up to several miles away from the epicenter might be able to *feel* the quake, if they are sitting quietly in unpadded chairs at the time and concentrating on paying attention to tiny vibrations.
(I exaggerate. Slightly. I believe we actually had a 6.something once, back in the eighties, and people up to eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter claimed afterward that they felt it.)
Ohio is only seismically active in the technical sense. You generally need an actual seismograph to detect said activity. I'm sure it's fascinating, but it has little practical significance.
We never had a democracy. Ever. We have a republic -- a representative government. We elect people to engage in political discourse for us, so that we don't all of us have to do that ourselves, so that we can get on with our lives.
Furthermore, engaging in political "discourse", as you call it, with morons going on about irrelevant garbage on social networks would do absolutely NOTHING to help me know how to vote. Having an actual intelligent conversation about a real political issue would be a different thing. I might actually be interested in that. But listening to the kind of idiots who like to talk about news and politics on social networks drool about talking points they don't even understand that they heard on television is NOT my idea of good discourse.
Blocking Akamai would have significantly more impact than blocking Edgecast, because Akamai is the *big* CDN. It's like the difference between blocking Bing and blocking Google. One will result in bitter complaints, and the other will result in torches and pitchforks.
I watched a cat video once. It was dumb. With that said, however...
> The French love sharing news and politics on social networks
If I had to choose between sitting through a hundred hours of nonstop stupid cat videos or thirty minutes of news and politics on social networks, I'd take the stupid cat videos every time. It's clearly the lesser of those two evils.
You forgot the most important selling point of the new Firefox version:
- Re-arranged the toolbar buttons, merged some unrelated ones, and changed their appearances beyond recognition, to prevent users from easily learning where to find the ones they want.
Can you read your email in it? Can you read Slashdot in it? Can you use it to play music, get on IRC, play Zork and NetHack, and do in-place edits on a file that's stored on a remote server that you can access via ssh?
If you answer "no" to any of these questions, then it's not Emacs.
> three years (a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm).
I don't know exactly where you live, but where I come from most consumer (i.e., home) computers aren't really new enough to comfortably run Vista, let alone Eight. Most of Seven's market share comes from people's work computers, which are upgraded considerably more often than home computers, on average. Most of Eight's market share comes from people whose old Windows XP computer finally died, so they went out and bought a new computer. (Seven has some of that too, but such systems are outnumbered by work computers, which are *mostly* Seven at this point, although there are still some XP holdouts.)
Slashdot Mirror
1. Go to Mars.
2. There is no step 2.
3. There is no step 3 either.
Indeed. Web browsers have generally not been on my list of applications that are permitted to play sound, ever since the capability to play MIDI was introduced in Netscape. Why would anyone want that? I do NOT want random websites that I look at to be able to decide what sound comes out of my speakers. I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.
Businesses just raise their prices to compensate. The people who really get hurt are the people who make just a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage, because they've worked hard to get raises. Guess what happens to their raises when minimum wage goes up and drives inflation? Yeah.
With that said, I'm surprised California minimum wage wasn't already more than $15/hour. In real terms, that might actually be _lower_ than minimum wage in the Midwest. I say might, because it depends somewhat on exactly what you're buying. Electronics, for instance, are generally the same price nationwide, so your minimum wage job in California could buy a lot more iPhones than an equivalent minimum wage job in Ohio. OTOH, if you are mostly buying food and housing, you'd be better off with $5 an hour in Indiana than $15 an hour in Southern California. So figuring out an exact purchasing power ratio for the general case is not really possible. But anyway, my point is, $15/hour sounds high if you live in a place with a reasonable cost of living, but it's really not high in LA. Money's just worth less out there.
"Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out."
Stripping away the spin, updates will come out as soon as they're ready (which is probably a good thing on the whole), and business users will have to test and deploy them at that time, whenever it happens, rather than having a monthly scheduled day to do so.
That "option to set their own update cycle" spin is nonsense. If you do that, every single security fix Microsoft ever rolls out goes public days or weeks before you get it -- like what happens when a zero-day goes public and it takes Microsoft several days or weeks to get the fix out, but it'll be like that for you for every single security update ever. Yeah, no, that is not the way any reasonable large business is going to handle it.
This means effectively, if you are a large company, you will really need to have people on call or otherwise available every day in case an update comes out. But, in 2015, are there any large businesses left that *don't* already have IT people on the clock every day? I see this as Microsoft catching up with the reality that at this point large businesses *do* have IT people on staff full time -- they *have* to have them -- and everyone, including the large businesses, is put unnecessarily at risk when security updates that are ready to roll out are held back to wait for a certain day of the month. It does mean occasionally an IT department's going to have to reschedule a day full of department meetings and team-building exercises to test and deploy an update that just came out, but it's worth it.
So it's the right thing to do, but Microsoft's spin is so much nonsense.
You should move to Galion. You'd be happy here. We're under some kind of exotic grandfather clause from Hell that has prevented us from ever joining the twentieth century and getting fluoride in our water, even to this day. So we don't have it.
And actually, if you can get past the crazy high dental bills and somewhat low educational standards, Galion *is* a fairly nice place to live, in many other respects.
> 100 months rent maximum (and lower in times of high interest rates)
Ok, but interest rates are kinda not real high right now, so.
Where is 500 a month a "very low" rate? Around here that's about average.
Oh, right, Southern California. Of course. Meh. Why would anyone voluntarily live there?
I live in Ohio. We have 3.x and even 4.x quakes, I'm told, "all the time" (albeit, not nearly as often as California).
/theoretically/ possible to feel a 3.0, under perfect laboratory conditions. But under normal real-world conditions, there's no way you're ever going to notice it. It's way too subtle.
I've never felt an earthquake, nor do I know anyone who has ever felt one of these 3.x or 4.x quakes. Back in the eighties (I want to say '86 maybe) we had a 5.x, which of course was all over the news for weeks. I knew several people who claimed to have felt that one, including my father. Invariably, they were sitting at the time, and not on a padded surface like a couch or recliner, either. People who were outdoors walking around at the time -- including me -- felt nothing. We could only hear about it later and envy our friends who had actually experienced this amazing once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
I don't doubt that it's
> And the German word for "piano" is "Klavier".
I don't know about modern German, but in Bach's time any keyboard instrument would be called a Klavier.
However, you are certainly correct about the Well-Tempered Clavier being by design particularly suited, more than any of Bach's other music, to newer instruments that were more closely approaching the modern piano than anything that had come before. That's the whole point of the piece, in fact.
> I went to Bach's childhood home and they have a number of his harpsichords
/same/ particular key, mind you). Well tempered instruments were a relatively new thing in Bach's time, and the instrument most widely associated with well temperament (and later perfectly equal temperament) is the pianoforte.
Yes, but those harpsichords were probably all justly intoned for a particular key (not necessarily all for the
Most of Bach's works would be better performed on some other instrument -- violin, harpsichord, or in a few cases the pipe organ. The Well-Tempered Clavier is the exception. More than anything else Bach wrote, it really does belong on the piano.
The more you study Bach's work, the more you get the impression that he didn't really prefer one instrument over another. The man routinely took pieces that had been originally written for one instrument and reworked them for another. He made violin pieces work on the harpsichord, harpsichord pieces on the pipe organ, organ pieces on the violin, whatever. He really seems to have been more interested in the music itself than in the specific acoustic properties of any particular instrument.
Besides that, of all the works Bach wrote, the WTC specifically is probably the best suited for pianoforte. Virtually every other keyboard instrument available in Bach's time was tuned to a just intonation in almost every case, making them unsuitable to play this particular piece. A justly intoned harpsichord (or a set of justly intoned violins for that matter) would be fine for BWV1079 or 1080, but it clearly wouldn't work at all for WTC.
At least they've improved the performance of using .zip files in Windows Explorer. Back when they first introduced that, it was *awful*. If the zipfile contained more than a couple of dozen files, copying them out took an amazingly long time. (It's still not as fast as some other software that works with .zip files, e.g. info-zip; but it's way more reasonable now than it used to be. It's no longer bad enough to drive me to put the .zip file on a USB 2.0 flash drive and hand-carry it to a Linux box to unzip it and hand-carry the contents back and copy them from the USB 2.0 flash drive to the Windows computer -- at one time, this was actually significantly faster than using Explorer's zipfile support, if the zipfile had a lot of small files in it.)
> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.
I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.
When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.
Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)
Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)
Five bytes. In decimal, it'd be 38 115 104 121 59. HTH.HAND.
Honestly, it'd probably taste better than some of the other stuff NetHack characters eat.
For practical purposes, you can think of libuncursed as the display layer of NetHack 4, replacing an older curses library that NitroHack used, which in turn replaced the extensive and rather complicated set of platform-specific user interfaces NetHack 3.4.3 used, which were never entirely consistent with one another, due to being separately maintained.
libnethack is distributed with the game, as part of it, and I think it is even linked in statically by default. Yes, it was written as a highly-generalized support library, so that it *could* be used by other projects if desired and could probably even be made a dynamic library. But if all you want to do is build and run NetHack 4, that doesn't matter.
But in any case the original question from the Dev Team is about what to do in the vanilla codebase that may eventually lead to a new vanilla release (with a number yet to be announced, but 3.6 is probable; the number 3.5 will not be used for reasons explained on nethack.org). The vanilla codebase does not use libuncursed and in a number of additional ways is far more similar to 3.4.3 than it is to NetHack 4.
Although, the NetHack 4 devs are probably following this thread as well and may also implement Unicode in a larger way. (Unicode graphics for map display are already supported there, but things like player names, fruit names, object names, and level annotations are still treated as ASCII, I think, the same as in 3.4.3.)
Another thing not mentioned in the post is that the Dev Team is known to have already implemented some Unicode support, using wchar_t, which you can find in the leaked code (a tarball made from the tip of the dev team's internal repository from a few months ago now), if you hunt down a copy of that. But apparently they have not entirely settled on that implementation as the final solution.
Get ready for the big one. If we have an earthquake because of this, it could measure, 3.0, 3.5, maybe even 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale. People up to several miles away from the epicenter might be able to *feel* the quake, if they are sitting quietly in unpadded chairs at the time and concentrating on paying attention to tiny vibrations.
(I exaggerate. Slightly. I believe we actually had a 6.something once, back in the eighties, and people up to eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter claimed afterward that they felt it.)
Ohio is only seismically active in the technical sense. You generally need an actual seismograph to detect said activity. I'm sure it's fascinating, but it has little practical significance.
We never had a democracy. Ever. We have a republic -- a representative government. We elect people to engage in political discourse for us, so that we don't all of us have to do that ourselves, so that we can get on with our lives.
Furthermore, engaging in political "discourse", as you call it, with morons going on about irrelevant garbage on social networks would do absolutely NOTHING to help me know how to vote. Having an actual intelligent conversation about a real political issue would be a different thing. I might actually be interested in that. But listening to the kind of idiots who like to talk about news and politics on social networks drool about talking points they don't even understand that they heard on television is NOT my idea of good discourse.
Blocking Akamai would have significantly more impact than blocking Edgecast, because Akamai is the *big* CDN. It's like the difference between blocking Bing and blocking Google. One will result in bitter complaints, and the other will result in torches and pitchforks.
I watched a cat video once. It was dumb. With that said, however...
> The French love sharing news and politics on social networks
If I had to choose between sitting through a hundred hours of nonstop stupid cat videos or thirty minutes of news and politics on social networks, I'd take the stupid cat videos every time. It's clearly the lesser of those two evils.
You forgot the most important selling point of the new Firefox version:
- Re-arranged the toolbar buttons, merged some unrelated ones, and changed their appearances beyond recognition, to prevent users from easily learning where to find the ones they want.
Can you read your email in it? Can you read Slashdot in it? Can you use it to play music, get on IRC, play Zork and NetHack, and do in-place edits on a file that's stored on a remote server that you can access via ssh?
If you answer "no" to any of these questions, then it's not Emacs.
> three years (a complete tech cycle in the consumer realm).
I don't know exactly where you live, but where I come from most consumer (i.e., home) computers aren't really new enough to comfortably run Vista, let alone Eight. Most of Seven's market share comes from people's work computers, which are upgraded considerably more often than home computers, on average. Most of Eight's market share comes from people whose old Windows XP computer finally died, so they went out and bought a new computer. (Seven has some of that too, but such systems are outnumbered by work computers, which are *mostly* Seven at this point, although there are still some XP holdouts.)