Does anyone else think that researching ways NOT to make someone explode when pumping gas in there during a colonoscopy might actually be a good thing? I don't really want to end up like one of Dig Dug's enemies, you know...
Eew... you mean Dig Dug was shoving his hose up the monsters' backsides? (*) No wonder I preferred Mr. Do...
(*) Upon proofreading this, the unintentional innuendo makes it sound even worse:-O
Damn you! Just one misplaced apostrophe and I could have had an amusing joke about how snakes- and python's in particular- are incapable of learning anything more complicated than Javascript.
But nooooo..... you had to be gramatically correct. Spoilsport! Where's an illiterate when you need one?!:'-(
Boy, are people still banging on about that, 35 years on?
Yes they are. And you know why? It's because Nestle are still doing that, 35 years on.
They die because the water they drink is tainted. It would still be tainted when they stop drinking breast milk.
No, it's not Nestle's fault that toddlers and older children don't have clean water to drink. It certainly *is* their fault that babies are being exposed to additional risk at a vulnerable age for no justifiable reason other than to bulk up their own profits. Particularly as babies of that relatively undeveloped age (who would normally be drinking breast milk) aren't really meant to be able to handle water-borne pathogens to the same extent as older, weaned children.
If you want to help those kids, donate to sanitation efforts.
As a suggestion in its own right, that would be laudible. As an attempt to divert attention and excuse Nestle from responsibility, it's contemptible.
Nestle were the ones that made the lack of clean water an even bigger problem than it needed to be. Improving sanitation and boycotting Nestle are not mutually incompatible, and suggesting that the water supply should be improved as an attempt to let Nestle off the hook- and indeed to bolster their business- is pretty disgusting.
Boycotting Nestle has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
That's open to question. I agree that those greedy fucks wouldn't be doing this "35 years on" if it wasn't making them more money than any boycott was costing them. Whether that means more people should be boycotting them or taking more action is open to question.
People do it because it's an easy hair shirt to wear and requires no real sacrifice.
That as may be, peoples' alleged laziness doesn't make Nestle's actions any more acceptable.
If 10% of the instructions executed take 10 clock cycles each, there is no budget left if your target is 1 instruction per clock cycle (and that target is not exactly aggressive). If any of the other instructions executed take more than zero clock cycles, you will miss the target.
Perhaps we are misinterpreting each other. When you referred to "making 10% of the instructions take 10 clock cycles", I assumed that you meant "10% of the instruction set that a given CPU supports" whereas (apparently) you meant "10% of the instructions that make up a given program".
IMHO, the former interpetation makes more sense though, because the designers of the chip can't somehow dictate the exact proportion of instructions in every program it'll be expected to run (though they can influence it by design), and the program-writers can't dictate how long the instructions last (though they can influence it by choosing different instructions).
What I had in mind was (say) if one was discussing a chip where those 10-clock-cycle instructions were (say) only included for legacy support (e.g. like the nice-idea-at-the-time-instructions Intel introduced then superseded in successive generations of the x86, but still had to support for compatibility) and not likely to be used in modern programs, then they wouldn't be likely to make up 10% of instructions executed in practice.
Like I posted elsewhere, intel hasn't made real CISC processors for years, and I don't think anyone has.
Modern Intel processors are just RISC with a decoder to the old CISC instruction set.
Exactly. Intel has been doing this ever since the Pentium Pro and Pentium II came out in the 1990s. Anyone who knows much at all about x86 CPUs is aware of this, and Perens certainly will be. That's why I'm surprised that that article misleadingly states:-
So, we start with the fact that Atom isn't really the right architecture for portable devices (*) with limited power budgets. Intel has tried to address this by building a hidden core within the chip that actually runs RISC instructions, while providing the CISC instruction set that ia32 programs like Microsoft Windows expect.
The "hidden core" bit is, of course, correct, but the way it's stated here implies that this is (a) something new and (b) something that Intel have done to mitigate performance issues on such devices, when in fact it's the way that all Intel's "x86" processors have been designed for the past 15 years!
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting or misunderstanding the article, and he's saying that- unlike previous CPUs- the new Atom chips have their "internal" RISC instruction set directly accessible to the outside world. But I don't think that's what was meant.
(*) This is in the context of having explained why IA32 is a legacy architecture not suited to portable devices and presented Atom as an example of this.
Maplin UK recently had a While-Stocks-Last promotion on Intenso 64GB pen drives - three for £18. That promo lasted all of half an hour before even the distribution centres ran out.
I'm pretty sure that was one of those attention-grabbing below-cost-price offers on an intentionally-limited amount of stock that one has to be fast and lucky to catch. As such, it doesn't say much about the everyday price of a 64GB pen drive.
That said, one can probably pick up a 16GB drive for more like US $10 these days.
(Note; this is a reference to my supposed "homepage" link, which actually points to Slashdot Japan shoved through Google Translate)
Thank you for introducing me to Slashdot Japan in English. With headlines like "Why do you need the growth of the railway children" I know which site I'll be visiting more often.
Yes, I can only assume that Japanese is a language that isn't as simple to auto-translate to English as others. Google Translate does quite a good job on some European languages, but Japanese comes across as quaintly bizarre at best and downright incomprehensible way too often.:-)
In 1995 nobody envisioned computers being in everyone's home and connected to the internet. Back then, a PC was a single-user device on its own or a local network.
Wrong- the Internet was already starting to break into the public consciousness by 1994, with a mainstream-oriented news/analysis programme about it on British TV by the middle of the year, and mainstream magazines such as this one coming out shortly afterwards.
Windows 95 came out in late 1995, by which time the Internet was becoming quite well-known about; the man on the street had probably heard about it, even if most non-geeks didn't have net access yet. MS hoped they could corral users into using their proprietary MSN service instead, and didn't even include a browser (i.e. IE!) with the first release of W95, nor even include TCP/IP in the default networking setup. Whether this was an intentional move to divert attention away from the Internet and into their own walled garden service (and the belief that this could be done), a genuine underestimation of the Internet or simply an afterthought, they were still clearly thinking about online services when W95 launched, even if that service wasn't the Internet.
You confuse explaining a rational for doing sometime, with an endorsement for the practice.
My apologies- I thought your comment came across a bit like you (personally) were trying to excuse the company with that rationale, rather than merely explaining their position. I'm happy to accept that this was a misinterpretation.
The gaming company know that cheaters are a problem, then they need to figure out where to draw the line.
Systematically compromising *everyone's* anonymity without telling them so is (IMHO) quite clearly over that line.
So if you are going to be taking screen shots of your cheating. Might as well get tracked down and banned because of it.
And if you *haven't* actually been cheating, but you've posted pictures of your WoW game for whatever reason over the years anyway, it's okay that identifying information was embedded without your knowledge (possibly to be used against you years later in circumstances like, oh... *this case*) even if you had good reason to want to remain anonymous?
Actually, I don't care whether the person *was* cheating, it doesn't excuse this sort of thing. If Activision had wanted to do this, they should have been open about it happening, if not the precise mechanics of how it was implemented.
...because convincing people to pay $200 to upgrade from Windows NT 6.0 to Windows NT 6.1 is not as easy as telling them it's a whole new version of Windows.
It's also got a different consumer name from the previous version of Windows, because marketing it as what it really was- i.e. "Windows Vista Second Edition"- would have tainted it with the name of an irredeemably disliked failure, even if it *had* fixed a lot of the things people hated about the original Vista.
People ran "Windows 3.11", "Windows 95", and "Windows 98" for a very long time, and were fine with names like that. Dumping marketing into this and giving the silly names only speaks to the audience they're trying to capture.
"Windows 95" (with its consumer-obvious and up-to-date-signifying year number) was already a more marketing-driven name than the previous version-numbered Windows releases.
Windows 7 is sort of crap, because its pseudo version number doesn't really signify anything meaningful. It's not version "7" internally, and one could argue whether it's really the "7th" release of Windows anyway. (You could probably argue for anything from 6 to 10 using similar logic, so it's pointless).
Vista is an *obviously* marketing-driven name, but at least it's openly so and doesn't really confuse with its clear vapidness. "Windows XP", on the other hand... nowadays it's been with us so long, we don't even think about that meaningless name, but even when it was new it never got called out on it.
I bet the vast majority of people don't even know what "XP" is supposed to mean. I *do* know what it's meant to represent (the user "eXPerience", ahem). If anything, knowing that makes it seem even more vapid and meaningless, a stupid, half-baked marketing-driven non-acronym that Microsoft never seemed to bother marketing, thus making one wonder why they bothered.
Also, XP represents a smiley with eyes screwed up in frustration sticking out its tongue...:-)
In a sense, although I'm sure if they were being pedantic they'd argue that technically it *is* Firefox 12 because that's what it's called.:)
Anyway, what about Java's numbering... we started with Java 1.0 and 1.1... then we moved to Java 2 SE (J2SE), which still had the version number 1.2(!) Following that we had J2SE 1.3, J2SE 1.4 and then, er... J2SE 5.0. After which they dropped the "2" so it was "Java SE 6.0" and so on. That's not counting the stupid half-baked marketing driven brand dilution, sorry.... *extension* of the "Java" Desktop System.
Mind you, Microsoft are the experts when it comes to counter-productive, marketing-driven messing about with names. Witness "Microsoft Account" which Wikipedia tells us was "previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID". Unbelievable... how many people know all those names, or that they're all basically the same thing?
Another good MS example was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme, "Plays for Sure"- obviously implying Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. Except that they then proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed *other* schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range.
In short, MS are the market leaders when it comes to creating a clusterfuck of overlapping, badly-defined brands where no-one has a clue what they're meant to represent because this week's corporate marketer wants to justify their pay packet by chopping and changing stuff for no reason at all, no doubt egged on by senior management with no focus.
No doubt, but it's not really consistent with the existing scheme (i.e. the "proper English" names of cat species) and nor does the other suggestion of "Felix Domesticux" (whether that's correct Latin or not).
So they'll just have to go with my oh-so-amusing suggestion anyway;-P
That is why some smart people recorded TV shows they hoped to sell again and again on film and not video-tape. Because film has a "wasted" resolution in the days of VHS video tapes but when DVD and now Blu-ray came out, these shows can simply be re-scanned from the original footage and voila, something new to flog to the punters.
Maybe some people did, but most of them didn't. Ironically, American TV dramas from the late-80s onwards moved from being entirely shot and edited on film, to being shot on film but edited (and postproduced) on video. Standard-def crappy NTSC video, that is.
This probably didn't matter at the time, because as their primary audience was only going to be viewing the programme via an NTSC video transmission anyway. 20-25 years on, shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation look like fuzzy crap because they were done this way, and they're having to tediously re-edit and remaster the whole lot from the source footage (where they still have it) to get a "hi-def" version. Many of the effects will have to be redone because they were only ever done on SD video.
Same applies to a lot of other shows made up until the early-2000s. They definitely *weren't* planning for a hi-def Blu-Ray future. The reason those shows were even shot on film in the first place (rather than native video) is- I assume- because film-sourced footage still looks different (and more "respectable") compared to footage entirely shot on traditional interlaced video- even once converted to crappy NTSC resolution.
Also, don't paint as a douchebag everyone who downloaded/used your software without giving you a check, since you were the one _actively encouraging_ people to download, use and share your software without paying you for it.
Perhaps you misunderstand what was generally meant by "shareware" back then. The term is (or was) generally used to mean software that was offered on a trial basis with the understanding that if you continued to use it- or found it useful- you should pay whatever the author was asking for.
In other words, the terms that the software was offered under was that you could distribute copies to your friends, but you were still *meant* to pay up if you continued using the software. I can't remember the exact wording of all the different shareware, but I think that it ranged from what would have been a legal (but hard to enforce) requirement that you should pay if you continued using the software to one that wasn't as legally strict, but still made clear that the intention was you pay a "donation".
Actual "gratis" software *was* out there back then (which wasn't usually "Free" in the RMS sense), but would normally have been called "freeware", not "shareware". Had he offered it as "freeware" with a "please consider donating" thing, that would have been closer to what you describe. However, the fact that the GP called his "shareware" suggests that it was offered under the first model.
One might argue that it was stupid to *rely* on people's honesty under a shareware model, but that doesn't change the fact that lots of people were (I assume) using it knowing the deal offered, and not abiding by the terms offered (moral at least, legal at most). Whether you agree or not, he's not a hypocrite in finding that douchey.
Of course, he's not entitled to expect everyone that shared the software or tried it out to register and pay up- only the people that continued using it, being aware of the legal and/or moral obligation they were under. But I get the impression that was a far higher number than the people who actually did pay.
No that is an idiot. Blue Cheese is blue cheese here in yank land.
Apparently there *are* some people out there who call it "bleu cheese", but it's definitely not used in Britain.:-/
As for pronouncing the silent "h" in herbs, silent letters aren't supposed to be pronounced.
Well, yes, I guess that it *is* meant to be a silent letter... if you're trying to affect a silly cod-French accent, that is.;-P
I could understand this as being a part of the American accent's supposed relation to the English "West Country" accent, but when they drop the "h" on words it sounds natural, whereas the way Americans say "erbs" grates, like it *hasn't* got an implied apstrophe at the start.:-)
Er, anyway, that's enough slagging off bizarre American pronounciations for one day. (^_^)
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else think that researching ways NOT to make someone explode when pumping gas in there during a colonoscopy might actually be a good thing? I don't really want to end up like one of Dig Dug's enemies, you know...
Eew... you mean Dig Dug was shoving his hose up the monsters' backsides? (*) No wonder I preferred Mr. Do...
:-O
(*) Upon proofreading this, the unintentional innuendo makes it sound even worse
If I'm going to teach my nephews python
Damn you! Just one misplaced apostrophe and I could have had an amusing joke about how snakes- and python's in particular- are incapable of learning anything more complicated than Javascript.
:'-(
But nooooo..... you had to be gramatically correct. Spoilsport! Where's an illiterate when you need one?!
I'd first worry about the Chinese companies promoting melamine "milk".
I'd worry about them both. It's pretty stupid to suggest that one precludes dealing with the other.
Boy, are people still banging on about that, 35 years on?
Yes they are. And you know why? It's because Nestle are still doing that, 35 years on.
They die because the water they drink is tainted. It would still be tainted when they stop drinking breast milk.
No, it's not Nestle's fault that toddlers and older children don't have clean water to drink. It certainly *is* their fault that babies are being exposed to additional risk at a vulnerable age for no justifiable reason other than to bulk up their own profits. Particularly as babies of that relatively undeveloped age (who would normally be drinking breast milk) aren't really meant to be able to handle water-borne pathogens to the same extent as older, weaned children.
If you want to help those kids, donate to sanitation efforts.
As a suggestion in its own right, that would be laudible. As an attempt to divert attention and excuse Nestle from responsibility, it's contemptible.
Nestle were the ones that made the lack of clean water an even bigger problem than it needed to be. Improving sanitation and boycotting Nestle are not mutually incompatible, and suggesting that the water supply should be improved as an attempt to let Nestle off the hook- and indeed to bolster their business- is pretty disgusting.
Boycotting Nestle has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
That's open to question. I agree that those greedy fucks wouldn't be doing this "35 years on" if it wasn't making them more money than any boycott was costing them. Whether that means more people should be boycotting them or taking more action is open to question.
People do it because it's an easy hair shirt to wear and requires no real sacrifice.
That as may be, peoples' alleged laziness doesn't make Nestle's actions any more acceptable.
If 10% of the instructions executed take 10 clock cycles each, there is no budget left if your target is 1 instruction per clock cycle (and that target is not exactly aggressive). If any of the other instructions executed take more than zero clock cycles, you will miss the target.
Perhaps we are misinterpreting each other. When you referred to "making 10% of the instructions take 10 clock cycles", I assumed that you meant "10% of the instruction set that a given CPU supports" whereas (apparently) you meant "10% of the instructions that make up a given program".
IMHO, the former interpetation makes more sense though, because the designers of the chip can't somehow dictate the exact proportion of instructions in every program it'll be expected to run (though they can influence it by design), and the program-writers can't dictate how long the instructions last (though they can influence it by choosing different instructions).
What I had in mind was (say) if one was discussing a chip where those 10-clock-cycle instructions were (say) only included for legacy support (e.g. like the nice-idea-at-the-time-instructions Intel introduced then superseded in successive generations of the x86, but still had to support for compatibility) and not likely to be used in modern programs, then they wouldn't be likely to make up 10% of instructions executed in practice.
Alas, if you make 10% of the instructions take 10 clock cycles, you have to do the other 90% at 0 clock cycles just to reach 1 instruction per clock.
This does assume that all instructions are used the same amount, which isn't necessarily the case.
Like I posted elsewhere, intel hasn't made real CISC processors for years, and I don't think anyone has. Modern Intel processors are just RISC with a decoder to the old CISC instruction set.
Exactly. Intel has been doing this ever since the Pentium Pro and Pentium II came out in the 1990s. Anyone who knows much at all about x86 CPUs is aware of this, and Perens certainly will be. That's why I'm surprised that that article misleadingly states:-
So, we start with the fact that Atom isn't really the right architecture for portable devices (*) with limited power budgets. Intel has tried to address this by building a hidden core within the chip that actually runs RISC instructions, while providing the CISC instruction set that ia32 programs like Microsoft Windows expect.
The "hidden core" bit is, of course, correct, but the way it's stated here implies that this is (a) something new and (b) something that Intel have done to mitigate performance issues on such devices, when in fact it's the way that all Intel's "x86" processors have been designed for the past 15 years!
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting or misunderstanding the article, and he's saying that- unlike previous CPUs- the new Atom chips have their "internal" RISC instruction set directly accessible to the outside world. But I don't think that's what was meant.
(*) This is in the context of having explained why IA32 is a legacy architecture not suited to portable devices and presented Atom as an example of this.
Maplin UK recently had a While-Stocks-Last promotion on Intenso 64GB pen drives - three for £18. That promo lasted all of half an hour before even the distribution centres ran out.
I'm pretty sure that was one of those attention-grabbing below-cost-price offers on an intentionally-limited amount of stock that one has to be fast and lucky to catch. As such, it doesn't say much about the everyday price of a 64GB pen drive.
That said, one can probably pick up a 16GB drive for more like US $10 these days.
Thank you for introducing me to Slashdot Japan in English. With headlines like "Why do you need the growth of the railway children" I know which site I'll be visiting more often.
Yes, I can only assume that Japanese is a language that isn't as simple to auto-translate to English as others. Google Translate does quite a good job on some European languages, but Japanese comes across as quaintly bizarre at best and downright incomprehensible way too often. :-)
can we at least get pleistocene park?
Well, these dinosaurs are obviously from the, er, Plasticine era. ;-)
I wish I could, but I can't. What's E.T. short for?
Evolutionary reasons- the gravity on his home planet is relatively high.
Until a jury decides a circle is just a square with extremely rounded corners
Nonsense, a square is just a circle with very sharp corners!
In 1995 nobody envisioned computers being in everyone's home and connected to the internet. Back then, a PC was a single-user device on its own or a local network.
Wrong- the Internet was already starting to break into the public consciousness by 1994, with a mainstream-oriented news/analysis programme about it on British TV by the middle of the year, and mainstream magazines such as this one coming out shortly afterwards.
Windows 95 came out in late 1995, by which time the Internet was becoming quite well-known about; the man on the street had probably heard about it, even if most non-geeks didn't have net access yet. MS hoped they could corral users into using their proprietary MSN service instead, and didn't even include a browser (i.e. IE!) with the first release of W95, nor even include TCP/IP in the default networking setup. Whether this was an intentional move to divert attention away from the Internet and into their own walled garden service (and the belief that this could be done), a genuine underestimation of the Internet or simply an afterthought, they were still clearly thinking about online services when W95 launched, even if that service wasn't the Internet.
You confuse explaining a rational for doing sometime, with an endorsement for the practice.
My apologies- I thought your comment came across a bit like you (personally) were trying to excuse the company with that rationale, rather than merely explaining their position. I'm happy to accept that this was a misinterpretation.
The gaming company know that cheaters are a problem, then they need to figure out where to draw the line.
Systematically compromising *everyone's* anonymity without telling them so is (IMHO) quite clearly over that line.
So if you are going to be taking screen shots of your cheating. Might as well get tracked down and banned because of it.
And if you *haven't* actually been cheating, but you've posted pictures of your WoW game for whatever reason over the years anyway, it's okay that identifying information was embedded without your knowledge (possibly to be used against you years later in circumstances like, oh... *this case*) even if you had good reason to want to remain anonymous?
Actually, I don't care whether the person *was* cheating, it doesn't excuse this sort of thing. If Activision had wanted to do this, they should have been open about it happening, if not the precise mechanics of how it was implemented.
Why do dogs lick their balls?
Please choose one of these two obligatory answers:-
(i) To take away the taste of the dog food.
(ii) Because they can.
Not to be pedantic, but the OS 10.8 update is $19.99, and covers every computer in your household.
What? Even my Wintel desktop machine, my Commodore Amiga, Atari 800XL and late-1970s Prinztronic "pong" console?
...because convincing people to pay $200 to upgrade from Windows NT 6.0 to Windows NT 6.1 is not as easy as telling them it's a whole new version of Windows.
It's also got a different consumer name from the previous version of Windows, because marketing it as what it really was- i.e. "Windows Vista Second Edition"- would have tainted it with the name of an irredeemably disliked failure, even if it *had* fixed a lot of the things people hated about the original Vista.
People ran "Windows 3.11", "Windows 95", and "Windows 98" for a very long time, and were fine with names like that. Dumping marketing into this and giving the silly names only speaks to the audience they're trying to capture.
"Windows 95" (with its consumer-obvious and up-to-date-signifying year number) was already a more marketing-driven name than the previous version-numbered Windows releases.
:-)
Windows 7 is sort of crap, because its pseudo version number doesn't really signify anything meaningful. It's not version "7" internally, and one could argue whether it's really the "7th" release of Windows anyway. (You could probably argue for anything from 6 to 10 using similar logic, so it's pointless).
Vista is an *obviously* marketing-driven name, but at least it's openly so and doesn't really confuse with its clear vapidness. "Windows XP", on the other hand... nowadays it's been with us so long, we don't even think about that meaningless name, but even when it was new it never got called out on it.
I bet the vast majority of people don't even know what "XP" is supposed to mean. I *do* know what it's meant to represent (the user "eXPerience", ahem). If anything, knowing that makes it seem even more vapid and meaningless, a stupid, half-baked marketing-driven non-acronym that Microsoft never seemed to bother marketing, thus making one wonder why they bothered.
Also, XP represents a smiley with eyes screwed up in frustration sticking out its tongue...
but Firefox 4 is also called Firefox 12
In a sense, although I'm sure if they were being pedantic they'd argue that technically it *is* Firefox 12 because that's what it's called. :)
.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID". Unbelievable... how many people know all those names, or that they're all basically the same thing?
Anyway, what about Java's numbering... we started with Java 1.0 and 1.1... then we moved to Java 2 SE (J2SE), which still had the version number 1.2(!) Following that we had J2SE 1.3, J2SE 1.4 and then, er... J2SE 5.0. After which they dropped the "2" so it was "Java SE 6.0" and so on. That's not counting the stupid half-baked marketing driven brand dilution, sorry.... *extension* of the "Java" Desktop System.
Mind you, Microsoft are the experts when it comes to counter-productive, marketing-driven messing about with names. Witness "Microsoft Account" which Wikipedia tells us was "previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,
Another good MS example was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme, "Plays for Sure"- obviously implying Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. Except that they then proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed *other* schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range.
In short, MS are the market leaders when it comes to creating a clusterfuck of overlapping, badly-defined brands where no-one has a clue what they're meant to represent because this week's corporate marketer wants to justify their pay packet by chopping and changing stuff for no reason at all, no doubt egged on by senior management with no focus.
OS X Kitty has a better ring to it.
No doubt, but it's not really consistent with the existing scheme (i.e. the "proper English" names of cat species) and nor does the other suggestion of "Felix Domesticux" (whether that's correct Latin or not).
;-P
So they'll just have to go with my oh-so-amusing suggestion anyway
Probably true, but they're going downhill on the feline names already.
I hope they don't change before we get "OS X Domestic Cat".
That is why some smart people recorded TV shows they hoped to sell again and again on film and not video-tape. Because film has a "wasted" resolution in the days of VHS video tapes but when DVD and now Blu-ray came out, these shows can simply be re-scanned from the original footage and voila, something new to flog to the punters.
Maybe some people did, but most of them didn't. Ironically, American TV dramas from the late-80s onwards moved from being entirely shot and edited on film, to being shot on film but edited (and postproduced) on video. Standard-def crappy NTSC video, that is.
This probably didn't matter at the time, because as their primary audience was only going to be viewing the programme via an NTSC video transmission anyway. 20-25 years on, shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation look like fuzzy crap because they were done this way, and they're having to tediously re-edit and remaster the whole lot from the source footage (where they still have it) to get a "hi-def" version. Many of the effects will have to be redone because they were only ever done on SD video.
Same applies to a lot of other shows made up until the early-2000s. They definitely *weren't* planning for a hi-def Blu-Ray future. The reason those shows were even shot on film in the first place (rather than native video) is- I assume- because film-sourced footage still looks different (and more "respectable") compared to footage entirely shot on traditional interlaced video- even once converted to crappy NTSC resolution.
Also, don't paint as a douchebag everyone who downloaded/used your software without giving you a check, since you were the one _actively encouraging_ people to download, use and share your software without paying you for it.
Perhaps you misunderstand what was generally meant by "shareware" back then. The term is (or was) generally used to mean software that was offered on a trial basis with the understanding that if you continued to use it- or found it useful- you should pay whatever the author was asking for.
In other words, the terms that the software was offered under was that you could distribute copies to your friends, but you were still *meant* to pay up if you continued using the software. I can't remember the exact wording of all the different shareware, but I think that it ranged from what would have been a legal (but hard to enforce) requirement that you should pay if you continued using the software to one that wasn't as legally strict, but still made clear that the intention was you pay a "donation".
Actual "gratis" software *was* out there back then (which wasn't usually "Free" in the RMS sense), but would normally have been called "freeware", not "shareware". Had he offered it as "freeware" with a "please consider donating" thing, that would have been closer to what you describe. However, the fact that the GP called his "shareware" suggests that it was offered under the first model.
One might argue that it was stupid to *rely* on people's honesty under a shareware model, but that doesn't change the fact that lots of people were (I assume) using it knowing the deal offered, and not abiding by the terms offered (moral at least, legal at most). Whether you agree or not, he's not a hypocrite in finding that douchey.
Of course, he's not entitled to expect everyone that shared the software or tried it out to register and pay up- only the people that continued using it, being aware of the legal and/or moral obligation they were under. But I get the impression that was a far higher number than the people who actually did pay.
No that is an idiot. Blue Cheese is blue cheese here in yank land.
Apparently there *are* some people out there who call it "bleu cheese", but it's definitely not used in Britain. :-/
As for pronouncing the silent "h" in herbs, silent letters aren't supposed to be pronounced.
Well, yes, I guess that it *is* meant to be a silent letter... if you're trying to affect a silly cod-French accent, that is. ;-P
:-)
I could understand this as being a part of the American accent's supposed relation to the English "West Country" accent, but when they drop the "h" on words it sounds natural, whereas the way Americans say "erbs" grates, like it *hasn't* got an implied apstrophe at the start.
Er, anyway, that's enough slagging off bizarre American pronounciations for one day. (^_^)