I suspect more non-Americans than Americans are taking a really keen interest in this election. Considering that only, what, 40-odd percent of eligible voters actually bother to turn out on election day in the states, you could hardly say interest there is raging, despite the fanatical partisans we see all the time on the news. Given the disproportionate effect that US policies have on my country (Australia), I would kill to be able to vote in this election.
Of course, if non-US citizens could vote, it's pretty clear what the result would be. Although maybe we shouldn't publicise this, it might provoke a nationalistic wave of support for you know who...
...that Bush didn't write those answers himself. For one thing there are words of more than three syllables used throughout. For another it appears that the person who wrote them was actually familiar with Whitehouse briefing papers and current scientific issues. And the final clue is the use of the word 'nuclear' instead of GW's preferred 'nucular'.
I'm sure the same goes for Kerry, although he is actually able to spell and say most of the words used in his responses.
I really don't see the point of this kind of 'interview.' Basically, each candidate is asked a series of questions, each of which has a 'good' or 'bad' answer. The results will shock you.
Is it just me, or would this be a total non-story were it not for the inclusion of the word 'iPod' in the original article?
As far as I can see, there would be absolutely no difference if this guy had hooked up an iPod, a CD player, digital radio, a minidisc player, a PC, or basically any digital music source to his old hi-fi, except that a CD player would undoubtedly have given superior sound when combined with the nice old speakers. Essentially the only interesting angle in this story is that some people think it sounds better to use older equipment to play music from newer, digital sources.
Content is apparently no longer a prerequisite for being 'news for nerds' or 'stuff that matters.' All you need to do is include an Apple lifestyle product being used in an exciting and hip way and you could WIN! If you happen to be an ancient Japanese guy, all the better, you already have iKarma +5 for being so damn minimalist and stylish.
But seriously... what is the relevance of the iPod to this story? Why is this posted under 'Apple'?
I've been using Skype a bit to call the UK from Australia. Not bad, but I find the latency is much worse than a standard phone - at times up to 1-1.5 seconds. In comparison I have very low latency on an ordinary phone calling the UK since the majority of the network went fibre optic.
IMHO the latency makes it hard to carry out a natural conversation - although as you say, it does save a hell of a lot on international phone bills.
I have learned through bitter experience not to respond immediately to e-mail, even if it would be convenient for me to do so. If people learn that you generally respond within a few minutes, they start to get expectations that you will be contactable all the time and all they need to do is write an e-mail to get a reply straight away. This causes major communication problems when you then decide to go away for a couple of days, or if your net connection goes down, or if you just want to be left alone for a couple of hours.
Nowadays I let e-mail 'mature' in my inbox, much like the PHB in Dilbert does with files on his desk. Once I think it's ripe, and the sender will most likely be away from their computer, I write back. That way they get a reasonably prompt response, but they don't get an unrealistic expectation that I will be at their beck and call.
The same applies to mobile phones, both text messaging and voice calls - I make a habit of routinely turning off my mobile, even if I just want to watch some TV or do some work in my home office. People have learned that I will eventually call them back if it is something of sufficient importance. They have also learned that they cannot assume that I will answer my phone 24-7, and as a result I think the quantity of calls has decreased but the quality has increased.
Of course I'm mainly talking about clients here - I run a small business.
What a great piece of software for LANs! I have a number of networked computers, but they are all in different rooms of the house because their primary (ahem) function is work for various family members. But Quake III became a whole new experience with 4 people using headsets and Roger Wilco - so much faster to abuse people verbally than with the 't' command! And co-op Ghost Recon and Rainbow 6 are also a fantastic experience with a decent headset and a copy of RW.
Unfortunately they went semi-commercial a couple of years back, and the software doesn't seem nearly as usable to me as it used to.
I've also had this experience - any outbound traffic brought Skype stuttering to a halt. Running BitTorrent or even Eudora, my mail client, caused serious interruptions.
I don't know if this is Skype, or a problem with the way Windows handles outbound data, however.
Ok, I've done some further reading and I'll accept that in US English Hopkins's is acceptable. I would still argue strongly that it is the less preferred, and certainly less literate, version, however.
From a pronunciation perspective you are placing two sibilant sounds together with no vowel to smooth or join them. This is just ugly sounding and destroys the flow of a sentence.
From a spelling point of view Hopkins's may be more 'logical' in one way, but it's not hard to remember an obvious exception to the rule about possessives. It should be easy enough to say the word to yourself and realise that it sounds worse with the extra 's' to remind you when you should or should not use it - and to me that makes the removal of the 's' more logical than the stubborn retention of it.
If you get too obsessed with removing all the exceptions from a language you remove a lot of its character. But then, I'd rather speak French than German, as it were, you may be different. Incidentally, the recent chaos in Germany with the attempted standardisation of grammar and spelling is a good example of taking this kind of 'improvement' too far - most major publishers are now in open revolt against the 'logical' spelling and grammar rules that the government there tried to impose.
I would still use Word over Abiword even if neither, or both, had a grammar checker. And I would still turn it off.
I care about English, not word processing evangelism. But congratulations for leaping to a totally idiotic conclusion based on zero evidence. Who's the real zealot here?
I was thinking of the latter rule, which from the 'Elements of Style' is:
"Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake."
Nevertheless, I'm pretty confident that in English English leaving off the extra 's' for possessives of all names ending in 's' is the standard and correct approach.
I like just pasting swathes of Dickens or Melville or Shakespeare into Word and watching it all turn green and red like it's Christmas time. It's the strongest argument I can think of for lighting forest fires around Redmond in midsummer...
Actually in real English (as spoken in England) it's still Hopkins' with no extra 's'. Maybe the Oxford Dictionary can help both you and Hopkins. Hopkin's. Hopkinses. Hopkins's. Whatever.
Anyway, you're right about the false positive's in spell checkers.
according to the article the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
-insert lame jokes with really poor grammar here-
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature? I find that in Word, I turn it off because it drives me crazy. For one thing it is often out and out wrong. It will suggest corrections where none should exist, and falter on the more finessed rules of grammar such as singular references to indefinite pronouns or the subjunctive. Try typing "here be dragons" into Word and you'll see what I mean. If you're a pirate, Word is next to useless for noting up treasure maps, and that's just one of its many grammatical flaws for average users.
To me, these rules are the things that make English interesting and enjoyable. Products like the Word grammar checker just make people lazy and reduce the need to actually know the rules. Instead of making a computer do it we should take the time to learn the subtle details of our language. If you don't know the rules, not only will you struggle to express yourself but you will miss the details in other people's words. In this sense it's all a bit cyclic - the more our word processors fix our spelling and grammar for us, the more we devolve into a community of people with the linguistic skills of George Bush, totally dependent on pressing 'F7' to help us construct our sentences.
Or to forget the learned discussion and just quote the damn Simpsons like I was going to in the first place:
Lisa: Almost done. Just lay still.
Linguo: Lie still.
Lisa: I knew that. Just testing.
Linguo: Sentence fragment.
Lisa: 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment.
Linguo: Must conserve battery power... *switches himself off*
Thanks for assuming I'm an idiot because I don't share your opinion. Your comment title was particularly helpful, I feel that I am now on the path to true wisdom.
With the nub, how fast you go up or down the list is how hard you push on the nub.
How hard? Or how far up or down? Think of it like a joystick in a flight sim - by pushing further, I increase the angle of the flaps and thereby change position faster. This is not a question of how 'hard' I push it, any more than spinning that little wheel involves you pushing 'harder'.
This argument is completely negated because the wheel isn't at all like moving the mouse up and down for the basic reason that you have to pick the mouse up and move when you run out of space. You will never run out of room with the wheel because, of course, it spins.
No, you're wrong. When I click the middle button, the position of the mouse is zeroed. When I move it forward, say, 1cm, it starts scrolling at a 1 line/second. When I move forward another centimeter, the speed of the scrolling increases. When I return to zero, the original position, the scrolling stops. When I move it towards myself the same principle applied, but scrolling in the other direction. I do not run out of space, unless I only have 5 or so centimetres to work it.
Of course, maybe I'm making the unfair assumption that you have a three button mouse with a scroll wheel, not a one-button shiny thing...
Once again the competition fails to grasp the fact that you cannot easily scan through over 1000 songs with a nub and your thumb.
I don't understand the rationale behind this argument. From a functional point of view I can't see why it's any easier to move a lever up or down to scroll through a list than it is to spin a wheel. In fact, I find with web pages that are particularly long (e.g../ discussions) it's a heck of a lot more convenient to click down on my scroll wheel (logitech mouse) and then gently push the mouse up or down to scroll down the page, increasing or decreasing the distance forward that the mouse is moved to speed up or slow down the scrolling. In other words, I use the mouse as a 'lever' not a 'wheel'. With the wheel I have to continually roll it to keep scrolling, meaning that I have to lift my finger again and again.
Scrolling is an essentially binary operation. You want to go up, or you want to go down. A lever can produce this just as well as a wheel - up and down vs. round and round the other way. It's easy enough to add good analogue control to a lever (see for example the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube controllers for an excellent example). So where's the benefit of a wheel?
And before you ask, yes, I have used an iPod for considerable lengths of time, including gen. 1, 3, and mini. They are all very nice - but the wheel didn't strike me as inherently superior on any of them.
"This monstrosity that is a so-called "iPod-slayer" looks hideously cumbersome to use."
Uh... huh. Monstrosity. Hideously cumbersome.
Are we not being perhaps just a tad over the top? It is not rectangular, true, but in many ways it looks very similar to an iPod with no wheel. At least it's not frickin pink or other fruity pastel colours.
Oh god... how many times do we have to hear this stupid argument????? The fact is, the price point of these players does not make sense from a logical point of view. I know that people are dumb, so they buy at strange price points, but this does not make the pricing of the mini or this thing a good thing. What it does show is that companies will cynically screw idiot consumers out of every buck they have without thinking twice.
I mean, just because solid state players are expensive per megabyte doesn't mean Apple or Rio is justified in overcharging people for a comparatively cheaper technology. It reflects an immature market where competitors have not yet moved in with realistic pricing, so at the moment the price point is arbitrary and artificial. It reflects a lack of supply, not the actual value of the goods.
"Would you buy a car that you had to steer with two buttons rather than a wheel? If not, why not?"
This is fallacious reasoning. Would you buy a keyboard that had a wheel instead of buttons? You are drawing an analogy to a completely unrelated situation.
I agree with the other respondent - the differentiating factor is above all else marketing, something that Apple is very good at. It does have a cool design, but so do Rio products and a number of others that are around the place.
"No fair! You changed the result by observing it!"
Seriously though, they do appear to be stupid enough to think that a 'recount' means you just print out the votes FROM THE DATABASE and count them. They don't seem to realise that the FRIGGING PROBLEM IS WITH HOW THE VOTES ARE GETTING INTO THE DATABASE! FU--K!!!!!!!
They completely realize this, they were just hoping you wouldn't.
No, they just hope that 51% of the voting public don't realise this. They know we're not that stupid. They also know we are too politically useless to do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect more non-Americans than Americans are taking a really keen interest in this election. Considering that only, what, 40-odd percent of eligible voters actually bother to turn out on election day in the states, you could hardly say interest there is raging, despite the fanatical partisans we see all the time on the news. Given the disproportionate effect that US policies have on my country (Australia), I would kill to be able to vote in this election.
Of course, if non-US citizens could vote, it's pretty clear what the result would be. Although maybe we shouldn't publicise this, it might provoke a nationalistic wave of support for you know who...
...that Bush didn't write those answers himself. For one thing there are words of more than three syllables used throughout. For another it appears that the person who wrote them was actually familiar with Whitehouse briefing papers and current scientific issues. And the final clue is the use of the word 'nuclear' instead of GW's preferred 'nucular'.
I'm sure the same goes for Kerry, although he is actually able to spell and say most of the words used in his responses.
I really don't see the point of this kind of 'interview.' Basically, each candidate is asked a series of questions, each of which has a 'good' or 'bad' answer. The results will shock you.
Is it just me, or would this be a total non-story were it not for the inclusion of the word 'iPod' in the original article?
As far as I can see, there would be absolutely no difference if this guy had hooked up an iPod, a CD player, digital radio, a minidisc player, a PC, or basically any digital music source to his old hi-fi, except that a CD player would undoubtedly have given superior sound when combined with the nice old speakers. Essentially the only interesting angle in this story is that some people think it sounds better to use older equipment to play music from newer, digital sources.
Content is apparently no longer a prerequisite for being 'news for nerds' or 'stuff that matters.' All you need to do is include an Apple lifestyle product being used in an exciting and hip way and you could WIN! If you happen to be an ancient Japanese guy, all the better, you already have iKarma +5 for being so damn minimalist and stylish.
But seriously... what is the relevance of the iPod to this story? Why is this posted under 'Apple'?
I've been using Skype a bit to call the UK from Australia. Not bad, but I find the latency is much worse than a standard phone - at times up to 1-1.5 seconds. In comparison I have very low latency on an ordinary phone calling the UK since the majority of the network went fibre optic.
IMHO the latency makes it hard to carry out a natural conversation - although as you say, it does save a hell of a lot on international phone bills.
I have learned through bitter experience not to respond immediately to e-mail, even if it would be convenient for me to do so. If people learn that you generally respond within a few minutes, they start to get expectations that you will be contactable all the time and all they need to do is write an e-mail to get a reply straight away. This causes major communication problems when you then decide to go away for a couple of days, or if your net connection goes down, or if you just want to be left alone for a couple of hours.
Nowadays I let e-mail 'mature' in my inbox, much like the PHB in Dilbert does with files on his desk. Once I think it's ripe, and the sender will most likely be away from their computer, I write back. That way they get a reasonably prompt response, but they don't get an unrealistic expectation that I will be at their beck and call.
The same applies to mobile phones, both text messaging and voice calls - I make a habit of routinely turning off my mobile, even if I just want to watch some TV or do some work in my home office. People have learned that I will eventually call them back if it is something of sufficient importance. They have also learned that they cannot assume that I will answer my phone 24-7, and as a result I think the quantity of calls has decreased but the quality has increased.
Of course I'm mainly talking about clients here - I run a small business.
What a great piece of software for LANs! I have a number of networked computers, but they are all in different rooms of the house because their primary (ahem) function is work for various family members. But Quake III became a whole new experience with 4 people using headsets and Roger Wilco - so much faster to abuse people verbally than with the 't' command! And co-op Ghost Recon and Rainbow 6 are also a fantastic experience with a decent headset and a copy of RW.
Unfortunately they went semi-commercial a couple of years back, and the software doesn't seem nearly as usable to me as it used to.
I've also had this experience - any outbound traffic brought Skype stuttering to a halt. Running BitTorrent or even Eudora, my mail client, caused serious interruptions.
I don't know if this is Skype, or a problem with the way Windows handles outbound data, however.
Well, everyone's happy then!
./ thread ever... :)
This must be the most disappointing
Ok, I've done some further reading and I'll accept that in US English Hopkins's is acceptable. I would still argue strongly that it is the less preferred, and certainly less literate, version, however.
From a pronunciation perspective you are placing two sibilant sounds together with no vowel to smooth or join them. This is just ugly sounding and destroys the flow of a sentence.
From a spelling point of view Hopkins's may be more 'logical' in one way, but it's not hard to remember an obvious exception to the rule about possessives. It should be easy enough to say the word to yourself and realise that it sounds worse with the extra 's' to remind you when you should or should not use it - and to me that makes the removal of the 's' more logical than the stubborn retention of it.
If you get too obsessed with removing all the exceptions from a language you remove a lot of its character. But then, I'd rather speak French than German, as it were, you may be different. Incidentally, the recent chaos in Germany with the attempted standardisation of grammar and spelling is a good example of taking this kind of 'improvement' too far - most major publishers are now in open revolt against the 'logical' spelling and grammar rules that the government there tried to impose.
I would still use Word over Abiword even if neither, or both, had a grammar checker. And I would still turn it off.
I care about English, not word processing evangelism. But congratulations for leaping to a totally idiotic conclusion based on zero evidence. Who's the real zealot here?
Get 'Fowler's Modern English Usage' and learn the native tongue, not 'American'. Please.
I was thinking of the latter rule, which from the 'Elements of Style' is:
"Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake."
Nevertheless, I'm pretty confident that in English English leaving off the extra 's' for possessives of all names ending in 's' is the standard and correct approach.
So you're up all night drinking and the best thing you can think of to do is post about grammar on a computer geek website?
They aren't kidding when they say 'news for nerds', are they?
I like just pasting swathes of Dickens or Melville or Shakespeare into Word and watching it all turn green and red like it's Christmas time. It's the strongest argument I can think of for lighting forest fires around Redmond in midsummer...
Actually in real English (as spoken in England) it's still Hopkins' with no extra 's'. Maybe the Oxford Dictionary can help both you and Hopkins. Hopkin's. Hopkinses. Hopkins's. Whatever.
Anyway, you're right about the false positive's in spell checkers.
according to the article the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
-insert lame jokes with really poor grammar here-
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature? I find that in Word, I turn it off because it drives me crazy. For one thing it is often out and out wrong. It will suggest corrections where none should exist, and falter on the more finessed rules of grammar such as singular references to indefinite pronouns or the subjunctive. Try typing "here be dragons" into Word and you'll see what I mean. If you're a pirate, Word is next to useless for noting up treasure maps, and that's just one of its many grammatical flaws for average users.
To me, these rules are the things that make English interesting and enjoyable. Products like the Word grammar checker just make people lazy and reduce the need to actually know the rules. Instead of making a computer do it we should take the time to learn the subtle details of our language. If you don't know the rules, not only will you struggle to express yourself but you will miss the details in other people's words. In this sense it's all a bit cyclic - the more our word processors fix our spelling and grammar for us, the more we devolve into a community of people with the linguistic skills of George Bush, totally dependent on pressing 'F7' to help us construct our sentences.
Or to forget the learned discussion and just quote the damn Simpsons like I was going to in the first place:
Lisa: Almost done. Just lay still.
Linguo: Lie still.
Lisa: I knew that. Just testing.
Linguo: Sentence fragment.
Lisa: 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment.
Linguo: Must conserve battery power... *switches himself off*
"on wall st, if you're using other mp3 products, u're already a second-class citizen"
That says it all about America's consumer society, really, doesn't it?
Thanks for assuming I'm an idiot because I don't share your opinion. Your comment title was particularly helpful, I feel that I am now on the path to true wisdom.
With the nub, how fast you go up or down the list is how hard you push on the nub.
How hard? Or how far up or down? Think of it like a joystick in a flight sim - by pushing further, I increase the angle of the flaps and thereby change position faster. This is not a question of how 'hard' I push it, any more than spinning that little wheel involves you pushing 'harder'.
This argument is completely negated because the wheel isn't at all like moving the mouse up and down for the basic reason that you have to pick the mouse up and move when you run out of space. You will never run out of room with the wheel because, of course, it spins.
No, you're wrong. When I click the middle button, the position of the mouse is zeroed. When I move it forward, say, 1cm, it starts scrolling at a 1 line/second. When I move forward another centimeter, the speed of the scrolling increases. When I return to zero, the original position, the scrolling stops. When I move it towards myself the same principle applied, but scrolling in the other direction. I do not run out of space, unless I only have 5 or so centimetres to work it.
Of course, maybe I'm making the unfair assumption that you have a three button mouse with a scroll wheel, not a one-button shiny thing...
Once again the competition fails to grasp the fact that you cannot easily scan through over 1000 songs with a nub and your thumb.
./ discussions) it's a heck of a lot more convenient to click down on my scroll wheel (logitech mouse) and then gently push the mouse up or down to scroll down the page, increasing or decreasing the distance forward that the mouse is moved to speed up or slow down the scrolling. In other words, I use the mouse as a 'lever' not a 'wheel'. With the wheel I have to continually roll it to keep scrolling, meaning that I have to lift my finger again and again.
I don't understand the rationale behind this argument. From a functional point of view I can't see why it's any easier to move a lever up or down to scroll through a list than it is to spin a wheel. In fact, I find with web pages that are particularly long (e.g.
Scrolling is an essentially binary operation. You want to go up, or you want to go down. A lever can produce this just as well as a wheel - up and down vs. round and round the other way. It's easy enough to add good analogue control to a lever (see for example the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube controllers for an excellent example). So where's the benefit of a wheel?
And before you ask, yes, I have used an iPod for considerable lengths of time, including gen. 1, 3, and mini. They are all very nice - but the wheel didn't strike me as inherently superior on any of them.
"This monstrosity that is a so-called "iPod-slayer" looks hideously cumbersome to use."
Uh... huh. Monstrosity. Hideously cumbersome.
Are we not being perhaps just a tad over the top? It is not rectangular, true, but in many ways it looks very similar to an iPod with no wheel. At least it's not frickin pink or other fruity pastel colours.
Oh god... how many times do we have to hear this stupid argument????? The fact is, the price point of these players does not make sense from a logical point of view. I know that people are dumb, so they buy at strange price points, but this does not make the pricing of the mini or this thing a good thing. What it does show is that companies will cynically screw idiot consumers out of every buck they have without thinking twice.
I mean, just because solid state players are expensive per megabyte doesn't mean Apple or Rio is justified in overcharging people for a comparatively cheaper technology. It reflects an immature market where competitors have not yet moved in with realistic pricing, so at the moment the price point is arbitrary and artificial. It reflects a lack of supply, not the actual value of the goods.
"Would you buy a car that you had to steer with two buttons rather than a wheel? If not, why not?"
This is fallacious reasoning. Would you buy a keyboard that had a wheel instead of buttons? You are drawing an analogy to a completely unrelated situation.
I agree with the other respondent - the differentiating factor is above all else marketing, something that Apple is very good at. It does have a cool design, but so do Rio products and a number of others that are around the place.
"No fair! You changed the result by observing it!"
Seriously though, they do appear to be stupid enough to think that a 'recount' means you just print out the votes FROM THE DATABASE and count them. They don't seem to realise that the FRIGGING PROBLEM IS WITH HOW THE VOTES ARE GETTING INTO THE DATABASE! FU--K!!!!!!!
It makes me so angry I think I might explode...
They completely realize this, they were just hoping you wouldn't.
No, they just hope that 51% of the voting public don't realise this. They know we're not that stupid. They also know we are too politically useless to do anything about it.