With practice you can minimise accidental ambiguity but for most people language is not a professions.
Which brings us nicely back to the original article - kids are simply not being taught how to use language correctly, giving rise to ambiguity and confusion. Learning to write well is an art, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be taught to every child.
(As an aside, though, I actually like the use of emoticons in email as they remove most forms of language ambiguity. I would have thought that the research mentioned in the article would have repeated the test with people who routinely use emoticons in their personal email - I think they'd have found a very different result. Unfortunately, emoticon use seems to have fallen off these days - probably because writers are scared that their elegant ascii art is going to be replaced by some cloyingly pathetic animated graphic...;-)
Rubbish. If that were true you wouldn't use English, you'd use mathematics, or a computer language.
No, you'd use a language that most people understood.
English and just about every language in the world are by their very nature imprecise, open to multiple interpretations, and deeply entrenched in the culture of the day.
And a writer with a decent knowledge of a language will use these imprecisions to their advantage - the true beauty of language lies in the fact that a sentence may have many different meanings, depending on the context.
Ummm... if we're headed for another ice age then how do sea levels rise? Isn't all that excess water tied up in, well, snow and ice? As in ice age?;)
I think he's talking about the potential of much colder winters in Europe (and only Europe) thanks to the gulf stream slowing down/completely stopping (see, for example this paper for recent evidence of changes to the gulf stream flow)
but since you're wanting to rip, you can either hire that teenager, or send it off to these people.
Or you could just do it a few CDs at a time. I've been ripping my CD collection onto my laptop over the last few months - you don't need to do it over a weekend, you know, and it's no great trouble to occasionally pop a CD in and rip it...
Logging on *my* computer is fine and useful. Logging on *their* server is not.
So don't use it. Don't use Gmail, for that matter, unless you're using gnupg and pop3. Encrypt your hard disk, and make sure you're using anonymous proxies when you're posting to/.... Hell, don't use computers at all - can you really trust that the people you're corresponding with are as concerned with security as you are??
Do what I do - put on a trenchcoat and sunglasses and conduct all interactions with other people in Hyde Park, whispering in ancient Babylonian. With my hand in front of my mouth, in case of lip readers...
A better analogy might be comparing those Rolls Royces and Ferraris to a Hyundai, as long as the Hyundai came with your driver's license, and those better cars only seemed to be driven by the folks who spend every weekend working on their cars.
Hey, provided I can turn up and grab as many Ferraris as I want completely free, my Hyundai's not going to last very long...
And I'd tend to see the cars that were driven by guys who spent their weekends working on them as more desirable - after all, these are guys who really like cars and know how they work, and they're still driving them. Must be something about them that's alright...
True, it wasn't LCD (obviously), but it's CRT did have subpixels. Same effect, really.
Oh yeah - the monitor pixels were in stripes, weren't they? You know, the funny thing was that I always assumed that the wacky colour fringe on the text was a display bug... I guess there weren't too many shades of sub-pixel colour available back then!
I love your use of the term 'shocking' regarding the Apple//e's resolution.:)
It was shocking! Even at the time, I remember thinking how crap it looked...:)
I'm wondering if that's true only for black & white text? I'd like to see some ClearType on a coloured background or with coloured text sometime.
No, it works for all text colours... I'm wondering how that works myself, now, but it does...
I figured it would be; I remember ClearType back on my Apple//e, and the extra colours around the letters bugged me even back then.
Uh, your Apple IIe didn't have an LCD monitor, and the resolution (280x192 for maybe a 12" screen) was shocking.
I'm pretty much only using LCD monitors these days and I can tell you that "ClearType" on Windows works just great, as does sub-pixel anti-aliasing (same thing, just no fancy name) on X. You really don't notice any colour around the text, until you use xmag or something to blow it up. The only caveat is that you have to make sure you're using correctly hinted fonts (which was the problem Fedora fell into a few releases ago - their default font wasn't hinted and sub-pixel aa was enabled by default for LCDs... it looked disgusting!! I wonder if they've fixed it yet?). If you want a good example of "cleartype" rendering on LCD, try Ubuntu.
The grandparent post was probably using some strange free font that wasn't hinted, or else they'd got a panel with the RGB orientation different from the norm and hadn't corrected for it...
Look at Disney's animated output over the last ten years. Then look at Pixar's. They may hypothetically be doing the same thing, but in reality Pixar's in an entirely different league.
Um... correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't Pixar part of Disney for almost all of the last ten years?? Everything up to and including "The Incredibles" was released with Disney...
If you really just want to run Linux, a homebuilt computer is gonna be leaps and bounds ahead of any pre-manufactured box from a quality perspective, including Apples. Cheaper too.
I think we're talking laptops here, not desktops. I can't imagine why anyone'd buy a desktop Mac unless they liked the OS. But their laptops are nicely constructed and definitely worth considering for hardware alone - if they made something with three buttons on the trackpad, I'd seriously consider it.
The question is: will we have any more luck escaping the "MacOS" tax than we've had trying to escape the Windows tax??
I have some CDs that are burned copies (although I'd call this great quality cds, not cheap storebrand with no backing), stored in a CD wallet case that are easily over 5 years old... still work great.
I first got a CDR drive in 1997, and the CDs burned from it that year are still perfectly readable. I was just listening to one the other day, in fact - that's a disc that's lasted nearly nine years!
What I don't know is whether the media quality was better back then - we certainly paid a lot more for it!! The other factor might be recording speed - my old recorder had a maximum speed of 2x. As I'm sure everyone's noticed on the disks they've burnt, the faintness of the visible track data increases with speed - quite possibly the tracks fade into unreadability much faster when they've been burnt at 52x.
One of the failures of the Linux community is recognizing the fact that most users don't want and don't care about such a tool. If you want full Linux-installer-style partition and format control over a Windows install, it's there, and it's not that hard to find.
Oh, for crying out loud!! The article is humorous. Funny. A joke. It's supposed to make you laugh. I know there's a lot of/. users who don't understand the concept, but that's why there's a little foot icon alongside the story - it's a cue for you to skip to the next article...
Since you clearly didn't get it the first time around, let me explain: the author takes the view point of a linux power user trying to use Windows the first time, and complaining about the lack of functionality. For example, he also goes off at Windows for not being able to switch to virtual terminals. He is in no way suggesting that your average end-user wants to repartition their hard disk.
I can't believe you got modded +5 informative for this...
For one, even on Windows, it uses multiple windows for the same app. That doesn't make ANY sense from a UI perspective, and means that I often have to click more than four times in order to bring GIMP back up to focus when it's behind other Windows.
Well, you could try this... haven't used it myself, but it sounds like the sort of thing you're after. However, your comment seemed more like a troll than anything else. Either that, or you've forgotten that not every graphic application has to be a direct clone of the hideous MDI interface of photoshop...
Oh, and straight lines? Use the shift key. How do you do it in photoshop??
PLEASE! If you are writing a windows program, or a program you plan to port to windows, do not use GTK+. It works terribly on that platform.
Eh? Gimp works great. So does Inkscape. I use those on WinXP all the time here at work, and I've never had a problem with them.
Can you name anything that doesn't work well?? Gtk2 is a beautiful toolkit, IMHO - it's so easy to get your head around it, and it's powerful, too. And there's bindings for just about any higher level language you could care to name.
Yes, that was actually done around here. They've since taken it down, no doubt due to the ridicule from even the most basic customer.
Yeah, because everyone knows that there's no other way to access the internet other than a home connection. It's kinda funny that workplaces don't have internet access yet, and you'd have thought that local libraries would have provided it as a community service, but no...
Geez, it's almost as crazy as the ISPs who allow you to sign up on their web page!! They must have been smoking crack or something, huh?
Perhaps some people use screen-savers, but would still like to have a visible indicator of when e-mail arrives?
Except that these days most laptops have a dedicated mail led, and for those using desktops there's always the scroll-lock led free and available... This is just a christmas gimmick, really.
The worst part is, all the good new laptops are being made with widescreen because little Jane going off to college wants to watch DVDs. I don't want to watch DVDs on my computer, I'll do that on the TV. I want to use it as a computer, and computer need height.
Well, I use my laptop primarily for work (I'm writing a thesis, a couple of papers and a book chapter on it; I also do image processing on it), but when I got it I specifically bought a widescreen so I could watch movies on it as well. Why would I want to, when I've got a TV? Well, because the resolution's heaps better and the relative screen size (the 15.4" laptop on the coffee table compared to the 21" TV in the corner of the room) is larger too. I get the equivalent of a plasma/LCD HD set in a machine that I needed to get anyway.
It's not just college kids that are buying widescreen displays, it's anyone who enjoys watching DVDs at their real resolution, rather than a crappy low-res interlaced display.
(Mind you, even without the DVD bonus, I've found that I much prefer widescreen displays - I can now fit several windows side-by-side more easily, you get more taskbar space and I don't feel as though I've "lost" any vertical space...)
Eh? You still can. Or at least, you still can here in Australia. Very cheaply, too - I can pick up a pre-paid phone compatible with my current network for $79 Au, which has a monochrome screen and a speaker phone. There's probably cheaper available too, but I haven't looked into it much since my current phone, which is nearly four years old now, still works well. That's of course another option - you don't actually need to buy a new phone, you know - the old ones still work...
But regardless, there's still a market for simple phones here, and I think one of the reasons for that is the wide-scale adoption of mobiles - they're not a tech-savy only market.
HTML would accomplish the same thing. It's a public standard, implementable by anyone on any platform, and convertable to plain text by a simple regex substitution. You're no more likely to find someone who can't read an html file than someone who can't read an ascii text file.
I agree, personally. However, you could also argue that _this_ sort of emphasis is convertible to html with a simple regex substitution - my point was simply that the texts haven't lost any information. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter _that_ much, does it?? Ascii is the lowest common denominator - it's not a bad place to start.
I know about the problems that old file formats can cause. However, I doubt that formats like PDF or JPG will ever get "lost".
My point was that since the emphasis is included in the file, you could always convert it to a nicely formatted PDF if you wanted to. In fact, I used to do almost exactly that a while back - I wrote some perl script to convert etexts to RTF and peanut markup language, and it worked pretty nicely. Keeping things at the lowest common denominator level isn't always a bad thing...
Personally, I wish PG would use basic html markup for italics and bold formatting, rather than plain text. But I'd rather cope with a lack of formatting than having the texts only in binary format.
Project Gutenberg is great and all, but there's something to be said for some effort made at presentation. Sometimes italics are a good thing.
It's not a great solution, but emphasis _is_ preserved in the etexts, just like that. Or occasionally like THIS... Pity there's no consistency, but for most texts it works well enough.
Also, the fact that they are plain text, with no markup, formatting, binary code, whatever in them means that they'll always be accessible to anyone, regardless of software or platform. And that's a good thing, too!
CD sales are down. It doesn't matter if you believe file-sharing is damaging record companies. It's their intellectual property. Should we believe it's okay to not compensate John Carmack for his years of work on Doom 3 because he's rich enough to drive a Ferrari and id made millions off the game?
Please note that record companies != artists... You might be interested in an actual artist's take on the situation. It's rather old now, having been published in 2002, but it's highly illuminating in terms of both the effect of free music downloads and the nature of the RIAA and recording companies.
Don't assume that the RIAA represents the interests of artists - it quite clearly does not.
have a Sony Ericsson T610 phone, which has black shiny plastic around the screen almost identical to the Nano. I always keep it in my pocket without a case, rubbing against the keys and change... And yet the screen and black plastic parts have no scratches to speak of.
Same with my Panasonic phone, and that's been carried around with my keys for over 3.5 years now - most buttons are unreadable, the body has had the metalic silver paint almost entirely scratched off, but the screen has only a few minuscule scratches that are only noticable when you shine a light to reflect off the surface and do not impair readability at all. Sounds like an apple manufacturing error to me - they tried to make the nano ultra-smooth and shiny, and cocked up big time in the process.
In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks. It's different in some other countries, like Britain, but for American English the GP had it right.
You just said "In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks"!?
Are you really sure that it's "different in some other countries, like Britain"? I think you'll find it's the same everywhere...
Slashdot Mirror
With practice you can minimise accidental ambiguity but for most people language is not a professions.
... ;-)
Which brings us nicely back to the original article - kids are simply not being taught how to use language correctly, giving rise to ambiguity and confusion. Learning to write well is an art, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be taught to every child.
(As an aside, though, I actually like the use of emoticons in email as they remove most forms of language ambiguity. I would have thought that the research mentioned in the article would have repeated the test with people who routinely use emoticons in their personal email - I think they'd have found a very different result. Unfortunately, emoticon use seems to have fallen off these days - probably because writers are scared that their elegant ascii art is going to be replaced by some cloyingly pathetic animated graphic
Rubbish. If that were true you wouldn't use English, you'd use mathematics, or a computer language.
No, you'd use a language that most people understood.
English and just about every language in the world are by their very nature imprecise, open to multiple interpretations, and deeply entrenched in the culture of the day.
And a writer with a decent knowledge of a language will use these imprecisions to their advantage - the true beauty of language lies in the fact that a sentence may have many different meanings, depending on the context.
Ummm... if we're headed for another ice age then how do sea levels rise? Isn't all that excess water tied up in, well, snow and ice? As in ice age? ;)
I think he's talking about the potential of much colder winters in Europe (and only Europe) thanks to the gulf stream slowing down/completely stopping (see, for example this paper for recent evidence of changes to the gulf stream flow)
but since you're wanting to rip, you can either hire that teenager, or send it off to these people.
...
Or you could just do it a few CDs at a time. I've been ripping my CD collection onto my laptop over the last few months - you don't need to do it over a weekend, you know, and it's no great trouble to occasionally pop a CD in and rip it
Logging on *my* computer is fine and useful. Logging on *their* server is not.
/. ... Hell, don't use computers at all - can you really trust that the people you're corresponding with are as concerned with security as you are??
...
So don't use it. Don't use Gmail, for that matter, unless you're using gnupg and pop3. Encrypt your hard disk, and make sure you're using anonymous proxies when you're posting to
Do what I do - put on a trenchcoat and sunglasses and conduct all interactions with other people in Hyde Park, whispering in ancient Babylonian. With my hand in front of my mouth, in case of lip readers
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story.
...
5 42 has some first screenshots of Cobalt, so maybe it's possible that it won't be vaporware after all ...)
Given the amount of time spent on OS6, I think they're creating their own "Hurd" story, not "OS X" story
(mind you, I notice that http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6
A better analogy might be comparing those Rolls Royces and Ferraris to a Hyundai, as long as the Hyundai came with your driver's license, and those better cars only seemed to be driven by the folks who spend every weekend working on their cars.
...
...
Hey, provided I can turn up and grab as many Ferraris as I want completely free, my Hyundai's not going to last very long
And I'd tend to see the cars that were driven by guys who spent their weekends working on them as more desirable - after all, these are guys who really like cars and know how they work, and they're still driving them. Must be something about them that's alright
True, it wasn't LCD (obviously), but it's CRT did have subpixels. Same effect, really.
... I guess there weren't too many shades of sub-pixel colour available back then!
//e's resolution. :)
... :)
... I'm wondering how that works myself, now, but it does ...
Oh yeah - the monitor pixels were in stripes, weren't they? You know, the funny thing was that I always assumed that the wacky colour fringe on the text was a display bug
I love your use of the term 'shocking' regarding the Apple
It was shocking! Even at the time, I remember thinking how crap it looked
I'm wondering if that's true only for black & white text? I'd like to see some ClearType on a coloured background or with coloured text sometime.
No, it works for all text colours
I figured it would be; I remember ClearType back on my Apple //e, and the extra colours around the letters bugged me even back then.
... it looked disgusting!! I wonder if they've fixed it yet?). If you want a good example of "cleartype" rendering on LCD, try Ubuntu.
...
Uh, your Apple IIe didn't have an LCD monitor, and the resolution (280x192 for maybe a 12" screen) was shocking.
I'm pretty much only using LCD monitors these days and I can tell you that "ClearType" on Windows works just great, as does sub-pixel anti-aliasing (same thing, just no fancy name) on X. You really don't notice any colour around the text, until you use xmag or something to blow it up. The only caveat is that you have to make sure you're using correctly hinted fonts (which was the problem Fedora fell into a few releases ago - their default font wasn't hinted and sub-pixel aa was enabled by default for LCDs
The grandparent post was probably using some strange free font that wasn't hinted, or else they'd got a panel with the RGB orientation different from the norm and hadn't corrected for it
Look at Disney's animated output over the last ten years. Then look at Pixar's. They may hypothetically be doing the same thing, but in reality Pixar's in an entirely different league.
... correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't Pixar part of Disney for almost all of the last ten years?? Everything up to and including "The Incredibles" was released with Disney ...
Um
If you really just want to run Linux, a homebuilt computer is gonna be leaps and bounds ahead of any pre-manufactured box from a quality perspective, including Apples. Cheaper too.
I think we're talking laptops here, not desktops. I can't imagine why anyone'd buy a desktop Mac unless they liked the OS. But their laptops are nicely constructed and definitely worth considering for hardware alone - if they made something with three buttons on the trackpad, I'd seriously consider it.
The question is: will we have any more luck escaping the "MacOS" tax than we've had trying to escape the Windows tax??
I have some CDs that are burned copies (although I'd call this great quality cds, not cheap storebrand with no backing), stored in a CD wallet case that are easily over 5 years old... still work great.
I first got a CDR drive in 1997, and the CDs burned from it that year are still perfectly readable. I was just listening to one the other day, in fact - that's a disc that's lasted nearly nine years!
What I don't know is whether the media quality was better back then - we certainly paid a lot more for it!! The other factor might be recording speed - my old recorder had a maximum speed of 2x. As I'm sure everyone's noticed on the disks they've burnt, the faintness of the visible track data increases with speed - quite possibly the tracks fade into unreadability much faster when they've been burnt at 52x.
One of the failures of the Linux community is recognizing the fact that most users don't want and don't care about such a tool. If you want full Linux-installer-style partition and format control over a Windows install, it's there, and it's not that hard to find.
/. users who don't understand the concept, but that's why there's a little foot icon alongside the story - it's a cue for you to skip to the next article ...
...
Oh, for crying out loud!! The article is humorous. Funny. A joke. It's supposed to make you laugh. I know there's a lot of
Since you clearly didn't get it the first time around, let me explain: the author takes the view point of a linux power user trying to use Windows the first time, and complaining about the lack of functionality. For example, he also goes off at Windows for not being able to switch to virtual terminals. He is in no way suggesting that your average end-user wants to repartition their hard disk.
I can't believe you got modded +5 informative for this
For one, even on Windows, it uses multiple windows for the same app. That doesn't make ANY sense from a UI perspective, and means that I often have to click more than four times in order to bring GIMP back up to focus when it's behind other Windows.
... haven't used it myself, but it sounds like the sort of thing you're after. However, your comment seemed more like a troll than anything else. Either that, or you've forgotten that not every graphic application has to be a direct clone of the hideous MDI interface of photoshop ...
Well, you could try this
Oh, and straight lines? Use the shift key. How do you do it in photoshop??
PLEASE! If you are writing a windows program, or a program you plan to port to windows, do not use GTK+. It works terribly on that platform.
Eh? Gimp works great. So does Inkscape. I use those on WinXP all the time here at work, and I've never had a problem with them.
Can you name anything that doesn't work well?? Gtk2 is a beautiful toolkit, IMHO - it's so easy to get your head around it, and it's powerful, too. And there's bindings for just about any higher level language you could care to name.
Yes, that was actually done around here. They've since taken it down, no doubt due to the ridicule from even the most basic customer.
...
Yeah, because everyone knows that there's no other way to access the internet other than a home connection. It's kinda funny that workplaces don't have internet access yet, and you'd have thought that local libraries would have provided it as a community service, but no
Geez, it's almost as crazy as the ISPs who allow you to sign up on their web page!! They must have been smoking crack or something, huh?
Perhaps some people use screen-savers, but would still like to have a visible indicator of when e-mail arrives?
... This is just a christmas gimmick, really.
Except that these days most laptops have a dedicated mail led, and for those using desktops there's always the scroll-lock led free and available
The worst part is, all the good new laptops are being made with widescreen because little Jane going off to college wants to watch DVDs. I don't want to watch DVDs on my computer, I'll do that on the TV. I want to use it as a computer, and computer need height.
...)
Well, I use my laptop primarily for work (I'm writing a thesis, a couple of papers and a book chapter on it; I also do image processing on it), but when I got it I specifically bought a widescreen so I could watch movies on it as well. Why would I want to, when I've got a TV? Well, because the resolution's heaps better and the relative screen size (the 15.4" laptop on the coffee table compared to the 21" TV in the corner of the room) is larger too. I get the equivalent of a plasma/LCD HD set in a machine that I needed to get anyway.
It's not just college kids that are buying widescreen displays, it's anyone who enjoys watching DVDs at their real resolution, rather than a crappy low-res interlaced display.
(Mind you, even without the DVD bonus, I've found that I much prefer widescreen displays - I can now fit several windows side-by-side more easily, you get more taskbar space and I don't feel as though I've "lost" any vertical space
Why can't I buy *just a phone*?
...
Eh? You still can. Or at least, you still can here in Australia. Very cheaply, too - I can pick up a pre-paid phone compatible with my current network for $79 Au, which has a monochrome screen and a speaker phone. There's probably cheaper available too, but I haven't looked into it much since my current phone, which is nearly four years old now, still works well. That's of course another option - you don't actually need to buy a new phone, you know - the old ones still work
But regardless, there's still a market for simple phones here, and I think one of the reasons for that is the wide-scale adoption of mobiles - they're not a tech-savy only market.
HTML would accomplish the same thing. It's a public standard, implementable by anyone on any platform, and convertable to plain text by a simple regex substitution. You're no more likely to find someone who can't read an html file than someone who can't read an ascii text file.
I agree, personally. However, you could also argue that _this_ sort of emphasis is convertible to html with a simple regex substitution - my point was simply that the texts haven't lost any information. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter _that_ much, does it?? Ascii is the lowest common denominator - it's not a bad place to start.
I know about the problems that old file formats can cause. However, I doubt that formats like PDF or JPG will ever get "lost".
My point was that since the emphasis is included in the file, you could always convert it to a nicely formatted PDF if you wanted to. In fact, I used to do almost exactly that a while back - I wrote some perl script to convert etexts to RTF and peanut markup language, and it worked pretty nicely. Keeping things at the lowest common denominator level isn't always a bad thing...
Personally, I wish PG would use basic html markup for italics and bold formatting, rather than plain text. But I'd rather cope with a lack of formatting than having the texts only in binary format.
Project Gutenberg is great and all, but there's something to be said for some effort made at presentation. Sometimes italics are a good thing.
... Pity there's no consistency, but for most texts it works well enough.
It's not a great solution, but emphasis _is_ preserved in the etexts, just like that. Or occasionally like THIS
Also, the fact that they are plain text, with no markup, formatting, binary code, whatever in them means that they'll always be accessible to anyone, regardless of software or platform. And that's a good thing, too!
CD sales are down. It doesn't matter if you believe file-sharing is damaging record companies. It's their intellectual property. Should we believe it's okay to not compensate John Carmack for his years of work on Doom 3 because he's rich enough to drive a Ferrari and id made millions off the game?
... You might be interested in an actual artist's take on the situation. It's rather old now, having been published in 2002, but it's highly illuminating in terms of both the effect of free music downloads and the nature of the RIAA and recording companies.
Please note that record companies != artists
Don't assume that the RIAA represents the interests of artists - it quite clearly does not.
have a Sony Ericsson T610 phone, which has black shiny plastic around the screen almost identical to the Nano. I always keep it in my pocket without a case, rubbing against the keys and change ... And yet the screen and black plastic parts have no scratches to speak of.
Same with my Panasonic phone, and that's been carried around with my keys for over 3.5 years now - most buttons are unreadable, the body has had the metalic silver paint almost entirely scratched off, but the screen has only a few minuscule scratches that are only noticable when you shine a light to reflect off the surface and do not impair readability at all. Sounds like an apple manufacturing error to me - they tried to make the nano ultra-smooth and shiny, and cocked up big time in the process.
In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks. It's different in some other countries, like Britain, but for American English the GP had it right.
...
You just said "In the United States, punctuation marks are always put inside of the quotation marks"!?
Are you really sure that it's "different in some other countries, like Britain"? I think you'll find it's the same everywhere