I used to use a Linux VM inside a Windows host but the computers we have at work are fairly weak (with upgrades being promised "in the near future"). I think the CPU doesn't even have proper virtualization support (thank you, Intel). Given that I spend virtually all of my time in Linux I got a nice productivity boost when I started booting straight into it.
As for the IDE, I'm kind of partial to Komodo's free offering. While it doesn't have too many bells and whistles it has what I need (syntax highlighting, code completion and click-to-find-definition), it's cross-platform and it's free. Project management amounts to pointing at a directory. I'd love the commercial version, especially since it has a built-in DBGP-based debugger, but the free version works well enough for day-to-day use and I think I'll be looking for a new job before the boss is ready to pay for the thing.
Windows 7 is nice. As usual, it has some questionable but not outright catastrophic UI design choices and some annoying but harmless quirks but it's vastly better than XP was. Then again it suffers from not being POSIX compliant (sure, Windows might have something similar to grep, sed or awk but having to relearn everything to cater to one specific OS vendor is somewhat wasteful when everyone else supports those tools).
Of course it depends on what you do. I'm a web developer, so having a well-configured local server environment is paramount and XAMPP never meshed well with me. Between the platform-independent IDE, the platform-independent office suite and a bash with all the tools I need out of the box I really don't have anything on Windows that I particularly miss. Okay, IE for compatibility testing but you can always keep a Win box around or use a VM.
As for bluescreens: I did get bluescreens that only occurred in Win 7 but I'm pretty certain that the computer had a subtly flaky mainbord.
There are already plenty of games that dont involve guns and/or violence. Music games, puzzle games, sim games, racing games, sports games. Like the poster above me said. We already have what they are trying to do. Its just that the violent ones tend to be more popular
Don't lie. Dance Dance Revolution doesn't exist and neither does Need for Speed. And Tetris was just a lie to make the Soviet Union appear harmless. All games involve shooting guns as their only gameplay element.
And before video games came out children were always well-behaved, played wholesome contact-free team sports and got their rushes of pleasure discussing classical literature and working out how to best advance society once they would be old enough to do so. Then computers appeared and it was non-stop Doom.
That's most likely because the "tank on top" configuration is pretty much only used in places where you get enough sun to gain a significant benefit by using it. If you look at Europe (excluding the Mediterranean area) you'll find that the temperature and average sun exposure would mean that the water in the tank just gets cold. Hence we use boilers which are usually located well inside the house or basement.
Oh, come on. Unless your family consists of idiots malware mitigation should make up a negligible amount of tech support work. It's more "Where did my program go?" (Windows decided to clean up the desktop), "What does this dialog box mean?" or "My printer stopped working!". The last one can happen anywhere (printer drivers are universally evil) but the first two happen especially on Windows.
My mother uses a laptop running Windows 7. My father uses a netbook running Ubuntu. Neither of them are proficient with computers but my father requires vastly less help since making the switch. When I have to help them it's usually because Windows did something incomprehensible (to them) and they need someone to figure it out. Windows may no longer be the only malware-affected OS but it's still the king of random nonsense. It's not that OS X and Linux don't have harmless but annoying behavior; it's just usually harmless but annoying behavior that doesn't scare the hell out of nonproficient users.
They actually got better on this as far as the laptops are concerned. The G4 iBook was horribly designed but the MacBook and MacBookPro were actually built to make the reasonably-serviceable components (HDD and RAM) easy to replace. I've upgraded a mid 2009 MBP's RAM and HDD with no fuss and it seems that my mid 2012 MBP will be no different.
The batteries on MBPs are somewhat harder to replace but basically amounts to having to use a weird screwdriver bit.
Of course all bets are off if you try to work with the retina MBP where everything is part of the logic board. I think they would've soldered the AC adapter to the logic board if they thought they could've gotten away with it.
Not really. In order to be of any relevance in the US system a new party would need to instantly get about one third of the votes. That's extremely implausible. If we look at Europe where proportional systems are the norm, new parties considered to be undergoing a meteoric rise to power gain single-digit percents - and that's in a system where the notion that a vote for anything but the biggest party is a wasted vote doesn't exist.
It's easy to form a party and get the message out. It's hard to do so and instantly gain the support of a third of the country, especially when you consider that the incumbents can most likely outspend you by orders of magnitude and have the bonus of voters who always vote for the same party without thinking.
Unless the entire nation completely loses faith in one of the two big parties it's extremely unlikely that any new entrant will have any chance of making their voice heard. At least not until they're willing to spend the equivalent of a mid-size corporation's market cap on their campaign.
In Germany it's fairly obvious that the economists are right: McD's and BK's business concepts revolve not around being cheap or good but around being ubiquitous. Subway, kebab shops and Chinese takeaway shops (to name common options in Germany) are all usually better and the latter two are also cheaper. But wherever you are there's always a McD or a BK nearby.
And so you pay five bucks for a not very Big Mac that's virtually taste-free even with salt and pepper, some mediocre fries and a coke while the same money could've bought you a tastier doner kebab where the salad component alone packs more nutrients than the entire McD offering. Plus the same coke. Of course it depends on whether you like cacik.
A German public-service TV station recently did a little report where they had test persons exclusively eat at one certain kind of restaurant for... a month, I think. The guy who went to the burger chain ended up paying the most and being the least enthusiastic about his next meal while the guy who went to eat Chinese every day paid comparatively little and was much less apprehensive.
This matches up with my experience: My workplace lies next to a small mall that has most of the above options plus two bakeries. Generally speaking the Chinese is cheap and okay, the doner stall is slightly more expensive and good, the bakeries are again slightly more expensive but are great if you don't mind a cold dinner and the BK is utterly bland and almost twice as expensive as the Chinese. It also has the distinction of keeping you sated for the shortest amount of time.
No matter what the ads say, the big burger chains don't even try to compete on quality or price. At least not anywhere I've ever been.
Google never did that. Someone external to Google pointed out that Google improved on their implementation of some well-known measures. Which he probably learned due to Google not exactly keeping the Android internals a secret, Android being open source. If you look at TFA it's not "Google says that Android is unhackable" but "someone from an IT security company praises Google for improving on the ineffectual ASLR found in the last Android release".
That's a bit like saying that Microsoft boasts about Windows 8 coming with a direct computer-to-brain interface when actually a few PC mags said that they like Metro. (Granted, I haven't seen any instances of that, either.)
I don't see how their first device being made for the Chinese market precludes them from making deals with other manufacturers for devices that target the Western high-end market. I'd assume that it's sensible to accept a reasonable offer instead of telling everyone interested to go home if you don't consider their device to be prestigious enough. If D.Phone made the first reasonable offer then D.Phone is their first manufacturer.
And no, I'm not particularly interested in MeeGo. I don't spend enough money on my prepaid contract to justify more than ten bucks for a new phone and I doubt they'll cater to my market segment. I'm just intrigued by how you seem to think that them not coming out with an iPhone killer first somehow means that MeeGo is dead in your market forever. Shouldn't a deal with the Chinese give them the money and credentials to more aggressively market toward companies that are big in the Western markets?
Well, English words don't have a built-in gender so you could be an obese male or an obese female.
Now if you'll excuse me, being from Germany and Germany being in Europe I now have to fetch my lederhosen and hipster glasses, sit in a beer garden and complain about American politics and/or Greece.
I don't want to defend/.'s weird character set but the Euro sign isn't part of Latin-1. You're thinking of Latin-15 (aka "Latin 1 with the Euro sign instead of generic currency sign").
I do spend quite a bit of my spare time on a Windows computer... but that's just because Windows is still the best platform for games. For me Windows is just an immensely bloated shell around DirectX that happens to be able to run arbitrary applications.
Well, you can have both at the same time but so far the NFL's Large Athlete Collider has failed to produce anything besides a few new Super Bowl commercials.
Which is precisely why I find it amusing that Windows declares that it tries to install a "driver" for something that doesn't need driver installation. And how it can "fail" at "installing" a "driver", which might have no consequences whatsoever.
I get the feeling that someone at Microsoft decided that every time anything is connected to a Windows computer the OS needs to inform the user that some kind of driver is being installed. Perhaps they think it's too confusing if some things need drivers and some don't... or Windows just has really bad reporting and just classifies anything remotely related to system configuration as "installing a driver".
The way plugging in any new piece of hardware starts a hardware installation wizard that hardly ever seems to work and then causes people to go hunting for some CD or driver on the net?
Bonus points if the driver is for a USB Human Interface Device or an SMB network share... and fails to install properly. (Windows 7 did that to me recently. At least it was able to access the network share despite complaining that "the device doesn't function" for lack of a driver.)
Re:Perhaps it is not broken and horrible
on
The PHP Singularity
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· Score: 2
PHP is a screwed-up language. However, it's a screwed-up language that is very easy to get into. It's the Basic of web development languages. In order to compete, your language must be more straightforward than Basic - at least as far as beginners are concerned. While frameworks like Django or Rails are very nice and automate a lot of stuff, they are much more complex than "write 'echo $bar' to output some text". That's why PHP has such a solid grasp of the beginners' market: One file with three lines (two of which are boilerplate) is all you need to get a working Hello World implementation and it's obvious how to progress from there. "One file, one script" is messy but easy to get started with.
And, of course, other languages are not free from utter nonsense, either. For instance, Python can convert base-n numerical strings (with 1 <= n <= 36) to integers but it can only convert integers to numerical strings of the bases 2, 8, 10 and 16. Why? Nobody knows. Of course Python doesn't get anywhere near PHP's level of idiosyncrasy but the combination of "unlike PHP, $LANGUAGE is consistent"-type rhethoric and inconsistencies in the language does turn one off when trying to move away from PHP. (Although in my case it was just a small part of a general incompatibility between me and Python; I seem to mesh better with Ruby, though.)
Before someone asks why I needed to generate arbitrary-base numeric strings: Legacy interfaces.
(I'd also like to mention that PHP is debuggable with a third-party extension. If third-party extensions don't count then Python and Ruby aren't web languages; neither Django nor Rails are part of the default package. In fact, AFAICT Python and Ruby also require third-party packages for remote debugging support.)
I stand corrected on "mown" but I often see questions that begin with a negation like that. For example:
"Do you know X?" - "Isn't that the guy who does Y?"
"Why was X fired?" - "Didn't he screw up project Y?"
"People use nonstandard English!" - "Wouldn't life be better if they didn't?"
I admit that "Haven't you mowed the lawn?" is a strange question to ask but similar questions seem to be used fairly commonly when someone tries to ascertain a fact they think might be true but aren't entirely sure about. I see the non-negated versions too but the subtext seems to be different – the non-negated version seems to imply less certainty while the negated one seems to imply that they assume the topic of the inquiry to be true but inquire whether it actually isn't.
This may, of course, be something that has only recently started leaching into colloquial English from other languages. I couldn't say; I only know what I deal with.
Mostly but not entirely. I currently run an old hand-me-down Geforce 8800 GTS and while its processor is certainly powerful enough to calculate the scene in my native resolution it has an entirely different problem that makes newer games (say, Far Cry 2) run horribly on higher settings: 320 megabytes of RAM. You can have all the power you want in your GPU core but it all amounts to nothing if anything but the lowest settings induce noticeable pumping as the core spends most of its time mobing around data because the working set just doesn't fit in the memory.
If they sold an 8800 with one or even two gigs of RAM I'm fairly certain that I could play just about anything on high settings without any problems.
It was a dark and stormy night. The lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonia wind which swept up the alien canals. In other words, a typical day on the dark side of Omicron 1.
It was a dark and stormy night; the lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonia wind which swept up the crystaline streets (for it is on Omicron 1 that our scene lies), rattling along the gemstone-encrusted housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the spontaneous bouts of atmospheric fusion that struggled against the darkness, when Edward George Bulwer-Lytton decided that science fiction really wasn't his genre.
No. I'm fluent in German and mostly fluent in English (and suck at Romance languages) and there are times when the languages just work entirely differently. Let's take the German "doch". It's the proper answer given to express that the assertion made by a negative question is wrong. For instance, for "Haven't you mown the lawn?" the answer "Doch." expresses that I have indeed mown the lawn. While English can approximate the answer with "Yes, I have.", the subtext is different. "Doch" is a negative answer; it implies wrongness on the part of the asker. "Yes, I have", on the other hand, answers in the affirmative.
Now, this is a simple language construct that could be imported into the English language (although English is already such a hodgepodge that the relationship between spelling and pronounciation is often unintuitive even to native speakers*). But there are other things where it's not as easy. When you hear the word "cadence" you would think of music or perhaps My Little Pony. A German or an Italian might think of guns. Why? The German "Kadenz" can mean both "cadence" and "rate of fire". Similarly, "cadenza" can be extended to "cadenza di tiro" to similar effect. These relations might give a German or an Italian an idea relating to music and guns that would be entirely unintuitive to an American who might only make the connection through Kurt Cobain.
I'm not going to go all Sapir-Whorf and declare that speaking another language means that you think entirely differently - but you do make different connections simply because often concepts are related differently in certain languages or even jargons. It's not about speakers of certain languages not being able to understand the color blue or polyglots being hyper-intelligent; it's about speaking multiple languages giving you more opportunities for unusual ideas because you have more conceptual relations to work off.
And no, I'm not a linguist although I briefly considered studying it. Language is pretty interesting.
* Including people who should really know better. Ghoti anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use a Linux VM inside a Windows host but the computers we have at work are fairly weak (with upgrades being promised "in the near future"). I think the CPU doesn't even have proper virtualization support (thank you, Intel). Given that I spend virtually all of my time in Linux I got a nice productivity boost when I started booting straight into it.
As for the IDE, I'm kind of partial to Komodo's free offering. While it doesn't have too many bells and whistles it has what I need (syntax highlighting, code completion and click-to-find-definition), it's cross-platform and it's free. Project management amounts to pointing at a directory. I'd love the commercial version, especially since it has a built-in DBGP-based debugger, but the free version works well enough for day-to-day use and I think I'll be looking for a new job before the boss is ready to pay for the thing.
Windows 7 is nice. As usual, it has some questionable but not outright catastrophic UI design choices and some annoying but harmless quirks but it's vastly better than XP was. Then again it suffers from not being POSIX compliant (sure, Windows might have something similar to grep, sed or awk but having to relearn everything to cater to one specific OS vendor is somewhat wasteful when everyone else supports those tools).
Of course it depends on what you do. I'm a web developer, so having a well-configured local server environment is paramount and XAMPP never meshed well with me. Between the platform-independent IDE, the platform-independent office suite and a bash with all the tools I need out of the box I really don't have anything on Windows that I particularly miss. Okay, IE for compatibility testing but you can always keep a Win box around or use a VM.
As for bluescreens: I did get bluescreens that only occurred in Win 7 but I'm pretty certain that the computer had a subtly flaky mainbord.
There are already plenty of games that dont involve guns and/or violence. Music games, puzzle games, sim games, racing games, sports games. Like the poster above me said. We already have what they are trying to do. Its just that the violent ones tend to be more popular
Don't lie. Dance Dance Revolution doesn't exist and neither does Need for Speed. And Tetris was just a lie to make the Soviet Union appear harmless. All games involve shooting guns as their only gameplay element.
And before video games came out children were always well-behaved, played wholesome contact-free team sports and got their rushes of pleasure discussing classical literature and working out how to best advance society once they would be old enough to do so. Then computers appeared and it was non-stop Doom.
That's most likely because the "tank on top" configuration is pretty much only used in places where you get enough sun to gain a significant benefit by using it. If you look at Europe (excluding the Mediterranean area) you'll find that the temperature and average sun exposure would mean that the water in the tank just gets cold. Hence we use boilers which are usually located well inside the house or basement.
Well, at least now Microsoft distantly follows the standard instead of completely ignoring it like before...
Oh, come on. Unless your family consists of idiots malware mitigation should make up a negligible amount of tech support work. It's more "Where did my program go?" (Windows decided to clean up the desktop), "What does this dialog box mean?" or "My printer stopped working!". The last one can happen anywhere (printer drivers are universally evil) but the first two happen especially on Windows.
My mother uses a laptop running Windows 7. My father uses a netbook running Ubuntu. Neither of them are proficient with computers but my father requires vastly less help since making the switch. When I have to help them it's usually because Windows did something incomprehensible (to them) and they need someone to figure it out. Windows may no longer be the only malware-affected OS but it's still the king of random nonsense. It's not that OS X and Linux don't have harmless but annoying behavior; it's just usually harmless but annoying behavior that doesn't scare the hell out of nonproficient users.
They actually got better on this as far as the laptops are concerned. The G4 iBook was horribly designed but the MacBook and MacBookPro were actually built to make the reasonably-serviceable components (HDD and RAM) easy to replace. I've upgraded a mid 2009 MBP's RAM and HDD with no fuss and it seems that my mid 2012 MBP will be no different.
The batteries on MBPs are somewhat harder to replace but basically amounts to having to use a weird screwdriver bit.
Of course all bets are off if you try to work with the retina MBP where everything is part of the logic board. I think they would've soldered the AC adapter to the logic board if they thought they could've gotten away with it.
iPads come with a tablet? Wow. I guess I'll have to keep that stuff they fill the box with the next time I buy one.
Not really. In order to be of any relevance in the US system a new party would need to instantly get about one third of the votes. That's extremely implausible. If we look at Europe where proportional systems are the norm, new parties considered to be undergoing a meteoric rise to power gain single-digit percents - and that's in a system where the notion that a vote for anything but the biggest party is a wasted vote doesn't exist.
It's easy to form a party and get the message out. It's hard to do so and instantly gain the support of a third of the country, especially when you consider that the incumbents can most likely outspend you by orders of magnitude and have the bonus of voters who always vote for the same party without thinking.
Unless the entire nation completely loses faith in one of the two big parties it's extremely unlikely that any new entrant will have any chance of making their voice heard. At least not until they're willing to spend the equivalent of a mid-size corporation's market cap on their campaign.
In Germany it's fairly obvious that the economists are right: McD's and BK's business concepts revolve not around being cheap or good but around being ubiquitous. Subway, kebab shops and Chinese takeaway shops (to name common options in Germany) are all usually better and the latter two are also cheaper. But wherever you are there's always a McD or a BK nearby.
And so you pay five bucks for a not very Big Mac that's virtually taste-free even with salt and pepper, some mediocre fries and a coke while the same money could've bought you a tastier doner kebab where the salad component alone packs more nutrients than the entire McD offering. Plus the same coke. Of course it depends on whether you like cacik.
A German public-service TV station recently did a little report where they had test persons exclusively eat at one certain kind of restaurant for... a month, I think. The guy who went to the burger chain ended up paying the most and being the least enthusiastic about his next meal while the guy who went to eat Chinese every day paid comparatively little and was much less apprehensive.
This matches up with my experience: My workplace lies next to a small mall that has most of the above options plus two bakeries. Generally speaking the Chinese is cheap and okay, the doner stall is slightly more expensive and good, the bakeries are again slightly more expensive but are great if you don't mind a cold dinner and the BK is utterly bland and almost twice as expensive as the Chinese. It also has the distinction of keeping you sated for the shortest amount of time.
No matter what the ads say, the big burger chains don't even try to compete on quality or price. At least not anywhere I've ever been.
For the same reason you'd eat at a McDonald's elsewhere: You hate decent food.
Dude, we're nowhere near nanomods yet. He should've gone with CASIE or perhaps a skullgun. If he could kil just by thought, it would be beter.
Google never did that. Someone external to Google pointed out that Google improved on their implementation of some well-known measures. Which he probably learned due to Google not exactly keeping the Android internals a secret, Android being open source. If you look at TFA it's not "Google says that Android is unhackable" but "someone from an IT security company praises Google for improving on the ineffectual ASLR found in the last Android release".
That's a bit like saying that Microsoft boasts about Windows 8 coming with a direct computer-to-brain interface when actually a few PC mags said that they like Metro. (Granted, I haven't seen any instances of that, either.)
I don't see how their first device being made for the Chinese market precludes them from making deals with other manufacturers for devices that target the Western high-end market. I'd assume that it's sensible to accept a reasonable offer instead of telling everyone interested to go home if you don't consider their device to be prestigious enough. If D.Phone made the first reasonable offer then D.Phone is their first manufacturer.
And no, I'm not particularly interested in MeeGo. I don't spend enough money on my prepaid contract to justify more than ten bucks for a new phone and I doubt they'll cater to my market segment. I'm just intrigued by how you seem to think that them not coming out with an iPhone killer first somehow means that MeeGo is dead in your market forever. Shouldn't a deal with the Chinese give them the money and credentials to more aggressively market toward companies that are big in the Western markets?
Well, English words don't have a built-in gender so you could be an obese male or an obese female.
Now if you'll excuse me, being from Germany and Germany being in Europe I now have to fetch my lederhosen and hipster glasses, sit in a beer garden and complain about American politics and/or Greece.
I don't want to defend /.'s weird character set but the Euro sign isn't part of Latin-1. You're thinking of Latin-15 (aka "Latin 1 with the Euro sign instead of generic currency sign").
I do spend quite a bit of my spare time on a Windows computer... but that's just because Windows is still the best platform for games. For me Windows is just an immensely bloated shell around DirectX that happens to be able to run arbitrary applications.
Well, you can have both at the same time but so far the NFL's Large Athlete Collider has failed to produce anything besides a few new Super Bowl commercials.
Which is precisely why I find it amusing that Windows declares that it tries to install a "driver" for something that doesn't need driver installation. And how it can "fail" at "installing" a "driver", which might have no consequences whatsoever.
I get the feeling that someone at Microsoft decided that every time anything is connected to a Windows computer the OS needs to inform the user that some kind of driver is being installed. Perhaps they think it's too confusing if some things need drivers and some don't... or Windows just has really bad reporting and just classifies anything remotely related to system configuration as "installing a driver".
Bonus points if the driver is for a USB Human Interface Device or an SMB network share... and fails to install properly. (Windows 7 did that to me recently. At least it was able to access the network share despite complaining that "the device doesn't function" for lack of a driver.)
PHP is a screwed-up language. However, it's a screwed-up language that is very easy to get into. It's the Basic of web development languages. In order to compete, your language must be more straightforward than Basic - at least as far as beginners are concerned. While frameworks like Django or Rails are very nice and automate a lot of stuff, they are much more complex than "write 'echo $bar' to output some text". That's why PHP has such a solid grasp of the beginners' market: One file with three lines (two of which are boilerplate) is all you need to get a working Hello World implementation and it's obvious how to progress from there. "One file, one script" is messy but easy to get started with.
And, of course, other languages are not free from utter nonsense, either. For instance, Python can convert base-n numerical strings (with 1 <= n <= 36) to integers but it can only convert integers to numerical strings of the bases 2, 8, 10 and 16. Why? Nobody knows. Of course Python doesn't get anywhere near PHP's level of idiosyncrasy but the combination of "unlike PHP, $LANGUAGE is consistent"-type rhethoric and inconsistencies in the language does turn one off when trying to move away from PHP. (Although in my case it was just a small part of a general incompatibility between me and Python; I seem to mesh better with Ruby, though.)
Before someone asks why I needed to generate arbitrary-base numeric strings: Legacy interfaces.
(I'd also like to mention that PHP is debuggable with a third-party extension. If third-party extensions don't count then Python and Ruby aren't web languages; neither Django nor Rails are part of the default package. In fact, AFAICT Python and Ruby also require third-party packages for remote debugging support.)
I stand corrected on "mown" but I often see questions that begin with a negation like that. For example:
"Do you know X?" - "Isn't that the guy who does Y?"
"Why was X fired?" - "Didn't he screw up project Y?"
"People use nonstandard English!" - "Wouldn't life be better if they didn't?"
I admit that "Haven't you mowed the lawn?" is a strange question to ask but similar questions seem to be used fairly commonly when someone tries to ascertain a fact they think might be true but aren't entirely sure about. I see the non-negated versions too but the subtext seems to be different – the non-negated version seems to imply less certainty while the negated one seems to imply that they assume the topic of the inquiry to be true but inquire whether it actually isn't.
This may, of course, be something that has only recently started leaching into colloquial English from other languages. I couldn't say; I only know what I deal with.
Mostly but not entirely. I currently run an old hand-me-down Geforce 8800 GTS and while its processor is certainly powerful enough to calculate the scene in my native resolution it has an entirely different problem that makes newer games (say, Far Cry 2) run horribly on higher settings: 320 megabytes of RAM. You can have all the power you want in your GPU core but it all amounts to nothing if anything but the lowest settings induce noticeable pumping as the core spends most of its time mobing around data because the working set just doesn't fit in the memory.
If they sold an 8800 with one or even two gigs of RAM I'm fairly certain that I could play just about anything on high settings without any problems.
It was a dark and stormy night. The lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonia wind which swept up the alien canals. In other words, a typical day on the dark side of Omicron 1.
It was a dark and stormy night; the lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonia wind which swept up the crystaline streets (for it is on Omicron 1 that our scene lies), rattling along the gemstone-encrusted housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the spontaneous bouts of atmospheric fusion that struggled against the darkness, when Edward George Bulwer-Lytton decided that science fiction really wasn't his genre.
No. I'm fluent in German and mostly fluent in English (and suck at Romance languages) and there are times when the languages just work entirely differently. Let's take the German "doch". It's the proper answer given to express that the assertion made by a negative question is wrong. For instance, for "Haven't you mown the lawn?" the answer "Doch." expresses that I have indeed mown the lawn. While English can approximate the answer with "Yes, I have.", the subtext is different. "Doch" is a negative answer; it implies wrongness on the part of the asker. "Yes, I have", on the other hand, answers in the affirmative.
Now, this is a simple language construct that could be imported into the English language (although English is already such a hodgepodge that the relationship between spelling and pronounciation is often unintuitive even to native speakers*). But there are other things where it's not as easy. When you hear the word "cadence" you would think of music or perhaps My Little Pony. A German or an Italian might think of guns. Why? The German "Kadenz" can mean both "cadence" and "rate of fire". Similarly, "cadenza" can be extended to "cadenza di tiro" to similar effect. These relations might give a German or an Italian an idea relating to music and guns that would be entirely unintuitive to an American who might only make the connection through Kurt Cobain.
I'm not going to go all Sapir-Whorf and declare that speaking another language means that you think entirely differently - but you do make different connections simply because often concepts are related differently in certain languages or even jargons. It's not about speakers of certain languages not being able to understand the color blue or polyglots being hyper-intelligent; it's about speaking multiple languages giving you more opportunities for unusual ideas because you have more conceptual relations to work off.
And no, I'm not a linguist although I briefly considered studying it. Language is pretty interesting.
* Including people who should really know better. Ghoti anyone?