There is no way to define the default character set when mounting a file system (except for FAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and SMBFS/CIFS).
Imagine a file server that is accessed both locally and over Samba, NFS, and FTP. Tons of files with non-ASCII characters in them. How do you make it work? In *nix, you don't: locales only work locally and cannot be enforced, Samba is only one way to access the server, and there is no FTP software that can switch the character set used. Using FAT for storage space is also a not-very-good idea.
I usually do not use quotations and even when I do, I never top-post. The ancient FidoNet netiquette, enforced by GoldEd, stated that one's message should never contain any more than 30% of quotations. Now it's ingrained or almost.
However, I do think in some places excessive quoting and even top-posting is useful. Why? In an office situation where information about, say, an upcoming WAN upgrade is sent between many people, it can become an arduous task to keep up with every piece of it, were it all written according to the proper netiquette. It is remarkably easier to just scroll down in a message to find both the context and the part you need. Sometimes you may even find something that wasn't initially sent to you at all, but should've been. Et caetera.
So, I opposed top-posting and excessive quoting as much as anybody, perhaps even more than many since I am a language freak and perhaps even a language jerk sometimes, but I came to accept that practice in an office situation where it makes perfect sense to me (and I do feel bad for saying it).
Considering all the Steven Seagal films and adding some other flicks to the mix, I would never dare to go to the United States. I mean, why do you Americans have to shoot each other all the time in the streets? Innocent bystanders do get hurt, I just saw it in Heat. Besides, your traffic is crazy, just check out Bad Boys II.
Then again, the main character in Encino Man comes from my country...
Kidding aside, mafia is not Russia's biggest problem. Can I say "the administration"?
Over time, I have bought tons of East European music, plus some from Russia and even from Uzbekistan. Oh, and Greece. I rip the CDs into Vorbis and keep them nicely (or sometimes not so nicely) on the shelf. Who knows when I visit Samarqand or, say, Belgrade again, cannot risk scratching the discs.
I am also anal when it comes to written language and I don't believe in those make-your-own-Cyrillic-to-Latin transliterations. Luckily, I don't do MP3 anymore and the comments in Ogg are in UTF-8. The tag editor in Winamp even shows the characters, but playlists are empty. Sighing sadly, I went for foobar2000 (while in Windows, which happens rarely). Hell, in a generous spree I even paid 10 dollars for Winamp once.
For the same reason I cannot use XMMS for anything else than playing CDs and lending its input plugins to MPlayer.
A friend and a talented jazz/fusion musician once decided to call his every musician acquaintance at three in the night and ask them, "Why do you make music?" Catch them unawares. Many replied, "Because I really really have to."
To some, making music and listening to it is quite essential. Or what, should we have told Van Gogh that he'd have been better off and maybe not an ear short, had he laid off those whacky colours before it was too late?
Most people in Europe learn English without ever visiting an English-speaking country. I spoke it before I even went abroad for the very first time. I also learnt Russian without frequenting there and French with chances next to none to ever get to France. (Though I finally did get to hitchhike there.)
Now, Hungarian and Spanish are in the queue and I've never been to Spain or any other Spanish-speaking country.
And the next time an American Krishnaite comes up to me in my hometown and assumes I have to speak to him in his native tongue while he has the luxury of knowing not a word of the language of those people whose guest he's been for years, I am going to kick his arse. Really.
First day on the job as an NT and LAN admin at an important financial institution. For some reason, I was moving my feet under the table - motoric anxiety? - and pushed over my full tower workstation. Guess what happened to the hard disk.
Also, I once wrote a small batch script like this:
@echo off echo bbb >> aaa :1 type aaa >> bbb type bbb >> aaa goto 1
and let it run for a while to see how fast the disk would fill up. On a friend's computer with one gibibyte of free space. Forgot about it - much beer! - and left. In a half hour he called and asked for help, he was not able to save his work files anymore. Oh, was he rightfully pissed off.
The weaker the economy, the more likely are most people to deal in a "stable currency". Coming from the former Soviet Union, I've seen the tendency come and go in my own country as well, when the rouble was going downhill and nobody knew what it was going to cost next morning. At one point, it was even so bad that people who were standing in line for something didn't often know how much the object they were after was going to cost when they got to the counter. So people dealt in US dollars, Deutschmarks, Finnish marks and Swedish crowns. When the economy started climbing uphill, the foreign money was ousted from everyday transactions. So, if Macedonian establishments accept Macedonian money, I can only see an uphill trend there, even if my observation is only based on what currency is universally accepted.
As for waving pieces of plastic around and expecting everyone to accept those as the be all and end all of payment methods... Well, get real.
The so-called Islamic Fundamentalists may be Islamic, but that's not their starting point. They do not want to destroy the Western culture because they're Islamic Fundamentalists. Moreover, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a fundamentalist of some kind. Hell, Iggy Pop can get away with it.
The thing is that all those warmongers are very clever to find their ways to target the crowds who feel that they've been had. The "Fundamentalists'" propaganda would not be as effective among the would-be human explosives if they weren't using the basis of the Mid-Eastern culture for their soapbox. For all we know, they could give squat for the religion, as long as they can persuade the people to be on their side and strive to achieve their agenda. Works all the time, everywhere. Also see topic Western Values.
I spent two weeks in an Islamic Mid-East country called O'zbekiston (it's Uzbekistan for you). I wasn't in incubatory conditions, either, I lived and travelled with the locals. I found out more about their ways of life and about Islam than I could've imagined possible. Yes, they are Sunnis, yes, they pray every day and 5 times every Friday, yes, there's some gender segregation etc. But no-one is planting bombs at the doorsteps of the US embassy or sending modern day kamikazes to explode overseas. Their ways are ultimately more quiet than ours. There I started to realise that we're being fed the "Islam is bad, look at what they're doing to us because of their religion" rap, while the real motives are somewhere else.
Ogg is a container. MPEG Layer III is headerless. It makes much more sense to call MP3s as such than to call Vorbis audio contained in the Ogg wrapper simply Ogg. Are your movies always AVI this and AVI that or do you actually speak of DivX, XviD etc?
Well, it's not solely the useless equivalent of Ctrl-Enter.
When I am in Windows, Win-R is a very convenient way to pop up the Run line in one go. Plus I find Win-M and Win-Shift-M very convenient when I have to use the desktop but all those 10+ windows are blocking the view. Much more convenient than using the mouse for achieving the same result. Win-E opens a new Explorer window. Under XP, Win-L locks the computer (though Ctrl-Alt-Del Enter is much more ingrained). Also, Win-Tab is another way of task switching and some may argue that it creates less visual clutter.
Even KDE can use many of those shortcuts when it is switched to the Windows behaviour. Why you would want to is another question, but it's there when you (or your grandma) needs it.
You make me wonder now. My page is almost completely XHTML 1.0 strict, validates as such and everything, and yet there are no pages on it that IE cannot display. Granted, I haven't done anything fancy with CSS there and for a historical reason I use tables to delimit the width of text (going to change that soon, though), but IE still does display it and I've tried with almost any version of it that I've come across.
Leave the hair alone. I let my hair grow when I was 13. One day, somebody made a passing comment at school that got to me and I cut the hair in a "popular way". It's quite painful now to look at all those pictures where I'm wearing a textbook example of the molester mullet.
There's much confusion among laymen about that dpi thing. When lpi is introduced, most people just give up.
Printer dpi. Standard in print shops is about 2400-2540 dpi.
Image dpi - not really dpi, it's actually ppi. Pixels per inch.
Screen lpi. Lines per inch. For halftone screens.
Lpi is related to dpi so that the higher the dpi count, the more precise can the little dots be in size and in shape that make up lpi. That's why you only get ~65 lpi with 300 dpi printers, ~80 lpi with 600 dpi printers and perhaps ~100 or so with 1200 dpi printers.
Desired image resolution = desired lpi * 2. So if you're going to print at 2540 dpi / 150 lpi (standard magazine), you have to work with 300 ppi scans. 2540 / 133 (glossy newspapers) requires 266 ppi scans. Then again, there's no real gain in going over 300 ppi when printing at, say, 175 lpi (photo magazines).
Even for digital photo labs there's no use in going over 300 ppi, and scanning a 10x15 cm print at 600 for 1:1 reproduction is particularly pointless, since those usually contain no more than 200 ppi of information on them anyway.
They aren't if done properly. By properly, I mean reverse translation etc. If the system knows, for instance, what Hans.Mueller and Hans.Muller really stand for, then there's no trouble. Same with i18n in domain names. It's really not that hard to do. For instance, what do you think how the Japanese write their language in computers? They use romaji, the latinised script of the language, and the computer itself converts it to kanji, hiragana or katakana. If Word can do it on the fly, why cannot BIND? As I understand, it already works something like this in Southeast Asia.
Yes, I can see that for some people, status quo is the way it should be, but I don't really buy it. My language contains 6 characters that aren't in US-ASCII. Believe it or not, the umlauts and tildes aren't there to make the letters look good, they're there for a reason. Pronunciation is one. Omitting them in writing will very often change the meaning of a word to a grotesque. For just one example, lo~helo~igud (damn US-ASCII at work again) means "salmon slices", while loheloigud is "dragon puddles". Until now, people around here have been forced to work creatively around that obstacle, but we still have tons of pointless and unintuitive domain names that could have been avoided, had the technology not been so US-ASCII centred from the get go.
And why do you think Americans are stupid and cannot find charmap.exe or gucharmap?:-)
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There is no way to define the default character set when mounting a file system (except for FAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and SMBFS/CIFS).
Imagine a file server that is accessed both locally and over Samba, NFS, and FTP. Tons of files with non-ASCII characters in them. How do you make it work? In *nix, you don't: locales only work locally and cannot be enforced, Samba is only one way to access the server, and there is no FTP software that can switch the character set used. Using FAT for storage space is also a not-very-good idea.
So, once outside US-ASCII, you're screwed.
. . . .not now mom i am compiling my kernel . . . .
Stop doing that, you'll go blind!
I usually do not use quotations and even when I do, I never top-post. The ancient FidoNet netiquette, enforced by GoldEd, stated that one's message should never contain any more than 30% of quotations. Now it's ingrained or almost.
However, I do think in some places excessive quoting and even top-posting is useful. Why? In an office situation where information about, say, an upcoming WAN upgrade is sent between many people, it can become an arduous task to keep up with every piece of it, were it all written according to the proper netiquette. It is remarkably easier to just scroll down in a message to find both the context and the part you need. Sometimes you may even find something that wasn't initially sent to you at all, but should've been. Et caetera.
So, I opposed top-posting and excessive quoting as much as anybody, perhaps even more than many since I am a language freak and perhaps even a language jerk sometimes, but I came to accept that practice in an office situation where it makes perfect sense to me (and I do feel bad for saying it).
Considering all the Steven Seagal films and adding some other flicks to the mix, I would never dare to go to the United States. I mean, why do you Americans have to shoot each other all the time in the streets? Innocent bystanders do get hurt, I just saw it in Heat. Besides, your traffic is crazy, just check out Bad Boys II.
Then again, the main character in Encino Man comes from my country...
Kidding aside, mafia is not Russia's biggest problem. Can I say "the administration"?
Holy macaroni. Should have checked from which clipboard the address came.
This is what it should have been. Although it may well be too late for that.
My problem was the reverse: how do I teach Thunderbird to open links in a new Firefox tab.
The solution was right there.
It also took care of the mailto: links opening in Thunderbird.
Over time, I have bought tons of East European music, plus some from Russia and even from Uzbekistan. Oh, and Greece. I rip the CDs into Vorbis and keep them nicely (or sometimes not so nicely) on the shelf. Who knows when I visit Samarqand or, say, Belgrade again, cannot risk scratching the discs.
I am also anal when it comes to written language and I don't believe in those make-your-own-Cyrillic-to-Latin transliterations. Luckily, I don't do MP3 anymore and the comments in Ogg are in UTF-8. The tag editor in Winamp even shows the characters, but playlists are empty. Sighing sadly, I went for foobar2000 (while in Windows, which happens rarely). Hell, in a generous spree I even paid 10 dollars for Winamp once.
For the same reason I cannot use XMMS for anything else than playing CDs and lending its input plugins to MPlayer.
One-byte codepages are so n<1994.
- Oh why, Antonio, why?
- Because I have amnesia!
To many people, it is.
A friend and a talented jazz/fusion musician once decided to call his every musician acquaintance at three in the night and ask them, "Why do you make music?" Catch them unawares. Many replied, "Because I really really have to."
To some, making music and listening to it is quite essential. Or what, should we have told Van Gogh that he'd have been better off and maybe not an ear short, had he laid off those whacky colours before it was too late?
Most people in Europe learn English without ever visiting an English-speaking country. I spoke it before I even went abroad for the very first time. I also learnt Russian without frequenting there and French with chances next to none to ever get to France. (Though I finally did get to hitchhike there.)
Now, Hungarian and Spanish are in the queue and I've never been to Spain or any other Spanish-speaking country.
And the next time an American Krishnaite comes up to me in my hometown and assumes I have to speak to him in his native tongue while he has the luxury of knowing not a word of the language of those people whose guest he's been for years, I am going to kick his arse. Really.
First day on the job as an NT and LAN admin at an important financial institution. For some reason, I was moving my feet under the table - motoric anxiety? - and pushed over my full tower workstation. Guess what happened to the hard disk.
Also, I once wrote a small batch script like this:
and let it run for a while to see how fast the disk would fill up. On a friend's computer with one gibibyte of free space. Forgot about it - much beer! - and left. In a half hour he called and asked for help, he was not able to save his work files anymore. Oh, was he rightfully pissed off.
Nonono, boyee, it's the other way around.
The weaker the economy, the more likely are most people to deal in a "stable currency". Coming from the former Soviet Union, I've seen the tendency come and go in my own country as well, when the rouble was going downhill and nobody knew what it was going to cost next morning. At one point, it was even so bad that people who were standing in line for something didn't often know how much the object they were after was going to cost when they got to the counter. So people dealt in US dollars, Deutschmarks, Finnish marks and Swedish crowns. When the economy started climbing uphill, the foreign money was ousted from everyday transactions. So, if Macedonian establishments accept Macedonian money, I can only see an uphill trend there, even if my observation is only based on what currency is universally accepted.
As for waving pieces of plastic around and expecting everyone to accept those as the be all and end all of payment methods... Well, get real.
The so-called Islamic Fundamentalists may be Islamic, but that's not their starting point. They do not want to destroy the Western culture because they're Islamic Fundamentalists. Moreover, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a fundamentalist of some kind. Hell, Iggy Pop can get away with it.
The thing is that all those warmongers are very clever to find their ways to target the crowds who feel that they've been had. The "Fundamentalists'" propaganda would not be as effective among the would-be human explosives if they weren't using the basis of the Mid-Eastern culture for their soapbox. For all we know, they could give squat for the religion, as long as they can persuade the people to be on their side and strive to achieve their agenda. Works all the time, everywhere. Also see topic Western Values.
I spent two weeks in an Islamic Mid-East country called O'zbekiston (it's Uzbekistan for you). I wasn't in incubatory conditions, either, I lived and travelled with the locals. I found out more about their ways of life and about Islam than I could've imagined possible. Yes, they are Sunnis, yes, they pray every day and 5 times every Friday, yes, there's some gender segregation etc. But no-one is planting bombs at the doorsteps of the US embassy or sending modern day kamikazes to explode overseas. Their ways are ultimately more quiet than ours. There I started to realise that we're being fed the "Islam is bad, look at what they're doing to us because of their religion" rap, while the real motives are somewhere else.
As eloquently stated in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", Italy was silently winning the war while the other countries were getting their troops killed.
Ogg is a container. MPEG Layer III is headerless. It makes much more sense to call MP3s as such than to call Vorbis audio contained in the Ogg wrapper simply Ogg. Are your movies always AVI this and AVI that or do you actually speak of DivX, XviD etc?
Well, it's not solely the useless equivalent of Ctrl-Enter.
When I am in Windows, Win-R is a very convenient way to pop up the Run line in one go. Plus I find Win-M and Win-Shift-M very convenient when I have to use the desktop but all those 10+ windows are blocking the view. Much more convenient than using the mouse for achieving the same result. Win-E opens a new Explorer window. Under XP, Win-L locks the computer (though Ctrl-Alt-Del Enter is much more ingrained). Also, Win-Tab is another way of task switching and some may argue that it creates less visual clutter.
Even KDE can use many of those shortcuts when it is switched to the Windows behaviour. Why you would want to is another question, but it's there when you (or your grandma) needs it.
Try that:
~/.mozilla/default/lkajsrfl.als/bookmarks.html
The default profile under Windows is at:
Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\lkajsrfl.als
Substitute lkajsrfl.als for whatever Mozilla came up with.
And yes, it's still the same basic concept with some odd enhancements. Check before you berate!
You make me wonder now. My page is almost completely XHTML 1.0 strict, validates as such and everything, and yet there are no pages on it that IE cannot display. Granted, I haven't done anything fancy with CSS there and for a historical reason I use tables to delimit the width of text (going to change that soon, though), but IE still does display it and I've tried with almost any version of it that I've come across.
Leave the hair alone. I let my hair grow when I was 13. One day, somebody made a passing comment at school that got to me and I cut the hair in a "popular way". It's quite painful now to look at all those pictures where I'm wearing a textbook example of the molester mullet.
Try Cinelerra.
Just out of curiosity, what were you grepping for when you found this? And why?
There's much confusion among laymen about that dpi thing. When lpi is introduced, most people just give up.
Printer dpi. Standard in print shops is about 2400-2540 dpi.
Image dpi - not really dpi, it's actually ppi. Pixels per inch.
Screen lpi. Lines per inch. For halftone screens.
Lpi is related to dpi so that the higher the dpi count, the more precise can the little dots be in size and in shape that make up lpi. That's why you only get ~65 lpi with 300 dpi printers, ~80 lpi with 600 dpi printers and perhaps ~100 or so with 1200 dpi printers.
Desired image resolution = desired lpi * 2. So if you're going to print at 2540 dpi / 150 lpi (standard magazine), you have to work with 300 ppi scans. 2540 / 133 (glossy newspapers) requires 266 ppi scans. Then again, there's no real gain in going over 300 ppi when printing at, say, 175 lpi (photo magazines).
Even for digital photo labs there's no use in going over 300 ppi, and scanning a 10x15 cm print at 600 for 1:1 reproduction is particularly pointless, since those usually contain no more than 200 ppi of information on them anyway.
They aren't if done properly. By properly, I mean reverse translation etc. If the system knows, for instance, what Hans.Mueller and Hans.Muller really stand for, then there's no trouble. Same with i18n in domain names. It's really not that hard to do. For instance, what do you think how the Japanese write their language in computers? They use romaji, the latinised script of the language, and the computer itself converts it to kanji, hiragana or katakana. If Word can do it on the fly, why cannot BIND? As I understand, it already works something like this in Southeast Asia.
Yes, I can see that for some people, status quo is the way it should be, but I don't really buy it. My language contains 6 characters that aren't in US-ASCII. Believe it or not, the umlauts and tildes aren't there to make the letters look good, they're there for a reason. Pronunciation is one. Omitting them in writing will very often change the meaning of a word to a grotesque. For just one example, lo~helo~igud (damn US-ASCII at work again) means "salmon slices", while loheloigud is "dragon puddles". Until now, people around here have been forced to work creatively around that obstacle, but we still have tons of pointless and unintuitive domain names that could have been avoided, had the technology not been so US-ASCII centred from the get go.
And why do you think Americans are stupid and cannot find charmap.exe or gucharmap? :-)