I was actually mentally forming "pedantism" from "pedantic"... But ok. And no, in case you were wondering, I didn't learn the word from Family Guy. Wow though... I really was tired when I wrote that. I knew pedantism didn't sound right, but apparently, I was too tired to think of the correct version... whoops.
I haven't RTFA, but surely the submitter didn't mean that the sodium powder is converted to hydrogen... After all, that would involve transmuting (or is it transmutating?) the actual element (Na)...
As I understand it, the reaction in fact involves the water molecule breaking in two. The oxygen (or maybe a hydroxide ion, IANAchemist) binds with the sodium, and the hydrogen escapes as a gas. The sodium powder is converted into sodium oxide or sodium hydroxide (I think, once again IANAC), not into hydrogen. Sorry, a bit of pedantism there.
Good heavens, I'm sick of seeing posts (almost) exactly like these. (the almost is because your first paragraph is really pretty decent.) Sorry, yes this is a flame. That's what you get when you post flamebait. If you don't want to be flamed, then by all means, don't read this. None of it is vitally important, you're just the umpteenth post along these lines that I've seen, and yours happened to be the one that put it past my limit. So I'm flaming you.
If you are my aunt or grandma or mom are you going to know if Gentoo is better then Fedora?
Tell your aunt or grandma or mom which distro is newbie-friendly. Better yet, install it for them.
Are you going to know how to patch up to the latest kernal?
I have never needed to patch a kernal [sic]. And yes, I have recompiled my kernel several times, but patching it has never been necessary. Unless you've got some really screwy hardware, the chances you will need to patch (or even compile) the kernel (or anything!) are pretty small.
What are all these crazy things talking about when I boot up?
It is fairly easy to find distributions that hide all the kernel and init bootup messages (Mandriva for one). If your aunt/grandma/mom objects to lots of messages (nobody objects to POST messages BEFORE the OS even starts, though...), then install one of those. Additionally, the distros that do this tend to be the distros that are newbie-friendly... hmmm, coincidence? I think not.
Son...why is my computer "Panic"ing?
The only time I have ever seen my kernel panic is when I had deliberately screwed it up to see what happened. Not an issue.
Why can't I run iTunes or any of the software I see at bestbuy?
Say it with me: W-I-N-E.... No, its not perfect, but out of "any of the software I see at bestbuy", there is a significant subset that will run. Furthermore, if your aunt/grandma/mom asks you this question, then find and install the equivalent of whatever app it is that she is looking for! Then, show her how to find and install these herself! If you don't know enough to do so, then find a local Linux Users Group, and I'm nearly certain that they will help.
In other words, while I agree with your general sentiment in the first paragraph that if you have no real need or desire to use linux, you probably shouldn't, as far as the second paragraph goes, you are a) wrong, and b) parroting the same old, hackneyed misconceptions parroted by everyone else on/. who didn't get linux within the first week they tried it. Smarten up, or go away.
Personally my favourite thing about Windows is Autohotkey, basically an open source hotkey and macro program. I have looked and not found the equivalent on Linux, and until I do, I won't be switching to Linux full time.
Try xpybind for a lot of the key stuff you're talking about... As for the rest of Autohotkey's features... well, actually, I've just been given developership of a project (http://pywm.sourceforge.net/), and my plans involve a component that would certainly be capable of such things. Unfortunately... I have not really gotten much actual work done on the project yet.
However, I will keep this utility in mind, and possibly when I get the event catcher/handler to a workable point, I'll write some scripts (that's the key about this window manager, everything is scriptable!) that will try and implement at least a subset of those features, if not all of them eventually. My plans involve writing things in such a way that you could run the event catcher/handler completely independently from any of the rest of the window manager. The event catcher would catch every X event, and then pass them on to the event handler, which would be completely scriptable (written most likely in python.) So, perhaps, if I ever get around to doing anything, we will have your Autohotkey utility for Linux!
Hear, hear! Only one small point I'd disagree with. I'm all for peacefully coexisting with commercial/non-free/whathaveyou systems. I see (almost) no reason to aggressively push people towards something for which they have no need or desire. BUT, it is conceivable that the companies behind such systems (yes, I am speaking about Microsoft today, but it could be Apple, or (God forbid!) Google tomorrow) could purposefully use their influence in the computer world to make data formats (for example) that they own all rights to de facto standard, and then, through the use of patents etc, prevent any other system from having any access to those standards. So, I see self-defense (I want to be able to use the internet and the things I find there) as a small reason to encourage people to switch to a free system and use free formats. Switch to a free system to deny the giants the power I mentioned, and use free formats to prevent the de facto standardization of closed ones. The people I encourage to switch might have no other reason to do so, and in fact it might inconvenience them for a time, but, heartless bastard that I am, I am willing for that to happen to protect me and others who use free systems.
The relevant portion occurs at the end of the second paragraph:
So, if we say there is an 80% chance of dense fog, this means that there is an 80% chance of dense fog occurring right at your location.
This seems to back up what I have heard and understood about the nature of the forecasts. However, I could be wrong. In fact, it is entirely possible that there are two systems being used, with no clear distinction as to which is being used in any given forecast.
70% of those times the weather conditions resulted in rain.
Rain where? In Bombay? how about Antarctica? The reason for the "70% of (area)" type of forecast is that everyone who is watching the weather wants to know whether it will rain on them. So, in that case, a prediction of "70% chance of rain" in my specific location is essentially the same as a prediction that 70% of a wider area that includes my specific location will get rain.
If it is "70% of the times we noted these weather conditions, rain occured", then that 70% is a much higher percentage than the actual probability that it will rain on me. This is because (probably) most of those "70%" of times did not see rain falling on every square meter of the prediction area. So, suppose that the area coverage for each of those recorded times that it did rain was 50%. Then, the chance it will rain on me would be 35% (.7 *.5 +.3 * 0). The chance it will rain on me would have to be the average rain area coverage over every time that those similar weather conditions occured.
Admittedly, IANAM, but I have heard, from TV meteorologists, that the area coverage method is the one they report, and furthermore, the area coverage method is much more informative to individual people watching/listening to/reading the weather forecast.
Perhaps if I had run across such a joke, I might have reacted the same way... Certainly strikes me as tasteless... Don't call me a hypocrite unless you are pointing to some specific hypocrisy that I have committed. No, I am certainly not claiming to be free of hypocrisy (is anyone?), but I do claim that I am free of the particular hypocrisy you are referring to.
Wow..... that was really really morbid and gruesome... Did you actually post that? I mean, really. Sibling was right. -1, tasteless. And -1, sicko, to whoever modded it funny.
Well, I know in the weather reports, 70% chance of rain actually means that 70% of a given area will get rain... So does that mean that 70% of the shuttle will launch on Wednesday?
It's not anywhere near that simple... There aren't colors that I can't see, or colors that "look just like that other color"... wikipedia has a fairly good article on the topic, but I have never once in my life managed to really explain it to someone... Here's an example. A rainbow in the sky looks to me like two wide bands of yellow and blue. However, someone else's representation of a rainbow (not a photograph) I can see just fine.
However, basically, the RGB choice roughly corresponds to the peak sensitivies of the three types of cones in a normal eye. A computer screen, if you really did a spectral analysis of an image on the screen versus an actual view of the same thing, looks nothing like what it represents. Since my cones somehow (I'm not quite sure how, I don't seem to match any of the diagnoses on the wikipedia page perfectly...) don't match up to normal, things both on the computer screen and in real life are perceived differently than normal.
But I can't say "I can't see x color", because if I look at something that is that color, it is not black or invisible. On the other hand, there are definitely some colors which I have a lot of difficulty distinguishing from some other colors. Which colors those are depend on the particular shades chosen. For example, some browns and some reds look very similar. Some reds and some greens look very similar. Some blues and some purples look very similar. Some greens and some yellows look very similar. The wikipedia page describes trouble perceiving colors in the yellow-red-green-orange area of the spectrum. But I can distinguish yellow from orange and orange from red with little or no problem. It is very puzzling.
Thank you for being the only response to my post which had any sense to it, instead of essentially "you liar, you're not colorblind if you can tell they were red and green, quit trolling!"... Some people can really be idiots and jerks...
Colorblindness (in my case, it varies a lot from one person to the next) does not mean that I cannot tell what colors they are, or that they are utterly indistinguishable. However, the two colors chosen are difficult enough for me to distinguish from one another that, at a glance, I cannot determine using the legend which line represents which quantity. On closer examination, yes, I can tell. Additionally, where the lines meet, I have trouble telling which one goes which direction.
The color choice did not make it impossible for me to read the graphs. However, if the two colors chosen were say, forest green and jungle green (thank you crayola), you might have the same difficulty.
Yes, I can distinguish red and green... depending on the shade, I can distinguish them with varying degrees of success. It was not a troll. The particular shades which were present made it quite difficult for me to glance at the graph and glance at the legend and determine which line was which. Additionally, without some close examination, where the red and green lines cross, I have difficulty (not impossibility, mind you!) determining which one went which way. Learn a little bit about colorblindness, and how much it varies from one person to the next, before you open your trap again.
2. do not meddle in internal affairs of other countries unless officially asked to.
2.a. when you *do* meddle in internal affairs of other countries, do so in a pacifying way -- offer a negotiation table to all interested parties.
Tried that. It was called "Monroe Doctrine". Look what happened? Pearl Harbor!
Personally, when I was running windows, I didn't allow the patches to be installed automatically, and I don't on Linux either. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I want to know exactly what goes onto my system before it goes on.
It's roughly analogous to real estate speculation. Yes, it has negative effects (land speculation can cause, or contribute to economic recessions). But, it should not be made illegal.
CTSS was written by a team of MIT Computation Center programmers led by Prof. Fernando J. Corbató, known to everybody as Corby.
CTSS, of course, stands for Compatible Time-Sharing System. That is, the first multi-user/multi-tasking operating system. True, it was not fully multi-tasking in the sense we are used to today. That had to wait for MULTICS and UNIX, which were developed at.... ta-dah... Bell Labs! Oh wait, look at that, that's NOT IBM...
In case you hadn't paid attention, it is as much the evil business practices of MS as the crappiness of their software. And in many many ways, the crappiness of their software is not evident to someone who is not a developer.
Well, first off, they find employers who don't mandate 70 hour workweeks....
Personally, I think any employer who demands a 70 hour workweek of programmers, but is not a programmer working 70 hour weeks him/herself ought to be taken out to the county courthouse and strung up.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually mentally forming "pedantism" from "pedantic"... But ok. And no, in case you were wondering, I didn't learn the word from Family Guy. Wow though... I really was tired when I wrote that. I knew pedantism didn't sound right, but apparently, I was too tired to think of the correct version... whoops.
I haven't RTFA, but surely the submitter didn't mean that the sodium powder is converted to hydrogen... After all, that would involve transmuting (or is it transmutating?) the actual element (Na)...
As I understand it, the reaction in fact involves the water molecule breaking in two. The oxygen (or maybe a hydroxide ion, IANAchemist) binds with the sodium, and the hydrogen escapes as a gas. The sodium powder is converted into sodium oxide or sodium hydroxide (I think, once again IANAC), not into hydrogen. Sorry, a bit of pedantism there.
Good heavens, I'm sick of seeing posts (almost) exactly like these. (the almost is because your first paragraph is really pretty decent.) Sorry, yes this is a flame. That's what you get when you post flamebait. If you don't want to be flamed, then by all means, don't read this. None of it is vitally important, you're just the umpteenth post along these lines that I've seen, and yours happened to be the one that put it past my limit. So I'm flaming you.
/. who didn't get linux within the first week they tried it. Smarten up, or go away.
If you are my aunt or grandma or mom are you going to know if Gentoo is better then Fedora?
Tell your aunt or grandma or mom which distro is newbie-friendly. Better yet, install it for them.
Are you going to know how to patch up to the latest kernal?
I have never needed to patch a kernal [sic]. And yes, I have recompiled my kernel several times, but patching it has never been necessary. Unless you've got some really screwy hardware, the chances you will need to patch (or even compile) the kernel (or anything!) are pretty small.
What are all these crazy things talking about when I boot up?
It is fairly easy to find distributions that hide all the kernel and init bootup messages (Mandriva for one). If your aunt/grandma/mom objects to lots of messages (nobody objects to POST messages BEFORE the OS even starts, though...), then install one of those. Additionally, the distros that do this tend to be the distros that are newbie-friendly... hmmm, coincidence? I think not.
Son...why is my computer "Panic"ing?
The only time I have ever seen my kernel panic is when I had deliberately screwed it up to see what happened. Not an issue.
Why can't I run iTunes or any of the software I see at bestbuy?
Say it with me: W-I-N-E.... No, its not perfect, but out of "any of the software I see at bestbuy", there is a significant subset that will run. Furthermore, if your aunt/grandma/mom asks you this question, then find and install the equivalent of whatever app it is that she is looking for! Then, show her how to find and install these herself! If you don't know enough to do so, then find a local Linux Users Group, and I'm nearly certain that they will help.
In other words, while I agree with your general sentiment in the first paragraph that if you have no real need or desire to use linux, you probably shouldn't, as far as the second paragraph goes, you are a) wrong, and b) parroting the same old, hackneyed misconceptions parroted by everyone else on
How does an AC get mod points?
Personally my favourite thing about Windows is Autohotkey, basically an open source hotkey and macro program. I have looked and not found the equivalent on Linux, and until I do, I won't be switching to Linux full time.
Try xpybind for a lot of the key stuff you're talking about... As for the rest of Autohotkey's features... well, actually, I've just been given developership of a project (http://pywm.sourceforge.net/), and my plans involve a component that would certainly be capable of such things. Unfortunately... I have not really gotten much actual work done on the project yet.
However, I will keep this utility in mind, and possibly when I get the event catcher/handler to a workable point, I'll write some scripts (that's the key about this window manager, everything is scriptable!) that will try and implement at least a subset of those features, if not all of them eventually. My plans involve writing things in such a way that you could run the event catcher/handler completely independently from any of the rest of the window manager. The event catcher would catch every X event, and then pass them on to the event handler, which would be completely scriptable (written most likely in python.) So, perhaps, if I ever get around to doing anything, we will have your Autohotkey utility for Linux!
Hear, hear! Only one small point I'd disagree with. I'm all for peacefully coexisting with commercial/non-free/whathaveyou systems. I see (almost) no reason to aggressively push people towards something for which they have no need or desire. BUT, it is conceivable that the companies behind such systems (yes, I am speaking about Microsoft today, but it could be Apple, or (God forbid!) Google tomorrow) could purposefully use their influence in the computer world to make data formats (for example) that they own all rights to de facto standard, and then, through the use of patents etc, prevent any other system from having any access to those standards. So, I see self-defense (I want to be able to use the internet and the things I find there) as a small reason to encourage people to switch to a free system and use free formats. Switch to a free system to deny the giants the power I mentioned, and use free formats to prevent the de facto standardization of closed ones. The people I encourage to switch might have no other reason to do so, and in fact it might inconvenience them for a time, but, heartless bastard that I am, I am willing for that to happen to protect me and others who use free systems.
Ever seen a pinto with a 454 hemi...
... explode? I don't mean to diss your car or anything, man, great post and all... but... a pinto?
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jan/hazards/HazardousWeat
The relevant portion occurs at the end of the second paragraph: This seems to back up what I have heard and understood about the nature of the forecasts. However, I could be wrong. In fact, it is entirely possible that there are two systems being used, with no clear distinction as to which is being used in any given forecast.
70% of those times the weather conditions resulted in rain.
.5 + .3 * 0). The chance it will rain on me would have to be the average rain area coverage over every time that those similar weather conditions occured.
Rain where? In Bombay? how about Antarctica? The reason for the "70% of (area)" type of forecast is that everyone who is watching the weather wants to know whether it will rain on them. So, in that case, a prediction of "70% chance of rain" in my specific location is essentially the same as a prediction that 70% of a wider area that includes my specific location will get rain.
If it is "70% of the times we noted these weather conditions, rain occured", then that 70% is a much higher percentage than the actual probability that it will rain on me. This is because (probably) most of those "70%" of times did not see rain falling on every square meter of the prediction area. So, suppose that the area coverage for each of those recorded times that it did rain was 50%. Then, the chance it will rain on me would be 35% (.7 *
Admittedly, IANAM, but I have heard, from TV meteorologists, that the area coverage method is the one they report, and furthermore, the area coverage method is much more informative to individual people watching/listening to/reading the weather forecast.
Perhaps if I had run across such a joke, I might have reacted the same way... Certainly strikes me as tasteless... Don't call me a hypocrite unless you are pointing to some specific hypocrisy that I have committed. No, I am certainly not claiming to be free of hypocrisy (is anyone?), but I do claim that I am free of the particular hypocrisy you are referring to.
Yes, well, Correct-Facts-Nazi is suing you for patent infringement! Geez, what a pedantic git!
It's a joke.
Wow..... that was really really morbid and gruesome... Did you actually post that? I mean, really. Sibling was right. -1, tasteless. And -1, sicko, to whoever modded it funny.
Old sayings are too good to be true.
Well, I know in the weather reports, 70% chance of rain actually means that 70% of a given area will get rain... So does that mean that 70% of the shuttle will launch on Wednesday?
It's not anywhere near that simple... There aren't colors that I can't see, or colors that "look just like that other color"... wikipedia has a fairly good article on the topic, but I have never once in my life managed to really explain it to someone... Here's an example. A rainbow in the sky looks to me like two wide bands of yellow and blue. However, someone else's representation of a rainbow (not a photograph) I can see just fine.
However, basically, the RGB choice roughly corresponds to the peak sensitivies of the three types of cones in a normal eye. A computer screen, if you really did a spectral analysis of an image on the screen versus an actual view of the same thing, looks nothing like what it represents. Since my cones somehow (I'm not quite sure how, I don't seem to match any of the diagnoses on the wikipedia page perfectly...) don't match up to normal, things both on the computer screen and in real life are perceived differently than normal.
But I can't say "I can't see x color", because if I look at something that is that color, it is not black or invisible. On the other hand, there are definitely some colors which I have a lot of difficulty distinguishing from some other colors. Which colors those are depend on the particular shades chosen. For example, some browns and some reds look very similar. Some reds and some greens look very similar. Some blues and some purples look very similar. Some greens and some yellows look very similar. The wikipedia page describes trouble perceiving colors in the yellow-red-green-orange area of the spectrum. But I can distinguish yellow from orange and orange from red with little or no problem. It is very puzzling.
Thank you for being the only response to my post which had any sense to it, instead of essentially "you liar, you're not colorblind if you can tell they were red and green, quit trolling!"... Some people can really be idiots and jerks...
Colorblindness (in my case, it varies a lot from one person to the next) does not mean that I cannot tell what colors they are, or that they are utterly indistinguishable. However, the two colors chosen are difficult enough for me to distinguish from one another that, at a glance, I cannot determine using the legend which line represents which quantity. On closer examination, yes, I can tell. Additionally, where the lines meet, I have trouble telling which one goes which direction.
The color choice did not make it impossible for me to read the graphs. However, if the two colors chosen were say, forest green and jungle green (thank you crayola), you might have the same difficulty.
Yes, I can distinguish red and green... depending on the shade, I can distinguish them with varying degrees of success. It was not a troll. The particular shades which were present made it quite difficult for me to glance at the graph and glance at the legend and determine which line was which. Additionally, without some close examination, where the red and green lines cross, I have difficulty (not impossibility, mind you!) determining which one went which way. Learn a little bit about colorblindness, and how much it varies from one person to the next, before you open your trap again.
2. do not meddle in internal affairs of other countries unless officially asked to.
2.a. when you *do* meddle in internal affairs of other countries, do so in a pacifying way -- offer a negotiation table to all interested parties.
Tried that. It was called "Monroe Doctrine". Look what happened? Pearl Harbor!
6)Always have 100% sane rational population and neighbors.
WHooaaaaa, buddy... Sanity is waaaaaaaay overrated. Trust me, I tried it once. Whew, glad I got rid of that in a hurry!
Personally, when I was running windows, I didn't allow the patches to be installed automatically, and I don't on Linux either. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I want to know exactly what goes onto my system before it goes on.
Could you at least have chosen colors other than red and green for the first two choices!? I'm colorblind, you insensitive clod!
It's roughly analogous to real estate speculation. Yes, it has negative effects (land speculation can cause, or contribute to economic recessions). But, it should not be made illegal.
6. Multitasking Operating systems
This is plainly wrong. From http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html, CTSS, of course, stands for Compatible Time-Sharing System. That is, the first multi-user/multi-tasking operating system. True, it was not fully multi-tasking in the sense we are used to today. That had to wait for MULTICS and UNIX, which were developed at.... ta-dah... Bell Labs! Oh wait, look at that, that's NOT IBM...
In case you hadn't paid attention, it is as much the evil business practices of MS as the crappiness of their software. And in many many ways, the crappiness of their software is not evident to someone who is not a developer.
Well, first off, they find employers who don't mandate 70 hour workweeks....
Personally, I think any employer who demands a 70 hour workweek of programmers, but is not a programmer working 70 hour weeks him/herself ought to be taken out to the county courthouse and strung up.