Splitting infinitives, like ending sentences with prepositions, is an acceptable practice that has fallen into disfavor through superstition, not by rule of grammar. Be honest, which of the following more clearly makes the point: "...to improve greatly...", "...greatly to improve...", or "to greatly improve..."? I submit that the latter is the most clear.
I agree. However, in fact, I believe that the editors Slashdot already has are perfectly capable of it, but simply do not take the time to do their job. They aren't called "editors" for the sole talent of button-pushing. Also, if they did take the time to actually edit submissions, possibly with a usage manual and dictionary by their side, the editors would grow in their jobs and, as a result, grow as people. It's not like I'm asking them to give up posting quality content - quite the contrary, and that's a request that should never have to be made of a journalist.
I didn't say that I was error-free, or that I would hold the editors or any submittor to that standard. I just pointed out how easy it is to greatly improve the quality of front-page articles.
This isn't off-topic - it's on-topic for a metatopic. At least read the entire thing (particularly the end) before modding me in any direction, be it up, down, or along the imaginary axis.
First off, this is Slashdot. For software announcements, see Freshmeat. It's not like the two are in competition with each other. Next, the title of the article contains an error in the version number of Gnome being announced. But we'll let that slide, since it got caught within a few hours and an update was posted.
Now, into the meat...
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005.
This is incorrect in one way or another. Either Mr. Madeley wrote an article entitled "A Sneak Peak at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter failed to capitalize the A, he wrote an article entitled "Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter added an extraneous A, or he wrote a generic sneak peek at Gnome 2.10 and the submitter erroneously capitalized "Sneak Peak." Additionally, is the article scheduled for release on March 9, 2005, or is Gnome 2.10 scheduled to be released that day? Finally, I didn't have to be told that it's the March 9, 2005, as only one such date exists and rules of usage insist that you not tell me which one even if you are ambiguous as to year.
Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added.
The grammatical error of leaving out any subject for the verb looks notwithstanding, there are a few errors here. "Gnome's new release policy" would have been correct - note the omission of the extraneous hyphen and specification of whose release policy is being mentioned. Also, the word sought here is "off," not "of." I'll let "couple of" slide because it's a part of the vernacular.
Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog.
Stylistically, "finally" should have been set off by commas, not parentheses; but it's not technically incorrect. However, "Mozilla" should have been capitalized and "style" has only one E. Also, the last time I checked, the "open" and "save" dialogs of most programs are separate, even in those cases where the "save as" dialog is just called "save."
Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?"
Unbelievably, the submitter completed an entire sentence without any real errors. It's irrelevant to the story at hand, which is itself outside the scope of this site, but, as far as the English language goes, it's correct! Good work!
Revised, this reads:
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a sneak peek at Gnome 2.10, which is scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. It looks like Gnome's new release policy is starting to pay off, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple new ones are added. Also, a Mozilla-style type-ahead find feature has finally been implemented in Gnome's open and save dialogs. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?"
That didn't take me all that long to do. If submitters would do the same, there would be a lower rate of submission and each submission would be higher quality. If the editors would also do this, there would be fewer duplicate stories, fewer already-dispelled urban legends posted as fact, and higher-quality content, all of which would lead to higher subscription rates and greater income. That's how real newspapers make money: they produce a quality product that's worth the price they charge.
Are the gates set up for multiple deboarding points? I can see the greatest advantage of the A380 being that you could conceivable deboard through 8 doors - two per side per deck. In theory, deplaning would be just as quickly (I use that term loosely, but it is, relatively speaking, accurate enough) as a 110-seat DC-9 through one door is.
Detroit International evidently has a setup to deplane through four doors on DC-10's and 747's, IIRC.
I blame michael. Right now on the front page, there are 10 michael stories and 5 non-micheael stories. Most of the stories that have been pushed off the front page were michael stories, too, including one that was posted on Snopes as an urban legend long before it was submitted here. If he has that much time on his hands, he may not have enough time to actually fact-check anything, but it'd be really nice if he could put in the effort to time-check articles so make sure they're less than 4 years old before they are deemed front-page-worthy "news."
Nope. I installed it and it remembered file associations wrong, as in I'd say "display" and it'd use it that time but, in the future, try to run "displayb" for me. "gvim" became "gvimt", and I don't trust a program that has what appears to be bad buffer math in something as simple and likely to be tested as that to be secure in other areas.
My real complaints with Xffm are: speed, poor handling of renaming files, poor handling of files with more than one dot in their names, and no way to get rid of all the crap and just have it show my home directory by default and actually give me the ".." link without having to double-click on my home directory icon first. From opening Xffm from the panel to the root directory, it takes 3 double-clicks, where at most two (/home/ari ".."-->/home ".."-->/) would be required.
I'm hoping that 4.2 fixes some of this, but I'm waiting for Arch to package it for me. I suppose I could try it out on my Gentoo partition, but I didn't boot it for two weeks and had to recompile over 200 ports.
I tried it, and it wasn't bad, except that it made a non-hidden directory in my home directory to store settings, and the default settings suck. So it's disqualified. I can't stand programs that take a dump in my home directory without at least covering it up.
The XFCE file manager is the single worst element of an otherwise very nice desktop. I use it anyhow, but rarely browse files with XFFM, opting instead to resort to command line navigation and launching of applications and documents.
The other annoyance I have is the taskbar taking up so much space and looking ugly unless it's on the opposite end of the screen from the panel. I almost wish it had a panel more like KDE's, with a task switcher as part of it.
I was intentionally setting an unattainable goal, the closer to which we can come, the better. 500GB drives running at 7200RPM do not come very close, and that's the point I was making. I apologize that my sarcasm missed its mark.
I'd rather see better technology than faster technology. I want a laptop hard drive that doesn't use any battery power at all and emanotes no noise or heat. I want a truly portable machine that has a full-size keyboard but no wasted space for a trackpad (e-Clit is more efficient, both for use and for space), no wasted power on 7200RPM drives or 17" displays, and about 36 hours of battery life on a 1-hour charge.
I want something that doesn't tie me down with wires, alert the room that its hard drive is now spinning faster than the main turbine of an SR-71's engine, or heat up my nuts so bad I can't have children later.
IBM has something along these lines, but with their sale of their laptop business, I don't know what will happen with that.
Slashdot promotes editors on the basis of incompetence alone. It'd be silly to think that exceeding the criteria under which you were hired would get you terminated. I mean...say you get a job because you're really good at Java. You show your boss the best Java app ever written. He won't fire you for it. The same process applies here.
In Minneapolis, Unisys has I believe two or three large diesel generators. One time when their part of the city lost power, they fired them up and had a lot of juice left over. Northwest Airlines bought some of their power and they still had electricity to spare, and ended up powering thousands of homes in the southeastern suburbs, if I remember the story right.
A friend who worked for Exxon once told me about their power backups...I think it was almost cheaper for them to run on diesel than on the local grid.;)
I never said conservatives don't do it. I said that liberals are hypocritical about it. Conservatives are consistently anti-individual-rights. Liberals just operate under the claim that they know which rights are good for you and which are not, but then they keep the rights for themselves that you cannot, because they are better than you. I'm not defending anyone but the libertarians, on this topic.
Re-read my comments. I never said his novels are non-fiction. If you're going to make a point, make it, but so far you're only throwing a lot of angst against a very good author who happens to know more about peer review than the global warming community.
You aren't refuting any of the points he makes. Please do, if you are able, but otherwise his well-researched material is going to hold water against your ad hominem counter-point.
The thing I find to be most telling is that Crichton puts more credible research into his novels than most global warming believers put into their understanding of the world around them.
For those who are complaining that this is a novel, here is a speech by Crichton entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming." Read the transcript, then read the novel (including the non-fiction appendices), and then get back to us.
Am I the only Slashdotter who has never seen more than 5 minutes of Tron? I went to college in the first town nuked in Wargames, but I haven't seen enough of Tron to even know whether it has a plot, much less what that might be. In fact, I've seen more cumulative time of Family Guy spoofs of Tron than I have of the movie itself. Tell me I'm not alone!
Actually, Slashdot's search function is not the worst. There is a forum I frequent whose search page has essentially two fields: search text (titles only, not message bodies) and the username who posted.
But the username is a drop-down box, and there are thousands upon thousands of users. It takes longer for your browser to download, parse, and render as a blank entry the thousands of entries in that drop-down box than it does to just go from page to page of the forum and use your browser's search feature to find the title of the thread you want, since that's all you can search for with the forum's function anyhow.
Re:Legal uses
on
Today in P2P
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Just a suggestion - try 'ABC', as in 'Yet Another Bittorrent Client'. It is a far better Win32 client than is the official python client.
That being said, I agree that Bittorrent needs to be publicized more for its clearly legal uses. I won't say that all multimedia downloading is illegal copyright infringement, but even under the assumption that it is, Bittorrent is still the single best way I know of for widespread legal distribution of large files.
Thanks for covering this - I didn't see that reply to my comment, but you have it right. A free state must be defended from enemies of all sorts, from the common burglar (who invades your right to security in your home and possession) to the US Government (when it comes to tell you to stay in your homes, stop the presses, don't talk to your friends, and be quiet) to foreign invaders (such as the Japanese who wouldn't invade our homeland because "there would be a rifle hiding behind every blade of grass") to terrorists (who are smart enough to hijack planes where nobody can be armed and crash them into our buildings, rather than attacking on the ground).
Remember, folks: terrorists are attacking American civilians, not American government, and the second amendment is America's original homeland security.
As to hunting, you fail to note the problems with game population that are realized when you over- or under-hunt a species. The natural predators are no more - we killed them off to make room for save homes with very little fear of wolf attacks. Hunting serves a legitimate social purpose.
The military is not here to protect the people, it is here to protect the country. The police are not here to protect you, they are here to respond to crime. Crime prevention is a misnomer of the modern age, not a reality at all. If you are not defending yourself, you need to do it yourself or, as most (very hypocritical, I'll note, in so doing) celebrities do, contract for personal protection.
Now, to the negligent ownership of guns that occasionally does injure or even kill people, and even children. You have not addressed the drownings in buckets. Would you ban buckets of water? How about windows higher than a foot above ground level? Bathtubs? Cars are more common killers than all of these combined, of course, but you would not argue for a total ban on personal ownership of motor vehicles. You ignore this altogether and claim that, if "it saved even 1 four year old or 1 convenience store clerk," you are against any private ownership of guns whatsoever, even in the face of legitimate social purposes. No element of this argument cannot be more strongly made against cars or bathtubs.
Now, to the real important bit - you argue all along that there is no truly legitimate purpose for me to own a gun. Let us presume, quite falsely, that you are correct. Now, tell me why I should not be allowed to own a gun? There is no social purpose to a gay couple engaging in sexual activities, to you having a pet dog or cat in your home, or to allowing people to cook on a gas range, but we do not ban these activities outright, because of our respect for personal liberty. Just because you can't see a reason why I should own a gun does not mean that I must be prevented from doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Splitting infinitives, like ending sentences with prepositions, is an acceptable practice that has fallen into disfavor through superstition, not by rule of grammar. Be honest, which of the following more clearly makes the point: "...to improve greatly...", "...greatly to improve...", or "to greatly improve..."? I submit that the latter is the most clear.
I agree. However, in fact, I believe that the editors Slashdot already has are perfectly capable of it, but simply do not take the time to do their job. They aren't called "editors" for the sole talent of button-pushing. Also, if they did take the time to actually edit submissions, possibly with a usage manual and dictionary by their side, the editors would grow in their jobs and, as a result, grow as people. It's not like I'm asking them to give up posting quality content - quite the contrary, and that's a request that should never have to be made of a journalist.
I didn't say that I was error-free, or that I would hold the editors or any submittor to that standard. I just pointed out how easy it is to greatly improve the quality of front-page articles.
This isn't off-topic - it's on-topic for a metatopic. At least read the entire thing (particularly the end) before modding me in any direction, be it up, down, or along the imaginary axis.
First off, this is Slashdot. For software announcements, see Freshmeat. It's not like the two are in competition with each other. Next, the title of the article contains an error in the version number of Gnome being announced. But we'll let that slide, since it got caught within a few hours and an update was posted.
Now, into the meat...
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005.
This is incorrect in one way or another. Either Mr. Madeley wrote an article entitled "A Sneak Peak at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter failed to capitalize the A, he wrote an article entitled "Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10" and the submitter added an extraneous A, or he wrote a generic sneak peek at Gnome 2.10 and the submitter erroneously capitalized "Sneak Peak." Additionally, is the article scheduled for release on March 9, 2005, or is Gnome 2.10 scheduled to be released that day? Finally, I didn't have to be told that it's the March 9, 2005, as only one such date exists and rules of usage insist that you not tell me which one even if you are ambiguous as to year.
Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added.
The grammatical error of leaving out any subject for the verb looks notwithstanding, there are a few errors here. "Gnome's new release policy" would have been correct - note the omission of the extraneous hyphen and specification of whose release policy is being mentioned. Also, the word sought here is "off," not "of." I'll let "couple of" slide because it's a part of the vernacular.
Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog.
Stylistically, "finally" should have been set off by commas, not parentheses; but it's not technically incorrect. However, "Mozilla" should have been capitalized and "style" has only one E. Also, the last time I checked, the "open" and "save" dialogs of most programs are separate, even in those cases where the "save as" dialog is just called "save."
Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?"
Unbelievably, the submitter completed an entire sentence without any real errors. It's irrelevant to the story at hand, which is itself outside the scope of this site, but, as far as the English language goes, it's correct! Good work!
Revised, this reads:
spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a sneak peek at Gnome 2.10, which is scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. It looks like Gnome's new release policy is starting to pay off, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple new ones are added. Also, a Mozilla-style type-ahead find feature has finally been implemented in Gnome's open and save dialogs. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?"
That didn't take me all that long to do. If submitters would do the same, there would be a lower rate of submission and each submission would be higher quality. If the editors would also do this, there would be fewer duplicate stories, fewer already-dispelled urban legends posted as fact, and higher-quality content, all of which would lead to higher subscription rates and greater income. That's how real newspapers make money: they produce a quality product that's worth the price they charge.
Are the gates set up for multiple deboarding points? I can see the greatest advantage of the A380 being that you could conceivable deboard through 8 doors - two per side per deck. In theory, deplaning would be just as quickly (I use that term loosely, but it is, relatively speaking, accurate enough) as a 110-seat DC-9 through one door is.
Detroit International evidently has a setup to deplane through four doors on DC-10's and 747's, IIRC.
Thank you.
I blame michael. Right now on the front page, there are 10 michael stories and 5 non-micheael stories. Most of the stories that have been pushed off the front page were michael stories, too, including one that was posted on Snopes as an urban legend long before it was submitted here. If he has that much time on his hands, he may not have enough time to actually fact-check anything, but it'd be really nice if he could put in the effort to time-check articles so make sure they're less than 4 years old before they are deemed front-page-worthy "news."
Nope. I installed it and it remembered file associations wrong, as in I'd say "display" and it'd use it that time but, in the future, try to run "displayb" for me. "gvim" became "gvimt", and I don't trust a program that has what appears to be bad buffer math in something as simple and likely to be tested as that to be secure in other areas.
/home ".."--> /) would be required.
My real complaints with Xffm are: speed, poor handling of renaming files, poor handling of files with more than one dot in their names, and no way to get rid of all the crap and just have it show my home directory by default and actually give me the ".." link without having to double-click on my home directory icon first. From opening Xffm from the panel to the root directory, it takes 3 double-clicks, where at most two (/home/ari ".."-->
I'm hoping that 4.2 fixes some of this, but I'm waiting for Arch to package it for me. I suppose I could try it out on my Gentoo partition, but I didn't boot it for two weeks and had to recompile over 200 ports.
I tried it, and it wasn't bad, except that it made a non-hidden directory in my home directory to store settings, and the default settings suck. So it's disqualified. I can't stand programs that take a dump in my home directory without at least covering it up.
The XFCE file manager is the single worst element of an otherwise very nice desktop. I use it anyhow, but rarely browse files with XFFM, opting instead to resort to command line navigation and launching of applications and documents.
The other annoyance I have is the taskbar taking up so much space and looking ugly unless it's on the opposite end of the screen from the panel. I almost wish it had a panel more like KDE's, with a task switcher as part of it.
I was intentionally setting an unattainable goal, the closer to which we can come, the better. 500GB drives running at 7200RPM do not come very close, and that's the point I was making. I apologize that my sarcasm missed its mark.
I'd rather see better technology than faster technology. I want a laptop hard drive that doesn't use any battery power at all and emanotes no noise or heat. I want a truly portable machine that has a full-size keyboard but no wasted space for a trackpad (e-Clit is more efficient, both for use and for space), no wasted power on 7200RPM drives or 17" displays, and about 36 hours of battery life on a 1-hour charge.
I want something that doesn't tie me down with wires, alert the room that its hard drive is now spinning faster than the main turbine of an SR-71's engine, or heat up my nuts so bad I can't have children later.
IBM has something along these lines, but with their sale of their laptop business, I don't know what will happen with that.
Don't worry. They'll post a few more urban legends as fact on the front page by nightfall.
Slashdot promotes editors on the basis of incompetence alone. It'd be silly to think that exceeding the criteria under which you were hired would get you terminated. I mean...say you get a job because you're really good at Java. You show your boss the best Java app ever written. He won't fire you for it. The same process applies here.
Long answer: Is this question just another move to ask rhetorical but inflammatory questions on the front page?
In Minneapolis, Unisys has I believe two or three large diesel generators. One time when their part of the city lost power, they fired them up and had a lot of juice left over. Northwest Airlines bought some of their power and they still had electricity to spare, and ended up powering thousands of homes in the southeastern suburbs, if I remember the story right.
;)
A friend who worked for Exxon once told me about their power backups...I think it was almost cheaper for them to run on diesel than on the local grid.
I never said conservatives don't do it. I said that liberals are hypocritical about it. Conservatives are consistently anti-individual-rights. Liberals just operate under the claim that they know which rights are good for you and which are not, but then they keep the rights for themselves that you cannot, because they are better than you. I'm not defending anyone but the libertarians, on this topic.
Re-read my comments. I never said his novels are non-fiction. If you're going to make a point, make it, but so far you're only throwing a lot of angst against a very good author who happens to know more about peer review than the global warming community.
You aren't refuting any of the points he makes. Please do, if you are able, but otherwise his well-researched material is going to hold water against your ad hominem counter-point.
The thing I find to be most telling is that Crichton puts more credible research into his novels than most global warming believers put into their understanding of the world around them.
For those who are complaining that this is a novel, here is a speech by Crichton entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming." Read the transcript, then read the novel (including the non-fiction appendices), and then get back to us.
Am I the only Slashdotter who has never seen more than 5 minutes of Tron? I went to college in the first town nuked in Wargames, but I haven't seen enough of Tron to even know whether it has a plot, much less what that might be. In fact, I've seen more cumulative time of Family Guy spoofs of Tron than I have of the movie itself. Tell me I'm not alone!
Actually, Slashdot's search function is not the worst. There is a forum I frequent whose search page has essentially two fields: search text (titles only, not message bodies) and the username who posted.
But the username is a drop-down box, and there are thousands upon thousands of users. It takes longer for your browser to download, parse, and render as a blank entry the thousands of entries in that drop-down box than it does to just go from page to page of the forum and use your browser's search feature to find the title of the thread you want, since that's all you can search for with the forum's function anyhow.
Just a suggestion - try 'ABC', as in 'Yet Another Bittorrent Client'. It is a far better Win32 client than is the official python client.
That being said, I agree that Bittorrent needs to be publicized more for its clearly legal uses. I won't say that all multimedia downloading is illegal copyright infringement, but even under the assumption that it is, Bittorrent is still the single best way I know of for widespread legal distribution of large files.
Thanks for covering this - I didn't see that reply to my comment, but you have it right. A free state must be defended from enemies of all sorts, from the common burglar (who invades your right to security in your home and possession) to the US Government (when it comes to tell you to stay in your homes, stop the presses, don't talk to your friends, and be quiet) to foreign invaders (such as the Japanese who wouldn't invade our homeland because "there would be a rifle hiding behind every blade of grass") to terrorists (who are smart enough to hijack planes where nobody can be armed and crash them into our buildings, rather than attacking on the ground).
Remember, folks: terrorists are attacking American civilians, not American government, and the second amendment is America's original homeland security.
As to hunting, you fail to note the problems with game population that are realized when you over- or under-hunt a species. The natural predators are no more - we killed them off to make room for save homes with very little fear of wolf attacks. Hunting serves a legitimate social purpose.
The military is not here to protect the people, it is here to protect the country. The police are not here to protect you, they are here to respond to crime. Crime prevention is a misnomer of the modern age, not a reality at all. If you are not defending yourself, you need to do it yourself or, as most (very hypocritical, I'll note, in so doing) celebrities do, contract for personal protection.
Now, to the negligent ownership of guns that occasionally does injure or even kill people, and even children. You have not addressed the drownings in buckets. Would you ban buckets of water? How about windows higher than a foot above ground level? Bathtubs? Cars are more common killers than all of these combined, of course, but you would not argue for a total ban on personal ownership of motor vehicles. You ignore this altogether and claim that, if "it saved even 1 four year old or 1 convenience store clerk," you are against any private ownership of guns whatsoever, even in the face of legitimate social purposes. No element of this argument cannot be more strongly made against cars or bathtubs.
Now, to the real important bit - you argue all along that there is no truly legitimate purpose for me to own a gun. Let us presume, quite falsely, that you are correct. Now, tell me why I should not be allowed to own a gun? There is no social purpose to a gay couple engaging in sexual activities, to you having a pet dog or cat in your home, or to allowing people to cook on a gas range, but we do not ban these activities outright, because of our respect for personal liberty. Just because you can't see a reason why I should own a gun does not mean that I must be prevented from doing so.