I would have been happier if CmdrTaco had simply admitted that copyediting for spelling and prescriptive grammar just isn't one of his strengths. I know plenty of engineers, programmers, artists, and even writers who can't spell to save their lives, but who are unequivocally intelligent and talented. Poor written language skills aren't reliable indicators of low intelligence, and anyone who happens to have a knack for spelling and grammar should humbly bear this in mind.
Having said that, the web is a predominantly textual medium, and poor written language skills are as much of a disadvantage here as the inability to catch a ball is a disadvantage on a football field. I wish that Slashdot's editors would at least make a minimal effort to watch for simple errors such as misspellings.
I'd consider the comma splice a species of run-on sentence, though my last Google search didn't uncover much consensus on the subject. In any case, there are several acceptable ways to form a compound sentence, and the sentence in question doesn't use any of them. Here's a corrected version of the sentence:
The only possible advantage I can see in substituting the word "leverage" is that it sort of implies they are making the best use of these tools that they can, in which case you would think that most people would have already assumed they are not making the worst possible use they could of the tools, and it's interesting that the author feels it necessary to make that distinction.
It would probably be even better to split this into two or more distinct sentences.
As for the use of "leverage" instead of "use," it's annoying corporate argot that the dictionaries probably haven't caught on to yet, but we may as well get used to it; it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon.
IP geeks may be interested to know that the illustrations on O'Reilly's covers are generally public domain works from the Dover pictorial archive. Dover Publications, if you don't know, is an invaluable publishing house that specializes in budget-priced literature and art books (especially clip art); many, perhaps most, of their publications use public domain material.
(As an aside, you may also be interested to know that their clip art collections aren't entirely unemcumbered -- while the individual works are public domain, their collections are copyrighted derivative works, and they place limits on commercial use of art from their collections.)
Be sure to check bugzilla.mozilla.org to see if the issue that you're experiencing is a known issue -- and write up a bug if not.
You can also try running one of the nightly builds (see, for example, The Rumbling Edge) to see if that gives you a better experience. Nightlies are untested and may have even worse bugs, of course.
Personally, I try to take the idea of some immutable canon of classics with a grain of salt, and I'd rather selectively populate my book collection one book at a time, but the Penguin Classics lineup is not too shabby, and if I were able to purchase some subset of this series in one fell swoop (say, the Viking sagas), I'd certainly consider it.
This promotion is for the people who want "the classics" but don't know what the classics are or why.
My main problem with your reasoning is that you readily imagine a potential buyer who is only motivated by insecurity and ignorance, but it's impossible for you to imagine a potential buyer who could sincerely want this collection, knowing full well what's included. It's not as if the list of titles and authors isn't there for anyone to see, and while I'd be hard pressed to find somebody with an intimate knowledge of every single title, it's not unreasonable for a literate reader to have some enough familiarity with the majority of the works to know what they would be getting in to. Really, what evidence do you have that nobody but "snobs" and the ignorant could possibly be interested in this promotion? It seems that you're not advancing an argument so much as you're simply airing your prejudices.
I should also add that this discussion is chiefly hypothetical anyhow, because I doubt that individual readers are the intended audience for this promotion.
As an English major, I have to say that I wish I had known about Project Gutenberg when I was in college, and I wish that all books were available in electronic format. Think about it this way. While a novel or any other large work of literature is best read in book form, and I can't imagine that changing just yet, having an electronic plaintext copy of the book alongside the physical book would be an enormous boon to students and scholars. It's easier to quote from an electronic text. It's easier to search an electronic text. Hell, with a little work, you could build a concordance of your text, and then the possibilities really begin. Oh, I wish I had known about Project Gutenberg sooner.
I'm going to skip over your embarrassingly poor writing and spelling. As an English major, I know that English in college bears little resemblance to English in grammar school, and, just as art history majors aren't necessarily all talented artists, English majors have no special claim to mastery over either writing or spelling.
Why this cynicism? Can't you even consider the possibility that the collected Penguin Classics might not just appeal to insecure, contemptible snobs, but also to readers with a genuine love for books and reading?
I'd wager that most people buy Penguin Classics books because they need them for school, or because they've retained a love for literature into their post-student lives, and appreciate the Penguin Classics' affordability and solid introductions and notes. They're not always the best paperback editions that you can find, but they're nevertheless of a consistently adequate quality. And bear in mind that these aren't showy, decorative books, either -- we're talking about relatively inexpensive, medium-quality paperbacks that are expressly geared to be accessible to the mass market through low prices and wide distribution. No snob appeal there. Furthermore, the Penguin Classics line is currently in transition to a new design, so anyone looking for a set of decorative books to satisfy their snobby needs isn't likely to appreciate the inconsistency in the collection's look and feel, either.
While I can't think of any sane individual who would drop several grand on this collection, I can think of plenty who would fantasize about it, and it wouldn't be because they think that they can legitimize themselves with a pile of cheap paperbacks. Just because you fail to imagine a reader who could be sincerely excited about these books doesn't mean that they don't exist.
(You're confused about "duplicates," too. Multiple translations of individual source texts are not duplicates; they are distinct works, each appreciable (or detestable) in its own right. I'd expect any reasonably serious reader to realize this....Then again, I'd expect a serious reader to point out that Penguin's translations aren't always the best. Once again, little snob appeal there.)
Okay, I worked for Globeset, so if you worked for SETCO, you know that SETCO certified Globeset's SET software suite with its SET Mark, which is supposed to signify interoperability and compliance with the SET standard.
Okay, this irks me. The Penguin Classics exist expressly to keep affordable editions of canonical works available to the general public. If the Penguin Classics weren't in print (and these books don't exactly fly off the shelves at non-university bookstores), most of these books would only be available in expensive university press editions costing twice as much, if they would be available at all.
As for your comment about the public domain status of some of these titles, bear in mind that translations, introductions, and editing aren't free.
I agree that the list is a bit odd. You just get a collection of Kafka short stories without including either The Trial or The Castle. Likewise Hesse's Siddartha should probably be paired with or replaced with either Demian or Steppenwolf. In fact this set seems to betray the classic modernist view of literature: pre-colonial, predominantly Western. Though there are some interesting choices. Like The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam. But Borges seems to carry the load for all of South America. And no Rushdie? Murakami? Aren't we missing a hemisphere? And everything seems to stop around Vineland. No DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis or Eggers. Its like literature stopped with the post-modern singularity.
I could add my own roster of missing authors: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, H.D., Ezra Pound, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Felipe Alfau, Samuel Beckett, and so on. The most likely answer to most of these complaints is that Penguin doesn't have the rights to many 20th-century and contemporary titles. So DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis, Eggers, and Murakami are obviously out -- they're not published by Penguin, to my knowledge. And while I don't specifically know the copyright situation of Kafka's oeuvre, a glance at a bookstore shelf certainly gives the impression that Schocken holds the publishing rights to The Trial and The Castle while seemingly anybody can publish a translation of the short stories.
On the other hand, I have an old Penguin collection of Sylvia Ocampo stories, and I could have sworn that Penguin had an edition of Martin Fiero, so your complaint about South America rings true. I suspect, though, that Penguin doesn't hold rights to publish that other giant of South American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this is probably also true for Adolfo Bioy Casare, Julio Cortázar, and the many worthy South American writers that I've never heard of. And then there's the fact that South American writers in general simply aren't well-known or welll-read in the English-speaking world -- most of Borges's books aren't even in print in the United States!
I don't know what the excuse is for Rushdie, either, except that Penguin publishes Midnight's Children, Haroun, etc. under its Penguin Contemporaries imprint, not its Penguin Classics line. But yeah, if Pynchon and Barthelme make the Penguin Classics cut, I don't see why Rushdie doesn't -- it does seem arbitrary.
In fact this set seems to betray the classic modernist view of literature: pre-colonial, predominantly Western. Though there are some interesting choices. Like The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam.
And Li Po and Basho and Confucius and Cao Xueqin and Shen Fu and Murasaki Shikibu... but your criticism still stands. I think it's fair to say that the non-Western titles here are included because of the impact they've made upon the Western literary tradition.
Apparently they decided it was cheaper to let their customers bear the cost and hassle of dealing with the fraud in the existing system.
I'm not sure if that was why SET failed. I worked for a company that sold a complete suite of SET software, and the main problem with SET, as far as I could tell, was that SET was too complex and too expensive for merchants to implement -- no merchant wanted to spend the money needed to completely train their staff and retool their web sites to support SET, especially when encrypting the channel with SSL was seen as good enough (though the latter, of course, does nothing to protect cardholder data).
Are you sure? You make no indication of having read the article that I linked from Ars Technica, which more or less states in its discussion of Quartz 2D Extreme that Tiger will use all of the VRAM that you throw at it. FWIW, today's post about ATI's 512MB video card discusses this topic as well. See, for example, this and this.
You're absolutely correct, and this makes sense from Apple's perspective; their offerings cover the gamut from low-end (Mac mini) to midrange (iMac) to high-end (Power Mac), and that's that. When looking at Apple's lineup, an average consumer would probably find it simple to pick a model to suit their needs and their budget. Contrast this with Dell's overabundance of choices and rather opaque model names.
It's a shame, though, because my needs don't quite fit Apple's schema. I'd like a desktop Mac to use as my primary machine, but it needs to share a monitor with my PC, it ought to be relatively small, and it needs to cost well under $2,000. None of Apple's three choices quite works. The Mac mini is unsatisfactory because it's a little too underpowered; I have an Apple laptop already, and if I buy an Apple desktop, I'd want it to be a noticeably better performer. The Power Mac is both too expensive and too big -- it's ridiculously big. The iMac, meanwhile, is perfect from a price/performance perspective, but I don't need the display. So what I'd like is either a more powerful Mac mini (say, with a low-end G5 CPU and a decent hard drive) or a headless iMac.
I'm hoping that in a year's time, the Mac mini will be sufficiently powerful to be a compelling purchase.
32MB [of VRAM] is plenty for anything you can do on a 1.25GHz G4 -- more would just be a waste.
I'm not sure if the conventional wisdom about VRAM -- that it's only used as a dumb framebuffer and so the amount you need is a strict function of the screen resolution and color depth that you use -- is necessarily true anymore. The impression I got from reading the Tiger review on Ars Technica is that Tiger basically uses the GPU for everything it possibly can in order to avoid system bus bottlenecks, and thus it actually helps to have more VRAM.
However, this isn't really an area in which I can speak comfortably or with any sort of authority, so I might be dead wrong, and please correct me if so.
This isn't an exploit against end users. This is an exploit against the Googlebot allowing a site operator to usurp another site's search result rankings by taking advantage of the fact that Googlebot honors the HTTP 302 status code as a temporary redirect (as it's supposed to do).
You know, if I ever receive a wireless message from another car that says, "DIE, bitch!", I'm going to track down the creators of Unreal Tournament and key all their cars.
My apologies for jumping on the temporary issue with your web site, which was occurring for me on Firefox 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X, but which righted itself shortly after I made the comment.
Slashdot Mirror
"and a GNOME contributor, and an excellent tech weblogger"
Sorry about the extra 'and.'
I take him seriously. Edd Dumbill is an Editor at Large for O'Reilly Network, an author of three books for O'Reilly, and a GNOME contributor, and an excellent tech weblogger, among other things.
I have to say that you've really hit the nail on the head there.
I would have been happier if CmdrTaco had simply admitted that copyediting for spelling and prescriptive grammar just isn't one of his strengths. I know plenty of engineers, programmers, artists, and even writers who can't spell to save their lives, but who are unequivocally intelligent and talented. Poor written language skills aren't reliable indicators of low intelligence, and anyone who happens to have a knack for spelling and grammar should humbly bear this in mind.
Having said that, the web is a predominantly textual medium, and poor written language skills are as much of a disadvantage here as the inability to catch a ball is a disadvantage on a football field. I wish that Slashdot's editors would at least make a minimal effort to watch for simple errors such as misspellings.
I'd consider the comma splice a species of run-on sentence, though my last Google search didn't uncover much consensus on the subject. In any case, there are several acceptable ways to form a compound sentence, and the sentence in question doesn't use any of them. Here's a corrected version of the sentence:
The only possible advantage I can see in substituting the word "leverage" is that it sort of implies they are making the best use of these tools that they can, in which case you would think that most people would have already assumed they are not making the worst possible use they could of the tools, and it's interesting that the author feels it necessary to make that distinction.
It would probably be even better to split this into two or more distinct sentences.
As for the use of "leverage" instead of "use," it's annoying corporate argot that the dictionaries probably haven't caught on to yet, but we may as well get used to it; it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon.
IP geeks may be interested to know that the illustrations on O'Reilly's covers are generally public domain works from the Dover pictorial archive. Dover Publications, if you don't know, is an invaluable publishing house that specializes in budget-priced literature and art books (especially clip art); many, perhaps most, of their publications use public domain material.
(As an aside, you may also be interested to know that their clip art collections aren't entirely unemcumbered -- while the individual works are public domain, their collections are copyrighted derivative works, and they place limits on commercial use of art from their collections.)
Be sure to check bugzilla.mozilla.org to see if the issue that you're experiencing is a known issue -- and write up a bug if not.
You can also try running one of the nightly builds (see, for example, The Rumbling Edge) to see if that gives you a better experience. Nightlies are untested and may have even worse bugs, of course.
Ah... I see now. Thanks for the clarification.
Personally, I try to take the idea of some immutable canon of classics with a grain of salt, and I'd rather selectively populate my book collection one book at a time, but the Penguin Classics lineup is not too shabby, and if I were able to purchase some subset of this series in one fell swoop (say, the Viking sagas), I'd certainly consider it.
My main problem with your reasoning is that you readily imagine a potential buyer who is only motivated by insecurity and ignorance, but it's impossible for you to imagine a potential buyer who could sincerely want this collection, knowing full well what's included. It's not as if the list of titles and authors isn't there for anyone to see, and while I'd be hard pressed to find somebody with an intimate knowledge of every single title, it's not unreasonable for a literate reader to have some enough familiarity with the majority of the works to know what they would be getting in to. Really, what evidence do you have that nobody but "snobs" and the ignorant could possibly be interested in this promotion? It seems that you're not advancing an argument so much as you're simply airing your prejudices.
I should also add that this discussion is chiefly hypothetical anyhow, because I doubt that individual readers are the intended audience for this promotion.
As an English major, I have to say that I wish I had known about Project Gutenberg when I was in college, and I wish that all books were available in electronic format. Think about it this way. While a novel or any other large work of literature is best read in book form, and I can't imagine that changing just yet, having an electronic plaintext copy of the book alongside the physical book would be an enormous boon to students and scholars. It's easier to quote from an electronic text. It's easier to search an electronic text. Hell, with a little work, you could build a concordance of your text, and then the possibilities really begin. Oh, I wish I had known about Project Gutenberg sooner.
I'm going to skip over your embarrassingly poor writing and spelling. As an English major, I know that English in college bears little resemblance to English in grammar school, and, just as art history majors aren't necessarily all talented artists, English majors have no special claim to mastery over either writing or spelling.
Why this cynicism? Can't you even consider the possibility that the collected Penguin Classics might not just appeal to insecure, contemptible snobs, but also to readers with a genuine love for books and reading?
...Then again, I'd expect a serious reader to point out that Penguin's translations aren't always the best. Once again, little snob appeal there.)
I'd wager that most people buy Penguin Classics books because they need them for school, or because they've retained a love for literature into their post-student lives, and appreciate the Penguin Classics' affordability and solid introductions and notes. They're not always the best paperback editions that you can find, but they're nevertheless of a consistently adequate quality. And bear in mind that these aren't showy, decorative books, either -- we're talking about relatively inexpensive, medium-quality paperbacks that are expressly geared to be accessible to the mass market through low prices and wide distribution. No snob appeal there. Furthermore, the Penguin Classics line is currently in transition to a new design, so anyone looking for a set of decorative books to satisfy their snobby needs isn't likely to appreciate the inconsistency in the collection's look and feel, either.
While I can't think of any sane individual who would drop several grand on this collection, I can think of plenty who would fantasize about it, and it wouldn't be because they think that they can legitimize themselves with a pile of cheap paperbacks. Just because you fail to imagine a reader who could be sincerely excited about these books doesn't mean that they don't exist.
(You're confused about "duplicates," too. Multiple translations of individual source texts are not duplicates; they are distinct works, each appreciable (or detestable) in its own right. I'd expect any reasonably serious reader to realize this.
Okay, I worked for Globeset, so if you worked for SETCO, you know that SETCO certified Globeset's SET software suite with its SET Mark, which is supposed to signify interoperability and compliance with the SET standard.
Okay, this irks me. The Penguin Classics exist expressly to keep affordable editions of canonical works available to the general public. If the Penguin Classics weren't in print (and these books don't exactly fly off the shelves at non-university bookstores), most of these books would only be available in expensive university press editions costing twice as much, if they would be available at all.
As for your comment about the public domain status of some of these titles, bear in mind that translations, introductions, and editing aren't free.
I could add my own roster of missing authors: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, H.D., Ezra Pound, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Felipe Alfau, Samuel Beckett, and so on. The most likely answer to most of these complaints is that Penguin doesn't have the rights to many 20th-century and contemporary titles. So DeLillo, Eugenides, Ellis, Eggers, and Murakami are obviously out -- they're not published by Penguin, to my knowledge. And while I don't specifically know the copyright situation of Kafka's oeuvre, a glance at a bookstore shelf certainly gives the impression that Schocken holds the publishing rights to The Trial and The Castle while seemingly anybody can publish a translation of the short stories.
On the other hand, I have an old Penguin collection of Sylvia Ocampo stories, and I could have sworn that Penguin had an edition of Martin Fiero, so your complaint about South America rings true. I suspect, though, that Penguin doesn't hold rights to publish that other giant of South American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this is probably also true for Adolfo Bioy Casare, Julio Cortázar, and the many worthy South American writers that I've never heard of. And then there's the fact that South American writers in general simply aren't well-known or welll-read in the English-speaking world -- most of Borges's books aren't even in print in the United States!
I don't know what the excuse is for Rushdie, either, except that Penguin publishes Midnight's Children, Haroun, etc. under its Penguin Contemporaries imprint, not its Penguin Classics line. But yeah, if Pynchon and Barthelme make the Penguin Classics cut, I don't see why Rushdie doesn't -- it does seem arbitrary.
And Li Po and Basho and Confucius and Cao Xueqin and Shen Fu and Murasaki Shikibu... but your criticism still stands. I think it's fair to say that the non-Western titles here are included because of the impact they've made upon the Western literary tradition.
I'm not sure if that was why SET failed. I worked for a company that sold a complete suite of SET software, and the main problem with SET, as far as I could tell, was that SET was too complex and too expensive for merchants to implement -- no merchant wanted to spend the money needed to completely train their staff and retool their web sites to support SET, especially when encrypting the channel with SSL was seen as good enough (though the latter, of course, does nothing to protect cardholder data).
Are you sure? You make no indication of having read the article that I linked from Ars Technica, which more or less states in its discussion of Quartz 2D Extreme that Tiger will use all of the VRAM that you throw at it. FWIW, today's post about ATI's 512MB video card discusses this topic as well. See, for example, this and this.
You're absolutely correct, and this makes sense from Apple's perspective; their offerings cover the gamut from low-end (Mac mini) to midrange (iMac) to high-end (Power Mac), and that's that. When looking at Apple's lineup, an average consumer would probably find it simple to pick a model to suit their needs and their budget. Contrast this with Dell's overabundance of choices and rather opaque model names.
It's a shame, though, because my needs don't quite fit Apple's schema. I'd like a desktop Mac to use as my primary machine, but it needs to share a monitor with my PC, it ought to be relatively small, and it needs to cost well under $2,000. None of Apple's three choices quite works. The Mac mini is unsatisfactory because it's a little too underpowered; I have an Apple laptop already, and if I buy an Apple desktop, I'd want it to be a noticeably better performer. The Power Mac is both too expensive and too big -- it's ridiculously big. The iMac, meanwhile, is perfect from a price/performance perspective, but I don't need the display. So what I'd like is either a more powerful Mac mini (say, with a low-end G5 CPU and a decent hard drive) or a headless iMac.
I'm hoping that in a year's time, the Mac mini will be sufficiently powerful to be a compelling purchase.
I'm not sure if the conventional wisdom about VRAM -- that it's only used as a dumb framebuffer and so the amount you need is a strict function of the screen resolution and color depth that you use -- is necessarily true anymore. The impression I got from reading the Tiger review on Ars Technica is that Tiger basically uses the GPU for everything it possibly can in order to avoid system bus bottlenecks, and thus it actually helps to have more VRAM.
However, this isn't really an area in which I can speak comfortably or with any sort of authority, so I might be dead wrong, and please correct me if so.
Not to mention that the joke isn't even applicable to current versions of Windows, which descend from OS/2 and Windows NT, not MS-DOS and Windows 95.
Unsurprisingly, a simple Google search would have revealed that you're not the first person to have thought of this.
You're not a reader of Borges or Kafka by any chance, are you?
This isn't an exploit against end users. This is an exploit against the Googlebot allowing a site operator to usurp another site's search result rankings by taking advantage of the fact that Googlebot honors the HTTP 302 status code as a temporary redirect (as it's supposed to do).
Please read the article before commenting.
I don't have any mod points today, so I'm glad that you've already reached a score of 5. Great comment.
You know, if I ever receive a wireless message from another car that says, "DIE, bitch!", I'm going to track down the creators of Unreal Tournament and key all their cars.
My apologies for jumping on the temporary issue with your web site, which was occurring for me on Firefox 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X, but which righted itself shortly after I made the comment.