me: Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?
you: If your users are FOSS developers, they quite likely care about the ability to modify the tool, which includes caring about the languate in which it is written.
Interesting point. Certainly FOSS developers care about being legally allowed to modify code, but I'm not sure that they care, on the whole, about the language.
emacs, for example, is largely written in elisp -- hardly a mainstream language. Yet it's extremely popular, even among people who don't know any lisp. People who find the need to extend it get a good excuse to learn lisp in a well-motivated, incremental way.
Speaking personally, I'd be ''more'' inclined to hack on a project written in something interesting like Haskell, ML, Smalltalk, or Lisp. (In fact I chose my current main project partly as an excuse to learn Lisp.) A lot of people like having a motivation for learning a new language, or a practical use for an "academic" language they happen to know. (I learned Haskell in university, so I'd be quite keen to get to use it in the "real world".)
I think the only time I'd care about the language of a program I'm using would be if it were written in something particularly horrible -- "urgh, if I ever want to modify this I'll have to learn befunge!" But perhaps that's the way some people view Haskell;-).
It's a matter of taste, I suppose. I do acknowledge that I'm a bit of a language nut.
I still maintain that quality is more important than quantity, though. I've been teaching C and Java to second-year undergraduates this year -- having seen some of their code, I can safely say that if I were starting an OSS project, I'd rather have one seasoned Haskell hacker on board than the entire lot of 'em:-).
I did read the article, however I do DISAGREE with that comment in the article. People won't learn a language for one program...
but the article says:
And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs.
So either:
(1) You haven't read the article, or (2) You have read the article, but you were incapable of comprehending that sentence, or (3) You're calling David Roundy a liar.
I find it odd that you use phrases like "won't cut it" and "won't learn a language", as if this were all speculation. darcs has hit 1.0. People use it. It is actively developed by many people. People have learned Haskell solely to hack on it. The facts clearly contradict your unsupported assertions.
While "Darcs is written in a Haskell, a functional language that is relatively unknown compared to C or Perl", this really does hurt it's common use.
How will the choice of language hurt darcs's use? Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?
You wrote:
Not being able to get a larger group of developers such as C, C++, or even some interpreted projects means that it becomes one or a few developers working on this project
From the article:
I've been surprised by the number and quality of contributors darcs has had. There seem to be quite a few people out there just looking for somewhere to use Haskell!:) And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs. It's such a pleasant language to work with that I think it's more of a draw to developers than a put-off.
So perhaps you should attempt to assimilate some facts before trotting out your tedious, ill-informed prejudices, hmmm?
Furthermore, it's not just about the sheer number of developers, it's about the power of the language. A million monkeys writing code are still only monkeys, and the more developers you have on a project, the more co-ordination is required (read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month if you don't believe me).
If "number of potential developers" were the only criterion for choosing a project's programming language, everything would be written in BASIC. And Paul Graham makes a good case for coding in less common languages: you'll get people smart enough to learn unusual languages for the hell of it, rather than a mass of monkeys who have little interest in building great software and just want to learn this week's marketable language to improve their employment prospects.
I've been distressed about this nonsensical treatment of PHP as an application language for some time now.
Amen. I've done a small CMS in LAM+PHP, and I came away with the feeling that anything bigger would be a maintenance nightmare. And I've had PHP upgrades break applications because newly introduced functions in the language clashed with function definitions in the application. It seems practically insane to me to have a language that big without cast-iron namespacing.
That's a nice anecdote. Apparently neither you nor the author understand the difference between correlation and causation.
Hush -- this is slashdot, where not only does correlation imply causation, but we can infer the correlation from a sample size of one!
My girlfriend's father was diagnosed with diabetes when I started using an LCD monitor. Coincidence? Yeah, that's what the LCD manufacturers want you to think...
Your unimaginative and immature posting however, profoundly disturbs me... On the other hand, there may possibly be a more rational explaination for your obnoxious behavior; perhaps you're French?
Nice, well-reasoned post, until the final sentence revealed you to be just as unimaginative and immature as the poster to whom you were replying.
We aren't concerned with terrorism, because terrorism is mostly affecting the US.
Untrue. Did you hear about the Madrid bombing? The Bali bombing? The
three hundred and fifty people killed in Beslan, Russia? And how many major terrorist attacks have there been on U.S. soil since 9/11?
In fact, terrorist attacks last year hit a 35-year low, at least until Powell realised this was bad for business and had the official figures heavily revised.
Of course non-U.S. terrorist attacks don't get as much media coverage (even outside the U.S.) but it doesn't mean that they don't occur.
The normal people are so food-deprived, there are claims of cannibalism in the North. Screw satellite pictures: technology is the least of North Korea's people's problems.
Thank you for your informative post; too bad it was modded flamebait. Herearesomelinks for those who reckon it's "flamebait" to point out that starving people probably don't give a shit about their country's "intelligence warfare capability".
No, AFAIK it's pretty much just a British phenomenon. And even most Brits would baulk at putting milk in, say, green tea, earl grey, or lapsang souchong.
While everone else was luggin around either texbooks or the odd Notebook computer. I had my trusty Newton.
Uhm. Assuming you mean "textbooks", rather than "copies of Donald Knuth's manual for TeX"... how did your Newton replace textbooks? Did you transcribe whole books onto your Newton for easy reference?
I'd've thought that the old-tech equivalent of a Newton is a pen and a slim folder of writing paper, which probably weighs about as much as a Newton, *and* doesn't run out of battery power, *and* lets you make paper darts when the lecture gets slow;-).
We didn't attack Iraq until after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Sorry, what's the connection here? Even Bush now admits that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
What's that you say? Musab al-Zarqawi? I'll believe he had links to Hussein when I see some proof. Repeated assertions are not proof. Fairly moot point anyway since the 9/11 commission stated that al-Zarqawi had no link to the 9/11 attacks.
Come to that, if al-Zarqawi was the justification for the invasion, it's a bit of a shame that he's still at large and doing better than he ever was while Hussein was in power...
Does anyone know about the potential effects of too much floride?
Yes, I believe it's fairly well known [1] that too much fluoride causes nasty brown spots on teeth; trouble is, "too much" varies from person to person. In areas where they fluoridate water, the argument seems to be that the net effect is a good one: a few unfortunates end up with ugly teeth for life, but far more people are saved from tooth decay.
AFAIK brushing with fluoridated toothpaste (i.e. just about every toothpaste -- non-fluoridated toothpaste is a rare specialist item for fluoride-sensitive individuals) provides more than enough fluoride, so fluoridated water benefits mainly those who don't brush their teeth enough. IMHO it's pretty unfair on the fluoride-sensitive (especially since you're unlikely to know that you're sensitive until your teeth turn brown, by which time it's too late).
[1] Sorry, don't have time to dig up references. You'll have to trust me;-).
because of my public pro-stance on free software... I was on their shitlist and they would not sell me, and therefore the company I currently work for, a license to use Bitkeeper.
Holy hell. That's not so much unprofessional as infantile. Let's hope Linus never pisses Larry McVoy off...
Linus: "Hey, that's a pretty nasty-ass shirt you're wearing!" Larry: "Yeah? Well, in that case I revoke your BitKeeper licence! How d'ya like them apples?
A large group of slackware users/fans decided to flame the admin repeatedly on the forums. Those "belligerent" responses were a direct result of that.
I remember it somewhat differently; unfortunately the posts were deleted by the admin. This is why I think that responding to criticism is preferable to deleting it: there's no way to determine in hindsight whether the criticism was valid.
Would you try installing debs on a SUSE system and expect it to always work?
The difference is that I can expect to find most of the software I want as a SuSE-compatible RPM. Yoper is a far less popular distro, so I'm concerned that not much software is available unless you resort to non-Yoper RPMs, which might break the system.
Give the little guy a chance!
Is he a little guy or not? One minute it's a professional-grade distro with x thousand downloads, a large user base, a substantial development team and a "commercial team". As soon as any criticism arises, it's "well, what do you expect from a one-man distro?". You can't have it both ways.
Andreas is the guy behind the distro, english was not his first language (cut the site some slack) and he's a programmer, not a Public Relations Rep
But he claims to have "hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ". Presumably one of these hundreds of minions wouldn't mind proofreading the website. Shouldn't crafting a decent website be the job of the Yoper commercial team?
I have nothing against Yoper or Andreas. I think it's great that free software is good enough that one person can put together a working distro. And I don't believe that a one-man distro has to be flakey -- look at Knoppix, or Mepis. But most of the good stuff I've heard about Knoppix and Mepis is from independent sources; most of the good stuff I've heard about Yoper is from Yoper's website, which states that criticism will be deleted from its forums. Evenhanded evaluation is thus hard to come by.
For what it's worth, I'm in New Zealand and this is the first that I've ever heard of these people
So am I (since the start of the year), and all I've seen so far is RH, Fedora, Debian and Mandrake. So far I've heard of one person using Yoper, in a message to a LUG mailing list which said "is anyone else using Yoper?". Nobody was.
I looked into it when it made its debut a couple of years back. Several things made me uneasy. IIRC:
1. It seemed to launch with huge fanfare and hype, and there was a bit of a backlash when it turned out to be just another "generic distro plus knoppix hardware detection" deal.
2. Source wasn't originally available, so it was infringing on the GPL.
3. They were very reticent about acknowledging the work they'd built on, and responded quite violently to any criticism.
I had a poke about their website recently, the things that now make me uneasy are:
1. Package availability -- according to this declaration, you can only install Yoper-packaged RPMs ("The ones for other distros have to probably be installed with rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps and might break apt.").
2. Lack of decent documentation -- lots of important information seems to be squirreled away in the forums.
3. Amateurish website ("Yoper is one of the most standardised Linuxes that you will find and hardware performancetries to be better better than that of any commercial OS." -- http://www.yoper.com/about.html )
3. Responses to criticism still seem pretty belligerent, not to mention self-contradictory. A forum post from March 2003 says:
We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ. ( original post )
Then, in October 2003:
Some of you compile quite a few packages, which is great!!!! The base Yoper is done by ONE person and this person (ME) has a distro which is now fairly well known even though it is only version 1. Just think of this. Yoper is a one man distro and so many have an opinion on it. ( original post )
So, is it a one-man distro or not?
Still, it seems they're no longer trying to flog it for 99 USD, which makes me think a little more kindly of it:-).
Unless you're in the US, of course, in which case it's 237ml (unless you're talking butter, in which case it's two sticks. I think. And a stick is a quarter of a pound, so a cup of butter would be 227g.) What a mess.
if it is not in the OED, it is considered far enough outside common usage to require a definition within the article.
I sincerely hope the converse doesn't hold -- you can't really expect your readers to be acquainted with every word in the full OED (you wouldn't really drop "cyanacobalamin" into a general article without a definition, would you)?
Do the institutions you're talking about use some well-defined subset of the OED as an inclusion test, or do they just use it as a fallback exclusion test?
As I said before, many institutions consider it the canon definition of the English language.
I agree that it's the closest thing to a standard we have, but my point was that (regardless of how many institutions use it) it doesn't have any official weight outside those institutions. It's not a definition of the language, no matter who chooses to use it as one. You can't meaningfully say, as Billy69 did, "x is by definition a word", because the OED isn't a definition and doesn't pretend to be one.
The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language.
Please name a few of them, and give some kind of evidence. Most publications have their own style guide, which does not necessarily coincide with the OED.
Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language.
Bollocks. The OED includes both slang (e.g. "bollocks") and technical language (e.g. "cyanacobalamin"). And that's just in the concise edition.
the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language
Once more -- whose? Americans, surely, would incline more towards Webster's. Scrabble players use Chambers.
A dictionary (at any rate an English one) is not a definition, it's a record. As such, it's always out of date. I suspect that even the compilers of the OED themselves would agree on this point:-).
Question 5: Is the DebianInstaller going to be graphical in nature? / Is there any prebuilt/downloadable graphical DebianInstaller?
Answer: The DebianInstaller will not be graphical by nature, but modularity is a key in its design. It would allow the use of different kinds of frontends, including those of a graphical nature.
There is a project underway to create a GTK frontend to the installer. For more information on the current status of this frontend see here. Unfortunately the project hasn't seen much activity lately.
Regular police don't -- in this case, someone phoned in a tip-off ("man with non-English accent carrying long object in plastic bag!") so they sent an Armed Response Unit.
When I was there the police had a whistle and a baton...and just blew and battered...
It's usually known as a truncheon. Good word, truncheon.
In Chicago if a cop sees you with a handgun (or something that looks like a handgun, like maybe a cell phone) you are running the risk of being shot.
Think that's bad? In the UK, a man was shot dead by police because he was taking a newly-repaired table leg home and someone mistook it for a shotgun. More details here.
Slashdot Mirror
me: Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?
;-).
:-).
you: If your users are FOSS developers, they quite likely care about the ability to modify the tool, which includes caring about the languate in which it is written.
Interesting point. Certainly FOSS developers care about being legally allowed to modify code, but I'm not sure that they care, on the whole, about the language.
emacs, for example, is largely written in elisp -- hardly a mainstream language. Yet it's extremely popular, even among people who don't know any lisp. People who find the need to extend it get a good excuse to learn lisp in a well-motivated, incremental way.
Speaking personally, I'd be ''more'' inclined to hack on a project written in something interesting like Haskell, ML, Smalltalk, or Lisp. (In fact I chose my current main project partly as an excuse to learn Lisp.) A lot of people like having a motivation for learning a new language, or a practical use for an "academic" language they happen to know. (I learned Haskell in university, so I'd be quite keen to get to use it in the "real world".)
I think the only time I'd care about the language of a program I'm using would be if it were written in something particularly horrible -- "urgh, if I ever want to modify this I'll have to learn befunge!" But perhaps that's the way some people view Haskell
It's a matter of taste, I suppose. I do acknowledge that I'm a bit of a language nut.
I still maintain that quality is more important than quantity, though. I've been teaching C and Java to second-year undergraduates this year -- having seen some of their code, I can safely say that if I were starting an OSS project, I'd rather have one seasoned Haskell hacker on board than the entire lot of 'em
You wrote:
I did read the article, however I do DISAGREE with that comment in the article. People won't learn a language for one program...
but the article says:
And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs.
So either:
(1) You haven't read the article, or
(2) You have read the article, but you were incapable of comprehending that sentence, or
(3) You're calling David Roundy a liar.
I find it odd that you use phrases like "won't cut it" and "won't learn a language", as if this were all speculation. darcs has hit 1.0. People use it. It is actively developed by many people. People have learned Haskell solely to hack on it. The facts clearly contradict your unsupported assertions.
How will the choice of language hurt darcs's use? Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?
You wrote:
From the article:
So perhaps you should attempt to assimilate some facts before trotting out your tedious, ill-informed prejudices, hmmm?
Furthermore, it's not just about the sheer number of developers, it's about the power of the language. A million monkeys writing code are still only monkeys, and the more developers you have on a project, the more co-ordination is required (read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month if you don't believe me).
If "number of potential developers" were the only criterion for choosing a project's programming language, everything would be written in BASIC. And Paul Graham makes a good case for coding in less common languages: you'll get people smart enough to learn unusual languages for the hell of it, rather than a mass of monkeys who have little interest in building great software and just want to learn this week's marketable language to improve their employment prospects.
Amen. I've done a small CMS in LAM+PHP, and I came away with the feeling that anything bigger would be a maintenance nightmare. And I've had PHP upgrades break applications because newly introduced functions in the language clashed with function definitions in the application. It seems practically insane to me to have a language that big without cast-iron namespacing.
Hush -- this is slashdot, where not only does correlation imply causation, but we can infer the correlation from a sample size of one!
My girlfriend's father was diagnosed with diabetes when I started using an LCD monitor. Coincidence? Yeah, that's what the LCD manufacturers want you to think...
Nice, well-reasoned post, until the final sentence revealed you to be just as unimaginative and immature as the poster to whom you were replying.
Untrue. Did you hear about the Madrid bombing? The Bali bombing? The three hundred and fifty people killed in Beslan, Russia? And how many major terrorist attacks have there been on U.S. soil since 9/11?
In fact, terrorist attacks last year hit a 35-year low, at least until Powell realised this was bad for business and had the official figures heavily revised.
Of course non-U.S. terrorist attacks don't get as much media coverage (even outside the U.S.) but it doesn't mean that they don't occur.
Heh. And now the UK has one Conservative party called New Labour, and a running joke called the Conservative Party.
(P.S. Spelling nitpick: surely it's the New Zealand Labour party...)
The normal people are so food-deprived, there are claims of cannibalism in the North. Screw satellite pictures: technology is the least of North Korea's people's problems.
Thank you for your informative post; too bad it was modded flamebait. Here are some links for those who reckon it's "flamebait" to point out that starving people probably don't give a shit about their country's "intelligence warfare capability".
> Do Europeans really put milk in their tea?
No, AFAIK it's pretty much just a British phenomenon. And even most Brits would baulk at putting milk in, say, green tea, earl grey, or lapsang souchong.
While everone else was luggin around either texbooks or the odd Notebook computer. I had my trusty Newton.
;-).
Uhm. Assuming you mean "textbooks", rather than "copies of Donald Knuth's manual for TeX"... how did your Newton replace textbooks? Did you transcribe whole books onto your Newton for easy reference?
I'd've thought that the old-tech equivalent of a Newton is a pen and a slim folder of writing paper, which probably weighs about as much as a Newton, *and* doesn't run out of battery power, *and* lets you make paper darts when the lecture gets slow
We didn't attack Iraq until after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Sorry, what's the connection here? Even Bush now admits that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
What's that you say? Musab al-Zarqawi? I'll believe he had links to Hussein when I see some proof. Repeated assertions are not proof. Fairly moot point anyway since the 9/11 commission stated that al-Zarqawi had no link to the 9/11 attacks.
Come to that, if al-Zarqawi was the justification for the invasion, it's a bit of a shame that he's still at large and doing better than he ever was while Hussein was in power...
Does anyone know about the potential effects of too much floride?
;-).
Yes, I believe it's fairly well known [1] that too much fluoride causes nasty brown spots on teeth; trouble is, "too much" varies from person to person. In areas where they fluoridate water, the argument seems to be that the net effect is a good one: a few unfortunates end up with ugly teeth for life, but far more people are saved from tooth decay.
AFAIK brushing with fluoridated toothpaste (i.e. just about every toothpaste -- non-fluoridated toothpaste is a rare specialist item for fluoride-sensitive individuals) provides more than enough fluoride, so fluoridated water benefits mainly those who don't brush their teeth enough. IMHO it's pretty unfair on the fluoride-sensitive (especially since you're unlikely to know that you're sensitive until your teeth turn brown, by which time it's too late).
[1] Sorry, don't have time to dig up references. You'll have to trust me
because of my public pro-stance on free software... I was on their shitlist and they would not sell me, and therefore the company I currently work for, a license to use Bitkeeper.
Holy hell. That's not so much unprofessional as infantile. Let's hope Linus never pisses Larry McVoy off...
Linus: "Hey, that's a pretty nasty-ass shirt you're wearing!"
Larry: "Yeah? Well, in that case I revoke your BitKeeper licence! How d'ya like them apples?
A large group of slackware users/fans decided to flame the admin repeatedly on the forums. Those "belligerent" responses were a direct result of that.
I remember it somewhat differently; unfortunately the posts were deleted by the admin. This is why I think that responding to criticism is preferable to deleting it: there's no way to determine in hindsight whether the criticism was valid.
Would you try installing debs on a SUSE system and expect it to always work?
The difference is that I can expect to find most of the software I want as a SuSE-compatible RPM. Yoper is a far less popular distro, so I'm concerned that not much software is available unless you resort to non-Yoper RPMs, which might break the system.
Give the little guy a chance!
Is he a little guy or not? One minute it's a professional-grade distro with x thousand downloads, a large user base, a substantial development team and a "commercial team". As soon as any criticism arises, it's "well, what do you expect from a one-man distro?". You can't have it both ways.
Andreas is the guy behind the distro, english was not his first language (cut the site some slack) and he's a programmer, not a Public Relations Rep
But he claims to have "hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ". Presumably one of these hundreds of minions wouldn't mind proofreading the website. Shouldn't crafting a decent website be the job of the Yoper commercial team?
I have nothing against Yoper or Andreas. I think it's great that free software is good enough that one person can put together a working distro. And I don't believe that a one-man distro has to be flakey -- look at Knoppix, or Mepis. But most of the good stuff I've heard about Knoppix and Mepis is from independent sources; most of the good stuff I've heard about Yoper is from Yoper's website, which states that criticism will be deleted from its forums. Evenhanded evaluation is thus hard to come by.
For what it's worth, I'm in New Zealand and this is the first that I've ever heard of these people
So am I (since the start of the year), and all I've seen so far is RH, Fedora, Debian and Mandrake. So far I've heard of one person using Yoper, in a message to a LUG mailing list which said "is anyone else using Yoper?". Nobody was.
I looked into it when it made its debut a couple of years back. Several things made me uneasy. IIRC:
:-).
1. It seemed to launch with huge fanfare and hype, and there was a bit of a backlash when it turned out to be just another "generic distro plus knoppix hardware detection" deal.
2. Source wasn't originally available, so it was infringing on the GPL.
3. They were very reticent about acknowledging the work they'd built on, and responded quite violently to any criticism.
I had a poke about their website recently, the things that now make me uneasy are:
1. Package availability -- according to this declaration, you can only install Yoper-packaged RPMs ("The ones for other distros have to probably be installed with rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps and might break apt.").
2. Lack of decent documentation -- lots of important information seems to be squirreled away in the forums.
3. Amateurish website ("Yoper is one of the most standardised Linuxes that you will find and hardware performancetries to be better better than that of any commercial OS." -- http://www.yoper.com/about.html )
3. Responses to criticism still seem pretty belligerent, not to mention self-contradictory. A forum post from March 2003 says:
We are not a one man distro. Currently we have hundreds of users and several people on the development team and also a new commercial team that does the commercial side here in NZ. ( original post )
Then, in October 2003:
Some of you compile quite a few packages, which is great!!!! The base Yoper is done by ONE person and this person (ME) has a distro which is now fairly well known even though it is only version 1. Just think of this. Yoper is a one man distro and so many have an opinion on it. ( original post )
So, is it a one-man distro or not?
Still, it seems they're no longer trying to flog it for 99 USD, which makes me think a little more kindly of it
"I'm sorry to inform you, Mr. Cheney....that you're pants are on fire.'
See also Steve Bell's take.
Er, a cup is 250mL, of course.
Unless you're in the US, of course, in which case it's 237ml (unless you're talking butter, in which case it's two sticks. I think. And a stick is a quarter of a pound, so a cup of butter would be 227g.) What a mess.
if it is not in the OED, it is considered far enough outside common usage to require a definition within the article.
I sincerely hope the converse doesn't hold -- you can't really expect your readers to be acquainted with every word in the full OED (you wouldn't really drop "cyanacobalamin" into a general article without a definition, would you)?
Do the institutions you're talking about use some well-defined subset of the OED as an inclusion test, or do they just use it as a fallback exclusion test?
As I said before, many institutions consider it the canon definition of the English language.
I agree that it's the closest thing to a standard we have, but my point was that (regardless of how many institutions use it) it doesn't have any official weight outside those institutions. It's not a definition of the language, no matter who chooses to use it as one. You can't meaningfully say, as Billy69 did, "x is by definition a word", because the OED isn't a definition and doesn't pretend to be one.
The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language.
:-).
Please name a few of them, and give some kind of evidence. Most publications have their own style guide, which does not necessarily coincide with the OED.
Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language.
Bollocks. The OED includes both slang (e.g. "bollocks") and technical language (e.g. "cyanacobalamin"). And that's just in the concise edition.
the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language
Once more -- whose? Americans, surely, would incline more towards Webster's. Scrabble players use Chambers.
A dictionary (at any rate an English one) is not a definition, it's a record. As such, it's always out of date. I suspect that even the compilers of the OED themselves would agree on this point
For the sake of this post, I will simply define the two methods of
p ?t=8325 , without any attribution to the original author, one Justin Troutman. Shame on you.
attack...
For the sake of this post, you will blatantly paste in great wodges of content from http://www.security-forums.com/forum/viewtopic.ph
When are they getting with the times and making a decent graphical installer?
From http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianInstallerFAQ :
they have guns in the UK?
Regular police don't -- in this case, someone phoned in a tip-off ("man with non-English accent carrying long object in plastic bag!") so they sent an Armed Response Unit.
When I was there the police had a whistle and a baton...and just blew and battered...
It's usually known as a truncheon. Good word, truncheon.
In Chicago if a cop sees you with a handgun (or something that looks like a handgun, like maybe a cell phone) you are running the risk of being shot.
Think that's bad? In the UK, a man was shot dead by police because he was taking a newly-repaired
table leg home and someone mistook it for a shotgun. More details here.