Thank you. That's pretty much exactly what I was trying to get at, but I was in a hurry to get home:-). I was getting a little tired of people shouting "ETHICS!" and considering the argument over, as if ethics were some universal absolute.
But for a society to thrive and function, there must be a common ground defined, a shared ethical framework that is fair to everyone.
To an extent, there can be a common ground. The vast majority of people, for example, would agree that murder is ethically wrong.
However, the great popularity of copyright infringement clearly demonstrates that a substantial number of people don't share your ethical view. Where should the common ground lie?
I don't have any easy solutions. But unilaterally declaring things "ethically wrong" and expecting that to clinch the debate is not going to win many people to your cause.
That's not even getting into the ethics issue, an overlooked issue, in my opinion.
That's because universal ethical laws are very hard to formulate, and because there's no way of forcing people to subscribe to them anyway.
Here's a silly thought-experiment: say I had $500 to spend on a copy of Photoshop (or whatever the price is). Instead I download a copy for free and send the money to a charity which uses it to provide a handpump in an African village. The handpump provides clean drinking water for several hundred people, and is very, very likely to save lives. Now, I admit this is an artificial and extreme example, but I just wanted to point out that ethics aren't as rigid as some people would like them to be. In general, any sweeping "X IS WRONG" statement will have corner cases which aren't quite as clear-cut.
NOT Bill Gate's ethics (or lack there of), not the RAII / BSA's ethics (or lack there of), it's about YOUR ethics.
You've hit the nail right on the head. It's about MY ethics. What are you going to do if MY ethics don't equate copying software with property theft? Ethics, unlike laws, are not enshrined in statute books. Everyone has their own set.
Well, of course. Piracy is by *definition* illegal. It's like saying "illegal acts are against the law" -- true, but content-free.
... and ethically. Right? Right?!
Far more complicated. I don't doubt that you subscribe to a system of ethics in which software piracy is wrong, but you can't expect *all* of the other six billion people on earth to share your ethical system. If you're declaring things to be "ethically wrong", you have to be clear on which ethical framework you're working within -- and accept that not everyone will necessarily share that framework.
Let's be specific here: people are working on FreeDOS, a reimplementation of MS-DOS. As has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, it is stable and useful but not yet a complete reimplementation, which is why people are still working on it.
Either it's broken...
"Broken" is not really the same as "still under development". A great number of perfectly stable programs are still being actively developed.
... and should be ported to modern hardware...
Eh? You've lost me now. AFAIK FreeDOS runs fine on modern hardware.
or it's not broken, in which case no one should be working on it.
I think the developers are free to work on what they like in their own time... how were you planning to stop them?
People using DOS need to drive their avanti to the store and buy a $50 computer that will run a modern version of Linux or Windows.
... but still won't run the mission-critical DOS applications they were running in the first place? (Unless, of course, they install FreeDOS on their new $50 machines.) That would be a case of "if it's not broken, then break it", I think.
Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone?
To run DOS applications.
If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need.
What if the OS features I need are, in their entirity, "I need it to run this application"?
DOS isn't a good fit.
It's an excellent fit for DOS applications.
If you need DOS for application support, then by God man, start porting the mission critical DOS app...
Sure thing, as soon as you start paying me to do so.
Seriously, though. If it's not broken, why fix it? Sure, it might be fun to port all those old applications to a modern OS, but who's going to pay for it? If you have a standalone machine already doing *exactly* what you need it to do, reliably, I see no need to start messing with it.
You're missing an important point: you are taking the carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere.
Err. No. You're taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the atmosphere. It's called photosynthesis. That's why plants keep their leaves out in the air, rather than under the ground.
It amazes me how bad open source people are at marketing.
Obviously, if Vita Nuova's marketing is bad, it must be because there's an open source version of Inferno! Tell me, if I buy the commercial version, does the name Inferno magically become more apposite?
Do open source authors believe that there are only a few concepts available, not enough for everyone?
Try to be sensible. There's a fairly tenuous connection between naming your company and product after the works of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, and having a cute red devil logo. Why not claim they're ripping off "Stain Devil" stain removers while you're at it?
And Why did the FreeBSD project adopt that idea?
I always assumed it was a visual pun on "daemon".
I know FreeBSD is an excellent OS, and the favorite BSD for ISPs, but there are some who will be discouraged by the amateurish baby red devil marketing scheme.
Well quite. Just as people are discouraged from Linux by the amateurish fat penguin drawn by some sysadmin who's never studied marketing, right? Let's hear it from Linus himself:
I've talked to some people who are in advertising, and they love the penguin. They think it's the greatest logo ever. And it's funny thinking back. Because we made it for, I think, the 2.0 release. Like, in '95 or something? And a lot of people hated it because it wasn't serious enough. But it's great. The advertising people really like the fact that you can do things with it. "That's the stroke of genius! The guy who came up with the penguin is a marketing genius!
I think the same arguments apply to the BSD devil.
Still, the great thing about open source is that you don't have to sit there moaning, you can pitch in. Perhaps you could offer some of your marketing genius to an OSS project encumbered with a substandard logo or name. I think it's a good fortnight since Firefox last changed name -- maybe you could find them a new one:-).
and no i will not give it the honor of capital letters(gimp) that respect is earned when you make something that can deliver on it's claims.
Developer #1: "Watcha doin' today? Wanna work on improving GIMP usability?" Developer #2: "Nope. I refuse to acknowledge the vast consensus that PS is much faster and more usable." Developer #3 [bursting through door]: "Have you guys SEEN? An AC on Slashdot is refusing to use capital letters when referring to the GIMP!" All: "HOLY FUCK! Let's get coding!"
(A week later, GIMP 3.0 is released to worldwide acclaim. AC contends that "gimp still suxx0rz" but after intense negotiations agrees to capitalize the M and the P.)
Why is it that we think ignorance is some God-given right and get mad when anyone disspells it.
The point here is that the extra information wasn't really relevant, and merely appeared to be inserted to boost the submitter's ego. It becomes more obvious if you rephrase it:
"Just one step close to George Orwell's vision of 1984. Oh, and George Orwell was actually a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair."
His real name DOESN'T MATTER here. It would matter if you were talking about his life rather than his books, but since the only reason for mentioning Orwell was the (tediously obvious) Nineteen Eighty Four reference, it was completely extraneous. I'd prefer less pretentious crap and more careful typing (he writes "close" for "closer").
I eagerly await the next YRO story -- I'm hoping for something like:
"Is this just one step closer to a Jughashvilian state? Oh yeah, Jughashvili was Stalin's real name, by the way. I'm pretty fucking smart, me."
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.
It's a question of defining your goals. You're criticising Debian because their project isn't achieving what *you* see as the ideal goal of a Linux distro.
Debian is not accountable to you. Debian is accountable to its developers -- and as the vote shows, they overwhelmingly support freedom over world domination.
As you point out, there are other distributions which settle on a different compromise between freedom and ease of use. You are, of course, welcome to use these. But frankly I think it's a little cheeky to lambast Debian for not conforming to YOUR idea of what THEIR goals should be. Why do you unleash such bitterness against something you profess not to care about? If you're right, Debian will die quietly and it won't make any difference to you.
Debian is quickly becoming the dinosaur of Linux distributions and is pulling an RMS and hurting the cause of Free Software by marginalizing itself with extremism such that no serious users or organisations will want to be associated with it.
According to a Netcraft Ltd. report covering July 2003 to January 2004, Debian was the fastest-growing distribution among Linux Web servers, and Debian trailed only Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Linux in the number of Web sites it serves.
But hey, I'm happy with Debian, you're happy with Fedora. No need to make a flamefest of it.
> Guessing you have never even heard of 8-track tapes, much less listened to any.
No, I suspect [s]he just meant "Compact Audio Cassette" or whatever the official designation is. That's certainly what I think of when I hear the word "cassette". If I mean 8-track I say "8-track". I mean, dictaphone, DAT, Elcaset, and DCC are (or were) all technically cassette formats too, but I doubt that the poster was deriding any of them.
Not that I'd advise dictaphone cassette as an archival storage medium, mind you.
The intention of this work is to address matters of Interactive Fiction's craft and theory; to review where IF has recently been, and offer some thoughts as to where it may go; to pull together some of the seminal discussion on Interactive Fiction, and to commission new material to advance our understanding.
As far as craft is concerned, it will take up more or less where Graham Nelson's Inform Designer's Manual (4th edition) leaves off: the content of this work should be accessible and useful to designers working in any IF language, and cover issues of more general interest. Anything pertaining to technical coding issues is beyond the scope of this book.
Legitimate authors struggle to perfect their reader's experience, and would never deliberately abandon it to dice-throws.
And indeed, neither do IF authors. IF is pretty much deterministic. But writing it well is arguably more difficult than writing traditional fiction well: giving the player/reader enough choice to maintain interest, while gently constraining them within the plot, and trying to avoid getting them stuck. As Graham Nelson puts it in The Craft of Adventure (required reading for anyone interested in IF, BTW):
The author of a text adventure has to be schizophrenic in a way that the author of a novel does not. The novel-reader does not suffer as the player of a game does: she needs only to keep turning the pages, and can be trusted to do this by herself. The novelist may worry that the reader is getting bored and discouraged, but not that she will suddenly find pages 63 to the end have been glued together just as the plot is getting interesting.
Thus, the game author has continually to worry about how the player is getting along, whether she is lost, confused, fed up, finding it too tedious to keep an accurate map: or, on the other hand, whether she is yawning through a sequence of easy puzzles without much exploration. Too difficult, too easy? Too much choice, too little? So this book will keep going back to the player's eye view.
On the other hand, there is also a novel to be written: the player may get the chapters all out of order, the plot may go awry, but somehow the author has to rescue the situation and bind up the strings neatly. Our player should walk away thinking it was a well-thought out story: in fact, a novel, and not a child's puzzle-book.
Nelson memorably characterizes an adventure game as "a crossword at war with a narrative". Anyone in doubt as to the possible literary merit of IF should withhold judgement until they have played, at the least, his Curses.
(Incidentally, the abovementioned essay also echoes your contempt for "dice-throws": Article 12 in Nelson's "Player's Bill of Rights" is "not to depend much on luck".)
Interestingly, both Eccleston and Izzard starred in the recent Revengers Tragedy, a gory Elizabethan revenge drama transplanted to a sort of post-apocalyptic near-future northern England setting. It could almost have been a Dr Who practice run: low budget, silly costumes, slightly skewed English setting. Predictably, Eccleston got to be unhinged and menacing, and Izzard got to be camp and menacing.
A rubber door stop between the seat stays and down tube. They also have ingenious revolving 'wheels' and ingenious leather 'saddles'
Heh. What I meant, but didn't bother to make clear, was that it's pretty nifty the way the suspension comes for free as a consequence of the way the bike folds up. Well, that's what I always thought anyway.
Always fancied the Moulton APB myself, though it is not a true folder and therefore not so useful for the train.
I thought they disassembled conveniently, though -- something about Sir Moulton not deeming a hinge strong enough to hold his bikes together. Not that I've ever ridden one -- those things make Bromptons seem dirt cheap:).
So you're going to be spending 4% of your day on that bike, you want a fast, comfy, serious bike, not a toy.
A Brompton is definitely not a toy. These things are pricey and solid. They have ingenious rear-wheel suspension. The riding position is comfortable. For a 10km commute, they're fine.
For city commuting a small-wheeled bike has a lot going for it: it's nippier and more manoeuverable. The wheels have less angular momentum, which means it's easier to stop and takes less energy to get moving again -- a major consideration in a city commute. (Of course, the fact that the bike as a whole is small and light also helps.)
The flipside of this is that they can feel a little unstable at high speed -- I really wouldn't want to be coasting downhill at 50 k.p.h. on one of these, but for normal riding it's fine.
I can't pronounce on other brands of folding bike, but don't knock a Brompton till you've tried one.
> In the US, they are more commonly referred to as English units.
... which makes the whole mess even more hilarious, given the discrepancies even between U.S. and U.K. measurement. So, for example, an imperial pint (as used in England) is 568 ml, but an *English* pint (as used in the U.S. but, of course, never in England) is 454 ml.
Mind you, if you were in England and mentioned an "English pint", people would generally assume you meant an "Imperial pint" (568 ml), whereas if you wanted to refer to an "English pint" as defined above, you'd probably call it an "American pint".
Apoologies for using metric units in the above. A purist might have gone for the thoroughly intuitive original definition of the imperial pint, i.e. one-eighth of the volume of 10 lb of pure water at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. (And if you're going to ask whether that's a Troy, Avoirdupois or European pound, piss off.)
it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.
Hear hear. I accept that it's probably possible to match the quality and convenience of my 2nd-hand Minolta SLR with digital these days, but until I can get it at the same price (£90 inc. lens) I'm staying put -- ATM it's not even in the same order of magnitude:).
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. That's pretty much exactly what I was trying to get at, but I was in a hurry to get home :-). I was getting a little tired of people shouting "ETHICS!" and considering the argument over, as if ethics were some universal absolute.
But for a society to thrive and function, there must be a common ground defined, a shared ethical framework that is fair to everyone.
To an extent, there can be a common ground. The vast majority of people, for example, would agree that murder is ethically wrong.
However, the great popularity of copyright infringement clearly demonstrates that a substantial number of people don't share your ethical view. Where should the common ground lie?
I don't have any easy solutions. But unilaterally declaring things "ethically wrong" and expecting that to clinch the debate is not going to win many people to your cause.
That's not even getting into the ethics issue, an overlooked issue, in my opinion.
That's because universal ethical laws are very hard to formulate, and because there's no way of forcing people to subscribe to them anyway.
Here's a silly thought-experiment: say I had $500 to spend on a copy of Photoshop (or whatever the price is). Instead I download a copy for free and send the money to a charity which uses it to provide a handpump in an African village. The handpump provides clean drinking water for several hundred people, and is very, very likely to save lives. Now, I admit this is an artificial and extreme example, but I just wanted to point out that ethics aren't as rigid as some people would like them to be. In general, any sweeping "X IS WRONG" statement will have corner cases which aren't quite as clear-cut.
NOT Bill Gate's ethics (or lack there of), not the RAII / BSA's ethics (or lack there of), it's about YOUR ethics.
You've hit the nail right on the head. It's about MY ethics. What are you going to do if MY ethics don't equate copying software with property theft? Ethics, unlike laws, are not enshrined in statute books. Everyone has their own set.
Stealing from The Donald is still stealing.
Who's The Donald?
pirating software is wrong. Legally...
... and ethically. Right? Right?!
Well, of course. Piracy is by *definition* illegal. It's like saying "illegal acts are against the law" -- true, but content-free.
Far more complicated. I don't doubt that you subscribe to a system of ethics in which software piracy is wrong, but you can't expect *all* of the other six billion people on earth to share your ethical system. If you're declaring things to be "ethically wrong", you have to be clear on which ethical framework you're working within -- and accept that not everyone will necessarily share that framework.
Except a human has this neat thing called intuition.
Your intuition can tell you things that will take you hours and hours to prove on paper.
Indeed. It seems intuitively obvious to me that the earth is flat and the sun moves round it, and I *still* haven't managed to prove it on paper.
Hell, who needs Windows when we've got SEAL? ;-)
So why is anyone working on DOS?
... and should be ported to modern hardware...
... but still won't run the mission-critical DOS applications they were running in the first place? (Unless, of course, they install FreeDOS on their new $50 machines.) That would be a case of "if it's not broken, then break it", I think.
Let's be specific here: people are working on FreeDOS, a reimplementation of MS-DOS. As has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, it is stable and useful but not yet a complete reimplementation, which is why people are still working on it.
Either it's broken...
"Broken" is not really the same as "still under development". A great number of perfectly stable programs are still being actively developed.
Eh? You've lost me now. AFAIK FreeDOS runs fine on modern hardware.
or it's not broken, in which case no one should be working on it.
I think the developers are free to work on what they like in their own time... how were you planning to stop them?
People using DOS need to drive their avanti to the store and buy a $50 computer that will run a modern version of Linux or Windows.
Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone?
To run DOS applications.
If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need.
What if the OS features I need are, in their entirity, "I need it to run this application"?
DOS isn't a good fit.
It's an excellent fit for DOS applications.
If you need DOS for application support, then by God man, start porting the mission critical DOS app...
Sure thing, as soon as you start paying me to do so.
Seriously, though. If it's not broken, why fix it? Sure, it might be fun to port all those old applications to a modern OS, but who's going to pay for it? If you have a standalone machine already doing *exactly* what you need it to do, reliably, I see no need to start messing with it.
You're missing an important point: you are taking the carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere.
Err. No. You're taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the atmosphere. It's called photosynthesis. That's why plants keep their leaves out in the air, rather than under the ground.
Obviously, if Vita Nuova's marketing is bad, it must be because there's an open source version of Inferno! Tell me, if I buy the commercial version, does the name Inferno magically become more apposite?
Do open source authors believe that there are only a few concepts available, not enough for everyone?
Try to be sensible. There's a fairly tenuous connection between naming your company and product after the works of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, and having a cute red devil logo. Why not claim they're ripping off "Stain Devil" stain removers while you're at it?
And Why did the FreeBSD project adopt that idea?
I always assumed it was a visual pun on "daemon".
I know FreeBSD is an excellent OS, and the favorite BSD for ISPs, but there are some who will be discouraged by the amateurish baby red devil marketing scheme.
Well quite. Just as people are discouraged from Linux by the amateurish fat penguin drawn by some sysadmin who's never studied marketing, right? Let's hear it from Linus himself:
( http://www.oetrends.com/news.php?action=view_reco
I think the same arguments apply to the BSD devil.
Still, the great thing about open source is that you don't have to sit there moaning, you can pitch in. Perhaps you could offer some of your marketing genius to an OSS project encumbered with a substandard logo or name. I think it's a good fortnight since Firefox last changed name -- maybe you could find them a new one
Presumably the processor needs extreme cooling?
;-)
Well, duh. Why do you think the ninth circle is made of ice?
And considering what the core looks like, I'm glad they've expanded the traditional four rings of protection to nine...
...the reluctant Esphahnian revenge play with Hamlet...
Erm. Anyone care to tell me what "Esphahnian" means? Google won't.
and no i will not give it the honor of capital letters(gimp) that respect is earned when you make something that can deliver on it's claims.
Developer #1: "Watcha doin' today? Wanna work on improving GIMP usability?"
Developer #2: "Nope. I refuse to acknowledge the vast consensus that PS is much faster and more usable."
Developer #3 [bursting through door]: "Have you guys SEEN? An AC on Slashdot is refusing to use capital letters when referring to the GIMP!"
All: "HOLY FUCK! Let's get coding!"
(A week later, GIMP 3.0 is released to worldwide acclaim. AC contends that "gimp still suxx0rz" but after intense negotiations agrees to capitalize the M and the P.)
Why is it that we think ignorance is some God-given right and get mad when anyone disspells it.
The point here is that the extra information wasn't really relevant, and merely appeared to be inserted to boost the submitter's ego. It becomes more obvious if you rephrase it:
"Just one step close to George Orwell's vision of 1984. Oh, and George Orwell was actually a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair."
His real name DOESN'T MATTER here. It would matter if you were talking about his life rather than his books, but since the only reason for mentioning Orwell was the (tediously obvious) Nineteen Eighty Four reference, it was completely extraneous. I'd prefer less pretentious crap and more careful typing (he writes "close" for "closer").
I eagerly await the next YRO story -- I'm hoping for something like:
"Is this just one step closer to a Jughashvilian state? Oh yeah, Jughashvili was Stalin's real name, by the way. I'm pretty fucking smart, me."
From the Debian website:
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.
It's a question of defining your goals. You're criticising Debian because their project isn't achieving what *you* see as the ideal goal of a Linux distro.
Debian is not accountable to you. Debian is accountable to its developers -- and as the vote shows, they overwhelmingly support freedom over world domination.
As you point out, there are other distributions which settle on a different compromise between freedom and ease of use. You are, of course, welcome to use these. But frankly I think it's a little cheeky to lambast Debian for not conforming to YOUR idea of what THEIR goals should be. Why do you unleash such bitterness against something you profess not to care about? If you're right, Debian will die quietly and it won't make any difference to you.
Debian is quickly becoming the dinosaur of Linux distributions and is pulling an RMS and hurting the cause of Free Software by marginalizing itself with extremism such that no serious users or organisations will want to be associated with it.
Oddly enough, eweek doesn't agree:
According to a Netcraft Ltd. report covering July 2003 to January 2004, Debian was the fastest-growing distribution among Linux Web servers, and Debian trailed only Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Linux in the number of Web sites it serves.
But hey, I'm happy with Debian, you're happy with Fedora. No need to make a flamefest of it.
>> Cassette is the WORST FORMAT EVER RELEASED.
> Guessing you have never even heard of 8-track tapes, much less listened to any.
No, I suspect [s]he just meant "Compact Audio Cassette" or whatever the official designation is. That's certainly what I think of when I hear the word "cassette". If I mean 8-track I say "8-track". I mean, dictaphone, DAT, Elcaset, and DCC are (or were) all technically cassette formats too, but I doubt that the poster was deriding any of them.
Not that I'd advise dictaphone cassette as an archival storage medium, mind you.
IF Theory. From the website:
The intention of this work is to address matters of Interactive Fiction's craft and theory; to review where IF has recently been, and offer some thoughts as to where it may go; to pull together some of the seminal discussion on Interactive Fiction, and to commission new material to advance our understanding.
As far as craft is concerned, it will take up more or less where Graham Nelson's Inform Designer's Manual (4th edition) leaves off: the content of this work should be accessible and useful to designers working in any IF language, and cover issues of more general interest. Anything pertaining to technical coding issues is beyond the scope of this book.
And indeed, neither do IF authors. IF is pretty much deterministic. But writing it well is arguably more difficult than writing traditional fiction well: giving the player/reader enough choice to maintain interest, while gently constraining them within the plot, and trying to avoid getting them stuck. As Graham Nelson puts it in The Craft of Adventure (required reading for anyone interested in IF, BTW):
Nelson memorably characterizes an adventure game as "a crossword at war with a narrative". Anyone in doubt as to the possible literary merit of IF should withhold judgement until they have played, at the least, his Curses.
(Incidentally, the abovementioned essay also echoes your contempt for "dice-throws": Article 12 in Nelson's "Player's Bill of Rights" is "not to depend much on luck".)
Interestingly, both Eccleston and Izzard starred in the recent Revengers Tragedy, a gory Elizabethan revenge drama transplanted to a sort of post-apocalyptic near-future northern England setting. It could almost have been a Dr Who practice run: low budget, silly costumes, slightly skewed English setting. Predictably, Eccleston got to be unhinged and menacing, and Izzard got to be camp and menacing.
So it can avoid civilians who are miles away from the munitions?
If said civilians are standing directly between the laser and the munitions, that would still be quite a feat. Bent laser beams anyone?
They have ingenious rear-wheel suspension
:).
A rubber door stop between the seat stays and down tube. They also have ingenious revolving 'wheels' and ingenious leather 'saddles'
Heh. What I meant, but didn't bother to make clear, was that it's pretty nifty the way the suspension comes for free as a consequence of the way the bike folds up. Well, that's what I always thought anyway.
Always fancied the Moulton APB myself, though it is not a true folder and therefore not so useful for the train.
I thought they disassembled conveniently, though -- something about Sir Moulton not deeming a hinge strong enough to hold his bikes together. Not that I've ever ridden one -- those things make Bromptons seem dirt cheap
So you're going to be spending 4% of your day on that bike, you want a fast, comfy, serious bike, not a toy.
A Brompton is definitely not a toy. These things are pricey and solid. They have ingenious rear-wheel suspension. The riding position is comfortable. For a 10km commute, they're fine.
For city commuting a small-wheeled bike has a lot going for it: it's nippier and more manoeuverable. The wheels have less angular momentum, which means it's easier to stop and takes less energy to get moving again -- a major consideration in a city commute. (Of course, the fact that the bike as a whole is small and light also helps.)
The flipside of this is that they can feel a little unstable at high speed -- I really wouldn't want to be coasting downhill at 50 k.p.h. on one of these, but for normal riding it's fine.
I can't pronounce on other brands of folding bike, but don't knock a Brompton till you've tried one.
Mind you, if you were in England and mentioned an "English pint", people would generally assume you meant an "Imperial pint" (568 ml), whereas if you wanted to refer to an "English pint" as defined above, you'd probably call it an "American pint".
Apoologies for using metric units in the above. A purist might have gone for the thoroughly intuitive original definition of the imperial pint, i.e. one-eighth of the volume of 10 lb of pure water at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. (And if you're going to ask whether that's a Troy, Avoirdupois or European pound, piss off.)
Bleaugh. I think I need a pint now.
it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.
:).
Hear hear. I accept that it's probably possible to match the quality and convenience of my 2nd-hand Minolta SLR with digital these days, but until I can get it at the same price (£90 inc. lens) I'm staying put -- ATM it's not even in the same order of magnitude
ROFL! Where's a modpoint when I need one?
Ahem. Anyway, you forgot Luton, or (to use the canonical form) Fucking Luton.