Re: CHAT: browsers

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> What I've heard didn't involve hardware problems. Even after a clean install,
> people just couldn't get it to work properly and reinstalled Windows ME
> instead. I guess XP is just too young and needs a few Service Packs...
How do you know it wasn't a hardware problem? I think WinXP is much more
able to detect and crash with dodgy RAM than earlier versions of
Windows. At least, that's what I've heard. I hardly use Windows so I'm
not speaking from experience.

>>Exactly why your usage of 'largely fit' was wrong.
>
> Why? I didn't get rid of *any* feature. And unless the English language has
> changed since last time I learned the expression, "largely fitting" means
> fitting with a lot of free space left, which is quite the case when you put a
> 360KB programme on a 1.41MB floppy.
Others have confirmed what I've thought: your use of 'largely fit' is
wrong. I've *never* heard it mean fitting with plenty of space. In this
context, 'largely' means 'mostly'. Don't be fooled by -ly, it's not
always transparent: are you hardly working or hard-working?

>>I don't know. I generally define myself before they have a chance to
>>ask
>>me what it means. ;)
>
> The defense rests :) .
Actually, you haven't proven anything other than that when I use it, I
generally define myself before they ask me what I mean. I could define
myself every time I said 'frog', but that wouldn't mean that no-one but
me knew what 'frog' meant.

>>Oh, whoops... A major miscalculation. /me hits himself with a bat.
>
> Leave the poor animal alone!!! ;))))
I was thinking of a cricket bat, actually. And no, that has nothing to
do with crickets, cicadas, or any other small green animal you could
care to name.

> Oh, I give it *some* credit. Windows still handles fonts much better than Linux
> (can anyone tell me how to get Mozilla to antialias its fonts under Linux?
At one stage, I ran
        # emerge rox-filer
which installed (as dependencies of ROX-Filer), among other things, gtk2
and xft. Xft takes care of font anti-aliasing, and rather well, I should
add.

Later, I ran
        # emerge mozilla
which installed Mozilla 1.2b. After waiting (and waiting, and waiting)
for it to compile, I had Mozilla running with anti-aliased fonts so nice
that they put Windows to shame.

Obviously how you'll do it depends on your distro (that works for Gentoo
and that's about it). I'm not sure that you can get precompiled versions
of Mozilla with XFT enabled, but I'd be suprised if you couldn't. You
*can* get precompiled XFT-enabled versions of Phoenix, though.

> Indeed not. Or you have such a memory that you consider 2001 to be
> recent ;)))) .
Well, it's happened before. Anything within the last four years often
seems like yesterday. Give it a month and that'll be whiped clean,
though, I imagine, given that I'll've started at University and
everything'll be different.

> Hehe, my spelling wouldn't look too much out of place in Australia I guess ;)) .
So long as you spell litre 'liter', they would be. Most other US
spellings get produced by normal people, but never 'liter', because it
spells /lait@/.

> LOL. At least Maggel doesn't have (yet) much spelling variants. It's already
> difficult enough to make words, I'm not gonna mess with alternate spellings
> yet, especially in a language where each letter can have any phonetic value
> whatsoever.
I must say, though, that I'm apalled. Hope to it already!

>>Really? Oh. I thought they didn't, at least with borrowings...
>
> But most recent borrowings keep the original orthography, and that's the advice
> of the Academie ;))) . As for strange things like the alternative |mél| for "(e-
> )mail (address)" proposed by the Academie, I've actually seen it quite often in
> use!!! (in this case, I must admit that the parallel with |tél| for "telephone
> number" has made it easier to accept).
I'm honestly surprised. I don't thing English-speakers would settle for
someone telling them how to spell.

>>We were certainly taught to use it as a measurement...
>
> Then you were taught wrong. It's as much a measurement as saying that water is
> salty! It's an adjective that describes a particular kind of solution, whose
> particularity can be connected to some measurement. But it's not a measurement
> in itself, and certainly not a unit (you *never* say *"a molar of". It's
> meaningless).
Hmm... Bad Victorian Education System, then. Very bad!

>>No it's not, it's a choice on the part of the writers. You *can* use
>>capital letters in IM (the same way I include capital letters in this
>>email) and SMS (using the phone's shift/caps key). People simply
>>choose
>>not to.
>
> OK, then people are lazy (and anyway, it's such a hassle to write SMSs that I
> understand the people here).
Doesn't alter the fact that they don't use capitals, though. (Actually,
you'd be lucky to get something like 'km/h' or 'km' in an SMS; the
things are called 'kay(s)' (spelt 'k') in colloquial speech. /k@lOm@t@/
is much too long. (Likewise, kilograms tend to be kilos; you'd never ask
for a kilogram of mince. And if you call that lazy, I understand the
French still use pounds...).)

> How difficult isn't it? ;)) I don't think it's a real problem. It's just the
> laziness of the people here, and when it's about writing, it seems English
> speaking people are the champions of laziness (I surely never saw that among
> French people, and not even among Dutch people, even the ones of the course I
> had to grade and who failed so miserably - 25% of success at the final exam,
> that had never been seen before, the normal rate of success was always more
> than 75% in the last few years -). And I don't see why something like
> scientific abbreviations should adapt to the laziness of people. That's taking
> the problem at the wrong end.
When correctness counts, in an exam for instance, they'd get them right.
But labelling a bottle, who cares if it says 600 ml, 600 mL or 600 ML?
(At least with litres, no-one would be deluded enough to think that a
bottle would fit 600 megalitres...)

(On a side note, though both l and L are correct for litres, L is the
normal one used here (even in mL), and has the greater perception of
'correctness', but the GNU units program doesn't seem to accept it...
It's almost like the way the MS Australian spellchecker accepts both
'organise' and 'organize' (which is perceived as wrong, but accepted),
but only 'organization'... Stupid multinationals.)

Tristan.

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