Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

I recently got a letter that was written in a really artful, beautiful handwriting. It was pure joy, reading this work of art. It would have been beautiful even if the words didn't make any sense. I wish I could write even remotely as beautifully... Banning handwriting would be a terrible loss.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

This really is fun: I installed SPORE on my Mac and there is no copy protection whatsoever. I don't even have to keep the disk in the drive to play it.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

It's strange: Although SPORE clearly has many flaws (somtimes strange control setup, lacking depth), I feel that it is really far more enjoyable than it should be.

The sheer scale of things and the continuous development of your creature, your world and the universe is really an amazing experience, although the "game" itself is rather dull.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

Congratulations, Jeff!

(BTW Is Stallman really THAT... inhuman?)

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

I'm sorry but those few numbers really do not convey any deeper meaning.

First of all, there is not enough data to prove that the shown variations are greater than the standard variation of browser usage.

Then, Chrome usage has not settled yet. I mean, who is going to give Chrome a try? My mom, who is using the-installed-browser, and is completely oblivious about alternatives? Or the Firefox 3 users, who probably tried Safari, IE8 and Opera, too? Every new browser will trigger an initial hit with those people just because of their curiosity. Then again, any new gadget will, so what's the point?

Let's wait some weeks (or months) and review the browser adoption then.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

If you work much, you want a high display resolution. However, the laptop still has to be small, so there will be a compromise. Personally, I would go for something like 1280*768 on 13", which is both small and possible to work with.

The other thing you really want is silence. And battery life.

Even if you code a lot, CPU speed is rather irrelevant. Any Core2Duo will do (dual core and 64Bit are great to have). But RAM, you can't have enough -- and since it is cheap at the moment, don't bother and directly upgrade to 4G.

For me, this is a MacBook, but there are plenty of alternatives. For example, the FSC Lifebook series is really great. If possible, look for those business-offerings. They tend to use a little older but more reliable hardware, which can really save your day and will most certainly enable you to run linux.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

Seriously, I think this is a bright idea: After all, I could use a less daunting word processor than MS Word that is still fully *.doc-compatible.

The problem is rather: If they sell it at a 30$-price point, how are they going to compete against the shareware crowd?

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

I used Emacs for about three months and I could see the reason people deemed it great. Still, it somehow didn't work for me. Felt too clunky and ugly somehow. Also, I tried Vim for even a longer time, but couldn't get to love it. Also, neither editor is usable by anyone other than me, which was important to me at that time.

(I used both for several hours per day for Latex, C/C++ and Matlab)

Then, I started looking for Alternatives. I found MANY. But the one I really felt in love with is TextMate. Somehow, It just works for me... I love its design: This "Emacs the easy way" with beautiful text rendering and without icon-clutter. But that is probably just me. Everyone has to find his own solution.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

Here is an interesting thing:

Search google.com/trends for Emacs and Vim: It suggests that in the last few years, both editors have lost users, but Emacs lost them faster than Vim. While Emacs started out with twice the popularity of Vim, Vim is now stronger.

Personally, I tried them both for some weeks each, but in the end settled with TextMate and WriteRoom, as both Emacs and Vim somehow felt too clunky for me.

Paperflyer

vor 18 Jahrendiscuss

I am a native German speaker.

While trying to translate an article I wrote in English to German, I noticed that many things did translate very poorly unless I significantly differed in style. This is especially prominent in scientific papers. In English, you would focus on short, easy to understand sentences. In scientific German, it is absolutely necessary to write very difficult, convoluted sentences to avoid ambiguity. This made the text significantly longer -- and harder to read. However, the texts conveyed more detailed information and were overall more precise.

My personal theory is, that the German language enforces logic and grammar more rigidly than English, which makes it sort of more like a programming language. Therefore, the complexity of a sentence is directly tied to the complexity of its content. In english, I feel that it is more easy to simplify things (deliberately!), which makes it easier to understand. On the other hand, German behaves similar to programming languages: The more compact German is written (without losing information), the less readable it will get -- try Kant for example. Hence, the primary reason for German text being longer than English text is often that it is written in rather simple (long) style. You could write it more concisely, but you would lose ease of reading that way, which is inappropriate for museums, of course. (Or you would lose information, but germans are somewhat disinclined to do that: one THIRD of the worldwide tax laws are German, only because we don't like to lose precision...)

By the way, that is why I prefer to buy English books for learning something, as they are easier to read, while I prefer German books as reference, as they tend to be more precise.

For the matter at hand however, I think that the spoken language is sort of the "operating system" of the mind. It can only think within the boundaries of the language and only the cleverest of minds can really expand their thoughts beyond that limit -- by using the language in new ways. Most major philosopher did that (i.e. Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud etc.). Example from Kant: "Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Handelns jederzeit als allgemeingültiges Gesetz gelten könne." (Act in such a way, that the "Maxime" of your actions may be applicable as universal law at all times. Where "Maxime" is a new word meaning sort of the "gist" or "idea" of an action) This is not normal German: It is something new, more concise and more precise than normal German. It feels a lot like a sentence in a programming language. It would take significantly more words to express the same content in normal language without losing precision.

So by learning English, I learned to express things in a more understandable way. By learning C, I discovered quite many "syntactic" inaccuracies in normal spoken sentences. Matlab thought me to think in vectors. Why should Swedish be different? Or Lisp? Or Whatever?

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