English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

6:00 PM

@Cerberus Then, vomit all over yourself, inducing more misery.

@Mahnax Right. Moderation is key.

user19161

@FumbleFingers Very seldom though. I have some supernatural experiences that are hard to explain with simply coincidence.

Mahnax

@Cerberus Being an alcoholic is not moderation.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus hmm. you mean the one true god is somewhere between the xtian one and allah?

user19161

@FumbleFingers The Christian God and the Muslim God can be said to be the same from a certain perspective.

FumbleFingers

6:02 PM

@WillHunting my thinking is it's all effectively a simulacrum, and the finite computing resources that sustain it sometimes "show the joins" by re-using subroutines when they think we're not looking!

Kitḫ

I heard there was a fray...

Mahnax

Hi @Kit!

@FumbleFingers Which OS are you using?

Cerberus

@Mahnax I suppose not. I never drink alone by the way.

Mahnax

@Cerberus Probably a good plan.

FumbleFingers

I'm not a statistician, and I know very well that people in general are inclined to see significance in things that happen by blind chance. But my job used to be all about picking up on the apparently innocuous things that were really causing the problem.

Cerberus

6:07 PM

@FumbleFingers I rather meant that moderate drinking is OK. But, yes, any moderation in religion is better than the converse.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus If I recall, you yourself are sometimes inclined to less than total "moderation" in matters alcoholic. I may recall wrong, of course!

@Mahnax it's XP, recently switched from IE8 to Chrome. Why?

Mahnax

@FumbleFingers I like knowing these things.

I'm not sure why I like knowing them, though.

FumbleFingers

@Mahnax hmmm. I suppose you'll be wanting to know the size of my dick next! How big is yours, btw?

Mahnax

@FumbleFingers Um, no. And that is classified information!

Cerberus

@FumbleFingers Heh. Well, actually I'm quite moderate. I sometimes drink maybe 8 beers when I go out, but that is rare.

@FumbleFingers Etiquette!

FumbleFingers

6:12 PM

actually, I think I might have been one of very few XP/IE8 users here. no-one had anything useful to say when I asked for help after it stopped working on ELU (everywhere else was okay)

Cerberus

Your question was discussed here.

I am made fun of because I use XP.

I don't use IE, though.

Mahnax

I find Windows XP to be the only tolerable Windows OS.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus soz if I breach etiquette

Cerberus

@FumbleFingers You are absolved.

@Mahnax Why?

FumbleFingers

@Mahnax ditto - if you have an older machine XP is less resource-hungry. IE8 is total crap compared to chrome though

Cerberus

6:14 PM

@FumbleFingers I think that's true. The slowness of my father's computer only became intolerable after we installed 7 on it. Though that may be somewhat subjective.

It had 512 MB.

Mahnax

@Cerberus Hmm. Windows Vista is absolutely intolerable because it didn't work properly, and Windows 7 is trying to get too fancy for Windows IMO.

@FumbleFingers IE8 is total crap compared to anything.

Except IE6, that is.

Cerberus

Agreed: FF and Chrome are better. Though IE9 is not so bad either; the main point is perhaps that FF and Chrome have many more and better extensions. And FF handsomely beats Chrome there, I believe.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus It's generally pretty easy/cheap to double the supplied memory. 1Gb will be vast improvement over 512Mb

Cerberus

@Mahnax Hmm how did Vista not work properly? I personally suspect that the anti-hype, in which I took part, was not very rational.

@FumbleFingers Absolutely. We upgraded it to 2 GB.

Vast difference.

Mahnax

@Cerberus My mother had it. It kept doing stupid things, and not working, etc.

FumbleFingers

6:17 PM

@Cerberus vista was a resource-hog, plus the defaults for admin rights made it very hard to use

Cerberus

Hmm yeah I heard similar things.

Mahnax

She also had distinct problems with changing settings, that would revert themselves later.

Cerberus

Then again, MS did an experiment where self-proclaimed Vista-refusers were told they could test the new Windows version after Vista (7 wasn't out yet). They tried this experimental Windows and quite liked it.

FumbleFingers

I have an old box that does nothing except play movies thru the tv. am thinking about swapping it to Linux to see how that pans out

Cerberus

Only afterwards were they told that what they had been using was in fact Vista.

@Mahnax So why is 7 too fancy?

Mahnax

6:19 PM

Hmm.

@Cerberus It's hard for me to describe.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus user perceptions are weird. Decades ago I made a lot of users happy by slowing down the comms link from central mainframe to their monitors. The screen redraws were slower, but looked smoother, so all the users thought it was actually faster!

Cerberus

Huh!?

That is weird.

Mahnax

But I absolutely hate how they won't allow you to change your background in Starter Edition (which comes with many notebooks).

Cerberus

@Mahnax don't they? Haha.

(That sounds almost as needlessly restrictive as Apple.)

I would just hack it.

Kitḫ

@Mahnax I am sure they did studies on that. What will get people to buy a more expensive version? They will be annoyed that they can't change their background.

Cerberus

6:21 PM

I installed Ultimate on this VM.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus when it was fast, a user's screen would get half redrawn, then stall for a second before the next chunk of data arrived. total time to redraw was faster, but it didn't seem like that to the guy in front of the screen

Mahnax

@Kitḫ Hmm, or maybe "how can we make people hate us? Oh! Let's make them suffer with this unchangeable background!"

Cerberus

@Kitḫ Yeah could be, and I absolutely hate that. They withhold good things from society as whole that don't cost them anything.

@FumbleFingers Hmm then I'd formulate it thus: the faster speed had a bad side effect.

It was not the speed itself that they didn't like.

Mahnax

I also dislike the price of Windows 7 if you want to upgrade.

FumbleFingers

@Cerberus The users at the time didn't know we were going to upgrade the comms links - we didn't think it would affect them anyway. It was very strange, because they complained the system had got slower, and for several days no-one could figure out why!

Mahnax

6:25 PM

Anyways, I'm off.

FumbleFingers

@Mahnax c u mahnax

gotta shake a leg myself - it's teatime here in blighty, and my job is to lay the table!

Cerberus

@FumbleFingers Haha yeah that's paradoxical.

Bye!

MetaEd

@FumbleFingers Or, if you're Dijkstra, prove once, code once.

Must be nice to be Dijkstra.

Hey, Kit.

Kitḫ

My favorite is "I've cut it three times and it's still too short."

@MetaEd Hey.

MetaEd

People hate variable speed much more than they hate slow speed.

Make the performance the same every time for a given operation, and they'll love you. They know just how much time they have to get a cup of coffee.

Cerberus

6:37 PM

@MetaEd Hey which Dijkstra?

@MetaEd Good point.

MetaEd

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002); ) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor. Life and work Born in Rotterdam...

cs.utexas.edu/~EWD

Kitḫ

Oh yeah. I had sexual relations with him.

He was very efficient.

I'll be honest. This isn't much of a fray.

MetaEd

6:58 PM

What, monkeys flying out of my butt isn't a fray?

aedia λ

Such a busy day! tummy growls

MetaEd

By the way, that cs.utexas.edu link is astonishingly good. It's a huge collection of Dijkstra's papers.

aedia λ

I'm late for breakfast, even. looks sad

MetaEd

3

Q: Meaning of "the waft of"

Now he was beginning to have the waft of an old man who hadn't bathed for several days. The meaning of the sentence is absolutely clear to me, since the second part of the sentence explains the meaning. But I have only a rough perception what the exact meaning of a waft of is. I found this ...

Pile on.

aedia λ

Oh dearie me I'm never going to understand the transcript. I give up after @Kit's diary.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

7:05 PM

@aediaλ TL;DR: Cerb still loves XP; Jez is angry; ~~Jas~~ er, Will is mystical, Kit had sexual relations with past Kit, and MetaEd has humans flying out of his butt.

6

aedia λ

What about Dijkstra?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 That sounds pretty normal...

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@aediaλ pretty much

I did learn, from Vitaly last night, about a tool that MS provides which lets you make new keyboard layouts for windows.

user19161

@aedia Noticed something yesterday? Shhh.

aedia λ

I don't have my diaries handy but here is a present for you from high school me

user19161

@aediaλ Are the sticks for art work?

Matt Эллен

7:16 PM

@aediaλ I struggled on through the political debate for a while, but it was much of a muchness

aedia λ

Not the popsicle sticks - I don't know why they were in there - the buttons. I had these or a slight variation on every pencil case I had in high school. I probably got the spongebob one later like in college; I think there used to be a Niagara Falls souvenir one there...

@WillHunting They're for building like little boxes and stuff yeah, but I don't know why I stored them in a pencil case. I had thought this one was in a drawer and then I found it in an art box full of popsicle sticks

user19161

@MattЭллен I am wondering if that was a typo or deliberate wordplay.

aedia λ

It's a saying for a muddle right?

Like same difference

Matt Эллен

much of a muchness? yeah, not worth bothering baout

user19161

I thought he wanted to say much of a madness.

Matt Эллен

7:20 PM

oh, no. It's idiomatic English!

user19161

You never know. After all @matt spelled Bangkok as Bangcock!

aedia λ

that's indeed how my brain how saw it at first. I mean read it. I mean words in head mine were created by light coming out of the screen, I think, something, food?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен idiomatic British, maybe...

phrases.org.uk/meanings/251550.html

@aediaλ passes donuts and coffee sssh don't try to talk yet, eat this first

Matt Эллен

@MrShinyandNew安宇 British ain't no language boy! English, pure and proud.

aedia λ

@MrShinyandNew安宇 eats coffee and drinks donut appreciatively

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

7:23 PM

@MattЭллен Listen you young whippersnapper, I was speaking English when you were knee-high to a grasshopper. And "muchness" ain't no word, that's for dang sure.

Matt Эллен

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Well, sweat pea. I think you'll find that's just down to your inferior educating

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен Oh, I'll educate you, darling

user19161

-3

Q: How to better express thanks to someone wishing you on Birthday?

I am so bored of saying everyone "Thank you so much", "Thanks", etc. What is a more gentler way of expressing thanks to: Your friends Your elders

expressions phrase-requests common-expressions greetings expression-choice

user19161

Closed! Yay! I can't stand his zero per cent accept rate.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I think that last conversation may have slid dangerously out of control

user19161

7:26 PM

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Which one?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@WillHunting never mind

Kitḫ

@MrShinyandNew安宇 So much has become clear to me now.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

so Google AdWords has ads, and ads have ids. but the ids are not unique except within an adGroup. But you can't pass the adGroup id in the URL, only the ad id. WTF?

Kitḫ

Fascinating.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Kitḫ .so_much { opacity: 0; background-color: transparent; color: transparent; }

Kitḫ

7:30 PM

BTW, I only hugged my past self.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Kitḫ mm hm.

Well at least you kept a diary. I tried on multiple occasions to write one. Usually I'd write one entry, then get bored, forget about it, then lose that volume and have to get another.

Matt Эллен

I never new you cared, @MrShinyandNew :p

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен oh, I care

user19161

Care bears, shine!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Dec 13 '11 at 15:52, by Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен Group hug! Matt sandwhich!

annoying typo in that message made it hard to search for

So, today's fun fact about the Quran: it forbids muslims from being friends with non-muslims.

user19161

7:35 PM

Care Bears

The Care Bears are characters created by American Greetings in 1981 for use on greeting cards. The original artwork for the cards was painted by artist Elena Kucharik. In 1983, Kenner turned the Care Bears into plush teddy bears. The Care Bears appeared in their own TV specials called The Care Bears in the Land Without Feelings (1983) and The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine (1984). They also had their own television series from 1985 to 1988, in addition to three feature films: The Care Bears Movie (1985), Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation (1986), and The Care Bears Adventure i...

MetaEd

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Thinking that's in the Bible too. Shunning seems common to the Abrahamic religions.

Kitḫ

So did a bunch of regulars end up reading my diary entries? I had no idea there were so many transcript enthusiasts here.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MetaEd I do recall something in one of Paul's letters.......

@Kitḫ I came online just after you left. I skimmed it a bit.

Also some of the messages are starred....

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…