Talkback
Talkback:173/starks.html
[ In reference to "Picking Fruit" in LG#173 ]
Henry Grebler [henrygrebler at optusnet.com.au]
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 11:53:28 +1000
Hi Ken,
Great article. And you sound like a beautiful person.
But enough of this man love.
Re melons. Someone of the medical persuasion taught me that the way to pick melons is to percuss them (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussion_%28medicine%29). I am not myself medically inclined, but I have applied this process for several years. To use your metaphor, I certainly do not bat 1.000. I couldn't tell you for sure how well I bat, but I'd guess up around .7 (I won't dignify it with 3 decimal places since it could be .6). But I am quietly confident that I bat much better these days than I used to.
I never bring home concrete blocks; the ones I bring home taste from ok to excellent.
On the subject of HeliOS, I probably could not be further from Central Texas. Your project captures my imagination, but at this distance I can only offer moral support.
I have some ideas related to picking candidates for Linux conversion, based on points raised in your article. I realise that I do not have a complete understanding of the environment in which you find yourself, but I respectfully offer these as possibly useful, perhaps with some adaptation.
We all have an investment in what we know. You said it yourself: "People get used to doing things one way." I'm writing this on a new platform (second-hand hardware). I got fed up with Fedora when I discovered that F10 needed a minimum of 512MB of RAM. I have a Redhat 8 firewall which until recently was running just fine on a 24MB Pentium 1 100. So I've installed FreeBSD. My /History file indicates that I started installing 17 January 2010. While I was building I still had my old Fedora machine. Eventually (16 March 2010), I decided to bite the bullet and move to FreeBSD.
But I'm stilling running my old Fedora machine. I've got at least a dozen xterm sessions SSHed into it. I keep discovering things I want to be able to do, things I can do on the Fedora box that I can't yet do on my FreeBSD box. Gradually I am installing the software I need.
And, boy, am I glad that I had the safety net. Recently, I rebooted my FreeBSD machine because I'd installed quite a lot of software and I wanted to be sure it would still work after a reboot - and it didn't! In the event, it was only off the air for a day. But I know that from the perspective of today looking backwards. Faced with a machine hung somewhere in the boot process, my first reaction was panic. And terror.
Further, without the ability to fallback to my other machine, I would not have been able to get onto the forums which eventually gave me a pointer about how to work around my problem.
Perhaps some of the prospects for conversion to Linux need the safety net of being able to go back to the familiar environment of Windows until they can be weaned off.
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Talkback:171/nonstyleguide.html
[ In reference to "Words, Words, Words" in LG#171 ]
Henry Grebler [henrygrebler at optusnet.com.au]
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 10:32:43 +1000
Hi Gang,
In his article, "Words, Words, Words", Rick complained about
"Levitz is having a sale at their Oakland warehouse."
I was going to write explaining Rick's objection. But that would be naughty. Instead, I'll explain mine.
The sentence uses number inconsistently.
I don't care if "Levitz" is singular or plural - so long as it is only one, not both - especially within a single sentence. It defies logic for an entity to be simultaneously singular and plural.
So, I'm ok with either of these:
"Levitz is having a sale at its Oakland warehouse." "Levitz are having a sale at their Oakland warehouse."
Cheers, Henry
