petecox

Essays for academia thus typically insist on word counts.

Albeit they encourage 3/2 or double spacing so they can leave annotations during marking.

The fangyan/topolect distinction reminds me of Italy. The Tuscan language of the renaissance and Dante was deemed "Italian" following unification in the mid 19th century. Yet the regional topolects of Italy derive not from a unified standard Italian but dating back two millennia to the time of Caesar. Here in Australia, children will learn standard Italian as a foreign language, if only to communicate with their grandparents speaking a fossilized 1940-50s "dialect" from the villages they fled post the war, with an implied stigma that said octogenarians aren't speaking 'properly'. Here's an interesting clip sampling regional Italian languages: [0]

This article was written last decade, before the age of the ubiquitous smartphone in which the Latin alphabet is used to suggest Chinese characters [1]. Perhaps then a new application of Taiwanese 'church romanization' emerges, with character suggestions specific to that romanization - though not if the prevailing low prestige of fangyan languages remains.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58 [1] http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-pinyi...

I've never been to Moçambique but absolutely I felt a bond with people over the other side of the Pacific in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Similar post-colonial perspective on the world, similar emigration stories (e.g. strong Italian cultures in both Buenos Aires and Melbourne, German migration to Adelaide and Valdivia), similar latitude producing great "new world" wine, and we celebrate Christmas in summer.

Of course there's the language but my attachment to England ended 160 years ago and my only visit to the US I found strangely alien, feeling more at home across the border in Canada.

> Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here.

Sigh. Not everyone is blessed to be have been born in the southern hemisphere, it seems.

As a resident of the big island to NZ's west, it is welcome news, particularly juxtaposed with my own government's lagging response to climate change, in a pacific region with many low lying island nations.

Having personally caught ferries in Australia and Chile, as well as between the border of Argentina and Uruguay, I reflect then on how each nation's carbon footprint could be reduced by adopting such technology.

Are you sure?

I thought Qt Widgets were deprecated by Plasma 5, which uses QML internally.

> iOS app porting inherently creates bad Mac apps

Reassess in a couple of years when app porters have matured with the technology. Gestures and pinch and zoom won't work with a mouse but the key point is interfaces designed for a form factor.

UWP on Windows mightn't be a great success but there's no reason a universal toolkit can't serve both. c.f. Qt - a first class citizen on mobile (Sailfish) and on desktop (KDE), while Plasma Active has real potential on postmarketOS.

On Android, where I am typing this message, a good number of apps designed for tablet work surprisingly well on a desktop (Outlook, Apple Flinger, Hot Death, Taskbar, iview, SBS on Demand, Supertuxkart to name a few). A bit more polish for mouse in the form of tooltips, contextual menus, scroll wheels and menu bars and it'd be a nice interface.

Those of us in the Southern Hemisphere never really got the sleighride thing.

Not when it's 40ºC.

I'm wondering whether a webapp environment such as Chrome OS would be that niche (with a couple of commits in their issue tracker to enable x32).

Hardware is typically a price sensitive netbook contrained by RAM and with a low powered x86-64 CPU, so that 13% performance increase might be noticeable.

The software is a design that is inherently multiprocess for security reasons (where every webapp is essentially a browser tab running in its own sandbox).

As the resolution of the bug report suggests, the iOS toolkit needs fixing. It's the symptom of a phone OS evolving into something more general.

c.f. In Android land, by design, none of the web browsers support desktop-style spellcheck. So if I'm typing a comment on Hacker News using my usb keyboard, I get no red underscore indicatting I've missspelled a woord. The workaround is to keep the big, ugly, onscreen keyboard taking up half my 21" screen; apologies for my bad spelling!

Manure is basically a monoculture of whatever the cow ate - i.e. decomposing grass.

Worms and bugs need a balanced diet. So a farmer will, presumably, add crop and other agricultural waste to cultivate these helpful aerobics.

(I'm only a backyard horticulturalist. Gardening experts stress adding a balance of leaves, grass clippings and miscellaneous 'organic material' to one's vegie scraps for a healthy urban compost.)

(Wake up where? You mention the grandfather paradox but 1718 is precisely 70 years before my country is invaded/colonized by the British. My very presence, as a 'European' on the continent of Australia would tear a rip in the fabric of space-time.)

So presumably I'm back in my ancestral homelands of Britain and Ireland.

But language is an issue.

(revival efforts aside) Norn, Cornish and Manx are several of the languages of the Crown that have gone extinct since 1718. I would catalogue these endangered languages and stress the importance of preservation and multilingual education - which is a theme in 21st C society in the case of Welsh, Basque, Catalan etc.

And the 18th century brought education to deaf children into modernity. The interventionist in me would unify fledgling British, French and Martha's Vineyard efforts into a common variety so that the world's hearing impaired can communicate in the same language.

Why not open the protocol, so I can use the one app for all my cross-service messaging needs?

e.g. Pidgin.

Previously, MS and Google have publically announced they will collaborate on bringing Chrome to Windows on ARM.

Abandoning EdgeHTML on the basis of that bug report would be drawing a long bow.

I still use the FM tuner built into Snapdragon phones.

I guess everyone else streams their radio these days.

Only if your telco still supports it.

In Australia, perhaps not.

Our home phone service was moved from copper to VOIP as part of the NBN rollout. The technician who did the installation confirmed our multifunction laser printer would no longer fax, as the network didn't enable it.

It would work better on poetry, where skilled translators themselves are poets and do seek to match up the verses; in parallel texts I own.

There's definitely something strange with that text.

Maybe it's individual metadata for Sherlock Holmes - when I tried Spanish to English worked on a different book it worked ok.

Well as someone else commented, the source material is likely from Project Gutenberg, so a long out of copyright translation is perhaps expected.

On the other hand, Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries, so I think it enhances reading Don Quixote for the translation to use early modern English - e.g. "Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath".

I find the OCAML-inspired option types in F# and Scala more aesthetically pleasing but the author mentions in a previous post why C# wouldn't implement them.

Alpine will have a growing catalogue of software for phone and tablet as the popularity of postmarketOS increases.

The Lumia 950/XL were the last hurrah for the platform, so one can hardly blame Continuum for the demise of Windows on phones.

The beauty of English is the process of 'verbing', where we can turn arbitrary nouns into verbs. Schooled in Commonwealth English, I wasn't familiar with buffalo being used as a verb but others in this thread have cited its meaning.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-verbing-1691035

That's a Chrome OS device.

So what is preventing OEMs from releasing a Chrome OS phone which runs both Android apps and desktop Linux apps out of the box without this Dex/Canonical vendor-specific solution?

In Australia (which has 2 chambers - 1 under this system and the other proportional):

It is very difficult for a 3rd voice to gain traction. A party which has attracted over 10% nationwide for the past 2 decades, Greens, has exactly 1 seat out of 150 under this system.

We've had this method of voting for a century but voters generally see it as a binary choice - Roughly 35-40% will vote for A and 35-40% will vote for B. Typically there will be up to 5-10 candidates on the ballot paper. So that 20-30% of the "neither of major 2" could be split 8 ways across a wide political spectrum. Inevitably, most outcomes fall back to the 2 majors.

I'd have suggested planting more sugar maples as a carbon sink but climate change is impacting the production of maple syrup:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...

A few weeks ago MS suspended development of Office for UWP, so unlikely.

Usted(es) is a more modern invention. Ladino does have vos, which survives in some varieties, e.g. Argentine.

> I don't mind if an application I explicitly launched as an application asks to make Bluetooth connections

The security model for a desktop-installable 'app' is a superset of a webpage. Or at least it was in Firefox OS, where additional permissions were required for accessing the filesystem or hardware APIs. In this way they were not available to websites to hijack the in-browser sandbox; the system web browser was itself a 'browser app' with a restricted set of permissions.

(I presume it's similar in Chrome OS, while this blog post is in the context of 'appifying' Windows desktop outside the browser.)

The ability to run foreign software is a goal even Google embraces with their support for Android apps and 'Linux' within their Chrome OS sandboxes.

(If you're asking why Windows in the first place, well that is another discussion entirely.)

You mention a lack of hosting but would it, optionally, browser-sync?

I use a web interface, The Old Reader, to access feeds from 4 devices. Whichever I'm using at the time knows which articles have been marked as read; without using a different client for each OS platform.

So a browser extension that syncs to one's Firefox account, like the bookmarks/history feature would be handy, with no additional hosted service other than having a browser login.