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Well, they had to hold off on many days of 'standard' drone attacks in order to launch the recent "mass attack" on Kiev. They're so short of missiles that they need Iranian drones. They're so self-insufficient in other areas that they had to butter up Kim.

They "attritionising" Ukraine, but it seems they're not "unattritioned" themselves (they're even going back to recruiting from their own prison populations, with or without the Wagner touch, it seems, as well as conscripting active/prominant anti-'SVO' individuals). They must be hiding much of it, that we're even seeing what signs of it that we see.

Mother Russia is hurting, I am fairly sure. If we can (in what ways we can) assuage Ukraine's own pains then I can see it not being as hopeless as some interpretations might go as far to say. Winter is probably going to be as much an enemy as the 'glorious' forces sent in by Moscow. And to them as well.

We're getting firmly into the territory of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I'm only just beginning to get the inkling of what bothers Strongpoint, here. But I don't see it.

Man dies in shootout with police (UK)
Flooding/floods have killed people in Kenya
People in car killed when it crashes and explodes on US/Canada border
Frenzied knife attack continued even after the victim had died (South Korea)

Being immersed in English, I do understand the difference between passive and active voice (if that's it). But there's a lot of linguistic leeway, just because we like varying the way we phrase things and also use a broad breadth of stolen borrowed vocabulary and grammatical forms. All the above could have been switched between kill and die without really changing the feeling of the article. "...man killed...", "...people have died...", "...people in car die...", "...even after killing the victim...".

(The "Fan dies at concert" articles I came across couldn't have been written as "...killed at", however. This side of any sort of "gross corporate manslaughter" rulings, at least. Other than that, I used the first few articles that looked like they might mention "kill/die", and the primary use (paraphrased as needed).

And the last had "killed" and "killing" in another bit, e.g., which might have prompted the stylistic variation to choose "died" to avoid too much internal repitition. As well as individual reporters (assigned randomly/by being the duty reporter for the given time/location/subject) perhaps having a personal preference to one form of language, the opposite can(/will?) also be possible. Perhaps they like to not stick to the one version. Within an article (including paragraphs or phrases that ended up cut out by subeditors tightening it up for publication, who might or might not switch the words used for their own reasons), or between subsequent write-ups, treatments and incidents reported (that you might or might not have seen).


Or am I missing a huge actual bias, that even I'm not immune to? And I, of course, don't know how a professional translator would accurately and idiomatically render the English into your own language. Given how much the language used can shape perception... And English is a mongrel language.

Speaking of problems, excel decided to fuck itself once again. For some reason it started crashing whenever I try to import data from txt. All I know is that it doesn't do it to all files, so maybe some of them got corrupted? Googling it (even with the error code I found through the event viewer) didn't bring up anything useful, so any suggestions are welcome.

If you re-save the .txt in different encoding (perhaps going from on or other UTF-16 to UTF-8/ASCII/whatever, possibly even going the other way?) does it import nicer (or at least not crashy)?

Have you also tried cutting it down? See if sequential chunks of (say) a hundred lines will import, individually[1], identifying "safe" bits and narrow down "unsafe" bits until lines (and perhaps fractional lines) of data are identified as your problem, perhaps where a problem with your chosen combination of delimiters (tab, comma, semicolon, space, etc) might be. Unexpected string delimiters (e.g. “”s (inter?)mixed with ""s), or issues with a form of Scientific Notation of values, might also trip it up (though shouldn't/oughtn't!)... Once identified, you might be able to work round it, or prepare your source(s) better in a simple(ish) extra step.

Not quite knowing what data or format you're handling, this is just a generic suggestion. Perhaps it includes something you haven't considered (even though I imagine you have done most of it already).


[1] Slice and resave externally, or perhaps use the "From row:" to skip a given number of original-file lines, if the issue isn't with LineFeed/NewLine stupidity itself...

Well, October 2025 is "the end-point of Windows 10 support". Which is not to say you can't continue with it, with caveats. (I've still got a Win2K machine[1] in constant use!) But might be complicated by the inbuilt "windows as a service"/semi-subscription model.

Also interesting to read the (now historic) reports about how Windows 10 "would be the last version". There's a bit of interesting "forward analysis" in the likes of this report (dated 2015) - though the first run-through I just did of it crashed my browser (probably a specific ad badly reacting with my system/connection), just to warn you - which may be useful to compare with what we see now.


But I digress. As usual.


[1] The hardware was originally Win98ed, so you can imagine that I couldn't even consider "reWindowsing" it, these days. But it's all happily registered through the mechanisms and standards of the day, so I'm sticking with it until it actually[2] breaks. (Tempting fate by mentioning it, yet again.)

[2] Irrevocably. The fan in the PSU actually did break free of its spindle, more than 20 years ago, shortly after I 2Ked it. Replaced it, and the new one (fan, that is, in otherwise original PSU) has been spinning ever since. ...the place I bought the fan from has long since gone out of business, actually, but I doubt it's for specifically having sold far too good spare parts! :p

(A bit ninjaed, as I tried to reduce tue waffle, and probably failed.)

In general, the major difference between Linux dists are not in the 'commands' (i.e. anything you'd do with shells, saving perhaps precisely what shell-based install command to use), but in the 'skinning' of the GUI. The package-manager interface[1] may vary a bit, but within broad 'wizard'-style bounds that make adding (and removing) functionality not really an impediment for most[2].

Once installed, GIMP is GIMP, LibreOffice is LibreOffice and that Asteroids-like game is that Asteroids-like game, no matter what wm you have (by necessity, default or choice). KDE/Gnome/whatever-based might change some of the support issues you encounter (basic apps might be KDE-specific or Gnome-specific, which might mean hoops to jump through on a basic system install), but being (potentially) as simple as Tom's/Motif or going into the Ice/Xmonad/xfce/etc is mostly bells-and-whistles (like the trend to go for the fancily rendered 'desktop furniture'). And you really don't need glorified "scrollable horizontal ribbon toolbars", a la Apple, when a (now) basic "Start button on a toolbar" gives you much the same (whichever edge/corner of the screen it inhabits) in a way long-time Windows users should be comfortable with.

(Really minimal distros might not even have a 'classic toolbar', instead you pop up a menu by right-click on the desktop, but even Puppy/Damn Small Linux (both JWM?) these days seem to include the toolbar/'start button' setup.)

If it really needs to be reconfigured to work, any half-decent thing (under open-source development) probably has had someone do the necessary work just so that it works for them.

Of course, closed-source products may be beyond use (unless WINE/etc helps). And when you're dealing with someone who gets confused when a "small icon" view is changed to a "details" one[3] then it can be a bit of a hill to climb to get used to a more widely revamped appearance and having to switch away from MSOffice to Libre and/or Photoshop to GIMP (advantages to both aside). Even if OOTB or trivially-reconfigured-OOTB functionally does exactly the same.

Horses for courses. Dists for lists (...of highly personal pros and cons).


[1] Assuming you didn't go straight to one with negligable out-of-the-'box' GUI, and even then you tend to get 'ASCII-rendered' pseudo-GUI setup and package installation tools so you don't need to do more than click-or-tap your

[2] In fact, my past tendency has often been to go "I want that, and thst, and that, and definitely that. Let's also try that, and I can always remove that later...", which was always a developing problem when disk space was a premium.

[3] Actual experience of that... If I switch it, e.g. to sort/examine by file-size, I need to remember to change it back before handing back..m

Quote from: Starver on November 16, 2023, 11:05:29 am

I seem to recall a past initiative somewhere in the UK for certain Drive-Through meals to have the receiving car's registration printed on the packaging before being handed over. Not quite sure how that went(/is going), with all caveats about how easy it is to render deliberately-littered packaging unidentifiable (if littering is not just carelessness) or how hard it would be to roll out to 'pedestrian' purchases (like bottles from vending machines, or even 24-packs of cans from your local mom'n'pop cash'n'carry).

How can you prove that a piece of litter wasn't actually in a trash can at some point, then got blown away by the wind? Seems kind of useless, legally.

Best as I can recall (the most familiar instant), it was to be a 'voluntary' (my quotes) process, that may have been part of the planning approval process for the fast-food joint to add/expand its 'Drive-Thru' facility. Following concern that even counter-served food packaging was accumulating in huge quantities in a nearby lay-by (even with the site's council rubbish bin being regularly emptied and, if and when required, repaired). And not just the odd stray burger-wrapper floating around, but something like half-drunk-from cups (even in their 'trays'), rewrapped burger 'crusts', ice-cream tubs, etc, that had amazingly gathered themselves together (after presumably been blasted out of the bin by a squall) in piles that seem almost as if each haf been placed there by someone who had opened their car door and placed their own waste on the ground before driving off.

Not that anybody would do that, naturally. Not when there's a bin almost within throwing distance (if you wanted to throw it, see if you can get at least one item in there) or... just maybe... they could even be taking their litter home (or to whosever home they were next driving).

Quote from: A_Curious_Cat on November 20, 2023, 03:38:19 pm

Make DF entirely headless (as in it doesn’t display anything to the user).

All gameplay must be done by echoing to stdin and reading from stderr.

...surely