[MPlayer-users] Full screen mode isn't actually full screen

The Wanderer inverseparadox at comcast.net
Sat Sep 2 03:11:41 CEST 2006


Brian Dean wrote:

> --- The Wanderer <inverseparadox at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> Is there any reason why you not only did not attribute the quote
>> but snipped the attribution which was already there?
> 
> Laziness.  I wanted to snip out all the stuff that had been said 
> before by deleting everything from the beginning to the new stuff,
> only leaving in the last few replies.
> 
> To be honest, I think it's really stupid for emails to add the > 
> character in front of relies.  I understand that in the old days of
> computers, this may have been efficient.  But in actuality, it would
> be easier to read if you did the following:

Having just looked at this, I find it significantly less easy to follow
than the standard form I used and am using; as a consequence, I
re-formatted this into standard quoting form before realizing you
actually hadn't added anything new which I needed to respond to and
snipped it all out. (An additional problem is the one of coming up with
appropriate names for each quoted block, without forcing the poster to
do it by hand every time. Your practice of appending " (old)" to each
poster's name - or part of that name - is unwieldy past a certain point;
this is borne out by the fact that you are referring to two entirely
different levels of quotation with the same name, "ELZOG (old)". There's
also the problem of needing to re-name each quoted block every time you
quote it again.)

I've just been through a potentially related argument on a newsgroup
about Web-forum-style quoting practices, which this resembles just
strongly enough that I think the two are connected; please, don't put me
through it again.

I really think you're trying to fix a nonexistent problem, here.

<snip of reformat of fundamentally broken quote style>

> And so forth.  As you can see this is easier to read than the > mess
> that emails usually produce.

Assuming you mean "easier to follow": that is certainly not the case for
me. (If you did in fact mean "easier to read", then all that I can say
is that I am able to read both forms equally easily, but the standard
form is much easier to follow.)

">" quoting easily becomes a mess if people don't handle it properly in
replying (snipping, re-wrapping, and the like) - but it's a good idea to
do that anyway, and your proposed form has at least as much possibility
for messiness of different sorts.

> And it has the added advantage that it doesn't mess up the lines.  A
> lot of the time, when you add > characters, email will wrap the lines
> because of (another stupid rule) the 72 character line wrap rule.

It's not "stupid" unless you assume that no one reading your post will
ever be using a width-limited display.

In any case, the solution is simple: just re-wrap - either by hand or
via a client-provided wrapping function. I have done both with every
single message I've sent in quite a number of years (current count: 6437
since the last time I lost my mail archives).

> The problem is, I don't want to do all of that editing myself so it
> would be nice if someone wrote a program to do it for you. But I
> know, it's just easier to write a program that will put a > in front
> of all the lines in your reply.

Not only "easier" - vastly less unwieldy and less problematic. I came up
with several different problems just in the parenthesitical comment
above, without having spent more than sixty seconds considering the
issue; I'm quite certain that people who actually pay attention to these
things could provide more.

>>> Your name isn't Bill Devos by any chance is it?
>> 
>> Nope.
>> 
>> There are enough "Wanderer"s around the Internet that I've had to
>> come up with quite a variety of fallback names to use where my own
>> is already taken. I'm known in various places as Identity,
>> InverseParadox, Alias Bongo, and Catholic Bear - that last being a
>> roughly triple-layered reference, which very few people are likely
>> to get without explanation.
> 
> Too bad.  I used to have a roommate that went by "wanderer" who was 
> Bill Devos.  Very intelligent guy, but didn't seem to know how to 
> deal with people very well sometimes.
> 
> I used to be a Catholic but now I am an atheist/agnostic.

I'm not a Catholic, actually. Like I said, that name is a kind of joke.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.



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