drac wrote:Don't be too quick to destroy Carthage - you might be happy there. In that old world, "join us or die" was the battle cry.
Curiously enough, it's not that cut and dry. I've been on a Carthage-binge for the last few months, refreshing my memory of old university lectures with what a few of the "newer histories" have to say. To be fair, since I'm more of a Rome-freak, I usually read the Punic Wars with a perspective - while hardly a full-blown prejudice, or agenda - when pushed to root for one side or t'other, my allegiance was usually with the purple. If forced to be professorial, I can read things with an unbiased eye, but it's much more fun to indulge one's fancies with the narrative.
Anyway, it's always amusing the read reviews of books you've read just to see what other people thought of them, and it turns out Amazon is a great trove of this sort of past-time. Recently I ran across a review of
this book which I read a couple of years ago (not a great book, but passable), and one lad in particular (Thomas Fleming) had a rather interesting point to make (his review in full is on the linked page):
Miles [the author] complains, naturally, of the bias of Greek historians against Carthage and sees it (following the speculative and tendentious work of Edith Hall) as an invention of the fifth century, a piece of propaganda orchestrated by Sicilian Greeks who wanted to claim some of the panhellenic glory won by Athens and Sparta against the barbarians. But the stories and artistic representations of the Hellenic struggle with mythical barbarians antedates the Persian Wars. The Greeks were simultaneously aware of how much they owed to eastern cultures and yet determined to assert their own unique identity. This is no late invention. Miles might also consider the plain fact that the Carthaginians did not produce much of a literature. It is not only that they were eventually defeated by the Romans, since Greeks and Romans did translate and read Carthaginian books, when they were of interest. The truth is that the Carthaginians were a lot like Americans, more interested in getting and spending than in creating anything particularly beautiful or original. This left them, naturally, vulnerable to Greek culture.
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drac wrote:What can I do (that *I* want to do) that is only possible with two panes (or is considerably easier with two panes)?
First of all, obviously my "rant" was just in jest - people may use programmes any way they please, especially (in my opinion) if they can be used in ways that they were never originally intended.
The latter-state is rather rare, especially in the realms of technical things like file-managers, but I always hold out hope for the little-guy fighting against the storm of conservatism the technocratic world so embraces.
Since I can in no way ever possibly answer such a subjective question as yours (do I know what you want to do with your computer? Obviously not!) I can but give a simple example. Just for the fun of it, it involves one of your other toys (Macrium) - except even worse, you yourself have made it clear that you don't actually use your backups and virtually never look at them, etc., so my example won't mean much to you, but hey, I'm busy promulgating a premise for the mythical Fourth Punic War, so we're a little pushed for time.
Contrary to you, I use my image backups on a daily basis, and I'm forever mounting one or two (or more at a time) images to compare or renew aspects of my current system or even each other (yes, I actually do this daily, just for fun - what can I say, I'm easily amused). Anyway, I do this so often that I went out of my way to have x2 automatically launch and mount multiple images (not using explorer, nor Reflect's rather awful GUI), with Mirrored Browsing and Mirrored Scrolling automatically active. Anyone who ever used Windows Explorer to look at things has usually ended up with multiple instances of it open with overlapped windows, and all the trouble that ensues. That paradigm has been "enjoyed" by almost all serious PC users over time that it's virtually an engrained de rigueur part of the culture to laugh-at, belittle, and generally trounce the very notion of using
anything with single-pane, let alone a file-manager. Copy and paste? I think not.
Anyway, since x2 can mirror-browse and scroll multiple disparate locations all by itself, I can zip my way through the entire structure of a drive with both panes (the "old system" on the left, the "new" on the right) and they always automatically stay locked in tandem view, no matter if I use bookmarks or whatever other means to navigate.
"So what?" I hear you say, "I'm sure if I did that sort of thing, I'd do it the same way, but your drugs don't interest me, so what's in it for me?"
As stated before, there can be no useful response to that sort of solipsistic and reductionist viewpoint - it can only be answered with one of my own, as is only reasonable. There was a reason I started off this post with the bit about Carthage, and did not leave it a separate discussion, for it is in no way off-topic. It is, as it has ever been, quite relevant to all our waking moments.
And, just for the record, when I use the phrase "Carthago delenda est", I'm using it in an iconic imitation of Cato the Elder who used to include it in virtually all of his speeches, even those that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Carthaginian contretemps he was so fond of. I'm not using it literally - though if your man above is right in his associating the myopic Carthaginian and vainglorious American demeanours, it might have some value after all.
It's just my way of objectifying the otherwise normal "shouting into the void" I engage in regularly around here. Somebody's gotta do it.
Anyway, Single-Pane users are Carthage, and Dual-Pane users are Rome. Guess who wins the fourth punic war in my little curious world of non-Nominalism?