Slashdot Mirror

With google, here is one reference I found which mention this technique by Applicon:

jrward@alum.mit.edu: Annotated Bibliography in On-line Character Recognition and Pen Computing

Exactly 29 years ago 09/11/1973 the democratic elected president of Chile was murdered with official help from the US. Thousends of his followers were killed or simply disappeared during the years that followed. here

Exactly 9996 days ago the US left Saigon the death count varies but all sources give 1.000.000+ people death. How long do you think The Vietnam Victim's Memorial Wall should be?

The people of Palestine are living in bondage and indignity since 53 years. Their oppressors are financially and militarily backed by the US. Many thousands of Palestinians had suffered extinction. here

I could add to this list on and on but I'm simply tired to do it. A message to learn:

Look around and see the bloodshed others have suffered by US actions. If you bring mourning to others, one day the mourning will come back to haunt you. It took quite long but now it finally has arrived. The cathedral of the church of globalisation has come down.

Amen

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969

"there was ONE thing I could not explain.
In some of the photos, the camera's crosshair is *partially behind* the scene. How is that possible unless the photos were airbrushed?"

Film is not perfect. Lenses are not perfect. Bright portions bleed into dark. When the dark portion is a very thin line like a crosshair, an adjacent light portion of the image will make the crosshair appear to be lighter, thinner, or just plain not there.

Here's a good webpage about that and the other so-called "anomalies" you already debunked: http://users.erols.com/igoddard/moon01.htm

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

The stupid fuckhead asshole pieces of shit editors and the fags that post are fucking wrong - as usual.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Journey Into the Fourth Declension (new)
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• ASM News Update (new)
• Footnotes

Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.

1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.

2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.

b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]

The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.

Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.

Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.

This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may also imply that it's 4th declension, as some scholars believe.

Those confused souls who write *virii are tacitly positing the existence of the non-word *virius, and declining it as though it were like filius. It's true that l/r are both linguals that sometimes get interchanged, and that f/v are just a change in voicing[2], but that's just reaching. *Virii is still completely silly, so don't do that; otherwise, everyone will know you're just a blathering script kiddie.

The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]

One citation below wonders whether these -us 2nd declension neuters might have inflected -us => -ora, the way the 3rd declension's neuter plurals for tempus and corpus do. There's really not any support for that notion--that I could find at least. If so, that would end up producing *virora. Most other citations think that these plurals just never happened at all, or that if they did, they didn't jump declensions. Perhaps they were invariant as they oddly are for the vocative and accusative cases. In any event, *virora does not fit comfortably in the mouth of an English speaker, which is a good reason to avoid it.[4]

Another theory holds that virus, if it was a 2nd declension neuter, must go to *vira in the plural as do its -um neuter brethren in the 2nd declension. However, that assumes that it works like a -um form, not as a -us form does. And it really seems to do neither. If it were a -us form (again, as a 2nd declension nominative), then its vocative would have to be *vire; but it's really only virus. You also expect an accusative form *viros, but that too is missing; it's still just virus in the accusative. And if it were a -um form, then its vocative would have to be *virum. But it's not--here again, it's only virus. (Vocative examples of virus are not particularly common. Apparently the Romans seldom addressed their slime in a personal fashion. :-)

So what we have here is something of a mixed or invariant declension. Trying to find a plural for something that didn't take a plural (possibly because it was not a count but a mass noun), or at least, one for which no plural is classically attested, is a fruitless endeavour. Best to stick with English and use viruses. Journey Into the Fourth Declension Some scholars, includining Gavin Betts, believe that virus pertained not to the second declension, but to the fourth one. Here is an example or two that support[5] Betts and dispute the 2nd declension theory. The first is classical, from Ammianus:

qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum

Just another note: You must not forget that Ammian's native tongue was Greek, not Latin - so it's (very hypothetical!) possible he understood virus as a so called accusativus respectus and copia as adverbial expression. (A more common phenomenon in Greek.) exuberare was combined that way with lucrum and there was a tendency to use non-transitive verbs in a (active) transitive way - like anhelare or spumare in late antiquity's Latin as well. (The pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium's fourth book is an outstanding exception with its usage of anhelans et spumans in the passage about the denarratio and the following example IF one dates it to 80 a.Chr.n. ...) But - to make a conclusion - it's not classical at all to use the form viri(i), because there isn't any genitive-singular- or nominative-plural-form (*) viri found in the whole Latin literature up to the first century p.Chr.n. as far as PHI-CD-Rom can tell :-)

Here's what other sources have to say about this matter:

alt.usage.english FAQ Not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals in -i. Apparatus, cantus, coitus, hiatus, impetus, Jesus, nexus, plexus, prospectus, and status were 4th declension in Latin, and had plurals in -us with a long `u'. Corpus, genus, and opus were 3rd declension, with plurals corpora, genera, and opera. Virus is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been; the only plural in English is viruses. Omnibus and rebus were not nominative nouns in Latin. Ignoramus was not a noun in Latin.

[...] classical plurals [...] What is the plural of virus? This neuter in Latin lacked a plural; it would presumably [disputable -tchrist ] have been virora like corpora, the plural of neuter corpus. (Like corpora, virora would be stressed on its initial syllable. As indicated earlier, *corpi would be as outlandish--as far beyond the pale--as *rhinoceri and *octopi.)

Latin had several declensions containing neuter, feminine, and masculine words ending in -us; the plurals are different in each one. Incidentally, the singular of mores (pronounced `moh-rehs') is mos, with the same change of `s' to `r' between vowels heard in corpus : corpora and in genus : genera.

Allen and Greenough The authors at the cited reference point out the follwoing:

Many Greek nouns retain their original gender: as, arctus (F.), the Polar Bear; methodus (F.), method.

a. The following in -us are Neuter; their accusative (as with all neuters) is the same as the nominative: pelagus, sea; virus, poison; vulgus (rarely M.), the crowd. They are not found in the plural, except pelagus, which has a rare nominative and accusative plural pelage.

NOTE.--The nominative plural neuter cete, sea monsters, occurs; the nominative singular cetus occurs in Vitruvius.

Latin inflections And for those who just can't get enough, try this. It is a bunch of inflection tables, more complete than I've seen elsewhere. For a good time, figure out the nominative plural of venus is. Hint: it's not veni. ASM News Apparently this question is `in the air'. The following is from the June 1999 issue of ASM News by the American Society for Microbiology, sent it by Jim Sandoz.

/* Begin Excerpt */

Numerous Latin words have been taken over into the modern scientific vocabulary, most without difficulty. The Latin word virus, however, presents a minor but interesting problem, if one wishes to express a phrase such as Index of Viruses in its Latin form. By analogy with other nouns, one would expect the normal Latin equivalent to be Index Virorum. The difficulty stems from the fact that the Latin noun virus is defective, i.e. does not have a full set of case--forms, singular and plural. The Roman grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 A.D.) states that some claim the word is indeclinable (i.e., has only one form for all the cases in the singular); others, apparently more accurately, that it is declined in the singular according to the second declension neuter and cite two passages from the poet Lucretius in substantiation. All of the ancient grammarians are in agreement, however, that the word is used in the singular only, which indeed appears to be true, for no plural forms are attested in extant Latin works.

In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. (The first meaning given for this word, a slimy liquid, slime, in the most widely used Latin-English dictionaries is inaccurate; the error has been corrected in the more recent Oxford Latin Dictionary.) Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms.

When the word was taken over into modern languages and acquired its current scientific meaning, it changed categories and denoted a countable entity. The modern languages which have adopted the word each pluralize it in their own fashion (e.g., Eng. viruses, Germ. Viren; French and Italian do not distinguish in form between singular and plural, virus). But what to do in neo-Latin, which normally is subject to the rules and constraints of classical Latin?

W. T. Steam in his manual on botanical Latin (Botanical Latin, Newton Abbey, 2nd ed., 1973) gives what would be the normal plural forms of such a second declension neuter noun: nominative vira, genitive virorum, without, however, indicating his authority for those forms. It may be observed that in Latin as in other languages when the plural of noncountable nouns does occur, it generally denotes various kinds of the entity (e.g., wine, honey, oil). Steam may have applied this principle to virus in order to meet the requirements of modern scientific terminology. If Latin had continued to be the common international language of scholars and scientists at the time that viruses were first identified, it appears likely that it would have generated the forms adduced by Steam.

Robert J. Smutny

ASM News Update The following letter recently appeared in ASM News, from Ton E. van den Bogaard. (Formatting added.)

On the Presence of a Plural of the Latin Noun "Virus"

With interest I read the contribution `On the Absence of a Plural of the Latin Noun ``Virus''' in the June 1999 ASM News, p. 388, by Robert J. Smutny. However, according to my Latin grammar, one of the very few books of my gymnasium (high school) days that is still up to date, the plural of the noun virus in Latin is, like the plural nowadays used for virus in Romance languages (e.g., Italian and French), also virus. The Latin noun virus does not belong to the second declension group but, like the noun fructus, meaning fruit or piece of fruit, belongs to a group of Latin words that is declined according to the fourth declension. Hence, two pieces of fruit is in Latin duo fructus and two viruses would be duo virus. According to the fourth declension the plural genitive of virus in Latin is viruum and therefore an Index of Viruses is in Latin an Index Viruum. Virorum is the plural genitive of the Latin noun vir (second declension) meaning man or husband. Consequently an Index Virorum would indicate a list of husbands or men.

Moreover, because the noun virus belongs to the fourth declension group the study of viruses should have been called virulogy and people practicing that science virulogists. My former professor in virology at veterinary school consequently called himself a virulogist and he lectured virulogy. I am afraid that these words have become extinct since he died.

It is important to realize that Latin and Greek derived expressions in biomedical English have been coined by scientists for convenience and not by scholars based on classical grammar. The old Romans might have said to these scientists modulating their language: ``Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,'' which means freely translated: ``Despite your lack of knowledge, still appreciated.''

Ton E. van den Bogaard
University Maastricht, the Netherlands

Here are some Web resources: The Perseus Project Read Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, Hirtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Plautus, Servius, and Vergil, plus quite a bit of other useful material. For example, you can look up virus for a definition and forms, or find its citations in literature. Here's one by Vergil.

Latin Textbook: Wheelock's Latin (HTML) Wonderful on-line course notes designed as a study aid for those without formal grammar/linguistics training. Note that `the entire zip archive' he advertises isn't really complete, and so I used these commands to pull in and view the whole thing locally: % cd /tmp % wget -r -l2 http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Lat in/ % netscape /tmp/humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin /index.html

The Classics Page Innumerable links, including some to on-line interactive exercises and to various dictionaries.

Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis Read your daily news--in Latin! Also contains sound files for the radio version whence it was transcribed. I'm sure glad that we now write FAQ instead of interrogata usitatissima. :-)

De Meditatione Various Latin snippets and sound clips. Footnotes [1] One examble of an invariant genitive form of virus is attested in Ammianus, which reads: qui ut coluber copia virus exuberans natorum. See the original for details. [2] Well, in English; in Latin it probably wasn't, as their `v' was likely more akin to the intervocalic `v' in today's Spanish, a sound with no equivalent in English but which is often perceived as a `w'. To be even more technical, an English `v' is a voiced labial-dental fricative. An intervocalic Spanish `v' (or `b') such as in aves, is a voiced bilabial fricative, usually represented in IPA as a lower-case Greek beta. [3] Some budding Romance philologist should go research a possible connection between the neuter conceptual nouns versus the gendered discrete ones in asturianu , the only extant Romance tongue with anything aproximating neuter nouns (I'm not counting the nominalized adjectives of Spanish such as lo difcil, since these aren't really nouns the way the so-called nomes de xneru neutru (de materia) are in asturianu.) a [4] The word virora actually appears to exist, but as some sort of South American tree. [5] Yes, I hated this sentence, too. It takes the singular verb "is" because the singular "an example" is the closer of the two elements in the disjunction, but likewise, "support" should be in the plural because the closer thing to it is now "two", which is obviously nonsingular. I think only a rewrite would be tolerable. Silly rules.

Sections in this document:

• English Inflections
• Classical Inflections and References
• Other Latin Resources
• ASM News
• Footnotes

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.

Cicero, Oratio in Catilinam Prima, 2

piss@fuck.com Last update: Wed Nov 17 09:20:10 MST 1969

"Elecrokinetic propulsion means that no propellers or jets are used."
Someone want to explain that one?

I saw a picture of [a Pentium V processor] on the web

For one thing, it's "Pentium 4" not "Pentium IV".

For another, Pentium 5 would be abbreviated as "P5", which is one of the generic terms used to refer to 586-generation processors such as the original Pentium, AMD's K5, and whatever Cyrix had out at the time.

Athlon and Pentium 4 are 786 processors. Pentium 5 and the Hammer series will probably be considered 886's unless Intel tries to squeeze another chip out of its Pentium 4 core (the PIII was just a PII with SSE and a couple slight optimizations to the P6 core).

I saw a picture of [a Pentium V processor] on the web

For one thing, it's "Pentium 4" not "Pentium IV".

For another, Pentium 5 would be abbreviated as "P5", which is one of the generic terms used to refer to 586-generation processors such as the original Pentium, AMD's K5, and whatever Cyrix had out at the time.

Athlon and Pentium 4 are 786 processors. Pentium 5 and the Hammer series will probably be considered 886's unless Intel tries to squeeze another chip out of its Pentium 4 core (the PIII was just a PII with SSE and a couple slight optimizations to the P6 core).

Here's a good quote from a "loyalist" publication. Note that the source this came from listed it as "propaganda", but then again, history is made by the victors:

The rebels have hitherto been infamous for their wanton cruelties. Their brutal treatment of Governor Franklin, and many other persons of distinction whom I could mention, their barbarity to loyalists in general, and at this present hour hanging men for acting according to the dictates of conscience whipping men almost to death because they will not take up arms publicly whipping even women, whose husbands would not join the militia their confiscations, fines, and imprisonments; these things which they daily and indubitably practice, very ill agree with the character of humanity so lavishly bestowed on them by this writer. Nothing but a long, very long series of conduct the reverse of this can wipe off the infamy which they hereby incurred.

And people today try to imagine some idealized past. A good book for you to read would be The Good Old Days... They Were Terrible! to learn what our Grandparents generation's life was really like.

You can definately argue that the rich are proportionately richer today over the masses then and now, but frankly a more correct and relevant comparison would be comparing the masses today to the masses yesterday.

Seeing this post I just remembered that research is going into subjects such as noise cancellation and the like. Doing a bit of googling I quickly hit upon this faq on Active Noise Control.

Seems to me that this technology would be ideally suited to solve the problem of noisy computers.

I'd love to see Creative, for example, releasing some new hardware/drivers to help out in this area!

In the meantime, maybe I'll get myself a pair of these.

If you want nice printouts in UNIX use Xprint.

Xprint replaces the underlying XFree86 drawing primatives with ones that generate PostScript. Mozilla has the necessary code to support this and it can easily be activated. This results in printouts that look almost exactly like the display. It will even print wacko fonts by downloading them or, as a last resort, embedding them as bitmats. If you have good Type1 font's it looks pretty good. It is very popular with non-U.S./Canadian users for just this reason. There's minor setup but it's all explained in detail here:

Using Xprint with Mozilla

I'd like to see this developed further so the distros catch on and support it. Spread the word.

There are approximately 5 million dead of famine during Russian Civil War (1917-1922), plus 30-50 million dead (excluding WW2 casualties) in Stalin's Russia, and 30 million dead of famine in Mao's "Great Leap Forward" who might beg to differ with you.

(Actually, Stalin's count may have "only" been another 5-10 million from famine. The other 40 million were executed in purges or worked to death in labor camps. So I suppose you were right - not as many people starved, per se, under Stalin.)

I'll take my changes with Capitalism, if you don't mind.

Huh? I think the comparable levels of real-world harm are so far away from "pretty close" as to have a red shift due to cosmological expansion.

I mean, unless there are 40-45 million people dead that we've somehow managed not to notice in the past 50 years.

You wanna knock the Cultural Revolution casualties down to just the ~2 million actually executed, ignoring the ~10M who "died of natural causes" in the labor camps, and the ~30M who died from starvation... well, fine, but I'll still take my chances with the CIA ;-)

During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars.

During the last century, more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars.

Well, you probably won't remember, but your great-grandparents might have gone through this. When aspirin was first commercially used in the 1870's, no one knew how it worked. It sure was nice that it did work thought, even if an occasional upset stomach occured. It wasn't until the 1970's that it's relation to prostaglandin was discovered. Read this link for more info.

3) Who invented the vacuum tube amplifier? (de Forest)

Many historians and engineers would insist that Howard Armstrong is the proper and deserving inventor of the vacuum tube amplifier (originally known as the "audion" or "regenerative oscillator"). Why? Well, DeForest's claim is based on an accidental (and quite incidental) discovery that a particular electronic circuit howled when tuned a certain way. It was Armstrong that understood the underlying theory and was able to fine-tune this "howl" into something that could be harnessed to amplify practical signals (such as voice over radio). Furthermore, DeForest never bothered to submit for a patent until he had discovered that Armstrong had fine-tuned the very primitive observation into a usable technology. DeForest would never have gotten, or even attempted to get, a patent based on his discoveries alone.

DeForest is only credited with the invention because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision based on technically flawed assumptions (Chief Justice Cardozo desperately needed a "Special Master" to tutor him on the technical details). It's all described in fascinating detail in the 1991 PBS Documentary Empire of the Air.

Another one of Armstrong's inventions that was rightfully his was wide-band Frequency Modulation, the basis of today's FM radio. Armstrong spent the last years of his life fighting companies like RCA and Motorola who blatantly violated his patent rights. Corporate legal tactics, including stalling him for years in endless and expensive "discovery," eventually led him to suicide. His widow eventually triumphed in court after his death and was awarded millions in damages.

1. Civilian: this is what anyone can access. This was discontinued because companies were about to come out with units that compensated for the programmatic imperfections the satellites were feeding the receivers. It was accurate to within one hundred meters, and is still applied on a regional basis (for instance, Iraq still has Civilian-level GPS accuracy).
2. Military: this is now what both civilians and the general military share. It is accurate to within approximately twenty meters.
3. SpecOps: this is what the SEALs, DEVGRU and all their friends use. It is accurate to within approximately one meter.

A while ago I wrote a Perl program to spider through my yahoo mail account and download my email. I had some reason to do it instead of just going to pop3, but mostly because I wanted to play around with it. The code is pretty damn ugly, but mostly because it is the first spider I ever wrote, and I was too lazy to look up nice examples. The programs can be found here. Before Yahoo started charging for pop3, the ethics of this were pretty straight forward. Now I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. (I think it is ok because I am still using their web interface for email, and I am just using this because I am an information pack rat. Your millage may vary.) W

I didn't believe it but I was recently forced to use XSLT to generate unit testing code. So I read the XPath and XSLT specs (not long, easy reading) and thought I would document my personal library of C modules by defining the interfaces as XML and running an XSLT processor (Xalan-J) on it to generate an html reference, man pages, postscript, header files, etc. I'm still in the middle of it and trying to reduce the XML model but I have generated man pages and a very nice HTML reference. Here's an example. As you can see the style sheet isn't quite right. I'm working on it right now. If someone knows XSLT and wants to help, let me know...

And like kids who are beaten up and grow up to be abusers themselves, Israel has grown into bully of a nation that's occupying territory that's not rightfully theirs (west bank and gaza), runs a reign of terror there and for the last month has been preparing a Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem:

Israel radio said Mr Liberman went further, urging the bombing of Palestinian civilian targets such as shopping centres and petrol stations. This would force the Palestinians to surrender and to agree to a cease-fire, he said.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres' reply was harsh. He warned that "if the ministers were to pursue that course of action, they would end up like Milosevic at the Hague," the radio reported.

"I do not care", Mr Liberman replied.

(Source: BBC News)

There are American criminals, and Swedish criminals, and Mongolian criminals, and there are probably Israeli criminals too.

Indeed. Not a single nation, race, religion, political system or individual is innocent.

Acrophobia was great, but is, alas, no more. During the merge-fest and flopping around of bezerk, uproar, iwon, flipside, etc, it got cancelled. But it is supposed to be coming back. (Unfortunately, that page has been there for a while)

But of course, some fans decided to make their own version. Check out AcroChallenge for one option. I've played it, it works pretty well. Check out Acro All Night for news related to Acrophobia.

intuitive and easy to use IDE

Overrated. It must be because I'm getting along pretty well with vi.

simplified GUI design and event handling

This is a tough one. The GUI frameworks are unconditionally complicated. Use what you're team is most familar with.

advanced error handling

errno? Just kidding. But real exception handling is pretty expensive. Those are really your only options besides maybe something like this.

advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection

This is kinda funny because multiple inheritance a feature that is only justified in a very small number of cases (I believe it should be avoided alltogther) and is a really good way to get into trouble lick-ity-split, abstact classes is mearly a convention and really doesn't buy you anything in terms of functionality and garbage collection makes languages far too forgiving to the idiot using crappy data structures and algorithms.

full support for operator and function overloading

Well, you just want everything and the kitchen sink don't you? They did that already, it's that morass of a language called C++. Do the next guy a favor and pick features that suit the needs of the application rather than features you think will make it easier for you or the result will be indecipherable.

and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms

Why? Is this really that great? The XOpen and ANSI standards are designed to reduce system dependancies to the point where this shouldn't be an that much of an issue. Even if you're not using C/C++ the language binding likely is. In either case, as long as you consider the scope of those specifications your code should be portable without too much effort. Of course if you cheat and call those Win32 API functions it wouldn't matter what language you're using.

Sounds like you're trolling for some super Java/C++ language. It will probably never happen and rightly so because it would undoubtedly result in unrecognisable code that's dog slow.

I'm willing to bet your application could be written very well with plain ANSI C a few additional libraries and some C++ for the GUI.

..But maybe nicer for him than the Repo man.

"Never broke into a car. Never hot-wired a car. Kid. I never broke into a trunk. I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof. Nor through inaction let that vehicle or the personal contents thereof come to harm. That's what I call the repo code kid. Don't forget it etch it in your brain. Not many people got a code to live by anymore."

They don't like the Linux Chinese language support. None of the Linux boxes in the lab have chinese installed on them, in any case.

I don't know exactly what they find wrong with it, but Chinese readers who don't use Linux should take a look here; which btw is actually hosted from here and then give comments to people on sourceforge who will, given the attention this is getting, help to develop tools that better fit whatever people's needs are.

The Chinese language is very different from English and features that are hugely convenient for English users can seem irrelevant while things that it would never occur to English users to want, or which are downright inconvenient, are very helpful when you're typing Chinese. This is a situation where Linux needs.... marketing (dum dum dum) and in a terrible way.

It's clear this list is not the respectful, law-abiding group you make it out to be. The only reason it's still around is it's illegal activities have managed to fly under the radar, for now.

(Please guys, hear me through before flaming or modding down.)

Can someone please explain to me the exact portions of the bill that state that

a) you will not be allowed to run linux
b) you will not be allowed to build your own PC from commodity parts

??

What I see is "unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security system standards.". Which is basically saying that "if you want to have something that you can view multimedia on, it has to have built in digital copyright controls on it".

So what you're saying is: "Hey, hell no we won't put such things into linux! .... Damn! now we can't use linux (to view videos or listen to music)" "Hell, I don't want to build a computer using those parts that have built in copy control ..... damn, now I can't build my own computer!"

While I am not saying that this is a good thing, don't you think that you all are going just a wee bit over the deep end with the exaggerations on this one?

Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that it is nearly as bad as you are claiming it to be. If linux were to implement these technologies (which, of course, the people who make linux would really, really, truly rather not do) then you could still use it. If you bought the hardware that conformed (which, btw, all hardware sold will so I don't see the argument there?) then you can still build your own computer.

Now, with that aside, this "proposed" legislation is shitty for the customers, but why is it? If you think about it, they are not preventing us from doing anything that the majority of customers don't already do. Now let me qualify that. What you are legally allowed to do is buy something and watch it. What this prevents is piracy, which BTW is illegal anyways. Piracy in this case means viewing it when you're not allowed/making copies/etc. Yep, it sucks. However we always break these laws anyways.

Oh, can someone please explain to me how the ability to copy a movie or music is a funamentally basic human right?

In any case, as with all things, if this does get passed and these restrictions are put on, and if you don't like it, nobody is making you buy that movie or listen to that music ... Sure you like to, but it's not a necessity. As has been said before (that seems to fall on deaf ears), vote with your wallet. Don't buy that stuff that has the restrictions that you don't agree with. If people adapt this mentality, then 1 of 2 things will happen:

1) the purchases of music/videos/etc will fall by the curb and the industries will be left scratching their heads going "wtf happened?"

-or-

2) the majority of people won't care and will still continue to buy the new restricted stuff anyways, and, in the eyes of the corps, they will not have lost.

Of course, if #2 happens then that means that you, my friends, are indeed in the minority and it's just because you want to illegally copy/pirate your stuff or get stuff for free, because the majority of people won't have seen a difference.

however if #1 happens, then it will turn out that everything that you are saying is correct, and justice will take care of itself.

Thus perhaps you should be putting your energies into the right place. If indeed this legislation does pass, (or even before it does), then lean on the same mechanisms that they use to promote this shit. Write your local newspapers. Create situations where this stuff truly is horrible. Tell your friends and neighbours. Put up billboards and posters. And certainly not the entire public are morons, they can see through shit, and if it is truly, absolutely horrible for the gross public then the gross public will respond.

Is everyone aware here that there are 5,000 children dying every month in iraq from malnutrition? check out the list of the top 30 atrocities of the 20th century, some of which are still continuing. And there's more that happens every day, in front of you, that you're too desensitized to look at. There's homeless (up to 700,000 each night sleeping on the streets, begging for money during the day), and many others.

Just a reminder that perhaps you guys with your DVD players and 28" televisions and well paying jobs and 1GHz+ computers might want to step back and take it all in perspective.

And finally, talk is cheap. If you are seriously angered by this, that's GREAT, seriously, so do something about it. I don't agree with this type of legislation any more than you do, but yelling/overexaggerating about it on /. isn't going to accomplish anything. And I'm not really sure that sending emails/real mail to your congress is going to do anything either. Educate the public at large and you'll find out if either everyone thinks the same way, or if you are indeed just in the minority. If you can't get your mother and your computer illiterate significant other to get the least bit roused by this, the perhaps it isn't that big a deal after all.

Hick town eh?

Oh yeah, way out there in Fairfax County.

Funny, we have the NRO, one of the largest airports in the US, an 802.11b wireless network, SGI, a linux users group, and an Intel datacenter, not to mention also having a boatload of linux careers. Oh yeah, and don't forget that MAE-East often gets cut by cows chewing on the fiber out here in hickville. Oh, I forgot some little things like ThinkGeek, NSI, and ARIN.
Oh yeah, and that hick high school is getting me my CCNA.

I'm not even going to mention AOL, Erols, or the CIA.

But you get the picture.

- Cary

Setting the Record Straight: The Miracle of Islamic Science

1 lb heatsink jokes aside, the P4 runs cooler then the Athlon. Hell, with the default Athlon OEM heatsink, 1+ ghz CPUs have no problem hitting 50+C. The slot athlon is rated to 70C, the socketed athlon is rated to 95C, which is only 5C short of boiling. My home CPU (K7 1133), with OEM heatsink and only one case fan has hit temps of 71C. (Yes, I'm shopping for another heatsink, I just kept the OEM heatsink on because that's what we sell to our customers, and I'm curious about the temp.)

On the other hand, the P3 @ 1.13 Ghz (and the P4 @1.5 Ghz) have a max temperature rating of 72C, which probably means its normal operating temperature is a tad cooler.

Now the difference in temperature measurements probably means that the actual temp vs the measured temp of the pentiums are more accurate, rather then the underreporting I suspect the K7's temp measurement reports. The pentium has its temperature measured by an internal diode. The K7 goes by max case surface temperature of the cpu. I'm guessing that the K7 method of temperature reporting will lead to a lower then real temperature then the P4's method of temperature reporting.

So, if heat is an issue, or if there is a lot of computers in a room and AC might be an issue, then there might be a reason to go with the P4. Of course, the ignores the fact that RDRAM is supposed to run hot, and I'm too busy/lazy atm to look up the total heat output of a P4 + RDRAM solution vs K7 + DDR-SDRAM solution. Anyways, now since the P4 is switching to to DDR-SDRAM, that is no longer an issue. Intel traditionally has had a better chipset then AMD's 3rd party solution, at least in the opinion of many people in the technical community. This is another factor in favor of Intel. Also, the K7 doesn't beat the P4 in *all* benchmarks. There are some benchmarks where the P4 will beat the K7. So even though the K7 is a great chip for the money, I could see using the P4 for a computer devoted to a specialized app if the time saved was worth the extra price of the P4.

There is also brand loyalty, and service/supplier agreements that lock a company into dealing with intel-only products. If a company is getting great technical support from an intel-only supplier, I cannot see any reason to change, great technical support is worth the extra cash.

Of course, "intel" and "pentium" are household names, everyone keeps asking me who "AMD" is and what they do. And the P4 has a higher mhz rating which makes the idiots flock to it.

From the consumer side, intel is hurting. I work in a shop that has switched over to selling only AMD, based on AMD's price. Sure, we can and will custom order Pentium CPU's, but after we show the customer the price difference between the P4 and the K7, they have all switched over to the K7. Intel still has a stronger market in multi-processor solutions, but the release of the Athlon MP (as well as the fact that all K7's, Athlon or Duron, support a dual processor configuration) and the availability of a dual-processor motherboard will change that, especially when the other motherboard manufacturers release their motherboards and the prices lower to a more reasonable level. AMD has a different SMP solution then Intel, and I believe that AMD's version will convince shops to switch over to the Athlon MP, as long as AMD markets a dual-processor configuration successfully, and can keep up with the demand.

Okay, I'm done playing devil's advocate. Last Pentium CPU I've owned was a P100. I'm quite happy with my Athlon, even if it is a portable heater.

References: Processor Electrical Specifications - Gotta credit my sources for the temperature ratings.

It will almost certainly fail to diagnose an Interface Nightmare. Please note, the link is something that I wrote when I worked in tech sup, and as you can tell, I haven't worked there for a while.

The fundamental idea to come away with is that you should not always assume there is something wrong. When I was a level-2 tech, I straightened out all kinds of problems caused by level-1 techs because they assumed that there was a problem. After all, the customer is on the phone, so there *must* be a problem, right? Of course, I probably did the same thing when I was a level-1 tech.

Still, the original comment is outrageous. Consider a horrible century like the 20th. Somewhere around 200 million people died due to war. I sincerely doubt the war figures from previous centuries would double that figure, leaving us well short of even a single billion!

Helevius

Fungi like dark, warm, environments, no? What if a small fluorescent light were installed in the cases? Perhaps that would help keep the growth down. Or maybe an ultraviolet light? UV is sometimes used to sterilize drinking water and is known to alter the DNA of fungi, bacteria, viruses to keep them from reproducing. There's a chart of how much UV is required to kill certain organisms at http://users.erols.com/markricci/newpage1.htm.

Most computer manufacturers who sell large quantities to hospitals and other health-care facilities would probably be willing to install these.
-----------------------

Not to be too pedantic, but Parens is a Latin word, meaning parent (it also means obeying). I don't see any word in my dictionary that could become perens, and Whitaker's Words also says that perens isn't a word. Of course, it could be wrong, but the only thing I could think of that could look like perens and mean traveling is periens, which you might think would mean traveling (because per=through and eo, ire, ivi, itus sum=go) in fact means dying. I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think this is valid.

Photographic film can 'bleed' under bright conditions, and a bright background can obscure fine foreground details such as crosshairs. Here is a good site explaining some of the anomalous results of the Apollo photos.

"Ad hominem" means "to the man" -- attacking the messenger instead of the message, which I did not do. You are right, however, that just saying it's tired doesn't make it so. Which is why I went on to explain in great detail why it was false.

simply having an atheist instigate it is not enough.... Hitler was Catholic

Whoa. Let's leave the goalposts in one place, shall we? We can't blame atheism for Stalin just because Stalin was atheist; however, World War II was all the pope's fault just because Hitler was Catholic. Yup -- works for me. Not.

the Holocaust had its roots in the 1500 year history of persecution of and hatred towards the Jews by the Christians.

The problem with your little theory is that half the victims of the Holocaust were non-Jews -- and mostly Catholic. In Poland alone three million Catholics were exterminated under the Nazi regime from September, 1939 through the end of the war. For nearly the first two years of its existence, Auschwitz was home exclusively to non-Jews (the first Jew died at Auswchitz in 1942 -- 21 months after it began operation); ultimately, more than 100,000 non-Jews were exterminated at Auswchitz alone.

It is true that nearly six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. It is equally true that more than five million non-Jews lost their lives. The man who, on August 22, 1939, mustered his stormtroopers to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent" was a racist, not a religious bigot.

As far as causation, I mean people who were killed in the name of religion, or whose deaths were a result of religious teachings

Well, which is it? "Killed in the name of religion" is a fairly clear target, but "a result of religious teachings" is way too self-servingly ambiguous to be of practical use, as you proceed to demonstrate.

The two world wars put together still killed less people than the various Crusades did, IIRC.

Sorry, but YDNRC (You Do Not Recall Correctly). Or, rather, you do not seem to recall at all, at least to judge by the complete lack of effort you make to back up your claims with anything resembling fact or figure.

Numbers for the two world wars are easy enough to come by: the Great War, 8.5 million military and perhaps 6 million civilian; the Second, 55 million; if you throw in the 26 million who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic (which I'm sure you'll think of some way to blame on religion) that swept the world in the aftermath of WWI, the total stands in the vicinity 96 million.

As for the Crusades, numbers are nearly impossible to guess, but the great British historian Wertham estimates the casualties at approximately 1 million. Pitirim Sorokin, on the other hand, estimated that Europeans lost some 435,000 men on all battlefields between 900 and 1450.

Even if we accept Wertham's higher numbers for the Crusades, still the two world wars did not simply kill more people than the Crusades, they exceeded the Crusades by nearly two full orders of magnitude. In fact, while both world wars made Matthew White's list (see here) of "(Possibly) The Ten Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other" (at #8 and #1, respectively), the Crusades aren't even on the scope.

Care to try again?

And as to the "Inquisition", if we presume you mean the Spanish Inquisition (which is the one most of those who don't know any better have in mind), Juan Antonio Llorente, General Secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, estimated that 31,912 people were executed between 1480-1808. Historian Will Durant, on the other hand, lends his weight to much lower numbers, in the vicinity of 2,000 burned between 1480 and 1504, and another 2,000 between 1504 and 1758, for a total of 4,000 burnings during the 254-year span of the Spanish Inquisition, or a rate of less than two a month. I'd be willing to bet more people died from lightning strikes during that same period than from inquisitorial persecutions.

You might also want to more closely examine the rest of White's top ten list (see link, above); of the ten worst atrocities humans have ever committed, according to White, only one (the last one, in fact) could be considered religiously motivated. Stalin alone beats the Thirty Years' War by nearly 3-to-1.

And how many of those deaths was religion a contributing cause of?

I begin to wonder if you even know the meaning of the word "cause".

How many people have died because of religious opposition to research into the treatment of various STDs? How many people died of plagues in Europe because of the Church suppression of knowledge? ... How much of the famine over the years has been due to religious opposition to birth control, and encouragement of out-of-control breeding?

Yes, "how many" and "how much", indeed. Tell you what -- when you can provide me with something more than the idle machinations of an overactive imagination, we'll talk. Until then, all you've managed to do is bandy about some wild, half-baked speculations without attempting even a modicum of factual support. As you said yourself, simply saying something don't make it true.

Yeah, I actually do these things. I'm working in air traffic control research and development. My degree is applied math, BS, and I write code as needed to solve problems. Here's my resumé as an example (I'm not actively looking, and - don't tell my employer - I actually LIKE what I'm doing).

Look for someone who programs to solve problems, not a person who programs for the sake of programming. There's a difference. You want someone who can do the Right Thing - a simple shell script if that's what's needed, or a processor efficient C program if that's instead what's needed. You want a mathematician/scientist first, programmer second.

Look for someone who loves to solve problems. You want someone who can take a fundamental question and can answer it all of the way from high level concept to bit manipulation. Accordingly you want someone who can ask all of the questions inbetween. You need someone who is essentially a systems engineer, where "system" isn't so much a computer system, it is a collection of related items or elements. (A dictionary definition of "system" will give a better idea.) The person should be able to effectively communicate with everyone from the executive managers through the scientists through the computer system administrators through the secretaries.

A few posters recommended older geek types. In some ways they're right, as long as the older geeks are current. Yet, I would also consider the younger geek types. The older ones might tend to have a deeper understanding of systems, and can draw from many more patterns. The younger ones might tend to just have more enthusiasm and drive, and a hunger to learn and improve.

Graham

Five years ago the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that oxygenated additives be added to gasoline. Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) was the compound of choice.

Typical government stupidity. MTBE is now leaking into the water table. It may be carcinogenic! Now the EPA is screaming about the very chemical it told gasoline companies to produce massively just five years ago.

Some track record government has.

At one point GCC was sued by Atari for trademark infringment over some of these games, so I'm not sure who actually owns the rights to them now. GCC no longer does games. We now make laser printers. As far as I know, GCC has no plans to do anything with the old games.

If you really want to know, let me know and I can ask the CEO about it all next time I see him.

Me, I want simple instructions on how to measure the power dissipation of the CPU's on *my* board. According to the dead 400W power supply, the draw is a bit more than it's supposed to be.

I believe that the consensus is that Australia is a continent.

blessings,

This is a good site for a listing of processor power dissipation figures:
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

Regards
Glenn Garrett
http://www.quietpc.com/

For the record, I've never had any stability problems with my Athlon system (In fact, it seems like the most stable system I've ever had!), but I've only had it for a few months... Note that I do not play games on this system, but I have stressed the processor (and to a lesser degree the memory subsystem) quite thoroughly and for (fairly) long periods of time. The only advice I can offer is to pay close attention to the motherboard's strengths, power supply, and RAM when purchasing. Not all motherboards with the same chipset are created equal. Also, chipset specs don't tell the whole story.

The AMD 770 chipset is going to be capable of dual processor SMP, with otherwise the same features as the forthcoming AMD 760 (266 DDR SDRAM support, 4xAGP, next-gen ATA 120?). The last I read, it would probably be available early third quarter for release with Mustang. However it will probably be a little while before motherboards using it are available. So, although you might see it as early as July, it will probably be later. I would guess they will probably try to have them available in time for "Back-to-School" in late August/early September.

In fact, was Gharlane active ca. 1995 on rec.arts.sf-written? Or ca. 1991-1992 on either r.a.sf-w or (if that was before the Great Renaming, though I don't think it was) it's predecessor? If so, I may have read his posts in the flesh. So to speak :)

Yup, that would have been the selfsame Gharlane. He's been around usenet approximatly forever. Had an amusing habit of setting the "Followup-To:" header on all of his posts to alt.dev.null, so that the unwary would be unable to follow up on his posts.

I still trade email with him from time to time, and he has a FAQ and a homepage of sorts, although the latter is basically a repository for his (exhaustive) Lensman FAQ.

> It's super hot all the time
Then you failed to use set6x86 to enable suspend-on-HLT. It's the one most important thing to do with Cyrix processors.
I have myself used 5x86, 6x86 and MediaGXm processors, and they were quite efficient; while they did have slower FPUs than Intel or AMD, the 5x86 at 90mhz actually ran most applications faster than the Pentium II (a brand new one at the time). The best point about Cyrix CPUs imho is that they're all optimized for 486 code. The 6x86 (a 4x25mhz version) was sensitive to overclocking, but ran fine at 4x30 - not at 4x33 though.

On this website there are some great quotes regarding Perl. My favourites are (Disclaimer: these are not mine, but I claim fair use. :-)) :

prhine: Advanced Perl Programming is a welcome mat on the Dark Path(tm)

prhine: D'you know anything about JavaPerl? As in how they combine the two?
Colin: Well. Imagine that Java is a dainty, well-dressed Victorian lady. And Perl is a big, grimy 10th century viking with a hard-on. JavaPerl is like a small room with a bed.