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It's Just the 'internet' Now?
This morning Wired News announced that 'web', 'net', and 'internet' will no longer be capitalized in their stories. Is this the next logical step after ditching 'e-mail' in favor of 'email' , or should the global computer network still be treated with a proper name? For more discussion, see Wikipedia, The Chicago Manual, and an article profiling Joseph Turow's de-capitalization efforts.
The reason we capitalise 'Internet' is so that we can distinguish between it and mere 'internets'. 'Internet', with a lower case 'i', refers to any set of interconnected networks. Whereas 'Internet', with a capital 'i' refers to "the specific, worldwide internet that is widely used to connect universities, government offices, companies and [...] private individuals". That quotation incidentally comes from Tanenbaum's textbook, "Computer Networks" (3rd edition, page 16) where he made the exact same distinction that I have just made.
It's always been capitalised and always will be AFIAC.
A lot of people joke around about this, but the truth of the matter is that he never claimed that he "invented it," only that he secured funding for it. This funding was instrumental in its creation. Really, this whole joke is just another example of a witty Republican smear that has no basis in fact.
o re _internet/index.html
http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/g
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
It's like the ocean. The ocean is big, powerful, and impressive, and we owe our existence to it, but even still, we don't call it the Ocean, merely the ocean.
Unless, of course, you might actually want refer to a *specific* ocean -- say, the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, etc. Otherwise, you make it sound as if there's just one.
(Speaking as a Wikipedia admin) - god, oh god, why did you link to the *TALK* page and not the article? Sigh...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'll never understand why this pathetic lameness is still considered funny for so long after the Republicans started exaggerating what Gore actually said. Is it some sort of self-mocking humor by the people dumb enough to repeat it?
With most of the words in question, I don't see the point in having the first letter capitalized, such as email, web, net (wich is slang for Internet), but with Internet vs. internet, I thought there was a difference between the 2, where internet refers an "inter-network (a link between networks which has not been tied to The Internet), and Internet refers to the "net".
Wow, you've been thoroughly commercialized. Brand names aren't the only things capitalized in English.
We refer to it as the Internet. Corporations have intranets. The capitalization conveys meaning. Wired's usage is wrong.
Correctimundo, my friend. I was wondering why nobody made this point: any routed network using the Internet Protocol is an internet. The first private or restricted internets like MILnet were around long before the publicly-facing portion of the ARPAnet expanded into the Internet.
The Internet was never a brand name but the capital I Internet is used to differentiate between the global Internet and other internetworks or internets. There's more than one internet but only one Internet.
Wikipedia has a good write-up at the top of its entry for Internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
and I appreciate the manner in which it addresses the "popular parlance" for "internet" in terms of the commonly used services on the Internet, e.g. "A system running internet services." (my example, based on Wikipedia's narrative).
There is also a good discussion of Capitonyms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitonym
I think Wikipedia got it right.
I thought the point was that my 192.168.1.0/24 behind my linksys access point is "an internet". The 66.35.250.0/24 slashdot is on is "an internet" (unlike mine, a publicly routeable one). An internet is any network that uses, surprise surprise, the "internet protocol".
The largest internet, the one consisiting of all publicly routeable internets, was (until today at least) called "the Internet". Like most proper nounse, it is (was) capitalized.
All's true that is mistrusted
Me = democrat = likes Gore + capable of making a joke next time I will put the smiley face so it is obvious...
Why would you look to Wired for questions about language? That's what dictionaries are for! If you want to know if a word should be capitalized or not, look to a dictionary like OED or Merriam-Webster. Incidentally, Merriam-Webster lists internet with a capital "I."
-Rich
Alright punks - the reason I posted the link is so someone MIGHT read the damned thing. I meant it as a joke, but people want to make it personal now. Let me give a quote I am accused of not having:
"The one thing that sustained him? 'The thought that some day I would come home and invent the Internet.'"
Goes on...
" 'I was pretty tired when I made that comment because I had been up very late the night before inventing the camcorder,' Gore told the Democratic National Committee on Saturday."
He admitted to it in front of the fucking DNC so do I still not have a source?
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
Capitalization is determined by whether or not something is a proper noun, not by whether it is a brand name. The Internet is a proper noun, as opposed to "the internet", which would refer to, say, one's private corporate internet.
If you'd like other examples: nobody owns the "Pacific Ocean", but because there is only one "Pacific Ocean" (despite being many oceans that could be called pacific) we capitalize it. There are many moons, but only one Moon. There are many presidents, but President as a title is capitalized, because it is used as a proper noun.
The proper way to refer to Google is "Google" when using the term as a noun -- it is a proper noun that refers to a company. The *verb* "google", meaning "to search for on Google", is not capitalized.
May we never see th
Actually, there are such creatures, exactly as you suggest. The American and allied military and intelligence agencies run a SECRET-level internet called SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router NETwork) and a TOP SECRET-level one called JDISS (Joint Deployable Intelligence Support System). They're completely separate from the Internet (the publicly accessible one), but they're sprawling, worldwide internets connecting tens of thousands of machines.
Chris
Has noone RTFA? The submitter had the email thing backwards, wired is now using e-mail, precisely because the 'e' is a contraction for electronic, and thus a hyphen is needed to show that letter were omitted.
The abbreviation 'i.e.' does NOT mean 'for example.' If you want 'for example', use 'e.g.'
The former is an abbreviation for the latin 'id est', which means 'that is'. It's a rephrasing of what came before.
Your use is probably not strictly wrong, as reading it with 'that is' works, just 'e.g.' ('exempli grati') would work better.
1) Associated Press is a business. Reuters, for example, has its own style guide and it doesn not have to conform, in any way, to its competitor AP.
2) It has also been tradition, from periodical to periodical, to allow for institutional style. The comma choices are one example, as many periodicals choose to list things in an "A, B and C" format, whereas traditional periodicals still prefer the traditional "A,B, and C." And then there are more formal choices such as, for example, The New York Times would run an article that read "Mr Cycline3's view is publishers should use the AP standard" as opposed to most other papers, Time, etc. that would read "Cycline3's view..."
It always comes down to the publisher and his or her choices for the periodical's style. While most may follow AP's style guide, there is nothing dictating that it has to be followed by all who publish.
There are scores of unique things which don't have their names capitalized. The earth. The sun. The internet is now one of those things. Initially, it was named the Internet because it wasn't unique. "Internet" was only capitalized in order to differentiate it from other large internetworks of computers back in the early days. Due to the fact that "the internet" itself has become the de facto wide scale global network, relegating the other networks to obscurity or supplanting them entirely, capitalization is unnecessary. The vast size of the internet has essentially given it "ownership" of the word. It is the internet now.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
MP3s is a good example. "MP3" is not a word. It is not even an acronym, since it has no discernible vowels and the "3" is clearly not a pronounceable letter. Furthermore, it does not have a meaningful plural form: MP3s would presumably be pronounced "em pee three ess", but the actual pronunciation "em pee threes" seems to suggest that there are a set of threes of the MP variety.
A really stuffy way of indicating what is intended would be to write "MP3"s, to indicate that the thing in quotes is actually a quotation of informal speech. So it is quite reasonable to put a less ostentatious punctuation mark to say "Hey, this is a complete bastardisation of English, but this is what people are using."
Personally, I think that "MP3 files" is clearer and less offensive to us grammar Nazis, but newspapers have to reflect real world usage.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"Intranet" is meaningless marketspeak which usually applies to a Web site.
The technical term "internet" applies to a collection of "networked networks".
Genius.
Yes, they are, by definition.
eg TLD, TCP, PSTN, etc
Those are not acronyms. They are initialisms.
An internet is any connected series of networks. The Internet is the globally connnected system that we are currently using.
"Intranet" is meaningless marketspeak which usually applies to a Web site.
The technical term "internet" applies to a collection of "networked networks".
Genius.
Apparently you haven't made it into the real world yet. Intra means within. Inter means between. You have interstate roads (crossing boundaries) and intrastate roads (stay within the state). A corporations network that is not open to the public is an intranet. It is used only within (intra) the company.
intranet is most certainly not meaningless marketspeak.
You do in German :-)
If you think that's wrong, if you agree with Wired (excuse me, wired) magazine, consider this:
"ship" is a generic term, therefore we should not capitalize the names of ships. Call it the u.s.s. enterprise, then.
"planet" is a generic term. Call this place earth.
"country" and "nation" and "city" are generic terms. Call them the athens olympics.
Hell (i mean, hell), let's just eliminate uppercase altogether.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Vinton Cerf (generally acknowledged as the father of the Internet):
More here: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wigginNow, in Andrew Tanembaum's "Computer Networks, Third Edition" is an interesting part in chapter one that says:
(...) A collection of interconnected networks is called an internetwork or just internet.
(Here goes a paragraph explainin what a WAN is, snipped for brevity)
To avoid confusion, please note that the word "internet" will always be used in this book in a generic sense. In contrastm the Internet (note uppercase I) means a specific worldwide internet that is widely used to connect universities, government offices (....)
So there IS a reason to capitalize "Internet". Namely to indicate it is the internet we all know, instead of a minor internet somewhere else.
These two terms are also defined in RFC-1983 (Internet users' glossary), as defined in Tanembaum's book, with that distinction especially indicated. Sure, RFC-1983 is marked as "Informational", but it's still a RFC, and it shows a valid reason for the capitalization.
Clearly someone at Wired did not do the necesary research.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Your problem is that you think people mean it in a generic sense. If I invented the refrigerator and built a huge one called the Regrigerator then it would be a proper noun. Yes, other people could build refrigerators but if you want to speak about the big one you say the Refrigerator. It's a name... that's the name they gave it more than twenty years ago. It just also happens to be a generic term for the kind of thing it is. Kind of like windows vs. Windows, john vs. John apple vs. Apple. They mean different things -- the capital letter is there for a reason.
"(a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales)"
.beat system has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever come across (and Sega was even stupider for implementing it in PSO!).
I swear, the whole
We already have a very nice time standard for the internet. It's called "Coordinated Universal Time" or UTC for short (because the acronym UTC confuses speakers of all languages equally). The internet even has its own protocol for distributing UTC to various machines. The only problem one might have with UTC is the possibility of leap seconds cropping up every now and then, but all you need to do is poll your favorite NTP server and your clock will be back on track.
But Swatch has to go and break things for the sole purpose of trying to be "cool."
First off, they're stupid enough to use the length of a mean solar day as their standard, which means they inherit the problems of UTC. They could have tried some different standard, something that made their "beat" system an actual alternative to UTC instead of simply dressing it up in a new set of clothes, but that might have resembled innovation too much. The only difference now is that we talk about leap beats instead of leap seconds.
Then they go off and break the Prime Meridian. Ever since Harrison started to build his little trinkets (now he could build a watch!) over two centuries ago just about everybody has been using the line of longitude passing through Greenwich, England. But no, God forbid they conform to anything vaguely resembling a standard, they have to pick their own meridian. Continuing with their theme of "just dress up UTC," they don't actually pick the meridian going through Swatch headquarters, they pick the nearest multiple of 15 degrees from the Greenwich Meridian.
But the real flaw in the system, the one that drives the final nail in the coffin of this God-awful idea that can serve as a symbol of the dot-com bubble all too well, was the idea of dividing the day into an even 1000 "beats." Yay. 1000. A nice round number. It's just like SI. Except we already have SI!!!. And the SI unit of time is not the mean solar day, it is the second! Everything is seconds! 60 seconds in a minute! 3600 seconds in an hour! 86,400 seconds in an SI day! And now we have 86.4 seconds in a beat? Yay! We now have the first man-made unit of time that isn't an integer number of seconds! At a time when people such as myself catch hell from self-styled "metric" zealots for measuring things in units of 0.3048 m and 0.45359237 kg, Swatch has now developed a system of measuring time that everybody can agree is fucked up!
Swatch could have done something neat. They could have been constructively different instead of just being different in an effort to be "cool" (which they apparently also failed miserably at). How about a system of time that does nothing but count off integer seconds? No minutes, hours, days or years, just seconds. They pick some arbitrary time to start counting from (say, 2000 January 1 00:00:00 UTC or 1999 December 31 12:00:00 UTC, since "Y2K" was so freakin' trendy at the time) and have a watch that tells you how many hectoseconds it's been since then (they could even call them "beats" instead). It'd be simple, it'd be different, and it'd have absolutely nothing to do with "time in the real world" (since so few people are able to divide any given integer by 864 in their heads). And it'd have an advantage over all the other time standards widely used today in that it is purely SI (UTC has that leap-second fudge factor to add into TAI, and even the TAI put out by BIPM ticks off an MJD every 86,400 s). The only problem I'd have with it then is the fact that the WWVB signal doesn't carry information on the current offset between UTC and TAI (and NTP does even less), which would mean having to put the TAI offset into my radio-controlled watch by hand, but I'd put up with it for the niftiness factor alone.
Does Swatch even offer a radio-controlled watch, or is keeping accurate time not important enough a feature to put into one of their watches?
It's DARPA's, not Darpa's--since this whole discussion is pathetically pedantic.
And Wired has it wrong, but they wrote one of the earliest and best authoritative style manuals for the Internet, so it makes sense to hear them out.
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Too many errors in one post (make fewer).