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Examining Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight
Ton writes "Apple has published a discussion of Spotlight, the radical systemwide search technology that will be part of Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'. The really interesting part is that metadata will be playing a big role in Spotlight while just a few years ago people were afraid metadata in Mac OS X was going the way of the dodo."
Or should it be co-operative since it's a mac thread
Twentieth century called, they want they trolls back.
What if I want to find files from male colleagues?
modded funny, but very much true. the method of generically referring to an individual in a gender neutral way is using the male form ("he", "his"). this is true for many other languages as well. in fact, in languages that are more particular about genders of objects, a group of a thousand females and one male is still referred to in the masculine form. using the feminine form implies the exclusion of males from discussion (as the parent suggested). the author merely shows his (or her, i haven't bothered to check, thus i can safely use "his") ignorance of the language by an assinine attempt at 'equality'. having used a female as the subject of an example would have been just fine and would have satisfied the author's pc boner. having the female form in a neutral sentence is just foolish.
p.s.
no, you are not clever in pointing out that i did not properly capitalize anything in this post.
what you said was commonly held to be true, say, 25 years ago. more recently, however, the realization that there is no semantic or syntactic reason that "he" can be inclusive and "she" cannot has changed that. please remember that languages (except dead ones) are evolving things. this deficiency in our language, in fact, is a product of that evolution: we once had gender-neutral second-person-singular pronouns in english, but they fell out of use. "she" was a (comparatively) late addition to the language.
looking at linguistic history, the fact that "he" got the widespread use as a gender-neutral pronoun and "she" didn't reflects the fact that "scholarly" control of the english language was firmly in the hands of men: if nothing else, they ran the universities and printing presses.
various people aware of this problem use a range of tactics for addressing it. there's a few small movements to, effectively, make up words for the missing gender-neutral pronouns. this tends to sound "silly", at least for the first hundred years or so. the most common approach is to use "they", "their", &c, but this actually introduces a grammar conflict, and most scholarly and "benchmark" (folks like the NY Times) sources object to this solution. using "he" and "she" interchangeably for this purpose is sub-optimal, but has the benefit of being an easier "sell" (as evidenced by its presence in mainstream "benchmark" sources), not arbitrarily/artificially introducing new words, and not altering the syntactic value of any existing words.
also, your comparison to languages without gender-neutral nouns or pronouns is not useful. their evolution and history are very different from that of english. in such languages, the lack of gender-neutral nouns makes the lack of gender-neutral pronouns kinda moot.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.