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Water Cooling an Xbox 360
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has done it once again. They have an article running down the process of water cooling an Xbox 360, and with surprising effectiveness and remarkable styling." From the article: "We had plans to water cool an Xbox 360 for over a year now. Little did we know that not only will this water cooling project be more fun than the original, but it may even be practical. Imagine that. With reports of heat related issues and a heat sink that can get almost too hot to touch after marathon gaming sessions, the Xbox 360 water cooling project now had a sense of purpose. We bought a retail Xbox 360 specifically for this project. The minute we got it back to the [H] labs we tore into it and, with a little help from the fine folks at Koolance, we have put together a water cooling solution that will handle anything the Xbox 360 can throw at it and literally knock your socks off." Actual implimentation with hand-holding. Hexus.net was discussing a kit to do this a few days ago.
They used all Koolance products throughout, with no discussion at all about why they used those particular parts when several other better ones are available. This really doesn't seem that useful anyway unless you pipe the water through the power supply. Even the most intrepid of the PC water cooling community are wary of doing that.
Well I look at it like they did this for a few reasons.
1) For people who already bought an XBox 360 and cannot wait for MS to "fix the problem"
2) It's a cool thing to do.
3) Third parties can see that watercooling an XBox 360 is possible and will release kits that people can use.
But yes in a perfect world MS should fix the problem, it's not 100% guaranteed that they will though. Power to the people.
If what you're doing doesn't qualify as such, then I don't know what does.
I'm not saying that usage of the word "literally" is wrong because the dictionary says it is. I'm saying it's wrong because it's opposite of the common usage. Point is, the entire value of language is its commonality. Traditional prescriptivism is railing against uses of "ain't" not in place of "am not", or the splitting of infinitives. "Incorrect" usages like that do not cause ambiguity, they're simply nitpicks by absolutists.
Using the word "literally" to add emphasis is common usage,
Hogwash. It's a common error, but common usage is still primarily the correct way.
and given that you understood clearly the intent of the author, it seems that it was an adequate choice of words.
Just because an error is common doesn't make it not an error. My recognition of the error doesn't make it not an error. There is a descriptive definition of the word as we, the english speaking public, use it, and it isn't for emphasis. See, "descriptivists" can be as bad as prescriptivists when they defend every illiterate dumbfuck's utter misuse of a word. "Literally knock your socks off" is an easy one to spot as wrong because there does not exist anything that literally knocks off socks. But what if they said "literally burning down the house", intending it as emphasis? Pretty fucking ambiguous. It's fucking wrong because "literally" has a specific common usage that doesn't just vanish because some crackhead with a web site doesn't know how the rest of us use it.
And if I'm not mistaken, we use the American punctuation rules on slashdot, so put those commas back behind those quotation marks.
I use "programming" punctuation rules, i.e. if the fragment quoted didn't have punctuation originally, then the period at the end of my sentence has no business weaseling its way into that character string as it's part of MY words, not THEIRS. It doesn't matter, though. The important thing is that no meaning is lost.
I probably haven't convinced you, but at least I hope you see that prescription is ultimately a waste of time.
Oh, indeed I accept that trying to stem the tide of illiteracy is pointless.
I just don't agree that I'm being prescriptive.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.