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Car Hits Utility Pole, Takes Out EC2 Datacenter
1sockchuck writes "An Amazon cloud computing data center lost power Tuesday when a vehicle struck a nearby utility pole. When utility power was lost, a transfer switch in the data center failed to properly manage the shift to backup power. Amazon said a "small number" of EC2 customers lost service for about an hour, but the downtime followed three power outages last week at data centers supporting EC2 customers. Tuesday's incident is reminiscent of a 2007 outage at a Dallas data center when a truck crash took out a power transformer."
In Soviet Russia, utility pole hits YOU!
Um.... Whooosh?
Using 'grammar' as a verb is one of those linguistics jokes I love. (Actually, I love all linguistics jokes.) My usual explanation for when I've done a grammar edit on my posts (on forums which support it) is 'Edit: I'm don't grammar'.
A key clue to this being a joke is the use of the word 'fail' which these days is often associated with LOLcats. Those damn cats have raised the use of deliberately bad grammar to an artform in and of itself.
This is why I long ago resolved to never, ever, ever correct someone else's grammar on slashdot. The risk in inadvertently failing to grammar is unacceptable.
Here's a wacky thing: the plural form of someone else is actually someone's else which I only discovered one day when the the spell checker kept underlining else's. I'm not correcting you, by the way. My own grammar and spelling are atrocious, so I nearly always fail to grammar. I just thought I'd point out an oddity of the language in case anyone else found it humorous.
I think automated spell checking is a poor way to learn grammar and that such tools are frequently wrong.
A quick review makes me suspect that the correct possessive form is still someone else's. (Sources: a dictionary, a writing guide, and a google test)
You are correct that a semicolon is inappropriate here. But
it's improper to begin a sentence with a conjunction
is pure bullshit, the sort of arbitrary rule magicked up by English teachers which has frustrated people what speak good English but feel that a language exists for the purposes of communicators, not bureaucrats.
And to quote the oft-cited New Fowler's, "There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with And, but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. An initial And is a useful aid to writers as the narrative continues."