This article is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing that has ever been published on the Internet, ever. Did anyone there notice that the Beethoven MP3s were FREE but the iTunes songs cost US$0.99each, you have to have iTunes (a multi-MB download itself) to get them, you have to have a credit card and sign up with Apple to get them, the iTMS service is only available in a handful of countries, *and* they have playback restrictions?
Compare that to the Beethoven MP3s which were freely available to anyone on the planet with Internet access, will play on any personal computer made in the last 5 years and countless other devices, and require nothing more than visiting a website and clicking a link. Perhaps, just perhaps, there were more forces at work here than just popularity. Just a thought.
"As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark."
Sorry, but that's a pretty damn weak argument. I've got as much crap as the next geek, but few people have houses that are unnavigable when the lights are out. If you're smart enough* to think "I'll keep this traditional phone in case the power goes out" then you're probably smart enough to make sure it's vaguely accessible in bad conditions. My office is a sty, but I make sure there's a clean path from the door to the phone on the desk. Many people have them in even better locations, like nightstands and kitchen walls.
Besides, a wired phone is a great way to pass the time when the power's out, and it doesn't cost you minutes or precious battery time.
My choice was equally simple: $20/mo for a landline I barely use, rock-solid phone system, haven't called the phone company since the day they installed it except for the time I dug through the line, versus $25+ for a less reliable system with features (voicemail, long distance) I don't need. To each his own.
* many people, especially if born after ~1985, aren't even aware that traditional phones work when the power is out.
I used to hit every Apple ][ in the lab with 10 flash 20 print " (40 spaces) " 30 goto 20
For those that don't know, flash:basic::blink:netscape. Basically, it made every screen in the lab (a dozen computers arranged in a 'u' so you could see them all at once) alternate between all black and all white at about 1Hz... and all out of sync, of course.
One of many favorite memories. Another was making the computers nonfunctional. To simulate a prompt that actually does nothing: 10 input "]"a$ 20 print 30 goto 10
result: would print ]_ (cursor) take whatever input they wanted print a blank line and draw another prompt. until you say 'run' and nothing happens, you won't know it's ignoring you.:-) (No, I never cost anyone hours of work this way. Most people would do an output-producing command pretty quick, then control-C would kill the fake prompt.)
*ahem* I cut my teeth using Photoshop 3 on a 40 MHz 68k Quadra with 24 MB RAM. Yes, Photoshop CS 2 might be a shade slow on a 1.25 GHz Mini compared to a dual-2.7 GHz G5, but I assure you that it will run, and be completely usable... just as it is on my Mini at home and my G3/800 iBook. Besides, he's talking about scripting and automating... click a few buttons and let it run overnight. No big deal.
Now, for the original question: do you have your own portable Mac? Demonstrate to your boss that everything he needs can be done on this platform, then make him buy a friggin' Mini. I could see a lone photographer starting out not wanting to get an extra machine, but for crying out loud, he's got PHOTOGRAPHERS, plural, you said, taking zillions of pics a year. He should not blink at $600 for a miracle box.
Fucking lying fuckers. And the same thing never happened to Windows?!?!? That's just one of a million examples, as we all know, and for crying out loud, it's a patch from MS that's causing the problem in that one.
1) System Preferences -> Security-> [x] Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screensaver
2) System Preferences -> Screen Saver -> Hot Corners. Set one to 'Start Screen Saver' (I have that in the bottom left, and bottom right is 'disable screen saver', which I think were the old (AfterDark) conventions.)
Now: wanna lock your computer? throw the mouse into a corner. The screensaver will come on and you need a password to return to the desktop. Voila--locked! Once you start using it, you'll find it's even easier and faster than c-a-d+enter/space. Windows-L (in XP only) is as fast but requires accuracy on the keyboard. The Mac way requires you to push the mouse any distance in a general direction. Put those mile wide croners to use!
As nicely as I can say this: yes, it's just you. Millions of people want Apple computers, in a laptop configuration, and the cheaper the better. Stereotypes are not always accurate, and every Apple customer isn't a rich NYC-based loft-dwelling graphic designer. Many (myself included) are more than happy to pay $500. (12" iBook: $999, 12" PB: $1599.) What the PowerBook has, many people don't need. There's nothing "half" about my iBook--it does everything I want a portable to do. And, as it happens, I prefer the white plastic to aluminum, so that's a bonus for me.
probably the easiest is to convince IT that the people you want to conference with are trustworthy and get them VPN access. Once they're in, you can do whatever you want.
"Zeta will succede or fail on the strength of its multimedia features. period."
I guarantee it will fail, just like it did before. As a Be fan (bought R3 for Intel as soon as it came out, then R4 and 4.5; never bothered with 5 because I realized right away "This is really cool. Too bad there's not a thing I can do with it.") it pains me to say this, but if they couldn't make a dent in 1998, they don't have a prayer today. MS Windows and Mac OS both have multiprocessor support, both ship with video editing apps, and hardware is fast enough that a cruft-free OS is not the selling point it once was. Why would anyone, other than an enthusiast or hobbyist, buy this?
Yes, I loved how quickly it booted. Yes, I loved watching 5 movies playing faster than 1x because I had 'caps lock' pressed when I launched them... on a P150. (R3 only.) Yes, 3DSound was great fun to play with but they didn't ship it until R4.5, IIRC, and it would crash like mad. Without Photoshop or Netscape I had no reason to run it then, and a cool platform to run Firefox is not that compelling today.
Agreed. I was a big fan of Be, just had no practical reason to use it. Gotta love a box that booted 10-15 seconds after POST. Everything else was fast. Amazing what you can do when you throw away decades of legacy crap. (And, inevitably, a bit sad what you lose.) I never had enough files on it to make use of the cool filesystem, but the right-click navigation was awesome and super-obvious to use.* I wonder if Zeta is as fast as Be was on, say, a classic Pentium 150 with 32 MB? I also wonder if Zeta has the option of (I think) control-alt clicking on the start menu (tracker button? I forget its name) and setting the theme (and much behavior) to Win98? If so, it might be worth looking at.
That's one of the downsides of Be--as good as it was that things were different, it was bad that they had to throw away some things just because they *had* to be different. Taskbar and start menu (excuse my terms) as two overlapping squares in the top-right corner? WTF was that about?!?!?
* for those who never saw it, you could right-click on a file on your desktop and, in addition to the standard things--open, delete, etc.--were three options: copy to, move to, create link in. Select one of those, and it would create cascading dropdowns of your whole filesystem so you could pick your destination. Sorry, can't find any screenies. Trust me: it was cool.
If it's DRM'ed 9 ways from Sunday then I maybe wouldn't. If it's just a Macintosh with an Intel chip, though, why the hell not? 9 out of 10 blindfolded lab rats can't tell the difference between PPC and x86 without cracking the case. It's not like free-vs.-non-free, (DRM aside, which they could have done with PPC if they really wanted to) it's just one vendor's chip or another. Unless you're an irrational fanboy, it shouldn't matter if it's PPC, Intel, AMD, SPARC, silicon, diamond, neural net, or whatever. It's just a chip in a box you like, running an OS you like, running the apps you like.
Re:After having a Tivo for about five years now...
on
Women Control the DVR
·
· Score: 1
Yup... I've got two 120 GB drives in my TiVo, probably 75% full of chick movies, 20% things we both like, and less than ten shows just for me.
Re:After having a Tivo for about five years now...
on
Women Control the DVR
·
· Score: 1
"The only way I can watch one of my shows on Tivo is to pick the recording that runs somewhere between 2am and 5am..."
They just posted today that they sold their 500,000,000th song. They might not be 'creating' content like a division of Sony, but if selling a half-billion songs isn't 'content providing', I don't know what is. Just because they're providing content to help hardware sales doesn't mean they aren't providing content. I mean, why do you think Sony got into the game in the first place?
For pictures: Gallery. Super-easy to use, pretty easy to set up, OSS, and requires a couple OSS (I think) libs (ImageMagick or NetBPM.) Makes nice galleries, good looking thumbnails, and any user (if you allow it) can add comments to pictures.
For content, including calendar: GeekLog. Pretty easy to use (the user model throws me a bit but I haven't spent much time with it since I'm the only user), works a lot like Slashdot (stories, comments, etc.), looks a lot like Slashdot (sections, polls, etc., but gorgeous; I fell in love with the 'clean' theme) and has integration with Gallery. (Or maybe Gallery offers integration with GeekLog. I forget. One or the other, I know it's there, I just haven't used it.) And GeekLog was originally designed to be the weblog for a security site, so it's pretty good in that regard. My GeekLog-backed site is here with the aforementioned 'clean' theme. (Note also that GeekLog ships with only one theme, so even Clean--which used to be a stock theme--has to be downloaded separately.) Look around for tips--many sites (mine included) start off with "how I made this site" as the first story.
Or, if you don't mind having your eggs in someone else's free-as-in-beer basket, Yahoo's services, as others have mentioned, are pretty sweet and easy-to-use, not to mention the availability and bandwidth. (Though they still put ads in the groups, AFAIK.)
If the point of your trip is to see it take off--i.e., watch it sit on the ground, then lift off--then you have little choice but to go all the way out there and sit in traffic and/or sit around for hours waiting for traffic to clear. (I once spent about 3 hours coming home from a 1am launch and it's usually an hour trip.)
If I were to try to see tomorrow's launch from anywhere close, I'd probably leave Orlando at noon, sit in traffic the whole time, then get home at 8. And remember two things: 1) there might be so much traffic that you wind up just pulling over to see it, and 2) if the launch doesn't happen, you've gotta sit through all that traffic for nothing.
OTOH, if you just happen to be in the state at the time of launch and are happy to see it go up from anywhere, you can see it from miles away. I live in Orlando (~50 miles away) and if you're anywhere in town with a clear view of the eastern sky you can spend a solid minute or more watching this bright flare come into view and then disappear. (It's not like looking at a planet or comet--you won't miss it, even in the middle of the day.) You won't see the vehicle but you'll see a very bright spot in the sky and it'll show up fine in pics on or video.
Summary: unless you're really, really into this and willing to dedicate a day to it, just look in the direction of KSC at the time of launch.
So, yet another Generation Y-er (OMG! 3 'no carrier' jokes in the first paragraph! U R TEH FUNNYMAN!!!!!11one) posts yet another mindless rant about how Windows sucks. We hear how great his PSP is, how well Apple is doing with the iPod (thank you, Captain Obvious!) and how OS X apps are infinitely superior to Windows apps.
The twin barbs of his attack: Dashboard (which has already been discussed to death; let's just say that as many people hate it as love it) and an application called "Comic Life", which this grizzled veteran of computing (look at the picture) thinks "is likely to drive even the most die-hard Windows user to switch to OS X." Yeah: I'm gonna dump my whole platform to make my digital pictures cuter. Uh-huh. I'm surprised he didn't sneak a 'BSOD' joke into his rant or spell Windows with 'BL' or a dollar sign.
One mark in his favor: clearly, he is an expert in boring and uninspired. A lame blog post about Windows software sucking? Wow. Next.
"It baffles me that a culture so obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy can demonstrate such little attention to detail when it comes to communicating that knowledge with others..."
Communication is just another area of knowledge. Techs always talk about working with doctors and lawyers who are very smart but are unable to grasp the simplest computer concepts. Just as many computer techs might not know much about their cars, or gardening, or a million other things, they might not know much about grammar. Being able to code != being able to write English. That's all.
(The above is the basic answer to the question. Below is just more detail.)
Most of the difficulty comes from the fact that spoken words sound different than the way they are written. The only way I can remember your example of 'definitely' is to break it down--de, finite, ly. 'Vocally' is spelled like it sounds but 'logically' is pronounced 'logicly'. And of course it's not just spelling. You mentioned 'could of.' It's the same with my personal pet peeve, 'try and.' How we speak is different from how we write. (Or is that 'different than'? Let's see, imagine it as a verb--A differs from B. Yup, the correct choice is 'different from.')
However, some other rules are just plain arbitrary. It's one thing to keep "their, they're, there" straight, another altogether to remember it's/its. I mean, that's just plain arbitrary--the rules of possession and contraction both say to use an apostrophe, but someone decided that the two words should look different, so they flipped a coin.
And that's just spelling. Grammar is the same way. Some things just don't sound right. I should say "Joe is taller than I" instead of "Joe is taller than me" because what I'm really saying is "Joe is taller than I am (tall)." But that just sounds crappy. As does "It is I." You're supposed to use the nominative form after the verb "to be" but "It's me" just sounds so much better.
All this comes from the fact that, unlike C or any other computer language that was invented and has to compile, human language is a natural thing--people started communicating, *then* they tried to wrap rules around the language. Because it is based on a natural thing, there will always be exceptions to rules. No sense mentioning our miserable excuse for a language is a horrible mishmash of Latin vocabulary, German grammar, and a couple dozen other things.
For anyone wishing to learn about English, I highly recommend studying another language. I learned more about English in my first semester of high school Spanish than I had ever learned in all previous English classes combined. I mean, I'm sure I was *taught* everything along the way, but since I naturally write and talk acceptably, it never really stuck. Learning how to operate another language was a steady stream of learning a rule about Spanish and then realizing, "OK, so the correxponding rule in English is..." Seriously, I didn't know what an infinitive or gerund was until I learned what they were while taking Spanish.
Slashdot Mirror
"...but make one little syntax error and you can lose your ass."
Like yelling "Oh, (not your wife's name)!" at the wrong moment?
Submitted here:
2 890,00.html
Re: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,153
This article is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing that has ever been published on the Internet, ever. Did anyone there notice that the Beethoven MP3s were FREE but the iTunes songs cost US$0.99each, you have to have iTunes (a multi-MB download itself) to get them, you have to have a credit card and sign up with Apple to get them, the iTMS service is only available in a handful of countries, *and* they have playback restrictions?
Compare that to the Beethoven MP3s which were freely available to anyone on the planet with Internet access, will play on any personal computer made in the last 5 years and countless other devices, and require nothing more than visiting a website and clicking a link. Perhaps, just perhaps, there were more forces at work here than just popularity. Just a thought.
"As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark."
Sorry, but that's a pretty damn weak argument. I've got as much crap as the next geek, but few people have houses that are unnavigable when the lights are out. If you're smart enough* to think "I'll keep this traditional phone in case the power goes out" then you're probably smart enough to make sure it's vaguely accessible in bad conditions. My office is a sty, but I make sure there's a clean path from the door to the phone on the desk. Many people have them in even better locations, like nightstands and kitchen walls.
Besides, a wired phone is a great way to pass the time when the power's out, and it doesn't cost you minutes or precious battery time.
My choice was equally simple: $20/mo for a landline I barely use, rock-solid phone system, haven't called the phone company since the day they installed it except for the time I dug through the line, versus $25+ for a less reliable system with features (voicemail, long distance) I don't need. To each his own.
* many people, especially if born after ~1985, aren't even aware that traditional phones work when the power is out.
I used to hit every Apple ][ in the lab with
:-) (No, I never cost anyone hours of work this way. Most people would do an output-producing command pretty quick, then control-C would kill the fake prompt.)
10 flash
20 print " (40 spaces) "
30 goto 20
For those that don't know, flash:basic::blink:netscape. Basically, it made every screen in the lab (a dozen computers arranged in a 'u' so you could see them all at once) alternate between all black and all white at about 1Hz... and all out of sync, of course.
One of many favorite memories. Another was making the computers nonfunctional. To simulate a prompt that actually does nothing:
10 input "]"a$
20 print
30 goto 10
result: would print
]_ (cursor)
take whatever input they wanted
print a blank line
and draw another prompt. until you say 'run' and nothing happens, you won't know it's ignoring you.
*ahem* I cut my teeth using Photoshop 3 on a 40 MHz 68k Quadra with 24 MB RAM. Yes, Photoshop CS 2 might be a shade slow on a 1.25 GHz Mini compared to a dual-2.7 GHz G5, but I assure you that it will run, and be completely usable... just as it is on my Mini at home and my G3/800 iBook. Besides, he's talking about scripting and automating... click a few buttons and let it run overnight. No big deal.
Now, for the original question: do you have your own portable Mac? Demonstrate to your boss that everything he needs can be done on this platform, then make him buy a friggin' Mini. I could see a lone photographer starting out not wanting to get an extra machine, but for crying out loud, he's got PHOTOGRAPHERS, plural, you said, taking zillions of pics a year. He should not blink at $600 for a miracle box.
Fucking lying fuckers. And the same thing never happened to Windows?!?!? That's just one of a million examples, as we all know, and for crying out loud, it's a patch from MS that's causing the problem in that one.
Which is where 'trustworthy' comes into play.
1) System Preferences -> Security-> [x] Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screensaver
2) System Preferences -> Screen Saver -> Hot Corners. Set one to 'Start Screen Saver' (I have that in the bottom left, and bottom right is 'disable screen saver', which I think were the old (AfterDark) conventions.)
Now: wanna lock your computer? throw the mouse into a corner. The screensaver will come on and you need a password to return to the desktop. Voila--locked! Once you start using it, you'll find it's even easier and faster than c-a-d+enter/space. Windows-L (in XP only) is as fast but requires accuracy on the keyboard. The Mac way requires you to push the mouse any distance in a general direction. Put those mile wide croners to use!
As nicely as I can say this: yes, it's just you. Millions of people want Apple computers, in a laptop configuration, and the cheaper the better. Stereotypes are not always accurate, and every Apple customer isn't a rich NYC-based loft-dwelling graphic designer. Many (myself included) are more than happy to pay $500. (12" iBook: $999, 12" PB: $1599.) What the PowerBook has, many people don't need. There's nothing "half" about my iBook--it does everything I want a portable to do. And, as it happens, I prefer the white plastic to aluminum, so that's a bonus for me.
probably the easiest is to convince IT that the people you want to conference with are trustworthy and get them VPN access. Once they're in, you can do whatever you want.
Don't tell this guy!
"...a way for yT to actually succede in the marketplace: OEM deals."
Are you kidding? That was tried before and didn't work out. At all.
"Zeta will succede or fail on the strength of its multimedia features. period."
I guarantee it will fail, just like it did before. As a Be fan (bought R3 for Intel as soon as it came out, then R4 and 4.5; never bothered with 5 because I realized right away "This is really cool. Too bad there's not a thing I can do with it.") it pains me to say this, but if they couldn't make a dent in 1998, they don't have a prayer today. MS Windows and Mac OS both have multiprocessor support, both ship with video editing apps, and hardware is fast enough that a cruft-free OS is not the selling point it once was. Why would anyone, other than an enthusiast or hobbyist, buy this?
Yes, I loved how quickly it booted. Yes, I loved watching 5 movies playing faster than 1x because I had 'caps lock' pressed when I launched them... on a P150. (R3 only.) Yes, 3DSound was great fun to play with but they didn't ship it until R4.5, IIRC, and it would crash like mad. Without Photoshop or Netscape I had no reason to run it then, and a cool platform to run Firefox is not that compelling today.
Good tip. Doing that brings you here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunes.html
which lets you request new artists, etc. Changing the URL (OMG! I am teh 1337 h4x0r!!!11) to this:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
looks like a good place to request gapless playback. c'mon, everyone!
Agreed. I was a big fan of Be, just had no practical reason to use it. Gotta love a box that booted 10-15 seconds after POST. Everything else was fast. Amazing what you can do when you throw away decades of legacy crap. (And, inevitably, a bit sad what you lose.) I never had enough files on it to make use of the cool filesystem, but the right-click navigation was awesome and super-obvious to use.* I wonder if Zeta is as fast as Be was on, say, a classic Pentium 150 with 32 MB? I also wonder if Zeta has the option of (I think) control-alt clicking on the start menu (tracker button? I forget its name) and setting the theme (and much behavior) to Win98? If so, it might be worth looking at.
That's one of the downsides of Be--as good as it was that things were different, it was bad that they had to throw away some things just because they *had* to be different. Taskbar and start menu (excuse my terms) as two overlapping squares in the top-right corner? WTF was that about?!?!?
* for those who never saw it, you could right-click on a file on your desktop and, in addition to the standard things--open, delete, etc.--were three options: copy to, move to, create link in. Select one of those, and it would create cascading dropdowns of your whole filesystem so you could pick your destination. Sorry, can't find any screenies. Trust me: it was cool.
If it's DRM'ed 9 ways from Sunday then I maybe wouldn't. If it's just a Macintosh with an Intel chip, though, why the hell not? 9 out of 10 blindfolded lab rats can't tell the difference between PPC and x86 without cracking the case. It's not like free-vs.-non-free, (DRM aside, which they could have done with PPC if they really wanted to) it's just one vendor's chip or another. Unless you're an irrational fanboy, it shouldn't matter if it's PPC, Intel, AMD, SPARC, silicon, diamond, neural net, or whatever. It's just a chip in a box you like, running an OS you like, running the apps you like.
Yup... I've got two 120 GB drives in my TiVo, probably 75% full of chick movies, 20% things we both like, and less than ten shows just for me.
"The only way I can watch one of my shows on Tivo is to pick the recording that runs somewhere between 2am and 5am..."
:-)
I recommend Cinemax Late Nite.
They just posted today that they sold their 500,000,000th song. They might not be 'creating' content like a division of Sony, but if selling a half-billion songs isn't 'content providing', I don't know what is. Just because they're providing content to help hardware sales doesn't mean they aren't providing content. I mean, why do you think Sony got into the game in the first place?
Congratulations, Windows! We're happy to have you up here with us.
PS: 'bout damn time.
For pictures: Gallery. Super-easy to use, pretty easy to set up, OSS, and requires a couple OSS (I think) libs (ImageMagick or NetBPM.) Makes nice galleries, good looking thumbnails, and any user (if you allow it) can add comments to pictures.
For content, including calendar: GeekLog. Pretty easy to use (the user model throws me a bit but I haven't spent much time with it since I'm the only user), works a lot like Slashdot (stories, comments, etc.), looks a lot like Slashdot (sections, polls, etc., but gorgeous; I fell in love with the 'clean' theme) and has integration with Gallery. (Or maybe Gallery offers integration with GeekLog. I forget. One or the other, I know it's there, I just haven't used it.) And GeekLog was originally designed to be the weblog for a security site, so it's pretty good in that regard. My GeekLog-backed site is here with the aforementioned 'clean' theme. (Note also that GeekLog ships with only one theme, so even Clean--which used to be a stock theme--has to be downloaded separately.) Look around for tips--many sites (mine included) start off with "how I made this site" as the first story.
Or, if you don't mind having your eggs in someone else's free-as-in-beer basket, Yahoo's services, as others have mentioned, are pretty sweet and easy-to-use, not to mention the availability and bandwidth. (Though they still put ads in the groups, AFAIK.)
Of course. Clearly it belongs under 'hardware.'
If the point of your trip is to see it take off--i.e., watch it sit on the ground, then lift off--then you have little choice but to go all the way out there and sit in traffic and/or sit around for hours waiting for traffic to clear. (I once spent about 3 hours coming home from a 1am launch and it's usually an hour trip.)
l
If I were to try to see tomorrow's launch from anywhere close, I'd probably leave Orlando at noon, sit in traffic the whole time, then get home at 8. And remember two things: 1) there might be so much traffic that you wind up just pulling over to see it, and 2) if the launch doesn't happen, you've gotta sit through all that traffic for nothing.
OTOH, if you just happen to be in the state at the time of launch and are happy to see it go up from anywhere, you can see it from miles away. I live in Orlando (~50 miles away) and if you're anywhere in town with a clear view of the eastern sky you can spend a solid minute or more watching this bright flare come into view and then disappear. (It's not like looking at a planet or comet--you won't miss it, even in the middle of the day.) You won't see the vehicle but you'll see a very bright spot in the sky and it'll show up fine in pics on or video.
Summary: unless you're really, really into this and willing to dedicate a day to it, just look in the direction of KSC at the time of launch.
http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/index.htm
So, yet another Generation Y-er (OMG! 3 'no carrier' jokes in the first paragraph! U R TEH FUNNYMAN!!!!!11one) posts yet another mindless rant about how Windows sucks. We hear how great his PSP is, how well Apple is doing with the iPod (thank you, Captain Obvious!) and how OS X apps are infinitely superior to Windows apps.
The twin barbs of his attack: Dashboard (which has already been discussed to death; let's just say that as many people hate it as love it) and an application called "Comic Life", which this grizzled veteran of computing (look at the picture) thinks "is likely to drive even the most die-hard Windows user to switch to OS X." Yeah: I'm gonna dump my whole platform to make my digital pictures cuter. Uh-huh. I'm surprised he didn't sneak a 'BSOD' joke into his rant or spell Windows with 'BL' or a dollar sign.
One mark in his favor: clearly, he is an expert in boring and uninspired. A lame blog post about Windows software sucking? Wow. Next.
"It baffles me that a culture so obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy can demonstrate such little attention to detail when it comes to communicating that knowledge with others..."
Communication is just another area of knowledge. Techs always talk about working with doctors and lawyers who are very smart but are unable to grasp the simplest computer concepts. Just as many computer techs might not know much about their cars, or gardening, or a million other things, they might not know much about grammar. Being able to code != being able to write English. That's all.
(The above is the basic answer to the question. Below is just more detail.)
Most of the difficulty comes from the fact that spoken words sound different than the way they are written. The only way I can remember your example of 'definitely' is to break it down--de, finite, ly. 'Vocally' is spelled like it sounds but 'logically' is pronounced 'logicly'. And of course it's not just spelling. You mentioned 'could of.' It's the same with my personal pet peeve, 'try and.' How we speak is different from how we write. (Or is that 'different than'? Let's see, imagine it as a verb--A differs from B. Yup, the correct choice is 'different from.')
However, some other rules are just plain arbitrary. It's one thing to keep "their, they're, there" straight, another altogether to remember it's/its. I mean, that's just plain arbitrary--the rules of possession and contraction both say to use an apostrophe, but someone decided that the two words should look different, so they flipped a coin.
And that's just spelling. Grammar is the same way. Some things just don't sound right. I should say "Joe is taller than I" instead of "Joe is taller than me" because what I'm really saying is "Joe is taller than I am (tall)." But that just sounds crappy. As does "It is I." You're supposed to use the nominative form after the verb "to be" but "It's me" just sounds so much better.
All this comes from the fact that, unlike C or any other computer language that was invented and has to compile, human language is a natural thing--people started communicating, *then* they tried to wrap rules around the language. Because it is based on a natural thing, there will always be exceptions to rules. No sense mentioning our miserable excuse for a language is a horrible mishmash of Latin vocabulary, German grammar, and a couple dozen other things.
For anyone wishing to learn about English, I highly recommend studying another language. I learned more about English in my first semester of high school Spanish than I had ever learned in all previous English classes combined. I mean, I'm sure I was *taught* everything along the way, but since I naturally write and talk acceptably, it never really stuck. Learning how to operate another language was a steady stream of learning a rule about Spanish and then realizing, "OK, so the correxponding rule in English is..." Seriously, I didn't know what an infinitive or gerund was until I learned what they were while taking Spanish.
...it was the last Macintosh review that didn't complain about the number of buttons on the mouse.