...the Next Big Thing...while [generic crappy pop] music gets blasted at your ears anywhere you go...
The same can't really be said for books, surprisingly.
No reason to be surprised. You very rarely hear any really good music on commercial radio, and you will almost never find a good book by reading reviews in the tabloid media. Good literature or good music - it makes no difference. You have to go looking for it.
Something that sounds like moose singing to me might sound wonderful to you.
I hope you realise that now you have mentioned this, you will have forced someone to start a new musical genre of moose vocals. And I thought Lady Gaga was bad...
Indeed. Amazon over-reacted when Macmillan decided it wanted more money for its publications than Amazon had been offering, and they must have known it.
I'm not really in the habit of defending publishers, but Macmillan's profile of publications covers a range of non-fiction, academic and textbook material that is way more expensive to produce than your average scheissdreck from Dan Brown and his ilk. To ask a higher price for these publications isn't exactly being unreasonable.
The fact that Macmillan is prepared to offer digital editions of its publications at all, rather than insisting that everybody pay ten times as much for a dead-tree edition is to be commended. Here's just one example of what I'm talking about. I would have loved to have a digital version of this bulky and heavy tome to carry around on a lightweight device while I was an undergrad, but neither the option nor the technology existed. In fact, Amazon's Kindle still doesn't offer the technology, since it is still stuck on monochrome displays.
but English wouldn't be the language it is if it couldn't accommodate these new usages and evolve accordingly.
And fortunately, Shakespeare came up with so many neat and beyond-cool usages, he might as well have invented the English language. Just as well he couldn't patent them, otherwise we'd all be broke before we're even born.
Ideally you wouldn't want them to appear in an English paper..
Contractions and elisions are not new. There are countless thousands of documents in archives of English manuscripts where the authors use what to us might appear to be quite obscure abbreviations according to the custom of their period. (My wife is a PhD in history, and I've seen lots of them.) Indeed, the practice goes back further, and is common in mediaeval Latin manuscripts and who knows where else.
But in the interests of clarity (since we don't have to worry about covering an excessive amount of parchment), there is absolutely no reason not to spell everything out as much as practicable in order to make our work more easily searchable and readable.
...I'd use "I try to write as though I were having a conversation" but that may be editorialism not grammar.
No, it's grammar. You're making use of the subjunctive (cool) which is largely discarded as a sort of "wtf?" these days (not so cool).
If there's any justice at all, though, people that use smileys in papers will be dragged into the street and beaten.
While I actually agree, what I would like to see is a society capable of recognising context such as sarcasm or humour without needing to be poked in the eye with a;-) emoticon. These devices always remind me of the canned laughter we hear on crappy TV shows where the audience is assumed to be so stupid as to not know which bits are funny.
Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it.
Most of the grammatical solecisms we see here are not so much a failure in competence as a writer, but more a failure in reading. It is the latter that does most to instil by example what we might consider "proper" usage of our language. I'm not saying that rules should be set in concrete (that just won't work), but meaningful syntax isn't that hard to learn. While lots of kids, or indeed adults may spend hours sitting at a computer, playing on the internet, this doesn't really qualify as concentrated reading. What they are actually doing is little more engaged than mindless channel-hopping on a TV.
The majority will rarely read much beyond the first sentence of an article. For example, I have a friend who has multiple university degrees, and who is CEO of a successful public-listed company. I have found that if I have a series of points or questions requiring a response via email (he won't use IM), the best way is to go about it is to send a series of single-sentence emails, with the content in the title. What niggles me most about this is that although he realises I am taking the piss out of him, he makes no effort to address the issue.
So, getting back your sentence that I quoted, I see little point in taking aim at the education system which has absolutely no control over students' reading, when it is really society that is at least tacitly encouraging everybody to boil down meaning into bite-sized gobbets. Watching a movie (however rewarding) is not a replacement for reading a book.
If people are to become competent writers, they must first become competent readers, and they can only do that by not regarding reading as a chore. I was brought up to consider reading to be fun, or something I could/would do when being lazy. That is where the education system might do well to pitch its resources.
My supervisor in my initial first-year chemistry units at university insisted on lab reports being done with pen (or even pencil) and paper. His philosophy was that the computer, with its bells and whistles of cool formatting etc offers too many distractions and is a big time-waster, and that a low-tech approach is a better way towards effective communication.
There's time enough to deal with computers when it's necessary. Better to concentrate on what's actually important right now.
I'll second that. There's very little point in worrying about computers and software until quite late in a university degree course (if then). Your time and resources would be better spent on concocting simple diagnostic exercises that can be completed in the lab or in tutorials in order to tell whether you have managed to get the concepts across. There's nothing reprehensible about using technology no more sophisticated than pencil and paper.
There's a lot to learn in basic chemistry, and adding unnecessary factors to the learning curve should be avoided.
This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk.
How about iPodLinux? Or gtkpod if you don't want to go the whole hog. You have plenty of choices. The hardware's cool, and there are OSS options to use it. What's your problem?
Bittorrent is much more useful for downloading music than you give it credit [for].
This is true. But unless the artist has given his permission for his work to be thus distributed, you are actually cheating him of the royalties to which he is *entitled*. Sure, lots of (or most) recording companies are predatory, but that is simply no excuse.
My personal preference, since I'm extremely picky about sound reproduction, is to simply buy the CDs and rip my own files for my iPod. That way, I get the music I want (the sound of Shirley Temple when I'm expecting Branford Marsalis is a nasty surprise), and I get the warm fuzzy feeling of having done the "Right Thing"(TM).
It has a glossy screen? Oh, then I wouldn't ever buy -- or recommend -- one
Agreed. I endure my MacBook's glossy screen because that's what I've got, but I much preferred the matt screen of the old iBook G4, despite the lower resolution. I'm inclined to suspect some fetish on the part of Steve Jobs for Shiny Things(TM).
Well, to be fair, the iPad clearly *is* more functional than the Kindle. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it will succeed commercially, which is an entirely different matter.
In my personal opinion, Apple has wasted an opportunity to redefine the tablet market, and instead given us an oversized iPod Touch that doesn't fit in anyone's pocket. This assessment might not go down well with the fanboys, but although I don't have any animus against Apple in particular (I have an iPod and a 2nd-hand MacBook) I won't be buying this gadget.
...but of vastly poorer quality and without the ownership and durability advantages of a dead tree.
I'm not so sure that we can count on such a durability advantage. This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'll try to keep it brief...
I am of the opinion that in the future, the 20th and most of the 19th centuries are going to appear to surviving generations as something of a "dark age". Since publishers started using woodchips to provide the requisite fibre to make paper in about the 1820s, residual acids in the paper have had a destructive effect on the paper. While some quality publications still appear on rag or otherwise stabilised or buffered paper, much has simply disintegrated.
The trouble is, although printers must be aware of the problem, they don't seem to be doing anything about it. I have many texts from the 1980s which are in very poor shape, which is bad enough. But what has disappointed me more is that a number of books I have bought *new* in the last year are already showing signs of serious foxing.
Although I still love the feel - and the smell - of printed paper, I'm inclined to think the textual content has a better chance of survival in digital form, provided that it is stripped of proprietary formats and DRM.
This is why I won't be buying an e-reader any time soon. Now that I have finally finished my university studies (for the time being) my main motive has been put to one side; I would have liked the idea of being able to carry the contents of my huge (and seriously expensive) molecular biology and biochemistry textbooks on a lightweight gadget. But the devices have to have much better resolution and get a lot more robust before I plough that kind of money into a purchase.
On the one hand, Macmillan are perfectly entitled to strike deals with whoever they want in order to get the best bang for their buck. Fair enough if they can make it work.
On the other hand, they have managed to shoot themselves in the foot with pinpoint accuracy. They have failed to consider that by pinning their products to Apple's iPad, they are (a) gambling on the success of hardware that won't be commercially available for another two months and (b) failing to realise that iBooks is limited to the US for the forseeable future, so they have casually abandoned their international market.
It seems to me that some MBA sales manager has gone charging off to the latest trendy bidder without saddling up his brains first.
Yeah, my 1980s digital watch gets more than that.;)
Well, your digital watch seems to have nearly as much functionality as the iPad. If it runs on the same OS as the iPhone, then as far as I'm concerned that is an absolute show-stopper. I can pretty much understand why the iPhone is as popular as it is, but it's easy to forgive a phone for having a single-tasking operating system.
Persisting with that platform on a device approaching the size of a laptop is where the product loses me. It just doesn't have a big enough advantage over the laptop, especially since the LCD screen is no better.
I wouldn't attempt to predict the success or failure of the iPad, but if that depended on the reactions of people like me, it would fail dismally. I would rather have a MacBook Air: at least there's a real computer inside it. Fortunately for Apple, their success doesn't depend on me. I use and like their MacBooks for the same reason I like Linux on my desktop machines: the ability to pull up a decent CLI in a terminal window.
Canonical needs to have at least some income to be able to pay the electricity and bandwidth bills.
In any case, anyone with the minimal savvy required to use Ubuntu will also have the requisite smarts to change the default search engine to one of their choosing.
Jeez, garbage nazis! It's common here to sneak bricks and rubble into our 70L wheelie-bins. If the rubbish-collectors complain, we just say it's the little old lady next door, and if she can cope with the weight, why can't they?
Slashdot Mirror
...the Next Big Thing...while [generic crappy pop] music gets blasted at your ears anywhere you go...
The same can't really be said for books, surprisingly.
No reason to be surprised. You very rarely hear any really good music on commercial radio, and you will almost never find a good book by reading reviews in the tabloid media. Good literature or good music - it makes no difference. You have to go looking for it.
Something that sounds like moose singing to me might sound wonderful to you.
I hope you realise that now you have mentioned this, you will have forced someone to start a new musical genre of moose vocals. And I thought Lady Gaga was bad...
This is nice because it promotes discussion.
Indeed. Amazon over-reacted when Macmillan decided it wanted more money for its publications than Amazon had been offering, and they must have known it.
I'm not really in the habit of defending publishers, but Macmillan's profile of publications covers a range of non-fiction, academic and textbook material that is way more expensive to produce than your average scheissdreck from Dan Brown and his ilk. To ask a higher price for these publications isn't exactly being unreasonable.
The fact that Macmillan is prepared to offer digital editions of its publications at all, rather than insisting that everybody pay ten times as much for a dead-tree edition is to be commended. Here's just one example of what I'm talking about. I would have loved to have a digital version of this bulky and heavy tome to carry around on a lightweight device while I was an undergrad, but neither the option nor the technology existed. In fact, Amazon's Kindle still doesn't offer the technology, since it is still stuck on monochrome displays.
Lonx?
No, Lonks.
but English wouldn't be the language it is if it couldn't accommodate these new usages and evolve accordingly.
And fortunately, Shakespeare came up with so many neat and beyond-cool usages, he might as well have invented the English language. Just as well he couldn't patent them, otherwise we'd all be broke before we're even born.
Ideally you wouldn't want them to appear in an English paper..
Contractions and elisions are not new. There are countless thousands of documents in archives of English manuscripts where the authors use what to us might appear to be quite obscure abbreviations according to the custom of their period. (My wife is a PhD in history, and I've seen lots of them.) Indeed, the practice goes back further, and is common in mediaeval Latin manuscripts and who knows where else.
But in the interests of clarity (since we don't have to worry about covering an excessive amount of parchment), there is absolutely no reason not to spell everything out as much as practicable in order to make our work more easily searchable and readable.
...I'd use "I try to write as though I were having a conversation" but that may be editorialism not grammar.
;-) emoticon. These devices always remind me of the canned laughter we hear on crappy TV shows where the audience is assumed to be so stupid as to not know which bits are funny.
No, it's grammar. You're making use of the subjunctive (cool) which is largely discarded as a sort of "wtf?" these days (not so cool).
If there's any justice at all, though, people that use smileys in papers will be dragged into the street and beaten.
While I actually agree, what I would like to see is a society capable of recognising context such as sarcasm or humour without needing to be poked in the eye with a
Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it.
Most of the grammatical solecisms we see here are not so much a failure in competence as a writer, but more a failure in reading. It is the latter that does most to instil by example what we might consider "proper" usage of our language. I'm not saying that rules should be set in concrete (that just won't work), but meaningful syntax isn't that hard to learn. While lots of kids, or indeed adults may spend hours sitting at a computer, playing on the internet, this doesn't really qualify as concentrated reading. What they are actually doing is little more engaged than mindless channel-hopping on a TV.
The majority will rarely read much beyond the first sentence of an article. For example, I have a friend who has multiple university degrees, and who is CEO of a successful public-listed company. I have found that if I have a series of points or questions requiring a response via email (he won't use IM), the best way is to go about it is to send a series of single-sentence emails, with the content in the title. What niggles me most about this is that although he realises I am taking the piss out of him, he makes no effort to address the issue.
So, getting back your sentence that I quoted, I see little point in taking aim at the education system which has absolutely no control over students' reading, when it is really society that is at least tacitly encouraging everybody to boil down meaning into bite-sized gobbets. Watching a movie (however rewarding) is not a replacement for reading a book.
If people are to become competent writers, they must first become competent readers, and they can only do that by not regarding reading as a chore. I was brought up to consider reading to be fun, or something I could/would do when being lazy. That is where the education system might do well to pitch its resources.
Hmmm. I stopped reading that article on Muphry's Law at the "History" section, where I found two redundant commas in as many lines. :-P
My supervisor in my initial first-year chemistry units at university insisted on lab reports being done with pen (or even pencil) and paper. His philosophy was that the computer, with its bells and whistles of cool formatting etc offers too many distractions and is a big time-waster, and that a low-tech approach is a better way towards effective communication.
There's time enough to deal with computers when it's necessary. Better to concentrate on what's actually important right now.
Don't make the use of computers too important.
I'll second that. There's very little point in worrying about computers and software until quite late in a university degree course (if then). Your time and resources would be better spent on concocting simple diagnostic exercises that can be completed in the lab or in tutorials in order to tell whether you have managed to get the concepts across. There's nothing reprehensible about using technology no more sophisticated than pencil and paper.
There's a lot to learn in basic chemistry, and adding unnecessary factors to the learning curve should be avoided.
This?
No, sorry. It's a snippet from Myles Na gCopaleen, also known as Flann O'Brien or Brian O'Nolan.
This leads me to another gripe: The iPod and its ilk.
How about iPodLinux? Or gtkpod if you don't want to go the whole hog. You have plenty of choices. The hardware's cool, and there are OSS options to use it. What's your problem?
Bittorrent is much more useful for downloading music than you give it credit [for].
This is true. But unless the artist has given his permission for his work to be thus distributed, you are actually cheating him of the royalties to which he is *entitled*. Sure, lots of (or most) recording companies are predatory, but that is simply no excuse.
My personal preference, since I'm extremely picky about sound reproduction, is to simply buy the CDs and rip my own files for my iPod. That way, I get the music I want (the sound of Shirley Temple when I'm expecting Branford Marsalis is a nasty surprise), and I get the warm fuzzy feeling of having done the "Right Thing"(TM).
You speak as if MacMillan pulled their offerings from the Kindle store. They didn't.
You're quite right. Seems I didn't saddle up my brains...
It has a glossy screen? Oh, then I wouldn't ever buy -- or recommend -- one
Agreed. I endure my MacBook's glossy screen because that's what I've got, but I much preferred the matt screen of the old iBook G4, despite the lower resolution. I'm inclined to suspect some fetish on the part of Steve Jobs for Shiny Things(TM).
But is it more functional?
Well, to be fair, the iPad clearly *is* more functional than the Kindle. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it will succeed commercially, which is an entirely different matter.
In my personal opinion, Apple has wasted an opportunity to redefine the tablet market, and instead given us an oversized iPod Touch that doesn't fit in anyone's pocket. This assessment might not go down well with the fanboys, but although I don't have any animus against Apple in particular (I have an iPod and a 2nd-hand MacBook) I won't be buying this gadget.
...but of vastly poorer quality and without the ownership and durability advantages of a dead tree.
I'm not so sure that we can count on such a durability advantage. This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, so I'll try to keep it brief...
I am of the opinion that in the future, the 20th and most of the 19th centuries are going to appear to surviving generations as something of a "dark age". Since publishers started using woodchips to provide the requisite fibre to make paper in about the 1820s, residual acids in the paper have had a destructive effect on the paper. While some quality publications still appear on rag or otherwise stabilised or buffered paper, much has simply disintegrated.
The trouble is, although printers must be aware of the problem, they don't seem to be doing anything about it. I have many texts from the 1980s which are in very poor shape, which is bad enough. But what has disappointed me more is that a number of books I have bought *new* in the last year are already showing signs of serious foxing.
Although I still love the feel - and the smell - of printed paper, I'm inclined to think the textual content has a better chance of survival in digital form, provided that it is stripped of proprietary formats and DRM.
This is why I won't be buying an e-reader any time soon. Now that I have finally finished my university studies (for the time being) my main motive has been put to one side; I would have liked the idea of being able to carry the contents of my huge (and seriously expensive) molecular biology and biochemistry textbooks on a lightweight gadget. But the devices have to have much better resolution and get a lot more robust before I plough that kind of money into a purchase.
As usual, there are two sides to this story.
On the one hand, Macmillan are perfectly entitled to strike deals with whoever they want in order to get the best bang for their buck. Fair enough if they can make it work.
On the other hand, they have managed to shoot themselves in the foot with pinpoint accuracy. They have failed to consider that by pinning their products to Apple's iPad, they are (a) gambling on the success of hardware that won't be commercially available for another two months and (b) failing to realise that iBooks is limited to the US for the forseeable future, so they have casually abandoned their international market.
It seems to me that some MBA sales manager has gone charging off to the latest trendy bidder without saddling up his brains first.
a hypochondriac's wet dream and worst nightmare all in one.
...or a valetudinarian's vademecum. ;-)
[A virtual beer to whoever spots the literary reference - Google probably won't find it.]
Maxi pad
:-P
I want one with wings...
Yeah, my 1980s digital watch gets more than that. ;)
Well, your digital watch seems to have nearly as much functionality as the iPad. If it runs on the same OS as the iPhone, then as far as I'm concerned that is an absolute show-stopper. I can pretty much understand why the iPhone is as popular as it is, but it's easy to forgive a phone for having a single-tasking operating system.
Persisting with that platform on a device approaching the size of a laptop is where the product loses me. It just doesn't have a big enough advantage over the laptop, especially since the LCD screen is no better.
I wouldn't attempt to predict the success or failure of the iPad, but if that depended on the reactions of people like me, it would fail dismally. I would rather have a MacBook Air: at least there's a real computer inside it. Fortunately for Apple, their success doesn't depend on me. I use and like their MacBooks for the same reason I like Linux on my desktop machines: the ability to pull up a decent CLI in a terminal window.
Canonical needs to have at least some income to be able to pay the electricity and bandwidth bills.
In any case, anyone with the minimal savvy required to use Ubuntu will also have the requisite smarts to change the default search engine to one of their choosing.
Jeez, garbage nazis! It's common here to sneak bricks and rubble into our 70L wheelie-bins. If the rubbish-collectors complain, we just say it's the little old lady next door, and if she can cope with the weight, why can't they?
You know what I meant. :-)