Remember the old adage: no one ever got fired for buying IBM? In the current corporate culture it's pretty much the same for buying Microsoft.
Yes, but I'm not sure that applies where tablets are concerned. It doesn't seem to help them in the corporate phone market.
Except that 'Metro' isn't just Windows 8, it is the future UI paradigm for Windows/Microsoft. IE 10 will have two versions, Metro and 'traditional'. I don't think MS is going to continue to create two versions in the future. Windows 9 will take things one steep further - probably a compatibility mode or VM for traditional applications - or perhaps eliminate traditional 'windowed' apps all together. Windows 8 is a transitional product release for Microsoft.
In which case I see a lot of people moving on from windows, especially in the enterprise, or doing as they did with Vista and just not bothering to move.
Can they afford to ignore the millions of tablets that are finding their way into offices and everyday use?
I think the question is more whether anyone will care if they do release it. I think probably not.
If a palatable alternative reigns supreme on tablets, will companies convert to the alternative in lieu of MS Office on the desktop to insure document compatibility?
Well this is an interesting area of thought. Some enterprises are already turning away from it now, I guess we'll see.
Metro is going to be a disruptive change for a lot of companies,
Really?
Everyone's happy with Win 7, and IIRC Win 8 has a traditional mode, so I'm not really seeing it on the desktop, and on the tablet or mobile, MS is a non-entity.
I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?
I can't imagine you'd want to be doing a lot of text input on it, would you?
This in mind, it seems to me the whole thing is a non-story. MS is now an also-ran in the phone biz, and has no footprint at all in the tablet market. Office or no office, it doesn't seem to matter.
But there are illegal prostitution gangs that smuggle women into the country and keep them confined, basically enslaved. Those would be good things to break up.
These cretins ought to be dealing with people traffickers, gang crime and other actual Serious Organised Crime.
That they are taking down music sharing sites is ridiculous. The justification I heard recently was even more laughable. It was serious organised crime because it cost the record labels 15 million.
Ah, record label mathematics, even better than cop math!
I don't doubt that these sites are hives of illegal activity. What they are not is a serious threat to the British public, which SOCA should be concentrating on, not pissing into the wind trying to clamp down on piracy.
The people that could acquire those things that enjoyed them a little too much would slowly become addicts after a year or two, and be dead from overdose in another.
You know that heroin addicts can, when given access to a supply of known strength that's not contaminated, continue to use the drug and be functional in society for many years, right?
Your other point, that it becomes pretty un-cool does work though. Apparently new addicts are quite rare in Switzerland, now that the young folks can see people the older addicts queueing up outside clinics to get their fix in the morning.
Do you have any links that show that it's wrong, or at least some non-circular arguments for why it is wrong?
How about you backup your claim that vaccine-resistant strains occur as a result of vaccination? Because after searching on this all I can find is conspiracy sites mixing this in with their other bullshit claims.
A quick search on pubmed turns this interesting looking paper up - Vaccines and their impact on the control of disease.. From the abstract - "Despite intense (and often successful) attempts to control infectious diseases through vaccination, there is still rather little evidence of the emergence of strains of pathogen resistant to vaccines.". It goes on to say it's certainly possible and should be planned for, but seems extremely rare.
Quite a few, actually:
Those pressures are only against being in the same host body as another virus. The proportion of people with a given virus at any one time is pretty low, low enough that this is pretty irrelevant. You're not talking about competition between strains in general.
What you are arguing for is for people to be permanently infected and suffering from a disease, in order to try to prevent another disease emerging or spreading - a state which would more likely lead to adaptation of viruses to these conditions.
Many elderly people were immune to the 2006 H5N1 "bird flu" because they had antibodies against a close sibling, whereas those previously inoculated did not have the same resistance, and required re-inoculations against the particular strain.
Sure, because nobody had been vaccinated for a close sibling to that sort of flu either. Not entirely sutre what you're trying to say here, but if it's the old "Natural Immunity is better!" canard then I'd ask you to think about how many of the older generation are not carrying forward such immunity because they're dead. Those currently getting vaccinated against particular strains don't have to be.
Any one of these would be enough to give an advantage to a virus without less deadly siblings in the wild. Do we want to increase this risk to save a whole bunch of lives today? Apparently, yes. I won't say it's the wrong decision, but I do respect those who think otherwise.
I disagree, the first four only apply to the case of multiple infection and are irrelevant. The last is effectively a vaccination anyway (see cowpox and smallpox.)
There's little evidence that this risk you point out is increasing is really increading. besides which I do not believe for a second that this is a real concern to many people who are against vaccination.
Firstly, the people within Corporations could stop acting like frakking arseholes all the time, and have some principles. And no, I don't care about the principles of capitalism, the people in charge absolutely can and should be blamed for being amoral bastards.
Secondly, and we already see this in some arenas, consumers can start spending their money only with corporations they consider ethically sound. The effect of this would be that in order to slavishly follow the maximum available profit, corps would have to act ethically or be outcompeted by those that do.
I know that both situations are a pipe dream, people care more about price than ethics and most business practices will not change and most people will not demand they do.
I find Linux useful for UNIX programming in general. Something that builds and runs on Linux will usually also work, with some modifications, on commercial UNIX variants and Linux on non-x86 hardware. Windows most definitely is not part of this family of operating systems and using it as a primary platform, when your target is the server room, is less than helpful.
It doesn't sound like you do that sort of coding though, as Windows, Linux and Mac are the only things you mention.
Not that I think windows is bad, and not that I really wanted to say it's not useful, but I object to (frankyl stupid) blanket statements like "If you want productivity and you aren't coding in C or PHP, then Windows is the way to go."
By what mechanism do you see these two flu viruses compete with each other?
Oh, and in terms of money, remember that a shot of prevention is thousands of times less lucrative than selling maintenance drugs. There really is no rational reason to fear vaccination.
It doesn't have to be available from the GNOME team to be available from debian repositories, and even if it doesn't end up there then another one can be set up.
And why would it duplicate code when it can just reuse? It's a fork of the shell, not the whole GNOME system.
Besides which, duplicate code or no, a sensible desktop is what people want. For some that looks like cinnamon.
Your post seems pointlessly negative. Why is that?
If the politician was an idiot with awful judgement at age 23
Many, many very good people are idiots at that age.
And that's not even to say that a few pictures of someone drunk at a party is evidence of awful judgement. To me it seems normal. As the other poster said, in the age of ubiquitous compromising photographs, who do you trust, they guy who has been in total media control since day 1? He's either a sociopath or completely and utterly joyless, neither of which is a good quality in someone supposed to represent your interests.
Because there are plenty of examples where a double negative does make a positive. For instance - "it is not impossible", meaning that it's possible (though likely implying it's quite hard).
I understand your algebra and what you are trying to say, I just don't really agree that it's good grammar to say "I have not misunderstood nothing", regardless of whether the conveyed meaning is the same.
Your argument is that all double negatives are positives.
No, my argument is that double negatives in English are often a case of bad grammar.
Then you need your brain checked, because it's clearly sarcastic.
I humbly disagree. There may have been sarcasm in the original usage of "I could care less", but now it is said unthinkingly as an idiom meaning that someone doesn't care. I have had a complementary argument with people on this very site in the past, citing that to them the meaning was the same, and that it was the conveyed meaning of the phrase that was important, not the words used or any tone. Frankly the sarcasm argument seems like a post-hoc justification.
Double negatives through negative concordance are proper grammatical forms in many languages, which provide all the counter examples you need to invalidate the argument that a double negative is always a positive.
Didn't say it was, don't agree that that makes it in the slightest bit relevant to English, which has strong Germanic roots as well as others languages, and don't even think it that relevant anyway.
you're not getting any traction by telling me that simply by including the "anymore" that it created a negative sentence, or that double negatives always mean a positive.
I'm not sure where you think I said those things, but it wasn't my intention.
My initial response was that in light of other Americanisms by other people in which the negative is dropped, I found it very hard to understand what you were saying. My internal parser has adapted to people randomly dropping negatives. For you to use "anymore" in a non negative sense, in a sentence which I would usually parse as a negative due to the mistakes, omissions or colloquialisms of other internet users, rendered me unable to parse the sentence for meaning at all.
My comment about double negatives was mildly self-deprecating admission that British English grammar is frequently not 'perfect' either. From my perspective you then went off on one about a tangential linguistic issue, to which I frankly disagree that there is an absolute answer.
You can't disagree with my argument, as it is the consensus of the linguistic community. It's like saying that Newtonian physics is correct, and Relativistic physics is wrong. We have documented evidence that states quite clearly who is right and who is wrong. Hint: YOUR SIDE IS WRONG.
Of course I can disagree with it, unless you're contending that there is an absolute right and wrong in language? Something deeply unfashionable in linguistics these days I believe.
It looks like you and I see language in vastly different ways, which makes sense as I'm used to evaluating statements in computer language and thinking in line with strict grammars in which tokens have meaning. Perhaps we differ there.
This is not a case of negative concordance.
No, it's a case of a double negative meaning a positive, something you said was a fallacy.
And they claim that the British are so much more keenly aware of sarcasm than Americans...
Yes, and I'm keenly aware that the construct is used without a hint of sarcasm.
It has come to mean its opposite and is used unsarcastically.
However, despite us speaking different dialects, double negation through negation concordance is scientifically known to not cancel itself out.
It doesn't cancel out the intent of the speaker, if that is the speakers intent, certainly. As you say, pragmatics, which brings us back to the my original comment, your use of positive "anymore" is not pragmatic and I'm clearly not the only one thrown by it.
Again, as I already explained, this is a fallacious argument.
Then you may take it that I disagree with the argument as you have so nicely explained it.
The whole notion that "two negatives make a positive" is logical fallacy.
Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.
This is not a case of what you seem to be inventing as "dropped negative". This is a case of SARCASTIC TONE.
No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic. Furthermore its use has spread from that one expression to many general dropping of the negative in various places. If you want to accuse me of inventing this phenomenon that's up to you, my data is purely anecdotal - my reading of the internet over many years.
I'm sorry that we speak a different dialect. The meaning was clear enough to me, despite sounding odd.
Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.
Again, as I already explained, this is a fallacious argument.
Then you may take it that I disagree.
The whole notion that "two negatives make a positive" is logical fallacy.
Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.
This is not a case of what you seem to be inventing as "dropped negative". This is a case of SARCASTIC TONE.
No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic. Its use has spread from that one expression to many general dropping of "'t" in various places, and mixing up of "can" and "can't".
I'm sorry that we speak a different dialect. The meaning was clear enough to me, despite sounding odd.
Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.
In American English, we would say "like grammatical nonsense". Nonsense being considered something like water... uncountable. I'm curious, would you say "much nonsense", or "many nonsenses"?
I'd say a lot of nonsense. Nonsenses is not a word I'm familiar with. I used "a nonsense" for emphasis; I'm sure it's relatively uncommon in the US. The "like grammatical nonsense" form would be more usual in the UK and Australia as well, though both are used. Are you unfamiliar with the phrasing "X makes a nonsense of Y" ?
English already uses negative concordance, we just don't see our concordances as negative. It is ungrammatical to say "I have any books." Yet the negative of "I have books" is "I don't have any books." Clearly, the "any" there is simply to coordinate with the negative of the sentence, much like you expected "anymore" to concord with a negative sentence.
Certainly, but negative concordance like that is not the double negative to which I was referring. You may well consider these concordances similar to the French "Je n'ai pas". I was referring to the informal double negatives used colloquially by my countrymen - "I ain't never see one o' them before..." which strictly means the opposite of that which the speaker intends.
However, even that conveys meaning. The "positive anymore" is jarring to read and genuinely confused me, especially in light on the increasing incidence of the dropped negative. The usual exemplar of this is the aforementioned "could care less", but it seems to be spreading.
The usual argument I hear in defense of strange constructs like that is that the meaning is still clear. Here it was not.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. You had me until Ron Paul. The guy is a nutcase.
Yes, but I'm not sure that applies where tablets are concerned. It doesn't seem to help them in the corporate phone market.
In which case I see a lot of people moving on from windows, especially in the enterprise, or doing as they did with Vista and just not bothering to move.
I think the question is more whether anyone will care if they do release it. I think probably not.
Well this is an interesting area of thought. Some enterprises are already turning away from it now, I guess we'll see.
Really?
Everyone's happy with Win 7, and IIRC Win 8 has a traditional mode, so I'm not really seeing it on the desktop, and on the tablet or mobile, MS is a non-entity.
I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?
I can't imagine you'd want to be doing a lot of text input on it, would you?
This in mind, it seems to me the whole thing is a non-story. MS is now an also-ran in the phone biz, and has no footprint at all in the tablet market. Office or no office, it doesn't seem to matter.
But there are illegal prostitution gangs that smuggle women into the country and keep them confined, basically enslaved. Those would be good things to break up.
Jesus.
These cretins ought to be dealing with people traffickers, gang crime and other actual Serious Organised Crime.
That they are taking down music sharing sites is ridiculous. The justification I heard recently was even more laughable. It was serious organised crime because it cost the record labels 15 million.
Ah, record label mathematics, even better than cop math!
I don't doubt that these sites are hives of illegal activity. What they are not is a serious threat to the British public, which SOCA should be concentrating on, not pissing into the wind trying to clamp down on piracy.
Vaccinations do not necessarily give less of a spectrum of resistance than real disease, your one example was fallacious.
But keep on believing your nonsense, it's your right I suppose.
You know that heroin addicts can, when given access to a supply of known strength that's not contaminated, continue to use the drug and be functional in society for many years, right?
Your other point, that it becomes pretty un-cool does work though. Apparently new addicts are quite rare in Switzerland, now that the young folks can see people the older addicts queueing up outside clinics to get their fix in the morning.
Must learn to proofread - "increasing is really increading" should just read "increasing"
How about you backup your claim that vaccine-resistant strains occur as a result of vaccination? Because after searching on this all I can find is conspiracy sites mixing this in with their other bullshit claims.
A quick search on pubmed turns this interesting looking paper up - Vaccines and their impact on the control of disease.. From the abstract - "Despite intense (and often successful) attempts to control infectious diseases through vaccination, there is still rather little evidence of the emergence of strains of pathogen resistant to vaccines.". It goes on to say it's certainly possible and should be planned for, but seems extremely rare.
Those pressures are only against being in the same host body as another virus. The proportion of people with a given virus at any one time is pretty low, low enough that this is pretty irrelevant. You're not talking about competition between strains in general.
What you are arguing for is for people to be permanently infected and suffering from a disease, in order to try to prevent another disease emerging or spreading - a state which would more likely lead to adaptation of viruses to these conditions.
Sure, because nobody had been vaccinated for a close sibling to that sort of flu either. Not entirely sutre what you're trying to say here, but if it's the old "Natural Immunity is better!" canard then I'd ask you to think about how many of the older generation are not carrying forward such immunity because they're dead. Those currently getting vaccinated against particular strains don't have to be.
I disagree, the first four only apply to the case of multiple infection and are irrelevant. The last is effectively a vaccination anyway (see cowpox and smallpox.)
There's little evidence that this risk you point out is increasing is really increading. besides which I do not believe for a second that this is a real concern to many people who are against vaccination.
It doesn't mean there can't be.
Firstly, the people within Corporations could stop acting like frakking arseholes all the time, and have some principles. And no, I don't care about the principles of capitalism, the people in charge absolutely can and should be blamed for being amoral bastards.
Secondly, and we already see this in some arenas, consumers can start spending their money only with corporations they consider ethically sound. The effect of this would be that in order to slavishly follow the maximum available profit, corps would have to act ethically or be outcompeted by those that do.
I know that both situations are a pipe dream, people care more about price than ethics and most business practices will not change and most people will not demand they do.
I find Linux useful for UNIX programming in general. Something that builds and runs on Linux will usually also work, with some modifications, on commercial UNIX variants and Linux on non-x86 hardware. Windows most definitely is not part of this family of operating systems and using it as a primary platform, when your target is the server room, is less than helpful.
It doesn't sound like you do that sort of coding though, as Windows, Linux and Mac are the only things you mention.
Not that I think windows is bad, and not that I really wanted to say it's not useful, but I object to (frankyl stupid) blanket statements like "If you want productivity and you aren't coding in C or PHP, then Windows is the way to go."
"Some" are wrong.
By what mechanism do you see these two flu viruses compete with each other?
Oh, and in terms of money, remember that a shot of prevention is thousands of times less lucrative than selling maintenance drugs. There really is no rational reason to fear vaccination.
Or python, C++, Javascript or a myriad of other things.
Windows is good for windows programming, otherwise not so much.
What are you talking about?
It doesn't have to be available from the GNOME team to be available from debian repositories, and even if it doesn't end up there then another one can be set up.
And why would it duplicate code when it can just reuse? It's a fork of the shell, not the whole GNOME system.
Besides which, duplicate code or no, a sensible desktop is what people want. For some that looks like cinnamon.
Your post seems pointlessly negative. Why is that?
Many, many very good people are idiots at that age.
And that's not even to say that a few pictures of someone drunk at a party is evidence of awful judgement. To me it seems normal. As the other poster said, in the age of ubiquitous compromising photographs, who do you trust, they guy who has been in total media control since day 1? He's either a sociopath or completely and utterly joyless, neither of which is a good quality in someone supposed to represent your interests.
Because there are plenty of examples where a double negative does make a positive. For instance - "it is not impossible", meaning that it's possible (though likely implying it's quite hard).
I understand your algebra and what you are trying to say, I just don't really agree that it's good grammar to say "I have not misunderstood nothing", regardless of whether the conveyed meaning is the same.
Irregardless, this is not the main issue.
No, my argument is that double negatives in English are often a case of bad grammar.
I humbly disagree. There may have been sarcasm in the original usage of "I could care less", but now it is said unthinkingly as an idiom meaning that someone doesn't care. I have had a complementary argument with people on this very site in the past, citing that to them the meaning was the same, and that it was the conveyed meaning of the phrase that was important, not the words used or any tone. Frankly the sarcasm argument seems like a post-hoc justification.
Didn't say it was, don't agree that that makes it in the slightest bit relevant to English, which has strong Germanic roots as well as others languages, and don't even think it that relevant anyway.
I'm not sure where you think I said those things, but it wasn't my intention.
My initial response was that in light of other Americanisms by other people in which the negative is dropped, I found it very hard to understand what you were saying. My internal parser has adapted to people randomly dropping negatives. For you to use "anymore" in a non negative sense, in a sentence which I would usually parse as a negative due to the mistakes, omissions or colloquialisms of other internet users, rendered me unable to parse the sentence for meaning at all.
My comment about double negatives was mildly self-deprecating admission that British English grammar is frequently not 'perfect' either. From my perspective you then went off on one about a tangential linguistic issue, to which I frankly disagree that there is an absolute answer.
Of course I can disagree with it, unless you're contending that there is an absolute right and wrong in language? Something deeply unfashionable in linguistics these days I believe.
It looks like you and I see language in vastly different ways, which makes sense as I'm used to evaluating statements in computer language and thinking in line with strict grammars in which tokens have meaning. Perhaps we differ there.
No, it's a case of a double negative meaning a positive, something you said was a fallacy.
Yes, and I'm keenly aware that the construct is used without a hint of sarcasm.
It has come to mean its opposite and is used unsarcastically.
It doesn't cancel out the intent of the speaker, if that is the speakers intent, certainly. As you say, pragmatics, which brings us back to the my original comment, your use of positive "anymore" is not pragmatic and I'm clearly not the only one thrown by it.
Let's try that again without the HTML cockup.
Then you may take it that I disagree with the argument as you have so nicely explained it.
Then to you the phrases "I have never understood" and "I have never misunderstood" have the same meaning? Interesting.
No, it's really not. If that's the way you use it then good for you, you understand what you're saying. I do not believe that the general use of this phrase in American English is sarcastic. Furthermore its use has spread from that one expression to many general dropping of the negative in various places. If you want to accuse me of inventing this phenomenon that's up to you, my data is purely anecdotal - my reading of the internet over many years.
Then as I said before, your dialect and mine are clearly moving apart in terms of mutual intelligibility.
Then you may take it that I disagree.
I'd say a lot of nonsense. Nonsenses is not a word I'm familiar with. I used "a nonsense" for emphasis; I'm sure it's relatively uncommon in the US. The "like grammatical nonsense" form would be more usual in the UK and Australia as well, though both are used. Are you unfamiliar with the phrasing "X makes a nonsense of Y" ?
Certainly, but negative concordance like that is not the double negative to which I was referring. You may well consider these concordances similar to the French "Je n'ai pas". I was referring to the informal double negatives used colloquially by my countrymen - "I ain't never see one o' them before..." which strictly means the opposite of that which the speaker intends.
However, even that conveys meaning. The "positive anymore" is jarring to read and genuinely confused me, especially in light on the increasing incidence of the dropped negative. The usual exemplar of this is the aforementioned "could care less", but it seems to be spreading.
The usual argument I hear in defense of strange constructs like that is that the meaning is still clear. Here it was not.
Maybe at that point we can start to drop this ludicrous "OMG he got drunk once!" puritanism. It's repellant.
I know, unlikely.
Reminds me of that old dilbert cartoon -
Our product is so advanced and so simple that it only has one button ... and we press that before it leaves the factory!