Given the office I'm sitting in and the job I do this is a question I encounter from time to time. I can't comment on pricing for obvious reasons, but I can offer an alternative that may help some of you.
Many public libraries purchase OED Online subscriptions which they make available to their users for free. All you need is your library card number to log in and use it as much as you like. In addition most educational institutions have site licences for use by their people in the same way. It may not help you if your library or institution doesn't have a subscription, but it's worth a look. http://public.oed.com/how-to-subscribe/does-my-library-subscribe/
The OED is a descriptivist dictionary, as opposed to a prescriptivist dictionary. That means that the OED includes words that are actually being used, rather than prescribing which words should and should not be used. This means including words that many people object to, but too bad, there are a large number of people who use the word regardless of any official position about the word.
If you want to speak a language which has a prescriptivist authority, then I recommend French or Spanish, they have institutes that declare what is and is not proper language, and if you disagree, then you're wrong. If you want a language that is generally descriptivist, then stick with the Germanic languages, where we recognize that the authority on language is a native speaker, and not some people locked up in a room declaring that "ain't isn't a word" even though 70% of the population uses it on a regular basis.
If I had mod points I'd give 'em to your post. Sitting next door to the OED lexicographers I couldn't have put it better myself.
However my lexicographer colleagues would take issue with their decision to include a word granting it any sort of "official" status. They are scientists though they often don't see themselves as such, all their inclusion means is that they have found sufficient evidence of the word's use for them to consider it to be part of their record of contemporary English.
Whether a word is part of a user's "official" vocabulary is purely up to that user, not to anyone else and certainly not to us.
Since the OED lexicographers are over an office divider from where I am sitting I guess I'm in a good position to answer this.
The most important point to make about modern dictionaries is that they are descriptive not prescriptive. That is to say that they describe the language as it evolves rather than tell you how you should use it. Lexicographers are like scientists though they do not generally consider themselves as such, everything they include in their dictionaries has made it there through painstaking linguistic research.
Please believe me when I tell you that my lexicographer colleagues have no interest in being 'hip'. Trust me on this one, I see them walk past my desk every day. Instead they are passionately interested in language and when a word has amassed enough evidence of usage in modern English they include it in their modern English dictionaries. Evidence of sufficiently common usage to be considered to have entered the language is their only value judgement.
It is also worth spelling out the differences between the different Oxford dictionaries. The OED is a massive multi-volume historical dictionary based on human research. You would use it to find the etymologies of words over a milennium. The Oxford Dictionary of English and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary however are corpus based dictionaries, they are derived from computational analysis of a billion-plus word corpus of contemporary English. That kind of stuff should be right up the average Slashdotter's street. Thus words like 'woot' and 'leet' (The lexicographers are funny about numbers in words, don't blame me) will not have been selected for trendiness but because the corpus analysis tells us people are using them.
The multi-volume book sells rather well as it happens. Not to many individuals but there are a lot of schools, universities and libraries in the world. And yes, we do have two dictionarywebsites. But as to a desperate attempt to stay profitable, the OED itself is not likely ever to do that. It took decades to produce its first edition, decades more for the second. We are a publishing company that is also a not-for-profit department of a major university so the OED is a project created for its academic value rather than its monetary return.
Oxford dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is to say they describe how the language is evolving rather than telling people how to use it. They are based on a lot of solid research on a multi-billion-word corpus of contemporary English as well as a huge printed gorpus of the last thousand years plus of written English. Thus if Igpay Atinlay (or any other "odd" word) started to show up significantly in the corpus of contemporary English then yes, it would merit its own entry.
You wouldn't want your tech fossilised in Shakespeare's day, so why would you want your language to have that happen to it?
I'm an OUP employee, I work on http://oxforddictionaries.com/ and I sit just over a partition from the OED team so I guess I'm well placed to comment on this one.
For a start, it already is in our dictionaries. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/leet . Unfortunately though they have lemmatised it (rendered it into its simplest form) as the rather lame-sounding 'leet' rather than '1337'. Hey, give them a break, they're English graduates!
This probably has a root in their research. Analysing the corpus to find out how much the word is used, they are probably ignoring numbers because their job is to look for words.
This infographic showing our inclusion process might be illuminating: http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/newwordflowchart/how-a-new-word-enters-an-oxford-dictionary
Sheer force of habit. If you spend your week doing it because you're at work then you do it at the weekend too without thinking. I have been assimilated.
So what's new, Amazon has cr@p customer service. In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears cr@p in the woods.
I used to buy a lot of stuff from Amazon UK. Then they changed couriers and the new courier had problems delivering to me. No problem I thought, I'll get on to their customer service line and fix it. Trouble is, there was no customer service line for Amazon UK, no customer service email address, just an online form that took you through several steps and then gave an error message. No problem I thought, it must be my minority browser/OS choice. Except it gave the same response on everything I could try it on at every site I tried it, including the obvious win/IE combo.
Amazon: great when everything goes right, cr@p when it doesn't. I've made my last ever Amazon order.
"in the UK a lot of houses need upgraded aerials to receive digital TV and digital radio - is the cost of fitting these going to be met by the government / tax payers?"
Sort of, but not quite. The government and broadcasters aren't going to pay to upgrade anyone's home antenna but they are going to increase the power of the digital transmissions when the analogue ones have been turned off, so the problem will just go away.
The fear was that digital transmitters might have caused interference to the existing analogue service so they were all made low power, but with analogue gone that's no longer an issue.
Uh... Did they think you were going to build a coldfusion bomb in the airplane bathroom?!?
As far as I could see, yes.
I get the impression that a side-effect of the Channel Island policy of only letting you live and work there if you're born there (the reason I (at that time) and thousands of other contractors make the daily flight) means that perhaps they end up with people in jobs like airport security who might not reach such exalted positions on the mainland.
You have a point.
Ok, I probably wouldn't. But if I did I'm pretty sure I would simply be challenged, asked to surrender the LED for examination and given it back when they had satisfied themselves it was harmless. I once had this happen to me at Guernsey airport because I was carrying the O'Reilly Coldfusion book.
Never mind. We can't read the Anarchist's Cookbook over here any more but at least we can still wear a flashing LED on our clothing without having guns pointed at us.
Indeed not. But by then DAT had failed in the consumer marketplace and was largely a professional format. MD and DCC were the first consumer formats to use digital data compression and were the first digital recordable formats to be aimed specifically at the consumer.
Casting my mind back to the early 1990s MD didnt take off despite being a really good format because its launch was coincidental with the Philips DCC format and the consumers stayed away in droves because they didnt want to end up with whichever one became the betamax of the 1990s.
Stupid really because DCC was a much poorer idea that should have been still-born and because of that MD missed its moment.
That's what the "Report spam" button is for. If it happened to me I would probably report abuse as well. That way I've covered my arse, if the Keystone Kops come round accusing me of looking at kiddie porn I can point to an action I've taken to mark the message as "Not mine guv!".
You're right of course, Drupal is extremely flexible. But if you want to write a custom app that nobody's written before as a module you still have to get your hands dirty and write that module from scratch for Drupal's API. The idea of an application framework is to provide a mechanism to simplify the development of new applications rather than just an existing application with an API to plug your coded-from-scratch application into.
Both types of approach have their advantages and disadvantages. Drupal's advantage is that it comes out of the box with most of the applications you'd need for most websites of its type. By comparison an application framework comes out of the box with no application, i.e. you have to create something in it to make it do anything. But conversely that application creation process is intended to be simpler in the application framework than it is writing a Drupal module. Which is not such a ridiculous idea IMHO.
Drupal is a content management framework, these are application frameworks. In other words Drupal is the application and once you've installed it and whatever modules you need all you have to do is input your content while an application framework requires you to use it to write an application before you can think of content. Drupal is very useful if you want to do what it or one of its modules already does but it is less flexible for custom applications.
More to the point, how easy would it be to get T shirts printed with random licence plate numbers to screw up the system as protesters walk past the cameras?
Slashdot Mirror
Given the office I'm sitting in and the job I do this is a question I encounter from time to time. I can't comment on pricing for obvious reasons, but I can offer an alternative that may help some of you.
Many public libraries purchase OED Online subscriptions which they make available to their users for free. All you need is your library card number to log in and use it as much as you like. In addition most educational institutions have site licences for use by their people in the same way. It may not help you if your library or institution doesn't have a subscription, but it's worth a look. http://public.oed.com/how-to-subscribe/does-my-library-subscribe/
The OED is a descriptivist dictionary, as opposed to a prescriptivist dictionary. That means that the OED includes words that are actually being used, rather than prescribing which words should and should not be used. This means including words that many people object to, but too bad, there are a large number of people who use the word regardless of any official position about the word.
If you want to speak a language which has a prescriptivist authority, then I recommend French or Spanish, they have institutes that declare what is and is not proper language, and if you disagree, then you're wrong. If you want a language that is generally descriptivist, then stick with the Germanic languages, where we recognize that the authority on language is a native speaker, and not some people locked up in a room declaring that "ain't isn't a word" even though 70% of the population uses it on a regular basis.
If I had mod points I'd give 'em to your post. Sitting next door to the OED lexicographers I couldn't have put it better myself.
It's nice to know that we're not "Any schmuck" :)
However my lexicographer colleagues would take issue with their decision to include a word granting it any sort of "official" status. They are scientists though they often don't see themselves as such, all their inclusion means is that they have found sufficient evidence of the word's use for them to consider it to be part of their record of contemporary English.
Whether a word is part of a user's "official" vocabulary is purely up to that user, not to anyone else and certainly not to us.
Since the OED lexicographers are over an office divider from where I am sitting I guess I'm in a good position to answer this.
The most important point to make about modern dictionaries is that they are descriptive not prescriptive. That is to say that they describe the language as it evolves rather than tell you how you should use it. Lexicographers are like scientists though they do not generally consider themselves as such, everything they include in their dictionaries has made it there through painstaking linguistic research.
Please believe me when I tell you that my lexicographer colleagues have no interest in being 'hip'. Trust me on this one, I see them walk past my desk every day. Instead they are passionately interested in language and when a word has amassed enough evidence of usage in modern English they include it in their modern English dictionaries. Evidence of sufficiently common usage to be considered to have entered the language is their only value judgement.
It is also worth spelling out the differences between the different Oxford dictionaries. The OED is a massive multi-volume historical dictionary based on human research. You would use it to find the etymologies of words over a milennium. The Oxford Dictionary of English and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary however are corpus based dictionaries, they are derived from computational analysis of a billion-plus word corpus of contemporary English. That kind of stuff should be right up the average Slashdotter's street. Thus words like 'woot' and 'leet' (The lexicographers are funny about numbers in words, don't blame me) will not have been selected for trendiness but because the corpus analysis tells us people are using them.
The multi-volume book sells rather well as it happens. Not to many individuals but there are a lot of schools, universities and libraries in the world. And yes, we do have two dictionary websites. But as to a desperate attempt to stay profitable, the OED itself is not likely ever to do that. It took decades to produce its first edition, decades more for the second. We are a publishing company that is also a not-for-profit department of a major university so the OED is a project created for its academic value rather than its monetary return.
Oxford dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, which is to say they describe how the language is evolving rather than telling people how to use it. They are based on a lot of solid research on a multi-billion-word corpus of contemporary English as well as a huge printed gorpus of the last thousand years plus of written English. Thus if Igpay Atinlay (or any other "odd" word) started to show up significantly in the corpus of contemporary English then yes, it would merit its own entry.
You wouldn't want your tech fossilised in Shakespeare's day, so why would you want your language to have that happen to it?
Damn. Linked to the wrong sense of leet in the post above. Try this: http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0984830?rskey=7RJxzw&result=2#m_en_gb0984830
I'm an OUP employee, I work on http://oxforddictionaries.com/ and I sit just over a partition from the OED team so I guess I'm well placed to comment on this one. For a start, it already is in our dictionaries. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/leet . Unfortunately though they have lemmatised it (rendered it into its simplest form) as the rather lame-sounding 'leet' rather than '1337'. Hey, give them a break, they're English graduates! This probably has a root in their research. Analysing the corpus to find out how much the word is used, they are probably ignoring numbers because their job is to look for words. This infographic showing our inclusion process might be illuminating: http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/newwordflowchart/how-a-new-word-enters-an-oxford-dictionary
This was 18 months to a couple of years ago. Trust me, at the time there was nothing but the form. No email, no phone. Yes, I did look.
Sheer force of habit. If you spend your week doing it because you're at work then you do it at the weekend too without thinking. I have been assimilated.
So what's new, Amazon has cr@p customer service. In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears cr@p in the woods.
I used to buy a lot of stuff from Amazon UK. Then they changed couriers and the new courier had problems delivering to me. No problem I thought, I'll get on to their customer service line and fix it. Trouble is, there was no customer service line for Amazon UK, no customer service email address, just an online form that took you through several steps and then gave an error message. No problem I thought, it must be my minority browser/OS choice. Except it gave the same response on everything I could try it on at every site I tried it, including the obvious win/IE combo.
Amazon: great when everything goes right, cr@p when it doesn't. I've made my last ever Amazon order.
"in the UK a lot of houses need upgraded aerials to receive digital TV and digital radio - is the cost of fitting these going to be met by the government / tax payers?"
Sort of, but not quite. The government and broadcasters aren't going to pay to upgrade anyone's home antenna but they are going to increase the power of the digital transmissions when the analogue ones have been turned off, so the problem will just go away.
The fear was that digital transmitters might have caused interference to the existing analogue service so they were all made low power, but with analogue gone that's no longer an issue.
...Now all the user has to do is remember to charge the thing every day.
I was going to make a really witty comment, but I'd better not...
As far as I could see, yes.
I get the impression that a side-effect of the Channel Island policy of only letting you live and work there if you're born there (the reason I (at that time) and thousands of other contractors make the daily flight) means that perhaps they end up with people in jobs like airport security who might not reach such exalted positions on the mainland.
You have a point.
Ok, I probably wouldn't. But if I did I'm pretty sure I would simply be challenged, asked to surrender the LED for examination and given it back when they had satisfied themselves it was harmless. I once had this happen to me at Guernsey airport because I was carrying the O'Reilly Coldfusion book.
Never mind. We can't read the Anarchist's Cookbook over here any more but at least we can still wear a flashing LED on our clothing without having guns pointed at us.
Indeed not. But by then DAT had failed in the consumer marketplace and was largely a professional format. MD and DCC were the first consumer formats to use digital data compression and were the first digital recordable formats to be aimed specifically at the consumer.
Stupid really because DCC was a much poorer idea that should have been still-born and because of that MD missed its moment.
That's what the "Report spam" button is for. If it happened to me I would probably report abuse as well. That way I've covered my arse, if the Keystone Kops come round accusing me of looking at kiddie porn I can point to an action I've taken to mark the message as "Not mine guv!".
Both types of approach have their advantages and disadvantages. Drupal's advantage is that it comes out of the box with most of the applications you'd need for most websites of its type. By comparison an application framework comes out of the box with no application, i.e. you have to create something in it to make it do anything. But conversely that application creation process is intended to be simpler in the application framework than it is writing a Drupal module. Which is not such a ridiculous idea IMHO.
Drupal is a content management framework, these are application frameworks. In other words Drupal is the application and once you've installed it and whatever modules you need all you have to do is input your content while an application framework requires you to use it to write an application before you can think of content. Drupal is very useful if you want to do what it or one of its modules already does but it is less flexible for custom applications.
Also many vehicles, vans etc have plates more than 2 feet above ground.
Not very nice, but cheaper.
More to the point, how easy would it be to get T shirts printed with random licence plate numbers to screw up the system as protesters walk past the cameras?
Hang on, Yahoo gives you http://personals.yahoo.com/ but Google users have more cash. Could this be the real reason?