Most of the time, I try to be exacting about spelling and grammar. I fully spell words in text messages, and I punctuate where appropriate.
At the same time, I am quite accepting about the way other people use the language and don't point out errors if the author's intent is still clear.
I do have some pet hates when it comes to grammar, such as incorrect usage of "begs the question", or overusage of the word "get". Until now, the "internet" has not been on that list.
However, if Wired has succumbed to the commercial world to the extent that it believes only trademarks and brandnames are truly deserving the consideration of the shift key, then let the battle lines be drawn!
"True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important."
This is the basis of their argument? Some idiots who misuse capital letters also inadvertently spell Internet correctly: therefore we should intentionally misspell it ourselves in order to disassociate ourselves from them.
What complete and utter bollocks. Bollix, if you prefer. While I can understand Wired wanting to distance themselves from marketing and political people, they have no need to do so with techies - their articles do that all by themselves.
Are the editors in Wired really that contemptuous?
That they claim there was never any reason to capitalise it in the first place reflects their disregard for the heritage of the Internet. That they view it as "just another medium for delivering and receiving information" overlooks the armies of network engineers, and the tonnes of switches, routers, and cabling required to keep the Internet alive. If we unplugged all the routers, there would be no Internet. I'm pretty sure there would still be an internet or two though.
Perhaps because you cannot catch a bus to the Internet you hesitate to use the shift key. I, however, have definately stubbed my toe on a portion of it before, and that for me is reason enough to capitalise it.
Slightly unrelated, I usually write "Thank god", except when I want to remind the Christians that there may be more than one.
Hmm. Theology meets regexp(3)... think its time for a new sig... (God)?|(god)*|(god)+
Well, I've seen this recently, there appears to be some script going about trying various password for root, admin nobody, guest, and other common accounts. I've noticed this happening to machines in 3 independent networks I look after.
Most important thing is to make sure you're software is up to date - there's no point spending time crafting letters when you should be updating.
Only if you have time, should you bother complaining to anybody.
Here's the template email I use:
Hi, We intercepted a series on unauthorised login attempts to one of our hosts last night. This originated from one of the machines on your network, [IP ADDRESS], and started at [TIME DATE TZ]. We have seen similar attempts at other times originating from other hosts, so there is probably either an open proxy on this particular host, or it has itself been compromised and is being used as a zombie.
Either way, I thought you'd like a heads-up, it should be checked out. Full logs are listed below.
Thanks for your time,
I reckon I've had 50% success on the first attempt with this. Many of the people out there just couldn't be arsed in the first place, so I'm not going to waste my time complaining to them - or not until I've nobody else to complain to first.
The sentence in question looks fine to me. The first part is an abstraction of the parent post. Alone, it is redundant, and raises the question of why the author bothered. The second part answers this so that the reader is not left hanging. It also reveals the author's thoughts which led to his question.
However, this is a moot point. The author was trying to be funny by speculating that the parent poster in fact worked at Starbucks. Since this wasn't a natural conclusion to reach, he used the colon to force the question and set up the punchline.
Thus I find no fault with his syntax. BTW boss, can I have next Thursday off? Squirrel season opens at first light, and there's a $50 prize for the first kill.
To be exact, they haven't done any test flights yet. They haven't revealed when they will do them, but have stated that they do have a number of drop tests scheduled.
I do share your fear though, in Wild Fire's case the project leader, Brian Feeney, will be the pilot so I remain optimistic that adequate testing will be done. If not, at least he's not playing with other people's lives.
The Brits are extremely pompous and annoying, but at least we can thank them for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, and others. Ireland? Forget it. Stick a fork in it, it's done.
UK: Population 60 million. Ireland: Population 3.5 million, producers of Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison, The Undertones, Bob Geldof, The Pogues, The Corrs, Sinead O'Connor, Clannad, Cranberries, Ash to name a few...
Heh, I just realised another benefit for Microsoft - Threaten to sue everybody using OSS equivalents to their products, and then include the defence teams legal costs in Total Cost of Ownership comparisons...
Of course, all 2D maps will be wrong in some aspects, and the Gall-Peters approach distorts the actual shape of the land-masses. You could do worse though for a wallchart sitting in a classroom though.
You mispelt "REFERRER". Uh, I mean you spelt REFERRER correctly, but you mispelt REFERER. Uh, you mispelt something:
(from dictionary.com)
World-Wide Web: A misspelling of "referrer" which somehow made it into the HTTP standard. A given web page's referer (sic) is the URL of whatever web page contains the link that the user followed to the current page. Most browsers pass this information as part of a request.
Yeah, that happened to me once. Appropiately enoughfor/., I happened when I tried to install Win 98 on it.
I had of course wandered off for a while as the install chugged away. When I came back, I noticed an odd smell, but the machine was still running, installing away. After a minute or two trying to figure out the smell, I finally noticed the orange glow from inside the machine.
I unplugged everything from the machine and carried it outside, took the cover off, and blew out all the flames. Everything bar the PSU worked, although the plasic facade of the cd drive had melted. Once removed, the drive itself worked fine.
Going back many years, a friend had a spectrum 128+2 of which the tape drive wouldn't record, so he couldn't save games. He was playing Elite at the time trying to achieve the top rating so he would leave his speccy on all the time with the game paused while he was at school, sleeping, or otherwise engaged.
After about two weeks, the keyboard went on fire. Thankfully he was in the room when it happened, so Commander Jameson was the only fatality.
Usually I use the over-rated option where I'd really like to use an Incorrect option. The over/under-rated options are there to correct bad moderation as it happens, the meta-moderation to correct for the future. I never realised moderations of over/under-rated were not meta-moderated.
Of all the X-Prize competitors, Scaled Composites have been the most media-shy. He receives lots of publicity for his projects because they are pretty, innovative, and successful.
Also I heard on Cnn interview of Rutan that he didn't develop this rocket with the X prize in mind.
They have spent more than double the prize money developing Tier One. They'd have to be pretty stupid to be in it just to win the X-Prize. While it would be nice to recoup $10m by winning the prize, they will continue their developement whether they win or not. (Mass fatalities excluded.)
Just another contest bought out by the richest guy.
Yes. That was the point. Encourage the private sector to invest in commercial space travel by rewarding the smart investor with $10m.
They are an eye-in-the-sky for the control centre. They stay within visual range of the primary for as long as possible in order to provide feedback which cannot be attained by ground-based crews.
A chase plane will describe characteristics of the flight as they see it, and send back video footage. Despite all the telemetry in the world, the engineers still want to hear somebody say that the "burn looks good." They will also take photos which will be analyzed afterwards.
In the case of emergency, they are not of as much use with spacecraft as conventional craft as they cannot maintain proximity as easily. However, in conventional testing they can be invaluable in providing information to the test pilot that his telemetry may not provide; if something has gone wrong, the test pilot may not have any reliable telemetry at all. The chase pilot can have a look and confirm whether the engine is, indeed, on fire, or whether the landing gear has deployed properly.
The information the chase provides can be critical if decisions need to be made in emergency situations. If the damage to Columbia was more noticeable, in theory a chase could have spotted it and the launch be aborted before reaching orbit. As stated however, it's a lot more difficult providing chase to a spaceship so this would have been luck more than anything else.
AFAIK, NASA uses the T-38 for it's shuttle chase planes, and usually is piloted by other astronauts or astronauts in training. I think it only gets about Mach 1.5, so they will have a number of them in the air at different altitudes waiting for the shuttle to blast by.
The BBC has a sponsorship guide which details the average costs. Unfortunately it's in flash and I haven't installed it yet so you'll have to check it yourself.
On the best of days, for the best of teams, the pit-stop is still a hazardous affair. Coming in at high speed, braking at the last second to stop on a dime, pumping huge volumes of fuel, leaving again with maximum acceleration the instant work has finished - it's pretty dangerous. That's why all the mechanics have fire-proof gear, tough boots and so on.
Every team and driver have had their problems in the pits, I think it's unfair to single out M. Schumacher. Besides, I wouldn't say Benneton were unsafe in the pit-stops - they probably were the best trained.
If I were the front jack man, and I had to pick a driver to stand in front of, it'd be M. Schumacher. Not because I reckon he'd be the most concerned for my safety though; he'd want to hit his markings just right to minimise the stop time.
He is of undoubted skill, but his arrogance makes it easy to take shots at him. My main problem is that right now nobody else is as good as him. I wouldn't mind if he won every single race, just as long as he had to fight hard for each victory.
Compared individually, eyesight is actually better on its own at determining directions and vectors than our aural senses. The limitation of sight of course is that it only works for our field of vision; one presumes though that these days pilots don't scan the skies for bogies, they use consoles/HUDs instead.
When you combine visual and audio cues together however you get the greatest response from the user. If a pilot with good situational awareness momentarily focuses on another display while the missle changes trajectory, he should be able to extrapolate the extent of the change based on the audio cues as his mind will still have a picture of the situation.
The main problem with using audio cues for providing feedback is that environmental pollution can annoy co-workers; fighter pilots probably do not mind so much. People often disable sound warnings associated with error messages as they feel they are annoying others, and as they do not want to alert others to the fact they are having problems.
The main cause of this annoyance however is not the sound itself, but the suddden change from silence to noise.
That's why the monitoring systems mentioned above generate a constant operational noise; it becomes part of the daily background noise so it ceases to be an annoyance. For safety monitoring this is particularily advantageous as operators will often disable safety features if they find them inconvenient; look to the number of machinists who suffer injury due to the removal of blade-guards and such like.
You should check out x2x - "allows the keyboard and mouse on one ("from") X display to control another ("to") X display". Move off the left edge of one screen and the pointer appears on the other. It keeps the X selection too so you can cut and paste between the two.
I have my laptop with my email sitting by my desktop monitor, and control my laptop with the desktop keyboard and mouse. It's also great for when I'm going through a project with a client; I attach the monitor to the laptop sharing the display, and swing it around, hand him the keyboard and mouse. I can then talk him though it, tell him where to click etc., and if I need to do it for him, I use the laptop keyboard and mouse.
Only problem is when he scrolls off the left edge of the screen and the pointer disappears, I have to point to the desktop box under the desk and explain that the mouse is over there now...
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time, I try to be exacting about spelling and grammar. I fully spell words in text messages, and I punctuate where appropriate.
At the same time, I am quite accepting about the way other people use the language and don't point out errors if the author's intent is still clear.
I do have some pet hates when it comes to grammar, such as incorrect usage of "begs the question", or overusage of the word "get". Until now, the "internet" has not been on that list.
However, if Wired has succumbed to the commercial world to the extent that it believes only trademarks and brandnames are truly deserving the consideration of the shift key, then let the battle lines be drawn!
"True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important."
This is the basis of their argument? Some idiots who misuse capital letters also inadvertently spell Internet correctly: therefore we should intentionally misspell it ourselves in order to disassociate ourselves from them.
What complete and utter bollocks. Bollix, if you prefer. While I can understand Wired wanting to distance themselves from marketing and political people, they have no need to do so with techies - their articles do that all by themselves.
Are the editors in Wired really that contemptuous?
That they claim there was never any reason to capitalise it in the first place reflects their disregard for the heritage of the Internet. That they view it as "just another medium for delivering and receiving information" overlooks the armies of network engineers, and the tonnes of switches, routers, and cabling required to keep the Internet alive. If we unplugged all the routers, there would be no Internet. I'm pretty sure there would still be an internet or two though.
Perhaps because you cannot catch a bus to the Internet you hesitate to use the shift key. I, however, have definately stubbed my toe on a portion of it before, and that for me is reason enough to capitalise it.
Slightly unrelated, I usually write "Thank god", except when I want to remind the Christians that there may be more than one.
Hmm. Theology meets regexp(3)... think its time for a new sig... (God)?|(god)*|(god)+
Well, I've seen this recently, there appears to be some script going about trying various password for root, admin nobody, guest, and other common accounts. I've noticed this happening to machines in 3 independent networks I look after.
Most important thing is to make sure you're software is up to date - there's no point spending time crafting letters when you should be updating.
Only if you have time, should you bother complaining to anybody.
Here's the template email I use:
Hi,
We intercepted a series on unauthorised login attempts to one of our hosts last night. This originated from one of the machines on your network, [IP ADDRESS], and started at [TIME DATE TZ].
We have seen similar attempts at other times originating from other hosts, so there is probably either an open proxy on this particular host, or it has itself been compromised and is being used as a zombie.
Either way, I thought you'd like a heads-up, it should be checked out. Full logs are listed below.
Thanks for your time,
I reckon I've had 50% success on the first attempt with this. Many of the people out there just couldn't be arsed in the first place, so I'm not going to waste my time complaining to them - or not until I've nobody else to complain to first.
The sentence in question looks fine to me. The first part is an abstraction of the parent post. Alone, it is redundant, and raises the question of why the author bothered. The second part answers this so that the reader is not left hanging. It also reveals the author's thoughts which led to his question.
However, this is a moot point. The author was trying to be funny by speculating that the parent poster in fact worked at Starbucks. Since this wasn't a natural conclusion to reach, he used the colon to force the question and set up the punchline.
Thus I find no fault with his syntax. BTW boss, can I have next Thursday off? Squirrel season opens at first light, and there's a $50 prize for the first kill.
To be exact, they haven't done any test flights yet. They haven't revealed when they will do them, but have stated that they do have a number of drop tests scheduled.
I do share your fear though, in Wild Fire's case the project leader, Brian Feeney, will be the pilot so I remain optimistic that adequate testing will be done. If not, at least he's not playing with other people's lives.
Oh for Christ's sake. The fucking article is 5 paragraphs long and contains this information.
/. but still haven't learned how to click on a link.
This is not in any way informative except for idiots who somehow manage to find
I wish I was new here, at least then the stupid moderation would be a refreshing surprise.
Uh, before anyone gives out, The Corrs are there because they're cute.
The Brits are extremely pompous and annoying, but at least we can thank them for Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, and others. Ireland? Forget it. Stick a fork in it, it's done.
UK: Population 60 million.
Ireland: Population 3.5 million, producers of Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison, The Undertones, Bob Geldof, The Pogues, The Corrs, Sinead O'Connor, Clannad, Cranberries, Ash to name a few...
"The Edge"? "Slash"? Who cares?
Heh, I just realised another benefit for Microsoft - Threaten to sue everybody using OSS equivalents to their products, and then include the defence teams legal costs in Total Cost of Ownership comparisons...
Jolly good show guys, top ho!
Going OT, but you should check out the Gall-Peters projection which represents countries based on their land area, which produces strikingly different results than that of a conventional map.
Of course, all 2D maps will be wrong in some aspects, and the Gall-Peters approach distorts the actual shape of the land-masses. You could do worse though for a wallchart sitting in a classroom though.
Uh, you mispelt something:
(from dictionary.com)
One of life's little quirks.
Yeah, that happened to me once. Appropiately enoughfor /., I happened when I tried to install Win 98 on it.
I had of course wandered off for a while as the install chugged away. When I came back, I noticed an odd smell, but the machine was still running, installing away.
After a minute or two trying to figure out the smell, I finally noticed the orange glow from inside the machine.
I unplugged everything from the machine and carried it outside, took the cover off, and blew out all the flames. Everything bar the PSU worked, although the plasic facade of the cd drive had melted. Once removed, the drive itself worked fine.
Going back many years, a friend had a spectrum 128+2 of which the tape drive wouldn't record, so he couldn't save games. He was playing Elite at the time trying to achieve the top rating so he would leave his speccy on all the time with the game paused while he was at school, sleeping, or otherwise engaged.
After about two weeks, the keyboard went on fire. Thankfully he was in the room when it happened, so Commander Jameson was the only fatality.
A friend's younger brother decided to see what would happen if my friend's phone was immersed in orange juice. My friend was not happy.
Mind you, IIRC his brother did try to dry the phone out by putting it in the toaster...
Usually I use the over-rated option where I'd really like to use an Incorrect option.
The over/under-rated options are there to correct bad moderation as it happens, the meta-moderation to correct for the future.
I never realised moderations of over/under-rated were not meta-moderated.
Linux is dying...
Christ, if you're going to troll, at least get it right: you left out a doublequote.
Karma: <span style="voice-family: Mr-Burns, evil, male">Excellent</span>
Use the "Extrans" option to display HTML in a post.
He seems to 'crave' publicity with his projects.
Of all the X-Prize competitors, Scaled Composites have been the most media-shy. He receives lots of publicity for his projects because they are pretty, innovative, and successful.
Also I heard on Cnn interview of Rutan that he didn't develop this rocket with the X prize in mind.
They have spent more than double the prize money developing Tier One. They'd have to be pretty stupid to be in it just to win the X-Prize. While it would be nice to recoup $10m by winning the prize, they will continue their developement whether they win or not. (Mass fatalities excluded.)
Just another contest bought out by the richest guy.
Yes. That was the point. Encourage the private sector to invest in commercial space travel by rewarding the smart investor with $10m.
Really. I'm sure you can find out more on CNN.
AFAIK, NASA uses the T-38 for it's shuttle chase planes,
Argh! I meant, of course, to say "its shuttle chase planes."
BTW, well done to Scaled Composites, and to Mojave. Nice to think there is now a commercial spaceport out there.
And while I'm at it, doesn't "Ansari" seem like a mega-corporation name that would be right at home in William Gibson's writings?
They are an eye-in-the-sky for the control centre.
They stay within visual range of the primary for as long as possible in order to provide feedback which cannot be attained by ground-based crews.
A chase plane will describe characteristics of the flight as they see it, and send back video footage. Despite all the telemetry in the world, the engineers still want to hear somebody say that the "burn looks good." They will also take photos which will be analyzed afterwards.
In the case of emergency, they are not of as much use with spacecraft as conventional craft as they cannot maintain proximity as easily. However, in conventional testing they can be invaluable in providing information to the test pilot that his telemetry may not provide; if something has gone wrong, the test pilot may not have any reliable telemetry at all.
The chase pilot can have a look and confirm whether the engine is, indeed, on fire, or whether the landing gear has deployed properly.
The information the chase provides can be critical if decisions need to be made in emergency situations. If the damage to Columbia was more noticeable, in theory a chase could have spotted it and the launch be aborted before reaching orbit. As stated however, it's a lot more difficult providing chase to a spaceship so this would have been luck more than anything else.
AFAIK, NASA uses the T-38 for it's shuttle chase planes, and usually is piloted by other astronauts or astronauts in training. I think it only gets about Mach 1.5, so they will have a number of them in the air at different altitudes waiting for the shuttle to blast by.
The BBC has a sponsorship guide which details the average costs. Unfortunately it's in flash and I haven't installed it yet so you'll have to check it yourself.
On the best of days, for the best of teams, the pit-stop is still a hazardous affair. Coming in at high speed, braking at the last second to stop on a dime, pumping huge volumes of fuel, leaving again with maximum acceleration the instant work has finished - it's pretty dangerous. That's why all the mechanics have fire-proof gear, tough boots and so on.
Every team and driver have had their problems in the pits, I think it's unfair to single out M. Schumacher. Besides, I wouldn't say Benneton were unsafe in the pit-stops - they probably were the best trained.
If I were the front jack man, and I had to pick a driver to stand in front of, it'd be M. Schumacher. Not because I reckon he'd be the most concerned for my safety though; he'd want to hit his markings just right to minimise the stop time.
He is of undoubted skill, but his arrogance makes it easy to take shots at him. My main problem is that right now nobody else is as good as him. I wouldn't mind if he won every single race, just as long as he had to fight hard for each victory.
Compared individually, eyesight is actually better on its own at determining directions and vectors than our aural senses. The limitation of sight of course is that it only works for our field of vision; one presumes though that these days pilots don't scan the skies for bogies, they use consoles/HUDs instead.
When you combine visual and audio cues together however you get the greatest response from the user. If a pilot with good situational awareness momentarily focuses on another display while the missle changes trajectory, he should be able to extrapolate the extent of the change based on the audio cues as his mind will still have a picture of the situation.
The main problem with using audio cues for providing feedback is that environmental pollution can annoy co-workers; fighter pilots probably do not mind so much. People often disable sound warnings associated with error messages as they feel they are annoying others, and as they do not want to alert others to the fact they are having problems.
The main cause of this annoyance however is not the sound itself, but the suddden change from silence to noise.
That's why the monitoring systems mentioned above generate a constant operational noise; it becomes part of the daily background noise so it ceases to be an annoyance.
For safety monitoring this is particularily advantageous as operators will often disable safety features if they find them inconvenient; look to the number of machinists who suffer injury due to the removal of blade-guards and such like.
If he had sounds of different pitches for different events, I could have composed a short ditty to "play" to him.
"Your Honour, I wasn't trying to crack his system, I was trying to play the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly".
(Important to pick something that's in the public domain, don't want the RIAA coming after you for unlicensed performances...)
You should check out x2x - "allows the keyboard and mouse on one ("from") X display to control another ("to") X display". Move off the left edge of one screen and the pointer appears on the other.
It keeps the X selection too so you can cut and paste between the two.
I have my laptop with my email sitting by my desktop monitor, and control my laptop with the desktop keyboard and mouse.
It's also great for when I'm going through a project with a client; I attach the monitor to the laptop sharing the display, and swing it around, hand him the keyboard and mouse. I can then talk him though it, tell him where to click etc., and if I need to do it for him, I use the laptop keyboard and mouse.
Only problem is when he scrolls off the left edge of the screen and the pointer disappears, I have to point to the desktop box under the desk and explain that the mouse is over there now...
Do you mind if I print a T-shirt for myself with that someday?