* Posts by jake

26591 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

jake Silver badge

Re: Ugh

Exactly.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Ugh

Yes. The obvious solution.

This round's on me.

jake Silver badge

Re: Fahrenheit -- banish

What about Pints?

jake Silver badge

Re: I remember...

This Yank remembers pig bins in British schools ... do all y'all still do that? Or did it go away with the foot&mouth problems in the early '90s (or earlier?)?

jake Silver badge

Re: Appreciate the effort but...

The whole Paris thing was a joke that was past its prime a decade or more ago. Good riddance.

Dump Travaglia (rusting on his old laurals for a quarter century), and bring back Dabbs.

jake Silver badge

Re: German-American pseudo-English.

The Amish probably use more technology than you think they do. Even Cell Phones, although most of them refuse to allow a telephone into their homes.

jake Silver badge

Yes.

Even Scientific American, back in the day, allowed spellings according to the Author's background. And even mixed & matched, in the case where one author was quoting another. (See Martin Gardner's columns on Conway's Game of Life, for example ... if you can find reprints that haven't been "helpfully" edited, that is).

jake Silver badge

Misunderstanding of how rifting works.

jake Silver badge

Except ...

... the mid-Atlantic is slowly retreating from both sides.

jake Silver badge

Regardless of my somewhat irreverent amusement elsewhere in this thread, it may surprise some that I agree with the above post.

Well, most of the post ... Kate Fox's observation "The English are not usually given to patriotic boasting – indeed, both patriotism and boasting are regarded as unseemly, so the combination of these two sins is doubly distasteful. But there is one significant exception to this rule, and that is the patriotic pride we take in our sense of humour, particularly in our expert use of irony." is clearly bullshit.

Or perhaps she didn't notice the major kerfuffle caused by The Sex Pistols when they were top of the charts during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, as the entire nation lost its tiny collective mind in celebration ... There are other, somewhat less egregious examples.

jake Silver badge

The word "Math" is ...

... inherently plural , as it is short for "Mathematics". Presumably you say "Mathematicses"?

Kind of like RPM is the plural (the S is implied from "revolutions"). If you insist on saying "RPMs", I'll need to know how many minutes you are intending to measure those revolutions.

jake Silver badge

Where did you get that "statistic", Fat Freddy Scat?

jake Silver badge

"ize" is the original, from the ancient Greek. You Brits partially changed over to the French "ise" awhile back. Kinda like you did when going metric.

So once again, you're speaking/spleling in French, not your vaunted English.

The Big Dic says that both -ise and -ize are correct in British English.

jake Silver badge

Their servers, their rules. The freedom of the Press belongs to he who owns the press.

::shrugs::

jake Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

As a Left Coastian Yank, I have never heard of anybody having issues with any of those phrases.

However, willfully, intentionally and even stubbornly illiterate people exist in every society. Usually they are spread out among the general population, where they can't cause much trouble ... but I'm sure (nearly) all the readers of this august rag can name a few States where they seem to have concentrated for varying reasons. Were you, perchance, in one of those states?

And yes, "it was OK" tends to be a backhanded compliment around here.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

Where the fuck were you? Stuck in the Bible Belt? You poor bastard ...

Here in SillyConValley "evil" is, and has been. used just as it is in Blighty for generations ... Read comments in Source Code from the 1960s if you don't believe me.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

As a Yank who spent many years in the British isles, I suspect your problem is that you just plain aren't as funny as you think you are. Cross-pond humo(u)r can be difficult to translate for the GreatUnwashed, but it's not impossible. And once explained (regardless of direction), it keeps its humo(u)r. Except many of the Brits refuse to have anything to do with the crossing from the West "because it's Yank".

There is a word for that ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

Personally, having spent roughly 20% of my life in Blighty, I find both versions of English to work just fine. All the angst being displayed here is, to me, quite funny.

Because IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER. The Universe doesn't care, and never will.

jake Silver badge

"if the Tories embark on a death spiral this week"

This week? Didn't they start that roughly when they threw Thatcher under the bus?

jake Silver badge

I wouldn't know. My personal bozo filter is wetware. Much better granularity than the software version. 40-odd years of Usenet and IRC will do that to a guy.

Some decidedly odder than others ...

jake Silver badge

But it IS a word!

What? He didn't say leatherized? Bloody accents ...

jake Silver badge

Where is Kaliphornia?

Or is that a British mispleling of California?

Hypocrite much?

jake Silver badge

Re: The King's English

His paternal Grandad was the King of Greece for half a century or so. Close enough?

jake Silver badge

Not wounded pride.

More like lese-majesty.

That version of the language belongs to the King, after all. Inherited it from his Mum, he did.

jake Silver badge

"How long till somebody makes an extension which removes all opposing opinions on the Internet, allowing you to live in you very own little confirmation bubble?"

Killfiles (AKA bozo filters) have been around forever. Where do you think your spam filter(s) came from?

jake Silver badge

Re: German-American pseudo-English.

How very dare you. Pennsylvania Dutch is a perfectly cromulant language.

jake Silver badge

Re: Spellerizer?

Presumably you are going to get right on that, in your copious free time.

jake Silver badge

Owed to a Spell Checker (was: Re: Optional)

(AKA "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise")

I have a spelling checker,

It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,

Your sure reel glad two no.

Its vary polished in it's weigh.

My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing,

It freeze yew lodes of thyme.

It helps me right awl stiles two reed,

And aides me when eye rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen

Eye trussed too bee a joule.

The checker pours o'er every word

To cheque sum spelling rule.

Bee fore a veiling checker's

Hour spelling mite decline,

And if we're lacks oar have a laps,

We wood bee maid too wine.

Butt now bee cause my spelling

Is checked with such grate flare,

Their are know fault's with in my cite,

Of nun eye am a wear.

Now spelling does knot phase me,

It does knot bring a tier.

My pay purrs awl due glad den

With wrapped word's fare as hear.

To rite with care is quite a feet

Of witch won should bee proud,

And wee mussed dew the best wee can,

Sew flaw's are knot aloud.

Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays

Such soft wear four pea seas,

And why eye brake in two averse

Buy righting want too pleas.

-Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar, early 1990s

jake Silver badge

"As I understand it, if someone want an international audience you should use UK English"

For the spoken word.

However, like it or not, just as written Arabic drove early science, written Latin (Koin Greek, Aramaic, et al) drove early Christianity, written Deutsch drove later science (etc., I won't continue. You are quite welcome), written American English is the lingua franca of tehintrawebtubes, and of the FOSS world. This isn't a good thing, nor is it a bad thing. All it is is an accident of history.

However, it will change over time. If there is one thing that's a dead cert, it's that language mutates. Much to the deep dismay of all those Internet King's English nazis out there.

And of course, running code trumps all.

Please understand Godwin's Law before invoking it, or I shall laugh at you.

jake Silver badge

Re: But some of us prefer the Encheferizer.........

There are other variations on the theme, including ValSpeak, Jive, Pig Latin, Porn and a few more.

Most are funny, once, but rather dated by today's standards.

jake Silver badge

Re: Icon required

Seconded.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Spellerizer?

Damn your ise!

But ta. I'll be sure to cheque into it, if I ever get around to trying Chrome.

Have a beer for your efforts. And another, for the hate comments you're going to be getting from the chronically complaining commentards.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

jake Silver badge

Re: Been there done that

"Just note it was before remote login"

No. We've been using remote login for well over half a century. In fact, the very first event across the (D)ARPANET was a login attempt. It failed, but the second attempt succeeded. You can read about it here. That was the 29th of October, 1969.

For those of you who don't like pointy-clicky and prefer copy-pasta, here ya go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Initial_four_hosts

jake Silver badge

Worst case I ever saw ...

We had a high-profile customer making a transition from their own internal world-wide network to a more commercial T-carrier based system. The company I worked for supplied the necessary gear to interface between $TELCO and their own equipment. This wasn't pre-Internet, but it was before the general use of the Internet for routing internal traffic around the world, so all their WAN links were supplied by one $TELCO or another. Call it mid 1980s.

Our customer service got a phone call from the customer allowing as to how one of their offices in Sydney, Australia refused to see the rest of the world. Customer service called me (the primary TAC Engineer for the customer), and I eyeballed it. Digging into the network, I could see that a loopback switch in the Sydney office was thrown, it would need to be flipped back to connect their LAN to their WAN. I informed customer service, and figured that was the end of it. Until about two hours later when my Boss wandered in and asked what I knew about Sydney being down. I blinked three or four times to reboot (kernel hacking again, probably) and told him I had located the cause and informed our guys as to the fix, and then got on with putting out fires elsewhere.

He replied that apparently the dude in charge of the Sydney office didn't like the answer, had called his Boss, who called his Boss, who called the director of the Australian branch, who called the owner of our company, who was informed by our CS guys that I was responsible, and so now my Boss had been put in charge of fixing it. He wasn't happy. So using my TAC access, I showed him the "fault". He expressed disbelief. And called the owner down to my office. The owner (the engineer who founded the company, and a real tech, not just a suit) also expressed disbelief. I believe his actual words were "What the fuck are those useless fucks doing?" ...

ANYway, he called the director of the Australian branch (just a suit, apparently), who got all shouty and demanded an immediate fix, now, or we'd lose the entire contract if he had anything to say about it. Our owner tried to calm him down, but the dude wasn't having any of it ... so to make a long(er) story short(er), he promised to "put his best man on it" ... and I got sent to Sydney on the next flight. Out of San Francisco. First Class. At very short notice. To flip a switch. With invoice in hand, to be presented personally to the Director in Oz. I honestly thought he was going to take a swing at me when he read it ... it was a tick over $20,000 ... in mid-1980s dollars. Broken down in glorious detail. To flip a switch.

But wait ... it gets better! When I was at the airport heading home (having been in Australia for maybe 2 hours total), I got called to the proverbial White Courtesy Phone[0]. Seems a different branch of the very same company had a similar problem, this time in a satellite office outside Boca Raton, Florida. I called my Boss and asked something like "WTF‽‽‽". He tiredly allowed as to how he personally had checked, and indeed it was the exact same issue. Our owner had asked if I wouldn't mind doing the hono(u)rs ... a completely different Director had called and threatened him in a similar manner to the first. So instead of taking the long east-bound flight home six hours later, I had to take an immediate West-bound flight, changing planes in Jakarta and London, to Florida. Arriving somewhat cranky & disheveled in Boca, I was rather pleased with the similar result (one switch, and out), except I didn't feel physically threatened after the Director read the invoice. This one just went white and slumped in his chair. I excused myself.

Back to the airport, and home to California. Still First Class. Four+ days on the road, literally once around the world, no hotel rooms, not a single proper meal, showering in airports, just to flip two switches. Such was the life of a field engineer. Tell that to kids these days ...

[0] This was in the halcyon days before ubiquitous cell phone, and I had left my DynaTAC at home ... it not only wouldn't have worked in Oz, it probably would have been confiscated at the airport.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

jake Silver badge

Re: Free speech, duh

"It's amazing that I don't have six toes on each foot."

Nowt wrong with being polydactyl. Some of my favorite cats, etc. etc.

jake Silver badge

Re: Free speech, duh

I use "no worries" occasionally, too. Not sure where Australia comes into it ... I got it from my Grandfather, Northern California, early '60s. (Probably earlier.)

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: E-z money

As the great Bill Watterson taught us, "Verbing weirds language". Weirding is not a bad thing, especially in informal writing/speech. Unless you lack the humo(u)r gene, of course, in which case I feel very, very sorry for you.

Generic "you", not you personally, COCM. Allow me to beer you.

jake Silver badge

"Of particular concern is the sheer number of ex- Prime Ministers who must now have nuclear launch codes too."

I'm absolutely certain that's not an issue.

jake Silver badge

Re: We can only hope for beheading, just the other way around

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

jake Silver badge

Re: We can only hope for beheading, just the other way around

Put that on Pay Per View and solve all of the UK's financial problems in one swell foop.

jake Silver badge

Re: Export please!

Time flies like and arrow, and all that?

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: This makes me so happy

He buggered off to France.

Probably didn't want to be press-ganged into the job. Smart man, that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Face like thunder

Perhaps the Ministers (including the Prime Minister) should be made to serve salads to poor people one day per month, as a reminder that once elected they are supposed to leave their Salad Days behind them.

Might as well do something with that old lettuce ...

jake Silver badge

Re: seeing how things work (or don't) over there...

The problem with removing Orange Idiot in Chief early was that his replacement, that fucking nutcase Pence, was/is so bad that not even the conservative ultra-right old guard wanted him in the oval office, not even for a couple of months ...

Why do you think Cheeto hired him for the job? Made his spot in the White House bullet-proof for four years.

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

jake Silver badge

Re: "LEET"?

Don't be silly. That only works when you ROT26 it, as any fule no.

jake Silver badge

As a consultant ...

... These numbers seem to be a trifle conservative.

jake Silver badge

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

"They can't survive without auto-correct and predictive text"

From what I've seen, most of the people who rely on such things can't survive WITH it.

jake Silver badge

Re: EY did not define ranges for the four generations included in the report.

"pretty much every treasure hunting documentary"

Consider the source. It's not like the producers, actors, script-writers and intended targets are the sharpest tools in the shed.

For the record, I've only heard it called "cache" by the vast majority of the population (the Jr. High set has just discovered geo caching ... ).

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

jake Silver badge

Unless you turn your chair around.

Artist formerly known as Kanye reveals Parler trick: Buying the far-right haven

jake Silver badge

Re: Perceived ant-semitic posts?

"Unvaxxed, fucking stupid, and proud of it!"

FTFY

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