Damn, people, do you think we could give this a rest already? If it bugs you to read shit that's, well, hard to read, just use the "delete" button. That's what I do. For god's sake, I majored in English, and I seem to be less worried about it then many others on this list ;-) Richard Erlacher said: - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

it's a PGP signature. Your're using outlook, which while brain-dead, should be able to tell you that...I believe it's identified with the MIME type "application/pgp-signature", which seems pretty self-explanitory. and if you don't know what it is, don't open it. I wouldn't expect anything else, really... Richard Erlacher said: - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

jeez! ok, if it's causing such problems, i'll tell my mailer to stop attaching my signature if i'm sending from this mailbox... hope that helps... Richard Erlacher said: - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Doc said: I agree, in general. That's why I really started using GPG in the first place. However, I'm only dropping it in sending to this list since people have complained, not in my other correspondance...perhaps if people's mailers stop being brain-dead, I'll send my signature to the list again :) - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Richard Erlacher said: Actually, it does. I've looked at my mail spool after e-mailing myself. The real problem is that outlook is brain-dead... The message is sent as mulipart/MIME, with the first part being the text of the message and the other part being the signature. Clearly outlook doesn't understand how to process MIME the right way; it should recognize that part 1 is plain text and display it, and that part 2 is something it doesn't know about. I've talked to others (not on this list) about it, and the only mailers that seem to have this problem are 1) outlook, and 2) some e-mail appliances. I stand by outlook being brain-dead in dealing with this, but I'm dropping sending the signature to the list for the time being since it's causing problems, and it's not so important to me if my list traffic is signed... anything I send in private mail will continue to include it, though, so be aware in case I ever send you anything off-list ;-) - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Dan Wright wrote: In my freshman year at the University of Michigan in the early postwar years I took a semester course in English taught by an instructor who acknowledged he could not spell and stated to the class that he "didn't think it was important". Seems likely he was one of the early advocates that started us on the downhill road to where we are now. - don <snip>

Thank you for posting the info about VCF in your sig. I will put it on my agenda. Bill Amsterdam, NL On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 02:54:38PM +0100, Hans Franke wrote: <<snip>>

Well ... I said I didn't read his work much ... I do seem to remember though ... never a capital, not even in his name ... <sigh> Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Doc" &lt;doc(a)mdrconsult.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 10:05 AM Subject: Re: Language and English was that example. poetry, about case the

At 12:06 PM 1/4/02 -0500, you wrote: When I went to school (many years ago & I am retired) we had a class in 8th grade in which we studies Spanish, German, French & Latin so we could decide which language to take in high school.

Unfortunately, todays student doesn't have the tools he needs to cope with a foreign language if he hasn't been taught basic sentence structure(subject, verb, predicate nominative, predicate adjective, etc.) , spelling, and grammar. A foreign language would, otherwise, help the student with such things, as well as with syntax. English, however, differs from the languages listed in the quoted message below in that the order of the words in a sentence greatly affect the meaning of the sentence, while that's not so much the case in the other languages. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Koller" &lt;vze2mnvr(a)verizon.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt;rg>; "Gene Ehrich" &lt;gehrich(a)tampabay.rr.com&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 1:00 PM Subject: Re: Language and English 8th

Nope ... never studied Latin ... folks don't use it much anymore. Most of the guys on this list recognize, however, that GERMAN, which I learned before English, is not a romance language, being of the "other" camp, i.e, a Germanic language. Had you paid attention during what few classes you attended, you might, perhaps, have encountered reference to a fellow named Chaucer, who wrote in a style almost trivially transliterable to German, because of the structural and lexical similarities between the languages. That, of course, was before English became an "infix" language, meaning that the order of the words has effect on the meaning of the sentence. (See what you can learn if you watch the PBS channel instead of the "Simpsons?") Why is it you feel you have to defend yourself against what really isn't an attack? What's happened is that a few guys have, to greater or lesser degree, pointed out their annoyance at a practice to which you've become accustomed. The message is simple. Don't do that here. It's OK to do it elsewhere, if folks don't object. They do object here, however. Give yourself, and all of us, a break, please. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Koller" &lt;vze2mnvr(a)verizon.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt;rg>; "Richard Erlacher" &lt;edick(a)idcomm.com&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 10:06 AM Subject: Re: Language and English it was that example. is one's people to poetry, about case the

Yes, this come from old typewriter formatting. It is also visually pleasing. The colon also takes two spaces. On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Hans Franke wrote: M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc. Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." - Ovid

At 06:33 PM 1/4/02 +0100, you wrote: That's a matter of personal choice of your typing teacher. It certainly is not an english rule. ================================= Gene Ehrich gene(a)ehrich.com gehrich(a)tampabay.rr.com

I'm not sure it ever was taught outside the typing class, since people writing by hand weren't conscious of leaving additional space at the end of a sentence, though they did it. The extra spaces make it easy to parse out the sentences. For those of us who need reading glasses, the extra gap helps avoid having to grope around for the maginfying glass. On some displays, the single-pixel period at the end of the sentence is hard to see. BTW, I gave Monica that KIM-2 and KIM-3 board pair for her to ship you. Please let me know when you have them. These are pretty rare boards, so I hope you get some enjoyment from them. I'd be interested to know whether they work OK after all these years. I don' t know whether they ever did work, of course. That on-board regulator (LM305 + pass transistor) is pretty ancient nowadays, but it fits right in with the mid-'70's (1975-76) design that this represents. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hans Franke" &lt;Hans.Franke(a)mch20.sbs.de&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 10:33 AM Subject: Re: Language and English was that example.

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Stan Barr wrote: These are all _typesetting_ rules, and not so much grammar rules. Furthermore, most of these rules are workarounds for problems introduced by the limited nature of the typewriter as compared to a full typesetting machine. Typesetting machines use spaces of varying widths according to complex rules---some of which are aesthetic in nature. Generally speaking, spaces after full stops in typeset materials are wider than spaces between words Typewriter rules like "two hyphens approximate one em-dash" (wrong, IMO, it should be three hyphens) are put in place because common typewriters have traded off mechanical complexity for widespread adoption and lack the full character set of typesetting machines. Many early typewriters, in an attempt to reduce mechanical complexity to the utmost, even lack differentiated type for the numerals '1' and '0' as either can be suitably approximated in typewritten documents by the lowercase letter 'l' and the uppercase letter 'O', respectively. Even the American English "rule" of placing all punctuation inside quotation marks is a _typographical convention_ that stems from the early days of movable type, when the period and comma were the most fragile pieces of type and were prone to breaking off in the press. Placing a period between a quotation mark and a space increased the mechanical stress on the die, and made it more likely to break than if it were "protected" on one side by other type. Example: ...a chicken". Sighing heavily, he... ...died suddenly," Ernestine remarked without... Should this tradition continue in an age where fragility of movable type is no longer a real concern, and punctuation placed inside quotation marks has the real possibility of confusing meaning? Example: At the SCM prompt, type, "SHOW BOOT." At the SCM prompt, type, "SHOW BOOT". Which one is correct? Anyway. Don't confuse typographical convention with rules of grammar. Notice in my first line of text, the underscores surrounding the word, "typesetting". Is that "incorrect grammar"? Or is it a typesetting convention for approximating emphasis in a medium which cannot predictably reproduce emphasized text? ok r. PS: don't forget that underlining, as a typographic convention, came about because italic text could not predictably be reproduced on a typewriter.

To some extent, it would depend also on whether you wanted a perfect score on this week's test. When I was learning English punctuation, I was taught that the quotation marks come last, even though the terminal punctuation is not part of the quoted item. Aside from that, I was also taught that two bits of punctuation never go together, unless the last one is a quotation mark. Never having had any interest or training in COBOL I wouldn't guess as to the correctness of that line of text. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Pope" &lt;bpope(a)wordstock.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 1:53 PM Subject: Re: Language and English marks

I would doubt, altho I've been pleasantly surprised at the depth of knowledge of the participants on this list, if many are acquainted to the "writers bible", "The Elements of Style" by Stronk and White. The title gives the clue. These are sugestions not rules. Fred is saying that typography did lay down a set of rules to be followed if you were going to print and that this had little to do with grammar. eg: 2 spaces after an end of sentence. Lawrence Damn !! I can't believe I'm a willing contributor to this OT dribble. Possibly because it's as comfortable as a favorite BBS. Maybe we should set up another mail-list "classiccomp.dribble" and hope it doesn't suffer the fate of the short-lived "discoveries on E-bay" one which rose out of a flame-war. At least it would cut down the list msgs. to reasonable proportions. From my point of view I could live with a split between micro and mini as I tend to automatically delete anything with DEC (and not appended with Rainbow), VAX, or VMS. Tho at times I'm able to actually able to understand what is being talked about. I know !!! You'se guys are just setting me up to be a mini collector. You have no more room for your own passion and you just want to spread the disease. LOL. Lawrence Reply to: lgwalker(a)mts.net

Hey! That's <drivel> not <dribble> you're meaning, isn't it? When I was a student, the "bible" was Campbell's Form and Style in Thesis Writing. I may actually still have my original copy. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lawrence Walker" &lt;lgwalker(a)mts.net&gt; To: "Ethan Dicks" &lt;erd_6502(a)yahoo.com&gt;om>; &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 6:57 PM Subject: Re: Language and English knowledge bible", to do Possibly of mini early days of yes, I be, however.

All this discussion makes me want to go searching for Turabian. I also remember of very nice little manual -The Little, Brown Handbook. I also have a Navy manual of style somewhere. On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote: M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc. Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." - Ovid

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote: OK, this is interesting. I always thought that it was both aesthetically ugly and illogical to place punctuation marks inside quotes. The belong on the outside, unless it belongs to the quote itself. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Clint Wolff (VAX collector) wrote: The main purpose of the period is to denote the end of a declarative or imperative sentence (i.e., a statement or an order). Within a quotation lies another context, one which could be different from that of the containing sentence. Having only one place to put punctuation creates ambiguity, and putting the punctuation *inside* the quotation makes the situation worse. For example, in "proper" American English: Jamie asked, "Where are the toys?" Now, which does this mean? Jamie asked, "Where are the toys?". Jamie asked, "Where are the toys?"? In the first case, the author is stating that Jamie asked a question. In the second, the author is asking if Jamie asked a question. These are two very different meanings, and "proper" punctuation has no way to distinguish between the two meanings. Here is a slightly more complicated example: Jamie said, "Jason said, 'What the hell!'" Now, which does this mean? Jamie said, "Jason said, 'What the hell!'.". Jamie said, "Jason said, 'What the hell!'."? Jamie said, "Jason said, 'What the hell!'?". Jamie said, "Jason said, 'What the hell!'?"? Jamie said, "Hello, world." is quite like printf("Hello, world);" Personally, I use a writing style reminiscent of that described in the Jargon File. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Hacker-Writing-Style.html -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com

There was a thread on alt.folklore.computers on this very topic (does that make this on-topic? No, just two similar threads from two similar forums that are/were off-topic. But I digress). I agree, punctuation inside quotes IS ugly, but it does seem to be the "rule." I wasn't sure about the root of that rule, so thanks for pointing it out. Kind of reminds me of the use of Kelvin vs. degrees kelvin. Eric Sellam Ismail wrote:

You may have noticed, Sellam, that the Germans recently performed vast truncation surgery on their language, though I don't know much of the details. American English could benefit by removing many of those features that puzzle foreigners and natives alike, such as the features that allow one to presume that GHOTI is pronounced like FISH. That's GH as in enough, O as in women, and TI as in nation. If we could simply agree to spell through thru, as it's often done already, and tough as tuff, etc, it would be an improvement. Of course, there are still lots of possible syntax errors, e.g. there vs. their vs they're. I couldn't find it when I was looking for it, but I saw one net-funny that I received once, illustrating how that would resurrect the roots our language shares with German. If we could come up with an acceptable set of spellings and grammar that would meet everyone's needs, perhaps we could reduce the need for spell-checking our speech. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" &lt;foo(a)siconic.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 1:15 PM Subject: More off-topic drivel: Re: Language and English Festival ---- http://www.vintage.org www.VintageTech.com *

----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" &lt;spc(a)conman.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 07:34 PM Subject: Re: More off-topic drivel: Re: Language and English already, are ROFLMAO! I was going to look around and see if I could find this again. It looks like things are progressing a little slower than Sam thought. Perhaps it's progressing by generations rather than years? Bob

It was thus said that the Great Don Maslin once stated: I wonder why most typography systems don't use the system developed by Donald Knuth for TeX. It easily handles about 95% of the cases for hyphenation, and when it breaks down, you can give it hints for words it missed. -spc (O. T. since TeX is older than 10 years 8-)

That was my point, Sellam. You, of all people, being one of the better writers, whatever your opinions, in this forum, should recognize, then, that this is not the place to explore or fulfill one's need for self-expression through unconventional formatting. Most of the fellows who write here use the most widely accepted formats, avoiding HTML, for example, and try to be focused and to-the-point, if not always entirely on-topic, in their posts. This is not a place for "stream-of-consciousness" writing style, as has probably been pointed out repeatedly to those who insist on it. That is a style popular with, though wholly inappropriate for, a generation of youngsters with attention deficits and hyperactivity. It can give a guy whiplash trying to follow the mid-sentence changes in subject. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" &lt;foo(a)siconic.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 12:14 PM Subject: Re: Language and English Festival ---- http://www.vintage.org www.VintageTech.com *

It's like I said, Richard must have been smoking those "funny little cigarettes". I must say I approve of the new you Richard. Lawrence Damn ! I miss Ward Griffith the Libertarian TRS80 guru. Reply to: lgwalker(a)mts.net

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote: I've been told that the only reason they originally taught us to use two spaces between sentences was because a typewriter's punctuation characters are not the same width as regular letters. This isn't true with computers, so the two space rule does not apply. It's also customary to insert a blank line between This also makes it easier to trim someone's email when quoting for a reply. -Toth

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Ben Franchuk wrote: Nope. IT IS NOT in any way an issue of unformatted capacity. The unformatted capacity of such disks is almost 2M. They get it by using the most ridiculous, cockamamy, idiotic possible value for what a megabyte should represent.

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote: I think that "1.4M" does just fine. For those who are too lazy to do the arithmetic: A "Decimal" megabyte (10^6) would be 1000000 bytes, which would give the disk a capacity of 1.47 M An "honest" megabyte (2^20) would be 1048576 bytes, which would give the disk a capacity of 1.40625 M An "IBM disk" or "sleazy" megabyte (1000 * 1024) would be 1024000, which is the only way to get "1.44" M. I prefer the binary based unit, I can accept the decimal based unit, but there just is no possible justification for the mixed one, other than "But IBM has always done it that way." It's especially egregious, because even IBM, who use 1024000 for Megabyte for disks, uses 1048576 for memory. Thus, an IBM megabyte of disk storage will not hold the content of an IBM megabyte of memory! Rounding, I don't have a problem with. In fact, I think that Alan Shugart was brilliant to round down the capacities of his drives, thus significantly reducing the support issues ("but I only got 10 and a half usable megabytes on that 11.1492872347653257 M drive") But calling the disk 1.44 is NOT rounding from 1.40625, it is inflating the capacity with a BOGUS unit size. I would really like "Mebibyte". IFF it were to have been introduced more than twenty years ago! They waited WAY too long. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote: What? That makes no damn sense. A Megabyte was, is, and always will be 1024 * 1024 bytes. The NIST folks are a bunch of stupid losers for even suggesting such an atrocity. They should coin a new term for a fake Megabyte (i.e. something other than 1024 ^ 2). Call it a "Maybebyte". That wasn't funny. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *