[sclug] TopPosting Was: Helping others into FOSS/Linux

[JRKnight]

Personally, I'm sick of the way so much software, as well
as having an illogical or unintuitive user interface, has forced
unnecessary cultural changes on us, such as:

(a) language errors:
      [quoting from the original message]
     ... if its such a bad practise why hasn't it formed....
      " its" should read "it's" [for "it is", not the possessive of it
       which does NOT carry an apostrophe, and "practise" is
      the verb: "practice" [noun] is intended here, but the spelling
      given is that of an American spellING checker [note: a
      'spell checker' would presumably be used by trainee
      witches to get their potions and incantations right...]

      The shortening of -ing and -tion words not only leads to
      ambiguity (is the Iraqi 'No-Fly Zone' in fact devoid of those
      insects?),  but also may reflect the loss of the abstract
      ideas (perhaps difficult for the transatlantic/IT mindset)
      which such words often represent, as computer-driven
      typing-laziness leads us closer to Orwellian Newspeak...

(b) the geek-stupidity that substitutes unnecessary invented
      abbreviations for the months of the year on rail tickets,
      instead of the long-established ones - eg DMR for DEC.

(c) the irrational and confusing mm/dd/yy date format that
     can appear unexpectedly in some software, and can be
     ambiguous for at least a third of any month. Microsoft
     started to accomodate the notations for different national
     formats of time, date, currency etc way back in early
     DOS,  so why do we still have to put up with the stupidity
     of  incorrect settings - or is this another piece of cultural
     imperialism?

(d) the expression  heard, often on TV, when Web addresses
     are being read out: "forward-slash"  for '/', when the latter
     is just a simple slash, long-established as a division
     sign or separator for alternatives. It is of course the
     backslash which is anomalous, and should be named as
     such, but Microsoft/DOS usage changed the emphasis.

Someone will inevitably criticise all this as pedantic, but as
Lynn Truss forgot to mention in her book: if you make the
same kind of spelling or syntax mistakes (or even insert a
space, in some cases) in just one line of any computer code,
that program will either fail to run, or crash, or go horribly
wrong in some other way.
JR