Original post on defending the purity of the English language

 

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From: jdnic...@watyew.uwaterloo.ca (Brian or James)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
Subject: The King's English
Message-ID: <1990May15.155309.8892@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 15 May 90 15:53:09 GMT
References: <9005111639.AA25393@rutgers.edu> <8052@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <4126@thebes.Thalatta.COM> <1990May15.083934.2532@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
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Posted: Tue May 15 16:53:09 1990


 The problem with defending the purity of the English language
is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't
just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for 
new vocabulary. I have a friend who has a wonderful tirade about
the incorrectness of trying to 
	1: Map Latin grammar onto English 
  He's an English teacher, BTW. I don't think he's likely to win
mass coverts, alas.
					JDN     

Formerly at this Google Groups link to their Usenet archives, but it seems to be broken.

Faux Pas

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

JDN

"On defending the purity of the English Language"

 

		"Faux Pas"

        English comes
        on little fox paws.

        It sits looking
        over German and French
        on silent haunches
        and then mugs them.

			-- Apologies to Carl Sandburg

Microsoft isn't doing much QA on their new-user experience.

Microsoft isn't doing much QA on their new-user experience.

This is too good not to share (Enterprise Cobolscript).

 Saved from my old blog c/o the Internet Archive:

"Enterprise COBOL supports Java™-based object-oriented syntax to facilitate the interoperation of COBOL and Java programs."

This is just too good not to share

DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 CURR-ARG-COUNT PIC 9(9) BINARY VALUE ZERO. LINKAGE SECTION. 01 ARG-COUNT PIC 9(9)BINARY. 01 ARG-LENGTH-LIST. 05 ARG-LENGTH-ADDR POINTER OCCURS 1 TO 99999 DEPENDING ON CURR-ARG-COUNT. 01 ARG-LIST. 05 ARG-ADDR POINTER OCCURS 1 TO 99999 DEPENDING ON CURR-ARG-COUNT. 01 ARG-LENGTH PIC 9(9) BINARY. 01 ARG PIC X(65536). PROCEDURE DIVISION USING ARG-COUNT ARG-LENGTH-LIST ARG-LIST. That's Enterprise COBOL for main(int ac, char *av[]). But you ain't seen nothin' yet... you thought ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL was a joke: CBL DLL,THREAD,PGMNAME(LONGMIXED) IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. CLASS-ID. ACCOUNT INHERITS BASE. * ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. CONFIGURATION SECTION. REPOSITORY. CLASS BASE IS "java.lang.OBJECT" CLASS ACCOUNT IS "Account". * IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. FACTORY. DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 NUMBER-OF-ACCOUNTS PIC 9(6) VALUE ZERO. * ... * OBJECT. DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 ACCOUNTNUMBER PIC 9(6). 01 ACCOUNTBALANCE PIC S9(9) VALUE ZERO. * PROCEDURE DIVISION. * IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. METHOD-ID. "getBalance". DATA DIVISION. LINKAGE SECTION. 01 OUTBALANCE PIC S9(9) BINARY. * PROCEDURE DIVISION RETURNING OUTBALANCE. MOVE ACCOUNTBALANCE TO OUTBALANCE. END METHOD "getBalance". * ... * END OBJECT. * END CLASS ACCOUNT.

Windows 10 "invalid value for registry" opening image file

Googling for this message gets you lots of closed threads in Microsoft's forums with solutions that didn't work for me, usually involving registry edits or powershell commands.

So, I'm posting something here in the hope that someone else will be helped when they search for it.

At some point, some Windows update in the past year (posting in January 2019) removed or broke the "photos" app. I don't use it explicitly, so I never noticed that it was gone.

Reinstalling it from the Windows app store fixed the problem completely.

Horrible Hacks

A confession inspired by this article... here's one of my horrible hacks.

I once ran out of space for buffers in a program on the PDP-11, so I re-used some of the stack space above main()s entry for extra scratch space, and then made sure main() never returned. There was a bunch of memory (over a kilobyte!) at the top of stack containing the environment and command line arguments, so that was space I didn't need once I started. So long as I scanned them and stashed anything of value before I needed to use the space, anyway.

But later it turned out I needed the environment back when I wanted to run another program so the first thing I did was write() the environment to a file, and then when I called anything I read() that file back into place between the fork() and exec().

 

So, what horrible hacks are you guiltily proud of?
 

Clinton is not pushing for an audit

A rare post, and a rarer topical one without any snark or attempts at humor.

Hillary Clinton and her team is NOT 'pushing for', 'supporting', or otherwise taking part in the effort to have any states electoral results audited and/or recounted.

They are going to participate in any recounts that occur, and they pretty much have to simply because their opponents are going to be involved. But to claim that this means they're part of the push for recounts is at the best misplaced enthusiasm.

And yet a lot of sites, including the Guardian and even Snopes, are talking about Clinton's sudden reversal, based on this post by Marc Elias on Medium.

The post starts out by rejecting the necessity of a special effort to recount these states, and repeats that, good and hard, with details as to why it's not necessary, for several paragraphs. Then it finally makes the most lukewarm announcement possible that now that a recount has been initiated they will participate, and if a recount happens in the other states, they will participate there as well.

Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides. If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.

That's all. Participation, if and when recounts occur, to cover their legal behinds.

What does this participation entail?

According to the New York Times, this won't involve any material support, but be limited to paying for the presence of their lawyers to monitor the process.

This is basically the minimum level of engagement they could possibly take. This is hardly a reversal. It is not support for Jill Stein's efforts. It is not endorsement nor is it pushing for the recount.

Now... they may take a stronger position on the recount in the future, but as of the morning of the 28th of November, 2016 this is as far as they have gone.

But who can fear a kzin who is having his ears scratched?

One day, as one does, I searched for this line from Ringworld: "But who can fear a kzin who is having his ears scratched?"

Some fine fellow provided it as an example for the use of "scratched" in a Hungarian-English dictionary.

De ki félne egy kzintől, aki hagyja a füle tövét vakarni?
-- http://www.hungarianenglishdictionary.com/hu/vakar.asp

No, blowing up the Death Star won't collapse Galactic Civilization.

What part of "it's a galactic civilization" did you miss?

1. The Republic/Empire is a robust Kardashev level II civilization, and not a young one. It's got a LOT of civilized worlds, and is clearly heading for KIII classification. Blowing up a whole planet didn't kick off a depression. Analyzing the resources of a civilization like that using assumptions based on our civilization is like Pliny the Younger looking at the possibility of building an aircraft carrier based on the resources of a slave-based economy and deciding that sinking a single vessel would collapse the world's economy.

2. The Death Star is not productive infrastructure. It's sunk costs. Any economic impact it has is in the past. If maintaining the production lines for the Death Star have a positive impact on the economy, then blowing it up to keep the lines flowing as you build another one is probably the best thing you can do. Of course those same production lines can be used for building, I don't know, modern housing for Jakku scavengers instead. Point is, there's no benefit to the Galactic economy from the continued existence of the Death Star.

3. They make a big deal about the amount of steel involved. That amount of steel is basically lying around in nickel-iron asteroids for the taking in any "dirty" system with a lot of small body matter. That whole part of the paper is like Pliny calculating how many slaves would be needed to dig up the iron ore for the aircraft carrier I mentioned two paragraphs back.

New Years Resolutions

A quick search on Google confirmed that people are really not stretching themselves when choosing their new years resolutions.

Search term "new years resolution" "1920x1080" got a creditable 33,000 hits... but it looks like almost 80,000 people were willing to put up with 640x480:


COUNT   RESOLUTION
67      2560x2048
239     1900x1200
878     1152x864
2330    1440x1080
4600    1280x1024
9130    2048x1536
10600   1280x960
33000   1920x1080
38400   1024x768
53400   800x600
78900   640x480

Shameful, really

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.

The moon's albedo is actually quite low. The Earth is significantly brighter, thanks to the clouds and oceans... which are shiny enough that there's a visible highlight in the center of the disc from the sun directly behind the spacecraft. So in this image, with the brightness adjusted for the larger planet, you get to see the true color of our dry, airless companion world.

Suggested listening for the day: Albedo 0.39

Aug 5: From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth

The Last Android Villain...

I bought a non-Nexus Android phone a few years back. It was my first smartphone. It was released less than a year before Android 4.0 shipped. When I bought it, ICS was already going out to developers.

Did it get an update?

Bollocks.



The cellphone business is chronically sick.



In this article disparaging Nexus phones as "advertising" Vlad Savov writes:

Google's Nexus phones are just ads

I've spent the past couple of days desperately trying to puzzle out the purpose behind Google's newly announced Nexus 5X and 6P smartphones. [...]

One word. Updates.

Google, our knight in shining armor and a propeller hat, has come to save us from the evils of perfidious carriers, ugly Android skins, and late software updates.

I wouldn't mind late software updates. I mind not getting them at all. If you get a flagship phone, it might get updates for a year or two. Then I guess you're supposed to buy a new phone. If you get a mid-range or entry-level phone? You get Bollocks.

There isn't a single Android device manufacturer that is happy with the Nexus program, and I've spoken with them all.

Have you asked them about updates?

Motorola went all-out with the Moto X Pure this year, seeking to deliver the cleanest possible Android experience, best possible specs, and lowest possible price, all while operating independently of carrier interference.

Now they're no longer owned by Google, let's see how they do with updates. If they keep them up, I'll consider getting one. There's a lot of things I really dislike about Nexus phones. Like the lack of SD card slots, which more or less force you to depend on the Google cloud.

 Android phone makers have grown more conscientious and restrained.

Except when it comes to updates.

There is no Android villain left for the Nexus crusader to slay.

Updates.

Making Android profitable for Android phone makers is one of the great challenges of our time.

I'd be happy with a spec-for-spec replacement for my Nexus 4, with an SD card slot. Is that hard to do? The Nexus 5X is more than I want. I was looking at Chinese phones shipping with plain old AOSP or Cyanogen, because I knew the community could support them even if the manufacturer couldn't.

I wish Google would recognize that and try to do more to support Android as a whole rather than just its own good name.

With the phone manufacturers undercutting it all the time, by releasing phones that never receive a single update, they kind of have to.

Public Service Announcement

The pre-history of sudo...

I was reminded by this article on Evi Nemeth of the days before sudo. It seems like every group of UNIX users had an "su alternative" that avoided having to share the root password.

The su alternative at Berkeley was called "setsh". It wasn't just used for root, users could let other users into their account using setsh - this was a necessary evil back then because users could only be in one group at a time. It was generally distributed as source, users would edit the names of other users they wanted to let into their account into a table in the code, and compile it and leave a copy in ~/bin. So to run a command as someone you were working with you'd run "~them/bin/setsh" and if you were in the list, you'd get a shell su-ed to them.

Surprisingly, in hindsight, I don't recall ever hearing of anyone putting a boobytrap into ~/bin/setsh.

BCPL pointers were not zero indexed because of compile time issues.

Re: Citation Needed - blarg?

Mike has done a bit of research, but not enough. Reading and understanding the BCPL manual (let alone having any experience with '60s and '70s compiler technology) would have made this jump from Martin Richard's comment (which says nothing about the cost of optimizing the code) to "in that context none of the offset-calculations we’re supposedly economizing are calculated at execution time" obviously wrong.

First, the yacht thing is a complete red herring. You always had to limit your job run times because computers were just plain unreliable. They could easily go down several times a day, forcing the restart of a job. Higher priority jobs could always show up and bump you, and getting bumped was not all that big a deal... you'd just get run again once it was done, if by chance you happened to be late in the queue you'd run a day or so later at the most... and that could happen anyway if jobs before you ran into problems or there was too much maintenance downtime. A handicapping run a few times a year? that's nothing.

Second, you could have expressions on both sides of the dyadic "!" operator. "V!I" was exactly the same as "I!V" ... Richards spells that out explicitly in the text Mike quoted! There's no reason to treat it as a compile-time-only issue.

Third, of course BCPL had pointers. It was completely typeless, an address was just a number. When you wrote

LET V = VEC 5

You create both a pointer variable "V" and allocated a 5 element array to it. Yes, it really allocated a total of six cells. As far as I recall, "V" could be reassigned to point to another vector, or incremented within itself.

Fourth, local variables were dynamically created on the stack. So a local

LET V = VEC X

could be at any address in the stack, depending on the call history.

Fifth, and backing up my recollection in the third point, the BCPL manual has an example of pointers being initialized on page 27:

LET IOV = VEC 650
LET IOVP, IOVT = IOV, IOV + 650

Sixth, he's applying 21st century reasoning about compilers to the '60s. When you wrote:

V!1

it's virtually certain that the compiler would actually generate the code to fetch "V" and add one to it. I would be staggered to learn that the compiler optimized away this extra indirection, ever, because that would have required tracking the state of every variable used as an lvalue to know when that optimization was safe.

Finally, seventh, and most critically, using 1 index on the dyadic "!" operator would have caused extra complexity for *programmers*, because suddenly "!(V+I)" would mean something different from "V!I", and having "!(V+I)" mean "the memory at V + I + 1" would be just nutty.

BCPL arrays, like C arrays, were zero-origin because it fell naturally out of the unification of pointers and other values in a low level language.

Hipster NSA

Hipster NSA was into data before they got big.
Hipster NSA only taps underground cables.
Hipster NSA says you don’t really collect data until you listen to it.
Hipster NSA stopped 50 terrorist attacks. You’ve probably never heard of them.
Hipster NSA stalked you before you were cool.

Onward Sauron’s Soldiers

Just leaving this here...

Onward Sauron’s Soldiers

Words by Richard Tatge, Al Kuhfeld and Ken Fletcher. Sung to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers'

Onward Sauron’s soldiers,
Marching as to war,
With the eye of Sauron
Going on before
Darkness like a banner
shadows all the foe.
Forward into battle see the Nazgul go.

CHORUS:
Onward Sauron’s soldiers,
Matching as to war,
With the eye of Sauron
Going on before.

Trolls and Balrogs mangle
Dragons burn and bite!
With us you must tangle
Or run and scream in fright.
Evil is our watchword,
Pain is our delight;
Middle-Earth must crumble,
Under Mordor's might.

CHORUS

From the dread dark tower.
To the black Khazad-dum.
We’ll send elves and hobbits
Shrieking to their tomb.
Men and dwarves together
Go down in defeat.
In the hunger after the battle.
They’ll be nice to eat.

CHORUS

Conquer every village!
Yell out the battle cry!
Murder, rape and pillage,
Then spit in their eye!
See the craven victims
Quivering with fear:
We’ll be leaving Mordor
Sometime late next year.

Teal Deer has a new buddy! PW;DR

Via @Skud RT @NeuroPolarbear Proposed new internet slang: BPW;DR. Means, "behind paywall, didn't read".

I'm just going to use "pw;dr".

The Teal Deer has a new buddy. What do we call this one? Power Deer?

Oh dear where can the matter be...

Just leaving this here for reference...

Oh dear, where can the matter be?
When it's converted to energy,
There is a slight loss of parity.
Johnny's so long at the fair.

He promised to buy me a second-hand Morris,
A matched set of H-Bombs that go off in chorus,
A musically-talented agile slow loris,
And other delights that are rare.

Oh dear, where can the matter be?
When it's converted to energy,
There is a slight loss of parity.
Johnny's so long at the fair.

He promised to buy me a used weeping willow,
A pair of chrome booties for my armadillo,
A hand-tatted, plaid, pterodactyl-down pillow,
And other delights that are rare.

He promised to buy me a magical locket,
A miniature couerl to keep in my pocket,
A duocorn stallion, a Saturn-V rocket,
And other delights that are rare.

He promised to buy me a positron beauty,
A lit'rally minded transistorized cutie,
A chrome-plated robot that does double-duty,
And other delights that are rare.

He promised to buy me an incomplete wizard,
A red-headed genie, a hexapod gizzard,
A house-broken dragon, a musical blizzard,
And other delights that are rare.

He promised to buy me a microwave oven,
Some witches from Karres arrayed in a coven,
Some teflon extrusions to further our lovin',
And other delights that are rare.

Credits: Don Simpson, and others...

One version credited to Andrew MacRobb exists that sounds like it's different from this one, but I haven't found a copy beyond this quoted verse:

Oh, dear, where can the matter be
When it's converted to energy?
There's that slight loss of entropy
Thermodynamics ain't fair!

Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark (from wayback machine)

CDI.ORG is now owned by a domain squatter, so I'm just going to leave this article in its entirety here:

Taken from here.

Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark
(Episode #1: The Case of the Missing “Permissive Action Links”)
Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D, CDI President, bblair@cdi.org
Feb. 11, 2004
Last month I asked Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles. These long-range nuclear-tipped missiles first came on line during the Cuban missile crisis and grew to a force of 1,000 during the McNamara years — the backbone of the U.S. strategic deterrent through the late 1960s. McNamara replied, in his trade-mark, assertively confident manner that he personally saw to it that these special locks (known to wonks as “Permissive Action Links”) were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.

When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

After leaving the Air Force in 1974, I pressed the service, initially by letters addressed to it and then through congressional intermediaries, to consider a range of terrorist scenarios in which these locks could serve as crucial barriers against the unauthorized seizure of launch control over Minuteman missiles. In 1977, I co-authored (with Garry Brewer) an article (click here to view) entitled “The Terrorist Threat to World Nuclear Programs” in which I laid out the case for taking this threat more seriously and suggesting remedial measures including, first and foremost, activating those McNamara locks that apparently he and presidents presumed had already been activated.

The locks were activated in 1977.

It is hard to know where to begin, and end, in recounting stories like this one that reveal how misinformed, misled, and misguided on critical nuclear matters our top leaders have been throughout the nuclear age. A multitude of such examples can, and will, be described in forthcoming columns.