[G4] [OT] Correct English Flame War

[keith_w]

VERy well said, Doug!
We all should take a stand when we see careless or ignorant usages of the 
language, and most especially when it involves SI units.
If you're writing to comment on or state what you call 'facts', you really must 
get the units designation correct.
For years I've preached that kb is not the same as KB or Kb. And so on down the 
line.
If you are going to use shortcuts, do it correctly. PLEASE!

keith whaley  <== lower case usage established by years of use... :-D


Doug McNutt wrote:
> OK. since you guise started it. . .
> 
> I can tolerate a lot of acronyms and other jargon, even misspellings 
> like the one above which a particular friend of mine uses deliberately. 
> What really bugs me is use of abbreviations which can actually mislead. 
> Always define such things at the time of first usage.
> 
> Second person plural pronouns when the rest of the phrase is singular 
> has become common and is actually made politically correct by some of 
> our favorite editors. It's done to avoid the apparent sexism of "his" to 
> refer to the people of planet Earth and it grates my ears when I see or 
> hear it. Each of you must submit their payment by Friday afternoon. Pass 
> me a scissors.
> 
> All lower case typing with  no capitals, even to start a sentence, is 
> dangerous. How many times have you seen a reference to "mb" when the 
> author probably meant MB for megabyte. How about use of K to mean either 
> 1000 or 1024 depending on context that is rarely clear. K by itself is a 
> unit of temperature as in "The noise of this receiver is 25 K.". Proper 
> usage for 1000, base 10, is "k" and for 1024 (10) is ki.
> 
> When I see "mb" I read millibar, a unit of atmospheric pressure that 
> would be appropriate in  the altitude specification for a G4 which is 
> only 5000 feet or so.  gb is meaningless. There really are international 
> standards for Systeme Internationale, SI. Please use them correctly even 
> if it means using the shift key once in a while.
> 
> Even the local newspaper suffers from a lack of proofreading. 
> Misspellings are rare but wrong words set in type are often really 
> spelling errors that have been "corrected" by software. By all means use 
> a spelling checker but don't allow it to change words by correcting the 
> wrong letter.
> 
> Just a week or so ago I had to ask our utility company just what it 
> means when it calls out 300 MMBTU as an amount of natural gas. I had to 
> get quite deep in the personnel structure before I found someone who 
> explained that M means millia as in Roman paces so it's 1000. One gets a 
> million by using two Ms which isn't even the way Roman numerals work. 
> And I did know that BTU is a British Thermal Unit representing the 
> amount of energy required to raise a pound of water one degree 
> Fahrenheit but that hardly related to a cubic foot which is a more 
> common unit of gas quantity. You're excused if you thought MM meant 
> million million or Tera. The folks who pay the bills had no idea what 
> the acronym meant and they saw it every day.
> 
> My G4 runs nicely on 10.3.9. That's as high as I can go because 10.4 
> refuses to talk to my SE/30 file server. The King's English and MacOS 
> 7.5 were quality developments. We may be going the wrong way on both. 
> Ubuntu on the desk to my left runs just like the  machine I used in the 
> mid 70s.