• Hannes (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    standers usually get hit as well:
    Heartbeat (Played by Nicolas Cage): "Are you still there?"
    FTFY!

    Refixed that for you!

    "Heartbleed" is what the bug in "Heartbeat" was called.

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to alanis morissette

    Better educated - or enculturated - speakers often use finer distinctions of vocabulary, or nuisances of grammar or idiom, than an average speaker of the language. (That is, a word sometimes has a more precise meaning in some contexts - even for the same speaker.)

    There are, as I understand it, examples of non-gradual (or very rapid) changes in the meanings of certain words. Margaret Thatcher once used a word in a speech incorrectly - given the generally accepted meaning at the time. The meaning she implied is now the usual meaning of that word in British English, and it has been argued that the modified meaning derives from this one 'mutation' event. I think the word was 'procrastinate' but I'm not certain.

  • Maurizio (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    [quote user="snoofle"][quote user="Gumpy Gus"] ... Lots of folks make a pretty good income fixing the mistakes that new Legions of Idiots keep repeating...[/quote]

    That's us, right ?

    Maurizio

    PS: at the end, WTFs look very good for the economy :->

  • Alex Papadumbass (unregistered)

    Oh dear, they implemented a grid management system without reading an Operating Systems textbook?! Deadlock, anyone? Anyone?

  • kbar (unregistered) in reply to Gumpy Gus

    It sounds like someone tried to invent batch jobs and JCL. I remember specifying how much memory and disk space (in cylinders or volumes) the job would need. The scheduler would then manage allocating resources and starting the job. I believe this problem was completely solved by the early 70's.

    The only thing this grid is missing is requiring that the requirements be specified in columns 1-72 and sequence numbers go in columns 73-80. Oh, the good old days of the 029 card punch.

  • (cs) in reply to alanis morissette
    alanis morissette:
    all those people who use the words irony and ironic incorrectly...

    Generally, people who complain that others are using "irony" or "ironic" incorrectly (besides being naive prescriptivists) are people who have no idea what "irony" means etymologically, or has historically meant in common English usage, or what it means as a term of art in rhetoric or (structural) linguistics.

    Irony is one of the master tropes. It could be considered the master trope, since all non-literal usage can be construed as irony in some sense. In fact, irony is essential to language use in an information-theoretic sense, because it is simply a violation of expectation, and if there's no violation of expectation, then the message contains no information.

    So, ironically, every non-trivial utterance is in some degree ironic.

    And yes, all of Alanis' examples in that song are ironic, even in the traditional rhetorical sense.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Dale
    Dale:
    And for that matter, when things were going wrong, people didn't *first* look at the logging of the part of the system that was finally being put under production load.
    What makes you think people weren't? This is the classic political problem where the new system that will solve everything while saving money -- only to make things worse -- so of course every attempt to look into the true cause was shut down until everyone was revolting over it.
  • SB (unregistered) in reply to Gumpy Gus

    Wait, when did "Mexican Standoff" become politically incorrect?

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