i-node one

Sysloggin' one day at a time.

Meta

Pages

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

You are here: Home / 2004 / Archives for August 2004

Archives for August 2004

From me to Mary (and Tammy, and …)

By

Scare quotes, oh my!
Link: www.suck.com…

Scare quotes are the quotation marks found around phrases like “gangsta rap,” “shame spiral,” or “security zone”: coinages that may be lingo, that may be jargon, that may even be slang but are more likely excuses where a little distance is in order. The subject of the story may say it’s “the truth,” but we say it’s spinach and — ya know what? — to hell with it. Scare quotes throw a net around the ideas and assertions media culture hasn’t absorbed yet, stuff journalism’s jobholders may even be a little afraid of.

National Punctuation Day is Aug 22
Link: www.prweb.com…

Today on Plastic
(me: and you can download the adobe or microsoft e-book from amazon for US$12.25!)
Link: book on amazon.com…
Link: www.plastic.com…

You know who you are. You’re reading the SubQ and you have to take deep breaths because some submitter doesn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s.” Or you shudder as someone thinks the plural of banana is “banana’s.” Or you find yourself unintentionally bemused by someone’s misuse of “scare quotes.”

The good news is that you are not alone, if sales of the surprise best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves: A Zero-Tolerance Approach To Punctuation by Lynne Truss is any indication. The unlikely smash has topped best-seller lists in the U.S. and Britain, and is among Amazon’s top worldwide sellers.

How did this happen? How did an fussy editor airing her pet peeves about punctuation become an international sensation? Truss herself isn’t sure, and views the whole thing as a “complete fluke.” She hardly expected its success, but takes comfort in knowing there are other sticklers out there. “I wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves because I’d become very animated about illiteracy,” Truss explained. “I had no idea so many people shared my concern. It’s very heartening. Because I’m not myself a parent, I underestimated the extent to which ordinary, decent folk are worried about the kind of education their children are receiving.”

The book is probably not for everyone, as people who aren’t writers, editors or at least mildly word-obsessed may find it a bore. Others may be taken aback by her obsession, which included a regrettable episode of shredding a childhood pen pal for a perceived lack of literacy. She admits that sticklers like her can be “an annoying bunch of people.” But the book has received a boost from the expected friendly journalists, as well as those gearing up to salute National Punctuation Day on Aug. 22. If nothing else, it yields such bits of trivia as learning that 15th-century printer Aldus Manutius the Elder invented both the italic typeface and the semicolon. And she tries to make the process fun, offering up a punctuation game on her Web site, as well as the guilty pleasure of a punctuation hall of shame (where you can even submit your own photos chronicling abuse of the English language).

For all her humor, Truss sees slumping writing standards as a serious problem. She winces at discovering during televised quizzes “that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow” and since learning that the United States “is not immune to similar levels of public illiteracy.” She notes the unfortunate timing of it all, as ignorance of the written word comes while written communication has become “the ascendant medium” because of the Internet, which “happens to be the most immediate, universal and democratic written medium that has ever existed.”

What is ”Slashdot”?

By

Blatantly ripped without permission from anyone but it is entirely intact…

Re:Microsoft and Windows Topics Icons (Score:5, Insightful)
by Mysticalfruit (533341) Alter Relationship on 04-08-17 7:08 (#9990650)
(Last Journal: 03-11-13 10:12)
Basically, your correct.

Last time I checked we’re on the “IN-TER-NET”. You know that place that is practially a blackhole of all things immature.

If you were to map the internet like a galaxy, Slashdot would be tucked over in the corner next to the obscene jokes and well stuff involving well hung midgets and horny lonely housewives.

Microsoft could release a patch that just by installing would cure world hunger and shrink maligant tumors and the headline on Slashdot would be “Microsoft distrupts food distribution and healthcare systems worldwide!”

So, in short, if your looking for unbiased punctunal and definitative coverage of the every evolving internet, this is not the place.

If however, your looking for the diatribes of cynical, world weary geeks, who know the whole world is basically built on match sticks and is gleefully waiting for the day the whole place comes tumbling down, you’ve found it.

—
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.

Unix for dummies, lesson 1

By

Link: linuxgazette.net…

The first really good explanation of symbolic links and hard links I’ve seen. One of the most basic Unixisms — if you don’t understand this, you can’t call yourself even a Jr-Jr Unix admin. :)

al-Qaeda’s hard drive

By

Link: www.theatlantic.com…

(excerpt – note in particular the last paragraph here)

What emerged was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic planners—among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of 9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large. The documents included budgets, training manuals for recruits, and scouting reports for international attacks, and they shed light on everything from personnel matters and petty bureaucratic sniping to theological discussions and debates about the merits of suicide operations. There were also video files, photographs, scanned documents, and Web pages, many of which, it became clear, were part of the group’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to conduct a global Internet-based publicity and recruitment effort.

The jihadis’ Kabul office employed a zealous manager—Ayman al-Zawahiri’s brother Muhammad, who maintained the computer’s files in a meticulous network of folders and subfolders that neatly laid out the group’s organizational structure and strategic concerns. (Muhammad’s system fell apart after he was arrested in 2000 in Dubai and extradited to Egypt.) The files not only provided critical active intelligence about the group’s plans and methods at the time (including the first leads about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, who had yet to attempt his attack) but also, in a fragmentary way, revealed a road map of al-Qaeda’s progress toward 9/11. Considered as a whole, the trove of material on the computer represents what is surely the fullest sociological profile of al-Qaeda ever to be made public.

Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda’s strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group’s penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad. Al-Qaeda’s leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower.

Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.