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| One Space, or Two?; Which is proper? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 19 2011, 09:31 AM (1,011 Views) | |
| JBryan | Jan 19 2011, 11:33 AM Post #26 |
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I am the grey one
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A close cousin to what Ax is talking about is the "check grammar" feature built into Microsoft Word. I had to turn that thing off because it seemed to be consistently wrong and often, frankly, stupid. |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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| sue | Jan 19 2011, 11:41 AM Post #27 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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bingo. If you are writing something you want people to be able read and understand, you make the effort, or you get binned. Don't even get me started on the lazy arses who don't use paragraphs. That gets the delete button. Think of your audience, people. |
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| Aqua Letifer | Jan 19 2011, 11:50 AM Post #28 |
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ZOOOOOM!
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Wordpad. I write everything "important" with Wordpad only. I use Word for making 1" margins and adding headers perhaps but I do the nitty gritty editing with a hard copy, a pen and my eyes. |
| I cite irreconcilable differences. | |
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 19 2011, 12:10 PM Post #29 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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AL: I suppose the software vs. human debate is a different discussion entirely, but I tend to agree with you (and I write software!). Software will always have some significant limitations, as it will (at least for the foreseeable future) not be able to recognize subtlety in the same way a human can. There are still lots of things that humans can simply do better/faster/easier than computers. |
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| Axtremus | Jan 19 2011, 12:33 PM Post #30 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Oh, I bet Klaus can tell you all about defining your own macros (or whatever they are call those things where you define your own special rules to be applied to some small set of special things scope-limited to certain portions of a document) in TeX or LaTeX. But that's not what I said at all. I said things that can be codified can be rolled into software. Things that cannot be codified are things that humans cannot agree on to begin with, and in these cases where humans cannot agree with each other, the software's output would not be more right or more wrong than a human's output. That's the wrong measure to use. It's like saying that the number of people dying is a lot higher today than it was pre-industrial revolution, hence modern medical science does more harm than good. You forget the denominator -- the total number of people in existence today vs. pre-industrial revolution, the total amount of text published today vs. pre-computer revolution. I bet # of errors per professionally published word (or even better, # of errors per published word per inflation-adjusted dollar spent on professional publishing) would show a different picture. Did hundred page stuff and hundreds of pages of stuff with LaTeX (many times that in Word) -- text with subject-specific abbreviations and not-in-dictionary jargons mixed with dozens of equations with odd symbols, figures, footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies and sh!t ... everybody wanted stylistic consistency. Sometimes a slightly different style has to be applied to basically the same material for publishing in a different venue. Human "habit" could not have kept everything straight and "consistent." Reliance on "human habit" alone would have required editing dozens of different places (and you'd invariably miss a few if you try) had you decide to change the way certain subject-specific terms or quantities are to be typographically presented rather than, say, just change the definition of a style or macro in one place. (LaTex FTW!) It's nice to have human spelling cop or grammar cop or style cop or what have you looking over stuff for you ... but beyond certain scale and/or below certain budget, software is often the best (if not the only) way to go. If nothing else, software takes care of most of the mundane stuff so the human can focus on the substantive or out-of-the-ordinary stuff. Imagine how many of her you'd need to maintain the same rate of output without editing software taking care of most of the mundane stuff before things get to her. Jobs like hers will continue to disappear as software grows more capable (hopefully she'd have moved on to bigger and better things by then). It's just a matter of time. |
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| kenny | Jan 19 2011, 01:05 PM Post #31 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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. . . talk about made up and agreed with.
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 19 2011, 01:07 PM Post #32 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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That is making a (huge) assumption that software will get to the point that it costs less to develop this software, than to pay someone a low wage to do the work. There are numerous sites where you can pay people in other countries to do repetitive work that still costs too much to do with software. For example, if I want to count the number of females in a photograph, I can't easily accomplish that programmatically - and I certainly can't do that in video (current live-render human detection in video is hovering around 5 fps). Rather than dumping a million dollars into R&D to develop the software (which I'm 85% sure is possible to accomplish based solely on theory), it's easier to pay someone to simply count the number of people in a photograph (or a thousand photographs), and tell me how many were men, and how many were women. Current grammar-checks simply aren't efficient, or even accurate, hence their seldom use. For the foreseeable future it will simply be easier to pay someone to check that manually, and continue to train people to know how to write, in an attempt to avoid these mistakes. Software simply can't handle this at 100% (or even close) yet. It's not known if software will be at that point anytime soon, given the number of poor people on the planet I can pay to do these tasks for me, by human-hand. I just read an article yesterday on Best Practices pertaining to the use of CAPTCHA. RECAPTCHA is the leading product from Google, and is the hardest to crack - however, software can indeed crack it, with about 30% success. Know why it isn't widely used though? Because it's still cheaper for me to pay someone in Bangladesh to setup spam email accounts for me, than it is for me to either develop, or purchase, software that will automatically signup "real" gmail accounts for me, making past their CAPTCHA. The going rate right now, is about $1.20 USD per *THOUSAND* valid accounts the nice Bangladesh man sets up for me. |
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| Axtremus | Jan 19 2011, 01:21 PM Post #33 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Like I kept saying, it's just a matter of time for software to get there. Wages creeps up over time, software cost creeps down over time. Intersection is inevitable. |
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| jon-nyc | Jan 19 2011, 02:46 PM Post #34 |
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Cheers
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Like your post in English - a language made up and agreed with In fact, its a language - also made up and agreed with. ![]() Sh1t, Kenny, we're on a forum - made up and agreed with. ![]() Man, I just called you Kenny. THats a name. Names are made up and agreed with. ![]() By the way, before my forehead gets bruised beyond recognition, could you tell me what's so bad about something being made up and agreed with? |
| In my defense, I was left unsupervised. | |
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 19 2011, 02:47 PM Post #35 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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software cost creeps down? Software cost is hourly, and as functionality increases, so do man hours. Sure, dynamic runtimes like CakePHP and Ruby allow developers to "scaffold" in a way they couldn't before, and reduce man hours considerably (no argument there), but there's still a net gain in man hours going into development of large/new projects (like what we're describing). The intersection is plausible, perhaps even probable, but certainly not inevitable. |
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| Aqua Letifer | Jan 19 2011, 03:02 PM Post #36 |
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ZOOOOOM!
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Prove to me your software will be able to take care of every special case and exception possible. You can't, because that's ridiculous.
Okay, we can go along repeating ourselves if we want. Still doesn't make you any less wrong. There are plenty of instances where 1) humans agree on rules that 2) editing software doesn't get right.
What did I say. "Have the number of errors in professional publications gone up or down?" Read better.
You've never done editing work. If you did, you'd know that a page is a page, and the difference between reading an entire page and finding few vs. many errors is negligible. The point is, you'll always need a human being to do your editing if you want it done right. I mean, I've done this every day for three years, Ax. I've had to go through this very process, for thousands and thousands of pages of material. What do you have to back up your case, other than abstraction and theories? |
| I cite irreconcilable differences. | |
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| Dewey | Jan 19 2011, 03:10 PM Post #37 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Looks like lots of other people have already said it, but I'll add in the same. I learned "two spaces after a period" in the days of typewriters. It was very annoying when I started using word processing software back in the '90's, and being told that what I was doing was "wrong." But I eventually got used to it, and always just use a single space now - have for a long, long time. |
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"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685. "Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous "Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011 I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14 | |
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| RosemaryTwo | Jan 19 2011, 04:52 PM Post #38 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Depends on how expensive the medium is. AP papers ask for only one space. Most magazines do too. Inches of text must be paid for by inches of ads. Minus this fiscal concern, two spaces. |
| "Perhaps the thing to do is just to let stupid run its course." Aqua | |
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| RosemaryTwo | Jan 19 2011, 05:07 PM Post #39 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Depends on how expensive the medium is. AP papers ask for only one space. Most magazines do too. Inches of text must be paid for by inches of ads. Minus this fiscal concern, two spaces. |
| "Perhaps the thing to do is just to let stupid run its course." Aqua | |
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| jon-nyc | Jan 19 2011, 05:35 PM Post #40 |
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Cheers
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Apparently TNCR space is pretty cheap, huh Rosemary.
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| In my defense, I was left unsupervised. | |
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| brenda | Jan 19 2011, 05:42 PM Post #41 |
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..............
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Thanks, Jon, I enjoyed that. Oh, don't worry, Kenny.
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“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” ~A.A. Milne | |
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| brenda | Jan 19 2011, 05:44 PM Post #42 |
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..............
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Say, is anyone else thinking of chocolate chip scones? How many bags do you want with that? |
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“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” ~A.A. Milne | |
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| Ballyhoo | Jan 19 2011, 10:10 PM Post #43 |
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Middle Aged Carp
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| JBryan | Jan 20 2011, 04:14 AM Post #44 |
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I am the grey one
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Seems the discussion magically transformed from "that is easy to do in software" to "someday, software will be sophisticated enough to do that". How could you argue with that? |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 20 2011, 07:45 AM Post #45 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| Axtremus | Jan 20 2011, 07:49 AM Post #46 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Reading comprehension FAIL right there. |
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 20 2011, 07:52 AM Post #47 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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?? |
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| JBryan | Jan 20 2011, 07:55 AM Post #48 |
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I am the grey one
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Come on, Ax. You started out making it sound pretty darned easy. |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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| KlavierBauer | Jan 20 2011, 08:01 AM Post #49 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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You've even maintained up until just a few posts ago, that you can deliver a picture perfect manuscript to AL, created in latex, with all of the proper spacing, which AL has challenged you to do. Hence my "??" - I'm not seeing the reading comprehension fail. In fact, JBryan would be pretty low on my list of folks that I'd suspect would suffer from reading comprehension problems on this forum. |
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"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
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| JBryan | Jan 20 2011, 08:09 AM Post #50 |
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I am the grey one
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Huh? |
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"Any man who would make an X rated movie should be forced to take his daughter to see it". - John Wayne There is a line we cross when we go from "I will believe it when I see it" to "I will see it when I believe it". Henry II: I marvel at you after all these years. Still like a democratic drawbridge: going down for everybody. Eleanor: At my age there's not much traffic anymore. From The Lion in Winter. | |
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