Posts by Kong
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US spelling is anaethema to this person- it's erratic, and excludes the innate linguistic history of some words. And, a rather large lercentage of English users/writers - dont use it-
sorry Kong -aint persuaded (& yep, deliberate usage there-)
You're jerking my chain, right? The lercentage (I know this is not a Maori word) of misspelled words in your posts is anaethema (OK, I guess this one is like a play on 'anaesthetic', right?) to this person, it dont (does that rhyme with font?) respect the innate linguistic history of any language I've heard of and it aint punctuated period
But it's got it's own style. Kind of Kiwi dyslexic stream of consciousness... A spell checker would cramp it severely, I can see that.
I'm not seriously advocating US spelling, btw. I just don't particularly like EN_GB.
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@James Green
US spelling ain't perfect. But it's closer to it.
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Expecting multilingualism from a spell checker is asking a lot. Not a bad idea, but there are some issues that should be thought of. For starters, it has no way of knowing which language you meant a word in, so it would stop picking up typos (one of the main points of a spellchecker), if those typos are words in one of the other languages. So you meant 'is', but you typed 'si', and because you accept both English and Italian, it lets it slide. Mind you this happens within a language pretty often to (spelling mistake intended, to make the point).
Also, just because a spell checker can't recognize anything other than the main language you use, doesn't make it totally useless. It still helps in that one language, and even ESL folk write predominantly in English on here. For them, English spelling is actually something that help can be appreciated for.
But there's an argument for allowing users to decide how they want it to be, and if they interweave the languages extensively I can see that having half of the page highlighted is going to draw attention away from the one actual spelling mistake, making the feature kinda useless. It would be neat if you could just choose to add to the languages, accepting the issue I spoke of above as the lesser of evils. Another idea might be to be able to choose a predominant language (and be able to change this at will) and have the other languages highlighted in a different color to the simple spelling mistakes. So then you look first at the red stuff (most likely to be real mistakes) then you look at the green stuff (huh? Did I really use some Italian that time? No, that's a typo, cheers spell checker).
It is possible for users to help themselves a lot with spell checkers. I always 'teach' them, and it might seem like a pain to try to teach the checker an entire language, but bear in mind that in almost all languages there is a real bulge in the frequency towards the most used words, so the returns from using 'Add to dictionary' stack up really quickly. You may have to click it a thousand times, but after that it's learned the words you use 90% of the time, and adding in extra ones as they come up after that isn't a huge chore, could be worth it for the help. I speak one other language and did exactly this, and find that it's now helpful in both languages. It still gets any new words in the second language wrong, but I add those words in (after making sure that I spelled them right), and on we go.
I can see a market opening out there for some tool that can merge dictionaries for the main user platforms to work around these issues, if there isn't one already. I couldn't find one from a brief search. By merging I mean, basically selecting your languages from a list and making a meta-dictionary, which you then have on your local machine (or you could carry it in a memory stick or store it online somewhere). Anyone know of such a thing? I'm tempted to write one, the merging algorithm would not be the least bit hard.
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Isabel
No to threading but a way to directly reply to posts and maybe to notify people when they have been directly replied to would be good.
That one's easy: Address them by name as the first thing in your post. If necessary, quote a snippet of what it is you're replying to. It's a good habit anyway, for disambiguation, and other-reader convenience.
Raymond
Oh and a spell checker would be kind of nice for us dislectics
dislectics is underlined in red right now in my post window. Spell checking is a browser setting, at least in Firefox.
LOL James, plugging GB English. Much tho I disagree with American Imperialism, I think they have the best spelling. Mind you, I suppose for consistency, 'browser' should be underlined, and 'browzer' should be suggested :(~
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Next pigeon I see, I'm gonna bribe with seeds to put in a good word for PA.
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My understanding was that the true pagerank formula was one of Google's best kept secrets, for perfectly understandable competitive advantage reasons. Also if people don't know the exact system, they can't find the loopholes so easily.
I'd guess that dropping pagerank for lots of outbound links to low pagerank sites would be an anti spamming technique. I know one person who eked out an existence spamming Google, and that was his speculation, that they detected automatically created sites from the massive outbound linkage to low rank stuff, which suggested some kind of circle jerk.
That's if pagerank leakage is true. Possibly they detected his circle jerks much more directly, by actually forming a huge digraph of all the links out there. It's theoretically possible, and if anyone could do it that would be Google. In which case leakage is less of a concern. But avoiding leakage is possibly a bit like taking your vitamins - they might be doing nothing, but then again they might, and it's not hard to take them, just in case.
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Is that the fabled 'page rank leakage'?
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Many mail systems allow you to 'recall' messages. But it's too late if the other person already read it, or is external to your system. It was a useful feature in one corporate environment I worked in, particularly when silly things happened like some poor innocent user forwarding the entire company a hoax virus alert (usually telling people to do something like delete their autoexec.bat file), thinking they were doing the right thing. But it was always funny when people used it just because they had clicked send without thinking. Then it merely confirmed that they were embarrassed about what they had just done.
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The multithreadedness of PA debates gives it much more of a community feel. You feel like you walked into a chat room, which is full of intellectuals discussing a bunch of stuff that is generally, if loosely connected. On blogs with threads for each topic, there's no room for off-topic stuff, which seems to be where a lot of the action happens. They end up being very sterile a lot of the time.
OTOH, if you're actually searching the forum for specific information, I think single thread stuff probably works better. Technical forums are always like that. But this isn't a technical forum. It's a general interest one, loosely organized around Russell's general interests.
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Curious, in a thread titled 'On Ideas' to hear some. So far we've got the old chestnut, that we should aim to emulate Australia, which seems like not so much a bad idea as an unformed idea, saying nothing, but evoking images of Australian wealth. Then we have the counter offer of Denmark, which is only more like NZ than Australia in population, in every other way its entirely dissimilar. But of course that idea is unformed too, the point, I'm sure, being that we should only emulate some facet of Denmark's way of doing things, some arbitrary dimension or two picked out of the millions that go to making up public policy. I'm sure they're not saying that we ought to move NZ geographically into the middle of one of the richest regions in the world, and then concentrate on monopolizing the herring market.
Now, I don't have any new ideas. I'll be honest about that, all my ideas for public policy are as old as the hills. Spending cuts seem inevitable in face of reduced tax take, although tax hikes are another possibility, as is borrowing money, and the debate is really about 'what to cut?'. What will be the least damaging to people in need, and the economy? Them's hard questions. Who to hurt, and why?
The path of least political resistance is probably picking on a couple of bogeymen to make token cuts to, finding creative ways to hide new taxation, and borrowing 'on the sly'. It could also work, depending on how long the recession drags on, a factor that is most likely entirely out of NZ hands.