----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Purcell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 7:57 AM Subject: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Three problems IN KDE
> > 'Programmer-ese' (or hack-speak) is a language in its own right, and > > is very precise where computing is concerned, but if you try > > interpreting it as conventional English, you are probably going to > > miss a lot of what is being said. > > I know about tech speak and how it does not communicate to newbies > very well. I taught electronics for seventeen years to people who in > many cases were retreads from some other field that no longer needed > them. Ahhh, don't make the mistake of thinking Techspeak is anything like Programmerese, which is a sub-dialect of Engineerese. Where techspeak seeks to increase the precision of word meanings by plonking more and more syllables and letters onto words, Programmerese seeks to remove superfluous letters and syllables in the name of 'efficiency'. So words like 'manual' and 'User' become 'man' and 'usr'. So what if the word 'man' already exists with a completely different meaning - the word itself is superfluous since the computer doesn't need or want to know your gender, it only wants to know if you are a usr or a su. 'Man', in the conventional sense, is simply unneeded data or digital noise to be filtered out. Now you know where they got the whole file compression idea from. Norm PS - I almost expected the man pages to be filled with pictures of naked women - after all, what else would men be most interested in? ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12huih7s7/M=362131.6882499.7825260.1510227/D=groups/S=1705006580:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1123978337/A=2889191/R=0/SIG=10r90krvo/*http://www.thebeehive.org ">Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job) Welcome to the Sweet Life - brought to you by One Economy</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
