Comments on: Technical Vocabulary and Grammar

By: hemasrivatsav

hemasrivatsav — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 08:45:31 +0000

I am confused about the use of preposition before an operating system.
should it be on or in?

By: Christopher Thompson

Christopher Thompson — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 23:27:33 +0000

You are absolutely correct about collective nouns. Either the plural or singular can be used depending on whether you are refering to it as a single thing or a group of individual things.

As for “Then delete a line from the file by typing dd,” it would probably be better to just rewrite it as “Then type ‘dd’ to delete a line from the file.” It is simpler and you don’t need to worry about quotes falling at the end of the line.

I find it a little odd to belittle inexperienced users with “Hard Drive != Computer” or “PC != Windows.” It is rarely unclear what they mean. I am sure I have said similar misnomers to doctors, plumbers, etc. who just took it in stride.

Finally I still don’t get “Orientated != Oriented” and “Depreciated != Deprecated.” Orientated and oriented mean the same thing—I believe oriented is the base word, but English and American usage probably vary.

Depreciated and deprecated are a strange pair. Depreciated means to lessen the value of something. Deprecated means to belittle or disapprove of. What’s worse they have come to mean the same thing over time. So when a feature is left in software but its usage is discouraged—is that lessening the value of or disapproving of? You got me?

But the bottom line is that for all the irritation expressed, I doubt there any lack of understanding with any of these usages.

By: Vidyut Luther

Vidyut Luther — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 04:11:23 +0000

Thanks for bringing up the PC v Mac debate. Lately, with all the hoopla about Apple switching to intel, and then the ad about PCs prior to the intel iMac doing boring things…it really infuriates me. PC = Personal Computer (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=PC) even try m-w.com.

The mac mini, is a PC by Apple. So is the iMac, the Powerbook, the Macbook Pro, and my wife’s eMachines m6809.

While we’re at it.. let’s not get into the brouahaha about the intel dual core chips, which lose every benchmark compared to the AMD dual core offerings. Yet, everyone is excited about OS X on the intel. I’d like to see it on an AMD X2 damnit!.

By: yarcles

yarcles — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 02:58:03 +0000

So what do you call a computer that runs on operating systems that are not “Windows OR Macintosh operating systems” ?

By: Rob...

Rob... — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:50:10 +0000

Whilst, I see your point about PC, it was also the trade name used by IBM for their 8088 computer and when that was cloned the term “PC compatible” was used to mean that the computer was compatible with the IBM PC computer. With the way Windows started as a DOS shell, I can see how PC came to mean a desktop computer running Windows.

Regarding quotation marks, in the UK, we put the full stop after the closing quotation mark, unless the text in the quotation is a full sentence.