School buses, aka: Student Transportation. The topic guaranteed to raise a holy war is seat belts, and why doesn’t every school bus have them?
I’m a technical writer/editor. We have so many - the Oxford comma, whether the word Load is too “technical…”
I’m currently the rotating member of our company’s Style Board, and hoo-boy. I need to start bringing popcorn to meetings.
I can think of several:
Yellow legal pad v. White legal pad
8 1/2" x 11" legal pad v. 8 1/2" x 14" legal pad
Yellow highlighter only v. Green/Blue/etc. highlighter
12 point v. 13 point
Serif v. Sans-serif
Times New Roman v. Arial v. Century v. Bookman v. Courier
Those last three aren’t entirely jokes. Some courts prefer briefs in Times New Roman, but others like the U.S. Seventh Circuit recommend that you only use Times New Roman in your brief if you’d like for them to wipe their bottoms with it:
Requirements and Suggestions for Typography in Briefs and Other Papers
Small hijack, if you please:
First: at last, a current gen IT person who sees “Cloud Computing” for the massive security breach it is.
As to mainframe security: What happened to ACF2?
While not familiar with Top-Secret, I am quite familiar with the RACF v ACF2 debate.
There really shouldn’t be. RACF is the equivalent of letting everything execute at admin level authority, and wondering why the bad guys can break your security at will.
IIRC (and I’m certain I do) RACF allowed anyone access to anything UNLESS a specific rule had been entered to block it.
ACF2 disallows access to anything by anybody UNLESS they have been given specific authority (read, update, create, delete/rename).
(yes, you create “profiles” for different groups - “assign newhire same security as ddapgmr”.
Please say we’re learning about leaving the keys next to the lock?
Can you expand on that? Do you mean “load” as in “load a file” (as a counterpart to “save”)? Do you mean more generally, but slightly more technically the literal act of loading data into memory? Or perhaps you mean “load” in the context of “stress” e.g. “the server cannot handle your request because it is under heavy load”.
IMO all of those have completely different levels of how technical of terms they are, with 1 and 3 being rather benign and the middle one being at least moderately technical.
[QUOTE=usedtobe]
RACF is the equivalent of letting everything execute at admin level authority, and wondering why the bad guys can break your security at will.
[/QUOTE]
And that would be why my counterparts who came from a RACF shop pine for the old easy days. 
I think we actually are running ACF2 here, and Top Secret is somewhat like a shell with advanced features - rather like the old days of installing Norton Desktop on top of Windows. I’m just a security analyst, so I’m indifferent to whatever the actual software is.
In Delphi, the with statement.
Example not using the with statement:
procedure test;
begin
DBISAMTable1.FieldValues[‘Field1’]:=‘Test’;
DBISAMTable1.FieldValues[‘Field2’]:=‘Test’;
DBISAMTable1.FieldValues[‘Field3’]:=‘Test’;
end;
Example using the with statement:
procedure test;
begin
with DBISAMTable1 do
begin
FieldValues[‘Field1’]:=‘Test’;
FieldValues[‘Field2’]:=‘Test’;
FieldValues[‘Field3’]:=‘Test’;
end;
end;
To me, anything that saves me a bunch of typing is a great help! You can see how this would be a great time saver for a database with 50 fields.
However, there are Delphi developers out there that want the with statement ABOLISHED!
I think the best thing is to keep it, and if you don’t like it, don’t use it!
Regarding spaces, I agree that there should be a wider space between sentences, but this should be done as a standard single space character rendered wider the same way line spacing is rendered. After all if you want a double spaced document, you don’t actually hit carriage return twice after every line. And it should be closer to 1.5 than 2x width.
I’m having trouble figuring out in what context this would be meaningful. Can you explain it a little better?
When I was first a graphic designer we had the Quark vs inDesign debate. I still prefer the general interface of old Quark, but I’m fine with the idea that inDesign won out because its nice to have all the adobe products synchronized. I guess there’s still some heat over whether jpg should exist now that we have png.
I don’t recall there being any big controversies at the various bookshops I worked at, nor the genetics lab.
At the educational computing lab, there’s still a big debate going on as to the proper way to construct an ebook. And the real answer is, there isn’t yet. There’s no tool currently available that is easy to use, has fine controls for standardizing the markup, and consistency of rendering over multiple platforms and devices. They ended up choosing a proprietary format that you have to basically hand code but that has some non standard extra goodies. The code does end up looking pretty nice, and the goodies are fun and optional, but the interface is very tedious. I tend to prefer Pages, because it makes styles and TOCs very easy, but it doesn’t render tables well after conversion. There needs to be something more akin to an HTML editor, where you can simultaneously see the output and the code.
I constantly hear the " <Martial Art A> is better than <Martial Art B>" argument, to the point where I just laugh out loud at it these days.
That’s the same rationale for the otherwise inexplicable success of Adobe Illustrator with it’s terrible spline drawing tools. Coreldraw blows it away. And I cringe to see people painting in Photoshop when Fractal Design Painter is what they really need.
But all that is not really a Holy War. Anyway, I have cables to wrap.
In our case, it would be more like this: Ensure that the application loads…
We usually change Load to Open, or in some cases, Access (Verify that you can load the {whatever}).
Completely agree (related to my own holy war of technical editorial styles and authorial voice). I read, edit, and write metric-redwoods of technical documents and am at my best when I can read quickly, skim, and pick relevant information out from the chaff. I am an unapologetic 2-spacer. With 2-spaces my eyes can flow and parse information easily when speed reading. With 1-space I suffer speed when I need to constantly re-read portions that my brain didn’t parse because it didn’t notice a sentence break.
The worst are “corporate identity policies” shoved from above into inappropriate places. No, I will NOT publish my requirements spec in Times Fucking Roman.
And my last technical writer axe to grind…the word “or”. Not kidding, I have seen shouting arguments with millions of dollars hinging around confusing the colloqiual “or” and the logical operator “or”. When contracts people sit with marketing people with legal people with technical people in one room to read a document, it isn’t pretty.
Please explain.
Or, in common usage can have multiple meanings. “You can take the sword or the gun”, for instance, implies an EXCLUSIVE or. The implication is that you can take one, or the other, but not both. “Can you take the tent or the flashlight out to the car” is (debatably) an INCLUSIVE or. Taking one is sufficient, but taking both is also allowed.
I’ve also seen the colloquial “or” used to mean “and” and any other number of crazy things, but can’t think of any examples.
In formal logic (and computer logic), we disambiguate with the logical OR (inclusive) and XOR (exclusive). Some (imo rather dense) people will argue that any use of the word “or” unambiguously must be inclusive. Others argue that even when writing technical documents the meaning of a lowercase “or” depends on context. That’s true and prevents you from writing really awkward, stilted statements… but sometimes it’s ambiguous and you can have a good ol fight over whether “or” mean XOR or OR in that sentence.
Not the same profession, but…
Dentists call them “bicuspids.”
Anthropologists call them “premolars.”
Dental picks at dawn!
(I have a BA in Anthro and am going back to school to study dentistry, so this should be interesting. :D)
Personally I think “bicuspid” is more descriptive. Shhhh, don’t tell my anthro professors!
I’m afraid that quibbling about C coding and other computer-related trivia is the only way I can participate in this thread. 
The most supreme rule of coding is that you use the existing style when modifying or adding to any body of code … (no matter how demented and brain-damaged that style might be ).
At some point, BTW, one notices that almost all the most renowned C programmers (Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds, etc. etc.) use the same rules as each other for arrangement of white space, braces, etc – rules referred to as One True Style:trade_mark:. Frankly, use of other styles strikes me as obstinate or amateurish. To save a round of rejoinders, I’ll admit upfront that I’m a narrow-minded pedant. 
Ah, I can see how that would be important in technical or legal contexts. I imagine “or” should always be replaced with either “either/or” or “and/or” where the distinction matters.
I have never been a coding style Nazi, and when I started my software company, I didn’t have a company style guide. Then one of my programmers needed to make a small change to someone else’s code and spent an entire afternoon reformatting the file instead of ten minutes doing the edit. At that point, I realized I had to give them all one style to work from.
The other side effect to doing that is that everybody suddenly had an easier time understanding everyone else’s code.
I HAVE to stop reading threads about what currently passes for DP/MIS/IS/IT.
I do hope nobody in the world uses RACF for a system with (even potentially) more than 3 users.
The USING clause:
The micro code began by creating tiny macros and using them as commands.
This was a great leap over re-keying the same logic in countless programs. Then it blew it by resulting in 800-page “text books”*.
Now the USING to state what database is being defined to use these fields. See COBOL “COPY” command.
All that gibberish is
COPY dbimage01.
Where dbimage01 is all that code defined ONCE and invoked by the compiler when the COPY command is processed.
Please say that function still exists? Please?
- My COBOL book, with pictures, was 135 pages and included 80% of all commands and 95% of those you would ever use.