Author Topic: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.  (Read 627437 times)

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Offline nigelwright7557

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #875 on: June 03, 2021, 03:41:55 am »
Self appointed moderators on forums.
Its up to the moderator to moderate not the members.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #876 on: June 03, 2021, 03:50:47 am »
People and organisations that jump down your throat and criticise you for not being “inclusive” because you have a point of view that is different to theirs, thereby demonstrating that they are the ones that are not “inclusive”...

Your mistake is thinking that "inclusive" means what it sounds like it means.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #877 on: June 03, 2021, 08:11:16 am »
One of my pet peeves is "Monday through Friday"---- through to when?

Ok, they are trying to make a distinction between something that is "All the days up to, but not including Friday" & another thing which is "Monday to Friday inclusive", but why not just say that?

Another delight is the journalist's habit of labelling something as "Iconic"--------Do we venerate such things as part of a religious observation?

Yet another is "ahead of" instead of "prior to" some event.

There are so many more, such as "Hot Gospellers" like the late Herbert W Armstrong, who declared that he "Believed 'on' Jesus Christ".
Not that he "believed in Him", or believed in the various Gospels, no--------he "believed 'on' Him!"(Note, I'm being properly respectful & giving JC his capitalisation of "Him".)

This seems to be common among broadcast preachers, not just "old mate" Herb!
 

Offline Ed.Kloonk

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #878 on: June 03, 2021, 08:45:34 am »
(Note, I'm being properly respectful & giving JC his capitalisation of "Him".)

May God bless you.
iratus parum formica
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #879 on: June 03, 2021, 01:46:36 pm »
Re: "Believe on".  Acts 16:31 (King James Version): "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."
 

Offline CirclotronTopic starter

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #880 on: June 03, 2021, 01:59:21 pm »
People who sanctimoniously use English language words from several hundred years ago like thee and thy and thou, particularly in a religious context, as if this obsolete way of speaking is more wonderful and grand and whatever compared to contemporary vernacular speech, despite the fact that that was how ordinary people spoke way back then.
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #881 on: June 03, 2021, 02:25:55 pm »
Quote
People who sanctimoniously use English language words from several hundred years ago like thee and thy and thou, particularly in a religious context,
And the same people seem to get offended when i use language of a similar age to tell them to go away or question there parentage
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #882 on: June 03, 2021, 03:14:46 pm »
Re: "Believe on".  Acts 16:31 (King James Version): "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."

An early example of a typo?  :D
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #883 on: June 03, 2021, 03:41:26 pm »
Re: "Believe on".  Acts 16:31 (King James Version): "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."

An early example of a typo?  :D
No, just an earlier version of the language that I speak.  Contemporary English usage admits both "log in" and "log on", as required.
 I would never criticize a preacher from Rev. Armstrong’s generation for quoting the King James Version translation.
If we forget about the language of that era, we lose much of the beauty of Shakespeare and Donne when forced to read it through a translation of texts that are readable in plain text.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 09:57:23 pm by TimFox »
 

Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #884 on: June 03, 2021, 03:46:52 pm »
Language is hard.

One of my pet peeves are people who knowingly re/misdefine words and concepts, in order to manipulate others.

Like browser developers, who decided "UTF-8 is the only non-legacy character set".  And that is used to end any and all arguments about why UTF-8 is treated specially among all character sets – specifically, it is the ONLY character set you cannot choose as your default one, "because it is not a legacy character set, and the default mechanism is meant only for legacy character sets".  Yet, who defined "legacy character set"?  I know for a fact that it has nothing to do with time, because UTF-8 was introduced in Plan-9 in 1992, but the widely used ISO-8859-15 – the ISO Latin 1 character set that includes the € character; ISO-8859-1 does not - came about after 1996.  The assholes did, who wanted to discriminate against UTF-8, but not do so openly; that's who.  The definition is based on nothing except "because we say so".

This is even more prevalent in today's politics, but let's not go there.  Suffice it to say that it is impossible (and utterly, utterly frustrating) to discuss any important matter when a faction takes each term and twists them to suit their own needs, so that discussion on objective facts is impossible, no matter what the concept or situation.  It becomes just a nitpicking game that does not and cannot achieve anything constructive.

And if you post a reply saying "objective facts do not exist anyway", I have a baseball bat which would like to be introduced to your nose at a high velocity, as a surrogate for a philosophical argument on objectivity and facts.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 03:50:55 pm by Nominal Animal »
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #885 on: June 03, 2021, 03:53:01 pm »
Definitions:  In high-school competitive debate, it was mandatory to start by defining the important terms, so that both sides used the same definitions.  In this modern age, each of us can use arbitrary meanings of political terms such as “socialist”, “conservative”, “liberal”, “fascist”, “progressive”, “reactionary”, ad inf.  This works, since we aren’t talking with each other, anyway.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 04:50:43 pm by TimFox »
 
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Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #886 on: June 03, 2021, 04:33:32 pm »
This may be a repeat, and if so, I apologize... One of my biggest peeves is companies who require you to register on their site before they let you download datasheets or user manuals.
"That's not even wrong" -- Wolfgang Pauli
 
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Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #887 on: June 03, 2021, 04:47:10 pm »
One of my pet peeves are people who knowingly re/misdefine words and concepts, in order to manipulate others.
Indeed. The word "gay" appears in popular Christmas carols and had an entirely different meaning from today's common usage. So too "progressive", "liberal", and a host of others. For example, it's now necessary to use the modifier "classic" to identify that you're speaking of what was commonly known as liberalism just ~100 years ago. It's extremely annoying when perfectly good and long-established words are hijacked for someone's agenda.

Disclaimer to assuage the cancel culturists: This is not a comment on anyone's politics, just a eulogy for the loss of - dare I say it - diversity in word choice.
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #888 on: June 03, 2021, 05:28:33 pm »
[...] if you post a reply saying "objective facts do not exist anyway", I have a baseball bat which would like to be introduced to your nose at a high velocity [...]

"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth."
--Mike Tyson
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #889 on: June 03, 2021, 05:38:27 pm »
One of my pet peeves is "Monday through Friday"---- through to when?

Ok, they are trying to make a distinction between something that is "All the days up to, but not including Friday" & another thing which is "Monday to Friday inclusive", but why not just say that?

I think it's obvious what "Monday through Friday" means. It means normal weekday business hours, so approximately 9am Monday through 5pm Friday. Maybe it isn't a common saying in all English speaking places but if you said it in the USA pretty much anyone would know exactly what you meant.
 

Offline E-Design

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #890 on: June 03, 2021, 09:57:55 pm »
Here's a pet peeve: Copy bad behavior because a competitor did it that way. Circlotrons example in that datasheet There are other companies who do it the same way because well, they think they need to be easily compared to the competition and thereby keep perpetuating the nonsense.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #891 on: June 03, 2021, 09:59:19 pm »
One of my pet peeves is "Monday through Friday"---- through to when?

Ok, they are trying to make a distinction between something that is "All the days up to, but not including Friday" & another thing which is "Monday to Friday inclusive", but why not just say that?

I think it's obvious what "Monday through Friday" means. It means normal weekday business hours, so approximately 9am Monday through 5pm Friday. Maybe it isn't a common saying in all English speaking places but if you said it in the USA pretty much anyone would know exactly what you meant.
I agree.  In American usage, "Monday to Friday" could mean until the start of Friday, while "Monday through Friday" unambiguously means until the end (or COB) of Friday.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #892 on: June 03, 2021, 10:01:53 pm »
Here's a pet peeve: Copy bad behavior because a competitor did it that way. Circlotrons example in that datasheet There are other companies who do it the same way because well, they think they need to be easily compared to the competition and thereby keep perpetuating the nonsense.
I disagree about Circlotron's example, since that's the form in which characteristic curves have been graphed since the beginning of electronics.  Curve tracers normally ramp the voltage (drain-source for FETs) while measuring the current (drain for FETs), then change the bias voltage (gate-source for FETs) and ramp again, possibly limiting the sweep to avoid excess power dissipation, to generate the family of curves in the graph.
There are other ways to graph the same data, of course.  What's wrong with making it easy to compare one component with a similar one from the competition?  Sneaky companies would try to confuse the comparison.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2021, 10:50:02 pm by TimFox »
 

Offline CirclotronTopic starter

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #893 on: June 04, 2021, 12:37:15 am »
I can understand why characteristic curves are graphed the way they are for devices that are intended for operation in the linear region. No argument there. But with mosfets, the overwhelming majority of which are meant to be used primarily as a switching device, I still think the drain current should be across the bottom of the graph and the resulting voltage drop up the side of the graph.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #894 on: June 04, 2021, 12:56:35 am »
I can understand why characteristic curves are graphed the way they are for devices that are intended for operation in the linear region. No argument there. But with mosfets, the overwhelming majority of which are meant to be used primarily as a switching device, I still think the drain current should be across the bottom of the graph and the resulting voltage drop up the side of the graph.

Maybe it is historical, as back in the day, if you said "mosfet", you were probably referring to a device used in a small signal application in a linear mode.
"Dual gate mosfets" were pretty much the "go to" solution for both RF/IF amplifiers & mixers in much RF stuff in the 1970s, '80s, early '90s.

The characterisation of mosfets as power switching devices is pretty much a 2000s thing.
Unfortunately, many relatively youthful people only know them as such.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #895 on: June 04, 2021, 01:02:13 am »
One of my pet peeves is "Monday through Friday"---- through to when?

Ok, they are trying to make a distinction between something that is "All the days up to, but not including Friday" & another thing which is "Monday to Friday inclusive", but why not just say that?

I think it's obvious what "Monday through Friday" means. It means normal weekday business hours, so approximately 9am Monday through 5pm Friday. Maybe it isn't a common saying in all English speaking places but if you said it in the USA pretty much anyone would know exactly what you meant.
I agree.  In American usage, "Monday to Friday" could mean until the start of Friday, while "Monday through Friday" unambiguously means until the end (or COB) of Friday.

To non-Americans it is ambiguous.(quite apart from sounding weird)
Why not "Monday to Friday, inclusive?"
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #896 on: June 04, 2021, 01:29:24 am »
Why not "Monday to Friday, inclusive?"

Because that sounds weird to us, we'd understand what it means but it isn't something you're likely to hear an American say and the "inclusive" is an extra word that is not really necessary as it is already implied. If I wanted to say Monday up until but not including Friday I'd say "Monday through Thursday", the "inclusive" is implied without explicitly saying it.

It's kind of useless to debate this sort of thing IMO, American English is its own distinct dialect, and within that there are numerous local dialects. Australian English has its own unique dialects compared to British English. It's all English and we can all more or less understand each other but it's not really the same language. There are a lot of phrases that would sound really weird to someone from a region where that phrase is not typically used. 
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #897 on: June 04, 2021, 02:07:26 am »
One of my pet peeves are people who knowingly re/misdefine words and concepts, in order to manipulate others.
Indeed. The word "gay" appears in popular Christmas carols and had an entirely different meaning from today's common usage. So too "progressive", "liberal", and a host of others. For example, it's now necessary to use the modifier "classic" to identify that you're speaking of what was commonly known as liberalism just ~100 years ago. It's extremely annoying when perfectly good and long-established words are hijacked for someone's agenda.

Disclaimer to assuage the cancel culturists: This is not a comment on anyone's politics, just a eulogy for the loss of - dare I say it - diversity in word choice.

In Oz, we have a political party called the Liberal Party.

They have, historically, been true conservatives, much closer in philosophy to the British Conservative Party, than to others parties with similar names.
They  have drifted somewhat further right in recent years, making the name even less valid.

As "conservative" is just a label, traditional conservatives don't have anything to distinguish them from others that are quite a bit more radical, so the term "conservative" in this country has come to refer to the "right wing" of the Liberal Party as well as others even/much further from the mainstream.

Thus, we have the situation where the media has to call more left wing people "small 'L' liberals."

Much of this is because various people have seen fit to shoehorn current US terminology into Australian politics, where the meanings don't neatly fit.

Of course, "cut n' pasting" of US material is a cheap way for smaller groups of whatever persuasion to appear to have a presence on line.
The dumb thing is they don't do "due diligence" when it comes to editing the result, so their followers end up perpetuating the misuse of terminology, further distorting the meanings of words.

Your example of "gay", though a common one, is not as new as you may believe.
I read an American novel written in the late 1950s, where it was used in that sense.
Even disregarding that one as an "outlier" , it has certainly been in common use in Oz since, at least, the 1980s.
When a ice cream confection was launched called "Golden Gaytime", it caused many a chuckle.
Interestingly, they still make & sell it!

A common term back in the1960s, synonomous with the modern use of "gay", was "camp".
That term has morphed into one simply meaning "showy, extravagant, "kitschy".

 

Offline johnboxall

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #898 on: June 04, 2021, 02:18:42 am »
... "go ahead"... why is this now said?

Example:

I'm going to go ahead and screw in that light bulb.
I'm going to screw in that light bulb.

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #899 on: June 04, 2021, 02:20:57 am »
People who sanctimoniously use English language words from several hundred years ago like thee and thy and thou, particularly in a religious context, as if this obsolete way of speaking is more wonderful and grand and whatever compared to contemporary vernacular speech, despite the fact that that was how ordinary people spoke way back then.

In any case, that wasn't what was actually said by the historical?(religious) figures quoted.
It has been filtered through many translations before it got to the  "King James" Bible.

Interestingly, I have never heard the "on" usage perpetuated by any normal working Priest, Minister, Pastor, or whatever.---- the ones that actually do stuff, like wedding & burial services, good works, etc, & live in the real world.

It always seems to be from these blokes who scream & shriek on TV or Radio, then con the believers into sending them donations so they can continue to live a life of affluence & privilege.
 


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