arooaroo

I used to work for Pearson Longman, and one of their USPs was that their defining vocabulary was significantly smaller than the main competitors, namely OUP and CUP. Longman's was just over 2000 (about 2100 IIRC), whereas OUP's was approx 3000.

Even then, one is rather constrained and definitions frequently cross-referenced other words to bootstrap the definition.

I got one from order-update@amazon.co.uk too. Looked genuine -- didn't seem to be fishing for anything. However, the complete lack of information bothered me a lot.

Tell that to the person/people in charge of the lightning port and headphone jack on the iPhone.

I know headphone jacks are no longer on Apple's radar, but they always seem to get messed up after a year so that the stock iPhone headphones are not recognised and thus the control buttons don't work.

However, the lightning port drives me mad because the blasted device won't charge up properly without me fiddling with angles and pressure for that goldilocks zone. It just sits there vibrating away in a charging/not-charging loop. One assumes it's the cable but that makes no difference.

I’m pretty sure that Google, Facebook, Twitter et al., stick to acting as platforms because they are relying on years of legal precedents which protects them from liability of any abuse carried out by users.

If however they start curating content or being especially controlling then they risk being classed as a normal publisher, and as such liable to additional regulations or damages based on actions of their users and/partners.

This is why Facebook is in a bind about “fake news” being shared on their network. If they remove it then they will be accused of not being an impartial platform. So instead, at best, they have to algorithmically cross reference posts with other reliable content sources to “flag” to the user that the shared article “may” be inaccurate. Unless that post contains a bit of naked flesh, it ain’t being taken down.

I know this post is young but surprised not to see Linode on here yet. We are deploying to Linode and have recently switched from Puppet to Saltstack to manage our servers. There's a bit of Fabric and Capistrano to glue it all together.

I noticed that Windows Phones seemed over-represented on TV too - UK and US shows. And they still pop up despite being mothballed by MS. I noticed one on a recent show just a month or two ago although the show escapes my memory.

Now Windows Phones are really rare beasts, in the UK at least.

Wow. I’m just trying to do 1+2+3= and I’m consistently getting 24.

My father quit smoking this way.

Always pleased to see more resources encouraging more LaTeX use. ShareLatex and Overleaf are doing a great job of promoting Latex.

Fwiw my Getting to Grips with LaTeX[1] tutorial have been around for years and are well used.

[1] http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex

Packt once approached me to write a book about LaTeX. They would only accept the manuscript in MS Word.

Needless to say negotiations didn't get very far.

To be honest that wasn't necessarily a red-line, but it was clear that their typesetting was fairly basic (their books at the time did look like Word docs - I've not looked at one in print for a while so I can't comment on current standards) and their ability to provide information about royalties was opaque to say the least. So my confidence wasn't with them.

But fair play to Packt, in a short space of time they've created a large collection of titles, particularly in niche areas which O'Reilly wouldn't touch. It's great that there is a publisher willing to invest in the IT textbook sector. I'm just hoping that things have improved as they've grown.

It's certainly a great resource and extremely comprehensive. Personally I think it a bit too detailed to be an effective beginner's guide.

And I say this as one of the credited authors of the LaTeX wikibook (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Authors)

Therefore I'd still plug my own Getting to Grips with LaTeX as a good starting point for newbies: http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/

I promise that's my final plug :P Quite frankly I'm just happy people want to learn LaTeX other word processors.

Go for it - it's simpler than you'd imagine. You may find this beginner's guide a useful starting point: http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/

[disclosure: I'm the author]

I know this is a minor point but using 'gg' to move to the first line is easier than '1G'.

[Self-declared interest: I'm an ex-employee of Pearson Education, the publisher of Longman Dictionaries, and I used to work on the dictionaries team.]

The author may appreciate English learners' dictionaries as a possible source of greater lexicographic stimulation, such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English or Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. These are aimed at learners of English at an advanced level and therefore can be quite insightful for natives too.

On the negative side most dictionaries in this space compete for having definitions expressed as simply as possible. But on the positive they outline significant language nuance, enumerating a word's usage in to multiple fine-grained senses. An entry such as 'go' will have 30-40 different senses of the raw word itself, and then as many again in various phrasal verbs and idiomatic usage.

Synonyms and antonyms are a common and significant feature in learners' dictionaries too.

Sure, the examples aren't from Shakespeare either but they are usually modern language, derived from vast language corpora of real world language use.

Edit: I am of course in British English mode; whilst the dictionaries I referred to do accommodate American variants of usage and spelling they are primarily British English titles. There are exclusively American titles such as Longman Advanced American Dictionary and Oxford Advanced American Dictionary which would suit American readers too.

Despite sounding like a salesman I have no interest in either company or publication - just the language!

But in Stable it's not quite that cutting edge: v0.7.63.

And what version of nginx does Debian ship with? I suspect it classes nginx entirely as experimental!

I'm sure there's a good reason why Apache 2.4 wasn't in the comparison but the author failed to mention it. Apache 2.2.23 may be a recent release but it's a security update of an old but stable branch. Apache 2.4 branch is a year old and a significant update including performance improvements to complete with the likes of nginx.

I would still expect nginx to "win" but seems a fairer comparison somehow.

Rest assured that my tutorials have been tried-and-tested by many under- and post-grads over the years. They've been included in college & university syllabi and I've get a lot of positive feedback from postgrads who've opted for the LaTeX route rather than word processors.

If all this typesetting talk has ignited people's interest in LaTeX then I can recommend a handy beginner's guide: Getting to Grips with LaTeX (http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex) I can recommend it because I wrote it ;)

Funnily enough I've been meaning to make my guide into a self-published book too...

Just to be clear, Vim has had built-in spelling checker since v7.0 (released 2006). The LanguageTool plugin may be handy for spelling and other grammar checking issues but users requiring straight-forward spelling functionality will most likely have essential spell-checking features available out-of-the-box.

I suspect that agnostic as a word has lost some of its meaning because of all the heat in the religious vs atheist debates. To some being agnostic on the issue of god is a cop-out (get off the fence!); to moderates being agnostic is a kind way of not offending either side. Either way it's become associated with a kind of pragmatic ambivalence about the issue.

And hence agnostic -> ambivalent -> disinterested (NB disinterested != uninterested) -> neutral. A chinese whisper of semantics if you will. The result being 50% of software platforms nowadays profess to not having a position on the existence/non-existence of a god!

Funny old world.

"Job Queue is Backend agnostic"

This may be slightly tangental and I really don't want to come across as a troll but 'agnostic' in its absolute loosest terms could be defined as 'unknowable' (although it specifically relates to whether the existence of a higher-being/god-figure is provable or not).

I don't know techies have latched on to this word when it's totally unrelated; words like 'independent' or 'neutral' already existed and do actually mean what the techies want it to mean!

I know language evolves - trust me, I'm a computational linguist who used to work for Longman Dictionaries - but if people started using 'mangler' as a synonym 'compiler' nerds would, quite rightly, wonder wtf is going on!

Other than that, keep up the good work :)