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One space good, two spaces bad? (This story appears near the end of the article; scroll down to see it.)
Finally, Microsoft found time to weigh in on the age-old debate of just how many spaces belong after a full stop (or "period"). Thanks to an update, Word will apparently treat two spaces as a typo and festoon a double-spaced document with red, squiggly lines unless told to ignore the rule.
A debate for the ages finally settled. Where do you stand? ⚔️ https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1253655739379470338
— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) April 24, 2020
Not everyone is impressed with change; this hack, for example, has fond memories of bashing away on the keys of a typewriter back in the day and slapping the spacebar twice between sentences [...]. It has proven a hard habit to break. Others, such as Jason Howard, senior project manager on the Windows Insider Team, called for a poll on the matter.
@Microsoft365 has thrown down the gauntlet. Apparently #MicrosoftWord will now flag double-spacing between sentences as an error.
Which side will you pick? Choose wisely...
— Jason Howard (@NorthFaceHiker) April 24, 2020
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:10PM (45 children)
Perhaps you meant English teachers. I don't think IT cars about how many spaces you use.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:37PM (7 children)
Can anybody explain this using a care analogy?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:42PM (3 children)
Stay 6 ft apart instead of 12 ft. My God 12 ft!?!
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:50PM
That's what she said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @12:30AM (1 child)
No!! Microsoft is now saying 3ft is right not 6ft standard.
Microsoft is just WRONG
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:12AM
Yep... that's what he said.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:53PM (1 child)
OK: I couldn't possibly care less about whatever microsoft feels like saying.
I can even think of a car analogy: I'm not going to waste time listening to microsoft's opinion on whether or not double declutching is necessary with an unsynchronised gearbox.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @01:46AM
It is, but they call them synchronized gearboxes instead.
(Score: 3, Touché) by datapharmer on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:25AM
In a world of things like python we can safely say that IT folk are concerned with whitespace and the choice of delimiters. Whether we want to be or not.
(Score: 5, Funny) by TapeApe on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:09PM (3 children)
English teachers will explain patiently that it's two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, or after a colon. Then they'll mention that it's just one space after a comma or a semicolon.
IT teachers will froth at the mouth and argue over whether to use 5 spaces, 8 spaces, or hit the [TAB] button when indenting your code for readability.
Each type of teacher thinks the other is slightly ridiculous, and both look down at the auto mechanics teacher who keeps them mobile.
...
It's a funny old world when you look at it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)
You left out Sports / PE teachers.
It's the state law that STEM and IT students attend one hour of PE per day and get beat up by jocks.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:58PM
>> It's the state law that STEM and IT students attend one hour of PE per day and get beat up by jocks.
And it's karma that the jocks spend the rest of their lives being monitored and manipulated by their IT overlords.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:06PM
The junior high school I went to, many moons ago, was very old and only had a small gym with a single locker room. So the girls got to use the gym in the junior high building, and the boys had to go across the large parking lot to the high school to have gym. With the high school boys.
Imagine, if you will, being a seventh grader nerd for whom puberty was merely a rumor, having to take gym class with high schoolers. Especially the seniors, when for senior year gym wasn't mandatory so all the seniors were there voluntarily. Not just the sports, which was bad enough, but having to shower with everyone. It was not good. During the first week, in the shower the oldest boys started to (ahem) hassle us junior highers, until the coach stuck his head into the shower and stopped it. The rest of the year, and following ones, after class the coach stood where he could swivel his head and keep an eye on what was going on in the shower and in the rest of the locker room. We might have been the only boys ever who were glad the coach was watching us take showers.
That was over forty years ago, and I still occasionally have a bad dream about being in that locker room again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:22PM (31 children)
Our Typing Teacher told us to use two spaces. We used coal-fired steam powered typewriters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:26PM (13 children)
Young whippersnappers. We had to do word processing in our head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:44PM (11 children)
Manual word processing? Pfft. We had to be content with wet clay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:21PM (10 children)
You had wet clay? We had to use chisels to do the editing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:38PM (9 children)
Chisels? Luxury. We had to write by selectively eroding the stone with water!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:22PM (8 children)
What luxuries! All we had in our cave was charcoal and poo!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:53PM (7 children)
You had a cave? My god, we were forced to save every space for Microsoft, they only had room for 640.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:18PM (6 children)
You were lucky. We were chained to the linotype machines from birth, and had to scrape the droppings of hot lead from the type machines to use for food. They used our very blood for heat to melt the lead in the first place. With each line of type formed we had to catch the lava hot hunks of lead with our teeth, and trot quickly over to the page forms to drop each line into the press for each page of the morning paper. During our five-minutes-per-day break, our only solace was capturing the reflection of the flames, from the criminals being burned at the stake outside for the crime of smudging a sheet of newsprint, in the shiny bits of lead covering our rotting nubs of teeth.
But we were happy.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)
So you had heating then? Luxury!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 29 2020, @10:23PM
You knew what heating was? And the only ink we had was our blood, just like Tom Hanks in Castaway.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday April 28 2020, @11:58PM (3 children)
Yeah, that's right, but just try telling todays kids...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @04:00AM (2 children)
Booooo! I should mod you down for breaking the lovely start of a USENET-style cascade.
For the young'uns, page down here to see some small ones,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.cascade/4qe6SXf_8iQ [google.com]
They looked better on a text screen, not a web page.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:19AM (1 child)
I'll see your Google and raise The Four Yorkshiremen [youtube.com] (now sadly down to one) from "At Last the 1948 Show"
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:50PM
Would you like a parrot with that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:55PM
Damn right! To center a line you had to count the characters, divide by two and backspace from the center of the page, and we didn't complain!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:40PM (1 child)
In 1977 I got to use a cool IBM Selectric in typing class. It was bright red.
I took typing for one and only one purpose: to be good at typing on a computer keyboard, which I knew I would be doing for the rest of my life.
Two years later in college, I did far less hand writing and more typing. After starting in the "real world" no more hand writing again ever. Except to sign my name, and write checks. Even the check writing eventually went away. Now, at most I hand scrawl post-it notes. But I sure can type.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 29 2020, @10:26PM
In something like 1981 my typing class had three Selectric II's (had its own correction ribbon which made it different from the original Selectric) and we had 27 manual typewriters. We also had a computer room with 27 PETs and 3 TRS-80 M. III's. But my Dad owned a Selectric II he bought for his business, and they bought me a Model III of my very own with cassette but it had 16K. (Which was @#$*()%@*)% expensive for our family's budget. I've never forgotten it).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:42PM (14 children)
It is interesting how QUERTY has stuck to this day. There are other keyboard layouts. But four and a half decades since I started using computes, everything is still QUERTY. Well into the 21st century.
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(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:54PM (11 children)
How do you typo "QWERTY"? The letters are literally lined up for you at the top of the keyboard!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:04PM (10 children)
I think by reflex. Not sure why. But I didn't even realize it. It didn't "look" wrong. In fact QWERTY is awkward to type, and looks strange.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:14PM (6 children)
DANNYB!!!
And this is after you were almost bragging what a typing whiz you are...?! Anybody can type 120 typos a minute. I can type 280 bits of nonsense a minute!
All your credibility has gone swiftly down the drain. 🤣
(Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:29PM (5 children)
I'm not bragging about being especially fast. But I do fairly rapidly type. And backspace sometimes. :-) But I've been doing it for decades. The typing teacher made sure nobody got started with any bad habits.
I am thinking about how I repeated that mistake twice and didn't catch it. I think Q is uncommonly used at the start of a word. And QU is a common digram.
I tried to think of a word starting with Q not followed by U. I couldn't think of any.
So I just had a peek at /usr/dict/words
Scrolling down to the Q's. It starts like . . .
pyrotechnic
pyrotechnics
pyrotechnics's
python
python's
pythons
pyx
pyx's
pyxes
q
qua
quack
quack's
quacked
quackery
And ends with . . .
quoted
quotes
quoth
quotidian
quotient
quotient's
quotients
quoting
r
rabbi
rabbi's
rabbinate
rabbinate's
rabbinical
rabbis
rabbit
rabbit's
rabbited
Other than the single letter Q, every word in /usr/dict/words, starting with Q is followed by U. So it must be reflex to type it. Which it was. I had no conscious awareness of it. Even though I knew what I intended to type.
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(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:49PM (2 children)
Some Arab place names do, like Qatar, if you need something to practise on.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
I have probably typed Qatar even less than any other word beginning with Q. And I noticed that my fingers slowed down compared to other words in these sentences.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @08:59PM
I managed to win at Scrabble once by claiming QWERTY was a word. With a little virtual arm twisting the other players accepted it (but pretty sure it's not in the Scrabble dictionary). It was on at least a double square, so lots of points!
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Tuesday April 28 2020, @06:49PM
DannyB, I love you! ❤️ Your wit and love for stupid puns are always welcome reads for me here.
But...just 'fess up already! You fucked up. Twice! It's QWERTY. It
should beis ingrained in our collective brain. You're just making it worse for yourself with yr who-cares list from...like I said, who cares?!Ehhh...I love you anyway! ❤️
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday April 28 2020, @10:49PM
For those who like to cheat at Scrabble, here are all of the words that use Q but not U [word.tips]
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday April 29 2020, @12:02AM (2 children)
Can't see how, I very rarely mistype my passwords...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:39PM (1 child)
I find that the more letters I have to type on the same hand, the slower it goes. Even as I rapid fire what you are reading right now, I notice that moving back and forth between hands seems to speed things up. But I'm not sure. But I notice that in this very test there are significant runs of letters on the same hand, alternating between hands. Just look at the word 'between' for example.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:52PM
Re-inventing Dvorak -- vowels on one side, common consonants on the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:16PM (1 child)
The position of the letters doesn't really matter that much.
For a programmer, what can matter over the course of a day is all those punctuation symbols and control key combos we have to type.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 29 2020, @02:42PM
Like most things that humans can adapt to, you get used to them.
I remember having to break the := (colon-equals) assignment operator from Pascal. And I typed words like BEGIN and END so rapidly and frequently that I'll always be able to do it.
Then I realized C was developed by a bunch of hunt-and-peck savages. And C++ continued that awfulness. And Java. But at least in Java you get variable and identifier names that use up at least half of a 120 character line. So there.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday April 28 2020, @04:08PM
Not many IT teachers cares, but the guy who came up with TEX is probably rolling in his grave (oh still alive? sorry)
Account abandoned.