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, @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?