Belated Comment Represents ‘End Of Story’

Huffpost Tech (the Huffington Post still sounds to me like it should be a parody site) reports on a recent comment from Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF file format.

When humans read, they tend to have a sort of ‘voice in their heads’ that sounds each word out to them as though someone’s talking. Did you notice, when you read the word ‘GIF’ just there, how the voice in your head sounded it out with a hard ‘G’?  So did mine.  And so, I gather, do those in most people’s heads.  Well, Steve Wilhite says that’s wrong, and that you should be pronouncing it ‘jiff’. Some people do – mostly agonisingly fashion-conscious people – and they’ve been arguing, apparently for quite some while, that the computer-using public as a whole has been Doing It Wrong™ this whole time while he remained inexplicably silent on the matter.

Honestly I don’t rate his chances of changing anyone’s mind, even if he does assert that his belated comment represents ‘End Of Story’.  Firstly, ‘giff’ (hard ‘g’) makes more sense (‘Jraphics Interchange Format’ just sounds weird), secondly ‘giff’ is pretty much embedded in the public consciousness and he probably should’ve started correcting people before now, and thirdly – some might say most importantly – who gives a toss?  (Well clearly I do, this being my second post on the subject; but I shouldn’t, because it really is of less than no consequence at all.)

But really, it’s not the question itself that caught my attention today.  It’s the comments under the said Huffpost article.

KevvyTermite, for example, is rather concerned about forriners tayking over are langwidge:

“Its Our language (English England) We pronounce it Gif. The Americans think they own our language now!”

Hmmm. Well, the first time I discovered that this argument existed, it was because I was listening to two people here in ‘English England’ debating it. So clearly we don’t all pronounce it ‘Gif’, Kevvy; though undoubtedly the hard G is vastly more common.

Also, the Americans do indeed ‘own our language’ in that English is also their national language. Yes, it’s American English – but I’m guessing you’re one of those many angry Little Englanders who’ve never bothered to research these ‘Americanisms’ enough to find out that in most cases they’re actually ‘Britainisms’: the Americans tend to use older forms that Britain has changed away from, rather than the other way around. But who cares? There are doubtless variants between all English-speaking nations – yet it’s only the Americans that cop flak* from people like Kevvy.

That said, I can’t say I was that impressed with AcaciaJules‘ rebuttal of Kevvy’s point:

“Um, he invented it. The person that invented the word decides.”

‘Um’, well that’s nice and simple, then.  The problem is that it’s really not that simple at all.  Once a creator releases their work they don’t have a great of control over it any more: hence the ongoing argument about whether George Lucas should be able, having re-worked the Star Wars movies, to eliminate the older editions.  Are the films still ‘his’ movies, or do they now belong to The World?  Some say one, others disagree – though it’s a fair bet which side of the divide AcaciaJules would come down on.

(Also, don’t start with ‘Um’ or ‘Er’ when you’re about to correct someone. It’s incredibly patronising and makes you look like an insufferable pompous arse. And it looks even worse still when, as in this case, your correction isn’t correct.)

treborc, who is at pains to inform us, apropos of bugger all, that although he used to vote Labour he now ‘none-votes’, steps in with a dose of intellectual:

“Wilhite…. Shitte same difference really”

There’s a whole separate argument to be had over the use of the phrase ‘same difference’, although since this, too, is well-established there’s little real point. But ‘shite’ definitely has only one ‘t’.

(Oh, treborc, by the way, is apparently a HUFFPOST SUPER USER. Which I guess gives us all hope, doesn’t it?)

But I think that Chillops probably has the best answer:

“Rubbish! Its always been pronounced ‘jif’… Or maybe ‘jiff’… Or sometimes ‘jjiff’. Occasionally I’ve heard it pronounced ‘Geoff’.”

Yep. I’ll go with that. If a soft ‘g’ there must be, then the .geoff file format it is, henceforth and forever more.

---

[* From 'fliegerabwehrkanone'.  Not an Americanism.  And for the love of Brenda don't spell it 'flack'.  Do you see a 'c' amongst all that lot?]

Leap-frogging Our Orders

I’ve absolutely no justification for bleating about this. EVE Online is a player-versus-player game, by and large: its trade markets no less cut-throat and ruthless than the vast tracts of unsecured space in which fleets of player ships constantly battle for supremacy. There is no culture of politeness: such sentiment would be seen as weakness and quickly exploited.

Just like modern Britain. [Damn you; get down, Cynicism.]

Still, the way the markets operate can still get up my nose from time to time.

Simply buying or selling an item on the EVE markets can be dead easy: just click ‘sell’ and your item will be sold to the highest bidder.  Click to buy something without placing an order, and – assuming the desired item is available – it’ll be purchased automatically from the lowest Sell order listed.

Or you can place orders yourself.  Generally the spread between Buy and Sell orders is such that, with more expensive items, you won’t want to simply go for the automatic orders: you won’t get the best price for your sales, and you won’t buy items as cheaply as you could.  So you can place an order at a specified price, which will sit on the system until someone comes along and fills the order for you.

The current market for Inferno heavy missiles in Jita.

In the above example, the highest Buy order is 58.99 ISK per unit, and the buyer wants 244,115 missiles.  The lowest Sell order is 70.69 per missile, and the seller is offering 1,244 of them.  If I have missiles to sell, I would probably put them on the market at 70.68 ISK per missile, and hope that buyers seeking to just re-arm and go will buy from me before someone else places or modifies an order to sell their missile stock at 70.67 per unit.

It Just Clicked…

…Why I’ve been finding the newer-looking BMWs slightly comedic.

Despite BMW’s explicit desire to make their ubiquitous cars look ‘aggressive’ (as if British drivers aren’t aggressive enough as it is, but this is presumably why everyone here has a BMW and drives it like they do), there was something in my head that sparks a little flicker of funny whenever I see this:

For ages, I couldn’t work out what it was.  And then, yesterday, I realised.  It’s because part of my brain is seeing this:

Heth Makes a Spectacle

Part of me watches Tibus Heth fawning all over the Minmatar Republic and wonders what his plan really is.

The obvious explanation – that he’s trying to create an ally for the State by creating a common enemy in the Gallente Federation – is so obvious that it hardly seems worthy of the Top Caldari®.  This is the guy who supposedly schemed and manipulated his way to complete control of the State, and now he’s behaving like some nondescript child shouting vainly and ineffectively for the bigger kids’ attention.

And the Republic speaks volumes by not replying to him at all.  What greater snub could there be, if in the midst of their strife with the Gallente, they don’t consider Caldari offers of support even worth a response?

Self-appointed Defenders of Freedom

“The world’s first gun made with 3D printer technology has been successfully fired in the US,” says the BBC News.

My first reaction on reading this was, “that didn’t take long.”  But I guess, thinking about how long 3D printing has been going on, I’m surprised at how long it did take the gun nuts to twist the technology into feeding their favourite obsession.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do have a fairly ambivalent attitude towards guns.  (It’s also worth pointing out that I’m not a USAian, but live in the UK where gun control seems perfectly normal, not to mention desirable.)  On the one hand, I’m an archer, so I can appreciate the satisfaction to be gained from shooting.  And if the question was solely about the sporting use of guns, as it was here in Britain in the run-up to the 1997 handgun ban, then I’d find the question a little more hazy.

But our printing pioneer, Cody Wilson, 25, of ‘Defense Distributed’, puts paid to all that.  He makes his motivations quite clear.  Says the report:

“Mr Wilson, who describes himself as a crypto-anarchist, said his plans to make the design available were ‘about liberty’.”

Exploration Trepidation

Scanning training goes swimmingly, but is possibly an utter waste of time.

Well, inasmuch as any online roleplaying game is by definition a waste of time, this may well be a particularly wasteful waste of time.

Scanning in EVE Online is a fundamental part of one of the professions a player can choose to follow: that of ‘explorer’. Exploration involves the discovery, by chasing down spatial signatures, of hidden locations, which can be one of four specific types. Some are asteroid belts, which can provide the player with rarer ores to sell or refine for manufacture. Some are concealed bases or communications facilities, which can be hacked to obtain secrets, which can then be sold. Some contain gas clouds, which can be harvested for their chemicals. The final type of site is archaeological ruins, which can be scanned and analysed for scientific discoveries.

Each type of site requires specialist skills and equipment to exploit. Exploration can be carried out with basic kit at a relatively early stage, but as the pilot becomes more experienced, it can, so I’m told, be quite lucrative. In addition, the pilot can apply their scanning skills to the detection of other stuff, such as wormholes, ships, space stations and cargo containers. So it can, with luck, be a handy skill set to offer a corporation.

Corp That Tolerates

I discovered that a friend of mine plays EVE.

This is the sort of friend you’ve not known all that long, but you seem to get on with relatively okay, and that sense is helped quite a bit when you discover that they play the mad Internet spaceships game you like.

And this friend told me that she’s in a corporation, and that her corporation has a place for pilots like me – the sort who don’t fly on regular hours, and who aren’t all that keen on the seriously cut-throat side of New Eden life.

In short, it’s a corp that tolerates carebears.  I’ve put in an application – the first time in six or seven years of playing EVE that I’ve ever done so.  I’ll let you know what happens, whether you want to know or not.