i am glad to see someone using the word man in an appropriate manner. anyone who wishes to create a different definition for this word, in this context, is doing exactly that: creating a different definition.

these people are bringing about the problem of "political correctness shit", by creating such alternative, out-of-context definitions for previously correct usage of words. maybe this is ok, maybe it isn't -- in this case.

regardless, i still don't get it how people can actually say that the use "it is" can be defined as a relative pronoun because "that's english language for you, you know, it changes with common usage", well they can fuck off, and stay out of my way.

i remain, yours, ever unimpressed, by the usage of "I T apostrophe S" as a relative pronoun,
luke.

afterthought macmillan technical publishing. i went through quite a few people on the book DCE/RPC over SMB. they sent me the final draft, asking me to review it in 24 hours. i had requested that they send me the completed chapters as-and-when, months beforehand, instead of in one shot. they did not: they sent me the whole lot, pretty much last minute. based on a review of their modifications to the introduction (four pages which took ten minutes), i estimated that it would take five days to complete the review.

the modifications includes a global-search-replace of the word "as" to "because"; "whilst" to "while"; "etc." to "and so on" and sometimes "and so forth"; all occurrences of the word "they" to "he or she" and even, once, "one", which i was really irritated by ["one can do this", "one can do that" automatically implies an arrogance on the part of the author]: i specifically and completely avoided the use of "he, she, and I" except one occurrence of "I"; all colons to semi-colons [this i was absolutely furious about: they quoted me some shit about the chicago dictionary being their standard, which none of them i doubt actually read].

on average, there were 25 modifications per page. on average, i rejected 9 of these modifications, per page. i let nothing slip by without comment. in other words, these people, who were *supposed* to have superior grammatical and syntactical understanding than the authors they were supporting [i.e. they needed _something_ to keep them occupied, so they chose to make gratuitous modifications to reflect the "usage of the english language, as it is today"], fucked it up.

my favourite one was, "this was a difficult function to decode" to "this is a difficult function to decode", making me the authority on imposing on peoples' psychology as to whether they can decode NDR data over-the-wire back to its IDL definition for the function, instead of the actual meaning, which was, "i had a difficult time decoding this function, i hope you can do better as i probably have this one wrong".

about the only thing that they got right was picking up on some of the ambiguities from my prevalent usage of the word "this". apparently, this causes problems as it is not often clear what the subject is. well, you learn something new.