* Quinn C:

> * Ken Blake:
>
>> "Media" and "criteria," along with "data" and "news" are English words
>> that are almost always used only in their plural.
>
> "Media" only in one of it's various meanings.

The "head of Instagram" did a nice demonstration of how fluid these
things are in an interview I heard this morning:

I understand social media /is/ new, and new mediums ... media /are/
going to be scrutinized [...]

(my emphasis)

--
They're telling the truth. [...] I know what you mean. There's
another truth that they're not telling. But newspapers never
do, that's not what they're for.
-- James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

On 9/17/2021 10:17 AM, Quinn C wrote:
> * Quinn C:
>> * Ken Blake:

>>> "Media" and "criteria," along with "data" and "news" are English
>>> words that are almost always used only in their plural.

>> "Media" only in one of it's various meanings.

> The "head of Instagram" did a nice demonstration of how fluid these
> things are in an interview I heard this morning:

> I understand social media /is/ new, and new mediums ... media /are/
> going to be scrutinized [...]

> (my emphasis)

Perhaps the first "media" is singular because it stands for "the
phenomenon of social media", and the second is plural because it is the
plural of "medium", as the speaker signalled with their correction.

CDB used thar keyboard to writen:
> On 9/15/2021 1:59 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>> Tak To wrote:
>>> Ken Blake wrote:
>>>> [...] "Media" and "criteria," along with "data" and "news" are
>>>> English words that are almost always used only in their plural.
>
>>> Agenda.
>
>> No, as far as I'm concerned, "agenda" is different. "Media,"
>> "criteria," "data" and "news" are all plural forms of English words
>> that are often treated as singular.
>
>> That's not what "agenda" is. Regardless of the fact that in Latin, "agenda"
>> is the plural of "agendum," in English "agenda" is singular.
>> The Latin singular "agendum" also exists in English, but
>> dictionaries define it as a synonym of "agenda" and it is almost
>> never used. I can't remember even reading it or hearing it.
>
> Last time we did this discussion, it was pointed out that "agenda" is
> singular because it stands for "[list of] agendums"
>
> I have heard more than one person pronouncing "phenomenon/phenomena"
> with a nasal "ah" at the end [f@'nAmenA~] so as to cover their bases.

The Muppets didn't.

/dps

--
Yes, I have had a cucumber soda. Why do you ask?

On Wed, 15 Sep 2021 10:07:38 +0100, Janet <nobody@home.com> wrote:

> What's even more grating, is people who think kudos is the plural of
>kudo, so they spell it kudoes.

As opposed to kubucks?

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On Wed, 15 Sep 2021 10:24:46 +0200, occam <nobody@nowhere.nix> wrote:

>I wonder sometimes if McLuhan would have come up with that memorable
>piece of nonsense, had he lived in the current cacophony of media we
>have today.
><see my post in Twitter>.

What's your Twitter handle?

But I think he had a valid point.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On Wed, 15 Sep 2021 13:18:23 -0400, Tak To <takto@alum.mit.eduxx>
wrote:

>On 9/14/2021 10:56 AM, Ken Blake wrote:
>> [...]
>> "Media" and "criteria," along with "data" and "news" are English words
>> that are almost always used only in their plural.
>
>Agenda.

"We will discuss Agendum 24 now, and Agenda 23 and 25 after the tea
break."

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:05:37 +0300, Anton Shepelev
<anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> wrote:

>Steve Hayes:
>
>> Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
>
>I see that your blog is moving because of technological ad-
>vances make using Wordpress painful. Why not switch to a
>more stable system that will not betray you because some
>corporation has decided to undermine or upgrade a standard,
>and others begun to incorporate the changes into their prod-
>ucts, sacrificing backwards compatibility?

Yes, I've mostly gone back to LiveJournal.

I moved to Blogger because it was quicker and less clunky than
LiveJournal, but then to WordPress when "improvements" made Blogger
clunkier. Then back to Blogger when WordPress became impossible to
use, and now Black to LiveJournal when Blogger became clunkier and
dysfunctional.

LiveJournal keeps exorting me to use their new editor, but I've grown
very suspicious of new editors that invariably are more difficult to
use (like Blogger) or impossible (like WordPress).

>I recommend that you try one of the many free and open-
>source static website generators. I have had a most pleas-
>ant experience with Nikola -- a static generator designed
>specifically for bloggers:
>
> https://getnikola.com/
>
>Once set up, it will work infinitely without any upgrades,
>and will generate normal HTML websites without any perni-
>cious Javascript. Free or very cheap hosting of plain HTML
>websites can be found easily.

Thanks, i might have a lookat it. I do have a static web site, but I
mainly use a word processor to edit the HTML. I have used a program
called HotDog to set up the initial pages.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

In message <559okg50mi1r4ofilgjon9lgpjmd93393g@4ax.com> Steve Hayes <hayesstw@telkomsa.net> wrote:
dysfunctional.

> LiveJournal keeps exorting me to use their new editor, but I've grown
> very suspicious of new editors that invariably are more difficult to
> use (like Blogger) or impossible (like WordPress).

I generally use my own editor on my own computer, then export to Word
Press. It is very rare, and usually only for minor corrections, that I
need to interact with the webface editor for anything.

The issue with most of the blogging engines is that the constant
addition of new features leads to serious security issues, Simpler is
better.

Back in the day I wrote my own system that worked very well. I would put
new posts in a specific folder on my machine, which would periodically
upload the files to a directory on the web servers. On that server there
was a process that synced the files from where they were uploaded to
another folder, doing some basic checks on the files (including checking
for a secret tag and removing it) before moving them to a second folder.
Then ANOTHER process checked that second folder for new files, and moved
them to where the web pages were (one way sync). The static pages were then
generated and the 'post' files were removed, leaving behind only static
HTML.

Because of the multiple steps involved and the completely separate
processes, it was pretty much impossible for anyone to insert content
into the website, and the site appeared to all comers as static pages.

A bit "security by obscurity" but the important thing was the code that
generated the webpages was not accessible in anyway via the web.

It didn't scale well for multiple users, however, and I lost interest in
it when I was trying to add per-user support.

If I were doing it now, I'd encrypt the post files with a public key and
have the process on the server hold the private key.

--
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy.

On 24/09/21 07:40, Lewis wrote:

> Because of the multiple steps involved and the completely separate
> processes, it was pretty much impossible for anyone to insert content
> into the website, and the site appeared to all comers as static pages.

I'm testing my own web server at the moment, and it's amazing how much
of the traffic is from people trying to find security holes. Yesterday
there was even a POST command trying to upload a script to my home page.

The most popular page on my web site is one called guestbook.html. The
people who fetch that only get a message saying "Because of abuse by
suspect web crawlers, this page has been removed", but they keep coming
back anyway.

--
Peter Moylan Newcastle, NSW http://www.pmoylan.org

In message <sij9u1$np1$1@dont-email.me> Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
> On 24/09/21 07:40, Lewis wrote:

>> Because of the multiple steps involved and the completely separate
>> processes, it was pretty much impossible for anyone to insert content
>> into the website, and the site appeared to all comers as static pages.

> I'm testing my own web server at the moment, and it's amazing how much
> of the traffic is from people trying to find security holes. Yesterday
> there was even a POST command trying to upload a script to my home page.

It's the majority of connections on my servers, but not the majority of
traffic.

--
"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an
enemy." - Friedrich Nietzsche

On 26/09/21 08:24, Lewis wrote:
> In message <sij9u1$np1$1@dont-email.me> Peter Moylan
> <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
>> On 24/09/21 07:40, Lewis wrote:
>
>>> Because of the multiple steps involved and the completely
>>> separate processes, it was pretty much impossible for anyone to
>>> insert content into the website, and the site appeared to all
>>> comers as static pages.
>
>> I'm testing my own web server at the moment, and it's amazing how
>> much of the traffic is from people trying to find security holes.
>> Yesterday there was even a POST command trying to upload a script
>> to my home page.
>
> It's the majority of connections on my servers, but not the majority
> of traffic.

Yes, good point. A client that is immediately rejected is annoying but
not a huge extra load.

--
Peter Moylan Newcastle, NSW http://www.pmoylan.org