Also, after reading several reviews, I also conclude that the only good usage guide is the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage.

I think there was another book snailplane mentioned on punctuation if you're really interested.

I think snailboat would have a lot to say if she were here, since she has a lot of these books!

The Linguistics of Punctuation by Geoffrey Nunberg.

Ah, that seems to be a terribly difficult book for the non-linguist.

Right now, I only have 3 English books: CGEL, SOED, and ODE.

Sort of enough, covering grammar, punctuation, pronunciation, and vocabulary between them, lol.

I don't know what is the fuss about the Dell XPS 13/15. It is meant to be the Windows competitor to Macbook Pro 13/15. But I think it looks terrible, lol.

I don't really care about such soap operas, haha.

I don't understand. Soap operas?

The brands and the competition.

What are you referring to?

OIC.

Bye.

Later.

Word of the morning: peridot

@JasperLoy It costs a lot!

100 000 rubles

My Dell 5770 has malfunctioned

The hard drive began dying. A lot of bad sectors, HDDScan counted 1.5 million of them before I grew tired and turned it off.

It's now at the maintenance station, waiting for a replacement drive

@JasperLoy My husband and I switched everything over to Mac because of Windows 10

We started with iPhones when they had a sale where you could buy one and get one free, then we got an AppleTV, and then when we realized how well everything worked together we got iMacs

Haven't regretted it at all

@userr2684291 🥳 Woot - CMD+CTRL+spacebar Thanks!

@JasperLoy My iMac was used but not very much. I got a very good deal. You can find them sometimes, and while they are more expensive that "equivalent" Windows machines, they last longer and don't have the compatibility problems you get when you can have so many possible combinations of components to support.

@CowperKettle I thought your Dell machine was new. If your HDD is new and it is dying I am not sure if there is a bug in the Scan that might read things wrongly. I saw a youtube video on that long ago. Also, I thought you used SSD. Maybe you have a dual drive.

@ColleenV I think I read that they knew Jamal Khashoggi was murdered because the audio was recorded on his Apple Watch, amazing.

@JasperLoy It is brand new - the warranty period ends in September 2019. That particular HDD model is a bit unstable

I bought an SSD and cloned the system to it

Seagate ST1000LM035

I found this blog post about my HDD:

ST2000LM007 / ST1000LM035 – Is this the worst HDD ever made?

> All hard disk drive manufacturers have at some point their history produced a poorly designed HDD which has higher than average failure rate. The IBM 75GXP is particularly noteworthy. However, these new models of Seagate HDD really stand out. Premature failure is a major issue. Many of our customers present these disks after owning them for only a few weeks or months. Secondly, the typical failure found in these HDDs is relatively severe.

A forum thread:

> In my opinion, The drives are not fit for purpose. From what I understand they use shingled magnetic recording which is not designed for normal data storage. We have seen the drives used for and marketed as normal data storage and they fail dismally. Seagate should be ashamed of these drives.

@ColleenV Is this the command to turn a PC into a Mac? I'm about ready to execute it!

@CowperKettle You must have bought it in September this year, same as me, I got my Acer Swift 3 then. The only bad thing about mine is that the backlight for the keyboard turns off after 30 seconds if there is no typing, so you cannot have it on all the time. Now I just have it off all the time and pretend it is not a backlit keyboard. But Acer should at least have the settings for this somewhere.

@CowperKettle I am now more sceptical of Dell computers than before. I already read two reviews how the cooling solution is not good and the computers heat up very easily. One for Inspiron 3576 and another for Inspiron 5570. I have not seen 5770 before.

Yes, there's a long thread on the fan noise issue:

dell.com/community/Inspiron/Inspiron-5570-fan-noise/td-p/…

I've read on a Russian website a review by a Russian programmer. He simply took off the lower lid and made some holes in it to let the air pass through.

I'm thinking of the same, and probably of removing the DVD drive to allow more air inside.

I never thought that an $1000 Dell laptop would have any problems at all.

I remembered a Dell laptop I worked a little in the 1990s.

It was so cool. It even survived falling on the floor.

So the word "Dell" was like "first-class" to me.

@CowperKettle If you are looking for an alternative to Dell laptops, other than the Acer Swift 3 I think the HP 14 inch notebook with the specs you want might be a good thing too, though I have not used that personally.

@JasperLoy I work for peanuts. I'm afraid I'm stuck with this model for the next 10 years.

My dad has a Compaq/HP that I bought to him in 2013, and it works silently and without any troubles.

Yes, I should have picked an HP model.

Well, in 2028 I'll do that.

@CowperKettle I will use my Acer for the next 10 years too. I even got Office 2019 to go with it. There is no more OneNote in Office 2019. The default OneNote from now will be the one you install for free from Windows 10 Store.

@CowperKettle What I don't like about computer stores online, but in this case, especially the Dell website, is that it sells a very different set of products in a different country. That is why I have never come across Inspiron 5770. I just visited the Dell Russian website and saw the specs of the 5770. =) Although I do not know Russian, I know numbers, so I can still read the number 17. =)

But other than that no complaints. I am still happy with it. I had to reload OS twice over this period mainly the clear up the old staffs. Currently I am running Linux on that laptop and it's clear and secured.

@Man_From_India I'm curious what CPU it has

I cannot run Linux because SDL Trados works only under Windows

@Man_From_India My sister's Acer actually had a crack in it, so that it was impossible to completely close the upper lid. Yet still it worked ))

@CowperKettle it uses Core 2 Duo or Dual Core. I can't differentiate the two.

You can run wine on Linux and see if your translation software works or not. But don't dump your Windows as yet. Try running linux on virtual machine and then run wine inside linux. And check if your specific software works in Linux environment or not.

nods

> In a new paper published in the Cell Press/Elsevier journal Current Biology, "Rapid transformation from auditory to linguistic representations of continuous speech," Maryland researchers were able to see where in the brain, and how quickly—in milliseconds—the brain's neurons transition from processing the sound of speech to processing the language-based words of the speech.

eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/uom-s-h112718.php

@CowperKettle At first I thought SDL Trados was the name of the CPU, and I was wondering what CPU cannot run Linux, LOL.

@CowperKettle The main reason I got Windows is because I want to use Office. LibreOffice is not good for me. If Office can run under Linux, I would not have gotten a Windows computer.

What do you know, the grammar debate did have meaningful gain. 10k views

10k souls that hopefully got an idea of what grammar is and isn't