@Robusto That is exactly what I thought, too. OED2 has separate entries, and a strange pronunciation:
chancre /ˈʃæŋkə(r)/. Also 7-8 shanker, chanker, 8 shancre. Etymology: a. Fr. chancre cancer, also venereal ulcer:-L. cancer crab. Cf. cancer, canker.
As opposed to:
canker /ˈkæŋkə(r)/, sb. Forms: 1 cancer, -or, 3 cauncre, 3-4 cancre, 4 kankir, 4, 6 cankre, 5 cankyr, kankere, 6 cancar, cankar, kanker, 6-7 cancker, 4- canker. Etymology: a. ONFr. cancre, in Central OFr. and mod.Fr. chancre (whence also in Eng. shanker, chancre, q.v.):-L. cancr-um (nom. cancer) crab, also gangrene. The word had been used in OE. directly from L. 1. An eating, spreading sore or ulcer; a gangrene. † a. Formerly, often the same as cancer. b. Now spec. A gangrenous affection of the mouth, characterized by small fetid sloughing ulcers; gangrenous stomatitis, stomacace. Also call…
@RegDwighт I remember each and every point deducted from my turn-in work for every diacritic missed in Spanish, French, and Italian classes. It really pissed me off that they considered these wrong words. So I pass on the annoyance that they never be forgotten. But you should see what GoogleXlate does to @Rob’s Greek dedication without the diacritics. It is a megafumble.
Uh oh, looks like the quincunxen are ambiguous:
⁙ 2059 FIVE DOT PUNCTUATION
= Greek pentonkion
= quincunx
x (die face-5 - 2684)
⊼ 22BC NAND
x (projective - 2305)
x (quincunx - 26BB)
⚻ 26BB QUINCUNX
x (nand - 22BC)
Hmm, the quincunx is definitely an encoding issue, but Firefox displays it in UTF-8 just fine, while Chrome shows me a box no matter what. So it's not the computer, it is the browser.
When you are doing NLP on biomedical texts, you have to count ß U+00DF LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S as though it were β U+03B2 GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA, or else you will miss beta-carotene instances and such.
@Cerberus well, like I said: it will depend highly on the use-case. will desktop users hate it? Or will they just spend all their time on desktop mode and basically ignore the other mode? Tablet users will probably hate it when desktop mode gets involved, but that will just encourage them to use new apps... esp for Win RT which doesn't have any old apps.
@nohat In “astrology”, a quincunx is the name of the “aspect” (angle) formed by two “planets” that are 150° degrees apart. I don’t know if they are multiplying 5*30° for the quin- part; not my field. :) It is also called an inconjunct there.
Here are the “real” Unicode quincunx’s near neighbors:
⚹ 26B9 SEXTILE
x (asterisk - 002A)
x (alchemical symbol for sal-ammoniac - 1F739)
⚺ 26BA SEMISEXTILE
x (xor - 22BB)
⚻ 26BB QUINCUNX
x (nand - 22BC)
⚼ 26BC SESQUIQUADRATE
The irony is that MS has had "tablet" computers for about a decade now. Yet they completely failed to make that product really succeed. And they've had "Windows" on phones since forever, but failed there too. And they've had non-Windows OSes, if you include WinCE which is very different from Windows. And yet Apple managed to succeed by doing all the same things: totally new OS, launch on phones, launch tablets with no apps, etc. And now MS has nowhere to play.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 And that is a bit silly: either integrate them well, or don't integrate them at all (allow us to alt-tab into the other OS or something).
I don't think most users benefit from installing a new version of Windows anyway.
Windows does what it needs to do, and it does it well.
Oh look, I found a semunce to go with a quincunx. The semunce is a half-ounce, or ¹⁄₂₄ of an as, while the quincunx was ⁵⁄₁₂ of an as. So there were ten semunces in a quincunx.
> I already mentioned things like defaulting to using the Metro Photos app instead of the desktop Photo Viewer app, so let's explore that in detail. I often get sent ZIP files of images (product photos, that kind of thing). So I unzip them all into a directory somewhere. I then want to look at them, so I double-click one of them. In Windows 7, this would open up Photo Viewer, and I can just use the arrow keys to cycle through all the images in the same directory. Quick and easy.
ǁ semuncia /siːˈmʌnʃ(ɪ)ə/. Rom. Antiq. Pl. -iæ /siːˈmʌnʃɪiː/. Etymology: L. sēmuncia, f. sēmi- semi- + uncia ounce sb.1 A half-ounce, the twenty-fourth part of an as. Also anglicized † semunce (rare-0). Hence seˈmuncial a. ad. L. sēmunciāl-is. 1656 Blount Glossogr., ― Semuncial, of or belonging to half an ounce. 1658 Phillips, ― Semuncial, belonging to a semunce, i. half an ounce. 1887 Head Hist. Nummorum 43 ― Bronze coins of Uncial and Semuncial weight, b.c. 217-89.
> There is a hard and dividing line between the two worlds. Far from allowing seamless switching between the two environments, they barely even acknowledge the other's existence. It's extremely limited, and it means that as a person who has to use the desktop for some things, I find myself avoiding Metro apps for all things. Bridging the gap is just too painful and annoying.
> Until this gap is closed, it leaves Windows 8 feeling like two separate operating systems poorly grafted together. You can never avoid the join entirely, but your happiness with Windows 8 will depend heavily on just how often you have to cross over.
If you cannot avoid the "join" entirely, then that means functional regression. Why would I even consider using an OS that shows regression, even at a single point? Why?
@tchrist Yeah, sort of. Or they just trust in companies and PC manufacturers to pre-install the new OS by default, because that's what they're used to: corporations are often very irrational and inefficient, especially when it comes to things their managers don't really understand.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Am I? Doesn't it work for you like that?
@Cerberus Life is full of trade-offs. "one regression + one new feature" does not mean "zero gain". It totally depends on what the regression and features are and the impact they have, and you know that.
@Cerberus Storage Spaces is like RAID, only easy to understand for mortals. I think it will be a big deal, if Windows 8 catches on.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Oh yeah? Try to see what happens to your flagweight when you get one more declined flag compared with one more helpful one. The declined one hurts you a lot more than the helpful one helps you. So 1 bad + 1 good = almost bad, which is anything but good.
@Cerberus No way. That is not at all how businesses work. They totally manage that stuff to an insane level of detail. Any organization with more than 25 machines cares a great deal about what OS is installed.
@tchrist Perhaps it is, and perhaps it isn't. The point is Cerb is always getting on my case about making blanket generalizations and then he goes and says that if a new OS has a SINGLE regression it isn't fit to use AT ALL.
@MattЭллен Yeah...don't play cards with a man called Doc, don't piss in the wind, and never ever rub a cat on its tummy; when you stop they'll rip your hand off.
@tchrist Only considering the bad and ignoring the good is bad reasoning. It may be explained by evolution, but that doesn't mean it isn't a failure to think about stuff logically.
@tchrist Bugs may hurt disproportionately more than features help, but that does not imply that the existence of a bug in a new product automatically invalidates what features it has. Or else nobody would ever use new software, ever.
> Recruits into the Roman legions often acquired new names when they first signed on. For the auxiliary soldier, who was usually a foreigner, this usually took the form of a two names plus a "patronymic" (a name derived from a person's father or ancestor), a tribal name (e.g., Pollia, Sabina), and possibly the name of his home town, resulting in a name like Lucius Julius, son of Menander, of the Pollia tribe.
Roman soldiers who were citizens already might get a cognomen for the first time or might even exchange their old cognomen for a new one. The cognomen might indicate the soldier's pla…
A quincunx is a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross:
⁙
Are there other geometric arrangements with similar related names?
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…