Re: I hate to make the critics work so hard . .
(I normally don't read this forum, but Karsten pointed out this thread and Grygus's excellent essay to me.)
Concur about hyphenation. (It's a compound adjective.) For the same reason, "First World" in "including first world countries" should be hyphenated. It should be capitalised because it's a proper noun. The "ever popular" in "the ever popular Linux platform" should be hyphenated, too. By contrast, two hyphens for the compound adjective in "second most successful Linux publisher" might be a bit much.
There should be a comma after "If other voices join the chorus" (parenthetical phrase). Comma after "Using a zSeries", much further on, for the same reason.
Ditto after "Meanwhile" in "Meanwhile they owe".
The word "server" in "important Web Server market" is not a proper noun, and should not be capitalised. Nor is "services" in "Web Services".
The "for" in "NetWare has suffered for not being considered a great application platform" isn't quite idiomatic. I think "from" is the word you're looking for.
In "Novell is moving all their products", you don't seem able to make up your mind whether the company is plural or singular. In Commonwealth English, companies are plural ("Novell are"). In USA English, they're singular. Pick one.
"sales, dealer and support network" needs a comma after "dealer" for parallelism. (This is called the "serial comma".) Ditto for "desktop, messaging and .NET compatible products". (Additionally, ".NET compatible" is a compound adjective.) Ditto for "Novell, SuSE, IBM and Red Hat".
Oddly, you do use the serial comma in the phrase "IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Red Hat, Apple, Novell, and more." At least be consistent, please.
In "a leading replacement for Microsoft Exchange Server which supports Outlook clients", you mean "that" rather than "which". One uses "that" for clauses that further specify what one's referring to, and "which" for parenthetical ones that don't.
There are more compound adjectives in "a well known name", "rock solid products", "long time darling", "low end products", "one year support", "lowest cost contract", "long running relationship", "standards compliant browser" (repeated later on), "open source Mozilla", "fully native version", "SuSE Linux based Java Desktop", "thin client environment", "open source projects".
In "invest $50 Million", "million" is a common noun. This repeats, several paragraph later on. "$3 Billion lawsuit": same error.
In "but lets face it", you mean "let's", short for "let us".
In "IBM's PC business is no longer either large enough or profitable enough to provide Microsoft the leverage it's accustomed to, and their vengeance capability is severely diminished by having been soundly convicted on antitrust charges", once again, you can't decide whether the company is singular or plural. Same with "But what about SCO Group and its $3 Billion lawsuit against IBM, its loud and continuous clamoring that Linux is an illegal rip-off of their Unix, and their endless threats to sue the pants off Linux users?"
In "Microsoft strong armed Apple", "strong-armed" is a compound verb. You know what to do.
"Apple still has one ax hanging over its head, Microsoft Office as the dominant office productivity suite for the Macintosh" is a run-on sentence. Changing the comma into a semicolon will fix that.
"OpenOffice" is NOT the name of the office suite; it's the name of a Linux-oriented VAR in the Netherlands. Because of the latter, Sun Microsystems was obliged to have its office suite be named "OpenOffice.org". Don't take my word for it; feel free to check. (Error repeats several times.)
Lose the "at" from "denouncing Linux at one moment". The sentence is more idiomatic without it.
What's up with singular vs. plural in "Then they turns around and denounces Linux"?
The "dot" in "Dot.com bubble" is a common noun.
The sentence starting with "There has been no slowing of Linux adoption, in fact it has accelerated" is another run-on sentence. Change the comma into a semicolon; you can't grammatically just weld two complete sentences together with a comma like that.
The sentence with "nobody with a legal background thinks they have a valid case either" refers to SCO in the singular, earlier. Again, pick one usage.
In "Santa Cruz Operation (the real SCO) which in turn sold it", there should be a comma before "which". (See earlier comment about which versus that.
Hmm, "purchase of SuSe is almost right. The company started out as "S.u.S.E.", changed that to "SuSE", and most recently has declared that it should be written as "SUSE". I still cling to the middle usage, because "und" in System und Softwar Entwitlung" shouldn't be capitalised. But there's no reasonable rationale for "SuSe", I'm afraid.
In "So what does this mean to your business?", there really should be a comma after "So", because it's parenthetical.
Would you consider subsituting "affect" for the gruesome neologistic verb in "how Longhorn will impact your business"?
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
