dextorious

"""("Their coming" would suggest a correction to "They're coming")'""

How about: "Her relatives would visit us for Christmas. Their coming filled us with dread!"

"""The sentence contains misspelled words."""

No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.

"I sea your eyes", "I she your eyes"

If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. Also, the above are trivial cases. There are tons of edge cases and far more difficult distinctions. Here's an amusing one, that can lead to "Microsoft paperclip" like interactions:

"I gave him the new pink dress as a present" => "I gave her the new pink dress as a present"

No, idiotic spell-checker, I do mean him. My friend is a cross-dresser, shut up and let me type.

Such a spellchecker would also be useless for poetry. And if you find poetry obscure, so it doesn't really matter, then such a spellchecker would also be useless for irony. Suddenly, you lose all the hipsters from your potential users (except if they start using it ironically).

Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this --and it's probably a very hard nut to crack, and probably uncrackable in the general case.

"""I think it's perfectly reasonable to define "spelling checker" to include mere non-word detectors. """

Sure it is (reasonable).

You just cannot go around acting as if such a definition is already widespread, established in tech discussions, and followed by spell checkers.

I mean the whole tone and the other arguments of the parent comment. Skipped them, much?

"""That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software."""

That's hardly a story.

Company wants you to use their products instead of OSS/whatever alternatives. News at 11.

No, he has not. "sql server" is just the product's name, it's not a generic category of servers.

We call the generic category "SQL Server" belongs to: database servers, or relational database servers.

No one uses "sql server" for something besides naming that specific MS product.

"""This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering."""

Yes, please, do reduce an elaborate article discussing technical and business trade-offs into a silly anti-MS rant that wouldn't be out of place in Slashdot circa 1999 for us.

Well, re: tinfoil, you'll have to admit that turning js off is a little on the tinfoil side...

What's the supposed benefit of breaking 80% of the modern web?

Using lower resources?

Sites not "tracking" you with cookies?

Better security?

"""It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. """

Actually it seems that everybody reading the article got the same WRONG impression.

The author full well knows what it takes to do a i18n full-featured spell checker.

That is BESIDE the point.

What he says is that doing a basic (lame ass) spell-checker in the 80s used to be a MAJOR undertaking, and now, doing EXACTLY THE SAME is trivial.

His point is not about spell-checking.

It's about modern OS, language, CPU, HD and memory conveniences, vs what one had to deal with in the olden days.