My idea of a hot date was looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary.
If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#32Printed dictionaries are basically ordered lists with metadata, so look-ups are O(lg n), and by a human no less!
Online dictionaries are likely to be backed by, well, a dictionary, which allows for O(1) look-ups.
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#33Am I the only one here that still makes my kids look up words in dictionary? We have all the e-devices but I think there's something worthwhile about re-enforcing alphabet order in words, learning by wandering or happens upon words nearby in paper dictionary. The kids also have to sound out the words to try to find it so they learn different word-sound patterns. All this skills are practiced each time they do a quick dictionary lookup.
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#34Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from. The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were s…
Still not sure if the hours I spent as a kid scrolling down the names in the phone book and deciphering the foreign-sounding ones were well spent.
That's how Will Wright came up with the cheat codes for SimCity 2000, when he found the silliest names in the phone book of Mr. Porntips and Mr. Guzzardo.
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#35Horowitz and Hill, duh.
Or Peskin and Schroeder if you still need the information from H&H
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phone book? What is that?
Of course I haven't used (and for that matter not sure I've seen) a white pages in years. But yellow pages can still be somewhat useful for finding local services of various types. A lot of local service businesses are still pretty bad about online presences.
Yellow Pages may have been good for finding local services of various types, but it was also useful for retrieving the entire password database for offline inspection. Sun eventually improved their online presence and security, and renamed Yellow Pages to Network Information Services after losing a lawsuit by British Telecom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service
Jordan Hubbard has YP to thank for the infamous "rwall incident" of 1987:
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#37My idea of a hot date was looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary.
Was?
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#38Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#39The Sears catalog
Re: If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
#40I was very glad I still had my printed dictionaries that day they digged the cables over by accident. I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because the power/internet goes out.
Even if it only happened one time for the rest of my life, it would be worth the 20cm of shelf space it claimed.