Microsoft to Train Installers and unveil “new technologies” for Media Center at CEDIA Expo 2008

Microsoft continueS

Seriously dude, you need to do a little reading on subject plurality agreement.  Not only is it really annoying, it makes you sound stoopid.

Here's the quick version:  If it's correct to prepend "the people of" or "the people at" or "the people within" or "the employees of" or something of the sort, then your verb should agree with a plural subject as you always seem to use.  Oh, and if it IS correct to prepend one of these, then actually prepend them, so that the plurality of your verb looks correct.

However, it was microsoft as an organization (singular) that continueS to target Media Center...

Got it?  :)

Now, get back to sharing great info with your readers ... just stop letting the idiots at Slashdot convince you to talk stupid.

thanks Jim good to know that someone is paying attention or is that somebody?

I hate the spelling and grammar ***.

Blogs are inherently written poorly as most are written daily by hobbyists and aren't double checked for mistakes. Yes, the blog posts should probably be checked, but since they are usually not, I think you should accept this as a fact and not get your panties in a bunch whenever you see these kinds of mistakes in a blog post or comments.

Actually the grammar thing may be cultural. When listening to the BBC and other British sources I am sometimes distracted by the tendency to refer to a single organization of people as plural when I would expect it to be singular. It's pretty consistent, leading me to believe that different countries may have different rules on this point.

Yeah, I guess I did come off as "having my panties in a bunch" ... but in my defense, I only addressed it because it's a recurring issue.

If I ran a blog read by thousands and I was making the same English language error over and over (with thousands of people were reading these errors daily), I would hope that somebody would try to explain to me what I was doing wrong.  Fortunately, I have a wife that does that for me  :)

Anyway, I apologize if I sounded insulting or overly-critical.  But I see there have already been a few new blog posts by Ian that make the same error, so I'll try again, and this time try to be nicer about it.

Jim

As 'Tim' pointed out in another thread, when the person speaking/writing is British, it's okay to assume that a company/organization is plural and to therefore have it accompanied by a singular verb.  So, it was me that needed some correcting.

Tim's source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement

Back with another post round up with some rumours on future updates, Media Center university videos and...

PingBack from http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2008/07/11/windows-home-server-and-windows-media-center-share-the-stage-at-cedia/

PingBack from http://www.ditii.com/2008/07/11/windows-home-server-and-windows-media-center-share-the-stage-at-cedia/

Now that the grammar lesson is over, can anyone direct me to any WMC installer community resources other than Microsoft? I'm looking for real world experiences.

Many thanks.