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I'd add Karel Capek as another non-English writer that would deserve to be on the list. Read "The war with the newts". Incidentally he was also the first author to use the word "robot" in his play Rossum's Universal Robots (though the word was apparently invented by his brother - see the linked page for background)

I'd add Karel Capek as another non-English writer that would deserve to be on the list. Read "The war with the newts". Incidentally he was also the first author to use the word "robot" in his play Rossum's Universal Robots (though the word was apparently invented by his brother - see the linked page for background)

Czech writer Karel apek's play R.U.R. - only it's Karel Capek

I remember watching the old movie R.U.R., that was pretty funny - the robot workers at the factories taking over human positions and then even revolting against the humans. The proto-proto-terminators :)

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B.T.W., an old anekdote (an association from the German 'arbaiten'):

the German version of the cuckoo's clock:
the bird comes out every 15 minutes and shouts:
-Arbeiten und Disziplinen!

The word robot comes from the Czech robota meaning "labor." The word was first used in Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (written in 1920; first performed 1921; performed in New York 1922; English edition published 1923). 1. While Karel is frequently acknowledged as the originator of the word, he wrote a short letter in reference to the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, painter and writer Josef Capek as its true inventor. 2. . . .

Of course I forgot one:

Josef Jelikek's fast method for the last layer.

This is the one I use. It's the same as Lars Petrus' method up to the last layer, but then it does things in a different order and you only have to memorize 28 patterns to solve the last layer in 2 steps.

For beginners I recommend Lars Petrus' page. You only have to learn flipping the edges, Niklas(tm), Sune(tm) and Allan(tm) by heart to always be able to solve it. I.e. only 4 sequences. That's how I started off.

Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE.

So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't. Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek (aka Karla Capka). That C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka", but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold, it has the proper character!

Are you set? Not at all; to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer, is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.

See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then it will be screwed up. You can't win.

Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.

Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode), these particular problems do go away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes, really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C, a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter of the Euro for your keyboard, under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.

Even if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all, how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode? Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers, etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.

So, I don't think there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet Soups.

--tom

Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE.

So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't. Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek (aka Karla Capka). That C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka", but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold, it has the proper character!

Are you set? Not at all; to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer, is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.

See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then it will be screwed up. You can't win.

Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.

Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode), these particular problems do go away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes, really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C, a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter of the Euro for your keyboard, under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.

Even if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all, how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode? Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers, etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.

So, I don't think there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet Soups.

--tom