Sony PCG-U1

hexdcml writes "Just found this whilst browsing, Sony has now brought out the My Little Vaio range, (probably for rich kids..tsk) All I can say is WOW, this thing is tiny. Makes me wanna ditch my lurvely little iBook and get this! The site's in japanese, so you'll need to translate (for those how are non-japansese literate) using Babelfish or something." Dynamism.com has specifications in English.

Comments

Re:And the obligatory....

[CajunArson]

How about:

I had a Beowulf cluster of these things, but they must have
slipped out of my pocket!

If you think that girl looks cute,

[Things To Do Tuesday]

I have some hoes with pretty eyes cleft palates that I'm sure you will love.

Now, I have things to do Tuesday.

1. Conceal face
2. Attract deseperate web nerds

Re:gibberish

[tps12]

(A list of your spelling errors is omitted for brevity.)

Is this your sig, or did I actually misspell something? Other than "submittor," which is questionable but at least a valid slashdotism, I didn't see anything wrong in my first post.

Re:The Article from Dynamism

[scotch]

I take it you're new here.

No, Anonymous Coward has been posting to slashdot as long as I can remember. His User Id must be low, but I can't seem to figure out what it is.

Re:gibberish

[Nurf]

It isn't my sig. To be fair, I was being a bit imprecise. I thought talking about the other parts of your message that were a bit dubious would be boring and a bit off topic, not to mention anal. :-)

"Submittor" is actually spelt "submitter", yes. "ebay" is "eBay". "b/c" is amusing from someone complaining about "whilst". For that matter any use of nonstandard English or jargon is asking for trouble in a comment about English you consider nonstandard. :-)

On the whole your punctuation is probably better than mine. I don't usually care, but I have this built in need to correct people that think their English is the only English. Feel free to use your brand of English, just don't confuse it with all of English. That probably goes for things like milk, bread and Coke too. :-)

I have heard "lurvely" used in various countries by the way. :-)

I admit it, I saw an oppurtunity to take a dig at you (in a hopefully funny way) and I took it. :-)

Re:"Play" station

[tzanger]

I tried out your pr0n site but it seems to break under Konqueror (KDE3) -- sorry.

Offtopic: web page in Japanese

[steveha]

I took Japanese classes a few years ago. I tried looking at some web sites in Netscape 4.x on a Windows system. I even downloaded a few fonts to try to get it to work better. It never looked good.

Just now, using Galeon, I clicked on the link to the Japanese page, and oh my gosh wow! The whole thing looks like it should. Hiragana, katekana, kanji, English text, it's all there and it all looks like it should.

Kudos to the Mozilla and Galeon developers.

By the way, it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much. They will use their Katekana phonetic alphabet and spell out English words by sound.

Their phonetic spellings look odd to English-speakers. In Japanese, the consonant sounds don't appear alone; you can never have just "k", it has to be "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", or "ko". The sole exceptions are "m" and "n" (e.g. "Nisan" can end with just "n" instead of "nu"). There is no "l", so they use "r" for "l" when doing foreign words. They often swallow or drop the "u" sound, so a Japanese speaker pronouncing the word "mobairu" will say something like "mobile" (i.e. he will get it pretty much correct, even though the spelling looks odd to us).

Examples on that page: "katarogu PDF" is the link to the PDF Catalog; "rainuppu" is the link to the "lineup"; and the picture showing two hand thumb-typing says "mobairu gurippu sutairu" (mobile grip style).

Note that the name "Vaio" is very difficult for the Japanese to pronounce; the phonetic spelling is "Baio", much easier for them. Japanese doesn't have a "v" sound.

steveha

Re:Offtopic: web page in Japanese

[ryochiji]

>it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much

You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...

Seriously, it's kind of unavoidable in the development of a language to not be influenced by other languages one way or another. There are funny stories about how, during World War 2, they tried banning the use of English words and had to invent Japanese equivalences for all English-derived words.

>There is no "l", so they use "r"

As someone who speaks both Japanese and English natively, this has always intrigued me. The thing is, it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l". Heck, most Japanese people can't pronounce the "r" sound, yet, in Roma-ji all the "l" sounds are spelled out using "r". IIRC, it used to be that you could use "r" or "l", but apparently the Japanese text input engine for Windows used "r" and reserved "l" as a special case (the Kotoeri on Mac still accepts "r" and "l" interchangeably).

...okay, that was waaay off topic.

Re:Offtopic: web page in Japanese

[steveha]

You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...

English steals shamelessly from any language. English has Germanic words, French words, acronyms, jargon and slang, all tossed in and as good as any other. (Compare with the French; they don't like "le computer" so the Academie Francaise invents new words like "l'ordinateur".)

Japan seems to steal more specificially from English. I remember puzzling out the Katekana on a sign at a restaurant, and discovering that it was advertising a "Ladies' Lunch" ("raidisu ranchi" or something like that).

It isn't that hard to learn Katekana (51 base characters and a few variations) and if you know it there are so many Japanese things you can read!

it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l".

Every textbook and dictionary I have seen tells me that it's "ra" "ri" "ru" "re" "ro". Thus my comment that Japanese has "r" but not "l". However, my Japanese sensei taught me to pronounce the letters as "la" "di" "lu" "le" "lo" (where the "d" in "di" is sort of part way between an "l" and a "d"). However, I have met Japanese people who definitely use an "r" sound in their speech. I just figure it has something to do with where you learned your Japanese, or something, and I don't pretend to understand it.

I also don't understand how they know when to swallow the "u" sound and when not to. My name, "Steve", comes out "Sutiibu", but Japanese speakers reading the Katekana will say something like "S'teeb" which is pretty close.

By the way, and wayyyy off topic, my Japanese sensei and her white American husband have a daughter named Lori. Sensei has some trouble pronouncing "Lori" correctly, since it has both an "r" and an "l", causing her maximum confusion. Years of practice have helped her to learn "Lori" but when I introduced my brother Larry she had great trouble with his name. "Lori" and "Larry" sound very similar to me, but she had trouble with it. (But her English is very much better than my Japanese!)

steveha