Oh, you have it all wrong!
With your logic, Sun has to develop Java for the NetBSD on StrongARM or other obscure platform. They behave fair (IMHO) by giving the reference implementation to any organization/body/vendor willing to port it. It is not their problem that the Open Source community can't do it. THEY DON'T OWE ANYONE!
As for your second argument, I can't understand it at all. What license fees do they get from Java Development Kit they give away for free, especially if it is for the operating system they don't sell and hardware they don't sell? OTOH, without decent Java on Linux they SELL some workstations (and they make the cheapest non-x86 workstations, IIRC - don't know about Alpha ones). I would guess IBM would make a JDK for Linux just to irritate Sun!;-)
Why should Sun care about Linux???
They don't owe you and don't make money from Linux. Their Windows version was pretty much a reference implementation (with significant portion like JIT compiler written by Symantec) to avoid relying on M$ that was just dreaming about screwing Java up. Solaris version (that was always behind) WAS NOT produced by Javasoft; it was a SunSoft implementation on top of the same reference implementation that every OEM was getting from JavaSoft thus being behind Windows version.
OTOH, writing efficient code right away saves enormous amount of time, especially when testing batch processes (I do a lot of it when writing SQL and PL/SQL code).
Putting some hints in the program took a couple of days (including the research), but execution time had shrunk from 3 hours to 20 minutes. It was sure worth it.
I guess Russian might be hard for English speaker, but not that hard for others. Hardest part will probably be the gender-based nouns, adjectives and some forms of the verbs. Other things are much simpler than breaking your tongue trying to speak tonal languages;-)
They do, but you should be careful about ones with bitchy character. As a Russian, I can tell you that the difference can be great between different areas of the country and different girls.
If you want to marry one, try to find one from a provincial center, but neither one from a village nor from Moscow.
(If BillyG decides that 129K is enough). Do you remember how Budget car rent company got busted? They paid more, and got bad publicity.
The sad truth about licensing in companies and government/municipal agencies is that IT IS A BLOODY MESS! I've developed a software licensing system for my previous job (mid-sized corporation with about 2500 employees). Developing was hard, but even harder thing was making the data conversion from several Excel spreadsheets that I would rather call spreadshits. This is how bad it was: tonns of software (about 350 different packages), millions of different versions of the same software, and complete inability to inspect all PCs to find what they really had there (our guys were using a special tool called Express Meter).
And our company had an Enterprise agreement with MS, thus pretty much taking His Billness out of the picture (because everything MS was covered).
... reminds me of Stainless Steel Rat of our time;-)
Another hero from non-science fiction is Ostap Bender from two books ("12 Chairs" and "The Golden Calf") published in Russia in the beginning of 1930-s.
There is nothing wrong with Dell computers. They are reliable, designed well, and priced competitively. Their service and customer satisfaction are above average.
The problem I can't transgress lies with the Dell's morals as a company. I find their morals equal to the morals of a cheap prostitute. Expensive prostitute (and non-prostitute) will choose with which client/men to deal and which ones to reject. Dell will not just go after every niche, they will also yelp louder than everyone about the greatness of this niche.
Just remember recent times when licking Micro$oft butt was a necessary condition for surviving in the PC busyness. IBM was growling and roaring while doing it; Compaq was doing it with a squeamish "everyone does it" look on their collective face; HP had an attitude of "we don't care". Dell was the only one doing it joyfully; it was a cheerleader of licking M$ Butt (tm), and they were testifying for the MS at the anti-trust trial willfully and honestly.
Look at the situation now. Windows is still 95-99% of Dell's busyness, but they newertheless try not just to pay their lip service to Linux, but sound like a bigger proponent of Linux than Linus himself! It might be good for Linux at this point, but I care about integrity more than about Linux.
Or look how they bleat at such a genuine technological company like Sun while being a marketing-driven screwdriver technology outlet themselves!
So, YMMV, but I won't get Dell if I need a computer.
While your argument about no cash cow is valid, the other one is not.
1) Transmeta operates the same way as Sun does, i.e. it designs its chips but does not build them itself. They are built by the company with a bit of relevant experience (called IBM;-)
2) Who cares about 15 years of x86 crap^H^H^H^Hlegacy; a processor core lives about 4 to 5 years, so it clearly shows how much time is necessary to develop, test and bring to market any new (processor) architecture.
No, I don't HATE it that much; I just don't find it THAT interesting (even though I like to write my code optimally, so it works much more efficiently) after 10+ years.
IMHO, the only other interesting part of programming (besides the optimization as distant second) is the Algorithmization, i.e. resolving the problem and creating a computable algorithm.
And this is the thing I'm proud of, here my bragging rights lie. No one (but some stupid managers) cares how many screens with entry forms you've coded in the application; clever ones are more interested in some proof how you've translated complex business problems into working (optimally working preferrable;-) programs/systems.
Bad side is that it looks like my 47 days have already expired for this year; so, I waste my life at work by reading/.:-(
... but Transmeta is about 5 years old. And its founder used to be a chief processor architect at Sun. and the technology they claim as their own was initially developed in Russia before 1990 because 1990-91 was the time when Elbrus team had designed the UltraSparc I (or at least helped Sun to start with the design).
/. population seems to be demonizing Israel:-(
I remember how an article about alleged development of genetical weapon by Israel got about 600 responces in 1997 or 1998 (?); only Microsoft bancrupcy would get more responces at that time!
The first problem with your thinking is that there is no single Israeli genome. Even though studies show apparent Middle-Eastern heritage of Jews participating in the research (and their closeness to Arabs in this regard), modern Jews are pretty assimilated; significant portion of new immigrants is only 1/2 or even 1/4 Jewish genetically. You can't test them all!
The second problem is that Jews and Arabs are REALLY close. Half of Jews (Sefardim) has never left Middle East/Northern Africa, thus living among Arabs for many generations.
The third problem is that many Palestinians are really descendants of Jews!;-) If you read the history of Islam, you will see that earlier Islam was less about killing infidels or making "religious cleansing" and more about converting conquered tribes/peoples (BTW, muslims were much more tolerant toward Jews at that time than Christians were). Thus most of the Palestinians are in reality ancient Jews, some converted to Christianity, later converted to Islam when it had spread there. Thus, releasing such a virus runs a significant risk of decimating your own population, especially since it's an unproven new technology.
And what do you think of the way to propagate this virus at the modern times when every country (except maybe China) is open to the world ??? Have you heard of any epidemy that would spread fast and kill a lot of people lately ??? AIDS does not count; it not a recent phenomenon, it's brewing since 1936, as some reseachers think.
So, stop bashing Israel and look at the other side of the conflict;-)
The latter point is also made in studies of Jews. Based on earlier studies using classical genetic methods7 , Cavalli-Sforza et al. came to the conclusion "that Jews have maintained considerable genetic similarity among themselves and with people from the Middle East, with whom they have common origins." Evidence for the latter concept was very convincingly made and extended by an international team of scientists in a very recent research article8,widely reported in the press, in which the genetics of different Middle Eastern populations were studied using a completely different method than the classical methods that form the great majority of papers in the Cavalli-Sforza et al book. The research involved direct DNA analysis of the Y chromosome, which is found only in males and is passed down from father to son. Seven different Jewish groups from communities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were compared to various non-Jewish populations from those areas. The results showed, first of all, that "Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level." Furthermore, the genetic characteristics of Jews were shown to be distinctly different from (non-Jewish) Europeans, suggesting that very little admixture occurred between Jews and Europeans, even after about 80 generations of Jews in Europe. There was a similar distinct difference between Jews and North Africans. In striking contrast, there was an "extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations [Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Druze, Saudi Arabians] observed here...[that] supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin" of these populations dating back about 4,000 years. The differences between the populations were not statistically significant, demonstrating once again the close genetic relationship of Middle Eastern populations to each other. In fact, the Palestinians and Syrians were so close to the Jews in genetic characteristics that they "mapped within the central cluster of Jewish populations." As one of the Israeli scientists on the team said, "Eventually people will realize that they are not that different." Peace through Genetics?
I have just bought my second Nissan 300zx Turbo (sigh) - used one...
I care less about a name, so I won't pay premium for BMW if some other company comes up with equally good product for less.
Returning to the topic of AMD - don't you think that one of the reasons for AMD not being used in the corporate environment is the corporate obsession with DELL, the only Intel-only big PC manufacturer?
Intel is probably the most litigious company in the industry; most of their cases never go on trial or are dropped eventually, but they manage to spread some FUD about entity being sued.
And this litigiousness signals a very big problem: Intel is unsuited to be an industry leader. Somehow, they don't want to be a "team player", and it hurts them in the long run. Good example - if they would not sue VIA about chipsets at some point, they'd have working DDR chipset for Pentium IV on the market by now. Even though Intel's managers are pretty smart about saving the company from the outright war with the US government (unlike their peers from the Necrosoft@Redmond), their heavy-handedness and lack of hesitancy before sicing lawyers at somebody don't make them a lot of friends.
Do you know much about children of Einstein and Socrat, Sun Tzu, Paracelsius (sp?) and Thomas More? You know about Judy Garland's daughter only because she is Lisa Minelli.
By your logic Eastern shahs and emperors with their hareems and numerous offsprings should be the ones who made the biggest difference!
Sure, some of their heirs became important or so, but most of them were just a miserable "consumers", wasting their lives in luxurious idleness (I remember Stalin's children as modern example). History had played jokes with them, and many of them were killed when the new dynasty conquered the throne. But somehow only the founder of the dynasty left some memories of himself in the history in most cases.
How will you look in the mirror, and what will you tell yourself when you learn that you daughter became a lesbian and your son is sterile and second son dies for his country (hopefully, nothing of that will happen to you) if you consider them your only legacy ???
One famous Soviet writer said that you can' stay in history forever, but you can linger there for a shorter or longer term depending on you.
All that said, I don't think that being childless/monk is a virtue. It is just that I don't consider spawning a virtue. When having a baby you just give a new human a chance to achieve something in this life and spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to educate/train/indoctrinate him or her into success. You can succeed, you can fail, but don't hope that your greatgrandchildren will proudly display your bleaky photo on the wall of their house and remember your name unless you deserved it by your hands and/or brain, not by your crotch;-)
Read the Misantropic Bitch at bitch.sutdown.com
It's pretty interesting and funny reading on this topic;-)
(IMHO) The point was less about baby announcement and more about right place to do it.
It is really interesting how e-mail is much more "democratic" than phone. RMS is probably a very busy man, the same way as CEO of my 50 bln $ company is.
If you try phoning CEO, you'll get into 10 levels of secretaries who'll decide if your call/opinion is that important that deserves the CEO's personal time/attention. If you want to phone RMS, you need to get his phone that won't probably be easy too;-)
OTOH, you can easily send an e-mail message to the aforementioned CEO, RMS, any other important person or even entire e-mail list thus having these people spend their valuable time reading whatever nonsense your inferior brain generates (or brilliant ideas you have produced to eclipse Einstein;-) Anyway, THEY will spend their time and attention reading it.
I consider such an ability to reach people a priveledge and not a right, so no one should abuse this priveledge to make these important people feel sorry that they give anyone a chance to contact them.
This is a "person of great wealth or prominence" from arabic derived through Urdu. This is how a provincial governer in the Mogul Empire in India was called.
BTW, there is a site www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Online.
Companies started moving to Oregon (or opening Oregon/SW Washington operations - Intel is biggest industrial employer in Oregon now) from California in eighties. But you can't move hi-tech operations somewhere without people.
It meant a lot of educated professionals coming from California with its inflated real estate prices. As the result, people were selling their entry-level to middle-level housing in CA and buying the best here. It inflated prices really much (I've bought mine in 97 for about 160K; it will cost about 180K now, and the previous owner bought it in 89 for about 90K). At the time I was buying I saw an article in Oregonian where authors cited the study that an average Oregon family could not afford a house because they could not accumulate a down payment.
Not only that, Oregon is often used as a retirement house by the California's oldsters thus again scaling down Oregonian counterparts' savings.
So, Oregonians (somehow justifiably) link the deteriorating standards of living to the influx of the southerners. No one feels that I'm stealing their bread and butter (even though I'm an immigrant) whether Californians trigger negative feelings towards them.
My advice to people who move here will be to change plates on their car ASAP, throw away Californian license plate frames and tell that you're from some other state;-)
Come on, government just sued a monopolist, and crowds of idiots yelp and bleat about "punishing the success"; what will happen after the outright expropriation ???
If it would happen in Soviet Union or China though , Rambus members/owners would already be convicted and work as tree loggers in the Far East;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you have it all wrong!
;-)
With your logic, Sun has to develop Java for the NetBSD on StrongARM or other obscure platform. They behave fair (IMHO) by giving the reference implementation to any organization/body/vendor willing to port it. It is not their problem that the Open Source community can't do it. THEY DON'T OWE ANYONE!
As for your second argument, I can't understand it at all. What license fees do they get from Java Development Kit they give away for free, especially if it is for the operating system they don't sell and hardware they don't sell? OTOH, without decent Java on Linux they SELL some workstations (and they make the cheapest non-x86 workstations, IIRC - don't know about Alpha ones). I would guess IBM would make a JDK for Linux just to irritate Sun!
+4 for this nonsense ??? :-(
Why should Sun care about Linux???
They don't owe you and don't make money from Linux. Their Windows version was pretty much a reference implementation (with significant portion like JIT compiler written by Symantec) to avoid relying on M$ that was just dreaming about screwing Java up. Solaris version (that was always behind) WAS NOT produced by Javasoft; it was a SunSoft implementation on top of the same reference implementation that every OEM was getting from JavaSoft thus being behind Windows version.
OTOH, writing efficient code right away saves enormous amount of time, especially when testing batch processes (I do a lot of it when writing SQL and PL/SQL code).
Putting some hints in the program took a couple of days (including the research), but execution time had shrunk from 3 hours to 20 minutes. It was sure worth it.
I guess Russian might be hard for English speaker, but not that hard for others. Hardest part will probably be the gender-based nouns, adjectives and some forms of the verbs. Other things are much simpler than breaking your tongue trying to speak tonal languages ;-)
They do, but you should be careful about ones with bitchy character. As a Russian, I can tell you that the difference can be great between different areas of the country and different girls.
If you want to marry one, try to find one from a provincial center, but neither one from a village nor from Moscow.
(If BillyG decides that 129K is enough). Do you remember how Budget car rent company got busted? They paid more, and got bad publicity.
The sad truth about licensing in companies and government/municipal agencies is that IT IS A BLOODY MESS! I've developed a software licensing system for my previous job (mid-sized corporation with about 2500 employees). Developing was hard, but even harder thing was making the data conversion from several Excel spreadsheets that I would rather call spreadshits. This is how bad it was: tonns of software (about 350 different packages), millions of different versions of the same software, and complete inability to inspect all PCs to find what they really had there (our guys were using a special tool called Express Meter).
And our company had an Enterprise agreement with MS, thus pretty much taking His Billness out of the picture (because everything MS was covered).
... reminds me of Stainless Steel Rat of our time ;-)
Another hero from non-science fiction is Ostap Bender from two books ("12 Chairs" and "The Golden Calf") published in Russia in the beginning of 1930-s.
Demon leapfrogging Penguin? ;-)
There is nothing wrong with Dell computers. They are reliable, designed well, and priced competitively. Their service and customer satisfaction are above average.
The problem I can't transgress lies with the Dell's morals as a company. I find their morals equal to the morals of a cheap prostitute. Expensive prostitute (and non-prostitute) will choose with which client/men to deal and which ones to reject. Dell will not just go after every niche, they will also yelp louder than everyone about the greatness of this niche.
Just remember recent times when licking Micro$oft butt was a necessary condition for surviving in the PC busyness. IBM was growling and roaring while doing it; Compaq was doing it with a squeamish "everyone does it" look on their collective face; HP had an attitude of "we don't care". Dell was the only one doing it joyfully; it was a cheerleader of licking M$ Butt (tm), and they were testifying for the MS at the anti-trust trial willfully and honestly.
Look at the situation now. Windows is still 95-99% of Dell's busyness, but they newertheless try not just to pay their lip service to Linux, but sound like a bigger proponent of Linux than Linus himself! It might be good for Linux at this point, but I care about integrity more than about Linux.
Or look how they bleat at such a genuine technological company like Sun while being a marketing-driven screwdriver technology outlet themselves!
So, YMMV, but I won't get Dell if I need a computer.
While your argument about no cash cow is valid, the other one is not. ;-)
1) Transmeta operates the same way as Sun does, i.e. it designs its chips but does not build them itself. They are built by the company with a bit of relevant experience (called IBM
2) Who cares about 15 years of x86 crap^H^H^H^Hlegacy; a processor core lives about 4 to 5 years, so it clearly shows how much time is necessary to develop, test and bring to market any new (processor) architecture.
No, I don't HATE it that much; I just don't find it THAT interesting (even though I like to write my code optimally, so it works much more efficiently) after 10+ years.
;-) programs/systems.
/. :-(
IMHO, the only other interesting part of programming (besides the optimization as distant second) is the Algorithmization, i.e. resolving the problem and creating a computable algorithm.
And this is the thing I'm proud of, here my bragging rights lie. No one (but some stupid managers) cares how many screens with entry forms you've coded in the application; clever ones are more interested in some proof how you've translated complex business problems into working (optimally working preferrable
Bad side is that it looks like my 47 days have already expired for this year; so, I waste my life at work by reading
... but Transmeta is about 5 years old. And its founder used to be a chief processor architect at Sun. and the technology they claim as their own was initially developed in Russia before 1990 because 1990-91 was the time when Elbrus team had designed the UltraSparc I (or at least helped Sun to start with the design).
It means that it is not THAT new.
/. population seems to be demonizing Israel :-(
;-) If you read the history of Islam, you will see that earlier Islam was less about killing infidels or making "religious cleansing" and more about converting conquered tribes/peoples (BTW, muslims were much more tolerant toward Jews at that time than Christians were). Thus most of the Palestinians are in reality ancient Jews, some converted to Christianity, later converted to Islam when it had spread there. Thus, releasing such a virus runs a significant risk of decimating your own population, especially since it's an unproven new technology.
;-)
y News/geneticbrothers000509.html
e ws.14948.html
d _742000/742430.stm
,widely reported in the press, in which the genetics of different Middle Eastern populations were studied using a completely different method than the classical methods that form the great majority of papers in the Cavalli-Sforza et al book. The research involved direct DNA analysis of the Y chromosome, which is found only in males and is passed down from father to son. Seven different Jewish groups from communities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were compared to various non-Jewish populations from those areas. The results showed, first of all, that "Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level." Furthermore, the genetic characteristics of Jews were shown to be distinctly different from (non-Jewish) Europeans, suggesting that very little admixture occurred between Jews and Europeans, even after about 80 generations of Jews in Europe. There was a similar distinct difference between Jews and North Africans. In striking contrast, there was an "extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations [Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Druze, Saudi Arabians] observed here ...[that] supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin" of these populations dating back about 4,000 years. The differences between the populations were not statistically significant, demonstrating once again the close genetic relationship of Middle Eastern populations to each other. In fact, the Palestinians and Syrians were so close to the Jews in genetic characteristics that they "mapped within the central cluster of Jewish populations." As one of the Israeli scientists on the team said, "Eventually people will realize that they are not that different." Peace through Genetics?
I remember how an article about alleged development of genetical weapon by Israel got about 600 responces in 1997 or 1998 (?); only Microsoft bancrupcy would get more responces at that time!
The first problem with your thinking is that there is no single Israeli genome. Even though studies show apparent Middle-Eastern heritage of Jews participating in the research (and their closeness to Arabs in this regard), modern Jews are pretty assimilated; significant portion of new immigrants is only 1/2 or even 1/4 Jewish genetically. You can't test them all!
The second problem is that Jews and Arabs are REALLY close. Half of Jews (Sefardim) has never left Middle East/Northern Africa, thus living among Arabs for many generations.
The third problem is that many Palestinians are really descendants of Jews!
And what do you think of the way to propagate this virus at the modern times when every country (except maybe China) is open to the world ??? Have you heard of any epidemy that would spread fast and kill a lot of people lately ??? AIDS does not count; it not a recent phenomenon, it's brewing since 1936, as some reseachers think.
So, stop bashing Israel and look at the other side of the conflict
Here are some links:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/Dail
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/11/06/News/N
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
http://www.assyrianfoundation.org/genetics.htm
Long quote from the last article:
The latter point is also made in studies of Jews. Based on earlier studies using classical genetic methods7 , Cavalli-Sforza et al. came to the conclusion "that Jews have maintained considerable genetic similarity among themselves and with people from the Middle East, with whom they have common origins." Evidence for the latter concept was very convincingly made and extended by an international team of scientists in a very recent research article8
I have just bought my second Nissan 300zx Turbo (sigh) - used one ...
I care less about a name, so I won't pay premium for BMW if some other company comes up with equally good product for less.
Returning to the topic of AMD - don't you think that one of the reasons for AMD not being used in the corporate environment is the corporate obsession with DELL, the only Intel-only big PC manufacturer?
They first sue then think.
Intel is probably the most litigious company in the industry; most of their cases never go on trial or are dropped eventually, but they manage to spread some FUD about entity being sued.
And this litigiousness signals a very big problem: Intel is unsuited to be an industry leader. Somehow, they don't want to be a "team player", and it hurts them in the long run. Good example - if they would not sue VIA about chipsets at some point, they'd have working DDR chipset for Pentium IV on the market by now. Even though Intel's managers are pretty smart about saving the company from the outright war with the US government (unlike their peers from the Necrosoft@Redmond), their heavy-handedness and lack of hesitancy before sicing lawyers at somebody don't make them a lot of friends.
Khe, khe - Cesare Borgia (sp?), the bastard son of the Pope Alexander (don't remember the index ;-)
There were enough of them.
Hmmm, let's look at the history.
;-)
;-)
Do you know much about children of Einstein and Socrat, Sun Tzu, Paracelsius (sp?) and Thomas More? You know about Judy Garland's daughter only because she is Lisa Minelli.
By your logic Eastern shahs and emperors with their hareems and numerous offsprings should be the ones who made the biggest difference!
Sure, some of their heirs became important or so, but most of them were just a miserable "consumers", wasting their lives in luxurious idleness (I remember Stalin's children as modern example). History had played jokes with them, and many of them were killed when the new dynasty conquered the throne. But somehow only the founder of the dynasty left some memories of himself in the history in most cases.
How will you look in the mirror, and what will you tell yourself when you learn that you daughter became a lesbian and your son is sterile and second son dies for his country (hopefully, nothing of that will happen to you) if you consider them your only legacy ???
One famous Soviet writer said that you can' stay in history forever, but you can linger there for a shorter or longer term depending on you.
All that said, I don't think that being childless/monk is a virtue. It is just that I don't consider spawning a virtue. When having a baby you just give a new human a chance to achieve something in this life and spend a lot of time, money and effort trying to educate/train/indoctrinate him or her into success. You can succeed, you can fail, but don't hope that your greatgrandchildren will proudly display your bleaky photo on the wall of their house and remember your name unless you deserved it by your hands and/or brain, not by your crotch
Read the Misantropic Bitch at bitch.sutdown.com
It's pretty interesting and funny reading on this topic
(IMHO) The point was less about baby announcement and more about right place to do it.
;-)
;-) Anyway, THEY will spend their time and attention reading it.
It is really interesting how e-mail is much more "democratic" than phone. RMS is probably a very busy man, the same way as CEO of my 50 bln $ company is.
If you try phoning CEO, you'll get into 10 levels of secretaries who'll decide if your call/opinion is that important that deserves the CEO's personal time/attention. If you want to phone RMS, you need to get his phone that won't probably be easy too
OTOH, you can easily send an e-mail message to the aforementioned CEO, RMS, any other important person or even entire e-mail list thus having these people spend their valuable time reading whatever nonsense your inferior brain generates (or brilliant ideas you have produced to eclipse Einstein
I consider such an ability to reach people a priveledge and not a right, so no one should abuse this priveledge to make these important people feel sorry that they give anyone a chance to contact them.
... but noise is one of the problems in pretty much every "habitat" made or built in the Soviet Union.
For example, commercial jetliners or houses had not had enough sound isolation.
This is a "person of great wealth or prominence" from arabic derived through Urdu. This is how a provincial governer in the Mogul Empire in India was called.
BTW, there is a site www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Online.
Aforementioned "soft sign" is found in the cyrillic transcription of my sig where the apostrophe is ;-)
I have noticed that English natives speakers often have a hard time pronouncing the soft consonants that are abundant in Russian.
6 out of 10 Russian vovels cause the consonant in front of them sound soft, and there is also a "soft sign" that has the same effect on consonants.
... I can explain why it happens.
;-)
Companies started moving to Oregon (or opening Oregon/SW Washington operations - Intel is biggest industrial employer in Oregon now) from California in eighties. But you can't move hi-tech operations somewhere without people.
It meant a lot of educated professionals coming from California with its inflated real estate prices. As the result, people were selling their entry-level to middle-level housing in CA and buying the best here. It inflated prices really much (I've bought mine in 97 for about 160K; it will cost about 180K now, and the previous owner bought it in 89 for about 90K). At the time I was buying I saw an article in Oregonian where authors cited the study that an average Oregon family could not afford a house because they could not accumulate a down payment.
Not only that, Oregon is often used as a retirement house by the California's oldsters thus again scaling down Oregonian counterparts' savings.
So, Oregonians (somehow justifiably) link the deteriorating standards of living to the influx of the southerners. No one feels that I'm stealing their bread and butter (even though I'm an immigrant) whether Californians trigger negative feelings towards them.
My advice to people who move here will be to change plates on their car ASAP, throw away Californian license plate frames and tell that you're from some other state
If you speak French, the coolest tld is .nu ;-)
Come on, government just sued a monopolist, and crowds of idiots yelp and bleat about "punishing the success"; what will happen after the outright expropriation ???
;-)
If it would happen in Soviet Union or China though , Rambus members/owners would already be convicted and work as tree loggers in the Far East