No problem dude; that's very gracious of you:-) I get riled up by European stereotypes of Americans so I can understand;-) After all, I'm an American who's lived in Germany for 12 years and spent a couple of years of that making regular business trips to the U.K. so I get it coming and going:-/
What I think is very funny, and you might be able to confirm this, is the Castilian dialect was formed because a Spanish King spoke with a lisp and everyone in his court mimicked him and it spead throughout the region and eventually became the standard dialect. I haven't researched it, but I still like to get a rise out of my wife by telling her that story.:-)
I've heard that story too, but I have never heard a reliable confirmation of it. However, I can say with confidence that one of the principles of language change is that colonies are more conservative than their parent countries; IOW, if you want the more 'original' version of the language you will almost always find it among the most recently settled speech communities. This holds for e.g. English, Spanish, and French; interestingly, many French French speakers at least recognize this, but then rip Canadian French for sounding "archaic".
Sigh. More cluelessness. I feel like a Biologist talking to a roomful of creationists. By your logic ("it is what you call it") all the Native-Americans should be citizens of India, right? And Amerigo Vespucci is the... I dunno, inventor of America?
Look if you guys want to jump into the debate, at least read the points I'm making in the other posts, and maybe read up on the relevant fields of Linguistics.
I'm obviously not getting through to anyone, which I should be used to by now.... everyone thinks they're an expert on Language. Maybe another Linguist wants to take it up; I'm done here.
You didn't read my sister-analogy at all, did you.
US English really isn't much of a shift at all away from English English
U.S. English isn't any kind of "shift" away from English English. They are both (admittedly slight) shifts away from the English which was spoken when they branched off from each other. Strictly speaking U.S. English shifted less, if you consider pronunciation and vocabulary.
Let me state the analogy again, but in more detail: A couple has two children, let's call them John Doe and Jane Doe. John grows up and moves to another country where he marries and has a child, Jim. Jane stays in the hometown and eventually marries her high-school sweetheart; she and her husband are pretty modern-thinking, so he takes her surname and they have a kid, Jenny. Now does it sound in any way reasonable if Jenny starts talking down to Jim saying the Doe family is *her* family rather than *his*? After all she still lives where the "family started", right? The "origin" here is not the town, but the grandparents.
(in the UK) every major city has a variation of English far more extreme than US English will probably ever be.
This has no meaning. Variations have to be relative to *something*, and I suspect you mean they are variations from some mythical standard English; and what does 'extreme' mean in this context? That the differences among them are greater than the differences between any of them and a given U.S. dialect?
If you take a look at the history of the English lingo
I've done more than take a look. I've studied it.
Look, I know language is fascinating; that's why I studied Linguistics. But I can hardly think of another field where more people think they are qualified to talk about it just because of its application in their daily life. Being facile with language and/or knowing some "little-known" facts, etc. implies no deeper or real understanding of the actual evolution and mechanisms of language than being a great lover makes you an expert in Genetics. Human language is not a construct like computer languages, and you can't meaningfully talk about a given language like some discrete 'object' and say "This is the actual real English and every other dialect is a variation of it", in the same way you can point ANSI C and say what's standard C and what's not.
Your language? Get over yourself. Did I miss the memo where the English who migrated to America suddenly lost their "magical English essence" which apparently comes from being on the soil where the language originally evolved? Kind of like how my sister is more closely genetically related to my parents because she still lives closer to them?
Both Brits and Americans speak descendants of earlier forms of English. Nobody speaks the English which was spoken when America was colonized. A language belongs to all its native speakers. By any sane measure there are at least 3 times as many native speakers of the various American descendants of early Modern English (the English of Shakespeare's era) as there are of the various British descendants of early Modern English. So, democratically speaking....;-)
I swear, Brits attacking Americans for perceived arrogance (such as claiming the Internet is purely American) and then turning around and claiming English belongs to them are priceless.
P.S. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons called from Germany and they ask that you Brits kindly stop butchering their language.:-P
This is nonsense. Physically, there is no way the echo can be processed as you describe, unless you are using a stereo microphone... and almost nobody is. Without that, all the processing in the world would amount to little more than a wild guess, and a waste of everybody's time.
What echo and what microhpone are you talking about? And what does that have to do with the "sonar tranceiver" comment I was responding to? If you're talking about accounting for the echos in the room a listener is in, and eliminating those, then: duh. But that can be eliminated by wearing a pair of headphones, not by some magical application of "sonar tranceivers". Read the context please.
Do you really have to reverse the polarity? Shouldn't a speaker "just work" albeit probably not very well, as a microphone?
Correct. Reversing the polarity will only shift the sound wave produced by the speaker by IIRC 90, which is why you get all kinds of harmonic effects if you only reverse the polarity on one speaker.
Hell, I'm surprised that the symmetrical nature of speakers isn't better known. Are walkie-talkies so rare these days, that people forget they only have one combined speaker/microphone?
I'm going to assume the question is serious. There is no fundamental difference between speakers and microphones other than using materials which allow for more efficient functionality in one direction. It's like electrical motors and generaters; in fact a speaker is a kind of motor which converts electrical energy to kinetic energy, and a microphone is a kind of generator which converts kinetic energy to electrical energy; each can act in the other direction, just with less efficiency. Modern Sonar is generally passive, i.e. uses the "microphone" functionality so I mentioned that version. But an active array is essentially a bunch of speakers + microphones, etc.
The point of my response was to address the implication that Sonar is using some special kind of technology that isn't comparable to speakers and audio processing. It's not. It's just a matter of degree and specialization. The simple case of adding phase-delays so that disparate audio signals are synchronized is something commercial sound studios have been able to do since the 60's with analog electronics (or actually any electronics hobbiest), and something every sound card that can generate stereo has been able to do digitally since -- well I'm not sure when the first stereo sound cards came out... sometime in the 80's?
It just goes to show that when the chips are down, no guy can resist a dick-size contest, and low-id on slashdot is about the close as most geeks get;-) That's why I never chime in on these things even though they usually start in the high 5-digit range, because I know there'll be a slew of 3 and 4 digiters trumping me before I've even closed my "comment submitted" window.
Unless it can turn the speakers into sonar transcievers all the processing in the world isn't going to be able to do that effectivly.
Explain to me the difference between speakers and sonar tranceivers? I mean, I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy for only 4 years, so maybe I missed something, but a sonar array is basically a bunch of high-quality underwater microphones and a shitload of audio processing. Essentially doing the reverse of what the poster above claimed Vista does (never mind that that kind of processing ability is what sound cards are *for*). IOW: you're wrong.
As long as you have more than one channel, audio processing can do exactly that sort of thing; the only problem is, that it would ruin the whole point of multiple channels. You want the audio processing to cause the sounds to reach your ears at different times because than it simulates what happens when something is not directly in front of you. The initial implentation of this technology for consumer purposes has a very familiar name: stereo.
So one extra copy for you to buy since I am not buying it due to above reasons and lack of free time (got other games to play and finish).
I'm confused. I searched for your "above reasons" and all of the text there looks like a recommendation. You said nothing negative at all. Were you thinking of some negative point and forgot to list it? I'd be curious what outweighed those positive points in your opinion.
That might not have been what you meant, but you should consider blanket statements like that before you make them.
That's not only probably not what he meant, it's not what he said either, unless you're trying to contort the statement "put your project into X" into "migrate your project from Y to X". So, yeah, the charitable interpretation of your post is: you're an idiot; the more realistic interpretation is: you're a dick.
I've used code completion, and it's annoying. If it makes a difference in the way you work, you're either doing something wrong or using a very bad API.
Or -- and maybe I'm reaching here -- different people work and think in different ways...
e.g. I'm the kind of person who is very good at remembering and visualizing the functionality of a program I'm working on or an API I'm using in terms of program flow, and how it works, etc. (kind of holistically) but I can't remember exact keywords, method names, etc. to save my life. I often have to repeatedly look up the exact name and spelling of a method, even if I've just used it in the last 10 minutes. However, I can recognize the name of the method I want at a glance. That makes something like code-completion a blessing for me since it prevents me switching back and forth between references and my program as much. There are plenty more examples, but hopefully you get the idea. YMMV.
why is it everyone talks about women's right to decide to have an abortion, but no one cares that the baby doesn't get the right to decide whether or not they get to live?
Because it's not a baby, but rather a collection of cells which could potentially become a baby, but currently has even less capability to "decide" than a dog.
In any case, what do you mean with "no one cares"? Last I checked, there are still plenty of people supporting your (apparent) position.
That could easily result in an Americans With Disability Act lawsuit.
I, for instance, am left-handed and write (print, actually) with 'the hook' writing method.
No kidding. I would have raised hell. When I was 10 I lived in Germany for a year; the schools there still (yes, even today) have the kids using fountain pens. Not only do you have the problem of constant smearing and such, but, even worse for me since I'm a completely mirror-image left-hander, there's the problem that fountain pens can often even rip paper when pushed instead of dragged; this happens especially with stationary which is typically thinner.
I managed to get through that year (I think I was allowed to switch to "normal" pens after all my problems) but having that as a rule for my academic career would have been hell. Bad enough always trying to get one of the few left-handed desks, etc.
Interesting, I never thought about a "feedback loop" in that way. But now you mention it, it makes (evolutionary) sense that important words (for a baby) would correlate to simple and consistent sounds the parents can pick out and reinforce.
The feedback loop is essential. There is an anecdote Linguists learn on the subject of language acquisition: A couple, both of whom were deaf for non-genetic reasons, had a hearing child. Since the parents could only communicate in sign language they plopped the kid in front of the TV a lot, thinking he could pick up spoken English from the TV. At 3 the child had developed at a completely normal rate in acquiring... sign language; he had not learned one word of spoken English.
As others have pointed out, this is one of the genetic aspects of learning a language. We are "hard-wired", if you will, to socialize, particularly with our parents, and are predisposed to ascribing meaning to the sounds we make to each other. This is of course a vast over-simplification, but I'll leave the detailed explanations to others in this thread; I just wanted to add that anecdote.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem dude; that's very gracious of you :-) I get riled up by European stereotypes of Americans so I can understand ;-) After all, I'm an American who's lived in Germany for 12 years and spent a couple of years of that making regular business trips to the U.K. so I get it coming and going :-/
I've heard that story too, but I have never heard a reliable confirmation of it. However, I can say with confidence that one of the principles of language change is that colonies are more conservative than their parent countries; IOW, if you want the more 'original' version of the language you will almost always find it among the most recently settled speech communities. This holds for e.g. English, Spanish, and French; interestingly, many French French speakers at least recognize this, but then rip Canadian French for sounding "archaic".
what makes you think thats a brit?
The username "Bloke down the pub" and his sig; Sure it's an assumption, but I felt it was a fairly safe one. Maybe he'll correct me if it was wrong...
The way he was speaking in the quote was obviously ironic and I didn't take that to mean anything other than that he's funny.
Sigh. More cluelessness. I feel like a Biologist talking to a roomful of creationists. By your logic ("it is what you call it") all the Native-Americans should be citizens of India, right? And Amerigo Vespucci is the... I dunno, inventor of America?
Look if you guys want to jump into the debate, at least read the points I'm making in the other posts, and maybe read up on the relevant fields of Linguistics.
I'm obviously not getting through to anyone, which I should be used to by now.... everyone thinks they're an expert on Language. Maybe another Linguist wants to take it up; I'm done here.
U.S. English isn't any kind of "shift" away from English English. They are both (admittedly slight) shifts away from the English which was spoken when they branched off from each other. Strictly speaking U.S. English shifted less, if you consider pronunciation and vocabulary.
Let me state the analogy again, but in more detail:
A couple has two children, let's call them John Doe and Jane Doe. John grows up and moves to another country where he marries and has a child, Jim. Jane stays in the hometown and eventually marries her high-school sweetheart; she and her husband are pretty modern-thinking, so he takes her surname and they have a kid, Jenny. Now does it sound in any way reasonable if Jenny starts talking down to Jim saying the Doe family is *her* family rather than *his*? After all she still lives where the "family started", right? The "origin" here is not the town, but the grandparents.
This has no meaning. Variations have to be relative to *something*, and I suspect you mean they are variations from some mythical standard English; and what does 'extreme' mean in this context? That the differences among them are greater than the differences between any of them and a given U.S. dialect?
I've done more than take a look. I've studied it.
Look, I know language is fascinating; that's why I studied Linguistics. But I can hardly think of another field where more people think they are qualified to talk about it just because of its application in their daily life. Being facile with language and/or knowing some "little-known" facts, etc. implies no deeper or real understanding of the actual evolution and mechanisms of language than being a great lover makes you an expert in Genetics. Human language is not a construct like computer languages, and you can't meaningfully talk about a given language like some discrete 'object' and say "This is the actual real English and every other dialect is a variation of it", in the same way you can point ANSI C and say what's standard C and what's not.
:-) Now that's the kind of contribution from a Brit which I love: classic British irony. Nicely done.
Your language? Get over yourself. Did I miss the memo where the English who migrated to America suddenly lost their "magical English essence" which apparently comes from being on the soil where the language originally evolved? Kind of like how my sister is more closely genetically related to my parents because she still lives closer to them?
Both Brits and Americans speak descendants of earlier forms of English. Nobody speaks the English which was spoken when America was colonized. A language belongs to all its native speakers. By any sane measure there are at least 3 times as many native speakers of the various American descendants of early Modern English (the English of Shakespeare's era) as there are of the various British descendants of early Modern English. So, democratically speaking....
I swear, Brits attacking Americans for perceived arrogance (such as claiming the Internet is purely American) and then turning around and claiming English belongs to them are priceless.
P.S. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons called from Germany and they ask that you Brits kindly stop butchering their language.
What echo and what microhpone are you talking about? And what does that have to do with the "sonar tranceiver" comment I was responding to? If you're talking about accounting for the echos in the room a listener is in, and eliminating those, then: duh. But that can be eliminated by wearing a pair of headphones, not by some magical application of "sonar tranceivers". Read the context please.
Correct. Reversing the polarity will only shift the sound wave produced by the speaker by IIRC 90, which is why you get all kinds of harmonic effects if you only reverse the polarity on one speaker.
Hell, I'm surprised that the symmetrical nature of speakers isn't better known. Are walkie-talkies so rare these days, that people forget they only have one combined speaker/microphone?
Obviously. But not due to some limitation of computer speakers + audio processing vis-a-vis "sonar tranceivers" which is what I was responding to.
I'm going to assume the question is serious. There is no fundamental difference between speakers and microphones other than using materials which allow for more efficient functionality in one direction. It's like electrical motors and generaters; in fact a speaker is a kind of motor which converts electrical energy to kinetic energy, and a microphone is a kind of generator which converts kinetic energy to electrical energy; each can act in the other direction, just with less efficiency. Modern Sonar is generally passive, i.e. uses the "microphone" functionality so I mentioned that version. But an active array is essentially a bunch of speakers + microphones, etc.
The point of my response was to address the implication that Sonar is using some special kind of technology that isn't comparable to speakers and audio processing. It's not. It's just a matter of degree and specialization. The simple case of adding phase-delays so that disparate audio signals are synchronized is something commercial sound studios have been able to do since the 60's with analog electronics (or actually any electronics hobbiest), and something every sound card that can generate stereo has been able to do digitally since -- well I'm not sure when the first stereo sound cards came out... sometime in the 80's?
It just goes to show that when the chips are down, no guy can resist a dick-size contest, and low-id on slashdot is about the close as most geeks get ;-) That's why I never chime in on these things even though they usually start in the high 5-digit range, because I know there'll be a slew of 3 and 4 digiters trumping me before I've even closed my "comment submitted" window.
So that your multi-channel system can sound like a mono system?
Explain to me the difference between speakers and sonar tranceivers? I mean, I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy for only 4 years, so maybe I missed something, but a sonar array is basically a bunch of high-quality underwater microphones and a shitload of audio processing. Essentially doing the reverse of what the poster above claimed Vista does (never mind that that kind of processing ability is what sound cards are *for*). IOW: you're wrong.
As long as you have more than one channel, audio processing can do exactly that sort of thing; the only problem is, that it would ruin the whole point of multiple channels. You want the audio processing to cause the sounds to reach your ears at different times because than it simulates what happens when something is not directly in front of you. The initial implentation of this technology for consumer purposes has a very familiar name: stereo.
I'm confused. I searched for your "above reasons" and all of the text there looks like a recommendation. You said nothing negative at all. Were you thinking of some negative point and forgot to list it? I'd be curious what outweighed those positive points in your opinion.
That's not only probably not what he meant, it's not what he said either, unless you're trying to contort the statement "put your project into X" into "migrate your project from Y to X". So, yeah, the charitable interpretation of your post is: you're an idiot; the more realistic interpretation is: you're a dick.
Or -- and maybe I'm reaching here -- different people work and think in different ways...
e.g. I'm the kind of person who is very good at remembering and visualizing the functionality of a program I'm working on or an API I'm using in terms of program flow, and how it works, etc. (kind of holistically) but I can't remember exact keywords, method names, etc. to save my life. I often have to repeatedly look up the exact name and spelling of a method, even if I've just used it in the last 10 minutes. However, I can recognize the name of the method I want at a glance. That makes something like code-completion a blessing for me since it prevents me switching back and forth between references and my program as much. There are plenty more examples, but hopefully you get the idea. YMMV.
Must... resist... bad... joke... [sweat pouring down face]
Because it's not a baby, but rather a collection of cells which could potentially become a baby, but currently has even less capability to "decide" than a dog.
In any case, what do you mean with "no one cares"? Last I checked, there are still plenty of people supporting your (apparent) position.
No kidding. I would have raised hell. When I was 10 I lived in Germany for a year; the schools there still (yes, even today) have the kids using fountain pens. Not only do you have the problem of constant smearing and such, but, even worse for me since I'm a completely mirror-image left-hander, there's the problem that fountain pens can often even rip paper when pushed instead of dragged; this happens especially with stationary which is typically thinner.
I managed to get through that year (I think I was allowed to switch to "normal" pens after all my problems) but having that as a rule for my academic career would have been hell. Bad enough always trying to get one of the few left-handed desks, etc.
I'm really replying to the whole thread, not just your post.
To sum it all up: You capitalize Santa Claus right? Belief has nothing to do with capitalization.
You missed his smiley. Part of being a parent is lots of black humor like that.
The feedback loop is essential. There is an anecdote Linguists learn on the subject of language acquisition: A couple, both of whom were deaf for non-genetic reasons, had a hearing child. Since the parents could only communicate in sign language they plopped the kid in front of the TV a lot, thinking he could pick up spoken English from the TV. At 3 the child had developed at a completely normal rate in acquiring... sign language; he had not learned one word of spoken English.
As others have pointed out, this is one of the genetic aspects of learning a language. We are "hard-wired", if you will, to socialize, particularly with our parents, and are predisposed to ascribing meaning to the sounds we make to each other. This is of course a vast over-simplification, but I'll leave the detailed explanations to others in this thread; I just wanted to add that anecdote.
Cool, that sounds exactly like the argumentation used by the Stainless Steel Rat :-)
Made me want to read again...
You forgot to read the history of the Coast Guard. It was part of the Department of the Treasury for most of its history.