Actually, "Lýðveldið" is Icelandic for "the Republic". You could call Iceland "Lýðveldið Ísland" ("the Republic of Iceland"), but "Ísland" ("Iceland") would be the common name. Just calling it "the Republic" would be as silly as calling Great Britain and Northern Ireland "the United Kingdom" or America "the United States". Oh, wait...
Wouldn't it be simpler to have normal chairs and move the head and the tail of the queue, as in a circular buffer, rather than moving all the chairs? Of course, that would require the queue to be somewhere else than leading to the thing people are queueing for...
Considering the sheer amount of statistics being thrown around in what passes for Science, it might be more accurate to say that Science is the way we find things are likely to be true and likely to be untrue.
That said, I'm having trouble defining a representative sample of Science...
That's almost certainly a translation error. The University of Tampere press release states that "these studies clearly show that members of the group B coxsackieviruses are associated with the risk of type 1 diabetes", and the offending sentence in the Yle article would be the same in Finnish irrespective of whether the virus found is the only one or not (e.g. "löytänyt viruksen" would be "discovered a/the virus"). Finnish grammar doesn't have the concept of definiteness, meaning that a translator working from a Finnish source text would in many cases have to guess the intended meaning or look it up elsewhere. For similar reasons, many Finns have problems figuring out whether to use a definite or indefinite article when writing in English.
I like your idea, but I find your vowel mapping very confusing. I think diphthongs should be spelt as their component vowels. Using the IPA for English summary on Wikipedia to enumerate the necessary combinations and noting that many vowels in English only come in short or long versions (and blatantly recycling the apostrophe), I'd suggest:
"a" as in "trap", "aa" as in "palm" or "start", "ai" as in "price", "au" as in "mouth" "e" as in "dress" or "error", "ei" as in "face" "i" as in "kit", "ii" as in "fleece" "o" as in "lot", "oi" as in choice, "oo" as in "thought", "ou" as in "goat" "u" as in "foot", "uu" as in "goose" "'" as in "a" or "comma", "''" as in "strut", "nurse" or "hurry"
Consonants are mostly straightforward. "b", "d", "f", "h", "k", "l", "m", "n", "p", "r", "s", "t", "v", "w" and "z" all have obvious values. "g" is needed for "guy", so we use "j" as in "pleasure" (hence "dj" for "jam"). "y" is as in "yes". This allows us to reuse "c" for "th" as in "father", "q" for "th" as in "thigh", "x" for "sh" (and hence "tx" for "ch"). I'm not quite happy about having to use a digraph for "ng", but that should not be much of a problem for English.
Nau, yuu mei fiil cis luks sili, and aim x''r meni wud 'grii. Cat sed, geting juusd tu taiping laik cis is not ool cat haard. Sam mait aargjuu cat cis iz not inglix eni mo'r, b't ai qingk piipl xud 'dj''st priti kwikli.
Being able to type symbols like []/\;= with single key presses is a distinct advantage of the US layout over many European layouts when programming. I actually spent a few years programming with a US layout (switching back to Finnish when typing something in e.g. Finnish), but the difference is small enough that I felt that switching back and forth is not worth the trouble. Besides, the Finnish multilingual layout works for pretty much any European language with a Latin-based alphabet.
Many people don't seem to realise that the labels on PC keyboards' key tops are purely cosmetic; in most operating systems you can switch between layouts quite easily. As long as you don't need to look at the keyboard to know which key is which, you can easily use a different layout. In other words, switching a keyboard to a more familiar layout than the one it is labelled in works quite well.
If you work with several different languages with different alphabets, you are more or less forced to switch layouts as required by the current task. For example, a Greek programmer will almost certainly spend much of their time typing program code, commands or suchlike with a US layout (or similar) and switch to their local layout to type in their own language.
VGA was the minimum for Windows 3.1 and it was 640x480 with 16 colors.
The previous standard was EGA and it was 640x350.
Actually, Windows 3.1 runs fine on EGA; the installation disks come with EGA drivers (640x350, 16 colours). In fact, CGA works at 640x200 with 2 colours (with the Windows 3.0 driver, which is not included in Windows 3.1). Windows 3.11 seems to have dropped EGA support and requires VGA.
OpenJDK is pretty much GPL 2 (with exceptions to allow applications to have other licenses), so Java should be OK as long as you don't use any Oracle-specific stuff. The blog clarifies that open source OpenGL implementations exist and may be used. Lots of game programming libraries can be found in most Linux distributions (e.g. SDL, ClanLib, PyGame); as far as I can tell they should all be OK.
VLC is mostly run from France, where computer programs explicitly cannot be patented. Since the VLC developers apparently have no presence in the United States, US software patents are irrelevant for them. Hence, they can distribute H.264 decoders. Mozilla Foundation is based in California, making it hard for them to ignore US patents.
The problem with using only passwords to log in is that you then have to prevent users from having the same password. This can lead to serious security implications as discussed in this article.
Actually, you could, as long as the Pirate Bay download is a link to the data or rules to recreate it and not just a binary blob that contains all of TPB including itself. For example, quines can contain the information necessary to reconstruct themselves.
I'd say you lose nerd points not just for not bothering to look it up, but for failing to recognise that the "English" term you mention is, essentially, Latin, and therefore very likely to occur in languages related to Latin.
Getting slightly more on-topic, I've found that being multi-lingual means you end up thinking about things in the language you normally use to communicate about them in. So, for example, I end up thinking about university administration in Finnish, the upcoming presidential election in Swedish and computer science in English. In part, this is simply to avoid making the effort to translate (for example, the admin staff at our university is predominantly Finnish-speaking), but also because some of the terminology may be unfamiliar in some languages (the more esoteric a subject is, the more likely it is that everything I read about it is in English) or simply not standardised.
Like if they were primarily Spanish speaking, but also fluent in English, and they were thinking of the phrase "To be thrown out of a window" in Spanish (I am not even going to bother figuring out what it really is in Spanish, I could Google Translate, but then again, so could you), it would just be easier to use the English word "Defenestrate".
The Spanish word is "defenestrar". I suspect a better example would be something specific to a certain culture, e.g. "vihta" in Finnish.
Aalto University Internet access is through Funet, the Finnish University and Research Network. The block does not apply to Funet at all. However, my Saunalahti residential ADSL is provided by Elisa and has both DNS and IP traffic blocks active; traceroute shows packets failing to make the jump from the last elisa.net node to eunetip.net. In other words, Elisa seems to be filtering inbound and/or outbound traffic by IP.
2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work, but I'd say DRM and useless network services are things that would be less work if they were never introduced in the first place. Also, wouldn't it be easier to develop the game on PC first, then port to console?
Also, many of the settings mentioned, such as aspect ratio and sound/music volume, should be in the console version already.
Have you tried moving the monitor closer? I use a 24" at 1920x1080, placed about 50-60 cm from my eyes. This is at the lower end of what OSHA suggests, but looks much the same as a 32" display at 70-80 cm. The only difference is whether your eyes can comfortably focus at that distance. I'm myopic enough to need glasses to see anything beyond 30 cm properly, so the decreased viewing distance is not a problem, but if you have even mild hyperopia, I'd advise against this.
You're missing the point. cat is not supposed to distinguish between file types nor behave differently based on the file type; the only change to its behaviour is to propagate the MIME type information (which, unfortunately, is guessed from the file's extension rather than a proper MIME type field in the filesystem). The terminal is the one that does all the interpreting, and, as I mentioned, this already happens, albeit to a lesser extent.
In practically any sane terminal emulator, you're not seeing the bytes, you're seeing a picture generated from these bytes by interpreting it as text with embedded control codes. This is merely an extension of that concept; instead of just "clear the screen" and "switch text colour to red" you also have "display the following PNG". Considering that there are tons of different sets of escape sequences in use, one more would hardly be a problem. Since the author suggests that the metadata identifying the data type (MIME-style) would be separate from the actual data, legacy programs would presumably just ignore the additional information and behave like they used to.
if you know your problem reduces to TSP or SAT or CLIQUE, you can tell your boss this is not feasible for our input size, so we either need to relax the problem or approximate the solution. If you don't know this you're going to waste your time writing a program that takes 4 years to calculate the answer.
I think you mean: "you know TSP or SAT or CLIQUE reduces to your problem". By reducing one problem to another (quickly enough; polynomial time is good for NP-completeness proofs), you can show that the problem you have reduced to is at least as hard as the one you reduced from. Lots of easy problems reduce to SAT, but SAT doesn't reduce to them. In other words, "I can reduce SAT to my problem in polynomial time. Hence, if I can solve my problem in polynomial time, I can solve SAT in polynomial time, proving P=NP. Since nobody's been able to do that in 40 years, I wouldn't bet my career on doing it."
Doing a quick look on wiki it looks like they used latin for the negative powers and greek for positive powers but why they got rid of all those weird imperial gotchas that were known by common folk just to turn around and start chucking in latin/greek gotchas is beyond me.)
An international system has to have international terminology, so they used the international languages of science and learning: Latin and Greek (remember those Harvard entrance exams a few weeks ago?). That said, I'd have suggested exponential notation myself...
Bit late now, but it's rather a pity that the Metric system couldn't have had imperial equivalences. There is no good reason why the metre couldn't have been 100 inches, or why the gram couldn't have been defined as 1/1000 pound. Actually, some engineers do: the "mil" is 0.001 inch - most electronic components use a 0.1" pin-spacing.
What you fail to realise is that different countries (and sometimes even different towns) had different interpretations of these units. Should they have used a French inch (27.07 mm), a Swedish inch (24.74 mm), a Bavarian inch (24.3216 mm), an Austrian inch (26.34 mm) or what? Furthermore, these units have a nasty habit of changing all the time; the only way to get everyone (i.e. the UK and its colonies) to agree on exactly what an inch is was to define it as 25.4 mm. Either way, for most people there wouldn't have been an exact equivalent to the old system whichever unit you choose. At this point, you realise that the metre is essentially a metric yard.
Fahrenheit gives a better range of usable temperatures than Celcius. "It's in the 60s" vs. "It's in the 50s", etc. There's no scientific reason for using Celcius instead of Fahrenheit, either. Unless you are boiling water on a day to day basis, there's really no excuse not to be using Kelvin for everything.
Up north, it's very convenient to be able to look at the sign of the temperature to determine whether there's a risk of ice or snow on the road. Also, how are you supposed to make tea (or coffee, if that's what you prefer) without boiling water? That said, the Celsius scale is not very well integrated into SI.
Likewise, the fuckers could have kept one Imperial units for distance, etc., and simply tacked base-10 onto it (kiloyards, centiyards) instead replacing them with arbitrary units like meters and saddling us with a secondary measurement system that is no more scientific in terms of the base unit than the Imperial.
From a European point of view, the question is which unit to use. Before the metric system, there were, for example, literally dozens of different feet. The yard differs from the metre by less than some of these different feet differ. Also, there are still several different gallons in use. Surely it's better to give the common unit a new name rather than call it a "yard" and confuse everyone.
All you metric purists that aren't using lightseconds and Kelvin, should really check your sense of superiority at the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, "Lýðveldið" is Icelandic for "the Republic". You could call Iceland "Lýðveldið Ísland" ("the Republic of Iceland"), but "Ísland" ("Iceland") would be the common name. Just calling it "the Republic" would be as silly as calling Great Britain and Northern Ireland "the United Kingdom" or America "the United States". Oh, wait...
Wouldn't it be simpler to have normal chairs and move the head and the tail of the queue, as in a circular buffer, rather than moving all the chairs? Of course, that would require the queue to be somewhere else than leading to the thing people are queueing for...
Considering the sheer amount of statistics being thrown around in what passes for Science, it might be more accurate to say that Science is the way we find things are likely to be true and likely to be untrue.
That said, I'm having trouble defining a representative sample of Science...
That's almost certainly a translation error. The University of Tampere press release states that "these studies clearly show that members of the group B coxsackieviruses are associated with the risk of type 1 diabetes", and the offending sentence in the Yle article would be the same in Finnish irrespective of whether the virus found is the only one or not (e.g. "löytänyt viruksen" would be "discovered a/the virus"). Finnish grammar doesn't have the concept of definiteness, meaning that a translator working from a Finnish source text would in many cases have to guess the intended meaning or look it up elsewhere. For similar reasons, many Finns have problems figuring out whether to use a definite or indefinite article when writing in English.
See Google Apps Status Dashboard for more details (hover over red outage dots for times).
I like your idea, but I find your vowel mapping very confusing. I think diphthongs should be spelt as their component vowels. Using the IPA for English summary on Wikipedia to enumerate the necessary combinations and noting that many vowels in English only come in short or long versions (and blatantly recycling the apostrophe), I'd suggest:
"a" as in "trap", "aa" as in "palm" or "start", "ai" as in "price", "au" as in "mouth"
"e" as in "dress" or "error", "ei" as in "face"
"i" as in "kit", "ii" as in "fleece"
"o" as in "lot", "oi" as in choice, "oo" as in "thought", "ou" as in "goat"
"u" as in "foot", "uu" as in "goose"
"'" as in "a" or "comma", "''" as in "strut", "nurse" or "hurry"
Consonants are mostly straightforward. "b", "d", "f", "h", "k", "l", "m", "n", "p", "r", "s", "t", "v", "w" and "z" all have obvious values. "g" is needed for "guy", so we use "j" as in "pleasure" (hence "dj" for "jam"). "y" is as in "yes". This allows us to reuse "c" for "th" as in "father", "q" for "th" as in "thigh", "x" for "sh" (and hence "tx" for "ch"). I'm not quite happy about having to use a digraph for "ng", but that should not be much of a problem for English.
Nau, yuu mei fiil cis luks sili, and aim x''r meni wud 'grii. Cat sed, geting juusd tu taiping laik cis is not ool cat haard. Sam mait aargjuu cat cis iz not inglix eni mo'r, b't ai qingk piipl xud 'dj''st priti kwikli.
Being able to type symbols like []/\;= with single key presses is a distinct advantage of the US layout over many European layouts when programming. I actually spent a few years programming with a US layout (switching back to Finnish when typing something in e.g. Finnish), but the difference is small enough that I felt that switching back and forth is not worth the trouble. Besides, the Finnish multilingual layout works for pretty much any European language with a Latin-based alphabet.
Many people don't seem to realise that the labels on PC keyboards' key tops are purely cosmetic; in most operating systems you can switch between layouts quite easily. As long as you don't need to look at the keyboard to know which key is which, you can easily use a different layout. In other words, switching a keyboard to a more familiar layout than the one it is labelled in works quite well.
If you work with several different languages with different alphabets, you are more or less forced to switch layouts as required by the current task. For example, a Greek programmer will almost certainly spend much of their time typing program code, commands or suchlike with a US layout (or similar) and switch to their local layout to type in their own language.
"320x240 displays were the norm for Windows 3.1"
VGA was the minimum for Windows 3.1 and it was 640x480 with 16 colors.
The previous standard was EGA and it was 640x350.
Actually, Windows 3.1 runs fine on EGA; the installation disks come with EGA drivers (640x350, 16 colours). In fact, CGA works at 640x200 with 2 colours (with the Windows 3.0 driver, which is not included in Windows 3.1). Windows 3.11 seems to have dropped EGA support and requires VGA.
OpenJDK is pretty much GPL 2 (with exceptions to allow applications to have other licenses), so Java should be OK as long as you don't use any Oracle-specific stuff. The blog clarifies that open source OpenGL implementations exist and may be used. Lots of game programming libraries can be found in most Linux distributions (e.g. SDL, ClanLib, PyGame); as far as I can tell they should all be OK.
VLC is mostly run from France, where computer programs explicitly cannot be patented. Since the VLC developers apparently have no presence in the United States, US software patents are irrelevant for them. Hence, they can distribute H.264 decoders. Mozilla Foundation is based in California, making it hard for them to ignore US patents.
The problem with using only passwords to log in is that you then have to prevent users from having the same password. This can lead to serious security implications as discussed in this article.
Actually, you could, as long as the Pirate Bay download is a link to the data or rules to recreate it and not just a binary blob that contains all of TPB including itself. For example, quines can contain the information necessary to reconstruct themselves.
I'd say you lose nerd points not just for not bothering to look it up, but for failing to recognise that the "English" term you mention is, essentially, Latin, and therefore very likely to occur in languages related to Latin.
Getting slightly more on-topic, I've found that being multi-lingual means you end up thinking about things in the language you normally use to communicate about them in. So, for example, I end up thinking about university administration in Finnish, the upcoming presidential election in Swedish and computer science in English. In part, this is simply to avoid making the effort to translate (for example, the admin staff at our university is predominantly Finnish-speaking), but also because some of the terminology may be unfamiliar in some languages (the more esoteric a subject is, the more likely it is that everything I read about it is in English) or simply not standardised.
I have DNA at home, and nothing is blocked. But doesn't DNA use Elisa's Internet infrastructure also?
DNA has always been a competitor to Elisa with its own network. However, DNA recently acquired Welho.
Like if they were primarily Spanish speaking, but also fluent in English, and they were thinking of the phrase "To be thrown out of a window" in Spanish (I am not even going to bother figuring out what it really is in Spanish, I could Google Translate, but then again, so could you), it would just be easier to use the English word "Defenestrate".
The Spanish word is "defenestrar". I suspect a better example would be something specific to a certain culture, e.g. "vihta" in Finnish.
Aalto University Internet access is through Funet, the Finnish University and Research Network. The block does not apply to Funet at all. However, my Saunalahti residential ADSL is provided by Elisa and has both DNS and IP traffic blocks active; traceroute shows packets failing to make the jump from the last elisa.net node to eunetip.net. In other words, Elisa seems to be filtering inbound and/or outbound traffic by IP.
2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work, but I'd say DRM and useless network services are things that would be less work if they were never introduced in the first place. Also, wouldn't it be easier to develop the game on PC first, then port to console?
Also, many of the settings mentioned, such as aspect ratio and sound/music volume, should be in the console version already.
Have you tried moving the monitor closer? I use a 24" at 1920x1080, placed about 50-60 cm from my eyes. This is at the lower end of what OSHA suggests, but looks much the same as a 32" display at 70-80 cm. The only difference is whether your eyes can comfortably focus at that distance. I'm myopic enough to need glasses to see anything beyond 30 cm properly, so the decreased viewing distance is not a problem, but if you have even mild hyperopia, I'd advise against this.
You're missing the point. cat is not supposed to distinguish between file types nor behave differently based on the file type; the only change to its behaviour is to propagate the MIME type information (which, unfortunately, is guessed from the file's extension rather than a proper MIME type field in the filesystem). The terminal is the one that does all the interpreting, and, as I mentioned, this already happens, albeit to a lesser extent.
In practically any sane terminal emulator, you're not seeing the bytes, you're seeing a picture generated from these bytes by interpreting it as text with embedded control codes. This is merely an extension of that concept; instead of just "clear the screen" and "switch text colour to red" you also have "display the following PNG". Considering that there are tons of different sets of escape sequences in use, one more would hardly be a problem. Since the author suggests that the metadata identifying the data type (MIME-style) would be separate from the actual data, legacy programs would presumably just ignore the additional information and behave like they used to.
if you know your problem reduces to TSP or SAT or CLIQUE, you can tell your boss this is not feasible for our input size, so we either need to relax the problem or approximate the solution. If you don't know this you're going to waste your time writing a program that takes 4 years to calculate the answer.
I think you mean: "you know TSP or SAT or CLIQUE reduces to your problem". By reducing one problem to another (quickly enough; polynomial time is good for NP-completeness proofs), you can show that the problem you have reduced to is at least as hard as the one you reduced from. Lots of easy problems reduce to SAT, but SAT doesn't reduce to them. In other words, "I can reduce SAT to my problem in polynomial time. Hence, if I can solve my problem in polynomial time, I can solve SAT in polynomial time, proving P=NP. Since nobody's been able to do that in 40 years, I wouldn't bet my career on doing it."
Doing a quick look on wiki it looks like they used latin for the negative powers and greek for positive powers but why they got rid of all those weird imperial gotchas that were known by common folk just to turn around and start chucking in latin/greek gotchas is beyond me.)
An international system has to have international terminology, so they used the international languages of science and learning: Latin and Greek (remember those Harvard entrance exams a few weeks ago?). That said, I'd have suggested exponential notation myself...
Bit late now, but it's rather a pity that the Metric system couldn't have had imperial equivalences. There is no good reason why the metre couldn't have been 100 inches, or why the gram couldn't have been defined as 1/1000 pound. Actually, some engineers do: the "mil" is 0.001 inch - most electronic components use a 0.1" pin-spacing.
What you fail to realise is that different countries (and sometimes even different towns) had different interpretations of these units. Should they have used a French inch (27.07 mm), a Swedish inch (24.74 mm), a Bavarian inch (24.3216 mm), an Austrian inch (26.34 mm) or what? Furthermore, these units have a nasty habit of changing all the time; the only way to get everyone (i.e. the UK and its colonies) to agree on exactly what an inch is was to define it as 25.4 mm. Either way, for most people there wouldn't have been an exact equivalent to the old system whichever unit you choose. At this point, you realise that the metre is essentially a metric yard.
Fahrenheit gives a better range of usable temperatures than Celcius. "It's in the 60s" vs. "It's in the 50s", etc. There's no scientific reason for using Celcius instead of Fahrenheit, either. Unless you are boiling water on a day to day basis, there's really no excuse not to be using Kelvin for everything.
Up north, it's very convenient to be able to look at the sign of the temperature to determine whether there's a risk of ice or snow on the road. Also, how are you supposed to make tea (or coffee, if that's what you prefer) without boiling water? That said, the Celsius scale is not very well integrated into SI.
Likewise, the fuckers could have kept one Imperial units for distance, etc., and simply tacked base-10 onto it (kiloyards, centiyards) instead replacing them with arbitrary units like meters and saddling us with a secondary measurement system that is no more scientific in terms of the base unit than the Imperial.
From a European point of view, the question is which unit to use. Before the metric system, there were, for example, literally dozens of different feet. The yard differs from the metre by less than some of these different feet differ. Also, there are still several different gallons in use. Surely it's better to give the common unit a new name rather than call it a "yard" and confuse everyone.
All you metric purists that aren't using lightseconds and Kelvin, should really check your sense of superiority at the door.
A foot is roughly one light-nanosecond, right?
If they die the instant the player sees them, there's not much point in making them smart.
There's still a point, if it means they can sneak up on the player and shoot him in the back before he sees them.