Well, since the Russian word for "water" is "vada", I'm thinking that they'll just stick with changing those W's to V's and forget that W's even exist.:-)
I think that using a Web Interface like Google does with GMail, would give them a distinct advantage. For one, you'd never have to worry about software upgrades or installation. For another, just about any content can be pushed to you. In fact, I really can't think of a single down side to using a webapp for instant messaging.
The only possible issue is that the logs and message transmissions would have to go through Google's servers. Personally, I don't mind that. At least I'd know that ALL settings and history are saved between machines instead of the classic issue of SOMETHING being lost when I jump from machine to machine. Not to mention that it would be the ultimate in cross-platform compatibility.
You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time.
Indeed. My wife has quite a few Russian family members and friends that we often correspond with. I have *never* heard a 'W' misused. OTOH, it may be a different class of Russians we're talking about. My wife is from a Moscow family of scientists (primarily biology). Pretty much all of them speak more than one language fluently, although quite a few have pretty heavy accents when speaking English.
It's possible that the Russians you know are from some other area of Russia, where their accents differ anyway. Not to mention that they're likely to know less about other languages and therefore more likely to confuse proper sounds.
The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
Don't you love that?:-) When I was dating my wife, I used to love how she pronounced my name. Since it starts with a 'J', she'd pronounce it with a 'zsa' (you know, draw a vertical line through an X and you've got the glyph). Cutest thing ever. Sadly, her accent is now nonexistent. Seems I taught her English a little too well.:-(
I'm happy for the French, I really am. But you know what? I'm not French, nor do I speak it. Therefore, "rendezvous" is seriously screwed up in the English language.
The core of the problem is that French nearly supplanted the entire Anglo-Saxon language at some point. Thus they tried to get us to adopt their idiosyncrasies rather than taking five minutes to rewrite "rendezvous" as "rondevoo". Or even better, break the word down into Latin roots and rebuild it as an English word. But noooo, it's easier to saddle the unsuspecting English with words like "attache" instead of allowing them to simply use "attachment".
I think you meant English has several sounds not present in Russian, based upon the example given.
I suppose you're right about this. Although the sounds we're discussing are actually stolen from other languages, thus the lack of proper glyphs. (I still think "rendezvous" is seriously screwed up.)
Russian has no consonants to depict the sounds presented by the English letters "j", "qu", "x" and "w".
You're correct about everything except the 'X'. My wife's name is Ksenia (often incorrectly transliterated into Xenia), and the first two letters are indeed pronounced with a "ks" sound. The only difference is that they spell out the 'k' and 's'. (Looks something like 'KCEHHR', but the second H has a slanted midsection, and the R is backwards. Literally sounds out as 'K S Ye N Ee Ya'. Man do I wish Slashdot had Unicode support.)
Don't you wish we could use Unicode characters on Slashdot? Then I could actually spell out Cyrillic characters, and you could use proper accenting to make your point.
That's actually why they'd say wessel - they don't distinguish the two sounds, and their "v" sound is between our w and v.
Ah, no. Their 'V' is just like our 'V', but generally pronounced harshly. 'W' is a very different sound that they lack. They would have said "nuclear vessel", but pronounced "where" as "vhere". The problem during the cold war is that the public heard very little Russian spoken. Thus it somehow entered into common usage that the V's and W's get switched with a Russian accent. This simply isn't the case.
A more likely reason for the confusion is that Russian has several sounds which English does not. (For example, they have a 'zsa' sound as in the name Zsa Zsa Gabor. They transliterate all J's into zsa's.) Since these sounds often serve as replacements for english sounds, many people have difficulty in distinguishing exactly what sounds were used. Thus silliness like W's instead of V's entered as a common idea of a Russian accent. No real Russian sounds like Mr. Chekov (who's name we absolutely murder in pronunciation).
I'm thinking that it's the fact you live in Britain. My wife is also Russian, and she has no issue with using the bovine pronunciation. Guess the world really does need more cow bell!;-)
BTW:
"Envelope" with a short 'e' vs. "envelope" ("On ve lope")
"Coupon" like a "cucumber" vs. "coupon" (Coo-pon)
"Pronounce" vs. "Pronunciate" (which isn't even a word!):-D
7) Jokes usually need a grain of truth or a plausible premise in order to be funny.
e.g. "3 girls jumped off a building. Which one hits last? The one who stopped to ask for directions!"
That's not funny because it's a ridiculous situation with no roots in reality. On the other hand,
"A Blonde, a Brunette, and a Red Head all jump off a building. Which one hits last? The Blond! She had to stop and ask for directions!"
That is funny because the premise for the joke is a commonly held belief that blonds are dumb. Of course, such suppositions are often flawed and allow for an equally amusing joke that makes the exact counter point:
"So a Blond walks into a bank and asks for a two week loan of $10,000. Dubious of the Blond's motives, the bank manager asks for collateral. The Blond replies that she could always put her Mercedes up as collateral, since it was worth far more than her loan. The bank manager agrees, and drives her car into the bank garage after loaning her the money.
"In two weeks the Blonde returns with the $10,000, plus the $5.00 interest on the loan. As the manager returns the keys to her car, he asks, 'I did some checking while you were away. It seems you're loaded with money! Why did you need a loan for two weeks?' To which the Blonde replies, 'Where else in New York can I park my car for two weeks and only pay $5.00!'"
That's a 'V', not a 'W'. Moscow is really "Moskvá'. "Moscow" is sort of an incorrect transliteration we use. The reason for the name is that Moscow is next to the "Moskva" river. Wikipedia has more info.
Re:this looks like a job for...
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ok, here's a torrent for parts 1-4. Make sure you right click and choose "save as". I didn't have a chance to reconfigure Apache. The sooner everyone stops their downloads and uses the torrent, the sooner I can get the rest of the files in a torrent.
Re:this looks like a job for...Google Cache!
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 1
Not good enough. All the files are only for download, and are not in Google's cache. When I saw the story, my first though was, "The idiot referenced binary files on Slashdot!" I'm trying to grab the PDFs and put them on BitTorrent, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
Ever heard of a company called, "Binladin Brothers for Contracting and Industry"? They're one of the largest corporations in Saudi Arabia. (Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that provides ~25% of the world's oil.) It just so happens that this corporation is owned by Osama Bin Laden's family. In fact, his family has strong ties to the Saudi Royal Family.
And while Osama was "living in a single-room rain-soaked mud-house with 8 family members and watching them die of hunger" (yeah, right), it seems he was also going to bars and nightclubs in Lebanon. In fact, "poor old Osama" seems to have inherited somewhere between 25-300 MILLION US DOLLARS after his father's death.
Poor Osama Bin Laden. He was so starved, hungry, and tired of death, that he asked the friendly US troops for help. Oh wait, no he didn't. He called them "infidels" and tried to kill every one of them in the name of Allah.
Just replace the side panel of your case with a Stirling refrigeration unit. It'll draw quite a bit of power, but you should be able to get the inside of your case close to super-conducting temperatures. Of course, do this at your own risk. I'm in no way responsible for any cracks, warping, or other thermal damage you do to your equipment.
One thing that has often concerned me is the matter of lift from the wings/lifting body. Obviously this design should be able to go into orbit with a relatively minor assist from rocket engines. However, how much lift does it actually get? Is it possible to build a craft that can use wing lift all the way up to LEO? If so, could it then be possible to obtain a flight envelope on the way back down?
The primary reason why I've concerned myself with this, is that the Space Shuttle literally "falls" out of orbit in a very steep dive. The idea is to re-enter somewhere over the Pacific and shed enough speed to land just before the Atlantic. Obviously, it was important the normal flight operations didn't overfly the USSR. The problem with this sort of profile is that the Shuttle takes on a tremendous heat load from the aero-braking. Yet there's nothing really inherent in the atmosphere that says the the Shuttle MUST take on that load.
To get to the point, would it be possible to return in a glide or powered flight without the requirement of a heat shield? i.e. Could a vehicle obtain a thin-atmosphere flight envelope and reduce its speed at a more gradual rate? Perhaps even to the point where no shielding is required?
Any aerospace engineers in the know want to comment?
Sure. But the idea is that a complete screen refresh is a very rare thing in real-world systems. And even on the rare occasion that they DO happen, the screen consists of highly compressible data. This is a side effect of the large fields of single color that are prevalent in GUI designs. For example, a fresh desktop might paint in the following fashion:
1. Flood fill the screen with the background color. (This should compress to almost nothing.)
2. Draw taskbar.
3. Draw desktop icons.
That's really not so bad. Wallpapers would slow things down, but you have to transfer those anyway. The worst case scenario would tend to be something like scrolling a web browser window with a complex page rendered inside. In cases like this, you have to cheat a bit. Instead of sending the entire scrolled area, you simply send a command that area X has moved to area Y, then send an update for the amount of the remainder of the screen.
Obviously such a design would be unsuitable for video games or video. There's really no good solution to the former, but the later can be solved by adding a special stream for the video. Instead of decompressing the video on the server, the client can be notified of the codec, and the data can be sent to him with no decompression or decoding.
b) That's totally wrong. Consider the size of a windows message in another OS. For instance... Windows. Messages are 32-bytes. They are sent infrequently. Sending pixel updates would require 32 bytes PER PIXEL. Sent frequently.
Reread the article yourself. He's not suggesting pixel by pixel. He's suggesting compressed pixel streams (although he didn't make this very clear). This is fundamentally similar to what VNC does. Every time a graphics area is "dirtied", its rectangular area is calculated and a sub-image extracted. The sub-image data is then compressed and sent over the wire to be decompressed and rendered.
If you've tried VNC on Unix/Linux, you know that the performance of this is quite good. The only reason for poor performance under windows is that the VNC designers had to build several "hacks" to figure out when Windows has changed the screen. VNC then performs a screenshot and compares it against the last screenshot it took. This is a very time consuming and memory intensive task. Under Unix, however, VNC is able to run the X commands and figure out EXACTLY what has changed. These changes can then be sent over with minimal latency and memory usage.
Personally, I'm a bit surprised by this article. Not because he talked about anything extraordinary, but rather because he didn't say anything revolutionary at all. Given his work on the NeWS project, I would have expected a much more complex (yet flexible) document rendering model out of him. Instead he merely streamlined existing Windowing technology without bringing anything new to the table.
I suggest you start here. The JNode guys are working on a completely new OS and need someone to design them a windowing system. If you feel you've got the expertise and direction, go kick out some code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since the Russian word for "water" is "vada", I'm thinking that they'll just stick with changing those W's to V's and forget that W's even exist. :-)
Ummm... no. Try AIM Express. It does just about everything the real AIM does, but it's a webapp!
I think that using a Web Interface like Google does with GMail, would give them a distinct advantage. For one, you'd never have to worry about software upgrades or installation. For another, just about any content can be pushed to you. In fact, I really can't think of a single down side to using a webapp for instant messaging.
The only possible issue is that the logs and message transmissions would have to go through Google's servers. Personally, I don't mind that. At least I'd know that ALL settings and history are saved between machines instead of the classic issue of SOMETHING being lost when I jump from machine to machine. Not to mention that it would be the ultimate in cross-platform compatibility.
You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time.
:-) When I was dating my wife, I used to love how she pronounced my name. Since it starts with a 'J', she'd pronounce it with a 'zsa' (you know, draw a vertical line through an X and you've got the glyph). Cutest thing ever. Sadly, her accent is now nonexistent. Seems I taught her English a little too well. :-(
Indeed. My wife has quite a few Russian family members and friends that we often correspond with. I have *never* heard a 'W' misused. OTOH, it may be a different class of Russians we're talking about. My wife is from a Moscow family of scientists (primarily biology). Pretty much all of them speak more than one language fluently, although quite a few have pretty heavy accents when speaking English.
It's possible that the Russians you know are from some other area of Russia, where their accents differ anyway. Not to mention that they're likely to know less about other languages and therefore more likely to confuse proper sounds.
The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
Don't you love that?
I'm happy for the French, I really am. But you know what? I'm not French, nor do I speak it. Therefore, "rendezvous" is seriously screwed up in the English language.
The core of the problem is that French nearly supplanted the entire Anglo-Saxon language at some point. Thus they tried to get us to adopt their idiosyncrasies rather than taking five minutes to rewrite "rendezvous" as "rondevoo". Or even better, break the word down into Latin roots and rebuild it as an English word. But noooo, it's easier to saddle the unsuspecting English with words like "attache" instead of allowing them to simply use "attachment".
I think you meant English has several sounds not present in Russian, based upon the example given.
I suppose you're right about this. Although the sounds we're discussing are actually stolen from other languages, thus the lack of proper glyphs. (I still think "rendezvous" is seriously screwed up.)
Russian has no consonants to depict the sounds presented by the English letters "j", "qu", "x" and "w".
You're correct about everything except the 'X'. My wife's name is Ksenia (often incorrectly transliterated into Xenia), and the first two letters are indeed pronounced with a "ks" sound. The only difference is that they spell out the 'k' and 's'. (Looks something like 'KCEHHR', but the second H has a slanted midsection, and the R is backwards. Literally sounds out as 'K S Ye N Ee Ya'. Man do I wish Slashdot had Unicode support.)
Don't you wish we could use Unicode characters on Slashdot? Then I could actually spell out Cyrillic characters, and you could use proper accenting to make your point.
That's actually why they'd say wessel - they don't distinguish the two sounds, and their "v" sound is between our w and v.
Ah, no. Their 'V' is just like our 'V', but generally pronounced harshly. 'W' is a very different sound that they lack. They would have said "nuclear vessel", but pronounced "where" as "vhere". The problem during the cold war is that the public heard very little Russian spoken. Thus it somehow entered into common usage that the V's and W's get switched with a Russian accent. This simply isn't the case.
A more likely reason for the confusion is that Russian has several sounds which English does not. (For example, they have a 'zsa' sound as in the name Zsa Zsa Gabor. They transliterate all J's into zsa's.) Since these sounds often serve as replacements for english sounds, many people have difficulty in distinguishing exactly what sounds were used. Thus silliness like W's instead of V's entered as a common idea of a Russian accent. No real Russian sounds like Mr. Chekov (who's name we absolutely murder in pronunciation).
I can't believe that no one bit on the opening! The obvious response is, "I think they're in Alameda"!
I'm thinking that it's the fact you live in Britain. My wife is also Russian, and she has no issue with using the bovine pronunciation. Guess the world really does need more cow bell! ;-)
:-D
BTW:
"Envelope" with a short 'e' vs. "envelope" ("On ve lope")
"Coupon" like a "cucumber" vs. "coupon" (Coo-pon)
"Pronounce" vs. "Pronunciate" (which isn't even a word!)
You forgot:
7) Jokes usually need a grain of truth or a plausible premise in order to be funny.
e.g. "3 girls jumped off a building. Which one hits last? The one who stopped to ask for directions!"
That's not funny because it's a ridiculous situation with no roots in reality. On the other hand,
"A Blonde, a Brunette, and a Red Head all jump off a building. Which one hits last? The Blond! She had to stop and ask for directions!"
That is funny because the premise for the joke is a commonly held belief that blonds are dumb. Of course, such suppositions are often flawed and allow for an equally amusing joke that makes the exact counter point:
"So a Blond walks into a bank and asks for a two week loan of $10,000. Dubious of the Blond's motives, the bank manager asks for collateral. The Blond replies that she could always put her Mercedes up as collateral, since it was worth far more than her loan. The bank manager agrees, and drives her car into the bank garage after loaning her the money.
"In two weeks the Blonde returns with the $10,000, plus the $5.00 interest on the loan. As the manager returns the keys to her car, he asks, 'I did some checking while you were away. It seems you're loaded with money! Why did you need a loan for two weeks?' To which the Blonde replies, 'Where else in New York can I park my car for two weeks and only pay $5.00!'"
That's a 'V', not a 'W'. Moscow is really "Moskvá'. "Moscow" is sort of an incorrect transliteration we use. The reason for the name is that Moscow is next to the "Moskva" river. Wikipedia has more info.
It's called an Alcubierre Drive. You can finish yourself off now.
he was later understood to have remarked,
"A Windows Key. How quaint!"
A Windows Key? On a Mac?!?
Excuse me! Can you direct me to d'he nearest nuclear wessel in Alameda?
(The amusing part about that statement is that the Russian language has no 'W' sound!)
Ok, we're missing the big one, warp drive,
Whatch'you talkin' 'bout foo'?
Ok, so we have no idea where we're going to get the energy from. But at the moment, it's looking more realistic than Wormholes.
Here's the complete torrent for all the PDFs:
http://iambatman.homeip.net/linux-guide.torrent
Come get it while it's hot!
Ok, here's a torrent for parts 1-4. Make sure you right click and choose "save as". I didn't have a chance to reconfigure Apache. The sooner everyone stops their downloads and uses the torrent, the sooner I can get the rest of the files in a torrent.
Not good enough. All the files are only for download, and are not in Google's cache. When I saw the story, my first though was, "The idiot referenced binary files on Slashdot!" I'm trying to grab the PDFs and put them on BitTorrent, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
Ever heard of a company called, "Binladin Brothers for Contracting and Industry"? They're one of the largest corporations in Saudi Arabia. (Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that provides ~25% of the world's oil.) It just so happens that this corporation is owned by Osama Bin Laden's family. In fact, his family has strong ties to the Saudi Royal Family.
And while Osama was "living in a single-room rain-soaked mud-house with 8 family members and watching them die of hunger" (yeah, right), it seems he was also going to bars and nightclubs in Lebanon. In fact, "poor old Osama" seems to have inherited somewhere between 25-300 MILLION US DOLLARS after his father's death.
Poor Osama Bin Laden. He was so starved, hungry, and tired of death, that he asked the friendly US troops for help. Oh wait, no he didn't. He called them "infidels" and tried to kill every one of them in the name of Allah.
Don't believe me? Try reading for yourself. Maybe you'll learn something.
Just replace the side panel of your case with a Stirling refrigeration unit. It'll draw quite a bit of power, but you should be able to get the inside of your case close to super-conducting temperatures. Of course, do this at your own risk. I'm in no way responsible for any cracks, warping, or other thermal damage you do to your equipment.
One thing that has often concerned me is the matter of lift from the wings/lifting body. Obviously this design should be able to go into orbit with a relatively minor assist from rocket engines. However, how much lift does it actually get? Is it possible to build a craft that can use wing lift all the way up to LEO? If so, could it then be possible to obtain a flight envelope on the way back down?
The primary reason why I've concerned myself with this, is that the Space Shuttle literally "falls" out of orbit in a very steep dive. The idea is to re-enter somewhere over the Pacific and shed enough speed to land just before the Atlantic. Obviously, it was important the normal flight operations didn't overfly the USSR. The problem with this sort of profile is that the Shuttle takes on a tremendous heat load from the aero-braking. Yet there's nothing really inherent in the atmosphere that says the the Shuttle MUST take on that load.
To get to the point, would it be possible to return in a glide or powered flight without the requirement of a heat shield? i.e. Could a vehicle obtain a thin-atmosphere flight envelope and reduce its speed at a more gradual rate? Perhaps even to the point where no shielding is required?
Any aerospace engineers in the know want to comment?
Sure. But the idea is that a complete screen refresh is a very rare thing in real-world systems. And even on the rare occasion that they DO happen, the screen consists of highly compressible data. This is a side effect of the large fields of single color that are prevalent in GUI designs. For example, a fresh desktop might paint in the following fashion:
1. Flood fill the screen with the background color. (This should compress to almost nothing.)
2. Draw taskbar.
3. Draw desktop icons.
That's really not so bad. Wallpapers would slow things down, but you have to transfer those anyway. The worst case scenario would tend to be something like scrolling a web browser window with a complex page rendered inside. In cases like this, you have to cheat a bit. Instead of sending the entire scrolled area, you simply send a command that area X has moved to area Y, then send an update for the amount of the remainder of the screen.
Obviously such a design would be unsuitable for video games or video. There's really no good solution to the former, but the later can be solved by adding a special stream for the video. Instead of decompressing the video on the server, the client can be notified of the codec, and the data can be sent to him with no decompression or decoding.
b) That's totally wrong. Consider the size of a windows message in another OS. For instance... Windows. Messages are 32-bytes. They are sent infrequently. Sending pixel updates would require 32 bytes PER PIXEL. Sent frequently.
Reread the article yourself. He's not suggesting pixel by pixel. He's suggesting compressed pixel streams (although he didn't make this very clear). This is fundamentally similar to what VNC does. Every time a graphics area is "dirtied", its rectangular area is calculated and a sub-image extracted. The sub-image data is then compressed and sent over the wire to be decompressed and rendered.
If you've tried VNC on Unix/Linux, you know that the performance of this is quite good. The only reason for poor performance under windows is that the VNC designers had to build several "hacks" to figure out when Windows has changed the screen. VNC then performs a screenshot and compares it against the last screenshot it took. This is a very time consuming and memory intensive task. Under Unix, however, VNC is able to run the X commands and figure out EXACTLY what has changed. These changes can then be sent over with minimal latency and memory usage.
Personally, I'm a bit surprised by this article. Not because he talked about anything extraordinary, but rather because he didn't say anything revolutionary at all. Given his work on the NeWS project, I would have expected a much more complex (yet flexible) document rendering model out of him. Instead he merely streamlined existing Windowing technology without bringing anything new to the table.
I suggest you start here. The JNode guys are working on a completely new OS and need someone to design them a windowing system. If you feel you've got the expertise and direction, go kick out some code.