of course, you can read what I've written, and know that this is a horrible idea, but in the past 100 years, the english language(s) has metamorphed into so many different dialects that we may even put the chinese to shame. we have our share of slang and coloquialisms (sp?) too, and because the computer doesn't understand them, we are stupid for using them.
I don't know about this. I suspect the rise in literacy has greatly helped stabilize the language. Editors of written works are quite consistent in grammer and usage and have had a huge influence on the spoken language. Even 50 years ago the misuse of the double negative ('I don't want no more.') was so ingrained in the spoken language that it wasn't ever expected to leave. Now the majority of the population believes that to be incorrect usage. That's not to imply that one way is better than the other, but to demonstrate the close in the difference between educated and uneducated speakers.
Also the recent broadcast media have had a large impact on minimizing the difference in the way people speak or at least in increasing the understanding of the differences.
I also think that the differences in say US versus British English are very overstated. Virtually anyone can make themselves understood by another English speaker with little difficulty. You think that spelling theater vs theatre or organize vs organise is a significant language difference? Compare that to difference between to Germany's German and Swiss German. Or to different parts of China whose dialects have little in common other than a shared written language.
It's the way many machine translators work, unfortunately it's kind of a cheap shortcut.
You end up with a double translation with is inevitably going to end up worse than a specific one-to-one translation.
If you need any proof, try using a machine translator to translate something in English to any other language and back again. Es no bueno amigo! The fewer translations you make the less horrible the translation (but it will still be horrible anyway.)
You're right, English is undoubtedly the international language right now. Nobody could dispute that. That doesn't mean that it will be forever.
It came about mainly because of England's colonial success and America's economic might. But the British empire has crumbled completely, and nothing says that the US will be on top ecominically forever.
If Latin America ever becomes an economic powerhouse, Spanish could certainly give English a run for its money, especially with its higher growth rate.
However, I do doubt that a language is tied to a single country would ever become a world language. That rules out Chinese and Hindi. For multi-national languages with large numbers of speakers, you've got English, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, any others?
for years the Chinese people have been moving away from Mandarin and towards their local dialect
Are you saying that fewer Chinese people speak Mandarin now than in the past? Nonsense! The Chinese government has done a very successful job of promoting the understanding of Mandarin in China. People may still speak their local dialects is everyday life, but the vast majority of the country understand Mandarin. And that's a *huge* difference to 50 years ago!
I don't think the native speakers of any language have a hard time learning to speak the language and if they study it in school, they'll be able to read it.
But for non-native speakers trying to learn the language, a phonetic alphabet has definite advantages over a character set. I can teach myself spoken Spanish vocabulary by reading a Spanish newspaper. Or if someone says something and I can't reproduce it properly, I can ask the person to write it down.
And for people like me who are learn more easily with visual cues, there is no alternative to oral learning in a character set language.
It's a lesser problem in languages which have inconsistent transliterations (like English unfortunately) or incomplete ones like Arabic or Hebrew (I think) which don't write vowels.
Though all the sounds are based on Polish, due to its creator.
Anyway, it's utterly useless except as a curiosity. Spoken languages have never and probably will never be used because of ease of use. Though I suppose particular difficulty of learning could prohibit a language being adopted, like the difficulty of outsiders learning Asian tonal languages or the lack of a phonetic alphabet in Chinese.
You speak the language you do primarily because it's what those around you use and secondarily for political reasons (look at the decline of German in Luxemberg and Belgium after WWII).
What's wrong with that (aside from the shrill voice)? Undoubtedly the museum/castle/etc. does have an English tour, and the person working there probably knows enough English to answer your question.
Among other things, English is the international language of tourism.
Don't forget that virtually every Unix with the exception of Linux comes with Motif but does *not* come with gtk, qt, etc.
I work with Solaris boxes a lot and have you ever seen the expression on an system administrator's face when you ask them to install gtk? (it ain't pretty and the install doesn't happen). Plus if you're not running on x86, you can pretty much forget about having all your gtk apps precompiled for your particular version of your OS, so warm up your compiler.
Organic solutions are one thing (that pretty much just means carbon-based doesn't it?) But I'd be pretty surprised if *living* organic material ended up it wide commercial use.
Think about the quantities of petroleum that would be used in electronics. The box of styrofoam peanuts your device is shipped it will likely have several thousand times the petroleum in the device itself will have. The price of petroleum used could never cost more than a fraction of a cent.
By the way, we'll never *run out* of petroleum or virtually anything else. As the supply decreases, the price increases and alternatives become more attractive. And there are tons of alternatives to petroleum for making plastics, as others have pointed out.
I'm an avid perl user. It's always my first choice for doing any fairly small task (less than a week) and absolutely anything that does text manipulation or unix scripting.
That said, I think perl would be a horrible choice for a first programming language. A little structure from a language is actually a big benefit for a new programmer. It helps to prevent yourself from shooting yourself in the foot too badly.
Also, the lessons you learn in perl may not translate well when you learn another, more traditional language. Data typing is an important concept of of programming in most languages, but perl's handling of data types would be confusing for a beginner.
I've never used python, but it sounds like a decent language. The best language for new programmers I've used is java. It's very programmer-friendly, compared to C, C++, or perl.
I'm no too impressed with these arguments. Since the growth of the internet, I've got greater access to a huge variety of mass media.
Ten years ago, if I wanted to find out information on problems in the Middle East, I could go to ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, AP, Reuters, NY Times and that's about it. Now, just for starters I've got:
And those are links off of Yahoo's "full coverage" page. These are not obscure sources.
People bemoan the changes in the Telecommunications Act that removed restrictions on ownership of television and radio stations, but we've got more choice now than we've ever had.
Sure maybe people don't take advantage of these alternative sources of media, but it's not up to the government to force them. Alternative information and viewpoints have never been more readily available.
Sorry for quibbling over vocabulary, but the H1-B program has nothing to do with indentured servitude, except that they both supply inexpensive labor.
An indentured servant is a limited term unpaid slave. The idea is that the costs of immigration are paid off after several years of labor. After that they are free to stay and work in the job of choice.
H1-B workers are almost the opposite of indentured servants; being paid workers who have to leave the country afterwards.
And how many of those companies said that CDE was the future of the Unix desktop a few years ago?
-Bruce
Couldn't connect to ad.doubleclick.net alerts
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
I have my hosts file edited to send ad sites to 127.0.0.1. This works great with IE and Netscape, but on mozilla I gives me alert popups on each failed connection:
The connection was refused when attempting to contact ad.doubleclick.net
It's sad, and a bit pathetic, to see Stallman portrayed as a "dangerous radical"
I've never seen anyone imply that he is in any way dangerous. Most people just think he's a bit of a nut.
What scares people about Stallman is that he's effective.
He was an effective programmer, but he doesn't program anymore. He has never been an effective advocate for his ideas, capturing only a handful of followers who believe that non-GPL software is morally wrong.
The people who are effective now is whoever is giving me free stuff today. If Red Hat and VA Linux and SGI and IBM want to develop and give away free software, then they're being pretty effective!
Stallman's best legacy will be the development of the GPL, but not for the reasons he planned.
Just because it's in the constition, doesn't mean it should be. The constition is not gospel, it's a document written by men and designed to be updated over time.
Amendment XVIII, Section 1: After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Yikes! What if we were stuck with that one? Worse than that of course is Article IV, Section 2 which effectively allows slavery, but was overridden by the 13th amendment.
I can't believe that electric rail transportation is anywhere near as cost efficient as electric bus transportation.
Road construction and maintenance is far cheaper than rail construction and don't even talk about the difference in price between 10 new buses vs. a new train!
Bus travel can be safe and efficient if separate roads are built solely for buses, as is the case is some places in Brazil (anywhere else?)
So isn't bus travel more popular? Because people don't like taking the stupid bus. And this is the same reason that people don't take the train. It might be better than a bus, but most people prefer using their own car.
The solution? Come up with some way of taxing carbon and pollution, raise the tax a certain amount every year and let the laws of economics figure out the best solution!
I've been hooked on tcsh for a long time. I'd be willing to switch to bash if I could get it to do what I want (need!)
1. tcsh 'autoexpand' functionality: expands the history command on the command line on tab, eg: % !ca[tab] goes to % cat/etc/passwd
2. tcsh 'autolist' functionality: possibilities are listed after an ambiguous completion on tab (bash requires two tab's), eg: % ls/usr/l[tab] lib/ libexec/ local/
I know the functionality is in bash, but is it possible to get it to work exactly as they work in tcsh, with the same keybindings? I've been using it too long to switch to hitting escape or Ctrl-D or tabbing twice to get these things.
I've always thought that it was unbelievably arrogant for doctors (medical and otherwise) to refer to themselves as Dr. Whoever, except when necessary in the course of their work.
Shouldn't we be past the use of titles in our supposedly egalitarian society? Do people need some special letters before or after their name to prove how smart or accomplished they are? Do we need this hierarchy in our society? Isn't modesty a virtue?
Slashdot Mirror
of course, you can read what I've written, and know that this is a horrible idea, but in the past 100 years, the english language(s) has metamorphed into so many different dialects that we may even put the chinese to shame. we have our share of slang and coloquialisms (sp?) too, and because the computer doesn't understand them, we are stupid for using them.
I don't know about this. I suspect the rise in literacy has greatly helped stabilize the language. Editors of written works are quite consistent in grammer and usage and have had a huge influence on the spoken language. Even 50 years ago the misuse of the double negative ('I don't want no more.') was so ingrained in the spoken language that it wasn't ever expected to leave. Now the majority of the population believes that to be incorrect usage. That's not to imply that one way is better than the other, but to demonstrate the close in the difference between educated and uneducated speakers.
Also the recent broadcast media have had a large impact on minimizing the difference in the way people speak or at least in increasing the understanding of the differences.
I also think that the differences in say US versus British English are very overstated. Virtually anyone can make themselves understood by another English speaker with little difficulty. You think that spelling theater vs theatre or organize vs organise is a significant language difference? Compare that to difference between to Germany's German and Swiss German. Or to different parts of China whose dialects have little in common other than a shared written language.
-Bruce
It's the way many machine translators work, unfortunately it's kind of a cheap shortcut.
You end up with a double translation with is inevitably going to end up worse than a specific one-to-one translation.
If you need any proof, try using a machine translator to translate something in English to any other language and back again. Es no bueno amigo! The fewer translations you make the less horrible the translation (but it will still be horrible anyway.)
-Bruce
You're right, English is undoubtedly the international language right now. Nobody could dispute that. That doesn't mean that it will be forever.
It came about mainly because of England's colonial success and America's economic might. But the British empire has crumbled completely, and nothing says that the US will be on top ecominically forever.
If Latin America ever becomes an economic powerhouse, Spanish could certainly give English a run for its money, especially with its higher growth rate.
However, I do doubt that a language is tied to a single country would ever become a world language. That rules out Chinese and Hindi. For multi-national languages with large numbers of speakers, you've got English, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, any others?
-Bruce
for years the Chinese people have been moving away from Mandarin and towards their local dialect
Are you saying that fewer Chinese people speak Mandarin now than in the past? Nonsense! The Chinese government has done a very successful job of promoting the understanding of Mandarin in China. People may still speak their local dialects is everyday life, but the vast majority of the country understand Mandarin. And that's a *huge* difference to 50 years ago!
-Bruce
Transliteration is the wrong word. I don't know the right word for creating an alphabet from a spoken language.
-Bruce
I don't think the native speakers of any language have a hard time learning to speak the language and if they study it in school, they'll be able to read it.
But for non-native speakers trying to learn the language, a phonetic alphabet has definite advantages over a character set. I can teach myself spoken Spanish vocabulary by reading a Spanish newspaper. Or if someone says something and I can't reproduce it properly, I can ask the person to write it down.
And for people like me who are learn more easily with visual cues, there is no alternative to oral learning in a character set language.
It's a lesser problem in languages which have inconsistent transliterations (like English unfortunately) or incomplete ones like Arabic or Hebrew (I think) which don't write vowels.
-Bruce
Though all the sounds are based on Polish, due to its creator.
Anyway, it's utterly useless except as a curiosity. Spoken languages have never and probably will never be used because of ease of use. Though I suppose particular difficulty of learning could prohibit a language being adopted, like the difficulty of outsiders learning Asian tonal languages or the lack of a phonetic alphabet in Chinese.
You speak the language you do primarily because it's what those around you use and secondarily for political reasons (look at the decline of German in Luxemberg and Belgium after WWII).
-Bruce
What's wrong with that (aside from the shrill voice)? Undoubtedly the museum/castle/etc. does have an English tour, and the person working there probably knows enough English to answer your question.
Among other things, English is the international language of tourism.
-Bruce
Don't forget that virtually every Unix with the exception of Linux comes with Motif but does *not* come with gtk, qt, etc.
I work with Solaris boxes a lot and have you ever seen the expression on an system administrator's face when you ask them to install gtk? (it ain't pretty and the install doesn't happen). Plus if you're not running on x86, you can pretty much forget about having all your gtk apps precompiled for your particular version of your OS, so warm up your compiler.
-Bruce
Organic solutions are one thing (that pretty much just means carbon-based doesn't it?) But I'd be pretty surprised if *living* organic material ended up it wide commercial use.
Someone call PETA!
-Bruce
Think about the quantities of petroleum that would be used in electronics. The box of styrofoam peanuts your device is shipped it will likely have several thousand times the petroleum in the device itself will have. The price of petroleum used could never cost more than a fraction of a cent.
By the way, we'll never *run out* of petroleum or virtually anything else. As the supply decreases, the price increases and alternatives become more attractive. And there are tons of alternatives to petroleum for making plastics, as others have pointed out.
Cheers!
-Bruce
I'm an avid perl user. It's always my first choice for doing any fairly small task (less than a week) and absolutely anything that does text manipulation or unix scripting.
That said, I think perl would be a horrible choice for a first programming language. A little structure from a language is actually a big benefit for a new programmer. It helps to prevent yourself from shooting yourself in the foot too badly.
Also, the lessons you learn in perl may not translate well when you learn another, more traditional language. Data typing is an important concept of of programming in most languages, but perl's handling of data types would be confusing for a beginner.
I've never used python, but it sounds like a decent language. The best language for new programmers I've used is java. It's very programmer-friendly, compared to C, C++, or perl.
Cheers!
-Bruce
I'm no too impressed with these arguments. Since the growth of the internet, I've got greater access to a huge variety of mass media.
Ten years ago, if I wanted to find out information on problems in the Middle East, I could go to ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, AP, Reuters, NY Times and that's about it. Now, just for starters I've got:
http://www.arab.net/
http://www.arabicnews.com/
http://www.amin.org/
http://www.israelwire.com/
http://www.jta.org/
http://www.jpost.com/
And those are links off of Yahoo's "full coverage" page. These are not obscure sources.
People bemoan the changes in the Telecommunications Act that removed restrictions on ownership of television and radio stations, but we've got more choice now than we've ever had.
Sure maybe people don't take advantage of these alternative sources of media, but it's not up to the government to force them. Alternative information and viewpoints have never been more readily available.
-Bruce
An indentured servant is a limited term unpaid slave. The idea is that the costs of immigration are paid off after several years of labor. After that they are free to stay and work in the job of choice.
H1-B workers are almost the opposite of indentured servants; being paid workers who have to leave the country afterwards.
-Bruce (just another immigrant)
And how many of those companies said that CDE was the future of the Unix desktop a few years ago?
-Bruce
I have my hosts file edited to send ad sites to 127.0.0.1. This works great with IE and Netscape, but on mozilla I gives me alert popups on each failed connection:
The connection was refused when attempting to contact ad.doubleclick.net
Does anyone know a way around this?
Thanks,
-Bruce
I've never seen anyone imply that he is in any way dangerous. Most people just think he's a bit of a nut.
What scares people about Stallman is that he's effective.
He was an effective programmer, but he doesn't program anymore. He has never been an effective advocate for his ideas, capturing only a handful of followers who believe that non-GPL software is morally wrong.
The people who are effective now is whoever is giving me free stuff today. If Red Hat and VA Linux and SGI and IBM want to develop and give away free software, then they're being pretty effective!
Stallman's best legacy will be the development of the GPL, but not for the reasons he planned.
-Bruce
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television.
-Bruce
Amendment XVIII, Section 1:
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Yikes! What if we were stuck with that one? Worse than that of course is Article IV, Section 2 which effectively allows slavery, but was overridden by the 13th amendment.
-Bruce
I can't believe that electric rail transportation is anywhere near as cost efficient as electric bus transportation.
Road construction and maintenance is far cheaper than rail construction and don't even talk about the difference in price between 10 new buses vs. a new train!
Bus travel can be safe and efficient if separate roads are built solely for buses, as is the case is some places in Brazil (anywhere else?)
So isn't bus travel more popular? Because people don't like taking the stupid bus. And this is the same reason that people don't take the train. It might be better than a bus, but most people prefer using their own car.
The solution? Come up with some way of taxing carbon and pollution, raise the tax a certain amount every year and let the laws of economics figure out the best solution!
-Bruce
I've been hooked on tcsh for a long time. I'd be willing to switch to bash if I could get it to do what I want (need!)
/etc/passwd
/usr/l[tab]
1. tcsh 'autoexpand' functionality:
expands the history command on the command line on tab, eg:
% !ca[tab]
goes to
% cat
2. tcsh 'autolist' functionality:
possibilities are listed after an ambiguous completion on tab (bash requires two tab's), eg:
% ls
lib/ libexec/ local/
I know the functionality is in bash, but is it possible to get it to work exactly as they work in tcsh, with the same keybindings? I've been using it too long to switch to hitting escape or Ctrl-D or tabbing twice to get these things.
Thanks,
-Bruce
Shouldn't we be past the use of titles in our supposedly egalitarian society? Do people need some special letters before or after their name to prove how smart or accomplished they are? Do we need this hierarchy in our society? Isn't modesty a virtue?
-Bruce
All they needed was Chrysler to round out the team.
-Bruce
Does anyone know how to turn this thing off? It's incredibly obnoxious!
Regarding the task bar, as others have mentioned, it's fixed in newer versions of Enlightenment.
-Bruce
-Bruce