I can highly recommend anything from Stanislaw Lem. Not only are some of his books amusing to read ("The Star Diaries") they usually have a lot of depth and are socially critic and give you good food for thought. And some of them are just a good thriller ("Peace on Earth").
It is one of the more consisten ones (but you'd be wondering whether Japanese isn't an artificial language, once you see how regular the grammar is there).
I just find you can use very simple sentences in English without sounding like a 3-year-old or an idiot.
Try to do that in German--won't work. Unless you are capable of building complex sentences with relative clauses, sub-sentences--that's where some things get hairy, like zusammengesetzte Verben (whatever that is in English)--appositions, attributes, indirect speech and more, unless you have a quite thorough command of the language, your German will always sound very alien to the native ear.
I've always heard that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I can't point to any facts to back that up, so I am willing to accept that it is probably just another one of those myths that get passed around. Sorry, but I'll have to take your comment about the German language in similar fashion. Well if you consider that English is a Germanic language, but has lost most of the really fucked up intricacies of Germanic languages like German, you can rest assured it is easier than German.
What makes English somewhat complicated is the huge influence the Normans had (and the Latin/French vocabulary and spellings they brought in). So only when it comes to pronunciation and reading, English is harder than German, because there is no consistency whatsoever between the written letters and how you read them. The same vowel sequence might be pronounced totally differently in a different word (e.g. doubt, tough, brought - "ou" is pronounced differently for each word).
Now if you look at the rest, it's basically that English has lost most of the complicated grammar parts that most Germanic languages still have to carry around. Conjugation of verbs in English almost gone, in German conjugating verbs has them change vowels in the middle of the words. Same with plurals, there are so many ways of building plurals for nouns it's not funny anymore in German.
Then you have three genders for nouns (there's single rule to distinguish the genders of nouns, you just have to know them, actually) which then influences the article (der, die, das) which again will change dependent on the case of the noun (you don't have any of that in English anymore). Adjectives also follow the gender and the case of the noun and change accordingly...
Look at the number of irregular verbs. You might have about 4-5 pages of irregular verbs in an English dictionary, in a German one you'll have about 12-14 pages of them.
I could go on for hours, but you get the gist. English is a medium difficult language I'd say. It's definitely harder than spoken Japanese, at least at a basic level (when you get into politeness levels Japanese can get quite tricky).
No I make the same observation about Australians, Canadians and Brits here in Japan. Most of my French or German friends have impressive Japanese proficiency. Most of them even read, some can even write Japanese.
I'm German so I can also talk about foreigners in Germany. Considering that German is far more complicated than English I still find it amazing that most of the foreigners can speak as much German as they do there. But this is also due to the fact, that Germans just expect people to speak the local language if they decide to live in this country for more than a few years.
From the many English native speakers in Japan I know there are only a handful who can actually read, write and speak Japanese at a level that would be acceptable for an adult. The rest seem to have learned the little Japanese they know at Roppongi or some Playground elsewhere.
I find it even more astonishing to see the lengths most English native speakers go to as not to be forced to speak any other language at all.
I've been living in Japan for 12 years now, and it's really amazing how perseveringly most English native speakers manage not to learn the local language beyond the level of a 4-year-old. It's amazing.
If the memory of the people in the US went a little more back into history they'd also notice that France actually totally kicked the Western World's ass lead by a tiny Corsican. It's not like the can't fight, you know.
And Germany (then Prussia) saved the world from France once. At the battle of Waterloo.
Not only did Blücher's troops play a huge part in it, Wellington's troops also had a big share of German troops.
So I guess if you dig around long enough then most of the major nations have once saved other nation's asses and at other times kicked other nation's asses. So what.
There's tons of DRM free high quality music on the iTMS. If you have previously bought into DRM crap be it iTMS or anywhere else, you are fucked anyway. Say, if you would have a huge library of Windows Media DRMed stuff, what are the chances you can get that onto your iPod. See?
I double that. The only time I ever used WordPerfect was on Windows 3.1 on my dad's computer and after a while I just failed to comprehend, how a) someone would pay money for such a piece of shit (WP and Windows, that is) and b) could even try to run a business on such a piece of shit software.
I see it as part of the big plan of China taking over the world.
Just have millions of iPhone knock-offs explode in the pants of (male and geeky) Longnoses and they'll all be impotent. In another 20 years, China will make 50% of the population or so... They just forget that geeks never get laid anyway.
you have so totally no plan it's not even funny. OS X has never ever been running as root (unless you boot into single user mode, duh). Login as root has been disabled on OS X from day one.
The Administrator in OS X is a normal user with the one difference that he's in the sudoers list. That's it. You can setup OS X that it will login automatically straight to your desktop, but most OS X users don't do that anymore. Even if you choose to do autologins, if you want to install stuff in important places you'll still have to input your password. Your myth of running as root and no passwords is plain bullshit.
And since Leopard OS X is a certified UNIX, so please tell me what makes your Linux box so mega superior to OS X?
If you mean the UK with Europe you're right. In Germany however the C=64 totally owned. And the Amiga afterwards. Neither the Spectrum, nor the Schneider CPC, nor later the Atari had much of a chance (in Music the Atari was king, though). Both commodores were mainly used for games. Both were awesome playing platforms.
I still play all my old games on Power64 () a C=64 emulator for the Mac. So I'm running an 8-Bit computer emulator in a PPC emulation environment to play ancient games on a Duo Core intel Mac.
I know those specialists. Like the "specialists" in shops like BicCamera, Kojima or Yodobashi - you name it. Please spare me.
Ask them anything (in Japanese of course) beyond "could you please tell me what the price tag on this product says?", and they'll start reading the brochure for the product aloud or go and ask a guy who will then call the maker's hotline and have you wait for 10 minutes. Hopeless. There's no such thing as an informed opinion or critical analysis of the products weak points with any kind of salesmen in tech in Japan. Every time I actually did hear anything critical about a product it was mostly because they were pushing a different brand in that store. It's so obvious.
They will tell you about some new features which are funny for the first 20 minutes. That's your sommelier. They shouldn't call them sommeliers, that's an insult for the whole trade.
I think the interesting part is the backup portion. Apple decidedly dropped backing up stuff with Time Machine via AirPort, because there is no way to make sure that the data transferred over the wireless LAN was not only received properly, but also written out to disk reliably and for sure.
So this now makes me believe they have sorted that out, which is a little revolution to me. Up until now backing up over wireless basically included a lot of hoping and praying.
OK I'll bite, although you're AC and everything. This article said nowhere "why OS X blows Windows out of the water" it didn't say "why OS X is better than Windows", so I don't get why you would start advocating your borg mothership without anybody else involved even thinking about it.
Are you trying to turn any intelligent discussion into an OS flamewar? Yes, maybe your dick is bigger, but you still don't get laid. Get a life. Or a pussy. Or better both.
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I can highly recommend anything from Stanislaw Lem. Not only are some of his books amusing to read ("The Star Diaries") they usually have a lot of depth and are socially critic and give you good food for thought. And some of them are just a good thriller ("Peace on Earth").
It is one of the more consisten ones (but you'd be wondering whether Japanese isn't an artificial language, once you see how regular the grammar is there).
I just find you can use very simple sentences in English without sounding like a 3-year-old or an idiot.
Try to do that in German--won't work. Unless you are capable of building complex sentences with relative clauses, sub-sentences--that's where some things get hairy, like zusammengesetzte Verben (whatever that is in English)--appositions, attributes, indirect speech and more, unless you have a quite thorough command of the language, your German will always sound very alien to the native ear.
What makes English somewhat complicated is the huge influence the Normans had (and the Latin/French vocabulary and spellings they brought in). So only when it comes to pronunciation and reading, English is harder than German, because there is no consistency whatsoever between the written letters and how you read them. The same vowel sequence might be pronounced totally differently in a different word (e.g. doubt, tough, brought - "ou" is pronounced differently for each word).
Now if you look at the rest, it's basically that English has lost most of the complicated grammar parts that most Germanic languages still have to carry around. Conjugation of verbs in English almost gone, in German conjugating verbs has them change vowels in the middle of the words. Same with plurals, there are so many ways of building plurals for nouns it's not funny anymore in German.
Then you have three genders for nouns (there's single rule to distinguish the genders of nouns, you just have to know them, actually) which then influences the article (der, die, das) which again will change dependent on the case of the noun (you don't have any of that in English anymore). Adjectives also follow the gender and the case of the noun and change accordingly...
Look at the number of irregular verbs. You might have about 4-5 pages of irregular verbs in an English dictionary, in a German one you'll have about 12-14 pages of them.
I could go on for hours, but you get the gist. English is a medium difficult language I'd say. It's definitely harder than spoken Japanese, at least at a basic level (when you get into politeness levels Japanese can get quite tricky).
No I make the same observation about Australians, Canadians and Brits here in Japan. Most of my French or German friends have impressive Japanese proficiency. Most of them even read, some can even write Japanese.
I'm German so I can also talk about foreigners in Germany. Considering that German is far more complicated than English I still find it amazing that most of the foreigners can speak as much German as they do there. But this is also due to the fact, that Germans just expect people to speak the local language if they decide to live in this country for more than a few years.
From the many English native speakers in Japan I know there are only a handful who can actually read, write and speak Japanese at a level that would be acceptable for an adult. The rest seem to have learned the little Japanese they know at Roppongi or some Playground elsewhere.
I find it even more astonishing to see the lengths most English native speakers go to as not to be forced to speak any other language at all.
I've been living in Japan for 12 years now, and it's really amazing how perseveringly most English native speakers manage not to learn the local language beyond the level of a 4-year-old. It's amazing.
If the memory of the people in the US went a little more back into history they'd also notice that France actually totally kicked the Western World's ass lead by a tiny Corsican. It's not like the can't fight, you know.
And Germany (then Prussia) saved the world from France once. At the battle of Waterloo.
Not only did Blücher's troops play a huge part in it, Wellington's troops also had a big share of German troops.
So I guess if you dig around long enough then most of the major nations have once saved other nation's asses and at other times kicked other nation's asses. So what.
No, we can't because you forgot Poland, you insensitive clod!
The first Linux version with an unified GUI will also come preinstalled with Duke Nukem Forever.
Universe includes the mass & gravity libraries, so it should be "hanging" there just nicely...
There's tons of DRM free high quality music on the iTMS. If you have previously bought into DRM crap be it iTMS or anywhere else, you are fucked anyway. Say, if you would have a huge library of Windows Media DRMed stuff, what are the chances you can get that onto your iPod. See?
Just don't buy music with DRM.
Look at the top left of your screen. Subliminal, I know that's why it works even with the screen open.
I double that. The only time I ever used WordPerfect was on Windows 3.1 on my dad's computer and after a while I just failed to comprehend, how a) someone would pay money for such a piece of shit (WP and Windows, that is) and b) could even try to run a business on such a piece of shit software.
(I was already using a Mac at that time).
I see it as part of the big plan of China taking over the world.
Just have millions of iPhone knock-offs explode in the pants of (male and geeky) Longnoses and they'll all be impotent. In another 20 years, China will make 50% of the population or so... They just forget that geeks never get laid anyway.
Was the last time you used OS X some time around 10.1? At least you sound like that.
you have so totally no plan it's not even funny. OS X has never ever been running as root (unless you boot into single user mode, duh). Login as root has been disabled on OS X from day one.
The Administrator in OS X is a normal user with the one difference that he's in the sudoers list. That's it. You can setup OS X that it will login automatically straight to your desktop, but most OS X users don't do that anymore. Even if you choose to do autologins, if you want to install stuff in important places you'll still have to input your password. Your myth of running as root and no passwords is plain bullshit.
And since Leopard OS X is a certified UNIX, so please tell me what makes your Linux box so mega superior to OS X?
Then again the Lenovo is running Windows. Wasn't he mentioning he wants a reliable machine? ;-P
Still I doubt that. After all the Commodore 64 was the best selling computer _ever_.
If you mean the UK with Europe you're right. In Germany however the C=64 totally owned. And the Amiga afterwards. Neither the Spectrum, nor the Schneider CPC, nor later the Atari had much of a chance (in Music the Atari was king, though). Both commodores were mainly used for games. Both were awesome playing platforms.
I still play all my old games on Power64 () a C=64 emulator for the Mac. So I'm running an 8-Bit computer emulator in a PPC emulation environment to play ancient games on a Duo Core intel Mac.
Don Quixote? How analogue. That's why I search my stuff through kakaku.com!
I know those specialists. Like the "specialists" in shops like BicCamera, Kojima or Yodobashi - you name it. Please spare me.
Ask them anything (in Japanese of course) beyond "could you please tell me what the price tag on this product says?", and they'll start reading the brochure for the product aloud or go and ask a guy who will then call the maker's hotline and have you wait for 10 minutes. Hopeless. There's no such thing as an informed opinion or critical analysis of the products weak points with any kind of salesmen in tech in Japan. Every time I actually did hear anything critical about a product it was mostly because they were pushing a different brand in that store. It's so obvious.
They will tell you about some new features which are funny for the first 20 minutes. That's your sommelier. They shouldn't call them sommeliers, that's an insult for the whole trade.
I think the interesting part is the backup portion. Apple decidedly dropped backing up stuff with Time Machine via AirPort, because there is no way to make sure that the data transferred over the wireless LAN was not only received properly, but also written out to disk reliably and for sure.
So this now makes me believe they have sorted that out, which is a little revolution to me. Up until now backing up over wireless basically included a lot of hoping and praying.
And neither has come up with anything even remotely resembling Shakepeare's work.
Why? Because RMS and the freetards say so?
To be more precise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code are what's used by all the mobile phones.
OK I'll bite, although you're AC and everything. This article said nowhere "why OS X blows Windows out of the water" it didn't say "why OS X is better than Windows", so I don't get why you would start advocating your borg mothership without anybody else involved even thinking about it.
Are you trying to turn any intelligent discussion into an OS flamewar? Yes, maybe your dick is bigger, but you still don't get laid. Get a life. Or a pussy. Or better both.