They're both named after the Angles, a tribe from Denmark.
In any case, I would say that the case for 'color', 'realize' and many other American spellings is stronger than that for their English equivalents.
English English spellings were affected by a wave of Francophilia in the 19th century which resulted in a lot of changes intended to give a cultured, Gallic flavor to the language. I think with the benefit of hindsight most speakers of the language now would say this was a bad idea.
Some Americanisms, however, such as 'kerb' and 'tire' (for tyre), originate in violently anti-English lexicographers of the post-Revolutionary period (of course, said lexicographers had been English themselves), and don't have much other claim to validity (except, of course, that they are widely used).
Both sets of changes, then, basically come from people wishing they were some other kind of person.
My brand-new Intuos3 seems as dust and wormwood to me now that I hear the Cintiq really does work... I am consumed with envy and covetousness... the great shininess of this shiniest of toys calls to me... perhaps finally it's actually time to hop over to the US and shop for one!
PS I live in the UK. Sensible people don't buy at UK prices.
PPS For innovation, service and attitude, Wacom are the best tech company in my universe.
There is a lot of ignorance here about the difference between the Chinese and Western ways of defining, and thus changing, reality.
If a Western government banned a game or a particular statement, it would be a move against that particular game or statement. When the Chinese government does it, it's one tiny part of the general full-time business of defining the version of reality they want to be percieved (and which is percieved) as the canonical Chinese one.
China is a large country, containing large areas which were not China until quite recently and still have major anti-Chinese native populations, and large areas whose interests conflict with each other and with Beijing's interests. The Chinese machine -- 'leadership' is the wrong word because it is a culture-wide effort -- has therefore always worked hard to promote a unified pro-Chinese vision in which the answer to the questions 'Should we not be part of China? Can China do bad?' is an automatic, instinctive 'no', so automatic that the question cannot really be asked at all.
If you want to get a feel for this, try reading XinHua in parallel with your other news sources. At first you will note differences here and there but over time you will come to see two different, parallel world histories going on; the XinHua one and the 'real' one.
But the true effect is only achieved when the whole dialectic of discussion at all levels, not just of government-controlled news sources, assumes the artificial reality, and this effect has been achieved brilliantly -- although lately they have been resorting to extreme nationalism to keep it up. The abuse of foreign soccer teams, the constant rehearsing of Japanese, British and French crimes in schools, the scholarly books on how Tibet and Goguryeo (google it, I don't know the right romanization though) and this and that bit of India have been stolen away by evil foreign interests but have been returned to China by the force of truth and sincerity -- it's all part of one absolutely brilliant concerted effort of which the banning of this game is a tiny, tiny, tiny, part.
I think the creation of not merely a new Chinese history but a whole Chinese reality, basically in 5 short decades, is probably the greatest cultural achievement of the previous century.
In this case the latter is accurate and is probably what was meant.
---
Side note -- another way to express the second choice is:
"The Linux that belongs to Red Hat"
By adding the article, you clearly indicate that you refer to one of many linuxes. To me, this control of definite/indefinite and countable/uncountable is one of the strongest and most unusual features of English -- although other European languages have it to some degree.
It's ridiculous to suppose that God would have created a whole universe and then expected us to restrict our examination of it to a short list of statements.
And in Victorian times, everyone used to think the same way; the business of a scientist(*) was to admire, analyse, and better appreciate God's creation. Then the ****ing Evangelicals came along and it all went straight to heck.
Evolution is not a god that sits on a mountain somewhere. It's the theory that those forms that have the greatest tendency to propagate in a given environment gradually become more frequent in that environment(*).
Seriously, this kind of bizarre 'science as voodoo' thinking is why to a lot of people creationism doesn't sound so stupid -- "God wanted there to be left handed people for his own ineffable plan" sounds about equivalent to "Evolution has kept left handed people on purpose".
It sucks and requires a certain amount of discipline, but it's better to keep science as science, a methodology for choosing between theories, than to let it become just another set of beliefs, like a religion.
(*) I know this is not a good or rigorous definition of evolution in general or biological Darwinian evolution in particular, but throw me a frickin' bone here.
Re:Why reimplement Ruby?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Informative
if one goes to full unicode, then some chunks will be one size, and some another (up to 32 bits).
Sounds like a case for my Unicode FAQ!
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unicode.shtml
Character set != encoding. Longest representation of a character in a standard Unicode encoding is necessarily > 32 bits.
In any case, Java, C# and (with eg Boost) C++ don't have this problem and Perl and Python, while not perfect, are much better than Ruby. If you have a mass of generic text to process, like maybe a big database of emails written in various languages, with Ruby your first task is to sit down and implement the relevant character encodings, followed by an enhanced string class and maybe plugging in a new regex engine. This makes Ruby a particularly bad choice for a lot of things, although I maintain a bit of an interest in it anyway because it's a good way to practise reading docs in Japanese.
Re:Why reimplement Ruby?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
(this goes for both comments above)
I'm referring to stepping through a string character by character -- I should have said that rather than 'char by char', which is open to misinterpretation. I meant 'text character' rather than a C 'char' type, which can indeed be done with 'each_byte'.
For instance, a lot of strings contain Asian characters that are intrinsically more than 1 byte long, or combining characters which consist of a 'main' character and 1 (for most european languages) or more (for the nightmare that is Vietnamese) accent marks. To ruby, it's all just bytes -- if 64 A7 03 A7 04 means an 'a' with an acute accent and a dot, ruby will cheerfully give you those 5 seperate bytes and let you implement the concept of a character yourself.
There are various libraries for Ruby that extend the string class to handle text in different languages and encodings, but this is still nothing like as good as just being able to get, set, read, write, and match characters, as I can in most other high-level environments. Unfortunately, while the concept of a text encoding is built into ruby, it is hardcoded with knowledge of a few particular encodings and it only uses them for IO -- in internal processing, it's welcome to the wonderful world of each_byte.
All this would go away (along with many other issues) if there were an implementation of Ruby for some modern runtime environment such as Java.
This situation and the discussions behind it is one of the things that inspired me to write this essay (which may or may not be interesting, I just mention it):
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
Looking down
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
America has a strong cultural bias that looks down upon "low-skill" work,
Pity America tends to look down on academic achievement as well...
The difference now is that the competition is taking on the white-collar workforce as well....whoops.
Re:...Israel?
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The EU, land of safety and home of the IRA... basque seperatists... Red Brigades... Jean-Marie LePen... and coming soon to a European Union near you, those Kurd-slayin', Armenia-crushin', fun lovin' Turks!
Staying competitive?
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, in answer to the reviewer's doubts, the key to staying competitive in the marketplace (as a worker) is to actually know something, like biochemistry or exotic option valuation or how to flatter to auto company executives. IT knowledge is a perfect adjunct to the real skills that get you a job. That's the same as ever.
In terms of what to do about the increasing concentration of wealth made possible by advances in comms, transport and free trade, though, I dunno.
If in doubt refer to ancient Rome -- they lost their well-off middle class in a few short decades once the Senate families had gained enough leverage to begin consolidating huge estates. Those Romans who still remained socially mobile (as opposed to the other 95% whose families were plebs forever) did it by going abroad and setting up shop in ever more remote and volatile provinces, often via the armed forces. Note how the age of consolidation of wealth in Rome came at around the same time as the major wars of foreign expansion and the shift from kinda-sorta democracy to straight up God-Emperors.
In other words, at the same time as Roman wealth became immobile (locked up by the major families that ruled Rome) the increasingly aggressive foreign policy made new, more mobile wealth available. This might happen again.
As a member of the 'reading slashdot at work' class, I have no ambition to share in it:)
Why reimplement Ruby?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, the trouble is that Ruby is a great language in search of a good implementation.
The current Ruby implementation has various weaknesses -- primitive text support is the most mentioned one (you can't step through a string char by char, I kid you not). Lack of native threading (it uses weird homemade application-level threads) some concurrency issues (it's C with lots of static variables -- I may be very out-of-date here though) and integration problems (it's very much designed with a 'C and UNIX and nothing else' mindset) are also problematic.
Thus, a port of Ruby to the Java or.net runtime, that kept the language intact but performed text processing, threading etc via those runtimes, would be absolutely amazing. The.net one stalled, though -- maybe the Java one is doing better.
Could you tell me who it's by? Googling for the lines didn't turn anything up. As the grandparent poster I and my small companionship robot have a right to know...
You mean the USA is becoming bogged down in city management, resulting in a long boring crawl forward which everyone except complete obsessives eventually gives up on?
Japanese newspapers don't space their words, as a rule.
Spaces in general are by no means universal; they're more a property of Latin script than anything else although spaces do occur in various other situations (oghams, some cuneiform scripts, many others).
Yeah... it just seems so small now, compared to rail privatization / utilities privatization. It's true that the Tories did hide it -- question is, does Labor not hide it because they understand the English and know they don't need to, or because they tried to but aren't very good at it? I used to think the former, but I changed my mind after the Mowlam and Byers affairs because they just looked so amateurish.
The UK Government's Important List of What Not To Do in IT:
1 -- Employ EBS 2 -- Employ EBS for pretty well every contract 3 -- Pay strangely high fees to EBS 4 -- Never complain when EBS fucks up, just start a new contract 5 -- Anything else to do with EBS
I can remember when the UK was pretty well without corruption at the national level, and it _wasn't even long ago_. Remember how terrible it seemed in Major's time when someone got a kickback for asking a question? It would just be line noise now.
Slashdot Mirror
They're both named after the Angles, a tribe from Denmark.
In any case, I would say that the case for 'color', 'realize' and many other American spellings is stronger than that for their English equivalents.
English English spellings were affected by a wave of Francophilia in the 19th century which resulted in a lot of changes intended to give a cultured, Gallic flavor to the language. I think with the benefit of hindsight most speakers of the language now would say this was a bad idea.
Some Americanisms, however, such as 'kerb' and 'tire' (for tyre), originate in violently anti-English lexicographers of the post-Revolutionary period (of course, said lexicographers had been English themselves), and don't have much other claim to validity (except, of course, that they are widely used).
Both sets of changes, then, basically come from people wishing they were some other kind of person.
My brand-new Intuos3 seems as dust and wormwood to me now that I hear the Cintiq really does work... I am consumed with envy and covetousness... the great shininess of this shiniest of toys calls to me... perhaps finally it's actually time to hop over to the US and shop for one!
PS
I live in the UK. Sensible people don't buy at UK prices.
PPS
For innovation, service and attitude, Wacom are the best tech company in my universe.
I'm married too... so it looks like (excluding anomalous results) _all_ slashdotters are married. Interesting.
The Korea one is new, actually.
You must not be from around here.
Tibet is also officially part of China -- and so is Taiwan in the official opinion of many countries.
This is why Windows went from 'country' to 'region' in all it's i8n settings.
There is a lot of ignorance here about the difference between the Chinese and Western ways of defining, and thus changing, reality.
If a Western government banned a game or a particular statement, it would be a move against that particular game or statement. When the Chinese government does it, it's one tiny part of the general full-time business of defining the version of reality they want to be percieved (and which is percieved) as the canonical Chinese one.
China is a large country, containing large areas which were not China until quite recently and still have major anti-Chinese native populations, and large areas whose interests conflict with each other and with Beijing's interests. The Chinese machine -- 'leadership' is the wrong word because it is a culture-wide effort -- has therefore always worked hard to promote a unified pro-Chinese vision in which the answer to the questions 'Should we not be part of China? Can China do bad?' is an automatic, instinctive 'no', so automatic that the question cannot really be asked at all.
If you want to get a feel for this, try reading XinHua in parallel with your other news sources. At first you will note differences here and there but over time you will come to see two different, parallel world histories going on; the XinHua one and the 'real' one.
But the true effect is only achieved when the whole dialectic of discussion at all levels, not just of government-controlled news sources, assumes the artificial reality, and this effect has been achieved brilliantly -- although lately they have been resorting to extreme nationalism to keep it up. The abuse of foreign soccer teams, the constant rehearsing of Japanese, British and French crimes in schools, the scholarly books on how Tibet and Goguryeo (google it, I don't know the right romanization though) and this and that bit of India have been stolen away by evil foreign interests but have been returned to China by the force of truth and sincerity -- it's all part of one absolutely brilliant concerted effort of which the banning of this game is a tiny, tiny, tiny, part.
I think the creation of not merely a new Chinese history but a whole Chinese reality, basically in 5 short decades, is probably the greatest cultural achievement of the previous century.
Or not.
Wait, I have a better idea... don't do that first bit and go straight to shooting the bastards!
"Red Hat's Linux" could be parsed as:
"Linux, which belongs to Red Hat"
or
"That Linux which belongs to Red Hat"
In this case the latter is accurate and is probably what was meant.
---
Side note -- another way to express the second choice is:
"The Linux that belongs to Red Hat"
By adding the article, you clearly indicate that you refer to one of many linuxes. To me, this control of definite/indefinite and countable/uncountable is one of the strongest and most unusual features of English -- although other European languages have it to some degree.
As a christian, I strongly agree.
It's ridiculous to suppose that God would have created a whole universe and then expected us to restrict our examination of it to a short list of statements.
And in Victorian times, everyone used to think the same way; the business of a scientist(*) was to admire, analyse, and better appreciate God's creation. Then the ****ing Evangelicals came along and it all went straight to heck.
(*)Except Frankenstein.
Evolution is not a god that sits on a mountain somewhere. It's the theory that those forms that have the greatest tendency to propagate in a given environment gradually become more frequent in that environment(*).
Seriously, this kind of bizarre 'science as voodoo' thinking is why to a lot of people creationism doesn't sound so stupid -- "God wanted there to be left handed people for his own ineffable plan" sounds about equivalent to "Evolution has kept left handed people on purpose".
It sucks and requires a certain amount of discipline, but it's better to keep science as science, a methodology for choosing between theories, than to let it become just another set of beliefs, like a religion.
(*) I know this is not a good or rigorous definition of evolution in general or biological Darwinian evolution in particular, but throw me a frickin' bone here.
if one goes to full unicode, then some chunks will be one size, and some another (up to 32 bits).
Sounds like a case for my Unicode FAQ!
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unicode.shtml
Character set != encoding. Longest representation of a character in a standard Unicode encoding is necessarily > 32 bits.
In any case, Java, C# and (with eg Boost) C++ don't have this problem and Perl and Python, while not perfect, are much better than Ruby. If you have a mass of generic text to process, like maybe a big database of emails written in various languages, with Ruby your first task is to sit down and implement the relevant character encodings, followed by an enhanced string class and maybe plugging in a new regex engine. This makes Ruby a particularly bad choice for a lot of things, although I maintain a bit of an interest in it anyway because it's a good way to practise reading docs in Japanese.
(this goes for both comments above)
I'm referring to stepping through a string character by character -- I should have said that rather than 'char by char', which is open to misinterpretation. I meant 'text character' rather than a C 'char' type, which can indeed be done with 'each_byte'.
For instance, a lot of strings contain Asian characters that are intrinsically more than 1 byte long, or combining characters which consist of a 'main' character and 1 (for most european languages) or more (for the nightmare that is Vietnamese) accent marks. To ruby, it's all just bytes -- if 64 A7 03 A7 04 means an 'a' with an acute accent and a dot, ruby will cheerfully give you those 5 seperate bytes and let you implement the concept of a character yourself.
There are various libraries for Ruby that extend the string class to handle text in different languages and encodings, but this is still nothing like as good as just being able to get, set, read, write, and match characters, as I can in most other high-level environments. Unfortunately, while the concept of a text encoding is built into ruby, it is hardcoded with knowledge of a few particular encodings and it only uses them for IO -- in internal processing, it's welcome to the wonderful world of each_byte.
All this would go away (along with many other issues) if there were an implementation of Ruby for some modern runtime environment such as Java.
This situation and the discussions behind it is one of the things that inspired me to write this essay (which may or may not be interesting, I just mention it):
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
America has a strong cultural bias that looks down upon "low-skill" work,
...whoops.
Pity America tends to look down on academic achievement as well...
The difference now is that the competition is taking on the white-collar workforce as well.
The EU, land of safety and home of the IRA... basque seperatists... Red Brigades... Jean-Marie LePen... and coming soon to a European Union near you, those Kurd-slayin', Armenia-crushin', fun lovin' Turks!
Well, in answer to the reviewer's doubts, the key to staying competitive in the marketplace (as a worker) is to actually know something, like biochemistry or exotic option valuation or how to flatter to auto company executives. IT knowledge is a perfect adjunct to the real skills that get you a job. That's the same as ever.
In terms of what to do about the increasing concentration of wealth made possible by advances in comms, transport and free trade, though, I dunno.
If in doubt refer to ancient Rome -- they lost their well-off middle class in a few short decades once the Senate families had gained enough leverage to begin consolidating huge estates. Those Romans who still remained socially mobile (as opposed to the other 95% whose families were plebs forever) did it by going abroad and setting up shop in ever more remote and volatile provinces, often via the armed forces. Note how the age of consolidation of wealth in Rome came at around the same time as the major wars of foreign expansion and the shift from kinda-sorta democracy to straight up God-Emperors.
In other words, at the same time as Roman wealth became immobile (locked up by the major families that ruled Rome) the increasingly aggressive foreign policy made new, more mobile wealth available. This might happen again.
As a member of the 'reading slashdot at work' class, I have no ambition to share in it
Well, the trouble is that Ruby is a great language in search of a good implementation.
The current Ruby implementation has various weaknesses -- primitive text support is the most mentioned one (you can't step through a string char by char, I kid you not). Lack of native threading (it uses weird homemade application-level threads) some concurrency issues (it's C with lots of static variables -- I may be very out-of-date here though) and integration problems (it's very much designed with a 'C and UNIX and nothing else' mindset) are also problematic.
Thus, a port of Ruby to the Java or
Could you tell me who it's by? Googling for the lines didn't turn anything up. As the grandparent poster I and my small companionship robot have a right to know...
Should I:
a) Weep for the millions of human tragedies that must have taken place to lead so many to this extreme of loneliness and general patheticness, or...
b) Laugh because it's called 'Snuggling Ifbot'?
Eh, I'll go for b). Hee hee hee... 'snuggling ifbot'... hee hee hee...
You mean the USA is becoming bogged down in city management, resulting in a long boring crawl forward which everyone except complete obsessives eventually gives up on?
Just kidding, Civ is great.
Yes, he it was who led us in our rebellion
1 -- The distinction between direct and reported speech is not one of tense
2 -- Choctaw has _three_ past tenses
This pedantry brought to you by Pedant's Revolt (tm)
Get used to it.
Japanese newspapers don't space their words, as a rule.
Spaces in general are by no means universal; they're more a property of Latin script than anything else although spaces do occur in various other situations (oghams, some cuneiform scripts, many others).
Yeah... it just seems so small now, compared to rail privatization / utilities privatization. It's true that the Tories did hide it -- question is, does Labor not hide it because they understand the English and know they don't need to, or because they tried to but aren't very good at it? I used to think the former, but I changed my mind after the Mowlam and Byers affairs because they just looked so amateurish.
The UK Government's Important List of What Not To Do in IT:
1 -- Employ EBS
2 -- Employ EBS for pretty well every contract
3 -- Pay strangely high fees to EBS
4 -- Never complain when EBS fucks up, just start a new contract
5 -- Anything else to do with EBS
I can remember when the UK was pretty well without corruption at the national level, and it _wasn't even long ago_. Remember how terrible it seemed in Major's time when someone got a kickback for asking a question? It would just be line noise now.