If our OS does not provide a correct form of our language surely we will use one who does.
I don't remember how many times I've had to reset MS defaults from American (spelling, MDY date format, Letter-size paper, inches) to what we actually use here (UK spelling, DMY, A4, metric). It wouldn't be so bad if it actually made users aware that they were making this choice (I know that there is a selection somewhere, but it is usually ignored in the "click okay" frenzy of installing). And every time you reinstall you have to carefully choose your "foreign" settings again.
It's not the same at all. You're making up new words using existing English roots. So it's not hard to guess the meanings with a few moments thought -- whereas Voynich has defied translation for centuries.
Yes, but I have to ask, since my knowledge of indonesian is non-existant, is the most used word in indonesian also a noun?
Could be if you happened to use "men" in every sentence, as it's certainly possible to do in English.
Anyway; I wasn't arguing that this language was Indonesian, and we weren't given any figures in the brief article. I simply wanted to point out that frequent duplication is part of at least some natural languages, and so is not much of an indicator of whether it's real.
scholars of that period, 16th century, could most likely read and speak 3-4 languages
Yes; but the theoretical, abstract knowledge of language that you'd need to make up a novel, believable one didn't exist. Of course, a genius could appear and work it out for himself.
Those were random examples. In Indonesian, EVERY noun is doubled to pluralise. So this is very common feature indeed. In English, no, we don't duplicate so much.
As far as the main article goes, though, I'd vote for it being a hoax.
if someone really wanted to make a hoax book, they could simply translate any other book (even the bible) into a made up language.
Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.
The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.
Indonesian pluralises words by duplicating them (anak = child, anak anak = children). And many languages, including English ("he was really, really stupid") intensify by repetition, so this point is not at all conclusive.
Suppose this gene multiplies further out past Australia, we could very well see the extinction of all Carp once they all become male.
Look at a map. Carp are freshwater fish. Australia is an island. There were no carp in Australia till they were introduced over 100 years ago. They can't spread unless someone deliberately transports them.
A commercial broadcast is a copyrighted work. So you can't infringe on that copyright by creating a derivative work.
Yes you can. You don't violate copyright unless you publish the derivative work. If you're allowed to make a copy of the work at all (which you probably are under time-shifting exemptions) you can make an edited copy just as legally as long as you don't distribute it.
"five hundred and fourty five" is first registered as "504 ty five," after which the listener must stop, mentally rewind, and listen again to comprehend.
[Since we're quibbling, it's "forty", not "fourty".] Maybe you rewind but I don't. (Would you really parse the number in the middle of the word?) It's what you're used to that determines how you "register", not an abstract grammatical rule.
When I hear "two hundred and six," I think "two hundred and six what? Tenths? Hundredths? Thousandths?"
Don't pretend to be stupid. You know what they mean, you just don't like it.
I sincerely doubt either of us has the qualifications to offer ourselves as an authority on the subject.
In my entire 45 years of life the only people I've heard omit "and" are Americans. This isn't street slang, or some neologism, it's what I was taught in primary school. Not having any grade one texts to hand, I did however find this:
None of the above, however, changes the fact that using "and" in spoken numbers for any purpose other than marking the decimal is highly illogical, too.
Sorry, this is not a "fact", but a preference. And I mark the decimal by saying "point".
If I had to justify the use of "and" (which I don't, it's just common usage in many places, especially British Commonwealth) I would say it removes ambiguity in some cases: eg, "200 six-packs". In "American" this could sound like "206 packs". In "Commonwealth" it's unambiguous, as 206 is "two hundred and six". The "and" tells you the number isn't finished. And if you want to comment on my usage of full stops outside of quotemarks, sorry that's also non-American but nevertheless valid.
Perhaps the poster is indeed American, but I think it's telling that you made that assumption.
I made that assumption (by the way, since you raised the question, a brief look at his other posts reveals he at least lives in America) since I've been lectured before on this point (maybe even by him, I don't recall, but he seems to have a canned speech on the subject). I think it more "telling" that he assumed I was wrong, not just speaking according to diferent rules.
Now, so that I may be educated properly about other cultures, please provide me with the Australian- version-of-the-English-language grammatical rules for inserting the word "and" into spoken numbers.
X hundred AND Y
X thousand, Y hundred AND Z
Maybe you can explain why Americans customarily write dates MDY? Seems perverse to me, but what would a yob like me know.
I don't quite understand what you mean with "natural" and "first" since for a person writing or reading a language right to left the rightmost part of a word (or number) naturally comes first.
That's why I said Arabic was an exception. "in German the numbers are spoken..." seems German is too (you might consider the English *-teen numbers to be like that too), so I was too quick to generalise -- but all the languages I have a nodding acquaintance with do speak and write numbers big to small. But I still think the suggestion that "litle-endian" style of writing figures is from Arabic is hardly proven.
When the original algebra texts from Persia were translated, the translator kept the right to Left form of the numbers (little-endian).
Maybe so, but Roman numbers are also little-endian, and so are Chinese and Thai. I don't think it has anything to do with the way words are written, when speaking we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one", and write the figures down in the same order -- it's natural to give the most important, biggest, part first.
So actually Arabic scripts are the exception, as not the origin, if you look at the sequence of writing.
Give people a limited number of emails per day based on actual work need...
A few anecdotes:
A problem I get (and sometimes contribute to) is the quick shoot from the hip email, and two minutes later a postscript, and 10 minutes later a recantation and quite different position. Or working on correcting a long document someone sends me a separate email for every single correction instead of combining the dozen or more total into one.
Eudora had a feature that was supposed to reduce flames by rating your messages by key words to detect hostility, and popping up an advisory or delaying sending. A bit too Big Brotherish and not popular though.
Every now and then you read about companies where email is blocked except for one or two periods in the day; this is a generally a good idea. If something is really urgent you should just phone anyway.
Summary: In an effort to encourage new entrepreneurs, Eric spills his guts about the mistakes he has made and the lessons he learned. (7 printed pages)
Robert Scoble, weblogger extraordinaire, recently said, "I want to see more software companies, not fewer." I heartily agree.
At the risk of being too obvious, let us observe that every ISV is started by an entrepreneur who somehow overcomes fear of failure. The genesis of a new company usually involves hundreds of hours of study, deliberation, and conversation, most of which is focused on a single question: "Can I make this business work?"
That process is healthy and necessary. It involves market research and number crunching and presentations and conjecture and coffee, all of which are critical elements of business success.
Invariably, the process also involves a great deal of self-examination. The core question isn't just "Can this business work at all?" but rather, "Can I make this business work?" This, too, is healthy and necessary. I've seen research studies that show that self-awareness is the number one factor in success. There is no substitute for knowing your own abilities and limitations.
But the self-examination stuff usually includes some basic worrying as well. Entrepreneurs tend to worry about the mistakes they might make. Unlike all the other research and study and deliberation that happens in the formation of a new company, this worrying actually isn't all that helpful.
Continuing to quote only from the giants of the technology industry, let me now cite a remark made by Thomas J. Watson, Sr., founder and former CEO of IBM:
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. Thomas J. Watson, Sr.
I don't think Watson advocated courage to the point of recklessness. After all, I'm sure IBM did plenty of prudent market research and planning during his tenure.
But Watson makes a very important point for new entrepreneurs: Mistakes just don't need to be all that scary.
Endless Decision-Making
Life in a small ISV feels like a never-ending stream of decisions, many of which you were never trained to make:
Should we sign this five-year lease or negotiate for a shorter term?
How should we incorporate?
Should we seek outside funding?
Should we write this code ourselves, or buy a component?
Should we host our own site or find co-location space?
When should we spend money on advertising?
If we build this product, will anybody buy it?
Should we do consulting work to help our cash flow?
None of my college classes taught me how to make these choices, so I had to learn by doing. Actually it would be more accurate to say that I learned this stuff by doing it badly. In the seven years since I started SourceGear, I have made lots and lots of mistakes. Although the memories of my failures sometimes sting, the lessons I have learned have been so valuable.
Through all these mistakes I have learned an important distinction. Whenever a decision yields bad results we call it a "mistake," but actually "clueless errors" are quite different from "bad bets."
Clueless Errors
In high school I once cost my math team a trophy by writing down "102/17" as my answer. I did all the calculations correctly, but I failed to realize that this fraction can be further reduced to "6". Leaving my answer in the incorrect form was not
I met a guy who used whiskey (Thai Mekhong) in his Zippo lighter. Seemed to work, so I suppose that means it's over 100 proof, unless he was cheating by adding some lighter fluid.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember how many times I've had to reset MS defaults from American (spelling, MDY date format, Letter-size paper, inches) to what we actually use here (UK spelling, DMY, A4, metric). It wouldn't be so bad if it actually made users aware that they were making this choice (I know that there is a selection somewhere, but it is usually ignored in the "click okay" frenzy of installing). And every time you reinstall you have to carefully choose your "foreign" settings again.
It's not the same at all. You're making up new words using existing English roots. So it's not hard to guess the meanings with a few moments thought -- whereas Voynich has defied translation for centuries.
Could be if you happened to use "men" in every sentence, as it's certainly possible to do in English.
Anyway; I wasn't arguing that this language was Indonesian, and we weren't given any figures in the brief article. I simply wanted to point out that frequent duplication is part of at least some natural languages, and so is not much of an indicator of whether it's real.
Yes; but the theoretical, abstract knowledge of language that you'd need to make up a novel, believable one didn't exist. Of course, a genius could appear and work it out for himself.
Those were random examples. In Indonesian, EVERY noun is doubled to pluralise. So this is very common feature indeed. In English, no, we don't duplicate so much.
As far as the main article goes, though, I'd vote for it being a hoax.
Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.
Look at a map. Carp are freshwater fish. Australia is an island. There were no carp in Australia till they were introduced over 100 years ago. They can't spread unless someone deliberately transports them.
Yes you can. You don't violate copyright unless you publish the derivative work. If you're allowed to make a copy of the work at all (which you probably are under time-shifting exemptions) you can make an edited copy just as legally as long as you don't distribute it.
[Since we're quibbling, it's "forty", not "fourty".] Maybe you rewind but I don't. (Would you really parse the number in the middle of the word?) It's what you're used to that determines how you "register", not an abstract grammatical rule.
Don't pretend to be stupid. You know what they mean, you just don't like it.
I sincerely doubt either of us has the qualifications to offer ourselves as an authority on the subject.
In my entire 45 years of life the only people I've heard omit "and" are Americans. This isn't street slang, or some neologism, it's what I was taught in primary school. Not having any grade one texts to hand, I did however find this:
Which is American, authoritative, and accepts both usages.No, because what he advocates is NOT Queen's English.
Sorry, this is not a "fact", but a preference. And I mark the decimal by saying "point".
If I had to justify the use of "and" (which I don't, it's just common usage in many places, especially British Commonwealth) I would say it removes ambiguity in some cases: eg, "200 six-packs". In "American" this could sound like "206 packs". In "Commonwealth" it's unambiguous, as 206 is "two hundred and six". The "and" tells you the number isn't finished. And if you want to comment on my usage of full stops outside of quotemarks, sorry that's also non-American but nevertheless valid.
I made that assumption (by the way, since you raised the question, a brief look at his other posts reveals he at least lives in America) since I've been lectured before on this point (maybe even by him, I don't recall, but he seems to have a canned speech on the subject). I think it more "telling" that he assumed I was wrong, not just speaking according to diferent rules.
X hundred AND Y
X thousand, Y hundred AND Z
Maybe you can explain why Americans customarily write dates MDY? Seems perverse to me, but what would a yob like me know.
If feels natural to you because of your cultural bias.
Thank you for that wake up call. I never realised that ordering numbers could be culturally insensitive.
Who is "we"? As an Australian, I do. and makes the speaker sound, at best, like he's rambling on, on the verge of incoherency.
No, just not American. Try not to be insulting about the way other people speak.
I was expecting something more like this.
That's why I said Arabic was an exception. "in German the numbers are spoken ..." seems German is too (you might consider the English *-teen numbers to be like that too), so I was too quick to generalise -- but all the languages I have a nodding acquaintance with do speak and write numbers big to small. But I still think the suggestion that "litle-endian" style of writing figures is from Arabic is hardly proven.
Maybe so, but Roman numbers are also little-endian, and so are Chinese and Thai. I don't think it has anything to do with the way words are written, when speaking we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one", and write the figures down in the same order -- it's natural to give the most important, biggest, part first.
So actually Arabic scripts are the exception, as not the origin, if you look at the sequence of writing.
A few anecdotes:
A problem I get (and sometimes contribute to) is the quick shoot from the hip email, and two minutes later a postscript, and 10 minutes later a recantation and quite different position. Or working on correcting a long document someone sends me a separate email for every single correction instead of combining the dozen or more total into one.
Eudora had a feature that was supposed to reduce flames by rating your messages by key words to detect hostility, and popping up an advisory or delaying sending. A bit too Big Brotherish and not popular though.
Every now and then you read about companies where email is blocked except for one or two periods in the day; this is a generally a good idea. If something is really urgent you should just phone anyway.
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman, SourceGear
December 19, 2003
Summary: In an effort to encourage new entrepreneurs, Eric spills his guts about the mistakes he has made and the lessons he learned. (7 printed pages)
Robert Scoble, weblogger extraordinaire, recently said, "I want to see more software companies, not fewer." I heartily agree.
At the risk of being too obvious, let us observe that every ISV is started by an entrepreneur who somehow overcomes fear of failure. The genesis of a new company usually involves hundreds of hours of study, deliberation, and conversation, most of which is focused on a single question: "Can I make this business work?"
That process is healthy and necessary. It involves market research and number crunching and presentations and conjecture and coffee, all of which are critical elements of business success.
Invariably, the process also involves a great deal of self-examination. The core question isn't just "Can this business work at all?" but rather, "Can I make this business work?" This, too, is healthy and necessary. I've seen research studies that show that self-awareness is the number one factor in success. There is no substitute for knowing your own abilities and limitations.
But the self-examination stuff usually includes some basic worrying as well. Entrepreneurs tend to worry about the mistakes they might make. Unlike all the other research and study and deliberation that happens in the formation of a new company, this worrying actually isn't all that helpful.
Continuing to quote only from the giants of the technology industry, let me now cite a remark made by Thomas J. Watson, Sr., founder and former CEO of IBM:
I don't think Watson advocated courage to the point of recklessness. After all, I'm sure IBM did plenty of prudent market research and planning during his tenure.
But Watson makes a very important point for new entrepreneurs: Mistakes just don't need to be all that scary.
Endless Decision-Making
Life in a small ISV feels like a never-ending stream of decisions, many of which you were never trained to make:
None of my college classes taught me how to make these choices, so I had to learn by doing. Actually it would be more accurate to say that I learned this stuff by doing it badly. In the seven years since I started SourceGear, I have made lots and lots of mistakes. Although the memories of my failures sometimes sting, the lessons I have learned have been so valuable.
Through all these mistakes I have learned an important distinction. Whenever a decision yields bad results we call it a "mistake," but actually "clueless errors" are quite different from "bad bets."
Clueless Errors
In high school I once cost my math team a trophy by writing down "102/17" as my answer. I did all the calculations correctly, but I failed to realize that this fraction can be further reduced to "6". Leaving my answer in the incorrect form was not
If you identify Opera as Opera, it gets bounced. Change the browser ID to IE and it lets you in. Fuck MS.
This is not a joke. Opera gets bounced. Does anyone have a mirror?
I met a guy who used whiskey (Thai Mekhong) in his Zippo lighter. Seemed to work, so I suppose that means it's over 100 proof, unless he was cheating by adding some lighter fluid.