This new verb might not mean its closely sounding couterpart
In effect, I might suggest that suspened is couterpart's counterpart in lexicon creation.
Consider this:- Merriam Webster's entry for "couterpart" is the same as that of "suspened"! As an avid user of the English language, I deplore this blatant lack of creativity; why should two new words mean the same?
And what's with the repeated mention of the guy's Indian-ness? Can we try to keep the nationalism out of Science, please?
Personally, I think it's a response to the general anti-Indian bashing that Indians apparently face on most international newsgroups. Add the fact that India is only now coming out of its socialist hibernation and you have a perfect situation for some oh-I'm-so-Indian chest beating. (Disclaimer:That's not a troll. I might have something in common with Indians.)
But you're right; I agree that's a tad too gooey. Science is beyond nationalism and even (presumed) patriotism.
As for the experiment, I've read about this before. Andromeda Strain anyone?:-D
Allow me to rephrase it (I mean, after all, this is/.!:-D):-
It is now official - SearchEngineWatch has confirmed: Google is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Google community when recently IDC confirmed that the Google accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all search engine usage. Coming on the heels of the latest SearchEngineWatch survey which plainly states that Google has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Google is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive search engine usage test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Google's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Google faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Google because Google is dying. Things are looking very bad for Google. As many of us are already aware, Google continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Google Groups is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core posters.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
The Google CEO Eric Schmidt states that there are 7000 users of Google. How many users of other protocols are there? Let's see. The number of Google versus other search engine hits when you search "search engine" on Google is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 other search engine users. Google posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of other protocols posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Google. A recent article put Usenet at about 80 percent of the Internet market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Google users. This is consistent with the number of Usenet posts about Google on Google.
Due to the troubles of Mountain View, abysmal sales and so on, Google went out of business and was taken over by Slashdot who sell another troubled web service. Now Slashdot is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Google has steadily declined in market share. Google is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Google is to survive at all it will be among search engine hobbyists. Google continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Google is dead.
Fact: Google is dead.
(Credits: This is a revisionist post-modernist/.-aimed humour inspired by an earlier Web is dying troll, which in turn was inspired by earlier "BSD is dying" trolls. And oh, I got the post by googling slashdot for "Kreskin".)
You miss the point. I regularly travel to India myself, among other internatioal destinations, so this is no *guesswork* of any sorts. The point is, as you yourself have so correctly said, the existence of an education infrastructure. Did you know that over 50% of students in Uttar Pradesh flunk their primary schools? And really, do you think this 9000 rupees thing will have *any* effect on classrooms in villages? If my experience is any indication, some bigshot somewhere up there will pocket the Simputer, claiming that it won't be useful for kids.
My take:- Great that someone (okay, someone from India for all those patriotic Indians out there:-D) developed a cost-effective PDA, but let's not start having wet dreams about it. It ain't gonna change anything drastically.
Don't take it personally, but I really don't think you should troll just because someone else doesn't sound Indian and has something negative to say. I know that there are a lot of anti-India trolls out here in/., but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't rub off someone else's point. For all you know, it could be valid.
However, there are 18 (not 14) constitutionally recognised languages.
Anthropologically speaking, there's little similarity between *most* languages except for geographical proximity; for instance, folks speak Gujarati, Siddhi and Indo-Portuguese in and around the islands of Daman and Diu. It's interesting to note that these languages have derived themselves from Aryan, African and European roots respectively. Very little overlap, historically speaking, but these languages are spoken nowhere else, hence are uniquely Indian.
But despite all this, there *is* a certain amount of overlap. There are 10 uniquely Indian (as opposed to Indic; Indic would include scripts such as Burmese, Thai, Tagalog and Sinhala as well) scripts which are all derived from the 5th century Brahmi script. A fact that was already researched and recorded in C-DAC's masterful ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange) format, which, as I understand, treats each individual language as a specialisation of an existing meta layout.
It is my contention that the basic grammar for *most* prominent constitutionally recognised languages is inherently same; the grammatical difference between, say, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu and Kannada is noticeable, but not significant.
Bottomline: I'm an NLP researcher myself fascinated by languages (see my sig). As much as I'm excited by this project, I really think we shouldn't kid ourselves, coz:-
Let's admit it; computerisation of *all* Indian languages won't happen in our lifetimes. Denying that would be to deny India's mind-boggling linguistic diversity.
If you want to increase literacy in India, get your basics right:- increase the number of schools and increase their quality. Don't search for magic bullets. They won't deliver, even if they're tech-y stuff.
Kids, next time when you want to find the meaning for the (presumably) Spanish word "hupia", don't google, don't click on the third link and no, don't download the page even through Google's cache. You'll be violating a couple of copyright laws, not the least of which is the Copyright extension thing.
I mean, we still haven't seen any "Michael Crichton is dead at 58" trolls, have we?
"now that the Internet provides near-universal exposure at comparatively no cost"
This can be applied to ANY digital medium.
I'll modify that. It was applied to every new medium of mass communication.
Surprised? So was I, when I was reading this amazing book on mass-communication theories. Apparently, people said the same thing when newspapers and magazines became popular in the turn of the century.
People call me paranoid... but thats what they called andy too.. and look where intel is
Not to be a smartass nitpick, but 'people' didn't call Andy Grove paranoid. It was he who wrote a book titled "Only the paranoid survive". The distinction is crucial. I believe the reason he said this was his experience with Nazi and Communist regimes in Hungary.
A Trojan asteroid is "any planetoidal body at the triangular Lagrangian point of any two bodies" named thus because the Trojan asteroids of the Sun - Jupiter system are named according to the Illiad.(Wikipedia). There's an interesting webpage on the Trojan asteroids in the Sun - Earth system here
is there some management software to help with this sort of thing?"
Sure. It's called Excel, part of a set of productivity tools made by a certain company based in Redmond, WA. Not only can you make a list of the things you're moving, you can actually make multiple lists with hyperlinks and cute pics in a SINGLE FILE!
Alternatively, you can search for "barcodes" on Google, find out about EAN/UPC error detection algorithms, assign each piece of luggage a unique barcode, incorporate XSL, somehow use this XSL barcode generator thing, print them all out, stick them to your whatever you're moving and move! When you reach your destination, and this very important, but remember to buy a barcode reader and to scan all your luggage before you unpack.
You might also want to set up a website where you can track your shipment exactly the same way this website does.
But seriously folks, I've always found interesting the way we seek anthropomorphic images in almost everything. Not to flame believers out there, but I'd say that there's very little difference between techno-myths such as this and the ancients looking at the sky and believing that, say, a certain group of stars resemble two twins.
(Incidentally, the link on Gemini says that "many" cultures see two humans in those stars; I'm not sure about others, but Arabic and Indic schools of astronomy were greatly influenced by Graeco - Chaldean traditions in the 5th century AD. One of the bigger imports are 12 solar constellations. Does anyone know if Mayan or *real* Incan astronomical traditions have anything similarly anthropomorphic?)
Dude, take a breath. I know it's not often that you see/. stories from India, but that's no reason to get excited.
On a more serious note, I believe your attitude of Linux needing to be "taught" is contrary to the Linux philosophy. Agreed, Linux has a steep learning curve, but that doesn't mean that you need "gurus" to teach Linux (as opposed to evangelize it.) I believe the best way to "learn" Linux is by exploring it; hack it a bit, fiddle with a few things, see how things are different. Yup, you got it, The Hacker Mentality.
I agree that English is by far becoming ubiquitous in India, but to say that they're more people who can't speak in English is a major denial of sorts.
I speak five languages, three of them Indian (see my siggie for more information). I understand that people like me are quite common in India; "someone very low on India's social/ literary echelon" speaks more languages than I do.
Point #2: There was a story sometime back on/. on how illiterate slum kids figured computers for themselves. One interesting result in that exercise was that the slum kids created metaphors for themselves that didn't quite correspond to Microsoft-suggested ones. ("Arrow Pointer" versus "trishul" for instance). And here's something more damning:- after the experimenter changed the English interface to a Hindi one, they didn't know how to operate the computer! All their traditional metaphors were gone; indeed, any native Hindi speaker would laugh if you say "karyakram ko bhaago" instead of "run the program". It's just too silly, a bit like Coca Cola's alleged mishaps in translating its company name into Chinese.
Bottomline: The process of internationalization as you describe it is definitely not going to work in India. People there are waaay more multi-lingual than your traditional West European or East Asian.
I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.
Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.
Indian Linux is your answer. The website says it will be developed in all 18 official Indian languages.
Might be slightly misleading of course; I'm presuming they really meant all 10 ISCII ("Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange") alphabets in transmutation to give, I don't know, 12 or so languages. Will be interesting to see if they later provide for transcribing the Arabic script as well; the website at present seems to be suggesting only native Indian scripts. Not to accuse them of ethnic bias; I'm pretty sure it's plain intellectual laziness.
A More Detailed Explanation:- Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali use the Devnagri script; a few languages such as Konkani, Manipuri use the Roman script and scripts of other languages. Sindhi, Kashmiri and Urdu use the Arabic script (or modifications of it thereof). Unicode doesn't recognise the Assamese script to be different from the Bengali one, but provides for two additional Assamese-only characters; not sure if ISCII does that as well. (IndLinux's page gives seperate keymaps for Assamese and Bengali; I neither speak nor read these languages, so I don't know if they are significantly distinct.) All other languages, namely, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada have their own unique scripts.
Tamil is way ahead in implementation though; the Tamil Linux group is very active; the website says you can use Tamil in Mandrake 9.0. Can't read Tamil myself, but the KDE snapshots provided look extremely cool to me.
Silicon Pines might be interested.
on
Web Hospices?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
As reported by the acclaimed news portal SatireWire, Silicon Pines offers loving care for the technically spare. Pretty sure they could take in dotcoms with problems in managing certain non-equity payment modes.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, are you slashturbating?
In effect, I might suggest that suspened is couterpart's counterpart in lexicon creation.
Consider this:- Merriam Webster's entry for "couterpart" is the same as that of "suspened"! As an avid user of the English language, I deplore this blatant lack of creativity; why should two new words mean the same?
You're bloddy right; we're in complete agreement. In fact, I'll even say that your post is more lucid, to-the-point, and better phrased.
Personally, I think it's a response to the general anti-Indian bashing that Indians apparently face on most international newsgroups. Add the fact that India is only now coming out of its socialist hibernation and you have a perfect situation for some oh-I'm-so-Indian chest beating. (Disclaimer:That's not a troll. I might have something in common with Indians.)
But you're right; I agree that's a tad too gooey. Science is beyond nationalism and even (presumed) patriotism.
As for the experiment, I've read about this before. Andromeda Strain anyone? :-D
Allow me to rephrase it (I mean, after all, this is /.! :-D):-
It is now official - SearchEngineWatch has confirmed: Google is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Google community when recently IDC confirmed that the Google accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all search engine usage. Coming on the heels of the latest SearchEngineWatch survey which plainly states that Google has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Google is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive search engine usage test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Google's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Google faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Google because Google is dying. Things are looking very bad for Google. As many of us are already aware, Google continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Google Groups is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core posters.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
The Google CEO Eric Schmidt states that there are 7000 users of Google. How many users of other protocols are there? Let's see. The number of Google versus other search engine hits when you search "search engine" on Google is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 other search engine users. Google posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of other protocols posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Google. A recent article put Usenet at about 80 percent of the Internet market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Google users. This is consistent with the number of Usenet posts about Google on Google.
Due to the troubles of Mountain View, abysmal sales and so on, Google went out of business and was taken over by Slashdot who sell another troubled web service. Now Slashdot is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Google has steadily declined in market share. Google is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Google is to survive at all it will be among search engine hobbyists. Google continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Google is dead.
Fact: Google is dead.
(Credits: This is a revisionist post-modernist /.-aimed humour inspired by an earlier Web is dying troll, which in turn was inspired by earlier "BSD is dying" trolls. And oh, I got the post by googling slashdot for "Kreskin".)
All roads lead to Rome. Neat book that, for anyone interested in Indian (Indic) NLP.
You miss the point. I regularly travel to India myself, among other internatioal destinations, so this is no *guesswork* of any sorts. The point is, as you yourself have so correctly said, the existence of an education infrastructure. Did you know that over 50% of students in Uttar Pradesh flunk their primary schools? And really, do you think this 9000 rupees thing will have *any* effect on classrooms in villages? If my experience is any indication, some bigshot somewhere up there will pocket the Simputer, claiming that it won't be useful for kids.
My take:- Great that someone (okay, someone from India for all those patriotic Indians out there :-D) developed a cost-effective PDA, but let's not start having wet dreams about it. It ain't gonna change anything drastically.
Don't take it personally, but I really don't think you should troll just because someone else doesn't sound Indian and has something negative to say. I know that there are a lot of anti-India trolls out here in /., but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't rub off someone else's point. For all you know, it could be valid.
Not to karma-whore, but just a few additions/corrections (I had posted earlier on the scripts; now including stuff on grammar as well here) :-
Bottomline: I'm an NLP researcher myself fascinated by languages (see my sig). As much as I'm excited by this project, I really think we shouldn't kid ourselves, coz:-
Bad grammar yet another...
The distinction is that this is not "Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.
Kids, next time when you want to find the meaning for the (presumably) Spanish word "hupia", don't google, don't click on the third link and no, don't download the page even through Google's cache. You'll be violating a couple of copyright laws, not the least of which is the Copyright extension thing.
I mean, we still haven't seen any "Michael Crichton is dead at 58" trolls, have we?
I'll modify that. It was applied to every new medium of mass communication.
Surprised? So was I, when I was reading this amazing book on mass-communication theories. Apparently, people said the same thing when newspapers and magazines became popular in the turn of the century.
Not to be a smartass nitpick, but 'people' didn't call Andy Grove paranoid. It was he who wrote a book titled "Only the paranoid survive". The distinction is crucial. I believe the reason he said this was his experience with Nazi and Communist regimes in Hungary.
A Trojan asteroid is "any planetoidal body at the triangular Lagrangian point of any two bodies" named thus because the Trojan asteroids of the Sun - Jupiter system are named according to the Illiad.(Wikipedia). There's an interesting webpage on the Trojan asteroids in the Sun - Earth system here
Sure. It's called Excel, part of a set of productivity tools made by a certain company based in Redmond, WA. Not only can you make a list of the things you're moving, you can actually make multiple lists with hyperlinks and cute pics in a SINGLE FILE!
Alternatively, you can search for "barcodes" on Google, find out about EAN/UPC error detection algorithms, assign each piece of luggage a unique barcode, incorporate XSL, somehow use this XSL barcode generator thing, print them all out, stick them to your whatever you're moving and move! When you reach your destination, and this very important, but remember to buy a barcode reader and to scan all your luggage before you unpack.
You might also want to set up a website where you can track your shipment exactly the same way this website does.
But, but it's already there! I mean, I can't tear myself free of The Onion!
That's Dubai in the UAE. Think it should be "Muscat" for Oman? (That's the capital of the country anyway)
I'm presuming this "Incan city" is same as the City in Cydonia, near the Face.
No, don't look at my nick.
But seriously folks, I've always found interesting the way we seek anthropomorphic images in almost everything. Not to flame believers out there, but I'd say that there's very little difference between techno-myths such as this and the ancients looking at the sky and believing that, say, a certain group of stars resemble two twins.
(Incidentally, the link on Gemini says that "many" cultures see two humans in those stars; I'm not sure about others, but Arabic and Indic schools of astronomy were greatly influenced by Graeco - Chaldean traditions in the 5th century AD. One of the bigger imports are 12 solar constellations. Does anyone know if Mayan or *real* Incan astronomical traditions have anything similarly anthropomorphic?)
Dude, take a breath. I know it's not often that you see /. stories from India, but that's no reason to get excited.
On a more serious note, I believe your attitude of Linux needing to be "taught" is contrary to the Linux philosophy. Agreed, Linux has a steep learning curve, but that doesn't mean that you need "gurus" to teach Linux (as opposed to evangelize it.) I believe the best way to "learn" Linux is by exploring it; hack it a bit, fiddle with a few things, see how things are different. Yup, you got it, The Hacker Mentality.
Did you know that 50% of public school students in the state of Uttar Pradesh fail their exams, probably because they're taught in a language that is not their mother tongue?
I agree that English is by far becoming ubiquitous in India, but to say that they're more people who can't speak in English is a major denial of sorts.
It's even worse than saying that the United States and the United Kingdom speak only English, or that France speaks only French.
I speak five languages, three of them Indian (see my siggie for more information). I understand that people like me are quite common in India; "someone very low on India's social/ literary echelon" speaks more languages than I do.
Point #2: There was a story sometime back on /. on how illiterate slum kids figured computers for themselves. One interesting result in that exercise was that the slum kids created metaphors for themselves that didn't quite correspond to Microsoft-suggested ones. ("Arrow Pointer" versus "trishul" for instance). And here's something more damning:- after the experimenter changed the English interface to a Hindi one, they didn't know how to operate the computer! All their traditional metaphors were gone; indeed, any native Hindi speaker would laugh if you say "karyakram ko bhaago" instead of "run the program". It's just too silly, a bit like Coca Cola's alleged mishaps in translating its company name into Chinese.
Bottomline: The process of internationalization as you describe it is definitely not going to work in India. People there are waaay more multi-lingual than your traditional West European or East Asian.
I posted earlier on the language issue.
Essentially, bottomline is this:- not all official languages will be supported; Mandrake 9.0 already has Tamil. And so does Tamil Linux.
And of course, Emacs supports Devnagri scripts as well.
Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.
A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D
(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)
Indian Linux is your answer. The website says it will be developed in all 18 official Indian languages.
Might be slightly misleading of course; I'm presuming they really meant all 10 ISCII ("Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange") alphabets in transmutation to give, I don't know, 12 or so languages. Will be interesting to see if they later provide for transcribing the Arabic script as well; the website at present seems to be suggesting only native Indian scripts. Not to accuse them of ethnic bias; I'm pretty sure it's plain intellectual laziness.
A More Detailed Explanation:- Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali use the Devnagri script; a few languages such as Konkani, Manipuri use the Roman script and scripts of other languages. Sindhi, Kashmiri and Urdu use the Arabic script (or modifications of it thereof). Unicode doesn't recognise the Assamese script to be different from the Bengali one, but provides for two additional Assamese-only characters; not sure if ISCII does that as well. (IndLinux's page gives seperate keymaps for Assamese and Bengali; I neither speak nor read these languages, so I don't know if they are significantly distinct.) All other languages, namely, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada have their own unique scripts.
Tamil is way ahead in implementation though; the Tamil Linux group is very active; the website says you can use Tamil in Mandrake 9.0. Can't read Tamil myself, but the KDE snapshots provided look extremely cool to me.
As reported by the acclaimed news portal SatireWire, Silicon Pines offers loving care for the technically spare. Pretty sure they could take in dotcoms with problems in managing certain non-equity payment modes.