The digraph elimination took me quite young so I've no problem looking up stuff in dictionaries. I do however still have one at home which lists these digraphs as separate entries. I'm not completely sure of the resons for the elimination of digraphs, but I wouln't agree to make it more like other languages. Each language has its own differences. AFAIK, Spanish is the only language with 'ñ' in its alphabet. The fact that it doesn't really break much by deleting digraphs (after all, they are written as two letters anyway) shouldn't be an excuse for imitating others.
The 'x' and 'j' conversion makes sense depending on how you look at it. Before the conversion, 'j' had the same sound as it has in most other languages (English, French and German for sure, probably others) and the 'x' had the Greek chi sound. Now we have the 'j' and the 'g' with that sound (which in some sounds overlap and there are only general rules as to usage) and the 'x' is now 'cs'. Some of the
'Ç' had a sound similar to the 'z' in Italian or German which in most cases changed into the modern 'z' sound.
According to the Panamerican Doubt Dictionary (Diccionario panamérico de dudas), México is the recommended way to write the country name and the derived words as is the one used there and most if not all of southamerica. Méjico is an accepted form and used to be the normal way of writing in Spain.
Y/ll does indeed overlap in most places but some still use the pure 'll' sound. B/v are a remnant from Latin. There has never been a difference and both are pronounced 'b'. During the 18th Century reform, and effort was made to use whichever was used in the Latin form, but some words slipped so we now have more inconsistencies.
The 'h' at the beginning of words is kept mainly as a way to differenciate words and as a signal that there was something else there before. In English, you keep the 'k' in knock, kneee et al. In french you the circunflex accent (ê) where in the Latin form there was an 's' after it (Fenêtre - Fenestra).
It really depends on what you mean by successful. I still don't recognise the elimination of 'ch' and 'll' from the alphabet. 'rr' never really seemed like a real letter to me so I don't worry too much about that one.
Until not that long ago (maybe 12 years) Spanish had mostly a one letter one sound relation and no double letters. Now you have to explain about double letters and combinations.
Some other 'simplifications' I consider equally invalid though I can't really comment on those since they took place in the 15th and 18th century. The elimination of the 'ç' was due to the elimination of the sound which is understandable just like changing the beginning of some words to 'h' from 'f' as it had become mute. The one I consider the worst is the change to the letter 'x'.
In Greek and Cyrillic, the 'x' (or something that looks a lot like it) is used to represent the 'kh' sound, or 'hard k' (as the 'ch' in German Bach or the 'J' in Spanish Juan). This used to be the case in Spanish as well. Now we have that sound with two consonants which overlap at times and makes certain words a PITA to write. The 'x' in those words was either made an 's' or changed to one of the other 'hard k' sounds. The one exception is Mexico. It's still officially written with an 'x' keeping the old sound.
There are a few other cases, but I'll leave that for another day.
It's considered a `good' pastime now. Some time ago (during the dictatorship IIRC), children and priests weren't allowed to see it. That said, there are many people who consider bullfighting a brutal, especially due to what they do to make the bull half-crippled. This is illegal, but there are many who do it.
You shouldn't judge the complete population of a country by some stupid tradition they happen to have. Not everyone follows traditions, especially of certain kinds.
>hardcore linux users don't want proprietary drivers bundled with their OS, correct?
No, well, they (we?) don't want it bundled with the OS, but that's secondary. The real reason is people don't want to stick some binary thing they can't see the source of into their precious kernel. You don't know what's in there. It's not just about Sony rootkit-like stuff, it's also about hard-to-detect off-by-one errors which can crash the computer and you can't see where it happened.
>is it illegal to make proprietary drivers? I don't believe it is,
It might be, it might not be. Only a judge can decide that. The problem here is what constitues a derivative work. The nVidida blob is the same for all OSs and only the glue is Linux-specific, so it's the only thing that needs to be GPL. This is a grey area however. Most other drivers are indeed Linux-specific and constitute a derivative work (or not), so it'd need to be GPL. Modifying the existing kernel is clear-cut, but a module is considered by some to be mere aggregative work, so it doesn't have to be GPL.
Another problem is trust. I'm sure the nVidia engineers are very intelligent people, but anybody can make mistakes. I've had the PCI subsystem rendered useless by the driver, but there's no way for me to check where the problem is and possibly mend the mistake. This was whilst I was hacking on a reverse-engineered driver, so I got angry and decided not to use the binary driver again. The only problem I've noticed is not being able to use two monitors, though I'll probably fix that by sticking in another graphics card.
One further problem is making the driver work with a specific kernel. I usually run the latest -git, and the driver may not always compile or work properly. Even if it does, it's something else I need to remember to do when I compile the kernel. If it was in a state where it could be in the kernel, it would make testing kernels much easier.
Really, the main problem is the changing kernel API and ABI. Their OpenGL library is bigger than the rest of the kernel. They should just put it on a userspace library and make the kernel-side driver just initialize the device and pass the commands from the usespace library. That way, the system isn't brought down when there's a problem in the library and you could upgrade your driver just by restarting the X system, without needing to reboot! How cool is that;)
>Windows comes with some crappy generic nVidia drivers,
Does it? It my experience it comes with a generic VESA or VGA or whatever driver, so it works on all graphic boards, basically the same as most other OSs do.
With this Linux deplyment, I think that this is a reason itself to like Spain.
Well, the deployment is still just in a region. Here in Castilla y Leon, the president (of this region) has signed a contract with a certain Redmond-based company which produces monopolistic software to increase the availability of this software in this region (I can't remember the details, but I think you get the idea), while everyone and his dog around us are pushing out their regional GNU/Linux distros (Sarge in spanish whith minor mods).
What? You mean you didn't know they're using the enhanced 1.1 version?
It now stands for M$ HugeText Transport Protocol, and that line is mandatory here. If not, the browser thinks the server is using one of the other OSs and will crash your computer for being naughty.
Or something like that.
As soon as I can afford to have one (maning having a static IP, a broadband connection, a domain, and a computer running 24/7) be sure I will. Sadly, that will be a few years away. I hate being a kid, but then again, I hate growing up...
That worked very well for one of my Maths teachers. When he was travelling around Europe, in France we went to get a job and he said he was a geologist. They sent him to Egypt and spent a couple of years secretly copying off the other geologist's journal. They agreed on everything;-)
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The digraph elimination took me quite young so I've no problem looking up stuff in dictionaries. I do however still have one at home which lists these digraphs as separate entries. I'm not completely sure of the resons for the elimination of digraphs, but I wouln't agree to make it more like other languages. Each language has its own differences. AFAIK, Spanish is the only language with 'ñ' in its alphabet. The fact that it doesn't really break much by deleting digraphs (after all, they are written as two letters anyway) shouldn't be an excuse for imitating others.
The 'x' and 'j' conversion makes sense depending on how you look at it. Before the conversion, 'j' had the same sound as it has in most other languages (English, French and German for sure, probably others) and the 'x' had the Greek chi sound. Now we have the 'j' and the 'g' with that sound (which in some sounds overlap and there are only general rules as to usage) and the 'x' is now 'cs'.
Some of the
'Ç' had a sound similar to the 'z' in Italian or German which in most cases changed into the modern 'z' sound.
According to the Panamerican Doubt Dictionary (Diccionario panamérico de dudas), México is the recommended way to write the country name and the derived words as is the one used there and most if not all of southamerica. Méjico is an accepted form and used to be the normal way of writing in Spain.
Y/ll does indeed overlap in most places but some still use the pure 'll' sound. B/v are a remnant from Latin. There has never been a difference and both are pronounced 'b'. During the 18th Century reform, and effort was made to use whichever was used in the Latin form, but some words slipped so we now have more inconsistencies.
The 'h' at the beginning of words is kept mainly as a way to differenciate words and as a signal that there was something else there before. In English, you keep the 'k' in knock, kneee et al. In french you the circunflex accent (ê) where in the Latin form there was an 's' after it (Fenêtre - Fenestra).
It really depends on what you mean by successful. I still don't recognise the elimination of 'ch' and 'll' from the alphabet. 'rr' never really seemed like a real letter to me so I don't worry too much about that one.
Until not that long ago (maybe 12 years) Spanish had mostly a one letter one sound relation and no double letters. Now you have to explain about double letters and combinations.
Some other 'simplifications' I consider equally invalid though I can't really comment on those since they took place in the 15th and 18th century. The elimination of the 'ç' was due to the elimination of the sound which is understandable just like changing the beginning of some words to 'h' from 'f' as it had become mute. The one I consider the worst is the change to the letter 'x'.
In Greek and Cyrillic, the 'x' (or something that looks a lot like it) is used to represent the 'kh' sound, or 'hard k' (as the 'ch' in German Bach or the 'J' in Spanish Juan). This used to be the case in Spanish as well. Now we have that sound with two consonants which overlap at times and makes certain words a PITA to write. The 'x' in those words was either made an 's' or changed to one of the other 'hard k' sounds. The one exception is Mexico. It's still officially written with an 'x' keeping the old sound.
There are a few other cases, but I'll leave that for another day.
It's considered a `good' pastime now. Some time ago (during the dictatorship IIRC), children and priests weren't allowed to see it. That said, there are many people who consider bullfighting a brutal, especially due to what they do to make the bull half-crippled. This is illegal, but there are many who do it.
You shouldn't judge the complete population of a country by some stupid tradition they happen to have. Not everyone follows traditions, especially of certain kinds.
>hardcore linux users don't want proprietary drivers bundled with their OS, correct?
;)
No, well, they (we?) don't want it bundled with the OS, but that's secondary. The real reason is people don't want to stick some binary thing they can't see the source of into their precious kernel. You don't know what's in there. It's not just about Sony rootkit-like stuff, it's also about hard-to-detect off-by-one errors which can crash the computer and you can't see where it happened.
>is it illegal to make proprietary drivers? I don't believe it is,
It might be, it might not be. Only a judge can decide that. The problem here is what constitues a derivative work. The nVidida blob is the same for all OSs and only the glue is Linux-specific, so it's the only thing that needs to be GPL. This is a grey area however.
Most other drivers are indeed Linux-specific and constitute a derivative work (or not), so it'd need to be GPL. Modifying the existing kernel is clear-cut, but a module is considered by some to be mere aggregative work, so it doesn't have to be GPL.
Another problem is trust. I'm sure the nVidia engineers are very intelligent people, but anybody can make mistakes. I've had the PCI subsystem rendered useless by the driver, but there's no way for me to check where the problem is and possibly mend the mistake. This was whilst I was hacking on a reverse-engineered driver, so I got angry and decided not to use the binary driver again. The only problem I've noticed is not being able to use two monitors, though I'll probably fix that by sticking in another graphics card.
One further problem is making the driver work with a specific kernel. I usually run the latest -git, and the driver may not always compile or work properly. Even if it does, it's something else I need to remember to do when I compile the kernel. If it was in a state where it could be in the kernel, it would make testing kernels much easier.
Really, the main problem is the changing kernel API and ABI. Their OpenGL library is bigger than the rest of the kernel. They should just put it on a userspace library and make the kernel-side driver just initialize the device and pass the commands from the usespace library. That way, the system isn't brought down when there's a problem in the library and you could upgrade your driver just by restarting the X system, without needing to reboot! How cool is that
>Windows comes with some crappy generic nVidia drivers,
Does it? It my experience it comes with a generic VESA or VGA or whatever driver, so it works on all graphic boards, basically the same as most other OSs do.
With this Linux deplyment, I think that this is a reason itself to like Spain.
Well, the deployment is still just in a region. Here in Castilla y Leon, the president (of this region) has signed a contract with a certain Redmond-based company which produces monopolistic software to increase the availability of this software in this region (I can't remember the details, but I think you get the idea), while everyone and his dog around us are pushing out their regional GNU/Linux distros (Sarge in spanish whith minor mods).
What? You mean you didn't know they're using the enhanced 1.1 version? It now stands for M$ HugeText Transport Protocol, and that line is mandatory here. If not, the browser thinks the server is using one of the other OSs and will crash your computer for being naughty.
Or something like that.
As soon as I can afford to have one (maning having a static IP, a broadband connection, a domain, and a computer running 24/7) be sure I will.
Sadly, that will be a few years away. I hate being a kid, but then again, I hate growing up...
That worked very well for one of my Maths teachers. When he was travelling around Europe, in France we went to get a job and he said he was a geologist. ;-)
They sent him to Egypt and spent a couple of years secretly copying off the other geologist's journal. They agreed on everything