There are reasons why Russians want a cyrillic.rf domain, and it has nothing to do with who's got control.
1. Imagine the Internet has been developed in China and you have to enter all URLs in Chinese characters. Well, that's how it currently feels to a lot of Russians right now.
2. There is a problem in simply allowing cyrillics in the.ru domain because of the possibilities for phishing. Consider 'paypal.ru': any of the first five letters in 'paypal' could be substituted with absolutely identically looking cyrillic letters. That makes 2^5 = 32 possible domain names that all look the same but potentially resolve to different addresses; maintaining all such domains to avoid fishing may not be an option for small businesses, let alone individuals.
3. You could of course impose some restrictions on how one can mix cyrillics and latin in the same domain name; indeed, you could allow only one script in a domain name. But there are two problems still: a) spoken communication and b) layout switching. a: When someone says "go to image dot ru", it won't be unclear if they mean the domain name in cyrillics or in latin. b: Russians use two separate keyboard layout for cyrillics and latin. To type an URL that starts with cyrillcs and ends in the latin suffix, you'll have to switch the keyboard layout midway (normally the Alt-Shift keyboard shortcut, but the less tech-savvy ones have to use the mouse!)
4. An cyrillic.rf TLD solves all this elegantly: when someone says "image dot rf", it is obvious they expect you to type cyrillics; the entire url is in cyrillics so you don't have to change the keyboard layout. (The.rf will be in cyrillics of course; see this to get an idea how it looks)
Call me an insensitive clod or anything, but I laughed long and hard when I read TFA. You really should've received all that American English Center spam to understand how much people hate them.
When legislation and technology is incapable of stopping spam, there are old and simple methods to shut up the spammer. Dead simple.
Of course this murder doesn't really have to be related to the spammer's activities, but I got my satisfaction nevertheless.
Well, yeah, sure the yes/no and ok/cancel type of dialogs should go away. In fact I believe a simultaneous transition to sensible button labels and HIG button order (and the new looks, of course) will be a lot easier than if they were to do the transition in small steps - say, only change the button order.
There are certainly people at Microsoft who realize that the current interface is flawed in many aspects, but those who make decisions are afraid of doing something that will shy away the users and make the transition to Longhorn longer and harder. (Which is not necessarily true; seeing how Longhorn severely lacks innovation, new interface concepts could help Microsoft hype Longhorn as "the most innovative version of Windows since Windows 95" blah blah blah, you see what I mean). Maybe they're just afraid of putting their cash cows at risk.
They go on sticking to the bad old concepts. Desktop is the top level of namespace hierarchy, above Computer? OK is still on the left, Cancel on the right?
It's no new generation of operating systems, it's a Windows XP with a new theme and some transparency and shadows here and there.
It looks like all Microsoft's money can't buy talented people these days.
Possessive its has no apostrophe, you, erm, damned person with an intellectual impairment. How many visitors a day again and you idiots still can't hire an editor?
(c) tehdely & tezbobobo
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by the info on your website, you are reasonably successful in life despite your poor memory. What's your secret?
Does it have the option to show the date and time when the message was received, and sort messages accodring to that and *not* the "sent" timestamp?
It would be much more useful to allow non-ASCII characters in the identifier names.
As it is now, if you look at a program written by Russians, it'll usually be a mix of transliterated Russian and bad English.
There doesn't seem to be a Russian equivalent to Slashdot. (slashzone.ru was a good try, but it never became popular and is sorta abandoned now)
There are reasons why Russians want a cyrillic .rf domain, and it has nothing to do with who's got control.
.ru domain because of the possibilities for phishing. Consider 'paypal.ru': any of the first five letters in 'paypal' could be substituted with absolutely identically looking cyrillic letters. That makes 2^5 = 32 possible domain names that all look the same but potentially resolve to different addresses; maintaining all such domains to avoid fishing may not be an option for small businesses, let alone individuals.
.rf TLD solves all this elegantly: when someone says "image dot rf", it is obvious they expect you to type cyrillics; the entire url is in cyrillics so you don't have to change the keyboard layout. (The .rf will be in cyrillics of course; see this to get an idea how it looks)
1. Imagine the Internet has been developed in China and you have to enter all URLs in Chinese characters. Well, that's how it currently feels to a lot of Russians right now.
2. There is a problem in simply allowing cyrillics in the
3. You could of course impose some restrictions on how one can mix cyrillics and latin in the same domain name; indeed, you could allow only one script in a domain name. But there are two problems still: a) spoken communication and b) layout switching. a: When someone says "go to image dot ru", it won't be unclear if they mean the domain name in cyrillics or in latin. b: Russians use two separate keyboard layout for cyrillics and latin. To type an URL that starts with cyrillcs and ends in the latin suffix, you'll have to switch the keyboard layout midway (normally the Alt-Shift keyboard shortcut, but the less tech-savvy ones have to use the mouse!)
4. An cyrillic
to us
duh
Hey but you guys drive on the left, WTF?
The word is written with an a:
separately
Yeah, for an affordable price of $200,000?
They got the dimensions and colors about right, but the should've made it a penguin
Can you have sex with it?
I'm sure we can raise $50m for a one-way ticket pretty quickly
Thanks.
Call me an insensitive clod or anything, but I laughed long and hard when I read TFA. You really should've received all that American English Center spam to understand how much people hate them.
When legislation and technology is incapable of stopping spam, there are old and simple methods to shut up the spammer. Dead simple.
Of course this murder doesn't really have to be related to the spammer's activities, but I got my satisfaction nevertheless.
Well, yeah, sure the yes/no and ok/cancel type of dialogs should go away. In fact I believe a simultaneous transition to sensible button labels and HIG button order (and the new looks, of course) will be a lot easier than if they were to do the transition in small steps - say, only change the button order.
There are certainly people at Microsoft who realize that the current interface is flawed in many aspects, but those who make decisions are afraid of doing something that will shy away the users and make the transition to Longhorn longer and harder. (Which is not necessarily true; seeing how Longhorn severely lacks innovation, new interface concepts could help Microsoft hype Longhorn as "the most innovative version of Windows since Windows 95" blah blah blah, you see what I mean). Maybe they're just afraid of putting their cash cows at risk.
Usability experts tend to believe that reverse order is more intuitive and faster.
b ruary/msg00317.html
As seen on the Macs and in GNOME. More about GNOME's decision to go the Apple way here : http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-Fe
They go on sticking to the bad old concepts. Desktop is the top level of namespace hierarchy, above Computer? OK is still on the left, Cancel on the right?
It's no new generation of operating systems, it's a Windows XP with a new theme and some transparency and shadows here and there.
It looks like all Microsoft's money can't buy talented people these days.
My home phone number is 555-7733, and yes it's real. Moscow, Russia.
Few, oh so few slashdotters can figure out the country and city code so I'm not afraid of posting it here.
Wtf man, GTK2 interface but Windows button order? Get a clue
Been using DVORAK for half a year before and loved it.
My conclusion: go for it unless you're a sysadmin kind of a guy who needs to type on other people's computers pretty often.
I just found myself being constantly pissed off every time I needed the context switch to dvorak and back to qwerty.
Possessive its has no apostrophe, you, erm, damned person with an intellectual impairment. How many visitors a day again and you idiots still can't hire an editor? (c) tehdely & tezbobobo
Open up Safari? OMG you're a reta^W^Wan average slashdot user, that's ok...
Mod parent up!
But in a couple hours, another slashdot article will read "Russian hackers best in the world"