I don't call myself a 'linguaphile', snowgirl, I just quietly go through life with a PhD in linguistics. Also, your quote there has no bearing on anything. At all.
Is that the same kind of PhD that Ryan "Essjay" Jordan has? I can't tell because we're anonymous here. You have no idea what experience or education I have in linguistics either.
The quote I gave you is to point out that English lacks a consistent spelling system. FORGIVE ME for not being able to spell English accurately all the time anymore.
If you had listened to the text preceding the quote you would understand that I've learned a number of languages that don't have spell bees, because spelling their words out are guaranteed to be consistent, and have a much more accurate translation of phonemes to letters.
I mean, "linguIst" uses an "i", but "linguAphile" uses an "a"? They both pronounce as a schwa...
But then, of course you already know all this because you have a PhD in linguistics, right? Which makes me wonder... WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GETTING ON MY CASE FOR IF YOU ALREADY KNOW THIS SHIT?!
You can't be a linguaphile unless you can spell it. Sorry.
Sorry, I have learned far too many languages that have consistent and accurate spelling to figure out how to spell anything in English anymore.
If you were a linguaphile, you would know this.
In one of these studies, reported in Seymour et al.,[42] the word-reading accuracy of first-grade children of different European languages was measured. English children had an accuracy of just 40%, whereas among children of most other European languages accuracy was about 95%, with French and Danish children somewhere in the middle at about 75%; Danish and French are known to have an irregular pronunciation.
If you ever run out on snow stuff, here's a few more in Finnish: nuoska, kinos, nietos, hanki, tykky, viti, auhta, hÃrmÃ, hÃytÃkkÃ, kiti, kiuranne, nattura, utukka, rÃntÃ, sohjo, kohva, huove, kuura, siide, vuotos, hitva, pyry, tuisku. They don't all mean the same thing, but snow in it different forms.
I bet eskimos have more, but we get by with these.
the trouble with ditching x86 is finding someone who will spend the $$$$$$ to develop a more efficient processor knowing that it wont run windows.
I think the hardest thing to find is someone who will spend the $$$$$$ to develop a more efficient processor knowing that its been done before and each one "failed".
When last I heard, all intel's chips were risc with an x86 hardware interpreter tacked on.
Remove the interpreter?
Can't. The x86 chips now are CISC front-ends with interpreters to VLIW processors. VLIW = Very Large Instruction Word. With each instruction taking up 256-bit (let's say, the IW length on some of the Crusoe) you end up with 32-bytes per instruction. That makes for incredible space inefficiency for programs. Imagine office.exe itself took up 1GiB of memory on its own. ICK!
Newsflash. The naked lady on your notebook's desktop background? Not real - just a picture. Also - clit mouse? Not real clitoris. Neither your computer nor the woman in the photo feel anything when you fondle it.
Actually, since I am the girl in the photo on my background, she does feel something when I play with my clit mouse...
I hope you'll consider calling your next system "sneeuw", the Dutch word for snow.
Yes, I considered using sneeuw really early, and actually did use it shortly for an old PC machine before it stopped working. However, I never actually logged into it.
One group at JPMorgan had unix boxes named "Marx" (yes after Carl Marx) and "Bucky" (yes after Buckminster Fuller), and a slew of other Dead Utopian Philosophers.
Naturally the program that the group developed (in Visual Works Smalltalk with the Gemstone Object Database) for Trading Hybrid Derivatives is known as "Das Kapital"! Yes, it also has a start up screen with a picture of good old Carl Marx. This program trades and manages Trillions of Dollars of value (although the total value dropped recently due to, well, you know). But, was this program was likely part of the problem? Who knows?;--)
I should have known! IT WERE THE COMMIES! [/sarcasm]
> At my university NMSU, the CS department used alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, etc), which were changed to vehicles (cobra, stingray) over complaints from an incoming professor.
A server by any other name would smell as sweet?
I don't care about the smell... I want to get sloshed:( hehe
that sure beats the sol/luna/terra scheme I've seen everywhere else.
Oh, this reminds me, back at work I named my machines after astronomical objects in welsh. Lleuad, Gwener, and Mwarth is as far as I got. It was hard to refer anyone to one of my machines just by telling them the name, no one ever knew how to spell them. However, for me, the naming scheme was fun, and kept me interested at work.
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment. When your servers are named after wines, cheeses, and trees, who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum.
Well, the wines are build servers, the cheeses are webserver backends, and the trees are infrastructures... lol, sorry, being a bitch is so fun sometimes.
I did work at a job where we used acronyms to know what the computer was assigned for, but once you got past all of that, there was just a number for your team, and project. "Uh... which computer builds the x86fre version? 6? Oh, ok..." It required a map that was not just computer readable, but human readable.
Usually, it just ended up being team-specific knowledge that no one else knew. It was easy enough to know the prefix down to your stuff, it was regular, which just required a simple arbitrary map of numbers to purpose... what would be the difference between that and cheeses, wines, or trees?
Just like my user name, I decided to go with the word "snow" in various languages. So far, I have my router chioni, server nix, desktop losse, and various other names for components. My wii is yuki, my xbox 360 is xue, my ipod touch is lumi. Beyond that I've also used "eira" and "schnee".
At my university NMSU, the CS department used alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, etc), which were changed to vehicles (cobra, stingray) over complaints from an incoming professor. The sunrays were "bear" in various languages (oso, medved, ursa), and later they had words from the hacker's dictionary (foo, bar, baz, frob)
The naming schemes all were easily memorable, and prompted word associations, making them easy to mentally group. Ok, except the translations for bears, (and mine for snow) except for fellow crazy polyglots, and linguiphiles.
The origional Unreal and Half Life were 2 others that also worked under WINE perfectly back in the day too. Unreal Tournament and Quake II & III had Linux binaries as well. The FPS genre did quite well under Linux in the 90's
Oh yeah. I was playing all the games that our LAN party played on Linux, while everyone else was using Windows. Well, except the one who ran OSX.
These kids didn't do anything wrong. They're teens, they're full of hormones, and they're going to have sex with each other. And it's not the state or federal government's place to stop them. This has gotten far out of hand when 15 year olds willfully showing their bodies to 16 year olds can be prosecuted as child porn.
You OBVIOUSLY haven't heard about the success of abstinence-only education. Kids aren't having sex anymore, unless they're filthy nasty perverts!
I'm sorry but if you think that a guy that loves everything young with boobs is a pedophile, you might need to look at Wikipedia for the actual definition of a pedophile. Worst case we are talking about Ephebophilia which is actually an extremely healthy thing.
Not so often these days. Doesn't matter though, since I'm using OS X which supports Emacs shortcuts natively in all apps, so I'm constantly using them instead of moving my fingers to the cursor keys.
I don't know what you're are doing with your keyboard but I edit as often as I type and moving my hand to and from the home position again and again kills speed like nothing else. Hitting Control-b instead of arrow-left is much faster and easier...
Since editing and typing has fairly reasonable temporal locality, I've either entering text, or editing... moving my fingers away to the arrow keys isn't a big deal because I've doing other stuff. Anyways, usually, my editing involves start entering text at the beginning or the ending, both of those are Shift-i, and Shift-a respectively.
My point was you talking about chording. VI avoids chording, while Emacs promotes.
Although, I'm _SO_ with you on being able to Ctl-A and Ctl-E in order to move my cursor around! Yay for OSX!
Wow... I don't think I've seen the argument put more succinctly. It's like the ID folks, that don't actually propose anything better... or even conduct their own experiments. Just point out the flaws in the other person's argument, and since you've set up a false dichotomy, the only correct answer is then "ID is correct" or "the free market chose the right layout."
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages...Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.
Totally agreed. Actually, I type a lot in both English and German, and so I end up using the QWERTY-like setup of QWERTZUIOP from the German keyboard. Of course, this gives me three keys that I rarely ever hit: Ã-ÃÃoe, but meh, I'm pretty used to it now.
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers.
You use Emacs don't you?
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Yeah, only someone using Emacs would suggest this sort of thing.
Do you propose changing the layout completely between languages
I don't understand... I thought French used a non-QWERTY layout? So how would a different flavor of Dvorak be any different? English and French keyboards are different now, and they would still be different if we used our respective Dvorak flavors. I found two French Dvorak layouts by Googling: here and here.
French uses a non QWERTY layout in the sense that it uses an AZERTY layout. The meat of a QWERTY-style keyboard is still the same as the English QWERTY keyboard, even if some letters have been rearranged for some reason or another.
The German keyboard is what I call a QWERTZUIOP keyboard... since the entire top row can be turned into a pseudo-word, lol. Plus, German words are longer...:)
The only difference between the German keyboard and the EN-US keyboard besides punctuation and extra letters is the Y and Z, which are swapped. All of the other letters are in exactly the same spot.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this not an allotrope? I'm not a chemist so excuse me if the answer seems obvious to those with a better understanding.
That's exactly what I was wondering. The title made me wonder "what? graphite? diamonds?"
I don't call myself a 'linguaphile', snowgirl, I just quietly go through life with a PhD in linguistics. Also, your quote there has no bearing on anything. At all.
Is that the same kind of PhD that Ryan "Essjay" Jordan has? I can't tell because we're anonymous here. You have no idea what experience or education I have in linguistics either.
The quote I gave you is to point out that English lacks a consistent spelling system. FORGIVE ME for not being able to spell English accurately all the time anymore.
If you had listened to the text preceding the quote you would understand that I've learned a number of languages that don't have spell bees, because spelling their words out are guaranteed to be consistent, and have a much more accurate translation of phonemes to letters.
I mean, "linguIst" uses an "i", but "linguAphile" uses an "a"? They both pronounce as a schwa...
But then, of course you already know all this because you have a PhD in linguistics, right? Which makes me wonder... WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GETTING ON MY CASE FOR IF YOU ALREADY KNOW THIS SHIT?!
You can't be a linguaphile unless you can spell it. Sorry.
Sorry, I have learned far too many languages that have consistent and accurate spelling to figure out how to spell anything in English anymore.
If you were a linguaphile, you would know this.
In one of these studies, reported in Seymour et al.,[42] the word-reading accuracy of first-grade children of different European languages was measured. English children had an accuracy of just 40%, whereas among children of most other European languages accuracy was about 95%, with French and Danish children somewhere in the middle at about 75%; Danish and French are known to have an irregular pronunciation.
So... do you actually have something named "snow"?
I reject English.
If you ever run out on snow stuff, here's a few more in Finnish: nuoska, kinos, nietos, hanki, tykky, viti, auhta, hÃrmÃ, hÃytÃkkÃ, kiti, kiuranne, nattura, utukka, rÃntÃ, sohjo, kohva, huove, kuura, siide, vuotos, hitva, pyry, tuisku.
They don't all mean the same thing, but snow in it different forms.
I bet eskimos have more, but we get by with these.
Dial http://www.kotus.fi/index.phtml?s=278 for more.
Eskimo has an infinite number of words for "snow"... although they have the same number of words for "skyscraper"... they're polysynthetic.
the trouble with ditching x86 is finding someone who will spend the $$$$$$ to develop a more efficient processor knowing that it wont run windows.
I think the hardest thing to find is someone who will spend the $$$$$$ to develop a more efficient processor knowing that its been done before and each one "failed".
True each one has their own little niché market. ARM in embedded and PowerPC uh.... well, losing ground to ARM...
When last I heard, all intel's chips were risc with an x86 hardware interpreter tacked on.
Remove the interpreter?
Can't. The x86 chips now are CISC front-ends with interpreters to VLIW processors. VLIW = Very Large Instruction Word. With each instruction taking up 256-bit (let's say, the IW length on some of the Crusoe) you end up with 32-bytes per instruction. That makes for incredible space inefficiency for programs. Imagine office.exe itself took up 1GiB of memory on its own. ICK!
That's fine, I'll be your egg shield :)
My mistake...
YOU CAN'T BE POLITE! This is SLASHDOT!
I want to watch my flamewar. :(
Newsflash.
The naked lady on your notebook's desktop background? Not real - just a picture.
Also - clit mouse? Not real clitoris.
Neither your computer nor the woman in the photo feel anything when you fondle it.
Actually, since I am the girl in the photo on my background, she does feel something when I play with my clit mouse...
I hope you'll consider calling your next system "sneeuw", the Dutch word for snow.
Yes, I considered using sneeuw really early, and actually did use it shortly for an old PC machine before it stopped working. However, I never actually logged into it.
I promise my next sneeuw will actually be used. :)
One group at JPMorgan had unix boxes named "Marx" (yes after Carl Marx) and "Bucky" (yes after Buckminster Fuller), and a slew of other Dead Utopian Philosophers.
Naturally the program that the group developed (in Visual Works Smalltalk with the Gemstone Object Database) for Trading Hybrid Derivatives is known as "Das Kapital"! Yes, it also has a start up screen with a picture of good old Carl Marx. This program trades and manages Trillions of Dollars of value (although the total value dropped recently due to, well, you know). But, was this program was likely part of the problem? Who knows? ;--)
I should have known! IT WERE THE COMMIES! [/sarcasm]
> At my university NMSU, the CS department used alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, etc), which were changed to vehicles (cobra, stingray) over complaints from an incoming professor.
A server by any other name would smell as sweet?
I don't care about the smell... I want to get sloshed :( hehe
UQM ftw.
that sure beats the sol/luna/terra scheme I've seen everywhere else.
Oh, this reminds me, back at work I named my machines after astronomical objects in welsh. Lleuad, Gwener, and Mwarth is as far as I got. It was hard to refer anyone to one of my machines just by telling them the name, no one ever knew how to spell them. However, for me, the naming scheme was fun, and kept me interested at work.
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment. When your servers are named after wines, cheeses, and trees, who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum.
Well, the wines are build servers, the cheeses are webserver backends, and the trees are infrastructures... lol, sorry, being a bitch is so fun sometimes.
I did work at a job where we used acronyms to know what the computer was assigned for, but once you got past all of that, there was just a number for your team, and project. "Uh... which computer builds the x86fre version? 6? Oh, ok..." It required a map that was not just computer readable, but human readable.
Usually, it just ended up being team-specific knowledge that no one else knew. It was easy enough to know the prefix down to your stuff, it was regular, which just required a simple arbitrary map of numbers to purpose... what would be the difference between that and cheeses, wines, or trees?
Just like my user name, I decided to go with the word "snow" in various languages. So far, I have my router chioni, server nix, desktop losse, and various other names for components. My wii is yuki, my xbox 360 is xue, my ipod touch is lumi. Beyond that I've also used "eira" and "schnee".
At my university NMSU, the CS department used alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, etc), which were changed to vehicles (cobra, stingray) over complaints from an incoming professor. The sunrays were "bear" in various languages (oso, medved, ursa), and later they had words from the hacker's dictionary (foo, bar, baz, frob)
The naming schemes all were easily memorable, and prompted word associations, making them easy to mentally group. Ok, except the translations for bears, (and mine for snow) except for fellow crazy polyglots, and linguiphiles.
The origional Unreal and Half Life were 2 others that also worked under WINE perfectly back in the day too. Unreal Tournament and Quake II & III had Linux binaries as well. The FPS genre did quite well under Linux in the 90's
Oh yeah. I was playing all the games that our LAN party played on Linux, while everyone else was using Windows. Well, except the one who ran OSX.
Just do the Windows install under WINE, still works flawlessly for me
God, I was running Starcraft in WINE way back when it was a super popular game such that that everyone in America was still playing it.
I think it was one of the first games they ever worked on getting working with WINE.
These kids didn't do anything wrong. They're teens, they're full of hormones, and they're going to have sex with each other. And it's not the state or federal government's place to stop them. This has gotten far out of hand when 15 year olds willfully showing their bodies to 16 year olds can be prosecuted as child porn.
You OBVIOUSLY haven't heard about the success of abstinence-only education. Kids aren't having sex anymore, unless they're filthy nasty perverts!
I'm sorry but if you think that a guy that loves everything young with boobs is a pedophile, you might need to look at Wikipedia for the actual definition of a pedophile. Worst case we are talking about Ephebophilia which is actually an extremely healthy thing.
And I thought I read too much wikipedia....
Not so often these days. Doesn't matter though, since I'm using OS X which supports Emacs shortcuts natively in all apps, so I'm constantly using them instead of moving my fingers to the cursor keys.
I don't know what you're are doing with your keyboard but I edit as often as I type and moving my hand to and from the home position again and again kills speed like nothing else. Hitting Control-b instead of arrow-left is much faster and easier...
Since editing and typing has fairly reasonable temporal locality, I've either entering text, or editing... moving my fingers away to the arrow keys isn't a big deal because I've doing other stuff. Anyways, usually, my editing involves start entering text at the beginning or the ending, both of those are Shift-i, and Shift-a respectively.
My point was you talking about chording. VI avoids chording, while Emacs promotes.
Although, I'm _SO_ with you on being able to Ctl-A and Ctl-E in order to move my cursor around! Yay for OSX!
Wow... I don't think I've seen the argument put more succinctly. It's like the ID folks, that don't actually propose anything better... or even conduct their own experiments. Just point out the flaws in the other person's argument, and since you've set up a false dichotomy, the only correct answer is then "ID is correct" or "the free market chose the right layout."
... WTF doesn't Slashdot understand UTF-8 input?
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages. ..Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.
Totally agreed. Actually, I type a lot in both English and German, and so I end up using the QWERTY-like setup of QWERTZUIOP from the German keyboard. Of course, this gives me three keys that I rarely ever hit: Ã-ÃÃoe, but meh, I'm pretty used to it now.
When I was using Swedish English and German a lot all together, I was actually using the Swedish keyboard, since the Ãoe was easier to type on the Swedish keyboard than the Ã... on the German. But now I'm on a Mac, an Ã... is just Opt-Shift-A, and the much more common use of German over Swedish won me over. It's also nice having the  ` and ^ deadkeys available for all the romance languages. I can actually talk about resumés, and fiancés appropriately.
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers.
You use Emacs don't you?
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Yeah, only someone using Emacs would suggest this sort of thing.
ESC-:wq
Do you propose changing the layout completely between languages
I don't understand... I thought French used a non-QWERTY layout? So how would a different flavor of Dvorak be any different? English and French keyboards are different now, and they would still be different if we used our respective Dvorak flavors. I found two French Dvorak layouts by Googling: here and here.
French uses a non QWERTY layout in the sense that it uses an AZERTY layout. The meat of a QWERTY-style keyboard is still the same as the English QWERTY keyboard, even if some letters have been rearranged for some reason or another.
The German keyboard is what I call a QWERTZUIOP keyboard... since the entire top row can be turned into a pseudo-word, lol. Plus, German words are longer... :)
The only difference between the German keyboard and the EN-US keyboard besides punctuation and extra letters is the Y and Z, which are swapped. All of the other letters are in exactly the same spot.