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Obviously Max Payne 1 & 2 nuff said

I know it's not about the browser settings, I've been through them many times, and the same thing occurs with Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Wyz. This seems to make a difference, although I'd rather that it changed the search into a Finnish one, when now the results are English, not a bad choise though. And the problem is, google's not the only thing thinking I'm German

Thanks a bunch guys.

Sinsin: I am aware of such option, and it's already set for Finland, which is where I am, but it stills thinks I'm German and want to browse German sites. Sigh, I can't even open English versions of the Microsoft sites because my computer thinks I'm German, and won't give me an option.

Hello dear forum,

I turn to you again on a stupid question, mainly because it should be obvious but isn't:

I bought a Dell laptop with a Windows 7 in it, which it installed immediately at startup, and set my location to Germany by default, since that's where I bought it.

I can't change my location, and this makes stuff like googling hell (I can't find any English or Finnish sites).

I heard I'd have to install Windows again anew, but I didn't get an install CD. I'm asking if you knew where I could find a bootable one. Windows 7 lets me return to the last functioning point and set to factory defaults, but all these points are *after* the installation, and what I need is a thorough format.

The MS site offers a solution if I have the CD, but doesn't say how to get it. So if anyone had an .iso or at least an idea or something. It seems all the threads I can find are at least a year old and offer no answers...

This game came out at a perfect time, I really needed the break from the suffocating reality. I can't say I quite remembered the story that happened in episodes 1-7, but I must say this left me a bit cold. Don't get me wrong, I did like it and I did enjoy it, but there's a thing to BJ games that kind of bugs me, well, aside from the supernatural things.

Spoiler

First of all, the vampire theme is a bit of a cliche already, isn't it?

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Spoiler

secondly, Jones's story seemed a bit out of the place, and required too much attention from the main plot line, which seemed a bit hollow and empty. What I mean is, I couldn't quite figure which one was the main plot, which one was more important, and how did they come together. It was like two different plots, or even games, and the BJ-story suffered from the "forced paranormality" that the Jones-story was.

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Sorry if I sound strange, it's been a while since I last wrote English, and I've got a lot in my mind at the moment.

I suppose all you'd need is to go to the profile editor, where it tells you the maximum sizes and such of signatures and/or avatars. Other than that I don't think we can require more than common sense in the "content" of whatever you choose as your signature or avatar. About a special place for those rules, I can't help you, sry.

It's simply, there's a tradiotional joke structure you need to know first, one that compares a Finn, a Swede and a Norwegian. For instance, a Finn, a Norwegian and a Swede had a competition, who could stay longest in sauna. The Norwegian came out in 10 minutes, the Swede in 15 minutes. When after 2 hours the Finn was still inside, they shouted: "You can come out now, you've already won!" The Finn answered: "I would have already, but my balls are stuck between the planks!".

Yes, I know, not really funny, but the kids like them. The one I'm talking about is something like: A Finn, a Swede and a Norwegian go to an island. The Norwegian shoots everybody.

Yes, I thought it was funny, but was afraid to laugh. The fact that it's politically incorrect makes it funny a bit. It also isn't like the original ones, where the story keeps you waiting for the high point until the end, but it's cut short after one quick sentence, to everyone's surprise. So the joke's pretty much the fact, that there is no joke. Also, you can pretty much imagine, that the Finn usually ends up being the cunning one, that wins.

I too was just about to ask what's a rape joke? A joke that's rape related? A joke's a joke, some are funny, some not. It seems as if there's a lot of internet peer pressure that comes with these and the dead babies: basically you have to find them funny or else you're posh or a whiney kid. The problem is, most of it isn't even good, I mean, funny. If a joke is funny, people will laugh.

For instance, there's a joke about the island shootings in Norway, around half of my friends found it funny, the other half didn't, and they have a right not to

Obviously my studies have made me a purist, not probably a good thing, but I guess it's because language is to me a goal and not a mean anymore. How sad

Also it's true, I'm quite aware of people writing in a non-native language, I actually wrote my bachelor's on mirgant-literature as a part of the German culture of bildungsroman and such. It sucked, but at least I finished it

Hey,

I don't suppose any of you know a good way of finding out (quickly) which of my audio files are corrupt and which ones not? It seems, that when my computer broke down, not only did I lose 30% of my files, but thatthe ones I had backupped seem to be corrupted in one way or another now that I transferred them from my external HD to my new laptop. What happens is that, well, Winamp has a lot of difficulties playing some tracks, all being just plain mp3. The sound it makes is like a cd jumping from one place to another, and playing the same song from random positions. At the same time some songs just don't play.

I'd just like to make some inventory, fixing them is not necessary, although might be nice. After all, I've got everything on CDs, but ripping them on my laptop is such a bore.

Anyway, thanks.

And this I find to be a real problem

I'm thinking, do I want to go there, since I should be studying for my test and forum discussions are not really something I'd be interested in nowadays.

a language is created by man, and there's usually no rules to follow, the only way to learn one is to speak one for all your life.

No spoken language was created according to any rules, but has developed into something, that follows certain repeating phenomena, which we call rules. But all of these "rules" have just as many exceptions and I would never call them rules but guidelines at best. And yes, a native most often does not speak correct written language, but foreign speaker might. This does not mean the foreign speaker is as good at the language as the native, he's basically got the grips of the guidelines but lacks the skills of creating his own personality through what he is saying.

You can't really translate a text from one language to another because the whole ideas that the words represent are always different. Basically it's all about analysing the original text and writing down the interpretation.

... and we call that: translating! Of course you can't just take each word in one language and look up what word to replace it with in another language. No one thinks that.

Agreed, and this seems to be a big problem with computer translation.

While the whole academic community seems to have abandoned the idea of translating with a computer,

Eh? I'm on the same corridor as a computer linguistics department, and I can assure you based on the research posters they hang up (I remember one in particular that was looking at Swedish TV subtitles) that academic researchers are still working on computer translation.  Besides, computer translation plays an increasingly important role in the real world, with tools like Google Translate (including on YouTube subtitles) and Word Lens for the general public, and special apps e.g. for soldiers in Iraq.

What I meant by the academic community is not the same what you're referring to as Google or Word Lens, which two are obviously products of companies rather than university research. Anyway, the fact that a computer translation can never be correct renders the whole area of study useless, which is why it's been mostly abandoned. But as said, this polish researcher for example never gave up. And who knows when it'll come back. It just doesn't happen now with what we've got.

it would have worked if it weren't for all the exception and the fact that "there are as many languages as there are speakers". Meaning we all have our sociolects etc, children speak differently, everyone has a different register when speaking to his boss or his brother or best friend etc.

So how can people communicate at all, then?

Do you not understand any other languages than your own or even any dialects of your native language? Speak with a child about politics and you'll see what I mean. at the same time, it's easy to spot social classes from each other through word usage and pronounciation, and a lot of people choose their company according to what and how they speak, be it, that they all use the same guidelines and grammar.

Let's be clear on what the goal is here. A working computer translator will not be able to translate absolutely everything with 100% correctness. People don't always understand each other, and some things are "untranslatable", e.g. puns, rhymes, deliberate ambiguities, or allusions. But let's not exaggerate either. Those are the exceptions. In practice, most of what people write will be comprehended by other speakers of the same source language, and in most cases there is a sentence in the target language that represents a good translation of it.

Of course most of it is understandable, seeing as the original text is most often available. But a translation is worthless if it doesn't give out the exact message the original one would, and by this I mean translating literature, not separate sentences of correct grammar. At this point that does not happen. Translating from English and German into Finnish for example it's not uncommon, that you have to replace one sentence with several that explain the meaning of each conjunction or reference. Before that the sentence is incomprehensible, and a computer program does not, so far, know which parts of a sentence or a phrase are difficult to understand and locate and which indeed need more explanation. There are so many different kinds of languages, and I'm usually talking about literature, but for example law-texts are pretty much created to be understood exactly the way they are, and in their case a computer translation in my opinion would be very applicable (sadly about 70% of transaltors work on that field).

One of the big challenges is that a lot of perfectly clear sentences rely on semantic disambiguation. In other words, on people understanding the meaning of the sentence. (A not-so perfectly clear example of a sentence that is grammatically ambiguous and can only be resolved semantically - with effort, because it's deliberately confusing - would be the old "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.") This is hard for a computer: you can see Google Translate choking on even simple things like using the gender-appropriate pronoun depending on the name in sentences like "Lisa gillar inte sin chef" ("Lisa doesn't like her boss"; Google gives "his boss").

Getting a computer to be able to do semantic disambiguation at the level of a human would pretty much require creating a human-level AI, but that doesn't mean we can't do better than the current performance. Apple's Siri assistant is able to use context to disambiguate a lot of commands and queries that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. And just last week, I heard a talk by one of the IBM guys who'd worked on Watson (the Jeopardy-playing computer). A lot of the work on Watson was on how to interpret the meaning of questions, and they made huge advances over the previous state of the art. One of the possible applications they have in mind for the technology is computer translation.

Exactly the problem I and a lot of linguists see with computers. How Siri and Google translate work is that they create a text corpus with a search option for worth pairs or triplets (probably more) that appear together more often and basically use statistical analysis to choose which words & meanings to apply. Pretty much the same as the human brain actually, a lot of people take in sentences and words from say, tv. And this is interesting. The problem is, when running a "Type A" study like this, you only need one corpus that gives you the possible variables, but doesn't go any further than the list it has created by itself. And to be frank I believe, but I don't know for sure, if Google (for example) uses a comparative corpus (or many) to run a "Type B" study with different variations, aka types of texts. But in this case one would have to choose the category of the input while translating, to choose which comparative corpus to use.

Yes, Swedish has a lot of English words, mainly nouns, but that's about it. Swedish into Danish, Norwegian and maybe even German might work better because they're both germanic languages.

For the record, English is also a Germanic language. And in the big scheme of things (meaning compared to, say, Arabic or Chinese), Swedish has a lot more in common with English than just a few words.

Yes, what I meant was Swedish and German are closer to each other because of all the influence of other languages to the English language, for example the abusive amount of words and romanic languages, umm, I could see there being lots of problems with for example word compounding for instance. Not to mention my language, where the grammar isn't even realtively close to anything

Of course, the focus of efforts is on modern texts rather than archaic ones. It's OK if a Swedish-English computer translation service has trouble with Bellman or Shakespeare. We're not going to have computer systems where you can just feed it Dante in medieval Italian and it will give you a perfect poetic rendering in any language of your choice. Or any work of literature, for that matter. You need a good writer with a good ear to figure out what works and what doesn't, how best to phrase something. A computer won't do that for you. What it can do is provide a "mostly" readable, understandable and correct version of texts if they aren't too obscure.

The problem with texts that I usually handle is that it's not enough, that you can "mostly" read it. with law, and interpretation is of course always possible after a lousy translation, at linguistics your essay would be thrown into garbage, and imagine an engineer getting instructions for building a bridge translated with Google translator. My sister actually had this problem a month or so ago. She's working on he PhD and needed to quote a German text about composites and metals working together, having to quote it in English, but the whole shit was never translated, so we worked really hard to find the correct nails and weldings and whatever together. This, though isn't of course enough because I'm not a lisenced translator. (thank god)
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The whole idea of computer translation intrigues me. Yes, it would take my job from me, but at the same time, it'd be a great breakthrough in linguistics. The problem is, that a language is created by a man, and there's usually no rules to follow, the only way to learn one is to speak one for all your life. You can't really translate a text from one language to another because the whole ideas that the words represent are always different. Basically it's all about analysing the original text and writing down the interpretation.

Now I went to a symposium at our university to listen to an interesting presentation held by a polish researcher, can't quite remember his name though. While the whole academic community seems to have abandoned the idea of translating with a computer, this guy suggested, that a common language was created from all the languages, or the major language families in the world. Now someone asked if he'd count Esperanto as such, but the problem with that was that it was created to be pronounced and not read. Anyway, I suppose he was kind of a programmer trying to find a method to change one language into another, and it would have worked if it weren't for all the exception and the fact that "there are as many languages as there are speakers". Meaning we all have our sociolects etc, children speak differently, everyone has a different register when speaking to his boss or his brother or best friend etc.

A translation from Swedish to English would be extremely difficult to accomplish seeing as how they're two completely different languages. Yes, Swedish has a lot of English words, mainly nouns, but that's about it. Swedish into Danish, Norwegian and maybe even German might work better because they're both germanic languages. But again, there's too many differences. What you would have to do was to change the original input into one that's completely correct in syntax, with most common words in one language/dilect, then the output would be most correct (minimum of possibilities for misinterpretations etc), perhaps even with no syntax error if the program was good, but in the end, you'd have to change it into fuent language, and at this point instead of translating a sentence, you'd have translated the sentence 3-4 times. To pick the correct synonym the program would have to analyse the time the original text was written, the writer and his texts, probably his age and previous works, and hit in a rng to just match up to the human mind.

I don't know who designed the toilets to be separate to begin with, the men or the women, but I can see both sides being uncomfortable with others around. And it's not just something they've learned(sp) in their own toilets, but... well, I remember reading a "pooping" board at the forum of a Finnish baby-magazine. It's actually a great source of fun, but anyway, you'd be surprised to know the amount of women who are arfaid to take a shit when there's someone in the room or behind the door. There was a whole discussion about how to shit without making a sound etc. I'll say let them have their and us ours.

Hey guys.

Any idea how to get an internet radio lag like 2-3 seconds?

I'm trying to watch a video (sports) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfbL-epgjmU but the narrator is awful. So there's a free radio stream too, but it's 2-3 seconds ahead. Soo... if you know. Is this kind of thing even possible?

-Tuomas--

When was I last here? What happened to the place?

Anyway, it seems you're doing something I do fancy, so yeah, I shall list the last few books I've read.

Been in Berlin lately studying German literature, so I've basically went through a collection of Short stories + Amerika from Franz Kafka. At the moment I'm doing two courses of Thomas Mann, essays, short stories and novels, having read Der Zauberberg and Buddenbrooks. And umm, well there's Nathan der Weise from Lessing, which is basically a drama, but I read it so meh. And I've been through Goethes and Heinrich Heines poems. Oh 2 books for my bachelors from Yade Kara, one being Selam Berlin and the other one Cafe Cyprus.

That with the transaltion work I do with R.A. Salvatore, I guess it's not such a wonder I haven't been around for a while, is it?

I'm well aware that these aren't good background screens for interacting. Remember, that wasn't the point of this post. The point was just to see if the art style could work well for a game.

I'm sorry if my answer got lost in between the rhetoric I tried to answer your question best I could, but I also thought I'd give you something to think about when choosing the actual images for the backgrounds. I gave my opinion on the filtered photos, and it hasn't changed, and then I tried to give examples as to how these images could still be used. Seeing as how you didn't have any ready-made backgrounds, I couldn't comment on them and thought I'd point out what should/could be done if you went a long with a filter like this. Obviously it's going to be hard, and I think Anian proved my 1st point

If I'd have to figure out something new to say, I'd probably recommend, that you found something relatively background-like in the way that you yourself see your game and then fool around with it. Then you'll see if the style really is the one you want.

Well first of all everyone even a bit acquainted with photoshop would know they're filtered photos. If that doesn't bother you, then go for it. I mean, why spend time learning how to draw imaginary landscapes when you can have real ones.

These backgrounds look like they'd work for a cut-scene, but if you want to use them for playing, you'd probably like to get images of places where there's something to do. Basically what I personally hate are KQ-type screens where the only hotspot is a flower. when finding your style, consider how to make the characters and the objects visible in a style similar to the background so that they wouldn't stand out too much, but enough to be recognisable. For instance the 2nd photo has no walkable area or a detail to be touched, it's merely a scene through a window, a nice one at that. The 1st might work as a pass through scenario with perhaps a person sitting on the bench, but not a lot could happen here imo.

Just as bad as any fundamentalist. At least they might make it so, that polygamy became legal in the states I see nothing wrong with being a mormon, seeing as how you're always going to get an overly religious freak there with God making his decisions in his stead.

Seeing as how most big sites already have mobile versions, youtube included, that would seem a bit daft. I guess it's for elderly people Also, I can see how when the screen is full of stuff, like, in the worst possible case, the www.ryanair.com site, you need to have huge red text stating what is important and worthwhile and what not.

And yeah, at least in facebook it seems that the whole "try the new design" is rather a notification or a commercial of what's inevitable so that people will start talking about it before everyone gets it. It's like a hat in elementary school that says "wear this to get lice".