The Portuguese have voted to make some fundamental changes to their mother tongue in order to make the language, which is spoken by about 230 million people across the world. more uniform globally.
Numerous spellings will be standardized and three letters (k,w,y) will be added to the alphabet to bring it more into line with the way it is written and spoken in Brazil.
As an example silent consonants will be removed in order for words to be spelled more phonetically, turning, for example “optimo” (great) into “otimo”.
As well as Portgual and Brazil, Portuguese is also the official language in Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe.
I can’t help but smile at the thought of all the English speaking countries in the world trying to reach a similar agreement.
Four teenagers who kicked and stamped to death a cyclist in Bedfordshire have been jailed for life.
Stephen Green, 55, from Luton, was attacked in an underpass in Dunstable by a gang as he cycled home last May, and died in hospital nine days later.
They had been drinking strong beer and brandy and smoking pot before setting upon Mr Green.
Such a shame that the UK doesn’t have the death penalty.
I’ve been doing a little of that this morning.
Started off with coffee (of course). Then waded through emails; archived many, acted om some; deleted others. Got the Inbox under control though.
Started work on some web projects.
Got hungry mid morning. Went to kitchen, then remembered run out of bread, and didn’t make any yesterday. Found a left-over baked potato in the refrigerator, along with some left-over steak.
Cut it up, and fried it along with an egg, for brunch.
While I was at it, got some bread underway in the machine, and also got some meatballs into the crockpot along with some tomatoes, and sauce for dinner.
Eat food, did the dishes, went back to the web work. Now sitting here typing this and getting a waft of that hot bread smell….
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Now, I make no secret that I’m not a Microsoft fan. Not any kind of anti-corporate stance particularly, just that by and large I think their software sucks.
I had to smile a few days ago though. I know it’s a beta version, but I installed a copy of IE8 on a winbox here. I NEVER use IE out of choice, but you have to have a copy of IE on a Windows machine, so I thought OK, I’ll see if it’s any better at W3C compliancy than the previous dismal attempts at such.
By and large, at first glance most pages were displaying ok, but the truth will come when I code a few without the IE hacks in CSS to see what happens.
While I was in there, I thought I’d run MS update, which complains if you try to use a decent browser, such as Firefox.
This was what made me laugh. I got a message telling me that I needed to be using a copy of Internet Explorer IE6 or newer.
Again, I reiterate, I know it’s a beta, but even so I found it somewhat amusing that Microsoft’s own browser wasn’t recognized correctly on it’s own operating system.
Of course, with the advent of more and more online apps, perhaps Microsoft is slowly losing its relevance in the marketplace anyway?
After all, a Linux install isn’t particularly geeky these days. Simply insert a CD, and follow the prompts. If you can install Windows, you can install Ubuntu for example.
I can do everything I need to do on a linux box - email, read/write documents, spreadsheets, manipulate images, listen to music, watch video. It’s all free, and more to the point, no stupid activation nonsense, and I can install Linux on most anything I have here. No OEM nonsense either, when a copy of Windows that came with a Dell, won’t install on another machine I’ve built after the old Dell died.
No, personally, I’m not getting excited about Windows 7; Vista was a fiasco; and I wouldn’t miss Microsoft if it disappeared tomorrow.
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