Monthly Archives: April 2005

Differences between swearing cultures

Did you know that different cultures seem to swear very differently? What is used to express annoyance in one language is *really bad* in other languages. Interesting…

  • English: Swearing focuses on sexual areas: fuck, son of a…. Shit is worse than fuck (correct me if I’m wrong)
  • German: Swearing focuses on faecal areas, mainly “Scheisse” (shit) (isn’t considered that bad. Fuck is a lot more rude.)
  • Swedish: Don’t swear a lot generally. Mainly focusing on religious areas: helvete (hell), fan (devil)

Trivia: The movie “Four weddings and a funeral” starts out in the original with Hugh Grant saying “fuck” about 20 times in a row. The German synchronization translates that to “shit” (litterally; using the English word, no German translation)

Linus Torvalds says…

Date Thu, 7 Apr 2005 08:32:04 -0700 (PDT)
From Linus Torvalds
Subject Re: Kernel SCM saga..

…It’s increasingly a “network” in the kernel. I’m less and less “the top”, as much as a “fairly central” person. And that is how it should be. I used to think of kernel development as a hierarchy, but I long since switched to thinking about it as a fairly arbitrary network…

Gmail invites

Hehe, Google succeeded with an astonishing marketing ploy with their gmail invitations. Even I could not resist to get one, although I have several nice e.mail accounts already. If you have invites over drop them here, it’s an automatic service to give out invites to people who want them (I’m not affiliated with this site).

Future research topics

  • Finally expand the “Why freeriding is good” idea to a nice research note
  • Complete FN2 paper
  • Use dissertation to create 1-2 papers
  • Use cvs commit data to learn sth about developer life cycles and see how long most developers stay active. Is there a gradual increase in contributions or does it start out highest?
  • Joint research with a company, consulting or otherwise, or a government organization. How do “consumers” shape development?

Still alive…

My girl friend Almut is in Stockholm, so I am enjoying a bachelor weekend again. Actually not really enjoying, as I have enough work left to do over the weekend. Anyway, I got the corrections for my dissertation back and while the language is generally ok, there are too many comma and other small mistakes, so I need to correct it. Sigh, it’s not going to be boring the net few days…