And the Google ads at the bottom of this one...
Ha, 4 out of 5:
Pretty Women from Russia
Date Sexy Russian Women
Ukrainian Women
Beautiful Russian Ladies
The 5 one, lonely IT angle of the ad world, was:
Domain name value
Russia yesterday acquired the Cyrillic top-level domain .рф, as reps from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handed over the corresponding administration certificate at an internet forum in Moscow. This went down extremely well with Dmitry Medvedev, according to Pravda. The president told the " …
...the problem is, while I'm all for countries with non-Latin having TLDs in their own language (I'm surprised the Chinese weren't first here), the problem with this politician's statement is how will they become an IT superpower when much of the rest of the world will not have a clue how to access these domains?
I'm using a British eeePC 901. I have four options:
1. Follow a link somebody has already created.
2. Cut'n'paste it
3. Play around with Character Map to find the relevant squiggles - may be feasible with Russian and Greek, but try it with Kanji/Chinese where there's at least a thousand things that look alike.
4. Give up.
Instead of relying on Google for a translation you could just try pasting президент.рф into your browser's URL field and see that it's in fact the correct name of the domain.
1. It's a voiced s, "з", not a voiceless s, "с". Google gives you the anglo-saxon phonetic equivalent, "prezident", while the Reg article gives the translation of the word, "president".
2. Never rely on automatic translation unless you have a clue about the original language as well as the target language.
If you want to go to hsbc.co.uk, adopt the following technique:
Place cursor in cleared address bar, press keys on your keyboard labelled
H, S, B, C, ., C, O,.,U, and K, in that order, successively. Now press the bigger one on the right, often labelled with a left-pointing arrow, and known as the return key for obscure historical reasons which are unlikely to become clear again any time soon.
Log in with confidence.
президент.рф is all very well, but are new versions of browsers going to take aliases for protocol names, so you don't have to write a mixed-script http://президент.рф/ but can write хттп://президент.рф/ (or even translate "HyperText Transport Protocol" into Russian (Google Translate says "Гипертекстовый транспортный протокол" / Gipertekstoviy Transportniy Protokol) and take the inititals of that)?
And if you start typing in Mongol Bichig, does the URL bar re-orient itself for vertical scripts? Enquiring minds want to know.
Nah. Adobe's people will blog about Russia deliberately b0rking the web to fuck it up for everyone else. This'll be immediately followed by Adobe's department of cockup limitation taking full-page ads everywhere saying how they loooooove Cyrillic so much that they want to have its babies and offering a free blowjob with every copy of CS5 sold^H^H^H^Hpirated in Russia.