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by dragonbonheur 3660 days ago
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6 comments

"As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head."
What is this from ?
Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.
It's a subsystem of Windows for running part of Linux, so Windows Subsystem for Linux. :)
This title would be clearer: Windows subsystem for Linux apps.
That's the output though, they're not changing anything in Linux. The "Windows subsystem" they're developing will act as the translator to get there.
Linux Subsystem for Windows could also be misread the same way. Both are ambiguous.
I initially thought this one was less ambiguous but I have to admit, I think Microsoft's phrasing is right. Let's try some substitution:

"Russia Factory for England" most likely exists inside of Russia and is for the English.

"John's mail for Sally [try: who is out of town]" even with the addition, I presume that John has authored mail for Sally and is not collecting the parcels to give to her.

Here's a trickier one:

"Sampsons' Dinner for Two". This could be the following:

1. A product named "Sampsons' Dinner for Two" bought from a retail store

2. An item "Dinner for Two" on a menu from a restaurant named "Sampsons"

3. A place named "Sampsons' Dinner for Two" with only two-person tables.

4. A product "Sampsons' Dinner" which comes in multiple sizes, one of them being designed for two people. (which is the ambiguous form - presuming there's also say Annie's Dinner for One/Two and Martha's Dinner for One/Two - each with a brand specific cuisine). Even here though, the ownership of which "Dinner for Two" product is still clear - it's the "Sampsons'" or "Martha's" brand.

Regardless of what kind of substitution, we go back to "Windows Subsystem for Linux" for the most part parsing as

"Windows [Subsystem for Linux]" like "Windows [Media Player]". I don't assume that it's "[Windows Media] Player" - as in some multi-platform software that is tasked with playing the proprietary windows media formats.

It seems weird, but I think it's unarguably the right choice.

Maybe because the way they stated it it would be a much more attractive technology. Seems like an attempt to regaining ground in the server market.

This would be really useful for distributing Windows apps as Linux binaries. It would make it easier to develop from Linux and target Windows. Need the same for OSX.