Great. So when Japan is first with something, you say "They're fools for rushing into the market... we'll one-up them later... Rah! Rah! USA!!". When the Japanese one-up the US on a US-born technology, you say "Japan is a country of copycats... they never produce anything original."
Actually, Accenture already has a very bad reputation in Japan... if you read Japanese, try going to one of the university-graduate jobhunter discussion websites (www.2ch.net is a good start). They consider it to be the epitomy of "hype" companies (ie, hyping themselves while doing absolutely bugger-all for their clients).
The PC98 series was made by NEC, not Fujitsu - NEC had an 80% market share at one point, but they don't make them any longer. All the PCs sold in Japan now are the same AT-compatibles that you get in the States.
Not really. This question has been asked and answered many times before... merely collecting differently-licenced pieces of software into one package does not bring the GPL into play. Go and read it, it's not very long and it's quite easy to understand.
Um... the whole reason X15 is so fast is that many of the improvements made for Tux were actually put into the standard kernel, allowing X15 to take advantage of them from userspace (e.g. zero-copy sendfile).
Having a valid configuration does not guarantee that the kernel will boot. It just guarantees that the configuration chosen is valid and contains no contradictions.
1) You say that there are, indeed problems with the conversion tables. When you're trying to convert megabytes of electronic documents, a problem that may seem "small" to you seems much bigger, believe me.
2) You admit that code unification has several disadvantages, and then say that the distinctions "the Japanese" wanted were ported over. Ummm... have you been to a Japanese discussion on Unicode issues? The only Japanese who are satisfied with the current standard are those who were paid by the Unicode Consortium to put their rubber stamp on it.
3) So why are there som many different encodings for Unicode, if UTF-8 is so great? Oh, by the way, the problem is that Unicode doesn;t allow many people to encode their languages fully.
It was a course meant to take non-Japanese speakers from zero to college level in one year. Of course, that's impossible, but you can get by until you find your feet.
There are _slightly_ more than 2000 kanji in Japanese, but Japanese printers, like my wife's father, don't use more than 2100 absolute tops.
Funny, my Postscript printer sitting beside me can do about 6,500 Kanji, in pretty much any Japanese font available.
Chinese characters obey Zipf's law on a near perfect logarithmic scale. As in, the first ten characters make up about 60% of written text.
For someone who's supposed to have worked with Chinese dictionaries, that's an awfully strange claim to make. Unless you meant the first thousand characters, not the first ten.
*Sigh*. Actually, I have read Hofstadter, but if you want to be difficult, let me qualify my statement: "Have you ever read a translation of Shakespeare into a non-European language?"
It's not "whining", you knuckle-dragging moron. Just as Shakespeare is best appreciated in the original English (have you ever read a translation of Shakespeare? Didn't think so...), classical Chinese or Japanese texts are best read in the original. You know why? Because the author can convery subtle nuances and differences in meaning by choosing a particular character over others that have similar meanings.
Go learn Japanese or Chinese, and try and read a phonetic transliteration of a classical text. See how far you get.
Oh wonderful. So now we're not allowed to do searches, either. Where'd you come up with that bright idea, buddy?
And in case you didn't know, there are perfectly acceptable ways of inputting as many characters as you like in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Just because you don't know how to doesn't mean everybody else doesn't.
I did indeed read your post, including the bit saying, Perhaps some people will have problems using it today. In that case those people should interact with the standards committee instead of whining, and get their characters into the next version. What you don't seem to get is that the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have been trying to get the Unicode Consortium to produce a sensible standard from day one and they simply refuse to do so. Perhaps you should go look up the history of Unicode; there's been a lot of serious discussion and objection among the CJK people that's never made it into the open.
Now go learn something about how to parse basic English sentences.
Perhaps you'd like to debate the subject on a Japanese forum? No? I thought not. Excuse me if I don't view monolingualism as some indication of superiority...
And you obviously have a Western-centric mindset. Not to mention a stunning lack of knowledge of how Japanese, Chinese and Korean are actually used on today's computers.
Jesus, what is it about this article that attracts a level of cluelessness normally only seen in "IANAL" threads?
Japan does not have only 2,000 Kanji. Chinese can not be written satisfactorily with 10,000 characters. And how would you like it if the Chinese told you you can't write Shakespeare the way he was meant to be written???
Thank you for deciding how 1.3 billion Chinese, 120 million Japanese and 50-odd million Koreans should write.
In news today: The Chinese have embarked upon a simplification of the U.S. Constitution, stating that "it's too hard to understand." The result is expected to be declared an ISO standard within the next three years, with adoption by the US expected to be completed by 2005.
Now go learn something about the languages of which you speak.
And what is the point of that? You end up with Unicode characters of unequal length, which further complicates the whole problem (actually, these already exist...)
Part of the problem with the Chinese character set is that it is not an character set so much as a dictionary
Oh, bullshit. It's a character set just as much as ASCII is.
Why exclude the Constitution? Let's put everything published before...oh, say 1800... in there. The Gutenberg Bible (in fact, all Bibles preceding the modern versions), Shakespeare, Chaucer, say goodbye to them all!
I bet you can't even name one major Chinese or Japanese text. Plenty of people still study them in high school or university, just as you'd study Shakespeare. Don't spout crap when you don't know what you're talking about!
Hiragana, which is somewhat cursive, can be used to augment Kanji - in fact, everything in Kanji can be written in Hiragana. Katakana, which is much more fluid in appearance than is Hiragana, is used to write any word which does not have its roots in Kanji, such as the many foreign words and ideas which have drifted into general use over the centuries.
In actual fact, Katakana is much more angular than Hiragana - definitely not "fluid" in appearance. Furthermore, anything that can be written in Kanji can be written (phonetically) in either Hiragana or Katakana - the use of Katakana for foreign words is nothing more than custom, not a limitation of the characters.
Thus is can be said that Hiragana can form pictures but Katakana can only form sounds...
That should probably read "Kanji can form pictures but Hiragana/Katakana can only form sounds..."
Romaji is used to try and keep the whole written thing from getting out of control, with most Western concepts and necessary words being introduced into the language through this mechanism.
Bollocks. Romaji is hardly ever used (except for advertisements, and then only rarely, or textbooks for foreigners). It's definitely not the main conduit for Western ideas.
After a time these words (even though they will still maintain their "Roman" form for awhile longer) will become unrecognizable to the people they were originally borrowed from, such as the phrase, "Personal Computer," which is now "PersaCom" in Japan.
Again, this is incorrect. Words don't *have* a Roman form in everyday use; sure, you can express them in Romaji but no-one ever does. As for "personal computer", the correct Romanization is 'pasokon', not 'PersaCom". (Where did he get that from?!)
The rest of the 1,950 have to been memorized fully by the time of graduation from high school in Grade Twelve. Please remember that this total is only the legal minimum required threshold to be considered literate. And this is to be absorbed completely, along with a back-breaking load of other subjects.
Ummm... that's actually not too hard. I (along with everyone else at my language school) memorized more than 1300 Kanji in less than a year... and none of us were Japanese. I know it must seem like an impossible total to people used to ASCII, but there are many common points between Kanji that simplify the learning process greatly.
That said, I've long been against the current Unicode "standard", as have many technical people in Japan, for a number of reasons. Some of those are:
- No standard conversion tables from existing character sets (SJIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP).
Several conversion tables do exist, but there are minor differences between them that make it impossible to go from, say, SJIS to Unicode and back to SJIS without the possiblity of changing the characters used.
- A draconian unification of CJK characters.
The Unicode Consortium basically forced the standards bodies in China, Japan and Korea to unify certain similar Kanji onto single code points, which doesn't allow for cases where, say, Japanese actually has two or three distinctive writings that are used in different situations.
- The ugly "extensions".
Unicode has been effectively ruined as a method of data exchange by its treatment of characters not in the 60,000-character basic standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. So when Japan is first with something, you say "They're fools for rushing into the market... we'll one-up them later... Rah! Rah! USA!!". When the Japanese one-up the US on a US-born technology, you say "Japan is a country of copycats... they never produce anything original."
So which one is it?
OS: The TRON series (B-TRON, etc.) Used widely for embedded systems; you probably own an appliance that uses it.
Web browser: w3m
Programming language: Ruby
Don't speak of that about which you know nothing...
Actually, Accenture already has a very bad reputation in Japan... if you read Japanese, try going to one of the university-graduate jobhunter discussion websites (www.2ch.net is a good start). They consider it to be the epitomy of "hype" companies (ie, hyping themselves while doing absolutely bugger-all for their clients).
The PC98 series was made by NEC, not Fujitsu - NEC had an 80% market share at one point, but they don't make them any longer. All the PCs sold in Japan now are the same AT-compatibles that you get in the States.
Yeah, that one got me too...
Not really. This question has been asked and answered many times before... merely collecting differently-licenced pieces of software into one package does not bring the GPL into play. Go and read it, it's not very long and it's quite easy to understand.
Um... the whole reason X15 is so fast is that many of the improvements made for Tux were actually put into the standard kernel, allowing X15 to take advantage of them from userspace (e.g. zero-copy sendfile).
I could say "Use Google!", but here you go:
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/
Having a valid configuration does not guarantee that the kernel will boot. It just guarantees that the configuration chosen is valid and contains no contradictions.
Well, he wrote a lot of postcards, and the prizes are delivered by mail, so he only had to go to the front door.
As for the photo shoot thing, generally he only won small things - food, clothes, a vacuum cleaner IIRC, etc.
You titled your reply "Nonsense", but...
1) You say that there are, indeed problems with the conversion tables. When you're trying to convert megabytes of electronic documents, a problem that may seem "small" to you seems much bigger, believe me.
2) You admit that code unification has several disadvantages, and then say that the distinctions "the Japanese" wanted were ported over. Ummm... have you been to a Japanese discussion on Unicode issues? The only Japanese who are satisfied with the current standard are those who were paid by the Unicode Consortium to put their rubber stamp on it.
3) So why are there som many different encodings for Unicode, if UTF-8 is so great? Oh, by the way, the problem is that Unicode doesn;t allow many people to encode their languages fully.
So, if I may ask, how was my post nonsense?
It was a course meant to take non-Japanese speakers from zero to college level in one year. Of course, that's impossible, but you can get by until you find your feet.
There are _slightly_ more than 2000 kanji in Japanese, but Japanese printers, like my wife's father, don't use more than 2100 absolute tops.
Funny, my Postscript printer sitting beside me can do about 6,500 Kanji, in pretty much any Japanese font available.
Chinese characters obey Zipf's law on a near perfect logarithmic scale. As in, the first ten characters make up about 60% of written text.
For someone who's supposed to have worked with Chinese dictionaries, that's an awfully strange claim to make. Unless you meant the first thousand characters, not the first ten.
*Sigh*. Actually, I have read Hofstadter, but if you want to be difficult, let me qualify my statement: "Have you ever read a translation of Shakespeare into a non-European language?"
It's not "whining", you knuckle-dragging moron. Just as Shakespeare is best appreciated in the original English (have you ever read a translation of Shakespeare? Didn't think so...), classical Chinese or Japanese texts are best read in the original. You know why? Because the author can convery subtle nuances and differences in meaning by choosing a particular character over others that have similar meanings.
Go learn Japanese or Chinese, and try and read a phonetic transliteration of a classical text. See how far you get.
Sheesh.
Oh wonderful. So now we're not allowed to do searches, either. Where'd you come up with that bright idea, buddy?
And in case you didn't know, there are perfectly acceptable ways of inputting as many characters as you like in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Just because you don't know how to doesn't mean everybody else doesn't.
I did indeed read your post, including the bit saying, Perhaps some people will have problems using it today. In that case those people should interact with the standards committee instead of whining, and get their characters into the next version.
What you don't seem to get is that the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have been trying to get the Unicode Consortium to produce a sensible standard from day one and they simply refuse to do so. Perhaps you should go look up the history of Unicode; there's been a lot of serious discussion and objection among the CJK people that's never made it into the open.
Now go learn something about how to parse basic English sentences.
Perhaps you'd like to debate the subject on a Japanese forum? No? I thought not. Excuse me if I don't view monolingualism as some indication of superiority...
And you obviously have a Western-centric mindset. Not to mention a stunning lack of knowledge of how Japanese, Chinese and Korean are actually used on today's computers.
Sheesh.
Jesus, what is it about this article that attracts a level of cluelessness normally only seen in "IANAL" threads?
Japan does not have only 2,000 Kanji. Chinese can not be written satisfactorily with 10,000 characters. And how would you like it if the Chinese told you you can't write Shakespeare the way he was meant to be written???
Thank you for deciding how 1.3 billion Chinese, 120 million Japanese and 50-odd million Koreans should write.
In news today: The Chinese have embarked upon a simplification of the U.S. Constitution, stating that "it's too hard to understand." The result is expected to be declared an ISO standard within the next three years, with adoption by the US expected to be completed by 2005.
Now go learn something about the languages of which you speak.
And what is the point of that? You end up with Unicode characters of unequal length, which further complicates the whole problem (actually, these already exist...)
Part of the problem with the Chinese character set is that it is not an character set so much as a dictionary
Oh, bullshit. It's a character set just as much as ASCII is.
Why exclude the Constitution? Let's put everything published before...oh, say 1800... in there. The Gutenberg Bible (in fact, all Bibles preceding the modern versions), Shakespeare, Chaucer, say goodbye to them all!
I bet you can't even name one major Chinese or Japanese text. Plenty of people still study them in high school or university, just as you'd study Shakespeare. Don't spout crap when you don't know what you're talking about!
Hiragana, which is somewhat cursive, can be used to augment Kanji - in fact, everything in Kanji can be written in Hiragana. Katakana, which is much more fluid in appearance than is Hiragana, is used to write any word which does not have its roots in Kanji, such as the many foreign words and ideas which have drifted into general use over the centuries.
In actual fact, Katakana is much more angular than Hiragana - definitely not "fluid" in appearance. Furthermore, anything that can be written in Kanji can be written (phonetically) in either Hiragana or Katakana - the use of Katakana for foreign words is nothing more than custom, not a limitation of the characters.
Thus is can be said that Hiragana can form pictures but Katakana can only form sounds...
That should probably read "Kanji can form pictures but Hiragana/Katakana can only form sounds..."
Romaji is used to try and keep the whole written thing from getting out of control, with most Western concepts and necessary words being introduced into the language through this mechanism.
Bollocks. Romaji is hardly ever used (except for advertisements, and then only rarely, or textbooks for foreigners). It's definitely not the main conduit for Western ideas.
After a time these words (even though they will still maintain their "Roman" form for awhile longer) will become unrecognizable to the people they were originally borrowed from, such as the phrase, "Personal Computer," which is now "PersaCom" in Japan.
Again, this is incorrect. Words don't *have* a Roman form in everyday use; sure, you can express them in Romaji but no-one ever does. As for "personal computer", the correct Romanization is 'pasokon', not 'PersaCom". (Where did he get that from?!)
The rest of the 1,950 have to been memorized fully by the time of graduation from high school in Grade Twelve. Please remember that this total is only the legal minimum required threshold to be considered literate. And this is to be absorbed completely, along with a back-breaking load of other subjects.
Ummm... that's actually not too hard. I (along with everyone else at my language school) memorized more than 1300 Kanji in less than a year... and none of us were Japanese. I know it must seem like an impossible total to people used to ASCII, but there are many common points between Kanji that simplify the learning process greatly.
That said, I've long been against the current Unicode "standard", as have many technical people in Japan, for a number of reasons. Some of those are:
- No standard conversion tables from existing character sets (SJIS, EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP).
Several conversion tables do exist, but there are minor differences between them that make it impossible to go from, say, SJIS to Unicode and back to SJIS without the possiblity of changing the characters used.
- A draconian unification of CJK characters.
The Unicode Consortium basically forced the standards bodies in China, Japan and Korea to unify certain similar Kanji onto single code points, which doesn't allow for cases where, say, Japanese actually has two or three distinctive writings that are used in different situations.
- The ugly "extensions".
Unicode has been effectively ruined as a method of data exchange by its treatment of characters not in the 60,000-character basic standard.
I could go on, but I should get some sleep...
Er... what? Who was bickering? I just said I remembered it differently from him. The only one being antagonistic around here is *you*.
Macs have never run NT or OS/2 for PPC. Those OSs run on the Motorola PPC workstations, which are a fairly different kind of beast.