I was a Chinese major, studied and lived in Japan for 4 years and am fluent in both languages. I've also studied a small bit of Korean as well.
I'm not sure how words for numbers could be more "logical" in these languages. In fact, in Korean there are two number naming systems -- one of native origin and the other of Chinese origin -- that can be used for values up to 100. (Japanese has this as well, but only up to 10.) For higher values the Chinese number names are used. So I doubt it has anything to do with language. Rather, I could see the the use of the abacus as a teaching tool as a big advantage, since it seems to confer a visceral knowledge of numbers and calculations that would be hard to acquire otherwise. Many people I know who became proficient with an abacus can visualize one in their head and use that visualization to do calculations.
That said, learning "Indian methods of calculation" seems to have become popular in Japan recently. There are at least two Nintendo DS games that give instruction on how to do arithmetic using methods taught in Indian schools (I own one of them).
What is Esther Dyson famous for again? Being famous? Did she invent something? It seems like people interview her and quote her a lot in tech magazines, but I don't really know why. Is it just out of habit?
One could make the argument that DRM, by its very nature, holds consumers hostage.
Also, I wonder how many slashdotters will be won over by the fact that this implementation is open-source. I'm sure it might make some feel warm and fuzzy inside, but not me.
... except my primary concern was learning the language, and then finding work. Specifically, I wanted to live in Japan, so I ended up going to a language school full time there for a year and a half, and then after that finding work. If your primary concern is just living and working abroad, and language secondary, I would think that would be possible in many places in Europe. If language is important to you though, I would strongly recommend that you first study the language in the country you've chosen, and then find work. This is because 1. It's much easier to study when you don't have to work at the same time. 2. It will make you a more attractive hire. 3. Since you'll have put significant effort into learning the language (as opposed to just doing it in your free time while working), it will become a skill that will stay with you and that you can draw upon in the future.
So that didn't really answer the questions you were asking, but I thought it was something that was important to address....
I noticed that this article, a previous article it refers to, as well as the DCEMU all refer to this hand-held system as a "console." To me, the word "console" implies something that hooks up to a TV or monitor -- something immobile and even relatively large -- not a hand-held system. Is that true for anyone else?
to see so many otherwise individualistic geeks yelling "conform" at the top of their lungs!
By the logic employed by many here, surely even more than adopting a common temperature scale, the world would benefit from people throwing away their native tongues and all adopting English as a first language instead. I don't see anyone arguing for that though.
Maybe people should talk about the article instead of having this silly conversation. Or if truely necessary, someone should submit this discussion to Slashdot as "Geeks Debate Temperature Scales."
> If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.
I've lived in both China and Taiwan. I was also a Chinese major, speak, read and write Chinese, and have a fair amount of friends from mainland China (both peasants and city dwellers) and Taiwan. I also have a number of friends that are members of the CCP. Does this qualify me to comment?
> As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC.
Have you lived in Taiwan before?
Taiwan is nothing like the PRC. In the PRC, corruption permeates to even the most petty of bureaucrats, who must be bribed for simple things like marriage licenses and being allowed to continue to farm your own meager plot of land. Seeing the money wasted by mid-level party officials at their 3 hour "liquid lunches" in Beijing (and hearing about it from my friends in the party) was stomach-turning, knowing what the families of my friends were going through as peasants. (My friend's younger sister -- 13 years old -- worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week in a windowless factory to help support her family, and made herself sick in the process.)
Taiwan does not assert ownership over the mainland -- what sloppy thinking! The Nationalist Party asserts that it is the rightful ruling party of all of China, and so desires unification. Other parties' desires and opinions vary.
When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they massacred quite a large number of people they feared were leftists. This was probably Taiwan's greatest human-rights tragedy. But that has been acknowledged and apologized for, for what little it's worth. Don't expect that kind of acknowledgment in the PRC, though, where Tibet has always been a part of China, China never invaded Vietnam, the Korean war started when the US invaded North Korea, and serious human rights violations never happen.
Don't let your nationalism blind you to your country's imperialism. Or is imperialism okay as long it's China being imperialist? (And I don't think my Tibetan friends would agree with you about Tibet either.)
I work at a small software start-up in Osaka, Japan, so a lot of the side work I do is translation / teaching related. Teaching English privately (as opposed to at one of the big factory schools like ECC or Nova) can be especially lucrative. My small group lesson of four students earns me about 5300 yen an hour (8000 yen per 1.5 hour lesson).
"Wow," I though, "that's pretty good," until I noticed that it applied not to the PDA's screen, but rather to it's "illuminated LED push-wheel." Please tell me why I need a scroll wheel capable of blinking in 16.7 million different colors.
Of course, it's only _after_ I send the flame that I notice the error in the message (forgot to delete the first "compare" part. I guess anger does make you sloppy. Oh well, he'll get the picture....;)
Having known people lost in the WTC attacks, and having seen
the towers collapse with my own eyes, I take great offense at
your calling virus writers "industrial terrorists." Over
5,000 died that day, and your company would like to take
advantage of the opportunity to shirk its responsibility to write
robust code by transfering that responsibility in another form
to the government, i.e., 13-year-old script kiddies become
terrorists and are locked up, thus no more hacker problem. Are
you so enamored with your endless lines of IIS spaghetti code to
compare its poor security and thus easy demise in the hands of
pre-pubescent crackers that you would dare compare exploiting
its weaknesses to the needless and horrific taking of thousands
of innocent lives? Your (and Microsoft's) arrogance astounds me.
Burn in Hell.
Sincerely,
Daniel Wislocki
Software Developer
P.S. "Unfortunately, some individuals (or companies) seek to destroy
competing ideas rather than evolving their own."
Really? Certainly Microsoft has never been guilty of such a crime?
What disgusting propaganda.
A couple of groups have attempted to produce a crude graphical interface [for Linux], but until a new company named Eazel came along, no one was willing to take the step to create a world-class interface...
Really? I guess the definition of "crude" is subjective, but I don't know where the "no one was willing" bit comes from. I guess both the Gnome and KDE folks are trying for a barely mediocre interface, too fearful of what the fame and fortune of being "world-class" might bring them....
Is it just me, or does.NET feel like a dumbing down of the Windows UI to AOL levels to other people too? Perhaps, I'm not thinking outside the box enough, but where's the desktop? Where do things get done? Does anyone have more info on how the.NET desktop works?
Besides, no one is in trouble of losing to foreign jobs if you allow free trade. USA also has stuff that China, for instance, would love to buy.
Hmm, like missile technology? Seriously though, how many
Chinese do you think are going to buy expensive
American goods when a) the average worker / peasant makes less than a dollar a day, and b) with factory wages so low, they can make copies of those same goods at lower cost? The myth of the vast Chinese market for foreign goods has existed for well over a century now. The West has gone to great lengths to try to secure that market, all the way back to helping suppress the Boxer Rebellion, and waging the Opium Wars (an eternal black mark on an imperialistic Great Britain), with little luck. AIG (American Insurance Group), for example, has been active in mainland China for over 50 years now, and has yet to turn a profit.
I don't think we'll gain much from free trade with China, though I have no doubt that more than a few corps will try to take advantage of the utter lack of trade unionism and environmental protection in China, attempting to turn it into a giant Nike factory. Swish! We'll see where nationalism takes the Chinese then....
Yeah, that.three33 stuff is strange since they
have it again in Chinese (Japanese too?) as.sansansan. I wonder if three has any significance, as do, say four (death) and eight (luck/fortune, though that seems to be more the case in guangdonghua, aka Cantonese).
Slashdot Mirror
Did you bother to even look, or do you only read the top stories on Google News?
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52P60220090326
I was a Chinese major, studied and lived in Japan for 4 years and am fluent in both languages. I've also studied a small bit of Korean as well.
I'm not sure how words for numbers could be more "logical" in these languages. In fact, in Korean there are two number naming systems -- one of native origin and the other of Chinese origin -- that can be used for values up to 100. (Japanese has this as well, but only up to 10.) For higher values the Chinese number names are used. So I doubt it has anything to do with language. Rather, I could see the the use of the abacus as a teaching tool as a big advantage, since it seems to confer a visceral knowledge of numbers and calculations that would be hard to acquire otherwise. Many people I know who became proficient with an abacus can visualize one in their head and use that visualization to do calculations.
That said, learning "Indian methods of calculation" seems to have become popular in Japan recently. There are at least two Nintendo DS games that give instruction on how to do arithmetic using methods taught in Indian schools (I own one of them).
What is Esther Dyson famous for again? Being famous? Did she invent something? It seems like people interview her and quote her a lot in tech magazines, but I don't really know why. Is it just out of habit?
... if this will become Australia's "Prohibition".
What percentage of the population supports this, anyway? Anyone have any figures?
One could make the argument that DRM, by its very nature, holds consumers hostage.
Also, I wonder how many slashdotters will be won over by the fact that this implementation is open-source. I'm sure it might make some feel warm and fuzzy inside, but not me.
... except my primary concern was learning the language, and then finding work. Specifically, I wanted to live in Japan, so I ended up going to a language school full time there for a year and a half, and then after that finding work. If your primary concern is just living and working abroad, and language secondary, I would think that would be possible in many places in Europe. If language is important to you though, I would strongly recommend that you first study the language in the country you've chosen, and then find work. This is because 1. It's much easier to study when you don't have to work at the same time. 2. It will make you a more attractive hire. 3. Since you'll have put significant effort into learning the language (as opposed to just doing it in your free time while working), it will become a skill that will stay with you and that you can draw upon in the future.
So that didn't really answer the questions you were asking, but I thought it was something that was important to address....
I noticed that this article, a previous article it refers to, as well as the DCEMU all refer to this hand-held system as a "console." To me, the word "console" implies something that hooks up to a TV or monitor -- something immobile and even relatively large -- not a hand-held system. Is that true for anyone else?
to see so many otherwise individualistic geeks yelling "conform" at the top of their lungs!
By the logic employed by many here, surely even more than adopting a common temperature scale, the world would benefit from people throwing away their native tongues and all adopting English as a first language instead. I don't see anyone arguing for that though.
Maybe people should talk about the article instead of having this silly conversation. Or if truely necessary, someone should submit this discussion to Slashdot as "Geeks Debate Temperature Scales."
> If you have never lived in China, you don't know anything about the situation and should not comment.
I've lived in both China and Taiwan. I was also a Chinese major, speak, read and write Chinese, and have a fair amount of friends from mainland China (both peasants and city dwellers) and Taiwan. I also have a number of friends that are members of the CCP. Does this qualify me to comment?
> As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC.
Have you lived in Taiwan before?
Taiwan is nothing like the PRC. In the PRC, corruption permeates to even the most petty of bureaucrats, who must be bribed for simple things like marriage licenses and being allowed to continue to farm your own meager plot of land. Seeing the money wasted by mid-level party officials at their 3 hour "liquid lunches" in Beijing (and hearing about it from my friends in the party) was stomach-turning, knowing what the families of my friends were going through as peasants. (My friend's younger sister -- 13 years old -- worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week in a windowless factory to help support her family, and made herself sick in the process.)
Taiwan does not assert ownership over the mainland -- what sloppy thinking! The Nationalist Party asserts that it is the rightful ruling party of all of China, and so desires unification. Other parties' desires and opinions vary.
When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they massacred quite a large number of people they feared were leftists. This was probably Taiwan's greatest human-rights tragedy. But that has been acknowledged and apologized for, for what little it's worth. Don't expect that kind of acknowledgment in the PRC, though, where Tibet has always been a part of China, China never invaded Vietnam, the Korean war started when the US invaded North Korea, and serious human rights violations never happen.
Don't let your nationalism blind you to your country's imperialism. Or is imperialism okay as long it's China being imperialist? (And I don't think my Tibetan friends would agree with you about Tibet either.)
Okay....
I work at a small software start-up in Osaka, Japan, so a lot of the side work I do is translation / teaching related. Teaching English privately (as opposed to at one of the big factory schools like ECC or Nova) can be especially lucrative. My small group lesson of four students earns me about 5300 yen an hour (8000 yen per 1.5 hour lesson).
Ah, to be swashbuckling out there, as opposed to sitting behind a desk here, wrestling with old VB6 code.
If only the links weren't Slashdotted and I could waste more time revelling in someone else's success.
*sigh*
"Wow," I though, "that's pretty good," until I noticed that it applied not to the PDA's screen, but rather to it's "illuminated LED push-wheel." Please tell me why I need a scroll wheel capable of blinking in 16.7 million different colors.
Of course, it's only _after_ I send the flame that I notice the error in the message (forgot to delete the first "compare" part. I guess anger does make you sloppy. Oh well, he'll get the picture.... ;)
Mr. Thomas:
Having known people lost in the WTC attacks, and having seen
the towers collapse with my own eyes, I take great offense at
your calling virus writers "industrial terrorists." Over
5,000 died that day, and your company would like to take
advantage of the opportunity to shirk its responsibility to write
robust code by transfering that responsibility in another form
to the government, i.e., 13-year-old script kiddies become
terrorists and are locked up, thus no more hacker problem. Are
you so enamored with your endless lines of IIS spaghetti code to
compare its poor security and thus easy demise in the hands of
pre-pubescent crackers that you would dare compare exploiting
its weaknesses to the needless and horrific taking of thousands
of innocent lives? Your (and Microsoft's) arrogance astounds me.
Burn in Hell.
Sincerely,
Daniel Wislocki
Software Developer
P.S. "Unfortunately, some individuals (or companies) seek to destroy
competing ideas rather than evolving their own."
Really? Certainly Microsoft has never been guilty of such a crime?
What disgusting propaganda.
Duh, he was speaking for himself, and there wasn't a problem. Read the post again dumbass.
Tian xia wu shang? What's that in reference to?
Hollywood stars get suckered in because there's a specific branch of the Scientology organization devoted to recruiting them, in so far as I am aware.
Probably western side / face is a more coherent translation, not that that makes any sense either when applied to Gnome....
"How many retired bricklayers from FLORIDA are out purchasing PENCIL SHARPENERS right NOW??"
Really? I guess the definition of "crude" is subjective, but I don't know where the "no one was willing" bit comes from. I guess both the Gnome and KDE folks are trying for a barely mediocre interface, too fearful of what the fame and fortune of being "world-class" might bring them....
Is it just me, or does .NET feel like a dumbing down of the Windows UI to AOL levels to other people too? Perhaps, I'm not thinking outside the box enough, but where's the desktop? Where do things get done? Does anyone have more info on how the .NET desktop works?
Hmm, like missile technology? Seriously though, how many Chinese do you think are going to buy expensive American goods when a) the average worker / peasant makes less than a dollar a day, and b) with factory wages so low, they can make copies of those same goods at lower cost? The myth of the vast Chinese market for foreign goods has existed for well over a century now. The West has gone to great lengths to try to secure that market, all the way back to helping suppress the Boxer Rebellion, and waging the Opium Wars (an eternal black mark on an imperialistic Great Britain), with little luck. AIG (American Insurance Group), for example, has been active in mainland China for over 50 years now, and has yet to turn a profit.
I don't think we'll gain much from free trade with China, though I have no doubt that more than a few corps will try to take advantage of the utter lack of trade unionism and environmental protection in China, attempting to turn it into a giant Nike factory. Swish! We'll see where nationalism takes the Chinese then....
Fu zi yue: San ren xing bi you wo shi yen.
Yeah, that .three33 stuff is strange since they
have it again in Chinese (Japanese too?) as .sansansan. I wonder if three has any significance, as do, say four (death) and eight (luck/fortune, though that seems to be more the case in guangdonghua, aka Cantonese).