The scanners emit a loud beep and display the remaining balance whenever they debit the money. Of course machines and operates can and did go wrong but if you've been keeping track of the money still on your card you'll notice when that happens. Also, the entrances/exits are one-wayed, so the scanners will refuse to operate on the same card twice; on say buses where there are no exit-scanners there is a hold-time after a specific card has been scanned, during which no scanner will operate on it.
The character looks different. Surprisingly enough, this isn't a problem. It's simply a matter of a different font. The MAinland font has fewer strokes (usually, not always!), and that's why it's called simplified. The meaning behind the characters is the same. There is a one-to-one correspondence between simplified and traditional characters, I believe. We can use the same codes and different fonts on the two sides of the Straights.
That's not true, traditional Chinese and the simplified one have a many-to-one mapping. Not only do the Big-5 (traditional) character set and the GB families (simplied) have completely different coding map, the traditional and simplified version of the same character also have different code points in Unicode (they call it z-variants) and sometimes even calligraphical variants inherited from the preexisting Japanese fonts are retained. Check out U+8AAA, U+8AAC and U+8BFA, they're the same character meaning "say".
Most UNIX filesystems, including ext2fs, are in fact 8-bit clean; but the shells and file utils like ls are often not, at least not in their default setup.
For zsh, setopt printeightbit will do the trick. For Linux fileutils, apply the following patch:
I have lots of stuff with Big-5 filenames on my ext2fs. Even wu-ftpd and apache work fine on them.
Unicode is only useful when you want to use more than one languages at the same time. Even the Taiwan/Hongkong version of Windows does user-I/O in Big-5, it's only when it's saved on VFAT that it transparently converts the encoding.
In other words, Unicode support is a filesytem concern, application programmers simply need to make sure their apps are 8-bit clean.
(1) BTW - the actual Dragon Ball saga is very different than DBZ. The live action movie is a hoot, and the plot is actually based on
some real folktales.
I hate to tell you that the original Dragon Ball saga is based on the Journey to the West inasmuch as Stargate is based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead---people got the same names and they're on a quest for an item, but the similarity ends here. It does have its share of philosophical insight however, especially towards the end, where the issue of dualality between good and evil is touched.
Borrowing elements from earlier works does not necessarily make a work bad, and in fact, the original Dragon Ball sage is a damn fine piece of work. Also, the part about the monkey god in the Journey to the West is vaguely based on Hanuman in the Hindu epic Ramayana and the ascension of Vayu in earlier canons. Journey to the West is nevertheless considered one of the four greatest Chinese novels.
(As an aside - does anybody else wonder about that "XBox" name? Until Microsoft trademarked it, an "X
> Box", to me, was a terminal machine for X-windows...)
What else would you expect from a company that has previously redefined the meaning of "terminal server"?
Traditionally Cantonese is described as having nine tones. In addition to high-rising/flat/falling and low-rising/flat/falling, there are three additional tones (JÁn, or the "enter" tone) for stressed syllables (those end with -p, -t, or -k), which no longer exist in Mandarin. The isolated treatment of stressed syllables may seem redundant, but there is a linguistic reason for that as they better convey the feeling of agitation, which is a literature device very commonly utilized by medieval poetries.
The lack of "enter" tone is reason enough that I claimed Mandarin as linguistically inferior. Most medieval literatures, in particular Tang poems, are based on the theory of ¥ or "flat and changing tone metric system" which is musical in nature. Mandarin, by scattering the "enter" tones all over the first 2 tones, fundamentally mucks up the metrics. Indeed, certain poems sound extremely weird when recited in Mandarin. Native English speakers need look no further than to imagine reciting an English poem without stressed syllables and see how liveless it would be.
ø¦@¦|
F F C F C (F means flat, C means changing) -- ¼Bøë À^OýQ@nC
The meter should have been "F F F C C"; since the 2nd last character produces a flat tone, it violates the meter, but its musical grace is saved by placing a changing-tone character before it. Unfortunately this character (@) has become flat toned in Mandarin and this poem sounds awkward in that dialect.
That said, it is only natural that languages tend to simplify over time, like how "ye" and "you" merged in modern English. Mandarin may be an overall more practical dialect but it is no denying that Cantonese, the old dialect, is linguistically superior. Now, regarding English, I don't think having a lot of borrowed words would make a language inferior per se.
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The scanners emit a loud beep and display the remaining balance whenever they debit the money. Of course machines and operates can and did go wrong but if you've been keeping track of the money still on your card you'll notice when that happens.
Also, the entrances/exits are one-wayed, so the scanners will refuse to operate on the same card twice; on say buses where there are no exit-scanners there is a hold-time after a specific card has been scanned, during which no scanner will operate on it.
That's not true, traditional Chinese and the simplified one have a many-to-one mapping. Not only do the Big-5 (traditional) character set and the GB families (simplied) have completely different coding map, the traditional and simplified version of the same character also have different code points in Unicode (they call it z-variants) and sometimes even calligraphical variants inherited from the preexisting Japanese fonts are retained. Check out U+8AAA, U+8AAC and U+8BFA, they're the same character meaning "say".
Unicode sucks.
For zsh, setopt printeightbit will do the trick.
For Linux fileutils, apply the following patch:I have lots of stuff with Big-5 filenames on my ext2fs. Even wu-ftpd and apache work fine on them.
Unicode is only useful when you want to use more than one languages at the same time. Even the Taiwan/Hongkong version of Windows does user-I/O in Big-5, it's only when it's saved on VFAT that it transparently converts the encoding.
In other words, Unicode support is a filesytem concern, application programmers simply need to make sure their apps are 8-bit clean.
Borrowing elements from earlier works does not necessarily make a work bad, and in fact, the original Dragon Ball sage is a damn fine piece of work. Also, the part about the monkey god in the Journey to the West is vaguely based on Hanuman in the Hindu epic Ramayana and the ascension of Vayu in earlier canons. Journey to the West is nevertheless considered one of the four greatest Chinese novels.
Misinformation is much worse than no information at all. If they lack the talent to properly maintain a site I'd rather see it shut down.
The lack of "enter" tone is reason enough that I claimed Mandarin as linguistically inferior. Most medieval literatures, in particular Tang poems, are based on the theory of ¥ or "flat and changing tone metric system" which is musical in nature. Mandarin, by scattering the "enter" tones all over the first 2 tones, fundamentally mucks up the metrics. Indeed, certain poems sound extremely weird when recited in Mandarin. Native English speakers need look no further than to imagine reciting an English poem without stressed syllables and see how liveless it would be.
I will further illustrate my point by quoting a line from a Tang poem whose subtlety lies in how the author deliberately violated the meter (©í) and yet managed to save the line as a whole (±Ï):
The meter should have been "F F F C C"; since the 2nd last character produces a flat tone, it violates the meter, but its musical grace is saved by placing a changing-tone character before it. Unfortunately this character (@) has become flat toned in Mandarin and this poem sounds awkward in that dialect.That said, it is only natural that languages tend to simplify over time, like how "ye" and "you" merged in modern English. Mandarin may be an overall more practical dialect but it is no denying that Cantonese, the old dialect, is linguistically superior. Now, regarding English, I don't think having a lot of borrowed words would make a language inferior per se.