Clearly the guy's a smug asshole who has done an unknown but perhaps considerable amount of damage to a bunch of random BDSM people (and there are a great many quiet, sensitive, intelligent people in that community, to say nothing of a great many shy wannabees in whom I think we can all see something of ourselves). However, I can't figure out whether it's actually illegal and I am quite curious... does anyone know?
This is a grade-A freakin' cultural tragedy -- not that people are interacting in games (INTERACTING while PLAYING A GAME!!!omg!!) but that everyone has FORGOTTEN that this semi-revolution actually took place on MUDs and MUCKs (not to omit MUSHes and MOOs) in the freakin' early 90s. You freakin' teenagers.
Now get off my lawn before I hit you with my basalt sword.
I always jump in and say this and nobody gets it, but anyway, just for the sake of consistency:
There is a vast pool of business units (although not necessarily of whole companies) that can only move off Windows when there is a non-Windows equivalent of Excel. And because to create an Excel equivalent you must first have a well-established, cross-vendor application model based on pluggable, reusable, self-documenting components, it is very very hard to create an equivalent of Excel.
When people can have their Bloomberg data and their business logic DLLs all together in their spreadsheet and script it together with OS-level objects in a scripting language like VBA, THEN you have an equivalent of Excel. Otherwise, all you have is a spreadsheet.
I've visited a Japanese art site (ie pictures of characters from fighting games drawn in alarmingly extreme detail) which had roughly this on the front page:
"Because there have been some people coming in here and stealing pictures or linking without permission, I have had to put this small test up. Please enter the Emperor's birth date in Japanese calendar in the box below. I'm sorry for this inconvenience and I will remove it when they forget about this site."
I've also seen a site (again in the 'students with too much time on their hands' sector) that asked for some other date in Japanese calendar. There are also a fair few personal sites that have a front page with just one link that takes you in, and several spurious links, with the page being 100% japanese text -- which I think serves about the same purpose.
On a related note, there also used to be WinMX groups which required that you say something in Japanese on entering or be booted. The point there was that otherwise you'd get masses of Korean 12-year-olds coming in and going 'Fuk Japanese bitch! dokdo nun uri tang!!lolz0rz!' and generally spamming the place. At least, I hope they were 12.
So, cultural captchas certainly exist... but it's easy to see why they work better on 'my pictures of Vampire Hunter D' sites than in the commercial world.
Look, the ONLY point of articles like this is to bring the libertarians out of the woodwork so they can dance around in a circle chanting their magic chant that makes oil last forever and the Earth be inhabitable forever. Which is great, you know, I've always been a big fan of that whole Kachina thing. But it does make for slightly dull viewing after a while, especially given that everyone else will duly be trolled and write long fact-filled refutations of the libertarian's chant, which is futile, because you can't refute faith. And so the circle of chanting Libertarians droning on about the 'global warming controversy' and oil sands will be surrounded by a much larger circle of other people dancing round in the other direction and quoting numbers.
The point is that if you bring a man a problem, they will try and fix it and either give up or get annoyed when they can't. Whereas if you bring a woman a problem, they may not be able to fix it but they will emit sympathy, cups of tea, agreement, and words of encouragement.
The above, at least, is a point of view held by certain weepy females who would rather be told that they are right than actually solve the problem:) I think the grandparent poster is poking fun at this point of view. Other possibilities include:
-- Grandparent actually holds this point of view and is therefore probably a Sensitive New Man, gawd help us. -- Grandparent was alluding to this point of view, but neutrally. -- I am wrong and the grandparent post was about something unrelated. -- Grandparent's post is part of some horrible conspiracy, too vast... too UBIQUITOUS... for us to fully percieve.
Hm, to my great surprise, that actually sounds like it would work. The analogy is good; Wikipedia is like a large open source project where EVERYONE has commit rights and where commiting requires a single click.
I would imagine that a fairly structured system would be needed, with provision to make sure that editors who die or lose interest don't result in permanently stagnant articles, and so on; but these are all things that OSS projects have faced in the past and they are relatively well understood.
Now, if I may illustrate a small problem: I bag Cardiff (because I hate Cardiff), Tibet (because China has an eternal right to cleanse non-Han from the face of the world and everyone should know that), Dickens (because I think I know a lot about Dickens although I sometimes confuse him with Ted Kennedy) and Ancient Greece (because I know that no one person, or even one group of people, knows enough to fully describe Ancient Greece, so the partial description might as well be mine).
Still, even given that, I think 'gatekeepers' of articles, topics and regions might be the way to go.
I won't bother rebutting the above 'points' one by one as I am sure someone is even now jumping in to do that. I will observe, though, that people who use terms such as 'piss-poor' to describe things such as features or implementations are factually wrong much more often than the average.
I hypothesize that this is part of a general 'the louder you yell, the less you think about what you are yelling' rule. In other words, it's a kind of mini-mini-mob mentality -- a mob of one, if you will. I can't think of a way to test this hypothesis, though.
-NO Ability to set permissions on files for multiple users
It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens.
You're right. We should never try and prevent bad things. We should never inform ourselves. We should wait till something happens. Hey, maybe it never will, and our irresponsibility will go undetected! We could get lucky!
It's called trust.
Let me fix that for you:
It's called... uhh... my brain hav stop, I canot think.
You're buying _A_ market, the one encapsulated by the index you buy into. The market that you buy into may, itself, underperform, especially over a given time period.
No guaranteed win, just a conservative and usually-effective risk/reward tradeoff.
Carp (eg goldfish) live in an environment in which jumping from one body of water to another offers a real chance of accessing a new environment, e.g. a new pond or stream. It also offers the ONLY chance of survival for carp trapped in small, evaporating puddles of water, which may well be how goldfish register their surroundings.
By contrast, a dolphin has only a fairly low chance of being able to jump into a whole new ocean. A zero chance, in fact.
Therefore, the tendency to jump may be more a reflection of the chance that jumping will do a given creature any good, rather than a sign of intelligence.
Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans).
Elephants also have this, and so (probably) do (some) dogs. Again, these are the animals with the complex social structures.
But honestly, please don't underestimate elephants. They can think, and alone among the non-primates they have hands.
Copyright infringement != theft. If you think it is, your understanding of American (and other) law is insufficient for you to make any useful statement on the subject.
Learn the la -- oops. Whoops. Sorry. You're on Slashdot, yet you do have more knowledge of the legal system than the average muskrat. I didn't expect that! Er, sorry I snapped at ya.
Copyright infringement != theft. If you think it is, your understanding of American (and other) law is insufficient for you to make any useful statement on the subject.
Learn the law.
This has been a public service announcement; my karma being expended to try and encourage you to learn about the world you live in.
Cellphones, of course, don't work on flights as a general rule. They only work on flights THAT PASS OVER LOTS OF CELL PHONE CELLS. The Pacific, the Gobi, the Sahara, and Greenland are all good examples of places not rich in cell phone cells.
Of course, if by 'plane travel' you unconsciously mean 'plane travel within the continental United States', then sure, you can just use your cell phone.
The one thing missing for Microsoft, is panache. There's nothing hip or cool aboug having some music device from a giant corporation. Without that certain cachet of having something from a company which makes very stylish computers and operating systems and got U2 on board.
See, that _reads_ like a parody of a Mac user -- but it's serious, isn't it? I just remembered that there really are vast blocks of people who probably do stick on U2 in the evening quite regularly, and they probably aspire to being hip, cool and stylish with cachet and panache.
Smells like another waste of money from a company that just doesn't understand that they are only profitable at a few things and should stop this kind of nonsense.
I agree completely with what you say about feedback -- with one addition:
ALL feedback comes from people.
A computer can't tell you whether what you created was user-friendly, useful, legal, necessary, maintainable, marketable, reusable, finished on time, and capable of handling scenarios you haven't foreseen. It can tell you that your code does n things in m milliseconds -- i.e. things that are rarely of much interest except to the geek.
It's interesting to consider why some fields have prodigies and some don't. If the Sci Am article is right, then it's a matter of some things being efficiently teachable and others less so. I must say, I'm tempted to hypothesize that literature is 'harder' than math and music.
By 'rugby player' I just meant the opposite of the basement geek stereotype. I didn't specifically mean a grunting, drooling, pig-headed half-man:)
Actually, I meant to say that there is no correlation between technical 'aptitude' and geek-hood -- which is quite a difference.
I also could have been clearer (but my post was long enough already) about social factors. Wherever you are, there are clearly factors that either push the geeky into learning and applying technical skills, or push those who choose to specialize in technical skills into geek culture. It's like riding a motorcycle and being a big hairy guy with a filthy jacket -- they are not inherently correlated but local cultural factors can push those who have one trait into also having the other.
What I'm arguing is just that a natural tendency to geek-like traits and a natural tendency to skilled computer programming are not correlated, if indeed you can have a natural tendency to either of those things. But people think they are correlated (or used to think so) and thus tend to expect one when they encounter the other.
It's also probably important that you're talking about students and I'm talking about grownups(*). Students are free to throw themselves into whatever subculture they choose -- thus I think I'd expect correlations induced by social pressures to be strong in that population. I reckon in ten year's time, those of them that are still living the geek dream will not be the most skilled group.
(*) I'm not being mean, it's just a fact about delayed adulthood in the rich world. I benefited from it too!
A persistant delusion
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've noticed, like many others, that some 'expert' programmers are perhaps 8x as productive as regular programmers; their work does not require checking, they solve complex problems in such a way that the problem can actually be forgotten about, and they never find that something can't be done because of the decisions they made earlier. I would rather have one of these guys with on a project than three regular Joes, and the wise project manager scours the organization for them and collects them all in a fiercely guarded hoard. What vast innate aptitude they must have!
And yet I notice that these experts are, coincidentally, also the same people who use a spell-checker, who ask what terms mean before trying to use them, who write down what they're going to do before they do it, who understand what the business context of the work they're doing is, and who understand the imperfect realities of the workplace. In other words, they're not natural computer geniuses; they're people who bother to learn how to do stuff right.
An image of the naturally talented 'geek' or 'nerd' has grown up in the last 20 years, especially outside of the IT community. These individuals, the story goes, can be awkward and eccentric in the more 'people' aspects of life but are gifted with tremendous focus and ability to understand complexity in technical areas. Often seen watching Star Trek and blowing things up in their back yards, they are the highly specialized new breed on which the information revolution depends.
The fact is, the above is half-right. 'Geeks' do exist -- but there is absolutely no correlation between geek-hood and technical ability. Quite the reverse, in fact; technical ability is acquired by learning from others, and you can't learn from others if you don't communicate. The basement-dwelling machine-code-writing ubergeek of the 80's really existed, but only due to social factors; had he left his basement and gotten a girlfreind, he would have become more productive, not less. This is pretty well recognised in business now; nobody hires the basement-dweller if they can hire the rugby-player, which is rather bad luck for the basement-dweller but sound thinking on the part of the business.
And yet the image persists in popular culture, so much so that people who learn that I work with computers still occasionally expect me to be into a whole nerd culture of comics, DIY demolitions, and so forth. Sure, some people are bigger or stronger or smarter than others to some degree; but how remarkably seductive this idea that certain people just naturally fall into certain slots, where they are good and bad at specific predetermined things, is! And how very different from reality it is.
Except for mathematicians, mind you. Those guys are born not made, I'm sure of it.
I know what proto-Japonic is. How could I possibly know that the -eba form used to be a pluperfect-like form, and know of the existance of a 'Goryeo' language, and know that the word proto-Japonic exists, and yet not know what it means?? Whoosh factor... INCREASING!
It's worth bearing in mind that Korean is just the last, heavily Sinicized, survivor of a large group of languages in which the languages of Goryeo, Goguryeo, Balhae, Buyeo, those bastards Shilla, and early Japan all had a place (and which presumably had some relationship with the Tungusic languages to the north). Unfortunately the fact that they tended to leave all their inscriptions in Chinese, and that the whole area has been Chinesified with the suppression of other languages and cultures, makes it pretty well impossible to reconstruct the relationships.
I'm glad you didn't rush in and assert that 'Japanese is an Altaic language'. I can't help but feel the Altaic language group is more of a cool idea than a real language group. Turkish is Turkic, but the relationship between Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, and modern Japanese/Korean is probably lost forever.
Such, then, is the sadness inherent in N Asian linguistics. In the end it always comes down to '...and then the Chinese wiped them out'. Substitute 'Russians' for 'Chinese' where appropriate:)
The link you give is interesting. The guy does not actually consider 'guguru' an abbreviation, though; he just says that the fact it ends in 'ru' makes it lend itself to conversion to a verb. He also seems to suggest that 'guguru' goes back as far as 'guuguru' which is reasonable because it would be unusual to abbreviate a word in Japanese by shortening a vowel (although there's an example on the tip of my tongue...)
Anyway, I must dash, I have a shoulder of lamb in the oven.
Nice examples of usage, but where did you get this notion that "guguru" descends from proto-Japonic? I mean, you even called it a loanword from English at the beginning of your post!
Yes. Yes, I did. It's looks like a loanword... and I called it a loanword... and it is a loanword. Hmm. About this time, you might begin to experience a sort of 'whoosh'ing feeling. This is the sensation of having completely missed a very, very, VERY obvious joke. I think you ought to consider the possibility that I don't _really_ believe that 'guguru' is from 'proto-Japonic' (whatever that is). Not all sentences are to be taken at their literal face value; some are humorous or dramatic inventions or exaggerations, and some are metaphors or other imagery, or are to be understood allegorically. This one, for example, was a humorous invention.
It obviously is a shortening of "guuguru suru", ("to Google")
Hrm, I'm not sure it's just an abbreviation. For one thing, you get mostly 'guuguru suru' but mostly 'guguru'. I think it's more of a tongue-in cheek effort to create a fake kokugo word than an attempt to abbreviate. It would be interesting to consider other english words that have become 'suru' verbs ending in 'ru', such as 'insutaru suru'.
Aww, the Japanese verb 'guguru', to search on the internet, is almost the only import from English that I don't hate. It's cool the way it becomes a proper verb with a full set of conjugations:
guguru -- google it guguritakunakunaru -- to no longer want to google it guguriyagaru -- f@@king google it gugureba -- archaic pluperfect tense, now used as a subjunctive gugurikarikeri -- poetic form: 'to have once been googled... and perhaps to be googled again'
Possibly from proto-Japonic '*gugumi', c.f. Goryeo '*g-g-o'.
Mind, I suppose it would depend on whether Google trademarked 'google' spelt in katakana.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the guy's a smug asshole who has done an unknown but perhaps considerable amount of damage to a bunch of random BDSM people (and there are a great many quiet, sensitive, intelligent people in that community, to say nothing of a great many shy wannabees in whom I think we can all see something of ourselves). However, I can't figure out whether it's actually illegal and I am quite curious... does anyone know?
This is a grade-A freakin' cultural tragedy -- not that people are interacting in games (INTERACTING while PLAYING A GAME!!!omg!!) but that everyone has FORGOTTEN that this semi-revolution actually took place on MUDs and MUCKs (not to omit MUSHes and MOOs) in the freakin' early 90s. You freakin' teenagers.
Now get off my lawn before I hit you with my basalt sword.
I always jump in and say this and nobody gets it, but anyway, just for the sake of consistency:
There is a vast pool of business units (although not necessarily of whole companies) that can only move off Windows when there is a non-Windows equivalent of Excel. And because to create an Excel equivalent you must first have a well-established, cross-vendor application model based on pluggable, reusable, self-documenting components, it is very very hard to create an equivalent of Excel.
When people can have their Bloomberg data and their business logic DLLs all together in their spreadsheet and script it together with OS-level objects in a scripting language like VBA, THEN you have an equivalent of Excel. Otherwise, all you have is a spreadsheet.
Captcha is 'trapped'... how apposite.
I've visited a Japanese art site (ie pictures of characters from fighting games drawn in alarmingly extreme detail) which had roughly this on the front page:
"Because there have been some people coming in here and stealing pictures or linking without permission, I have had to put this small test up. Please enter the Emperor's birth date in Japanese calendar in the box below. I'm sorry for this inconvenience and I will remove it when they forget about this site."
I've also seen a site (again in the 'students with too much time on their hands' sector) that asked for some other date in Japanese calendar. There are also a fair few personal sites that have a front page with just one link that takes you in, and several spurious links, with the page being 100% japanese text -- which I think serves about the same purpose.
On a related note, there also used to be WinMX groups which required that you say something in Japanese on entering or be booted. The point there was that otherwise you'd get masses of Korean 12-year-olds coming in and going 'Fuk Japanese bitch! dokdo nun uri tang!!lolz0rz!' and generally spamming the place. At least, I hope they were 12.
So, cultural captchas certainly exist... but it's easy to see why they work better on 'my pictures of Vampire Hunter D' sites than in the commercial world.
Woah, currently it looks like someone has faith that we are both, as it were, teh trollz0rs
Look, the ONLY point of articles like this is to bring the libertarians out of the woodwork so they can dance around in a circle chanting their magic chant that makes oil last forever and the Earth be inhabitable forever. Which is great, you know, I've always been a big fan of that whole Kachina thing. But it does make for slightly dull viewing after a while, especially given that everyone else will duly be trolled and write long fact-filled refutations of the libertarian's chant, which is futile, because you can't refute faith. And so the circle of chanting Libertarians droning on about the 'global warming controversy' and oil sands will be surrounded by a much larger circle of other people dancing round in the other direction and quoting numbers.
It's like a great revolving pinwheel of futility.
*sigh*
The point is that if you bring a man a problem, they will try and fix it and either give up or get annoyed when they can't. Whereas if you bring a woman a problem, they may not be able to fix it but they will emit sympathy, cups of tea, agreement, and words of encouragement.
The above, at least, is a point of view held by certain weepy females who would rather be told that they are right than actually solve the problem
-- Grandparent actually holds this point of view and is therefore probably a Sensitive New Man, gawd help us.
-- Grandparent was alluding to this point of view, but neutrally.
-- I am wrong and the grandparent post was about something unrelated.
-- Grandparent's post is part of some horrible conspiracy, too vast... too UBIQUITOUS... for us to fully percieve.
On reflection, I favor the last possibility.
Hm, to my great surprise, that actually sounds like it would work. The analogy is good; Wikipedia is like a large open source project where EVERYONE has commit rights and where commiting requires a single click.
I would imagine that a fairly structured system would be needed, with provision to make sure that editors who die or lose interest don't result in permanently stagnant articles, and so on; but these are all things that OSS projects have faced in the past and they are relatively well understood.
Now, if I may illustrate a small problem: I bag Cardiff (because I hate Cardiff), Tibet (because China has an eternal right to cleanse non-Han from the face of the world and everyone should know that), Dickens (because I think I know a lot about Dickens although I sometimes confuse him with Ted Kennedy) and Ancient Greece (because I know that no one person, or even one group of people, knows enough to fully describe Ancient Greece, so the partial description might as well be mine).
Still, even given that, I think 'gatekeepers' of articles, topics and regions might be the way to go.
J2EE. "Enterprise Edition". Racks of blades, web services, distributability, scalability.
Embedded solutions. Single, self contained devices in which performance is critical.
Honestly, I just don't know what niche Slashdot is supposed to be filling any more. "Randomly Selected Links", perhaps?
I won't bother rebutting the above 'points' one by one as I am sure someone is even now jumping in to do that. I will observe, though, that people who use terms such as 'piss-poor' to describe things such as features or implementations are factually wrong much more often than the average.
I hypothesize that this is part of a general 'the louder you yell, the less you think about what you are yelling' rule. In other words, it's a kind of mini-mini-mob mentality -- a mob of one, if you will. I can't think of a way to test this hypothesis, though.
-NO Ability to set permissions on files for multiple users
Dear oh my, as my mother would say
It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens.
You're right. We should never try and prevent bad things. We should never inform ourselves. We should wait till something happens. Hey, maybe it never will, and our irresponsibility will go undetected! We could get lucky!
It's called trust.
Let me fix that for you:
It's called... uhh... my brain hav stop, I canot think.
There. Always a pleasure
You're buying _A_ market, the one encapsulated by the index you buy into. The market that you buy into may, itself, underperform, especially over a given time period.
No guaranteed win, just a conservative and usually-effective risk/reward tradeoff.
Carp (eg goldfish) live in an environment in which jumping from one body of water to another offers a real chance of accessing a new environment, e.g. a new pond or stream. It also offers the ONLY chance of survival for carp trapped in small, evaporating puddles of water, which may well be how goldfish register their surroundings.
By contrast, a dolphin has only a fairly low chance of being able to jump into a whole new ocean. A zero chance, in fact.
Therefore, the tendency to jump may be more a reflection of the chance that jumping will do a given creature any good, rather than a sign of intelligence.
Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans).
Elephants also have this, and so (probably) do (some) dogs. Again, these are the animals with the complex social structures.
But honestly, please don't underestimate elephants. They can think, and alone among the non-primates they have hands.
Well, trunks.
Copyright infringement != theft. If you think it is, your understanding of American (and other) law is insufficient for you to make any useful statement on the subject.
Learn the la -- oops. Whoops. Sorry. You're on Slashdot, yet you do have more knowledge of the legal system than the average muskrat. I didn't expect that! Er, sorry I snapped at ya.
Copyright infringement != theft. If you think it is, your understanding of American (and other) law is insufficient for you to make any useful statement on the subject.
Learn the law.
This has been a public service announcement; my karma being expended to try and encourage you to learn about the world you live in.
Cellphones, of course, don't work on flights as a general rule. They only work on flights THAT PASS OVER LOTS OF CELL PHONE CELLS. The Pacific, the Gobi, the Sahara, and Greenland are all good examples of places not rich in cell phone cells.
Of course, if by 'plane travel' you unconsciously mean 'plane travel within the continental United States', then sure, you can just use your cell phone.
The one thing missing for Microsoft, is panache. There's nothing hip or cool aboug having some music device from a giant corporation. Without that certain cachet of having something from a company which makes very stylish computers and operating systems and got U2 on board.
See, that _reads_ like a parody of a Mac user -- but it's serious, isn't it? I just remembered that there really are vast blocks of people who probably do stick on U2 in the evening quite regularly, and they probably aspire to being hip, cool and stylish with cachet and panache.
Smells like another waste of money from a company that just doesn't understand that they are only profitable at a few things and should stop this kind of nonsense.
The above, however, is unarguable truth
I agree completely with what you say about feedback -- with one addition:
ALL feedback comes from people.
A computer can't tell you whether what you created was user-friendly, useful, legal, necessary, maintainable, marketable, reusable, finished on time, and capable of handling scenarios you haven't foreseen. It can tell you that your code does n things in m milliseconds -- i.e. things that are rarely of much interest except to the geek.
It's interesting to consider why some fields have prodigies and some don't. If the Sci Am article is right, then it's a matter of some things being efficiently teachable and others less so. I must say, I'm tempted to hypothesize that literature is 'harder' than math and music.
By 'rugby player' I just meant the opposite of the basement geek stereotype. I didn't specifically mean a grunting, drooling, pig-headed half-man
Actually, I meant to say that there is no correlation between technical 'aptitude' and geek-hood -- which is quite a difference.
I also could have been clearer (but my post was long enough already) about social factors. Wherever you are, there are clearly factors that either push the geeky into learning and applying technical skills, or push those who choose to specialize in technical skills into geek culture. It's like riding a motorcycle and being a big hairy guy with a filthy jacket -- they are not inherently correlated but local cultural factors can push those who have one trait into also having the other.
What I'm arguing is just that a natural tendency to geek-like traits and a natural tendency to skilled computer programming are not correlated, if indeed you can have a natural tendency to either of those things. But people think they are correlated (or used to think so) and thus tend to expect one when they encounter the other.
It's also probably important that you're talking about students and I'm talking about grownups(*). Students are free to throw themselves into whatever subculture they choose -- thus I think I'd expect correlations induced by social pressures to be strong in that population. I reckon in ten year's time, those of them that are still living the geek dream will not be the most skilled group.
(*) I'm not being mean, it's just a fact about delayed adulthood in the rich world. I benefited from it too!
I've noticed, like many others, that some 'expert' programmers are perhaps 8x as
productive as regular programmers; their work does not require checking,
they solve complex problems in such a way that the problem can actually
be forgotten about, and they never find that something can't be done
because of the decisions they made earlier. I would rather have one of
these guys with on a project than three regular Joes, and the wise
project manager scours the organization for them and collects them all
in a fiercely guarded hoard. What vast innate aptitude they must have!
And yet I notice that these experts are, coincidentally, also the same
people who use a spell-checker, who ask what terms mean before trying to
use them, who write down what they're going to do before they do it, who
understand what the business context of the work they're doing is, and
who understand the imperfect realities of the workplace. In other words,
they're not natural computer geniuses; they're people who bother to learn
how to do stuff right.
An image of the naturally talented 'geek' or 'nerd' has grown up in the
last 20 years, especially outside of the IT community. These
individuals, the story goes, can be awkward and eccentric in the more
'people' aspects of life but are gifted with tremendous focus and
ability to understand complexity in technical areas. Often seen
watching Star Trek and blowing things up in their back yards, they are
the highly specialized new breed on which the information revolution
depends.
The fact is, the above is half-right. 'Geeks' do exist -- but there
is absolutely no correlation between geek-hood and technical ability.
Quite the reverse, in fact; technical ability is acquired by learning
from others, and you can't learn from others if you don't communicate.
The basement-dwelling machine-code-writing ubergeek of the 80's really
existed, but only due to social factors; had he left his basement and
gotten a girlfreind, he would have become more productive, not less.
This is pretty well recognised in business now; nobody hires the
basement-dweller if they can hire the rugby-player, which is rather bad
luck for the basement-dweller but sound thinking on the part of the
business.
And yet the image persists in popular culture, so much so that people
who learn that I work with computers still occasionally expect me to be
into a whole nerd culture of comics, DIY demolitions, and so forth.
Sure, some people are bigger or stronger or smarter than others to some
degree; but how remarkably seductive this idea that certain people just
naturally fall into certain slots, where they are good and bad at
specific predetermined things, is! And how very different from reality
it is.
Except for mathematicians, mind you. Those guys are born not made, I'm sure of it.
I know what proto-Japonic is. How could I possibly know that the -eba form used to be a pluperfect-like form, and know of the existance of a 'Goryeo' language, and know that the word proto-Japonic exists, and yet not know what it means?? Whoosh factor... INCREASING!
It's worth bearing in mind that Korean is just the last, heavily Sinicized, survivor of a large group of languages in which the languages of Goryeo, Goguryeo, Balhae, Buyeo, those bastards Shilla, and early Japan all had a place (and which presumably had some relationship with the Tungusic languages to the north). Unfortunately the fact that they tended to leave all their inscriptions in Chinese, and that the whole area has been Chinesified with the suppression of other languages and cultures, makes it pretty well impossible to reconstruct the relationships.
I'm glad you didn't rush in and assert that 'Japanese is an Altaic language'. I can't help but feel the Altaic language group is more of a cool idea than a real language group. Turkish is Turkic, but the relationship between Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, and modern Japanese/Korean is probably lost forever.
Such, then, is the sadness inherent in N Asian linguistics. In the end it always comes down to '...and then the Chinese wiped them out'. Substitute 'Russians' for 'Chinese' where appropriate
The link you give is interesting. The guy does not actually consider 'guguru' an abbreviation, though; he just says that the fact it ends in 'ru' makes it lend itself to conversion to a verb. He also seems to suggest that 'guguru' goes back as far as 'guuguru' which is reasonable because it would be unusual to abbreviate a word in Japanese by shortening a vowel (although there's an example on the tip of my tongue...)
Anyway, I must dash, I have a shoulder of lamb in the oven.
I would genuinely be abhorred if this were to actually happen.
Why? Is it your fault?
Nice examples of usage, but where did you get this notion that "guguru" descends from proto-Japonic? I mean, you even called it a loanword from English at the beginning of your post!
Yes. Yes, I did. It's looks like a loanword... and I called it a loanword... and it is a loanword. Hmm. About this time, you might begin to experience a sort of 'whoosh'ing feeling. This is the sensation of having completely missed a very, very, VERY obvious joke. I think you ought to consider the possibility that I don't _really_ believe that 'guguru' is from 'proto-Japonic' (whatever that is). Not all sentences are to be taken at their literal face value; some are humorous or dramatic inventions or exaggerations, and some are metaphors or other imagery, or are to be understood allegorically. This one, for example, was a humorous invention.
It obviously is a shortening of "guuguru suru", ("to Google")
Hrm, I'm not sure it's just an abbreviation. For one thing, you get mostly 'guuguru suru' but mostly 'guguru'. I think it's more of a tongue-in cheek effort to create a fake kokugo word than an attempt to abbreviate. It would be interesting to consider other english words that have become 'suru' verbs ending in 'ru', such as 'insutaru suru'.
Aww, the Japanese verb 'guguru', to search on the internet, is almost the only import from English that I don't hate. It's cool the way it becomes a proper verb with a full set of conjugations:
guguru -- google it
guguritakunakunaru -- to no longer want to google it
guguriyagaru -- f@@king google it
gugureba -- archaic pluperfect tense, now used as a subjunctive
gugurikarikeri -- poetic form: 'to have once been googled... and perhaps to be googled again'
Possibly from proto-Japonic '*gugumi', c.f. Goryeo '*g-g-o'.
Mind, I suppose it would depend on whether Google trademarked 'google' spelt in katakana.