"""Classic libertarianism asks "how can we do that with a little government as possible"."""
Some issues here.
First, it is Classic Liberalism. For the lack of a better description Classic Liberalism waned as a political force as implementation of its policies led to the Victorian workhouses. This led to Liberalism gaining a more social approach, leading to Social Liberalism which became the leading faction of Liberalism in the 20th century.
It is Libertarianism (ie. Neo-Classical Liberalism) that is concerned with minimalising government intervention. Libertarianism is basically Classical Liberalism in new clothing.
Well, we've drifted a bit off-topic here and I can see that you basically want to vent... so...
I'm sorry to hear that you feel discriminated against. However, as the mainland has much more political and economic power over HK than vice versa, I don't think this is any sort of real racial discrimination on the part of HKers. It's more to do with the difference in culture and also that people coming from the mainland not behaving well when travelling and living in HK. All I can say is that respect is earned, and not taken for granted.
Why don't you channel your passion positively and influence the way mainlanders behave (especially when travelling in Hong Kong) so that they don't feel that mainlanders are rude and embarrassing to be around. Stuff like not pushing people around on the street, not shouting all the time and to queue up orderly.
Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually intelligible for most part in the written form, but for spoken varieties it is a challenge.
The pronunciation has diverged too much (from their respective dialects in Middle Chinese) to be considered mutually intelligible. I'm putting my neck out here, but the difference between spoken Cantonese and Mandarin is similar to the difference between spoken Portuguese and Spanish.
What kind of tosh is this? No wonder the HK doesn't want to further integration with China, if it means they have to put up with people like you.
Have you never heard of "Loan Words"?
Much of Japanese and Korean is made of Chinese loan words. They are proud of their languague, why does it make Hong Kongers with their loan wards into Cantonese any different (considering that Cantonese has borrowed very little compared to the Korean and Japanese languages)?
In fact Mandarin has a number of loan words itself borrowed from English -
I don't know where to begin. You are not totally incorrect, but your omissions change the whole idea of how dialects work in Chinese.
First of all, understand that (written) Chinese is a logographic language. You can understand Chinese without being able to speak the spoken varieties. This is what the Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese did for centuries for learning and diplomacy. In the end, a lot of Chinese words were adopted into these languages but that's a discussion for another day.
In the past, the standard for written Chinese was Classical (or Literary) Chinese, based on the rules of vocabulary and grammar of the central plains between 500BC and 220AD. This was used extensively in learning and in government and in the past functioned similar to Latin in western and central Europe.
As the spoken varieties of Chinese started to branch out, the standard form of writing differed more and more to the spoken varieties. However, this did not stop local dialects from writing their vernacular in Chinese characters. In those days, you need to be learned in order to be able to read and write, and if you are learned, you would know how to read and write Literary Chinese (just like Latin). So most of the writing we see in Chinese history until the modern era was done in Literary Chinese.
However, in the modern era in China, and I'm simplifying this quite a lot - to promote literacy, it was decided to standardize on a new type of writing style, that based writing on the Mandarin dialect. This is called written vernacular Chinese and is what you are talking about. However, not everything is written this way.
Local 'dialects' can be written in the local vernacular (or close to it) using words specific to the dialect. This is often done in Hong Kong and in Canton/Guangzhou. In fact, there are many newspapers and magazines in HK that is written in the Cantonese dialect.
However, written Mandarin and written Cantonese for most part is mutually intelligible as the grammatical differences are not huge even though the pronunciation can be very different. There are differences in word use, but these are easily identifiable and can be navigated around.
No they didn't. The reason is that Microsoft never really wanted to be in the phone business for real - what they were worried about is that portable devices would replace Windows desktops and notebooks as the computing device of choice. That's the reason that Windows Mobile never really caught on - they saw smartphones as a niche complimentary product (to desktop and notebooks) and when it struck them that people were ready to move on to using their smartphones and tablets as primary computing devices, they still wanted to protect/leverage their Windows monopoly. Just look at Windows 8 - it's not a good desktop OS, it's not a good tablet OS, it's some sort of Frankenstein interface that tells you what a sad state of affairs that MS is in.
Marketing is more than just advertising and selling a product. Product development is also a part of the wider discipline of marketing.
I agree on your observation that software is a sore point for Nokia. I also have a 770 - it's next to my mouse pad right now. The software left a lot to be desired, but also the hardware. The 4 inch WVGA panel was incredible spec-wise back in the day, but they applied some sort of coating on it that made the screen grainly. Also the resistive touch-screen wasn't the easiest to use. Sound also was anemic. The experience just wasn't that impressive. Now compare that to the wow factor when the iPhone and iPad when it first came out.
I agree with your point, but it's not just diversity in the product range that give Apple and advantage - it's also just really good at making stuff that people desire and keeping people's attention on their products (and brand). In short, they're really really good at marketing (and not just the selling part).
Nokia is almost the opposite, they make products designed by engineers. All my Nokia products still work after all these years, bashed up housing and all. Talk time and battery life is excellent and even the Nokia accessories are well made. That's good if you're selling a car, or maybe even a fridge, but when you're talking about a smartphone which lasts on average 18 months, it's not that good. For many people, buying a smartphone is like buying a handbag or a pair of leather shoes, it's a functional fashion accessory and when Nokia tried to be fashionable, it came out with the 7600 and the 7280 (although I have to admit the 8810 was pretty hot).
When the iPhone came out, it's not just the phone hardware which needs to be fashionable, but the software as well. You got to sell that your customers want, not what they need. WP might be a OK smartphone OS and it's got everything that a user *needs* but that's not what they want.
The Microsoft deal was a done deal right from the start when they floated the idea to the board. Did it occur that you that every other phone manufacturer making WP7 phones were also making Android phones? Nothing stopped Nokia from licensing WP7 while making Meego or Android phones.. Well nothing apart from those platform support payments and the fact that a Microsoft executive was at the helm..
Nokia came out with an internet tablet back in 2005. I have one sitting on my desk right now. The problem with Nokia wasn't innovation, nor is innovation Apple's strength. What (the consumer part of) Nokia lacked was a understanding of how to market products other than normal phones. Add to that, it was *too* engineering focused - case in point, Symbian was difficult to code for, but battery life was excellent due to the design of the OS. Add to that Symbian was too entrenched.
Nokia had a good plan - they wanted to develop the OS from their tablets into a modern smartphone OS (Maemo/Meego), while at the same time, develop Qt so that developers have a good API and dev environment to code in. This code could then be portable across Symbian, Meego and desktop OSes.
If Nokia was able to fully execute this plan, I doubt that they would be in a worse position than they would be now. Microsoft saw this as a threat (and opportunity to find a reliable HW partner as WP7 was driving the major manufactures away) and nipped it in the bud.
To specifically address your first point, State run Chinese enterprises in the 1960s weren't doing much better. Many state run Chinese firms today still require state subsidies to operate.
What's more concerning is the current climate in which everything has to be privatised. There are some areas where the free-market performs sufficiently worse than than a controlled economy. Privatisation of rail in the UK, for example, privatised profits while the state still needs to subsidise the infrastructure. I'm sure if the current trends continue, this is exactly what's going to happen with the NHS. In the end, the public gets shafted.
I'm not sure which world you live in, but leading the project which produces the OS kernel that is used in more computing devices than any other - well, that's not a bad result really.
Yes, same here on a 660. Twinview works with 3 monitors on 1 card as expected. 3D acceleration is working fine, I'm using gnome-shell (I can hear the gasps already).
I'm on the proprietary Nvidia Linux driver with 2 monitors and adaptive mem/gpu clock speed. The clocks do appear to be scaling, so maybe this is a Windows driver problem?
Pinyin uses marks to indicate tones. You might not use it for computer input and it's also widely omitted on signs but it's a part of the system and is important to note.
Cantonese romanization standardization.. well it's a complicated story - as even the Hong Kong Government couldn't standardize on one romanization scheme. A lot of it is history, as the HK Gov uses a historical standard to romanize place name and personal names, and the system works very well at this level. A legacy of British rule so to speak. This system, however, is useless when you want to romanize Cantonese in texts.
Genetic affinity for left-handedness does exist on one side of my family. My aunt, for example, is left-handed and writes Chinese with her left hand from a small age. I can't, (well I can, but it's ugly), write Chinese with my left hand, nor English, Japanese or French for that matter. In any case, I fail to see how this relates to our conversation on the subject matter as a whole. Personally though, I do wish you well on your studies.
Cantonese romanization is not as standardized as Mandarin. Jyutping (which means "Cantonese assembled") is probably the most consistent Cantonese romanized phonetic system, but not the most used. Then there is Wong's system, which was standardized as the system used by the HK Education deparatment (which no-one uses). Yale romanization is more popular , but almost nobody uses Cantonese romanized input in Hong Kong because it is a massive hassle (especially in representing the tonal information - there are 7-9 tones in Cantonese (depending on who does the counting) compared to 4 in Mandarin).
In fact, the most widely used romanization system for Cantonese is the system that the HK government uses to transcribing names in latin script. This is used for proper names - the names of places and also for the names of people. This isn't standardized and is not very useful for text input as tonal information is not preserved well. However, it is probably the only Cantonese romanization system people in HK would generally know.
In any case, I would take care not to make over-generalizations from your personal experiences, and then use them to dismiss the observations of other people, which is probably the main point of my post to you. You only need to see the number of Galaxy Notes on the streets to see the popularity of the stylus input in the CJK region. It may be that text input is usually done on keypad systems (such as T9), or keyboard systems (such as Quick or CJ), but there is a certain attractiveness of stylus-based input there that you simply don't see in N.America or W.Europe for example.
Not everybody uses Pinyin in greater China. People in Hong Kong and Taiwan for example usually use T9, or some other quick input method based on brush strokes. But for some complicated words you can't find, it's just easier to use the pen. Handwriting recognition is very accurate in Chinese as the number and direction of the brush stroke is matched to a database of words. There is a system on how you write each Chinese character in terms of brush strokes and there is usually only one way to write it properly. It is also a natural way of inputting characters if you haven't had previous exposures to computers, for the elderly, for example. Another reason is that not everybody speaks Mandarin (Pinyin is romanization system for Mandarin). Pinyin in Hong Kong will probably never catch on.
Autonomous does not equal sovereign, plus nowhere in my post did I say Hong Kong was even fully autonomous.
In any case, the part of the post which was completely wrong was this -
... there is no external agreement to continue to operate them as SARs. China does so because it is in their best interest to make stuff in China, "smuggle" it to Hong Kong, then sell it from there, as if that's somehow different.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration governs the terms of the handover and how the territory is run after the handover. The Basic Law implements those terms, functioning as in effect a written constitution. Changes to the Basic law has to go through certain legal processes. The reason that Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy is due to these protections, and the fact that a overwhelming majority of the population would like to remain an SAR. It was pretty widely reported that Pro-Beijing sentiment has dropped to new lows in the last few years. As an English speaker, the best source of news is undoubtedly the SCMP, but most of the articles are behind a paywall.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they didn't have to ditch MeeGo to go with Android; that's the whole point.
The government isn't just one guy you know.
"""Classic libertarianism asks "how can we do that with a little government as possible"."""
Some issues here.
First, it is Classic Liberalism. For the lack of a better description Classic Liberalism waned as a political force as implementation of its policies led to the Victorian workhouses. This led to Liberalism gaining a more social approach, leading to Social Liberalism which became the leading faction of Liberalism in the 20th century.
It is Libertarianism (ie. Neo-Classical Liberalism) that is concerned with minimalising government intervention. Libertarianism is basically Classical Liberalism in new clothing.
Linus is funny while Ballmer acts funny. Worlds apart if you ask me.
I can't seem to find your point. In my last sentence I said that (formal) written Mandarin and Cantonese is largely mutually intelligible.
There are two kinds of written Cantonese - formal and vernacular. Formal written Cantonese is used in book, newspapers and magazines.
You can also write out vernacular Cantonese. This is what the courts did in Hong Kong to record the exact testimony that witnesses or defendants give.
Well, we've drifted a bit off-topic here and I can see that you basically want to vent... so...
I'm sorry to hear that you feel discriminated against. However, as the mainland has much more political and economic power over HK than vice versa, I don't think this is any sort of real racial discrimination on the part of HKers. It's more to do with the difference in culture and also that people coming from the mainland not behaving well when travelling and living in HK. All I can say is that respect is earned, and not taken for granted.
Why don't you channel your passion positively and influence the way mainlanders behave (especially when travelling in Hong Kong) so that they don't feel that mainlanders are rude and embarrassing to be around. Stuff like not pushing people around on the street, not shouting all the time and to queue up orderly.
Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually intelligible for most part in the written form, but for spoken varieties it is a challenge.
The pronunciation has diverged too much (from their respective dialects in Middle Chinese) to be considered mutually intelligible. I'm putting my neck out here, but the difference between spoken Cantonese and Mandarin is similar to the difference between spoken Portuguese and Spanish.
What kind of tosh is this? No wonder the HK doesn't want to further integration with China, if it means they have to put up with people like you.
Have you never heard of "Loan Words"?
Much of Japanese and Korean is made of Chinese loan words. They are proud of their languague, why does it make Hong Kongers with their loan wards into Cantonese any different (considering that Cantonese has borrowed very little compared to the Korean and Japanese languages)?
In fact Mandarin has a number of loan words itself borrowed from English -
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/englishloan.php
Note that 2/3rd of the list are Mandarin loan words.
I don't know where to begin. You are not totally incorrect, but your omissions change the whole idea of how dialects work in Chinese.
First of all, understand that (written) Chinese is a logographic language. You can understand Chinese without being able to speak the spoken varieties. This is what the Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese did for centuries for learning and diplomacy. In the end, a lot of Chinese words were adopted into these languages but that's a discussion for another day.
In the past, the standard for written Chinese was Classical (or Literary) Chinese, based on the rules of vocabulary and grammar of the central plains between 500BC and 220AD. This was used extensively in learning and in government and in the past functioned similar to Latin in western and central Europe.
As the spoken varieties of Chinese started to branch out, the standard form of writing differed more and more to the spoken varieties. However, this did not stop local dialects from writing their vernacular in Chinese characters. In those days, you need to be learned in order to be able to read and write, and if you are learned, you would know how to read and write Literary Chinese (just like Latin). So most of the writing we see in Chinese history until the modern era was done in Literary Chinese.
However, in the modern era in China, and I'm simplifying this quite a lot - to promote literacy, it was decided to standardize on a new type of writing style, that based writing on the Mandarin dialect. This is called written vernacular Chinese and is what you are talking about. However, not everything is written this way.
Local 'dialects' can be written in the local vernacular (or close to it) using words specific to the dialect. This is often done in Hong Kong and in Canton/Guangzhou. In fact, there are many newspapers and magazines in HK that is written in the Cantonese dialect.
However, written Mandarin and written Cantonese for most part is mutually intelligible as the grammatical differences are not huge even though the pronunciation can be very different. There are differences in word use, but these are easily identifiable and can be navigated around.
It also sealed Nokia's fate. Selling your soul, figuratively speaking.
No they didn't. The reason is that Microsoft never really wanted to be in the phone business for real - what they were worried about is that portable devices would replace Windows desktops and notebooks as the computing device of choice. That's the reason that Windows Mobile never really caught on - they saw smartphones as a niche complimentary product (to desktop and notebooks) and when it struck them that people were ready to move on to using their smartphones and tablets as primary computing devices, they still wanted to protect/leverage their Windows monopoly. Just look at Windows 8 - it's not a good desktop OS, it's not a good tablet OS, it's some sort of Frankenstein interface that tells you what a sad state of affairs that MS is in.
Marketing is more than just advertising and selling a product. Product development is also a part of the wider discipline of marketing.
I agree on your observation that software is a sore point for Nokia. I also have a 770 - it's next to my mouse pad right now. The software left a lot to be desired, but also the hardware. The 4 inch WVGA panel was incredible spec-wise back in the day, but they applied some sort of coating on it that made the screen grainly. Also the resistive touch-screen wasn't the easiest to use. Sound also was anemic. The experience just wasn't that impressive. Now compare that to the wow factor when the iPhone and iPad when it first came out.
I agree with your point, but it's not just diversity in the product range that give Apple and advantage - it's also just really good at making stuff that people desire and keeping people's attention on their products (and brand). In short, they're really really good at marketing (and not just the selling part).
Nokia is almost the opposite, they make products designed by engineers. All my Nokia products still work after all these years, bashed up housing and all. Talk time and battery life is excellent and even the Nokia accessories are well made. That's good if you're selling a car, or maybe even a fridge, but when you're talking about a smartphone which lasts on average 18 months, it's not that good. For many people, buying a smartphone is like buying a handbag or a pair of leather shoes, it's a functional fashion accessory and when Nokia tried to be fashionable, it came out with the 7600 and the 7280 (although I have to admit the 8810 was pretty hot).
When the iPhone came out, it's not just the phone hardware which needs to be fashionable, but the software as well. You got to sell that your customers want, not what they need. WP might be a OK smartphone OS and it's got everything that a user *needs* but that's not what they want.
The Microsoft deal was a done deal right from the start when they floated the idea to the board. Did it occur that you that every other phone manufacturer making WP7 phones were also making Android phones? Nothing stopped Nokia from licensing WP7 while making Meego or Android phones.. Well nothing apart from those platform support payments and the fact that a Microsoft executive was at the helm..
Nokia came out with an internet tablet back in 2005. I have one sitting on my desk right now. The problem with Nokia wasn't innovation, nor is innovation Apple's strength. What (the consumer part of) Nokia lacked was a understanding of how to market products other than normal phones. Add to that, it was *too* engineering focused - case in point, Symbian was difficult to code for, but battery life was excellent due to the design of the OS. Add to that Symbian was too entrenched.
Nokia had a good plan - they wanted to develop the OS from their tablets into a modern smartphone OS (Maemo/Meego), while at the same time, develop Qt so that developers have a good API and dev environment to code in. This code could then be portable across Symbian, Meego and desktop OSes.
If Nokia was able to fully execute this plan, I doubt that they would be in a worse position than they would be now. Microsoft saw this as a threat (and opportunity to find a reliable HW partner as WP7 was driving the major manufactures away) and nipped it in the bud.
To specifically address your first point, State run Chinese enterprises in the 1960s weren't doing much better. Many state run Chinese firms today still require state subsidies to operate.
What's more concerning is the current climate in which everything has to be privatised. There are some areas where the free-market performs sufficiently worse than than a controlled economy. Privatisation of rail in the UK, for example, privatised profits while the state still needs to subsidise the infrastructure. I'm sure if the current trends continue, this is exactly what's going to happen with the NHS. In the end, the public gets shafted.
I'm not sure which world you live in, but leading the project which produces the OS kernel that is used in more computing devices than any other - well, that's not a bad result really.
The pervasive stutter in Android rendering has all but disappeared since at least 3 versions of Android ago back in the ICS era.
Yes, same here on a 660. Twinview works with 3 monitors on 1 card as expected. 3D acceleration is working fine, I'm using gnome-shell (I can hear the gasps already).
I'm on the proprietary Nvidia Linux driver with 2 monitors and adaptive mem/gpu clock speed. The clocks do appear to be scaling, so maybe this is a Windows driver problem?
Pinyin uses marks to indicate tones. You might not use it for computer input and it's also widely omitted on signs but it's a part of the system and is important to note.
Cantonese romanization standardization.. well it's a complicated story - as even the Hong Kong Government couldn't standardize on one romanization scheme. A lot of it is history, as the HK Gov uses a historical standard to romanize place name and personal names, and the system works very well at this level. A legacy of British rule so to speak. This system, however, is useless when you want to romanize Cantonese in texts.
Genetic affinity for left-handedness does exist on one side of my family. My aunt, for example, is left-handed and writes Chinese with her left hand from a small age. I can't, (well I can, but it's ugly), write Chinese with my left hand, nor English, Japanese or French for that matter. In any case, I fail to see how this relates to our conversation on the subject matter as a whole. Personally though, I do wish you well on your studies.
Cantonese romanization is not as standardized as Mandarin. Jyutping (which means "Cantonese assembled") is probably the most consistent Cantonese romanized phonetic system, but not the most used. Then there is Wong's system, which was standardized as the system used by the HK Education deparatment (which no-one uses). Yale romanization is more popular , but almost nobody uses Cantonese romanized input in Hong Kong because it is a massive hassle (especially in representing the tonal information - there are 7-9 tones in Cantonese (depending on who does the counting) compared to 4 in Mandarin).
In fact, the most widely used romanization system for Cantonese is the system that the HK government uses to transcribing names in latin script. This is used for proper names - the names of places and also for the names of people. This isn't standardized and is not very useful for text input as tonal information is not preserved well. However, it is probably the only Cantonese romanization system people in HK would generally know.
In any case, I would take care not to make over-generalizations from your personal experiences, and then use them to dismiss the observations of other people, which is probably the main point of my post to you. You only need to see the number of Galaxy Notes on the streets to see the popularity of the stylus input in the CJK region. It may be that text input is usually done on keypad systems (such as T9), or keyboard systems (such as Quick or CJ), but there is a certain attractiveness of stylus-based input there that you simply don't see in N.America or W.Europe for example.
Not everybody uses Pinyin in greater China. People in Hong Kong and Taiwan for example usually use T9, or some other quick input method based on brush strokes. But for some complicated words you can't find, it's just easier to use the pen. Handwriting recognition is very accurate in Chinese as the number and direction of the brush stroke is matched to a database of words. There is a system on how you write each Chinese character in terms of brush strokes and there is usually only one way to write it properly. It is also a natural way of inputting characters if you haven't had previous exposures to computers, for the elderly, for example. Another reason is that not everybody speaks Mandarin (Pinyin is romanization system for Mandarin). Pinyin in Hong Kong will probably never catch on.
That will still take ages...
Why not give Bittorrent Sync a go? It's a decentralized "dropbox" on steriods!
http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
Autonomous does not equal sovereign, plus nowhere in my post did I say Hong Kong was even fully autonomous.
In any case, the part of the post which was completely wrong was this -
... there is no external agreement to continue to operate them as SARs. China does so because it is in their best interest to make stuff in China, "smuggle" it to Hong Kong, then sell it from there, as if that's somehow different.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration governs the terms of the handover and how the territory is run after the handover. The Basic Law implements those terms, functioning as in effect a written constitution. Changes to the Basic law has to go through certain legal processes. The reason that Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy is due to these protections, and the fact that a overwhelming majority of the population would like to remain an SAR. It was pretty widely reported that Pro-Beijing sentiment has dropped to new lows in the last few years. As an English speaker, the best source of news is undoubtedly the SCMP, but most of the articles are behind a paywall.