But from my experience in Japan, most people just send email on their phones instead. And with that being so cheap, and spending so much time on trains (at least in the Tokyo area - can't speak for other areas) which are plastered in signs telling you to not talk on the phone, it makes sense. I didn't talk on my cell phone much - and nor did I see a need to. Sending mail was so much cheaper, and more acceptable on the trains.
Sorry, no. The Japanese verb for "to look/see/watch" has been "miru" since Classical Japanese (almost a thousand years now) at least, and as far as I know, longer than that. It is true that at that time, the imperative form was "miyo" and not "miro" like it is today. I don't honestly know exactly when that change took place, but it certainly wasn't a change specific to this verb. The imperative form of all of the ichidan verbs of Japanese changed similarly too, and I really doubt they changed because of one word in Portuguese.
Xine is probably like MPlayer, and every other linux media player I've heard of that can use windows DLLs for playback - it uses a DLL loader which was forked from avidec at some point, which was itself at some point forked from wine. So while it doesn't use wine directly, and the code's probably mutated along the way to the point where it may no longer resemble the original wine code, it is, in a sense, using wine to load the DLLs.
The original Japanese article also only says he was arrested. It doesn't mention deportation.
Re:Topic-Comment vs. Subject-Verb-Object
on
PS3 Opened For Pictures
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And actually, by tacking parts of the sentence on as an afterthought, it's possible to move the verb away from the end of the sentence too. This is very common, especially in casual speech.
And although it's a newer creation, Japanese does have a 'v' sound. It's not used by any native Japanese words, and most foreign words that have made it into the language came in long enough ago that they still approximate the 'v' with a 'b'.
Japanese particles aren't necessarily a syllable. Japanese words are measured in length of mora rather than syllables. They may be the same in some cases, but aren't necessarily. A lot of particles (ga, wa, ni, etc) are a single mora, but there are longer ones (made, kara, yori, etc).
Not to mention numerous MPEG-4/MOV samples exist in the wild.
I wasn't aware of that, probably because of avoiding Quicktime for so long because there hadn't been a good way to play them for so long, and usually there were alternatives for everything I was trying to view.
And according to http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Sorenson _Video_1, SVQ1 was widely used from 1998-2002, when it was replaced by SVQ3. So that's at least 5 years of using proprietary codecs (I don't know how long SVQ3 was widely used).
According to Wikipedia at least, Quicktime supported MPEG-4 starting from version 6 in 2002, but it's quality was much worse than other MPEG-4 implementations, so I don't know how widely used it was at that point. Even if it was immediately and widely used, Quicktime still hasn't been supported open codecs for as long as they were using proprietary ones, though it's not as bad as I'd thought.
I'd forgotten about that patch. Mostly because when it was first introduced, I saw the repeated warnings on hat page about how it's really slow. I never tried it, so I can't comment on how slow it really is, but that many warning about it led me to believe it was probably unusable. And again, I don't know for sure, but being the VC-1 reference decoder, it still probably doesn't decode the older non-compliant WMV3 files properly.
Quicktime used MPEG-4 video for years. Now it uses h.264 and AAC audio in an MP4 container
No, it didn't use MPEG-4 video, it used Sorenson Video 1 and 3 (SVQ1/3) for the longest time. SVQ1 was completely non-standard, and SVQ3 was apparently based on an early draft version of H.264, but still wasn't quite the same. Both of these were proprietary. And the only reason Quicktime uses a standard conatiner format now is that MP4 was based on the Quicktime MOV format.
That said, I still think Apple is the best of the three.
Windows Media has a SMPTE standardized video codec
Ah, yes, VC-1. It's supposed to be identical to WMV3 (aka WMV9), but isn't quite. Maybe the current WMV3 encoder produces valid VC-1 streams, but there are plenty of older WMV3 files out there which don't follow Microsoft's own spec. And the FFMpeg implementation (and hence the implementation in MPlayer, Xine, VLC, etc) isn't complete yet. It's improving at a rapid pace, but it's not there yet.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
No, it's still separate windows. Which happens to be the way I prefer it. But even for those who do prefer everything gathered within one larger window, I just can't see this difference as being significant enough for all the bashing GIMP's interface gets.
I can accept that GIMP lacks (quite a few) features needed for high end work. But it's always been enough for what I do. And I've honestly never heard a good explanation of why GIMP's interface sucks as badly as everybody says it does. Personally, I can find what I'm looking for much more easily in GIMP than Photoshop. But that's probably because I learned it first. And I suspect that most of the people who hate GIMP's interface aren't doing so because Photoshop's interface is better in any objective way - it's probably just what they're used to, and they're too stubborn to give something different a fair shot.
And to make things even more complicated, China now uses simplified characters, which in many cases have been simplified the same a they have been in Japan (like your example of "study"). But other characters have been simplified differently in Chinese (often times simplified moreso than they have been in Japanese), for example "talk" (seems to be "hua" in Chinese. Has the readings "wa", "kai", and "hanasu" in Japanese). The radical on the left is seven strokes in Japanese, but I believe it's been simplified to two strokes in Chinese.
Of course, Taiwan still uses traditional characters...
I never found it to help much. If a game tells you to press the "X" button, or your friend's telling you what button sequence to press or whatever, you still have to know which shape goes with which button. I find that to be just as much work as remembering it by position. And either way, if you don't know which button is which shape/position, you're still going to have to look at the controller, unless the game displays a picture (which, admittedly, some do - though the same can be done for button position).
I didn't mean to imply that learning Japanese, or even just kanji was easy, or didn't take much effort, just that it wasn't as bad as it was being made out to be. Kanji do have pronounciation clues, even if they aren't immediately obvious; they share radicals in common, so after you learn a number of kanji, you start recognizing them, and learning new kanji isn't as hard as learning each one from scratch. And one thing I did forget to mention was that the lack of spaces between words isn't a problem. It's a pain if something's written entirely in kana, but the use of kanji actually tells you enough about where the words start and stop that you simply don't have much need for spaces.
That said, learning any language, including you first language, is a life-long learning process. Sure, kanji are probably among one of the harder, more time-intensive parts of any language to learn, but so probably is English spelling.
I've never thought about it that way before, and while I can see it, I don't think it's quite the same. In Japanese, "hito-tsu" and "ichi" both mean exactly the same thing: "one". (I'm leaving the suffix "tsu" on the Japanese numbers because they are only rarely ever used without a suffix, whereas it's more common to see the Chinese-derived numbers without one). In English, "one" and "first" aren't the same, and in Japanese, first would be "hito-tsu-me" or "ichi-ban-me" (though the suffix used before "me" may be different depending on what it's the first of).
I said that "hito-tsu,..." was a different series of numbers than "ichi,..." because they mean exactly the same thing, but are completely different, having been derived from different sources. In your example, not only does "one" not mean the same as "first", but after 3 the ordinal numbers are completely based off the regular numbers: "four" becomes "fourth", and so on.
Did you actually read the post!? Sure, he spent 8 years. But he wasn't as "a first grade level." He was conversing with people is own age and above. He learned keigo, which most Japanese people have trouble with until college level or so. He learned 1500+ kanji, which is a high-school level.
Oh please, it may be a hard language, but it's notnear as bad as you make it out to be.
5 year olds don't know that much Kanji. When I stayed with a family in Japan, their 4 year old son could read hiragana and some katakana, and was just learning to write hiragana. He didn't know any kanji.
Also, kanji isn't as hard as you imply. Most kanji have common shapes in them that appear all over the place, and so you learn very quickly. The major radical even typically gives you some hint as to the meaning of the word. Know the kanji for "to say"? Great! If you see it as the left half of another kanji, chances are it has to do with communication (eg, to talk, to read, etc). And with as many radicals as are common between kanji, stroke order isn't that hard to remember, and sometiems helps in remembering the kanji. Besides, native speakers of Japanese don't always get the stroke order right - why should you be expected to do better?
Most kanji only have two or three readings you need to know. One is the kun-reading. The native Japanese reading, which is used when the kanji is a standalone word by itself of with okurigana (hiragana used for inflectional endings and the like). The other readings are the on-readings. Those borrowed from Chinese at some point, and are used when the kanji is part of a compound with other kanji. I find that knowing the kanji for a word helps me remember the word itself. Of course, there are exceptions. For example: "shinjiru" (to believe), where "shin" is the on-reading of the kanji and "jiru" is okurigana, or "maiasa" (every morning), where "mai" is the on-reading of the first kanji, and "asa" is the kun-reading of the second.
Yes, to some extent, it is typically more polite to not complete a thought, but that generally when the rest of the tought it obvious. Why spell it out if everybody already knows what you're going to say? If it's a case where it's not obvious what you're getting at, of course there's no problem with finishing the thought.
Second, you don't use different numbers. Just a different suffix.
For the most part that's true, but there are two different series of numbers (native Japanese numbers: hito-tsu, huta-tsu..., and Chinese-derived numbers: ichi, ni,...). Luckily, the Japanese series of numbers is never really used above ten. Even a lot of Japanese people arean't always sure which counting suffix to use for which type of thing, and there are a couple generic suffixes that you can generally use when you're not sure (-tsu with the Japanese numbers, -ko with the Chinese numbers).
Really, the hardest series of numbers is the dates or counting days.
"AIR-is/ith" may be wrong based on the English spelling, but it is correct going by the katakana spelling. The two vowels at the beginning of the name, romanized straight from the katakana are "ea". This combination of vowels sounds roughly like the vowel in the English "bear" or "air".
And incidentally, there's a counterexample that shows "EA" is not always pronounced as a hard 'e' in English: "bear".
The grenade would fall faster than the person, but not because of density - density doesn't play into it. It's because of less air resistance, which may have a little to do with the density, but a lot more to do with the shape.
The point about it being a more powerful operation aside, it still takes my longer to find.
Why? Because it's in the menus, and not in the context menu for the layers palette. The menus in Photoshop (and GIMP) have way too many items, so it takes too long to read through them if you don't already know where the one you want is.
When the item is in the context menu for whatever part of the interface it naturally makes sense for, it suddenly becomes so much easier to find. Most basic layer operations are done withing the layers palette, so it makes sense to have that operation easily accessible through the context menu. That's not guessing where something it, that's logically grouping of like functionality.
Either it isn't there in Photoshop, or I missed it somehow.
Maybe this is just because I used GIMP first, and still use it more often than photoshop, but I find the GIMP easier to use. There have been countless times where I want to do something (the thing that comes to mind right now it merge two layers) where it takes me a while to find it in the photoshop GUI. In GIMP, merging a layer with the one below it is a simple as right-clicking on the layer and choosing "Merge Down". I've forgotten what it is in photoshop again, but I definitely seem to recall it was more mouse-clicks to do. And that's an operation I do fairly often - it shouldn't take many mouse-clicks.
Slashdot Mirror
But from my experience in Japan, most people just send email on their phones instead. And with that being so cheap, and spending so much time on trains (at least in the Tokyo area - can't speak for other areas) which are plastered in signs telling you to not talk on the phone, it makes sense. I didn't talk on my cell phone much - and nor did I see a need to. Sending mail was so much cheaper, and more acceptable on the trains.
Nope, that's "miyou". "Miro" is the imperative form of the verb.
Sorry, no. The Japanese verb for "to look/see/watch" has been "miru" since Classical Japanese (almost a thousand years now) at least, and as far as I know, longer than that. It is true that at that time, the imperative form was "miyo" and not "miro" like it is today. I don't honestly know exactly when that change took place, but it certainly wasn't a change specific to this verb. The imperative form of all of the ichidan verbs of Japanese changed similarly too, and I really doubt they changed because of one word in Portuguese.
Yes, but miyo isn't used as often anymore for the imperative.
"They're really different kinds of work, requiring different skills, and people who enjoy one sort of work might not enjoy the other sort."
.... they want to work in management"
Exactly. That's exactly why this study is useless. All it says is "Women don't want to work in IT because
His statement is still true even if the rate of progress is non-continuous.
This is what I love about being in Japan. I've got 50 Mbps internet, for only a little more than my parents pay back home for 5 Mbps.
Xine is probably like MPlayer, and every other linux media player I've heard of that can use windows DLLs for playback - it uses a DLL loader which was forked from avidec at some point, which was itself at some point forked from wine. So while it doesn't use wine directly, and the code's probably mutated along the way to the point where it may no longer resemble the original wine code, it is, in a sense, using wine to load the DLLs.
The original Japanese article also only says he was arrested. It doesn't mention deportation.
And actually, by tacking parts of the sentence on as an afterthought, it's possible to move the verb away from the end of the sentence too. This is very common, especially in casual speech.
And although it's a newer creation, Japanese does have a 'v' sound. It's not used by any native Japanese words, and most foreign words that have made it into the language came in long enough ago that they still approximate the 'v' with a 'b'.
Japanese particles aren't necessarily a syllable. Japanese words are measured in length of mora rather than syllables. They may be the same in some cases, but aren't necessarily. A lot of particles (ga, wa, ni, etc) are a single mora, but there are longer ones (made, kara, yori, etc).
I wasn't aware of that, probably because of avoiding Quicktime for so long because there hadn't been a good way to play them for so long, and usually there were alternatives for everything I was trying to view.
And according to http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Sorenso
According to Wikipedia at least, Quicktime supported MPEG-4 starting from version 6 in 2002, but it's quality was much worse than other MPEG-4 implementations, so I don't know how widely used it was at that point. Even if it was immediately and widely used, Quicktime still hasn't been supported open codecs for as long as they were using proprietary ones, though it's not as bad as I'd thought.
I'd forgotten about that patch. Mostly because when it was first introduced, I saw the repeated warnings on hat page about how it's really slow. I never tried it, so I can't comment on how slow it really is, but that many warning about it led me to believe it was probably unusable. And again, I don't know for sure, but being the VC-1 reference decoder, it still probably doesn't decode the older non-compliant WMV3 files properly.
That said, I still think Apple is the best of the three.
Ah, yes, VC-1. It's supposed to be identical to WMV3 (aka WMV9), but isn't quite. Maybe the current WMV3 encoder produces valid VC-1 streams, but there are plenty of older WMV3 files out there which don't follow Microsoft's own spec. And the FFMpeg implementation (and hence the implementation in MPlayer, Xine, VLC, etc) isn't complete yet. It's improving at a rapid pace, but it's not there yet.No, it's still separate windows. Which happens to be the way I prefer it. But even for those who do prefer everything gathered within one larger window, I just can't see this difference as being significant enough for all the bashing GIMP's interface gets.
I can accept that GIMP lacks (quite a few) features needed for high end work. But it's always been enough for what I do. And I've honestly never heard a good explanation of why GIMP's interface sucks as badly as everybody says it does. Personally, I can find what I'm looking for much more easily in GIMP than Photoshop. But that's probably because I learned it first. And I suspect that most of the people who hate GIMP's interface aren't doing so because Photoshop's interface is better in any objective way - it's probably just what they're used to, and they're too stubborn to give something different a fair shot.
And to make things even more complicated, China now uses simplified characters, which in many cases have been simplified the same a they have been in Japan (like your example of "study"). But other characters have been simplified differently in Chinese (often times simplified moreso than they have been in Japanese), for example "talk" (seems to be "hua" in Chinese. Has the readings "wa", "kai", and "hanasu" in Japanese). The radical on the left is seven strokes in Japanese, but I believe it's been simplified to two strokes in Chinese.
...
Of course, Taiwan still uses traditional characters
I never found it to help much. If a game tells you to press the "X" button, or your friend's telling you what button sequence to press or whatever, you still have to know which shape goes with which button. I find that to be just as much work as remembering it by position. And either way, if you don't know which button is which shape/position, you're still going to have to look at the controller, unless the game displays a picture (which, admittedly, some do - though the same can be done for button position).
That said, learning any language, including you first language, is a life-long learning process. Sure, kanji are probably among one of the harder, more time-intensive parts of any language to learn, but so probably is English spelling.
I said that "hito-tsu, ..." was a different series of numbers than "ichi, ..." because they mean exactly the same thing, but are completely different, having been derived from different sources. In your example, not only does "one" not mean the same as "first", but after 3 the ordinal numbers are completely based off the regular numbers: "four" becomes "fourth", and so on.
Did you actually read the post!? Sure, he spent 8 years. But he wasn't as "a first grade level." He was conversing with people is own age and above. He learned keigo, which most Japanese people have trouble with until college level or so. He learned 1500+ kanji, which is a high-school level.
5 year olds don't know that much Kanji. When I stayed with a family in Japan, their 4 year old son could read hiragana and some katakana, and was just learning to write hiragana. He didn't know any kanji.
Also, kanji isn't as hard as you imply. Most kanji have common shapes in them that appear all over the place, and so you learn very quickly. The major radical even typically gives you some hint as to the meaning of the word. Know the kanji for "to say"? Great! If you see it as the left half of another kanji, chances are it has to do with communication (eg, to talk, to read, etc). And with as many radicals as are common between kanji, stroke order isn't that hard to remember, and sometiems helps in remembering the kanji. Besides, native speakers of Japanese don't always get the stroke order right - why should you be expected to do better?
Most kanji only have two or three readings you need to know. One is the kun-reading. The native Japanese reading, which is used when the kanji is a standalone word by itself of with okurigana (hiragana used for inflectional endings and the like). The other readings are the on-readings. Those borrowed from Chinese at some point, and are used when the kanji is part of a compound with other kanji. I find that knowing the kanji for a word helps me remember the word itself. Of course, there are exceptions. For example: "shinjiru" (to believe), where "shin" is the on-reading of the kanji and "jiru" is okurigana, or "maiasa" (every morning), where "mai" is the on-reading of the first kanji, and "asa" is the kun-reading of the second.
Yes, to some extent, it is typically more polite to not complete a thought, but that generally when the rest of the tought it obvious. Why spell it out if everybody already knows what you're going to say? If it's a case where it's not obvious what you're getting at, of course there's no problem with finishing the thought.
For the most part that's true, but there are two different series of numbers (native Japanese numbers: hito-tsu, huta-tsu ..., and Chinese-derived numbers: ichi, ni, ...). Luckily, the Japanese series of numbers is never really used above ten. Even a lot of Japanese people arean't always sure which counting suffix to use for which type of thing, and there are a couple generic suffixes that you can generally use when you're not sure (-tsu with the Japanese numbers, -ko with the Chinese numbers).
Really, the hardest series of numbers is the dates or counting days.
"AIR-is/ith" may be wrong based on the English spelling, but it is correct going by the katakana spelling. The two vowels at the beginning of the name, romanized straight from the katakana are "ea". This combination of vowels sounds roughly like the vowel in the English "bear" or "air". And incidentally, there's a counterexample that shows "EA" is not always pronounced as a hard 'e' in English: "bear".
The grenade would fall faster than the person, but not because of density - density doesn't play into it. It's because of less air resistance, which may have a little to do with the density, but a lot more to do with the shape.
Why? Because it's in the menus, and not in the context menu for the layers palette. The menus in Photoshop (and GIMP) have way too many items, so it takes too long to read through them if you don't already know where the one you want is.
When the item is in the context menu for whatever part of the interface it naturally makes sense for, it suddenly becomes so much easier to find. Most basic layer operations are done withing the layers palette, so it makes sense to have that operation easily accessible through the context menu. That's not guessing where something it, that's logically grouping of like functionality.
Either it isn't there in Photoshop, or I missed it somehow.
I did, and I sure don't recall that menu item existing in the context menu.
Maybe this is just because I used GIMP first, and still use it more often than photoshop, but I find the GIMP easier to use. There have been countless times where I want to do something (the thing that comes to mind right now it merge two layers) where it takes me a while to find it in the photoshop GUI. In GIMP, merging a layer with the one below it is a simple as right-clicking on the layer and choosing "Merge Down". I've forgotten what it is in photoshop again, but I definitely seem to recall it was more mouse-clicks to do. And that's an operation I do fairly often - it shouldn't take many mouse-clicks.