" I am sure some short sighted person said such things about the automobile when it first arrived. Probably something like "If you don't understand how your car works, and can't fix it yourself, you will be walking everywhere." "
Yeah, you won't exactly be walking everywhere, but if you don't know anything about cars you'll probably be paying through the nose everytime you take it to the shop. I think the point the author of the article was trying to make (however poor his choice of words were) is that computers are becoming so prevalent in our everyday world, not knowing at least the basics of computer architecture could put an individual at a serious disadvantage when it comes to small, everyday things. I don't think he was suggesting people would end up as Morlocks if they couldn't whip up a simple "hello world" in Java. And to the topic of your Java class, just because you learned Java in a class that had 34 dropouts doesn't mean the general public is too stupid to learn more about computers. It's quite the opposite actually. Not enough is being done to teach people. Better professors, more classes, better textbooks etc etc.
SCO files lawsuits against the countries of China, Japan and Korea!
Anyways, all joking aside, they are gonna have one tough task up ahead of them. Even though Japanese borrowed characters from the Chinese, they are used in totally different ways. In Chinese, each character represents a certain sound, and that's it. You string together words like you normally would (phonographic), the only problem being that there is about a zillion characters. Japanese, on the other hand, is ideographic. Each group of characters is read differently depending on the context. So each character can have several different phonetic sounds associated with it, depending on the other characters immediately preceeding and following it. And that's just Chinese and Japanese. I don't even know the complications that the Korean writing system would bring to the table. The best idea I can think of off the top of my head is to map each base character, ones that are most frequently used to create other characters, to each key on the keyboard and use some sort of shifting to access them and string them together.
I understand everything in this article up to the point where they start to talk about Kodak's new compression. Do they somehow sneak info in through the 8 bits used for each pixel that allows them to use more than 256 colors? Cause if thats not it, the new Kokak compression seems to use just pre-determined pallete colors that are biased towards better skin rendition for images. And if that's it, then it seems kinda bleh, nothing revolutionary that I though it was. Maybe I'm just missing the key point...so...anyone care to elaborate for me?
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" I am sure some short sighted person said such things about the automobile when it first arrived. Probably something like "If you don't understand how your car works, and can't fix it yourself, you will be walking everywhere." "
Yeah, you won't exactly be walking everywhere, but if you don't know anything about cars you'll probably be paying through the nose everytime you take it to the shop. I think the point the author of the article was trying to make (however poor his choice of words were) is that computers are becoming so prevalent in our everyday world, not knowing at least the basics of computer architecture could put an individual at a serious disadvantage when it comes to small, everyday things. I don't think he was suggesting people would end up as Morlocks if they couldn't whip up a simple "hello world" in Java. And to the topic of your Java class, just because you learned Java in a class that had 34 dropouts doesn't mean the general public is too stupid to learn more about computers. It's quite the opposite actually. Not enough is being done to teach people. Better professors, more classes, better textbooks etc etc.
SCO files lawsuits against the countries of China, Japan and Korea! Anyways, all joking aside, they are gonna have one tough task up ahead of them. Even though Japanese borrowed characters from the Chinese, they are used in totally different ways. In Chinese, each character represents a certain sound, and that's it. You string together words like you normally would (phonographic), the only problem being that there is about a zillion characters. Japanese, on the other hand, is ideographic. Each group of characters is read differently depending on the context. So each character can have several different phonetic sounds associated with it, depending on the other characters immediately preceeding and following it. And that's just Chinese and Japanese. I don't even know the complications that the Korean writing system would bring to the table. The best idea I can think of off the top of my head is to map each base character, ones that are most frequently used to create other characters, to each key on the keyboard and use some sort of shifting to access them and string them together.
I understand everything in this article up to the point where they start to talk about Kodak's new compression. Do they somehow sneak info in through the 8 bits used for each pixel that allows them to use more than 256 colors? Cause if thats not it, the new Kokak compression seems to use just pre-determined pallete colors that are biased towards better skin rendition for images. And if that's it, then it seems kinda bleh, nothing revolutionary that I though it was. Maybe I'm just missing the key point...so...anyone care to elaborate for me?