I'm a US citizen living in Japan, and I wanted to see what my friends and coworkers will have to deal with, so I checked out the Japanese version of the registration website.
It's very poorly planned out in the following ways:
1. Translation is confusing and broken in parts. There were sentences that just broke off halfway through.
2. Due to the details of Japanese text input on computers, you have to specifically tell users to enter single-byte characters in text forms, and actually enforce the this requirement with proper input validation because many people don't really understand the difference. This is unless, of course, you're prepared to handle double-byte alphanumerics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullwidth_form) on the back end. Anyway, the form tells you to enter your info in the Latin alphabet (romaji), but nowhere does it specify single-byte. I wanted to test the form to see how well it coped with double-byte characters, but I didn't want the DHS knocking down my door in the middle of the night.
3. The website is not designed with mobile access in mind (or so I assume; I couldn't even connect to the site on my AU phone). Many, many Japanese people don't have PCs, and do all their internet activities on their mobile phones with very limited browsers.
4. The website does no geo sniffing and ignores preferred language settings, defaulting to English and throwing up a giant legalese JavaScript popup. Talk about unfriendly.
Ultimately I suspect that people will end up leaving all this bullshit to travel agents, and very few people will personally deal with the system on any level (unless that's not allowed; of course I didn't RTFA).
One thing that has been annoying me to no end lately is several incidents in Japan of college kids getting busted with marijuana.
Now the media is calling it an "outbreak" and a "scourge" and bemoaning the morals of the young people, blah blah blah. They trot out so-called experts who talk about "Marijana Psychological Disorder." It's Reefer Madness all over again, and absolutely no one is open to discussing it in a rational manner. Forget the fact that these kids weren't hurting anyone or anything. Forget the fact that most of the rest of the world looks the other way on college pot use. And how about the fact that this country drinks itself to sleep every night? Bunch of hypocrites.
Yes, Commons doesn't have any "notability" or "relevance" requirements. But Wikipedia is, in a way, more lenient in that you can post "fair use" images if no truly free alternative exists, and it meets some other requirements (not too large in resolution, doesn't infringe on owner's blah blah blah).
So for instance the Journey self-titled album cover art is acceptable for use in the article about same in Wikipedia. But this image would not be allowed in Commons because it is not a truly free image.
I work for a Japanese video game company, and about a month ago we had a network outage that was traced back to the auto-update feature of Lunascape. I have no idea how many people installed it, but it apparently created enough traffic to take down our internet connection.
I hope the developers have improved it by now.
Which brings up an interesting question. Up until now Western languages have had a huge advantage for computers since keyboards can have one button per letter because of the small alphabet and context-free characters. It is really easy and fast to input characters to form words using dedicated buttons.
Now with accurate, sensitive touch screens, will word-based writing systems like Chinese actually be better suited now for writing?
It might be faster to hand write a few simple kanji (or hanzi), but for complex characters* it is definitely faster to write the Romanized pronunciation (as described by numerous other replies in this thread).
Especially these days, with everyone inputting Japanese with romaji or cell phone-style inputs, people are forgetting how to hand write kanji. While easy, reliable computer handwriting input might help reverse that trend, I think that very few people can recall every character they might need to write in a given day quickly enough to make handwriting worthwhile.
*For the purposes of this discussion, I'd say the vast majority of kanji are "complex."
I tried to find the original Japanese for this supposed proverb and found this, which Slashdot is apparently incapable of displaying correctly (even converting to HTML entities didn't work; see here and search for "Japanese proverb"):
The meaning is correct, but a Google search for that phrase brings up exactly two hits. A search for the English version of the proverb gives over 61,000 hits.
This sounds like a fake proverb to me. An English speaker probably made it up, thought it sounded good, and attributed it to Japanese because it fit his or her stereotype of "Asian wisdom."
People have bemoaned the "decline in culture" of the young people for centuries. It's bullshit. Life goes on, just in ways different from when you were growing up. I know that's scary, but you can either get used to it or you can turn into a crotchety old bastard that no one likes.
Re: The "Google-it" culture. That's simply the democratization of access to information. The percentage of the population that has the interest and ability to create original solutions probably hasn't changed (or perhaps has increased but the signal is lost among the noise).
There is gSync, which works flawlessly for me and doesn't use a 3rd party server.
You might complain that it's not free or open source. That's true; however, it does work quietly in the background when you use iSync or sync an iPod in iTunes, and never nags you as far as I can tell (unless you sync from the app itself). So you could use it for free. It's certainly not open source though.
Einstein had extensive education in physics before and during the time he was employed as a patent clerk. Your attempt to cite him as an "outsider" to the physics world is quite disingenuous.
Not only is this not news, but it's a bad idea. Straight from the horse's mouth:
You can not make your extensions compatible by changing a Firefox preference. So don't do it unless you're fully prepared to deal with major breakage!
As for GIMP, the last time I used it, it still didn't have any easy way to draw Ovals/Circles and Rectangles/Squares, something that even the most basic of image editors (MS Paint) has. If you want to draw, then you want a vector image editor like Inkscape, not a bitmap editor like Gimp. Yes, that's even if you are drawing on top of bitmaps. Just import the bitmap into Inkscape and draw whatever you like on top of it. If the output must be a bitmap, export to PNG. There are very, very few instances where you should be drawing shapes in a bitmap editor. (An example where this is appropriate: Creating and editing selections. Surprise! You can do this very easily in Gimp.)
...because there is almost never a reason to do a clean install rather than an archive & install, which replaces the system while leaving your data untouched.
I just flew Air Canada for the first time last week and you're right, the seatback entertainment systems are running Windows. And poorly. There are terrible delays when responding to touches (when it responds at all) and interface elements like buttons are slow to draw on the screen. On both flights (round trip), the staff warned us beforehand that we should "be patient" with the system as it's slow to respond, and "too many touches may cause it to crash," which requires a reset (of just the crashed console, thank god) that takes up to 15 minutes.
I also got booted out of a movie in the middle of it. It just kicked me back to the menu screen, and all attempts to begin playback again were met with "This selection is currently unavailable" errors. I saw a lot of people around me, but not everyone, with similar problems. It started working again a couple hours later.
In summary, it was way better than Northwest Airlines's horrible seatback system that isn't on-demand at all (shows are played on a loop on various "channels"; if you miss the beginning of something you have to wait for it to start over again). But it still needs a lot of work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a US citizen living in Japan, and I wanted to see what my friends and coworkers will have to deal with, so I checked out the Japanese version of the registration website.
It's very poorly planned out in the following ways:
1. Translation is confusing and broken in parts. There were sentences that just broke off halfway through.
2. Due to the details of Japanese text input on computers, you have to specifically tell users to enter single-byte characters in text forms, and actually enforce the this requirement with proper input validation because many people don't really understand the difference. This is unless, of course, you're prepared to handle double-byte alphanumerics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullwidth_form) on the back end. Anyway, the form tells you to enter your info in the Latin alphabet (romaji), but nowhere does it specify single-byte. I wanted to test the form to see how well it coped with double-byte characters, but I didn't want the DHS knocking down my door in the middle of the night.
3. The website is not designed with mobile access in mind (or so I assume; I couldn't even connect to the site on my AU phone). Many, many Japanese people don't have PCs, and do all their internet activities on their mobile phones with very limited browsers.
4. The website does no geo sniffing and ignores preferred language settings, defaulting to English and throwing up a giant legalese JavaScript popup. Talk about unfriendly.
Ultimately I suspect that people will end up leaving all this bullshit to travel agents, and very few people will personally deal with the system on any level (unless that's not allowed; of course I didn't RTFA).
Converting from AAC to MP3 is lossy.
One thing that has been annoying me to no end lately is several incidents in Japan of college kids getting busted with marijuana.
Now the media is calling it an "outbreak" and a "scourge" and bemoaning the morals of the young people, blah blah blah. They trot out so-called experts who talk about "Marijana Psychological Disorder." It's Reefer Madness all over again, and absolutely no one is open to discussing it in a rational manner. Forget the fact that these kids weren't hurting anyone or anything. Forget the fact that most of the rest of the world looks the other way on college pot use. And how about the fact that this country drinks itself to sleep every night? Bunch of hypocrites.
Yes, Commons doesn't have any "notability" or "relevance" requirements. But Wikipedia is, in a way, more lenient in that you can post "fair use" images if no truly free alternative exists, and it meets some other requirements (not too large in resolution, doesn't infringe on owner's blah blah blah).
So for instance the Journey self-titled album cover art is acceptable for use in the article about same in Wikipedia. But this image would not be allowed in Commons because it is not a truly free image.
I work for a Japanese video game company, and about a month ago we had a network outage that was traced back to the auto-update feature of Lunascape. I have no idea how many people installed it, but it apparently created enough traffic to take down our internet connection. I hope the developers have improved it by now.
His product is clearly a FooGenerator!
The more I hear about the DSi, the less I'm interested in it. I think I'll hang on to my DS Lite.
Which brings up an interesting question. Up until now Western languages have had a huge advantage for computers since keyboards can have one button per letter because of the small alphabet and context-free characters. It is really easy and fast to input characters to form words using dedicated buttons.
Now with accurate, sensitive touch screens, will word-based writing systems like Chinese actually be better suited now for writing?
It might be faster to hand write a few simple kanji (or hanzi), but for complex characters* it is definitely faster to write the Romanized pronunciation (as described by numerous other replies in this thread).
Especially these days, with everyone inputting Japanese with romaji or cell phone-style inputs, people are forgetting how to hand write kanji. While easy, reliable computer handwriting input might help reverse that trend, I think that very few people can recall every character they might need to write in a given day quickly enough to make handwriting worthwhile.
*For the purposes of this discussion, I'd say the vast majority of kanji are "complex."
All of the possibilities you mentioned are not the same word as "Shiretoko." Did you even notice as you typed them differently from the actual name?
shireitoko != shirettoko != shiiretoko, and none of those are actual words, much less homonyms.
AFAIK Firefox releases use place names, and Shiretoko is a peninsula in Hokkaido. See: Shiretoko Peninsula.
I want "subtract spam"!
I tried to find the original Japanese for this supposed proverb and found this, which Slashdot is apparently incapable of displaying correctly (even converting to HTML entities didn't work; see here and search for "Japanese proverb"):
The meaning is correct, but a Google search for that phrase brings up exactly two hits. A search for the English version of the proverb gives over 61,000 hits.
This sounds like a fake proverb to me. An English speaker probably made it up, thought it sounded good, and attributed it to Japanese because it fit his or her stereotype of "Asian wisdom."
(Yes, I am a Japanese speaker.)
People have bemoaned the "decline in culture" of the young people for centuries. It's bullshit. Life goes on, just in ways different from when you were growing up. I know that's scary, but you can either get used to it or you can turn into a crotchety old bastard that no one likes.
Re: The "Google-it" culture. That's simply the democratization of access to information. The percentage of the population that has the interest and ability to create original solutions probably hasn't changed (or perhaps has increased but the signal is lost among the noise).
See snopes: http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp
Snopes.com debunks the Chevy Nova myth and the Coke-tadpole story. I've never heard of the other two, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were bunk as well.
plus I even pay for supplemental AD&D coverage
Is that so you're compensated if your level 12 rogue gets killed by an orc?
visualized in the large, solid man-world.
Or a manbot's manputer's world, for that matter. But what about a fembot's femputer's world?
Then you can pick it up about a month ago.
There is gSync, which works flawlessly for me and doesn't use a 3rd party server.
You might complain that it's not free or open source. That's true; however, it does work quietly in the background when you use iSync or sync an iPod in iTunes, and never nags you as far as I can tell (unless you sync from the app itself). So you could use it for free. It's certainly not open source though.
Einstein had extensive education in physics before and during the time he was employed as a patent clerk. Your attempt to cite him as an "outsider" to the physics world is quite disingenuous.
...because there is almost never a reason to do a clean install rather than an archive & install, which replaces the system while leaving your data untouched.
He used && && and.
I just flew Air Canada for the first time last week and you're right, the seatback entertainment systems are running Windows. And poorly. There are terrible delays when responding to touches (when it responds at all) and interface elements like buttons are slow to draw on the screen. On both flights (round trip), the staff warned us beforehand that we should "be patient" with the system as it's slow to respond, and "too many touches may cause it to crash," which requires a reset (of just the crashed console, thank god) that takes up to 15 minutes.
I also got booted out of a movie in the middle of it. It just kicked me back to the menu screen, and all attempts to begin playback again were met with "This selection is currently unavailable" errors. I saw a lot of people around me, but not everyone, with similar problems. It started working again a couple hours later.
In summary, it was way better than Northwest Airlines's horrible seatback system that isn't on-demand at all (shows are played on a loop on various "channels"; if you miss the beginning of something you have to wait for it to start over again). But it still needs a lot of work.