But I still learned about styles, tab stops, etc. I dare say that I know how use Word in a more "correct" way then 90% of my co-workers. When I co-write a paper, I generally get hard tabs, double spacing after periods, double returns to pad paragraphs, and other relics of the typewriter age. Stuff that works just fine until you go to change the format of your document.
I'm with you in most of this, but this bit about spacing after periods has me quite confounded. The convention of double-spacing after end punctuation makes for improved (human) readability and is quite old, traceable back to the Carolingian Reforms instituted under Charlemagne to improve literacy rates. If you've ever seen an ancient text from, say, the 7th century, you have some idea of how things were written all higgledy-piggledy, with letters practically on top of each other and one word running into the next. The Reforms standardized writing conventions to call for:
an obligatory space between letters, a double space between words, and a triple space between sentences. There was to be an indent to start a paragraph, and marks (periods and commas) to reveal where the reader was to pause or stop. The question mark appeared at this time. Lowercase letters were invented so as to set off the capitals.
Then came markup, most pervasively HTML, and what with the way text parsers seem to function by stripping any double-spacing, we've now apparently got one space after ending punctuation as the default standard. I must admit I really don't like this artificial convention, as it makes it much harder to skim a text and see at a glance where sentences end, as now we cannot easily distinguish between a period after an abbreviation, and a period to mark the end of a sentence.
So can anyone explain the aversion to double-spacing after final punctuation? Is there any argument based on document readability (for humans)? Or does it all come down to text parser programming?
On the other hand, I've been to smaller shows where it was about $12 to get in, and have bought the CD's because the artist was good and the CD's weren't a ripoff. If they had other merchandise I may have even bought that, assuming the price was just a little profit for them, and not a down payment!
Thats the average price most pepole pay outside the US
Maybe I'm deluded, but I was under the impression that the (previously) substantially higher prices on gasoline in other countries was largely due to heavy taxation to help pay for transportation infrastructure. The same kinds of infrastructure that folks in the US are figuring out is massively underfunded and crumbling dangerously. Meanwhile, in the US, high prices on gasoline instead go to... record-high petroleum company profits. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?
No one if forced to use Windows or other MS products, you can use alternative software any time you like.
... unless said alternatives don't exist. C.f. translation memory applications that can accurately and adequately handle Japanese text. The only one I'm aware of that runs on Linux, for example, is OmegaT, which still doesn't quite cover my needs.
And I'm far from alone, given what I've read here on/. and elsewhere about specific-needs software what can only be found on the Windows platform. Not all of us can get by with just basic office document processing + web browsing.
No idea how to effectively input chinese on a phone, but 10,000 ideograph input on a phone for SMS messages seems complicated without help:)
Have a look at Zhùyïn fúhào, also known as bopomofo. Makes it pretty easy to input using the basic Latin alphabet, though the software side is pretty complicated I'm sure.
Kanji and hangul support would be freaking sweet and I'd go so far as to switch mail provider in order to have that on my phone. The trouble is that kanji/hangul support isn't good enough because you need auto-completion and dictionary lookups as well. Essentially, you need something like NJstar on your phone. Or you need to go the route of the Japanese and have each key represent a sequence of kana (like a-i-u-e-o for 1, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko for 2, etc) that ties in to a dictionary-like lookup.
Hangul wouldn't need much beyond autocomplete, if you're getting fancy (no Chinese characters used much outside of academia these days). And hey, though Japanese is more complicated, if the folks in Japan can get their phones set up to do this (and they have already, complete with easy switching to Latin alphanumeric input), it shouldn't be too hard for Google or someone else to reproduce that functionality.
The only security software you need for Windows is Firefox and a brain.
Okay, so I've installed Firefox -- check -- but where do I put the brain thingy? The 3.5" drive bays are too small. Oo, wait, it looks like it might fit right there next to the vid
!:@(#)${%:^|&:*& };:... NO CARRIER
Things change fast - more out there than expected?
on
Vista Vs. Gutsy Gibbon
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately in some industries (I work in public - i.e. government - healthcare) there really isn't any competition for X vendor. I'd be interested in hearing your views on how to deal with that type of situation, as it is probably all too common and I imagine that in the aforesaid cases, the vendor would be quite happy to "call your bluff" so to speak. I'm sure ours isn't the only industry where there isn't a lot of competition (3D modelling comes to mind - is there a Linux version of Maya or Lightwave?)
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh your situation at all. I'm a Japanese-English translator, so I think I can sympathize -- there's pitifully little in the FOSS arena (or even just the commercial-but-Linux-compatible arena) that does what I need it to. I just want to point out that the software world is changing extraordinarily quickly. Look around, you might be surprised what you find. And if you really can't find anything that fits your bill, give it a year or two and look again.
Windoze is like a Ford Pinto. It'll get you to work and back home again, just don't expect it to have any real power.
Very accurate. It will get you to work and back home, without any real power...but you forgot to mention that it is perfectly normal for it to sometimes explode.
Yes, and then again, no. Remember, MS is a convicted monopolist, and has been operating outside the scope of the law in some very disturbing ways for quite a while. Sure, they might be doing so with a nod and a wink from the current not-so-benevolent US administration, but an awful lot of Microsoft activity has been deemed by US (and other) courts to be illegal. And they still do it.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this makes it okay to infringe their copyright. I'm simply pointing out that neither party here quite has the moral high ground. Though in the specific case of the GGP poster, I must ask if anyone lawyerly out there can explain to us if "pirating" a copy of XP after paying for one could possibly count as acquiring a fair-use copy? Thinking it through myself, I'd imagine that the DMCA probably gets in the way. But ethically speaking, this is a grayer area. The GGP poster has already paid MS for their copy of XP, so provided they aren't distributing the cracked copy, it could conceivably be within their ethical, as opposed to legal, rights to get and use an altered copy that doesn't include all the crap- and nag-ware. Hmm...
...the Telco's are getting fucked sideways by our government.
The phrase "fair's fair" comes to mind, given how they've been fucking the government sideways for a while regarding subsidies and extra charges allowed for new infrastructure that mysteriously never materialized. So I guess this is just a big orgy of sorts. Only somehow it's not one I really want to watch.
I knew Windows Update was dodgy, but this is far beyond the so-called red hand of guilt -- MS would have to be some kind of anti-Pict with its whole body dyed red for this expression to apply in this instance. Got me thinking more and more about simply sucking up the hit in productivity from missing *nix software and making the jump, regardless of required apps that I can't get to run under Wine. Part of smart business is reducing your exposure to risks, and MS is looming ever larger...
Far better than to create jobs through needless destruction and inefficiency, is to create jobs by aiming higher and achieving more as a society.
While I generally agree with this sentiment, and understand your reference to the broken window fallacy, I also find myself wondering if we might not still see a net gain should the Redmond campus suddenly fall off the map, given how active Microsoft has been in deliberately obstructing efforts to "aim higher and achieve more as a society" -- and not just for the US...
C'mon, this is common knowledge among people who hang around the pacific. If you catch a large fish, don't eat the whole thing... eat some, and share around to dilute the risk. People have known this for over 30 years. Large fish have higher risk just because they are older.
Not just the pacific -- it's also common knowledge in the Caribbean. The rule of thumb there is that you don't eat shallow-water fish that's grown bigger than a dinner plate, as the bigger (and older) they get, the more the toxin has concentrated in their tissues. Fish higher up the food chain are also more dangerous -- the higher order the predator, the more concentrated the toxin. Barracuda are generally avoided as food for this very reason. Apparently the microorganisms that produce the toxin stay near the surface where it's warmer, so deep-water fish are supposed to be safe.
More's the pity. I'm stuck on Windows due to client-demanded software that has no *nix version and cannot run under Wine. Evo would be welcome indeed. Ah, well...
5) The documentation does leave much to be desired, although it's getting better by leaps and bounds. The really key issue here is that the OO.org website sucks. I'll be the first to sing the praises of the program, but their web site looks bad, and is poorly organized. Even when you know what you are looking for, you can't necessarily find it unless you have inside information.
But in the case of OO other people can and will fix the mistakes IBM make...
I find myself thinking the opposite might be the case -- IBM might help fix OOo mistakes that have been on the books for far too long. Reference my previous post about how IBM's Lotus Symphony offers some substantial improvement over OOo in terms of basic functionality (word / character counts). I sincerely hope that IBM's involvement means that some of these *very* longstanding OOo deficiencies are finally dealt with.
To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.
Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is basic functionality, people, and this very issue and related issues have been on the OOo bug list for freaking five years at least! And continually ignored!
I'm blooming well fed up with OOo's nearly complete lack of progress on fixing fundamental usability issues without so much as a comment on when they think they might get around to it (both issues linked above are vaguely targeted at "OOo Later"). For that matter, it took them several years simply to add the Word Count entry to the Tools menu, where everyone coming from MSO would expect to find it. And I'll say it again -- IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is ostensibly based on OOo 1.x code, already implements a proper word / character count that rationally handles mixed Western + CJK text. If IBM can come out with this, using the same blooming codebase, why in the devil's briefcase can't the OOo team? It's not like we haven't been pointing it out to them.
So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary).
Dude, I'm sorry someone seems to have pissed in your cornflakes, but don't harsh outside your field. SerpentMage is clearly someone active in the field of finance, as in likely working for a financial services company, apparently on the buy side but possibly also / otherwise on the sell side. In this context, "quant" doesn't have anything at all to do with female anatomy, and your bringing up this unrelated meaning is pedantic and unhelpful (albeit slightly titillating -- and it's a shame that this region of the female anatomy is not indeed more "public":). The word is short for quantitative analysis, or someone engaged in same.
And yes, as someone else who has been professionally involved in financial services for several years, I too can vouch that many traders, and analysts too, at major financial services firms make extensive use of Excel and its financial formulae and extensibility. Large amounts of number crunching might well be handled by other applications, but the results are often then shown in Excel. There's a reason Microsoft took the trouble to build in a sensible object model with an easy-to-understand API for its VBA. Contrast this with OOo's bizarrely organized API documentation, which really seems much more geared towards showing off the underlying architecture of OOo itself rather than towards usability. I commented on this phenomenon before, and the/. community seemed to agree to some extent.
Okay, here we go, something with more meat to it.:)
More from the net, such as Wikipedia... "The Korean alphabet, invented in the years 1443-46, is the only true alphabet native to the Far East." Not derived, evolved, bastardized or co-mingled.
While Hangul is indeed a true alphabet, it did not actually arise from a vacuum. There is substantial evidence that at least some of the Hangul symbols were in fact derived from the extant Phagspa alphabet used by the Mongolians of the Yuan Dynasty, and which was in turn based on the Indic Tibetan alphabet. Have a look at the Wikipedia article on Hangul, particularly the section on Ledyard's theory of consonant jamo design. This is not meant to trivialize what King Sejong and his advisers did in deriving Hangul, but rather to point out that Hangul has roots, and did not just spring fully formed from this royal linguistic committee. Hangul is indeed quite notable for the perspicacity shown by the committee in their linguistic analysis of their own language.
Beyond the date, the rest if your rattling, however, is anecdotal and apparently suffers from your creative imagination:)
I'm not sure what you think was anecdotal in the GP post here. The GP noted:
Furthermore, it is not true that someone who speaks Chinese or Japanese can quickly pick up Korean. Chinese and Korean are not only unrelated but of radically different types. Chinese speakers find Korean quite difficult. Japanese speakers find Korean somewhat easier because the two languages are very similar in grammatical type, but even so most of the vocabulary is quite unfamiliar and the morphology, though similar in a general typological way, is quite different in detail.
All of this is backed up by published linguistic analyses, and is not just "anecdotal". Perhaps you were responding to something else? If you were instead responding to the GP's comment that Korean has notably different dialects in noting that the language has not been a single unified whole since King Sejong's time, as you had stated, this too seems to be borne out by published works. Wikipedia itself mentions different dialects in the relevant section of the Korean language article.
Sorry to call you on it, man, but if you're going to munge all your facts together, folks who know better are likely to pipe up.
Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither.
Actually, Korean resembles Japanese as far as grammatical structure (but not in terms of conjugation.)
Please re-read my comment -- I meant that Korean has borrowed words from both *Chinese and English*, but structurally resembles neither. I'm personally very much convinced that Korean and Japanese share (at least some of) the same origins, you'll find no argument from me there. And I happily consent that the vocabularies don't have much in common, but then I've not been much of a fan of Swadesh lists on the whole when it comes to non-IE languages; they're a fun analysis tool, but vocabulary differences alone don't strike me as enough evidence to prove unrelatedness, as it were, especially when underlying intrinsic language structures show so much similarity.
Korean and Japanese only appear to be totally isolated from each other because of the political elements that seem to inevitably taint any comparison of the two. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that Japanese was demonstrably related to some degree to Baekje, an older and now extinct Korean dialect that did not survive the Silla consolidation of the peninsula. There is also considerable archaeological evidence that the Yayoi cultural shift in the Japanese archipelago from around 200BCE - 200CE, wherein the previous Jmon hunter-gatherer culture with its relatively unstratified society was overtaken by a very different hierarchical culture replete with all the regalia of mounted warfare, was brought about by a large-scale immigration from the Korean peninsula. This repeated itself to some extent around 400 years later, around 660CE, when the Silla kingdom attacked and overwhelmed the Baekje kingdom, whereupon the Baekje (or at least their elite) fled to Japan, which had been helping the Baekje out militarily off and on for the preceding 250 years or so.
Anyway, to sum up, Korean and Japanese are only as "totally isolated" from each other as the nationalists and xenophobes in both cultures insist that they are.
With regard to their relation to other languages, that's more of an open question, but there is some (at least anecdotal) evidence suggesting that Korean (and by extension Japanese) might well be related to Mongolic languages and the rest of the greater Turkic grouping, though admittedly not all agree with the Mongolic-Turkic connection. What's needed is more linguistically trained people familiar with these languages, who are not also hell-bent on making political statements. We need more serious application of the scientific method, rather than nationalistic jingoism about how one group or the other couldn't possibly be related to 'that rabble' over there.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you in most of this, but this bit about spacing after periods has me quite confounded. The convention of double-spacing after end punctuation makes for improved (human) readability and is quite old, traceable back to the Carolingian Reforms instituted under Charlemagne to improve literacy rates. If you've ever seen an ancient text from, say, the 7th century, you have some idea of how things were written all higgledy-piggledy, with letters practically on top of each other and one word running into the next. The Reforms standardized writing conventions to call for:
Then came markup, most pervasively HTML, and what with the way text parsers seem to function by stripping any double-spacing, we've now apparently got one space after ending punctuation as the default standard. I must admit I really don't like this artificial convention, as it makes it much harder to skim a text and see at a glance where sentences end, as now we cannot easily distinguish between a period after an abbreviation, and a period to mark the end of a sentence.
So can anyone explain the aversion to double-spacing after final punctuation? Is there any argument based on document readability (for humans)? Or does it all come down to text parser programming?
Cheers,
It used to be the land of the free, and the home of the brave,
but all I see are herds of sheep, and ideological slaves.
So ends the republic.
Ahh, I miss Fugazi and their enlightened business ethics... (and hey, the music was pretty good too :)
Cheers,
Maybe I'm deluded, but I was under the impression that the (previously) substantially higher prices on gasoline in other countries was largely due to heavy taxation to help pay for transportation infrastructure. The same kinds of infrastructure that folks in the US are figuring out is massively underfunded and crumbling dangerously. Meanwhile, in the US, high prices on gasoline instead go to... record-high petroleum company profits. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?
Cheers,
... unless said alternatives don't exist. C.f. translation memory applications that can accurately and adequately handle Japanese text. The only one I'm aware of that runs on Linux, for example, is OmegaT, which still doesn't quite cover my needs.
And I'm far from alone, given what I've read here on /. and elsewhere about specific-needs software what can only be found on the Windows platform. Not all of us can get by with just basic office document processing + web browsing.
Cheers,
Have a look at Zhùyïn fúhào, also known as bopomofo. Makes it pretty easy to input using the basic Latin alphabet, though the software side is pretty complicated I'm sure.
Hangul wouldn't need much beyond autocomplete, if you're getting fancy (no Chinese characters used much outside of academia these days). And hey, though Japanese is more complicated, if the folks in Japan can get their phones set up to do this (and they have already, complete with easy switching to Latin alphanumeric input), it shouldn't be too hard for Google or someone else to reproduce that functionality.
Cheers,
Okay, so I've installed Firefox -- check -- but where do I put the brain thingy? The 3.5" drive bays are too small. Oo, wait, it looks like it might fit right there next to the vid
!:@(#)${% :^|&:*& };: ... NO CARRIER
Maya already runs on Linux, at least according to the Wikipedia page and Maya's own product page (look toward the bottom for a list of OSes). Meanwhile, LightWave's engine has apparently been ported to Linux, suggesting that a full version might not be too far off.
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh your situation at all. I'm a Japanese-English translator, so I think I can sympathize -- there's pitifully little in the FOSS arena (or even just the commercial-but-Linux-compatible arena) that does what I need it to. I just want to point out that the software world is changing extraordinarily quickly. Look around, you might be surprised what you find. And if you really can't find anything that fits your bill, give it a year or two and look again.
Cheers,
Sheesh, modded "Funny"? How about "Insightful"? (c.f. Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation)
Cheers,
Yes, and then again, no. Remember, MS is a convicted monopolist, and has been operating outside the scope of the law in some very disturbing ways for quite a while. Sure, they might be doing so with a nod and a wink from the current not-so-benevolent US administration, but an awful lot of Microsoft activity has been deemed by US (and other) courts to be illegal. And they still do it.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this makes it okay to infringe their copyright. I'm simply pointing out that neither party here quite has the moral high ground. Though in the specific case of the GGP poster, I must ask if anyone lawyerly out there can explain to us if "pirating" a copy of XP after paying for one could possibly count as acquiring a fair-use copy? Thinking it through myself, I'd imagine that the DMCA probably gets in the way. But ethically speaking, this is a grayer area. The GGP poster has already paid MS for their copy of XP, so provided they aren't distributing the cracked copy, it could conceivably be within their ethical, as opposed to legal, rights to get and use an altered copy that doesn't include all the crap- and nag-ware. Hmm...
Cheers,
The phrase "fair's fair" comes to mind, given how they've been fucking the government sideways for a while regarding subsidies and extra charges allowed for new infrastructure that mysteriously never materialized. So I guess this is just a big orgy of sorts. Only somehow it's not one I really want to watch.
I knew Windows Update was dodgy, but this is far beyond the so-called red hand of guilt -- MS would have to be some kind of anti-Pict with its whole body dyed red for this expression to apply in this instance. Got me thinking more and more about simply sucking up the hit in productivity from missing *nix software and making the jump, regardless of required apps that I can't get to run under Wine. Part of smart business is reducing your exposure to risks, and MS is looming ever larger...
Cheers,
While I generally agree with this sentiment, and understand your reference to the broken window fallacy, I also find myself wondering if we might not still see a net gain should the Redmond campus suddenly fall off the map, given how active Microsoft has been in deliberately obstructing efforts to "aim higher and achieve more as a society" -- and not just for the US...
Cheers,
Not just the pacific -- it's also common knowledge in the Caribbean. The rule of thumb there is that you don't eat shallow-water fish that's grown bigger than a dinner plate, as the bigger (and older) they get, the more the toxin has concentrated in their tissues. Fish higher up the food chain are also more dangerous -- the higher order the predator, the more concentrated the toxin. Barracuda are generally avoided as food for this very reason. Apparently the microorganisms that produce the toxin stay near the surface where it's warmer, so deep-water fish are supposed to be safe.
Cheers,
More's the pity. I'm stuck on Windows due to client-demanded software that has no *nix version and cannot run under Wine. Evo would be welcome indeed. Ah, well...
You hit the nail on the head here. As stated not too long ago, the OOo API documentation is most horribly organized...
Cheers,
I find myself thinking the opposite might be the case -- IBM might help fix OOo mistakes that have been on the books for far too long. Reference my previous post about how IBM's Lotus Symphony offers some substantial improvement over OOo in terms of basic functionality (word / character counts). I sincerely hope that IBM's involvement means that some of these *very* longstanding OOo deficiencies are finally dealt with.
Cheers,
Thank you for bringing this up. This is basic functionality, people, and this very issue and related issues have been on the OOo bug list for freaking five years at least! And continually ignored!
I'm blooming well fed up with OOo's nearly complete lack of progress on fixing fundamental usability issues without so much as a comment on when they think they might get around to it (both issues linked above are vaguely targeted at "OOo Later"). For that matter, it took them several years simply to add the Word Count entry to the Tools menu, where everyone coming from MSO would expect to find it. And I'll say it again -- IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is ostensibly based on OOo 1.x code, already implements a proper word / character count that rationally handles mixed Western + CJK text. If IBM can come out with this, using the same blooming codebase, why in the devil's briefcase can't the OOo team? It's not like we haven't been pointing it out to them.
Feh.
Dude, I'm sorry someone seems to have pissed in your cornflakes, but don't harsh outside your field. SerpentMage is clearly someone active in the field of finance, as in likely working for a financial services company, apparently on the buy side but possibly also / otherwise on the sell side. In this context, "quant" doesn't have anything at all to do with female anatomy, and your bringing up this unrelated meaning is pedantic and unhelpful (albeit slightly titillating -- and it's a shame that this region of the female anatomy is not indeed more "public" :). The word is short for quantitative analysis, or someone engaged in same.
And yes, as someone else who has been professionally involved in financial services for several years, I too can vouch that many traders, and analysts too, at major financial services firms make extensive use of Excel and its financial formulae and extensibility. Large amounts of number crunching might well be handled by other applications, but the results are often then shown in Excel. There's a reason Microsoft took the trouble to build in a sensible object model with an easy-to-understand API for its VBA. Contrast this with OOo's bizarrely organized API documentation, which really seems much more geared towards showing off the underlying architecture of OOo itself rather than towards usability. I commented on this phenomenon before, and the /. community seemed to agree to some extent.
Cheers,
That sounds quite interesting indeed. What sort of "features" do these exhibit? Do you have any links?
Cheers,
Okay, here we go, something with more meat to it. :)
While Hangul is indeed a true alphabet, it did not actually arise from a vacuum. There is substantial evidence that at least some of the Hangul symbols were in fact derived from the extant Phagspa alphabet used by the Mongolians of the Yuan Dynasty, and which was in turn based on the Indic Tibetan alphabet. Have a look at the Wikipedia article on Hangul, particularly the section on Ledyard's theory of consonant jamo design. This is not meant to trivialize what King Sejong and his advisers did in deriving Hangul, but rather to point out that Hangul has roots, and did not just spring fully formed from this royal linguistic committee. Hangul is indeed quite notable for the perspicacity shown by the committee in their linguistic analysis of their own language.
I'm not sure what you think was anecdotal in the GP post here. The GP noted:
All of this is backed up by published linguistic analyses, and is not just "anecdotal". Perhaps you were responding to something else? If you were instead responding to the GP's comment that Korean has notably different dialects in noting that the language has not been a single unified whole since King Sejong's time, as you had stated, this too seems to be borne out by published works. Wikipedia itself mentions different dialects in the relevant section of the Korean language article.
Sorry to call you on it, man, but if you're going to munge all your facts together, folks who know better are likely to pipe up.
I'm really not sure what you're referring to, but I'm happy to look for other posts from you.
Cheers,
Please re-read my comment -- I meant that Korean has borrowed words from both *Chinese and English*, but structurally resembles neither. I'm personally very much convinced that Korean and Japanese share (at least some of) the same origins, you'll find no argument from me there. And I happily consent that the vocabularies don't have much in common, but then I've not been much of a fan of Swadesh lists on the whole when it comes to non-IE languages; they're a fun analysis tool, but vocabulary differences alone don't strike me as enough evidence to prove unrelatedness, as it were, especially when underlying intrinsic language structures show so much similarity.
Cheers,
You missed out, man! Have a look at this important online English lesson. Sample sentence:
"That fucking fucker's fucking fucked!"
Cheers,
Korean and Japanese only appear to be totally isolated from each other because of the political elements that seem to inevitably taint any comparison of the two. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that Japanese was demonstrably related to some degree to Baekje, an older and now extinct Korean dialect that did not survive the Silla consolidation of the peninsula. There is also considerable archaeological evidence that the Yayoi cultural shift in the Japanese archipelago from around 200BCE - 200CE, wherein the previous Jmon hunter-gatherer culture with its relatively unstratified society was overtaken by a very different hierarchical culture replete with all the regalia of mounted warfare, was brought about by a large-scale immigration from the Korean peninsula. This repeated itself to some extent around 400 years later, around 660CE, when the Silla kingdom attacked and overwhelmed the Baekje kingdom, whereupon the Baekje (or at least their elite) fled to Japan, which had been helping the Baekje out militarily off and on for the preceding 250 years or so.
Anyway, to sum up, Korean and Japanese are only as "totally isolated" from each other as the nationalists and xenophobes in both cultures insist that they are.
With regard to their relation to other languages, that's more of an open question, but there is some (at least anecdotal) evidence suggesting that Korean (and by extension Japanese) might well be related to Mongolic languages and the rest of the greater Turkic grouping, though admittedly not all agree with the Mongolic-Turkic connection. What's needed is more linguistically trained people familiar with these languages, who are not also hell-bent on making political statements. We need more serious application of the scientific method, rather than nationalistic jingoism about how one group or the other couldn't possibly be related to 'that rabble' over there.
Cheers,