Something like Japanese (kanji, not the hiragana and katakana syllabaries) or Chinese puts all their eggs in the morphology basket, and none in the phonetic. Words are comprised of morphemes which are represented by particular graphemes (kanji/hanzi). This is great once you learn all the morpheme/grapheme pairs, but at 15,000 for Chinese, the system requires a large initial investment of time and cognitive burden.
Your overall point is one I highly agree with, but I need to point out that you're actually slightly wrong about Chinese characters having no phonetic meaning.
Once you know enough Chinese characters, you can pretty reliably guess the pronunciations of other characters. This is because a majority of hanzi have one part that's morpheme/meaning based and one part that's phonetic.
I wish Slashdot allowed Chinese character encoding. I'd show you what I mean. But here's are some examples:
Jiao1: "To exchange" by itself.
Xiao4: A wood radical + the above-mentioned Jiao1. Meaning "school".
Lao3: "Old".
Lao3: The above Lao3 + a human radical, meaning "a person of a given descent", as in Mei3lao3 ("American, Yankee").
When a radical is added to a phonetic component, the sound will usually change a little, but some barely change at all, as with the second example.
This would be helpful if it were Cantonese. Se4qing2 is Mandarin. Giving Mandarin answers to questions about Cantonese only serves to confuse Westerners further about the difference.
So, Cantonese speakers in the audience: how do you read in Cantonese? Is that a better word than ?
Singapore is Chinese? This will come as a real shock to all the Malay people who make up the majority of the population there, as well as the various South Asian folks and others.
Singapore is a multi-cultural society. Many people there speak Chinese, but this doesn't mean Singapore is Chinese any more than Chinatown makes San Francisco a sovereign territory of the PRC.
Flash gums up Firefox, the way some sites use it. Without Flashblock, I'd just skip those sites entirely, and would certainly never buy anything they sold. With Flashblock, I can see the site's less offensive ads, and when they're interesting, I will click on them. So Flashblock actually allows me to be a better consumer.
So in my opinion, if you want to go into other's territory, make sure you find out what can and cannot be done there, and stick to the rules.
A problem with this is that it assumes a system in which the rules are -- well, rules. Chinese societies are, to a large extent, not based on the rule of law but on the rule of relationships. It's not what the law says but who you know, in other words.
People in Sinitic societies quite often have no "respect" for the law at all; laws are, in the Confucian formulation, the worst form of rule. The best ruler is one who rules by example, not by making laws. Try driving in Taiwan sometime and you'll see what I mean. Try getting permits to start a construction project in China and you'll see, too.
That doesn't mean that a foreigner shouldn't be aware of the rules. The authorities will use them to their advantage when they can. Just don't expect the laws to mean much otherwise.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the actual start-date of the wifi network was much later. Taiwan has one of the most expensive MRT systems in the world -- not because it's especially good, but because of massive corruption. Even now, there's an excellent chance that just a mild earthquake would destroy huge sections of the Xinyi line. There's a fourth nuclear power plant on the island that's been the subject of intense political debate for at least a decade and probably won't be finished for at least another decade. Even the Taipei 101 building, a private venture, was nearly abandoned several times.
Taiwanese politicians are very good at coming up with grand, excellent plans and then not following them up. They're even better at starting excellent initiatives and then forgetting about them later. Many, many times during my eight years in Taiwan I heard that they were going to stamp out corruption, pollution, fire hazards, traffic problems, dangerously below-code construction, crime, rampant feral dogs and cats, poor romanization and many more problems. They make speeches and start campaigns that last a couple months and then move on to other things.
I don't mean to say that Taiwan is terrible. There are lots of great things about the island -- friendly people, health care, food, the general cost of living -- but big public projects are not one of them. I kind of doubt that this project will begin on time or still be fully operational a decade after it's finished.
In Taiwan, that would be the sixth branch of government (there already being five). Though, since 7-11 is part-owned indirectly by the KMT, it's probably a part of the other five already...
If I'm not mistaken, Uni-President is owned largely by the KMT , the political party of Lian Zhan, Jiang Jieshi and Jiang Jingguo. That makes it pretty significant.
Oh, and the Starbucks in Taiwan are also run by President.
I find XCin difficult to use. It doesn't have "intelligent input" (i.e., adaptive learning of common phrases), and it's often crashy. SCIM (Simple Chinese Input Method) is a much better choice -- probably the best Linux Chinese input system, and probably better than Microsoft's IME. It's not fully open-source, but it's still a great input system.
A single kanji (or hanzi, in the Mandarin reading, or simply Chinese character if you want to use English) doesn't necessarily represent a word. In Chinese, most words are actually bisyllabic -- that is, they are composed of two characters together. For example, hudie, 'butterfly', is composed of two characters that cannot be used individually. The majority of Chinese characters are used this way. Even in Japanese, kanji are almost always used either in pairs (Tokyo = Eastern Capital) or with kana (Kuroi = black, written with the kanji for black plus the kana for 'i').
Chinese can be read or written in any direction -- right to left, left to right, up to down, even occasionally down to up. (I've seen at least one sign that read this way.) Most modern books read left to right, like English texts.
Different parts of a character are important, not automatically the right or left. Each character is built up in different ways, but very often, there's a radical on the left that gives an indication of meaning, then a phonetic component on the right that gives an indication of pronunciation. This is not a hard and fast rule, though; characters are structured in many other ways.
Strange tidbit of knowledge: I've heard that it's impossible to read in a dream -- that words will always look like gibberish when you're in a dream. Well, I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and can read and write it quite well -- even when I dream. The characters don't look like gibberish when I dream; they're very clear and readable.
My biggest grievance about Word is the way it does styles. If you change a style by actually going into the style and changing it, Word will ask you if you actually want to update the text that's in that style. Um, of course! And trying to get text to actually conform to its style is another exercise in frustration. It means many extra keystrokes for every change of the style, which can be a lot when you're tweaking fine things like paragraph spacing, indents, etc. Styles in Word seem to be an afterthought, rather than the basis of things. Word's clearly designed for people who don't use styles; it pretends to be a good DTP package but isn't.
I was pleasantly surprised when I started using OO.o. Its styles are much more like a professional DTP package. When you change the style, the text of that style just changes. No annoying "Would you like to update the style, update the text or do nothing?" questions. And OO.o has the "Standard" format option, to forcibly make text conform to a style in a couple mouse-clicks. OO.o isn't perfect, but the way it does styles was enough to convert me.
In my experience, you don't need RPMs. Just download the.tar.gz file, unpack it in some nice folder, then run firefox.bin. You don't actually need to install it, you just run it from that script. In my experience, that is.
The new color scheme on the front page is, for lack of a better word, gay (it's light purple, ffs).
Really? You couldn't think of a better word than "gay"? How about "ugly" or just "unappealing"? I find the use of "gay" to mean "bad" pretty offensive. I know that "gay" is becoming a negative word again, but that doesn't mean I have to like it -- especially because I'm part of the group that is usually considered "gay".
Maybe you didn't realize that this use of the word gay is offensive. Please trust me, it is. Use "bad" or "uncool" or "terrible", but don't use "gay".
Also, for what it's worth, my Yahoo mail interface is light blue, all the way. No purple in sight. (Too bad, since purple is my favorite color.:) )
More importantly to this topic, OO Draw is really a pretty good vector graphics program. It has layers, boolean operations and pretty good gradient controls. Its node controls are a little clunky, but having layers makes it better than Sodipodi, in my book.
I don't know about Illustrator, but CorelDraw has better layer support than PSP, in my experience. Renaming groups, moving them up or down, editing them from the list, etc. all work better in Draw than in PSP.
I haven't used Illustrator, but I've used CorelDraw a lot. It's a very nice standard to aspire to.
Until recently, I worked in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) school in East Asia. Unfortunately, the school and much of the country where I lived are now in the throes of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL)-philia. Schools are looking for ways to keep students coming back, and computer programs that teach English are one of the big hooks.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work. Students are given exercises to do on the computer that amount to low-quality worksheets, but with audio and video. The computer can't correct writing, and the only help it gives to pronunciation is letting the students listen over and over to themselves -- something that could be done just as well with a tape recorder.
Students also use online chats and compositions to help their English. The chats are clearly not going to do much besides ingrain their already excessive use of AOL talk. The compositions are better -- it is actually good for them to get practice writing in English on a computer -- but this is hardly something that needs to be done online.
The main promise of CALL is helping busy students who can't come to regular classes, but even here, a computer can't give the kind of personally-attuned feedback that a physically present teacher can. Until there is AI, CALL will be largely a waste of time, in my opinion.
Strangely enough, I wasn't trying to be funny. As corprew showed, haw flakes are a real thing. I could see how someone might think my post was just goofy, though.
Anime is not a genre; it's not even a style. It's a medium. Like any other medium, it follows Sturgeon's Law. 90% of websites are probably crap, 90% of books are probably crap, 90% of CD's are probably crap, 90% of movies are definitely crap. Like any medium, you have to make informed decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Your overall point is one I highly agree with, but I need to point out that you're actually slightly wrong about Chinese characters having no phonetic meaning.
Once you know enough Chinese characters, you can pretty reliably guess the pronunciations of other characters. This is because a majority of hanzi have one part that's morpheme/meaning based and one part that's phonetic.
I wish Slashdot allowed Chinese character encoding. I'd show you what I mean. But here's are some examples:
Jiao1: "To exchange" by itself.
Xiao4: A wood radical + the above-mentioned Jiao1. Meaning "school".
Lao3: "Old".
Lao3: The above Lao3 + a human radical, meaning "a person of a given descent", as in Mei3lao3 ("American, Yankee").
When a radical is added to a phonetic component, the sound will usually change a little, but some barely change at all, as with the second example.
Meiyou shenme yisi, zhishi Whedon xiansheng zai fahui ta lanlan de Zhongwen. :)
Slashdot mei banfa shuru Zhongwen zi, zhen kewu...
Shi a, na you zenme yang?
(A, duile, ni hai wangle yige dongci!)
...which doesn't allow posting in non-English characters. !
This would be helpful if it were Cantonese. Se4qing2 is Mandarin. Giving Mandarin answers to questions about Cantonese only serves to confuse Westerners further about the difference. So, Cantonese speakers in the audience: how do you read in Cantonese? Is that a better word than ?
Singapore is Chinese? This will come as a real shock to all the Malay people who make up the majority of the population there, as well as the various South Asian folks and others.
Singapore is a multi-cultural society. Many people there speak Chinese, but this doesn't mean Singapore is Chinese any more than Chinatown makes San Francisco a sovereign territory of the PRC.
Flash gums up Firefox, the way some sites use it. Without Flashblock, I'd just skip those sites entirely, and would certainly never buy anything they sold. With Flashblock, I can see the site's less offensive ads, and when they're interesting, I will click on them. So Flashblock actually allows me to be a better consumer.
A problem with this is that it assumes a system in which the rules are -- well, rules. Chinese societies are, to a large extent, not based on the rule of law but on the rule of relationships. It's not what the law says but who you know, in other words.
People in Sinitic societies quite often have no "respect" for the law at all; laws are, in the Confucian formulation, the worst form of rule. The best ruler is one who rules by example, not by making laws. Try driving in Taiwan sometime and you'll see what I mean. Try getting permits to start a construction project in China and you'll see, too.
That doesn't mean that a foreigner shouldn't be aware of the rules. The authorities will use them to their advantage when they can. Just don't expect the laws to mean much otherwise.
There's a nifty interview with a supervisor at Zoic Studios on Rendernode magazine, and a smaller interview with the CG supervisor.
And it's all done with Lightwave 7.5... Now I have no excuse for not producing better stuff myself.
Really? I thought the KMT had a very large number of shares in President Corp.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the actual start-date of the wifi network was much later. Taiwan has one of the most expensive MRT systems in the world -- not because it's especially good, but because of massive corruption. Even now, there's an excellent chance that just a mild earthquake would destroy huge sections of the Xinyi line. There's a fourth nuclear power plant on the island that's been the subject of intense political debate for at least a decade and probably won't be finished for at least another decade. Even the Taipei 101 building, a private venture, was nearly abandoned several times.
Taiwanese politicians are very good at coming up with grand, excellent plans and then not following them up. They're even better at starting excellent initiatives and then forgetting about them later. Many, many times during my eight years in Taiwan I heard that they were going to stamp out corruption, pollution, fire hazards, traffic problems, dangerously below-code construction, crime, rampant feral dogs and cats, poor romanization and many more problems. They make speeches and start campaigns that last a couple months and then move on to other things.
I don't mean to say that Taiwan is terrible. There are lots of great things about the island -- friendly people, health care, food, the general cost of living -- but big public projects are not one of them. I kind of doubt that this project will begin on time or still be fully operational a decade after it's finished.
In Taiwan, that would be the sixth branch of government (there already being five). Though, since 7-11 is part-owned indirectly by the KMT, it's probably a part of the other five already...
If I'm not mistaken, Uni-President is owned largely by the KMT , the political party of Lian Zhan, Jiang Jieshi and Jiang Jingguo. That makes it pretty significant.
Oh, and the Starbucks in Taiwan are also run by President.
I find XCin difficult to use. It doesn't have "intelligent input" (i.e., adaptive learning of common phrases), and it's often crashy. SCIM (Simple Chinese Input Method) is a much better choice -- probably the best Linux Chinese input system, and probably better than Microsoft's IME. It's not fully open-source, but it's still a great input system.
A single kanji (or hanzi, in the Mandarin reading, or simply Chinese character if you want to use English) doesn't necessarily represent a word. In Chinese, most words are actually bisyllabic -- that is, they are composed of two characters together. For example, hudie, 'butterfly', is composed of two characters that cannot be used individually. The majority of Chinese characters are used this way. Even in Japanese, kanji are almost always used either in pairs (Tokyo = Eastern Capital) or with kana (Kuroi = black, written with the kanji for black plus the kana for 'i').
Chinese can be read or written in any direction -- right to left, left to right, up to down, even occasionally down to up. (I've seen at least one sign that read this way.) Most modern books read left to right, like English texts.
Different parts of a character are important, not automatically the right or left. Each character is built up in different ways, but very often, there's a radical on the left that gives an indication of meaning, then a phonetic component on the right that gives an indication of pronunciation. This is not a hard and fast rule, though; characters are structured in many other ways.
Strange tidbit of knowledge: I've heard that it's impossible to read in a dream -- that words will always look like gibberish when you're in a dream. Well, I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and can read and write it quite well -- even when I dream. The characters don't look like gibberish when I dream; they're very clear and readable.
My biggest grievance about Word is the way it does styles. If you change a style by actually going into the style and changing it, Word will ask you if you actually want to update the text that's in that style. Um, of course! And trying to get text to actually conform to its style is another exercise in frustration. It means many extra keystrokes for every change of the style, which can be a lot when you're tweaking fine things like paragraph spacing, indents, etc. Styles in Word seem to be an afterthought, rather than the basis of things. Word's clearly designed for people who don't use styles; it pretends to be a good DTP package but isn't.
I was pleasantly surprised when I started using OO.o. Its styles are much more like a professional DTP package. When you change the style, the text of that style just changes. No annoying "Would you like to update the style, update the text or do nothing?" questions. And OO.o has the "Standard" format option, to forcibly make text conform to a style in a couple mouse-clicks. OO.o isn't perfect, but the way it does styles was enough to convert me.
In my experience, you don't need RPMs. Just download the .tar.gz file, unpack it in some nice folder, then run firefox.bin. You don't actually need to install it, you just run it from that script. In my experience, that is.
Really? You couldn't think of a better word than "gay"? How about "ugly" or just "unappealing"? I find the use of "gay" to mean "bad" pretty offensive. I know that "gay" is becoming a negative word again, but that doesn't mean I have to like it -- especially because I'm part of the group that is usually considered "gay".
Maybe you didn't realize that this use of the word gay is offensive. Please trust me, it is. Use "bad" or "uncool" or "terrible", but don't use "gay".
Also, for what it's worth, my Yahoo mail interface is light blue, all the way. No purple in sight. (Too bad, since purple is my favorite color. :) )
More importantly to this topic, OO Draw is really a pretty good vector graphics program. It has layers, boolean operations and pretty good gradient controls. Its node controls are a little clunky, but having layers makes it better than Sodipodi, in my book.
I don't know about Illustrator, but CorelDraw has better layer support than PSP, in my experience. Renaming groups, moving them up or down, editing them from the list, etc. all work better in Draw than in PSP.
I haven't used Illustrator, but I've used CorelDraw a lot. It's a very nice standard to aspire to.
Until recently, I worked in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) school in East Asia. Unfortunately, the school and much of the country where I lived are now in the throes of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL)-philia. Schools are looking for ways to keep students coming back, and computer programs that teach English are one of the big hooks.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work. Students are given exercises to do on the computer that amount to low-quality worksheets, but with audio and video. The computer can't correct writing, and the only help it gives to pronunciation is letting the students listen over and over to themselves -- something that could be done just as well with a tape recorder.
Students also use online chats and compositions to help their English. The chats are clearly not going to do much besides ingrain their already excessive use of AOL talk. The compositions are better -- it is actually good for them to get practice writing in English on a computer -- but this is hardly something that needs to be done online.
The main promise of CALL is helping busy students who can't come to regular classes, but even here, a computer can't give the kind of personally-attuned feedback that a physically present teacher can. Until there is AI, CALL will be largely a waste of time, in my opinion.
Strangely enough, I wasn't trying to be funny. As corprew showed, haw flakes are a real thing. I could see how someone might think my post was just goofy, though.
Anime is not a genre; it's not even a style. It's a medium. Like any other medium, it follows Sturgeon's Law. 90% of websites are probably crap, 90% of books are probably crap, 90% of CD's are probably crap, 90% of movies are definitely crap. Like any medium, you have to make informed decisions.