They are about 10x the cost of floppies for one about 10x the size. If you want to "give" information, the CD is still the cheapest way (even cheaper than floppies for most people). And if you go to a convention, training, or anything like that, chances are the material will be provided on USB stick. It may cost more than a floppy, but is cheaper than paper, and cheaper than floppies (for the amount of information stored). Plus, unlike floppies, people will be able to use them when they get home.
Yeah, between the people talking about getting more US workers working on SV projects, and this guy talking about 8 zones (not 12 or 24), I had in my mind that he was referencing the US, not that SV would only deal with places 4 hours ahead, and 4 hours behind.
I disagree. You lose the ability to read words, but don't lose the ability to read like you learnt English. You have to sound it out, and use context. Same as English. Eventually, an advanced reader will read a word without looking at the letters. But Pinyin is not "worse". It's just different. You would be right if Chinese people couldn't understand spoken chinese. If there are 15 meanings for xi, then there are 15 words with the same pronunciation. If they can be differentiated in spoken speech (by context) then they can be differentiated in written language. I'd agree that speed-reading pinyin is impossible, but those speed reading Chinese do so with the hanzi. Pinyin is no "worse" than the spoken language, and that works just fine.
Management is hard remotely. Management is more than telling someone what they need to do by the end of the day. Having the ability to have more frequent casual conversations easily allows managers to better plan deadlines (Bob hasn't asked for time off, but is talking about a planned trip 6 months from now, so don't schedule anything then that Bob is required for - the corporate answer is deny Bob's leave request when it comes time, as he didn't place it early enough for anyone to plan around, but he didn't want to place it then because the plans weren't firm). And personal development. Workers are loathe to tell their boss "I don't do XXX well". In an office, it's easier to see that for ones self, then try to make training for XXX available to those who wish to take it (no need to even name Chris, if he wants it, let him take it, if not, then know he'll never be good at it and plan accordingly).
Light-touch bossing (the best kind, based on employee reports) is harder with distance.
Technical supervision is easy. "I need a bubble sort added to the library by Tuesday. Bob, that's yours." Tuesday comes. It's there or it's not. Then look at the code. The merge sort used didn't match the requirements, or the bubble sort is recursive in an unstable way, or other problems. Whether the person is next to you or 10,000 miles away, you can evaluate the objective results of most tasks, and then take action.
measure how much they're applying themselves and how much time they actually spend working.
If your main concern is keeping your employees "busy" rather than productive, then you are doing it wrong. I don't care whether someone is spending 8 hours a day sitting at their computer staring at it, or 2 hours. If they do the same work, it's all good. The corporate mentality these days punishes fast workers. Do 8 hours in two? Then you either need to get another 24 hours worth of work to keep you busy, or spend more time trying to look busy than being busy. Both of those are bad (as implemented by most corporations).
8 time zones? Counting only US states (not Guam and such) there are only 6 time zones. When you have to lie to make your point, you have proven you are wrong. In practice, those outside the head office zone must accommodate. But don't let reality mess with your irrational rant based on lies (and ones that are trivial to prove wrong).
Also in practice, the less-than-1% of the US in Alaska/HI can be ignored, leaving us with 4 time zones with more than 99% of the population. Hardly the crisis you made up.
There is a shortage of programmers in the US. There aren't enough of them, in my locality, that will work for what I'm willing to pay. That's a national emergency.
A tonal system is used by 100% of language speakers. It's just that most use tone over a whole sentence to convey meaning, rather than over a single syllable. Though tone within a word is used by many (most?), usually called accent or stress. Tones aren't confusing or difficult, except for old tongues to learn. It's the un-learning of years of muscle memory in the mouth that's hard, not learning the new thing.
English is hard to get fluency in, but not any harder than any other language to get to low-level passability. The "experts" have an agenda. They sell language training, or have a personal attachment to a particular language.
Chinese is the hardest for an adult to pick up because it's so different (especially when coming from an unrelated language group). Even changing alphabets, like from English to Russian is easier, because the basics (each letter has a sound, and groups of letters make words) are the same, unlike Chinese.
Pinyin also makes it possible to type with a "regular" keyboard.
There's also a large body of literature and poetry which does not translate well to Mandarin pinyin that would essentially be made inaccessible to the general public unless they learnt block characters as well, which seems more like a step back to a time when education was for the rich and well-connected and women had to bind their feet...
Ah, you don't like the idea of two independent and unrelated written representations of spoken language, not which one is used. That's a different complaint. Pinyin is necessary, even if you find it abhorrent.
I honestly expect Mandarin/Cantonese to remain the dominant language on the planet, just as it is today.
Chinese isn't "dominant".
If you walk in to a shop in Paris or Berlin and are Chinese, chances are that the shopkeeper will speak to you in English (not French or German), because they get so many foreigners and all foreigners speak English. Sure, if you look for the shops with hanzi, you'll be more likely to be greeted in Chinese, but for just random shops around the world in areas with lots of foreigners, you'll be spoken to in English, until you correct them.
Because for a long time, travel time exceeded the time to learn a new language. Now, you have instant global communication, and travel in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
Nope, English is easy. Someone transliterating from Chinese would say "I go store ago" (which is proper Chinese grammar) to mean "I went to the store". The transliteration may be grammatically incorrect, but it's understandable to many. Other languages have more tenses and genders/agreements that the additional complexity makes transliteration less understandable.
That said, no way is Chinese going to take over the world. It's way worse than English.
Yes, much more complex, with no tenses, genders, or modifiations to words at all. Not even plural. That makes it so complex. There are hundreds of rules you have to remember not to use. It also has one of the most gramatically flexible structures. There is often not a "right" or "wrong" (but there is a "preferred" and "less preferred" that will show you a learner if you get it wrong). There really isn't a language more simple that I know of. The complexity is in the pronunciation and writing, not in the grammar, vocabulary, or structure.
English has more ways to say the same thing. So remember one, or parts of many, and put them together, and you can get out an idea.
But that also makes it hard to master. Even most native speakers mess up "farther" and "further", worse still, most idioms using them use them wrong, so wrong is sometimes right.
When I went, it may have been because I'm American, but they were all trying to show off their American accents. Hong Kong had British accents for different reasons.
There is one official language of China. There are some regional dialects, but the schools teach Mandarin only, and anyone who learns the local dialect, will always be fluent in mandarin as well. Parents generally insist on that, as otherwise, employment outside your region would be impossible.
You also forgot that the International System of Units is SI, not IS. Again, because everyone caves to the french to make the official acronym of the french words, to appease them because they are mean bullies, not because of any usefulness of the language.
A Chinese written with latin alphabet would have more chances.
The municipality runs water and gas, but not power. Power is out a lot more than water or gas. The municipality is better than the private companies at providing reliable services with short restore times.
If you eliminate all the copper, how will you get power to the houses?
I like your plan. But only if the homeowner owns the fiber to the CO. The plan if being hostage to a utility isn't desireable. You have to for power and water because those are shared in a pipe to the house, and metered there. Fiber is dedicated and private to the POP (unless you go GPON, less performance, essentially same cost). So you can "own" your access to the shared point, same as power and water, though the shared point for those is in the street.
You say that like an employer has some responsibility for this, or some reason to know. I'm a dual-citizen (not german) and my employer doesn't know. They just know I'm legal to work.
There were more "blockbusters" this year than ever before. Hollywoodland is spending more money on fewer low-risk movies. The "old" formula was more cheaper movies. There's little made for $200M that couldn't be made for $50M. But rather than pushing for four cheaper movies, we get the more expensive movies, and fewer of them.
Chrome, Opera, and others load each tab/page in a separate process. Why isn't everyone doing that? Quad core, 2 threads per core lets me run 100+ pages, and any one or two of them freezing up won't cause a problem.
It doesn't have to be truly parallel, just separate. There's a difference.
They had no WMD program. They had no ties to al Qaeda. They never tried to buy Yellow Cake. All the reasons give were lies. Yes, Saddam dodged UN inspectors. If it was proven he didn't have WMDs then he'd have a revolt. Sure, some revisionists can claim that the UN violations was the reason for the invasion, but in the US at the time, the reasons given were solely "ties to al Qaeda" and "WMDs". No other reasons were mentioned explicitly by Bush. The implication was that Saddam was somehow responsible for 9/11.
The actual reason for the invasion was revenge. Bush Jr blamed Saddam for Bush Sr losing a second term. It didn't go any deeper than that, other than Cheney knew the war would make billions for his buddies, so nobody had a reason to say no.
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They are about 10x the cost of floppies for one about 10x the size. If you want to "give" information, the CD is still the cheapest way (even cheaper than floppies for most people). And if you go to a convention, training, or anything like that, chances are the material will be provided on USB stick. It may cost more than a floppy, but is cheaper than paper, and cheaper than floppies (for the amount of information stored). Plus, unlike floppies, people will be able to use them when they get home.
Yeah, between the people talking about getting more US workers working on SV projects, and this guy talking about 8 zones (not 12 or 24), I had in my mind that he was referencing the US, not that SV would only deal with places 4 hours ahead, and 4 hours behind.
I disagree. You lose the ability to read words, but don't lose the ability to read like you learnt English. You have to sound it out, and use context. Same as English. Eventually, an advanced reader will read a word without looking at the letters. But Pinyin is not "worse". It's just different. You would be right if Chinese people couldn't understand spoken chinese. If there are 15 meanings for xi, then there are 15 words with the same pronunciation. If they can be differentiated in spoken speech (by context) then they can be differentiated in written language. I'd agree that speed-reading pinyin is impossible, but those speed reading Chinese do so with the hanzi. Pinyin is no "worse" than the spoken language, and that works just fine.
English: lead. What did I mean?
Light-touch bossing (the best kind, based on employee reports) is harder with distance.
Technical supervision is easy. "I need a bubble sort added to the library by Tuesday. Bob, that's yours." Tuesday comes. It's there or it's not. Then look at the code. The merge sort used didn't match the requirements, or the bubble sort is recursive in an unstable way, or other problems. Whether the person is next to you or 10,000 miles away, you can evaluate the objective results of most tasks, and then take action.
measure how much they're applying themselves and how much time they actually spend working.
If your main concern is keeping your employees "busy" rather than productive, then you are doing it wrong. I don't care whether someone is spending 8 hours a day sitting at their computer staring at it, or 2 hours. If they do the same work, it's all good. The corporate mentality these days punishes fast workers. Do 8 hours in two? Then you either need to get another 24 hours worth of work to keep you busy, or spend more time trying to look busy than being busy. Both of those are bad (as implemented by most corporations).
8 time zones? Counting only US states (not Guam and such) there are only 6 time zones. When you have to lie to make your point, you have proven you are wrong. In practice, those outside the head office zone must accommodate. But don't let reality mess with your irrational rant based on lies (and ones that are trivial to prove wrong).
Also in practice, the less-than-1% of the US in Alaska/HI can be ignored, leaving us with 4 time zones with more than 99% of the population. Hardly the crisis you made up.
There is a shortage of programmers in the US. There aren't enough of them, in my locality, that will work for what I'm willing to pay. That's a national emergency.
Both mean "a smaller [number|amount] of something". But so long as number and amount are not synonyms, they won't be.
Yeah, like "red" isn't a valid word. Is it the color? The past tense of reading? We'll never know.
A tonal system is used by 100% of language speakers. It's just that most use tone over a whole sentence to convey meaning, rather than over a single syllable. Though tone within a word is used by many (most?), usually called accent or stress. Tones aren't confusing or difficult, except for old tongues to learn. It's the un-learning of years of muscle memory in the mouth that's hard, not learning the new thing.
English is hard to get fluency in, but not any harder than any other language to get to low-level passability. The "experts" have an agenda. They sell language training, or have a personal attachment to a particular language.
Chinese is the hardest for an adult to pick up because it's so different (especially when coming from an unrelated language group). Even changing alphabets, like from English to Russian is easier, because the basics (each letter has a sound, and groups of letters make words) are the same, unlike Chinese.
I read his post 3 times before I saw the spelling error. Some of us don't read the subject lines.
There's also a large body of literature and poetry which does not translate well to Mandarin pinyin that would essentially be made inaccessible to the general public unless they learnt block characters as well, which seems more like a step back to a time when education was for the rich and well-connected and women had to bind their feet...
Ah, you don't like the idea of two independent and unrelated written representations of spoken language, not which one is used. That's a different complaint. Pinyin is necessary, even if you find it abhorrent.
I honestly expect Mandarin/Cantonese to remain the dominant language on the planet, just as it is today.
Chinese isn't "dominant".
If you walk in to a shop in Paris or Berlin and are Chinese, chances are that the shopkeeper will speak to you in English (not French or German), because they get so many foreigners and all foreigners speak English. Sure, if you look for the shops with hanzi, you'll be more likely to be greeted in Chinese, but for just random shops around the world in areas with lots of foreigners, you'll be spoken to in English, until you correct them.
But it didn't. Why?
Because for a long time, travel time exceeded the time to learn a new language. Now, you have instant global communication, and travel in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
That said, no way is Chinese going to take over the world. It's way worse than English.
Yes, much more complex, with no tenses, genders, or modifiations to words at all. Not even plural. That makes it so complex. There are hundreds of rules you have to remember not to use. It also has one of the most gramatically flexible structures. There is often not a "right" or "wrong" (but there is a "preferred" and "less preferred" that will show you a learner if you get it wrong). There really isn't a language more simple that I know of. The complexity is in the pronunciation and writing, not in the grammar, vocabulary, or structure.
English has more ways to say the same thing. So remember one, or parts of many, and put them together, and you can get out an idea.
But that also makes it hard to master. Even most native speakers mess up "farther" and "further", worse still, most idioms using them use them wrong, so wrong is sometimes right.
When I went, it may have been because I'm American, but they were all trying to show off their American accents. Hong Kong had British accents for different reasons.
There is one official language of China. There are some regional dialects, but the schools teach Mandarin only, and anyone who learns the local dialect, will always be fluent in mandarin as well. Parents generally insist on that, as otherwise, employment outside your region would be impossible.
A Chinese written with latin alphabet would have more chances.
It's called Pinyin.
The municipality runs water and gas, but not power. Power is out a lot more than water or gas. The municipality is better than the private companies at providing reliable services with short restore times.
You are lying, or should move out of Detroit.
If you eliminate all the copper, how will you get power to the houses?
I like your plan. But only if the homeowner owns the fiber to the CO. The plan if being hostage to a utility isn't desireable. You have to for power and water because those are shared in a pipe to the house, and metered there. Fiber is dedicated and private to the POP (unless you go GPON, less performance, essentially same cost). So you can "own" your access to the shared point, same as power and water, though the shared point for those is in the street.
You say that like an employer has some responsibility for this, or some reason to know. I'm a dual-citizen (not german) and my employer doesn't know. They just know I'm legal to work.
There were more "blockbusters" this year than ever before. Hollywoodland is spending more money on fewer low-risk movies. The "old" formula was more cheaper movies. There's little made for $200M that couldn't be made for $50M. But rather than pushing for four cheaper movies, we get the more expensive movies, and fewer of them.
Chrome, Opera, and others load each tab/page in a separate process. Why isn't everyone doing that? Quad core, 2 threads per core lets me run 100+ pages, and any one or two of them freezing up won't cause a problem.
It doesn't have to be truly parallel, just separate. There's a difference.
They had no WMD program. They had no ties to al Qaeda. They never tried to buy Yellow Cake. All the reasons give were lies. Yes, Saddam dodged UN inspectors. If it was proven he didn't have WMDs then he'd have a revolt. Sure, some revisionists can claim that the UN violations was the reason for the invasion, but in the US at the time, the reasons given were solely "ties to al Qaeda" and "WMDs". No other reasons were mentioned explicitly by Bush. The implication was that Saddam was somehow responsible for 9/11.
The actual reason for the invasion was revenge. Bush Jr blamed Saddam for Bush Sr losing a second term. It didn't go any deeper than that, other than Cheney knew the war would make billions for his buddies, so nobody had a reason to say no.