Yes, such robots seem somewhat superficial now (where are all the old people / couldn't they us them?); perhaps the rate of progress made many of us think in terms of quickly showing tangible benefits & utility of something (which was rarely the case, for most things around us)
But "descendants" of such robots might prove crucially important in one of our "ultimate" endeavors... after they've been sufficiently improved, most likely over the course of centuries. Well, those might be first steps of that process.
Fitting, considering the region is revving up its space programs?;p
(yes, hibernation being also a possibility - question is, at what cost of mass to support one grown human vs. equivalent mass of fully automated systems meant to kickstart the colony; and the crew would be usually of skeleton size at most anyway, with robots certainly still crucial)
Seems HK uses actually one of the fastest input methods - but one which is quite difficult to learn. While some other (slower...) methods can be learned rapidly.
Yup, the relationship between speed and difficulty is tenuous at best... (nvm using that speed in comparisons with EN)
The question isn't about how many there are, their existence - but how widespread the few (in practice) of them are.
One stark example: despite my place having for a long time its own version of qwerty with diacritics, computer keyboards are virtually exclusively of the standard US layout (physically, what this is about; function is slightly modified of course - right Alt acts like AltGr; and nullifying it is a matter of one quick & easy keyboard shortcut - too easy in fact, people often do it accidentally and get totally confused / "the keyboard is broken"). The only "PCs" I used which had a "proper" local keyboard were old Mac Classic, LC475 and some middle-size Quadra (in itself exceedingly rare machines here back then); more recent Macs (much more popular now, relatively; but still quite rare) don't come with such very often - however slightly "weird" the Apple keyboards might be anyway, people perceive their US variant as more "standard & expected national keyboard" than the ones with diacritics... A quick search for "typist layout" (how it is called; though vast majority of people aren't even aware of this, and indeed of its existence!) on local auction service, among 1200+ keyboard offers, gave 2 results - one of them a 10+ year old Apple one, the other some new HP one (I'm slightly surprised / would say it's a lot, when it comes to new ones). Biggest online product catalog doesn't have the category and few variants of search term didn't find anything.
Similarly (if not so extreme) in few nearby places. Apart from their qwertz, standard qwerty is also widely used in Czech Republic and Slovakia (even if in their case AltGr, diacritics, etc. are typically printed on the keys - probably partly because they made an unfortunate choice of nonintuitive positions for letters with diacritics, not "on top"/as a modifier of pure latin ones - that is still essentially a standard US layout, and it's not too hard to see/buy a keyboard without local symbols... one might as well simply add them with a permanent marker). At least Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Bulgaria and Netherlands are similar. Few linguistic families already, and only my local examples.
Now, from glancing at Wiki - the two most prominent places of Francophone, France and Canada, have different keyboard layouts (FR qwerty similar to US vs. FR azerty). France isn't very rigorous itself - Canadian multilingual qwerty is apparently very easy to find, as well as... Portuguese or US international (which isn't at odds with standard one at all). Even neighboring Belgium made changes. Now, I don't think a lot of places in the Francophone would be more rigorous than France about using the "proper" keyboard...
In contrast "U.S. keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in other English-speaking places (e.g., Australia, English Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, the Philippines and India)" - most of the Anglophone, it seems (excluding only UK itself and Ireland). So, regarding your last post - it would seem that in former colonies FR-US cancel each other out at best (for azerty) - and then there are quite a few non-EN places using US qwerty.
Checking the biggest potential market, and one which might dictate things in the future... contrary to what AC said, apparently the most popular keyboard in China is a standard US qwerty, with some additions on top of existing keys (without modification of the underlying layout, just like in my area), used phonetically with their input method software (BTW, at least in the case of languages from my area it's not much of a stretch to say that the standard US layout, with its latin letters, is better for them than for English - their alphabets are much more phonetic than EN one, they are generally very close to latin pronunciation)
So yes, there definitely exists a standard keyboard layout. And even if not used everywhere, it's apparently easy to obtain worldwide anyway...
Seems it was, around a decade ago. Even if it was ignored at the time of its original publication, getting hands on recent implementation might nicely add to the "what if?" experience.
Sure, EEGs don't exactly grow on trees - I just meant it as a solution which is very reliable and decently doable (maybe know somebody with private practice? Or... - certainly much worse from medical ones, but might be enough for noticing sleep; then there's also http://openeeg.sf.net/ )
PS. Posted when close to 24h without sleep, near a "cliff"/crisis period. It's better to do ~36h and go to sleep normally - as you said, in a few hours it will be bearable/better; but how much of that is formed by our skewed perception? (good thing there's a holiday at my place today)
Might be not enough to draw conclusions? Were those speeds of native speakers? Some cultural differences causing... different way of reporting own speed? Native EN writing CN, or vice versa? Plus, typical speed is not a direct indicator of how hard it is.
If it's really harder (at the level of "surely harder") could be probably judged only by someone who is learning both, and native with some 3rd script...preferably similarly dissimilar to both. Better yet, a sample of such people.
BTW, the German Z3 probably deserves to consider it as the first computer; a lot of early history was obscured due to circumstances or outright classified for many years (for pragmatic reasons, too - "3rd world" places using Enigma machines after ww2 were supposed to believe in their unbroken record...). Check also Plankalkul.
One of those is a bit more widespread though; used in many places even if, technically, some local layout was established... (where, accidentally, it appears to be often called "locale (programmers)")
All those detractors with quite "technical" view even at literary analysis... while, if certain level of drive to uncover non-apparent meanings in our surroundings was a bit more widespread, the world could probably be a bit nicer too.
They often do come with AAC nowadays - at least if one looks at what has become the "standard" portable audio player.
Which also means not limiting ourselves to the highly visible, but ultimately atypical "iPod places" - in my decently prosperous, late EU memberstate, I can probably count the number of times I've definitely seen an iPod on the fingers of one hand (well, excluding the one I own); something like chinese S1 mp3 players was the norm for a long time. But for a few years that spot has been taken by mobile phones, usually in the form of so called "feature phones" - and most of them support AAC (many support HE-AAC and even HE-AAC+ for quite a while; something what most iPods doesn't really do). I would be very surprised if that wasn't fairly typical. And after looking at numbers, it's quite possible that Nokia alone ships more music-capable phones annually than the total of iPods ever produced; and they have only ~1/3rd of mobile sales.
Doesn't change how mp3 seems to be still the most widely used standard. And why not? Just a case of "good enough" probably.
Even with terrorists, flying is a lot safer than driving, but if you make it too inconvenient, then people that have a choice might choose something else.
It's a lot safer per distance travelled; or one of the safest per hour of travel (equal to trains here, but loosing noticeably to bus travel; and overall within the same order of magnitude as cars). It's one of the least safe per journey - only bicycles and motorcycles are worse.
So in practice, if traveling somewhere by bus or train seems practical, it's most likely safer (with cars it's often not that much worse). And people might even start choosing it more.
Thing is - posting one link wouldn't quite make it justice, IMHO. There are many sources of those data, easily reachable, easily available (just modify search terms a bit, for starters) by the simplest means; I wouldn't know which one to choose.
Slashdot Mirror
Vs. the model of a perfect average child "diagnosed" with ADHD, drugged with Ritalin, etc.?
(one can wonder from where does the desirability of ragdoll cats come from)
Yes, such robots seem somewhat superficial now (where are all the old people / couldn't they us them?); perhaps the rate of progress made many of us think in terms of quickly showing tangible benefits & utility of something (which was rarely the case, for most things around us)
But "descendants" of such robots might prove crucially important in one of our "ultimate" endeavors ... after they've been sufficiently improved, most likely over the course of centuries. Well, those might be first steps of that process.
Fitting, considering the region is revving up its space programs? ;p
(yes, hibernation being also a possibility - question is, at what cost of mass to support one grown human vs. equivalent mass of fully automated systems meant to kickstart the colony; and the crew would be usually of skeleton size at most anyway, with robots certainly still crucial)
I assumed you were talking about Plankalkul, since talking about Z3 doesn't make any sense - it was fully built, fully functional in 1941.
Might be not a bad thing, considering MS sort of derailed the original netbook idea in the first place.
Especially if installing a bit fuller environment, for those who want it, won't require fighting.
Hm, though it could mean that Linux (or at least Linux reporting) is hitting more mainstream.
Must have been especially tedious with all the punchcards involved.
Seems HK uses actually one of the fastest input methods - but one which is quite difficult to learn. While some other (slower...) methods can be learned rapidly.
Yup, the relationship between speed and difficulty is tenuous at best... (nvm using that speed in comparisons with EN)
The question isn't about how many there are, their existence - but how widespread the few (in practice) of them are.
One stark example: despite my place having for a long time its own version of qwerty with diacritics, computer keyboards are virtually exclusively of the standard US layout (physically, what this is about; function is slightly modified of course - right Alt acts like AltGr; and nullifying it is a matter of one quick & easy keyboard shortcut - too easy in fact, people often do it accidentally and get totally confused / "the keyboard is broken"). The only "PCs" I used which had a "proper" local keyboard were old Mac Classic, LC475 and some middle-size Quadra (in itself exceedingly rare machines here back then); more recent Macs (much more popular now, relatively; but still quite rare) don't come with such very often - however slightly "weird" the Apple keyboards might be anyway, people perceive their US variant as more "standard & expected national keyboard" than the ones with diacritics...
A quick search for "typist layout" (how it is called; though vast majority of people aren't even aware of this, and indeed of its existence!) on local auction service, among 1200+ keyboard offers, gave 2 results - one of them a 10+ year old Apple one, the other some new HP one (I'm slightly surprised / would say it's a lot, when it comes to new ones). Biggest online product catalog doesn't have the category and few variants of search term didn't find anything.
Similarly (if not so extreme) in few nearby places. Apart from their qwertz, standard qwerty is also widely used in Czech Republic and Slovakia (even if in their case AltGr, diacritics, etc. are typically printed on the keys - probably partly because they made an unfortunate choice of nonintuitive positions for letters with diacritics, not "on top"/as a modifier of pure latin ones - that is still essentially a standard US layout, and it's not too hard to see/buy a keyboard without local symbols ... one might as well simply add them with a permanent marker). At least Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Bulgaria and Netherlands are similar. Few linguistic families already, and only my local examples.
Now, from glancing at Wiki - the two most prominent places of Francophone, France and Canada, have different keyboard layouts (FR qwerty similar to US vs. FR azerty). France isn't very rigorous itself - Canadian multilingual qwerty is apparently very easy to find, as well as... Portuguese or US international (which isn't at odds with standard one at all). Even neighboring Belgium made changes. Now, I don't think a lot of places in the Francophone would be more rigorous than France about using the "proper" keyboard...
In contrast "U.S. keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in other English-speaking places (e.g., Australia, English Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, the Philippines and India)" - most of the Anglophone, it seems (excluding only UK itself and Ireland). So, regarding your last post - it would seem that in former colonies FR-US cancel each other out at best (for azerty) - and then there are quite a few non-EN places using US qwerty.
Checking the biggest potential market, and one which might dictate things in the future ... contrary to what AC said, apparently the most popular keyboard in China is a standard US qwerty, with some additions on top of existing keys (without modification of the underlying layout, just like in my area), used phonetically with their input method software (BTW, at least in the case of languages from my area it's not much of a stretch to say that the standard US layout, with its latin letters, is better for them than for English - their alphabets are much more phonetic than EN one, they are generally very close to latin pronunciation)
So yes, there definitely exists a standard keyboard layout. And even if not used everywhere, it's apparently easy to obtain worldwide anyway...
Seems it was, around a decade ago. Even if it was ignored at the time of its original publication, getting hands on recent implementation might nicely add to the "what if?" experience.
Certainly would be welcomed by some as a sign of an impending technological singularity.
Unambiguous and logical is boring anyway; it can have much more interesting lineage.
Sure, EEGs don't exactly grow on trees - I just meant it as a solution which is very reliable and decently doable (maybe know somebody with private practice? Or... - certainly much worse from medical ones, but might be enough for noticing sleep; then there's also http://openeeg.sf.net/ )
PS. Posted when close to 24h without sleep, near a "cliff"/crisis period. It's better to do ~36h and go to sleep normally - as you said, in a few hours it will be bearable/better; but how much of that is formed by our skewed perception? (good thing there's a holiday at my place today)
Might be not enough to draw conclusions? Were those speeds of native speakers? Some cultural differences causing... different way of reporting own speed? Native EN writing CN, or vice versa? Plus, typical speed is not a direct indicator of how hard it is.
Probably not; not as a single layout.
If it's really harder (at the level of "surely harder") could be probably judged only by someone who is learning both, and native with some 3rd script...preferably similarly dissimilar to both. Better yet, a sample of such people.
I mean one of the listed in AC post; "English" wasn't among them.
If you really wonder, it's not too hard to get a bit of a taste.
BTW, the German Z3 probably deserves to consider it as the first computer; a lot of early history was obscured due to circumstances or outright classified for many years (for pragmatic reasons, too - "3rd world" places using Enigma machines after ww2 were supposed to believe in their unbroken record...). Check also Plankalkul.
All creators of chorded keyboards were up to something after all?
One of those is a bit more widespread though; used in many places even if, technically, some local layout was established... (where, accidentally, it appears to be often called "locale (programmers)")
Also: Slashdot would never, ever, ever be able to display code snippets of such thing.
All those detractors with quite "technical" view even at literary analysis... while, if certain level of drive to uncover non-apparent meanings in our surroundings was a bit more widespread, the world could probably be a bit nicer too.
They often do come with AAC nowadays - at least if one looks at what has become the "standard" portable audio player.
Which also means not limiting ourselves to the highly visible, but ultimately atypical "iPod places" - in my decently prosperous, late EU memberstate, I can probably count the number of times I've definitely seen an iPod on the fingers of one hand (well, excluding the one I own); something like chinese S1 mp3 players was the norm for a long time. But for a few years that spot has been taken by mobile phones, usually in the form of so called "feature phones" - and most of them support AAC (many support HE-AAC and even HE-AAC+ for quite a while; something what most iPods doesn't really do). I would be very surprised if that wasn't fairly typical. And after looking at numbers, it's quite possible that Nokia alone ships more music-capable phones annually than the total of iPods ever produced; and they have only ~1/3rd of mobile sales.
Doesn't change how mp3 seems to be still the most widely used standard. And why not? Just a case of "good enough" probably.
At the least, if "they" can't quite force us to do their stated will, watching us humiliate ourselves could be gratifying / next best thing...
Even with terrorists, flying is a lot safer than driving, but if you make it too inconvenient, then people that have a choice might choose something else.
It's a lot safer per distance travelled; or one of the safest per hour of travel (equal to trains here, but loosing noticeably to bus travel; and overall within the same order of magnitude as cars). It's one of the least safe per journey - only bicycles and motorcycles are worse.
So in practice, if traveling somewhere by bus or train seems practical, it's most likely safer (with cars it's often not that much worse). And people might even start choosing it more.
Thing is - posting one link wouldn't quite make it justice, IMHO. There are many sources of those data, easily reachable, easily available (just modify search terms a bit, for starters) by the simplest means; I wouldn't know which one to choose.
And yet the myth persists...