"..what the Cultural Center is doing with Kanji does seem somewhat official."
Yes and no. It's the list of kanji you need to learn as part of your primary education. In the same way you'd have the "official math" and "official English literature" you're expected to have covered up through high school.
The practical impact (other than for school children) is mostly in government documents. There's a long-standing regulation that official documents only use the joyuu kanji, to make them as accessible as possible to people. With any other kanji you need to add furigana (a pronounciation key) so that people can still read them. There's a minor impact for publishers generally; while newspapers and book publishers are free to use whatever kanji they well please (technically, any Chinese character is a valid Japanese one) they do want their readers to understand what they publish, so this might increase the use of these characters a little bit.
But official in the sense that people didn't use the characters before, but now can, it is not. In fact, they're really leading from the back here (as any language-related regulations probably should): these characters have been added precisely because they're already in very wide use.
I'm no fan of the price gouging publishers are engaging in, but really - Elsevier publishes fake journals by the hundreds and there's not a peep from university or faculty. Thomson Reuters sues an open source competitor for just having a filter that can read Endnote files and the reaction is zero. But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
"the next generation Symbian will have Qt as user interface."
Qt isn't a user interface, it's a UI toolkit. The interface is almost completely orthogonal to this. Almost - you need a toolkit that can easily support the UI you want to build. But Qt, or GTK, or the Windows or OSX toolkits are all made for producing windowing user interfaces. Which is the cause of much of the trouble for Microsofts phone and PDA business, which doomed previous Linux-based mobile devices and which pushed Apple and Google to start from scratch with new systems specifically for mobile devices rather than trying to adapt existing stuff.
A heavily customized Qt - as in, forget source compatibility with desktop apps - may possibly work for a tablet-sized device. Qt for mobiles is likely dead from the start. If Nokia does make a serious go of it, it will have little but the name in common with the desktop toolkit.
"...app developers will quickly learn to check versions at runtime to make sure most of their features will work in older (or newer) versions of Android."
AFAIK, they already do. You declare the minimum API version in the application manifest. All Android versions in use today (1.5 and upwards) are backward-compatible, so if you as a developer wants to maximise the number of users is to target the lowest version that still supports the features your app needs. Which, for most of them, is any version currently in use.
Actually, as a user I don't find any restrictions on the X10 that aren't there on any other handset. I was pretty careful about checking that up, since I'm no fan of Sony either. There's a few DRM-laden music-buying apps added by default, but those are add-ons, not replacements, and they're not tied into the OS. The normal music player and other applications doesn't seem to have any restrictions; the phone works just fine as a developer phone; it opens as a USB mass storage device on mu Ubuntu desktop and so on.
You can root the phone already with some extra hardware and I expect a normal procedure to become available at some point. My only real concern about a third-party ROM is that phones here in Japan are SIM-locked, and I don't know if I'd be able to actually use the phone on the DoCoMo network anymore if I root it and load a different OS image.
The X10 screen is great. Wonderful. I love it. But if you specifically want to run 2.2 then it's probably not your best option. It runs 1.6 now (works just fine) and the update to 2.1 is coming in October. But no word yet on when a 2.2 update would be available. Of course, no other maker has announced their upgrade schedule either. YMMV.
"And headlines have gone from being one of the most fun parts of the job to one of the worst. I've had endless arguments with editors who will freak out if there's anything even the slightest bit clever or sly about a headline--if it's not packed with keywords, all properly researched via Google Trends and Omniture and God knows how many other vetting systems, it's just not wanted at all. "
As an inveterate punster I can sympathise. As a news reader, however, I can only say it's not a moment too soon.
The problem with your "clever or sly" headlines is that they don't actually tell me what the article is about, and they certainly don't tell me if there's an angle in your article that's different than the dozen other ones I've already seen about the subject. It becomes much worse when the headline is in English and especially Japanese; as a second-language user I frequently miss the double-takes and allusions and the headline ceases to have any coherent content to me at all. Content that was kind of the point of the headline. And of course, if you're an online news organization, second-language readers is a significant part of your audience, and something you ignore at your own peril.
Though remember that phobia is pretty much defined as an inappropriately strong aversion to something. It is not rational - when fear is rational it's not a phobia. So a phobia is a disorder; the question is just whether it is debilitating enough (or at all) that it warrants any kind of treatment. And that depends on your own lifestyle as much as on the strength of the phobia. A snake phobia, for instance, is likely no problem if you live and work in a northern city. If you work as a tropical-zone farmer on the other hand, it may well debilitate you.
Well, both flooding and gradual accomodation certainly works to get rid of a phobia (though it will tendency to return in some situations). You have to be really motivated to get rid of your phobia to even consider this kind of treatment, though, and for most sufferers (I'm one of them) their phobia just isn't bothersome or debilitating enough to go through with this.
They switch to DejaVu Sans at no less than 10 points here. Very easy to read, very soothing. I was rather put off when I got my Android phone, went to the New York Times website and discovered that they actually use some serifed typeface all over the site. Should find an Android browser that lets me choose my own fonts.
I didn't imply that current systems reach that bar; I'm sorry if I gave that impression. We're clearly not close yet. What I meant really was more about setting expectations, and when to declare success. It's a parallel to AI in a way: we don't need human-level AI for it to be a success. 95% of everything we'd want AI systems to do would do nicely with the perceptual, motor and cognitive abilities of a dog or a rat.
Most people won't be able to parse the sentence, though. I know I can't. I have no idea how to interpret it as anything but a string of nouns. My guess is, even fewer would be able to parse it if spoken (the capitals and the comma are, I assume, important hints). It'd be unrealistic and unproductive to require speech systems to actually do better than most humans on the task; if many of us can't parse the sentence then why expect a computer to do so?
Better overall benchmark: require it to have the ability of a competent but not perfect second-language user. We're long used to dealing with that level of proficiency, whether because the conversant is a foreigner, a child, or has a dialect very different from our own.
I'm just starting out with Android development, but I find it quite easy to get into. All the tools, emulator and everything is freely downloadable and fairly easy to set up. The online documentation is pretty good too - there's some hands-on tutorials that really help you get up to speed.
The programming model is a little different, but fairly easy to understand. Any one view - one screen, pretty much - is a more or less self-contained task. Your application consists of one or more such views - your own or other apps' - that start each other as needed. It can take a few moments to wrap your head around but seems to work fairly well.
"Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures."
Probably not. Cellphone cams have tiny sensors and tiny low-quality lenses that don't correct for sencond- or third-order aberrations. The resulting image is usually a low contrast, distorted image image with color fringing, coma and veiling glare. That 640x480 image, taken through a relatively high-quality optical system, most likely looks much better than your typical cellphone image, no matter what the relative resolution is on paper.
"each country has dishs that are odd for sure, but for pure volume of strange, it's hard to beat asians."
What, Asia is one country? You are collecting the weird foods of forty-odd different nations with completely different cultures spread over half the world and comparing to the foods of your own home.
The eels are already long since farmed. This simply enables eel farming without having to take juveniles from the wild.
"Answer: stop eating fish. Sorry."
When you've convinced people to stop eating meat as well. That is to say, never. Better to find ways of farming fish and seafood that minimizes impact. That will get us better results than pining for something that isn't going to happen.
Swallow's nest is a Chinese dish, not Japanese. And if I've understood it right, it's kind of a "stunt" dish in China as well.
"but they are definately more out there when it comes to what they will eat then we are."
I'm Swedish, and whenever conversation with some Japanese colleague or new acquaintance is about food, the subject invariably drifts to surströmming (sour herring), which they find inexplicable that anyone would eat. Food being "out there" is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
"My answer is to primarily eat wild, sustainably caught fish. It's generally much healthier than farmed fish anyway, which are fed the same garbage that factory farm cattle and pigs are fed, thus removing much of the health benefits of eating fish in the first place."
But the OP says they are fed fish, which makes them just as healthy as wild fish. Could you two decide: are they fed fish (great quality feed) or are they fed garbage (one disposal problem down)?
Besides, it's eels we're talking about here. You catch a wild eel, crab or clam and they haven't exactly been dining on fresh fish filets in the wild either.
"What if I don't own a G1 and want to see what apps are on the marketplace?"
http://www.appbrain.com/ or http://www.androidzoom.com/ is a good start. True, it'd (possibly) be better if Google made it browseable themselves, but letting other sites at the data and do it works pretty well too. On the upside, with several online catalog sites you can use the one that presents the data in the way that fits you.
"dynamic programming" is an overloaded term in the English language. All natural languages have many such terms. Sometimes the meanings are related, sometimes they are completely different. When you have learned a meaning of a term, do not assume that is the sole correct meaning. You risk sounding like a pedant or a fool as a result.
This is not a work-related "convenient opinion" of his. He's been critical of Apple's walled-garden approach to development for years, and an Android advocate since he got an Android phone in 2008 (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Diary for his chronicles using and programming it).
"What are we going to do once we move all of our manufacturing and service sectors over to robots? There won't be much work left for humans to do."
Before the industrial revolution more than 90% of europeans worked directly as farmers. Today the figure is somewhere in the single percentages. It saw a huge rise in manufacturing work, a rise that is now declining again (not just europe, but overall), while service jobs and abstract jobs are increasing.
At the same time there seems to have been an interesting shift from fairly short workdays (preindustrial farming was seasonal, and mostly low intensity), to very long days, and now back towards shorter ones.
People don't sit still doing nothing. Over time, if one type of work disappears people go out and do something else. Also, if trends continue we'll do it over shorter workdays too. What will people do? We'll find out.
And remember, just as a farming society would have said that it can't work when people just make things for each other, and an industrial society says it can't work when "everybody" works in services, whatever we see as impossible or unworkable is filtered through the structure of our own society. A future where half the population work as "creatives"? Don't count it out.
Nope. I don't see Kubuntu doing anything wrong. Nor do I see KDE at large - or Gnome, or Ubuntu - doing anything wrong here.
What I meant by "The public face of KDE" is the ranting zealots above. What I'm saying is that the kind of hyperpartisan frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Gnome people that self-identify as KDE zealots only manage to discredit and harm the project they think they support.
Even high school students are dabbling in autonomous drones nowadays, and most research on autonomous vehicles is open and readily downloadable. Your jammer is not going to help too much if the drone knows what it's supposed to do without radio contact.
And you need to know there's a drone to jam a kilometer overhead in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"..what the Cultural Center is doing with Kanji does seem somewhat official."
Yes and no. It's the list of kanji you need to learn as part of your primary education. In the same way you'd have the "official math" and "official English literature" you're expected to have covered up through high school.
The practical impact (other than for school children) is mostly in government documents. There's a long-standing regulation that official documents only use the joyuu kanji, to make them as accessible as possible to people. With any other kanji you need to add furigana (a pronounciation key) so that people can still read them. There's a minor impact for publishers generally; while newspapers and book publishers are free to use whatever kanji they well please (technically, any Chinese character is a valid Japanese one) they do want their readers to understand what they publish, so this might increase the use of these characters a little bit.
But official in the sense that people didn't use the characters before, but now can, it is not. In fact, they're really leading from the back here (as any language-related regulations probably should): these characters have been added precisely because they're already in very wide use.
I'm no fan of the price gouging publishers are engaging in, but really - Elsevier publishes fake journals by the hundreds and there's not a peep from university or faculty. Thomson Reuters sues an open source competitor for just having a filter that can read Endnote files and the reaction is zero. But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
"the next generation Symbian will have Qt as user interface."
Qt isn't a user interface, it's a UI toolkit. The interface is almost completely orthogonal to this. Almost - you need a toolkit that can easily support the UI you want to build. But Qt, or GTK, or the Windows or OSX toolkits are all made for producing windowing user interfaces. Which is the cause of much of the trouble for Microsofts phone and PDA business, which doomed previous Linux-based mobile devices and which pushed Apple and Google to start from scratch with new systems specifically for mobile devices rather than trying to adapt existing stuff.
A heavily customized Qt - as in, forget source compatibility with desktop apps - may possibly work for a tablet-sized device. Qt for mobiles is likely dead from the start. If Nokia does make a serious go of it, it will have little but the name in common with the desktop toolkit.
"...app developers will quickly learn to check versions at runtime to make sure most of their features will work in older (or newer) versions of Android."
AFAIK, they already do. You declare the minimum API version in the application manifest. All Android versions in use today (1.5 and upwards) are backward-compatible, so if you as a developer wants to maximise the number of users is to target the lowest version that still supports the features your app needs. Which, for most of them, is any version currently in use.
Actually, as a user I don't find any restrictions on the X10 that aren't there on any other handset. I was pretty careful about checking that up, since I'm no fan of Sony either. There's a few DRM-laden music-buying apps added by default, but those are add-ons, not replacements, and they're not tied into the OS. The normal music player and other applications doesn't seem to have any restrictions; the phone works just fine as a developer phone; it opens as a USB mass storage device on mu Ubuntu desktop and so on.
You can root the phone already with some extra hardware and I expect a normal procedure to become available at some point. My only real concern about a third-party ROM is that phones here in Japan are SIM-locked, and I don't know if I'd be able to actually use the phone on the DoCoMo network anymore if I root it and load a different OS image.
The X10 screen is great. Wonderful. I love it. But if you specifically want to run 2.2 then it's probably not your best option. It runs 1.6 now (works just fine) and the update to 2.1 is coming in October. But no word yet on when a 2.2 update would be available. Of course, no other maker has announced their upgrade schedule either. YMMV.
"And headlines have gone from being one of the most fun parts of the job to one of the worst. I've had endless arguments with editors who will freak out if there's anything even the slightest bit clever or sly about a headline--if it's not packed with keywords, all properly researched via Google Trends and Omniture and God knows how many other vetting systems, it's just not wanted at all. "
As an inveterate punster I can sympathise. As a news reader, however, I can only say it's not a moment too soon.
The problem with your "clever or sly" headlines is that they don't actually tell me what the article is about, and they certainly don't tell me if there's an angle in your article that's different than the dozen other ones I've already seen about the subject. It becomes much worse when the headline is in English and especially Japanese; as a second-language user I frequently miss the double-takes and allusions and the headline ceases to have any coherent content to me at all. Content that was kind of the point of the headline. And of course, if you're an online news organization, second-language readers is a significant part of your audience, and something you ignore at your own peril.
Though remember that phobia is pretty much defined as an inappropriately strong aversion to something. It is not rational - when fear is rational it's not a phobia. So a phobia is a disorder; the question is just whether it is debilitating enough (or at all) that it warrants any kind of treatment. And that depends on your own lifestyle as much as on the strength of the phobia. A snake phobia, for instance, is likely no problem if you live and work in a northern city. If you work as a tropical-zone farmer on the other hand, it may well debilitate you.
Well, both flooding and gradual accomodation certainly works to get rid of a phobia (though it will tendency to return in some situations). You have to be really motivated to get rid of your phobia to even consider this kind of treatment, though, and for most sufferers (I'm one of them) their phobia just isn't bothersome or debilitating enough to go through with this.
They switch to DejaVu Sans at no less than 10 points here. Very easy to read, very soothing. I was rather put off when I got my Android phone, went to the New York Times website and discovered that they actually use some serifed typeface all over the site. Should find an Android browser that lets me choose my own fonts.
I didn't imply that current systems reach that bar; I'm sorry if I gave that impression. We're clearly not close yet. What I meant really was more about setting expectations, and when to declare success. It's a parallel to AI in a way: we don't need human-level AI for it to be a success. 95% of everything we'd want AI systems to do would do nicely with the perceptual, motor and cognitive abilities of a dog or a rat.
Most people won't be able to parse the sentence, though. I know I can't. I have no idea how to interpret it as anything but a string of nouns. My guess is, even fewer would be able to parse it if spoken (the capitals and the comma are, I assume, important hints). It'd be unrealistic and unproductive to require speech systems to actually do better than most humans on the task; if many of us can't parse the sentence then why expect a computer to do so?
Better overall benchmark: require it to have the ability of a competent but not perfect second-language user. We're long used to dealing with that level of proficiency, whether because the conversant is a foreigner, a child, or has a dialect very different from our own.
I'm just starting out with Android development, but I find it quite easy to get into. All the tools, emulator and everything is freely downloadable and fairly easy to set up. The online documentation is pretty good too - there's some hands-on tutorials that really help you get up to speed.
The programming model is a little different, but fairly easy to understand. Any one view - one screen, pretty much - is a more or less self-contained task. Your application consists of one or more such views - your own or other apps' - that start each other as needed. It can take a few moments to wrap your head around but seems to work fairly well.
"Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures."
Probably not. Cellphone cams have tiny sensors and tiny low-quality lenses that don't correct for sencond- or third-order aberrations. The resulting image is usually a low contrast, distorted image image with color fringing, coma and veiling glare. That 640x480 image, taken through a relatively high-quality optical system, most likely looks much better than your typical cellphone image, no matter what the relative resolution is on paper.
"each country has dishs that are odd for sure, but for pure volume of strange, it's hard to beat asians."
What, Asia is one country? You are collecting the weird foods of forty-odd different nations with completely different cultures spread over half the world and comparing to the foods of your own home.
The eels are already long since farmed. This simply enables eel farming without having to take juveniles from the wild.
"Answer: stop eating fish. Sorry."
When you've convinced people to stop eating meat as well. That is to say, never. Better to find ways of farming fish and seafood that minimizes impact. That will get us better results than pining for something that isn't going to happen.
Swallow's nest is a Chinese dish, not Japanese. And if I've understood it right, it's kind of a "stunt" dish in China as well.
"but they are definately more out there when it comes to what they will eat then we are."
I'm Swedish, and whenever conversation with some Japanese colleague or new acquaintance is about food, the subject invariably drifts to surströmming (sour herring), which they find inexplicable that anyone would eat. Food being "out there" is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
"My answer is to primarily eat wild, sustainably caught fish. It's generally much healthier than farmed fish anyway, which are fed the same garbage that factory farm cattle and pigs are fed, thus removing much of the health benefits of eating fish in the first place."
But the OP says they are fed fish, which makes them just as healthy as wild fish. Could you two decide: are they fed fish (great quality feed) or are they fed garbage (one disposal problem down)?
Besides, it's eels we're talking about here. You catch a wild eel, crab or clam and they haven't exactly been dining on fresh fish filets in the wild either.
"What if I don't own a G1 and want to see what apps are on the marketplace?"
http://www.appbrain.com/ or http://www.androidzoom.com/ is a good start. True, it'd (possibly) be better if Google made it browseable themselves, but letting other sites at the data and do it works pretty well too. On the upside, with several online catalog sites you can use the one that presents the data in the way that fits you.
"dynamic programming" is an overloaded term in the English language. All natural languages have many such terms. Sometimes the meanings are related, sometimes they are completely different. When you have learned a meaning of a term, do not assume that is the sole correct meaning. You risk sounding like a pedant or a fool as a result.
This is not a work-related "convenient opinion" of his. He's been critical of Apple's walled-garden approach to development for years, and an Android advocate since he got an Android phone in 2008 (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Diary for his chronicles using and programming it).
"What are we going to do once we move all of our manufacturing and service sectors over to robots? There won't be much work left for humans to do."
Before the industrial revolution more than 90% of europeans worked directly as farmers. Today the figure is somewhere in the single percentages. It saw a huge rise in manufacturing work, a rise that is now declining again (not just europe, but overall), while service jobs and abstract jobs are increasing.
At the same time there seems to have been an interesting shift from fairly short workdays (preindustrial farming was seasonal, and mostly low intensity), to very long days, and now back towards shorter ones.
People don't sit still doing nothing. Over time, if one type of work disappears people go out and do something else. Also, if trends continue we'll do it over shorter workdays too. What will people do? We'll find out.
And remember, just as a farming society would have said that it can't work when people just make things for each other, and an industrial society says it can't work when "everybody" works in services, whatever we see as impossible or unworkable is filtered through the structure of our own society. A future where half the population work as "creatives"? Don't count it out.
"And that's Kubuntu's problem, somehow? "
Nope. I don't see Kubuntu doing anything wrong. Nor do I see KDE at large - or Gnome, or Ubuntu - doing anything wrong here.
What I meant by "The public face of KDE" is the ranting zealots above. What I'm saying is that the kind of hyperpartisan frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Gnome people that self-identify as KDE zealots only manage to discredit and harm the project they think they support.
"Oh, you KDE whiners. Everything about Gnome sucks. Everything about KDE rules." ..and everything is about Gnome versus KDE. Always.
I'm pretty sure they don't realize that this to some degree is the public face of KDE, and don't realize just how badly it reflects on the project.
Even high school students are dabbling in autonomous drones nowadays, and most research on autonomous vehicles is open and readily downloadable. Your jammer is not going to help too much if the drone knows what it's supposed to do without radio contact.
And you need to know there's a drone to jam a kilometer overhead in the first place.