So even if this thing gives the correct answer to "where can I find the Ministry of Whatever" or "have you seen my bento box", maybe it'll really disturb people on a level they won't immediately figure out.
I would frankly be more disturbed by being in a country that really has a Ministry of Whatever... Maybe the Department of Nevermind can help me get over it, though.
The most pressing problem for most engineering and science students regarding writing is that we simply do very little of it at all. Unlike the humanities and social sciences, many courses don't require any writing whatsoever, and those that do are mostly in the form of lab "reports", where, if the figures and results are fine, it simply does not really matter to anyone if the language is good (or even makes any sense). I had classmates that had never written a whole, uninterrupted page of normal language at university until they had to write their Master's thesis (and tellingly, a number of them never finished it).
So whatever you do, the single most helpful thing is probably to enable - and require - constant writing with quick turnaround time for the feedback. Don't require one or two large bodies of text; make it a bi-weekly thing to write and hand in something, anything, as long as it's coherent. Nothing helps improving your writing skills than just, well, writing. It's just like programming, where reading theory and looking at examples are helpful and essential, but secondary to buiding your familiarity and facility by _doing_ it.
And the feedback should not be focused on grammar, nor on "style", but on simple readability in comparison with good texts. Make people look at their own texts with new eye and understand how it will be received by someone who has not written it (ie. eveyone else than themselves). Show bot h good and bad examples, and explain _why_ they are good and bad; make people see when an explanation is deficient, when steps have been omitted, when a clarification is anything but.
I write a blog, and while it's not much to read, it has helped me immensely by the simple virtue of constant practice and the need to actually think about how to say things so it's not utterly incomprehensible. Requiring that kind of smaller text chunks would, I believe, be similarily helpful.
But how many people tries to use two locales at once?
It's not running two locales. I run one locale (sv_SE.UTF8), but want to write sometimes in English (which uses the same input method as Swedish), and sometimes in Japanese (which uses a different method).
You'd get the same kind of issue (though perhaps not this exact problem) whenever you want to use an input method different than the one that is default for your language. There's no shortage of European and US language students, for example, or bilingual people that want to write in a different language (and not infrequently mix languages in the same document). Many of the worlds largest languages use different input methods from indoeuropean (and different from each other). You want to write a proposal to a manufacturer in China? Or, you're customer contact for a Taiwanese company and need to answer an email from India in Sanskrit?
Locale, font set and input method have been (finally, painfully) separated for very good reason - remember the bad old days when it was the same, and you had to deal with codepages and other utterly painful hacks for this?
My current place has cat5 wired right in. I'll be moving eventually, and at the new place there is also cat5 strung throughout the apartment already. All you need to do is connect your ADSL router in the storage closet (and not even that if you go for the building-wide internet service instead of your own) and you're good to go in any room.
If you have to pull cable yourself its a major pain and I'd recommend wireless of course, but it seems most newer buildings have networking already, and at least for desktops it makes perfect sense to use it instead of messing with WEP keys and interference with your neighbour.
Still, Japan is among the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world.
Wanna talk suicide rates?
I believe suicide rates, traffic accidents, workplace incidents and so on are not part of this comparison; this is a comparison of health and disease, not injuries.
The OP has a point - people here are pretty healthy. Also, the "people work long hours" is not the whole story here. Those who push up those statistics a lot are the career professionals (the people in dark suits every morning on the train), but they ar of course a minority in the population; I believe Salarymen are about 10% or thereabouts of the workers.
Also, while you stay long hours at the office that doesn't necessarily mean you are working hard all that time. I've seen people soundly asleep or relaxing with the morning paper often enough to believe the actual output per person is not much higher than in Sweden, for example.
Generally, selling as much as you supply at asking price is considered a success....depending on how much you supply. And even then, they never exactly flew off the shelves in Japan; the 360 has even sold less than the original xbox during the same timeframe.
I did not say it was unusable for everybody. I said this is the particular hurdle that turned me off Java in linux. Take the more general case of a desktop in a western language while you still want to input a CJK language. Not that unusual anymore.
And in any case I took this as an example of how Java is not integrating with the desktop; all my other apps, in any other language, work fine when I've set it up, but not Java apps.
Umm, I really don't think we have to worry about people who can't clear the hurdle of installing a JVM attempting to write code. In any language. At least I hope not. Unless you're talking about sysadmins installing java for developers. But last I heard it took more chutzpa than being able to run 'apt-get' to get those jobs.
I was a bit unclear; I meant that as a linux developer you limit your audience for your application since many in your audience can not (or will not bother) install java to run what you made.
Janne, have you submitted a bug report for this? If you do, I'm willing to give it a try to get a bug fix submitted to java 1.6. No guarantees though, I'm only on the JCP so Sun might not even look at my suggested patch.
Frankly, no. I have no idea who's to blame - the Sun packaging, the version of SCIM, something in Ubuntu, or (most probably) all and none; just an unfortunate interaction between pieces of software never designed to be used together.
My interest in getting it to work was purely operational - I wanted to run a particular app with Japanese input. Once I realized things were not going to work with a lot of effort, I gave up and looked for a different (non-Java) app with the functionality I wanted. Had this been something I had to make work I would have dug deeper (and at least posted a few questions about it on appropriate mailing lists). But seeing as I had multiple options anyway it just didn't make sense to spend more time on it.
Re:What ? Eclipse has no issues with languages at
on
Will Sun Open Source Java?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I call bullshit - just because you don't know how to set up your machine properly doesn't mean java has language problems.
Great for you; I never got it to work properly (Ubuntu and SCIM/Anthy). I first had to add fonts to some java-specific list to get it to show CJK at all. When I run the app with Swedish locale it refuses to let me input Japanese (it does not listen to the SCIM server).
I'm sure I could get it working with enough effort - but after one frustrating evening I'm not going to bother. Java isn't alone out there; just about every Java app has good equivalents without the hassle (including the Kanji app I was trying to use). And I'm certainly not going to be using Java to develop anything knowing that potential users will have go through the same mess I do.
I should not have to "set up my machine properly" - most users do not have the technical skills to do so. I should be able to select "java" in the package manager (or rather, select the app I'm actually interested in) and it should all work - but it doesn't.
People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.
Irrespective of any ideological issues, there are a few reasons the current situation hurts Java a bit.
Foremost for quite a few readers of slashdot is that free Linux distributions can't include Java in their default install. That means Java-based apps are not going to be included either. And since users need to jump through quite a few hoops to get Java installed (don't say "it's easy" - for most people anything beyond using their package manager is too high a hurdle), you can't assume it will be available on desktops in general.
The second issue is that Java does not really play well with the desktop. I have set up my desktop to run fine using three languages - English, Swedish and Japanese - and made sure everything from localization to character input works smoothly. But Java does not cooperate; it has its own way of dealing with CJK characters and needs its own fonts and separate setup to work. I have fiddled a little with it, but have never gotten it to work properly (especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese). And since it uses its own input method, it does not share the local dictionary so typing becomes frustratingly different from any other application I use. And since the code is not open, distributions can't fix these interoperability issues.
Both of these issues serve as disincentives from using Java apps and from writing them in the first place.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with you, I just wish that people wouldn't sugar coat the truth. "every first-world country, not to mention many developing countries, will of course pay the cost of a college education" has such a heaping layer of sugar coating on it that I'm getting diabetes just looking at it.
Where's the sugar? Seriously?
If someone is so deluded they think a university education is about finding their future mate, finding themselves, or just finding a good party, then they deserve every failing grade, busted economy and every other disappointment they can possibly pick up along the way.
All you have to do is give up on private colleges,
So go to a public college. In most countries that's all there is (and in a lot of countries - Japan, where I live, is an excellent example) the public universities are the very best ones; private universities are for people without the abilities but with wealthy parents.
go into debt up to your waist for public ones
Where have anybody said the Indian graduates are not going into debt? If you think it's important enough, you do it. If not, well, don't complain.
I'm a graduate from Sweden, and even though the actual tuition is free, I have more university debt than I care to think about. I could always have been debt-free, though - I could just have stayed at the steel mill instead.
Work two jobs to cover the difference on tuition over what the government gives you (sorry stafford, $5200 a year just doesn't cut it anymore). Give up on having a social life (hey, it wasn't like you were getting laid anyway).
And the point of college is to have a party? Or is it to get an education; something on which to buid a career? If having fun is the poiunt for you, why do you waste it on college when the same money will stretch so much further on Disneyland?
Why am I quite wrong? The US is very much a first-world country - anybody that has the skill and the will can get the training to become a professional instead of a telephone parrot.
But you are not _entitled_ to become more if you are not willing to work for it.
However, how are you supposed to live and pay for school on $7.00 an hour? How are you supposed to get experience if there is no one out there willing to give you experience and a decent living wage?
Well, every first-world country, not to mention many developing countries, will of course pay the cost of a college education, making sure your living cost and tutorial costs are covered given that you are indeed bright and interested enough to make an effort. Many countries will even pay the associated costs if you want to study abroad (even if it's in the USA, despite the very high cost associated with it).
It is distinctive and easy to recognize again among its rivals even if you've only seen it once or twice before.
The most horrible example to the opposite is currently among DSLR camera makers. Here are a hew model names:
d30, d200, 350d 30d, d70, d50, 1d, d1.
Two manufacturers: Canon and Nikon, with incompatible lens systems.
Now, based on names, try to pair which model is for which system - and ficure out which is the high- respectively low-end models for each system. Good luck.
The government is made up of thousands of different individuals and departments working toward many different goals. Just because you gave your telephone number to the Dept. of Agriculture when you applied for a fishing license last November does not mean that the Dept. of Homeland Security can access it easily.
No doubt. And what does this have to do with having a standardized ID card, rather than (in the US) a patchwork of state driver's licenses, ID cards, passports and so on? Note how this will for example not make everybody uniquely identified in a way they haven't been before, for example (you already are). Again, what is the problem with having a standard ID card, specifically?
Absent any other factors, I think most slashdotters would say that not having a country-wide ID card is greatly preferable to having one.
But there are other factors. Some recent debates in the US highlights these well: the need for identification to fly, and the need for identification for voter registration. In other words, ID is already necessary to fully participate in the society.
But when ID is necessary in practice, the question shifts to one of access - can all citizens gain access to valid ID equally? And from the debates (especially regarding voting), it seems that perhaps not. A national ID card - issued for everyone, and presumably for free or at a very, very low cost, since it is mandatory - would equalize access to something that is already neccessary.
It's a sad commentary on slashdot moderation that the parent post got modded flamebait--it makes a completely reasonable argument, in a completely non-inflammatory way. Feh.
Somebody is in for a _very_ rude awakening once they leave college, I think.
I think they should have also bought a computer an an Apple store to see how they measure up.
From personal (thus anecdotal) experience in Osaka, you get the same minimal cluefulness combined with a push for whatever earns the highest commission.
A sales clerk isn't going to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, whether the door says "Apple" or "Yodobashi".
Slashdot Mirror
human name in the bible? I mean from what I understand, Eve was made out of his rib ...
That would depend on which of the creation myths in the old testament you chose to believe in.
So even if this thing gives the correct answer to "where can I find the Ministry of Whatever" or "have you seen my bento box", maybe it'll really disturb people on a level they won't immediately figure out.
I would frankly be more disturbed by being in a country that really has a Ministry of Whatever... Maybe the Department of Nevermind can help me get over it, though.
The most pressing problem for most engineering and science students regarding writing is that we simply do very little of it at all. Unlike the humanities and social sciences, many courses don't require any writing whatsoever, and those that do are mostly in the form of lab "reports", where, if the figures and results are fine, it simply does not really matter to anyone if the language is good (or even makes any sense). I had classmates that had never written a whole, uninterrupted page of normal language at university until they had to write their Master's thesis (and tellingly, a number of them never finished it).
So whatever you do, the single most helpful thing is probably to enable - and require - constant writing with quick turnaround time for the feedback. Don't require one or two large bodies of text; make it a bi-weekly thing to write and hand in something, anything, as long as it's coherent. Nothing helps improving your writing skills than just, well, writing. It's just like programming, where reading theory and looking at examples are helpful and essential, but secondary to buiding your familiarity and facility by _doing_ it.
And the feedback should not be focused on grammar, nor on "style", but on simple readability in comparison with good texts. Make people look at their own texts with new eye and understand how it will be received by someone who has not written it (ie. eveyone else than themselves). Show bot h good and bad examples, and explain _why_ they are good and bad; make people see when an explanation is deficient, when steps have been omitted, when a clarification is anything but.
I write a blog, and while it's not much to read, it has helped me immensely by the simple virtue of constant practice and the need to actually think about how to say things so it's not utterly incomprehensible. Requiring that kind of smaller text chunks would, I believe, be similarily helpful.
But how many people tries to use two locales at once?
It's not running two locales. I run one locale (sv_SE.UTF8), but want to write sometimes in English (which uses the same input method as Swedish), and sometimes in Japanese (which uses a different method).
You'd get the same kind of issue (though perhaps not this exact problem) whenever you want to use an input method different than the one that is default for your language. There's no shortage of European and US language students, for example, or bilingual people that want to write in a different language (and not infrequently mix languages in the same document). Many of the worlds largest languages use different input methods from indoeuropean (and different from each other). You want to write a proposal to a manufacturer in China? Or, you're customer contact for a Taiwanese company and need to answer an email from India in Sanskrit?
Locale, font set and input method have been (finally, painfully) separated for very good reason - remember the bad old days when it was the same, and you had to deal with codepages and other utterly painful hacks for this?
My current place has cat5 wired right in. I'll be moving eventually, and at the new place there is also cat5 strung throughout the apartment already. All you need to do is connect your ADSL router in the storage closet (and not even that if you go for the building-wide internet service instead of your own) and you're good to go in any room.
If you have to pull cable yourself its a major pain and I'd recommend wireless of course, but it seems most newer buildings have networking already, and at least for desktops it makes perfect sense to use it instead of messing with WEP keys and interference with your neighbour.
Still, Japan is among the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world.
Wanna talk suicide rates?
I believe suicide rates, traffic accidents, workplace incidents and so on are not part of this comparison; this is a comparison of health and disease, not injuries.
The OP has a point - people here are pretty healthy. Also, the "people work long hours" is not the whole story here. Those who push up those statistics a lot are the career professionals (the people in dark suits every morning on the train), but they ar of course a minority in the population; I believe Salarymen are about 10% or thereabouts of the workers.
Also, while you stay long hours at the office that doesn't necessarily mean you are working hard all that time. I've seen people soundly asleep or relaxing with the morning paper often enough to believe the actual output per person is not much higher than in Sweden, for example.
Generally, selling as much as you supply at asking price is considered a success. ...depending on how much you supply. And even then, they never exactly flew off the shelves in Japan; the 360 has even sold less than the original xbox during the same timeframe.
I did not say it was unusable for everybody. I said this is the particular hurdle that turned me off Java in linux. Take the more general case of a desktop in a western language while you still want to input a CJK language. Not that unusual anymore.
And in any case I took this as an example of how Java is not integrating with the desktop; all my other apps, in any other language, work fine when I've set it up, but not Java apps.
Umm, I really don't think we have to worry about people who can't clear the hurdle of installing a JVM attempting to write code. In any language. At least I hope not. Unless you're talking about sysadmins installing java for developers. But last I heard it took more chutzpa than being able to run 'apt-get' to get those jobs.
I was a bit unclear; I meant that as a linux developer you limit your audience for your application since many in your audience can not (or will not bother) install java to run what you made.
Janne, have you submitted a bug report for this? If you do, I'm willing to give it a try to get a bug fix submitted to java 1.6. No guarantees though, I'm only on the JCP so Sun might not even look at my suggested patch.
Frankly, no. I have no idea who's to blame - the Sun packaging, the version of SCIM, something in Ubuntu, or (most probably) all and none; just an unfortunate interaction between pieces of software never designed to be used together.
My interest in getting it to work was purely operational - I wanted to run a particular app with Japanese input. Once I realized things were not going to work with a lot of effort, I gave up and looked for a different (non-Java) app with the functionality I wanted. Had this been something I had to make work I would have dug deeper (and at least posted a few questions about it on appropriate mailing lists). But seeing as I had multiple options anyway it just didn't make sense to spend more time on it.
I call bullshit - just because you don't know how to set up your machine properly doesn't mean java has language problems.
Great for you; I never got it to work properly (Ubuntu and SCIM/Anthy). I first had to add fonts to some java-specific list to get it to show CJK at all. When I run the app with Swedish locale it refuses to let me input Japanese (it does not listen to the SCIM server).
I'm sure I could get it working with enough effort - but after one frustrating evening I'm not going to bother. Java isn't alone out there; just about every Java app has good equivalents without the hassle (including the Kanji app I was trying to use). And I'm certainly not going to be using Java to develop anything knowing that potential users will have go through the same mess I do.
I should not have to "set up my machine properly" - most users do not have the technical skills to do so. I should be able to select "java" in the package manager (or rather, select the app I'm actually interested in) and it should all work - but it doesn't.
People who complain that Java is slow, should be open-sourced, and so on have never seemed to had a clue.
Irrespective of any ideological issues, there are a few reasons the current situation hurts Java a bit.
Foremost for quite a few readers of slashdot is that free Linux distributions can't include Java in their default install. That means Java-based apps are not going to be included either. And since users need to jump through quite a few hoops to get Java installed (don't say "it's easy" - for most people anything beyond using their package manager is too high a hurdle), you can't assume it will be available on desktops in general.
The second issue is that Java does not really play well with the desktop. I have set up my desktop to run fine using three languages - English, Swedish and Japanese - and made sure everything from localization to character input works smoothly. But Java does not cooperate; it has its own way of dealing with CJK characters and needs its own fonts and separate setup to work. I have fiddled a little with it, but have never gotten it to work properly (especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese). And since it uses its own input method, it does not share the local dictionary so typing becomes frustratingly different from any other application I use. And since the code is not open, distributions can't fix these interoperability issues.
Both of these issues serve as disincentives from using Java apps and from writing them in the first place.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with you, I just wish that people wouldn't sugar coat the truth. "every first-world country, not to mention many developing countries, will of course pay the cost of a college education" has such a heaping layer of sugar coating on it that I'm getting diabetes just looking at it.
Where's the sugar? Seriously?
If someone is so deluded they think a university education is about finding their future mate, finding themselves, or just finding a good party, then they deserve every failing grade, busted economy and every other disappointment they can possibly pick up along the way.
All you have to do is give up on private colleges,
So go to a public college. In most countries that's all there is (and in a lot of countries - Japan, where I live, is an excellent example) the public universities are the very best ones; private universities are for people without the abilities but with wealthy parents.
go into debt up to your waist for public ones
Where have anybody said the Indian graduates are not going into debt? If you think it's important enough, you do it. If not, well, don't complain.
I'm a graduate from Sweden, and even though the actual tuition is free, I have more university debt than I care to think about. I could always have been debt-free, though - I could just have stayed at the steel mill instead.
Work two jobs to cover the difference on tuition over what the government gives you (sorry stafford, $5200 a year just doesn't cut it anymore). Give up on having a social life (hey, it wasn't like you were getting laid anyway).
And the point of college is to have a party? Or is it to get an education; something on which to buid a career? If having fun is the poiunt for you, why do you waste it on college when the same money will stretch so much further on Disneyland?
Only if you're from a middle class family that can support you.
A lot of families a lot poorer than any US middle class family manage to send their children to decent univerities.
Why am I quite wrong? The US is very much a first-world country - anybody that has the skill and the will can get the training to become a professional instead of a telephone parrot.
But you are not _entitled_ to become more if you are not willing to work for it.
However, how are you supposed to live and pay for school on $7.00 an hour? How are you supposed to get experience if there is no one out there willing to give you experience and a decent living wage?
Well, every first-world country, not to mention many developing countries, will of course pay the cost of a college education, making sure your living cost and tutorial costs are covered given that you are indeed bright and interested enough to make an effort. Many countries will even pay the associated costs if you want to study abroad (even if it's in the USA, despite the very high cost associated with it).
In other words, it should not be a problem.
It is distinctive and easy to recognize again among its rivals even if you've only seen it once or twice before.
The most horrible example to the opposite is currently among DSLR camera makers. Here are a hew model names:
d30, d200, 350d 30d, d70, d50, 1d, d1.
Two manufacturers: Canon and Nikon, with incompatible lens systems.
Now, based on names, try to pair which model is for which system - and ficure out which is the high- respectively low-end models for each system. Good luck.
The government is made up of thousands of different individuals and departments working toward many different goals. Just because you gave your telephone number to the Dept. of Agriculture when you applied for a fishing license last November does not mean that the Dept. of Homeland Security can access it easily.
No doubt. And what does this have to do with having a standardized ID card, rather than (in the US) a patchwork of state driver's licenses, ID cards, passports and so on? Note how this will for example not make everybody uniquely identified in a way they haven't been before, for example (you already are). Again, what is the problem with having a standard ID card, specifically?
The problem with an ID card, as I see it, is that it gives the government lots of information about the citizenry, which it should not *need* to know.
What information? Specifically, what information that the government does not already have?
These things do almost nothing but enable the governement to trample individual rights.
How, exactly, does a mandatory ID card do that? What kind of abuse will become possible that isn't already so?
Absent any other factors, I think most slashdotters would say that not having a country-wide ID card is greatly preferable to having one.
But there are other factors. Some recent debates in the US highlights these well: the need for identification to fly, and the need for identification for voter registration. In other words, ID is already necessary to fully participate in the society.
But when ID is necessary in practice, the question shifts to one of access - can all citizens gain access to valid ID equally? And from the debates (especially regarding voting), it seems that perhaps not. A national ID card - issued for everyone, and presumably for free or at a very, very low cost, since it is mandatory - would equalize access to something that is already neccessary.
Make sure you're protesting the right thing.
2% of road users are motocyclists here in the UK,
as are 20% of road fatalities.
That ratio sounds way off; much higher than in Sweden. You have a link to numbers backing that up?
It's a sad commentary on slashdot moderation that the parent post got modded flamebait--it makes a completely reasonable argument, in a completely non-inflammatory way. Feh.
Somebody is in for a _very_ rude awakening once they leave college, I think.
I think they should have also bought a computer an an Apple store to see how they measure up.
From personal (thus anecdotal) experience in Osaka, you get the same minimal cluefulness combined with a push for whatever earns the highest commission.
A sales clerk isn't going to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, whether the door says "Apple" or "Yodobashi".