Hmm... I've seen kana and kanji in boldface and underline, typically in advertising, although admittedly italic is a rarer sight since it deforms the character. I've seen katakana used for Japanese words as well, to my initial surprise upon first visiting the Yodobashi "camera" (Fry's on steroids) shop at the Yodobashi-Umeda in Osaka. Katakana is definitely used for many reasons, but whether it was necessary devote a separate set of glyphs with slightly different rules specifically for these purposes is what I question.
Having two separate but related systems seems to counter the simplicity value of a phonetic syllablery as compared to Kanji. I'm sure either Katakana or Hiragana alone would have sufficed. That both systems were maintained given their unique histories says a lot about Japan to me. I guess this discussion is old enough, for Slashdot anyway, that being on topic hardly enters into it;)
You're assuming someone tried to hack it. It's not impossible to stumble into a bug. I was using a "training" site at work a few years ago (we're required do the same training/test every year) and hit the wrong button accidentally. I then hit the back button so I could click on the button to print a "certificate". As it turns out, I was then logged in as another user.
Do you think I should have reported this? Should I have ignored the issue? I had access to another person's training records without authorization. No doubt someone could have gained access to mine as well. On the other hand, I'm not interested in being prosecuted for something this silly.
I'm not sure that it's quite the same, as it's a different set of glyphs as opposed to a modified weight, slant or a line under the text. I guess if anything it's more like cursive and print in languages using roman characters, but the "print" form is typically used to ensure legibility since many people's cursive handwriting is sloppy. Since it doesn't modify the spoken form, it's not quite like a pronoun.
Having three written forms like Japanese does is relatively unique in the languages I've studied, which does make it interesting, but I have to wonder how much it really adds. I posed the same question to my wife (also a native Japanese speaker), she doesn't think there'd be much of an impact, but one person's a pretty small data source.
I can see the use of Kanji, and maybe one kana system, but using two separate kana syllableries just seems excessive. I'm curious, aside from emphasis, loan words and maybe kids' writing, all of which could be written in hiragana, how much of an impact do you think the lack of katakana would have were it never developed?
I certainly agree with you on both parts. I'm not positing that the kana aren't useful, but rather they could have used one rather than creating two forms. The "Onna-de" was still around when katakana was created. I'm pretty sure Katakana's creation was a case of intellectual "migi-no-te", basically "Let's create our own rather than use a woman's script".
1) He's a Chinese history instructor, from China, and was referring to the Han chinese. According to him, "Han" simply means "the people".
2) You're picking nits and forgetting the original intention. Ignoring this tangent, the kana and kanji came from Chinese characters, and that was my original point.
3) Yes, but the "Onna-de" was created about two centuries prior to Katakana (7th century vs. 9th century IIRC.) I'd be surprised if the monks who created Katakana had no knowledge of it.
4) Sure, but they did not mirror the Chinese reforms character to character. They are generally based on the traditional characters.
Relax, it's the weekend. There are better things to do than post "wrong, wrong, wrong" all over slashdot.
Everything I've written came from either my Asian History/Japanese instructors in college, or books from the uni's library. My minor was Asian Studies, and although it may have been a decade or so for myself, it's accurate to my recollection.
1) My Asian Studies instructor mentioned that "Han" origninally referred to "The People". He was Chinese, I'll have to trust him on that. I actually did a paper in his class on the very subject we're discussing, based partially on his input and partially on external research.
2) Take a look at the Hiragana, and take a look at the more common radicals used in Chinese. You'll find a lot of similar characters, just write the radical in cursive. The Man'yo gana were taken directly from Chinese characters to most reliable accounts, and could be seen as an intermediate step between Chinese characters and Hiragana. Some argue that it came from old Korean forms, but the Chinese influence is too strong to ignore.
3) They are not cursive, this is true. Many of them appear simply as a non-cursive forms of the Hiragana character to which they are equivalent. Look at "ka", "uu", and "ee" for examples. Nearly identical but for the writing style. There are a few characters which are completely different, however my point was the actual need for a second phonetic syllablery at the time was questionable at best. A cursive writing system was probably seen as too "feminine", no doubt that was sufficient reason for them.
4) They were originally the same, although I wouldn't doubt that some of the characters received some "Cross-pollination" as time went on. The original infusion of Chinese characters happened long before the simplification was formalized, which was actually quite recent, although simplified forms had been used in the past in China.
The typical setup I saw gives you hiragana by default (one of two phonetic syllableries) and lets you convert them to the traditional (pre-simplified) Chinese characters adopted many years ago by the Japanese. There are a few keys which allow you to modify the input method to input "romaji" as well as the various Japanese writing systems.
Actually, the Kanji are Chinese characters (called Hanzi, roughly "people's writing" in China IIRC) which were adopted in Japan long before Katakana and Hiragana were created. The kana systems borrowed heavily from radicals in Chinese characters for many of their shapes. Slightly more accurately, hiragana borrowed heavily from Chinese characters to make a simpler writing system primarily for poetry, and then katakana borrowed heavily from hiragana when Japanese noblemen didn't want to use a writing system developed by women. Go figure...
I went to one of these to check my email while finishing up visa paperwork for my wife. They're quite convenient and comfortable, and the rates are reasonable. US companies would probably be afraid that some people would just try to live there, given the exact same setup. I'm pretty sure a few of the people in the one I visited were spending enough time there to change their address.
(Stifling a really bad joke about consumption rate and the Wii...)
It's not so much that the price point is low for the Wii, but rather that the price points of its competition are ridiculously high. To the point where they might have trouble catching on to the coattails of the Christmas season. I hope both systems do well, since I happen to be of the opinion that more consoles == better. I still play Dreamcast games FWIW. On the other hand, I own a PS2 and Gamecube, but I won't be buying a 360 or PS3 console until they get the prices under control.
If the user base gets large enough to become dominant on a console, the games will be made. It happened to the NES, Genesis, SNES, Playstation, PS2, most (if not all) variants of the Gameboy, and I think it'll happen with the Wii.
You can buy a lot of Strongbow for US $500-$600 (around 270 to 320 british pounds.) If the prices for Sony's and MS' systems don't come down quite a bit, the games your housemate wants to play might go to Nintendo's system by default simply because more people can afford the console.
As a SysAdmin who also deals with computers which both haven't been installed by our group, I see more than my fair share of Win32 crashes. When NT kernel based systems crash, it's true that it usually does these things. Sometimes though, it just freezes and doesn't get that far. If the mouse pointer freezes for more than a few minutes and the system doesn't respond to any other form of input, typically fixed only by holding down the power button for 5 or so seconds, you usually won't get this sort of debugging information.
I wouldn't say that the debugging information is as complete as what you get in a UNIX-type system just yet. It's also unfortunate that so many errors result in a stop rather than a recovery routine, it would be nice if some of these cases were configurable. It's definitely not as bad as it used to be though.
I've been using it for quite some time, its organization features are great for finding and grouping your music by artist, album, genre etc. The ability to download album covers and identify music through musicbrainz is nice, you can edit the m3u tags at runtime, the playlist is easy to use - drag and drop from the filesystem or click inside the collection browsers, and it has a nice interface for browsing and listening to Internet radio streams. It rates the music by frequency as you listen to it, allows you to set up and organize multiple playlists as well as automatically creating a few special types of collections, and it has a scripting interface with a nice variety of pre-written scripts downloadable through an internal dynamic "hot new stuff" interface. It interfaces with iPods, finds duplicate music files in your collection, helps you find lyrics for your music, locates new music files even while it's playing and adds them to a "newest tracks" list, assists in creating your own music CDs as either data (mp3) or redbook audio, and (this is getting a bit long, isn't it?) many more useful features.
To be fair, it doesn't have an association with an online music store, and it may not perform strange acts on llamas, but as far as a player/organization tool goes it's well worth a look.
And that's where we'll continue to disagree. Warez isn't nearly the problem that SPAM is, and it probably never will be. The government is going to continue to pass laws based on who has enough money to push their agenda through. No amount of consideration given to the comparison is going to change that, until the sort of corporate political lobbying that's currently laying our constitution to waste becomes illegal.
I doubt it's failed, but even if it had people will be able to recognize the system visually without a problem. The most important part for Nintendo of course is the buzz which has been generated before the hardware launch. Given the number of people who seem to care enough to discuss it to death, they've probably succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Perhaps it depends on who you listen to, I'm talking about people outside of the typical teenage male gaming audience. I've heard people call the Gamecube a Nintendo, both the PSX and PS2 a Playstation (no distinction!) and both the Genesis and Dreamcast a "Sega". I've also heard people refer to the NES, SNES and N64 systems as a "Nintendo". The average person it seems neither knows nor cares what the name of a game system is.
StarFox wouldn't likely make much of a difference, since it relied on the "FX" chip (a DSP) to push the polygons. Overclocking the FX chip as well might prove interesting, but there are so many synchronization issues that I'm not sure if it would actually improve anything without modifying the game code.
In a similar fashion to the NES, most people will probably just call it a "Nintendo". The Nintendo name and logo have tremendous brand recognition. Something similar (yet in reverse) has happened to Sony, as I've heard many people refer to the company as "Playstation".
SPAM is a different problem entirely. It's an attack against a basic infrastructure component, utilizing offensive and disruptive content to reduce the effectiveness of the email medium. It also consumes a very significant amount of bandwidth, deteriorating the performance of large parts of the network for the benefit of the spammer alone. Bandwidth is in fact metered, even if by interface limitation, and is paid for by each peer on the network from the mail server to the client host.
The "stealing" you speak of is barely even that, and is in fact only supported by relatively recent copyright legislation. The original owner is not deprived of the item, and speculation on potential profits stretches the credibility of the argument. Were there not deep-pocketed interests on one side of the argument, these laws would not exist. Frankly, they work against the best interests of the public in exactly the same way that SPAM does.
It's a waste of taxpayer dollars to go chasing after P2P "warez" traders. Petty, irresponsible and ridiculous. On the other hand, taking down someone who floods the internet with gigabytes, perhaps terabytes of garbage, slowing down the connections of businesses and individuals alike for personal gain, filling everyone's inboxes with lewd advertisements for porn and "enhancements"... There's simply no comparison here.
The "company that sold it" is usually referred to as the vendor; The vendor loaded software may well be one's definition of the operating system. The definition I'm most familiar with OTOH is far lower level than any of these and would preclude apache. It would probably even preclude the X, Win32 and OS X GUI environments. It might well include wine's binary loader however, since that can be considered a userspace portion of the system's binary loader when configured properly.
Actually, there are quite a few books on the subject. I've even seen a few at the local Fry's. OpenOffice.org has a web page listing various support options, including books:
Not really, everything that's patented is published in the patent. They can take whatever they want, and in China they won't even need to pay for it. It's a great deal for them, since descriptions of all this technology is available to view for free. They can run with it, making modifications and improvements while we're bound by the patent holder. A large number of the manufacturing plants for much of our technology is in or around China as well, we're practically begging them to surpass us on the technology front.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, although I've read that the US military uses thermite to melt the drives into slag. That's fairly foolproof too.
Hmm... I've seen kana and kanji in boldface and underline, typically in advertising, although admittedly italic is a rarer sight since it deforms the character. I've seen katakana used for Japanese words as well, to my initial surprise upon first visiting the Yodobashi "camera" (Fry's on steroids) shop at the Yodobashi-Umeda in Osaka. Katakana is definitely used for many reasons, but whether it was necessary devote a separate set of glyphs with slightly different rules specifically for these purposes is what I question.
;)
Having two separate but related systems seems to counter the simplicity value of a phonetic syllablery as compared to Kanji. I'm sure either Katakana or Hiragana alone would have sufficed. That both systems were maintained given their unique histories says a lot about Japan to me. I guess this discussion is old enough, for Slashdot anyway, that being on topic hardly enters into it
You're assuming someone tried to hack it. It's not impossible to stumble into a bug. I was using a "training" site at work a few years ago (we're required do the same training/test every year) and hit the wrong button accidentally. I then hit the back button so I could click on the button to print a "certificate". As it turns out, I was then logged in as another user.
Do you think I should have reported this? Should I have ignored the issue? I had access to another person's training records without authorization. No doubt someone could have gained access to mine as well. On the other hand, I'm not interested in being prosecuted for something this silly.
I'm not sure that it's quite the same, as it's a different set of glyphs as opposed to a modified weight, slant or a line under the text. I guess if anything it's more like cursive and print in languages using roman characters, but the "print" form is typically used to ensure legibility since many people's cursive handwriting is sloppy. Since it doesn't modify the spoken form, it's not quite like a pronoun.
Having three written forms like Japanese does is relatively unique in the languages I've studied, which does make it interesting, but I have to wonder how much it really adds. I posed the same question to my wife (also a native Japanese speaker), she doesn't think there'd be much of an impact, but one person's a pretty small data source.
I can see the use of Kanji, and maybe one kana system, but using two separate kana syllableries just seems excessive. I'm curious, aside from emphasis, loan words and maybe kids' writing, all of which could be written in hiragana, how much of an impact do you think the lack of katakana would have were it never developed?
Should we make it pay-per-view? :)
I certainly agree with you on both parts. I'm not positing that the kana aren't useful, but rather they could have used one rather than creating two forms. The "Onna-de" was still around when katakana was created. I'm pretty sure Katakana's creation was a case of intellectual "migi-no-te", basically "Let's create our own rather than use a woman's script".
1) He's a Chinese history instructor, from China, and was referring to the Han chinese. According to him, "Han" simply means "the people".
2) You're picking nits and forgetting the original intention. Ignoring this tangent, the kana and kanji came from Chinese characters, and that was my original point.
3) Yes, but the "Onna-de" was created about two centuries prior to Katakana (7th century vs. 9th century IIRC.) I'd be surprised if the monks who created Katakana had no knowledge of it.
4) Sure, but they did not mirror the Chinese reforms character to character. They are generally based on the traditional characters.
Relax, it's the weekend. There are better things to do than post "wrong, wrong, wrong" all over slashdot.
Everything I've written came from either my Asian History/Japanese instructors in college, or books from the uni's library. My minor was Asian Studies, and although it may have been a decade or so for myself, it's accurate to my recollection.
1) My Asian Studies instructor mentioned that "Han" origninally referred to "The People". He was Chinese, I'll have to trust him on that. I actually did a paper in his class on the very subject we're discussing, based partially on his input and partially on external research.
2) Take a look at the Hiragana, and take a look at the more common radicals used in Chinese. You'll find a lot of similar characters, just write the radical in cursive. The Man'yo gana were taken directly from Chinese characters to most reliable accounts, and could be seen as an intermediate step between Chinese characters and Hiragana. Some argue that it came from old Korean forms, but the Chinese influence is too strong to ignore.
3) They are not cursive, this is true. Many of them appear simply as a non-cursive forms of the Hiragana character to which they are equivalent. Look at "ka", "uu", and "ee" for examples. Nearly identical but for the writing style. There are a few characters which are completely different, however my point was the actual need for a second phonetic syllablery at the time was questionable at best. A cursive writing system was probably seen as too "feminine", no doubt that was sufficient reason for them.
4) They were originally the same, although I wouldn't doubt that some of the characters received some "Cross-pollination" as time went on. The original infusion of Chinese characters happened long before the simplification was formalized, which was actually quite recent, although simplified forms had been used in the past in China.
The typical setup I saw gives you hiragana by default (one of two phonetic syllableries) and lets you convert them to the traditional (pre-simplified) Chinese characters adopted many years ago by the Japanese. There are a few keys which allow you to modify the input method to input "romaji" as well as the various Japanese writing systems.
Actually, the Kanji are Chinese characters (called Hanzi, roughly "people's writing" in China IIRC) which were adopted in Japan long before Katakana and Hiragana were created. The kana systems borrowed heavily from radicals in Chinese characters for many of their shapes. Slightly more accurately, hiragana borrowed heavily from Chinese characters to make a simpler writing system primarily for poetry, and then katakana borrowed heavily from hiragana when Japanese noblemen didn't want to use a writing system developed by women. Go figure...
I went to one of these to check my email while finishing up visa paperwork for my wife. They're quite convenient and comfortable, and the rates are reasonable. US companies would probably be afraid that some people would just try to live there, given the exact same setup. I'm pretty sure a few of the people in the one I visited were spending enough time there to change their address.
(Stifling a really bad joke about consumption rate and the Wii...)
It's not so much that the price point is low for the Wii, but rather that the price points of its competition are ridiculously high. To the point where they might have trouble catching on to the coattails of the Christmas season. I hope both systems do well, since I happen to be of the opinion that more consoles == better. I still play Dreamcast games FWIW. On the other hand, I own a PS2 and Gamecube, but I won't be buying a 360 or PS3 console until they get the prices under control.
If the user base gets large enough to become dominant on a console, the games will be made. It happened to the NES, Genesis, SNES, Playstation, PS2, most (if not all) variants of the Gameboy, and I think it'll happen with the Wii.
You can buy a lot of Strongbow for US $500-$600 (around 270 to 320 british pounds.) If the prices for Sony's and MS' systems don't come down quite a bit, the games your housemate wants to play might go to Nintendo's system by default simply because more people can afford the console.
As a SysAdmin who also deals with computers which both haven't been installed by our group, I see more than my fair share of Win32 crashes. When NT kernel based systems crash, it's true that it usually does these things. Sometimes though, it just freezes and doesn't get that far. If the mouse pointer freezes for more than a few minutes and the system doesn't respond to any other form of input, typically fixed only by holding down the power button for 5 or so seconds, you usually won't get this sort of debugging information.
I wouldn't say that the debugging information is as complete as what you get in a UNIX-type system just yet. It's also unfortunate that so many errors result in a stop rather than a recovery routine, it would be nice if some of these cases were configurable. It's definitely not as bad as it used to be though.
I've been using it for quite some time, its organization features are great for finding and grouping your music by artist, album, genre etc. The ability to download album covers and identify music through musicbrainz is nice, you can edit the m3u tags at runtime, the playlist is easy to use - drag and drop from the filesystem or click inside the collection browsers, and it has a nice interface for browsing and listening to Internet radio streams. It rates the music by frequency as you listen to it, allows you to set up and organize multiple playlists as well as automatically creating a few special types of collections, and it has a scripting interface with a nice variety of pre-written scripts downloadable through an internal dynamic "hot new stuff" interface. It interfaces with iPods, finds duplicate music files in your collection, helps you find lyrics for your music, locates new music files even while it's playing and adds them to a "newest tracks" list, assists in creating your own music CDs as either data (mp3) or redbook audio, and (this is getting a bit long, isn't it?) many more useful features.
To be fair, it doesn't have an association with an online music store, and it may not perform strange acts on llamas, but as far as a player/organization tool goes it's well worth a look.
And that's where we'll continue to disagree. Warez isn't nearly the problem that SPAM is, and it probably never will be. The government is going to continue to pass laws based on who has enough money to push their agenda through. No amount of consideration given to the comparison is going to change that, until the sort of corporate political lobbying that's currently laying our constitution to waste becomes illegal.
I doubt it's failed, but even if it had people will be able to recognize the system visually without a problem. The most important part for Nintendo of course is the buzz which has been generated before the hardware launch. Given the number of people who seem to care enough to discuss it to death, they've probably succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Perhaps it depends on who you listen to, I'm talking about people outside of the typical teenage male gaming audience. I've heard people call the Gamecube a Nintendo, both the PSX and PS2 a Playstation (no distinction!) and both the Genesis and Dreamcast a "Sega". I've also heard people refer to the NES, SNES and N64 systems as a "Nintendo". The average person it seems neither knows nor cares what the name of a game system is.
StarFox wouldn't likely make much of a difference, since it relied on the "FX" chip (a DSP) to push the polygons. Overclocking the FX chip as well might prove interesting, but there are so many synchronization issues that I'm not sure if it would actually improve anything without modifying the game code.
In a similar fashion to the NES, most people will probably just call it a "Nintendo". The Nintendo name and logo have tremendous brand recognition. Something similar (yet in reverse) has happened to Sony, as I've heard many people refer to the company as "Playstation".
SPAM is a different problem entirely. It's an attack against a basic infrastructure component, utilizing offensive and disruptive content to reduce the effectiveness of the email medium. It also consumes a very significant amount of bandwidth, deteriorating the performance of large parts of the network for the benefit of the spammer alone. Bandwidth is in fact metered, even if by interface limitation, and is paid for by each peer on the network from the mail server to the client host.
The "stealing" you speak of is barely even that, and is in fact only supported by relatively recent copyright legislation. The original owner is not deprived of the item, and speculation on potential profits stretches the credibility of the argument. Were there not deep-pocketed interests on one side of the argument, these laws would not exist. Frankly, they work against the best interests of the public in exactly the same way that SPAM does.
It's a waste of taxpayer dollars to go chasing after P2P "warez" traders. Petty, irresponsible and ridiculous. On the other hand, taking down someone who floods the internet with gigabytes, perhaps terabytes of garbage, slowing down the connections of businesses and individuals alike for personal gain, filling everyone's inboxes with lewd advertisements for porn and "enhancements"... There's simply no comparison here.
The "company that sold it" is usually referred to as the vendor; The vendor loaded software may well be one's definition of the operating system. The definition I'm most familiar with OTOH is far lower level than any of these and would preclude apache. It would probably even preclude the X, Win32 and OS X GUI environments. It might well include wine's binary loader however, since that can be considered a userspace portion of the system's binary loader when configured properly.
Actually, there are quite a few books on the subject. I've even seen a few at the local Fry's. OpenOffice.org has a web page listing various support options, including books:
http://support.openoffice.org/index.html#oob
Not really, everything that's patented is published in the patent. They can take whatever they want, and in China they won't even need to pay for it. It's a great deal for them, since descriptions of all this technology is available to view for free. They can run with it, making modifications and improvements while we're bound by the patent holder. A large number of the manufacturing plants for much of our technology is in or around China as well, we're practically begging them to surpass us on the technology front.