Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Either of the poles woulc cause this effect (Score 1) 496

If you start a mile north of the South Pole, walk a mile south, then you cannot walk west, so it still fails.

Also, the North Pole isn't ice-free all year long. (I've not been keeping up with how much (if it has happened yet) it is ice-free during a year, but it's certainly not the whole year. Yet.)

Comment Re:some thoughts (Score 1) 626

It is allowed to write Japanese with spaces and many news papers e.g. do that. At least in their web version.

I believe most of my jap. Cartoons do use spaces.

They do that in cartoons for kids. That's how they learn, since they don't have a full grasp of the kanji characters until around high school. Without knowing a good chuck of Kanji, it's very difficult to tell where one word stops and another starts. It's not how adults typically read, though.

As far as news sites, I'm not good enough to read those in Japanese yet, but the ones I've seen only have spaces after punctuation, like commas or at the end of sentences, not between words.

Comment some thoughts (Score 1) 626

FYI: My native language is English, and I have studied Spanish, French, and am currently studying Japanese.

As already mentioned, no irregular verbs

No verb conjugation

Japanese has the concept of particles, which is brilliant, and can solve a great many problems that are present in most natural languages

The problems with Japanese (being a natural language, it has problems like any other) could be solved by more extensive use of particles. Verb conjugation particles could be added; counters could be replaced by a counter particle, etc. Verb particles could also let you put the verb anywhere in the sentence you want, making for a very flexible language. Particles for various levels of politeness could make that very easy for those societies where that is a thing.

re: sounds

I would evaluate the major languages of the world and see if there is a sizable enough set of sounds they have in common that would be sufficient for the new language. One of the problems learners of second languages have is their new language often has sounds that simply do not exist in their native language. If you don't start learning your new language before puberty, the chances of you being able to make native-level sounds in your target language (when those sounds don't exist in your native language) become very unlikely. Some people are able to, but most are not, especially if they don't have the opportunity to immerse themselves in that language every day, which will never happen in a new constructed language.

re: writing

I'm learning Japanese, and the no spaces between words is VERY difficult to adapt to. I would recommend against no spaces. :)

Logographs like Chinese characters (which are also used in Japanese) are VERY efficient for a native language (and I can read those far faster than the Japanese words which do not use them), but learning them is a total pain in the ass, and takes far longer than I would think a good idea for a secondary, universal language. For this reason, I would use an alphabet system that is already in widespread use, and well-understood by more people than any other - the Latin character set used by English and the Romanesque/Romance languages. I would avoid the use of diacritical marks, if possible, due to being harder to type.

Comment Re:Relatively clean? (Score 1) 83

What exactly does that mean? Granted, I don't use TrueCrypt but lately I've felt the need to encrypt some of my private emails and videos.

My reading of the results is that while no backdoors were found, there were some vulnerabilities found, which are being addressed in the forked projects. That's about as good as could be expected, really, since all software has bugs.

Comment don't waste time - try to fix the problem (Score 1) 1

Many such scripts are running from compromised boxes. Instead try to run some notification to the owner of said box (assuming you can trace it) that their system is compromised. Or notify upstream provider. Something useful, rather than wasting time (which would also likely waste bandwidth - which hurts everyone).

Comment for those complaining about this being too much... (Score 2) 263

Keep in mind that if proper scaling ever gets implemented, there is still a long way to go for displays to equal the quality of text compared to paper. I saw noticeable improvements in text quality from laser printers all the way up to 1200dpi, and people back in the day were saying we'd never need anything more dense than 300dpi, then it was 600dpi, etc. If we can get displays to 1200dpi, and especially with near-zero reflectivity, then I'll say we've gone far enough - but we're nowhere near that yet.

But we need GOOD scaling. I've read that Windows 10 will have proper scaling. We'll see.

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Working...