Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong are all East Asian nations (or special administrative areas) which are to varying degrees culturally similar to China and provide good examples of this. South Korea and Taiwan are particularly dramatic examples of moving from autocratic to democratic government. Although it is not in East Asia, you could also add Singapore and Malaysia to this list. Singapore interestingly still has an autocratic government, while (less developed) Malaysia is in a kind of transitional phase towards proper democracy. They all have cleaned up their environment a lot as citizen awareness and sensitivity towards environmental problems has increased.

I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS. Sure it means that I may get more apps, as developers are more familiar with it, but these general purpose operating systems just seem to slow things down in the end. My console just needs to play games, allow me to watch videos, and surge the web

So in other words the kernel only needs to provide:

• Disk drivers and file-system drivers
• Wireless/Ethernet drivers and a complete network stack
• USB and input device drivers
• Video card drivers and OpenGL-ES
• Sound card drivers
• Support for preemptive multitasking over multi-cores for games that want/need to utilize multiple cores (i.e. most modern games)
• Virtual memory to support copy on write, memory mapped files and to provide protection from buggy games crashing the entire system and potential corrupting disk data
• Power management
• Miscellaneous functions such as executable loading, .etc.

Might as well use Linux by this stage. It would sure beat re-inventing the wheel. Plus it gives you a much greater chance of developers actually supporting your platform. The fact that your Android device slows down when receiving messages while gaming sounds like a problem with the design of Android.

13y.o boy opens his brand new laptop that dad just got him:
"Do you have any kids? Yes / No"
"Um, no..."

I wouldn't rely on nationmaster.com for reliable, up-to-date information. That data is from 1998 and converted into US dollars based on 2001 PPP measurements. I would not say that is the most reliable source of information on the current state of education spending. According to that Thailand is outspending countries like South Korea, Singapore and Belgium on education..

No only VB, XXXX and Tooheys New are good enough to match the exacting standards of taste and quality that Australians expect from their beer....

I think the MacBook I bought in December 2008 has a 160 (or 120?) gb HDD. That's less than 4 years ago...

You may not care about having an SSD but I do. By far the biggest performance limitation on all my computers is disk read speed. Increasing read speed has a far bigger performance impact than adding more ram or more cores to the CPU. If you want mass storage buy an external USB drive. I think you can get a 1TB disk for around $100 these days. The disk you have the operating system on _should_ be an SSD in any half decent modern system.

Also if I recall correctly in 2000 I was a Compaq PC with a 4gb HDD

Ahhh... I what a beautiful verb to have missed... Wish /. had an edit button

It's an SSD so not even comparable.

Also if I recall correctly in 2000 I was a Compaq PC with a 4gb HDD. I think around 2001 I added a 30gb drive to it and that seemed big. 128gb would have been considered huge in 2000.

Meh all that's happened so far is a bunch of ministers have expressed the sentiment that Facebook should delete racists material from its website. Personally, I support their right to express that sentiment. If they go and make laws requiring websites to delete content deemed offensive on request then it will be a different issue all together but that hasn't happened so far.

So the internet filter was dropped and the government has been absolutely silent on it since then. We're not going to have browser history data retention laws. iiNet won its case and was found not responsible for its users copyright infringement and we haven't seen any government attempts to introduce French/NZ three-strikes or similar laws since then either. Oh and finally games are going to get an R-rating.

All in all, Australian democracy has worked quite well these last few years and the Australian internet is looking pretty free compared to a lot of other western countries. Oh and work on the nation wide fibre optic network continues as well.

Russia is about 2.2x the size of Australia. I think you've been fooled by map projections.

That and authors and solicitors and technical documentation writers, patent writers, translators .etc. also use the word processor as their primary tool. Since he/she mentions spreadsheets as well he could also be involved in "small-data" data-modeling, office administration or similar. Just because you lack the imagination to see otherwise doesn't mean he/she is stuck in a low level job. Although even if he/she was there would be no need to be an offensive ass about it. Typists and secretaries play a necessary role in society.

From the linked page:

A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 Preview or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013 Preview. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 Preview requires a Microsoft DirectX 10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. However, if you or your users do not have a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013 Preview.

Also it would seem the requirements are rounded to the nearest 0.5gb and probably are for extremely heavy usage cases.

Thank you. Just out of curiosity which other East-Asian languages have adopted hangul? I can't think of any. The Chinese haven't. They use their own characters and Roman characters for phonetic purposes. The Japanese haven't they use Chinese characters along with hiragana and katakana. The Mongolians haven't. They have their own native writing system that predates the creation of hangul. The Vietnamese (not sure if they count as East Asian) haven't. They use Roman characters. The Taiwanese speak Chinese and use non-simplified Chinese characters. I think that covers all of East Asia outside of Korea, unless there are some ethnic languages inside China that are using hangul...

Slashdot doesn't support unicode; welcome to the 20th century your time machine is working ;p I know the characters you're talking about though so it doesn't really mater.

Anyway I think if you re-read my post you would see that what you just demonstrated is exactly what I am talking about, although perhaps my explanation was less than perfect. Explaining using English terminology without relying on too much jargon or making the explanation too long is hard.

I'm not really talking about simplified Chinese vs Traditional Chinese. I'm saying two things 1. (just like you I think) that you have a set of basic characters which are used as phonetic components in other characters. I'm sure you're aware of this and 2. (again just like you I think) that most words are formed by combining characters together, and in fact many characters don't form words on their own, instead they have to be combined to have meaning.

Based on these two points, I think we can see clearly that the Chinese writing system operates on a lower unit than words and sentences, contrary to what the post I was replying to was suggesting :)