Re: tlug: parallel-port IDE

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Karl-Max Wagner wrote:

> > with written languages that are several orders of magnitude more complex
> > than the average European language, when you have a limited amount of desk
> 
> EXACTLY. You name it. This is what I pointed at some months ago
> where I proposed getting rid of the Kanji completely. You can
> draw up a huge list of things where Kanji stood in the way -
> from Gutenberg to modern computing - and I fear that the
> nefarious effects of the Kanji system haven't come to an end
> yet. Just think of microcontrollers for cheap appliances with
> just a few KB's of memory. Good enough for outputting alphabetic
> messages. For kanji messages you might have to add more memory -
> you could end up with needing most of the processing power and
> the memory for just outputting Kanji. It goes without much
> further commenting that this will drive the cost up.

well, as some other people pointed out, you can't get rid of Kanji and
still have an intelligible Japanese, really.  I think what needs to happen
is that the Japanese need to follow the German model and use English in
all technical circles.  Heck, it'd be better for everyone involved if
Japan, China, Korea, and the rest of Asia adopted English as their primary
languages and taught it to little kids right away (and didn't start
teaching Japanese/Chinese/Korean until Junior high or so).  However, that
probably won't happen for several hundred years, knowing human nature.
Sigh.  At least we have more powerful computers now :)

> 
> > space for your keyboard.  Besides, knowing the Japanese propensity for
> > NIH, we might have ended up with UNIVAC-98 from NEC :)
> 
> Hmmm. This in fact is kind of a inferiority complex. Never
> forget that pretty much ALL of modern science and technology
> comes from outside. Japan started out in the last century with a
> state of the art of the a thousand years back from what the
> outside world had ( well - not completely. We owe, for an
> example, the way we calculate pi ot the Japanese mathematicians
> Kenko Takebe and Ryohitsu Matsunaga. However, such things were
> pretty rare ). Then they had to play catch up for more than a
> century to reduce that gap to zero. It goes without saying that
> this has deeply shaken how the Japanese look at themselves -
> just try to imagine how you'd feel in such a setting. Probably
> somewhat queer, isn't it. It is a shitty situation for sure.

There's a couple things in which the Japanese were way ahead of the West,
however.  For example, there are samurai swords from over 1000 years ago,
whose steel is of comparable quality to that of a modern steel mill.  And
they had electric railways back in the 1920s...

Seems to me that the Japanese have always been ahead of the rest of the
world with trains, but not much else, and that doesn't really make sense
to me.  Oh well, many things don't, so it shouldn't come as a great
surprise.

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Head of TurboLinux Development/Systems Administrator
Pacific HiTech, Inc (USA) / Pacific HiTech, KK (Japan)
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


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