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posted by chromas on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the everyone-loves-autocomplete dept.

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.

Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.

But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.

His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.

[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.

Read more at The Atlantic.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:57PM (3 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:57PM (#874079) Journal

    中文不是易打字

    The times you have to scroll through a page of characters before you get to the right "yi" is really fucking annoying in practice.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:15PM (#874191) Homepage
    I spent probably 30 seconds scrolling up and down a huge list of little pictures attempting to find clinking pair of stein for a message on discourse earlier today. In the end I just gave up and said "Cheers!" instead.

    I was planning on starting a MPhil on this very subject matter (well, HCI from an Information-Theoretic perspective) nearly 30 years ago, before any of these particular instantiations of the problem even existed. I wish I had, I'm sure I'd have a wonderful citation count by now the number of terrible data entry interfaces that have been spewed into existence in the time in between.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:17AM (#874376)

      In the previous version of the chat software we used to use it would suggest emoji from text.
      That was lost in an upgrade.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:25PM (#874632)

    "yi"

    There you go.
    What's yer problem?