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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:20PM (4 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:20PM (#874168)

    They can build a nuclear power plant in 3 years instead of 30.

    Erm...a nuclear power station is pretty much the only facility that I would *want* people to take their time building, to make sure they get everything right. Because the failure case is so bad if they don't.

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  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:42PM (3 children)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:42PM (#874208) Journal

    a nuclear power station is pretty much the only facility that I would *want* people to take their time building

    Think through the implications of that statement. The newest nuclear power plant in my state (Watts Barr) started construction in 1973 and finished construction in 1996 and 2015 (Reactor 1 and 2 respectively). The original designers literally retired and died before the project finished. The oldest components in the system had 40 years of entropy and aging on them before they ever generated a single watt. That's a very long time for something to decay, become obsolete, or lose the institutional knowledge required to operate safely. It's poisoned the entire field as a career dead end, and almost half of the qualified engineers will retire in the next decade.

    It's a problem.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:14PM (1 child)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:14PM (#874217)

      Okay, maybe 30 years is too long, but I'm not sure the answer is exactly 3 years. There are these numbers between 3 and 30

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      • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:01AM

        by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:01AM (#874983) Journal

        It's not really a question of time; It's a question of quality. ElizabethGreene's comment about the original designers retiring and dying before the nuke plant came online is a comment about quality. You can't fix an exact number to a construction project with that kind of complication. Even well managed projects are merely estimates in the beginning with lots of problem solving and adjustments in the schedule along the way.

        There are those who can better articulated the absurd reasons it takes so long to bring an American nuke plant online. It is very disheartening to read. I'm too lazy to post links, though. You'll have to Google-Bing-DuckDuck yourself.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:03PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:03PM (#874253) Journal

      The original designers literally retired and died before the project finished.

      See? That's one additional danger of nuke power (grin)

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