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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.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:14PM (1 child)
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
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:01AM
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.