fuchikoma

Axe Cop? My god... How random is that?

How does singing work in Cantonese? I don't notice the verbal tonality in some artists' songs, but I hardly know any Cantonese - is it just more subtle, or is it overlooked for songs? The songs don't seem familiar, but hip hoppers in orange jumpsuits do... (Though this is kinda cheating since the 2nd group here was scouted by the 1st.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imJ05J6JnCM Found a new doujin vocalist - めらみぽっぷ or "Meramipop". Couldn't find any albums by her, but I'll have to check out some by ぴずやの独房 (Pizuya's Cell), and (Sally? Sarii?) to see how their stuff with other vocalists stacks up. These lyrics seem fitting for what 綾倉 盟 (Mei Ayakura), my favourite doujin vocalist tends to write.

Look for the laptop model and "service manual" - you may find step by step instructions to take it apart. If it's a Dell, you're set for sure. The keyboard's usually pretty easy to remove. It could be as simple as unplugging it and reconnecting it. Do not pry keys off if you're not prepared for a headache - many laptops use a tiny sort of wishbone-like hinge that snaps two points into the keyboard, two points into an identical piece, and then a crossbar under the key cap. They break easily, get lost, and can be tricky to reassemble. Chances are, you can order a new keyboard for $10-50, or even get it fixed under warranty if you didn't try to fix it yourself. As a very last resort, you might try removing the keyboard and putting a few drops of 99% isopropyl alcohol between/under the keys that don't work, tapping them a bunch, and leaving it to dry by an air vent for a day.

Here's an odd Americanism: "druthers" Had no idea what it meant the first few times I heard it. How common is it in the US? I pretty much never hear it up North here...

Mainly, even if there's no convincing or agreement going on, I rephrased things because I at least wanted my position to be understood - yet it seemed like instead of a discussion, the points I was bringing up were just being talked past. "Why is X?" "Because Y." "Well yeah, but why is X?" And I already pointed out that similar assumptions were busted by well over two orders of magnitude with RFID. This will be the case until someone invents a way to make radio waves that only propagate so far before completely halting. I mentioned the Android thing because while each thread is its own discussion, this stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum either. There have been a few related discussions about smartphone/tablet OSes lately and I was talking about an overarching trend I've noticed on this forum. まあ、実は俺はもう十六年前から日本語を勉強するとよく日本のマスコミを使うので、文化と社会に詳しいです。 That is, I started studying Japanese 16 years ago and often make use of their various mass media, so I understand the culture and society rather well. That's the world I'm in. Japan uses kaomoji on phones and PCs, and emoji on phones. Emoticons as we know them - tilted smileys - are extremely rare. But go ahead and comb 2ch and tell me how many you see there. And if you think I'm saying something is more capable because of limited availability, you really are just talking past what I'm saying. You can do it on iOS, OSX, WinPhone, Win8 and Win7, pretty much anything on DoCoMo, KDDI or SoftBank (they are also standardizing now) and Android will catch up in time, but yeah, it's totally only an Apple thing. It's more capable because instead of a dozen smilies or two, there are pages and pages of possible images to choose from. The funny thing about their connectors is it depends what they decide to put on the other end. Sometimes it's USB. Sometimes it's a stereo system. Sometimes it's a TV. Sometimes it's even a HMD. At times it's been Firewire. For now, it can be USB. Later it could be Thunderbolt - that'd sure fit the Lightning theme. The Lightning connector has 8 pins. USB does not. Surely you don't think it's just an obfuscation of 4-pin USB? I have already covered the next section to death. It's really double talk saying that USB does video output but Apple's video output was not standard. MHL is a rare and fledgling format that also dominates the data port while it's in use, and would require an adapter for most people to use, while analog video output goes to any TV, but yes, would require a cable to tap into it. At this point, an MHL TV is almost like an iPod stereo - an odd exception - except I bet there are more of the latter so far. It's not slander to say the iPhone will require adapters, even though it comes with a cable and USB charger the same as any phone's that obviates further adapters when charging or connecting to a computer... I guess the included adapter is an adapter. What is slander is saying they disregard open formats when they actively adopt and encourage them. Apple isn't MS Office, and even MS Office can use non-proprietary formats. I had said that Apple had opened, not that they were open-source. That is, they have moved more and more away from using unique proprietary formats to using and supporting common formats. Like Opera, they maintain proprietary design, but utilize open formats like Unicode or XML, ISO9660, UDF, USB and so on, or even common technologies like MP3 and X86. That may not be an "open and standardized proprietary player," but who knows what that's supposed to mean. Your words, not mine. I said they've opened up and standardized and they have. I said they're not much worse than any other proprietary player (MS for instance.) I stand by that. For god's sake. I already showed how they blocked apps that enabled it at first. You're not even reading my posts. I have to compare again, but I can show Android getting Swiss-cheesed with full-control privelege escalation exploits and it's waved aside, but if Apple has one loophole to allow enabling a keyboard, they've failed the world community. What they did was block it to the extent they could, and when they saw the overwhelming demand, they changed to a more universal implementation rather than pretend the whole thing didn't happen and live in a delusion. We've been over this. Like I said, if you ignore all the reasons, there are no reasons. So yeah, they're the bad guys. You win. The private area isn't made to be cross-compatible. It's still Unicode. Both cases are simply not having the symbols on hand to render it equally. You know what? Reading more here, it's not even private anymore. Emoji has been part of Unicode 6.0 for two years. But tell me again how it's just Apple throwing standards to the wind and making things that don't work with any other devices. I admire your wisdom. I can't let it rest - it's like quicksand - once you step in it, you decide you're not doing it again, but you still have to get out of it the first time.

There's been some reaction to my other post, so I'm going to try one big summary to clarify and if that changes nothing, nothing else will either, I think. Sorry, but I wrote most of this before the agreement to stop popped up. I am only too happy to get out of this at this point. As for ad hominems, I've already been called selfish for saying Apple should add a feature to their OS and butthurt for trying to explain my position. (I wasn't then, but I admit I'm definitely not cool at this point.) --- Sorry if it seemed over the top, but I was frustrated, and disappointed that on a board with such impartiality and reason on other issues, this became the sticking point and I was also getting tired of explaining the same things repeatedly. I've explained a bunch of times now how emoji came to be, how Apple restricted it outside its native ecosystem, why it got out, and how they embraced it instead of waging war against their users. But you're still demanding explanations for it, so... when you ignore all the reasons, there are no reasons. They didn't discuss it with other carriers to begin with because they can't see into the future and it wasn't their standard. When they did take it their own way, they worked with others to establish a standard, but they're still the bad guy for disregarding standards. To me that's just willful ignorance and disregard for facts and that's one of the few things that will really get to me. That's the issue to me, and this has been building on a heavy slant to pro-Android, anti-Apple for a while now as I see it. When I point out security holes in Android - I really just have to do a quick search and grab a handful of the most recent links to prove them - FDS waves it off as foolish to assume other OSes where so many exploits haven't been found are any more secure and Dean explains it away like just because the DoD uses a special customized version with no communication features, with extended security features, on one specific piece of hardware, that makes it secure on all consumer handsets regardless of all the holes that are found in it... but at the same time, when Apple pushes for standards compliance, they're somehow really pushing to break standards and make things fail on non-Apple hardware with the very same actions. I can bring evidence and explain something very carefully repeatedly every time I'm asked about it, but it doesn't get anyone to budge a millimeter. I get it. They're bad because they're bad and that's all there is to it, so this just isn't the place to discuss it, it seems. I came for a technical or philosophical discussion and stumbled into a religious one by mistake so I'll just drop it and go back to gaming stuff unless there are more things to answer for. Then whenever Apple does something that's more capable than what's common, they're slammed for not drastically cutting down their functionality to keep it standard. Emoji came to be used regardless of their locks on it, so they tried to standardize it, but instead they should just use a simpler set with less than 1/10 the characters, using emoticons that aren't used in Japan, when emoji is already in Japan regardless of what Apple does? Even if they forced the English users to do this, they'd still try to unlock emoji because the cat's out of the bag already. So what Apple did was try to make it so other platforms could see it too. How closed and uncooperative of them! And they're so bad for using a proprietary connector that allows things like analog video output to an ordinary TV. Instead, they should just use an unfinalized proposal for a standard that's only supported on a handful of devices, because it's a standard (or will be) and would let them just use a USB connector, even if they could only do video OR other data at a given time with it, and couldn't change the signalling format without changing the connector, like they've already had to do before. But using USB would reduce e-waste! Except their connector was originally Firewire, then dual, then they added video and removed Firewire, and because it was their own format, they were able to keep using it instead of forcing people to rebuy new accessories like stereo docks several times - thus reducing e-waste. This is why I'm getting frustrated - because even when it's shown that what they're doing in some instances is more beneficial than the alternative, they're villified for not taking the less practical option - even when they are shown to be doing the opposite of what's accused, they are still the bad guy for doing it. I don't know why I'm still trying to explain it; I just don't like misinformation and unjustified slander. But I know this isn't going to convince anyone because I've already made these arguments at length, and that's what's getting to me. No... actually... Exactly. Apple disables access to something and bans apps that unlock it - it means of course they knew people would get to it. Google disables access to something by default - well, it's ok, that means it's not meant to be used yet. Sure. As for whether the emoji unlockers accessed the wrong parts of the system... without technical understanding of how the unlockers worked, neither one of us can really say much with authority on that. Actually, they unlocked it with Apple's own SDK using an unforeseen trick. I've explained it all already, but let's see if this makes any difference since you've given me another good example to illustrate with: As SoftBank's emoji, they disabled it. They actually banned emoji unlockers back then. They faced a lot of resistance to this. When they finally did allow emoji to be enabled by users, it was simply Unicode being used as it was designed for. Yes, not all OSes could see it properly - that's what the private use area is for. Hooray for universally accepted unicode! That's exactly the same issue, in fact. Apple doesn't use the older EUC, JIS, or SJIS encodings for Japanese - they use UTF-16. Unicode. However, not all Unicode fonts support all Unicode characters. So if you're using WinXP (maybe Vista and 7 too?) in order to display it all correctly, you need to install the Asian language support pack. Without it, your system is still Unicode-compliant, but you don't have all the glyphs on hand to display it properly. Additionally, we tend to use UTF-8 here, which will utterly flop if you try to use it to interpret UTF-16. It's still a "universal" standard, but when you want to display every character in every language, plus a bunch of graphics and private use area, 8 bits per character doesn't cut it. The group messaging thing sounds like a simple issue of user interface or default behaviour, not standards compliance, but as a feature that's not even available here, I took it your word for it because I don't need to be right about every point regardless of the evidence. (Being proven wrong is quite useful - but it requires proof, or at least logic.) The patent issue is just BS - Apple seems way out of line there - they do a lot of things I don't like TBH, and I've mentioned a bunch of them that weren't even brought up before - I'm just defending them from what I see to be untrue and illogical attacks. As for what a kiss symbol is in Japan... well, there's the lips emoji. Other than that, probably something like （´ε`） or "chu!" written in hiragana (an onomatopoeia.) Even on Android phones, the Japanese keyboard often contains a huge palette of JIS-character faces so they wouldn't even have to type them. (JIS is Japanese Industrial Standard - sorta like ISO. So while there was JIS character encoding, you can still encode the JIS character set in Unicode.) Ok... I think that's everything. Let's talk about video games like we used to...

Yes, the bracketed ellipsis was not meant to imply you were saying it, but to visibly note that I was removing content. The eye rolling was my own response, not an attempt to make it appear as though you had said it. I used it to draw attention to an accusation, almost immediately followed by an admission that the opposite to what was accused was what was really happening. I figured for such tiny quotes, big quote boxes would be overkill - maybe not. Something proprietary is made with patents or trade secrets. Generally, something for which its operating principles are not publicly disclosed. However, you can have proprietary software or other processes that are made to correctly view, manipulate and store things in open formats - those which are publicly defined and free for anyone to make use of. Apple doesn't make all the software emoji appeared on - they were relative newcomers. They disabled it on all but the phones appropriate for it. I'm not sure, but I think for a while they did disallow emoji unlockers, and a number of them disappeared, but whenever one would disappear, more would show up, and it was obvious people wanted it. So rather than force people to jailbreak to get it, they just went "you know, it's a keyboard that generates Unicode... let's just allow it." Evidently the method used to unlock it didn't run afoul of their extremely cautious policies. And since they were made for Japan, you would actually use a vein bulge (irritation) or a bowing construction worker (common on roadwork and "temporarily closed for renovation" signs), and X isn't a standard notation for kissing there, at least not that I've seen in the last 15 years. It was not made for English audiences, it was made for Japan. It was also probably part of the original spec - which was made for SoftBank. SoftBank is in Japan. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Goddammit. This is worse than the piracy thread. Say whatever about them. Say they molest kids. Say they assassinate politicians. Who needs facts when something feels truthy? This thread is making me hate this place so I'm going to try to get out.

I didn't add anything to the quotes - I just cut out a small part to juxtapose two very near sentences to highlight the cognitive dissonance it took to keep accusing Apple of making up their own thing as they go along and ignoring standards, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Opera uses a proprietary engine and is closed-source. It has some of the top levels of compliance for open standards like HTML and CSS. MS Office is totally proprietary, and can use formats like TXT and RTF. Apple may remain closed source, but they've adopted more and more open standards like standard "IBM" PC architecture, USB, FAT32 support, EFI and so on. That's far more open than PowerPC systems using ADB connectors and HFS filesystem. So it's not quite the oxymoron it seems unless you take it to mean open-source instead of adopting open standards like we've been talking about. And again, emoji was never Apple's to define and there was no reason to think it'd be used outside of SoftBank in Japan when they got into it. So there's absolutely no reason they would have discussed it with any other handset maker since they were just implementing something that was there before them. It's absurd to keep holding them to account for it, knowing as much. It turns out that once the standard was made popular accidentally, they did just that - discussed with other vendors how to implement an open standard for emoji. Also, the standard you're saying exists already would lose the majority of symbols in emoji, a few of which being: Alien, sick person with a mask on, a wide range of hearts in different states, sparkle, shining star, vein bulge, fire, smiling poop, thumb up, thumb down, ok sign, fist, hand showing rock, paper, scissors, wave, stop (palm out, fingers up), 10 other hand gestures, a range of ages, genders and ethnicities, bowing construction worker, smiling cop, skull, footprints, kiss-mark, mouth, ear, eyes, nose... and that's just the first page of palettes, skipping over the various weather, animals, plants, electronics, tools, sporting goods, gaming pieces, clothes, accessories, other household objects, foods, buildings, scenes, vehicles, road signs, flags, indicators, and other marks... But like I was saying, they could just cater to the lowest common denominator and replace it with a handful of facial expressions...

I can't say without being... a linguistic anthropologist(??) but I'd accept that these may have come from Britain. I think not seeing them as Britishisms shows how they've been adopted. ...though it's sort of a strange distinction to make in the first place if you ask me, since we're all speaking English.

I'd already said that when a standard is made with a consortium that it's generally better. I mean as opposed to a company just making something up and going "this is our standard - feel free to use it!" like Atari 2600 games or LS120 disks(?). Though I did sort of confuse that by talking about restraints in them... Sorry, but what I see here is blind Apple hate. I never thought I'd type at such length to defend a company I've gone from detesting to just having some ambivalent distaste for, but they've extremely opened up and standardized from their old days and now they're not much worse than any other proprietary player. It wants to do everything their own way n screw talking it over with everyone else. [...] And it's neat they're now bashing out a standard with Google, but was it so hard to sit down n have a chat with them about it years back? Yes, but I'm at wits' end to make it any clearer: Emoji is a standard for phones. When the iPhone launched, there wasn't even an Android OS yet. Emoji wasn't made up by Apple, it was made by SoftBank. Apple didn't intend anyone off of SoftBank to use emoji. So why would it even occur to them to discuss it with Google, ultimately their competitor, and what say would Apple have had in what emoji was in the first place? And your assessment of the private-use areas is almost spot-on, but it IS Unicode. It's just a reserved area in which there is no guarantee of what will map to any given character on a given system. It's like "here are a bunch of table values. Implement them as you like."

and before someone says "but emoji isn't part of Unicode, so they're breaking the standard!" That's actually supported by Unicode as well.

I agree that standardization is a good thing, especially in communication these days. Still, standards should not hobble innovation either. When you only implement things that are universally supported, you build to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Now, when something is first implemented by a consortium formed to ratify the spec, such as USB, DVD or Blu-Ray, you can raise that common denominator to a pretty decent standard, but at the same time, if someone has the need for better, they can't just start making H.264 DVDs, or 1 Gbps USB 2 - they have to wait until a new version or whole new technology rolls around. But in the case of emoji, it's something that didn't have a common standard to begin with, and already existed with or without Apple. Still, holding with common standards as much as possible, when Apple changed, they implemented it in Unicode: According to a developer, troubleshooting issues with it: So there's a twist in the twist - Apple did Emoji SoftBank's way to support the carrier that had their phone, then they took off and did it a new way... to better adhere to standards and allow cross-platform compatibility.

And I agree with FDS that emoji standardization would be nice. I don't know about the history of them well enough to say why it's fragmented, or how much overlap there is. DoCoMo would almost certainly be the leader for adoption rates, then maybe KDDI? But they weren't really a major GSM carrier, and that was what the iPhone was, so the carriers who could have it were limited - much like how Rogers/Fido was the only option in Canada until they started supporting HSDPA. So it's obvious the version Apple supported would be the one for the carrier that supported Apple. (Need to proofread. I was murdering verb tense here.)

I'm with eleven on this one. There are lots of legitimate things to criticize Apple for, but it seems even the farthest-reaching, most spurious ones get approval on here, while criticism of Android is just waved off, even when linked to proof of it. The iPhone was carried by SoftBank, so to support their features, they implemented a standard feature of the carrier. If they didn't, people would be saying "what's with Apple? They can't even do emoji! This doesn't meet my needs - Americans don't get the phone market in Japan." If it's unlocked by default now, that's because everyone with a little bit of tech savvy already went out and got utilities to unlock it and used it anyway, so they decided to stop restricting their users. But I suppose if Apple hunted out and removed all emoji unlocker apps from the app store, you guys would be saying "look at their heavy-handed policies! It's not hurting anyone - users have no freedom on iOS!" They can't win for losing with some people. They also support a whole slew of languages, but if I were to enter something in Japanese or Korean on my phone, a lot of PC users would just see a bunch of squares. I guess they shouldn't support that either.

You must have missed it on the last page, but emoji isn't Apple, it's SoftBank. That's why it has a Japanese name ("picture letters.") Apple added it to the OS in order to support the Japanese carrier that offered the iPhone, and locked it so that other users couldn't access it. Then people started unlocking it via apps people posted on the store. I think for a little while, Apple may have resisted it, but eventually just went "ah well, people like it" and allowed it. Also sort of interesting you only see it was tweeted via iOS if you use an Android - it seems they're serving a different version of the page to each browser.

The pic of palm and claw grip both look like "palming" it to me. I habitually put my palm on the mouse, but that leads me to severe wrist pain because I end up with my wrist angled sharply. Now I do something like the claw with my palm up when I can catch myself and get it right. I actually use a little mouse to give me less place to put my palm (and my left hand because I kinda blew the right one out with RSI...) It's a Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX. It's... ok. Tiny receiver that can tuck into the mouse body for travel, and you can close a shutter over the sensor to turn it off. 2-button, no wheel button, forward and back on the left side. If you DO click the wheel, it goes into near-frictionless mode and you can spin it so that it'll keep turning for several seconds straight, scrolling past just about anything. It uses the "dark field" sensor, which is good for adverse surfaces like clear glass and CD jewel cases, but unfortunately not very good at all-terrain, like wrinkles on pantlegs. It pretty much needs a flat surface.

I think it's cool... but another holographic storage tech we'll never see in stores. In the 90s I read about holographic discs that were 3-5 years off, and later, fluorescent holographic media... and now it's 10-15 years later and it's just never gonna happen (though to be fair, some of them were boasting capacities less than Blu-ray discs, so...) Ah well, the Church of Scientology will love it, I'm sure. Don't they allegedly have glass-coated platinum tablets or something?

^ That's what always seems to happen if you watch a movie encoded in 5.1 without a center speaker, without downmixing it. Maybe the game has the same issue?

Yes... subs even on dubbed games, because there is usually no rewind, save for quitting, loading, and rewatching the whole scene. "Get into the building, disable the security system, and fuzzmubblebuh - and don't screw it up! You only have one chance!" If a movie does stupid things with min/max volume, some (many?) AV receivers support "dynamic range compression," which limits the difference between loud and quiet scenes. Sometimes it has names like "night mode" because it'd let you watch movies without waking people up.

I usually prefer subs. I got annoyed with loose translations and unlabelled rewrites and edits (Viz, Dark Horse, Viz, Viz) and actually learned Japanese. Now, I prefer subs even more because hearing the original gives me more acute insight into the meaning of what is being said, and better understanding of the cultural connotations of the words. I like etymology in any language so I find it interesting to know where a word came from and what it really means. It's hard to pull examples off the top of my head, but something like it would be the villains from Shakugan no Shana. They're called "Mystes," and their MO is to steal a person's "existence," leaving a placeholder version of them that gradually fades out of people's attention until they forget the person existed and it burns out and disappears. I don't know of any translation that explains it, but "Mystes" (misutesu) sounds like "misute(ru)" which is an expression that means to abandon, desert or forsake. It doesn't quite translate literally because means "to look-discard" - sort of alluding to how the victims fade from view. (This example of course doesn't quite matter if it's subbed or dubbed, but there are other lines you'd only hear in a subbed or original version that carry connotations that don't translate and would be erased in a dub: many kanji compounds for instance.) (new section:) Another thing that is missed in a dub is the use of regional dialects, most often Kansai-ben or Osaka-ben. Sometimes this is substituted with a southern USA accent, but the connotations are quite different. Osaka has a reputation for, among other things, business and commerce, outspoken people, and odd colloquialisms, but can sound sort of lazy too, which probably where the parallel is drawn to a drawl. Then there's other rural village dialects that people will often switch out of with outsiders so they're not seen as country bumpkins. Some are actually very hard to understand even for native speakers not from these areas. Then there's regular dialect variations like keigo (polite speech) which can seem polite, formal, haughty, or even derisively sarcastic depending on context. I think an English dub would often use vocal inflection and often "British accent" such as RP, spoken carefully (if you're lucky enough to find an actor who knows the difference.) Something that gets on my nerves is how dubs are typically written to fit the timing and cadence of the original piece, which usually results in really stilted unnatural sounding speech. On top of that, I've seen a lot of anime where even though someone is just portraying a normal human, they feel the need to put on a "cartoon voice" that makes it sound even more hokey. Often main characters can avoid this, but incidental ones are just hamming it up. (It's not like this never happens in the originals, but it tends to be more appropriate, ie. silly characters and obvious caricatures.) Also, while some people don't like how female seiyuu sound, they're usually not that different from the way Japanese women sound on media like TV or radio so it's not that conspicuous - however... that is not how they sound in English. I've heard too many dubs where the female English VAs try to go for a kind of "squeaky cute Japanese" voice and end up sounding like bad caricatures or bubbleheads. Dubs can be done well potentially, but they also face an unfair disadvantage that even the best one will be a replica. Like I said in Alex's status thread, it's like listening to a cover band. You may prefer the cover to the original, but it is still constrained by the need to be a substitute for what is already done, rather than being its own thing (usually. There are adaptations that veer off from the originals but that's less of a translation and more of an adaptation.) If other people want to go with dubs, I won't take offense to it or anything. It beats not understanding it at all, and some people can't read and watch at the same time. But at the same time, there are few times I'd go with a dub over a sub. That said, there are actually a few - Samurai Pizza Cats was a pretty good "dub" of Kyatto Ninden Teyande-, even though I'm sure something like half of it was rewritten or ad-libbed. It doesn't seem like a show where the lines are of great importance, but the adaptation was pretty funny. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins had a really corny dub, but it sort of fit since you're running around doing all sorts of archetypal ninja stuff. It's like you're in an old, badly dubbed movie or something. Usually I don't mind game dubs quite as much, but still really prefer subs. Castle Shikigami II was a textbook example of the worst dub possible, to the extent it was almost a selling point... (edit: Board inserted an unprocessed HTML tag in the middle of a word. I removed it. It put it back in.)