Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?
Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...
I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology.
So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
Sure, they understand each other, but it's a whole different dialect.
what?
1. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a...
Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X.
Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters = 140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized sentence.
I wonder if they lost viewership by making a statement in their headline that people thought they knew the answer to already.
The vast majority of words in Chinese and Japanese are not single characters. In fact, a very large portion of the characters cannot be used by themselves, at least in modern Japanese. Japanese is also heavily reliant on two other writing systems which are far less space-efficient. A single character of either hiragana or katakana represents only a single syllable of sound (such as か（ka),ぽ(po),し(shi),etc.). Unless your tweets were just very long noun phrases without any grammar pertaining only to things that can be written with Chinese characters (which means no modern foreign words), less efficient writing systems would be needed.
So, while Japanese may be slightly more compact due to the lack of spaces and the ability to assign a large number of sounds to a single Chinese character (such as 承る＝うけたまわる(uketamawaru)), it's still a synthetic language that can have very large conjugations (which have to be written in hiragana) and has a very unfavorable ratio of amount of meaning:syllables (partially mitigated by the use of Chinese characters).
As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word - the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms.
On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western words are used - western words are almost systematically written with katakanas.
Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
I'd go back and edit my comment, but that'd just make yours seem weird...
Also, why downvote? Even if was largely wrong, the discussion engendered was a net positive to HN.
I did not downvote, or if I did I did not mean to, op's comment certainly did not deserve it.
So, contrary to popular belief, the languages that could be discriminated seem to not be chinese or japanese, but languages with possible combinations on each character, such as european languages.
The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal that life was ..
You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social, breathing in smog.
EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a cultural artifact, people ..
Also, there's often unspoken rules, for example, someone leaving earlier than their boss being rude.
When they were in growth (back prior to 1980) where lifetime employment and salary increase by age were common, there was at least some incentive to put up with that, but they are now gone as the thing in the past, they are just getting the short end of the stick, as losing your current job might mean that there aren't any other jobs. (Getting hired in Japan outside of new hire -- that's something other than right after graduating, can be very tough.)
Now, having said that, of course, there are people out there who have more liberty in deciding how much they should work each day, and doing it as their choice, but considering this being nationwide issue, I wouldn't think that's a majority.
Note: If you are someone from outside of Japan, you will get some perk as a foreigner, that you are not expected to go along with the above. Merely appearing like the Japanese would lock me into same expectation as Japanese. (Which I envy "foreigners" every time I visit Japan, as my mindset is as foreign from Japanese.) Japanese people usually don't really discriminate foreigners, but they do have different social expectations. (Just you never can be "one of them.")
Having lived that life style, it doesn't leave you with much free time. Dinner with kids and spouse? Exercise? Cooking? Errands? Creative hobbies? 7-8 hours sleep / night?
My commute last for 30 minutes on a bicycle, I would like everyone to have the option to leave at a reasonable hour to live their life. If they want to continue working, that's cool too. But the impression I get from the Japanese culture is that it isn't so free to do so. It is 'expected'. I heard that Japanese employees don't leave until their boss leaves, which could be an ungodly hour. Having lived the extreme, my personal opinion is that balance is best.
Have you bothered to actually look at the statistics? Americans have some of the shortest commute times in the OECD, while the Japanese have some of the longest: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commut...
> being very un-social
This is entirely subjective, but I've found that Americans are much more sociable, particularly with strangers, than the Japanese (or most Europeans) are.
> breathing in smog
Again, have you looked at the statistics? According to recent OECD data, America is less polluted than Japan: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/environment/
it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home
I.e., there's no time for reading newspapers or surfing the web, and much less time for "spending time with your coworkers." Instead you do your work, and when your work is done (or if it's 5 pm), you go home. Which actually means you must work hard, because if you slack off and spend the evening in the workplace, your manager may start to wonder if you are fit for the job (unlike Korea, where your manager may question your competence if you leave on time).
Maybe Japanese work ethics is somewhat better (well, surely they have a much better economy...), but I'm skeptical. There's a limit on how much most people can work with concentration. Make them work longer, and they'll compensate by spending their time in distraction.
* On the other hand I'm working in a US company and writing comments in HN, so there's that...