This is probably country-dependant. I’m from Australia and the prices shown are the final price, with everything included, because businesses here are legally required to do so.
It's from the physical issue. The publication date on magazines is usually between one week and one month behind the actual release date. I'm not really sure why, but most magazines do this.
That happened because every publication wanted to have an edge over the others. So some monthly mags started sending their february issue to the stores in january 28th, and the others looked "late", being the one "01" issue in a see of "02"s, scheduling future issues a bit earlier to retaliate. Now they're all nearly a month early.
Hey there, I'm from Malaysia but have been studying and working in Australia the past 7 years. Am really keen to get to know some Malaysian devs and find out what the software industry condition is like back home. My email's me@jonathanchua.com if you're keen.
I play Starcraft 2 quite a bit, and can confidently say that no matter how good your strategy is, it just doesn't work without good execution against any decent player, and by decent I mean anyone above bronze league. This is because not using keyboard shortcuts slows you down by orders of magnitude, and your faster opponent can just brute force his/her way to victory.
Using MMORPG mice with all the extra hotkeys might work rather well though, but I still doubt that it's possible to get into the more serious players' leagues this way though.
> Seth absolutely deserves to have a forum to tell his version of the story, but I find it more than a little annoying that after everything he's done, he's still able to leverage his position as a YC Founder to ensure that his version of the story gets more attention than anyone else's.
I'm really interested to hear about the other side of the story. Any links?
The person I know who was at Amicus would definitely never go on the record about this stuff, so no, no links. All I'm saying is that I'm shocked by how many people here are willing to take this guy at his word without hearing from anyone else, given the kind of pathological lying he himself admits to in his blog post.
> Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative.
I would say that it's more of today's entrepreneur genuinely believe that they're doing good, but are just terribly misguided.
I'm a Chinese, and I can easily understand written kanji (one of the 3 Japanese writing systems) as it's essentially traditional Chinese characters, but the pronunciation is a whole different game altogether. From this I'm assuming that it's the same for Japanese speakers to recognise some Chinese characters, thus making it easier for them to learn.
In Japan, you learn both Japanese and Chinese readings for kanji. Except the Chinese readings in China are different to the ones in Japan. A lot of people thought I was strange when I was pointing things out on a menu, but couldn't say what they were. lol
Wait so the Chinese reading in Japan is different from the Chinese reading in China and most parts of the Chinese speaking world (ignoring the influences of accents)?
方法 (method)
In Chinese: fāngfǎ "FONG-fah"
In Japanese: houhou "HOE-hoe"
日常 (everyday, ordinary)
In Chinese: rìcháng "ZI-tchong"
In Japanese: nichijou "NEE-chee-joe"
七月 (July)
In Chinese: qīyuè "CHEE-yue"
In Japanese: shichigatsu "SHEE-chee-gah-tsoo"
(Yes, 'shichigatsu' is seriously the Chinese reading of July; the Japanese reading would be 'nanatsuki'.)
And some that are similar:
開始 (start)
In Chinese: kāishǐ "KAI-tsi"
In Japanese: kaishi "kai-shee"
第三 (third)
In Chinese: dìsān "dee-SAN"
In Japanese: daisan "dai-san"
(Note that the pronunciation guide is somewhat approximate since certain sounds don't map well and English vowel pronunciation is a mess.)
I've heard that the Japanese on'yomi (Chinese) readings are generally closer to Old Chinese than modern Chinese is. Also, notice that Chinese is tonal and Japanese isn't.
Well bunnie is Singaporean, and most if not all Singaporeans can speak Mandarin (not a linguist but Chinese is more of the language, and Mandarin the dialect, albeit the "official" dialect for the language).
If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china").
Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect.
I do understand that when people refer to Chinese it means Mandarin. However, if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too?
I don't think the way I described it in the grandparent post above is entirely accurate as well, but how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects.
> if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too?
What distinguishes one from the other?
> how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects
Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul?
If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect?
If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?
The drastically different way you pronounce a word, or even the choice of words.
Well for example for the sentence "I feel very cold".
Mandarin: wo jue de heng leng
Hokkien: wa chi tio jin na leng
Teochew: wa chi tio jin nga ngang
etc...
> Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul?
> If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If > I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect?
> If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?
I do understand what you're saying, and I do agree with you regarding the examples above. But then how would you explain the relationship between Chinese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, etc in terms of language vs. dialect?
This has become a response of some length, so I'll put a quick summary up front:
- From the perspective of linguistics, a "language" and a "dialect" are essentially the same thing; which word is used is a political question, not a scientific one.
- One common method of assigning different meanings to "language" vs "dialect" is to say that if person A and person B can communicate using A-speak and B-speak, then A-speak and B-speak are both dialects of the same language. On this approach, Mandarin and Cantonese are separate languages, and e.g. Beijinghua is a dialect of Mandarin.
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I understand that Mandarin, Minnan, Wu, Yue, etc etc etc aren't all the same thing. That wasn't what I meant. If the question is "are Mandarin and Cantonese the same language?", it's easy to demonstrate, e.g. by having two people attempt to communicate, that they aren't.
Consider an alternative question, "are Mandarin Chinese and my quilt the same thing?" It should be clear that they aren't. Furthermore, they aren't even the same kind of thing -- one is a quilt, and one is, in the context of comparing it to a quilt, clearly a language. We can distinguish the language from the quilt by many tests: one has a physical instantiation (the quilt), and from that many ancillary properties like color, weight, size, rigidity, and so forth; the language is more of a hypothetical concept with no physical object that represents it, but can be conceived of as a tool for communication much as the quilt is a tool for keeping warm. All normal humans over the age of four "possess" one or more languages; many lack quilts.
So, if we keep the question "is this thing that I'm considering a language, or not?" in our minds... the point of my earlier rhetorical question is that there is no distinction to be drawn between Cantonese and Mandarin that would be relevant to that question. Any evidence you adduce to support the idea that Mandarin is a language will apply just as well to Cantonese, and vice versa.
> But then how would you explain the relationship between Chinese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, etc in terms of language vs. dialect?
"Dialect", like "species", is not a perfectly well-defined concept. Some people (not me) like the ecological species concept (which I will rudely characterize as "two animals are the same species if an ecologist tells you so"), and some (most) prefer the biological species concept, which says that two animals are the same species if they can mate and produce viable, fertile offspring (as far as I can tell, the requirement of a single generation of fertility is there specifically to stop donkeys and horses from being the same species under this concept; the occasional fertile mule is handled by the traditional fingers-in-the-ears method).
Analogously, it's common to say that two, um, "modes of speaking" A and B are dialects of the same language if a person speaking A can carry on a conversation with a partner speaking B. By this view, a "language" is a very abstract concept, less physically real than a "dialect" in the same way that a dialect is less physically real than a quilt. The way any person speaks, which though massless is something you can measure in the world, is a dialect, and a language is a group of dialects which are all mutually intelligible.
Like the biological species concept, this has some issues; for example, it tends to suggest that Spanish and Italian are dialects of the same language. This is felt to be politically unfortunate, but from a facts-based perspective things could be a lot worse -- Spanish and Italian are known to be closely related, both recent descendants of Latin.
So to answer your question:
"Chinese" is a term with no clear meaning, usually synonymous with Mandarin. The structure of the word indicates that it refers to the language of China, but as there's more than one that's not very useful. Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, Hakka and so on are all "languages" (or "language families"), and Shanghaihua is a dialect of Wu, Beijinghua is a dialect of Mandarin, Guangdonghua is a dialect of Yue, etc. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese
All of these language families share an obvious (well, depending on your perspective) similarity because they descend from Middle Chinese, just as French and Italian share similarity because of their common descent from Latin.
