The research the article talks about was done in 1990, so the dynamics as to the influence of top-spoken languages may well have changed.
Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]
On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to.
[1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601... -- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language.
Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined)
It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back in the 1970s. But if we are talking about one language community, all of whose members can genuinely converse with one another, today English just might have more speakers than (standard) Chinese has. Social science surveys by the Chinese government suggest that only just more than half of China's population is conversant in standard Chinese,
and that squares with the experience of most travelers in China, and most Chinese-speaking people who know a lot of Chinese people outside of China, that there are still quite a few nationals of China who are not readily understood when they attempt to converse with other nationals of China.
Influence of a language depends on a lot more than just raw number of speakers. Sometime way back in the early 1980s, the Xerox company did an estimate of language influence weighted by the per-capita domestic product of persons speaking various languages, which of course boosts the ranking of English (and also of Japanese, at that time) as compared to Chinese.
Looking at what happened to Russian (my apologies to the authors of the first couple comments posted here), I would actually expect the influence of Chinese to decline by 2050, while the influence of English, both from the core strengths of the "inner circle" English-speaking countries (Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand) and the outer circle of countries where English is co-official, and from the unparalleled use of English as a worldwide interlanguage. When someone from Korea meets someone from Japan while both are in Taiwan, either might speak the language of the other, and I have seen that done both ways, but when they want to include a local person in the conversation, unless they really are in Taiwan as students of Chinese, they will likely resort to English to speak to one another. And so it goes with all kinds of unlikely combinations of ethnic groups in all kinds of places all over the world.
I am not at all ethnocentric about my sole native language, General American English, and I am second to none in urging Americans to acquire other languages for additional international understanding, but every mash-up of language groups that happens day by day in today's world is likely to accelerate the spread of English and to increase its influence.
> It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back in the 1970s.
Back in 1970s, interesting! Some questions, if you don't mind:
1) The Chinese language seems to be the odd duck in that it demands significantly more time to get a good grip of it. I've read a number of blogs where the language-learner in the end regrets having spent time learning Chinese[1], (something I seldom see for other languages). My question for you: if you had to decide at this point, in this day and age, would you go ahead and spend the time learning Chinese?
2) What interesting employment opportunity can be expected do you think, after having learned Chinese? I've read over and over again that every big Chinese company has strong ties to the Chinese gov't, and that no foreigner has ever been able to successfully pull it off (a good example is Zuckerburg -- even though the guy himself speaks a bit of Mandarin and has a Chinese girlfriend). Does that pretty much rule out entrepreneurial success in China for foreigners?
"Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]"
Counting the total number of speakers is not a very smart way of thinking about "network effects" of languages. You should count the number of speakers among knowledge and media creators. People will have to learn those languages to gain that knowledge and understand that media.
It's not the '60s - 90's anymore, when US had the stronghold on global cultural creation/consumption. There are many signs that this is starting to fade, and for huge masses of people it was never true in the first place. E.g Chinese people could not care less about english media and knowledge. But people wanting work in China/Asia might very well care about learning english.
Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony. Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth. A future constructed language may have a chance though.
> Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony.
I disagree. Movies, TV, and Music are a powerful way to spread a language because it is a great content is the best way to learn a language, and pop culture attracts young people to the language at an age when it is realistic to learn another language.
Scandinavians tend to be excellent English speakers. One possible reason is that they don't dub TV there. Young people want to know English so they can talk about the cool tv shows and music, and they also get a ton of practice because they watch so much English TV.
>Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth.
Never? The language of science, tech and business has already been displaced several times. It's far easier than you think. At some point it was Greek. Then Latin. Then French. Then English.
The Chinese, for one, could not care less about english content. They have their own "Google", their own forums, music, etc. One can imagine a near future where people from the west learn Chinese to communicate for trade and business and not the opposite. For example, language lessons from non existent and unimaginable in my (European) country, are all the vogue the last 3-4 years. And there is increased demand all over Europe and in the US too for Chinese language courses. From Wikipedia:
= = = = =
In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the Chinese Proficiency Test. For comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004. From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%. An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006. Chinese language study is also rising in the United States. The USC U.S.-China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students were studying the language in US colleges and universities. While far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the number is more than three times higher than in 1986.
Your railing on this article undermines your whole point. You say that you lack perspective as to what the living conditions are in different Chinese factories -- but you fail to recognize that this article gives you one more data point than you previously had. You gain perspective by having more articles bringing these issues to light a little at a time.
It is also worth noting that the article in question was originally written by a news agency from Shanghai -- it is not an American, outsider-perspective that's painting a scathing picture, it's the Chinese themselves with their own experiences.
Moral/political reasons aside, have you ever seen their UI?
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
While those things are certainly annoying, they take up about 10 minutes per year of my time. Yes, GoDaddy has lots of issues, but it's not like other registrars are any better. E.g. on the front page of NameCheap they advertise that .com domains are 3.99, but when you actually do a lookup they in fact cost $10.69.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
Namecheap is a fabulous hosting provider. Love 'em. That said, highly-redundant DDOS-resistant DNS infrastructure is not their focus--they offer it as a free service with hosting, but it's best to cough up a few extra bucks and move your DNS to something more robust with AnyCast (DNS Made Easy, Route53...) when you can if uptime's important to you.
Wow - you're seriously a hero. Thanks so much for building the test and thanks (even more) for the blog post (especially the legwork on pricing). I look forward to the day when "can we jump on a call?" sales processes are well and truly dead and self-service and transparent pricing is the norm.
Right below there it says web hosting starting at 2.95 per month, and if you click on the link the lowest price listed is 3.45 per month and that's only with a 24 month commitment. Why would I go with a company that is outright trying to steal money from me? I ask because they seem to be the most recommended GoDaddy alternative.
Their UI is AWFUL. But you know what...it's intentional. All of the upselling. The current hiding exactly where the "My Account" stuff resides. It all feels very intentional as to mislead people into buying unwanted services.
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
Wow, someone tried to sell me something...oh, it was so hard to say 'no' to things I did not want to buy and did not need. Oh wait, that's right, I don't care at all. I have no problem not buying those things.
It's actually not that bad and is only getting better since they've taken on investors. Even when it was bad, it was only bad on the first few visits, once you learned your way around the clutter, I never spent any more time on the GD site than I did on any other registrar or hosting provider site. For instance, just going to dcc.godaddy.com to go right into my domain manager when needing to update a domain.
I would be very wary in taking on such challenges... it would not be surprising if these so called 'black magicians' use poisons of different sorts in their tricks.
I'd be extremely worried about the knife he was waving around his head. You might prove your point if he has to stab you in the neck to kill you, but you're obviously at a net loss at that point.
I'm getting the feeling that the reason there are no updates on his site is because he's the sole developer of the site... and there's no-one else to provide updates. Presumably, therefore, he has been in jail since July 4.
Yeah mostly regex. Plus some heuristics. Works most of the times. Pretty efficient for the simple amount of heuristics it uses.
You can see the code here https://github.com/legalosLOTR/mdb/blob/master/MDB/DBbuilder...
Check out the function get_movie_name!
Yeah it totally would! Thanks for pointing this out.
Btw, I am planning to use another library that has better detection rates - https://github.com/wackou/guessit
> I don't want to bother with hosting a dynamic website that I would have to manage.
Out of curiosity, after once deploying it, what're some responsibilities that entail from hosting a dynamic website vs. a static one? Isn't it basically a matter of writing (/copying a good one and retrofitting) a fabric script, perhaps doing just a few things with some Apache/nginx config files, and just putting it up? What exactly makes it more hands-on post-launch?
I had been under the impression that this process would not take more than a few hours by itself.
