I actually received a fax today, through the eFax account I’ve had since the late 90s and has mostly lain dormant during this century, so I found today’s NYT article on the fax’s enduring importance in Japan quite interesting. The tl;dr: Japanese were early adopters of fax and it’s unbelievably intertwined with day-to-day operations of most businesses; the Japanese language and culture favor handwritten notes; people in Japan, demographically, are old and set in their ways.
I know nothing about the Japanese language, but could it be a big factor in why faxing is popular there, and ecommerce is being avoided in Japan? I imagine for those who want to write in their native language, the fax could still be superior to keyboards.
I wonder if the same “pro-fax” trends exist with other Eastern languages like Mandarin?
Like many of us, I consistently find a physical keyboard to be by far superior to touch for text input (due to the benefits of touch typing and all that), but I wonder if that changes with significantly more complex alphabets? Learning to type in english isn’t terribly difficult because the characters are all plainly written on the keys, but what about mandarin? The reason I’m wondering is because even if I knew how to write Chinese/Japanese/etc perfectly, actually typing those 2000+ characters on a physical keyboard must be far more challenging than the latin characters that I take for granted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Ex…
A question I’d like to pose to those with experience in eastern languages is whether the dynamic/expressive nature of touch screens actually makes them more friendly/suitable than physical keyboards for learning how to type messages, say in Japanese?
Edited 2015-04-07 03:15 UTC
Not in South Korea. It’s because Chinese Characters are used in special contexts. Korean doesn’t have many homophones compare to Japanese. And it’s very easy to type Korean than Japanese (having three separate writing systems like Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) on a laptop or a smartphone. So, Koreans would use a lot of emails or Katok or Line (Korean/Japanese SMS services) messages.
From what I’ve seen, China doesn’t even try to make their hardware keyboards map to the actual Hanzi characters. They use US English keymaps or similar, and use software IMEs to map a sequence of several keystrokes to a single Hanzi character.
tidux,
Any idea about how native text is done on tablets? Surely they do not use english keymap encoding…do they?
I found this link, which includes a video:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linpusime_tc.andro…
From the looks of it, it seems to have a keyboard portion as well as OCR and some kind of predictive sentence mode, but I’m still confused
Typing Japanese (and I guess Chinese, but I don’t know about that) involves two steps. First, you write what you want in kana (typically one or a few words); this can be done both with a Japanese kana layout or a latin one. Then, you press (typically) space, and the kana are converted to kanji. When the conversion is ambiguous (most of the time in Japanese), you are presented a list of options from which you can choose.
The process is exactly the same on the phone (e.g. in the Google Japanese IME for Android), so at least for me, the difference between physical and virtual keyboards is the same with a European language.
Watching the process in action reminded me of using a T9 dictionary and a numpad for SMS.
Savior,
Thank you, this is very informative! Do native typists think that typing this way is difficult?
I’m suddenly concerned that I could be guilty of releasing software that doesn’t work in these languages, even with unicode support. Software compatibility must be a huge problem, can these typing methods even be tested on a US version of windows?
Using Linux here, so no idea. Here you have to install an input server (SCIM, UIM, ibus, whatever it is called these days…), with which you can switch between your normal input and the ones supported by the server. I remember using the Microsoft Japanese IME back in the Windows XP days, which worked the same way.
Apparently it has gotten easier with time: https://www.coscom.co.jp/learnjapanese801/install_ime.html.
You can still find fax machines in use in the USA wherever the company wants to put up an “effort barrier”. For example, they advertise a $20 rebate on the front of the box, but the fine print says you have to fax them proof of purchase, since they know full well most people are too lazy to try and locate a fax machine. The same goes for “proving” identity and anti-fraud protection in the purchase of some hosting services and domain registrars. The clumsiness of the fax process is usually enough to keep away the large scale scammers.
I seem to recall that there is also a legal issue. A faxed copy will be legally upheld, while a emailed image gets into a gray area.
I guess a part of this comes with how fax machines work. You get a direct machine to machine copy, with little to no buffering, thus what is fed into one comes out the other (baring some serious connection issues).
I work with quite a lot of charitable and state grant makers in the UK, generally by email with the occasional phone call. Most of them have their phone numbers in the email signatures, right next to an almost identical fax number.
I don’t live a post-fax existence simply because of the number of times a month I accidentally call the wrong number — and almost go into cardiac arrest as a result.
There’s nothing quite like that sound: a cat buggering a Sinclair Spectrum is about the best I can do.
It is basically the first few parts of the age old modem hookup, iirc.
When a modem handshake happens, it will start out on the oldest baud rates, get a ok from the other end, and then try again at higher rates.
If it gets back a error from the receiver it will drop back to the last good rate, and that is what the connection will sit at for the duration.
Faxes simply top out at a very low rate, somewhere around 14400 i think. Thats just about the point where a modem handshake turns into a kind of white noise hiss.
I think most businesses in North America have fax machines too – they’re just integrated into the multifunction photocopiers.
I have 2 of them sitting next to me in my study in Texas (they also more usefully scan and print). Now if I could somehow hook that phone plug to my Nexus 4, I could fax something.
Most if not all buisness contact information you will come across here has a fax number listed.
Basically everything that requires a signature has either to be sent via snail-mail or fax.
I blame the decade long hostility of major players in the email application marked towards encryption for the lack of wide spread use of viable purely eletronic alternatives.
I wouldn’t be surprised of Outlook/Exchange and Lotus Notes still, to this date, can’t verify signed emails out of the box.
And I am not talking about advanced setups with support for different technologies, such as handling X.509 and PGP, I doubt they can even handle X.509 yet
Sure they have a fax number, but how many actually have a fax, compared to actually just sending/receiving faxes through email?
Quite literally, I turned on my external USR Courier V Everything (or something like that) 56K modem Sunday afternoon. Just to test it out I faxed my work fax #. When I got to work Monday I faxed back. Still works and I didn’t even have to install 3rd party software (Windows 7 has FAXing built-in) . I actually did that just so I can get the telemarketers to leave me alone. Many of them may not know what the shrieking noises are when they call. Nobody I know calls my land-line anyway…
The English NHS is heavily dependent on faxes. I work for a smallish NHS organisation and if our fax machine breaks it’s a major incident, so we have a backup fax machine just in case!
You think fax is a legacy communication system you’d think would have died already ?
How about telegrams:
“Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used.”
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2464980/telegram-not-dead-stop-alive…
One factor that was important in the uptake of fax machines in Japan, and may still be extending their life there, is that the majority of streets don’t have names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
So any kind of delivery / meeting etc would be arranged by fax with a quick and convenient hand-sketched map of the location, with key landmarks etc.
Otherwise it’s very easy to get lost… which I did my second day there.
It’s a shame that a centrally-maintained digital signature repository for authorising documents isn’t available (worldwide or in each country), because that’s about the last thing (signatures on faxed documents) I can see any use for the fax machine at all nowadays.
I always hated fax machines with a passion – they had so many ridiculous drawbacks that I considered them extremely primitive tech:
* Unless someone’s given you a leaflet or something, you’ve got to print something out using your own printer/paper/toner first.
* You’ve then got to find the fax number, which may or may not be on the stuff you just printed out. If not, you’ll have to scrawl it down on, yep, another bit of paper.
* You then walk over to a clunky machine that requires you to type in the number manually (maybe with a “9” prefix that you’ll forget for outside lines if you’re at work).
* Having fed in the paper, hoping it doesn’t jam, the fax machine then talks down the phone line (costing you money, particularly if international) at an excrutiatingly slow speed and often with the volume on so you can hear those chirping modem noises.
* The fax is then transmitted in a horribly scaled down super-chunky-bitmap format (that often makes small text unreadable) over the phone line to a remote machine and that’s where the fun begins…
* People often share fax and phone lines on the same number to save money, so don’t be surprised if they’ve left it in phone mode and a human answers the fax call! I’m not even including people who might turn off their fax machines at night or weekends…
* The remote fax machine has to have enough toner and paper to print out the low quality transmitted copy and it’s not uncommon for one or both to be low/missing, resulting in a rejected transmission…at which point your fax machine will often try again and again and again with no success…
* Some fax machines even print a summary page for you (like the header page of normal printer jobs, which almost everyone turns off), wasting even more toner/paper.
I just cannot believe this frankly diabolical tech is still in use today, especially with e-mail attachments (and optional encryption, which fax machines don’t seem to have as far as I know) being very easy to send nowadays.