New Site, avoid like the plague.....

A Chinese with poor English out to defend their stolen website, no doubt.

Which is fine.

But huge majority of the people in this country wouldn't buy from a company that sees no problem in stealing from others, be it an intellectual property, design ideas or anything similar. And when being caught spew hate language instead of making an apology or just plainly shut up. The reason (I am guessing here, being also a foreigner like you, also from a country and a culture with a lousy record of stealing intellectual property) is quite simple - if "88"s apparently have no moral problem stealing from others by faking their image, why should they have moral problems stealing from us by faking their tea? Pretty simple, but very effective logic, to which I whole-heartedly subscribe. You, too, may find it useful.

Sasha.

Um, I think you're confusing the two. These two "88" sites are both legit businesses that aren't stealing anybody's image, as far as I can tell. The fact that they use the same business software as many other Chinese websites can just mean that said software is popular.

What Mike Petro listed, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

MarshalN

I believe that in Morse Code-era ham radio shorthand, 88 meant "kiss" - signing off a message "73s and 88s" meant love and kisses. (And YL was young lady = girlfriend, so wife was XYL.)

Hence the expression "Kiss my shu."

-DM

I wonder how many people on earth there are who've done both Morse-code ham radio and instant messaging.

/Lew

I for one.... But I guess that gives away my age, at least to some degree.

Mike

Count me in. :)

OK, then let's get just a bit more esoteric:

- Is Cyrillic ham radio code the same as Morse where the characters overlap?

- Has there ever been a Chinese ham radio code?

/Lew

I'm in that number...

I got my Amateur Radio Technician license in high school. The test was basic Ham concepts plus send and receive morse code at 5 words per minute. I never did anything with it but it was fun being part of the dit-dat-dit bird club for a while. That is where the only language spoken was verbalization of morse code.

Jim

PS I d> I wonder how many people on earth there are who've done both

In fact, that predates ham radio, and is old landline-telegrapher's code from the 19th century. Ham radio operators still use it (although nobody uses any of the other numeric codes any more, other than those two).

I dunno, I have never used instant messaging.

--scott

No, it's really goofy, and like International code, the length of the symbol is based on the frequency of the letter. As late as the 1980s, the Aeroflot guys flying in and out of Cuba were still using CW, and I tried really hard to copy that stuff with a code card in front of me.

There is, and there is a famous Chinese story about a man who falls in love with the operator on the other end of a radio link.

The code is weird... there is a base sequence for the radical and then more stuff for additional strokes. I have heard it in Vietnam but don't know anyone that could copy it.

--scott

Fabulous information, Scott. Thanks!

By the way, I've never felt the urge to IM, myself. It seems ... so rude compared to email. But who knows, eventually we may all be forced to do it.

/Lew

Lew: What do you mean by overlap? This is Russian Morse code :

Scott:

I really think that calling "goofy" and "weird" anything that is slightly different from what you are used to, especially on the international forum is not very wise. How one combination of dots and dashes for one set of letters can be that "really goofy" in comparison to a slightly different one (in case of Russian?). At the end - its the same (dots + dashes) = letter! And Chinese system is not IMHO weird, its absolutely ingenious, keeping in mind that we are talking about encoding thousands of characters here!

Sasha.

What I meant by overlap was where the Latin character is essentially the same as the Cyrillic one, e.g. A. Judging by the URL you cited, the answer is yes, though at a level deeper than I imagined. What I mean here is that the inventor(s) of Russian "Morse" code went by phonetics rather than by the shape of the glyphs, e.g. equating the Latin R with the Cyrillic P.

/Lew

What is weird is that it sounds _almost_ like international code, but it's not. It's like someone talking and you can hear the syllables but they don't make up words.

Learning to copy code is sort of like learning to listen to speech, in that you just automatically hear what is being said after a while. You don't hear the dits and dahs, you hear the words. So hearing something that sounds _like_ what you think, but isn't, is very disconcerting.

If you try and copy it with the code card in front of you, you can't, because you are still hearing the wrong thing in your head and it's hard to drown that out. It's probably the same thing for someone who learned the Box 88 code trying to copy International code.

And it _does_ result in more commonly-used characters having shorter sequences than less commonly-used ones, which is the whole point of the codes.

--scott