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Thanks for the info, but I found that article to be impenetrable. So I went surfing for a more remedial explaination:

A decent explaination about how these things work.
http://www.tky.3web.ne.jp/~usrmotor/English/html/principlesandStructure.html

NASA JPL image of a robot arm assembly using a ultrasonic rotor (should help with visualizing what TFA is about)
http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/taskImage.cfm?TaskID=140&tdaID=800006&Image=319

NASA JPL article with a good illustration of the "travelling wave" phenomenon that makes these work.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/images_videos/iv_pages/Yosi_Ultrasonic_Motor1.html

Shmups are a popular indie genre in Japan, at least 50% of the indie ("dojin") games are shmups. Some are freeware like Kenta Cho's games, Cho Ren Sha and Galax. For the rest you can go through Palet or Himeya (Dojin section), look for games in the catalog and paste the name of the game or developer into Google, often there are playable demos available.

Of the in Japan that nobody gives a flying fuck about. From this page: Q. Do I have to pay the NHK man? A. The NHK man is a representative of Japan's state-run television station who goes door to door trying to collect NHK fees, a bi-monthly tax of about 2000 yen that everyone who owns a colour television in Japan is required by law to pay. They are generally very aggressive and threatening, usually sticking their foot in the door so that you can't close it on them, and somehow giving you the impression that dire consequences will ensue if you do not pay promptly. The truth is that although there really is a law, a lot of people in Japan completely ignore it and you can too if you want to. Telling them that you do not watch Japanese TV is not an acceptable excuse, because the law says that everyone who owns a TV has to pay so the best way to get rid of them is to just refuse outright. They are not going to have you arrested and they cannot garnishee your wages so if you don't watch NHK, so you don't have to be intimidated by them. Nor do they have any right to enter your apartment, so if you tell them that you do not have a TV there is no way for them to charge you (be careful if you have a satellite dish though). I predict a similar fate for this one. These laws really are stupidly cussed laws, and everyone knows it. The only thing is that you can actually see if someone is using the internet really easily, unlike a simple TV picking up radio waves. By the way, if this whole NHK tax thing is a big rumour or it's long done with or something, please inform me :)

I have a few gigabytes of games that offer quick gameplay and aren't available on the Mac. From an old list I compiled for an earlier thread:

Cho Ren Sha 68k (shmup)
Kenta Cho's games (mostly shmups)
Destruction Desire (fighting game)
Mind Arms (fighting game)
Galax (Shmup)
Doukutsu Monogatari (platformer)
Every Extend (kamikaze'em up)
Glace (platformer)
Frontline (sidescrolling shooter)
Minebot (... Action?)

1. Shmups are about the action. Some are about reacting quickly, some are about carefully maneuvering a huge mess of bullets and some are about performing a dance with steps you have to find out by trial and error (R-Type anyone?). They are never about finding some super-kill-everything weapon. Well, the japanese shmups aren't, anyway. In western shmups you'll often have to upgrade your weapon to insane levels to kill even the smallest enemies in later levels (Tyrian and Raptor, for example). Superweapons are sometimes only good for clearing out bullets, in some games they don't even do damage. Cho Ren Sha or rRootage are popular vertical shmups and pretty representative of what the genre is like these days.

2. IMO the hardest V-shmup ever is Radio Zonde. The default setting is infinite lives and you'll have to change that in the options menu (or select a character other than the two you can see on screen). I've never made it past the first level. I've seen videos of other games that claim to be harder but those are usually at high difficulty. Radio Zonde is impossible at normal (easiest) difficulty.

3. Ikaruga was an arcade game. What are they supposed to do, butcher the game to make it more home console friendly? Most arcade fans want arcade-perfect ports.

It has certainly been done with regular wheels and ratchets, using revolving weights or other sources of motion. Ratchets are pretty common in MEMS designs. There are similarities with ultrasonic motors too.

AC

I should keep the list somewhere...

Cho Ren Sha 68k (shmup)
Kenta Cho's games (mostly shmups)
Destruction Desire (fighting game)
Mind Arms (fighting game)
Galax (Shmup)
Frequon Invaders (weird)
Doukutsu Monogatari (platformer)
Every Extend (kamikaze'em up)
Glace (platformer)
Frontline (sidescrolling shooter)
Minebot (... Action?)
N (Platformer)

I can't remember with 100% certainty, but I think whenever I've been to Japan I've just put down my initial hotel location as best I can in Romaji, (or made something up) which half the time has ended up being something like "Capuseru Hoteru Kanda B, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo" and I've never been hassled over it.

I suppose in Japan, one could just as easily give the name/location of a Love Hotel, which as far as I know don't ever ask for identification or have you fill out any forms when checking in for a "rest" indicating who you are.

There was a TV show in Japan a few years ago, where there was a comedian by the name of Nasubi (Eggplant) that was on a reality show where he was locked into a room completely naked, and could only live off of what he could win by sending in applications for free prizes from various contests. Not only that, but he couldn't leave until he had won 1 million yen (~10000 USD) worth of prizes. You can see the whole dillema here.

This is the kind of crazy stuff that you can only see in Japan. Japanese TV had people enduring all sorts of painful and humiliating tortures years before anything like 'Fear Factor' ever caught on in the west. Near the end of the article, the author says:

"So what was the point of the Nasubi experiment? Ostensibly, it was to test the thesis that contests had become so ubiquitous that it would be possible to live entirely on what one had won in them. This was called kensho seikatsu (Living off contests).
Of course the real reason is that programs involving human suffering are extremely popular in Japan. The gambaru genre, started in the 1980's with the immensely popular show Za Gaman, a show in which university students competed in contests to see who could stand the most pain, eat the most unpleasant foods, and perform the most humiliating tasks. Denpa Shonen is a logical continuation of this trend, and the stunts are becoming more and more dangerous/appalling.
Someday a Japanese comedian is going to die in a horrible accident and this sort of program will be immediately pulled from the airwaves. People are travelling through dangerous countries, fighting bulls without any training, scaring the life out of innocent victims and playing incredibly cruel practical jokes. It's inevitable that a tragic accident will happen. There will be condemnations and recriminations, and people will say that they never liked them, knew they were dangerous, and definitely never watched them. But almost everybody is watching them because they are fascinating."

I think that says alot about reality TV here in the west, too. Anyway, Nasubi's own home page (Japanese only) is located here.

It's not funny if it's already been done better in real life. There was a Japanese reality show where they locked up this guy naked in an apartment and he had to survive on the items he won in mail-in contests.

Here.
This game comes in Win32 or X68k form, the latter seems to be a disk image.

Yes, I wouldn't want to miss the latest in cruelty TV if I moved away...

Can you win this box in a contest? ;- )

Ebay, distrbutes everything from pickels..to parts of discovery....and now subways.....only in america.

That's right. If you were talking Japan, they'd be in vending machines.

If you *have* to play MP3's on that old 486, though, mpg123 runs on the command line. A Windows port is avaliable here

Average amount charged by JR to the families of people who commit suicide by jumping in front of a train for clean up and lost revenues: 100 000 000 yen

Besides computer chess, Contract Bridge has also held its own Computer Bridge tournaments, of which the strongest has been Gibware. Would be interesting to see more different type of AI tournaments.... Maybe a tournament between the smartest Quake 3 or Counter-strike bots...

And the tv shows.