Slashdot Mirror

Wouldn't it be nice if phones were so cheap that after a year or two of use you wouldn't mind tossing and picking up a new one for a few dollars?

They already are.

Oh, wait, you're in America... ;-)

I have heard that it's actually faster to type japanese words on a cell than english words on a keyboard. Can someone confirm or refute this?

Not true. Typing is always faster on a keyboard. Anyway, typing Japanese on a cell phone is WAY faster than typing English (or other roman-alphabet language).

I'm Spanish, living in Japan, and I have a Spanish friend who's living here too. When we send email to each other from our phones we mostly use Japanese instead of Spanish (even though Spanish is our mother tongue) because it's so fast to type.

The reason is that when you type Japanese on a phone's keypad you type syllabes (or phonemes) instead of individual letters. And most words are composed by 2-3 phonemes, so typing a full sentence in Japanese often takes as few keystrokes as a single word in English.

However, when typing Japanese on a keyboard you actually type the letters that compose each individual phoneme. Or at least on the standard input method that most people use. In Windows and many X-Windows input methods it is possible to switch to a mode where each key is assigned a phoneme instead of a single letter. In theory you should be able to type VERY fast in that mode, but in practice you have to learn another keyboard layout, so nobody cares.

Ah, how much truth condensed in a single post!

I grew up playing (mostly) Japanese games on my MSX, and with a few exceptions, modern games don't appeal to me so much as the mid-80s to mid-90s games did.

Yes, nowadays games have better graphics and are faster, but they more often than not playability sucks. Hell, sometimes they aren't even fun! Often they rely on very successful franchises in order to sell lots of copies (like happened with Tomb Raider 6: Age of Darkness).

I guess I'm not the only one who thinks like this. I'm living in Japan, and in the biggest video game shops you can see LOTS of games from the 80s ported to GBA, adapters for playing old NES cartridges on new hard, and more recently, retro game collections for PSP (Space Invaders, Namco Museum, etc). And guess what? These "retro" games are selling almost as much as the new ones.

I think it is also significant the fact that most game arcades have "retro" games mixed among the newer ones. Here are some photos of this.

I guess this has something to do with the fact that older machines had fewer hardware resources, so game developers had to write FUN games in order to sell them. Sadly, nowadays it is all about flashy graphics.

Here's the Doraemon version. They had the Hello Kitty one too, but I didn't take photos of it.

Those are not USB-powered, by the way. ;)

...and if you want to be treated professionally, then you need to act AND look professionally.

Being tattooed/pierced doesn't have to affect how professional you look. I got my tongue pierced several years ago, and:

a) Never had a problem at work (yes, they've known about it in every company I've been working for).
b) The way I dress for work has more effect on how professional I look than whether I got my tongue pierced or not.

Two photos (warning: close-up of my big nose in this one).

Of course, there are extremes. But in those cases I guess the result was intended.

...and if you want to be treated professionally, then you need to act AND look professionally.

Being tattooed/pierced doesn't have to affect how professional you look. I got my tongue pierced several years ago, and:

a) Never had a problem at work (yes, they've known about it in every company I've been working for).
b) The way I dress for work has more effect on how professional I look than whether I got my tongue pierced or not.

Two photos (warning: close-up of my big nose in this one).

Of course, there are extremes. But in those cases I guess the result was intended.

$ wget -r -l1 -A.jpg,.JPG http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/

<snip...>
21:08:38 (584.31 KB/s) - `www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04249.JPG' saved [153,774/153,774]

FINISHED --21:08:38--
Downloaded: 31,207,867 bytes in 216 files

He spoke the truth. There are girls in Tokyo.

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04171.JPG ahhh
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04164.JPG Miss Capcom?
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04167.JPG nice boots
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04174.JPG seek and find

He spoke the truth. There are girls in Tokyo.

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04171.JPG ahhh
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04164.JPG Miss Capcom?
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04167.JPG nice boots
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04174.JPG seek and find

He spoke the truth. There are girls in Tokyo.

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04171.JPG ahhh
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04164.JPG Miss Capcom?
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04167.JPG nice boots
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04174.JPG seek and find

He spoke the truth. There are girls in Tokyo.

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04171.JPG ahhh
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04164.JPG Miss Capcom?
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04167.JPG nice boots
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc/tgs2004/DSC04174.JPG seek and find

These photos are here, but please don't tell my wife or she'll cut my balls. ;)

No thumbnails, by the way.

My favorite memory of strolling through akihabara was going through a maze of electronics vendor stalls and coming across a guy selling nothing but big red buttons.

Most likely that's one of the small electronic shops under the station. That's one of the most Blade Runner-esque spots I've ever seen. Many shops there are a 1x1 meter square with a hole on the midle barely wide enough for the guy to stand on it, with all kind of components surrounding the guy.

Shameless plug:

Akihabara photos on my site.
More Akihabara photos.
And more.

And yes, I'm living in Tokyo.

My favorite memory of strolling through akihabara was going through a maze of electronics vendor stalls and coming across a guy selling nothing but big red buttons.

Most likely that's one of the small electronic shops under the station. That's one of the most Blade Runner-esque spots I've ever seen. Many shops there are a 1x1 meter square with a hole on the midle barely wide enough for the guy to stand on it, with all kind of components surrounding the guy.

Shameless plug:

Akihabara photos on my site.
More Akihabara photos.
And more.

And yes, I'm living in Tokyo.

My favorite memory of strolling through akihabara was going through a maze of electronics vendor stalls and coming across a guy selling nothing but big red buttons.

Most likely that's one of the small electronic shops under the station. That's one of the most Blade Runner-esque spots I've ever seen. Many shops there are a 1x1 meter square with a hole on the midle barely wide enough for the guy to stand on it, with all kind of components surrounding the guy.

Shameless plug:

Akihabara photos on my site.
More Akihabara photos.
And more.

And yes, I'm living in Tokyo.

Most Japanese phones already come with a small Java application to turn the phone into a remote control. My old phone had this function, and the new one does too. The application in both phones shows a list of well-known TV/video manufacturers to choose from (I guess each company uses its own IR codes/protocols/whatever). It's not a feature that I use often because I don't watch much TV lately.

In any case, if your phone doesn't come with a remote control applet, you can always download one (links in Japanese).

More like 320x240 with 262.000 colours. This is my current phone, which is old enough already (I bought it for just 1 yen in January).

More than enough to watch TV on the train on your way to the office, as I see many people doing every morning.

I happen to have a few phone catalogs here. I have just scanned a page on a DoCoMo catalog showing the screens (and font sizes) on the latest phone models.

The image is here. This is a 1Mbyte JPEG file, be warned.

As you can see, this is more than enough to read a book, specially if it's written in Japanese.

This shows us that hamsters are SO much more intelligent than monkeys... Mine were doing their own porn movies long before this...

You can download Irix 6.5.24 (I think) for free from the SupportFolio site (http://support.sgi.com). Just create an account and you'll have access to these updates. I have two O2 myself (an R12000 and an R5000) and the Irix 6.5 CDs, so I used the updates on that site to get to 6.5.24.

[...] That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries [...]

My hamster says he'll be happy if you could hide his porn photos too:

http://www.ag0ny.com/misc-20040513-hamster-porn.ph p

What do other countries such as Asia, Europe and America pay?

I'm spanish, but I'm living in Tokyo.

I don't know about other asian countries, but at least here in Japan nobody uses SMS. Instead, we use email.

Each phone has a default email address associated to it (usually something like @phonecompany.tld), and you can change this email address whenever you want. Many people choose really hard-to-guess addresses to avoid spam. And yes, this is "normal" email, reachable from the Internet. For example, my server monitoring scripts can notify my phone of a problem by just doing a "cat $MESSAGE | mail @docomo.ne.jp".

The prices depend on the company and the type of contract. In DoCoMo phones using i-mode, one packet of data is 128 bytes. Each monthly plan includes 400 free packets. After these free packets, the next 10000 packets are billed at 0.3 yen each, and each additional packet after these 10000 is billed at 0.2 yen each. (source here).

An email message on these phones can be up to 512 characters long, so including the overhead, the maximum you will pay for a single message will be 4.5 yen.

At today's rate, 1 Japanese Yen = 0.009004 US Dollar.

I was the victim of a joe-job like that a few weeks ago. Details here. Some guy from Philippines started sending spam using email addresses in my domain, so during almsot two weeks I was receiving a constant flood of several hundred thousand returned mails a day. They're still coming, and a much slower rate.

Their ISP didn't even care to reply the email I sent to their abuse@ address. :-/

Oh, and the spammer was stupid enough to send his 'From' list as an attachment on many of the emails. I got many copies of the list in the returned emails.

Almost all the phones I've seen have had awful sharpness, low contrast and the most horrible pincushion distortion.

Current japanese phones give (IMHO) adequate image quality, considering what you paid for the phone. I'm sure the quality is going to be more than enough.


A few pics of my DoCoMo F505i, and many photos taken with it

...and I upgraded them long ago, as he did (photos here). I don't understand why this is news: just replace the disk, add memory. Nothing else. Besides, NetBSD for Qube2 is available at www.netbsd.org, ready to install.

However, I agree that the Qubes are wonderful machines if you don't need raw CPU power. The ones I have are MMQUBE2s, the japanese version of the Qube3. They're great as file servers (one of them is my internal network's file server, using NFS and Samba), and another is a remote backup server for my FreeBSD boxes. They just suck 45Watt each, don't need a CPU fan (just a heat sink), and produce almost no sound. And they look cool. :-)

...and I upgraded them long ago, as he did (photos here). I don't understand why this is news: just replace the disk, add memory. Nothing else. Besides, NetBSD for Qube2 is available at www.netbsd.org, ready to install.

However, I agree that the Qubes are wonderful machines if you don't need raw CPU power. The ones I have are MMQUBE2s, the japanese version of the Qube3. They're great as file servers (one of them is my internal network's file server, using NFS and Samba), and another is a remote backup server for my FreeBSD boxes. They just suck 45Watt each, don't need a CPU fan (just a heat sink), and produce almost no sound. And they look cool. :-)

It's easy enough to end up with tens of thousands of photographs on your machine if you're in the habit of carrying a digital camera around. Now, think about what happens when you snap video clips the way you currently snap photographs.

This is already happening. With cameras being integrated into phones, it's growing even more.

I couldn't agree more. I don't take many pictures, but I already have around 2Gb of them in my harddisk, all of them taken by me. And that was when I used to go around carrying a BIG digital camera.

Now that I bought a new phone, I guess I'll be taking pictures at pretty much everything here in Tokyo (translation: I'll be taking pictures of all the girls I cross on the street).

(8) Broom-closet sized apartments that cost thousands of dollars a month

Not really. If you want to live in central Tokyo, it's going to be expensive, of course. You can find one-room apartments (around 20m2) starting at around 70000 yen (almost $600). The farther you go from the center of Tokyo, the cheaper it gets. Also, Tokyo is the most expensive city in Japan. Just go to Osaka or Hiroshima and you'll find 3 and 4-room apartments for a bit more than that (around 100000 yen/month).

My wife an I are living in the east border of Tokyo (half an hour from Shinjuku), and we're paying $1100/month for a nice apartment (photos here). Probably small by american standards, yes, but more than enough space for us.

(9) Elbow-to-elbow people in almost any public place, all the time

No. That's true only during rush hours (7:30-9:00am) and express trains in the afternoon/night. The rest of the time is quiet enough. And about crowded public places, these are only the places where lots of people go: Shinjuku (specially the Kabukicho district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro or Harajuku. And I bet you would pay to be there even if only to see the girls. ;)

(10) Haughty disdain for Americans by most of the older population

This is probably true (I'm spanish, and I've never been discriminated in any way in the time I've been living here). But I guess that the fact that most young people do like foreigners (ie: girls) compensates for it.

(11) Expect to work 12 hour days if you get a job there. Be ostracized and frowned upon if you don't. (if not fired outright)

I'm working in a Japanese company and I work 8 hours/day (like the rest here). Before being here, I was working also 8 hours/day. Anyway, if you don't speak Japanese (or don't want to), you can always find a job in an american company.

(8) Broom-closet sized apartments that cost thousands of dollars a month

Not really. If you want to live in central Tokyo, it's going to be expensive, of course. You can find one-room apartments (around 20m2) starting at around 70000 yen (almost $600). The farther you go from the center of Tokyo, the cheaper it gets. Also, Tokyo is the most expensive city in Japan. Just go to Osaka or Hiroshima and you'll find 3 and 4-room apartments for a bit more than that (around 100000 yen/month).

My wife an I are living in the east border of Tokyo (half an hour from Shinjuku), and we're paying $1100/month for a nice apartment (photos here). Probably small by american standards, yes, but more than enough space for us.

(9) Elbow-to-elbow people in almost any public place, all the time

No. That's true only during rush hours (7:30-9:00am) and express trains in the afternoon/night. The rest of the time is quiet enough. And about crowded public places, these are only the places where lots of people go: Shinjuku (specially the Kabukicho district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro or Harajuku. And I bet you would pay to be there even if only to see the girls. ;)

(10) Haughty disdain for Americans by most of the older population

This is probably true (I'm spanish, and I've never been discriminated in any way in the time I've been living here). But I guess that the fact that most young people do like foreigners (ie: girls) compensates for it.

(11) Expect to work 12 hour days if you get a job there. Be ostracized and frowned upon if you don't. (if not fired outright)

I'm working in a Japanese company and I work 8 hours/day (like the rest here). Before being here, I was working also 8 hours/day. Anyway, if you don't speak Japanese (or don't want to), you can always find a job in an american company.

(8) Broom-closet sized apartments that cost thousands of dollars a month

Not really. If you want to live in central Tokyo, it's going to be expensive, of course. You can find one-room apartments (around 20m2) starting at around 70000 yen (almost $600). The farther you go from the center of Tokyo, the cheaper it gets. Also, Tokyo is the most expensive city in Japan. Just go to Osaka or Hiroshima and you'll find 3 and 4-room apartments for a bit more than that (around 100000 yen/month).

My wife an I are living in the east border of Tokyo (half an hour from Shinjuku), and we're paying $1100/month for a nice apartment (photos here). Probably small by american standards, yes, but more than enough space for us.

(9) Elbow-to-elbow people in almost any public place, all the time

No. That's true only during rush hours (7:30-9:00am) and express trains in the afternoon/night. The rest of the time is quiet enough. And about crowded public places, these are only the places where lots of people go: Shinjuku (specially the Kabukicho district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro or Harajuku. And I bet you would pay to be there even if only to see the girls. ;)

(10) Haughty disdain for Americans by most of the older population

This is probably true (I'm spanish, and I've never been discriminated in any way in the time I've been living here). But I guess that the fact that most young people do like foreigners (ie: girls) compensates for it.

(11) Expect to work 12 hour days if you get a job there. Be ostracized and frowned upon if you don't. (if not fired outright)

I'm working in a Japanese company and I work 8 hours/day (like the rest here). Before being here, I was working also 8 hours/day. Anyway, if you don't speak Japanese (or don't want to), you can always find a job in an american company.

If they were smart, they'd sell "per song" to Amazon, or whoever, and do it just like iTunes does. Hell, you could set up terminals in CD-Stores for punters to grab the tracks they want directly to their iPod and then pay at the counter.

This is already available in Japan since at least two years ago. This is a machine in a music store that lets you choose individual songs from the machine's catalog and save them to a MiniDisc. You can bring your own MiniDiscs, or buy them at this machine.

The problem with this is that it's so darn expensive. Those fiber-optic connections have to be perfect. It's just too expensive to put that in on a mass scale.

Then move to Japan. They've been selling FTTH since a loooong time ago, and it isn't expensive. I have a 100Mbps dedicated line at home with two IP addresses for 17.000 yen/month (around $145/month). And it would be much cheaper if I just wanted a shared 100Mbps line (more information in NTT-East's site, but in Japanese).

And this is a screenshot of my machine downloading two FreeBSD ISOs at around 25Mbps on this line.

Guess I should use 'preview' next time I post at this hours: here is the link.

I met one of them when I went to the MIT last year. Here is the picture.