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If an electron spins like the earth spins, it's revolving at 100 times the speed of light (see http://www7b.biglobe.ne.jp/~kcy05t/spin.html).

Except no towns were obliterated in Japan. All those catastrophic images that keep repeating on TV are mostly farm land being swept over.
In Sendai itself it was just earthquake damage, tsunami didn't reach the actual city as it is on higher ground then its eastern outskirts. No catastrophic fires, no power outage...
See for yourself here. (webcam images from yesterday, don't know how long they will be up.)
Note the grayed out image at 14:47, one minute into the earthquake.

Sure, there was damage, there are dead and missing, but only 605 dead and 784 missing so far.
But, after an 8.9 earthquake and a tsunami, that's nothing.
Even those figures combined don't come to 50% of Japan's daily mortality rate of about 3500.

I'm not going to format this so it's easy to read, I'm tired - so I'm getting straight to the point, I pray there's a billion to once chance a mouse manufacturer is listening.

For high end fingertip gamers (google it) this is the best shaped mouse ever made.
http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~yav/comp/pc/mouse/ltmm3u.jpg
Sadly, no wheel, not optical, old as hell (PS/2!)

All the modern laser or optical mice for gamers are absoloutely and utterly ridiculously huge for fingertip grip gamers, they are far too large or oddly shaped, they are great for browsing, bad for gaming.
I have just purchased this mouse for Warcraft 3 gaming and while it's good - it could do with a thumb button
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&ei=F_17SqSJE4vq6APotOVf&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=razer+salmosa&spell=1&start=0
There always seems to be a fear of putting a lot of buttons on a small mouse, it's unfortunate - we don't all have giant hands.

Takahashi is the third most common family name in Japan per number of households per here. And Rumiko Takahashi wasn't associated with Rurouni Kenshin from what I recall.

Don't get me wrong, I love my MacBook Pro, but there are some absolutely stupid decisions that Apple makes in the design.

Top on my list is the "I'm sleeping so you can't" light. So I either have shut down every night or physically put a book or some other non-translucent object directly in front of the light or the whole room pulsates all night long from that stupid indicator light on the front of the case. It would be one thing if they allowed you to modify the behavior via some setting (either the defaults write variety or an actual GUI option), but they don't.

Also on the list is the inability to control that stupid startup sound. Gee, isn't it fun when the whole airport looks at you just because you turned on your laptop...I don't need a stupid sound to let me know I pressed a button. Thankfully, someone decided this was annoying enough to fix without waiting for Apple to come to their senses, but this should still be an option in the sound prefpane. Hell...Windows even gives you the ability to *change* the startup sound, how hard could it be to allow you to mute the startup sound?

The one that used to be top of my list when I had my old PowerBook (though it seems to be mostly fixed on my MBP) is the behavior of closing the lid. It's a nice feature that when you close the lid, it automatically goes into sleep mode. However, this is *not* the correct behavior after the user has started the shutdown procedure. Once the machine is done prompting the user and is going to shut down, nothing should stop it. I had many dead batteries that came from thinking I'd shut down the computer only to realize it had actually gone into sleep mode before it shut down and continued to run down the battery until it died. When I plug the machine back in, it comes out of hibernation only to...drum roll...finish shutting down. So far my MBP has only done this once (which I think was a result of an update doing something post logout).

I have at least 10 more nits that would be almost trivial to fix that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that Apple is in no way perfect and does make stupid design decisions in many cases.

That said, you'll pry my MBP from my cold, dead hands, since it makes life so much simpler than my work laptop (PC, dual boot Windows/Kubuntu...Windows being basically for just for Outlook and Photoshop). And the lack of Quicksilver on any other platform means the rest are basically a non-starter for me when I have the choice of what platform to use.

I've found ToyViewer http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ogihara/software/OSX/t oyv-eng.html to be a great image viewer. It supports a pretty wide variety of image formats and can convert images to different formats for you (really useful when you need to put MS unsupported images into a Word doc).

I love it that java guys say java is so fast, small and lean on mobile devices, yet Mysaifu requires 11mb to install on my 6700 and ibm j9 needs 50+mb. Small, my ass. Don't get me started on speed.

For those needing the jvm for this or similiar devices, get one here:

http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~dat/java/project/jvm/d ownload_en.html
or
search ibm.com for WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment (You need to register to download)

Anything that requires the user to repeatedly "do stupid action (a)" to bypass "annoying function (b)" indicates that perhaps "annoying function (b)" should either not exist, period, or have a mechanism to be bypassed/disabled automatically.

And for the record, a previous posted already showed how to turn off the mac startup sound.

People probably would make a fuss if it were true, but thankfully it's not. StartupSound.prefpane.

Is the startup sound on Macs customizable?

No it isn't. It is built into the firmware and will change, when an error occurs. Just like beep codes on a PC, but sounds nicer.

Beside from not being customizable, the startup chrd can easily be turned off. There are a number of third party tools like StartupSound.prefPane and TinkerTool System , or you could easily enter

sudo nvram boot-volume=0

The Mac chime is a part of the BIOS.

To be more precise, it is part of the Open Firmware. The word "Open" in Open Firmware doesn't mean the firmware is open source, but that it has an open API. Thus one can manipulate the firmware using this API without having to deal with a proprietary BIOS screen. E.g. the

nvram

To disable the startup chime just execute

nvram boot-volume=0

So the startup chime of the Open Firmware isn't mandatory, but it is not very well documented, how to disable it. From a sophisticated platform like the Mac, I would expect an easily accessible control in the system preferences, not some thirdpary add-ons or obscure acrobatic on the command line; but perhaps I'm just spoiled over the years with OS X.

On my Mac it's all controllable by the user.. indeed any mac running os x afaik (haven't checked out os 9 and before to this depth). And there's even a beaufitul simple preference pane you can install at http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/index.en.html

It's not that Apple can do no wrong, but that they don't try to imo. :D

Set it to whatever volume you want without messing with sound control manually: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid= 16021051. Add to his list, this one for PPC: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/in dex.en.html

Thanks for the links. I'll be sure to take advantage of that :).

Actually the startup chime obeys the system volume. If you need to have a "quiet" start and your volume wasn't shut off on shutdown, you can hold down the "mute" button as you boot and that will squelch the chime. If you are into esoteric settings or you have a special need to kill just the startup chime, install this third party utility, which allows you to set the startup chime volume directly.

Set it to whatever volume you want without messing with sound control manually: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid= 16021051. Add to his list, this one for PPC: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/in dex.en.html

There is this StartupSound Preferences Panel that allows for more control over the startup sound...

'...within the os'; Not true, a quick google would have shown otherwise. There's a great simple System Preference Pane downloadable at..

http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/index.en.html

The OSX startup sound can be turned off or volume adjusted with a nice little system preference pane at http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/index.en.html

So what's your excuse?

If you have a PowerPC Mac, this utility will let you reduce the volume of the startup sound or even turn it off. I've used it on some of our computers at work to reduce the noise of the startup sound.

http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/in dex.en.html

Not sure if anyone has made something like this for Intel Macs, though.

Christianity had already spread through the Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion.

Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion

Really? Buddhists ahve historically fought holy wars, and persecuted other religions (for example Japanese Christians were forced into hiding.

Even now arson attacks on churches are frequent in Sri Lanka.

Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other

Jesus fairly consistently preached against hating anyone - even when Jewish tradition permitted it.

As soon as I saw the title of this story, I thought "it would be a crime if Guilty Gear wasn't mentioned." Although I can't access the article, it's great to see that this amazing game is getting some mainstream recognition. Guilty Gear XX Slash, the latest installment, is by far my favorite game ever. It's pretty popular in Japan (their arcade scene is orders of magnitude larger than the US's) and has an underground following in the States. In fact, a rather large tournament, Midwest Championships, is being held today.

Here are some links to a couple of videos of obsessed Japanese showing off what the Guilty Gear engine is capable of [Warning: large files! But cool if you like 2d fighters!]:
Sunrise
And two on this page: Lamentation of a Soul and Jam Combos.

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

This may be a bit pedantic, but you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del with one hand with all the keyboards I tried. This will work unless you have a keyboard that lacks the Ctrl and Alt keys on the right side. It even worked on my laptop, although it's certainly awkward, and is probably hard for children.

It wouldn't work very well on the original IBM 84 key keyboards. Though if I remember right, even back then there were 3rd party keyboards that had the now familiar 101 key layout.

And if you say "why would an intelligent designer make it so that the birth channel leads through the only non-expandable bone ring in our body, which is barely wide enough to allow birth at all, a catholic might say, "well, as punishment for original sin, duh."

Use one of these huge sons of bitches to lug around data in even larger and even more wheels at once.

I use, and recommend, a Sun Type 6 keyboard, Item-number #320-1271. It comes with a standard USB connector and a Mac-friendly layout, including the "command" key in the correct position.

Here is a diagram, a picture, and the online ordering page.
Sometimes it can be ordered for less from different online stores.

XBox million sellers in the US (source):

Halo: 3.10 M
Project Gotham: 1.07 M
GTA: Double Pack: 1 M
Splinter Cell: 1.33 M

And some more that did fairly well (note: different site--less complete and numbers are slightly more out of date). (source)

DoA3: 0.73 M
Ghost Recon: 0.79 M
Mech Assault: 0.51 M
Spider Man: The Movie: 0.51 M

So: no, Halo isn't the only successful XBox game, and the discrepancy presumably wouldn't be so large if it wasn't for the massive gap in advertizing between Halo and every other game combined. Then again, that may be a strategy for Microsoft: create a franchise that it can later use to draw in customers. In which case...

Wait for several people to claim that Halo 2 doesn't live up to the original despite being an improvement in basically every way!

Yeah, but what about the games that have made a huge impact on the US game market but haven't left a trace in Japan? What about Doom? Half-life? Those two games are easily two of the top 5 games of all time, yet they barely sold at all in Japan.

I think one or two people in Japan still 'get' these terribly Western games - for a start, there's Konmei Satou, who designed some gloriously surreal maps for Half-Life and Quake 2. If you haven't played his Half-Life stuff, I can seriously recommend it - here's some reviews to help persuade you. :-)

These are of course significant, but I wouldn't call them "apps". "Apps" are word processors, mail clients, web browsers, file-sharing software, etc.; in short: client stuff.

They may lack market share, but there are mail clients, web browsers, file sharing, and numerous word processors available. In fact, if you follow those links you will find a couple of complete office suites written in Java. IBM/Lotus used to offer eSuite, which was an entire office package written in Java. Oracle has a huge marketshare and is very focused on Java/Linux as well.

You may not have personally used any of these programs, but give them a shot before you write off the language. Chances are many people use Java applications with no knowledge that they are doing so (Limewire users come to mind). If the language lacks applications, it is the fault of developers, not the language. That is the point of ESR's letter: there would be much wider use/acceptance of Java if it were open and the incompatibilities between the implementations were fixed.

MSBob... proudly Polish AND Canadian :-)

Wow, this list is even more interesting. 3 of the top 4 US games were not even released in Japan.

in which case almost all of the top selling games are by a japanese developer (namely Nintendo themselves). Here's an interesting chart listing the gamecube's best selling games.

This one and this one That just doesnt look anything like high quality CG to me. I mean, unless someone around here knows Japanese and can give a decent translation, and not the gibberish Babelfish produced, then I don't see any reason to believe that the word DVD assures us that this is just going to be a movie.

This one and this one That just doesnt look anything like high quality CG to me. I mean, unless someone around here knows Japanese and can give a decent translation, and not the gibberish Babelfish produced, then I don't see any reason to believe that the word DVD assures us that this is just going to be a movie.

Also, try this one.

Hi, I maintain a Dragon Quest-related news website. Yes, this is a plug. But anyways here are some of DQVIII pictures. Gamefront's scanned one of the images. Also the Japanese website, Quiter has posted several images.

Japanese Transparent Skirts and Optical Camouflage Research

Transparent Skirts? What, the current schoolgirl uniforms aren't good^H^H^H^Hbad enough?

Only in Japan... :)

(ObAdultJapanese Art Links: Akira M's on this, he even names his XHTML/CSS Gallery "No more Pants" and has a mascot of a girl in just the top part of a schoolgirl uniform (turned away from the camera and usually covered by a logo).
There are a few other "Modified School Uniform Fetish" sites out there too -- DuKE, for example, has a school where the uniform was designed by the same guys who did "The Emporer's New Clothes", and Atma frequently has stuff on a "Naked Apron" School are two I have handy links to.)

Qvwm looks like Windows 95, while MLVWM looks like classic MacOS. There are lots of other nice window managers here

Here are some pictures of the PSX's main menu screen taken from a news
segment that Fuji television in Japan aired (Quiter
and ZDnet).

The images show how you will be able to navigate content stored on your
HDD, DVD, as well as content offered from online places like Sony Music.
The menu offers 3D "Jog-style" navigation. The article also has a quote from
Sony executives saying that the PSX will be the "Home Server" for it's consumers
and be a global product (with releases scheduled in the US and Europe).

Beer Water.

You will absoutlely hate this!

This has been know for a while. It was orignally reported on this website

Here see the Star Wars trilogy legos style!

Well, that's interesting and all, but when I saw the link copy I must admit I was expecting something more like this: http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~mbsf/sworde.htm

Though I would still dearly love to see a stop-motion recreation rather than stills. You gotta love that smiling Darth Maul figure....

Therefore, I won't discuss it further.

Instead, let's have a look at one of nature's most interesting creatures, the humble fruit bat.

About the fruit bat:
Many microbats have various facial protuberances,used in echolocation,which make it hart to refer to them as "cute". Fruit bats don't echolocate and have large eyes designed to be efficient at twilight. Their bodys are plump and furry. They are so cute!! Combined head and body length is about 20cm and wingspan can be as much as about 90cm.
They live in subtropical and tropical areas. Ryukyu Flying Foxes living in Kuchinoerabu are the northernmost of all the world's flying foxes. In winter they become less active in the low temperatures and are difficult to find, but they don't hibernate.
Bats have four very long fingers and a short thumb to each wing. The wing membranes are attached to the fingers and to the legs. They have a claw on the second finger in addition to the claw on the thumb. These are used to manipulate fruit and leaves.
Fruit bats make audible sounds. When two individuals meet they hit each other with their wings and scream loudly. Large colonies are occasionally very noisy with monkey-like screams. As fruit bats roost in trees out in the open their loud chattering can be heard from far away.
Fruit bats feed almost exclusively on fruit. They crush the fruit to extract the juice and spit out the pulp. The droppings are liquid. They look like bird droppings but lack uric acid crystals. They drop seeds in flight over a wide area, giving them a good chance of germination. Sometime they eat the pollen and the nectar of the flowers of mescal,palm and garcinia and so help in pollination. When fruit and flowers are in short supply in the woods they also eat leaves. Fruit bats have a good sense of smell. Many tropical fruits and flowers that bloom at night have scents that attract fruit bats.
Fruit bats don't use echolocation and have keen vision. As they can't see in total darkness,. they fly using moonlight,starlight and townlight. During the day they roost in trees not caves. Sometime they fly during the day.

There are few bat biologists so the life of fruit bat has not, as yet, been well studied. I have read that P.d.daitoensis mate in November and December,but I have watched them mating at the end of the year and into the new year. Babies are born in May or June. Their roosts are not always permanent. They roost in small groups or singly. Sometimes they roost in large colonies. Bonin Flying Foxes in Titijima Island have large fixed colonies from January to April. They wake up at sunset. When the sun sets and the sky darkens their voices are heard from the roost. About 30 minutes after sunset they assemble at the feeding site. For the following 2 or 3 hours they are very active feeding and chasing each other. As night draws on they disperse and rest. They begin to return to the roost 1 hour before sunrise and go to sleep at dawn. Sometime ,when it is cloudy, they don't return to the roost until after sunrise.

See http://www2r.biglobe.ne.jp/~fruitbat/english.htm for more information.

"Any idea why?"

Did you by any chance try clicking on any of those "not link free" links? Specifically, this one:

http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~APercher/u/faq_e.htm#l inkfree

;-D

DennyK

It's nice to see E still moving along. The more Desktop/WM's we have the better off we'll be. One of the things that seems to be lost in the ranting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussions about "The Linux Desktop" is that with all the different GUI options available we can make Linux look like anything we want and thus it will fit into any environment. If you need it to look like WinXX, CDE, Mac or Bob The Builder's desktop it can.

Can't they place the DSL termination (DSLAM) in the curb box ? Well, the answer is flatly no.

Really? You might want to check with Alcatel or Lucent or AFC or NEC or Nortel about that.

(Maybe they don't go into curb boxes, but they do go into the neighborhood DLC remote terminal....)

We also know that Americans continue to grow obese at an alarming rate, and that sedentary individuals such as computer operators and programmers are particularly prone to gaining unwanted weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, you can solve BOTH of these crippling problems with one fantastic new product from Preposterous Corporation!

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The Power-Cycle(TM) features a real-time display that shows how much power you are delivering to your system. Like a mountain bike, it offers 24 gears, so you can optimize your pedaling rate to your computer's energy needs. Planning to start a floating-point intensive calculation that you will make your Pentium III consume an extra 20 watts? Just upshift to a higher gear so you get more current with each turn of the crank!

The Preposterous Power-Cycle(TM) even includes a built-in 100 kVA uninterruptible power supply that charges as you pedal, so that your computer won't run out of power and crash if you need to step away for a moment to use the restroom. Trust us, the Preposterous Corporation has thought of everything!

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here

sorry