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Your post is informative, except that there is no Kanji used for "Bookmarks". Many of the menus use Katakana which probably takes as much or more space as the English equivalent.

See a random Firefox.jp screenshot as an example.

My first games were on single sided floppies for my Dad's Fat Mac. I was like two or three, but I can remember Count On Mac, Concentration, Daleks (which, at the time, I never understood), Battleship, and Pinball Construction Set. Later, it was Prince of Persia, Sufflepuck Arcade, and Specter on the Classic before we upgraded to the Performa and got color! Actually, I can remember allot of the games from this page.

QEMU does

Microsoft: "Where do you want to go years after everyone else?"

Completely right. In many parts of southern Germany the ICE barely runs faster than 200 km/h.

Here is an interesting table listing max and average speeds of the fastest real-world train services:
http://www.h2.dion.ne.jp/~dajf/byunbyun/speeds/wor ld.htm

KVM is a linux kernel module, to run another OS under Windows you'd just need the windows port of QEMU. It's currently alpha, so it's probably not a viable option right now.

qemu will run perfectly well as an unprivileged user on either Linux or Windows with no installation required. Just grab a package from here, unzip it, and launch qemu-win.bat. If you want it to use the native memory management hardware and directly execute user code (read: go faster) then you can use the shared-source kqemu kernel driver on either platform.

If the disease is highly infectious, and if they're on the Shinkansen (not the normal Tokyo subway line, for this demonstration), a standing sick person could aerosolize virus-infused particles into a car packed with up to 100 standing people (scroll down to the bottom). The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport posts guidelines to congestion in Tokyo subway cars; according to local sources many trains run at over 200% capacity. Tokyo subway cars are roughly the same size as the average-sized New York subway car (save for the large R143 mega-cars, which while Japanese-designed are not suitable for use in Japan). A narrow-width New York City subway car can fit a hundred people in rush hour; the comparatively smaller Japanese (who also cram more tightly into the cars) can reach 150% that capacity.

As opposed to...?

As opposed to using transparent persisting of objects, e.g. with ZODB (which doesn't use SQL at all) or other persistance frameworks (which translate everything to SQL behind the scenes).

The shinkansen has been running since 1-oct-1964, and in that time it has had one derailment(only minor, no injuries) and although it was due to an earthquake, since 1964 Japan has had a number of large earthquakes.
The track is beautifully put together and the ride supurb, unlike here in Australia where the track width varies upto a quarter of an inch.

Proper keyswitches register well before the end of their stroke, and provide gradually increasing resistance the rest of the way down. Rubber-sheet keyboard register at the end of their squishy stroke, so you have no choice but to bash your fingers against the bottom all day long.

Apple used to make decent keyboards - the Apple Extended Keyboard is wonderful (once modified to put the control key in the right place). The Extended II is almost as good. The smaller M0116 and the compact Apple ADB Keyboard - the obvious inspiration for the physical form of their latest abomination - are good too.

If you plan to keep using your fingers, get one of those old Apple keyboards and an ADB-to-USB converter. Or get one of these. Or, for that matter, get an AT-to-USB converter and an IBM Model M, a Fujitsu FKB4700 (OEM, many labels), or that skinny one with the fold-over function key templates.

I've worked with the X68000 and they are/were very cool and quite advanced for their time. Trying to compare different platforms is ultimately pointless so I won't say it was more advanced than the Amiga or Atari ST but it certainly was a peer and shouldn't be overlooked.

Not quite true. During a special run downhill, Mallard's speed peaked at 126mph for a few seconds. Still not bad for a steam train though. UK trains still did respectably (6th) in the world rankings a couple of years ago.

I'm not aware of anyone porting the drivers to Linux or Windows however.

I've lived in Tokyo for over a year now. I've taken the shinkansen (bullet trains) and see them pass through Tokyo station everyday. Neither of these allows you to actually SEE a bullet train up close at full speed. The first time I did (a few weeks ago) it was an amazingly moving experience.

The key is to be at a station in the MIDDLE of the line. Taking the train from Tokyo to Osaka (of some other big city) you will never see the trains at full speed. We took the Nasuno to Nasu Shiobara. This is a major shinkansen stop, but not the end of the line. While standing on the platform, trains will pass by on the center tracks at full speed!

We were waiting for the next train to Tokyo, and had luckily gone up to the platform about 20 minutes early. We saw two shinkansen pass us at full speed, going in opposite directions one after another. It was truly amazing...When you look down the track, its absolutely amazing how far away they are only seconds later. It was a very powerful experience I will never forget.

If you travel outside the cities in Japan, I highly recommend taking advantage of this. And, while you can see the trains in the middle of the country passing this way, I doubt you can get as close as you can when on the platform. Much of the tracks are raised high above the ground for long stretches. This station was in the middle of nowhere, but the platform is raised at least 4-5 stories off the ground...(as is the track for as far as I could see in either direction...)

Thanks for the link.
Wow good trains.sweet

No, you need the Japanese who have some REALLY cool-looking trains.

And you can set your watch by their departures.

Remember the Acorn RiscPC? The most expandable case design ever.
Start with a pizzabox with 1 CD drive 1 floppy drive. Then if you need more room, just add slices until you have behemoth server case!
Would this be possible? Of course, you would new motherboard standard, with riser plates for PCI.
Just a thouhgt. (Oh and the RiscPC was quiet, no fans whatsoever needed!)

Fit a Pizza-oven to it as well and we'll never need to go out again...

Yee, do you ever have that mangled! The island's name was "Oo too" ("Oo shima" on modern maps, "oo" means a long "o") English name would be "Big Island". The island is part of Japan, and the gatekeeper to the Sagami Sea. Godzilla has to pass it on the way to Tokyo Bay. Mount Mihara, in which Godzilla was imprisoned from 1984 to 1989, is located on the island.

Er... no. The island is 'Ootojima' (), written "Large Door Island". Ooshima is a completely different island. See here for further info.

For those curious, here's a link to a page with pictures of the machine (absolute bottom, the cube on a stand). As far as practical benefits go, I can see the cube form factor being very practical in terms of fold/slide-out panels for things like motherboard, drive array, etc...

What will make the trip from Tokyo to Osaka much shorter with the maglev, is not only the übercool new technology & speed, but mostly the fact that the tracks will be much shorter.

If you take a look at the tracks map (the current Tokyo-Osaka tracks are in orange), you'll see that they don't go in a straight line at all:
they follow the coast (through Shizuoka), and after Nagoya they still take a longer path to go through Kyoto instead of heading directly towards Osaka.

The reason for this is that Japan is constituted mostly of mountains. And the straight line from Tokyo to Osaka has to cross many of them. As a result, the construction of the straight Tokyo-Osaka maglev line will cost billions

- They need to develop the new maglev technology and stabilize it
- They need to build hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and bridges
- They need to build the maglev tracks

Therefore, don't expect the maglev to be inaugurated before at least a decade.

btw ac the fastest Shinkansen is not the hikari, but the nozomi. The Hikarii IIRC stops at least in Shizuoka, Nagoya, Kyoto, whereas some Nozomis don't make any stop between Tokyo and Osaka, and thus gain a few minutes.