Slashdot Mirror

Looks like they're talking about metric tons. This page says that it'll take a total of 1,999,200 grams of metal (9,996 g Gold; 1,232,840 g Silver; 736,372 g Copper; 16,660 g Zinc; 3,332 g Tin), which is about 2 metric tons. At market prices, that's 114,781,936 yen or $1,019,462. Guess they're saying it'll take four times that weight of actual phones to get that much metal ("The production process will reduce this eight tonnes down to around two").

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/service/safety/areamail/about(Japanese)
http://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/1009/29/news093.html(Japanese)
Japan Meteorological Agency issues alerts to large companies, public transportations and cellphone carriers via dedicated networks. It's working quite well - trains make emergency stop, phones and speakers screams out, and you'll even have a time to make your last tweet before the disaster will hit you!

I think it has much to do with the fact that iphone cell plans in Japan are reasonably priced. http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0912/01/news076.html (Japanese) Zero up front expense. The price of the iphone is amortized over the 24 month contract, then it is yours outright. Unlimited packets for 4410 yen (around $50 / month)

The supplied article only discusses edits by the Agriculture Ministry. Japanese reports, of course have more details.

Someone at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare was busted for editing the Japanese Wiki entry for Nanatsuiro Drops, a pornographic video game.

I will also note that the Japanese media reported this over a month ago.

So Geeko was banished to OpenSuSE.org, to make way for the new Mono-ized Clippy from their new pals in Redmond. Netcraft confirms it.

Original:

http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/pcuser/articles/0703/15 /news013_2.html

Go to babelfish and get it translated:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Funny, but I can't figure out anything really. Mabe some Japanese speakers can help us out here?

This is what they're really afraid of. It would be very funny if he got elected, especially given how 2ch has done stuff like almost getting Masashi Tashiro as Time's 2001 person of the year.

He does sound really awesome when you pair him with music from Dragonball Z!

The article mentions that this is a Manoi robot. A spot of online searching leads me to this MPEG video.

Cheers,
Ian

Heya! a bit late, but I could find the a quote about the price of the PS3 in Japan:

From : itmedia in japan:

"Both drives of the blue ray disk and the hard disk are prepared standard as for PS3 which is loaded 2 models (as for color only clear black), the 20G byte model 6 ten thousand 2790 Yen (including tax), the 60G byte model becomes open price." [babelfish translation].

Which I translated to: Y 62,790
This (according to xe.com) is more or less $558.668 USD.

About the rest of your comment, I understand the frustration of seeing that corporations are selling things more expensive, but one of the things I have seen while in UK is that the quality of life is better than that of USA and a lot of other countries. One of the things I read somewhere is that, one of the main difference between UK and USA quality of life is that over here (UK) having a full time job with the "minimum" payment (I believe it is £5.05) is enough to live ok, while in USA having a job is sometimes not enough to survive (and that is why you see people having two jobs or sellling Tupperware [not that there is something wrong with selling tupperware of course =oP] ).

Is there a stupidity prize at cebit?

Supppper. Supa Shuffle. Do tha supa shuffle.

My translation:

The patent is "information process device and information process method" (Patent No. 2803236), pantent request was made in October 1989, and registered in 17 July 1998. When clicking on "the 1st icon that describes the icon's purpose", followed by clicking on a second icon, the process describes the purpose of the second icon. It is said to have been a technology for word processors.

Source

To me, patent descriptions all seem rather too vague and confusing.

I've read quite a few posts referring to money from MSFT, but I don't think that's the case. According to a Japanese article, this whole thing came up because Matsushita was apparently trying to kick Sotec (a fairly new company that makes cheap PCs) out of business.

November 2002 Matsushita requests injunction to prevent Sotec and Justsystem for selling PCs that bundle Justsystem's "Just Home 2 Kakeibo Pack," which allegedly infringes the help patent. Sotec stops selling the PCs in question.

August 2003 Justsystem goes to court, trying to confirm that Matsushita has no right to stop sale of Just Home 2.

August 2004 Justsystem wins in court. Matsushita immediately sues Justsystem for Ichitaro and Hanako.

By the way, Justsystem started selling Linux versions of Ichitaro and Atok last year.

Last year, IMB created Thinkpad 20M, special model celebrating its twenty million shipments of Thinkpads. Its development concept is, in contrast to normal Thinkpad, to make bulky, thick Thinkpad with half-day warranty. It's made of nearly 100% natural materials and tastes good.

Note: linked article is written in Japanese.

According to this article, the protos are looking very good.

http://www.guidetohometheater.com/news/101804ceate c/

Admittedly there is a big difference between making a proto and making something in volume.

More info below. Its in Japanese but the pictures on the slides are pretty informative especially the one showing their production schedule.

http://www.itmedia.co.jp/lifestyle/articles/0409/1 4/news057.html

I don't know if SL-C3000 is going to be sold in US, but at least this article (in Japanese) reported a comment from Sharp who denied the rumor of them stopping the sale of SL-6000 in US.

They said "There is no fact of having made the decision which stops the enterprise development activities of SL-6000 in the U.S. market. It is also continued to consider the deployment according to the needs of a spot." (via a machine translation)

In Japan, most cellphone are 'advanced' model and phones without camera are rare. However, recently Tu-ka announced its release of Tu-ka S (sorry, the article is in Japanese). It only has a cellphone capability. It even doesn't have a display!

Here are some photos of the PDA.
http://www.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0410/15/n ews032.html

two medium sized shots

The Sanyo TS41 does this since some time ago. It has a "speaker" that you place on your skull (not necessarily near the ear) and allows you to hear the phone even on very noisy places. In fact that's what the TV commercial was focusing on.

There's an article (in Japanese) with very funny photos here. :)

All without additional hardware. The main advantage of RFID in this case is simply resistance to cloning of the tags. That's why this isn't being marketed as a mass-market feature.

Also, although this is the first READER application, DoCoMo did a pretty widespread trial last year with tags embedded in cell phones for use as train fare debits: Article.

This is more of a consumer application since the infrastructure and user need is already there.

While we're at it, I'm pretty sure we're missing the point by arguing whether it is demonstrating the ability to play soccer or football, since it was in fact a contestant in Bandai's annual Robo-One where the goal was to have little anthropomorphic (.PNG) robots pummel (.MPG) the crap (.MPG) out of each other to win by TKO. Dig around the sites and you'll find piles of highly entertaining videos.

For those of you who can't stomach anthropomorphic robot on anthropomorphic robot violence, click here for footage of the little suckers particpating in non-combative activities.

While we're at it, I'm pretty sure we're missing the point by arguing whether it is demonstrating the ability to play soccer or football, since it was in fact a contestant in Bandai's annual Robo-One where the goal was to have little anthropomorphic (.PNG) robots pummel (.MPG) the crap (.MPG) out of each other to win by TKO. Dig around the sites and you'll find piles of highly entertaining videos.

For those of you who can't stomach anthropomorphic robot on anthropomorphic robot violence, click here for footage of the little suckers particpating in non-combative activities.

Not denim. Not black. Red.

This news article in Japanese, dated 2003/07/15, report that SCEI announced recruitment of PlayStation emulator developers. (The official link at SCEI is http://www.scei.co.jp/synthesis/career/careerpro10 8.html, though it's already gone. Geez, I submit this story before in the last summer to Slashdot but rejected)

What is required for those who apply the recruitment was 1. Experience in emulator making 2. Knowledge about Just-In-Time compiler 3. Knowledge about CPU micro-architecture, and recommended is "experience in debugging existing game titles".

For PS2 compat in PS3, 1-chip EE/GS a la PS1 in PS2, for co-processor in PS3, or something hardware/software mix, will be safe bet.

The Motorola A760 is based on linux, but that doesn't necessarily mean it runs X. It could just be using linux's memory management, file system, etc. code. I don't know how good of reviews it's getting, but I don't think you can really say that linux isn't ready.