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I skimmed it but didn't read the comments at bottom.

It's true that I don't have sales data, and I'd be curious to see it if anyone does. Fair point.

The article mentioned that some handsets in Japan have capabilities that iPhones don't. It also mentioned that some of those handsets have initial usability issues. But that spoke (however well or poorly) to nairbv's point about Japan having some "better" handsets available.

The article also pointed out various aspects of the iPhone that might not appeal to some elements of the Japanese consumer market. They seemed plausible to me.

Finally, I'm guessing that *you* may not have read the editor's note about how the article changed after its initial publication (I read only the updated version):
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/why-the-iphone/#editnote

As I understand things, it's not simply a matter of "better". Personalization is important in Japanese culture. There's huge variety of phones and consumers can find and tweak one to be "perfect" for each individual. But Apple seems to have a diametrically opposed "one size fits all" philosophy of consumers products -- "we built the most perfect product we could, and it's the one you should use." (I type this on a MacBook Air with a piece of paper taped across the camera that has no lens cap and can't be turned off). So from what I've heard, the iPhone has done poorly in Japan and the reason is cultural mismatch. If there's a university program pushing iPhones on students, it strikes me as not unlike Apple's historical practice of using educational systems to gain footholds in markets. But good luck to them trying this in Japan...

After I wrote the above, I found the following story on "Why the Japanese Hate the iPHone:"
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/why-the-iphone/

Ah, so maybe you're right about simply "better" phones. What I wrote at top was opinion stemming from 9 years working in the telco industry, quite often closely -- sometimes in person in Tokyo -- with my then-employer's Tokyo office and Japanese customers.

Mathematical models always only work in a certain range As Newtonian mechanics well for smaller velocities and macroscopic bodies it has to be replaced for large velocities or in smaller scales. Exponential growth laws have to be replaced by logistic growth. etc Models are especially popular in probability theory. The text mentions Gaussian Copula function, the "rocket fuel" for collateralized debt obligation, which is cited as one of the reasons for the finance disaster. See "The formula that killed Wall street".

As a correction, can you really have missed all of media noise around the equation that brought down Wall Street? That's a pretty big example of a broken model that directly led to a lot of the current chaos, rather than people feeding garbage into a good model.

From Kevin Kelly:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all
"""
We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government -- for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
"""

In some ways, the capitalistically-oriented Bayh-Dole act is another thing that has damaged scientific integrity.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act

A better idea than Bayh-Dole, which gives ownership of inventions to universities and the government, would be for all inventions funded in whole or in part by public or charitable dollars should go under free licenses (or into the public domain). Something I wrote on that:
  http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html

Now that a manga collector got jailed up to 15 years having a some, hosting a website to the internet with plain and real child pornography should get at least death penalty (they will try to push it to something worse). You could not care if your pc is sending spam, or cracking captchas, or serving malware, not affecting specially you... but hosting a child porn site in your own pc is a bit risky taking that into account.

Back before the days of the 4004, 8008, and 8080, when we built computers, we REALLY built computers.
None of this take a pre-built-motherboard, add a pre-built-power-supply, add a pre-built graphics card...

A great example: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/homebrewed-cpu/

oblig: get off my lawn

i remember reading about a startup in the dotcom days that allows users to annotate webpages in ways that can be shared. complete failure

Sounds like you're talking about Third Voice, which IMHO was one of the most brilliant ideas for improving the web, since .. uh .. the invention of the web. (I have to say "idea" because I never got to try out their actual implementation, so I don't know if it sucked or not. But some day I hope to take a shot at implementing my own take on something vaguely like that.)

most users not only want to do nothing, they want to make sure they are seeing exactly what everyone else sees

What "most users" think they want is important if you're trying to create a commercial product, but it's not relevant if you're trying to solve other problems. And I think that while people do seem happy with their horses and buggies, they only need to see an automobile in action once, before some start to wonder, "Hey, can I have one of those?"

its a basic human desire for commonality of culture: sharing anything on the web is all about being part of contributing to a group, and consuming what is the same for everyone else. this is a basic human social drive. that if they had content that was "special" and only visible to them in a certain way, even if in just cosmetic appearance, you are driving a wedge between the user and that sense of shared commonality.

Wow. Well, here's what I think: If changing the presentation of the content takes away all commonality, then there never was any content.

I am probably using a slightly different size browser window to read slashdot than you are. Maybe even a different browser. But here we are, talking on slashdot. Something survives transformation.

I really do think that this summary was pretty unfair to it. This really doesn't seem to be a rebranding, but actually a pretty solid rewrite of the features. I read a WIRED article on it earlier today and it sounded interesting - a little like the offspring of Wolfram|Alpha and Google. See http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides-its-best-features/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/manga-porn/

U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World

In an obscenity first, a U.S. comic book collector has pleaded guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality.

Christopher Handley, described by his lawyer as a "prolific collector" of manga, pleaded guilty last week to mailing obscene matter, and to "possession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children." Three other counts were dropped in a plea deal with prosecutors.

The 39-year-old office worker was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Handley's guilty plea makes him the first to be convicted under that law for possessing cartoon art, without any evidence that he also collected or viewed genuine child pornography. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

Keep that cartoon coochie identifyably 18!

Having the adviser report to both the national security and economic advisers suggests that the White House is seeking to ensure a balance between homeland security and economic concerns, the sources said.

Economic concerns like what? The fact that internet commerce explodes on Cyber Monday as consumers and businesses enjoy a wealth of increased buying/spending? Or would you so happen to be referring to economic concerns like the MPAA/RIAA are short one ivory back scratcher? Perhaps the concerns that all that internet commerce is happening with most of it untaxed? Maybe concerns that used books, DVDs and games are being sold increasingly with a down-turned economy?

I am certain the economic concerns you speak of are only economic concerns of lobbyists when you should maybe be paying attention to what consumers are interested in?

You want to help the consumer, you should mandate that proprietary DRM violates anti-trust laws as it locks consumers into the software and hardware associated with their music service. Or maybe you should look into allowing people to use whatever level of encryption they want to secure their financial transactions? Nah, nobody's paying you for that.

Throw on top of that the fact that Biden's good friends with the MPAA and RIAA (and I'm sure Obama's not far behind) there may be cause for concern.

Even more fun is that in order for nukes to successfully work as deterrents, even the first world countries have to act like nutjobs so the other side would actually think they'd be crazy enough to use them. It's pretty pointless to have nukes if everyone thinks you're too civilized to use them.

So credit/blame Kissinger / Nixon for coming up with the idea of pretending to be nuclear-armed crazies first:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar?currentPage=all

Might as well bring bacteria and other life as well and contaminate away..

Yes we already did that so what is the next step? ... profit? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/the-dirt-on-mar/

Wal Mart actually did attempt to sell a Linux box for awhile. They figured out they could save a bunch of money by ducking Microsoft licensing fees, but not enough people wanted such a thing.

This is what you are looking for.

I doubt Bill Gates ever said that. He's claimed the contrary on several occasions:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

But yes, making predictions for the future is dumb. Unless you control the future, in which case it's not really a prediction *cough* Moore's Law *cough*

This was cool when I first read it...in 2007.

And it was cool when I was in the Slashdot thread as well.

Um... you can. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/11/official-guitar/

Whoever modded this insightful needs to do research, this was obviously a troll.

as yes there actually ARE some things, like child porn, that SHOULD be censored, according to ANY ideology

Right! Life is never more complicated than an ultimatum!

yet you see people all the time, especially on slashdot, actually saying "country A censors child porn so how can it criticize another country for censoring political opinion?

Really? ALL the time? ESPECIALLY on slashdot? Lets see two examples. Not half-assed examples that might kinda sorta mean what you say if you looked at them from the most biased perspective, nor examples of people trolling, I want full-ass examples. Gotta be pretty easy to come up with since they happen ALL the time, ESPECIALLY here. Right?

There is a cool graph on the outage from Wired and Arbor Networks.

Well good thing we still had access to Twitter! ;-)

I was following the #googlefail channel I found from the InformationWeek story and found a link to some cool response time graphs from the outage.

There's also a really great Wired article with graphs from a Tier-1 provider showing the incredible drop in network traffic (by about 15Gbps) during the outage.

Uh, no. I'm not eager to use a hip browser to go along with my jesus phone and elitist computer. Sorry Steve Jobs, you can keep your browser.

I read about chrome in wired, where they clearly stated this as a design goal. Does a WebKit browser preclude performance? Are you turned off by an open API to make development easier?

I thought Apple already proved the best way to fight digital piracy is to offer an extremely well stocked library that is shinier and easier to use than torrents. People will pay for convenience.

A year ago, it was reported Apple made 556 million in music sales on iTunes.

In fact, if you actually learn the lessons of the music industry, going digital is extremely profitable. Frederick Stamphammer, the RIAA Vice-President of Digitization says this is how the music industry is weathering the economic crisis.

Maybe they're planning on buying the Justice Department outright to avoid any future "misunderstandings".

The Recording Industry isn't likely to sell their prize to Microsoft.

I thought I'd add to my rant... I rode this metro system for several years. That article is correct. The trains were always pristine and always punctual. The announcements were clear, even if not necessary because the trains were frequent and on time.

I think the first line opened a bit over 12 years ago. And it's already reasonably extensive, and they're working aggressively to expand service. I know of two or three lines currently under construction and pretty far along. And looking at the map of what they have planned it's very ambitious. And this is in addition to conventional rail lines and a high speed rail line which service the rest of the country.

One thing I admired was how clean everything was and how good passengers were about keeping things clean. I never saw some slob munching on some sloppy sandwich, dripping juices everywhere and then dropping the empty bag on the floor under his seat, putting down a coffee cup so that it inevitably falls over when the train lurches spilling it's contents all over the train. But in the US that's routine.

Just try telling Americans that they shouldn't be eating on the train. They'd get all indignant. How dare anyone tell them what to do. God forbid they wait half an hour to eat.

And those are the people who make a mess of public transportation unintentionally. Then there are the mental defectives who have this obsession with writing gibberish all over every flat surface they see. Or otherwise they have this compulsion to tear at seat cushions and pull on trim. All because their parents couldn't be bothered to teach them to respect public property.

It goes back to what I see as fundamental cultural problems in the US. All this stuff is inter-related. This is yet another thing that has turned me off from public transportation. Why should I have to wait for trains that can't arrive on time and then have to be wary about where I sit when I can just drive anywhere I want where ever I want.

You'd do well to look up fMRI and lie detector. Because they are proposing using fMRIs as lie detectors based on localized brain activity.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/uc-berkeley-suffers-breach-of-student-health-data/

The email informing students of the breach was sent on May 8th. It was all over the news last Friday.

Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis) The claims are that no conclusive misdoings have ever been proven from the allegations. No one was prosecuted in the CIA cocaine transports that funded Iran/Contra, either. If you think this all ancient history, dig up the latest from Sibel Edmonds.

This outlines the shadowy connections between DoJ complicity with Israel against US interests, and the subversion of justice efforts to capture bi Laden - a US and MOSSAD intelligence agent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_Management_Information_System

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INSLAW

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/Jensen.htm

Upon review, we find that the crux of the state's "unauthorized use" case was based on the proposition that Appellant was acting outside the scope of his authorization to use the computer by engaging in criminal conduct, i.e. soliciting prostitution.

This wasn't so much about this guy sending naked pictures of himself as it was about him using his work computer to set up a rendez-vous with a dominatrix. The court determined that this was pretty obviously outside the boundaries of what you might reasonably expect to be able to do with your work computer.

That said, it's troubling that a misdemeanor (solicitation) can get double-whammied into a felony because it's done on company time, and that that's apparently at the company's discretion. And the potential for abuse is there. It doesn't look like the guy advanced constitutional vagueness arguments (probably because this isn't a great case for that). Eventually someone will be fired for surfing /. at work. Then we'll have an interesting case. :)

Does anyone play an "adult" video game to explore the human condition. Heck no. It's all about juvenile self-indulgence. Real adults are far past that stage and have no real desire to subject themselves to unsavory sights and sounds.

And there you have it. That barrier must be overcome for video games to be accepted as a dignified medium worthy of serious topics. It's the perception that must be overcome.

There is a sad truth to this, however there is also a large gray area. All media (books, comics, movies, TV, radio) have their own shining examples of controversial material. Many of them still have not quite been figured out by US society (likely others). As said in other replies, games are becoming an increasingly powerful medium with which to tell a story and directly involve the player. However, we quickly get into the area where "My rights end where yours begin", so while you may have a great story to tell, once it includes some risque nature to it, someone somewhere will be up in arms about it.

Consider other media for a moment. We're all aware of Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV, as well as all the backlash Howard Stern received and his move to satellite radio, a move which also garnered media attention about the content of his radio show.

The truth of the matter is that these things all reside in a capitalistic society. They wouldn't be made if there weren't some market for them, no matter how obscure or small the market may be. It's true that many juveniles (18-70something) get kicks out of playing GTA, so there's a market for it. Personally I don't care for GTA, so I don't support it by buying a copy (or even downloading one). If you find something offensive in a movie, you don't buy the DVD. If you find something offensive on TV/radio, you change the station. If you find a game offensive, don't buy it. When the market for something becomes small enough, it goes away, just like VHS, just like 8-track, just like VHS.

The number of heads doesn't mean jack sh***. Tape speed is low, and the dynamic range of cassettes are horrible compared to other technologies.

Under proper conditions, the quality of good Vinyl generally exceeds the sound quality of CDs.

Better frequency response, better dynamic range in practice, less distortion (assuming you don't have dirt or dust in the LP or on your read head).

My understanding from talking with traffic controllers is that the systems are not a requirement for controlling traffic. If the systems are down, or are believed to be unreliable the controllers will simply continue with a more conservative approach

Your understanding is both accurate and out-of-date. A key, long-term initiative of the FAA has been "Free Flight" to support the goals such as: handling more traffic, reducing per-flight fuel costs of the airlines, etc. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/es.faa.html

Each step towards that goal reduces the ability of controllers to handle the planes already in the sky if their computers ever die. Heck, when the old round-tube, green-screen ATC monitors were replaced the controllers lost the desk-space they would have used to track planes without the computers (the consoles with the old round-tube, green-screen monitors could be rotated down to a horizontal plane to provide a surface on which the controller could revert to the pre-computer "shrimp boat" method of ATC but that ability was dumped when the color monitors replaced them).

Just suppose that foreign crackers penetrated the air traffic control system or the power grid and either caused massive casualties due to lack of air traffic control or they turned off the lights to major portions of the country also causing significant casualties and economic losses. Further, let's suppose that we are able to identify the source of the attack. It sounds like the majority of the posters so far think we ought to call up their ISP and ask that their account be terminated.

I think the real reason that we are doing this is to force the governments in question to actually crack down on their own problems. Russia won't want to risk an international incident, for instance, and will gladly remove the botnets running out of their country if they have to. So will China. Probably with lots of bullets and other measures if need be.

And as for it not causing harm, well, besides my ex having 4 layers of protection and not doing anything wrong either, I just spent 6 hours fixing her bot infested machine. And then there's what happens if say, they compromise a site with personal data on it for 160,000 people...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/uc-berkeley-suffers-breach-of-student-health-data/

Nah, that could never happen... I mean what are the chances...

Eh, I'll go to see it simply because they have the Aptera 2e make a brief cameo in the background about half an hour into the movie (reportedly, it's with Kirk and McCoy on the steps at the Academy with the Golden Gate in the background).

When I said 'daguerreotypical' I was making an adjective out of daguerreotype, the first common method of photography. If you told Louis Daguerre in 1839 that in little more than a century we'd be taking pictures of astronomical events that span back through 95% of the time this universe has existed, physical waveforms travelling a mere three thousandths of a percent slower than light itself, and constructing cameras with lasers (not that he would understand those) that would take 6.1 million pictures/second. (Not to mention atomic force microscopes imaging atomic structures.)

I'm sure that faced with all that, Louis Daguerre would be agape. Seminal technologies are fantastically underwhelming compared to refinements (Exhibit A vs. modern computers). I would say that given current technological trends in neurological imaging and analysis, the mere idea of mapping and copying is conservative. Most likely there are even more advanced applications that haven't even been conceived that will rear their heads in a century or two.

While I respect Mr. Kurzweil, I'll bring up Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" Wired Magazine Archive

I suppose looking at human behavior with rose colored glasses on is nice and all but the parent is correct in that government (or the money behind it) will use (if in a position too) the technological Singularity to further their own ends.

If Ubuntu were a $0 way of running windows applications it would take over the world.

History disagrees. Perhaps you've forgotten about Lindows?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

And while Lindows was NOT free at $99, it was a $0 investment over a Windows upgrade, in its day.

http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2001/10/47888

He's the one who has appointed all the RIAA goons to high office. Even if he may not know exactly what is going on, he would have to be a fucking moron to not have a clue as to what might happen when he did that.

'The red means that it's "in the future" and being seen by a subscriber. For some reason they've been showing up for a few seconds to normal users too.'

That gives me a great idea! Why not devise some sort of complex financial instrument that nobody understands, which effectively bets the entire economy on the future colour of Slashdot articles? It would be no sillier than what happened over the last decade, and pretty easy to implement if we can come up with a single neat formula that seems to give correct predictions if you don't look too hard. Speaking of which, I thought we were still blaming this guy:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all

Wired: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
David X. Li formula used "Gaussian copula function" for risk estimation. It greatly oversimplified risk estimation and ignored any nonlinear, topological and whatever nontrivial dependencies, taking into account only single correlation parameter. Formula was applied recursively and the end result was completely divorced from reality.

Wrong!

You incorrectly claim that "the cable companies and telcos have a huge investment in infrastructure ahead of them before they can profit in the general market". However, this is absolutely not the case in America. Please look at a story from Wired.com which was published in 2004 about how "Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics":

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/time-warner-cab/

Also look at a recent New York Times article which tells us how "providers' profit margins are stable, and that investment in network equipment is generally falling."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20isp.html?_r=2

And here is the simple summary: "Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has told investors that doubling the Internet capacity of a neighborhood costs an average of $6.85 a home." That's not $6.85 per month, that's a *one time cost* of $6.85 per home *period*. So anybody who's trying to trick you into thinking that the problem is "huge investment in infrastructure" is absolutely wrong, and the cable companies' own accountants are admitting this.

One attempt by Banzi http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing

Prove the NSA backdoors

Hard proof is hard to do when deniability is part of the design.
But here is something extremely suspicious, "a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor."

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115

Well in that case, I'll just bring a pen with me and the Air Force will be mine! Mwuahahah!!

Combine Second Life and Second Skin with virtual reality "cave" technology and you have a low rent holodeck. Use it to interpret gestures like the Wii does, and yes, you have a revolution in cybersex and interactive pr0n.

I say it's a buy! Someone is going to make many millions on this. (Especially if they invent a Bluetooth API for optional teledildonics.)

Check who is paying their bills. They are only trying to do what has been done for a long time convince people that there needs to be more government money thrown at ISPs. We have seen these same stories going back years and years. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/04/63264 The report assumes no new investment in increasing capacity. Whatever. Dumb Masses.

Thanks. Calling Mark Russinovich an "advertising blogger" gave me a good laugh. The clever use of the $ sign topped it off perfectly.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2005/11/69601 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Russinovich

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/top-25-newspapers-lose-1-million-readers-since-last-march/

I had the same idea, probably you did too, but our name doesn't have nearly the clout as a "Researcher from Carnegie Mellon". After seeing their prototype, I could have made better.

My concept is: Little ridge lines around the areas of the "virtual button", needs less air, can be a more rigid material, because its only a small deformation, our finger tips are pretty good at sensing detail.

Another concept was an array of mechanical oscillators (tappers or vibrators) under the screen, so the buttons have different feeling, although the surface remains flat. For those with rare earth magnets in their fingertips, a little EM field would cause varying sensations. And I'm sure that the materials tech geniuses have, or very soon will have a plastic that will feel smooth or rough if they run a current inside it.