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Japanese Linux Initiatives
where_is_my_mind writes: "IBM, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi agreed to join forces to speed up development of Linux apps. Check it here." Another submitter sent in a Japanese story which said they were specifically working on building banking applications.
When will a version of Windows be based on Unicode from top to bottom, including all of those nooks and crannies that Microsoft likes to disavow?
To the end user, "KDE" is the distribution.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...if you're lucky.
OTOH, myself and various other WinDOS users have had all manner of troubles with every version of windows all the way up to NT5.
Just because something was problematic on one combination of machine & Linux distro does not magically make Linux generally unsuitable for the desktop.
There are plenty of WinDOS horror stories to counter every Linux horror that comes along. Ease of use in WinDOS is more hype than reality.
Redmond has not yet replicated the Macintosh.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...was me. The Nikkei article can be found here (if you can read Japanese). It says, in a nutshell, that the four companies will be using Linux as a base for "core banking functions" such as financial calculations. The 4 companies have committed 500 engineers to the project, and they plan for it to be ready for customers by 2003. One thing stated in the print version of the article is that they intend to speed up Linux-based transaction processing.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Without question.
Linux is the #1 developed-on OS here. There are about 15 Linux magazines ib print, and most big bookstores have a Linux section.
Not only that, many hardware components in stores have "works with linux" or "works with Turbolinux" stickers on them (if they're compliant, of course, which most are).
Linux is not a "revolution" here. It's taken very seriously. When I take out my Linux laptop at work, the American engineers chuckle. The Japanese engineers ask me what distribution I run and wether I have the latest version of Nautilus.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/kdb/
I've been wondering what this means. In the cartoons at least, it always seems to be added to the end of statements as emphasis, especially when the speaker is angry (or so my completely unscientific observation seems to be...I don't speak Japanese at all, other than a widely scattered and mostly useless handful of words and phrases. I just happened to notice this "ending" to phrases in subtitled anime one day...)
So...what's it mean?
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Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I was just speaking to some people from Hitatchi Japan about this yesterday at Linux World Tokyo.
(Specifically, I was looking at some of their Middleware offerings.)
It was closed-source development using Linux as the platform, though everything was named "Open - ".
It's interesting because this is an area that is lacking in the Linux server area. When a company is spec-ing out a system, such as a trade processing system with an application server, web server and database, if some of the better alternatives are Linux-based, it opens the door to a lot of new Linux development and a lot of new jobs for Linux developers.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
PS - Had a quick lunch with Hemos and Taco at the conference - great guys.
MMDC.NET
-- My Weblog.
I cannot say if Japan is where Linux is thriving most. Many Japanese kids who think they are into computers dream of being employed by Microsoft.
Microsoft is so big, and Bill Gates is (was?) the richest man on the planet, therefore, it must be good, kind of logic. Japan has had a tradition to view Big Company == Good. But it's more or less present in most cultures.
On the other hand, the Japanese have been much into technologies. Just take a look at all the gadgets a Japanese kids have. This is because anything new is viewed as good. Many think that they have to get that ``new'' stuff at any cost. Here New == Good.
Japan at some point was where Mac had the biggest market share (~20%?). When I went to Akihabara in the summer of '97, there were huge piles of boxes of OS-2 Warp!
Already in '93 or so, a magazine called Unix Magazine had a CD-ROM each month loaded with Slackware and FreeBSD. (Ironically, when Windows NT was getting mature, the magazine became a WinNT magazine, without changing its name. I do not know the current state of affairs.)
As with most other countries, information from the US flows to Japan in a skewed manner. When someone reports that Linux is big in the US, then most Japanese think that everybody in the US must be using Linux. They assume that the Linux is the future. In order not to be left in the dust of the US, they think, we have to do everything to catch up. This mentality also is in the works, I assume.
Thus, it is not that the Japanese are objectively evaluating the alternatives. But it seems to me that Linux's seemingly thriving in Japan is a combination and/or balance of all the cultural tendencies mentioned above.
Off course the all the above are my personal view.
IBM gets an OS that scales from tiny embedded systems to large mainframes. They get an OS that works with IBM hardware and software, and with competitors' hardware and software. They get an OS where it is nearly impossible to get locked into and subject to the whims of a single vendor. If Linux gives IBM any advantage in the interconnections required for effective business-to-business-to-business ..., the returns make the billion dollars look like chump change.
I don't know but I suspect that IBM is already making money from Linux, internally as a consumer, big time.
Finally a chance to slashdot Slashdot!
And another use for the fish! Do they have carma caps there too?
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Er, if you look in their Older Articles section you'll see it started in May 25... Good guess though.
If anyone cares, you can check out the translation of the site using Babelfish by going to: http://babel.altavista.com/urltrurl?lp=ja_en&url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.ne.jp%2F
;-)
Not mind blowing, but would be interesting to keep an eye on...
(Oh, and the About says it started May 28th - even though the older articles section goes back to the 25th... tsktsk)
It's probably broken Japanese for "I don't speak Japanese."
You don't use "hanasu" (to speak) to describe familiarity with a language. You use "dekiru" (to be able). You should say, "Nihongo ga dekimasen," or, "I am not capable in Japanese." (lit. "[In] Japanese, [I] am not-able.")
If they'd actually used the proper particle, "Nihongo de hanashimasen," would mean, "I am not speaking Japanese (right now)."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yes and no. The most common formal way to ask someone in Japanese if they can speak it is, "Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?"
Yes, this is a slightly shorted version of "Nihongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?" but one would never say, "Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?" or, "Nihongo o hanashimasen," because the context is somewhat ambiguous. In more informal speech, "Nihongo o hanasu?" isn't too bad since it's a colloqualism, but "Nihongo hanasimasen" is just broken grammar.
Also, "ga" is used to refer to the objects of verbs such as "dekiru" and "aru" not too infrequently. "Ano hito ha, mondai ga arimasu ne.." (That guy has problems.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Use Windows 2000.. it comes with Japanese IME and support for every language you can think of. Mmmmm unicode.. when will a Linux distribution be based on it from the kernel level?
MS Media Player will destroy itself of its own accord, if the transition 6.4 -> 7 is anything to go by
IANAJ, but I think you're on crack. 'ga' -always- indicates that the word before it is the subject of the verb. In this case, dekimasen (which doesn't have an english equivalent) is best read as the potential negative of 'suru', hence, a more literal translation of "Nihongo ga dekimasen" would be "Japanese cannot be done [by me]".
The guy was probably referring to "Nihongo o hanashimasen" (it's easy to see who the two "o"s can combine in speech), where 'o' indicates that the preceding word is the direct object of the verb, or "[I] do not speak Japanese".
Note: read that previous translation literally (eg. "When talking to the Chinese, I don't speak Japanese"). English usually says "I don't speak ___" idiomatically to mean "I can't speak ___", for which the 'formula' sentence would be: Nihongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasen (which is the same sentence as "____ ga dekimasen" mentioned earlier, with the adjectival phrase "Nihongo o hanasu koto" as the subject), or (rough lit.) "The thing 'to speak Japanese' cannot be done [by me]". This differs from your first sentence in that it explicitly mentions speaking, although one might say simply "Nihongo ga dekimasen" if it were already clear from context which aspect of the Japanese language you couldn't do.
Pokemon Linux? Noooooooooooo......
then again, it'd be a good way to get kids into it.
No, that's still the subject. aru is "to be", and your sentence could be literally translated as "Regarding that man: problems are."
check out linuxfab.cx here (hehe linux for fobs...)
No "Cowboy Neal" in the poll ....
The article says that IBM is prepared to dump a billion dollars into Linux development this next year... but I have to ask, how do they expect to make a return on this? Are they just doing this to get an OS to power the big servers that they're selling? I mean, a billion dollars is a lot of money to recover from an investment; I'm curious as to what their plan is.
It's like most wars, except this just happens to be an economic one. It's all about money. Who has it, and who wants it bad enough to take it. Any one who says war isn't based on profit (in land, material ownership, or cold hard cash) is deluding themselves.
For the rest of the world, Microsoft is probably not only seen as a monopoly, but a US-based monopoly. Every time they buy a MS product, that money goes to the US. Sure, there's always some local technical support, and the programmers who spend their time getting items regionalized, but the majority of that investment goes into the US. All it takes is a good, long look at how much currency is leaving the country in the form of software licenses and the top men start seeing savings.
Why should company X, Y, or Z send all that cash to the US when they can take another product and modify it to their needs. This doesn't come cheap, since they'll have to hire the programmers, managers, and whatnot required to bring the software product to market (internal or otherwise). Since Linux exists and is stable, the difficult part of creating a stable OS with the basic internet protocols is done, all they have to pay for is the program itself and whatever modifications are required to the kernel.
Observed what's happening in Argentina. Now that the government has realized just how much it would cost to keep their machines running Windows, they've decided to switch to Linux and spend all that money to hire native programmers. I'm guessing that as we see illegal software stamped out in more 3rd world countries, these countries will move to Linux-based systems. The more prosperous countries can afford to pay the software licenses without too many problems. Still, as more and more cash goes out of their country and into the US, they'll probably think of some way (tariffs, et al) to encourage the use of alternative OSs (Linux, *BSD).
Microsoft will probably have the US government as a big customer for a while. The 'It`s a US company' argument doesn't work, and Washington state congressmen will probably push Microsoft-friendly laws through Congress.
There's my $0.02 for what it's worth.
Huh, seems it opened May 28.
Is this going to be a massive translation?
It's not like there aren't any places for techies to talk online..
ball of wax. RedHat Japanese comes with a bunch
of liscensed software which you pay for in the
purchase price, including an IME by Omron. You
also get a lot of things in Japanese plus fonts,
etc. It is pretty involved, there is a liscense
server, kanji databases, fonts, AI grammar engines, links to emacs, Japanese docs, partial
localization into Japanese of interfaces for
programs like Gimp, etc.
I'm running Suse (English) on this machine, but a box of RedHat Linux 6.2J on my desk says on it "Available only in Japanese", and it says it includes Just System's ATOK12. This is the best kanji front end processor around, so you want it. It also comes
with HancomWord which is a word processor that can handle chinese, japanese, hangul (korean), and english.
A free but apparently less powerful version is
available of the Omron IME (Wnn6) as well.
I think some of these are probably conflicting so you can't run all at once, but I just used this on a machine I bought in Japan which had it preinstalled. It is neat because you can type
kanji into emacs and even vi. You need a properly equipped terminal program for that. I can type hiragana into emacs and display kanji even now in plain vanilla emacs as installed with SuSE (a couple of versions ago). But you may run into differences between emacs and XEmacs setup, available fonts, and so on.
Laser5 Linux has a lot of Japanese centric things
in its distro as well.
There is also something called PJE (which I have had a huge amount of trouble installing in the past) which supposedly is a full Japanese localized suite of tools and support files. It probably would install automatically on a RedHat kind of box but would be far inferior to what you get with RedHat Linux Japanese. Check out www.rehat.com/jp/ and maybe you can get a manifest and build and environment of your own out of the free components, based on noncommercial Wnn.(v4 I believe). But it is probably worth trying to get the ATOK12 package since it will not let you make as many errors in kanji. For example the kanji engine SuSE has hooked up to emacs in suse 6.1 is completely clueless and so you get a ton of characters to sift through all the time.
I think you meant engrish.com.
HTH.
VA Linux Japan quietly started "Slashdot Japan!
I can't read your crazy moon language!
love,
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
"Also feeding into the effort to get Linux to work on larger systems is continuing work on software IBM released in January that lets programs run several tasks simultaneously under a process called 'multithreading.'"
A little reformatting of the "Geeko" should make it look sufficiently like Godzilla.
Got Rhinos?
Srashdot? Rinux?
My head hurts...
You know, I hear all the time how this and that business teamed in effort to bring more Linux apps, but I somehow fail to see the apps comming from these efforts. Do you remember the famous Gnome foundation, it was a lot of hype and did it actually help Gnome? Not much. Maybe it will, but... my point is that when you see some Linux apps, there is usually single developer behind them or team of 4-5 excited programmers doing it on their spare time. Somehow it seems to me that multi-million corporations should be able to do more than I could see so far.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
RedHat 7.1 (standard English version) now includes good Japanese support. If at install time you select Japanese as one of your languages, and then also install XEmacs (use select indivudual packages in the installation), you can use WNN to write in Japanese in XEmacs (for email etc.) without doing anything else! (In XEmacs do Ctrl-\ then type japanese-egg-wnn) This is a vast improvement on previous installations where I always had to recompile XEmacs with Mule support and then install WNN separately to get it to work.
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I like to watch.
There IS an "l" sound. What's written "r" sounds like an "l". This is because the system of using english characters to represent Japanese was created by some Dutch guy, I believe. So "Linux" is pronouced "linakkusu" in Japanese.
how would you translate:
nihongo de hanasemasen
perhaps: I cannot speak in japanese right at the moment...
This is also a time that the open source will be put to the test. will questionable bastards steal mass ammounts of code? I think i will steal the code call it by my own name, make a pretty box, featuring prominently a label showing exactly who I stole it from. It's called a Garage MBA.
______
"Sorry, but I don't there's anything charming about ignorance and carelessness." -LordNimon
There's probably enough discussion to be had on this topic to fill a full "article". So write it up and submit it.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Under the licensing terms of Linux, it's very easy to share improvements to the Unix-like operating system but legally impossible to make it into a proprietary product such as the competing Microsoft Windows. This arrangement has underlain the growing cooperative effort among numerous companies to collectively improve Linux.
Linux works for whoever wants to work with it. I think this article dances around the idea that big business doesn't care for the MS tax any more than the home user when a viable alternative is avaliable. If many businesses come together to improve Linux, then they can provide their own solutions on their own terms without having to always deal with a third party (namely MS). This is what it's all about, innovation that benefits everyone and not just the vendor.
Big business is in it to make money sure enough, but if operating systems isn't their cash cow, why not use something free to all?
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
is a media player that can compete with Microsoft's Media Player.
Animated Tentacle Pr0n generator v 2.0
And a slew of imitators...
And you thought there were too many WINDOW MANAGERS...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
How is this a troll? Tentacle pr0n has been a part of Japanese culture for ages. Given the Slashdotian interest in warped pr0n like that, it seems like a perfect match of interests. I wish I had a dollar for every time there was some Elfin-half-human-half wombat three quarters naked anime bondage tentacle pr0n chick on some slash-geek page.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Guess it would be pretty easy to get a FP there.
:D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Fry's Linux Technology Center has 200 programmers working full-time to improve Linux, and he estimates 10 times that number are working within the company on Linux when other activities such as sales or server design are included.
:)
Fry's has a Linux Technology Center?!
More importantly, They have 200 linux developers yet only 30 total customer service rep's spread amongst all their locations?
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Fry's Linux Technology Center has 200 programmers working full-time to improve Linux, and he estimates 10 times that number are working within the company on Linux when other activities such as sales or server design are included.
Fry's has a Linux Technology Center?!
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All opinions presented here aren't mine.
Tux will spend half a season as a character on the ever-popular Pokemon before spinning off into his own show. Special Powers: Stability, Scalability.
As Ash shouts out "I chose you, Tux," the tiny penguin grows to the size of a house and attacks his opponent with the grace of a ballet dancer.
The promotional poster for the show features the penguin chomping down on some sushi with the caption, "I always did like raw fish."
In other news Greorge Comes to Play at Gray's House
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It would be another great irony if Japan does for Linux what it did for the automobile industry. Imagine a sleak, efficient little OS, well supported out of Japan, competing on equal footing with bloated and proprietary WinXP. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just curious. I'd actually be interested in hearing pro-Microsoft sentiment coming from other countries -- if for no other reason than novelty.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
VA Linux Japan quietly started "Slashdot Japan!
When was Quattro Pro (correct spelling) a database? AFAIK (and I own a copy!) it is a spreadsheet, originally designed to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. The database was Paradox.
You are right! Thank you for the correction.
I miss the Karma Whores.
I am very anxiously awaiting Japanese development for Linux. The reason? Japanese IME under Windows is my last hold-out for using Windows right now. Since I need to use Japanese language stuff and Windows offers the IME, I use Win98ja. If Linux had that level of useability available now, I'd reload my laptop with Linux right away.
I am not really up on the progress of Japanese IME support under Linux and chances are that documentation surrounding that information is not in English. So if anyone reading this message can comment about the current state of things, I'd be very interested in knowing about that.
In the Latest RedHat, I have noticed that when I indicate Japanese as a supported language on my install that a daemon called "jserver" is run and as near as I can tell, it is a server for IME information but as yet, I don't have a clue how to access it... clues anyone?
Here is a really traditional century-old company with an ultra-heavy bureaucratic infrastructure and yet, they are truely supporting and embracing free software. Interresting to notice that one can still teach an old dog some new tricks, but one cannot remove the gates around Bill's newfound "read my sources, but don't touch" openness. Quote of the day: When customers complain that the Linux development process doesn't have formal enough timetables, "We tell them you'll have to get used to it,"
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Instead of analyzing the memory state at the advent of a crash, has anyone worked on a functional kernel debugger for Linux? It would seem to me much more useful to see the memory state relative to the offending code.
Not that this has anything to do with coding Linux in Japan. I'm sure they can come up with some interesting new ideas, some new programming languages are spawning there (e.g. Ruby).
Dancin Santa
Urusai naa!..
Nihonjin ga kakanakatta kara iin dayo.
Odoroiteru Santa
When was Quattro Pro (correct spelling) a database? AFAIK (and I own a copy!) it is a spreadsheet, originally designed to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. The database was Paradox.
This really has to have the folks in redmond a little concerned, all of their biggest competitors seem to have found a common ground on which to build a serious threat to Windows (especially in the server and embedded spaces). Personally, I think that this can only be a good thing, and with all of it flying the GPL flag, and under the direction of the kernel group, a UNIX style fork can be avoided. No company can make it theirs exclusively. It's also kinda cool to hear IBM say they will spend 1 billion on linux development, that's almost a Microsoft R&D budget.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
IBM has a press release to proclaim they are sharing information about an open source product.
hmm...
how 'bout
Nihongo Dekinai
among friends?
my
We've heard of plenty other ventures from big corps shouting "we're going to invest in Linux big time". Nothing usually pans out. At least nothing that the community can really respect or enjoy. However, this case could be different. Consider how Sony reacted to the petition to get Linux ported to the PSX2. They didn't say, "oh, we'll that's something we may consider." They just went ahead and did it after a big show of support from the crowd. Even if they're not making "fun" applications (banking software :),
this could be a honest, guine, injection of life
that open source software could greatly benefit
from. The only downside I see is more corporate
involvement. *shrug*
Why bother.
I don't trust a company that makes these puppies. Though I imagine the uptime will be amazing if they could run linux on it.
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be it for media or otherwise. it took me hours to set up a relatively common SBLive under SuSe. Now I'm an idiot, I like doing that. Most people don't. WinMediaPlayer works out of the box (usually). They win. 3D-cards work out of the box as soon as you pop in the driver cd-rom. All games (well, most) will thencefort operate within the blink of an eye. If linux can't provide this ease of use, forget it as a desktop OS.
Which isn't necessarily bad.
There are plenty of WinDOS horror stories to counter every Linux horror that comes along.
That's something a lot of Linux advocates have been saying for a long time, and it simply isn't true. Most hardware works like a snap under Windows. It simply does. Hardly surprising, because Windows is the predominant platform, so it makes sense that a manufacturer will at least make sure Windows-users can get their device to work. Of course there always are exceptions, and, yes, when you have a problem with Windows, it's much harder to fix than when you have a similar problem with Linux. That is to say - if you know what you're doing and you're an experienced UNIX-sysadmin, Linux-problems can be solved, usually. Not so with Windows. There, it either works (most of the time) or it doesn't and you have to reinstall Windows after throwing the offending piece of hardware out.
please do not Slashdot Japan.
thanks,
japan
Master of odors. Using his powerful scent, Stinkor destroys all.
Um... so reading this article the most visible app I could see that they were talking about was something that could analyze core dumps, I certainly hope this isn't the new killer app for linux. I mean what Linux needs over anything else is a good office suite of some sort, and it didn't seem like anything of that sort was coming off in this deal. If IBM wants to help Linux along why don't they print off a bunch of propaganda about how Sun Microsystems sucks because Star Office is Sooooo slow. Maybe give Sun a kick in the ass to get Star Office moving in the right direction.
I mean I like Star Office and all, I just have a hard time using it because I tend to fall asleep waiting for it to load.
I wonder if it was just a loose tranlastion and they ment ERP software. I know that IBM has a partnership with SAP now (SAP's preferred database is now DB2), and with SAP making it's own sapdb code open source, as well as offering Linux demos of their software. Makes me wonder if IBM (et al) are going to make a run at Oracle and M$ for ERP dominance using some sort of new Red Hat platform.
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All words in this post are just words. Any resemblance to actual phrases was unintentional.
"Nihongo hanashimasen" would be more accurately translated as "I don't talk Japanese". "I don't speak Japanese" should be "Nihongo shaberemasen".
On the other hand "Nihongo hanashimasen" would be more convincing as the some what off phrasing would coincide with the actual intent. "Me no English" is more convincing that "I don't speak or comprehend a word of English", isn't it?
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