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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.
...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
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.
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)
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.
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"
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.
how would you translate:
nihongo de hanasemasen
perhaps: I cannot speak in japanese right at the moment...
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.
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
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
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!
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?
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.
please do not Slashdot Japan.
thanks,
japan
Master of odors. Using his powerful scent, Stinkor destroys all.