Even Japan is switching away from TRON to Linux. TRON is really limited. Made sense for controlling hardware in the 80s & 90s, but it lacks most of the abstractions expected in a system today. I've developed for it.
You probably noticed what was more foreign to you.
I live in Tokyo for about 4 years, and in my 30 min daily communte I see at least 20 iPhones everyday (I avoid crowded trains, so that's no small number). There's so many young people with iPhones here. It's true that many of those, specially the Japanese, also have some other Japanese cell phone to deal with the "Galapagos" system that is the Japanese.
As people said above, it's true that it's 46% of the smartphone market, which is not big here. But the iPhone is actually doing quite well. There are so many companies and individuals developing Japanese apps (many to make them more compatible with the "Galapagos" system, that's also true).
I hear a lot of people in America complaining about the iPhone and AT&T. Now imagine you could have an iPhone in a 3G only network with high-coverage. That's Japan.
Stanford has announced that it will be offering an iPhone development course. I would also expect that many books on iPhone development are being edited to be published soon. For these to occur, iPhone development information cannot be under NDA. So it's just a matter of time. Apple is not stupid.
That's mostly true, although carriers started charging much less for basic plans after the introduction of number portability (except Docomo, of course, as the market leader). SMSes are free, but you cannot exchange SMSes between carriers, and so are not very popular. What is really popular for messaging is MMS, which costs around 2 yen. And MMSes are hardly sent to phone numbers, but to email addresses in the carriers domain, so people usually don't message other people when they were not explicitely given the MMS address. Since anyone with an email can write to these email addresses, spam has become a very big problem. Ah, the fact that SMSes are not common in Japan is what gives me confidence that MMSes are coming to the 3G iPhone...:)
I'm a brazilian researcher. Public universities, like the one I work at, are responsible by the largest part of scientific research in Brazil. While most of what we develop is open source, it is not because any government requirement (I had never heard about this "requirement" prior to reading this article), but by the nature of what we do. I am pretty sure many people develop closed source software in the universities. Do we get government financing? Well, you could say that, since the government pays the universities bills (electricity, communications), professors salaries, etc. But that's mostly all about it. It doesn't have any money left to spend on researchers, equipment, etc, and universities have to find financing elsewhere (typically in cooperation projects with the private sector, who, among other things, requires NDAs and ownership to some of the deliveries of this funded research).
Free software, in Brazil, has become much more of a publicity stunt, and definitely used for self-promotion by a lot of people. But definitely not that close to our reality. It is a pitty and a shame.
I delete all mail that has not been directly addessed to me. Usually all mail from mailing lists, unless the message is really interesting or it is a thread I've been participating. I didn't use to do that, but when I changed to this method I deleted the old unimportant messages as well. It brings down the number of messages to a manageable level.
Messages are not sorted into separate subject folders. They are all in a single mailbox, the mailbox. Every month I back up this mailbox to the name of the previous month. I do the same with my sent mail. Messages are then kept in individually monthed mbox files, independent of the email program I am using. All mail programs to date I've used are able to import messages. I keep in the mail program only the mailboxes of the last few months.
If I need to find a message, I first search through the month or, if I am not sure, the year that the message was received. I "grep -i" in a directory with all my mboxes. It usually doesn't take too long, just a few minutes in the worst case. After I find the mailbox, I import it in my current mail program (Mail.app now), to forward, save attachments, etc.
I've tried keeping all these mboxes as a Cyrus imapd spool, but the trouble was larger than the benefit.
I keep all (personal, things I've been directly involved with) my mail since 1996. It works for me. It is around 300MB compressed with gzip.
why post it? I thought it was "News for nerds, stuff that matters." There is so many things that matter that are not accepted for post, I think the editors should be ashamed of saying something like "Ah, remember when the release of a Netscape mattered?" and then just posting it.
One of the most interesting and complete descriptions of the history of the Windows NT family of OSes I've seen was this PowerPoint presentation by Lucovsky.
for uncompressed "CD quality" audio, what enables these new headphones and this new sunglasses are the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, which compresses the audio using the low complexity lossless Sub-Band Codec. These devices usually also support a profile that enables you to play, pause, forward and rewind, or, if paired to a telephone too, to mute the audio when a call is received. This all seems very nice, I just wish these profiles get supported in Tiger (and Longhorn, or Windows XP new Bluetooth stack, to be fair). Can't wait to get some more wireless audio.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Japan is switching away from TRON to Linux. TRON is really limited. Made sense for controlling hardware in the 80s & 90s, but it lacks most of the abstractions expected in a system today. I've developed for it.
That's innovation!
"China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world."
No, it doesn't.
You probably noticed what was more foreign to you.
I live in Tokyo for about 4 years, and in my 30 min daily communte I see at least 20 iPhones everyday (I avoid crowded trains, so that's no small number). There's so many young people with iPhones here. It's true that many of those, specially the Japanese, also have some other Japanese cell phone to deal with the "Galapagos" system that is the Japanese.
As people said above, it's true that it's 46% of the smartphone market, which is not big here. But the iPhone is actually doing quite well. There are so many companies and individuals developing Japanese apps (many to make them more compatible with the "Galapagos" system, that's also true).
I hear a lot of people in America complaining about the iPhone and AT&T. Now imagine you could have an iPhone in a 3G only network with high-coverage. That's Japan.
We've had single Atom CPUs for some years now... :)
I believe Santa Cruz Operation is not supported. :)
Still using WEP here. ;)
Stanford has announced that it will be offering an iPhone development course. I would also expect that many books on iPhone development are being edited to be published soon. For these to occur, iPhone development information cannot be under NDA. So it's just a matter of time. Apple is not stupid.
Move to Canada.
That's mostly true, although carriers started charging much less for basic plans after the introduction of number portability (except Docomo, of course, as the market leader). SMSes are free, but you cannot exchange SMSes between carriers, and so are not very popular. What is really popular for messaging is MMS, which costs around 2 yen. And MMSes are hardly sent to phone numbers, but to email addresses in the carriers domain, so people usually don't message other people when they were not explicitely given the MMS address. Since anyone with an email can write to these email addresses, spam has become a very big problem. Ah, the fact that SMSes are not common in Japan is what gives me confidence that MMSes are coming to the 3G iPhone... :)
Cleaning up their lenses? You never know...
Bummer.
No, they won't.
You can read it here (large PDF, page 47):
"Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. "
Steve Gibson's crusade againts Windows raw socket capabilities. Did Microsoft listen, and now is being criticised for doing that?
It doesn't work at night. ;)
I'm a brazilian researcher. Public universities, like the one I work at, are responsible by the largest part of scientific research in Brazil. While most of what we develop is open source, it is not because any government requirement (I had never heard about this "requirement" prior to reading this article), but by the nature of what we do. I am pretty sure many people develop closed source software in the universities. Do we get government financing? Well, you could say that, since the government pays the universities bills (electricity, communications), professors salaries, etc. But that's mostly all about it. It doesn't have any money left to spend on researchers, equipment, etc, and universities have to find financing elsewhere (typically in cooperation projects with the private sector, who, among other things, requires NDAs and ownership to some of the deliveries of this funded research).
Free software, in Brazil, has become much more of a publicity stunt, and definitely used for self-promotion by a lot of people. But definitely not that close to our reality. It is a pitty and a shame.
I delete all mail that has not been directly addessed to me. Usually all mail from mailing lists, unless the message is really interesting or it is a thread I've been participating. I didn't use to do that, but when I changed to this method I deleted the old unimportant messages as well. It brings down the number of messages to a manageable level.
Messages are not sorted into separate subject folders. They are all in a single mailbox, the mailbox. Every month I back up this mailbox to the name of the previous month. I do the same with my sent mail. Messages are then kept in individually monthed mbox files, independent of the email program I am using. All mail programs to date I've used are able to import messages. I keep in the mail program only the mailboxes of the last few months.
If I need to find a message, I first search through the month or, if I am not sure, the year that the message was received. I "grep -i" in a directory with all my mboxes. It usually doesn't take too long, just a few minutes in the worst case. After I find the mailbox, I import it in my current mail program (Mail.app now), to forward, save attachments, etc.
I've tried keeping all these mboxes as a Cyrus imapd spool, but the trouble was larger than the benefit.
I keep all (personal, things I've been directly involved with) my mail since 1996. It works for me. It is around 300MB compressed with gzip.
why post it? I thought it was "News for nerds, stuff that matters." There is so many things that matter that are not accepted for post, I think the editors should be ashamed of saying something like "Ah, remember when the release of a Netscape mattered?" and then just posting it.
One of the most interesting and complete descriptions of the history of the Windows NT family of OSes I've seen was this PowerPoint presentation by Lucovsky.
Google Maps is now supported by Safari. Way to go, Google!
for uncompressed "CD quality" audio, what enables these new headphones and this new sunglasses are the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, which compresses the audio using the low complexity lossless Sub-Band Codec. These devices usually also support a profile that enables you to play, pause, forward and rewind, or, if paired to a telephone too, to mute the audio when a call is received. This all seems very nice, I just wish these profiles get supported in Tiger (and Longhorn, or Windows XP new Bluetooth stack, to be fair). Can't wait to get some more wireless audio.
Make this little robot build copies of itself, from raw materials it collets.
Minibosses surely like. They have a (very good) band that only plays video game classics. Check out their demos!
Thanks for Ars Technica for the info, from the Ars holiday gift guide