[...] remember that all we've lost is the fantasy that
those little green pieces of paper actually mean something.
Green? When I visited the States a couple of months ago, the money had turned off-white. I could have swarn the restarant I used my travellers check at was giving me counterfiet money for change. But everyone seemed to take it.
In Japan from medival times they've had houses which are made both black and white for this very purpose. The upper half is white, the lower half black with white "X"s through it. The "X"s are rounded pieces of wood that stick out a few centemeters for more surface area.
I've got FreeBSD running on a 66MHz x486 with 12MB RAM. For small queries (approx 1,000 records, three left joins), MySQL on it is comparable to Oracle on a dual 200MHz Pentium with 128MB running NT 4.0.
Note: "Comparable" is the perceived time it takes to generate a web page with some queries. I didn't do any serious benchmark testing. I have the same data on both machines/DBs, and have a third machine that accesses the data and spits it out to an HTML web page - selecting the DB by changing the name of the ODBC name to use.
An unusual Major/Minor combination for the mid 1980's, I was a Computer Science Major and the first person to sign up for the Japanese Minor at San Diego State University. At the time, most people would say, "that's... interesting." (By the time I graduated, people said, "that was smart!")
Nonetheless, it was my intent upon entrance to SDSU to graduate and return to Japan (where I lived in High School, when my Dad got a job at the Navy base in Yokosuka - just south of Tokyo). A major problem I faced with the exchange programs that were offered, though, were that they were all geared toward culture or business.
There were only two exchange programs that put the student going to Japan in with mainstream Japanese students. Two people had decided to go to one, so I wanted to go to the other. But on one condition, that I could take classes involving Computer Science.
After several talks with the exchange program councelors, who then contacted Yokohama National University to see if what I wanted was possible, it was arranged. I was "officially" assigned to the Kyoiku-gakubu ("College of Education"), but when I signed up for classes, with the exception of one class, I took all available 2nd through 4th year computer related classes in the Ko-gakubu ("College of Engineering").
Let me tell you. I was completly baffled the first few weeks of classes. None of the teachers wrote anything even resembling the Kanji that I knew. Even when they said what they were writing, which were things I knew I could read, the characters on the board didn't look anything like those I'd learned. Well, I learned how to read cursive really quick. (It's little things like this that aren't covered in foreign language study, but are quite necessary should one become immerced in a foreign culture.)
Before that year, I could get by in Japan. And I had long before taught myself how to read a lot of technical (computer related) articles (Japanese computer magazines, books, and manuals - thanks to my Kanji-English dictionary). I had to be self taught since even the Japanese language courses focused only on business and culture. But I really learned how to start communicating in Japanese that year. Regardless of what kinds of marks I got in class, I learned more of what I needed to fulfill my goal that year than in the previous three.
Of note, the classes weren't all that difficult in content. It was the language that was the biggest challenge. So, in a way, it helped consolidate all that I'd learned up until then in English about programming. Having to think about all of those first and second year concepts again in a different language (not programming language - but I find that it helps as well) did a great deal to help me come to grips with them.
Another thing that should be noted, Japanese universities struck me as odd in that they're very difficult to get into, but fairly easy to graduate from. It kind of seemed to me that it was a short vacation after working so hard to get into the university that kids got to have before entering the rat race. The U.S. educational system seems to be the opposite. Easy to get up to and into college, but not so easy to graduate.
The administration at Yokohama wanted to give me something special, as I was the first person to go on that program that actually attended all of his (or her) classes. It seems that in the past, all of the other participants found part time jobs to spend all of their time at. One wonders what their goal$ were.
J-Phone in Japan already does this. I count almost 50 games on their game list site, with makers like Namco, Tomy, Capcom, and Konami in there.
The game contents just started last year, so it's probably the smallest of content genre there.
(Note, I don't have a J-Phone, or an i-mode for that matter (i-mode's voice mode is too poor quality for me). But the commercials sure are breaking down my resistance.)
Something that doesn't seem to ever be mentioned with i-mode is the quality of voice conversations with it. J-Phone is the only "real" competition that NTT is seeing with content, but most serious business users here in Japan are sticking with NTT, it seems.
However, what is a phone primarily used for? Reading contents? No. Talking with others. For that, the PHS phones are so much better than i-mode. Yet, most people seem to tolerate the poor voice quality for the contents (and more often then not, IMHO, the name brand) of i-mode.
Like complaining to LookOut! users about their moronic HTML mail, I often ask i-mode users to find a public phone to talk with me.
But it does look as though contents are what most people find most important. At the train station or on the streets walking, I see hundreds of people every day focused on their little phone screens.
The last time I was in the States (3 1/2 to 4 years ago) was the first I'd heard that NBC had "MS" tacked to its front. And, not nearly as anti-M$ back then, I just found it annoying that what they called "news" sounded more like tabloids. The thing that struck me most was that every ad for the news would run the line:
________ may be more ________ than you think - on the next "News at Ten".
(I half expected them to say "on the next 'Ophra Whinefree Show.'") But, every day they filled in the blanks with something different. And the really sad thing was that any reasonably educated person shouldn't find any of their conclusions surprising at all.
Here in Japan it's Nikkei-NBC. I'm as inclined to watch is as MSNBC since it only covers business news.
Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee.;-)
I haven't tried it out yet, but plan to before the weekend is out. Wife and kids catching the flu have postponed my tests so far this weekend. Some things take priority.
The last time I used Word was in 1996. I was writing a design spec for an application I was working on. One of the things that needed to be specified were menu items. The standard way to write menu items for Japanese software is to write the word in Japanese, then put the shortcut in parentheses. So, when I got to the "Edit" menu and wanted to have the "Copy" item, I wrote "kopi- (C)". Or, I tried to. Every time I closed the paren, I got a copyright symbol. I went through searching the online help for how to disable this, then spent an hour disabling every "auto-anything" option.
After wasting an entire afternoon with this, I cut and paste everything to Netscape Gold (paid for), and Netscape has been my preferred word processor ever since.
The HTML generated by Netscape Gold and/or 4.x is just the basics, and all that are really needed. Word's exporting of HTML is full of junk to fix the width at a size that I don't nesessarily use my browser at, shrinks the font to be unreadably small, inserts a lot of strange characters instead of single and double quotes resulting in strange Kanji characters, and wastes space by specifying fonts that I don't even have in my machine on every line making the HTML file 30 times as large as need be.
I have no problem using a seperate utility for graphics (GIMP), but don't think that most M$ users could adjust to that.
From what I've seen of the BSD community, they've been working along for a very long time. The various pccard (PCMCIA) drivers were ported from NetBSD to FreeBSD back with PAO2 (which was then redone in 3.x and 4.x), weren't they? And there have been a great many security features ported from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. It just seems to me that FreeBSD has been the blending pot for all of the various flavors for quite a while.
FreeBSDCon --> BSDCon was a great idea. The current effort to merge ports/packaging system is another one. But were the BSD's really that fragmented all along?
You might want to try MagicPoint. It has the fancy effects that PowerPoint has. And you can embed any X application in a page. To display things like embedded PostScript, a viewer application is run in a given page. I'm sure the same could be done for a DVI segment. (Convert it to embedded PostScript if not.)
I know it's available from the/usr/ports/japanese/magicpoint port on FreeBSD. I'm sure a search of the web will provide a Linux port.
There are examples in both Japanese and English which you can use as a template to create a presentation pretty quickly. The entire presentation can be edited with your favorite text editor. The design is very simple, yet it is a very powerful presentation tool.
Not many Japanese Open Source projects have made it to the mainstream, but this is one that has - or at least should.
The current is 100 volt, instead of 110. That doesn't make much difference except when you try to use a U.S. hair dryer on Japanese current - it doesn't have enough juice.
The cycle is 50Hz in North-east Japan (Nagoya and up, I think), and 60Hz in South-west Japan (Nagoya and down - I'm not sure which side of the line Nagoya lies on). So, pretty much all Japanese consumer electronics come with auto switching between 50 and 60 cycles. This is important for anything with a timer in it.
Why all this talk about Linux and W2K? It was reported here at/. that FreeBSD sets new 1-day download record. And wasn't it their own record that they broke?
Is it the OS or web serving software that is the key?
What ever happened to the "speedy" in one's "right to a fair and speedy trial"? No, I'm not talking about Microsoft's right, I'm talking about the rights of consumers (being represented by the DoJ).
What's with the quotes?
on
Me-Commerce
·
· Score: 1
Katz-san,
I really like your articles, but since when did you start using Word (or WordPerfect) to write? I ask because all of your single quotes are escaping into strange Kanji codes.
Please run the demoronizer (or in/usr/ports/www/demoroniser) on your text before submitting. I know, the LA Times and others have the same problems, but I didn't expect to see this kind of non-standard character usage here on/..
A side effect of this episode was that I came to understand the concept of "That's unthinkable!" as
having
literal meaning (if you can say it in the moment, then it's probably not true).
This is something that always disturbs me when we technical people have joint meetings with sales.
I often think that:
I could never go into sales because I just can't lie like they can, and
if I were ever in a position to buy something, I'd rather talk with a developer (who may embellish a bit about how
good it is, but be sincere) than a salesman (who has nothing but a sale in mind).
I'm not saying that our sales people deceive people into buying something that they don't really need. The
solutions do what is promised. But they will sell vapor ware then expect us techies to provide miracles to do all
the things they promised - which usually get cut over.
OK, so to the customer, it really isn't lying. But to those of us who have to develop the goods, there seems to be
some deceit going on.
If your browser can handle Japanese, here's a function that checks to see if you've got a double-byte numberic character (after being converted to Unicode internally, of course). Notice that the function name and parameter are also in Japanese!
A few years ago I was stuck in the same kind of rut. Visual C++ was killing my ability to think for myself. So, I turned to my laptop, installed FreeBSD, and started migrating my work to Java, which I could develop on FreeBSD and distribute on WinDoze.
If you do Linux, install FreeBSD just to change your way of thinking for a while. If I run into a block again, I'll give Linux another try. Or maybe even Solaris 8.
You have the programming skills already. You just need to occupy your mind with a challenging task that will let you see other ways of doing things.
If you're really in a programming rut, rereading GoF's Design Patterns can often give a lot of inspiration.
The only real winners, of course, are the lawyers, as usual, and the handful of companies rich enough to pay and benefit them.
But there's no evidence that the entities copyright laws were meant to protect were billion dollar media corporatations with a distinctly unfair unadvantage over individuals when it comes to defining and enforcing copyright conventions.
No civil-liberties organization has offered money or other support to fans who are denied access to their culture by corporate lawyers.
Most people caught in copyright battles, or on the receiving end of hundreds of thousands of warning letters being issues in response to the DMCA lack the financial resources or the political acumen to take on vast entertainment conglomerates in court.
to quote his most recent article.
I'm sure that Kanz-san is infurring it, but never says it. But can it be true? One is only as free as one's layer can make you?
Now, I don't know about the normal, everyday citizen, but I certainly can't afford a stinking layer. If some corporation didn't like what I wrote on my home page, their legal department could threaten me, and I'd probably ignore them, standing behind my beliefs. I wouldn't write what I do if I didn't believe it. Yet, even though I'd be completely innocent of wrong doing, am I really at a corporation's mercy in the eye of the law? I was under the impression that an individual is "innocent until proven guilty." Has American society degressed to the point that one is innocent only if one can afford to convince a judge and jury of one's innocence?
A lot of aspects of American society have been bothering me since my high school years. Living on a U.S. military base in Japan during those development years can have a strong impression on one. And when CNN is all you really see about U.S. society for three years, it doesn't make for a very good impression. Needless to say, I was labeled an expatriot by my class mates. (And since I carried my laptop computer around everywhere I went for two years - an NEC PC-8201 - I think they made a U.S. version for Tandy - I'd have probably been misprofiled by many of those profiling systems Kanz-san is often ranting about.)
Nonetheless, my classmates would often tell me to "love it or leave it" when I expressed my views of the U.S., so I left it. My parents often try to entice me back, saying that I could be making 4 times what I do here. After my sister tried to convince me that the U.S. isn't as bad as I make it out, I asked her how she could accept all that is going on and not say anything about it. Not want to change it, to make a difference. My arguements must have struck a bad nerve with her, because I haven't gotten a reply to my questions. I think she just tries to put that sort of stuff out of her mind, and dislikes me bringing it up.
I'm convinced that if I still lived in the U.S. that I'd be dead by now. I'd ask somebody to turn down his Walkman because his idea of music and mind don't match, and that's the end. While I like the expression, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I also feel compelled to follow through on the opposite, "if it is broken, fix it yourself." I can't stand idolly by while something isn't right that I have the ability to do something about. If I do just turn the other cheek and walk away, I get knots in my stomach the size of softballs.
Back to the topic, though. Has the legal system gotten to the point where guilt and innocence are a commodity, not a right? Is there no way to fix it short of a revolution (to invalidate all of the precidents to date)? Is there really no better reason to return to the U.S. other than "hazzard pay" (pay for living in a 3rd world, dangerous country)?
If you lose, I'll boycott Microsoft for eternity. And, if you win... I think I will anyway.:)
How effective of a boycott can you do? I'm sure that most of the people here are boycotting them personally, but it's hard to get non-techies to join in.
Which brings me to an idea I had over the weekend. Do you remember the web being blacked out a number of years ago in protest for free speech? Background colors on sites around the world turned black for a day (or was it a week?). I know that it got a lot of attention, but did it really change anything?
What one needs is something that gets more than attention, that gets action. Something like a speed bump.
Huh? Let's use an analogy for a minute. The road outside my apartment is used often as a shortcut around the more crowded major route (with an extra stop light). It's a narrow, 1-way road with no side walk. And people zip up that road very fast!
As a parent of two children who use that road to go to school and the park, I want those people slowed down. So, I brought it up with community leaders that speed bumps would be a good way to regulate speed through there. What was their response?
A sign! Even after I was told that a sign was put up, I didn't notice it for 2 weeks! They did the same thing when I complained about people driving the wrong way - put up a second sign saying "No right turn" - right next to another sign saying "No right turn!" Needless to say, neither of these signs have had any effect.
Turning background colors black may have more effect than putting up a speed limit sign, but is it really enough to make people change the way they think? Will that bombard MS's PR hot lines to the point that they'll consider changing their ways?
On the road, a speed bump is a physical, hard to ignore, barrier that causes most drivers to slow down to a safe speed to go over them. But how can one put a speed bump in Microsoft's way?
Having some Federal agency looking over MS's shoulder would be more like having a cop on the road with a speed gun day in and day out. It may do wonders for the reduction of speed for a couple of days, but after that, he/she would just be taking up resources with nothing to do. And once the Enforcer is gone, the speed on the road will increase to what it was before the Enforcment. (Read into it what you will with the DoJ case.)
Something more than a sign, but less than an Enforcer is what would be needed. A speed bump. And the most effective way to hit Microsoft where it hurts would be to take it to their customers. Configure a site to allow normal browsing for non-IE browsers. When an MS browser is detected in the HTTP headers, either redirect or prepend a statement of protest. Include a method for feedback to MS, as well as links to alternative browsers through which one my browse unimpeeded (sp?). This will get people to act, rather than just admire the change in color. It'll be a hard sign to ignore.
I'm sure that someone will point out that filtering according to browser manufacturer would be an infringment on the user's freedom. And isn't that what this whole battle is about? Microsoft is extending the Kerbos spec to exclude non-Microsoft clients. How much would they like being the excluded ones?
Five years ago, I joined one of the first ISPs in the Yokohama area. I had used the Internet back in college, and that was the thing I missed the most after graduating. I tried showing just how great the Internet was to collegues at work (all Japanese), but the only thing they were concerned with was, "but it's all in English."
Five years later, they all use the Internet daily for all kinds of tasks. Why? Because a large number of sites have appeared over the years in Japanese.
Now, these are software engineers. They all program in C/C++ and other English based languages. They can read English manuals. But they tend to only read English web pages for information as a last resort. I've mentioned/. to some. They say that they've heard of it (from other Japanese technology based sites), but don't know what it's about.
Technology can change language useage a great deal. Microsoft has been changing the Japanese language over the past years. It used to be that the OK_CANCEL pair of buttons for the majority of Japanese applications were "Ryokai" and "Torikeshi" respectively. But Microsoft decreeded that they should be "OK" and "Kyanseru" in their design guide, so the two words were adopted into the Japanese language as the standard for OK_CANCEL dialogs. "Cut" used to be "Kiru," and there are a great deal more examples.
Above, I have two examples of the Japanese language going in two directions. On the one hand, even technical people are fairly reluctant to accept English as the language that they use every day. On the other hand, the technologies that they use introduce a large number of English words which they accept into their everyday language without really thinking about it.
Now, get out of the technical arena and into every day people. A lot of young people dream of going to America, so they want to learn English. But how do they do? Well, let me tell you about a true story.
One collegue's wife studied English at an English school 3 nights a week in preperation for a trip to Walt Disney World. When the two of them got to Florida, who was it that had to do all of the talking at the airport, hotel, etc.? It was the husband who didn't take any English classes. No matter how much someone may want to learn English, actually using it is a completly different issue.
There was one thread that talked about an "easy to type" language being adopted. There have been a number of times that a proposal to Romanize Japanese has been brought up here in Japan, and none of the proposals have gotten very far so far as I could tell. Personally, I'd be against such a proposal. If anything, I'd like to see pictoral characters adopted by more languages for writing. Why? Well, I can read a lot just based on knowing the meanings of a few hundred characters and/or parts of characters. I can't read the texts out loud (as a given character may have a number of pronunciations), but I know the overall meaning of what I'm reading.
It's starting to sound like I'm getting off topic, but bear with me. The Internet is essentially a written language, not a spoken language. A large number of achronyms have been introduced to the Internet culture like "IMHO" and others. One can consider "IMHO" a single pictograph in the written language of the Internet, with a given meaning of its own which can immediatly be recognized in any reader's native language - not translating "In My Humble Opinion" from English to one's native language, but understood in that language when seen.
Will anything like this every be adopted? I doubt it. Like many have already said, any kind of structured artifical language is bound to fail. Even if it's just a way of writing. Hey, Americans have a hard enough time learning how to read 26 characters. While I personally think that literacy would go up (in a generation or two) by requring the learning of a couple thousand pictographs, I don't think that most of the Roman alphabet world would be willing to learn them. But that's for another thread.
I went to high school in Japan (Dad worked for the military), and my goal after graduating from high school was to "become a computer programmer in Japan."
After studying Computer Science and minoring in Japanese at San Diego State University (I was the first to sign up for the "new" minor back in 1985), and studying in Japan for a year as an exchange student with mainstream Japanese students, I entered the company that I still work for in Tokyo.
[When I told people that I was majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Japanese back in 1985, the usual reply was, "Why?" By the time I graduated, the usual reply was, "That was smart!"]
My job search was pretty simple. Recruit U.S.A. holds (held?) two "Career Forums" each year, one in Boston, the other in San Francisco, which feature a large number of Japanese companies looking for U.S. educated employees (mostly looking for Japanese studying abroad, but most are open to any nationality). At the time (1991), there were a lot of oportunities for technical work. Those friends of mine from my Japanese courses who studied General Education or Business could only find English teaching jobs. I found the job I was looking for.
I then went (came?) to Japan during Spring break for follow up interviews. In the end, I deciding on the company that offered the least in the way of salary, but which I thought I would like the work the most. And since I'm still here 9 years later, still earning probably less than half what I could at another company or in the States, I'd say that I made the right choice.
The one thing that I would like to stress is that you must be willing to learn the culture. I can't tell you how much I hate running into gaijin (foreigners) who are loud and boisterous, always shouting about why "they" don't do things like "back home." There are different ways of doing things. Better or worse shouldn't be an issue. You must be able to accept the differences as the way things are.
For Japan, housing is small and expensive. If you work for an American company here, I understand that they pay a housing allowance higher than my monthly sallary. I would like to own my own home some day, but that'll be a long way down the road here.
If you have any specific questions, you can get in touch with me through my home page.
I'd recommend living abroad if, for nothing else, to give you a different perspective on things.
Slashdot Mirror
Off topic, but needed saying.
And an HTML editor with highlighting is one sample applet!!! You'd just have to write something on the server side to lock/save the file.
I think the buildings look pretty nice, myself.
Note: "Comparable" is the perceived time it takes to generate a web page with some queries. I didn't do any serious benchmark testing. I have the same data on both machines/DBs, and have a third machine that accesses the data and spits it out to an HTML web page - selecting the DB by changing the name of the ODBC name to use.
Nonetheless, it was my intent upon entrance to SDSU to graduate and return to Japan (where I lived in High School, when my Dad got a job at the Navy base in Yokosuka - just south of Tokyo). A major problem I faced with the exchange programs that were offered, though, were that they were all geared toward culture or business.
There were only two exchange programs that put the student going to Japan in with mainstream Japanese students. Two people had decided to go to one, so I wanted to go to the other. But on one condition, that I could take classes involving Computer Science.
After several talks with the exchange program councelors, who then contacted Yokohama National University to see if what I wanted was possible, it was arranged. I was "officially" assigned to the Kyoiku-gakubu ("College of Education"), but when I signed up for classes, with the exception of one class, I took all available 2nd through 4th year computer related classes in the Ko-gakubu ("College of Engineering").
Let me tell you. I was completly baffled the first few weeks of classes. None of the teachers wrote anything even resembling the Kanji that I knew. Even when they said what they were writing, which were things I knew I could read, the characters on the board didn't look anything like those I'd learned. Well, I learned how to read cursive really quick. (It's little things like this that aren't covered in foreign language study, but are quite necessary should one become immerced in a foreign culture.)
Before that year, I could get by in Japan. And I had long before taught myself how to read a lot of technical (computer related) articles (Japanese computer magazines, books, and manuals - thanks to my Kanji-English dictionary). I had to be self taught since even the Japanese language courses focused only on business and culture. But I really learned how to start communicating in Japanese that year. Regardless of what kinds of marks I got in class, I learned more of what I needed to fulfill my goal that year than in the previous three.
Of note, the classes weren't all that difficult in content. It was the language that was the biggest challenge. So, in a way, it helped consolidate all that I'd learned up until then in English about programming. Having to think about all of those first and second year concepts again in a different language (not programming language - but I find that it helps as well) did a great deal to help me come to grips with them.
Another thing that should be noted, Japanese universities struck me as odd in that they're very difficult to get into, but fairly easy to graduate from. It kind of seemed to me that it was a short vacation after working so hard to get into the university that kids got to have before entering the rat race. The U.S. educational system seems to be the opposite. Easy to get up to and into college, but not so easy to graduate.
The administration at Yokohama wanted to give me something special, as I was the first person to go on that program that actually attended all of his (or her) classes. It seems that in the past, all of the other participants found part time jobs to spend all of their time at. One wonders what their goal$ were.
The game contents just started last year, so it's probably the smallest of content genre there.
(Note, I don't have a J-Phone, or an i-mode for that matter (i-mode's voice mode is too poor quality for me). But the commercials sure are breaking down my resistance.)
However, what is a phone primarily used for? Reading contents? No. Talking with others. For that, the PHS phones are so much better than i-mode. Yet, most people seem to tolerate the poor voice quality for the contents (and more often then not, IMHO, the name brand) of i-mode.
Like complaining to LookOut! users about their moronic HTML mail, I often ask i-mode users to find a public phone to talk with me.
But it does look as though contents are what most people find most important. At the train station or on the streets walking, I see hundreds of people every day focused on their little phone screens.
Here in Japan it's Nikkei-NBC. I'm as inclined to watch is as MSNBC since it only covers business news.
http://glasscode.half-empty.org/gcservlet/LoadPage .
I haven't tried it out yet, but plan to before the weekend is out. Wife and kids catching the flu have postponed my tests so far this weekend. Some things take priority.
After wasting an entire afternoon with this, I cut and paste everything to Netscape Gold (paid for), and Netscape has been my preferred word processor ever since.
The HTML generated by Netscape Gold and/or 4.x is just the basics, and all that are really needed. Word's exporting of HTML is full of junk to fix the width at a size that I don't nesessarily use my browser at, shrinks the font to be unreadably small, inserts a lot of strange characters instead of single and double quotes resulting in strange Kanji characters, and wastes space by specifying fonts that I don't even have in my machine on every line making the HTML file 30 times as large as need be.
I have no problem using a seperate utility for graphics (GIMP), but don't think that most M$ users could adjust to that.
FreeBSDCon --> BSDCon was a great idea. The current effort to merge ports/packaging system is another one. But were the BSD's really that fragmented all along?
I know it's available from the /usr/ports/japanese/magicpoint port on FreeBSD. I'm sure a search of the web will provide a Linux port.
There are examples in both Japanese and English which you can use as a template to create a presentation pretty quickly. The entire presentation can be edited with your favorite text editor. The design is very simple, yet it is a very powerful presentation tool.
Not many Japanese Open Source projects have made it to the mainstream, but this is one that has - or at least should.
The cycle is 50Hz in North-east Japan (Nagoya and up, I think), and 60Hz in South-west Japan (Nagoya and down - I'm not sure which side of the line Nagoya lies on). So, pretty much all Japanese consumer electronics come with auto switching between 50 and 60 cycles. This is important for anything with a timer in it.
Is it the OS or web serving software that is the key?
What ever happened to the "speedy" in one's "right to a fair and speedy trial"? No, I'm not talking about Microsoft's right, I'm talking about the rights of consumers (being represented by the DoJ).
I really like your articles, but since when did you start using Word (or WordPerfect) to write? I ask because all of your single quotes are escaping into strange Kanji codes.
Please run the demoronizer (or in /usr/ports/www/demoroniser) on your text before submitting. I know, the LA Times and others have the same problems, but I didn't expect to see this kind of non-standard character usage here on /..
Off topic, but needs to be said.
- I could never go into sales because I just can't lie like they can, and
- if I were ever in a position to buy something, I'd rather talk with a developer (who may embellish a bit about how
good it is, but be sincere) than a salesman (who has nothing but a sale in mind).
I'm not saying that our sales people deceive people into buying something that they don't really need. The solutions do what is promised. But they will sell vapor ware then expect us techies to provide miracles to do all the things they promised - which usually get cut over.OK, so to the customer, it really isn't lying. But to those of us who have to develop the goods, there seems to be some deceit going on.
Of course, while function names and variables can be in any encoding, the syntax is still Java.
If you do Linux, install FreeBSD just to change your way of thinking for a while. If I run into a block again, I'll give Linux another try. Or maybe even Solaris 8.
You have the programming skills already. You just need to occupy your mind with a challenging task that will let you see other ways of doing things.
If you're really in a programming rut, rereading GoF's Design Patterns can often give a lot of inspiration.
- The only real winners, of course, are the lawyers, as usual, and the handful of companies rich enough to pay and benefit them.
- But there's no evidence that the entities copyright laws were meant to protect were billion dollar media corporatations with a distinctly unfair unadvantage over individuals when it comes to defining and enforcing copyright conventions.
- No civil-liberties organization has offered money or other support to fans who are denied access to their culture by corporate lawyers.
- Most people caught in copyright battles, or on the receiving end of hundreds of thousands of warning letters being issues in response to the DMCA lack the financial resources or the political acumen to take on vast entertainment conglomerates in court.
to quote his most recent article.I'm sure that Kanz-san is infurring it, but never says it. But can it be true? One is only as free as one's layer can make you?
Now, I don't know about the normal, everyday citizen, but I certainly can't afford a stinking layer. If some corporation didn't like what I wrote on my home page, their legal department could threaten me, and I'd probably ignore them, standing behind my beliefs. I wouldn't write what I do if I didn't believe it. Yet, even though I'd be completely innocent of wrong doing, am I really at a corporation's mercy in the eye of the law? I was under the impression that an individual is "innocent until proven guilty." Has American society degressed to the point that one is innocent only if one can afford to convince a judge and jury of one's innocence?
A lot of aspects of American society have been bothering me since my high school years. Living on a U.S. military base in Japan during those development years can have a strong impression on one. And when CNN is all you really see about U.S. society for three years, it doesn't make for a very good impression. Needless to say, I was labeled an expatriot by my class mates. (And since I carried my laptop computer around everywhere I went for two years - an NEC PC-8201 - I think they made a U.S. version for Tandy - I'd have probably been misprofiled by many of those profiling systems Kanz-san is often ranting about.)
Nonetheless, my classmates would often tell me to "love it or leave it" when I expressed my views of the U.S., so I left it. My parents often try to entice me back, saying that I could be making 4 times what I do here. After my sister tried to convince me that the U.S. isn't as bad as I make it out, I asked her how she could accept all that is going on and not say anything about it. Not want to change it, to make a difference. My arguements must have struck a bad nerve with her, because I haven't gotten a reply to my questions. I think she just tries to put that sort of stuff out of her mind, and dislikes me bringing it up.
I'm convinced that if I still lived in the U.S. that I'd be dead by now. I'd ask somebody to turn down his Walkman because his idea of music and mind don't match, and that's the end. While I like the expression, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I also feel compelled to follow through on the opposite, "if it is broken, fix it yourself." I can't stand idolly by while something isn't right that I have the ability to do something about. If I do just turn the other cheek and walk away, I get knots in my stomach the size of softballs.
Back to the topic, though. Has the legal system gotten to the point where guilt and innocence are a commodity, not a right? Is there no way to fix it short of a revolution (to invalidate all of the precidents to date)? Is there really no better reason to return to the U.S. other than "hazzard pay" (pay for living in a 3rd world, dangerous country)?
Can I watch a DVD with a friend present?
Which brings me to an idea I had over the weekend. Do you remember the web being blacked out a number of years ago in protest for free speech? Background colors on sites around the world turned black for a day (or was it a week?). I know that it got a lot of attention, but did it really change anything?
What one needs is something that gets more than attention, that gets action. Something like a speed bump.
Huh? Let's use an analogy for a minute. The road outside my apartment is used often as a shortcut around the more crowded major route (with an extra stop light). It's a narrow, 1-way road with no side walk. And people zip up that road very fast!
As a parent of two children who use that road to go to school and the park, I want those people slowed down. So, I brought it up with community leaders that speed bumps would be a good way to regulate speed through there. What was their response?
A sign! Even after I was told that a sign was put up, I didn't notice it for 2 weeks! They did the same thing when I complained about people driving the wrong way - put up a second sign saying "No right turn" - right next to another sign saying "No right turn!" Needless to say, neither of these signs have had any effect.
Turning background colors black may have more effect than putting up a speed limit sign, but is it really enough to make people change the way they think? Will that bombard MS's PR hot lines to the point that they'll consider changing their ways?
On the road, a speed bump is a physical, hard to ignore, barrier that causes most drivers to slow down to a safe speed to go over them. But how can one put a speed bump in Microsoft's way?
Having some Federal agency looking over MS's shoulder would be more like having a cop on the road with a speed gun day in and day out. It may do wonders for the reduction of speed for a couple of days, but after that, he/she would just be taking up resources with nothing to do. And once the Enforcer is gone, the speed on the road will increase to what it was before the Enforcment. (Read into it what you will with the DoJ case.)
Something more than a sign, but less than an Enforcer is what would be needed. A speed bump. And the most effective way to hit Microsoft where it hurts would be to take it to their customers. Configure a site to allow normal browsing for non-IE browsers. When an MS browser is detected in the HTTP headers, either redirect or prepend a statement of protest. Include a method for feedback to MS, as well as links to alternative browsers through which one my browse unimpeeded (sp?). This will get people to act, rather than just admire the change in color. It'll be a hard sign to ignore.
I'm sure that someone will point out that filtering according to browser manufacturer would be an infringment on the user's freedom. And isn't that what this whole battle is about? Microsoft is extending the Kerbos spec to exclude non-Microsoft clients. How much would they like being the excluded ones?
Five years later, they all use the Internet daily for all kinds of tasks. Why? Because a large number of sites have appeared over the years in Japanese.
Now, these are software engineers. They all program in C/C++ and other English based languages. They can read English manuals. But they tend to only read English web pages for information as a last resort. I've mentioned /. to some. They say that they've heard of it (from other Japanese technology based sites), but don't know what it's about.
Technology can change language useage a great deal. Microsoft has been changing the Japanese language over the past years. It used to be that the OK_CANCEL pair of buttons for the majority of Japanese applications were "Ryokai" and "Torikeshi" respectively. But Microsoft decreeded that they should be "OK" and "Kyanseru" in their design guide, so the two words were adopted into the Japanese language as the standard for OK_CANCEL dialogs. "Cut" used to be "Kiru," and there are a great deal more examples.
Above, I have two examples of the Japanese language going in two directions. On the one hand, even technical people are fairly reluctant to accept English as the language that they use every day. On the other hand, the technologies that they use introduce a large number of English words which they accept into their everyday language without really thinking about it.
Now, get out of the technical arena and into every day people. A lot of young people dream of going to America, so they want to learn English. But how do they do? Well, let me tell you about a true story.
One collegue's wife studied English at an English school 3 nights a week in preperation for a trip to Walt Disney World. When the two of them got to Florida, who was it that had to do all of the talking at the airport, hotel, etc.? It was the husband who didn't take any English classes. No matter how much someone may want to learn English, actually using it is a completly different issue.
There was one thread that talked about an "easy to type" language being adopted. There have been a number of times that a proposal to Romanize Japanese has been brought up here in Japan, and none of the proposals have gotten very far so far as I could tell. Personally, I'd be against such a proposal. If anything, I'd like to see pictoral characters adopted by more languages for writing. Why? Well, I can read a lot just based on knowing the meanings of a few hundred characters and/or parts of characters. I can't read the texts out loud (as a given character may have a number of pronunciations), but I know the overall meaning of what I'm reading.
It's starting to sound like I'm getting off topic, but bear with me. The Internet is essentially a written language, not a spoken language. A large number of achronyms have been introduced to the Internet culture like "IMHO" and others. One can consider "IMHO" a single pictograph in the written language of the Internet, with a given meaning of its own which can immediatly be recognized in any reader's native language - not translating "In My Humble Opinion" from English to one's native language, but understood in that language when seen.
Will anything like this every be adopted? I doubt it. Like many have already said, any kind of structured artifical language is bound to fail. Even if it's just a way of writing. Hey, Americans have a hard enough time learning how to read 26 characters. While I personally think that literacy would go up (in a generation or two) by requring the learning of a couple thousand pictographs, I don't think that most of the Roman alphabet world would be willing to learn them. But that's for another thread.
After studying Computer Science and minoring in Japanese at San Diego State University (I was the first to sign up for the "new" minor back in 1985), and studying in Japan for a year as an exchange student with mainstream Japanese students, I entered the company that I still work for in Tokyo.
My job search was pretty simple. Recruit U.S.A. holds (held?) two "Career Forums" each year, one in Boston, the other in San Francisco, which feature a large number of Japanese companies looking for U.S. educated employees (mostly looking for Japanese studying abroad, but most are open to any nationality). At the time (1991), there were a lot of oportunities for technical work. Those friends of mine from my Japanese courses who studied General Education or Business could only find English teaching jobs. I found the job I was looking for.
I then went (came?) to Japan during Spring break for follow up interviews. In the end, I deciding on the company that offered the least in the way of salary, but which I thought I would like the work the most. And since I'm still here 9 years later, still earning probably less than half what I could at another company or in the States, I'd say that I made the right choice.
The one thing that I would like to stress is that you must be willing to learn the culture. I can't tell you how much I hate running into gaijin (foreigners) who are loud and boisterous, always shouting about why "they" don't do things like "back home." There are different ways of doing things. Better or worse shouldn't be an issue. You must be able to accept the differences as the way things are.
For Japan, housing is small and expensive. If you work for an American company here, I understand that they pay a housing allowance higher than my monthly sallary. I would like to own my own home some day, but that'll be a long way down the road here.
If you have any specific questions, you can get in touch with me through my home page.
I'd recommend living abroad if, for nothing else, to give you a different perspective on things.