About 10 years ago, at a local Target, they were refilling the ATM machine. I was also fascinated with the inside of the ATM, but the security guard didn't allow me to go anywhere near to the machine to see the inside. In fact, the security guard politely, but firmly asked me to leave, otherwise, he told me that he would take me away.
So, based upon what I have experienced, it's no surprise that they arrested somebody for taking the photo.
Many larger places in the world use EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). An experiment I am a (small) part of use EPICS for control.
It is an open source control systems frequently used for particle accelerator control and observatory telescope control. We use it slightly differently, but for what we need to do, it works very well. It is maintained primary by Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. You can read more at the following URL: http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/
In case you are wondering, no, they don't use EPICS for LHC. They use a commercial SCADA program called PVSS (for the most part anyway).
The original article is INCREDIBLY MISLEADING! In fact, it makes
me wonder if Paul Kallender knew what he was writing about.
Here is the bottom of it. 21.0 % of Japanese business currently
use OSS for server, 7.6 % of Japanese business is planning to introduce
OSS for server, 14.6 % of Japanese business is considering to introduce
OSS for server. In the same white paper, they have the figures
for USA and South Korea. According to the white paper, the figure
in the US is 33.0 % currently use OSS server, 5.7 % is planning to use,
and 20.6 % is considering to use. In South Korea, 21.0 % is
currently using, 4.7 % is planning to use, and 12.9 % is
considering.
If you don't believe me, you can read it yourself at (it's on the
fourth page on this PDF): http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper/ eng/WP2005/eng_pressinfo3.pdf
In short, OSS use in Japan in server market is less than that of the
US! Is this supposed to be a news? I don't think so!
I thought something was wrong when I saw the headline, as I never saw
any OSS machines around when I used to work in Japan. In fact,
everywhere I saw, I only saw Windows machines (not even Mac back in
2002).
About a year ago, my friend's computer in her office decided to die
(she is a graduate student). She had an old Pentium II running
Windows 98 then. What happened was, Windows was corrupted enough
that it could not boot into Windows, and the best she could do was to
boot into the command mode.
Anyway, she calles the IT guys on site for the help. The kid who
showed up looked at her computer and asked her "Where is the mouse
(cursor) on your computer??" Apparently, the kid (undergraduate
student worker) have never seen a computer that does not run
Windows.
After seeing that, she sent the kid back and called me for
help...&
As somebody who works in a small university, I have to say that it is a
great job. Yes, the pay isn't all that great. However, I
have all the freedom I need. Most people around me works 35-40
hours/week, but there are a lot of slacking off among some of the staff
members (I swear some secretaries work way less than 30 hours/week in
actual working time).
Work hour can be very flexible. I know people who comes 7 AM and
leave by 3 PM, or 10 AM and leave 7 PM. On the other hand, if you
work for non-academic departments, then, you may have 8-5 (or 9-6) job
as the rest of the world. IT people tends not to have 8-5 jobs,
however.
A few years ago, I left my university job for a while working for a
company for a while,
then, I came back (to my original job at the same university). To
me,
the corporate job I had was a dreadful job. It was a 9-6 job, but
there were so many restrictions and procedures that I had to follow to
do anything.
Now, I work 6 AM to 6/7/9 PM almost everyday, but for the most part, I
enjoy my job. I have my own private office (with a lot of
space). I get to do a lot of cools things (including just playing
around/experimenting with a lot of things). I can even get some
research and teaching done. I have never showed up work with tie
or dress shoes that I can remember. In fact, during the summer
months, I usually show up work with shorts and sandals on.
It is true that in some cases, funding from grants matter, however, in
many cases, it doesn't matter. For example, if your posistion
does not have a lot to do with research directly, then, it probably
doesn't matter. Also, as far as I can tell, in smaller
institutions (like mine), it tend not to matter too much (smaller
schools are more likely to be teaching institutions where less grant
funding research with enough funding to hire people for the
research).
Generally speaking, the benefits are good. You can often take the
university classes for free (or nearly free in some places). In
fact, I know a few people who have gotten their college degrees by
taking classes for free a little by little (usually secretarial people
with only highschool degree seeking college degree, however).
The downside of working for a college is some people do not have broad
skills. My primary responsibility is a chemist/scientist,
however, I end up being an IT guy (in local offices), administrator (as
business administrator), etc all the time. This is partly so
because people who really should be doing that jobs aren't doing it,
and they need to be taken care of.
Also, depending upon the each specifics, it may be hard to get things
you really need because of the funding issues. For example, it
took them over 6 months to get me a reasonable computer to use for my
work (although I did get exactly what I wanted in the end). I
often have to improvise what I need with what I can get hold of.
There is one thing you should know if you work for a college settings
(particularly at a small teaching institution). The
college/university is there to teach students. That is the
primary function of the institution. That is why all the profs
were hired (so that they can teach students). If you are a staff
member, then, your job is assists the profs and students to help the
students learn better. Even those non-academic departments are
there for that purpose. That is a very important concept
(unfortunately, many people do not understand that at all).
What a hell is that?? I thought 35 mm cameras are called 35 mm, because of the size of the film it uses?? Since digital cameras do not use films, there can't possibly be a digital "35 mm" camera, can it??
More T-shirts, less laundry, right?
Well, maybe not. I don't know about the rest of you, but even I
have a lot of extra T-shirts, I would still need to do laundry every so
often. Otherwise, I would run out clean underware! Since
ThinkGeek doesn't appear to sell any, I doubt if the frequency of may
laundry would change that much even if I get one of these Slashdot
T-shirts...
Of course, this also makes me wonder something... CmdrTaco either has a
lot of underwares or doesn't change his underware very often... I hope
the truth is the second one...
A friend of mine bought several of those. He has one at his
house, one at his sister's, one at his brother's, and one at his
mother's house. He loves that.
Before he went out and set it up for his mother and sister, we tried it
at work. We connected Beamer units to phone lines in our offices,
as far as I can tell, it works very nicely. At least he is very
happy about that. I don't ever remember him complaining about the
frame rate.
We looked at D-Link units as well, but where his mother lives, there is
no broadband connection, so we decided not to go that way.
Lithium batteries and Li-ion (lithium ion) batteries are not the same thing! Lithium batteries you are talking about are not rechargeable. That is not the same battery as the ones in your cell phones and laptop computers (and other devices).
What's the big deal?? They have those small watermelons in Japan
for many years (some watermelons are as small as a softball). I
know this, as I worked in watermelon shipping warehouse in Japan for a
while.
That is so untrue!!! I can tell you that, as I currently live in Japan.
Yes, there are some place where they don't want foreigners to be present,
very few places like that!!! The reason you hear these places is because
these places are not common at all!!!
As far as I can tell, you probably want to stay within Tokyo (and/or Osaka)
and surrounding for the most part, if you don't understand Japanese very
well. It is easy to find support in English in the large cities, but
outside of it, it would be hard to do that. While it it true that in
general, many people in Tokyo may not be as nice as the people in the country
area in Japan, it is not hard to find nice people in Tokyo who are willing
to help you out.
Now, as far as the housing goes, well, buying a house is nearly impossible
in Tokyo and surrounding area. You will probably have to settle with
finding an apartment somewhere, and that would be expensive, but not impossible.
Remember, people actually lives there. That means they somehow
manage to pay the rent, eat, etc from what they earn.
Having a car may not make much sense there, however. It is not uncommon
for the people in Tokyo to own a car, but they often have their car parked
at 2-3 subway stations away from where they live, as that is the closest
monthly parking space they could find (and they often costs over $300). Given
the expense associated with owning a car, many people chose not to have one
at all in Tokyo area. This is not a big deal in Tokyo area, as public
transportation is widely available to anywhere you may possibly want to go
in Tokyo area.
Actually, based upon my experience (I installed on a couple of 6100s and
a 7100 a year ago), you don't want to run X on NuBus based PowerMacs, as
it is painfully slow. These machines come with built-in video chips
that are not all that fast. So, running X on these machines will be
extremely slow.
Even with "newer" PowerMacs, often, people complains how slow they are, as
X server isn't all that optimized on a PPC Linux in many cases (at least
this was a common complain at one time).
With NuBus PowerMacs, it will be very slow. I recommend it running
without X, unless you absolutely have to.
What the article doesn't mention is that i-mode Internet access (Internet
access via your cell phone offered by DoCoMo) is very limited in many way.
Sure, your phone is capable of connecting to the Internet, but typically,
most regular websites are not accessible from your phone, as it is bigger
than the maximum size that your phone is capable of handling. I have
found less than 1% of normal websites are accessible from my phone. So,
you are basically limited to i-mode only sites, which are not very accessible
from your computer. I suppose this is one of the reason why many people
doens't realize i-mode is connected to the Internet.
Also, as far as the e-mail goes, I have personally found it useless. For
one thing, your mail has to be less than 250 characters (2 byte Japanese
characters, so you should be able to write up to 500 characters in 1 byte
English characters, I think), so you cannot send a long e-mail message. At
least for me, it doesn't take long for me to fill up the 250 character limit!
Inputting the text is pretty bad, if you ask me. You basically have
to enter it by pressing the bunch of buttons on the phone multiple times,
scrolling many times, etc. It is very inefficient to type anything
into that. I think most Japanese don't think it is all that bad, as
very few Japanese can type, so they find that entering text in their cell
phones aren't all that worse than pecking the keyboard to enter text on their
PC.
I then thought maybe I could use my cell phone to access to my servers via
ssh (my phone is capable of using Java applications designed for cell phones
known as "i-appli"). Well, turned out, apparently there is no way of
connecting standard ssh port numbers (actually, I think you can only connect
to a handful of port numbers on these cell phones). So, here again,
I have found it useless.
I personally don't use i-mode access very much at all for the reasons that
I listed above. Why do I have that? Well, when I got the phone
last fall, there was no way not to have that, and I cannot unsubscribe from
it for a year no matter what I do! That's how their contract works!
I would be happy to lose the ability to connect to the Internet on
my cell phone.
So, the story here is, for most of you who are used to connect to the Interent
via computer, you may find the model they have in Japan is very inadequate
for what you use for.
Internet access isn't all that expensive in Japan. ADSL costs something
like $35 - 50/mo typically (depending upon the ISP, you may be able to get
less than $30 in some cases). Dialup internet connection typically
cost something like $20/mo or so for the unlimited access. Anyway,
internet access isn't any more expensive than the US.
I personally find that $700 for the phone line hard to believe. I currenly
live in Japan, but I don't own a phone. I only use my cell phone for
my phone usage, and use either ADSL or cell phone modem to connect to the
Internet.
For those of you who don't read Japanese, I give you a bit more info on
this. Based upon what I read here
(Yahoo News Japan), it is a Pocket PC 2002 (which is no surprise, as NEC
makes one of these in Japan). They are also hoping to make versions
for other languages as well. What's written there seems the original
Japanese of the post in Digitimes. And here
is the press release from NEC.
Based upon what it says on NEC's press release, it works via voice
recognition, not via phone as somebody suggested. It is tuned to
understand standard American English (whatever that means) and standard
Japanese (which is well defined). The recognition is based upon common
words used for tourists, so if you try to translate technical terms, it
probably wont' understand you at all. Just like many voice recognition,
the way how you speak will determine the accuracy of voice recognition
(with a thick accent, you won't go anywhere).
They will have special booth set up for this for evaluation of the
technology in Narita Airport in late June.
It probably works via voice recognition and translation engine.
Voice recognition is something that has been being developed everywhere
as you know. English-Japanese translation engine is something that
Japanese has been working on for a number of years, as Japanese is very
different from any other language, and pretty much useless outside of Japan,
as nobody else speaks Japanese.
Based upon my experience with these translation engines I have seen
in Japan, they work very poorly. You will get most ideas across,
but the sentences are very unnatural at best, often incomprehensive.
Of course, these are often a lot better than English written by most Japanese.
I personally think it is nearly impossible to make really good English-Japanese
bi-directional translation engine, as Japanese grammers are so erratic
and loose.
Of course, these devices/softwares probably are better than nothing
if you know absolutely nothing about the language...
I remember back in old days, when you could only get "dead tree" version of computer books, Macintosh Bible had offer for updating the book as new material came out.
The last page of the book had a postcard that you could send, and they say that they would periodically send out the sections of updated items/chapters or something like that.
Unfortunately, I don't have the book any more to verify it for you...
Well, I think it is quite simple that they are talking about carbon nanotubes. Since these nanotubes are made of carbon, I don't think they can be metallic nanotube.
Given some form of carbon do conduct electricity (graphite, for example), they probably are semiconductor.
They probably have a long cage like structure; somewhat like enormously stretched fullerene (bucky ball). That structure will make the tubes possible to conduct the electricity, as there are a lot of delocalized electrons (just as polybenzene conduct electricity).
You can use LinuxPPC for NuBus. I believe the current version will let you use SCSI devices on PowerBook. I had it running on a PowerBook 5300 for a while (installed from a SCSI CD-ROM drive). I also had it running on several PowerMac 6100s and PowerMac 7100 until a year ago.
You do need to do a bit more work to get it run, than installing on a PCI Macs, though.
The amount of gas produced would be very small.
Let's say there is 1 gram of ice on the windshield of your car. Given water is 18 grams/mole, that would be 0.056 moles of water on it.
Now, since for every 1 mole of water, you will get 1 mole of hydrogen and half a mole of oxygen, you will get 0.056 mole of hydrogen and 0.028 mole of oxygen.
Given gas occupies about 22.4 L at 1 atm, 0 degrees Celcius, about 124 mL of hydrogen and 62 mL of oxygen will be produced out of 1 g of water.
While that may seem a lot to be produced, all of that will be formed on relatively large area, about 1 or so square meters. Therefore, they will be dissipated into the air very very quickly (less than a second).
Somewhere along, I remember reading that the internal modem in an Airport is the same modem as the ones in PowerBook G3s (I don't know which series PowerBook, however). It was off of one of earlier reports of people who has taken an Airport a part...
This actually makes a lot of sense, as PowerBook modem was already available, low power small modem that Apple had, not to mention, unlike winmodems, that would be a real modem that is necessary for an embedded system like Airport.
If you have a PS/2 to ADB adapter, it actually works fine. I got it scan easily on my Mac at work.
SONY Palm PDA?? Yeah, right...
on
Sony's Palm PDA
·
· Score: 4
If you can read Japanese (I do read Japanese, in case you are wondering), you will quickly find out that this is only what ZDNet Japan is imagining SONY Palm PDA. They have no idea what SONY is really planning to do with Palm PDA. It is more like they are hoping somebody from SONY will read that and make something like what they have....
Slashdot Mirror
About 10 years ago, at a local Target, they were refilling the ATM machine. I was also fascinated with the inside of the ATM, but the security guard didn't allow me to go anywhere near to the machine to see the inside. In fact, the security guard politely, but firmly asked me to leave, otherwise, he told me that he would take me away.
So, based upon what I have experienced, it's no surprise that they arrested somebody for taking the photo.
Many larger places in the world use EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). An experiment I am a (small) part of use EPICS for control.
It is an open source control systems frequently used for particle accelerator control and observatory telescope control. We use it slightly differently, but for what we need to do, it works very well. It is maintained primary by Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. You can read more at the following URL:
http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/
In case you are wondering, no, they don't use EPICS for LHC. They use a commercial SCADA program called PVSS (for the most part anyway).
The original article is INCREDIBLY MISLEADING! In fact, it makes me wonder if Paul Kallender knew what he was writing about./ eng/WP2005/eng_pressinfo3.pdf
Here is the bottom of it. 21.0 % of Japanese business currently use OSS for server, 7.6 % of Japanese business is planning to introduce OSS for server, 14.6 % of Japanese business is considering to introduce OSS for server. In the same white paper, they have the figures for USA and South Korea. According to the white paper, the figure in the US is 33.0 % currently use OSS server, 5.7 % is planning to use, and 20.6 % is considering to use. In South Korea, 21.0 % is currently using, 4.7 % is planning to use, and 12.9 % is considering.
If you don't believe me, you can read it yourself at (it's on the fourth page on this PDF): http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper
In short, OSS use in Japan in server market is less than that of the US! Is this supposed to be a news? I don't think so!
I thought something was wrong when I saw the headline, as I never saw any OSS machines around when I used to work in Japan. In fact, everywhere I saw, I only saw Windows machines (not even Mac back in 2002).
About a year ago, my friend's computer in her office decided to die (she is a graduate student). She had an old Pentium II running Windows 98 then. What happened was, Windows was corrupted enough that it could not boot into Windows, and the best she could do was to boot into the command mode.
Anyway, she calles the IT guys on site for the help. The kid who showed up looked at her computer and asked her "Where is the mouse (cursor) on your computer??" Apparently, the kid (undergraduate student worker) have never seen a computer that does not run Windows.
After seeing that, she sent the kid back and called me for help...&
As somebody who works in a small university, I have to say that it is a great job. Yes, the pay isn't all that great. However, I have all the freedom I need. Most people around me works 35-40 hours/week, but there are a lot of slacking off among some of the staff members (I swear some secretaries work way less than 30 hours/week in actual working time).
Work hour can be very flexible. I know people who comes 7 AM and leave by 3 PM, or 10 AM and leave 7 PM. On the other hand, if you work for non-academic departments, then, you may have 8-5 (or 9-6) job as the rest of the world. IT people tends not to have 8-5 jobs, however.
A few years ago, I left my university job for a while working for a company for a while, then, I came back (to my original job at the same university). To me, the corporate job I had was a dreadful job. It was a 9-6 job, but there were so many restrictions and procedures that I had to follow to do anything.
Now, I work 6 AM to 6/7/9 PM almost everyday, but for the most part, I enjoy my job. I have my own private office (with a lot of space). I get to do a lot of cools things (including just playing around/experimenting with a lot of things). I can even get some research and teaching done. I have never showed up work with tie or dress shoes that I can remember. In fact, during the summer months, I usually show up work with shorts and sandals on.
It is true that in some cases, funding from grants matter, however, in many cases, it doesn't matter. For example, if your posistion does not have a lot to do with research directly, then, it probably doesn't matter. Also, as far as I can tell, in smaller institutions (like mine), it tend not to matter too much (smaller schools are more likely to be teaching institutions where less grant funding research with enough funding to hire people for the research).
Generally speaking, the benefits are good. You can often take the university classes for free (or nearly free in some places). In fact, I know a few people who have gotten their college degrees by taking classes for free a little by little (usually secretarial people with only highschool degree seeking college degree, however).
The downside of working for a college is some people do not have broad skills. My primary responsibility is a chemist/scientist, however, I end up being an IT guy (in local offices), administrator (as business administrator), etc all the time. This is partly so because people who really should be doing that jobs aren't doing it, and they need to be taken care of.
Also, depending upon the each specifics, it may be hard to get things you really need because of the funding issues. For example, it took them over 6 months to get me a reasonable computer to use for my work (although I did get exactly what I wanted in the end). I often have to improvise what I need with what I can get hold of.
There is one thing you should know if you work for a college settings (particularly at a small teaching institution). The college/university is there to teach students. That is the primary function of the institution. That is why all the profs were hired (so that they can teach students). If you are a staff member, then, your job is assists the profs and students to help the students learn better. Even those non-academic departments are there for that purpose. That is a very important concept (unfortunately, many people do not understand that at all).
What a hell is that?? I thought 35 mm cameras are called 35 mm, because of the size of the film it uses?? Since digital cameras do not use films, there can't possibly be a digital "35 mm" camera, can it??
More T-shirts, less laundry, right?
Well, maybe not. I don't know about the rest of you, but even I have a lot of extra T-shirts, I would still need to do laundry every so often. Otherwise, I would run out clean underware! Since ThinkGeek doesn't appear to sell any, I doubt if the frequency of may laundry would change that much even if I get one of these Slashdot T-shirts...
Of course, this also makes me wonder something... CmdrTaco either has a lot of underwares or doesn't change his underware very often... I hope the truth is the second one...
A friend of mine bought several of those. He has one at his house, one at his sister's, one at his brother's, and one at his mother's house. He loves that.
Before he went out and set it up for his mother and sister, we tried it at work. We connected Beamer units to phone lines in our offices, as far as I can tell, it works very nicely. At least he is very happy about that. I don't ever remember him complaining about the frame rate.
We looked at D-Link units as well, but where his mother lives, there is no broadband connection, so we decided not to go that way.
Lithium batteries and Li-ion (lithium ion) batteries are not the same thing! Lithium batteries you are talking about are not rechargeable. That is not the same battery as the ones in your cell phones and laptop computers (and other devices).
What's the big deal?? They have those small watermelons in Japan for many years (some watermelons are as small as a softball). I know this, as I worked in watermelon shipping warehouse in Japan for a while.
That is so untrue!!! I can tell you that, as I currently live in Japan.
Yes, there are some place where they don't want foreigners to be present, very few places like that!!! The reason you hear these places is because these places are not common at all!!!
As far as I can tell, you probably want to stay within Tokyo (and/or Osaka) and surrounding for the most part, if you don't understand Japanese very well. It is easy to find support in English in the large cities, but outside of it, it would be hard to do that. While it it true that in general, many people in Tokyo may not be as nice as the people in the country area in Japan, it is not hard to find nice people in Tokyo who are willing to help you out.
Now, as far as the housing goes, well, buying a house is nearly impossible in Tokyo and surrounding area. You will probably have to settle with finding an apartment somewhere, and that would be expensive, but not impossible. Remember, people actually lives there. That means they somehow manage to pay the rent, eat, etc from what they earn.
Having a car may not make much sense there, however. It is not uncommon for the people in Tokyo to own a car, but they often have their car parked at 2-3 subway stations away from where they live, as that is the closest monthly parking space they could find (and they often costs over $300). Given the expense associated with owning a car, many people chose not to have one at all in Tokyo area. This is not a big deal in Tokyo area, as public transportation is widely available to anywhere you may possibly want to go in Tokyo area.
Actually, based upon my experience (I installed on a couple of 6100s and a 7100 a year ago), you don't want to run X on NuBus based PowerMacs, as it is painfully slow. These machines come with built-in video chips that are not all that fast. So, running X on these machines will be extremely slow.
Even with "newer" PowerMacs, often, people complains how slow they are, as X server isn't all that optimized on a PPC Linux in many cases (at least this was a common complain at one time).
With NuBus PowerMacs, it will be very slow. I recommend it running without X, unless you absolutely have to.
What the article doesn't mention is that i-mode Internet access (Internet access via your cell phone offered by DoCoMo) is very limited in many way.
Sure, your phone is capable of connecting to the Internet, but typically, most regular websites are not accessible from your phone, as it is bigger than the maximum size that your phone is capable of handling. I have found less than 1% of normal websites are accessible from my phone. So, you are basically limited to i-mode only sites, which are not very accessible from your computer. I suppose this is one of the reason why many people doens't realize i-mode is connected to the Internet.
Also, as far as the e-mail goes, I have personally found it useless. For one thing, your mail has to be less than 250 characters (2 byte Japanese characters, so you should be able to write up to 500 characters in 1 byte English characters, I think), so you cannot send a long e-mail message. At least for me, it doesn't take long for me to fill up the 250 character limit!
Inputting the text is pretty bad, if you ask me. You basically have to enter it by pressing the bunch of buttons on the phone multiple times, scrolling many times, etc. It is very inefficient to type anything into that. I think most Japanese don't think it is all that bad, as very few Japanese can type, so they find that entering text in their cell phones aren't all that worse than pecking the keyboard to enter text on their PC.
I then thought maybe I could use my cell phone to access to my servers via ssh (my phone is capable of using Java applications designed for cell phones known as "i-appli"). Well, turned out, apparently there is no way of connecting standard ssh port numbers (actually, I think you can only connect to a handful of port numbers on these cell phones). So, here again, I have found it useless.
I personally don't use i-mode access very much at all for the reasons that I listed above. Why do I have that? Well, when I got the phone last fall, there was no way not to have that, and I cannot unsubscribe from it for a year no matter what I do! That's how their contract works! I would be happy to lose the ability to connect to the Internet on my cell phone.
So, the story here is, for most of you who are used to connect to the Interent via computer, you may find the model they have in Japan is very inadequate for what you use for.
Internet access isn't all that expensive in Japan. ADSL costs something like $35 - 50/mo typically (depending upon the ISP, you may be able to get less than $30 in some cases). Dialup internet connection typically cost something like $20/mo or so for the unlimited access. Anyway, internet access isn't any more expensive than the US.
I personally find that $700 for the phone line hard to believe. I currenly live in Japan, but I don't own a phone. I only use my cell phone for my phone usage, and use either ADSL or cell phone modem to connect to the Internet.
For those of you who don't read Japanese, I give you a bit more info on this. Based upon what I read here (Yahoo News Japan), it is a Pocket PC 2002 (which is no surprise, as NEC makes one of these in Japan). They are also hoping to make versions for other languages as well. What's written there seems the original Japanese of the post in Digitimes. And here is the press release from NEC.
Based upon what it says on NEC's press release, it works via voice recognition, not via phone as somebody suggested. It is tuned to understand standard American English (whatever that means) and standard Japanese (which is well defined). The recognition is based upon common words used for tourists, so if you try to translate technical terms, it probably wont' understand you at all. Just like many voice recognition, the way how you speak will determine the accuracy of voice recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go anywhere).
They will have special booth set up for this for evaluation of the technology in Narita Airport in late June.
It probably works via voice recognition and translation engine. Voice recognition is something that has been being developed everywhere as you know. English-Japanese translation engine is something that Japanese has been working on for a number of years, as Japanese is very different from any other language, and pretty much useless outside of Japan, as nobody else speaks Japanese.
Based upon my experience with these translation engines I have seen in Japan, they work very poorly. You will get most ideas across, but the sentences are very unnatural at best, often incomprehensive. Of course, these are often a lot better than English written by most Japanese. I personally think it is nearly impossible to make really good English-Japanese bi-directional translation engine, as Japanese grammers are so erratic and loose.
Of course, these devices/softwares probably are better than nothing if you know absolutely nothing about the language...
I remember back in old days, when you could only get "dead tree" version of computer books, Macintosh Bible had offer for updating the book as new material came out. The last page of the book had a postcard that you could send, and they say that they would periodically send out the sections of updated items/chapters or something like that. Unfortunately, I don't have the book any more to verify it for you...
Well, I think it is quite simple that they are talking about carbon nanotubes. Since these nanotubes are made of carbon, I don't think they can be metallic nanotube. Given some form of carbon do conduct electricity (graphite, for example), they probably are semiconductor. They probably have a long cage like structure; somewhat like enormously stretched fullerene (bucky ball). That structure will make the tubes possible to conduct the electricity, as there are a lot of delocalized electrons (just as polybenzene conduct electricity).
You can use LinuxPPC for NuBus. I believe the current version will let you use SCSI devices on PowerBook. I had it running on a PowerBook 5300 for a while (installed from a SCSI CD-ROM drive). I also had it running on several PowerMac 6100s and PowerMac 7100 until a year ago. You do need to do a bit more work to get it run, than installing on a PCI Macs, though.
I'm sorry, this is nothing new. They have had something like this in Japan for many many years, mainly for hot sake (usually in vending machines).
The amount of gas produced would be very small.
Let's say there is 1 gram of ice on the windshield of your car. Given water is 18 grams/mole, that would be 0.056 moles of water on it.
Now, since for every 1 mole of water, you will get 1 mole of hydrogen and half a mole of oxygen, you will get 0.056 mole of hydrogen and 0.028 mole of oxygen.
Given gas occupies about 22.4 L at 1 atm, 0 degrees Celcius, about 124 mL of hydrogen and 62 mL of oxygen will be produced out of 1 g of water.
While that may seem a lot to be produced, all of that will be formed on relatively large area, about 1 or so square meters. Therefore, they will be dissipated into the air very very quickly (less than a second).
Well, you are wrong on this as well. The proper reaction is something like this:
alkali metal (M) + 2 H2O --> alkali hydroxide (MOH) + H2 + heat
We have the pictures of this exact reaction on our web site. Check here and here.
Somewhere along, I remember reading that the internal modem in an Airport is the same modem as the ones in PowerBook G3s (I don't know which series PowerBook, however). It was off of one of earlier reports of people who has taken an Airport a part...
This actually makes a lot of sense, as PowerBook modem was already available, low power small modem that Apple had, not to mention, unlike winmodems, that would be a real modem that is necessary for an embedded system like Airport.
If you have a PS/2 to ADB adapter, it actually works fine. I got it scan easily on my Mac at work.
If you can read Japanese (I do read Japanese, in case you are wondering), you will quickly find out that this is only what ZDNet Japan is imagining SONY Palm PDA. They have no idea what SONY is really planning to do with Palm PDA. It is more like they are hoping somebody from SONY will read that and make something like what they have....