Well, yes...and no.
The Japanese market is rife with protectionism, price fixing and other lousy schemes.
But - I doubt that is why American companies don't do well here.
The problem is that many foreign companies fail to understand the Japanese market. Those that do, prosper here: McDonalds, KFC, Denny's (!?!), Subway Sandwiches, Starbucks - They all do phenomenally well here.
They have taken the time to understand the market, yet still retain their American um... flavor.
Saturn (cars) made a big deal about selling their cars here a while back - yet their marketing was pathetic: Overdubbed US commercials showing things that the typical Japanese could not relate to.
I've been here 2 years and have not yet seen a Saturn on the road.
Harley Davidson, on the other hand - Wow. I've seen more Harleys here than I ever did in the US.
There is no argument here about "Hog vs. Rice Burner" - Hog wins 'hoofs down'.
As far as rice goes - there is a difference. You can't use Uncle Ben's with Japanese food. Even Korean rice, which I can't tell from Japanese, my girlfriend can.
Sure Japan subsidizes their rice industry, but it's an attempt at self-sufficiency - which they need to do, or be at tremendous risk to outside forces, the way they were before WW2.
It's a different life here. You just can't apply American standards at all.
You know, I used to LOVE my Nokia.
In the US, I felt so cool, pulling it out when I got an email on it. People would tell me how small and high tech it was...
When I moved to Japan, I tried to see if I could get service on it - When I took it out, the guy in the store laughed and said "Burikku desu!" (What a brick!)
I just got a new one - a Tiny Toshiba with color screen, email, web, midi synthesizer (for composing your own multi-track, multi-instrument ring tunes,) and a digital camera that plugs in to the earphone jack.
Plus, the sound quality is incredible, does data at 64k and lasts for days on a single charge. When I see that scene in the Matrix, with the shameless product placement of the phone, I laugh - If people only knew what they were missing...
http://www.oconnell.net/~jim/images/london/leehofo ok.jpg
(too lazy to html-ize it...)
I'm glad to see other people know the place - No one that I mentioned it to at the time had any idea what I was talking about.
:-)
Here in Japan, English is taught in school starting quite early. But that doesn't mean that all of the students are fluent in English. The reality is that to get any kind of fluency, they have to enroll in external classes or do a homestay abroad.
I would guess that your typical Japanese person retains about as much English from school as a typical American retains from a few years of high school French. (Not much.)
Personally, I have no knack for learning languages, but being in a situation where I am forced to use Japanese to communicate, I am learning. That's how it is - If you want to learn a language, go to a place where they speak it and not English. You'll learn.
I do the same with a digital camera & 64MB media card - That way I can take files back and forth to work. Once in a while, I take home my 13GB SCSI with a USB adapter and dump in a new load of MP3s and VCDs to use while I work.
Since I have a sony vaio, I only have one PCMCIA slot, so if I'm on the network, I have to use USB to attach the big drive. Performance is slow, but OK for single-users hitting the drive over the network.
Copying gigabytes of files over the USB each morning is intolerably slow, so I use the SCSI cable instead, or just burn a CD if it is just MP3's... I copy the MP3s to my workstation or my laptop and then give away the CD...
I should really look into one of those USB network adapters - That would free up the PCMCIA for the drive...
"Because Windows 98 does not by default have lots of services running and doesn't have a good command prompt, it's harder and a less desirable target for crackers..."
...at a third of the weight.
face it - other than gaming, how much heavy processing are you going to do on a plane?
You're going to write emails, dick around with Word or listen to MP3's.
(Even with MP3's, you can close it to turn off the monitor.)
When you're not on the road, plug in and add a monitor...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You're going to run distributed.net on battery power?
Probably you'll want to disable that sort of thing when you're not plugged in - I have a picture book and after a year, the battery is about useless - 10 minutes tops. Of course, the battery is pretty small, physically.
It's a trade-off.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I've never had them say that when I *buy* a CD, but they do when I RENT one.
So strange a concept (renting new CDs) but it is very popular here. Just like renting videos.
The minidiscs are usually right by the counter, too, but you can always find them cheaper somewhere else...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Actually, here in Tokyo, the most frequent comment I hear about them is "Hmmm... Eki no haizara..." (Trainstation ashtray)
They really do look quite the same.
Cheers,
Jim
Very true!
The issue was raised and resolved.
Any more banter on the subject will just lead to confusion among the end users.
If, suppose you were an IT person proposing a switch to linux desktops in an organization and you are demonstrating the KDE desktop to your pointy-haired boss.
You get close to getting it approved, until he remembers reading an article in WinFUD Magazine - Something about a licensing problem.
PHB's fud meter goes into the red zone.
Now imagine trying to explain the intricasies of the GPL to him... Good luck with that.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Reminds me of a story I heard that ten or fifteen years ago, the Khomeni government of Iran sent extradition letters to the US State Department demanding that Michael Jackson and Madonna be turned over so that they could be put to death for violating Iran's obscenity laws.
Of course, Khomeni is dead now and all of his lawyers went to work for the US entertainment industry...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Actually, I was just a bit surprised to find out that I was expected to do their work for them. When do I get my check? If they've decided to go commercial, using whatever small percentage of their database that I populated, shouldn't I expect a cut?
We all submitted CD information in good faith, expecting it to remain free. Why didn't it?
Face it. They took something that used to be free and turned it commercial. They can now go promptly to hell, for all I care.
Good riddance. Once this community turns against them for this kind of behaviour, they're pretty much screwed, unless they go into heavy karma-repair mode.
They are abusing our trust - so what can we do?
Start submitting 'corrections' to entries...
If they are relying upon public input for their bread and butter, start putting flies in the butter.
I would guess that a fair percentage of slashdot's readership *built* their database and have the ability to render it unusable.
What legal obligation do we have to keep paying their salaries by populating their databases? Let's say I stick in a CD by the backstreet boys (supposing I owned one,) What if I decided that the the first song was called 'Some crappy song by backstreet boys' and the next was called 'Another crappy song by backstreet boys'.
Who's to say that there is anything wrong with that?
In another way, it's been happening - If you pop in a CD of J-Pop, half the time, the song titles come back as 'Japanese' since the title is written in Kanji. Is one more subjective than the other?
CDDB - I know you are reading this. Don't alienate this group. You'll regret it.
Jim in Tokyo
(PS - If you're right about google being next, I will sell my computer...)
I'm tempted to write a perl program to begin querying cddb with random ID's and populating FreeDB.
IIRC, cddb used to be freely available.
I used to submit enties and I once or twice downloaded the whole cddb file to use as sample data for database projects. (Maybe it was IMDB...)
How exactly do things like this become private?(CDDB, IMDB, whois...)
People contribute their time and effort to building a public database and some ########s turn it into some private business. Then they limit who can see it.
(Probably it boils down to who owns the hardware.)
I guess there is no more good will good faith efforts when the pointy-haired set get involved.
I don't get it. These things THRIVED before there were restrictions - why do these petty little dotcoms think they can change the rules and expect to remain viable?
I expect that I'm not the only one who no longer types in song titles and submits them to cddb - Let them do their own typing from now on...
Tell me more about FreeDB - I'm listening.
>could hook your 1394 HDTV to a 1394 DVD player
>and enjoy
From what I've heard, there are no 1394 DVD decks and there never will be - The DVD industry has made that a condition of licensing.
I may be wrong and I hope I am, but I don't think so.
I have a 1394 VCR and I love it - I wish I could buy a 1394 DVD...
The best office I ever had was one we set up at the Department of Justice. I was doing some contract work there a few years back and initially, they set us up on one of the upper floors, mixed right in with the clients. I told them that it was unworkable, due to the distractions, so they gave us a windowless room in the basement - A large storage space, really. (It quickly got nicknamed 'The X-Files Room') It was heaven - 4 folding cafeteria tables and some disused desk chairs. We could turn off the flourescents, play music, wear shorts and sandals. Whatever we wanted. I set up a small lan and the development team worked seperate from everyone else. No one knew or cared how we worked, as long as we produced. Which we did. We had a whiteboard for impromptu meetings. We had one telephone for the whole group. The workday started usually sometime before lunch and ended usually after midnight. It was probably the ugliest workspace in the building, aside from one of the janitor's rooms, but it was easily the most productive space for coding. Now I work in an open Japanese-office-style space, right outside the CEO's office. We have to wear a suit, keep our desks reasonably clean and of course, noise is prohibited. They don't even like us to wear headphones - small ones are ok - since it makes us look like we are isolating ourselves. (Um, yeah...)
God, I miss that old space!
Developers should be hidden away and left to their own devices - left to be the creative slobs that they are.
Well, it's after 4 am here - enough for now.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Hey!
Watch it, buddy - That's something we take very seriously over here!
Go-ji-ra attacks are nothing to kid about. People could get hurt in the resulting stampedes...
> yes, there are more than 200,000 characters in Japanese, but that is said to be the average that you need to know to get started.
Don't you mean 2000? My understanding is that you are considered 'literate' knowing the 1,945 'daily use' kanjis, (What is taught in schools and used in newspapers.) Plus a handful of obscure kanjis used mainly in family names and classical references and such.
(At my company, we frequently have to use kanji in programming perl - one of our databases has kanji column and table names. Perl has never even blinked.)
OT funny story - I had a meeting with a vendor and he was asking what localization requirements we had for a software package they were selling us. I knew they had just jumped through many hoops to get their program to take Japanese input, so I told them with a very serious face that we needed the reports to be able to print the kanji vertically.
You should have seen the looks on their faces -
Cheers,
Jim
...As well as being able to read a menu in Chinese, which, phonetically, has nothing to do with Japanese.
(Chinese and Japanese are VERY different languages. It is as hard for a Japanese person to learn Chinese as it is for an English speaker.)
From the menu, you could tell that a dish would be chicken, beef, fish, whatever... That's because the Japanese adopted the characters, but not the pronunciation, from the Chinese. (With exceptions, of course.)
Cheers,
Jim
>would roughly reconfigure as, "I Perl Use."
Actually, most people would just say: "Perl use."
Perl o tsukau. ('o' is an object particle.)
Which also means:
"(I/You/he/she)(uses)/(will use)/perl."
It's all context sensitive, kind of like "$_", I think.
That word order never proved a problem in learning Japanese - what gets tricky is adjectives. For example, to say "It is delicious.", you say:
Oishii desu.
(Oishii = tasty ; desu=is)
The past tense of desu is deshita, but you would never say "Oishii deshita".
In the past tense of this construct, the adjective gets modified to:
"Oishikatta desu."
Note that the verb is still in the present tense.
Once you wrap your mind around that, you can see where the real differences could occur.
Perl is very popular here in Japan.
Perhaps it is Perl's flexibility of syntax that makes it so.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
All I see is a lot of vague descriptions and what could pass for science fiction.
How did this technology come about? Why don't I see similar technologies being used? A dime-sized chip?
Sure, I'm being a bit paranoid, but I'll bet I'm right.
How much have you invested in this buzzword-ridden fantasy?
I looked over the patent application and the schematic and though I am not an EE, I don't see much there. A few resistors and a lot of 'black-box' chips. Maybe they are using technology from Roswell?
Show me some references that don't come from this company - Also, don't post as Anonymous Coward.
Come on - Convince me that this is not a scam.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes...and no.
The Japanese market is rife with protectionism, price fixing and other lousy schemes.
But - I doubt that is why American companies don't do well here.
The problem is that many foreign companies fail to understand the Japanese market. Those that do, prosper here: McDonalds, KFC, Denny's (!?!), Subway Sandwiches, Starbucks - They all do phenomenally well here.
They have taken the time to understand the market, yet still retain their American um... flavor.
Saturn (cars) made a big deal about selling their cars here a while back - yet their marketing was pathetic: Overdubbed US commercials showing things that the typical Japanese could not relate to.
I've been here 2 years and have not yet seen a Saturn on the road.
Harley Davidson, on the other hand - Wow. I've seen more Harleys here than I ever did in the US.
There is no argument here about "Hog vs. Rice Burner" - Hog wins 'hoofs down'.
As far as rice goes - there is a difference. You can't use Uncle Ben's with Japanese food. Even Korean rice, which I can't tell from Japanese, my girlfriend can.
Sure Japan subsidizes their rice industry, but it's an attempt at self-sufficiency - which they need to do, or be at tremendous risk to outside forces, the way they were before WW2.
It's a different life here. You just can't apply American standards at all.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You know, I used to LOVE my Nokia.
In the US, I felt so cool, pulling it out when I got an email on it. People would tell me how small and high tech it was...
When I moved to Japan, I tried to see if I could get service on it - When I took it out, the guy in the store laughed and said "Burikku desu!" (What a brick!)
I just got a new one - a Tiny Toshiba with color screen, email, web, midi synthesizer (for composing your own multi-track, multi-instrument ring tunes,) and a digital camera that plugs in to the earphone jack.
Plus, the sound quality is incredible, does data at 64k and lasts for days on a single charge. When I see that scene in the Matrix, with the shameless product placement of the phone, I laugh - If people only knew what they were missing...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
http://www.oconnell.net/~jim/images/london/leehofo ok.jpg
(too lazy to html-ize it...)
I'm glad to see other people know the place - No one that I mentioned it to at the time had any idea what I was talking about.
:-)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Here in Japan, English is taught in school starting quite early. But that doesn't mean that all of the students are fluent in English. The reality is that to get any kind of fluency, they have to enroll in external classes or do a homestay abroad.
I would guess that your typical Japanese person retains about as much English from school as a typical American retains from a few years of high school French. (Not much.)
Personally, I have no knack for learning languages, but being in a situation where I am forced to use Japanese to communicate, I am learning. That's how it is - If you want to learn a language, go to a place where they speak it and not English. You'll learn.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I do the same with a digital camera & 64MB media card - That way I can take files back and forth to work. Once in a while, I take home my 13GB SCSI with a USB adapter and dump in a new load of MP3s and VCDs to use while I work.
Since I have a sony vaio, I only have one PCMCIA slot, so if I'm on the network, I have to use USB to attach the big drive. Performance is slow, but OK for single-users hitting the drive over the network.
Copying gigabytes of files over the USB each morning is intolerably slow, so I use the SCSI cable instead, or just burn a CD if it is just MP3's... I copy the MP3s to my workstation or my laptop and then give away the CD...
I should really look into one of those USB network adapters - That would free up the PCMCIA for the drive...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
"Because Windows 98 does not by default have lots of services running and doesn't have a good command prompt, it's harder and a less desirable target for crackers..."
Would that be "Security through unusability"?
;-)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
...at a third of the weight.
face it - other than gaming, how much heavy processing are you going to do on a plane?
You're going to write emails, dick around with Word or listen to MP3's.
(Even with MP3's, you can close it to turn off the monitor.)
When you're not on the road, plug in and add a monitor...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You're going to run distributed.net on battery power?
Probably you'll want to disable that sort of thing when you're not plugged in - I have a picture book and after a year, the battery is about useless - 10 minutes tops. Of course, the battery is pretty small, physically.
It's a trade-off.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I've never had them say that when I *buy* a CD, but they do when I RENT one.
So strange a concept (renting new CDs) but it is very popular here. Just like renting videos.
The minidiscs are usually right by the counter, too, but you can always find them cheaper somewhere else...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Actually, here in Tokyo, the most frequent comment I hear about them is "Hmmm... Eki no haizara..."
(Trainstation ashtray)
They really do look quite the same.
Cheers,
Jim
Very true!
The issue was raised and resolved.
Any more banter on the subject will just lead to confusion among the end users.
If, suppose you were an IT person proposing a switch to linux desktops in an organization and you are demonstrating the KDE desktop to your pointy-haired boss.
You get close to getting it approved, until he remembers reading an article in WinFUD Magazine - Something about a licensing problem.
PHB's fud meter goes into the red zone.
Now imagine trying to explain the intricasies of the GPL to him... Good luck with that.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Reminds me of a story I heard that ten or fifteen years ago, the Khomeni government of Iran sent extradition letters to the US State Department demanding that Michael Jackson and Madonna be turned over so that they could be put to death for violating Iran's obscenity laws.
Of course, Khomeni is dead now and all of his lawyers went to work for the US entertainment industry...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
You do it because you can.
Need a better reason?
Actually, I was just a bit surprised to find out that I was expected to do their work for them. When do I get my check? If they've decided to go commercial, using whatever small percentage of their database that I populated, shouldn't I expect a cut?
We all submitted CD information in good faith, expecting it to remain free. Why didn't it?
Face it. They took something that used to be free and turned it commercial. They can now go promptly to hell, for all I care.
Good riddance. Once this community turns against them for this kind of behaviour, they're pretty much screwed, unless they go into heavy karma-repair mode.
They are abusing our trust - so what can we do?
Start submitting 'corrections' to entries...
If they are relying upon public input for their bread and butter, start putting flies in the butter.
I would guess that a fair percentage of slashdot's readership *built* their database and have the ability to render it unusable.
What legal obligation do we have to keep paying their salaries by populating their databases? Let's say I stick in a CD by the backstreet boys (supposing I owned one,) What if I decided that the the first song was called 'Some crappy song by backstreet boys' and the next was called 'Another crappy song by backstreet boys'.
Who's to say that there is anything wrong with that?
In another way, it's been happening - If you pop in a CD of J-Pop, half the time, the song titles come back as 'Japanese' since the title is written in Kanji. Is one more subjective than the other?
CDDB - I know you are reading this. Don't alienate this group. You'll regret it.
Jim in Tokyo
(PS - If you're right about google being next, I will sell my computer...)
I'm tempted to write a perl program to begin querying cddb with random ID's and populating FreeDB.
IIRC, cddb used to be freely available.
I used to submit enties and I once or twice downloaded the whole cddb file to use as sample data for database projects. (Maybe it was IMDB...)
How exactly do things like this become private?(CDDB, IMDB, whois...)
People contribute their time and effort to building a public database and some ########s turn it into some private business. Then they limit who can see it.
(Probably it boils down to who owns the hardware.)
I guess there is no more good will good faith efforts when the pointy-haired set get involved.
I don't get it. These things THRIVED before there were restrictions - why do these petty little dotcoms think they can change the rules and expect to remain viable?
I expect that I'm not the only one who no longer types in song titles and submits them to cddb - Let them do their own typing from now on...
Tell me more about FreeDB - I'm listening.
Jim in Tokyo
>could hook your 1394 HDTV to a 1394 DVD player
>and enjoy
From what I've heard, there are no 1394 DVD decks and there never will be - The DVD industry has made that a condition of licensing.
I may be wrong and I hope I am, but I don't think so.
I have a 1394 VCR and I love it - I wish I could buy a 1394 DVD...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
>I meant to write 2000
Maybe you converted it to yen in your head - I do that sometimes with non-money things...
Cheers,
jim
The best office I ever had was one we set up at the Department of Justice. I was doing some contract work there a few years back and initially, they set us up on one of the upper floors, mixed right in with the clients. I told them that it was unworkable, due to the distractions, so they gave us a windowless room in the basement - A large storage space, really. (It quickly got nicknamed 'The X-Files Room') It was heaven - 4 folding cafeteria tables and some disused desk chairs. We could turn off the flourescents, play music, wear shorts and sandals. Whatever we wanted. I set up a small lan and the development team worked seperate from everyone else. No one knew or cared how we worked, as long as we produced. Which we did. We had a whiteboard for impromptu meetings. We had one telephone for the whole group. The workday started usually sometime before lunch and ended usually after midnight. It was probably the ugliest workspace in the building, aside from one of the janitor's rooms, but it was easily the most productive space for coding. Now I work in an open Japanese-office-style space, right outside the CEO's office. We have to wear a suit, keep our desks reasonably clean and of course, noise is prohibited. They don't even like us to wear headphones - small ones are ok - since it makes us look like we are isolating ourselves. (Um, yeah...)
God, I miss that old space!
Developers should be hidden away and left to their own devices - left to be the creative slobs that they are.
Well, it's after 4 am here - enough for now.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Hey!
Watch it, buddy - That's something we take very seriously over here!
Go-ji-ra attacks are nothing to kid about. People could get hurt in the resulting stampedes...
> yes, there are more than 200,000 characters in Japanese, but that is said to be the average that you need to know to get started.
Don't you mean 2000? My understanding is that you are considered 'literate' knowing the 1,945 'daily use' kanjis, (What is taught in schools and used in newspapers.) Plus a handful of obscure kanjis used mainly in family names and classical references and such.
(At my company, we frequently have to use kanji in programming perl - one of our databases has kanji column and table names. Perl has never even blinked.)
OT funny story - I had a meeting with a vendor and he was asking what localization requirements we had for a software package they were selling us. I knew they had just jumped through many hoops to get their program to take Japanese input, so I told them with a very serious face that we needed the reports to be able to print the kanji vertically.
You should have seen the looks on their faces -
Cheers,
Jim
Plus, the compiler would never point out your errors - it would appreciate your efforts and do its best to accomodate them.
...As well as being able to read a menu in Chinese, which, phonetically, has nothing to do with Japanese.
(Chinese and Japanese are VERY different languages. It is as hard for a Japanese person to learn Chinese as it is for an English speaker.)
From the menu, you could tell that a dish would be chicken, beef, fish, whatever... That's because the Japanese adopted the characters, but not the pronunciation, from the Chinese. (With exceptions, of course.)
Cheers,
Jim
>would roughly reconfigure as, "I Perl Use."
Actually, most people would just say: "Perl use."
Perl o tsukau. ('o' is an object particle.)
Which also means:
"(I/You/he/she)(uses)/(will use)/perl."
It's all context sensitive, kind of like "$_", I think.
That word order never proved a problem in learning Japanese - what gets tricky is adjectives. For example, to say "It is delicious.", you say:
Oishii desu.
(Oishii = tasty ; desu=is)
The past tense of desu is deshita, but you would never say "Oishii deshita".
In the past tense of this construct, the adjective gets modified to:
"Oishikatta desu."
Note that the verb is still in the present tense.
Once you wrap your mind around that, you can see where the real differences could occur.
Perl is very popular here in Japan.
Perhaps it is Perl's flexibility of syntax that makes it so.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
All I see is a lot of vague descriptions and what could pass for science fiction.
How did this technology come about? Why don't I see similar technologies being used? A dime-sized chip?
Sure, I'm being a bit paranoid, but I'll bet I'm right.
How much have you invested in this buzzword-ridden fantasy?
I looked over the patent application and the schematic and though I am not an EE, I don't see much there. A few resistors and a lot of 'black-box' chips. Maybe they are using technology from Roswell?
Show me some references that don't come from this company - Also, don't post as Anonymous Coward.
Come on - Convince me that this is not a scam.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo