The best way to look at this is not "who was first" - but to look at the parallel lines of thought and development in various countries.
Baird gave his first public demo in Jan 1926. Campbell-Swinton had come up with the concept of television scanned, synchronised and displayed by electronic means in 1908. Baird's implementiation was very low cost in engineering terms - when the BBC used it for broadcasts they were able to use their audio transmitters. The BBC actually broadcast using Baird's system from 1932 to 1935. Mechanical scanning was based on Nipkow's ideas (a German - around 1884)
Baird was also the first to record television (on a wax disk). I think he also had a colour system. Mechanical scanning was not ideal, but it was all that could be done at the time and worked well enough for the BBC to broadcast using it. He can't just be written out of history.
The Farnsworth article makes much of the claim that the idea ocurred to him when he was 14 (no evidence is offered - and what was needed was not the ideas - they were in place but the electronics to practically apply them) as it concedes that practical application postdated Baird's demo.
The "various analysts" report you link to has caused much mirth for those of us in Japan who develop for i-mode.
Fact 1) Imode handsets have full email capability. I have no idea what the newysbytes analyst means by
"Japanese mobile-phone users don't have access to text-messaging technology, so mobile phone users have embraced I-Mode to allow them to surf the mobile Internet for their e-mail,"
Fact - when you send email (from any email client) to an i-mode phone, it is delivered straight to the handset. No "surfing the web" required. It is a packet network and you pay for the packets received - not for the time online. So yes - you pay for incoming mail. But not a great deal, and I would rather have it that way than have to pay for the time I am online.
Fact 2) Imode succeeded text based paging - which was the previous rage in Japan back when Europeans still thought that the digital watch was a rather cool new fangled piece of tech. So - no particular "lack of text messaging void" to fill... SMS? It's a joke.
What do you mean by "phones and networks are nearly at the i-mode level? The handsets I have seen in the UK on my trips home have been - oh - horridly misconceived bricks. I am sure you finally have one or two decent phones - but the majority of Brits at least are still using handsets better suited to use in the building industry.
As for networks - are they packet networks? Do you have the "always online" feeling that you get with i-mode?
As for comparing WAP with imode's version of chtml - knocking up a page for imode is trivial.
And when you claim phones and networks are nearly at the imode level - is that the new 3G Foma level, or the last generation, boring full colour 10k Java midlet running phones?
I-mode succeeded in Japan because the user experience is excellent - the phones "just work" there is wodges of content online, that kind of stuff. And it is a doddle to develop for.
Nick May Fukuoka, Japan i-mode/j-phone website developer....
Imode has 11 million subscribers out of 17.2 million phones with net access (J-phone and EZweb being the other two...)
If you become a content partner you can take advantage of DoCoMo handling the billing (9% commission) for your pay site - BUT there are LOTS of restrictions as to how you can raise money on the site- no advertising (I think). So yes, being part of their portal gets you hits and allows automatic billing - but comes at a price . Other portals will certainly appear - there is nothing special about their portal other than that it is programmed to a button. Various companies here are working on handling billing for the "non portal" (wild) sites. When that is sorted, the extra freedom you have for being outside the imode portal will become more and more appealing.
I suspect though that the GSP stuff may be available only to those within the official portal - which would ba royal pain....
NTT is a monopoly, but DoCoMO isn't. There are two other services - J-phone (uses MML - mobile markup language - they are moving away from it soon) and "au" who use CDMA1 and are WAP based. J-phone in particular are very hungry. Together they have 6.2 million subscribers, against imode's 11million.
but the poster who wrote:
It's about circuit-switiched vs packet-switched.
got it right - I develop for imode and j-phone - and have played with the EZweb phones extensivley and it is the "always online" feel that is the key - and that boils down to the packet switch element. If imode can get that in the US, they will do well - if they have to use a circuit switched system then they have NO KEY ADVANTAGE. For many applications, developing for WAP/MML/cHTML just boils down to different templates to hit your database as none are exactly overburdened with features. Of course, when we get the java-capable imodes later this autumn, that is a whole different ballgame....
Here is a useful Japan Mobile Info site http://anima.editthispage.com/
for those who want to read up on it.
Developing for these things is FUN! Bugger all memory, tiny screen, crappy keyboard - takes me back to the boxes I learned on (zx80)
Nick (nick at kyushunet dot com)
I am a native English speaker living in Japan who spends a fair amount of time reading perl written by Japanese coders. I have the following comments.
1) Most Japanese programmers of any quality read a fair amount of English and speak at least a little. It is hard to get through the education system (7 years of English) without picking at least some English up, though God knows, some of my Japanese friends tried hard... It would thus be VERY difficult to find an "untainted" sample - Japanese programmers who have had no exposure to English at all.
2) The Japanese I deal with all code very well.
3) What is more interesting is the effect the ability to write ANY computer language has on their ability to communicate in English. I proofread a lot of comp/sci papers (Ph.d theses and the like) written by the same coders in English. When they start writing/communicating in English it is usually pretty awful - it isn't just the English that is bad (my Japanese sucks by the way) but that the original Japanese, in which the thought was expressed, often has no clear meaning even in Japanese. In such situations we tend to communicate/articualte the problem in "pseudo code" - a stripped down English based on whatever computer languages we share. I have tried this with the same people to discuss very complex non-computer related issues and it seems to work there as well. I think being able to write computer code gives people an additional resouce from which they can escape from the semantic ambiguities of their primary natural language.
2) Some people have made the point that Japanese can be very clear and explicit. True, it can be - but as a Japanese friend put it - it is like writing a low level printer driver in cobol - POSSIBLE - but neither efficient nor sensible. I often encounter a problem of Japanese friends/wife not understanding sentences because they are too logical - and for them - "overdefined". Gaijin Nihongo has this feature they tell me - a kind of semantic overdetermination which has the curious effect of reducing comprehensibility. Japanese news commentators (even the serious ones) talk in far, far, shorter sentences than their English speaking couterparts. It is POSSIBLE to speak very long sentences in gramatically correct and unambigous Nihongo - but not if you expect to be understood by a monolingual Japanese speaker. Curiously enough, I can understand western commentators speaking long sentences in Japanese on Japanese television far better than my Japanese wife can - even though she agrees that it is gramatically correct. Japanese commentators just don't do it as they fight shy of using logic glue and complex conditionals to create monster sentences.
3) I doubt any of the above applies to any native Japanese speakers reading this who has a high level of Engish (or other non-Japanese language bar korean). The ability to speak a second language changes ones relationship to ones first language.
Of course, we don't know in THIS PARTICULAR CASE whether or not this guy is just whinging (because it really wasn't news) or whether it was "news" that was removed because it was about a competitor. But in general, the issue raised is a serious one. If a news outlet pulls a legitimate story because it is not in the commercial interests of the company that owns it to keep the story up, then that company is no longer providing a news service and can no longer be trusted by the user. Those of us who come from countries with strong public service broadcasting traditions probably have less patience with this kind of commercially driven bias than do many Americans - who seem to take it for granted. Does this guy have a right to have his story up? No. Do we have the right to read that story on this news services website? No. But if the story is legit and it is pulled or ignored, the news service no longer has the right to call itself a news service. It has certainly changed my perception, slightly, of Linux Today - because they actually PULLED it.... Great slogan for linux init - Open the code, close the media.... If it is bad if MSNBC does it , it sure as hell is if LinuxToday does it.
As far as I know, the excellent iCab browser for the Mac (limited javascript support, but otherwise pretty standards compliant) can switch off the sending of "http referrer" data - which I assume limits the data that can be gleaned at the server end (a little....). icab is at http://icab.de/
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to look at this is not "who was first" - but to look at the parallel lines of thought and development in various countries.
Baird gave his first public demo in Jan 1926. Campbell-Swinton had come up with the concept of television scanned, synchronised and displayed by electronic means in 1908. Baird's implementiation was very low cost in engineering terms - when the BBC used it for broadcasts they were able to use their audio transmitters. The BBC actually broadcast using Baird's system from 1932 to 1935. Mechanical scanning was based on Nipkow's ideas (a German - around 1884)
Baird was also the first to record television (on a wax disk). I think he also had a colour system. Mechanical scanning was not ideal, but it was all that could be done at the time and worked well enough for the BBC to broadcast using it. He can't just be written out of history.
The Farnsworth article makes much of the claim that the idea ocurred to him when he was 14 (no evidence is offered - and what was needed was not the ideas - they were in place but the electronics to practically apply them) as it concedes that practical application postdated Baird's demo.
Nick
The "various analysts" report you link to has caused much mirth for those of us in Japan who develop for i-mode.
Fact 1) Imode handsets have full email capability. I have no idea what the newysbytes analyst means by
"Japanese mobile-phone users don't have access to text-messaging technology, so mobile phone users have embraced I-Mode to allow them to surf the mobile Internet for their e-mail,"
Fact - when you send email (from any email client) to an i-mode phone, it is delivered straight to the handset. No "surfing the web" required. It is a packet network and you pay for the packets received - not for the time online. So yes - you pay for incoming mail. But not a great deal, and I would rather have it that way than have to pay for the time I am online.
Fact 2) Imode succeeded text based paging - which was the previous rage in Japan back when Europeans still thought that the digital watch was a rather cool new fangled piece of tech. So - no particular "lack of text messaging void" to fill... SMS? It's a joke.
What do you mean by "phones and networks are nearly at the i-mode level? The handsets I have seen in the UK on my trips home have been - oh - horridly misconceived bricks. I am sure you finally have one or two decent phones - but the majority of Brits at least are still using handsets better suited to use in the building industry.
As for networks - are they packet networks? Do you have the "always online" feeling that you get with i-mode?
As for comparing WAP with imode's version of chtml - knocking up a page for imode is trivial.
And when you claim phones and networks are nearly at the imode level - is that the new 3G Foma level, or the last generation, boring full colour 10k Java midlet running phones?
I-mode succeeded in Japan because the user experience is excellent - the phones "just work" there is wodges of content online, that kind of stuff. And it is a doddle to develop for.
Nick May
Fukuoka, Japan
i-mode/j-phone website developer....
"Neko" is the Japanse word for cat. neko-robot, presumably.....
Nick in Sunny Fukuoka,
Japan.
(The answer to your question is: with great care...)
Necoro-philiacs?
Hell yes - but macs are optimized for colour!
Imode has 11 million subscribers out of 17.2 million phones with net access (J-phone and EZweb being the other two...)
If you become a content partner you can take advantage of DoCoMo handling the billing (9% commission) for your pay site - BUT there are LOTS of restrictions as to how you can raise money on the site- no advertising (I think). So yes, being part of their portal gets you hits and allows automatic billing - but comes at a price . Other portals will certainly appear - there is nothing special about their portal other than that it is programmed to a button. Various companies here are working on handling billing for the "non portal" (wild) sites. When that is sorted, the extra freedom you have for being outside the imode portal will become more and more appealing.
I suspect though that the GSP stuff may be available only to those within the official portal - which would ba royal pain....
I am a native English speaker living in Japan who spends a fair amount of time reading perl written by Japanese coders. I have the following comments. 1) Most Japanese programmers of any quality read a fair amount of English and speak at least a little. It is hard to get through the education system (7 years of English) without picking at least some English up, though God knows, some of my Japanese friends tried hard... It would thus be VERY difficult to find an "untainted" sample - Japanese programmers who have had no exposure to English at all.
2) The Japanese I deal with all code very well.
3) What is more interesting is the effect the ability to write ANY computer language has on their ability to communicate in English. I proofread a lot of comp/sci papers (Ph.d theses and the like) written by the same coders in English. When they start writing/communicating in English it is usually pretty awful - it isn't just the English that is bad (my Japanese sucks by the way) but that the original Japanese, in which the thought was expressed, often has no clear meaning even in Japanese. In such situations we tend to communicate/articualte the problem in "pseudo code" - a stripped down English based on whatever computer languages we share. I have tried this with the same people to discuss very complex non-computer related issues and it seems to work there as well. I think being able to write computer code gives people an additional resouce from which they can escape from the semantic ambiguities of their primary natural language. 2) Some people have made the point that Japanese can be very clear and explicit. True, it can be - but as a Japanese friend put it - it is like writing a low level printer driver in cobol - POSSIBLE - but neither efficient nor sensible. I often encounter a problem of Japanese friends/wife not understanding sentences because they are too logical - and for them - "overdefined". Gaijin Nihongo has this feature they tell me - a kind of semantic overdetermination which has the curious effect of reducing comprehensibility. Japanese news commentators (even the serious ones) talk in far, far, shorter sentences than their English speaking couterparts. It is POSSIBLE to speak very long sentences in gramatically correct and unambigous Nihongo - but not if you expect to be understood by a monolingual Japanese speaker. Curiously enough, I can understand western commentators speaking long sentences in Japanese on Japanese television far better than my Japanese wife can - even though she agrees that it is gramatically correct. Japanese commentators just don't do it as they fight shy of using logic glue and complex conditionals to create monster sentences.
3) I doubt any of the above applies to any native Japanese speakers reading this who has a high level of Engish (or other non-Japanese language bar korean). The ability to speak a second language changes ones relationship to ones first language.
Of course, we don't know in THIS PARTICULAR CASE whether or not this guy is just whinging (because it really wasn't news) or whether it was "news" that was removed because it was about a competitor. But in general, the issue raised is a serious one. If a news outlet pulls a legitimate story because it is not in the commercial interests of the company that owns it to keep the story up, then that company is no longer providing a news service and can no longer be trusted by the user. Those of us who come from countries with strong public service broadcasting traditions probably have less patience with this kind of commercially driven bias than do many Americans - who seem to take it for granted. Does this guy have a right to have his story up? No. Do we have the right to read that story on this news services website? No. But if the story is legit and it is pulled or ignored, the news service no longer has the right to call itself a news service. It has certainly changed my perception, slightly, of Linux Today - because they actually PULLED it.... Great slogan for linux init - Open the code, close the media.... If it is bad if MSNBC does it , it sure as hell is if LinuxToday does it.
As far as I know, the excellent iCab browser for the Mac (limited javascript support, but otherwise pretty standards compliant) can switch off the sending of "http referrer" data - which I assume limits the data that can be gleaned at the server end (a little....). icab is at http://icab.de/