I don't know how bad spam is in the US, but in Japan, things have improved markedly over the last year or so. Not so much by the anti-spam law passed two years ago--with predictably negligible effect--but NTT DoCoMo, the largest keitai carrier, has been very proactive in fighting spam itself. Not only do they have user-settable black-and-whitelisting by source (carrier/Internet), domain, or address, they have an address where you can report spam to them, and they shut down spammers' connections pretty quickly. They've also started legal action against some of the worst offenders, though the Japanese legal system is slow enough that it will probably be irrelevant by the time the ruling comes down. My own incoming spam level has dropped dramatically over the last year--down from 10-20/day to 1-2/week.
I hate whitelisting. Its just a poor way to protect the end user. There are many instances, both for email, or cell phones where a whitelist will block an important transmission.
But it seems to work pretty well in Japan. DoCoMo lets you choose to block all mail from the Internet or from other mobile phones/terminals, then whitelist domains/addresses you want to receive mail from (up to 40, IIRC). I'm currently blocking Internet and Vodafone, with Vodafone-using friends whitelisted, and my spam has dropped from 10-20/day to 1-2/week with no real messages blocked.
Whitelisting is only a problem if you need to get mail from "any address", which isn't an issue for most people, particularly for cell phones.
Now I know that in Japan, Japanese style RPGs are probably the most popular for obvious reasons and I'm not really sure how popular western games are over there (although I heard that there is a healthy import market for American games, maybe you can tell me for sure).
There's a market, certainly, but I'm not sure whether I'd classify it as "healthy"--the only place I've seen them is a few (mostly used) game shops in Akihabara.
Also, I heard that the Xbox is much too large for most Japanese people to want in their homes. Is this true?
Absolutely. Let me put it this way: in Japan, even the PS2 verges on "kinda biggish". With lots of space already taken up by furniture, TV, VCR/DVD player, and PC, there really isn't any room left over to put an Xbox in unless you have a really big place to live. (My apartment, with two ~100 sq.ft rooms, is "luxurious" according to everyone I've talked to.)
How exactly is this a warning for MS? Sounds more like a "do whatever the fuck you want, we won't hold anyone responsible" message, to me.
The haijo-kankoku (FTC warning, literally "recommendation to eliminate [illegal behavior]") isn't just a "slap on the wrist" in Japan--it's the first step in taking real action against the company. The procedure goes something like this:
The Fair Trade Commission investigates and finds a potential violation of the anti-monopoly law.
The FTC issues a haijo-kankoku to the company. If the company agrees that it was in the wrong, it can correct its behavior (possibly paying a fine) and stop the process here.
The FTC holds a hearing on the issue. It may decide that the action does not actually violate the law, and stop here. Otherwise . . .
The FTC issues an order (haijo-meirei) to the company to correct its behavior, possibly accompanied by a fine.
If the company still doesn't obey, various other nasty stuff can happen. Japanese companies rarely go this far--you can get closed down for things like this.
Sony (and every other HW vendor) now has a choice: Let MS use their patents, or don't have MS support of their platform.
What's "unfair" about that?
As has been pointed out many times before, Microsoft has a (virtual) monopoly on operating systems. If Microsoft were the little guy, this wouldn't be so much of a problem, but they're not; shipping computers without Windows is tantamount to corporate suicide. This gives Microsoft immense leverage in contracts.
Now, keep in mind this is happening in Japan. Japan's anti-monopoly law has a clause forbidding "yuuetsu-teki chii ranyou", literally "abuse of overpowering status": in other words, if one of the parties to a contract or agreement has significantly more power or authority than the other(s), then that party is not allowed to dictate terms freely--they have to limit themselves to what they could reasonably expect to get agreement on without such power. This clause is applied not infrequently(*); in this case, the FTC decided that OEMs would not have agreed to the no-sue clause if they had not been in the position of having to accept whatever terms Microsoft gave them, and so it declared the clause "unfair" and issued the warning.
(*)For example, the yuuetsu-teki chii ranyou clause was recently used to prevent retail stores from forcing distributors to cut wholesale prices in response to a new law requiring sales tax to be included in display prices.
But he said Microsoft would drop the clause from all contracts signed from August onward. He said this decision was made following internal discussions over the past year.
Perhaps M$ agrees? Sometimes even the 900lb gorilla can catch on.
Actually, the decision to drop the clause from August onward was made before the warning--the warning was issued because Microsoft refused to drop it before then (which is probably why the article calls it a "largely symbolic" move), and Microsoft is still contesting it.
Locally the xbox seems to be doing reasonably well ( I live in the midwest in a college town). The PS2 is clearly the dominant player, but their are a lot of people that bought the XBox in order to be able to play Halo.
Maybe that's why the Xbox doesn't sell in Japan--nobody here plays FPS's. I recall reading that Japanese tend to get motion sickness easily from 3D games with rapid motion, which is probably a large factor. Even FFXI came with a warning saying "only move the camera gently to avoid vertigo", and that's hardly a high-motion game.
I guess I have no problem with Microsoft catering to the Western market and doing well there--as long as they don't proceed to use that leverage to squish Japanese games out of existence. (Ichitaro was the word processor in Japan until MS came along and ordered distributors to preinstall Word instead, and when talking to people who were using computers in that era I haven't heard a single voice favoring Microsoft's heavy-handed tactics. Aside from bulkiness, Ichitaro was designed for the Japanese market, while Word had Japanese support just as an afterthought and was/is consequently harder to use, is the complaint I hear most frequently.)
Yes, was. And still is by the rest of the world's standard, I expect, with a national crime rate around 1.5% IIRC. But as another poster mentioned, the smaller crime rate makes incidents stand out all that much more when they do happen. (For example: residents of e.g. Washington D.C. or Chicago, when was the last time you were surprised by reading about a murder in the newspaper? Yet such events come as a severe shock to the Japanese.) In particular, there has been a relative rash of schoolchild kidnappings recently, and this is probably one of the motivating factors in implementing tracking systems like this. There are others as well (though on a private scale), such as GPS "beacons" that can transmit the child's location over the keitai network.
For [Kay], "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
And let the spam, viruses, system cracking and general misbehavior commence . . .
Kay's intentions may be good, but I'm firmly of the belief that we're nowhere near a level of civilization that would allow us to use such a network well. Even putting aside the issue of random miscreants, you can't take six billion people of hugely varying backgrounds and beliefs, slam them all together into a common environment, and expect anything good to come out. Even five hundred years after we discovered the Earth was round, intercultural barriers are still quite high. (I don't mean to bait flames, but look at the Middle East for an excellent example.)
Besides which, do you really want to be connected to everybody else in the world? What would you do if you were? How much information do you really think you can keep track of, much less use? How much music, anime or whatnot have you downloaded off P2P and never even watched once? (I admit, I've got about 70 gigs of such.) Are you really happier having access to everyone in the world, even the fraction of the world's population that's currently networked?
Communication is good, but you can have too much of a good thing.
What a sad way to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
I fail to understand why people keep going on and on about whether the atomic bomb should or shouldn't have been dropped on Japan 59 years ago. It was dropped; that's a historical fact (except possibly in the realm of fiction), and arguing whether it should or shouldn't have been done or trying to assign blame won't change that fact. The argument that should be taking place is whether and under what circumstances we should use the atomic bomb again in the future, with the actual use in WWII as a historical adjunct, nothing more.
[...] are only allowed to vote if you have proven to be "patriotic" - and of course, if you have criticized your countrys current administration, then you are criticizing your country, and are thus "unpatriotic" and not allowed to vote.
<karma-burn>Hey, that sounds like the/. moderation system!</karma-burn>
Shells will quote spaces and other things in filenames, so that wouldn't accomplish what you wanted. However, a simple touch -- -rf could provide moderate amusement.
At one point, when I had just moved my home page URL from.../~achurch/ to.../ (HTTP root directory), I had created a symlink ~achurch ->. in my HTML directory for compatibility's sake.
So, when I'm cleaning up my homedir a few years later, I notice this link and say "hey, I don't need this anymore", and:
Fortunately, I had neglected to use -f, and that particular file was near the top of my home directory, so I managed to get out of that situation with little damage (except to my nerves).
Since then, I put an empty file..norm-r with mode 000 in important directories, and rename files as needed to get it to the top of the directory list, just in case. (For those who don't know, ls -U lists files in directory entry order, and at least on ext2, renaming a file to a longer name will usually free up the file's position in the directory.)
The Internet still runs on protocols designed 20-30 years ago that rested on the assumption that everyone using the network could be trusted. As long as we stick with that assumption, we're going to have blacklists, spoofing, what-have-you. The trick is to not rely on the Internet for anything important.
Unless we find some big loophole that allows us to get around relativity, the earth really is an island to itself, and while it may be one of millions, it is the only one that will ever have any significance whatsoever to us.
Of course, six hundred years ago everyone was convinced that the earth was flat, and that if you sailed too far you'd fall off the edge.
I'll grant that science plays a significantly bigger role these days than it did back then, and that we know a bit more now about how much we don't know, but I still argue that we don't yet know enough to disclaim the possibility of faster-than-light communication or travel.
That said, I'm not overly optimistic about the chances of figuring out FTL in my lifetime, and only slightly more optimistic about the chances of figuring out a way to extend my lifetime until we do figure out FTL (or its impossibility). At the moment I'd put my money on us blowing ourselves up before we get that far . . .
If you were the perfect employee and you were truly competent, smart and skilled, you could have convinced management that you actually saved them $100,000.
This assumes that management is reasonable, which is not always the case. You have a point in that many geeks lack good communication skills--I'm not exactly a stellar example myself, I have to admit--but there are, unfortunately, people who simply refuse to listen to reasonable arguments. (If not, would Dilbert be nearly as popular as it is now?)
Moreover, in any medium-to-large-size company, employees will typically have several layers of management above them, and even if the employee himself is "perfect", they can still get the short end of the stick if middle management can't communicate to their superiors effectively.
So yes, it's possible the parent post was the result of attitude problems, but it's also possible that the company just refused to acknowledge his contributions. Don't blame people for things they have no control over.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how bad spam is in the US, but in Japan, things have improved markedly over the last year or so. Not so much by the anti-spam law passed two years ago--with predictably negligible effect--but NTT DoCoMo, the largest keitai carrier, has been very proactive in fighting spam itself. Not only do they have user-settable black-and-whitelisting by source (carrier/Internet), domain, or address, they have an address where you can report spam to them, and they shut down spammers' connections pretty quickly. They've also started legal action against some of the worst offenders, though the Japanese legal system is slow enough that it will probably be irrelevant by the time the ruling comes down. My own incoming spam level has dropped dramatically over the last year--down from 10-20/day to 1-2/week.
I hate whitelisting. Its just a poor way to protect the end user. There are many instances, both for email, or cell phones where a whitelist will block an important transmission.
But it seems to work pretty well in Japan. DoCoMo lets you choose to block all mail from the Internet or from other mobile phones/terminals, then whitelist domains/addresses you want to receive mail from (up to 40, IIRC). I'm currently blocking Internet and Vodafone, with Vodafone-using friends whitelisted, and my spam has dropped from 10-20/day to 1-2/week with no real messages blocked.
Whitelisting is only a problem if you need to get mail from "any address", which isn't an issue for most people, particularly for cell phones.
Now I know that in Japan, Japanese style RPGs are probably the most popular for obvious reasons and I'm not really sure how popular western games are over there (although I heard that there is a healthy import market for American games, maybe you can tell me for sure).
There's a market, certainly, but I'm not sure whether I'd classify it as "healthy"--the only place I've seen them is a few (mostly used) game shops in Akihabara.
Also, I heard that the Xbox is much too large for most Japanese people to want in their homes. Is this true?
Absolutely. Let me put it this way: in Japan, even the PS2 verges on "kinda biggish". With lots of space already taken up by furniture, TV, VCR/DVD player, and PC, there really isn't any room left over to put an Xbox in unless you have a really big place to live. (My apartment, with two ~100 sq.ft rooms, is "luxurious" according to everyone I've talked to.)
I wonder why existing contracts are still valid if the government says it's illegal and wants the clause taken out?
The FTC has to issue a warning and give the company a chance to correct its behavior before it can start issuing orders--see my post here.
How exactly is this a warning for MS? Sounds more like a "do whatever the fuck you want, we won't hold anyone responsible" message, to me.
The haijo-kankoku (FTC warning, literally "recommendation to eliminate [illegal behavior]") isn't just a "slap on the wrist" in Japan--it's the first step in taking real action against the company. The procedure goes something like this:
Sony (and every other HW vendor) now has a choice: Let MS use their patents, or don't have MS support of their platform.
What's "unfair" about that?
As has been pointed out many times before, Microsoft has a (virtual) monopoly on operating systems. If Microsoft were the little guy, this wouldn't be so much of a problem, but they're not; shipping computers without Windows is tantamount to corporate suicide. This gives Microsoft immense leverage in contracts.
Now, keep in mind this is happening in Japan. Japan's anti-monopoly law has a clause forbidding "yuuetsu-teki chii ranyou", literally "abuse of overpowering status": in other words, if one of the parties to a contract or agreement has significantly more power or authority than the other(s), then that party is not allowed to dictate terms freely--they have to limit themselves to what they could reasonably expect to get agreement on without such power. This clause is applied not infrequently(*); in this case, the FTC decided that OEMs would not have agreed to the no-sue clause if they had not been in the position of having to accept whatever terms Microsoft gave them, and so it declared the clause "unfair" and issued the warning.
(*)For example, the yuuetsu-teki chii ranyou clause was recently used to prevent retail stores from forcing distributors to cut wholesale prices in response to a new law requiring sales tax to be included in display prices.
Perhaps M$ agrees? Sometimes even the 900lb gorilla can catch on.
Actually, the decision to drop the clause from August onward was made before the warning--the warning was issued because Microsoft refused to drop it before then (which is probably why the article calls it a "largely symbolic" move), and Microsoft is still contesting it.
Locally the xbox seems to be doing reasonably well ( I live in the midwest in a college town). The PS2 is clearly the dominant player, but their are a lot of people that bought the XBox in order to be able to play Halo.
Maybe that's why the Xbox doesn't sell in Japan--nobody here plays FPS's. I recall reading that Japanese tend to get motion sickness easily from 3D games with rapid motion, which is probably a large factor. Even FFXI came with a warning saying "only move the camera gently to avoid vertigo", and that's hardly a high-motion game.
I guess I have no problem with Microsoft catering to the Western market and doing well there--as long as they don't proceed to use that leverage to squish Japanese games out of existence. (Ichitaro was the word processor in Japan until MS came along and ordered distributors to preinstall Word instead, and when talking to people who were using computers in that era I haven't heard a single voice favoring Microsoft's heavy-handed tactics. Aside from bulkiness, Ichitaro was designed for the Japanese market, while Word had Japanese support just as an afterthought and was/is consequently harder to use, is the complaint I hear most frequently.)
'We have gone from nowhere to a significant player,' he said
Welcome to Bizarro World, where the Xbox is a significant player, rather than being challenged in sales by the PS1 and WonderSwan!
(Disclaimer: I live in Japan, where the Xbox's popularity level is somewhere around "the whowhat?". Is the Xbox doing any better in the West?)
Red Hat announced that they would be re-stating their revenues for the last 3 years ... in Japanese .
3.1415926535897932384629
In case you're not aware: s/9$/6/
And don't ask why I know that off the top of my head . . .
I thought Japan was an incredibly safe country.
Yes, was. And still is by the rest of the world's standard, I expect, with a national crime rate around 1.5% IIRC. But as another poster mentioned, the smaller crime rate makes incidents stand out all that much more when they do happen. (For example: residents of e.g. Washington D.C. or Chicago, when was the last time you were surprised by reading about a murder in the newspaper? Yet such events come as a severe shock to the Japanese.) In particular, there has been a relative rash of schoolchild kidnappings recently, and this is probably one of the motivating factors in implementing tracking systems like this. There are others as well (though on a private scale), such as GPS "beacons" that can transmit the child's location over the keitai network.
For [Kay], "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
And let the spam, viruses, system cracking and general misbehavior commence . . .
Kay's intentions may be good, but I'm firmly of the belief that we're nowhere near a level of civilization that would allow us to use such a network well. Even putting aside the issue of random miscreants, you can't take six billion people of hugely varying backgrounds and beliefs, slam them all together into a common environment, and expect anything good to come out. Even five hundred years after we discovered the Earth was round, intercultural barriers are still quite high. (I don't mean to bait flames, but look at the Middle East for an excellent example.)
Besides which, do you really want to be connected to everybody else in the world? What would you do if you were? How much information do you really think you can keep track of, much less use? How much music, anime or whatnot have you downloaded off P2P and never even watched once? (I admit, I've got about 70 gigs of such.) Are you really happier having access to everyone in the world, even the fraction of the world's population that's currently networked?
Communication is good, but you can have too much of a good thing.
What a sad way to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
I fail to understand why people keep going on and on about whether the atomic bomb should or shouldn't have been dropped on Japan 59 years ago. It was dropped; that's a historical fact (except possibly in the realm of fiction), and arguing whether it should or shouldn't have been done or trying to assign blame won't change that fact. The argument that should be taking place is whether and under what circumstances we should use the atomic bomb again in the future, with the actual use in WWII as a historical adjunct, nothing more.
(Seriously, I'm pretty impressed with VMS in retrospect, though when I was using it as a high-school student it seemed as dense as, well, a rock.)
So, what's the origin of this 'doubling' claim in the original story?
Found in a Redmond trash can:
[...] are only allowed to vote if you have proven to be "patriotic" - and of course, if you have criticized your countrys current administration, then you are criticizing your country, and are thus "unpatriotic" and not allowed to vote.
<karma-burn>Hey, that sounds like the /. moderation system!</karma-burn>
Shells will quote spaces and other things in filenames, so that wouldn't accomplish what you wanted. However, a simple touch -- -rf could provide moderate amusement.
At one point, when I had just moved my home page URL from .../~achurch/ to .../ (HTTP root directory), I had created a symlink ~achurch -> . in my HTML directory for compatibility's sake.
So, when I'm cleaning up my homedir a few years later, I notice this link and say "hey, I don't need this anymore", and:
Fortunately, I had neglected to use -f, and that particular file was near the top of my home directory, so I managed to get out of that situation with little damage (except to my nerves).
Since then, I put an empty file ..norm-r with mode 000 in important directories, and rename files as needed to get it to the top of the directory list, just in case. (For those who don't know, ls -U lists files in directory entry order, and at least on ext2, renaming a file to a longer name will usually free up the file's position in the directory.)
The Internet still runs on protocols designed 20-30 years ago that rested on the assumption that everyone using the network could be trusted. As long as we stick with that assumption, we're going to have blacklists, spoofing, what-have-you. The trick is to not rely on the Internet for anything important.
Africa is not a country. It is a continent.
I'm not sure which to bemoan more--that that statement would surprise some people, or that the comment was modded Informative . . .
Unless we find some big loophole that allows us to get around relativity, the earth really is an island to itself, and while it may be one of millions, it is the only one that will ever have any significance whatsoever to us.
Of course, six hundred years ago everyone was convinced that the earth was flat, and that if you sailed too far you'd fall off the edge.
I'll grant that science plays a significantly bigger role these days than it did back then, and that we know a bit more now about how much we don't know, but I still argue that we don't yet know enough to disclaim the possibility of faster-than-light communication or travel.
That said, I'm not overly optimistic about the chances of figuring out FTL in my lifetime, and only slightly more optimistic about the chances of figuring out a way to extend my lifetime until we do figure out FTL (or its impossibility). At the moment I'd put my money on us blowing ourselves up before we get that far . . .
"In 2004 the Las Vegas Strip corridor will see the opening of the first totally automated M-VI monorail system."
I sure don't want to be there when somebody gets caught in the crack between the train and the platform . . .
Next you know we'll have an implementation of RFC 3251.
If you were the perfect employee and you were truly competent, smart and skilled, you could have convinced management that you actually saved them $100,000.
This assumes that management is reasonable, which is not always the case. You have a point in that many geeks lack good communication skills--I'm not exactly a stellar example myself, I have to admit--but there are, unfortunately, people who simply refuse to listen to reasonable arguments. (If not, would Dilbert be nearly as popular as it is now?)
Moreover, in any medium-to-large-size company, employees will typically have several layers of management above them, and even if the employee himself is "perfect", they can still get the short end of the stick if middle management can't communicate to their superiors effectively.
So yes, it's possible the parent post was the result of attitude problems, but it's also possible that the company just refused to acknowledge his contributions. Don't blame people for things they have no control over.