Japanese mobile tech is at least 3 years ahead of everyone else. Vodafone just didn't get it.
A few years back this was still true, but not anymore.
There are a few features which are available on the JP market which don't exist elsewhere, eg TV phones and systems which allow you to pay with your phone (Suica/Edy/Felica and such).
Other than that I have to say that the Eu market produces just as good, and in many cases, better phones than Japan now. Korea is another country to watch for new interesting stuff. IIRC Samsung typically make phones with rediculous cameras in them.
Large, clumsy phones designed for Europeans simply don't jive with the small, sleek, feature-packed phones that typify the phones of other Japanese operators.
In my experience it's actually the other way around. Many phones (particularly 3G) in Japan are too big to be sellable on the Eu market. Eu phones are really pretty darned good in this aspect.
They do have higher demands on software quality though.
FYI I work with developing mobile phones, for multiple markets.
Vodafone not on a 3g network or offering a flip phone
This is incorrect. Vodafone has both a 3G network in Japan (the same they have everywhere else) and several clam-shells on the market.
Phones do have very different demands on the Japanese market than Eu though. Software crashes is unacceptable to a large part of the market there. It's nowhere near as critical on other markets. OTOH that a phone is large like a small house is not a problem in Japan though. You reguralry see phones there that would be unsellable in the Eu market due to size.
I just hope that the 3G network they put up will remain. It would be a damn shame if 3G phones from Eu couldn't be used in Japan anymore.
I recon that it can depend on the actual coverage as well. I know that GSM can give you a "RoboCop" voice if the coverage is poor. That hasn't happened me in Europe in, forever (10+ years). I have acutally never used a GSM in the states though.
GSM codes voices as a combination of pulse trains (for consonants) and white(-ish) noice (for vocals). It sends the data as 18 parameters, there is no way for it to accurately send any other noice.
To be fair I don't think those articles are about a coverup. They just state that it's extremely unlikely that you can actually make a mobile phone connection from a flying plane.
Personally I wouldn't doubt if some of those claimed callees are just media whores. There was one such case in Italy a few years back where one person claimed to have gotten a call (or SMS) from a friend on a plane just before it crashed (not related to terrorism).
It turned out that the guy just lied about it and wanted some media attention.
It may be a CDMA vs GSM thing though. But I have seen no examples of being able to use a GSM phone in a plane actually in flight.
From my own experience with operating automatic weapons (I've been trained in the Swedish army, yes we actually have one). I really can't see how I was trained to do that from a video game.
I certainly didn't learn how to dismantle and assemble a gun in a game. I didn't learn how to properly aim and fire a gun. (In games you seldom have to account for how your aim degrades as you move.) I was shown the basic "point this end away from you" ideas but I doubt anyone not living under a rock don't know this.
From what I've seen previously of Grossman his agenda is that he's against gun control. Instead of controlling a kids access to a gun it's better not to "teach them to kill" with games. I personally find it hard to believe that a kid with a gun who hasn't played Doom is any worse at shooting than a kid who has. In my view the real problem is that a kid is standing around with a loaded gun.
Not to sound disrespectful, but have you considered that it just might be "all in your head"?
That is, have you tried to verify that it is indeed the act of talking on a cell phone that causes your headache. Have you tried setting up an experiment to verify that if you remove the phone *without your knowledge* then the headache goes away?
As in, if you make a big fake phone with a cord to a box on the cunter. Have a friend (or even better an enemy) place the mobile phone in either the handset or in the box on the counter and see if you can tell the difference.
Of course there must be no communication between you and the tester. It's probably best if you're not in the room together.
Basically, you have found correlation between headache and mobile phones. You have so far not shown that there is reason to believe any causation between the two.
And again, the mind is good at making things real. The placebo effect is very real and has been demonstrated to have a real effect.
Lossless formats don't store the data unpacked. Typically it compresses down to 1/3 or 1/2 of the original size. Or compared to MP3s it's about 3-5 times larger than "standard" bitrate. (This is based on MP3s compressing down to about 1/10th of the original size.)
It's already been implemented, though not as a Bittorrent extention. Before Bittorrent there was SwarmCast which did exactly what you talk about. It used FEC to encode files and then "swarm" them over the net.
Since this was a few years back it didn't amount to much though. Probably because back then big pipes were still uncommon, and the added CPU demands slowed it down a bit. You could still get some pretty impressive download speeds with it.
Other posters who have replied to this and claimed that TCP handles this much better than FEC are not getting the point of it. In a current BT network if you have 10 clients with 90% of the file (the same 90%) then they must wait until a new seeder connects. Basically you create a larger file which has redundant data, and then send a portion of that. (Eg double the size, and then send half of that data.)
The end result is that the risk of getting a 90% file is much less.
I may still have the source code for SwarmCast laying about (they released it as OSS). IIRC some of the SwarmCast people later went on to do working on a creative commons network.
Yes the article was wrong on the details. However they are correct about the concept as there is a fundamental difference between "e-ink" displays and LCDs. The previous Ebooks I've seen (Sony has an older model) use a display where you set a pixel to a colour (or on those screens, a shade since they were monochrome) and it will remain *even if you turn off the electricity*. You can't do that in an LCD.
OTOH it seemed like what they were really upset with was that the book had a character obviously based on their dead son while it didn't really portray an accurate image.
That'd be more of a libel suit than anything else. OTOH I believe the laws protecting against that are rather weak in Germany. Unless I'm mistaken the Swedish royal house (among other European royals I'm sure) tend to legally bitch-slap several papers in Germany each year for making up stories and publishing them as truth.
I'm sure not many actually believe that crap they post, but I can see how it would be annoying.
My point is that many Americans seem to believe that the US invented free speech. (Like the person I replied to.) My point is that the founders of the US wisely took ideas from several of the best philosophers of their days. They also took ideas from the British Bill of Rights released (hah) about a hundred years earlier.
To reiterate: the ideas of freedom of speech and such were really the first implementation of already existing ideas. I doubt other countries would follow so quickly unless the ideas were already quite well rooted.
the author/publisher used as a defence that the real name can be found in the wikipedia
Why is this relevant to the case? Wasn't the point that the story was "based" on the hacker Tron and that they because of this tried to give credibility to their book by using his name.
As was pointed out this information can be found on the net so it's not like the Wikipedia is the last resort. (What I mean is, if they remove it from Wiki they'll just claim "Well the name is available here, here and here as well!".)
I just can't see how the Wiki article can be relevant to this. (Outside of the world of lawyers, which as we all know only rarely connects with the real world.)
I think you have slightly mis-informed view of the world. Most western countries have the same rights to free speech (you guys did import it from the French after all). The same story could have taken place in the states, although in that case someone would probably have been sued an astronomical amount of money as well.;-)
If anything I say hurray for the Internet. Jay for putting bureaucracy in way of lawyers!
From what I've read for all but the most extreme uses digital (as in dSLR) beats film across the board. In your example I'd be more inclined to believe that it's either psychosomatic (as you put it) or that you just are more experienced with film. Most people spend as much (or more) time tweaking the RAW files from a dSLR as they would in the old developing studio.
Also consider that the D50 is pretty much the lowest level of current dSLR (though that doesn't mean it's bad). If you compare a high end camera like the Canon 1Ds even professionally scanned medium has a hard time stacking up (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootou t.shtml).
I kind of like the sound it makes too. Not so much an explosion sound but more as if you hit really *really* hard or a large base drum. Seemed higher in frequency than I'd expect. (Though I'm sure there was a nice pressure wave as well.)
After travelling around in Japan for a while with Shinkansen I really wish the Eu would make themselves useful and try to establish a Eu system for high speed trains. If I could jump on a train in Sweden and go all the way down to Germany/France directly that would be *so* much nicer than going by the small and cramped airplanes.
I wouldn't have to bother with all the crap associated with airtravel neither. (Though it's pretty decent compared to what I hear about the US. We're not all treated as terrorists.)
You could even extend the idea of having elevators that move sideways. Eg at a hotel you could replace the hallways with the elevator "shaft" and have the elevator go directly to your room.
Perhaps not the best idea, but I'm sure a lot of neat applications could be made if the elevator carts were less contrained.
Oh I know it's CGI... But you have to animate meshes as well.;-) Actually it may be that they have used IK and physics to model the behaviour (with manual tweaks).
There's one scene where the huge spider tank "jumps" from a bridge and lands on the ground below. In this shot you see how the legs and body of the tank flex in order to absorb the shock and brace the cannon. *Really* nice! (For those that haven't seen it, it's not a tank like a Sherman, it's more similar to an insect/spider. A two ton spider with armour plating and an automatic cannon.)
They and the other machines are beautifully animated as well. One of my favourite machines in the first season is the "spider" tank in the second episode or so. They just managed to animate it so that you can really see the weight when it moves around.
A phrase I learned not too long ago in Japan is "Akibake". Ie a person who hangs around at Akihabara too much. Not as strong as otaku though, more like "geek" or "nerd".
Slashdot Mirror
Good to know, thanks for confirmation on that.
Last I was in Japan several people I was there with noted that they got connected to DoCoMo sometimes. I never saw it myself though.
A few years back this was still true, but not anymore.
There are a few features which are available on the JP market which don't exist elsewhere, eg TV phones and systems which allow you to pay with your phone (Suica/Edy/Felica and such).
Other than that I have to say that the Eu market produces just as good, and in many cases, better phones than Japan now. Korea is another country to watch for new interesting stuff. IIRC Samsung typically make phones with rediculous cameras in them.
In my experience it's actually the other way around. Many phones (particularly 3G) in Japan are too big to be sellable on the Eu market. Eu phones are really pretty darned good in this aspect.
They do have higher demands on software quality though.
FYI I work with developing mobile phones, for multiple markets.
This is incorrect. Vodafone has both a 3G network in Japan (the same they have everywhere else) and several clam-shells on the market.
Phones do have very different demands on the Japanese market than Eu though. Software crashes is unacceptable to a large part of the market there. It's nowhere near as critical on other markets. OTOH that a phone is large like a small house is not a problem in Japan though. You reguralry see phones there that would be unsellable in the Eu market due to size.
I just hope that the 3G network they put up will remain. It would be a damn shame if 3G phones from Eu couldn't be used in Japan anymore.
I recon that it can depend on the actual coverage as well. I know that GSM can give you a "RoboCop" voice if the coverage is poor. That hasn't happened me in Europe in, forever (10+ years). I have acutally never used a GSM in the states though.
GSM codes voices as a combination of pulse trains (for consonants) and white(-ish) noice (for vocals). It sends the data as 18 parameters, there is no way for it to accurately send any other noice.
3G networks in Europe use WCDMA as a carrier and GSM as the rest.
It's confusing to compare CDMA and GSM as GSM is really the entire stack in the phone. From voice coding down to radio transmission level.
The radio part of GSM isn't as advanced as that in CDMA, but the voice coding and higher functions typically do a better job and has more features.
Only with unshielded (read crappy) speakers.
To be fair I don't think those articles are about a coverup. They just state that it's extremely unlikely that you can actually make a mobile phone connection from a flying plane.
Personally I wouldn't doubt if some of those claimed callees are just media whores. There was one such case in Italy a few years back where one person claimed to have gotten a call (or SMS) from a friend on a plane just before it crashed (not related to terrorism).
It turned out that the guy just lied about it and wanted some media attention.
It may be a CDMA vs GSM thing though. But I have seen no examples of being able to use a GSM phone in a plane actually in flight.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Thread over.
From my own experience with operating automatic weapons (I've been trained in the Swedish army, yes we actually have one). I really can't see how I was trained to do that from a video game.
I certainly didn't learn how to dismantle and assemble a gun in a game. I didn't learn how to properly aim and fire a gun. (In games you seldom have to account for how your aim degrades as you move.) I was shown the basic "point this end away from you" ideas but I doubt anyone not living under a rock don't know this.
From what I've seen previously of Grossman his agenda is that he's against gun control. Instead of controlling a kids access to a gun it's better not to "teach them to kill" with games. I personally find it hard to believe that a kid with a gun who hasn't played Doom is any worse at shooting than a kid who has. In my view the real problem is that a kid is standing around with a loaded gun.
Not to sound disrespectful, but have you considered that it just might be "all in your head"?
That is, have you tried to verify that it is indeed the act of talking on a cell phone that causes your headache. Have you tried setting up an experiment to verify that if you remove the phone *without your knowledge* then the headache goes away?
As in, if you make a big fake phone with a cord to a box on the cunter. Have a friend (or even better an enemy) place the mobile phone in either the handset or in the box on the counter and see if you can tell the difference.
Of course there must be no communication between you and the tester. It's probably best if you're not in the room together.
Basically, you have found correlation between headache and mobile phones. You have so far not shown that there is reason to believe any causation between the two.
And again, the mind is good at making things real. The placebo effect is very real and has been demonstrated to have a real effect.
Lossless formats don't store the data unpacked. Typically it compresses down to 1/3 or 1/2 of the original size. Or compared to MP3s it's about 3-5 times larger than "standard" bitrate. (This is based on MP3s compressing down to about 1/10th of the original size.)
It's already been implemented, though not as a Bittorrent extention. Before Bittorrent there was SwarmCast which did exactly what you talk about. It used FEC to encode files and then "swarm" them over the net.
Since this was a few years back it didn't amount to much though. Probably because back then big pipes were still uncommon, and the added CPU demands slowed it down a bit. You could still get some pretty impressive download speeds with it.
Other posters who have replied to this and claimed that TCP handles this much better than FEC are not getting the point of it. In a current BT network if you have 10 clients with 90% of the file (the same 90%) then they must wait until a new seeder connects. Basically you create a larger file which has redundant data, and then send a portion of that. (Eg double the size, and then send half of that data.)
The end result is that the risk of getting a 90% file is much less.
I may still have the source code for SwarmCast laying about (they released it as OSS). IIRC some of the SwarmCast people later went on to do working on a creative commons network.
Yes the article was wrong on the details. However they are correct about the concept as there is a fundamental difference between "e-ink" displays and LCDs. The previous Ebooks I've seen (Sony has an older model) use a display where you set a pixel to a colour (or on those screens, a shade since they were monochrome) and it will remain *even if you turn off the electricity*. You can't do that in an LCD.
Makes sense.
OTOH it seemed like what they were really upset with was that the book had a character obviously based on their dead son while it didn't really portray an accurate image.
That'd be more of a libel suit than anything else. OTOH I believe the laws protecting against that are rather weak in Germany. Unless I'm mistaken the Swedish royal house (among other European royals I'm sure) tend to legally bitch-slap several papers in Germany each year for making up stories and publishing them as truth.
I'm sure not many actually believe that crap they post, but I can see how it would be annoying.
My point is that many Americans seem to believe that the US invented free speech. (Like the person I replied to.) My point is that the founders of the US wisely took ideas from several of the best philosophers of their days. They also took ideas from the British Bill of Rights released (hah) about a hundred years earlier.
To reiterate: the ideas of freedom of speech and such were really the first implementation of already existing ideas. I doubt other countries would follow so quickly unless the ideas were already quite well rooted.
the author/publisher used as a defence that the real name can be found in the wikipedia
Why is this relevant to the case? Wasn't the point that the story was "based" on the hacker Tron and that they because of this tried to give credibility to their book by using his name.
As was pointed out this information can be found on the net so it's not like the Wikipedia is the last resort. (What I mean is, if they remove it from Wiki they'll just claim "Well the name is available here, here and here as well!".)
I just can't see how the Wiki article can be relevant to this. (Outside of the world of lawyers, which as we all know only rarely connects with the real world.)
Hurray for US free speech rights
;-)
I think you have slightly mis-informed view of the world. Most western countries have the same rights to free speech (you guys did import it from the French after all). The same story could have taken place in the states, although in that case someone would probably have been sued an astronomical amount of money as well.
If anything I say hurray for the Internet. Jay for putting bureaucracy in way of lawyers!
From what I've read for all but the most extreme uses digital (as in dSLR) beats film across the board. In your example I'd be more inclined to believe that it's either psychosomatic (as you put it) or that you just are more experienced with film. Most people spend as much (or more) time tweaking the RAW files from a dSLR as they would in the old developing studio.
u t.shtml).
Also consider that the D50 is pretty much the lowest level of current dSLR (though that doesn't mean it's bad). If you compare a high end camera like the Canon 1Ds even professionally scanned medium has a hard time stacking up (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shooto
I kind of like the sound it makes too. Not so much an explosion sound but more as if you hit really *really* hard or a large base drum. Seemed higher in frequency than I'd expect. (Though I'm sure there was a nice pressure wave as well.)
After travelling around in Japan for a while with Shinkansen I really wish the Eu would make themselves useful and try to establish a Eu system for high speed trains. If I could jump on a train in Sweden and go all the way down to Germany/France directly that would be *so* much nicer than going by the small and cramped airplanes.
I wouldn't have to bother with all the crap associated with airtravel neither. (Though it's pretty decent compared to what I hear about the US. We're not all treated as terrorists.)
You could even extend the idea of having elevators that move sideways. Eg at a hotel you could replace the hallways with the elevator "shaft" and have the elevator go directly to your room.
Perhaps not the best idea, but I'm sure a lot of neat applications could be made if the elevator carts were less contrained.
Oh I know it's CGI... But you have to animate meshes as well. ;-) Actually it may be that they have used IK and physics to model the behaviour (with manual tweaks).
There's one scene where the huge spider tank "jumps" from a bridge and lands on the ground below. In this shot you see how the legs and body of the tank flex in order to absorb the shock and brace the cannon. *Really* nice! (For those that haven't seen it, it's not a tank like a Sherman, it's more similar to an insect/spider. A two ton spider with armour plating and an automatic cannon.)
They and the other machines are beautifully animated as well. One of my favourite machines in the first season is the "spider" tank in the second episode or so. They just managed to animate it so that you can really see the weight when it moves around.
A phrase I learned not too long ago in Japan is "Akibake". Ie a person who hangs around at Akihabara too much. Not as strong as otaku though, more like "geek" or "nerd".