The failure rate on dye-based writeable optical disk based storage is horrific. There is reason to think that foil based CDs, DVDs and Bluray disks- the ones you buy with films and music pre-recorded, could last an extraordinary age if well manufactured and carefully stored, but the write-once disks are a very different technology indeed.
The organic dye used on CD-R and DVD-R has a durability problem because it is susceptible to light. BD-R uses inorganic dye, which is not susceptible to light. Completely different ballgame.
And then again, light is pretty much a non-issue in data centers because the discs will be operating inside sealed servers anyway.
Temperature is actually more important than the energy density in this case. At 650C never mind 900C, you'll still have a lot of trouble with heat--material have an unfortunate tendency to expand and warp (or, worse, snap) at that kind of temperature. Thus, you may be able to turn your car on and off only dozens of times before the SOFC breaks down. This is the real reason why SOFC has never been seriously considered for cars--SOFC has always been relatively compact for the amount of energy they produce (except for the apparatus you'd need to get rid of the huge amounts of heat).
Now, 650C is easy, at least if you are using natural gas as feedstock. (Gasoline may be somewhat more difficult, but not impossible.) Other solid oxide fuel cells that are trying to enter the market operate at or near that temperature range. 350C, though--wow. That will be remarkable, and may indeed be able to brings in an era of fuel cell vehicles, but it'll involve whole new set of chemistry, and I won't believe it until I see it.
I do tend to be a real prick around self-styled net pontiffs who give me unsolicited sermons about having to collecting unemployment checks, yes. Try not doing that sometime. It'll make your own life a lot more enjoyable.
Highly-utilitized systems like the shinkansen are already often running near track capacity, and shorter trains couldn't be run any more frequently in many cases.
The Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen route is so crowded now that they only allow 16-car trainsets on the tracks. I suspect the only reason they won't make the trainsets even longer is because they don't have the physical room to extend station platforms.
Not to cool down the core but to prevent the spent fuel rods from starting up again.
No, the spent rods won't start up again, in the sense of reaching criticality. There's a reason why they're called "spent rods." They do melt down without cooling, however, and that was a big concern because, as you point out, they weren't covered by anything but water.
Coming from Japan, the most frustrating aspect of Acela is that it routinely runs late, due to having to share tracks with those damned freighter trains. The Shinkansen's average delay is measured in seconds; the Japanese routinely plan trips with 5 minute transit time because they can trust the trains to arrive on time.
The main reason Shinkansen trains are fast and on time is because the main routes run on dedicated tracks. On the Yamagata and Akita lines, they do share tracks with local passenger trains, but Shinkansen gets preferred right-of-way.
This, incidentally, is why splitting track and train ownership is a bad idea for high speed rail. Neither side can take full ownership in assuring the most convenience to the end users, which is what generates revenue at the end of the day.
For example, how can I get a character to continue to steal until they get certain item and then stop and switch to attacking? Or to steal only once from a certain monster for the whole battle, even if that monster has less then 100% health.
I can't dig up the source right now, but I remember the developers saying in a Japanese interview that this omission is deliberate. It'd have been trivial for them to add "Monster holding treasure" as a gambit target, but they chose not to make the game not too easy. Yes, you can program your characters to beat monsters in your sleep; no, you can't sleep your way through the game if you also want to optimize treasure collection. It's mean-spirited, yes, but don't assume they haven't thought through it.
By the way, if other characters are attacking monsters before your thief can target them, your gambit isn't precise enough. I'll leave the solution as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, it will roughly trace the ancient Koshukaido-Nakasendo route, but it was due to pork-barreling efforts by the corrupt politician Shin Kanemaru more than any engineering considerations.
Well, yes, but there's this thing called "reserved seating," which you are welcome to purchase for the holidays if you can plan ahead. It's really no better or worse than airlines, except you do have the option of standing when you're cheap and/or capricious and are really desperate.
Airplanes have a further disadvantage in that, after landing, you still have to stand on the local trains for quite a while to get to the final destination. Shinkansen stations in most cities are much closer to the city center.
Actually, the maglev line will not run parallel to the Shinkansen line on the coast, but will go through the mountainous regions of central Japan, incorporating the test line segment in Yamanashi. The line will act as a backup in case the existing Shinkansen line gets destroyed by a major earthquake or a volcano eruption (specifically Mt. Fuji).
All of them are doing very well in a supposedly xenophobic Japanese market, even though credible domestic alternatives exist. The Japanese people are perfectly happy to take Western products over Japanese products if they are in fact superior to needs in Japan, and is marketed properly. Microsoft can't blame the society for the horrendous performance over here.
As for the "Hard-Core" gamer segment, no, Sony is NOT supposed to be aiming at them. Microsoft already tried that on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, and the result is instadeath in Japan and less-than-PS2 sales in the US. There are just too few of them, and more importantly, they do not drive game sales because non-core gamers generally do not look to them when picking games. Compare this to the fashion industry, in which core fashion experts can and do drive trend because many women take Metropolitan and Elle models and journalists' words for gospel. Gamers and game journalists, in contrast, generally get all the respect of dung beetles(look at the level of respect Zonk is getting around here, for example), and is therefore unable to influence the general public beyond their own little circle.
As for multi-platform games, we'll see. There has never been a situation in console game history in which porting was widespread--it has always been limited to a few powerful franchises that did not need console maker's support--but maybe the market dynamics has changed so much that it is now going to happen. I'm not holding my breath, though. A more likely scenario is that games within a franchise gets released for different platforms, which is already starting to happen: Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360, RR7 for PS3; and FF12 for PS2, FF12RW for NDS.
People who follow the console wars have already abandoned ps3, by and large. I say that because for all the game forums I'm on (and most like console RPGs, which the ps2 had tons of), I have yet to find one single person excited about the ps3.
Sure, that's what "everybody" has been saying in Japanese game forums for the last few months, too--so much so that I was getting skeptical about initial demand myself. Then there was a near-riot in Akihabara last night (sorry, no English article yet) among people who were falling over themselves trying to get a PS3. No more PS3 to be had for love or money--OK, maybe lots of money if you go to auction sites--over here.
In contrast, there was a huge positive hype over Xbox 360 on all the Japanese game forums prior to release date, leaving naive viewers with no doubt who the next generation winner is going to be. Today, the 360 is dead in Japan--it has a puny <160K install base, and it will never occupy more than a Amiga-like niche. But game forums to this day are still dominated by kids gushing over Blue Odyssey or whatever the latest Great White Hope is for the 360 these days, and they will tell you the PS3 is a POS hardware that will never sell.
Conclusion: game forums are not accurate indicators of real consumer demand.
UMD is not the storage media you would use to play MP3s on a PSP--there is no consumer-writable UMD disc or drive on market today. MP3 and video files go on a Memory Stick Duo, which--though still a Sony format--is widely available from non-Sony vendors. I do agree that PSP does not make a good competitor to an iPod, though, unless you are solely interested in playing movies, in which case the bigger screen definitely helps. (By the way, the battery life should improve significantly if you play video off of the memory stick, since the UMD drive stays turned off.)
The cumulative sale of 360 in Japan is well under 200,000 units. Your esimate would require an average Japanese retailer to purchase an inventory of over five times as many 360s as they've sold all year, based solely on the unprovable belief that these two games will be mega-hits. What makes you think Microsoft has that kind of credibility left with retailers after their performance this year, not to mention the three years before that with the first Xbox?
It may be true that the race hasn't begun yet, but Microsoft is not starting from ground zero in Japan. They are starting from a very deep hole that they've been digging for themselves for the last four years.
In Japan, passenger cars are almost never allowed to run on diesel, out of emission concerns. Japanese carmakers, who basically own the hybrid market right now, are understandably reluctant to focus their R&D yen on something they can't sell in their home country.
Having said that, hybrid diesel for buses has been on market for a while, so hybrid diesel in passenger cars may not be too far off in markets that tolerate it...
>Yellow plate actually means that the engine volume is less than 750cc. Nothing else.
Er, no. It means the car fits the kei-car specification, which has size as well as displacement restriction (660cc, not 750cc as you claim).
Your information is outdated. Usen has FTTH for JPY2,980 (~US$27) per month. TEPCO's FTTH offerings are also well below $70/month. Unless you live in remote regions, I'm sure you can do better than $35/month for ADSL as well.
First of all, Japan does grow apples, and quite high quality ones at that. Many of the fruits popular in Japan are mostly imported (like bananas), but not apples.
Second, chances are that he shopped at premium fruit shops in premium locations (e.g. near the Imperial Palace, or in a high-class department store). Then he can easily spend more than $5 per apple, but that apple is likely to be:
Of super-high quality, both in appearance and taste; and
Primarily meant to be for gifts (i.e., not as tourist snacks).
Meanwhile, those of us in the middle class buy our apples at residential-area supermarkets (or maybe convenience stores) for maybe $1-$2 apiece (might be a bit high this year due to typhoon damages).
Really, folks, grow a brain! Japan doesn't have five times the per-capita GDP of, say, Canada; there is no way we can afford $5 apples on a regular basis. I know this is slashdot, but please stop accepting anecdotal evidence as a general trend.
The communication technology used in FeliCa, the Sony smartcard technology being used here, was approved as ISO/IEC IS 18092 last week.
The only thing DoCoMo is providing is a Java platform on the cell phone that can write to the smartcard; it's up to vendors like Edy (the joint venture doing the electronic money stuff), railway companies, airlines, etc., to come up with the actual applications. If all you want is to be able to accept electronic currency, you just sign up with Edy, not DoCoMo.
The biggest advantage of the smartcard is that it's "swipe and go"--no need to punch keys on your phone in order to pay. One second vs. ten seconds is a big deal at train turnstiles and kiosks.
Finally, as a side not, almost every Japanese bank is now part of the national ATM interchange (MICS), and will let you withdraw from other banks for about $2. AFAIK, this has been true for years.
I wouldn't give too much credit for that record. If you RTFL, you will learn that TGV's revenue service, which is what actually matters, will only go up to about 360km/h.
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The failure rate on dye-based writeable optical disk based storage is horrific. There is reason to think that foil based CDs, DVDs and Bluray disks- the ones you buy with films and music pre-recorded, could last an extraordinary age if well manufactured and carefully stored, but the write-once disks are a very different technology indeed.
The organic dye used on CD-R and DVD-R has a durability problem because it is susceptible to light. BD-R uses inorganic dye, which is not susceptible to light. Completely different ballgame.
And then again, light is pretty much a non-issue in data centers because the discs will be operating inside sealed servers anyway.
Temperature is actually more important than the energy density in this case. At 650C never mind 900C, you'll still have a lot of trouble with heat--material have an unfortunate tendency to expand and warp (or, worse, snap) at that kind of temperature. Thus, you may be able to turn your car on and off only dozens of times before the SOFC breaks down. This is the real reason why SOFC has never been seriously considered for cars--SOFC has always been relatively compact for the amount of energy they produce (except for the apparatus you'd need to get rid of the huge amounts of heat).
Now, 650C is easy, at least if you are using natural gas as feedstock. (Gasoline may be somewhat more difficult, but not impossible.) Other solid oxide fuel cells that are trying to enter the market operate at or near that temperature range. 350C, though--wow. That will be remarkable, and may indeed be able to brings in an era of fuel cell vehicles, but it'll involve whole new set of chemistry, and I won't believe it until I see it.
I do tend to be a real prick around self-styled net pontiffs who give me unsolicited sermons about having to collecting unemployment checks, yes. Try not doing that sometime. It'll make your own life a lot more enjoyable.
The Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen route is so crowded now that they only allow 16-car trainsets on the tracks. I suspect the only reason they won't make the trainsets even longer is because they don't have the physical room to extend station platforms.
You sound as if you do not personally believe this, but by exposing passwords to porn sites, LulzSec has done exactly that--ruin people's lives.
No, the spent rods won't start up again, in the sense of reaching criticality. There's a reason why they're called "spent rods." They do melt down without cooling, however, and that was a big concern because, as you point out, they weren't covered by anything but water.
Coming from Japan, the most frustrating aspect of Acela is that it routinely runs late, due to having to share tracks with those damned freighter trains. The Shinkansen's average delay is measured in seconds; the Japanese routinely plan trips with 5 minute transit time because they can trust the trains to arrive on time.
The main reason Shinkansen trains are fast and on time is because the main routes run on dedicated tracks. On the Yamagata and Akita lines, they do share tracks with local passenger trains, but Shinkansen gets preferred right-of-way.
This, incidentally, is why splitting track and train ownership is a bad idea for high speed rail. Neither side can take full ownership in assuring the most convenience to the end users, which is what generates revenue at the end of the day.
By the way, if other characters are attacking monsters before your thief can target them, your gambit isn't precise enough. I'll leave the solution as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, it will roughly trace the ancient Koshukaido-Nakasendo route, but it was due to pork-barreling efforts by the corrupt politician Shin Kanemaru more than any engineering considerations.
Very smart. Very smart, young man. Now go build me a new runway to land that aircraft. The existing ones in Tokyo are booked full, you know.
Airplanes have a further disadvantage in that, after landing, you still have to stand on the local trains for quite a while to get to the final destination. Shinkansen stations in most cities are much closer to the city center.
Actually, the maglev line will not run parallel to the Shinkansen line on the coast, but will go through the mountainous regions of central Japan, incorporating the test line segment in Yamanashi. The line will act as a backup in case the existing Shinkansen line gets destroyed by a major earthquake or a volcano eruption (specifically Mt. Fuji).
Apple.
Dell.
Coca-Cola.
Proctor & Gamble.
VISA.
All of them are doing very well in a supposedly xenophobic Japanese market, even though credible domestic alternatives exist. The Japanese people are perfectly happy to take Western products over Japanese products if they are in fact superior to needs in Japan, and is marketed properly. Microsoft can't blame the society for the horrendous performance over here.
As for the "Hard-Core" gamer segment, no, Sony is NOT supposed to be aiming at them. Microsoft already tried that on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, and the result is instadeath in Japan and less-than-PS2 sales in the US. There are just too few of them, and more importantly, they do not drive game sales because non-core gamers generally do not look to them when picking games. Compare this to the fashion industry, in which core fashion experts can and do drive trend because many women take Metropolitan and Elle models and journalists' words for gospel. Gamers and game journalists, in contrast, generally get all the respect of dung beetles(look at the level of respect Zonk is getting around here, for example), and is therefore unable to influence the general public beyond their own little circle.
As for multi-platform games, we'll see. There has never been a situation in console game history in which porting was widespread--it has always been limited to a few powerful franchises that did not need console maker's support--but maybe the market dynamics has changed so much that it is now going to happen. I'm not holding my breath, though. A more likely scenario is that games within a franchise gets released for different platforms, which is already starting to happen: Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360, RR7 for PS3; and FF12 for PS2, FF12RW for NDS.
In contrast, there was a huge positive hype over Xbox 360 on all the Japanese game forums prior to release date, leaving naive viewers with no doubt who the next generation winner is going to be. Today, the 360 is dead in Japan--it has a puny <160K install base, and it will never occupy more than a Amiga-like niche. But game forums to this day are still dominated by kids gushing over Blue Odyssey or whatever the latest Great White Hope is for the 360 these days, and they will tell you the PS3 is a POS hardware that will never sell.
Conclusion: game forums are not accurate indicators of real consumer demand.
UMD is not the storage media you would use to play MP3s on a PSP--there is no consumer-writable UMD disc or drive on market today. MP3 and video files go on a Memory Stick Duo, which--though still a Sony format--is widely available from non-Sony vendors. I do agree that PSP does not make a good competitor to an iPod, though, unless you are solely interested in playing movies, in which case the bigger screen definitely helps. (By the way, the battery life should improve significantly if you play video off of the memory stick, since the UMD drive stays turned off.)
With the Fish-Slapping Dance, of course.
It may be true that the race hasn't begun yet, but Microsoft is not starting from ground zero in Japan. They are starting from a very deep hole that they've been digging for themselves for the last four years.
Having said that, hybrid diesel for buses has been on market for a while, so hybrid diesel in passenger cars may not be too far off in markets that tolerate it...
>Yellow plate actually means that the engine volume is less than 750cc. Nothing else.
Er, no. It means the car fits the kei-car specification, which has size as well as displacement restriction (660cc, not 750cc as you claim).
Your information is outdated. Usen has FTTH for JPY2,980 (~US$27) per month. TEPCO's FTTH offerings are also well below $70/month. Unless you live in remote regions, I'm sure you can do better than $35/month for ADSL as well.
Which will be followed by a mass Exodus of Windows users from Cairo to the promised land.
Second, chances are that he shopped at premium fruit shops in premium locations (e.g. near the Imperial Palace, or in a high-class department store). Then he can easily spend more than $5 per apple, but that apple is likely to be:
- Of super-high quality, both in appearance and taste; and
- Primarily meant to be for gifts (i.e., not as tourist snacks).
Meanwhile, those of us in the middle class buy our apples at residential-area supermarkets (or maybe convenience stores) for maybe $1-$2 apiece (might be a bit high this year due to typhoon damages).Really, folks, grow a brain! Japan doesn't have five times the per-capita GDP of, say, Canada; there is no way we can afford $5 apples on a regular basis. I know this is slashdot, but please stop accepting anecdotal evidence as a general trend.
I wouldn't give too much credit for that record. If you RTFL, you will learn that TGV's revenue service, which is what actually matters, will only go up to about 360km/h.