Word and Excel formats are, in fact, not the same across versions. They are almost the same, to the point where it works seamlessly 95% of the time. The other 5% you get to scratch your head, go through endless debugging cycles, and weep. Macros are particularly evil in this respect.
At least open-source software tend to be completely up front about file formats of the week.
For a more sobering data, check out the this graph of speed vs. distance to NTT station on Yahoo BB's web site. (It's in Japanese, but you should be able to read enough of the graph to get the gist of it.)
As you can see, you basically need to live next door to your local NTT station in order to get 12Mb/s. Living 2km away (not unlikely, even in allegedly densely packed Tokyo) gives you maybe half that. Even the new 26Mb/s service doesn't give you 12Mb/s at 2km.
Really? 35+ other nations agree with us and vocally back the US.
In other words, as many as 156 countries (193 minus 36 minus Iraq) passed up a chance to butter up their relationships with the US for free.
9/11 gave the US an overwhelming goodwill from a lot of countries, even in traditionally anti-US places (like, say, France), and the internationally community heartily backed the war on Afghanistan. Now, 1.5 years later, the US is so strapped for friendship that it has to offer bribes
(see Turkey, et al.), and make an empty boast about how many countries support them--when, in fact, an overwhelming majority does not. Why do you think this is the case?
The important word here is replacement. Sharp's claim is that, if you replace libqpe, you lose the ability to run all the built-in applications. That's fine if you do want to replace everything--the default PIM applications certainly leave a lot to be desired--but it isn't an option if you want to run HancomWord, for example.
That's a document viewer for the.zbf format, which is a proprietary format Sharp is pushing as an e-publishing standard in Japan. It's almost completely irrelvant if you don't read Japanese. Why Dynamism didn't just erase it altogether is beyond me--it's even removable via the package manager!
I don't know anything about QuakeWorld, and I also don't have any CPU benchmarks, but the XScale processor in the Zaurus doesn't have an FPU. That might be a deal-killer for a 3D game.
As an owner of the SL-C700, I'd like to point out the following:
The going price in Japan for the SL-C700 is a touch under US$500 (if you can get any, that is; it's still in short supply, two months after release). Dynamism is getting a hefty margin for their effort.
Battery life is one of the biggest problems with this unit. The biggest battery drainers are the LCD backlight and the CF card. If you keep the backlight dim (which is adequate if you're indoors), and you don't have a WiFi card or a wireless modem running, you can easily exceed 3.5h in battery time. If you go full blast on both, the battery life can be as low as 1.5h. If you want better battery life, a better solution would be the SL-6000 (sold as the SL-B500 in Japan), which doesn't have the nice display, but whose battery lasts as much as 18 hours.
Memory is the other big problem. Actually, you can get by with 32MB of RAM if you turn off "resident in RAM" flags for the commonly used programs, but then you have to wait a few seconds every time you want to use them. Many Japanese users have resorted to creating swap files on SD cards. For some reason, Sharp is refusing to acknowledge this as an issue.
The machine does feel a bit unresponsive, especially when starting applications. This appears to be mostly due to the toolkit (Qt-Embedded) and the unaccelerated framebuffer. OTOH, profiling reveals that a lot of time is wasted opening and closing huge Japanese font files on startup, so maybe the English version runs much faster.
Sharp does publish kernel code, in accordance with GPL (although the SD card driver is proprietary). However, the QtE code, as well as most of the PIM code, is proprietary, which means that the users can't do much about the above problem. (Sharp's engineer said in an interview that recompiling the stock QtE library from Trolltech will likely not work.)
Sharp's decision to make 802.11b optional makes perfect sense in Japan, because hotspots aren't as ubiquitous or interoperable here as they are in the US. The most popular PDA wireless solution here is a cell phone modem in CF form, which works in almost all urban areas at 32kbps-128kbps. And if you do need WiFi, what's so hard about plugging a modem in?
Yes, third party application support is pretty patchy--unless you can live with console applications, in which virtually every non-X applications in Debian is a recompile away from running on the C700! A lot of Japanese users who were fed up with the default mailer are now happily using emacs to read their mail, for example.
To me, switching from the Palm Vx to the SL-C700 was like trading in a middle-aged accountant for a teenage math genius. The Palm was clearly better at traditional PDA work, and doesn't drive you up the wall like the C700 does sometimes, but there is something unquantifiable that is truly exciting about the C700 that the Palm can't begin to copy.
And the amazing thing is, it's still too big. I'm an adult, 5'7", with above-average hand size, and the Japanese controller is just a bit oversized to fit snugly in my hands. That means it's not going to fit in the hands of most Japanese kids. Microsoft makes good mice and keyboards; why can't they do controllers right?
If you read the article carefully, Tsutaya is not engaging in any nefarious geographical tracking--in fact, DoCoMo cell phones generally cannot be localized at all except within a relatively large range of an antenna. They almost certainly do track which branches you rent or shop at, but you don't even need cell phones for that.
And before slashdotters get all worked up about spamming, this campaign appears to be opt-in. I have had a Tsutaya card for a year and a half (yes, I live in Japan), but since I didn't give them my i-Mode address, I have never heard a word from them. Ever.
All Tsutaya is doing here is sending you targeted advertising--the only novelty is that the mail reader is a cell phone instead of a PC. What makes the cell phone approach more effective is that people generally take cell phones with them to the rental shops, whereas PC's tend to stay home.
I don't know how they associate purchases with cell phone addresses, but they did have campaigns in the past where you got discounts for presenting i-Mode based "online coupons" at the counter, so maybe that's how they do it. Rentals are easy, of course; you just associate (again, I have to emphasize, voluntarily provided) i-Mode addresses with rental membership cards.
Frankly, I would find these email ads to be annoying as heck, but some people apparently like it; as long as it's opt-in, I see no problem.
Here
is an article in Japanese, with pictures, linked from a Slashdot Japan article.
By the way, the revolutionary part about this laptop is that it uses a mechanical pump to move the hot coolant to the radiation panel at the back of the LCD, whereas traditional cooling mechanisms uses the palmrest and/or the bottom of the laptop to dissipate heat in addition to the air fan. The idea is that
a pump is much more reliable than a fan, because it doesn't move as fast or ingest foreign dust particles all the time; and
2) heating the back of the LCD affects the user experience less than with the palmrest or the bottom.
Also, before people start screaming about how big the water tanks are in the photos, the article says that the tanks were deliberately enlarged to emphasize the point of these prototypes, and they will be reduced in production models.
1) amazon appear to have made a profit without anyone (or me at least) every receiving any spam from them
I have. Not directly from them, but I got spam addressed to an Amazon-munged address (shimpei+amazon@blah.com) that I gave to no one but Amazon, which means the bastards must have sold it.
Admittedly, this was more than four years ago, and when I started buying from them again recently, I did not receive anything beyond a few ads from Amazon itself. But then again, I didn't bother giving out munged addresses this time, so I can't tell if they're still selling addresses or not.
You can get IDE or SCSI cables that are bunched up in cylindrical wire form, as opposed to flat ribbons. It isn't anything like plugging cards in, but it will make your case a lot less cluttered. I'm thinking about buying some next time I add components to my computer.
If virus writers are like cockroaches, why aren't we allowed to hit them with newspapers and spray RAID on them until they're dead whenever we find one? I'm sure a lot of sysadmins would love to do just that.
I haven't seen any article mentioning this law in any Japanese newspaper today, print or web--the Yomiuri site linked from the/. post is the front page, not the actual article. Can someone post the actual link?
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Try searching for "koran" at Amazon or something. You'll get a whole bunch of hits on English translations of the Koran. I know Penguin has a translation that my university used in some classes.
>Many things that I've read have indicated that the Japanese mainstream truly believes that the internet is entirely pornography and is a complete waste of time.
>
>Anyone in Japan want to comment on that?
Many things I've read have indicated that the internet _is_ entirely pornography and a complete waste of time. Any internet users want to comment on that?
In other words: don't believe everything you read.
Yes, those people exist, but the same type of people exist in the US and elsewhere, too.
As a Japanese person living in Japan, I'm intrigued by this alleged Japanese caste structure thingy, because I'd never realized there is one. (Unless you consider discrimination against foreigners as a caste system, Japan today is a lot less of a caste society than, say, the UK.) Would you care to elaborate what the castes are?
The one-button Mac mouse is hand-neutral to begin with. No control panel kludge necessary. The "left-handed mouse" option doesn't do anything to solve the problems associated with key shortcuts being harder for lefties--Alt-F4 is even harder for the right hand than Cmd-Q to hit.
As for accessibility, Mac OS had utilities like CloseView in System 6 (1988) and speech-driven commands in 1994; they were thinking about non-standard users long before Microsoft ever did (as usual).
As for Linux, it should be possible to remap mouse buttons at the X layer, although (being a righty) I've never experimented with it.
According to the papers here in Tokyo this morning, the ATMs at the Post Office (the Japanese Post Office offers savings accounts) broke down--not because an internal LSI didn't know that 2000 was a leap year, but because it didn't know about leap years at all! The same problem will happen again in 2004 unless they fix it by then.
Slashdot Mirror
At least open-source software tend to be completely up front about file formats of the week.
As you can see, you basically need to live next door to your local NTT station in order to get 12Mb/s. Living 2km away (not unlikely, even in allegedly densely packed Tokyo) gives you maybe half that. Even the new 26Mb/s service doesn't give you 12Mb/s at 2km.
The answer is yes, assuming that the 5600 is indeed identical to the B500 sold in Japan. The driver is still closed-source AFAIK.
9/11 gave the US an overwhelming goodwill from a lot of countries, even in traditionally anti-US places (like, say, France), and the internationally community heartily backed the war on Afghanistan. Now, 1.5 years later, the US is so strapped for friendship that it has to offer bribes (see Turkey, et al.), and make an empty boast about how many countries support them--when, in fact, an overwhelming majority does not. Why do you think this is the case?
The important word here is replacement. Sharp's claim is that, if you replace libqpe, you lose the ability to run all the built-in applications. That's fine if you do want to replace everything--the default PIM applications certainly leave a lot to be desired--but it isn't an option if you want to run HancomWord, for example.
That's a document viewer for the .zbf format, which is a proprietary format Sharp is pushing as an e-publishing standard in Japan. It's almost completely irrelvant if you don't read Japanese. Why Dynamism didn't just erase it altogether is beyond me--it's even removable via the package manager!
I don't know anything about QuakeWorld, and I also don't have any CPU benchmarks, but the XScale processor in the Zaurus doesn't have an FPU. That might be a deal-killer for a 3D game.
- The going price in Japan for the SL-C700 is a touch under US$500 (if you can get any, that is; it's still in short supply, two months after release). Dynamism is getting a hefty margin for their effort.
- Battery life is one of the biggest problems with this unit. The biggest battery drainers are the LCD backlight and the CF card. If you keep the backlight dim (which is adequate if you're indoors), and you don't have a WiFi card or a wireless modem running, you can easily exceed 3.5h in battery time. If you go full blast on both, the battery life can be as low as 1.5h. If you want better battery life, a better solution would be the SL-6000 (sold as the SL-B500 in Japan), which doesn't have the nice display, but whose battery lasts as much as 18 hours.
- Memory is the other big problem. Actually, you can get by with 32MB of RAM if you turn off "resident in RAM" flags for the commonly used programs, but then you have to wait a few seconds every time you want to use them. Many Japanese users have resorted to creating swap files on SD cards. For some reason, Sharp is refusing to acknowledge this as an issue.
- The machine does feel a bit unresponsive, especially when starting applications. This appears to be mostly due to the toolkit (Qt-Embedded) and the unaccelerated framebuffer. OTOH, profiling reveals that a lot of time is wasted opening and closing huge Japanese font files on startup, so maybe the English version runs much faster.
- Sharp does publish kernel code, in accordance with GPL (although the SD card driver is proprietary). However, the QtE code, as well as most of the PIM code, is proprietary, which means that the users can't do much about the above problem. (Sharp's engineer said in an interview that recompiling the stock QtE library from Trolltech will likely not work.)
- Sharp's decision to make 802.11b optional makes perfect sense in Japan, because hotspots aren't as ubiquitous or interoperable here as they are in the US. The most popular PDA wireless solution here is a cell phone modem in CF form, which works in almost all urban areas at 32kbps-128kbps. And if you do need WiFi, what's so hard about plugging a modem in?
- Yes, third party application support is pretty patchy--unless you can live with console applications, in which virtually every non-X applications in Debian is a recompile away from running on the C700! A lot of Japanese users who were fed up with the default mailer are now happily using emacs to read their mail, for example.
To me, switching from the Palm Vx to the SL-C700 was like trading in a middle-aged accountant for a teenage math genius. The Palm was clearly better at traditional PDA work, and doesn't drive you up the wall like the C700 does sometimes, but there is something unquantifiable that is truly exciting about the C700 that the Palm can't begin to copy.Erp? The C-700 has pen input as well. How else do you think you're supposed to input in the palmpad mode?
And the amazing thing is, it's still too big. I'm an adult, 5'7", with above-average hand size, and the Japanese controller is just a bit oversized to fit snugly in my hands. That means it's not going to fit in the hands of most Japanese kids. Microsoft makes good mice and keyboards; why can't they do controllers right?
And before slashdotters get all worked up about spamming, this campaign appears to be opt-in. I have had a Tsutaya card for a year and a half (yes, I live in Japan), but since I didn't give them my i-Mode address, I have never heard a word from them. Ever.
All Tsutaya is doing here is sending you targeted advertising--the only novelty is that the mail reader is a cell phone instead of a PC. What makes the cell phone approach more effective is that people generally take cell phones with them to the rental shops, whereas PC's tend to stay home.
I don't know how they associate purchases with cell phone addresses, but they did have campaigns in the past where you got discounts for presenting i-Mode based "online coupons" at the counter, so maybe that's how they do it. Rentals are easy, of course; you just associate (again, I have to emphasize, voluntarily provided) i-Mode addresses with rental membership cards.
Frankly, I would find these email ads to be annoying as heck, but some people apparently like it; as long as it's opt-in, I see no problem.
By the way, the revolutionary part about this laptop is that it uses a mechanical pump to move the hot coolant to the radiation panel at the back of the LCD, whereas traditional cooling mechanisms uses the palmrest and/or the bottom of the laptop to dissipate heat in addition to the air fan. The idea is that
Also, before people start screaming about how big the water tanks are in the photos, the article says that the tanks were deliberately enlarged to emphasize the point of these prototypes, and they will be reduced in production models.
Ah, you're right, my bad. I don't know anything about Grant Theft Auto 3.
Um, what part of GTA3 is not Japanese? My GTA3 (Japanese version) manual credits an all-Japanese team.
Admittedly, this was more than four years ago, and when I started buying from them again recently, I did not receive anything beyond a few ads from Amazon itself. But then again, I didn't bother giving out munged addresses this time, so I can't tell if they're still selling addresses or not.
You can get IDE or SCSI cables that are bunched up in cylindrical wire form, as opposed to flat ribbons. It isn't anything like plugging cards in, but it will make your case a lot less cluttered. I'm thinking about buying some next time I add components to my computer.
If virus writers are like cockroaches, why aren't we allowed to hit them with newspapers and spray RAID on them until they're dead whenever we find one? I'm sure a lot of sysadmins would love to do just that.
I haven't seen any article mentioning this law in any Japanese newspaper today, print or web--the Yomiuri site linked from the /. post is the front page, not the actual article. Can someone post the actual link?
Try searching for "koran" at Amazon or something. You'll get a whole bunch of hits on English translations of the Koran. I know Penguin has a translation that my university used in some classes.
>Many things that I've read have indicated that the Japanese mainstream truly believes that the internet is entirely pornography and is a complete waste of time.
>
>Anyone in Japan want to comment on that?
Many things I've read have indicated that the internet _is_ entirely pornography and a complete waste of time. Any internet users want to comment on that?
In other words: don't believe everything you read.
Yes, those people exist, but the same type of people exist in the US and elsewhere, too.
As a Japanese person living in Japan, I'm intrigued by this alleged Japanese caste structure thingy, because I'd never realized there is one. (Unless you consider discrimination against foreigners as a caste system, Japan today is a lot less of a caste society than, say, the UK.) Would you care to elaborate what the castes are?
The one-button Mac mouse is hand-neutral to begin with. No control panel kludge necessary. The "left-handed mouse" option doesn't do anything to solve the problems associated with key shortcuts being harder for lefties--Alt-F4 is even harder for the right hand than Cmd-Q to hit.
As for accessibility, Mac OS had utilities like CloseView in System 6 (1988) and speech-driven commands in 1994; they were thinking about non-standard users long before Microsoft ever did (as usual).
As for Linux, it should be possible to remap mouse buttons at the X layer, although (being a righty) I've never experimented with it.
Oracle is starting a Linux distribution, called Miracle Linux, in Japan. Whether the community will get any contribution from it remains to be seen.
According to the papers here in Tokyo this morning, the ATMs at the Post Office (the Japanese Post Office offers savings accounts) broke down--not because an internal LSI didn't know that 2000 was a leap year, but because it
didn't know about leap years at all! The same problem will happen again in 2004 unless they fix it by then.