But agreed, on all counts. If I remember correctly, I was intending to bolster your argument with further evidence, but that often sounds adversarial for some reason.
Yeah, and again, that doesn't bother me. It wouldn't bother me if they wanted my fingerprints on file. It's that I have to be fingerprinted every time I come into the country as though I were a "foreigner," when I have always been treated as a resident because, you know, I am.
The first time I went back to renew my spousal visa, I just brought the forms and the money. I didn't bring the family register or certificate of address or any of the ridiculous supporting documentation you need to get from all over Japan (okay, where we live now, and where she grew up). Why would I need all that stuff? We had just submitted it all 12 months before. I figured I was just showing up to say "Still here; still married; please renew my visa." But after waiting a couple hours to get to the counter, the lady was like, "where is all the information?"
I had no idea that I was required to apply for a new spousal visa. I wasn't renewing, I was reapplying!
And this just days before my visa was running out! I thought I was going to be deported!
My wife came in and worked her persuasive magic (that's why I married her--I saw no other choice!) and got them to count my little form as "starting the process" so I wouldn't be deported, and even talked them into giving me a 3-year visa, which they said they would not do.
The point of the story is that it doesn't matter how integrated you are; it doesn't matter if your most immediate family is Japanese; it doesn't matter if you are gainfully employed. The only thing that matters about you is that you are NOT JAPANESE, and therefore are not quite human in the eyes of the law.
Someone already mentioned this, but just look at the famous cases of foreigners being murdered over here. The last famous case (not far from where I live), a guy killed a female English teacher, nine police officers came to his house, and he escaped.
I am very much against the US policy regardless, but it's worth pointing out that the US does not fingerprint green-card holders.
I live in Japan. My wife is Japanese. I work for a Japanese university. I pay Japanese taxes. I have a Japanese driver's license. I have several Japanese bank accounts and a couple Japanese credit cards. I am on Japanese health insurance. I have the Japanese equivalent of a green card.
Yet I will have to go through the "foreigner" line from now on, separated from my wife, to be fingerprinted because everyone knows there was no crime in Japan before we dirty foreigners showed up. And I'll have to do this every time I re-enter the country, despite the fact that I am on a long-term spousal visa and already have to go to immigration every few years to get it renewed and to pay for the ability to exit and re-enter the country when I want. They already have every piece of information about me, where and how I met my wife, and a hand-drawn map to my house. If I had to submit my fingerprint, too, that'd be irksome, but I'd do it, but why do I have to do it every time I land at the airport? I live here!
Indeed. For the last few years I've done most of my online socializing with friends on private forums several people have set up. It's great because then your conversations are semi-public, in that your friends can see them and join in if they want, and you don't have to take part in every discussion.
The only email socializing I do is with my parents and with one friend who doesn't know the people with the forums. All of these people, however, live on the opposite side of the world from me, so IM isn't really an option. This is fine with me, though, because I hate IM.
For work, however, I'm emailing all the time. All the time. Sending documents around for comments, coordinating meetings, etc. I can't imagine handling any of this any other way. Email started out for work, and that is where it still shines.
Okay, a lot of people are already saying this, but they're not being modded up, and I don't have mod points, so I'll just join in:
But it's more revealing about the fact that non-western civilizations had an advanced grasp of the physics/science behind this stuff.
There is absolutely no reason to think the Incas knew anything of the sort, any more than "nature" knows how to fly, because there are birds. It's evolutionary. Ideas that work stick around and propagate. Ideas that don't result in smashed Incas at the bottom of a ravine. Those ideas don't stick around.
Most good cooks can't tell you the complex series of chemical reactions that result in deliciousness; they just learned via trial, error, and someone showing them what to do.
How's your understanding of English grammar? Do you know how to diagram sentences down to the morphological level? Do you know how the tense/aspect system works in English? Do you know about semantic features, etc? I do, but I had to go to grad school to learn it. I have, however, been successfully speaking English for at least 31 years!
Success at any task is not necessarily indication of an understanding of the theory behind it.
I get so tired of people praising stone-age cultures as though they were so much more advanced than we like to think just because they could pile some damn rocks really high or, given several millennia of sky-watching, could notice patterns in the night sky. None of this is special and none of it is indicative of the kind of detailed, theoretical knowledge that the modern, largely Western, world has developed and is continuing to develop. If these filthy savages had been so great, they would have colonized us and our stupid hunter-gatherer lifestyles would have been destroyed (which, of course, did happen, when the Roman Empire came all the way up to the hellhole that was the British Isles, from whence my family originally hails).
It's just simple evolution. Useful ideas that strengthen communities survive, others do not. That doesn't mean that the willful genocide of various primitive peoples the Europeans ran into was the "right" thing to do, but the destruction of their cultures and the re-appropriation of their resources was inevitable. I have no "white guilt," and I'm not sorry that I grew up on land my ancestors stole from people who had no written language, lived in animal-skin huts, and hadn't even developed farming. I don't feel any need to pretend any of these cultures were anything more than Paleo- to Neolithic cultures lost in time while the rest of the world (i.e. the cultures of Eurasia, each leading during different epochs) went on without them.
Is the ability to build such bridges cool? Hell, yes! But it is not particularly special.
Re:Tried it, don't like it
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Miro Turns 1.0
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· Score: 1
Indeed. Give me a normal BT client, The Pirate Bay, and VLC any day. I don't need everything running at once, and BT is slow as hell, so I won't be watching my shows for a long time anyway. Actually, I usually DL them to a NAS and watch them on the TV with one of these. It works quite well.
Sorry, but your conclusion doesn't follow from the facts. That doesn't mean it's not true, but, personally, I suspect otherwise.
This machine sold out ONLINE. Where do we (i.e. people like you and me, who know what Linux is) live? Online. I suspect Linux people bought it, most likely.
The first review on the page talks about installing XP or Vista on it. Just because it ships with Linux doesn't mean it's going to stay on there. As has been discussed a lot around here, Windows is actually free. Everyone knows someone who can get it to them for nothing. This is probably a distant second to the number purchased by existing Linux people, but it's probably worth noting.
As another commenter pointed out, we don't know how many of these will come back when they don't run AOL or MS Office. Linux is not only NOT popular in Middle America, it's largely NOT KNOWN. The idea that a computer would not run that deer hunting game you also bought at Wal-Mart is alien to many of the people most likely to buy a $200 computer. Unless the machine has a big sticker on the box that says, "WARNING! WILL NOT RUN ANY SOFTWARE YOU'VE EVER HEARD OF!" most people will just assume it'll run software they've heard of.
I actually have dumped an Ubuntu machine on an unsuspecting Wal-Mart patron, because I just no longer want to be the guy who knows how to get Windows for free, and because I know that Ubuntu is damn easy to use, looks nice, and has a great package manager. I also, however, know that Linux is more a lifestyle than an OS. It means you won't be buying any software at Wal-Mart. It means you won't be running MS Office. It means iTunes won't run. It means you'll be downloading software that is often very good, but of which you've never heard, and which is not being used by anyone you know. It means that if you have a problem, you're not going to be able to call your cousin Earl. It means you are basically on your own.
Although the lady I gave it to was happy to have SOMETHING, she wasn't very happy when she realized I'd just given her a lifestyle when she thought she was getting a computer.
My suspicion remains that these were snatched up by Linux people online, and that any sold in stores will either come back when they don't run any software or will be formatted and have pirated XP installed.
Note that those are suspicions. I'm just working off the same scant information as anyone here.
About the only thing I'd ever want a robot for is for mowing the lawn, because I hate it, but even then, it wouldn't do trimming, which I hate more. It's not like the image recognition software would be good enough to differentiate between weeds and flowers. They'd both get hacked. And it wouldn't be the same machine that did the mowing. And they'd both cost a lot more than just hiring someone else to do it, which I'm too cheap to do anyway.
I don't actually have a lawn, being that I live in Japan, but still.
As far as Japanese robots go... Well, vending machines are pretty sweet here. That's about the extent of the "robot-like" things I've seen. I've never seen a robot receptionist, but if I did, I'd immediately look for the real one. I'd be much more efficiently helped by a computer with a browser running that I could use to find answers to my questions than shouting, slowly, at a robot receptionist and hope that it 1) understood me and 2) doesn't blather on about things I don't care about in a recorded message. I can scan for the information I need if it's written down, but any kind of set answer system just wastes more of my time.
I have never, ever, ever seen a consumer robot that did anything better or cheaper than doing it myself. These people who seem to think that robotics are poised to revamp our lives belong in Kurzweil's Kamp Krazy where computers are smarter than us and understand natural language as well as us and will invent their own religions or something in the next 25 years. It isn't going to happen. We are so very, very far from any of this, it's silly to even talk about it. Furthermore, people don't want computers or robots to be anything like humans. We want slaves that don't complain and that we never have to feel bad about. It's all we have ever wanted.
Fair enough; you work in IT. I don't (anymore). I'm looking at middle and upper-middle-class kids who have never used a computer before. I'm looking at net speeds of 3Mb at my apartment and being unable to get fiber because no one else in the area is interested. I'm looking at computer stores that carry less than a typical Best Buy. And I'm looking at cellphones taking up half of the floorspace of most electronics stores.
And I'm in Makuhari, with BMW, IBM, Canon, SEI, Sumitomo, etc. all within a 10-minute bike ride away.
Akiba. I don't even bother going there anymore because it's the same products as I can get around here for the same prices, only with more creepy cosplay kids. About the only time I go is when I need something from Tsukumo.ex, because their online order system is nigh useless.
And finally, as someone who's lived in rural Japan (where my wife is from) for a few years, I have to take issue with defining Japan by Tokyo. Yes, that's what most people have in mind when they talk about Japan, but that's not Japan. That's Tokyo. I mean, you could say "the US has ubiquitous and affordable public transportation" if you narrowed your definition of the entire country to New York City. But the truth is far to the contrary. Same thing here.
...Well, I did say the uni story was from 1998. So yeah, that's 10 years ago. It was meant as a point of reference. I came from Colorado to the heart of Osaka and found worse net connectivity in the latter!
The bit about the students I have now, at an expensive private university, who haven't actually used a computer before? That part would be now. As in, this year. I have started scheduling at least one lesson at the beginning of the school year just to get some of the incoming students feeling comfortable with the PC. Of course, there is a lot of peer-teaching going on there, but can you imagine an 18-year-old North American or European having never used a computer before? I'm in my late-early-thirties (not that I'm counting, mind you!), and I had my first computer lessons in kindergarten. In the middle of nowhere. A town of 12,000. Surrounded by cows and corn for many, many miles.
Ultimately, my point is that there is not the kind of life-level penetration that one sees in the US. If there are elementary students blogging, they are doing more than my students, and certainly more than my wife. My point is that Japan is behind, not ahead. Looking at my 60-something parents, who have been online since 1996, do a lot of their business over the net, and who read their friends' blogs, it's clear the the PC and the internet are really a part of the economic and social fabric of everyday people's lives in the US. They're not computer people (far from it--oh, so very, very, very far); they're just people. Run around and try to find 60-somethings here who can say the same.
Of course I've heard of Rakuten--they have eaten every good website. But try hitting them with your keitai. They load mobile versions. That's not a complaint; that's pointing out that the keitai is where they are expecting to get enough business to warrant doing a whole other website. Hell, the web-based course management software my university uses even has mobile versions.
True, I see a lot of Amazon deliveries... to foreigners. Of course it can't only be us, but seriously, I've never seen an Amazon box in the trash of anyone but foreigners' houses. Just sayin'.
Perhaps I over-argued my point, but that is at least partly intentional: Stories about Japan in the foreign press oftentimes hinge on a few myths about Japan. They are very flattering myths, so Japan is in no hurry to expose them as such, but they are myths nonetheless.
I like living here. I've been living here off and on for almost 10 years (about 6 on, in 3 different periods). But it is not like people expect. My officemate is leaving after one year at our university largely because she finds living here extremely difficult. She was expecting techno-wonderland. She got Japan.
Okay, I've lived here in Japan off and on since 1998, and I've got a problem with this article.
The PC has never been big here. I teach university, and, seriously, I have kids who have never used a computer. Never. Not at home; not at school. I have to teach them how to open and close windows. How to click. How to type in Japanese (for whatever bizarre reason, no one uses the Japanese kana keyboard--they type in Roman characters and the computer changes them to kana, so they usually have to type 2 characters to get one).
When I first came in 1998 as a university student, the other foreign exchange students and I were mortified when we asked the university where we could connect to the internet so we could email our families to tell them we'd arrived, only to be told "Internet? We don't have that." A university with something like 15,000 students. With no internet.
"What," we asked, "you mean, not in the foreign exchange building? That's fine, we can go over to the library..."
"No, sorry. Not there either."
"Well, what about the professors? They have it don't they?"
"Some do, yes. But please don't bother them."
Finally, enough of us whined enough that they wired up two ancient Macs in the commons area. The students self-organized a waiting list to use them. They were horribly slow. The entire campus shared a single ISDN line. I gave up and just started dialing into the modem pool at my US university to quickly upload/download mail via the line-in on a pay phone.
What was the killer app that made the PC a must-have for most of the developed world? Internet, right? Well, most people in Japan had the internet on their cellphones (keitais) long before they had it at home. As a result, if you ask someone to mail you, the first thing they're going to do is tap out a message on their keitai.
But there's more to it. Of course email was the killer app for the internet in the rest of the world, but another was online shopping (in the case of the US, anyway). This has not taken off in Japan so much either. Why? Well, and this is just my new pet theory, a few days old, there is a cultural difference at play.
In the US, many of us are descendants of homesteaders and other people living in the middle of nowhere. You went to town once a month, if you had one. JC Penney, Sears, etc. were all originally what kind of company? Mail-order. You ordered your stuff via post, and then they arrived on the train. Next time you were in town, you picked it up. We have a strong mail-order cultural meme. Not so in Japan, which has basically always been urban, because most of Japan is uninhabitable (like 45-degree angles--beautiful mountains, but not so good for living on). Everyone lived and lives in the little strips of flattish land between the oceans and the mountains. So there is a strong culture of going to the shops (run by people you know) to get stuff. People--older people, especially--are very uncomfortable with ordering things they haven't seen.
Playing into the above problem is another: no customer rights. Return policies are usually not clearly stated. If you want to return something, you need to beg and convince a manager you deserve it. Worse still, the credit card is not the great deal it is in the rest of the world. In Western countries, you put purchases on a credit line with a credit card. Here, you have to pay it off at a rate you specify when you make the purchase. You don't know what bill any purchase is going to show up on, and the bill is direct-debit. Furthermore, the banks offer none of the protections we take for granted. If your card gets stolen or a database hacked, guess who pays? You. You're totally responsible for everything that happens with that card, even if it has nothing to do with you. So people don't really like using them. Personally, I try to use my US card as much as possible, because of the protections it affords.
I'll tell you what it is: It's soft-science inferiority complex.
You have two kinds of applied linguists: the mushy, gushy, hand-wavy types, and guys like me who really want the field to adhere more strictly to scientific conventions. The former don't care that their presentations and publications are fluff, and the latter just don't want to be lumped in with the former. So we probably overdo it.
Anyway, I'm going to give Keynote another look. I have a conference coming up in a couple weeks; we'll see what happens. I don't think my presentations are boring--I see a lot of grins in the audience--but I have also seen my share of blank "huh?" faces.
Yeah, I have been giving moving to a more Jobsy presentation style some thought lately, but every time I try to rework some presentation of a study to be like that, I just think, "God I'd hate to see this presentation." I always want to see the actual analyses at conferences, but it's always a bunch of hand-wavy "findings" with no quantifiable evidence.
Granted, this is with linguistics, etc., where there is good reason to assume most of the people didn't actually follow proper research protocols, and may not even know what they are. They might be raving about a statistically significant finding with a minuscule effect size, but not even realize that they're supposed to be much more interested in the latter than the former.
I like to put the actual analyses up there for two reasons: First, to prove I did my homework and did it right. Second, to immediately quash all but the most worthy opposition in the room. If someone has issues with my findings, I want to be assured they at least understand them. Putting a bunch of numbers on the screen makes the common heckler or the unqualified slackjaw keep quiet lest they get in over their heads, and makes sure that if there actually is something you've overlooked, someone at least as good as you will find it and you and your research will grow as a result. I don't mind being told I'm wrong as long as the person doing it is right.
Hey, you might have just sold me right there with the "Presenter's Display." I have always wondered why PPT didn't have something like that.
I saw that there was a lot of good stuff for animations, but I really don't like any movement on the screen during a presentation. I really just use PPT like the OHPs of yore--in fact, I sometimes use both, because a factor analysis component table of a 50-item questionnaire just doesn't display well at 1024x768 resolution.
I have, on occasion, tried using video in PPT, and yes, it is awful.
Anyway, you've certainly convinced me to take another look! Pity I didn't run into you before the trial period on my iWork ran out...
Could you explain how and why it blows PPT out of the water? I'm really asking. I have had a lot of people say that to me, but when I tried it, it seemed pokey and unintuitive. What's so great about Keynote? Hell, what's so bad about PPT? It does what it is supposed to and you never have a hard time finding it installed somewhere...
I concur. That was just such a detailed, well-thought-out review that I really felt like I knew what I'd be getting into if I bought it (I had been waiting for friends' appraisals), but after reading such a thorough review, I felt that I had enough information to make my decision.
It wasn't a glowing review; it was a totally fair review. It really was probably the best and most informative review I have ever read.
Thanks for your comment. I installed and set up Ubuntu 7.10 on Wednesday of this week. It went really, really smoothly, for the first time ever with my many Linux installs. 23min from brand-new, unpartitioned, unformatted hard drive to fully-installed system! Bravo to the Ubuntu team.
After getting more video codecs (so slick and easy with the package management system!) and setting up Firefox the way I like it, I went to install my M-Audio Firewire 410 audio interface. Oops. No drivers.
No drivers for my audio interface, and my beloved ProTools won't run on it, and none of my work software (mostly stuff for item response theory analysis of tests), and of course no games.
Back to Windows, which runs all of that, and the Mac, which runs most of it and is less stupidly designed than Windows.
What is bewildering is why I'm constantly accused of ignorance of FOSS when I'm one of the few people outside of the IT world who even know what it is and use it. Here's my FOSS list:
The GIMP
Inkscape
VLC
PDFcreator
Ghostscript drivers (Mac)
OpenOffice.org (for opening corrupted MS Office files)
Lyx (okay, I haven't really done much, but I'm very excited about the prospect)
Azureus
Cabos
Firefox
Thunderbird
--And there are probably a few I'm forgetting. How I can be accused of ignorance of FOSS is beyond me. I use it all the time. I dabble with Linux, because I like the idea of it. It just doesn't do what I need it to do. Simple as that.
Finally, the reason I'm so vehement on Slashdot with my anti-Linux/FOSS arguments is that you people need to hear them. You're off in your own little IT world with your Slashdot echo chamber. You don't know anybody else and you don't hear anybody else. There is an entire world of people to whom these products are not suited at all. That doesn't make them stupid or ignorant; that makes them enlightened enough to know what they do for a living.
In truth, it is the Linux fanatic whose ignorance is bewildering. You don't know what I do for a living; you don't know what software tools I'm required to use; you don't know my interests and hobbies; yet for some reason you seem to be the world's top authority on what computing platform is best for me? Get off it.
I saw a presentation by a British woman on library technology not too long ago. She was ridiculously behind and had almost no grasp of statistics.
I guess all British people are stupid.
Re:Software freedom is better.
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
Hear hear. This is actually true of all FOSS in my opinion. I use a lot of it for things I don't really need that much (Inkscape is plenty good vector for when I need it; GIMP is plenty good raster, etc.). However, when I'm dealing with work-related things, there really are certain pieces of software I'm required to use. More than that, though. I'm not just using them because some mean boss or The Man told me to; I'm using them because they are the best tools for the job, all told. Sorry, but it's true.
I get accused of hating on FOSS 'round here all the time, but actually, I use lots of it and evangelize it to death at work. Just... not for anything critical.
Things like the GIMP, though, really make one's computing life easy and productive.
Bravo! I'm a little embarrassed to say I took my first one back because I thought it was broken when I heard it start up. This is supposed to be my DVD player? Are you crazy? I had hoped to use it to replace my network video player, but I realized a few minutes after starting it that that wasn't going to happen.
I was actually upset that the warranty was extended because I was looking forward to taking it apart and doing something about that fan in a year. Now I can't justify the loss of warranty to myself.
That being said, I love my 360 for games, and I've scoffed at consoles until now.
Definitely. I actually own Acrobat 7, but I've found that PDFcreator (on Sourceforge) and Foxit meet all my PDF needs without all the updating/always-on-service/huge-disk-and-RAM-footprint/slow-ass-start-time bullshit.
Highly, highly recommended. Everyone I've shown it to has made the switch. Why not?
Slashdot Mirror
Whoah, WAY off topic AND time-shifted!
But agreed, on all counts. If I remember correctly, I was intending to bolster your argument with further evidence, but that often sounds adversarial for some reason.
Yeah, and again, that doesn't bother me. It wouldn't bother me if they wanted my fingerprints on file. It's that I have to be fingerprinted every time I come into the country as though I were a "foreigner," when I have always been treated as a resident because, you know, I am.
The first time I went back to renew my spousal visa, I just brought the forms and the money. I didn't bring the family register or certificate of address or any of the ridiculous supporting documentation you need to get from all over Japan (okay, where we live now, and where she grew up). Why would I need all that stuff? We had just submitted it all 12 months before. I figured I was just showing up to say "Still here; still married; please renew my visa." But after waiting a couple hours to get to the counter, the lady was like, "where is all the information?"
I had no idea that I was required to apply for a new spousal visa. I wasn't renewing, I was reapplying!
And this just days before my visa was running out! I thought I was going to be deported!
My wife came in and worked her persuasive magic (that's why I married her--I saw no other choice!) and got them to count my little form as "starting the process" so I wouldn't be deported, and even talked them into giving me a 3-year visa, which they said they would not do.
The point of the story is that it doesn't matter how integrated you are; it doesn't matter if your most immediate family is Japanese; it doesn't matter if you are gainfully employed. The only thing that matters about you is that you are NOT JAPANESE, and therefore are not quite human in the eyes of the law.
Someone already mentioned this, but just look at the famous cases of foreigners being murdered over here. The last famous case (not far from where I live), a guy killed a female English teacher, nine police officers came to his house, and he escaped.
Barefoot.
BY RUNNING PAST THE COPS AND OUT HIS FRONT DOOR.
They still haven't found him. They won't.
That would require looking.
I am very much against the US policy regardless, but it's worth pointing out that the US does not fingerprint green-card holders.
I live in Japan. My wife is Japanese. I work for a Japanese university. I pay Japanese taxes. I have a Japanese driver's license. I have several Japanese bank accounts and a couple Japanese credit cards. I am on Japanese health insurance. I have the Japanese equivalent of a green card.
Yet I will have to go through the "foreigner" line from now on, separated from my wife, to be fingerprinted because everyone knows there was no crime in Japan before we dirty foreigners showed up. And I'll have to do this every time I re-enter the country, despite the fact that I am on a long-term spousal visa and already have to go to immigration every few years to get it renewed and to pay for the ability to exit and re-enter the country when I want. They already have every piece of information about me, where and how I met my wife, and a hand-drawn map to my house. If I had to submit my fingerprint, too, that'd be irksome, but I'd do it, but why do I have to do it every time I land at the airport? I live here!
Indeed. For the last few years I've done most of my online socializing with friends on private forums several people have set up. It's great because then your conversations are semi-public, in that your friends can see them and join in if they want, and you don't have to take part in every discussion.
The only email socializing I do is with my parents and with one friend who doesn't know the people with the forums. All of these people, however, live on the opposite side of the world from me, so IM isn't really an option. This is fine with me, though, because I hate IM.
For work, however, I'm emailing all the time. All the time. Sending documents around for comments, coordinating meetings, etc. I can't imagine handling any of this any other way. Email started out for work, and that is where it still shines.
Okay, a lot of people are already saying this, but they're not being modded up, and I don't have mod points, so I'll just join in:
But it's more revealing about the fact that non-western civilizations had an advanced grasp of the physics/science behind this stuff.There is absolutely no reason to think the Incas knew anything of the sort, any more than "nature" knows how to fly, because there are birds. It's evolutionary. Ideas that work stick around and propagate. Ideas that don't result in smashed Incas at the bottom of a ravine. Those ideas don't stick around.
Most good cooks can't tell you the complex series of chemical reactions that result in deliciousness; they just learned via trial, error, and someone showing them what to do.
How's your understanding of English grammar? Do you know how to diagram sentences down to the morphological level? Do you know how the tense/aspect system works in English? Do you know about semantic features, etc? I do, but I had to go to grad school to learn it. I have, however, been successfully speaking English for at least 31 years!
Success at any task is not necessarily indication of an understanding of the theory behind it.
I get so tired of people praising stone-age cultures as though they were so much more advanced than we like to think just because they could pile some damn rocks really high or, given several millennia of sky-watching, could notice patterns in the night sky. None of this is special and none of it is indicative of the kind of detailed, theoretical knowledge that the modern, largely Western, world has developed and is continuing to develop. If these filthy savages had been so great, they would have colonized us and our stupid hunter-gatherer lifestyles would have been destroyed (which, of course, did happen, when the Roman Empire came all the way up to the hellhole that was the British Isles, from whence my family originally hails).
It's just simple evolution. Useful ideas that strengthen communities survive, others do not. That doesn't mean that the willful genocide of various primitive peoples the Europeans ran into was the "right" thing to do, but the destruction of their cultures and the re-appropriation of their resources was inevitable. I have no "white guilt," and I'm not sorry that I grew up on land my ancestors stole from people who had no written language, lived in animal-skin huts, and hadn't even developed farming. I don't feel any need to pretend any of these cultures were anything more than Paleo- to Neolithic cultures lost in time while the rest of the world (i.e. the cultures of Eurasia, each leading during different epochs) went on without them.
Is the ability to build such bridges cool? Hell, yes! But it is not particularly special.
Indeed. Give me a normal BT client, The Pirate Bay, and VLC any day. I don't need everything running at once, and BT is slow as hell, so I won't be watching my shows for a long time anyway. Actually, I usually DL them to a NAS and watch them on the TV with one of these. It works quite well.
Indeed. I almost mentioned that. It's a pretty decent machine for $200. Who cares what's installed?
Sorry, but your conclusion doesn't follow from the facts. That doesn't mean it's not true, but, personally, I suspect otherwise.
This machine sold out ONLINE. Where do we (i.e. people like you and me, who know what Linux is) live? Online. I suspect Linux people bought it, most likely.
The first review on the page talks about installing XP or Vista on it. Just because it ships with Linux doesn't mean it's going to stay on there. As has been discussed a lot around here, Windows is actually free. Everyone knows someone who can get it to them for nothing. This is probably a distant second to the number purchased by existing Linux people, but it's probably worth noting.
As another commenter pointed out, we don't know how many of these will come back when they don't run AOL or MS Office. Linux is not only NOT popular in Middle America, it's largely NOT KNOWN. The idea that a computer would not run that deer hunting game you also bought at Wal-Mart is alien to many of the people most likely to buy a $200 computer. Unless the machine has a big sticker on the box that says, "WARNING! WILL NOT RUN ANY SOFTWARE YOU'VE EVER HEARD OF!" most people will just assume it'll run software they've heard of.
I actually have dumped an Ubuntu machine on an unsuspecting Wal-Mart patron, because I just no longer want to be the guy who knows how to get Windows for free, and because I know that Ubuntu is damn easy to use, looks nice, and has a great package manager. I also, however, know that Linux is more a lifestyle than an OS. It means you won't be buying any software at Wal-Mart. It means you won't be running MS Office. It means iTunes won't run. It means you'll be downloading software that is often very good, but of which you've never heard, and which is not being used by anyone you know. It means that if you have a problem, you're not going to be able to call your cousin Earl. It means you are basically on your own.
Although the lady I gave it to was happy to have SOMETHING, she wasn't very happy when she realized I'd just given her a lifestyle when she thought she was getting a computer.
My suspicion remains that these were snatched up by Linux people online, and that any sold in stores will either come back when they don't run any software or will be formatted and have pirated XP installed.
Note that those are suspicions. I'm just working off the same scant information as anyone here.
You said it.
About the only thing I'd ever want a robot for is for mowing the lawn, because I hate it, but even then, it wouldn't do trimming, which I hate more. It's not like the image recognition software would be good enough to differentiate between weeds and flowers. They'd both get hacked. And it wouldn't be the same machine that did the mowing. And they'd both cost a lot more than just hiring someone else to do it, which I'm too cheap to do anyway.
I don't actually have a lawn, being that I live in Japan, but still.
As far as Japanese robots go... Well, vending machines are pretty sweet here. That's about the extent of the "robot-like" things I've seen. I've never seen a robot receptionist, but if I did, I'd immediately look for the real one. I'd be much more efficiently helped by a computer with a browser running that I could use to find answers to my questions than shouting, slowly, at a robot receptionist and hope that it 1) understood me and 2) doesn't blather on about things I don't care about in a recorded message. I can scan for the information I need if it's written down, but any kind of set answer system just wastes more of my time.
I have never, ever, ever seen a consumer robot that did anything better or cheaper than doing it myself. These people who seem to think that robotics are poised to revamp our lives belong in Kurzweil's Kamp Krazy where computers are smarter than us and understand natural language as well as us and will invent their own religions or something in the next 25 years. It isn't going to happen. We are so very, very far from any of this, it's silly to even talk about it. Furthermore, people don't want computers or robots to be anything like humans. We want slaves that don't complain and that we never have to feel bad about. It's all we have ever wanted.
Fair enough; you work in IT. I don't (anymore). I'm looking at middle and upper-middle-class kids who have never used a computer before. I'm looking at net speeds of 3Mb at my apartment and being unable to get fiber because no one else in the area is interested. I'm looking at computer stores that carry less than a typical Best Buy. And I'm looking at cellphones taking up half of the floorspace of most electronics stores.
And I'm in Makuhari, with BMW, IBM, Canon, SEI, Sumitomo, etc. all within a 10-minute bike ride away.
Akiba. I don't even bother going there anymore because it's the same products as I can get around here for the same prices, only with more creepy cosplay kids. About the only time I go is when I need something from Tsukumo.ex, because their online order system is nigh useless.
And finally, as someone who's lived in rural Japan (where my wife is from) for a few years, I have to take issue with defining Japan by Tokyo. Yes, that's what most people have in mind when they talk about Japan, but that's not Japan. That's Tokyo. I mean, you could say "the US has ubiquitous and affordable public transportation" if you narrowed your definition of the entire country to New York City. But the truth is far to the contrary. Same thing here.
...Well, I did say the uni story was from 1998. So yeah, that's 10 years ago. It was meant as a point of reference. I came from Colorado to the heart of Osaka and found worse net connectivity in the latter!
The bit about the students I have now, at an expensive private university, who haven't actually used a computer before? That part would be now. As in, this year. I have started scheduling at least one lesson at the beginning of the school year just to get some of the incoming students feeling comfortable with the PC. Of course, there is a lot of peer-teaching going on there, but can you imagine an 18-year-old North American or European having never used a computer before? I'm in my late-early-thirties (not that I'm counting, mind you!), and I had my first computer lessons in kindergarten. In the middle of nowhere. A town of 12,000. Surrounded by cows and corn for many, many miles.
Ultimately, my point is that there is not the kind of life-level penetration that one sees in the US. If there are elementary students blogging, they are doing more than my students, and certainly more than my wife. My point is that Japan is behind, not ahead. Looking at my 60-something parents, who have been online since 1996, do a lot of their business over the net, and who read their friends' blogs, it's clear the the PC and the internet are really a part of the economic and social fabric of everyday people's lives in the US. They're not computer people (far from it--oh, so very, very, very far); they're just people. Run around and try to find 60-somethings here who can say the same.
Of course I've heard of Rakuten--they have eaten every good website. But try hitting them with your keitai. They load mobile versions. That's not a complaint; that's pointing out that the keitai is where they are expecting to get enough business to warrant doing a whole other website. Hell, the web-based course management software my university uses even has mobile versions.
True, I see a lot of Amazon deliveries... to foreigners. Of course it can't only be us, but seriously, I've never seen an Amazon box in the trash of anyone but foreigners' houses. Just sayin'.
Perhaps I over-argued my point, but that is at least partly intentional: Stories about Japan in the foreign press oftentimes hinge on a few myths about Japan. They are very flattering myths, so Japan is in no hurry to expose them as such, but they are myths nonetheless.
I like living here. I've been living here off and on for almost 10 years (about 6 on, in 3 different periods). But it is not like people expect. My officemate is leaving after one year at our university largely because she finds living here extremely difficult. She was expecting techno-wonderland. She got Japan.
Okay, I've lived here in Japan off and on since 1998, and I've got a problem with this article.
The PC has never been big here. I teach university, and, seriously, I have kids who have never used a computer. Never. Not at home; not at school. I have to teach them how to open and close windows. How to click. How to type in Japanese (for whatever bizarre reason, no one uses the Japanese kana keyboard--they type in Roman characters and the computer changes them to kana, so they usually have to type 2 characters to get one).
When I first came in 1998 as a university student, the other foreign exchange students and I were mortified when we asked the university where we could connect to the internet so we could email our families to tell them we'd arrived, only to be told "Internet? We don't have that." A university with something like 15,000 students. With no internet.
"What," we asked, "you mean, not in the foreign exchange building? That's fine, we can go over to the library..."
"No, sorry. Not there either."
"Well, what about the professors? They have it don't they?"
"Some do, yes. But please don't bother them."
Finally, enough of us whined enough that they wired up two ancient Macs in the commons area. The students self-organized a waiting list to use them. They were horribly slow. The entire campus shared a single ISDN line. I gave up and just started dialing into the modem pool at my US university to quickly upload/download mail via the line-in on a pay phone.
What was the killer app that made the PC a must-have for most of the developed world? Internet, right? Well, most people in Japan had the internet on their cellphones (keitais) long before they had it at home. As a result, if you ask someone to mail you, the first thing they're going to do is tap out a message on their keitai.
But there's more to it. Of course email was the killer app for the internet in the rest of the world, but another was online shopping (in the case of the US, anyway). This has not taken off in Japan so much either. Why? Well, and this is just my new pet theory, a few days old, there is a cultural difference at play.
In the US, many of us are descendants of homesteaders and other people living in the middle of nowhere. You went to town once a month, if you had one. JC Penney, Sears, etc. were all originally what kind of company? Mail-order. You ordered your stuff via post, and then they arrived on the train. Next time you were in town, you picked it up. We have a strong mail-order cultural meme. Not so in Japan, which has basically always been urban, because most of Japan is uninhabitable (like 45-degree angles--beautiful mountains, but not so good for living on). Everyone lived and lives in the little strips of flattish land between the oceans and the mountains. So there is a strong culture of going to the shops (run by people you know) to get stuff. People--older people, especially--are very uncomfortable with ordering things they haven't seen.
Playing into the above problem is another: no customer rights. Return policies are usually not clearly stated. If you want to return something, you need to beg and convince a manager you deserve it. Worse still, the credit card is not the great deal it is in the rest of the world. In Western countries, you put purchases on a credit line with a credit card. Here, you have to pay it off at a rate you specify when you make the purchase. You don't know what bill any purchase is going to show up on, and the bill is direct-debit. Furthermore, the banks offer none of the protections we take for granted. If your card gets stolen or a database hacked, guess who pays? You. You're totally responsible for everything that happens with that card, even if it has nothing to do with you. So people don't really like using them. Personally, I try to use my US card as much as possible, because of the protections it affords.
Also, space constraints. The only thing that
You make some compelling arguments.
I'll tell you what it is: It's soft-science inferiority complex.
You have two kinds of applied linguists: the mushy, gushy, hand-wavy types, and guys like me who really want the field to adhere more strictly to scientific conventions. The former don't care that their presentations and publications are fluff, and the latter just don't want to be lumped in with the former. So we probably overdo it.
Anyway, I'm going to give Keynote another look. I have a conference coming up in a couple weeks; we'll see what happens. I don't think my presentations are boring--I see a lot of grins in the audience--but I have also seen my share of blank "huh?" faces.
Thanks for the advice!
That is the single biggest reason to have OO.o installed, I think. It'll open damn near anything.
Yeah, I have been giving moving to a more Jobsy presentation style some thought lately, but every time I try to rework some presentation of a study to be like that, I just think, "God I'd hate to see this presentation." I always want to see the actual analyses at conferences, but it's always a bunch of hand-wavy "findings" with no quantifiable evidence.
Granted, this is with linguistics, etc., where there is good reason to assume most of the people didn't actually follow proper research protocols, and may not even know what they are. They might be raving about a statistically significant finding with a minuscule effect size, but not even realize that they're supposed to be much more interested in the latter than the former.
I like to put the actual analyses up there for two reasons: First, to prove I did my homework and did it right. Second, to immediately quash all but the most worthy opposition in the room. If someone has issues with my findings, I want to be assured they at least understand them. Putting a bunch of numbers on the screen makes the common heckler or the unqualified slackjaw keep quiet lest they get in over their heads, and makes sure that if there actually is something you've overlooked, someone at least as good as you will find it and you and your research will grow as a result. I don't mind being told I'm wrong as long as the person doing it is right.
So I'm rather conflicted these days.
Hey, you might have just sold me right there with the "Presenter's Display." I have always wondered why PPT didn't have something like that.
I saw that there was a lot of good stuff for animations, but I really don't like any movement on the screen during a presentation. I really just use PPT like the OHPs of yore--in fact, I sometimes use both, because a factor analysis component table of a 50-item questionnaire just doesn't display well at 1024x768 resolution.
I have, on occasion, tried using video in PPT, and yes, it is awful.
Anyway, you've certainly convinced me to take another look! Pity I didn't run into you before the trial period on my iWork ran out...
Could you explain how and why it blows PPT out of the water? I'm really asking. I have had a lot of people say that to me, but when I tried it, it seemed pokey and unintuitive. What's so great about Keynote? Hell, what's so bad about PPT? It does what it is supposed to and you never have a hard time finding it installed somewhere...
I concur. That was just such a detailed, well-thought-out review that I really felt like I knew what I'd be getting into if I bought it (I had been waiting for friends' appraisals), but after reading such a thorough review, I felt that I had enough information to make my decision.
It wasn't a glowing review; it was a totally fair review. It really was probably the best and most informative review I have ever read.
10.5 is installing on my laptop now!
Thanks for your comment. I installed and set up Ubuntu 7.10 on Wednesday of this week. It went really, really smoothly, for the first time ever with my many Linux installs. 23min from brand-new, unpartitioned, unformatted hard drive to fully-installed system! Bravo to the Ubuntu team.
After getting more video codecs (so slick and easy with the package management system!) and setting up Firefox the way I like it, I went to install my M-Audio Firewire 410 audio interface. Oops. No drivers.
No drivers for my audio interface, and my beloved ProTools won't run on it, and none of my work software (mostly stuff for item response theory analysis of tests), and of course no games.
Back to Windows, which runs all of that, and the Mac, which runs most of it and is less stupidly designed than Windows.
What is bewildering is why I'm constantly accused of ignorance of FOSS when I'm one of the few people outside of the IT world who even know what it is and use it. Here's my FOSS list:
--And there are probably a few I'm forgetting. How I can be accused of ignorance of FOSS is beyond me. I use it all the time. I dabble with Linux, because I like the idea of it. It just doesn't do what I need it to do. Simple as that.
Finally, the reason I'm so vehement on Slashdot with my anti-Linux/FOSS arguments is that you people need to hear them. You're off in your own little IT world with your Slashdot echo chamber. You don't know anybody else and you don't hear anybody else. There is an entire world of people to whom these products are not suited at all. That doesn't make them stupid or ignorant; that makes them enlightened enough to know what they do for a living.
In truth, it is the Linux fanatic whose ignorance is bewildering. You don't know what I do for a living; you don't know what software tools I'm required to use; you don't know my interests and hobbies; yet for some reason you seem to be the world's top authority on what computing platform is best for me? Get off it.
I saw a presentation by a British woman on library technology not too long ago. She was ridiculously behind and had almost no grasp of statistics.
I guess all British people are stupid.
Hear hear. This is actually true of all FOSS in my opinion. I use a lot of it for things I don't really need that much (Inkscape is plenty good vector for when I need it; GIMP is plenty good raster, etc.). However, when I'm dealing with work-related things, there really are certain pieces of software I'm required to use. More than that, though. I'm not just using them because some mean boss or The Man told me to; I'm using them because they are the best tools for the job, all told. Sorry, but it's true.
I get accused of hating on FOSS 'round here all the time, but actually, I use lots of it and evangelize it to death at work. Just... not for anything critical.
Things like the GIMP, though, really make one's computing life easy and productive.
Bravo! I'm a little embarrassed to say I took my first one back because I thought it was broken when I heard it start up. This is supposed to be my DVD player? Are you crazy? I had hoped to use it to replace my network video player, but I realized a few minutes after starting it that that wasn't going to happen.
I was actually upset that the warranty was extended because I was looking forward to taking it apart and doing something about that fan in a year. Now I can't justify the loss of warranty to myself.
That being said, I love my 360 for games, and I've scoffed at consoles until now.
Definitely. I actually own Acrobat 7, but I've found that PDFcreator (on Sourceforge) and Foxit meet all my PDF needs without all the updating/always-on-service/huge-disk-and-RAM-footprint/slow-ass-start-time bullshit.
Highly, highly recommended. Everyone I've shown it to has made the switch. Why not?
Stupid Adobe and their endless feature creep.
Wish that were true of linguistics journals. Those are .doc.