Ever since the iPhone launched here (particularly since the 4), network signal has been extremely poor in busy areas, due to overcongestion. Every time I hit a major train station, my phone struggles to regain its signal, and it's impossible to load anything, due to the sheer number of devices being used, since practically every single one of the thousands of commuters waiting on & off the train are using their phones at the same time (Shinjuku station alone has >3.5M passengers per day, and a single 11-car train on the Yamanote during rush hour has 2-4000 people crammed inside). I'm just worried that these access points are going to become just as quickly saturated and as slow as the cell network. Not to mention that by the time you connect to the wifi point, the train's probably already moving away from the station. -_-;
I'm on a small team at a large company that's in charge of accounts- creation, deletion, & password resets. When I interviewed, I was like "That's it?" Well, as I soon found out, yeah, it is- with hundreds of UNIX and database servers, and dozens of internal applications- all of which require different setups & combinations of UNIX/db/share drive/etc., it turned out to be. When I started, though, it was very clear that my team was in WAY over its head. The scripts to create db accounts, for example, required editing a file w/ the account name to create, then running a shell script that generated a small SQL batch file which created the account (all users had the same static password) and maybe sent them an email w/ the password. Several other steps were also required, including any unix/wintel stuff, entering a log into the tracking system, etc. Oh, and also, our db "admin" user account/password was hard-coded in the script as well. And each app had its own separate scripts for creation, deletion & reset.
I went to work right away, creating a command-line menu-based tool that did all that at once- prompted for admin password, generated random user passwords, handled all the different application configurations, sent the emails, & even created the log entry automatically. It was also capable of parsing bulk revocation requests which we got daily in Excel format (don't even get me started)- when a single user has literally hundreds of accounts, trying to manually delete only the ones that were requested (and no more) is next to impossible, and a task that may have taken hours (or days) now took a few minutes, tops.
Did I get any recognition for this? Sure- my team loved it, and everyone on it (and a few managers from other teams who've seen what I've done) was generally quite impressed. Unfortunately, my team isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, especially when going up to a global level, at which point nobody gives a shit because their regions don't -have- such a team. It hasn't helped that our next-level-up manager has changed about 5 times. Also, as a contractor, I have pretty much zero rights (compared to a full-time employee), no bonuses, and in 5 years I have yet to get a single raise (my contracting company gave me a very tiny bump (less than 3%) out of their cut of what they make off of me, which I'm not counting). It's possible my work has saved me from several round of layoffs, but that's about it.
So yeah- sometimes you go way above & beyond what's expected of you, and you don't get jack shit for it.
Hey, the mafia already have their own internal "waste disposal" procedures- for getting rid of bodies! Getting some actual toxic waste to dump alongside them just makes it that much more unlikely that anyone will go snooping around.:D
It's not necessary for solar to cover the entire power needs of a data center. It'd be nice if it did, but any power generated is money saved on their electric bill (and less drain on the general grid). And as stated above- they already have lots of batteries to cover (if) any surplus generated, and a fairly constant demand.
There's their first mistake. The Japanese are always good at coming up with the "oldest" evidence. No doubt they'll "find" something even older somewhere in Japan in a few weeks.;>
Well, it's funny, the corporation prohibits you from installing and using FREE software in an area where you really won't be affecting any one else.
Actually, some corporations (particularly in the financial sector), prevent you from installing ANY software that isn't packaged and supported by the appropriate team, for compliance and legal reasons. Or read any non-work email (something in your hotmail account could have a worm that could spread across the corporate intranet). There are laws in place with serious penalties if anything bad were to happen due to something unexpected (or hidden) in some unauthorized software that someone decided to download because they thought it wouldn't affect anyone else, not to mention the enormous business expense and productivity loss of dealing with such a problem.
Granted, this doesn't stop some of the SAs from compiling GNU utilities or fvwm in their home directories...:)
Imagine if every big new release here came with the first couple singles (including b-sides) [...]
Actually, that kind of always annoyed me. B-sides are supposed to be b-sides- what's the point of shelling out money for a single when all the songs on it come out on the album a couple months later? Oh right, the instrumental/karaoke versions... @_@ No thanks. Does anyone ever even seriously listen to those?
And yeah, the packaging is usually a lot nicer, but I wouldn't say it justifies the extra $10-20. And it's kind of annoying when you get a bunch of CDs in obnoxious custom packaging that don't fit in a standard CD holder 'cause they're just slightly bigger than a normal jewel case... oh well.
As for DVDs, most of the CD-bundled ones I've seen will have the PV (music video) on it & that's about it... full concert DVDs tend to go up to nearly ¥7000. Then again, movie DVDs are just as overpriced here, too (and it's not like there's any extra added value there). I ordered a couple Blu-Rays from the US after determining the average price was about $25 there versus ~$50 here for the same shit (and obviously Japanese subtitles & menus aren't worth that much to me). At least we're in the same region now... -_-;
All I can say is, be glad you don't live in Japan. CDs here generally sell for around ¥3000-3500 ($25-29 at the current exchange rate of ¥120:$1). Singles are generally ¥1000-1600 ($9-14). What's worse is that the prices are printed on the back label, so pretty much every store has the same price- you don't get those "Virgin Special Price $9.99" stickers anywhere.
Then again, practically every high school girl has a $5000 Louis Vuitton purse (god those things are fugly), so it's not like there's a big bargain-conscious consumer base. And there's always the rental stores like Tsutaya, which seem to have more CDs than DVDs, so the thrifty can rent a CD for a couple bucks & copy it to their minidisc/MP3 player.
and, since we're talking about TiVo here too (apparently by my post), are there any impending lawsuits and injunctions against DirectTV for infringment upon TiVo's patents?
I think the more important question here is, are there any impending lawsuits from DirecTV against their own customers (or just anyone, actually) who happen to own something that DirecTV considers to be "pirate access devices"?
Hell, an HD-PVR with an ethernet jack could ITSELF be considered a piracy device. Better watch for the MPAA as well.
These are the same people that objected to (can't remember the site's name).com putting a server on the web where you could download companies' COMMERCIALS.
That was adcritic... They never went down, AFAIK, but they started charging ($99/year) to watch the commercials up there. Damn shame, considering most companies WANT people to watch their ads (and here was a site where people were watching them VOLUNTARILY), and some of them were damn funny... Wish I would've downloaded that Discovery Channel "Hello, meteor!" commercial back then, that was awesome... "Aaaah, the atmosphere. Aaaaah."
"in effect, she was suggesting we creat concentration camps for Muslims."
I wouldn't be surprised. The US has already exterminated large portions of the Native American population (Trail of Tears), set up "relocation" camps for Japanese (during WWII), and kept Chinese immigrants locked up on Angel Island for up to months at a time (Chinese Exclusion Act). Only next time (and the way things are going, it's only a matter of time), they're likely to be a lot more high-tech and a lot more secretive about it.
Actually, I remember a story long ago on slashdot mentioning just that. And there are phones in Japan with built in Suica cards now- Suica cards are like rechargeable proxcards for paying for any JR (Japan Rail) train- you just stick the card (or even your whole wallet) down on the pad on your way in & out & it deducts the appropriate fare. Some stores (and vending machines) will also let you pay for things with your Suica card, and now there's cell phones with Suica built in.
If your mobile phone can read barcodes, we could print them anywhere - in papers, on billboards, TV adverts - and all you'd need to do is take a photo and your phone automatically loads the webpage in its built-in browser.
This is already standard in Japan- barcode readers come on pretty much every cell phone here. They read special 2d-matrix barcodes that look like this, which generally encode a URL or email address. You don't even need to take a picture of it in the usual sense- you run a little app called "barcode scanner" and just hold your phone over it, and as soon as it recognizes the barcode, it instantly launches the web browser or opens a new email with a specified To: address & possibly a predetermined Subject: line. They're often used on posters & product ads as a "get more info by scanning here" thing, or even to sign up for store memberships & things- hold your phone over the little square, and you instantly get a web page w/ a form to enter your info. Much faster than typing a URL on your phone.
Yet another area where Japanese cell phones are WAY ahead of the US...
By the way, when you think of how many hours you'd have to play to become good enough at a game so that you can sell your knowledge it probably works out to less than you'd make bagging groceries.
Not necessarily. Once you've played enough (call that your "training period"), you're good enough to keep coaching people thereafter. Assuming you can charge more per hour than you'd get bagging groceries (which, given such jobs are probably minimum wage, is pretty likely), after a certain number of hours of work you'll pass the point at which it would've been more profitable "per hour" to bag groceries.
As a ridiculously simplified example, say you'd make $5 an hour bagging groceries, and $20/hr training in games. Now say it takes you 100 hours of play before you're good enough to start charging. True, if you were only able to get 1 hour's pay after that, then your net earnings would be $20 for 101 hours of "work", whereas the same amount of time spent would've gotten $505 bagging groceries. So, your earnings (y) for bagging groceries per hour (x) is y = 5x, whereas for gaming it's y = 20x - 2000 (subtracting $20/h * 100 hours of training shifts the graph to the right). The break even point, at which you'd have earned the same amount working either job, is at 133.33 hours. Anything after that and the gaming thing is MUCH more profitable. Also, consider that you can earn more the longer you've been playing- charge $20/hr after you've played 100 hours, and then after you've played for 500 or 1000 hours (certainly easy to do in an online game), raise your hourly rates even higher, since now you're more experienced.
Plop the actual numbers into any graphing app & see where the lines cross to find out practical values- point is, in the long run, assuming you can actually get people to pay you for the higher-paying job, it'll pay off a lot more in the long run. And considering most people who'd consider a job like this have either already been playing that long, or would be doing so anyway, so they wouldn't consider the "training period" as if it were hours & hours of "unpaid work"- it's something they would've been doing anyway.
Exactly. Another quote from p2 (the interview) of TFA:
Certainly neither Susie nor I ever thought we should pass huge amounts of money along to our children. Our kids are great. But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home - I would say it's neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money.
Too bad Mr. Hilton didn't share this philosophy... -_-;
I actually bought Jak & Daxter after seeing a billboard for it in the background of one of the Ratchet & Clank games (and after noticing that R&C used the rendering engine from Naughty Dog, which does J&D). Eventually got all 3, actually, so there's a direct sale. Of course, it's impossible for their marketers to know that, as there's absolutely no way of tracking it.
The US server seems to be having some problems, but there's a little mini commercial up on the Japanese site (no words in it, so no worries) here.
Quick translation of the contents of the next page (index2):
We present the new direction of the game system code-named "Revolution". The answer is this name.
"Wii", imaged from the English "We", represents a concept that anyone in the household can enjoy, and the "ii" in "Wii" expresses the unique controller, and that people gather to play.
Yeah, but given at least e.g. 80 characters with the reading 'shi' and only 4 possible tones, a large number of them still ARE homonyms, tone & all. Multi-character compounds might help narrow things down a bit, but there's still a lot of room for error.
And yes, Japanese has the homonym problem as well- was that 'seikou' referring to a bullseye, success, political platform, steel manufacture, affection, sex, etc.? Was that guy talking about paper, hair, or god (all 'kami')? Not to mention the DOZENS of different ways that first names can be written. But as for the multiple readings, that would only be a problem for reading, not for speech recognition.
...not to mention languages like Chinese in which literally EVERY WORD has dozens of homonyms. Hell, first day of class when I took it way back, we learned 4 different meanings for the sound 'ma', and 3 of those used the same character radical- I'm sure there are plenty more.
And then there's Japanese, where the verb is always last, and subjects (or just about anything else, actually) are frequently just plain omitted. A person can tell what's going on based on context, but without some seriously advanced AI, I highly doubt a machine could do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since the iPhone launched here (particularly since the 4), network signal has been extremely poor in busy areas, due to overcongestion. Every time I hit a major train station, my phone struggles to regain its signal, and it's impossible to load anything, due to the sheer number of devices being used, since practically every single one of the thousands of commuters waiting on & off the train are using their phones at the same time (Shinjuku station alone has >3.5M passengers per day, and a single 11-car train on the Yamanote during rush hour has 2-4000 people crammed inside). I'm just worried that these access points are going to become just as quickly saturated and as slow as the cell network. Not to mention that by the time you connect to the wifi point, the train's probably already moving away from the station. -_-;
I'm on a small team at a large company that's in charge of accounts- creation, deletion, & password resets. When I interviewed, I was like "That's it?" Well, as I soon found out, yeah, it is- with hundreds of UNIX and database servers, and dozens of internal applications- all of which require different setups & combinations of UNIX/db/share drive/etc., it turned out to be. When I started, though, it was very clear that my team was in WAY over its head. The scripts to create db accounts, for example, required editing a file w/ the account name to create, then running a shell script that generated a small SQL batch file which created the account (all users had the same static password) and maybe sent them an email w/ the password. Several other steps were also required, including any unix/wintel stuff, entering a log into the tracking system, etc. Oh, and also, our db "admin" user account/password was hard-coded in the script as well. And each app had its own separate scripts for creation, deletion & reset.
I went to work right away, creating a command-line menu-based tool that did all that at once- prompted for admin password, generated random user passwords, handled all the different application configurations, sent the emails, & even created the log entry automatically. It was also capable of parsing bulk revocation requests which we got daily in Excel format (don't even get me started)- when a single user has literally hundreds of accounts, trying to manually delete only the ones that were requested (and no more) is next to impossible, and a task that may have taken hours (or days) now took a few minutes, tops.
Did I get any recognition for this? Sure- my team loved it, and everyone on it (and a few managers from other teams who've seen what I've done) was generally quite impressed. Unfortunately, my team isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, especially when going up to a global level, at which point nobody gives a shit because their regions don't -have- such a team. It hasn't helped that our next-level-up manager has changed about 5 times. Also, as a contractor, I have pretty much zero rights (compared to a full-time employee), no bonuses, and in 5 years I have yet to get a single raise (my contracting company gave me a very tiny bump (less than 3%) out of their cut of what they make off of me, which I'm not counting). It's possible my work has saved me from several round of layoffs, but that's about it.
So yeah- sometimes you go way above & beyond what's expected of you, and you don't get jack shit for it.
Hey, the mafia already have their own internal "waste disposal" procedures- for getting rid of bodies! Getting some actual toxic waste to dump alongside them just makes it that much more unlikely that anyone will go snooping around. :D
It's not necessary for solar to cover the entire power needs of a data center. It'd be nice if it did, but any power generated is money saved on their electric bill (and less drain on the general grid). And as stated above- they already have lots of batteries to cover (if) any surplus generated, and a fairly constant demand.
Products include fresh produce, meat and seafood, frozen, bakery, baby, [...]
Wow, you can order babies from Wal-Mart now? Wonder if they have an "in-stock" supply, or a made-to-order system w/ a 9-month delivery period.
That's nothing. I once saw a web developer job that listed in its requirements "10 years of HTML experience".
...and this was in 1999.
There's their first mistake. The Japanese are always good at coming up with the "oldest" evidence. No doubt they'll "find" something even older somewhere in Japan in a few weeks. ;>
Ah, I've seen stuff like that before. I believe it went "right A down right A down".
Well, it's funny, the corporation prohibits you from installing and using FREE software in an area where you really won't be affecting any one else.
:)
Actually, some corporations (particularly in the financial sector), prevent you from installing ANY software that isn't packaged and supported by the appropriate team, for compliance and legal reasons. Or read any non-work email (something in your hotmail account could have a worm that could spread across the corporate intranet). There are laws in place with serious penalties if anything bad were to happen due to something unexpected (or hidden) in some unauthorized software that someone decided to download because they thought it wouldn't affect anyone else, not to mention the enormous business expense and productivity loss of dealing with such a problem.
Granted, this doesn't stop some of the SAs from compiling GNU utilities or fvwm in their home directories...
Imagine if every big new release here came with the first couple singles (including b-sides) [...]
Actually, that kind of always annoyed me. B-sides are supposed to be b-sides- what's the point of shelling out money for a single when all the songs on it come out on the album a couple months later? Oh right, the instrumental/karaoke versions... @_@ No thanks. Does anyone ever even seriously listen to those?
And yeah, the packaging is usually a lot nicer, but I wouldn't say it justifies the extra $10-20. And it's kind of annoying when you get a bunch of CDs in obnoxious custom packaging that don't fit in a standard CD holder 'cause they're just slightly bigger than a normal jewel case... oh well.
As for DVDs, most of the CD-bundled ones I've seen will have the PV (music video) on it & that's about it... full concert DVDs tend to go up to nearly ¥7000. Then again, movie DVDs are just as overpriced here, too (and it's not like there's any extra added value there). I ordered a couple Blu-Rays from the US after determining the average price was about $25 there versus ~$50 here for the same shit (and obviously Japanese subtitles & menus aren't worth that much to me). At least we're in the same region now... -_-;
All I can say is, be glad you don't live in Japan. CDs here generally sell for around ¥3000-3500 ($25-29 at the current exchange rate of ¥120:$1). Singles are generally ¥1000-1600 ($9-14). What's worse is that the prices are printed on the back label, so pretty much every store has the same price- you don't get those "Virgin Special Price $9.99" stickers anywhere.
Then again, practically every high school girl has a $5000 Louis Vuitton purse (god those things are fugly), so it's not like there's a big bargain-conscious consumer base. And there's always the rental stores like Tsutaya, which seem to have more CDs than DVDs, so the thrifty can rent a CD for a couple bucks & copy it to their minidisc/MP3 player.
Hell, an HD-PVR with an ethernet jack could ITSELF be considered a piracy device. Better watch for the MPAA as well.
Actually, I remember a story long ago on slashdot mentioning just that. And there are phones in Japan with built in Suica cards now- Suica cards are like rechargeable proxcards for paying for any JR (Japan Rail) train- you just stick the card (or even your whole wallet) down on the pad on your way in & out & it deducts the appropriate fare. Some stores (and vending machines) will also let you pay for things with your Suica card, and now there's cell phones with Suica built in.
Yep- that's it. Didn't know what it was called, and the matrix image I linked to looked pretty close.
Yet another area where Japanese cell phones are WAY ahead of the US...
As a ridiculously simplified example, say you'd make $5 an hour bagging groceries, and $20/hr training in games. Now say it takes you 100 hours of play before you're good enough to start charging. True, if you were only able to get 1 hour's pay after that, then your net earnings would be $20 for 101 hours of "work", whereas the same amount of time spent would've gotten $505 bagging groceries. So, your earnings (y) for bagging groceries per hour (x) is y = 5x, whereas for gaming it's y = 20x - 2000 (subtracting $20/h * 100 hours of training shifts the graph to the right). The break even point, at which you'd have earned the same amount working either job, is at 133.33 hours. Anything after that and the gaming thing is MUCH more profitable. Also, consider that you can earn more the longer you've been playing- charge $20/hr after you've played 100 hours, and then after you've played for 500 or 1000 hours (certainly easy to do in an online game), raise your hourly rates even higher, since now you're more experienced.
Plop the actual numbers into any graphing app & see where the lines cross to find out practical values- point is, in the long run, assuming you can actually get people to pay you for the higher-paying job, it'll pay off a lot more in the long run. And considering most people who'd consider a job like this have either already been playing that long, or would be doing so anyway, so they wouldn't consider the "training period" as if it were hours & hours of "unpaid work"- it's something they would've been doing anyway.
That should be: a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not necessarily a square.
I actually bought Jak & Daxter after seeing a billboard for it in the background of one of the Ratchet & Clank games (and after noticing that R&C used the rendering engine from Naughty Dog, which does J&D). Eventually got all 3, actually, so there's a direct sale. Of course, it's impossible for their marketers to know that, as there's absolutely no way of tracking it.
Quick translation of the contents of the next page (index2):
Yeah, but given at least e.g. 80 characters with the reading 'shi' and only 4 possible tones, a large number of them still ARE homonyms, tone & all. Multi-character compounds might help narrow things down a bit, but there's still a lot of room for error.
And yes, Japanese has the homonym problem as well- was that 'seikou' referring to a bullseye, success, political platform, steel manufacture, affection, sex, etc.? Was that guy talking about paper, hair, or god (all 'kami')? Not to mention the DOZENS of different ways that first names can be written. But as for the multiple readings, that would only be a problem for reading, not for speech recognition.
...not to mention languages like Chinese in which literally EVERY WORD has dozens of homonyms. Hell, first day of class when I took it way back, we learned 4 different meanings for the sound 'ma', and 3 of those used the same character radical- I'm sure there are plenty more.
And then there's Japanese, where the verb is always last, and subjects (or just about anything else, actually) are frequently just plain omitted. A person can tell what's going on based on context, but without some seriously advanced AI, I highly doubt a machine could do the same.
"NTT DoCoMo hopes to launch a commercial 4G network by 2010."
Damn... guess they won't be ready when I move there next week. Oh well. At least I'll still have a phone that's 5 years ahead of US cell tech...