kazuya

I wonder how this affected Toshiba's own processors -- MeP, then Cell. Some of MPEs (Nuon's processing units) only had access to its small local memory and needed DMA to access the main memory. This is kind of similar to Cell's SPEs. Each SPE has only 256 KB of directly accessible memory and required DMA to get to the main memory. You can say it's not uncommon in DSPs, but it's still interesting Toshiba has been involved with these.

It's not only in US. We've had the phrase 'three highs' (三高) in Japan, about height, income, and education, though people openly express this are getting downplayed these days. Not sure how it matters in the dating market.

Strange, no mention about excretions. The author did blood tests but no urine tests.

Where's the obligatory xkcd reference, anyone?

Splendid!

However I prefer http://facemakr.com/ when it comes to the variations of facial parts.

Or try think this way - your doorstep is part of Amazon's storefront. Even though you have to make a deposite and wait much longer than real retails before perusing the goods at hand, you think they have great customer service. Genuinely interesting, with no sarcasm.

Surprisingly, most of the descriptions apply also to Japan. Except you need to replace forks with chopsticks, cowboys with ninjas.

Hmm I've just pre-ordered two from Japan (and applied to the dev program too). I believe the form included international locations, can you confirm it?

Your low level is my high level.

Even assembly code appears high level when you are looking into how the electrons run through silicon and copper. But it's not realistic to cover all the stack down to the atoms. Then which layer you can stop digging at?

For a programmer, the processor architecture (including the instruction set architecture and the bus architecture) level would be fine. It is the strongest abstraction barrier and you rarely need to look below it.

That said, if you are working on embedded systems, knowledge about digital electronics is almost a must, and some analog bits really helps.

It's mentioned in one of the articles he linked to.

Agreed. I'm a native Japanese speaker and learned English because I thought it was required to learn programming. And I had thought it was the norm until I met other Japanese professional programmers. Somehow they thought they were allowed to stay whining about not being able to get information from English resources.

Once I told the management to have them learn English because it's almost mandatory for a software engineer to understand English as much as an aspiring Go player would learn Japanese. But the management told me back it's _harsh_ to require them to learn anything more. Harsh? Huh?

That said, I found the need for technical books real, and translated several English books (including Programming Erlang) into Japanese. However I know this effort will not scale and these days I am inclined to abandon translation and tell them that English is just another tool you have to learn to survive.

FWIW here's a story about the scene, by a native Japanese.

It was more than 10 years ago when I joined Fujitsu's 3G cellular network project as a subcontractor. It was a huge complex project and I believe was one of the first 3G networks deployed in the world. So I expected I would work with teams of descent engineers.

Except most of them were not.

The subproject had dozens of 'engineers', but many of them had just finished vocational schools that didn't teach them even programming in C. To make it worse, the existing code base was the exemplar of bad code, e.g. each function had more than 3000 lines, function names were a letter and some digits and we had to consult some other documents to find out what they were expected to do, etc as well as more architectural design problems. In fact there I was able to find every horror story about software development.

Why did such a mess happen? One of the reasons was that the contractor company (who then outsourced some senior positions to subcontractors like me) were paid by the headcount of engineers it offered to the project. No kidding. So, in order to maximize the profit, the contractor made up a legion of those incapables who were paid less. Expectedly that made things worse, and Fujitsu thought it needed more engineers to solve the problems. Vicious circle.

I had tried to make the situation better, but the root cause was not in the technical side and I had no clue. The only nice thing for me was that during the personal research to improve the project I got to know Erlang, which was of course never ever used in the project because of the similar reasons mentioned in the article.

> I remember when the PS3 was first shown at E3 many years ago, one of the big selling points that Sony was advertising was how difficult it was to program for it.

I'm pretty surprised to hear that, as we have always been working hard to make the SDK easier for game devs. Do you remember who said that?

I expected from the title a story about the future where Google uses purchase history collected from its Wallet service to predict items to be purchased next time, and even sends them to the home. Certainly that will kill many retail jobs.

Amazon does this, though imperfectly, and in fact it suggested me a periodic purchase plan of diapers after I bought it from them a couple of times.

No such a legal obligation, but all three major careers support the warning system (however Softbank has only few phones that can receive the warning messages).

This system uses a feature defined in 3GPP and probably can be implemented in cellular networks in other countries than Japan. However it may need modifications of the software in the network, it may take several years to be fully deployed.

50% doesn't sound great and I wish it would be better too, but it's far better than nothing when it's a matter of life and death.

This article is not actually about USB. Neither about Windows 8.

What's interesting is that Microsoft uses model checking on real shipping products. In fact it has been pushing static checker (SLAM and SDV) for years.

Other operating systems including Linux have their own verification projects, but they all appear to stay academic (though look promising).

We can expect more reliable operating systems in this decade. Maybe.

FWIW, here are what I, a low-level (OS/firmware) guy, got this time: https://plus.google.com/116664423478272670997/posts/BYtnWF73...

Totally agreed, in fact I was about to suggest a similar idea.

For those who live in Tokyo, this might be interesting, but I want the one without such a superficial academic style: http://www.academyhills.com/library/index.html

The cake is a lie.

Rather I would find radiative cooling cool.

Calculating error correction code, though efficiency depends on the memory architecture.

I heard Tsubame, a supercomputer built with NVIDIA GPUs, calculated ECC on its GPU-side memory with GPU code because those GPUs were consumer grade and didn't have hardware ECC.

We have had similar ones in sushi shops for years in Japan: http://www.garbagenews.net/archives/1511123.html

And some of them can be used with Nintendo DS: http://www.garbagenews.net/archives/1406127.html

As far as I observed, one of the problems with these devices is they give the restaurant a bit of cheap look. That's partly due to their poor make, but most probably, the guests feel embarrassed similarly to when one takes out his cell phone just in the middle of dinner.

I expected something like Algorithm March (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm_March), but this is far more... algorithmic.

You are supposed to be able to edit the animation once you go through the movie, but I wasn't able to confirm it on my Chromium 7.

Indeed, I've been wondering what could be an alternative deus ex machina.

Here is my take about Japan:

In Japan people learn English as a part of mandatory public education without targetting any practical use, and many companies mandate good exam score or certificate about English, even if they don't need English skills on the job.

This leaves Japanese in a strange parallel world of learning English, where the goal is scoring good and getting a nice job, not communicating with others.

Hence people without real incentive are forced to take globally standard English tests such as TOEFL or TOEIC, resulting in that low average score.

Thanks, I at first glance thought it was about building a DIY electromagnetic resonance device for medical usage.

> The Japanese have a cultural fascination with humanoid robots.

If you are talking about pop culture, yes. However, non-humanoids don't make news as they have already been part of Japanese culture. Even kids know cars, toys, foods etc are made by robots.

As Estragon pointed out, Japan doesn't have robots suitable for such condition as it didn't have urgent necessity.

In addition, the Fukushima power plants are very old and I think it was not designed for inspection and repair by robots.

Here is my story about leaving my own and joining a big.

We started it aiming to be a big fish in a tiny pond (software for embedded wireless devices, niche market, yes). But, as an expected result for a project without well-defined goals, we weren't able to build any working software. While we were at it we made money with contract jobs and that reduced time to work on the project furthermore as we were self-funded and it wasn't enough to feed us for more than six months.

To make it worse, one of the founding member, who is a specialist about digital signal processing and we couldn't go without, was considering pursuing academic research.

After plodding through that muddy state for almost five years, I had accumulated enough fatigue and eventually we decided to dissolve it.

Other members had found their own way and I found a job at a big company. Maybe I was fortunate, because it's quite difficult for a thirty-some with somewhat messy job records to find a job at an established company, esp. in Japan. Or maybe not, because my experience and skill set were considered versatile particularly in embedded systems industry.

As others says, I thought of it as bartering freedom with stability. That is partly true, but it wasn't that bad. Among others, it's a definitely invaluable experience to make software of a hardware product that are to be sold in thousand millions. That is what I never do in a small startup.

So mine is one example favoring your move, whatever your motivation is. I believe many big companies think your 3 years at a startup a big plus. Why? Because big companies are full of people without that experience, often only top execs have it, but they sometimes have to start new to survive.

As for maximizing your chances of getting a job at a big co, it is critical to understand and clearly state why you failed. I'm sure they will ask about it if they are decent.