For those of us Mac-users, the recent Apple Security Update 2007-009 v1.1 has created a lot of havoc on users' machines. After I installed the security update, I restarted the machine and lost access to my Airport wireless card. I took a chance and decided to "reset the PRAM", or reset the MacBook Pro System Management Controller, and my Airport wireless came back as usual.
Comments are not yet fixed.
I have a longer discussion about whether the iPhone will do well in Japan planned for when I have more than a moment to blog, but I wanted to point folks to an article on alternative interfaces to computers which Jeff Yang recently wrote in SFGate: ASIAN POP / Off key
My quote is:
"To a certain extent, Asia is a slave to the alpha keyboard,"
I'm pretty sure I said qwerty keyboard, but I'll let Jeff slide ;)
"Many input methods for languages like Chinese and Japanese require knowledge of the Roman alphabet to use, which is crazy when you think of it. Imagine if the PC was developed in China and everyone in the rest of the world needed to know Chinese before inputting their own alphabet. Well, that's the case for a lot of PC users in China and Japan."
Mixi's CTO, Batara Eto, is stepping down from the CTO job at the end of the year, Akimoto-san reports from Asiajin. I'm sure that the past few years of starting up and growing the most popular SNS in Japan would tire anyone out and I trust that Batara will take some well-deserved time off.
Otsukaresama, Batara-san.
EDIT: My comments are broken at this time so I'll turn them off. Been too busy to fix this.
I've finally gotten a moment to upgrade my blog to MT 4.01. It was actually very easy and painless. Let's hope the comments are now working? Please help me test by leaving a comment.
It looks like Symantec Software is taking lessons from Nike.
Norton Fighter v. Botlas (part1)
Norton Fighter v. Botlas (part2)
I will say that they are very well done for what they are, an advertisement.
That said, I do not use any Norton or Symantec products on my computers.
This is more than a week old but highly readable.
All-in-all, Android seems to be the only non-proprietary operating system with a strong chance of wider commercial adoption. Motorola is losing interest in LiMo (it committed to Qtopia APIs, whereas LiMo supports rival GTK). The LiPS forum doesn’t really have a route to market, apart from Chinese ODMs, and is a partial OS. All other mobile Linux operating systems are either in alpha stage (Celunite, ALP, A la Mobile), not shrink-wrapped (Greensuite), or not backed by a big services firm (Purple Labs). Symbian is dominated by Nokia and DoCoMo; outside Japan, the overwhelming majority (volume-wise and model-wise) of Symbian handsets are Nokia, whereas in Japan the vast majority of 30 million Symbian-based shipments are DoCoMo (60 out of 66 models). And Windows Mobile is for enterprise segments only (at least up to version 6). Plus Android ticks several boxes of OEM checklists including control, time-to-market and cost.
Sad but not surprising.
In any case, the decision to bar me is a grim reflection on China's concept of security. I have consistently argued that China has a right to develop and that the West has a duty to help it find a sustainable path in a global environment already seriously hurt by Western development. To construe this as enmity, or to believe that a better relationship could be achieved by bribery and bullying, is not only absurd but also deeply worrying.
Most disturbing is that this primitive "friend or foe" logic is still applied not just to foreigners, but to Chinese people. Recent months have seen heightened surveillance of local NGOs and the forced closure of some, such as a "rural reconstruction" initiative led by the eminent People's University professor, Wen Tiejun. This is the government's way of "killing the chicken to scare the monkey," as the Chinese proverb goes. It's a signal to others to watch their step.
Opinion: Why China cracked down on my nonprofit
Via Danwei
Christian Caryl has an excellent article in Newsweek, Why Apple Isn't Japanese, looking at the challenges Japanese businesses (specifically in manufacturing and high-tech) in the coming decades. I talk about these trends often and Caryl's article provides a great overview of Japan's weaknesses in global markets that they used to dominate (current exceptions being Toyota and Nintendo.) The last two paragraphs sum up the article for me.
At this point, it is worth taking another look at the cautionary tale of DoCoMo. Today it is trapped in a domestic market with a diminishing population, watching as its nimbler rivals at home grab an ever-bigger piece of the shrinking mobile pie. Its only hope for decisive growth would have been to leapfrog into the global market. But it didn't happen, thanks mainly to the company's limited cultural horizons and unimaginative management. Just three years ago the value of DoCoMo's shares amounted to about 10 times that of Nokia's. Today Nokia (based in Finland, with a population of 5 million versus Japan's 127 million) has a market capitalization more than double that of DoCoMo's. That puts Nokia in the realm of other global giants like Apple, Google and Vodafone. And just look at who tops the list: China Mobile.This drives home the point that the lesson for "them" (the Japanese) isn't necessarily that they should be more like "us" (the Americans). It's merely to warn that some serious adjustments might be in order. Over the next century, disruptive innovations won't be coming only from countries like the United States. They'll also be emerging from dynamic, hungry, rising economies that offer plenty of room for risk-taking, flights of fancy and cross-border synthesis. If the Japanese want to be a part of that club, they'll have to revamp not only how they think about technology, but how they think about themselves.
p.s. I haven't had time to update my weblog software so my comments are still broken. Please bear with me until I have enough time to deal with this. Thanks!
