ever thought about cruising on your own boat around the pacific ocean? you know, just for the hell of it? well then, are you an environmentalist perhaps? someone who is worried about the increasing acidity of our oceans and the giant pile of trash polluting the pacific. hmmm? then you’ll love this man.

his name is kenichi horie. already a record holder in solar powered sailing and a world class recycler of used beer kegs.

his vessel is the suntory mermaid 2. a wave powered ship; it is slow as a snail, but environmentally friendly and a possible harbinger of a future propulsion system for large slow moving ships like the cargo ships from china

i wasn’t really that impressed by the group of japanese engineers conclusions about the short comings of the macbook air’s design quality. it really seemed like nitpicking to bring up the amount of screws that hold down the keyboard and the non utilized space inside the casing. moreover, feigning surprise that apple would leave room for an upgrade or price drop next year is laughable. really, a corporation using price discrimination to recoup their research expenditures by charging early adopters more for the same thing people who wait will be able to buy next year? you don’t say?

that being said their are some legitimate reasons for not liking the macbook air. some have been mentioned elsewhere so I’ll go over those quickly, however there are others that not many know about that i’ll go over in deeper detail.

1. non-upgradable after purchase: the ram is soldered on with no extra card slots, the hard drive is not customer replaceable, meaning you void your warranty if you even look at the logic board, if you cant plug it into the one usb port than its not going to happen

2. increased repairs: need a battery change? have to send it in. need to reset the smu? send it in. ram need replacing? send it in. hope you don’t have any problems, or when about a year passes by i hope you don’t have any files that you haven’t backed up yet when you’re computer has to go in for a week. moreover i hope you enjoy that feeling of getting screwed when your battery dies after a year and apple care no longer covers it (over $150)

3. using the wireless migration and setup assistant is slow- it takes fourteen minutes to boot to the install disk wirelessly on a 25mb connection. i shit you not. want to migrate files from your old mac using migration assistant? depending on your internet connection speed and the amount of files my experience has been anywhere from 2-20 hours. there are many people who mistakenly think that their macbook air is broken when they’re just waiting on a slow ass connection. and just wait till when you back up your files using time capsule, enjoy.

4. wtf is with the hard drive space?- 80GB? are you kidding me? or you can “upgrade” (for a total price of $3000) to a solid state drive of 64GB. the ipod classic comes with a bigger hard drive and they couldn’t fit something a little bit larger into the macbook air?

5. remote disking cds and dvds- apple has been wrestled by the riaa and the mpaa into using dmr to disallow the wireless transfer of encoded dvds, blue ray dvds, (the now defunct) hd dvds and audio cds. thats right, without a hack you can’t transfer or play a dvd from another computer.

6. want accessories that might make the wireless transfer process a little faster, or maybe allow you to boot to the operating system before you pass out from boredom, maybe you’d like to transfer your remaining cds to onto the computer so you don’t have to buy them from itunes well never mind, because they are expensive as hell for what you’re getting.

7. processors are last generation-even the cheapest model of macbook comes with a 2.2hz processor, you can get up to 2.6hz on the macbook pro. on the macbook air the upgraded version comes with 1.8hz. you are paying premium price for last year’s model in a nice shell.

8. all this to drop three pounds-yes that is the difference in weight between the macbook air and the macbook

9. slim and sexy?- more like easy to break. these things are about a heavy key stroke away from annihilation. just look at it, does this seem sturdy to you?

10. why not just buy an iphone- seriously. they have 90% the same capabilities of the macbook air and they’re about the quarter of the price

long story short, if you’re going to buy a macbook, buy a macbook. if you want a cool toy buy the iphone or ipod touch.

InventorSpot’s Steve Levenstein has the lowdown on the new KIZUNA satellite that was launched recently by Japan, which promises to introduce a new era of super-high speed data communications across Asia

Let’s put things in perspective here: 1.2 Gbps is 150 times faster than the average high-speed ADSL connection rate (around 8 Mbps). It’s also 12 times faster than FTTP, or fibre-optic communication delivery. What this means is that students, researchers or company employees in different Asian cities will be able to communicate with each other without experiencing any time lag. Now THAT, is awesome… and so is the launch of KIZUNA, viewable here but previously watched live by millions in Japan over the Internet. Naturally.

The launch of KIZUNA no doubt will make it even harder for the U.S. to catch up to Japan in terms of consumer high-speed Internet access.

Maybe you dont remember, but Asimo lost a lot of credibility when in it felt from the stairs in a show. To avoid a repeat of that embarasement, they now are experimenting with how to solve the problem.

The first video shows how Asimo falls from the stairs, the second shows a robot getting up from the floor

below the buzzing metropolis of tokyo in the depths of a high rise building is a microcosm of an agricultural revolution. in a facility staffed by former freeters looking for a source of lasting employment, there are six rooms dedicated the the seeding, germination, and successful growth of various vegetables. why is this anything exciting, you might ask?

while for the last century large scale indoor cultivation has been commonly practiced around the world and indoor greenhouses and grow rooms are used by people as varied as researchers to marijuana growers, what is interesting about this experiment is the intent and unintended consquences. pasona o2, unlike its counterparts has among it goals the employment of that portion of disaffected japanese youth. in addition it is a live testing of the marginal transformation of land to capital in an urban environment.

while at first this may seem unexciting, to me it is intriguing for two reasons. first of all it is an introduction to a field of steady work for moderately educated youth to introduce themselves to both industrial and agricultural technology. while these are seemingly dying arts they are also heavily subsidized industries and thus a safe bet. secondly, while the proprietors may not see this as the future of farming, it was an object of debate in an environmental economics class in which i once enrolled. in an area where land prices are high and the soil quality is poor enough that it must be continually augmented by expensive fertilizers, there could conceivably be a situation, provided a cheap source of electricity, where hydroponic gardens in skyscapers could be the source of food to a nation and the nations to which it exports.

hat tip to pruned

Pileus is working on an Internet enabled umbrella that will allow the user to check out websites while their walking down the street, by looking up at the underside of the umbrella. It works by using a small projector to put the image on the inside of the umbrella. It’s enabled for Google Maps and Flickr.

It’s not quite ready for mass production yet as the projector is still pretty bulky and power-hungry, but it looks really cool.

When the groups Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders published an online report titled Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship about how China is censoring online content, the Chinese government did the only thing it knows how to do. . . It censored the report

Just hours after the report was issued, Yang Le, the head of the Beijing Information Office, which is in charge of Internet control, circulated an order to websites and ISPs asking them to update their lists of banned key-words. The new banned key-words, mostly relating to the Internet, were used throughout the Reporters Without Borders report.

Read more about it here.

Via The Raw Feed

“A 200-strong army of beady-eyed, ball-shaped robots” is being deployed nationwide, says Pink Tentacle.

Not quite as scary as they might sound, these spherical chaps are “Pollen Robots” and are to be employed by Weathernews.jp to monitor the pollen count. And this being Japan, they have built-in Cute - the ‘eyes’ light up different colours as the level changes.

As the Asahi reports, when the Japanese cedar and cypress get that lovin’ feelin’ and go into their springtime overdrive, data on the pollen count will be sent from these robots to the site. They’ll be stationed outside the homes of a couple of hundred volunteers, all hay-fever sufferers, who will also be reporting on their symptoms.

As the Asahi gravely intones, “Pollen levels from Japanese cedar and cypress are expected to be higher than last year in many parts of the country.” Oh joy.

China’s largest search portal has started up a Japan branch named “Baidu.jp” in an attempt to further expand its global share. Baidu already handles 70% share of search engine traffic in China, and is number three worlwide after Yahoo and Google, which currently dominate in Japan.

Baidu’s aim for the time being is to target users with high IT literacy that use several engines in parallel, for example, using its engine as their “second search engine.” Highlighting Baidu’s search accuracy toward heavy Internet users, the company aims to gradually gain recognition for its search engine.

Refraining from hosting advertisements on the search site for the time being, the company will be devoted to increasing user traffic.

According the a Baidu spokesman, their search engine’s strength lies in its ability to handle Chinese characters.

“In contrast to our rivals that are trying to develop a global standard search algorithm, we give weight to the development of algorithms optimized for local cultures,” [said Robin Li, the company's chairman and CEO]. “I always tell my employees to ‘look at local aspects, not global aspects.’”

Baidu’s search algorithm focuses on analyzing users’ click actions after search results are shown.

“If the algorithm is based on keyword frequency and link popularity, the websites of companies that are good at SEO (search engine optimization) measures will be ranked highest, which are not necessarily the websites that users are after,” Li said.

I wonder how many people in Japan and elsewhere will want to use a search engine from a repressive Communist country, which boasts of its ability to track its users activities. . .

Researchers in Japan and the U.S. have successfully transmitted the brain waves of a monkey half way around the world over the Internet to a robot that performed the correct movement.

The U.S. researchers at Duke University in North Carolina pinned down correlated patterns between a monkey’s brain nerve signals and leg movements. The monkey was trained to walk upright on a treadmill, its brain studded with electrodes to read the signals.

The signals were fed into a humanoid robot that walked in response to the signals.

“There may come an era when you could move a remotely located robot as if it is yourself and play tennis with it,” said Mitsuo Kawato, research director of a Japan Science and Technology Agency research institute in Seika, Kyoto Prefecture.

Wouldn’t playing tennis with yourself result in endless rallies?

Japan electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which markets products under the Panasonic brand overseas, has announced plans to introduce Internet-ready plasma TVs in North America in the spring that will allow users to directly browse videos on YouTube and photos in Google-based web albums.

“This is the first time mainstream consumers will be able to easily enjoy YouTube videos from the living room with the enhanced quality of a fully integrated widescreen TV experience,” said Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.

Rival Sony Corp. also announced that from this spring it will launch televisions offering access to free Internet video content from providers including AOL, Yahoo, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG Music.

We are eagerly looking forward to the day when someone will be announcing a JAPUNDIT-ready TV.

Japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing into Internet scariness. According to What Japan Thinks, over three-quarters of Japanese (77%) find Internet either “scary to some degree” (69%) or “very scary” (8%).

The main reasons for finding Internet scary include Viruses, hacking, and other attacks (81%) and Leaking of personal data (81%) followed by Libel (51%) and Internet addiction (19%). The Internet scariness situation seem to be worsening, since 66% find it as scary as ever and 20% even scarier than last year.

While terror related to leaking of personal data and especially libel seem a bit anal, worry about viruses is pretty commonplace. But as they say: “With decent virus software and just a little common sense, viruses can be almost completely avoided, although running things like Explorer and Outlook does make life a little more interesting on line…”

In fact, just using Firefox, Gmail, and OpenOffice, along with one of the many free virus programs, would make Internet a lot less scary place?

According to this Washington Post article Japanese people are blogging like crazy these days. According to the article 37% of all blog posts last year were written in Japanese, beating out English language posts by 1%.

It should come as no surprise that one of the popular items that people are writing about is food.

Consider, for example, the remarkably harmonious blog that Junko Kenetsuna has been writing five times a week for the past three years about her midday meal.

With understated precision, she calls her blog “I had my lunch.”

In a recent dispatch from a Vietnamese restaurant in Tokyo, Kenetsuna wrote: “The soup has a distinctive chicken flavor and the bitterness of pear, which gives you much sensation in your mouth.”

The article also notes that Japanese blogs rarely bash other people or organizations and are generally more polite.

There’s also a video to go along with the article.

That’s the title of a Newsweek article that explores why Japan is not more of a powerhouse on the world technological stage.

Japan is a technological powerhouse. If you exult in brilliantly bizarre gadgetry, engineering wonkery and prodigious feats of craftsmanship, you’ll feel right at home. It’s also an extremely sophisticated business environment. The Japanese domestic market is big and nuanced; Japanese consumers are notoriously finicky and demanding.

On the face of things, it would all seem to add up to an entrepreneurial paradise, a playground of creativity and innovation. Japan spent $130 billion on research and development last year (more as a percentage of GDP than the United States or the EU, putting it in third place globally behind Sweden and Finland). It registers, far and away, more patents than any other country—even more than the United States, with more than twice the population.

So you’d think Japan would be confident about its technological future, but you’d be wrong. These days, big business, academia, think tanks, government and the media, as well as the average Japanese salaryman, are all brooding about the state of their economy in the digital era. The educational system is going down the tubes, it’s said, generating math and science scores that increasingly lag behind other OECD countries. The government is gridlocked, stalling urgently needed economic reform. Managers are mired in old mentalities, while imaginative newcomers can’t find the space or the capital to develop their ideas. It’s a syndrome that’s sometimes summed up in a single, angst-ridden question: how come we weren’t the ones who invented the iPod?

Which next-generation DVD format are you planning to buy asks a recent survey summarized by What Japan Thinks? It’s a vexed question, since this is the next generation and everyone is going to want to buy new TVs, players, and DVDs to get that “high definition” experience–aren’t they?

There is much confusion between the standards, Blu-ray vs HD DVD, with consumers delaying their purchases to avoid being stuck with another Betamax. The jury is still out and a bit has been written about this on Japundit with a lot elsewhere (like here, here, and here). What does the average Japanese consumer think?

Well, 8.2% have already bought into HD DVD and 4.7% Blu-ray — but 87.1% are still sitting on the fence. In fact, 63% haven’t decided yet which format they will buy. But 28% have already decided on Blu-ray and only 9% HD DVD.

While HD DVD was the early leader, it looks like Blu-ray will finally prove to be the winner–this is about what most of us anticipated. In fact, 28% of those surveyed think so too, compared to 9% who are still rooting for HD DVD. Still, 60% say they don’t know which format will preval.

The big criteria that will be used to inform upcoming purchases of high definition gadgets include price (70%), features (48%), title selection (40%), and hardware selection (35%). Title selection is probably more important than they think, since you will recall that Betamax died because there were no movie titles to play on it.

Right now the major studios are lining up on each side–mostly Blu-ray’s side and Blu-ray is a Sony project so guess what format most of the new movies are going to be in (exclusively in most cases)?

Following up on Japundit’s post about the October 2007 introduction of the earthquake warning system, and a Tokyo cable TV company’s earthquake warning service, the cable provider has an instructional video on it’s site (scroll down to the second video).

Could you remember everything this woman does in 10 seconds, while this warning “siren” sounds?

The folks over at the Singapore government’s Media Development Authority pull out all the stops in an apparent attempt to prove that government bureaucrats can be cool. . . And end up verifying exactly the opposite. . .

Via Travellers’ Tales

Yay! It’s November 20, the 324th day of the year and, of course, there are now only 33 shopping days left till Christmas. Alistair Cooke and Robert F. Kennedy were born today and Queen Elizabeth got married today in 1947 (to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten–he got a promotion after that…) The Nuremberg Trials started today in 1945 and the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in 1962.

Most notably, Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. But for many of us, today is the day non-Japanese start to enjoy being fingerprinted and photographed on arrival (for their own comfort and safety) according to a controversial new law.

Pink Tentacle posts a picture of the actual hardware being used–but maybe you’ll be seeing the gizmo first-hand yourself soon enough! Since the post is titled “NEC Helps Big Brother Watch Foreigners in Japan,” it seems the blog does not think much of either the institutions or the new policy itself. They write:

Ministry of Justice officials at airports across Japan have been staging promotional events and showing off the new hardware that will be used to collect the fingerprints and scan the faces of the estimated 5 to 6 million foreigners potential terrorists that enter the country each year. The devices, which proudly bear the NEC logo, consist of a monitor, two fingerprint readers (one for each hand) and a camera that captures mugshots. The devices are being installed at immigration counters nationwide so that you can be fingerprinted and photographed while immigration officials ask you the usual questions about the purpose of your visit and your intended length of stay. Your biometric data will then be stored for an extended period of time in a database, which law enforcement officials will somehow use to thwart terrorist attacks.

I’m sure there is scope here for either segue into yubitsume or crafting of a clever and ironic joke. But I guess if interested you could just read up on it here and consider that, after all, they are only taking pictures. And maybe invading your privacy and who knows what they may do with this info subsequently. But it’s still better than never being able to play the piano again!

A new cell phone model from Softbank Hello Kitty Collection offers a choice of 7 colors, and each color comes with 7 snap-on Hello Kitty faceplates and inner sheets. And it comes with an original Hello Kitty strap, jewelry box and shopping bag.