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Thanks kinda how Japan works. Inventing something new is hard, but taking something that's a cool idea and making it actually usable is well within their wheelhouse.

See: - Blue LEDs - Quartz Watches - Lithium-ion Batteries - Bidets


I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff invented in Japan, but that's really beside the point.

The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.


UC Berkeley developed RISC-V, so no doubt their influence within the computer science academia sphere had something to do with it.

Dunno, I think Risc-V's simplicity gave it the initial popularity rush rather than being from a certain institution (the institution perhaps gave it visibility, but it does have own merits and no idea if other archs from the time had those?), don't remembere exactly but iirc it was possible to implement with a ridiculously small amount of FPGA gates. Conversly heard some rumblings that it had parts t hat were unsuitable for scaling up but it seems to have gained enough momentum for people to engineer past stuff like that.

POWER is still holding on just barely but I do suspect that IBM are looking to sunset it in the next few years.

Given that IBM just announced a dual-ISA mainframe with support for both z/arch and ARM, they might indeed be looking to sunset POWER.

Powers not dead yet! IBM is still clinging to it and I can't blame them, it's a pretty good ISA

Yep, I have said it for a good 20 years now.

POWER/PowerPC is what happens when you take a brilliant design to execute it poorly. x86 is when you take a poor design and execute is brilliantly.


PPC could have any number of merits, the 2 nail in the coffin imho is that the community/implementations seems to have held on to a big-endian tradition whilst the mass of users/developers firmly shifted to little-endian when Apple went to x86 and that IBM didn't push it properly open in the 2005-2008 timeframe when PS3/Xbox360 were still relevant (OpenPower seems to have been created in 2013, after the creation of Risc-V and PS4/XboxOne going to x86).

PPC was great with the G4, it was much better than the P3. Intel with P3 based-Core Duos won against the G5.

Core solo/duo was the last in the P3 heritage (but that heritage itself traced all the way back to the Pentium Pro initially) via the 2 generations of Pentium-M (even if Core2 had parts they were 64bit so more of a major upgrade).

Whoever convinced the execs at Intel to put Pentium-M into production as a "mobile" chip really saved them when NetBurst reached it's end of line, I owned a first-generation Pentium-M laptop and it was really superb (seeing the Macbook Air introduced was a big meh).

It was really a turning point though, I remember posting some compile time and people didn't believe me, but the Pentium-M chips were good at compiling (since compilers are kinda "branchy" when it comes to execution in a way P4 didn't "like") but also because I had maxed out the RAM on the machine (1.25gb when 256mb was the base for the machine and similar for many desktops) so much of the code and libraries could be retained in disk caches.

With portable performance like that, why do you need a desktop?


I had this idea that Fujitsu was one of those Japanese conglomerates that had operations in all kinds of markets, from electronics to heavy earth moving equipment to air conditioners to locomotives. But that doesn't appear to be the case so I'm wondering which company I'm confusing them with.

Edit I think I was thinking of Mitsubishi.


Fujitsu was a telco equipment spinoff from Fuji Electric, so Fujitsu do/did make a lot of things that would be in a phone exchange building over its history, from air conditioners to terminals to actual mainframes. Just not as everything as Mitsubishi, which was a do-all procurement company for the new government when the Tokugawa stepped down.

About 25 years back here in Australia they were advertising Fujitsu air-conditioners, they had the promise of some like "They will get the air down to 17c in all conditions."

About a month later there was a summer heat wave and I went to a friends house who had just bought one. It was wild walking in from a 45c day into, as advertised, a 17c house. Had to give it to them, they lived up to the claim.

That they come from the telecom/server space, it makes sense they had a good eye for aircon engineering.


In Spain an aircon ad in TV joked by telling the viewer that "silence" in Japanese it's "Fujitsu".

Fujitsu is basically the Japanese IBM.

I am in tech (okay now I am really wondering what % of people on here are NOT in tech). I have spent years in Japan for work, and ironically right now as I type this, I am sitting in a seat on JL2 from Tokyo to SFO. I worked with all of the large Japanese companies over the years and I can say Fujitsu has always been the most impressive, and to you comment, most like golden age IBM (I worked there for a brief time also). They, like IBM are most likely to have brilliant tech, and then shoot themself in the head for non-tech reasons.

Probably Panasonic. They're like the Apple of the B2B world. Except they also make everything

The 1980s called, it wants its stereotypes back.

Hard to argue that it's open source...


Graphene should qualify. That would be a good incentive for kids to learn to root a mobile device and run graphene on it.


I used the web based installer and it was so easy that we would be complaining the kids are not really learning anything by doing it!


You actually don't root a GrapheneOS device (sadly, imo, but this is one of GrapheneOS's peculiarities. If you want root, Lineage is your friend.)


Something like this has been top-of-mind for us since we have a heavy reliance on AWS, which was made evident with the VPC Origin failure earlier this year.

Multi-cloud is best cloud.


Many systems within Japan are also setup to accept Tap-to-pay/PayWave/contactless (though JR East is a notable exception), but many locals just use Suica/Pasmo because it's the much _faster_.


Likely because Verizon will only let "certified by Verizon" devices on their network, while AT&T and T-Mo will let pretty much anything with an LTE modem connect.


I use a Watch 6 Classic, just went in to find this toggle. Doesn't seem to exist in the Japanese market at least.


He was involved in the design, planning, and future-proofing one of the major redesigns of Google's data center fabric. Google, AFAIK still uses a derivative of the fabric today.

Disc: Former Googler, Cloud Networking.


Except that any lawyer worth their salt won't touch AI for fear of getting disbarred.


CarPlay and Android Auto only really started seeing adoption in post 2017 Model Year vehicles.

Anyone I know that has one, will immediately either plugin or connect whenever they go live.

There's other benefits like (in the aforementioned article), CarPlay Ultra being able to send data to multiple screens like the front dash. Where having my directions right next to me speed means I don't have to check two screens.


Oh, that's really cool. For about two years the car I drove and the phone I had lined up such that I could kind of wedge it in the front dash next to the speedometer, and that was for sure a better location than the dash mount I have now. I'd forgotten about that.


You're conflating two things, magnitude and intensity.

This earthquake was measured as a 6.9 moment magnitude, sometimes referred to incorrectly as the "Richter" scale.

The Shindo intensity system is measured without decimal places. In this particular case, the intensity was a 6+. Which isn't the highest, but is still quite severe.


And the Shindo system is best described as "what it feels like at the specific location"

So an earthquake can be a 4 at the epicenter, a 3 a little further away, a 2 even further away, and so on.

Common online conversation with a friend in a different prefecture may be something like, "Last night's earthquake was a 3 here, how about you?"


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