91–100 of 243 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And we can blame greed of a Japanese man for actually causing the failure
If you're referring to Masayoshi Son he's Korean by ethnicity, Japanese by nationality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The title is certainly clickbait-y. But the content is still interesting. And not sloppy.
It is, but claiming that it was "killed by the US government", and suggest it would have became the dominant OS is dubious at best. So it's not just clickbait-y, it misleading at best if not just a lie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance. That's not "hype".
Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution. (P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictato…
In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself. People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given wh…
> One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic. I can't tell if you're a tankie or a bot but Russia is right now conducting an unprovoked war against a democracy with no foreign policy goal other than to destroy Ukraine and seize its assets. Where Russia has been forced out of Ukraine it's left behind war crimes and mass civilian graves. So experience shows, there is no safe surrender for Ukr…
I think the main reasons behind BTRON failure like in the domestic market. I really don't know much about this period but here is my understanding. BTRON was never an OS, but rather a specification, a set of standards for how BTRON-compatible operating systems should behave. This is quite similar to POSIX, but the standard covered significantly more than POSIX (e.g. HMI guidelines and character encoding) and the BTRON standard came _before_ the implementations. But just like POSIX, there was no guaranteed ABI compatibility. And to make things worse, every implementation had to be rewritten from scratch, while most Unix distributions before GNU traced their code all the way back to AT&T Unix.
The other issue is that with BTRON1, the OS implementation seem to have been expected to be developed by the hardware vendor - they were not envisioned as highly portable operating systems yet.
The different OSs were supposed to be developed by OEM vendors and interated directly into their hardware (especially with BTRON1). From what I could find, only 3 vendors have signed up for BTRON: Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and OKI[1]. As far as I can tell, out of the three, only Panasonic ended up releasing BTRON-based computers. Panasonic went quite heavy on TRON and released multiple BTRON products, but Panasonic was a minor player in the home PC market in 1990[2].
Another small company that picked up BTRON was Personal Media. They released a sizable variety of BTRON-based hardware during the years and eventually started releasing it as a software package. In fact, they're still active today, rleasing it as chokanji, running inside a VM on Windows[3]. They basically took BTRONs impressive Kanji support and pivoted to an IME allowing inputting Kanji characters outside of Unicode.
The names that are missing from this story are all the big players in the PC industry in Japan in the 1990s. It's obvious why IBM Japan wasn't onboard, but NEC had its own monopoly to protect and Fujitsu and EPSON were clearly not interested[4]. CTRON, on the other hand, was picked up by NTT, which is probably the only company that mattered in Japanese telecommunications back in the early 1990s. BTRON had a window of opportunity in 1990, since Japan (or the rest of the world for that matter) did not have a dominant GUI platform yet. But in a market where the OS came with the hardware, lackluster vendor supported kinda sealed the deal.
[1] https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29
[2] AFAIK it was heavily dominated by NEC, with the smaller players bein Toshiba, Fujitsu and Epson. In 1990, when the first BTRON implementations were released, the dominant standard was PC-98, which was developed by NEC, with Toshiba and Epson making PC-98 clones. Even though all these computers were running x86 and usually ran on MS-DOS, they were NOT compatible with IBM PCs. This is mostly due to IBM PC not having enough RAM to display Kanji, so the which Japanese PC manufacturers in the 1980s solved with custom Kanji ROM chips. Getting Kanji support throughout the stack also meant heavily modifying MS-DOS and producing a different software stack that is tied to the custom hardware.
1990 is also the year that both DOS/V (a localized version of DOS that had built-in Kanji support) and Windows 3.0 were released, and both of them eventually lead to the death of domestic Japanese PC standards, since they could sufficiently support Kanji in software. 286 and 386 based PCs with extended memory were also powerful enough now to support Kanji in software, and DOS/V and Windows provided a standard application runtime environment for that. But this eventual standardization took time and back in 1990, PC-98 dominated the home market, while IBM managed to get some corporate market share with its PS/55 (an IBM PC variant with a custom display adapter with its own Kanji ROM).
[4] OP happily mentions NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu, but it fails to mention that they joined other TRON initiatives (ITRON, CTRON and The TRON chip) and explicitly declined to join BTRON.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the idea that Windows is a "better OS" really seems accurate for people in the Third World. This is because Korean language support on Linux is terrible Who in the third world is supposed to speak Korean?
In this case, I'd appreciate it if you could understand it as my 'native language.' When you input a language that isn't English into a computer, it often doesn't work well with ASCII—it frequently breaks in many places. Because the standards for computer work are mostly set by the US, people in Asia often call the ASCII system 'the privilege of one byte.' A single hardware switch maps directly to one byte of memory.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself. People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given wh…
> why we keep hitting the Russians 1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia is the odd one out here, in that it was started by Russian incursions as far back as 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_occupation_of_Crimea The think tank argument is very valid though. You can no longer find "Project for the new American Century" online, but they laid out the invasion of Iraq before 9/11 (the pretext) even happened.
Gosh, now I wonder why they would have possibly intervened at that particular time. No geopolitical analysts anywhere could have ever predicted the reaction of Russia to the possibility of Sevastopol becoming a NATO Naval base and US forward strike forces and missile base setting up shop just 250 miles away from Moscow...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The report stated that the US had concerns about Japanese government market intervention to support the TRON OS and identified two specific markets where TRON was receiving government advantage. The US government is one hell of a moat.
The financial center of the world selects its winners nearby. As simple as that. Businesses outside of the US have never had much of a chance. China does the same now, as the engineering center of the world. And they have to because the financial center is hyping them as a threat.