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No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

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Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#41

Post by yongjik »

ibisum wrote: post #27
hvs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was really bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home I highly recommend it. It's called having a life.

Saying that having a strong work ethos means 'not having a life' is about as derogatory as you can get without actually calling someone names .. whereas I found that the Japanese integration of work/home life really meant that there was more focus on really caring about what you were doing. Okay, there are exceptions, but I have to say that it was very clear to me that the two cultures have their own ways. It was con…

I'm not so sure about "strong work ethos" part. I believe Korean work culture is reasonably close to that of Japan, and one of the things most frequently mentioned by Koreans who emigrate to work in a western company is that people really concentrate on working (and nothing else) during work time.

I.e., there's no time for reading newspapers or surfing the web, and much less time for "spending time with your coworkers." Instead you do your work, and when your work is done (or if it's 5 pm), you go home. Which actually means you must work hard, because if you slack off and spend the evening in the workplace, your manager may start to wonder if you are fit for the job (unlike Korea, where your manager may question your competence if you leave on time).

Maybe Japanese work ethics is somewhat better (well, surely they have a much better economy...), but I'm skeptical. There's a limit on how much most people can work with concentration. Make them work longer, and they'll compensate by spending their time in distraction.

* On the other hand I'm working in a US company and writing comments in HN, so there's that...

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#42

Post by chc »

ibisum wrote: post #26
w1ntermute wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.

> You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time. I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive…

How in the world do you interpret "see their families" as "private time on the road"? This isn't a commuting fetish. It's the idea that there is lots of life — most of it, in fact — to enjoy outside the office. If you really enjoy hanging out with your colleagues, you could do it outside of work. But if you have other friends or family members you'd like to see, you can't do that at work, and it wouldn't be very high-quality time anyway if you're working.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#43

Post by w1ntermute »

ibisum wrote: post #26
w1ntermute wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.

> You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they probably could've gotten their work done in half that time. I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and less time doing things that were highly destructive…

> sitting in traffic for hours

Have you bothered to actually look at the statistics? Americans have some of the shortest commute times in the OECD, while the Japanese have some of the longest: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commut...

> being very un-social

This is entirely subjective, but I've found that Americans are much more sociable, particularly with strangers, than the Japanese (or most Europeans) are.

> breathing in smog

Again, have you looked at the statistics? According to recent OECD data, America is less polluted than Japan: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/environment/

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#46

Post by infruset »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #24

I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)

They come in to work and they do what? What service is it?

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#47

Post by rambojohnson »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #24

I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)

> they shout "HAI" hit login button.

what?

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#48

Post by rakoo »

jgalt212 wrote: post #4

Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no matches, so this might also be related. Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx 2X. Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 ch…

No, the 140 characters don't mean 140 bytes [0]. A zigzag read seems to indicate that it's much more accepting than that: Every character is normalized to a preset format, such that combinations like é are represented in a single codepoint (and not "e plus diacritic" which would be two), and then you count the number of codepoints.

So, contrary to popular belief, the languages that could be discriminated seem to not be chinese or japanese, but languages with possible combinations on each character, such as european languages.

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#49

Post by marak830 »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #24

I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not enough to handle that ;-)

Hahaha. I live in japan and i can definatly agree with this!!!

Re: No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter

#50

Post by hawkw »

dragonwriter wrote: post #9
josephschmoe wrote: post #6

"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak" Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...

> Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right? I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in" to technology. So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant portion" of Wired's readers were…

I feel like Wired goes back and forth a lot - some of their articles (on a number of topics, not just computer-related) are pleasingly technical and I've really enjoyed them, and some feel really watered down. Probably, it depends on the individual writer.
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