I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.
I forget if it was Samsung or Sony, but somewhere along the way on my internet journey, someone claimed, without evidence, and thus I have none either, that the incentive structure for having prestige jobs at large technology companies was always in hardware design and software was seen as easier and more low class.
So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?
This is historically the reason software engineering in Japan has lagged and there's such a talent shortage (leading companies like mine to hire mostly foreign software engineers). I've heard it's changing, but it'll take a long time to catch up.
Yes this is true and it might possibly be true for the rest of East Asia though I'm not sure. Software is considered intangible and thus low value that anyone can do, whereas hardware is a real "thing" that you can hold in your hands, and is therefore more prestigious. Well, this way of thinking has made things into the current state.
This was and partly is the attitude you can find in german non-software businesses where software is gaining more and more influenxe. For example car manufacturing.
Yeah this is probably downstream of the fact that if you visit any of the individual JR sites from the expandable map at the bottom, you'll discover they're all down at this time as well. Let's scrap the website and make a staffed phone line or fax machine with operating hours.
After receiving the orders that were actually printed from an Internet Explorer 6 only website, and faxed over from another office before being re-scanned in along with a barcode that usually failed to make it over the fax, hence the need to hand-type things. True story (not for JR specifically, but circa 2013)
Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.
I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.
The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.
At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.
I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back, fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment said though, subscription process was almost user hostile for some reason.
I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!
The UK driving licence authority (DVLA) also has a period in which you can’t conduct a range of transactions overnight, but that’s because it interfaces with systems that still run batch jobs overnight and the cost of making it all 24/7 simply wasn’t worth it considering the demand.
A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".
I’ve heard such things in the US were because of accessibility law that required the website (for the general population) to work no better than the associated call center (for the people who can’t interact with the website for whatever reason).
On one hand, that seems obviously stupid. On the other, I don’t see how you could phrase a legal requirement of this nature.
That's better than my assumption, which was that it was running off the Visual Foxpro instance on somebody's desktop and that guy had to be logged in for it to work.
this is also relatively common in Denmark, at least for government sites. One common thing you see (saw, haven't noticed in the last couple years) in Danish .gov sites is queuing where you need to wait some time before you are allowed in to use a site.
Getting ready for a trip to Japan, I spent an embarrassing amount of time troubleshooting failures to load a Suica (train/transit) NFC card on a phone before realizing it just doesn’t work a few hours a night Tokyo time.
The Suica app doesn't even work on my Pixel 10 Pro, since it requires an Android phone with some sort of Japan-specific hardware (FeliCa/Osaifu-Keitai technology, whatever that is, I'm assuming some special NFC or secure enclave sort of thing).
One of the worst sites in existence is the Japanese Visa site they direct people to to make QR codes for when you land in Japan as a tourist. It's atrocious.
if you're talking about the train booking site going down -- struggling elders are still using the face to face or phone support. they probably have never made an online reservation.
I can't believe there are also other people downrange who don't get it, but in case anyone has a broken sarcasm detector:
Yes, this blog post is meant to be whimsical and tongue-in-cheek because the post takes itself too seriously by pretending like one user leaving to another platform (for 2 years GASP!!) with a big scary countdown timer is a credible threat to a multi-trillion dollar company. The real part of the post is the request and complaining about the bug.
Yep, lol. Example 364023 of high prevalence of autism accompanied by an arrogant need to weigh in aggressively despite these people having to had realized by this point in their lives that if something completely doesn't make sense, it's worth sitting it out in the case that it is indeed sarcasm.
As an autistic/ADHD[1], I can assure you that we do get sarcasm, and it's not autism that hinders that ability. In fact, this very post is peak autistic humor. (Deadpan comedy is trademark autism[2]).
>accompanied by an arrogant need to weigh in aggressively
Ding-ding, that's the winner! A necessary and sufficient condition for comments of that sort to appear.
Not exclusive to people on the spectrum either, mind you.
It needs to be because the US has leaned further into individualism relative to other countries. If society's golden metric of success means being able to acquire all of these luxuries or services purely through monetary means as transactional individuals, don't be too surprised when the expenses rack up.
Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition.
Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of.
I help my kids, but I don't expect them to help me. I want them to save their money to help their kids, otherwise I'm just taking from my grandkids.
Same when I help my siblings. If they pay me back, now I'm taking away from my nieces and nephews. Within friends/family, I think it's completely reasonably if the money flows "downhill".
This is the fundamental concept of the vast majority of taxes, including those that feed the poor/unemployed: that money is gone, somewhere between little and no personal return, but that usually makes sense, increasingly so with income.
Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of.
I think it also reflects a lense of US academia. It kind of assumes a sanitized, formal, self-sufficient life, detached from others - and then assumes anything other than that is an aberration.
It's kind of like the physics joke about assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum.
You're presumably looking at a source that's including water area. When talking about land area, China > USA > Canada. (As opposed to when including water area, Canada > USA > China)
Replaced the original iPhone SE battery recently with a higher capacity one. Works perfectly. Many apps require an update or else they refuse tor run, but outside of that, still doing well.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I never knew there were libraries with a subscription model. Hopefully that means the catalogues are really good and well-taken care of.
> The US is not one country. It's two that are radically different.
I can't help but roll my eyes. I understand this is supposed to be figurative and not literally mean there are two countries, but I still roll my eyes because no, it is just one country. It is one country that collectively decides stratification to this extent is fine.
This reminds me of when some people say "America isn't bad, it's the other party that's keeping us hostage." The rest of the world really doesn't care and is waiting for the US to get it together already. Other countries couldn't care less about a completely different country's peculiar internal differences that contribute to its overall terrible behavior. The US is one country and the buck stops there. If you can't get your house in order, then yes, the house is bad and can't take responsibility for domestic affairs.
Is this a strange concept due to you being European or because of your particular European country? I thought public libraries where you can borrow books is a common thing in Europe, but I could be wrong since I just assumed that.
No no no. Sure, there might be a future where solid state batteries become the standard for electric vehicles, but you cannot link to Donut Lab's announcement from this month. There is no credible evidence they've achieved the holy grail of batteries so far until they actually deliver these motorcycles in hand and people independently verify them.
Time will tell on their battery, especially if the bike they're putting it on delivers. I think the overall point could be that there's active R&D in trying to find geopolitically sustainable materials, and lowering the weight of materials used.
I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.
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