Re: tlug: parallel-port IDE

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> As for gaijin, I don't see why a gaijin guru would come to Japan,
> except for the food.

There's a typo in there: it must read "despite the food" :-)))).
Well, if japan would offer dream conditions to them, they sure
would come. But that is clud cuckoo land thinking so far.

At present if a guru considers a move Japan sure is at the end
of the list of places to move to, and rightly so.

> Because he's got the keys to the machine room.  Sheesh.

Only interesting if there's something interesting in there. I
doubt the latter however.

> Believe that if you like, Karl-Max.  You'd be surprised what
> academically-trained people can do once freed from the supervision of
> the professoriate, though.

Sure. IF they are freed. And that isn't in view at all. On the
other hand, during most of my life I7ve heard academics talking
about interesting stuff and the non academics making it work.
Which didn't do a good job of providing me of a high opinion of
academics.....

> Believe that if you like, Karl-Max.  That's what the president of GM
> said circa 1970, and we all know what happened to the Western auto
> industry.

Thanks for that, Steve. Another opportunity to talk a little bit
about history.

About 40 km west of Munich there is a smaller city called
Augsburg. It is the home of KUKA, a companies whose main
business is garbage collection trucks.

At the end of the 70's KUKA came to the conclusion that it was
high time to do some major rationalisation. They decided that
industrial robots were the way to go. As they didn't find
anything in the marketplace that fit their needs, they started
developing and manufacturing robots themselves.

The first robots they made were used in their own factory with
tremendous success. Seeing that they decided that their robots
could be of use to others, too, and started offering them for
sale.

They didn't have much success with that. Robots weren't exactly
on the radar screens of management types in Europe yet.

Until some guys from japan came. They wanted to buy their entire
annual production, whatever that was. The more, the better.

It went like this for several years. Then sales to Japan
levelled off.

In the meanwhile the guys of KUKA were curious and tried to find
out what went on. They found out that their customers used the
robots to set up robot factories to manufacture robots much
alike theirs.

After robot production in Japan was ramped up enough, they ( and
other automation tools ) were put to work on a massive scale in
all sorts of volume producing industries.

Thus, while western industries tarried along in getting
automation for their own good, Japan - within only a few years -
became the region with an industrial infrastructure that was by
far the most automated in the world.

This - together with a careful selection of areas where huge
amounts of goods could be sold - soon gave them domination in
these fields.

Car manufacturing was close to ideal for that. Even today's cars
are technically pretty much what they were almost a century ago
 - there are no fundamental changes - nor were there any to be
expected in the future.

The automated industries in Japan - when working in large volume
mode - could produce cars at a much lower cost than the still
largely traditional industries in the rest of the world.
Consequently they were outcompeted.

This was also done on several other fields: tv's radios etc. all
those fields had one thing in common: progress was rather slow
in them.

Thus Japan prospered with a weird concept: using
technology from outside to make goods using technology from
outside as well to make goods to sell to outside.

It worked as long as the outside industries slept and didn't do
the same. Well they eventually woke up. One of the first was
Volkswagen. At the end of the eighties Volkswagen started a
massive automation program - even making their own robots.
Within less than two years they chucked out Japanese
manufacturers for the most part. Pretty much the same happened
in other industries. Gone was the Japanese superiority !

This ended with the "bubble burst", the end of the "bubble
economy" in Japan.

Unfortunately in the times of its well being Japan did
absolutely nothing to prepare for the post industrial era. This
fact is largely to blame for its present problems.

Japan still is plagued by an assortment of antiquated and rigid
structures that are pure poison in the information age. They
could be tolerated in a mass production centered era, but not in
an era where rapid movemnts and high flexibility are essential.

> I don't deny it's a danger, but you underrate the human capacity to
> catch up to other humans.

I don't ! Humans sure can do it easily if unimpeded in their
movements. It just doesn't work if they are caught in the corset
of bureaucratic, stubborn and immobile structures whic are -
unfortunately - still a hallmark of Japan.

In other words, I fear you severeley underrate the devastating
influence of the concrete head suits.....

================================================================
"It was hell. They knew it.          Karl-Max Wagner
  But they called it                 karlmax@example.com
    W-I-N-D-O-Z-E"
================================================================
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