As the owner of a Juno 106, I can't disagree. In the 90's, to me, it was Panasonic video gear that I found amazing. Had to take apart a couple of toughbooks tonight, and they are great little machines.
Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.
Exactly. There's a lot of value placed on expert craftsmanship or just...being an extreme nerd about some niche thing, as well as on the act of creating things. Whatever you're interested in, there's some random person in Japan who's really good at it.
It resonates with me, because I get uncomfortable if I do too much passive consumption and am not making something.
What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
> What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
The only Apple product I still have is a 2010 ipad 1. Only use it as a clock, violin tuner, and workout timer, but am amazed it's still going like an old volkswagen.
I wonder if Paul remembers that his company (Apple Corp.) had several trademark lawsuits[1] against Apple Computer over the name. Which is why System 7 had a alert sound called "sosumi".
By the same standard, Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers." Chrome doesn't only download from Google's servers, but the same thing applies to yt-dlp.
I'm equally not "surprised" by their bad behavior, but that shouldn't stop us from condemning Google for unethically misleading people and engaging in browser monopoly abuse.
---
EDIT: holding up (hilariously) RIAA lawyers as ethical role models only proves my point, thanks.
Actually that is what they want you to believe. Behind the scenes, secretly Chrome is mostly "a tool to upload files to Google's servers" but because it does not require any actions from the user to do that, many people miss that part.
I am sure that RIAA lawyers would rofl at this yt-dlp labelling being an example of Google "... unethically misleading people and (committing) browser monopoly abuse". I want to live in that fantasy world with you though.
Come to our fantasy Linux land anytime you want. We circumvent all of the strange things both RIAA, MPAA, Google and many other companies do to attempt to lock information into a box with only one hole they allow you to look through.
Our fantasy land gets better every time your reality gets worse.
> Chrome itself is "a tool to download files from Google's servers."
...legitimately. While Google (I will reinforce: Google, not everyone) sees downloading of the videos and other content from the YouTube by third-party services as illegitimate because of YouTube's ToS. After all, they're making money from the YouTube Premium and "Download" option provided by it, so things like that are kinda expected to happen.
And no, I don't agree that it's right. While I can understand the position of Google, the method they (allegedly) used here... Well... I don't even know what to say. That's plainly wrong, in my opinion. After all, "download" is defined as "To transfer (data or a program) from a central computer or website to a peripheral computer or device." by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Edition), so when you just watch videos, you download them already, don't you? What about watching them in browser, somewhere in embed on some website? Does that constitute a legitimate client (I guess so, because most of embeds still use YouTube Player after all)? That just makes me laugh : )
The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per day. Something will have to give.
I thought the AR UI in "Rainbow's End"[1] made more sense than hand gestures: with digital clothing, all of our movements become controls. And we each train our inputs according to our own slight tweaks and movements. Also, pretty sure this book was a big impetus for Google, Meta, etc to get started with AR, drones, and self-driving cars.
Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.
reply