JJNN 27 June 18th, 2008

Welcome again to JJNN for Wednesday June 18th, 2008. Today I will be talking about two computer related stories.

The first story is about something that is incredibly heartbreaking. The original story can be found here. I think that anyone that has used a computer has felt the pain associated with the loss of data or a full system crash. Crashes and data loss are very hard to deal with and end up giving the computer user a lot of stress, so Symantec Corporation wanted to find out was just how stressful the situation really is.

Symantec Corporation polled 1000 people that had 3 or more years of internet experience and were over 15 years old for about a month on the Internet. The thousand people were given a couple of situations and were asked to rate the stress level of the situations from 0 to 10. The average for a computer crash that leads to a non-working computer is 6.99. The average for all the computers on your computer disappearing is 6.98. Some other non-computer related situations were a lost wallet (7.99), loosing a friend (7.41), and getting sick or hurt (7.32). At the bottom of the list is breaking up with a girlfriend or boyfriend which was 6.03. Yep, a breakup is not as traumatic as looking all your data. Hmmm...

As always, I wonder about these polls. I mean they are rating their own stress levels, and that can't be an easy thing to do. In the end it probably makes a very fuzzy study. The error bars will probably end up being larger than one standard deviation. It is an interesting poll, but they really have to find a better way to take data.

The second story is about firefox 3.0. Oh yes, got to love firefox. You may be wondering what I am doing talking about firefox when I am suppose to be talking about news from Japan. Well, it turns out that firefox is really being pushed in Japan.

Before I go into that I want to talk about firefox a little bit. Firefox is an Internet browser made by the Mozilla company. It is currently the second most popular Internet browser (after IE). Personally I like firefox. 2.0 was a bit clunky and loved to devour memory, but that was fixed in 3.0 (or so I have been told...I haven't had a chance to get 3.0, but I was using the release candidate for a while.

Any way, Mozilla is targeting Japan with advertising for firefox. Normally it would be the smart thing to get a newspaper add or maybe a TV add, but Mozilla had a different idea. They decided to put their ad on the small screens of the trains that run on the Yamanote line in Tokyo. You can see the advertisement below.



The advertisement goes thus:
Fox: If you are going to use the Internet...!
Crowd: Firefox!
Fox: It's damn fast!
Crowd: Firefox!
Fox: I... I'm getting addicted!
Crowd: Firefox!
Narrator: This time the fox is damn fast!

Got to love to see a fox jump around like that. Makes me want to go out and get 3.0 right away.

Any way, it is now time for the word of the day. Today's word is 失恋(しつれん). It is pronounced shitsuren and means breakup up with someone. I still don't see how the emotional washing machine that is a breakup can be less stressful than loosing data. Data can always be replaced in some way, but a crazy ex-girlfriend is priceless I guess.

That's it for today. See you next time at JJNN.