One day at Akihabara

Akihabara, the famous electric town of Japan, offer plenty of things that an electrical or electronics engineer needs. So it's a heaven for a guy like me. Furthermore, it is an anime heaven too and wonderful for a guy like me, who love One Piece. (although i don't fancy AKB48 or Gundam) but there are a nice AKB48 cafe and a gundam cafe just outside the Akihabara JR station, which are attracting plenty of customers from morning til night everyday. There is even one AKB theater in the town (i didn't go in before coz i don't fancy them). One more thing i don't fancy is the "tax-less" electrical appliances shops in the electric town that targeting oversea customers. i don't really understand about the concept. I rather buy these kind of things in my own country as the prices here are still more expensive even in no tax condition. (although i'm an engineer, i don't fancy buying bombastic and sophisticated stuffs, all stuffs that i possessed are cheapest in price-performance graphs).

So today i came here for seminars. One of the things an engineer should do is to constantly update and upgrade his/her knowledge with the latest info/technology on the planet so that he or she can engineer a better product. For me, it's not effective enough to stay working everyday 14, 15 hours and trying to figure out what went wrong. A fresh day with new inputs helps to clean up and refresh ur mind. i always got some new ideas for my project after attending seminars/exhibitions.

i attended some seminars today related to stuffs like microcontrollers, computers, microprocessors... it was a great day listening to a few great speakers. But i must mention this, from the many times i attended these kind of seminars, i noticed that except for a few guys include me, most of the attendees were uncle (ojisan) level. Where were those young japanese engineers disappeared to??? Are not they suppose to come to this kind of events to learn more while they are still young?? Is this what we called an "aging society" that troubling Japan? I really hope all those bosses will let their young employees to go out and breath in the latest knowledge available, and just don't keep them do all those photocopying and document editing stuffs in the office, it's not gonna help. Sooner or later the R&D knowledge will start vanishing to nowhere for a developed society like Japan. One more thing, only asking the youngsters to attend those "newbies training programs" is not gonna help either. they should be exposed to more than that, i think.

So one of the hot topics recently in Japan is the use of ARM processors. Like Intel computer, we can do programming and other stuffs with ARM computers. So what's the ARM processors? it is the brain that powering the Apple's iphone, almost all the smartphones in the market => includes samsung, toshiba etc, our cars and many more. They are using the same technology, or we called "core architecture" designed by this british company, ARM. So for Japan, the good news is they also start to use this processor to design their products. It's great becoz in this globalization world, use of foreign technology is not a big deal. But, the problem is.... Until recently, Japanese company were designing their own computer architecture for their products.  However, in order to cut cost and other factors, people start buying license from ARM so they no need to design their own stuffs. Good thing is, you save money in short term. But, bad thing is, you are losing those computer architecture designers that formed the backbone of the electronics industry in Japan. When you stop doing R&D, you stop passing knowledge to younger generation, and you will start depending on imported technology. Hence, it's a complicated situation.

But in conclusion, i really hope that Japan will keep on designing the architecture like what we have in the past. One of the representative products is the "Cell Processor" jointly developed by Toshiba, Sony and IBM that was used to powered the Toshiba's 3D glassless TV, Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox 360 and others.....