Mr. Liu Shu Ye, chairman of the Japanese language department at Changchun Taxation College in Jilin Province, China, has used the BTRON3-specification Cho Kanji 3 operating system to write his Ph.D. dissertation. According to a report in the "Digital Trend" column at the Yomiuri Shimbun's Web site, Mr. Liu wrote his Ph.D. dissertation, "Evidential Research on Chinese and Japanese-Korean Chinese Loan Words," with Cho Kanji 3 because he couldn't find anything else on the market that would allow him to incorporate the Chinese characters of China, Japan, and Korea into a single text. Originally, he thought he would have to laboriously write his dissertation by hand. However, while on sabbatical at Waseda University, he heard from a friend about Cho Kanji 3, which he was told could handle any and all Chinese characters without any problem. Mr. Liu has now become a convert to the TRON movement, and he is very enthusiastic about spreading the BTRON3-specification operating system into China and Korea.
Personal Media Corporation announced on October 13 that it had completed development of a system utility for the Cho Kanji 3 operating system that allows the system language used in menus and panels to be switch into and out of Esperanto. (Click here for a screen shot of Cho Kanji 3 with a Esperanto interface.) Called Cho Kanji esuperanto taioo kitto [Cho Kanji Esperanto compatibility kit], the new utility was prepared in cooperation with the Esuperanto TRON Kenkyuukai [Esperanto TRON study society], which translated close to 2,000 display items between March and August of this year. According to reports, this new utility, which is called "EspeTRON" for short, is the first of its type in the world of personal computing.
Cho Kanji 3 users who would like to download EspeTRON should click the following link.
http://www.chokanji.com/download/ck3esp.html
For those who would like to know more about the Esperanto language, here is a detailed English-language FAQ.
http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq.txt
For Esperanto speakers who would like to know more about BTRON and EspeTRON, here is the Esperanto press release.
http://www.wombat.zaq.ne.jp/esperanto/tron/pbe01o13.htm
The TRON Association held its second "21st Century Microelectronics" seminar on October 9 and 10 at Gate City Hall in Ohsaki, Tokyo. This year, three foreign firms participated in the presentations--ARM Ltd., Intel Corp., and Transmeta Corp.--and for the first time there was a foreign speaker, Mr. David Ditzel of Transmeta Corp. For that reason, two-way simultaneous interpreters were employed to handle communication between the foreign speaker and the audience on the first day of the seminar. According to the TRON Association, approximately 100 people were in the audience on both days. The program for the event was as follows:
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Following on the heels of its "Mac-de Cho Kanji," the standard Cho Kanji 3 operating system software package with bundled applications plus an emulator designed to run on Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh personal computers, Personal Media Corp. is now experimenting with a similar software package for use on top of Microsoft Corp.'s MS Windows operating system. Like the Mac-oriented version, this software package is based on Connectix Corp.'s Virtual PC emulator--specifically "Virtual PC for Windows 4.0"--which is designed to mimic the IBM-PC/AT-compatible hardware environment on Microsoft's Windows NT, Windows Me, and Windows 2000 operating systems.
Using Cho Kanji 3 from inside MS Windows has some advantages over using it in a separate partition. In particular, it makes it easy to access Japanese-language data written with the unabridged kanji character set in Cho Kanji 3 from MS Windows. In addition, the user will be able to employ the powerful Character Search utility and hypertext functions within Cho Kanji 3. Of course, critics will reply that since the operating system will be running in emulation, it will be running much slower than normal. That's true. However, the microprocessors powering today's Intel-based personal computers operate a speeds at 1 GHz or more, which should allow Cho Kanji 3 to be very responsive to inputs from the user.
For a full-screen image of the BTRON operating system running on MS-Windows click here. Please note that the Chinese character selected in this image--the character for 'dragon'--is the character mention at the beginning of the interview between Prof. Ken Sakamura and author Hiroshi Aramata (see our Interviews section for the interview in which Mr. Aramata describes what Chinese characters mean in East Asian society).
NTT DoCoMo Inc. began TRON-based, commercial 3G cell-phone service in October, after a five month delay to correct technical problems and carry out technical trials with specially selected users. The new service, which the company calls Freedom of Multimedia Access (FOMA), is the world's first third-generation wireless service based on the Wide-Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) standard, and it boasts vastly higher speeds than higher speeds than wireless systems currently in use in other countries. The only drawback with FOMA is the high cost of the handsets and the high monthly charges, but both of these are expected to drop in the next few years.
There are some interesting comments about what the "killer app" for FOMA will be at the J@pan Inc Web site.
http://www.japaninc.com/newsletters/index.html?list=WW&issue=31
Here is an interesting article about the cell-phone business by an Italian who highly appraises the TRON Project.
http://www.vxm.com/Impact.3G.html
