Pc Jisakuha's publisher is Microdesign,the creator of the ad-free magazine PasoconHihyo. Just like PasoconHihyo, PC Jisakuha boasts a lot of text and does not include any advertisements. PC Jisakuha translates as "those who make their own PCs," so of course the magazine is quite technically oriented and talks about various motherboards and chipsets for powerful homemade machines.

One would think that even those who opt to make their own machines would choose Windows as their preferred OS, but not so. The magazine claims that although Windows is definitely the mainstream, there are other operating systems that are worth looking into. Contrary to the common belief that most other operating systems have become extinct, there is actually a number of them still in use. The magazine picks those that are compatible with MS-DOS, first looking at ReactOS, once known as FreeWindows, a GUI OS that is planned to be distributed on the Internet along with its source code (http://www.sid-dis.com/reactos).

After introducing a number of other MS-DOS compatible OSes such as FreeDOS and DR-DOS 7.02, and UNIX OSes such as Linux, BSD, and MINIX, the magazine devotes a page to IB/V3, a Japanese born-and-bred OS developed by Professor Ken Sakamura of Tokyo University. Apart from all JIS kanji characters, IB is capable of displaying and printing more than 10,000 kanji including Chinese and Korean characters. No longer does one have to create a difficult kanji character from scratch just because the computer doesn't have it --IB/V3 has it all. The magazine tests its installation and printing capabilities, Internet connection, analyzes its GUI and multi-task functions, file management in hypertext format, and rates them all favorably. However, IB/V3's files cannot be accessed by other operating systems because IB does not use a FAT file system. Subsidiary JIS characters are not often transferable to other OSes. Plus, there is very little software available for the IB/V3 environment. The magazine concludes that it could develop as a word processor operating system, that is, an operating system for those who deal with professional, multi-lingual writing.

Another interesting article is "How to Turn Your PC into a TV Phone." TV phone here is defined as a PC with a video capture function video card, small CCD camera, and special software, using the Internet for image and audio transfer. A PC TV phone is relatively cheap, even including the CCD camera and software purchases, compared to other TV phone technology. The author had to follow the magazine's precept and build a PC from scratch best suited to TV phone. After the ´200,000 hardware setup, the author went onto testing the actual online functions using software called CU-See Me developed by Cornell University. Despite the expectation, the conversation went rather slowly with a few lost connections. The author concludes that until 128Kbps ISDN and other faster lines are more widely used, the self-made TV phone PC is not yet practical.

The September issue of Nikkei Science has only one IT-related article. We know about encryption used on networks, the cracking of which would require a few billion years by current supercomputers. However, the computer of the future -- the "quantum computer" -- might be able to process this calculation in less than a year. The author of the article, an MIT researcher, says that current computers' technological advances will some day come to a dead end due to the physical limitations of minimizing circuit sizes. Higher specification semi-conductors are also phenomenally expensive to develop. However, quantum mechanics could solve all this. In conventional computers, bits are expressed in a binary series of ones and zeros, meaning n bits can express a number, two to the power of n. On the contrary, a quantum computer's basic unit is a "qubit."

Qubit handles the different energy states of an atom, as well as zero and one. The amount of information handled is then increased to the level where a quantum computer can equal a number of super parallel computers of today. The atoms comprising the qubit have a number of numerical values that are observed before and after factors like electrons and light are applied.

All this has great potential but of course there are many underlying problems in actually realizing the computer. First, there is a problem of decoherence -- a phenomenon where on application of light and electrons, the previous state of the atom converges to just one particular state, thus disabling the super parallel computation with different energy states. This means that the "core" of a quantum computer has to be isolated from the surrounding environment. The researchers have discovered that with a technology called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), they can manipulate the quantum information of atoms comprising a mass of liquid. The liquid is regarded as a collection of a vast number of independent quantum computers. Each qubit is expressed in terms of a mass of molecules; therefore, even if some of the molecules react to the surrounding environment and decoherence occurs, there are still a number of unaffected molecules. However this is where the second problem arises. The present NMR devices' abilities limit the optimum quantum computer to less than 10 qubits, but can go as high as 40. Should a quantum computer with a vast number of qubits be built, the abilities of NMR will have to be greatly improved. With liquid quantum computers, there will be no need for microscopic electric circuits and other nanotechnology used today.

There are still a number of technological hurdles, but the author remains optimistic. He says that in the future, a computer might not look like the box we are so used to. Instead, it might more resemble a cup of coffee. Imagine that.�<

Back to the table of contents