[HN Gopher] Japan's love affair with the fax machine (2021)
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Japan's love affair with the fax machine (2021)
Author : ecliptik
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-07-14 20:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| lsllc wrote:
| Fax is widely used in small to medium medical offices still in
| the US. Lab reports, radiology, referrals, prescriptions (for
| things like PT). End up in the ER on vacation? Unless your
| primary doc is in the same "health system" it's quite likely that
| the paperwork will be faxed from the ER to your doc.
| ajb wrote:
| Faxes, like modems, require an absolute timesync between the ends
| of the link. Packet networks are not designed to provide this,
| and a horrible hack (ITU T.38) is implemented in VoIP systems to
| fake it.Having had to debug an implementation of T.38 once, I
| expect that after a while no-one will bother to maintain it and
| these devices will stop working.Or they will just work only over
| email or some other mailbox system.
| donohoe wrote:
| Oh, am reminder of this 2020 story about the last pager user in
| Japan
|
| https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I just received a letter from the IRS asking for a document,
| which they said could be sent by post or by ... fax
| supernova87a wrote:
| By the way, the article isn't so much about the fax machine as
| about the Japanese belief that they were technologically leading
| the world (read it).
|
| I don't have a strong opinion about whether they were / continue
| to lead in tech, but I do have a strong belief that Japan and its
| general culture does lend itself to a much stronger valuing of
| _conscientiousness_ in work and doing things well / fully / to
| the best.
|
| Maybe that's a bit of cultural myth of course, which the Japanese
| benefit from propagating. (All the movies, mentions of people who
| take decades to perfect their craft; even small everyday jobs
| being done well; things on time; everyone polite, considerate,
| etc)
|
| But there definitely is something about what attentiveness to
| detail can achieve, when allowed to happen by emphasis of culture
| or the work at hand.
|
| I don't know if I or anyone I work with every gets to be
| conscientious about doing something really well and to high
| competence. It seems that everything I'm involved in is "let's
| try it and see whether it works" and then give up and move onto
| the next thing. Or "well, good enough".
|
| Which is good for some purposes and ends, but not good for
| developing a decades-long expertise, deep expertise and wisdom,
| about doing things.
| PakG1 wrote:
| This is an interesting comment. I once took an exchange course
| at Oxford regarding the history of business. One of the
| professor's lectures was on innovative edge and the issues it
| brings. He brought up various examples in history, but his most
| notable one was from Japan. Japanese swords were hardcore the
| best of the best. When foreigners first came to Japan, Japan
| laughed at their weaponry. Japan believed it had the pinnacle
| of weaponry and they were right for the most part, especially
| when it came to sword combat. But even the projectile weaponry
| that the foreigners brought also sucked in terms of operational
| reality. The Japanese sat confidently atop their mountain of
| sophistication. Then many many years later, foreigners came
| again, this time with more effective ships, cannons, guns, etc.
| The Japanese sword meant nothing in that context because the
| new weapons changed the rules of battle.
|
| It's interesting that Japan may keep experiencing this as a
| cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, there is beauty in
| seeking perfection in something, achieving it, and being
| satisfied with it. On the other hand, there is the risk of
| getting blindsided by a third party's innovation. Interestingly
| enough, after many years of 20-20 hindsight, the achievement of
| and satisfaction with perfection may be a more sustainable
| attitude than constantly trying to innovate. It's probably
| better for society and better for the environment. But humanity
| doesn't move forward if not for the innovation that breaks the
| rules. You probably want both in the world and constant tension
| between the two in order for the world because on their own,
| they probably both have issues.
| mattl wrote:
| Japanese hardware is usually up there with Apple in terms of
| quality.
|
| In my area, miniature modeling, Japanese tools and products are
| superior and cheaper than western alternatives from companies
| like Games Workshop
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| A decentralized p2p communication sytem. It even can voice chat
| ;-)
| hadlock wrote:
| Fax is plenty popular with small businesses in the US. A lot of
| it is efax but still plenty of fax in the US
| icedchai wrote:
| Certain industries in the US, such as construction, are still
| very dependent on fax machines.
| werdnapk wrote:
| A lot of prescriptions are still sent to pharmacies by fax.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Can't blame them, given how mediocre computer representation
| continues to be.
|
| Just hop onto any Wikipedia page about Chinese characters, and be
| perplexed at the non-displayability of many characters, eg
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%...
|
| Unicode just isn't a good solution for pictographic languages
| where new characters can be invented the same way new words can
| be coined in alphabetic languages. In practice this doesn't
| happen that often, but there's no reason they can't be; there's
| an annual creative kanji contest in Japan: https://sousaku-
| kanji.com/archive.html
| wk_end wrote:
| AFAIK the construction of new kanji is a novelty, not something
| of any real importance in communication.
|
| Japan has embraced UTF-8, and before that they embraced Shift-
| JIS - a homegrown encoding that also didn't support
| constructing new characters. Is there any encoding that works
| well for this particular case? AFAIK there aren't any of any
| prominence, which suggests that it's a non-issue - surely if
| constructing new characters was important to them, Japanese or
| Chinese or Taiwanese computer scientists and standards
| organizations would push for some kind of encoding that enabled
| it.
| hfhdjdks wrote:
| You're correct. Parent comment says something true (some /
| many characters don't have a representation in most fonts),
| but the inference it makes is wrong (this is a bottleneck for
| communication)
| Macha wrote:
| And specifically these characters that are not present in
| mainstream fonts are getting so far down the long tail that
| most natives wouldn't know how to write them, so would
| result in e.g. hiragana in Japanese if they knew the word
| at all. To some extent computers have even increased the
| variety of kanji usage as you'll get textbooks that
| describe a word as "usually written in kana" because it's
| infrequent enough that an average Japanese person wouldn't
| be confident to handwrite it from scratch, and so twenty
| years ago that meant they had to use Hiragana.
|
| But in these days of computer IMEs when they type it in
| phonetically and get a list of options presented to them,
| they're confident enough to pick one, and so the kanji gets
| used a lot more.
| hfhdjdks wrote:
| Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in
| chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure
| it applies to japanese too), what you're saying doesn't ring as
| relevant (i.e. it is true that some characters don't have a
| graphic representation in many fonts, but it doesn't cause
| problems for communication / creation of new words)
|
| Plenty of fonts can represent a vast amount of characters
| (search around, but even free fonts can have >50k), much more
| than even highly literate people could ever use (a very
| educated person might know 8k characters, but would use much
| less actively).
|
| Every new release of Unicode releases new characters that are
| slowly incorporated into fonts...but for many years these are
| on the truly long tail of characters, nothing that any common
| person would use. There might be a few exceptions with new
| characters (the new japanese emperor characters comes to mind),
| but the thing to bear in mind is that new words don't
| necessarily involve new characters. A big chunk of nouns in
| chinese are composed of multiple characters, so making a new
| combination can generate a new word (Dian Shi is
| television...electric + vision). This is probably even easier
| in japanese were they can use katakana to spell an English word
| and create a new japanese word.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes. Han Unification is something people read about online
| and decide is bad or whatever, but it actually isn't relevant
| to using Japanese with computers. People use Shift-JIS and
| fax machines because legacy technology takes a long time to
| die everywhere and longer in Japan. It's not more complicated
| than that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| This is correct: as much as it's wrong, Han Unification
| isn't a problem so long you stick to one language to
| support and remove all conflicting fonts for the other two
| locales, which are rarely needed anyway in Asia, it just
| comes back when you try to support multiple CJK languages
| at the same time. Unicode coverage of each languages are
| totally fine for 99% of use cases, the Unification problem
| is just it's reusing the same address space for all CJK
| languages.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| The problem is probably less prevalent in Japanese. There's
| like 10x less kanji than hanzi, and only 2-3k are normally
| used. Also faxes in Japan are generally sent using printed
| documents, so handwriting a very rare character doesn't
| explain the usage of faxes.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| > In practice this doesn't happen that often
|
| The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that
| neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters in a
| primarily pictographic manner anymore. Only a small subset of
| the characters are pictographic (and even they are only vaguely
| so), and unlike in the distant past, most words are actually
| compositions of several characters, so new words can be
| represented via either combinations of existing characters if
| applicable, or via borrowing existing characters for their
| pronunciation (or in the case of Japanese, using the syllabic
| characters).
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's super interesting: so even the 'well meaning' Unicode
| committee got a basic part of writing culturally very wrong:
| the assumption was that these are Alphabets, rather than living
| things. Alphabets change as well over time, but much more
| slowly than the words. Thanks for pointing this out.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think emojis were a mistake to include in Unicode.
|
| But they actually prove that we could continue adding
| characters, if the design allowed enough foresight in space
| designated to these evolving sets.
| Macha wrote:
| To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care
| about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the
| fact that they made English speaking users care about
| characters outside Latin-1 makes it worthwhile. Even from
| an English speaking country, running into software that
| wouldn't accept the EUR sign was a problem until the early
| 10s, and I think displaying emojis drives American
| companies more than displaying the euro sign or kanji.
|
| So I'll give emojis in Unicode a wide pass on criticism for
| their effect in making everyone actually support all of
| unicode, and making people give up things like MySQL's
| utf8mb3.
| elFarto wrote:
| Actually Unicode has something for character creation: 'IDS',
| or Ideographic Description Sequence. For example, the Chinese
| character for the word Biang[1] can be describe with:
|
| [?] Chuo [?] Xue [?] Yue [?] [?] Yao Yan Yao [?] Chang Ma Chang
| Dao Xin
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...
| kwanbix wrote:
| Well, here in Germany they still use them. Not the most used
| communication's device, but still used.
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's also very popular in Germany, for three simple reasons:
|
| 1. It is a written form, so you can sign things with a pen before
| faxing it. It functions like a scanned PDF.
|
| 2. You don't get spam like with email because the sender has to
| pay to reach you.
|
| 3. You get a confirmation that your document was received. And
| unlike email read receipts, those confirmations are honest
| because spam is not an issue.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > You don't get spam
|
| I recall 4chan faxing black pages taped together in an infinite
| loop to the church of Scientology.
| mbg721 wrote:
| In the US there always was occasional fax spam. I think I saw
| one maybe 5 years ago.
| unwind wrote:
| The US is known for having free local landline calls,
| something that as far as I know is not very common globally.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Remember the sheet fed by roller fax machines? Urban legend
| says that if you fed a piece of black construction paper into
| the sending machine and then tape the ends together after it
| had pulled through enough to do so would cause the receiving
| end to run out of toner and/or paper. Prank fax calls instead
| of SPAM.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Fax spam used to be a problem many years back (and some famous
| "DoS" attacks of faxing someone a completely black piece of
| paper on a loop to use up all their ink). Is that no longer the
| case? My guess in the US it's no longer a problem just because
| so few people use faxes anymore, but don't know about the rest
| of the world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Fax spam is absolutely a thing. 10 to 20 years ago or so, we
| had to use the software that comes with a brother MFC printer
| to digitally save the faxes because 99% was spam and it was
| wasting paper and toner.
| mattl wrote:
| One of my first jobs in the 90s was making fax software so my
| boss could send a newsletter to all of our customers who all
| had fax and virtually none had email or even internet access.
| One of the first things I worked on was getting our own
| virtual ISP by white labeling our ISP's services.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I run a smallish business in Germany (20+ employees) and we
| actually do have a fax machine. However, I wouldn't say it is
| used very often. The only thing I remember it was as used in
| the last year was for government grant which expected the
| signed quarterly time sheets to be faxed. So I think we used
| the fax machine 4 times last year. This probably still
| infinitely more than a lot of other countries, but I would say
| still very much an exception and not the norm. I think doctors
| still use them fairly frequently but I don't have much insides
| into that.
| vel0city wrote:
| Fax spam can be a thing. An old fax number at my office would
| get 1-2 spam faxes a week for a while. Often related to some
| kind of vacation membership scam.
| [deleted]
| xienze wrote:
| You're pitching email as the only viable alternative to a fax.
| It's not, you can use something like Docusign instead.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| These are all nice features but not the reason why faxes are
| still so popular in Germany. Its because Germany is years (some
| say decades) behind on digitizing the country and they need
| those fax machines to get anything done at all...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I would agree with you if I knew a technology that solved the
| same pain points as fax. Email is not the solution because
| you need to drop large amounts of incoming emails just
| because of spam. That means you can never rely on an email
| with an important document arriving. Snail mail is ... well
| ... slow. But it does arrive reliably and it does offer
| honest delivery tracking.
|
| As the example use case, let's go with me asking a potential
| supplier if they can provide a specific component.
|
| Which technology would an ideally digitized country use?
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Email? Or check the supplier catalogue online.
|
| Are you really sending a fax for that?
|
| Re : signatures. All my recent contracts have been sign
| with DocuSign. That's fine
| benatkin wrote:
| DocuSign and alternatives.
| krzyk wrote:
| Well, any other country (except Japan) has found a way. I
| don't recall when I had seen a fax machine in real life,
| there was one in the office 10 years ago, but it was one
| machine for about 1 thousand people.
|
| Sample solution is a website on which you send "email" (not
| real one, but the side shows it as such) - this way you can
| communicate with goverment (local and country level) in
| Poland.
|
| I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax them?
| Tainnor wrote:
| > I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax
| them?
|
| Many (most?) private households don't have a fax machine.
|
| There are several ways of submitting your taxes (e.g.
| mailing them in), but there's also the Elster app which
| makes this process fully digital:
| https://www.elster.de/eportal/start
|
| Plus various (mostly paid) third-party tools.
|
| It's also worth noting that filling out a tax report is
| optional for most(?) people that aren't self-employed,
| because taxes are automatically deducted from your
| salary. You're advised to fill them out, though, as
| usually you can get some money back (e.g. by deducting
| money for your commute and other things).
| noAnswer wrote:
| > I wonder, how do people in Germany do taxes? They fax
| them?
|
| They use software (or websites) that utilizes a so called
| ERiC-API (Elster) (available since ~1999) to communicate
| with the tax office. Since 2005 companies must send their
| tax stuff digital.
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
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