If class action lawsuits were allowed against Microsoft for the lack of OS choice when purchasing a computer from Dell as you suggest, then companies and individuals could sue for the 3-4 hours of productivity lost to reloading that machine with the operating system of your choice.
If you make $20/hour, you can take them to small claims court for the $80 they owe you.
*BUT* who can say how well the authoring software will cope with fancy menus, anamorphic video, alternate sound and text tracks, etc.
An excellent point. After all, what's a DVD without some kind of DVD Digest / menu system? iDVD comes with it's own, basic menu authoring system. Each screen can have 6 items (including folders, which can hold 6 more items, ad nausium). Great for basic usage.
The key here is basic. This will come bundled with the SuperDrive, just like iMovie came with the iMacs. But, if you want to get fancy at all, they also have a complete dvd authoring utility (DVD Studio Pro 1.0) which the pro can purchase for a mere $999 to make all the great stuff you see coming from the studios. Just like you can purchase Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 for $999 for regular QT files.
All in all, I was impressed with the basic functionality of both iDVD and iTunes. The PC coule really use something like this. But, then again, if Microsoft controlled all the hardware, I'm sure you'd see some pretty nifty stuff along these lines as well.
If I had my way, Nader would take a single state worth 3 electoral votes. The other candidates would come in at 269 and 268.
Well, you got the next best thing!
As of this moment, with 90% of the country's precincts reporting, all Gore required was 1/6 of Nader's green votes (ONE SIXTH!) and he would have been elected president by popular vote.
Yeah yeah, I know there's more to it than that - electoral college and all that jazz. But still, losing by some 400,000 votes... To use a football analogy, Nader knocked the ball loose from Gore's hand allowing W to recover it.
At the end of the (long, long) day, the Greens should be proud because we got exactly what we wanted: the power to effect an election.
Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
o/~ It's like rain on election day, o/~
o/~ It's the free ride for your college stay, o/~
o/~ It's the kickass high from a line of cocaine o/~
o/~ And who woulda' thought it'd be Nader...? o/~
What's a good GPS for a beginner?
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Geocaching
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· Score: 1
This sounds like the sort of thing I might want to get into. There don't seem to be any pots in or around St. Louis, MO, but placing and checking up on them seems like a pretty cool idea.
Schools (high schools) might want to get in on this activity as well. In grade school, our class used helium-filled balloons, tied stamped postcards to them and asked that whoever recovered it mail it back along with their address. Then we mapped the results. Typical young geek fun.
So I decided to go look up GPS devices and see what I was getting in for. From what I can tell, most of the cheap units seem to be fairly basic in their accuracy. The ones I've seen only seem to go to 6 sig-digs, which translates to about a 100 meter radius - which isn't near accurate enough. 10 meters, I'll buy.
Even if the feeds are coming in through digital means, VHS tapes are a horrible representation of the original.
You assume that the MPAA is solely planning on preventing the ability to make analog copies of digital broadcasts. I think that their goals are more focused on the future when we can make digital copies of digital television broadcasts.
Just like you rip MP3s from an Audio CD, the MPAA forsees individuals sitting with their TV encoders tuned and ready for the 5th season of Survivor. They'll edit out the commercials, post episodes to alt.binaries.movies.survivor5.mongolian-desert, then compile all the episodes and give them away on one big fat DVD. Many many dollars are to be lost.
Hey Jack, maybe it's just me, but if you want to control your content so much, don't broadcast it and certianly don't broadcast it for free.
Okkay, so the IOC is banning the net from the olympics. Or are they? As far as I knew, MSNBC's website was the Internet mirror to NBC news, which includes a robust sports section. Will they be banning the broadcast of Olympic related news on this website as well? That seems like a bum deal for a news org that shelled out the bucks to get exclusive coverage.
And as for pirate Olympic broadcasters, give me a break! American audiences are growing less and less interested in the Games as it is. Do they honestly think that some Aussie kid with a geocities website and a digital camera is going to give NBC serious coverage competition with 20-pixel-tall pictures of figure skaters, slightly masked by the back of some guy's head?
I just finished doing a basic 'quality for size' test here where I created a wav of several different music types as well as speech, and ran it though an MP3 encoder (Musicmatch Jukebox 5, several times for different bitrates, and once for VBR) and an OGG encoder (once, using the standard encoder and standard options). If anyone is willing to host the resulting MP3 and OGG files, please email me at neuracnu at inlink dot com.
The 4 minute, 42 second file took a staggering 13+ minutes to encode into OGG format with this AMD K6/2 333MHz machine. MP3 encoding took a mere fraction of that.
As you can see, the OGG file weighs in someplace between 96 and 128 kbps MP3 files. Judging from my cheesy processor load meter, I can see that playing the OGG file uses about twice as many calculations as playing any of the MP3s.
So far, I've found that OGGs are a little smaller than MP3s, take up a lot more clock cycles to play and a WHOLE lot more to encode. But how to they sound?
Well, my ear has been trained to listen for MP3-like audio artifacts, and I didn't hear anything glaring in the music itself. The speech, on the other hand, was another matter. In laymen's terms, high pitched voices (I used "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid soundtrack) sound overly 'hissy' when compared with MP3, and low pitched voice sounds bland and subdued. I was not impressed.
With these kinds of results, I'm not convinced that OGG will be replacing MP3 anytime soon at all.
Neuracnu Coyote presents: The RIAA vs Napster: A Diologue aka: Monty Python and the Holy Internet Startup ---
[SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers! [SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers! [SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers! [RIAA] Here's one. [SupremeCourt] $2500 in court costs for the injunction. [RIAA] Here you are. [Napster] It's not illegal! [SupremeCourt]... [SupremeCourt] What? [RIAA] Nothing, here's your $2500. [Napster] It's not illegal! [SupremeCourt] Here now - he says it isn't illegal! [RIAA] Yes it is! [Napster] It's not! [RIAA] Well, it will be soon. Our lobbyists are working on it. [Napster] Stealing music is freedom of information! [RIAA] No it's not. It'll be illegal any moment. [Napster] I don't want to file Chapter 11! [RIAA] Oh, don't be such a baby. [SupremeCourt] I'm sorry, that's an impropper injunction. Here, little Internet Startup, have a stay against that injunction. --
How will it continue? You decide! Get involved, send emails, sign petitons, write your congressmen, boycott the RIAA. Do something!
Someday geeks will snap out of it and realize that new hacks to old (!) technologies like Opennap is to Napster are just temp fixes. They're patches so that we can satasify our free music fix. Simply falling back on this is not what we need right now.
What we need right now is no more patches or hacking the old stuff. What we need is a new version - rewritten and streamlined rules of operation the music business that solve those nasty 1.0 bugs of $15 CDs with one good song, anti-promotion and Britney Spears' unprecidented success.
This isn't easy. Hell, it's a revolution; I don't think they're supposed to be easy. But if we want to solve our problem and make things better for good, this is the way to go.
I'm also neglecting to mention that if the RIAA does sink their teeth into Napster, and we leap off it like rats from a sinking ship, they'll eventually nab one of us for breaking the current rules and tear that poor rat fella a new arce. Imagine the RIAA winning and being able to slap individual users for all the MP3s they've traded on Napster - one person with millions of dollars to be paid in damages. That's something I really don't want to think about.
So, for short, don't think about the quick fix. Send letters and faxes to your congressmen. Ask questions to presidential canidates! This issue will only get bigger in the next 4 years and it would prove one hell of a boost if the person in the big chair ends up being on our side.
I don't remember any major plot differences between the fan-sub I saw vs the English language version released in theaters. However, there were some basic phrases of speech that had to be modified due to cultural differences. For example, one of the first lines of Jigo (the short, fat guy with Billy-Bob Thornton's voice) in Japanese translated to somethink like:
"This soup tastes like water."
In English, that's a rather ambiguous statement, but in Japanese, it's supposed to be a really nasty jibe at someone's cooking. So, in the English version, the Neil Gaiman changed it around to a line more suited to western audiences:
"This soup tastes like horse piss."
Note the difference. Personally, I'd prefer the English subtitles to be the direct Japanese translation. However, that may seem unfair to the English hearing impared. After all, they deserve to hear Billy-Bob wax poetic about urine just as much as the rest of us. In a perfect world, Disney would but both subtitle tracks into the DVD. But I'd be happy with just one or the other.
This is excellent news! I first saw Mononoke Hime almost a year ago at a furry convention in Memphis. It was a crummy VHS fan-sub, but it was mesmerizing none the less. I'm excited to once again see the film as it was orignally intended. However, make sure that we give special credit to those who lead the charge:
First place kudos go to Johnson at Nausicaa.net for getting everybody rolling on this whole protest thing for Mononoke.
Second place kudos to the good people at DVDTalk.com for helping the few screaming ninnies grow into the ruckus it is today.
Honorable mention kudos granola bars to all the angry anime geeks that signed petitions, wrote letters and beat up Mickey Mouse mascots in the name of our cause. We did it!
A friend of mine recently purchased an MP3 player... and it has a big problem decoding anything above 192kbps encoding. The player barfs and decides not to decode it at all.
This is my only problem with getting one of these MP3 players - be they portable, MP3-CD or in-dash decks. When I rip my CDs, I do them in 100% VBR. I've got the storage space to handle it. But from what I've read, very few of the players (not the good ones, anyway) support songs encoded this way. I can't justify buying one without this feature.
DVD Drives for computer vs entertainment center
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Anime Moves To DVD
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· Score: 2
I guess this means I need to go out, and buy a DVD drive for my Macintosh so I can get new anime.
Personally, I'd suggest getting a DVD drive for your entertainment center, rather than your computer. Both my computer and TV have their sound pumped thru the Dolby reciever. My couch, on the other hand, sits in front of the television. Go ahead and get a DVD-ROM drive, then try cuddling up with your girlfriend in an office chair during the scary parts of Scream 3. It just doesn't have the same romantic quality. Trust me, your SO will thank you.
"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong." - Dennis Miller
Come on now, folks. Everybody knows that the only games anyone plays on the Gameboy anymore are Tetris and the various Pokemon incarnations. AFAIK, you can't get a pair of palms to link up and exchange data ala networked quake, can you?
My point is that is they can't play Pokemon, they won't be popular. Sick, isn't it?
Webster Groves Computer School, a public elementary magnet school where I got my 1st thru 5th grade education, has just put 30 new Dells (complete with full, high-speed Internet access) running Windows 98 (hey, you can't have everything) in each of their 3rd, 4th and 5th grade classrooms. As it turns out, my own 4th grade teacher, Sue Gibson is still teaching there and I had the opportunity to hear about her experiences with the new equipment (as well as letting me play with the new toys).
The students are eating it up! Which causes the teacher to just plain love it. Remember when we used to do reports on posterboard with magazine cutouts pasted to it? These kids are putting together Powerpoint slide shows that look better than what I see at work. Heck, their class website is more interesting than any college classes I've taken.
And these aren't the select district Poindexters, either - they're just regular kids. The method for getting in the school is based on a lottery rather than test scores.
Now, it's not all peaches and cream. There are problems with kids going to "unauthorized" (read: PORN) sites, but from what I understand, it's only from students who are otherwise known for getting in trouble. In other words, the kid most likely to check out penthouse.com is the one who got in trouble last week for bring his dad's pocketknife to show off.
The way I understand this, it's all about guidance and supervision. Remember Star Trek? The prime directive was not to interfere with "primitive" races because a radical change in technology could seriously screw up their values. The same goes for computers in the classroom. You can't just plop a 10-year-old in front of a PIII and expect him to become Linus.
Computers are a teaching tool. There was math class before there were calculators, or slide rules for that matter. There was school before there were books. There was school before there was even paper! Ancient Roman schools had children writing on wax tablets. Then came paper and children used it to take notes on and store. Then books allowed us to store, read and recycle information. Computers are simply the next big teaching tool, and hence, belong in EVERY classroom, along with the propper guidance.
Alright, first, I'll get the obligatory funny link of the post out of the way (the StupidaMouse). Now, on with the meat of the post:
Optical mice? No balls or wheels to get dirty? Great! I can cross the Q-tips and rubbing alcohol out of my office supply list.
Cordless? Wonderful! No longer will I have to put up with that pesky mouse sliding away from me and causing focus to switch to some other window.
But removing the buttons; is this really necessary?
It makes it easier to click. Well, that's all good. I'm all for easier and more free movement. But still, given the choice between a standard PS/2 mouse for $5, and Apple's optical, cordless, buttonless wonder for $80, which do you think people are going to pay for?
Then again, let's not forget we're talking about Apple here; saved by the iMac which newbies plunked down their dead presidents for because it was pretty. Who knows what they'll do next.
If you need me, I'll be off painting the Brooklyn Bridge turquoise.
PS: Relax, you Mac zealots. I'm not bashing Macs - just the dummies who buy them because they don't clash with the curtians.
If someone can stop MP3's from moving around the net what stops someone from stopping your electronically filed taxes or the bills you pay online?
You're comparing apples and oranges here. I know; let's play a game. I want you to pick out which one of the following doesn't belong, and explain why not:
Sending your 1040 to the IRS via email
Using the gas company and your local bank's websites to pay your heating bill
Downloading an MP3 of "Song 21" by Alternative Band X from their offical website
Downloading an MP3 of "Oops.. I Did It Again" by Britney Spears from Napster
The answer is the fourth one, because it's illegal to pirate music. Sending email and conducting ecommerce are perfectly legal (right now), as are downloading MP3s that the artist is specifically giving away.
Hey, I love free music as much as the next guy, but don't kid yourselves. The situation of pirated MP3s is similar to that of child pornography on the Internet; it's just milder and more widely accepted. People have been cracking down on net kiddie porn and has that killed the Internet? Hardly.
So no, this is yet another false prediction of the Imminent Death Of The Net (as another./er posted).
Wonderful! Now all we need to do is procure grant money for the National Institute for Mental Health and give them a few years to be able to bring one of my favorite books as a child to life!
I had written a comment on this subject in the story about Courtney Love's RIAA rant. It works similar to PayPal, but not quite. Plus, unlike PayPal, this system will take Discover and American Express as well! ];-)
But with the frequency of incomplete files on services like Napster and Gnutella *ahem* so I heard *ahem* I believe I would go a littel crazy registiring movies and then finding out their incomplete.
If the file is incomplete, it doesn't work. I'm attempting to download the film (Quantum Project, named "SSC0 - QuantumProject_v4-0_highres.asf", size 174485308) as we speak. I'm at work, behind God knows how many OC-3 pipes and getting a transfer at about 1.5k/s. I'll have the thing fully downloaded sometime Saturday morning.
But that's another rant all together. The point is that the file is one of Microsoft's A$F files. This means that, upon launching whatever.asf, Media Player can fire up a IE browser window with a purchase form in it. That form then returns some kind of flag or key to the Media Player which allows you to watch the movie. A perfect (FREE!) example of this is the Little Nicky movie trailer (5.7 MB) which is an ASF that, when you try to play it, opens a website which has a simple survey to fill out.
If the file is incomplete or broken, it just won't launch. Such is the advantage of non-sequential files.
Courtney Love revisited the concept of "tips" several times during her rant on the current state of the recording industry. Now, could this not be a viable application for system of micropayments that Rob explained in an episode of Geeks in Space a while back?
Here's the way I see it working:
Set up a website that manages the whole micropayment system. Let's call it Webtips.com. Users register with the system by giving them their credit card of choice. Websites can register with the system by supplying a payment address.
Registered users browse registered websites. These websites (example: music group's website) can provide normal services or, if they chose, extra goodies (aka: exclusive content - Aie!! Evil buzzword!) like MP3s to users of the micropayment system.
If the user likes the content, they tip. "Thank you for the free MP3s, Ms. Love! To show my gratitude, here, have 5 cents." This can be set up using a basic form and a user-end cookie, ala one-click shopping, so one can leave a small monetary thank you in the form of a few cents.
Transactions occur monthly. Every 30 days, all the user's tips are added and deducted from their credit cards. Every 30 days, the websites are sent a check for all their tips left by users, minus a small percentage to make it all work (of course).
Sounds nifty, eh? The only short term problem I can think of is actually getting people to participate in the thing. If you can get several forward-thinking websites (who aren't so full of themselves that they'll go and build a similar system of their own, like slashdot) to sign on to the system, then the users will come. If the users come, more websites will come. And if more websites come, then more users will come. Ad nausium.
The key to making this whole thing work is how it will handle the exclusive content. Websites should be able to offer goodies only to registered webtips.com users, but they don't necessarily have to leave a tip to get at the content.
Slashdot Mirror
15 Aeron chairs
30 registered copies of Railroad Tycoon II
and 5 Microsoft USB SideWinder wheels with force feedback
I can't see this going far, especially without offering plugin-free demos. Some screenshots and example code is all I ask for.
If class action lawsuits were allowed against Microsoft for the lack of OS choice when purchasing a computer from Dell as you suggest, then companies and individuals could sue for the 3-4 hours of productivity lost to reloading that machine with the operating system of your choice.
If you make $20/hour, you can take them to small claims court for the $80 they owe you.
And here I was getting my hopes up about being able to go into AutoZone and buying a hemp carborator for my VW Microbus.
ok i'm being lazy but is the idvd menuing stuff open at all? it sounds like a great place to have a standard
Considering it works in all DVD players, I'm assuming the software complies with current DVD menu standards. But I seriously doubt it's open.
You can't have everything.
*BUT* who can say how well the authoring software will cope with fancy menus, anamorphic video, alternate sound and text tracks, etc.
An excellent point. After all, what's a DVD without some kind of DVD Digest / menu system? iDVD comes with it's own, basic menu authoring system. Each screen can have 6 items (including folders, which can hold 6 more items, ad nausium). Great for basic usage.
The key here is basic. This will come bundled with the SuperDrive, just like iMovie came with the iMacs. But, if you want to get fancy at all, they also have a complete dvd authoring utility (DVD Studio Pro 1.0) which the pro can purchase for a mere $999 to make all the great stuff you see coming from the studios. Just like you can purchase Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 for $999 for regular QT files.
All in all, I was impressed with the basic functionality of both iDVD and iTunes. The PC coule really use something like this. But, then again, if Microsoft controlled all the hardware, I'm sure you'd see some pretty nifty stuff along these lines as well.
- If I had my way, Nader would take a single state worth 3 electoral votes. The other candidates would come in at 269 and 268.
Well, you got the next best thing!As of this moment, with 90% of the country's precincts reporting, all Gore required was 1/6 of Nader's green votes (ONE SIXTH!) and he would have been elected president by popular vote.
Yeah yeah, I know there's more to it than that - electoral college and all that jazz. But still, losing by some 400,000 votes... To use a football analogy, Nader knocked the ball loose from Gore's hand allowing W to recover it.
At the end of the (long, long) day, the Greens should be proud because we got exactly what we wanted: the power to effect an election.
Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
o/~ It's like rain on election day, o/~
o/~ It's the free ride for your college stay, o/~
o/~ It's the kickass high from a line of cocaine o/~
o/~ And who woulda' thought it'd be Nader...? o/~
This sounds like the sort of thing I might want to get into. There don't seem to be any pots in or around St. Louis, MO, but placing and checking up on them seems like a pretty cool idea.
Schools (high schools) might want to get in on this activity as well. In grade school, our class used helium-filled balloons, tied stamped postcards to them and asked that whoever recovered it mail it back along with their address. Then we mapped the results. Typical young geek fun.
So I decided to go look up GPS devices and see what I was getting in for. From what I can tell, most of the cheap units seem to be fairly basic in their accuracy. The ones I've seen only seem to go to 6 sig-digs, which translates to about a 100 meter radius - which isn't near accurate enough. 10 meters, I'll buy.
So, what units do fellow geeks suggest?
You assume that the MPAA is solely planning on preventing the ability to make analog copies of digital broadcasts. I think that their goals are more focused on the future when we can make digital copies of digital television broadcasts.
Just like you rip MP3s from an Audio CD, the MPAA forsees individuals sitting with their TV encoders tuned and ready for the 5th season of Survivor. They'll edit out the commercials, post episodes to alt.binaries.movies.survivor5.mongolian-desert, then compile all the episodes and give them away on one big fat DVD. Many many dollars are to be lost.
Hey Jack, maybe it's just me, but if you want to control your content so much, don't broadcast it and certianly don't broadcast it for free.
Okkay, so the IOC is banning the net from the olympics. Or are they? As far as I knew, MSNBC's website was the Internet mirror to NBC news, which includes a robust sports section. Will they be banning the broadcast of Olympic related news on this website as well? That seems like a bum deal for a news org that shelled out the bucks to get exclusive coverage.
And as for pirate Olympic broadcasters, give me a break! American audiences are growing less and less interested in the Games as it is. Do they honestly think that some Aussie kid with a geocities website and a digital camera is going to give NBC serious coverage competition with 20-pixel-tall pictures of figure skaters, slightly masked by the back of some guy's head?
Think hard...
I THINK NOT!
I just finished doing a basic 'quality for size' test here where I created a wav of several different music types as well as speech, and ran it though an MP3 encoder (Musicmatch Jukebox 5, several times for different bitrates, and once for VBR) and an OGG encoder (once, using the standard encoder and standard options). If anyone is willing to host the resulting MP3 and OGG files, please email me at neuracnu at inlink dot com.
The 4 minute, 42 second file took a staggering 13+ minutes to encode into OGG format with this AMD K6/2 333MHz machine. MP3 encoding took a mere fraction of that.
The following files were produced:
- 64kbps MP3 (2.15 MB)
- 96kbps MP3 (3.23 MB)
- 128kbps MP3 (4.31 MB)
- 192kbps MP3 (6.46 MB)
- VBR MP3 (5.58 MB)
- VBR OGG (3.92 MB)
As you can see, the OGG file weighs in someplace between 96 and 128 kbps MP3 files. Judging from my cheesy processor load meter, I can see that playing the OGG file uses about twice as many calculations as playing any of the MP3s.
So far, I've found that OGGs are a little smaller than MP3s, take up a lot more clock cycles to play and a WHOLE lot more to encode. But how to they sound?
Well, my ear has been trained to listen for MP3-like audio artifacts, and I didn't hear anything glaring in the music itself. The speech, on the other hand, was another matter. In laymen's terms, high pitched voices (I used "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid soundtrack) sound overly 'hissy' when compared with MP3, and low pitched voice sounds bland and subdued. I was not impressed.
With these kinds of results, I'm not convinced that OGG will be replacing MP3 anytime soon at all.
Neuracnu Coyote presents:
The RIAA vs Napster: A Diologue
aka: Monty Python and the Holy Internet Startup ---
[SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers!
[SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers!
[SupremeCourt] Bring out your copyright infringers!
[RIAA] Here's one.
[SupremeCourt] $2500 in court costs for the injunction.
[RIAA] Here you are.
[Napster] It's not illegal!
[SupremeCourt]
[SupremeCourt] What?
[RIAA] Nothing, here's your $2500.
[Napster] It's not illegal!
[SupremeCourt] Here now - he says it isn't illegal!
[RIAA] Yes it is!
[Napster] It's not!
[RIAA] Well, it will be soon. Our lobbyists are working on it.
[Napster] Stealing music is freedom of information!
[RIAA] No it's not. It'll be illegal any moment.
[Napster] I don't want to file Chapter 11!
[RIAA] Oh, don't be such a baby.
[SupremeCourt] I'm sorry, that's an impropper injunction. Here, little Internet Startup, have a stay against that injunction.
--
How will it continue? You decide! Get involved, send emails, sign petitons, write your congressmen, boycott the RIAA. Do something!
Someday geeks will snap out of it and realize that new hacks to old (!) technologies like Opennap is to Napster are just temp fixes. They're patches so that we can satasify our free music fix. Simply falling back on this is not what we need right now.
What we need right now is no more patches or hacking the old stuff. What we need is a new version - rewritten and streamlined rules of operation the music business that solve those nasty 1.0 bugs of $15 CDs with one good song, anti-promotion and Britney Spears' unprecidented success.
This isn't easy. Hell, it's a revolution; I don't think they're supposed to be easy. But if we want to solve our problem and make things better for good, this is the way to go.
I'm also neglecting to mention that if the RIAA does sink their teeth into Napster, and we leap off it like rats from a sinking ship, they'll eventually nab one of us for breaking the current rules and tear that poor rat fella a new arce. Imagine the RIAA winning and being able to slap individual users for all the MP3s they've traded on Napster - one person with millions of dollars to be paid in damages. That's something I really don't want to think about.
So, for short, don't think about the quick fix. Send letters and faxes to your congressmen. Ask questions to presidential canidates! This issue will only get bigger in the next 4 years and it would prove one hell of a boost if the person in the big chair ends up being on our side.
- "This soup tastes like water."
In English, that's a rather ambiguous statement, but in Japanese, it's supposed to be a really nasty jibe at someone's cooking. So, in the English version, the Neil Gaiman changed it around to a line more suited to western audiences:- "This soup tastes like horse piss."
Note the difference. Personally, I'd prefer the English subtitles to be the direct Japanese translation. However, that may seem unfair to the English hearing impared. After all, they deserve to hear Billy-Bob wax poetic about urine just as much as the rest of us. In a perfect world, Disney would but both subtitle tracks into the DVD. But I'd be happy with just one or the other.- First place kudos go to Johnson at Nausicaa.net for getting everybody rolling on this whole protest thing for Mononoke.
- Second place kudos to the good people at DVDTalk.com for helping the few screaming ninnies grow into the ruckus it is today.
- Honorable mention kudos granola bars to all the angry anime geeks that signed petitions, wrote letters and beat up Mickey Mouse mascots in the name of our cause. We did it!
PS: You can stop beating up Mickey Mouse now.A friend of mine recently purchased an MP3 player ... and it has a big problem decoding anything above 192kbps encoding. The player barfs and decides not to decode it at all.
This is my only problem with getting one of these MP3 players - be they portable, MP3-CD or in-dash decks. When I rip my CDs, I do them in 100% VBR. I've got the storage space to handle it. But from what I've read, very few of the players (not the good ones, anyway) support songs encoded this way. I can't justify buying one without this feature.
I guess this means I need to go out, and buy a DVD drive for my Macintosh so I can get new anime.
Personally, I'd suggest getting a DVD drive for your entertainment center, rather than your computer. Both my computer and TV have their sound pumped thru the Dolby reciever. My couch, on the other hand, sits in front of the television. Go ahead and get a DVD-ROM drive, then try cuddling up with your girlfriend in an office chair during the scary parts of Scream 3. It just doesn't have the same romantic quality. Trust me, your SO will thank you.
"Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong." - Dennis Miller
Come on now, folks. Everybody knows that the only games anyone plays on the Gameboy anymore are Tetris and the various Pokemon incarnations. AFAIK, you can't get a pair of palms to link up and exchange data ala networked quake, can you?
My point is that is they can't play Pokemon, they won't be popular. Sick, isn't it?
Webster Groves Computer School, a public elementary magnet school where I got my 1st thru 5th grade education, has just put 30 new Dells (complete with full, high-speed Internet access) running Windows 98 (hey, you can't have everything) in each of their 3rd, 4th and 5th grade classrooms. As it turns out, my own 4th grade teacher, Sue Gibson is still teaching there and I had the opportunity to hear about her experiences with the new equipment (as well as letting me play with the new toys).
The students are eating it up! Which causes the teacher to just plain love it. Remember when we used to do reports on posterboard with magazine cutouts pasted to it? These kids are putting together Powerpoint slide shows that look better than what I see at work. Heck, their class website is more interesting than any college classes I've taken.
And these aren't the select district Poindexters, either - they're just regular kids. The method for getting in the school is based on a lottery rather than test scores.
Now, it's not all peaches and cream. There are problems with kids going to "unauthorized" (read: PORN) sites, but from what I understand, it's only from students who are otherwise known for getting in trouble. In other words, the kid most likely to check out penthouse.com is the one who got in trouble last week for bring his dad's pocketknife to show off.
The way I understand this, it's all about guidance and supervision. Remember Star Trek? The prime directive was not to interfere with "primitive" races because a radical change in technology could seriously screw up their values. The same goes for computers in the classroom. You can't just plop a 10-year-old in front of a PIII and expect him to become Linus.
Computers are a teaching tool. There was math class before there were calculators, or slide rules for that matter. There was school before there were books. There was school before there was even paper! Ancient Roman schools had children writing on wax tablets. Then came paper and children used it to take notes on and store. Then books allowed us to store, read and recycle information. Computers are simply the next big teaching tool, and hence, belong in EVERY classroom, along with the propper guidance.
Alright, first, I'll get the obligatory funny link of the post out of the way (the StupidaMouse). Now, on with the meat of the post:
Optical mice? No balls or wheels to get dirty? Great! I can cross the Q-tips and rubbing alcohol out of my office supply list.
Cordless? Wonderful! No longer will I have to put up with that pesky mouse sliding away from me and causing focus to switch to some other window.
But removing the buttons; is this really necessary?
It makes it easier to click. Well, that's all good. I'm all for easier and more free movement. But still, given the choice between a standard PS/2 mouse for $5, and Apple's optical, cordless, buttonless wonder for $80, which do you think people are going to pay for?
Then again, let's not forget we're talking about Apple here; saved by the iMac which newbies plunked down their dead presidents for because it was pretty. Who knows what they'll do next.
If you need me, I'll be off painting the Brooklyn Bridge turquoise.
PS: Relax, you Mac zealots. I'm not bashing Macs - just the dummies who buy them because they don't clash with the curtians.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. I know; let's play a game. I want you to pick out which one of the following doesn't belong, and explain why not:
The answer is the fourth one, because it's illegal to pirate music. Sending email and conducting ecommerce are perfectly legal (right now), as are downloading MP3s that the artist is specifically giving away.
Hey, I love free music as much as the next guy, but don't kid yourselves. The situation of pirated MP3s is similar to that of child pornography on the Internet; it's just milder and more widely accepted. People have been cracking down on net kiddie porn and has that killed the Internet? Hardly.
So no, this is yet another false prediction of the Imminent Death Of The Net (as another ./er posted).
Wonderful! Now all we need to do is procure grant money for the National Institute for Mental Health and give them a few years to be able to bring one of my favorite books as a child to life!
I had written a comment on this subject in the story about Courtney Love's RIAA rant. It works similar to PayPal, but not quite. Plus, unlike PayPal, this system will take Discover and American Express as well! ];-)
But with the frequency of incomplete files on services like Napster and Gnutella *ahem* so I heard *ahem* I believe I would go a littel crazy registiring movies and then finding out their incomplete.
If the file is incomplete, it doesn't work. I'm attempting to download the film (Quantum Project, named "SSC0 - QuantumProject_v4-0_highres.asf", size 174485308) as we speak. I'm at work, behind God knows how many OC-3 pipes and getting a transfer at about 1.5k/s. I'll have the thing fully downloaded sometime Saturday morning.
But that's another rant all together. The point is that the file is one of Microsoft's A$F files. This means that, upon launching whatever.asf, Media Player can fire up a IE browser window with a purchase form in it. That form then returns some kind of flag or key to the Media Player which allows you to watch the movie. A perfect (FREE!) example of this is the Little Nicky movie trailer (5.7 MB) which is an ASF that, when you try to play it, opens a website which has a simple survey to fill out.
If the file is incomplete or broken, it just won't launch. Such is the advantage of non-sequential files.
Courtney Love revisited the concept of "tips" several times during her rant on the current state of the recording industry. Now, could this not be a viable application for system of micropayments that Rob explained in an episode of Geeks in Space a while back?
Here's the way I see it working:
Sounds nifty, eh? The only short term problem I can think of is actually getting people to participate in the thing. If you can get several forward-thinking websites (who aren't so full of themselves that they'll go and build a similar system of their own, like slashdot) to sign on to the system, then the users will come. If the users come, more websites will come. And if more websites come, then more users will come. Ad nausium.
The key to making this whole thing work is how it will handle the exclusive content. Websites should be able to offer goodies only to registered webtips.com users, but they don't necessarily have to leave a tip to get at the content.
Waddya think?