Not an exclusive. It has appeared on the NES. It's also coming to the Game Boy Advance, in a slightly modified form (different story because of unavailability of characters for licensing, but classic Ninja Gaiden gameplay is still there) as Return of the Ninja. ("Gaiden" means "sequel".)
Robotech
Fact: 1-800-Robotech was the phone number for Quarterdeck Software, publisher of the QEMM memory manager for DOS. US telephones don't have Q or Z in the mnemonic labels on their number keys, which is why Blizzard's American phone number had the word "SNOW" at one time.
Superman: Man of Steel
Superman appeared in a rather crappy (to put it lightly) Nintendo 64 title. What makes this new Xbox version so much better? (question, not flamebait)
Unreal Championship
Isn't that just UT or UT2003 adapted for a console? If so, I might as well run UT on my Quake/MAME cabinet.
Halo alone is worth the price of the [Xbox] console right there.
Super Smash Bros. Melee is worth the price of a GameCube console right there, and in a couple months, the GameCube will be getting its own Halo killer, called Metroid Prime.
If I had to choose between Halo and 50 PS2 games, the choice would be clear.
I thought of another bad PS/2 joke. Once Bochs is ported to PS2 Linux, does that mean that the Sony PS2 can in effect become a PS-Slash-2?
The games do have to be programmed differently if they are going to be run on NTSC or PAL.
Oh really? PAL has two variations: the 625-line, 50-Hz PAL used for European TV, and the 525-line, 60-Hz PAL/M used for Brazilian TV and for European video games. PAL/M gives exactly the same pixel count (about 720x480) as the NTSC signal used in Japan and the USA. Thus, NTSC-style games on modern PAL consoles will run in PAL/M mode. (Older PAL consoles often halted the CPU during the extra scanlines of PAL, resulting in a slower game.) Not only do almost all PAL TVs multisync to both PAL and PAL/M signals, many can also display NTSC signals.
Another reason Nintendo releases at different times in different regions is they have a policy of only releasing a game after translating it to the local language
Then why not simultaneously release in the United States and the United Kingdom?
The real reason for region coding is the fact that different companies may own the copyrights or the exclusive licenses under copyright on a given work in different countries. For instance, Peter Pan fell out of copyright a long time ago in the United States, but the United Kingdom has passed a statutory perpetual copyright on the work and on all derivative works. The region lockout is intended partly to enforce parallel-import restrictions on works in markets where they don't have copyright clearance.
The only time I was forced to reboot XP was after the service pack install.
What about when using a laptop computer, and XP's "hibernation" feature doesn't work 100% with your hardware? In that case, you have to reboot the computer every time you move it from place to place. (It's not safe to jostle a hard drive whose platters are spinning.)
inosine. It's a nucleic acid - not found in naturally occurring DNA but used in molecular biology because it has the useful property of binding to all other bases equally.
I'm a computer science student, not a molecular biologist, but I'd guess that there's no inosine in natural DNA because the C-G and A-T pairings allow the copying procedure to include a bit of error detection; impossible pairings won't happen except in rare mutations. Inosine wouldn't allow for such error detection.
Candy isn't worth $20. Isn't there a law stating that you can't bring a lawsuit in the United States for amounts in question less than $20? Or am I misreading that amendment?
how many [DVD Video titles from] other regions include Japanese subtitling or dubbing???
Does it matter? A lot of Japanese people know quite a bit of English. The "It's so easy, happy go lucky, we are the world oh, we did it" in the "Yatta" video (and the Flash video) wasn't an accident.
How many carry Japanese films, which are mostly crap and barely even sell in Japan
Another anime hater. Or does anime really sell better in the USA than in Japan?
Oh, and you are still paying, what $20/$30 per DVD?
In the United States, because the copyright owner controls only the first sale of an audiovisual work, we have something called "DVD rentals." Sure, rental discs get all scratched up, but last time I rented a DVD that was unplayable ("Disney's Pinocchio" that died during "Give a Little Whistle"), I got a free rental.
Compared to how much for the cinema? (Don't know about US prices, but in.uk it's about £5 ~= $7.50).
That's about right, unless the movie starts before 18:00, in which case you get a $2 or so discount.
So what if a few skip the initial $7.50 preview....
Skipping the previews is a violation of the DMCA, which the UK had before the USA (section 296 of the UK's Copyright Act)
provides a 5-year maximum extension for FDA approval.
I don't see a five-year cap on a Section 155 extension. I see both five-year and fourteen-year caps on a Section 156 extension. Can you explain those sections in more detail?
The AVERAGE length of the approval process is curently running 9 years.
I'm assuming AVERAGE == median here.
This means that 50% of medications are not even approved until 4 years after the patent clock starts ticking. Then of course, there is the lead time needed to get the product to market which is probably another 2-3 years
Which means that they still get a good solid 13+ years of monopoly rights.
RC5-64 was supposed to take something like a hundred years when we started that, and it managed to be completed in about 5
The amount of processing power used for Distributed.net's RC5-64 effort hadn't grown exponentially but rather pretty much linearly. There's a limit to the power of even word of mouth.
You can play 4 notes a thousand different ways. Rhythm (alone is a huge variety)
I've already taken rhythm into account in my model.
pitch
The hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" is still the hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" no matter what key you transpose it to.
tempo, chorus, etc.
Inconsequential. The legal standard for copying is whether two melodies are "substantially similar", not whether their performances match exactly.
I guarrentee if you took a 4-note progression, you could make it into a techno song, a classical song, a vocal song, and a rock song that all sound completely different and most people wouldn't identify it as the same melody.
By default, Red Hat Linux since at least 7.3 has formatted Linux partitions in "ext3fs", a journaling version of the ext2fs format common on Linux systems.
This refers to hard disk access time penalties, not an overall 10-15% reduction in the performance of your computer.
When I bought my Acer notebook computer in 1999, I could afford only 64 MB of RAM. I have since upgraded it to 128 MB. A 10-15% reduction in swap file throughput will noticeably decrease the performance of my computer, especially with the slow 3600 RPM drives they put in laptops to keep the power drain down.
E.g. as regards CD audio vs. 96/24 audio, it's easier to design the DAC's brickwall filters for 96/24.
This is a solved problem. Use interpolation in the digital time domain to bring 44.1 kHz audio up to 88.2 kHz, which gives you more room to make an analog brickwall filter. Many DACs already do this; it's called "oversampling".
The dynamic range of 24 bits is much better than 16 bits and human ears can easily hear the difference in dynamic range.
In the average noisy household, automotive, or office environment?
If not, then I imagine that this product will have limited appeal unless the labels begin to intentionally cripple the mastering of Compact Disc Digital Audio releases. As others have pointed out in this discussion, the biggest reason for the move from vinyl to CDs in the consumer market wasn't improved clarity but rather improved clarity, a complete of pops and clicks (except when used as a deliberate effect), a lack of wow and flutter (again, except when used as a deliberate effect), and triple the playing time per side (no getting up to flip the disc).
Other than greater playing time, I don't see a significant advantage in DVD-No-Video, DVD-Audio, or SACD over plain old CD-DA among typical non-audiophile consumers (e.g. adolescents who buy Eminem or Britney Spears).
Maybe a USB mic with the frequency profile embedded in it?
If the frequency profile varies slightly among individual microphones, doesn't it cost a lot of money to measure each individual microphone's characteristic filter and burn it to flash? And don't a microphone's characteristics vary with normal wear and tear?
44.1 kHz samples ~44000 samples per second. If you had a sound at the upper end of healthy human hearing: 18kHz - you would have fewer than 3 samples for each wavelength. Not enough to accurately describe the waveform.
You're using linear interpolation, which introduces loads of aliasing artifacts into the sound. Instead, use higher-order (cubic or better) interpolation that fits a curve to a set of adjacent points. Follow it with a good analog filter, and you get great results, even at the high end of the spectrum. Look up Nyquist while you're at it.
I mean literraly there are only so many chords and note combinations possible. Unless something radical comes along I think that we will only have new instruments to rely upon.
It's likely the new format disks should cost about the same to produce (after the initial investments in the fabs).
Wouldn't recording, mixing, and mastering in high-frequency, high-bit-depth formats be more expensive as well because it takes more skill to keep noise from creeping into the process?
With the SACD format, there is a CD audio layer on the thing already so the disks will be indistinguishable from a regular CD for your existing equipment.
That is, unless the labels start doing shady things like dithering the CD audio layer to 8-bit to make the SACD layer sound better by comparison.
Nowadays, the original source would be 24-bit, 96kHz at least. It's only downmixed to 16-bit @ 44.1kHz for the initial CD press.
If 16-bit, 44.1kHz is all the human auditory system can perceive (16-bit is 90 dB SNR with 110 dB dynamic range after dithering; 44.1 kHz can accurately represent frequencies up to 22 kHz), then why go higher?
Slashdot Mirror
Again, these are EXCLUSIVES
Caps lock means you're so sure of the exclusivity of those titles...
Battlefield: 1942
1942 was on the NES.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Fact: Willow has appeared in an NES game.
Ninja Gaiden
Not an exclusive. It has appeared on the NES. It's also coming to the Game Boy Advance, in a slightly modified form (different story because of unavailability of characters for licensing, but classic Ninja Gaiden gameplay is still there) as Return of the Ninja. ("Gaiden" means "sequel".)
Robotech
Fact: 1-800-Robotech was the phone number for Quarterdeck Software, publisher of the QEMM memory manager for DOS. US telephones don't have Q or Z in the mnemonic labels on their number keys, which is why Blizzard's American phone number had the word "SNOW" at one time.
Superman: Man of Steel
Superman appeared in a rather crappy (to put it lightly) Nintendo 64 title. What makes this new Xbox version so much better? (question, not flamebait)
Unreal Championship
Isn't that just UT or UT2003 adapted for a console? If so, I might as well run UT on my Quake/MAME cabinet.
WWF RAW 2
Panda wrestling?
Halo alone is worth the price of the [Xbox] console right there.
Super Smash Bros. Melee is worth the price of a GameCube console right there, and in a couple months, the GameCube will be getting its own Halo killer, called Metroid Prime.
If I had to choose between Halo and 50 PS2 games, the choice would be clear.
I thought of another bad PS/2 joke. Once Bochs is ported to PS2 Linux, does that mean that the Sony PS2 can in effect become a PS-Slash-2?
The games do have to be programmed differently if they are going to be run on NTSC or PAL.
Oh really? PAL has two variations: the 625-line, 50-Hz PAL used for European TV, and the 525-line, 60-Hz PAL/M used for Brazilian TV and for European video games. PAL/M gives exactly the same pixel count (about 720x480) as the NTSC signal used in Japan and the USA. Thus, NTSC-style games on modern PAL consoles will run in PAL/M mode. (Older PAL consoles often halted the CPU during the extra scanlines of PAL, resulting in a slower game.) Not only do almost all PAL TVs multisync to both PAL and PAL/M signals, many can also display NTSC signals.
Another reason Nintendo releases at different times in different regions is they have a policy of only releasing a game after translating it to the local language
Then why not simultaneously release in the United States and the United Kingdom?
The real reason for region coding is the fact that different companies may own the copyrights or the exclusive licenses under copyright on a given work in different countries. For instance, Peter Pan fell out of copyright a long time ago in the United States, but the United Kingdom has passed a statutory perpetual copyright on the work and on all derivative works. The region lockout is intended partly to enforce parallel-import restrictions on works in markets where they don't have copyright clearance.
Probably because it is a Hoover.
No. Roomba is not a Hoover(tm) brand vacuum cleaner; it's a Roomba(tm) brand vacuum cleaner.
The only time I was forced to reboot XP was after the service pack install.
What about when using a laptop computer, and XP's "hibernation" feature doesn't work 100% with your hardware? In that case, you have to reboot the computer every time you move it from place to place. (It's not safe to jostle a hard drive whose platters are spinning.)
inosine. It's a nucleic acid - not found in naturally occurring DNA but used in molecular biology because it has the useful property of binding to all other bases equally.
I'm a computer science student, not a molecular biologist, but I'd guess that there's no inosine in natural DNA because the C-G and A-T pairings allow the copying procedure to include a bit of error detection; impossible pairings won't happen except in rare mutations. Inosine wouldn't allow for such error detection.
Tell him he's legally stolen them now
Candy isn't worth $20. Isn't there a law stating that you can't bring a lawsuit in the United States for amounts in question less than $20? Or am I misreading that amendment?
how many [DVD Video titles from] other regions include Japanese subtitling or dubbing???
Does it matter? A lot of Japanese people know quite a bit of English. The "It's so easy, happy go lucky, we are the world oh, we did it" in the "Yatta" video (and the Flash video) wasn't an accident.
How many carry Japanese films, which are mostly crap and barely even sell in Japan
Another anime hater. Or does anime really sell better in the USA than in Japan?
Oh, and you are still paying, what $20/$30 per DVD?
In the United States, because the copyright owner controls only the first sale of an audiovisual work, we have something called "DVD rentals." Sure, rental discs get all scratched up, but last time I rented a DVD that was unplayable ("Disney's Pinocchio" that died during "Give a Little Whistle"), I got a free rental.
Compared to how much for the cinema? (Don't know about US prices, but in .uk it's about £5 ~= $7.50).
That's about right, unless the movie starts before 18:00, in which case you get a $2 or so discount.
So what if a few skip the initial $7.50 preview....
Skipping the previews is a violation of the DMCA, which the UK had before the USA (section 296 of the UK's Copyright Act)
Nor does anyone seem to be threatening to sue www.archive.org
You mean like this? It's not exactly a lawsuit, but it is a takedown order.
Yep, now the Weebles can get around.
and they don't have to do this for long distances anymore
I figure one could put 48kHz 24-bit audio on a 3" DVD and still have a significantly longer playtime than a 5" CD.
That's entirely possible with DVDA on a 3" DVD. (I'm not sure whether DVDA goes down to 48 kHz though.)
if only there was a standard for lossless audio on 3-inch DVDs.....
Can MLP be run at 44 kHz 16-bit stereo? If so, use the DV/DA standard. If not, use DVD-Video with blank video and PCM audio.
Now just wait for the 3-inch DVD-R blanks to come out.
The Hatch-Waxman act
The Cher Act?
provides a 5-year maximum extension for FDA approval.
I don't see a five-year cap on a Section 155 extension. I see both five-year and fourteen-year caps on a Section 156 extension. Can you explain those sections in more detail?
The AVERAGE length of the approval process is curently running 9 years.
I'm assuming AVERAGE == median here.
This means that 50% of medications are not even approved until 4 years after the patent clock starts ticking. Then of course, there is the lead time needed to get the product to market which is probably another 2-3 years
Which means that they still get a good solid 13+ years of monopoly rights.
Just be glad that the late patron saint of counterproductive copyright law hadn't asked for an across the board patent term extension.
RC5-64 was supposed to take something like a hundred years when we started that, and it managed to be completed in about 5
The amount of processing power used for Distributed.net's RC5-64 effort hadn't grown exponentially but rather pretty much linearly. There's a limit to the power of even word of mouth.
You can play 4 notes a thousand different ways. Rhythm (alone is a huge variety)
I've already taken rhythm into account in my model.
pitch
The hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" is still the hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" no matter what key you transpose it to.
tempo, chorus, etc.
Inconsequential. The legal standard for copying is whether two melodies are "substantially similar", not whether their performances match exactly.
I guarrentee if you took a 4-note progression, you could make it into a techno song, a classical song, a vocal song, and a rock song that all sound completely different and most people wouldn't identify it as the same melody.
Oh really? Tell that to George Harrison.
are you serious? Can anyone confirm this?
By default, Red Hat Linux since at least 7.3 has formatted Linux partitions in "ext3fs", a journaling version of the ext2fs format common on Linux systems.
This refers to hard disk access time penalties, not an overall 10-15% reduction in the performance of your computer.
When I bought my Acer notebook computer in 1999, I could afford only 64 MB of RAM. I have since upgraded it to 128 MB. A 10-15% reduction in swap file throughput will noticeably decrease the performance of my computer, especially with the slow 3600 RPM drives they put in laptops to keep the power drain down.
E.g. as regards CD audio vs. 96/24 audio, it's easier to design the DAC's brickwall filters for 96/24.
This is a solved problem. Use interpolation in the digital time domain to bring 44.1 kHz audio up to 88.2 kHz, which gives you more room to make an analog brickwall filter. Many DACs already do this; it's called "oversampling".
The dynamic range of 24 bits is much better than 16 bits and human ears can easily hear the difference in dynamic range.
In the average noisy household, automotive, or office environment?
If not, then I imagine that this product will have limited appeal unless the labels begin to intentionally cripple the mastering of Compact Disc Digital Audio releases. As others have pointed out in this discussion, the biggest reason for the move from vinyl to CDs in the consumer market wasn't improved clarity but rather improved clarity, a complete of pops and clicks (except when used as a deliberate effect), a lack of wow and flutter (again, except when used as a deliberate effect), and triple the playing time per side (no getting up to flip the disc).
Other than greater playing time, I don't see a significant advantage in DVD-No-Video, DVD-Audio, or SACD over plain old CD-DA among typical non-audiophile consumers (e.g. adolescents who buy Eminem or Britney Spears).
Maybe a USB mic with the frequency profile embedded in it?
If the frequency profile varies slightly among individual microphones, doesn't it cost a lot of money to measure each individual microphone's characteristic filter and burn it to flash? And don't a microphone's characteristics vary with normal wear and tear?
44.1 kHz samples ~44000 samples per second. If you had a sound at the upper end of healthy human hearing: 18kHz - you would have fewer than 3 samples for each wavelength. Not enough to accurately describe the waveform.
You're using linear interpolation, which introduces loads of aliasing artifacts into the sound. Instead, use higher-order (cubic or better) interpolation that fits a curve to a set of adjacent points. Follow it with a good analog filter, and you get great results, even at the high end of the spectrum. Look up Nyquist while you're at it.
I mean literraly there are only so many chords and note combinations possible. Unless something radical comes along I think that we will only have new instruments to rely upon.
Heck not even new instruments. If you use the same melody as a previously published song, you're likely to face legal action. Four notes are enough to infringe, and there are fewer than 50,000 possible combinations.
The theoretical limit on the number of distinct works is the subject of a short story called "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. Read it and weep.
It's likely the new format disks should cost about the same to produce (after the initial investments in the fabs).
Wouldn't recording, mixing, and mastering in high-frequency, high-bit-depth formats be more expensive as well because it takes more skill to keep noise from creeping into the process?
With the SACD format, there is a CD audio layer on the thing already so the disks will be indistinguishable from a regular CD for your existing equipment.
That is, unless the labels start doing shady things like dithering the CD audio layer to 8-bit to make the SACD layer sound better by comparison.
Nowadays, the original source would be 24-bit, 96kHz at least. It's only downmixed to 16-bit @ 44.1kHz for the initial CD press.
If 16-bit, 44.1kHz is all the human auditory system can perceive (16-bit is 90 dB SNR with 110 dB dynamic range after dithering; 44.1 kHz can accurately represent frequencies up to 22 kHz), then why go higher?
the total combined sales of SACD's and DVD-A's, multiplied by 10, equals current sales of vinyl.
Can a DJ spin SACD and DVDA live yet?