I just can't get in to convergence (I don't want to carry a palm phone or PPC Phone all the time, even if I can changes phones with a SIM chip), but I will say that Bluetooth makes it all pretty sweet. When you can dial your phone and send and recieve SMS from your Palm/PPC it is pretty cool. If you have a BT headset then you basically have a smartphone, since you can make and get calls without taking your phone out of your pocket/bag. And then Friday night, at the club, you can leave the damn tricorder at home so you don't look like a total geek...
So I kinda used my PDA before, but once I was all hooked up with Bluetooth the PDA became much more useful.
Well, when La Femme Nikita ended really badly on USA the fans went nuts. The fan reaction resulted in a 9 episode "mini-season" which served to wrap things up in a way that fans liked better. Not as good as a full return, but it was a nice reaction by USA to the fans.
Do you discount the importance of a good voice actor? In some respects, voice acting is harder than traditional stage/screen acting.
That has been the major problem with dubbed anime in the US...the voice acting has been poor. I think it is primarily that they aren't using good directors. The director for the voice actors makes all the difference, since he's the one who knows what he wants it to sound like.
If the american anime companies tried to get better voice directors instead of having some production person with no experience from their own company do it (which does happen)then maybe the hardcore fans wouldn't be so pro-sub/anti-dub. (Though with DVDs these days it doesn't really make a difference...I have the Region 1 Mononoke disc, and the region 2 Spirited Away disc. Both have Japanese dialog with English subtitles:-)
The story is broadly similar, and then look at the character designs. It's like they hired Gainax to do them or something. They look remarkably similar, and they are almost 1-to-1 with the cast of Nadia.
Just because something isn't famous in America doesn't mean it's not famous. 95% of Americans many not know who Michael Schumacher is, but that doesn't change the fact that he's the world's highest paid sports figure, and famous for sure.
Gundam IS legendary in Japan. Have no doubt of that. It radically changed anime there, adding a bit of reality to the whole thing (not that it's particularly real) and matured the story lines for sure. So try not to be so provincial - something not legendary here can be legendary elsewhere.
To make sure you're getting the real Japanese DVD you had best either buy it in a Japan Town near you and make sure it's $50 (the $10 version in Chinatown is not legit) or order from Japan.
CD Japan is excellent for ordering Japanese CDs and DVDs. They're also good for ordering Japanese releases of non-Japanese stuff. You just pay shipping plus the exchange rate that your credit card company gives you, which is a pretty good deal.
Another place is AMO Tokyo. I haven't bought anything there but have heard good things, at least if you're ordering anime. If you are ordering J-Pop, stick with CD Japan.
Any place in Japan may have a bit of weirdness when ordering from the US...like you may have to fax them a copy of your credit card and driver's license for ID purposes. Japan is sill getting used to this whole credit card thing...but it is getting better.:-)
Actually, the North America premiere for the subtitled version was at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Their blurb about it is here. The showing even made news at the BBC. It was great to see it at the Castro theater...they even played the organ before the showing.
In the write-up of the Sunday Q&A Session with the Producer, Mr. Suzuki, and John Lasseter, they made reference to the "Mei and Neko-bus" short that is being worked on for the Ghibli museum. So that's sort of a Totoro sequel...or all we're going to get.
It just sucked having to wait from April 'til September to get the Region 2 release. That was, of course, offset by having seen it at all...especially at the North America premiere.
If you look at the history of telephony in the US you can understand why it has evolved the way it has compared to Europe.
First of all, land lines are significantly cheaper in the US than in Europe. And the phone companies are required to bring a line to your MPOE. There are places that people live in europe where you still can't get a land line, even in 2002. We did the hard work for the last mile problem and some places in Europe haven't. And the high cost of landlines increased demand for the cheaper mobile services.
Secondly, analog cell service had good coverage in the US when the first digital technologies came out. Maybe if the folks who had designed GSM had thought about how the US was gonna roll it out then they would have realized that the ability to fall back to analog would help the rollout. The folks at Qualcomm got it, as did the inventors of TDMA.
The US is much less dense than europe in terms of cell users. Therefore building out a brand new network is expensive and the lack of density means that it's hard to recoup the cost of the towers in remote places. That makes it hard to roll out a technology that's backwards compatable.
Don't get me wrong, I like GSM. I have a GSM phone. And I wish it was better rolled out here. Although I like the tech, I will be the first to admit that my TDMA phone gets much better coverage. I don't think that the existence of other formats is an attempt at American isolationism but rather a combination of the nature of America (a lot of sparse areas), the shortsightedness of GSM not offering the ability to speak analog, and the cost of upgrading vs. the need to make money.
And by the way, if you're gonna bag on the US for not using GSM then don't forget that Japan, one of the worlds densest cell markets, doesn't use GSM either.
Sorry, but are a bunch of Indian programmers gonna buy a car from Yahoo! Autos? Or sign up for Yahoo! Personal? No fucking way. The people that Yahoo cares about are the folks that pay the bills. And I don't think a bunch of Indian programmers fit the description. Face it, there aren't enough consumers there who can afford the stuff advertised for it to be worth the effort.
Fucking computer geeks think they're the center of the damn universe....
Even if you don't, I find it funny to see someone suggesting that employees have any reason to feel loyal in today's market, since it only works one way. They were complaining about folks job hopping during a hot market, yet seem to have no problem laying people off in a cold on. It works both ways, ya know.
As a side point, the Cisco 3000 series VPN products come with clients for MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, Windows, and maybe others. So you can use this VPN solution and still make the majority of users happy.
That reminds me of when Formula One had active/electronic suspensions. When the car was calibrating it self it would actually jump in the air a few inches. The mechanics called it "Jumping Jacks".
Last time I tried a mozilla variant under OS X it looked nasty. However, for those wishing an alternative to IE there is OmniWeb, which is one of the prettiest browsers out there. It renders totally in Quartz and looks more beautiful than any browser I've seen. It totally spoils you.
One of the posts here linked to an article with a possible reference to Episode VII. So I was wondering...is Lucas' personal involvement essential to the Star Wars experience? Will Star Wars die when he does? Or could Lucasfilm go on after he's gone and make the third trilogy?
My Powerbook G4 has 16MB of video RAM I believe. (667 MHz, bought in January 2002) And that's not enough for "Quartz Extreme" A box less than 6 months old? That doesn't seem right.
I finally have 802.11 at my apartment. I never needed it before, as I only had 1 room, but now I have a couch and a TV and a laptop...so is it wrong for me to sit in front of the TV with my TiBook and do stuff during the commercials? Does that make 802.11 illegal?
Oh please. Eva was good, but not *that* good. On the other hand, I still consider Eva to be a "new" series, having been in to anime since '91. But when I compare it to some older series, like Nadia, or some newer series, like Utena, I don't think it's that great. To me it feels like the "Ranma effect" - something gets so hyped by the fanboys that it has to be good...
I played this at SGI, and believe me it was the lunch time bomb. My entire team (8 of us) would be on there with maybe another 10 or so people...and that was just one server. The development of bzflag and the way people played it was just one example of how cool SGI was to work for.
And BZFLag was pretty smart. When I had a plain old Indigo2 the graphics were simple. When I upgraded to an Octane with an MXI graphics board (for one head, anyway...the other was just MX) it added texture maps and stuff.
Favorite trick: jump up, fire a missile (so that you can clear the buildings) and then when it gets past any buildings in the way lock on and watch it swoop in and kill.
I went to "update" my preferences and saw they had my home address and phone...and I certainly didn't give it to them. That worries me...
A silly question for Apple...
on
iPod on Windows
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· Score: 1
I said I'm waiting for the 20GB iPod before I'll by one. And I'm sticking by that. In the same day that Toshiba announced (news.com) a 10GB drive they also annouced a 20GB drive. Where is my 20GB iPod? Would it be just too expensive? I know the nomad 3 is coming but it's still a little too big. A 20GB iPod would really be cool, but it seems they don't want me to have it...
My only complaint is crappy GSM coverage in the US. I use Cingular in the Bay Area and it's been terribly oversubscribed and has poor signal strength. So even *if* someone can get through to me and doesn't get a fast busy then chances are the call will be dropped.
I like my phone, a v3682, and am considering switching to a Palm Phone. I like handspring, but I am not sure I wanna stay with GSM and the Samsung color palm phone sure does look nice.
In late January I bought a 667Mhz TiBook. This was my first Mac (not my first Apple, but the ][e isn't competitive anymore) ever, and OS X was definetly one of the reasons. For me, it's an OS with 95% of the Unix functionality I need, and 0% of the hastle. (It took a lot of effort to get Linux running on the Toshiba work gave me.)
OS X wasn't the only reason...Apple took a very sexy platform and put a sexy OS on it. Would I have bought the TiBook running Windows? Probably not. But I could go for OS X on another platform (if the TiBook didn't exist), it's just the that the features of the hardware wouldn't be as exciting.
As for the price issue, my TiBook came stock with:
512MB RAM
30GB HD
Firewire and USB
802.11b
DVD/CD-RW Combo drive
When I started trying to decide if I really wanted this TiBook, I priced out the competition. And what I found was that most of the name brand laptops that could come close in terms of feature set were $3500 or so, which is more than the TiBook. And none of them had a wide screen (which I love), or GigE (which believe it or not, I have used).
And even setting aside the feature set....this isn't some beige box that sits under the desk. It's a piece of hardware that's in my face, so to speak, and the form factor is exciting.
Apple's got killer hardware and a killer OS. For those that don't think Apple is price competitive then usually they're not being sure to add in all the features. I'm very happy with mine.
I've been waiting for this device for a while. A couple of co-workers have Kyocera phones, but I think they're way to bulky, no USB, and I prefer GSM service. The addition of the 900Mhz band is nice...it would work in London, maybe not all over Europe like a Tri-band would.
But now I'm not so sure. I've wanted a new PDA for a while, but then I heard about the Treo and decided to wait for it. I currently have a Palm III (not even e or anything) and a Motorola v3682. I don't carry the Palm around much due to it's bulk, and the phone numbers aren't exactly in sync. The idea of everything in one place appeals to me.
However, there are the new Sony PalmOS units...the 400 series is really nice...and there are tools to talk to GSM phones that have IR...for about the same price as the Treo I could switch to a PEG-T415 and a Nokia 8290 and have most of the functionality...but I'd still be carrying two separate devices.
I've got a pretty good camera (Cannon G1), and since it has a monster battery the power usage of a microdrive isn't a real problem. What I love is how I can squeeze 660+ Full-size max-quality JPEGs (2048 x 1536) on there before I have to do anything about it. I was in London almost 2 weeks, and I thought I took a lot of pictures but I never even came close to filling up the drive. It frees me up from wondering should I keep a shot or not so that I can just shoot everything I see and throw out the crap when I get home. I think it's great.
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I just can't get in to convergence (I don't want to carry a palm phone or PPC Phone all the time, even if I can changes phones with a SIM chip), but I will say that Bluetooth makes it all pretty sweet. When you can dial your phone and send and recieve SMS from your Palm/PPC it is pretty cool. If you have a BT headset then you basically have a smartphone, since you can make and get calls without taking your phone out of your pocket/bag. And then Friday night, at the club, you can leave the damn tricorder at home so you don't look like a total geek...
So I kinda used my PDA before, but once I was all hooked up with Bluetooth the PDA became much more useful.
Well, when La Femme Nikita ended really badly on USA the fans went nuts. The fan reaction resulted in a 9 episode "mini-season" which served to wrap things up in a way that fans liked better. Not as good as a full return, but it was a nice reaction by USA to the fans.
Do you discount the importance of a good voice actor? In some respects, voice acting is harder than traditional stage/screen acting.
:-)
That has been the major problem with dubbed anime in the US...the voice acting has been poor. I think it is primarily that they aren't using good directors. The director for the voice actors makes all the difference, since he's the one who knows what he wants it to sound like.
If the american anime companies tried to get better voice directors instead of having some production person with no experience from their own company do it (which does happen)then maybe the hardcore fans wouldn't be so pro-sub/anti-dub. (Though with DVDs these days it doesn't really make a difference...I have the Region 1 Mononoke disc, and the region 2 Spirited Away disc. Both have Japanese dialog with English subtitles
The story is broadly similar, and then look at the character designs. It's like they hired Gainax to do them or something. They look remarkably similar, and they are almost 1-to-1 with the cast of Nadia.
Just because something isn't famous in America doesn't mean it's not famous. 95% of Americans many not know who Michael Schumacher is, but that doesn't change the fact that he's the world's highest paid sports figure, and famous for sure.
Gundam IS legendary in Japan. Have no doubt of that. It radically changed anime there, adding a bit of reality to the whole thing (not that it's particularly real) and matured the story lines for sure. So try not to be so provincial - something not legendary here can be legendary elsewhere.
To make sure you're getting the real Japanese DVD you had best either buy it in a Japan Town near you and make sure it's $50 (the $10 version in Chinatown is not legit) or order from Japan.
:-)
CD Japan is excellent for ordering Japanese CDs and DVDs. They're also good for ordering Japanese releases of non-Japanese stuff. You just pay shipping plus the exchange rate that your credit card company gives you, which is a pretty good deal.
Another place is AMO Tokyo. I haven't bought anything there but have heard good things, at least if you're ordering anime. If you are ordering J-Pop, stick with CD Japan.
Any place in Japan may have a bit of weirdness when ordering from the US...like you may have to fax them a copy of your credit card and driver's license for ID purposes. Japan is sill getting used to this whole credit card thing...but it is getting better.
Actually, the North America premiere for the subtitled version was at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Their blurb about it is here. The showing even made news at the BBC. It was great to see it at the Castro theater...they even played the organ before the showing.
In the write-up of the Sunday Q&A Session with the Producer, Mr. Suzuki, and John Lasseter, they made reference to the "Mei and Neko-bus" short that is being worked on for the Ghibli museum. So that's sort of a Totoro sequel...or all we're going to get.
It just sucked having to wait from April 'til September to get the Region 2 release. That was, of course, offset by having seen it at all...especially at the North America premiere.
If you look at the history of telephony in the US you can understand why it has evolved the way it has compared to Europe.
First of all, land lines are significantly cheaper in the US than in Europe. And the phone companies are required to bring a line to your MPOE. There are places that people live in europe where you still can't get a land line, even in 2002. We did the hard work for the last mile problem and some places in Europe haven't. And the high cost of landlines increased demand for the cheaper mobile services.
Secondly, analog cell service had good coverage in the US when the first digital technologies came out. Maybe if the folks who had designed GSM had thought about how the US was gonna roll it out then they would have realized that the ability to fall back to analog would help the rollout. The folks at Qualcomm got it, as did the inventors of TDMA.
The US is much less dense than europe in terms of cell users. Therefore building out a brand new network is expensive and the lack of density means that it's hard to recoup the cost of the towers in remote places. That makes it hard to roll out a technology that's backwards compatable.
Don't get me wrong, I like GSM. I have a GSM phone. And I wish it was better rolled out here. Although I like the tech, I will be the first to admit that my TDMA phone gets much better coverage. I don't think that the existence of other formats is an attempt at American isolationism but rather a combination of the nature of America (a lot of sparse areas), the shortsightedness of GSM not offering the ability to speak analog, and the cost of upgrading vs. the need to make money.
And by the way, if you're gonna bag on the US for not using GSM then don't forget that Japan, one of the worlds densest cell markets, doesn't use GSM either.
Fucking computer geeks think they're the center of the damn universe....
"evidence of dedication"? Do you mean loyalty?
Even if you don't, I find it funny to see someone suggesting that employees have any reason to feel loyal in today's market, since it only works one way. They were complaining about folks job hopping during a hot market, yet seem to have no problem laying people off in a cold on. It works both ways, ya know.
As a side point, the Cisco 3000 series VPN products come with clients for MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, Windows, and maybe others. So you can use this VPN solution and still make the majority of users happy.
That reminds me of when Formula One had active/electronic suspensions. When the car was calibrating it self it would actually jump in the air a few inches. The mechanics called it "Jumping Jacks".
Eventually such systems were banned...:-)
My Powerbook G4 has 16MB of video RAM I believe. (667 MHz, bought in January 2002) And that's not enough for "Quartz Extreme" A box less than 6 months old? That doesn't seem right.
I finally have 802.11 at my apartment. I never needed it before, as I only had 1 room, but now I have a couch and a TV and a laptop...so is it wrong for me to sit in front of the TV with my TiBook and do stuff during the commercials? Does that make 802.11 illegal?
Oh please. Eva was good, but not *that* good. On the other hand, I still consider Eva to be a "new" series, having been in to anime since '91. But when I compare it to some older series, like Nadia, or some newer series, like Utena, I don't think it's that great. To me it feels like the "Ranma effect" - something gets so hyped by the fanboys that it has to be good...
I played this at SGI, and believe me it was the lunch time bomb. My entire team (8 of us) would be on there with maybe another 10 or so people...and that was just one server. The development of bzflag and the way people played it was just one example of how cool SGI was to work for.
And BZFLag was pretty smart. When I had a plain old Indigo2 the graphics were simple. When I upgraded to an Octane with an MXI graphics board (for one head, anyway...the other was just MX) it added texture maps and stuff.
Favorite trick: jump up, fire a missile (so that you can clear the buildings) and then when it gets past any buildings in the way lock on and watch it swoop in and kill.
I said I'm waiting for the 20GB iPod before I'll by one. And I'm sticking by that. In the same day that Toshiba announced (news.com) a 10GB drive they also annouced a 20GB drive. Where is my 20GB iPod? Would it be just too expensive? I know the nomad 3 is coming but it's still a little too big. A 20GB iPod would really be cool, but it seems they don't want me to have it...
My only complaint is crappy GSM coverage in the US. I use Cingular in the Bay Area and it's been terribly oversubscribed and has poor signal strength. So even *if* someone can get through to me and doesn't get a fast busy then chances are the call will be dropped.
I like my phone, a v3682, and am considering switching to a Palm Phone. I like handspring, but I am not sure I wanna stay with GSM and the Samsung color palm phone sure does look nice.
In late January I bought a 667Mhz TiBook. This was my first Mac (not my first Apple, but the ][e isn't competitive anymore) ever, and OS X was definetly one of the reasons. For me, it's an OS with 95% of the Unix functionality I need, and 0% of the hastle. (It took a lot of effort to get Linux running on the Toshiba work gave me.)
OS X wasn't the only reason...Apple took a very sexy platform and put a sexy OS on it. Would I have bought the TiBook running Windows? Probably not. But I could go for OS X on another platform (if the TiBook didn't exist), it's just the that the features of the hardware wouldn't be as exciting.
As for the price issue, my TiBook came stock with:
512MB RAM
30GB HD
Firewire and USB
802.11b
DVD/CD-RW Combo drive
When I started trying to decide if I really wanted this TiBook, I priced out the competition. And what I found was that most of the name brand laptops that could come close in terms of feature set were $3500 or so, which is more than the TiBook. And none of them had a wide screen (which I love), or GigE (which believe it or not, I have used).
And even setting aside the feature set....this isn't some beige box that sits under the desk. It's a piece of hardware that's in my face, so to speak, and the form factor is exciting.
Apple's got killer hardware and a killer OS. For those that don't think Apple is price competitive then usually they're not being sure to add in all the features. I'm very happy with mine.
I've been waiting for this device for a while. A couple of co-workers have Kyocera phones, but I think they're way to bulky, no USB, and I prefer GSM service. The addition of the 900Mhz band is nice...it would work in London, maybe not all over Europe like a Tri-band would.
But now I'm not so sure. I've wanted a new PDA for a while, but then I heard about the Treo and decided to wait for it. I currently have a Palm III (not even e or anything) and a Motorola v3682. I don't carry the Palm around much due to it's bulk, and the phone numbers aren't exactly in sync. The idea of everything in one place appeals to me.
However, there are the new Sony PalmOS units...the 400 series is really nice...and there are tools to talk to GSM phones that have IR...for about the same price as the Treo I could switch to a PEG-T415 and a Nokia 8290 and have most of the functionality...but I'd still be carrying two separate devices.
Anyone trying to make the same decision?
I've got a pretty good camera (Cannon G1), and since it has a monster battery the power usage of a microdrive isn't a real problem. What I love is how I can squeeze 660+ Full-size max-quality JPEGs (2048 x 1536) on there before I have to do anything about it. I was in London almost 2 weeks, and I thought I took a lot of pictures but I never even came close to filling up the drive. It frees me up from wondering should I keep a shot or not so that I can just shoot everything I see and throw out the crap when I get home. I think it's great.