Was I the only one who thought of Sluggy Freelance's Dr. Schlock and his futuristic "inflatable technology"?
Maybe there's something to that, after all...
Third-person *viewpoint* based writing
on
0wnz0red
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· Score: 2
I don't know what it is, but a lot of people seem to have this problem of assuming every narrator is omniscient, and calling errors or slang that creep into it "bad writing." The same thing gets Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan novels criticized...because people don't realize it's third-person viewpoint narration, which combines the character-based perspective of first-person with the out-of-bodyism of third-person. We get a window on how the character thinks, and why he does the things he does, and how he instinctively reacts, without the conceit that somehow this person is telling us everything with eiditic recollection of every single word everyone said.
Use your favorite method of HTML-to-docfile conversion to stick it in your PDA. I'm not familiar with the Zaurus (I use a Clie) so I don't know what that might be for you, but surely you have one. I used iSilo.
People in eastern Canada say "triple-double-you." I cracked up when I heard this on a recording from the Canadian Immigration Bureau's information hotline.
How silly of them. They really should be saying "sextupleyou." But on the other hand, that sounds like something obscene, so I guess I can see why they don't.
As the submitter of the story, you're welcome. I think it's silly to abbreviate "weblog" to "blog" for the sake of saving just two letters (or one if you use an apostrophe the way it was originally coined: "'blog"). Besides, "blog" reminds me of the sound someone makes while throwing up.
The man is simply a kook. There's nothing else that needs to be said. I don't think Salon really needed to give him even a hint of legitimacy by doing a story about him, and I think Slashdot could have done a lot better than featuring the story.
Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been any Slashdot posting of another "article" featured on Salon's tech page: bOing bOing co-editor Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red short story. It's a wonderful little gem in kind of a Stephensonian vein, sprinkled with the kind of terms and jargon that a Slashdot code-head could appreciate. Seems like it'd be a much better use of time than checking out Mr. Anti-Google.
Look at Battlenet. It has a lot of the characterics of a peer to peer system. If you host a Starcraft game where only one person has the map, first it downloads from that one person to one more person, then from those two people to two more people, then from those four people to the other four people (if it's an 8-player game)--in other words, from peer to peer. And there is no one specific set host--Battlenet itself assigns the host based on who has the best bandwidth and processor power...and if that person gets dropped, someone else's machine takes over.
Peer to peer doesn't automatically equate to Napster. It just means people send stuff to each other instead of to and from one master server. Geez, Slashdot stories are like playing buzzword bingo these days.
You know, I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this whole thing remarkably ironic. I mean, given that DivX:) started out as a cracked-and-patched version of someone else's codec to begin with, it's almost like Sigma's just "carrying on the tradition."
Note that Sigma Designs runs an NNTP server discussion board for its users and developers at news.sigmadesigns.com. To see what they think, go over there and read the "realmagic" or "realmagic.questions" groups.
And besides that, most of the music they're pushing so hard just sucks these days. Britney Spears, N*Sync, Backstreet Boys, Eminem? Puh-LEEZE.
Re:Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
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· Score: 2
1) Not only is it a theatrical dub, but I've heard that some areas will also have subtitled prints of the film available. No matter how much you hate dubs, you have to admit that the chance to see it subtitled in a theater is worth something, eh?
2) The Japanese version of the DVD reputedly has a mastering problem that tilts it heavily toward a red tint on any normal TV on which it is displayed. Also, it is a region-2 disc, so that folks who want to buy it need to be able to play omniregional. (Not that this will be a problem for most of the geeks here, but...)
3) By buying their version rather than the American version, you're taking away from the profitability of American version of the picture, and reducing the chances Disney will try anything like this again. This is kind of Miyazaki's last chance for an American release with Disney...when they released Mononoke, it was a total wash. $10 million license fee, $2 million total theatrical take. A lot of fans are counting on Spirited Away doing well enough to get all Miyazaki's films released on USA DVD.
Sure, you can import the Japanese DVD, but a lot of fans can't...and if Disney doesn't release any more of the films here, you're depriving Miyazaki-san of a lot more potential income and the chance to make more masterpieces of film. (And the money you spend on the Japanese disc goes to Disney anyway, since they're the ones who handle Ghibli's video releases world-wide.) If you want to buy both versions, then go for it, and more power to you. Me, I'm waiting for the American release and the American DVD.
Re:A non-literal translation
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 2
The Mononoke dub was indeed excellent, but it still falls short of the original audio. Granted the fact that I understand Japanese may skew my opinion... but honestly, did they really have to use a female voice actor for the wolf when the original voice actor was male?
Well, given that the Japanese voice actor was a male who was widely known for playing female roles--something that the Japanese audience would have known and understood--using a male voice over here simply would simply have confused the audience, who would have wondered if this was supposed to be a male or female wolf.
If they wanted to go for exact equivalency, then Moro would have to have been voiced by RuPaul, and I don't think any of us would have wanted that.
* scooped up wholesale by an alien vessel and plopped inside a giant terrarium to preserve it from the imminent destruction of the world by another alien vessel (Manhattan Transfer, by John Stith)
* plopped under a weather-control dome to become a part-time tourist trap and full-time ghetto (City of Darkness by Ben Bova)
It's nice to have this digital replica. It will provide a sort of "memory" so that we will still know what the city was like even if the unthinkable should happen.
I'm reminded of Detective Ross Sylibus's (Armitage III) derisive comment on seeing the Statue of Liberty replica on Mars. "They think they can just build that kind of thing anywhere."
One form of Google manipulation that recently hit the scene is known as Google bombing--to wit, getting a lot of people to link to a particular site with certain key words. It was done a lot with blogging, as the article indicates: by linking to a certain artist's page using the words "talentless hack," they caused that artist's page to come up first when one typed "talentless hack" into the search engine.
I got a Rio 600 a couple years ago, for free thanks to PepsiStuff. In the end, I decided it was worth maybe a little more than what I paid for it, but not a lot. Avoid it if you're paying real money.
I'm aware of that...but don't see that there's an awful lot I can do about it. I'm only able to use giFT when I'm booted into Linux, myself. Kind of wish it were available for Windows, just so there'd be more people I could DL from. Oh well, sooner or later it'll come out of CVS and into beta.
Back when I was still working at my Kmart, they had just finished upgrading all the cash registers to new tech, so as to support adding self-checkout registers. In fact, they had self-checks in all the local Kmarts, and I would not be surprised if that was going to be every single Kmart soon. Which means every Kmart would have new registers.
Note that the article says
Scanners and other hardware bought more than three years ago will not read longer codes and will have to be replaced. Software more than five years old will also have to be scrapped.
Since they bought the new equipment a lot less than three years ago, all it'll take to get Kmart up and running with the 13-char barcode will be a software upgrade.
Kmart isn't even mentioned in the article--I looked for it specifically when I first read it yesterday. How about being a little more careful with the facts in your editorializing, eh, Slashdot people?
You can also find the made-for-Finnish-TV-yet-almost-entirely-in-English Linux documentary The Code (for which I tried to submit a review to Slashdot, only to have it rejected) floating around on it. (Ironically, at least a couple of dozen people on giFT have The Code--but absolutely nobody has it on KaZaa itself!)
I was a bit surprised to notice that the chain Blockbuster Video wasn't mentioned in that article; I seem to recall they've been bowdlerizing their videos for years. But OTOH, they're owned by one of the studios, aren't they?
IMO, there's a substantial difference between selling edited copies of a tape and using a system to overlay your own "edits" onto a full version you've bought. The former is an unauthorized motification, but the latter is within your personal rights for fair use, and not any different from simply hitting the mute or the fast forward button.
I know that they plan to do it with future releases in some of their more popular series, such as John Ringo's Posleen books (I hope they include some Sluggy Freelance on that one:) and Ringo & Weber's March to... books. But I'm uncertain they'd do it with Bujold's next.
For one thing, I doubt they even have them all electronically. Most of her works were published before the start of Webscription.
And Lois Bujold is one of the more hesitant writers of Baen's stables about the benefits of free electronic release. In a New York Times article a year or so ago, she was quoted as having no plans to release anything in the Free Library. Even now, when she at last decided to join the other authors who have released a number of novels, she has only released...a novella, The Mountains of Mourning
Somehow, I can't see her being very excited about putting all her books on a CD-ROM inside of just the one.
You're closer than you think. Salon Magazine used to be stuck with the longer salonmagazine.com, and some hairstylist' collective site had salon.com. Then Salon Magazine worked out some kind of a deal to get the domain name, and they wandered off to salon.net or some such.
Granted, they're not usually so inexpensive, but they're called TracPhones (or TracFones, however you misspell it). In fact, I bought a friend one a few months back for $40 on clearance. (Not like he ever seems to have the money to recharge it with minutes, so it didn't seem to do much good, but oh well.)
What remains to be seen is whether these disposaphones' minutes have to be recharged each month like the TracFone's (unless you buy a $100 "all year account" card) or whether they stay on for longer. I'm betting they'll be good for 6 months after purchase, the way the cheapy long distance phone cards are.
Slashdot Mirror
Was I the only one who thought of Sluggy Freelance's Dr. Schlock and his futuristic "inflatable technology"?
Maybe there's something to that, after all...
I don't know what it is, but a lot of people seem to have this problem of assuming every narrator is omniscient, and calling errors or slang that creep into it "bad writing." The same thing gets Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan novels criticized...because people don't realize it's third-person viewpoint narration, which combines the character-based perspective of first-person with the out-of-bodyism of third-person. We get a window on how the character thinks, and why he does the things he does, and how he instinctively reacts, without the conceit that somehow this person is telling us everything with eiditic recollection of every single word everyone said.
As the submitter of the story, you're welcome. I think it's silly to abbreviate "weblog" to "blog" for the sake of saving just two letters (or one if you use an apostrophe the way it was originally coined: "'blog"). Besides, "blog" reminds me of the sound someone makes while throwing up.
The man is simply a kook. There's nothing else that needs to be said. I don't think Salon really needed to give him even a hint of legitimacy by doing a story about him, and I think Slashdot could have done a lot better than featuring the story.
Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been any Slashdot posting of another "article" featured on Salon's tech page: bOing bOing co-editor Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red short story. It's a wonderful little gem in kind of a Stephensonian vein, sprinkled with the kind of terms and jargon that a Slashdot code-head could appreciate. Seems like it'd be a much better use of time than checking out Mr. Anti-Google.
Dr. Pepper Red Fusion.
:)
Sobe Mr. Green.
Pepsi Blue.
Is it any wonder geeks are after this stuff? It's like drinking a monitor!
Look at Battlenet. It has a lot of the characterics of a peer to peer system. If you host a Starcraft game where only one person has the map, first it downloads from that one person to one more person, then from those two people to two more people, then from those four people to the other four people (if it's an 8-player game)--in other words, from peer to peer. And there is no one specific set host--Battlenet itself assigns the host based on who has the best bandwidth and processor power...and if that person gets dropped, someone else's machine takes over.
Peer to peer doesn't automatically equate to Napster. It just means people send stuff to each other instead of to and from one master server. Geez, Slashdot stories are like playing buzzword bingo these days.
You know, I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this whole thing remarkably ironic. I mean, given that DivX :) started out as a cracked-and-patched version of someone else's codec to begin with, it's almost like Sigma's just "carrying on the tradition."
Note that Sigma Designs runs an NNTP server discussion board for its users and developers at news.sigmadesigns.com. To see what they think, go over there and read the "realmagic" or "realmagic.questions" groups.
And besides that, most of the music they're pushing so hard just sucks these days. Britney Spears, N*Sync, Backstreet Boys, Eminem? Puh-LEEZE.
1) Not only is it a theatrical dub, but I've heard that some areas will also have subtitled prints of the film available. No matter how much you hate dubs, you have to admit that the chance to see it subtitled in a theater is worth something, eh?
2) The Japanese version of the DVD reputedly has a mastering problem that tilts it heavily toward a red tint on any normal TV on which it is displayed. Also, it is a region-2 disc, so that folks who want to buy it need to be able to play omniregional. (Not that this will be a problem for most of the geeks here, but...)
3) By buying their version rather than the American version, you're taking away from the profitability of American version of the picture, and reducing the chances Disney will try anything like this again. This is kind of Miyazaki's last chance for an American release with Disney...when they released Mononoke, it was a total wash. $10 million license fee, $2 million total theatrical take. A lot of fans are counting on Spirited Away doing well enough to get all Miyazaki's films released on USA DVD.
Sure, you can import the Japanese DVD, but a lot of fans can't...and if Disney doesn't release any more of the films here, you're depriving Miyazaki-san of a lot more potential income and the chance to make more masterpieces of film. (And the money you spend on the Japanese disc goes to Disney anyway, since they're the ones who handle Ghibli's video releases world-wide.) If you want to buy both versions, then go for it, and more power to you. Me, I'm waiting for the American release and the American DVD.
If they wanted to go for exact equivalency, then Moro would have to have been voiced by RuPaul, and I don't think any of us would have wanted that.
It could also be...
* scooped up wholesale by an alien vessel and plopped inside a giant terrarium to preserve it from the imminent destruction of the world by another alien vessel (Manhattan Transfer, by John Stith)
* plopped under a weather-control dome to become a part-time tourist trap and full-time ghetto (City of Darkness by Ben Bova)
It's nice to have this digital replica. It will provide a sort of "memory" so that we will still know what the city was like even if the unthinkable should happen.
But it is laughable to think that it would be used as any sort of blueprint for reconstruction. I mean, they can't even decide what will replace the single building complex that was destroyed on 9/11. Even though they still have the blueprints of the original, and could rebuild it floor for floor if they wanted to. Why should the entire city be any different?
I'm reminded of Detective Ross Sylibus's (Armitage III) derisive comment on seeing the Statue of Liberty replica on Mars. "They think they can just build that kind of thing anywhere."
One form of Google manipulation that recently hit the scene is known as Google bombing--to wit, getting a lot of people to link to a particular site with certain key words. It was done a lot with blogging, as the article indicates: by linking to a certain artist's page using the words "talentless hack," they caused that artist's page to come up first when one typed "talentless hack" into the search engine.
I got a Rio 600 a couple years ago, for free thanks to PepsiStuff. In the end, I decided it was worth maybe a little more than what I paid for it, but not a lot. Avoid it if you're paying real money.
I'm aware of that...but don't see that there's an awful lot I can do about it. I'm only able to use giFT when I'm booted into Linux, myself. Kind of wish it were available for Windows, just so there'd be more people I could DL from. Oh well, sooner or later it'll come out of CVS and into beta.
Note that the article saysSince they bought the new equipment a lot less than three years ago, all it'll take to get Kmart up and running with the 13-char barcode will be a software upgrade.
Kmart isn't even mentioned in the article--I looked for it specifically when I first read it yesterday. How about being a little more careful with the facts in your editorializing, eh, Slashdot people?
You can probably find it on the giFT internet File Transfer (OpenFT) network.
h Linux documentary The Code (for which I tried to submit a review to Slashdot, only to have it rejected) floating around on it. (Ironically, at least a couple of dozen people on giFT have The Code--but absolutely nobody has it on KaZaa itself!)
You can also find the made-for-Finnish-TV-yet-almost-entirely-in-Englis
...a white polyester leisure suit with really deep pockets.
Now where did I put that onklunk...
I was a bit surprised to notice that the chain Blockbuster Video wasn't mentioned in that article; I seem to recall they've been bowdlerizing their videos for years. But OTOH, they're owned by one of the studios, aren't they?
IMO, there's a substantial difference between selling edited copies of a tape and using a system to overlay your own "edits" onto a full version you've bought. The former is an unauthorized motification, but the latter is within your personal rights for fair use, and not any different from simply hitting the mute or the fast forward button.
I know that they plan to do it with future releases in some of their more popular series, such as John Ringo's Posleen books (I hope they include some Sluggy Freelance on that one :) and Ringo & Weber's March to... books. But I'm uncertain they'd do it with Bujold's next.
For one thing, I doubt they even have them all electronically. Most of her works were published before the start of Webscription.
And Lois Bujold is one of the more hesitant writers of Baen's stables about the benefits of free electronic release. In a New York Times article a year or so ago, she was quoted as having no plans to release anything in the Free Library. Even now, when she at last decided to join the other authors who have released a number of novels, she has only released...a novella, The Mountains of Mourning
Somehow, I can't see her being very excited about putting all her books on a CD-ROM inside of just the one.
You're closer than you think. Salon Magazine used to be stuck with the longer salonmagazine.com, and some hairstylist' collective site had salon.com. Then Salon Magazine worked out some kind of a deal to get the domain name, and they wandered off to salon.net or some such.
Granted, they're not usually so inexpensive, but they're called TracPhones (or TracFones, however you misspell it). In fact, I bought a friend one a few months back for $40 on clearance. (Not like he ever seems to have the money to recharge it with minutes, so it didn't seem to do much good, but oh well.)
What remains to be seen is whether these disposaphones' minutes have to be recharged each month like the TracFone's (unless you buy a $100 "all year account" card) or whether they stay on for longer. I'm betting they'll be good for 6 months after purchase, the way the cheapy long distance phone cards are.