I actually came away with the opposite feeling. While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings. They'd probably have a strong legal leg to stand on if McGee came to them with a lawsuit.
Parody is allowed- you can parody just about anything. So today's strip (the "American Greetings"=Nazis strip) is totally okay, AFAIK. Also, the strip they got in trouble for (the "American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake" strip) is probably legal too, at least the parody aspect.
If anything was illegal about the Strawberry Shortcake strip, it was because they used the "Strawberry Shortcake" name without noting that it was a registered trademark or whatever. Although, I don't know if it's even a violation there, IANAL, obviously!:P
This is an example of where you bite the bullet, pay for the lawyer, and proceed to file a counter suit for personal damages, ie, the cost fo hiring a lawyer to defend yourself from a baseless lawsuit. You get your money back, and then some. But most people will just back down, Am Greets is counting on it. Hope the PA guys get some backbone.
Just a few problems here...
Even if they successfully defend themselves against AmGreet, I don't see how they'd get much compensation for damages... legal costs aside, how much money have they lost here?
You... do have a passing familiarity with the American legal system, right? You know how lawyers cost a LOT of money, and trials take a LONG TIME and get appealed a lot? And you know how you don't get paid until the end, even if you win? I don't know that the PA guys have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around that they don't need for the next couple of years, when the court stuff would be finished and they'd possibly get paid.
If PA somehow lost, they might be totally bankrupt. So they have to weigh the very small potential gain agsint the very large potential losses they'd face.
Truthfully, when it comes to having "backbone", probably the most effective way to get back at AmGreet is to make them look stupid and maybe encourage a boycott and letter-writing campaign. PA has thousands of readers; I don't know that a PA-reader boycott of AG would really make a dent in their bottom line (in face I'm sure it wouldn't) but if they see it's costing them money and letters start pouring in, perhaps AmGreet will back down.
The banned strip is clearly a work of parody, which I believe is still legal in this country
It's clearly a parody, and would certainly hold up in court (IANAL), but the problem is that the PA guys don't have money to spend defending themselves in court. So it's another case of the "big guy" successfully squashing the "little guy" with the thread of a baseless lawsuit, because the cost of fighting is beyond the little guy's reach.
Have you tried Andale Mono? At least for code, I find that to be my favorite monospaced font of all time. It's a very subjective thing of course, but perhaps you'll like it.
It used to be part of Microsoft's free font downloads; they've since pulled it from their website, but it should be easily findable on the web.
I was never a hardcore comic book reader, but there were a bunch of American comic titles that I used to read back in the late 80's and early 90's. Around the early 90's, though, things started getting ridiculous. Comics wanted to be treated as *visual art*, they got much more expensive and "collectible". That first issue of McFarland's Spiderman comic was the beginning of the end. That thing was what, twenty pages long and cost three bucks? But the picture sure were pretty, and the paper sure was glossy. *gag*
Now, you can't even buy comics at the convenience store any more- at least not many of them. They're marshaled away in specialized comic book stores, where collectors go to peruse.
Manga, however, has always taken the opposite approach, the one American comics used until the time period I just described. Manga keeps things cheap, fun, and disposable. For the equivalant of a few bucks, you get a couple hundred pages of manga. Easy to pick up and put down, and it's not "collectible", so you can carry it anywhere. The stories are pulpy and fun, and they don't try to be more than they are. Sure, there are some though-provoking plots (Shirow, etc) but it never takes itself too seriously like a lot of American comics do.
(I know there's plenty of exceptions to the things I talked about. I'm talking "in general", not "absolutely and completely")
Think about it... suppose they re-release the SNES over there.
Now, think back to the days when *you* were playing SNES. Suppose consoles as powerful as the XBOX, PS2, and GameCube were available elsewhere in the world but they weren't available to you, thanks to your government.
Holy crap! I'd be plotting to overthrown that bastard in a minute!
But James Breyer, a longtime Kapor friend, said the OSAF model is a return to the "old-fashioned way" of designing software, in small development teams on tight budgets.
Wow, $5 million is a "tight budget"?
Assuming roughly $100K/year per developer (salary plus benefits) and 20% in overhead costs (utilities, office space, etc), that's 20 developers a year for two years. Or 10 developers a year for four years.
Even if more than 20% of the budget goes to marketing (I don't know if that's applicable in their case, since they're going the free/Free route), underage hookers, or whatEVER, that still seems like a pretty nice budget to work with!
Whatever the case, best of luck to them, though!:-)
I have an *ancient* Geocities home page, that was set up before Yahoo acquired them. I am "yoderm" on Yahoo and was on Geocities before the acquisition. Unfortunately, the GC home page is not associated with my Yahoo account. I now have no way of logging into the thing, and really want it deleted.
That sucks. Not that you should have to jump through such hoops, but what if you try making the site a Terms Of Service violation? You could hammer it with wget to constantly exceed the bandwidth allocation, or maybe falsely say there's some sort of, I dunno... Nazi propaganda on there?
I dunno, I don't know exactly what it takes to get a site kicked off of Geocities. Good luck.:P
Other CPUs (ARM etc) are ticking along just fine with no heatsinks and still have vast improvements ahead
I think we all know the x86 sucks as an ISA, but I don't see ARM or any other more-efficient architecture running at 2GHZ either. I bet they'd be running into the same problems.
That is, in the last five years, or are you guessing about how things were before you were in the business?
I'm just guessing. That's why I put that "mid-20's" disclaimer in there, not trying to mis-represent.
But right now I'm working on what's basically a video e-mail system. I (a skilled but by no means expert programmer) can accomplish this in a few weeks of work, because the existng components are all there. No need to re-invent the wheel, I mostly need to write the "glue".
Now, think about the work it would have taken to accomplish this, say, ten years ago. It could have been done, but it would have had to have been done from scratch. It would have taken months and months of work by a whole team.
While I'm only in my mid 20's and I'm no veteran by any stretch, it seems like there have been huge leaps in programmer productivity made possible by things like OOP and off-the-shelf components.
However, I think they're equally balanced out by huger demands on programmers. Once it's realized that a programmer can do 2, 3, or 10 times as much work by using more efficient methods management is quick to pile on 2, 3, or 10 times as much work!
This isn't really unique to programming either. I think it's universally applicable to any area
where technology permits greater productivity.
For example, look at all those ads from the 50's. Things like the microwave, the vaccuum, and the dishwasher were supposed to usher in a new era of leisure. Do we have more leisure? No, we have less, as those luxuries become necessities and we cram in more activities in out new-found time in order to stay competitive.
To use a crappy metaphor, it's why a ferrari performs better than a honda civic
Oh, I don't know about that. You can expect to get 150,000 miles from the Civic even if you treat it like shit, but you'll be lucky to get 30,000 from the Ferrari!:P
I wonder if dreamcast hackers could (or already have?) come up with something like this. Maybe the DC does not have the CPU power to do it.
I really don't think the Dreamcast has nearly enough power. It's got a 200mhz RISC CPU with nice floating-point power, but by all accounts you need at least a P3 around 600mhz or so to decode the newest DivX-encoded movies.
I notice the article didnt even try to find a quiet cdrom. I have 2 in my PC and both are loud as the dickens.
But how often are they spinning? The actual amount of time my CD-ROMs are spinning is probably and average of a few minutes a day... I probably spend an average of 20 total minutes a WEEK installing/ripping/burning, and the optical drives are silent the rest of the time.
If you're gaming, I suppose the drive would be spinning much more often, but then you've usually got the game music/sfx playing fairly loudly anyway:P
But think about how nature works. Sure, different species duplicate effort in coming up with solutions to environmental challenges, but a diverse ecosystem is much more viable long-term, producing more varied species and is more adaptable to change.
Seems to me we got a negative charge within the OSS community where they try to counter each and every project with a similar initiative, and in turn it just divides the developers into two camps and never gives edge to a single one.
See, your whole premise seems to be based upon the assumption that there's One Right Way to do things. If there was, yes. It would make more sense to have everybody working on a single project rather than competing ones.
Plain and simple it's like a car, the ability to top out at 300 mph is usless when the speed limit is 55. DVD-AUDIO and Super CDs are worthless unless the system they are played on can keep up.
Your post is 100% correct! I'd also like to suggest one thing that perhaps you hadn't considered: the placebo effect. Even if CD's and SACD/DVD-A sound the same Joe Consumer or Joe Audiophile-Wannabe's mediocre system... he might think his fancy SACD/DVD-A's sound better anyway.
There's a whole breed of consumers who are a notch below the "true" audiophiles in terms of know-how and savvy (and fanaticism) but are addicted to getting the latest electronic crap anyway simply for the sake of having the latest electronic crap. They aren't technically adept enough to know all of the in's and out's, but they the latest gear at Best Buy or Fry's and get a bad case of got-to-have-it technolust. While I don't see widespread adoption of these new formats, this class of consumer will probably be the prime target.:P
Also, I'd like to add that it's hard for me to type "DVD-A" without thinking of the DVDA acronym from Orgazmo!
What we need is a portable hard drive with a full set of connectors (lan/bluetooth/802.1ab/ethernet/serial (don't forget serial for those pesky old routers:) ) and an optional (detachable) small screen and some sort of expanding keyboard. Is that so much to ask for?
I share your concerns about the picture quality on these Sonys. However, these Sonys are *really tiny*. I doubt the device you're envisioning could be much smaller than one of these min-laptops.
If you're talking about per-session state information, it's pretty easy to just set up your networking hardware to do per-connection round-robin load balancing, rather than per-request load balancing.
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I actually came away with the opposite feeling. While the first strip was clearly a parody, it was a parody of American McGee, and not a parody of American Greetings. They'd probably have a strong legal leg to stand on if McGee came to them with a lawsuit.
:P
Parody is allowed- you can parody just about anything. So today's strip (the "American Greetings"=Nazis strip) is totally okay, AFAIK. Also, the strip they got in trouble for (the "American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake" strip) is probably legal too, at least the parody aspect.
If anything was illegal about the Strawberry Shortcake strip, it was because they used the "Strawberry Shortcake" name without noting that it was a registered trademark or whatever. Although, I don't know if it's even a violation there, IANAL, obviously!
Just a few problems here...
- Even if they successfully defend themselves against AmGreet, I don't see how they'd get much compensation for damages... legal costs aside, how much money have they lost here?
- You... do have a passing familiarity with the American legal system, right? You know how lawyers cost a LOT of money, and trials take a LONG TIME and get appealed a lot? And you know how you don't get paid until the end, even if you win? I don't know that the PA guys have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around that they don't need for the next couple of years, when the court stuff would be finished and they'd possibly get paid.
- If PA somehow lost, they might be totally bankrupt. So they have to weigh the very small potential gain agsint the very large potential losses they'd face.
Truthfully, when it comes to having "backbone", probably the most effective way to get back at AmGreet is to make them look stupid and maybe encourage a boycott and letter-writing campaign. PA has thousands of readers; I don't know that a PA-reader boycott of AG would really make a dent in their bottom line (in face I'm sure it wouldn't) but if they see it's costing them money and letters start pouring in, perhaps AmGreet will back down.The banned strip is clearly a work of parody, which I believe is still legal in this country
It's clearly a parody, and would certainly hold up in court (IANAL), but the problem is that the PA guys don't have money to spend defending themselves in court. So it's another case of the "big guy" successfully squashing the "little guy" with the thread of a baseless lawsuit, because the cost of fighting is beyond the little guy's reach.
Things change. The industry moves forward. This is why we don't all run 486's anymore.
If the Pentium wasn't backwards-compatible, we might still be running on 486's after all!
You mean a kludge? :P
Like my dual Athlon system doesn't run hot enough already... now you want me to put a decaying isotope in there as well? :-P
Have you tried Andale Mono? At least for code, I find that to be my favorite monospaced font of all time. It's a very subjective thing of course, but perhaps you'll like it.
It used to be part of Microsoft's free font downloads; they've since pulled it from their website, but it should be easily findable on the web.
If the Barenaked Ladies are right, then I'll be happy to be wrong, thanks very much!
...about their poor server actually running on one of these things. That's like a license to print karma!
I was never a hardcore comic book reader, but there were a bunch of American comic titles that I used to read back in the late 80's and early 90's. Around the early 90's, though, things started getting ridiculous. Comics wanted to be treated as *visual art*, they got much more expensive and "collectible". That first issue of McFarland's Spiderman comic was the beginning of the end. That thing was what, twenty pages long and cost three bucks? But the picture sure were pretty, and the paper sure was glossy. *gag*
Now, you can't even buy comics at the convenience store any more- at least not many of them. They're marshaled away in specialized comic book stores, where collectors go to peruse.
Manga, however, has always taken the opposite approach, the one American comics used until the time period I just described. Manga keeps things cheap, fun, and disposable. For the equivalant of a few bucks, you get a couple hundred pages of manga. Easy to pick up and put down, and it's not "collectible", so you can carry it anywhere. The stories are pulpy and fun, and they don't try to be more than they are. Sure, there are some though-provoking plots (Shirow, etc) but it never takes itself too seriously like a lot of American comics do.
(I know there's plenty of exceptions to the things I talked about. I'm talking "in general", not "absolutely and completely")
Think about it... suppose they re-release the SNES over there.
Now, think back to the days when *you* were playing SNES. Suppose consoles as powerful as the XBOX, PS2, and GameCube were available elsewhere in the world but they weren't available to you, thanks to your government.
Holy crap! I'd be plotting to overthrown that bastard in a minute!
But James Breyer, a longtime Kapor friend, said the OSAF model is a return to the "old-fashioned way" of designing software, in small development teams on tight budgets.
:-)
Wow, $5 million is a "tight budget"?
Assuming roughly $100K/year per developer (salary plus benefits) and 20% in overhead costs (utilities, office space, etc), that's 20 developers a year for two years. Or 10 developers a year for four years.
Even if more than 20% of the budget goes to marketing (I don't know if that's applicable in their case, since they're going the free/Free route), underage hookers, or whatEVER, that still seems like a pretty nice budget to work with!
Whatever the case, best of luck to them, though!
I have an *ancient* Geocities home page, that was set up before Yahoo acquired them. I am "yoderm" on Yahoo and was on Geocities before the acquisition. Unfortunately, the GC home page is not associated with my Yahoo account. I now have no way of logging into the thing, and really want it deleted.
:P
That sucks. Not that you should have to jump through such hoops, but what if you try making the site a Terms Of Service violation? You could hammer it with wget to constantly exceed the bandwidth allocation, or maybe falsely say there's some sort of, I dunno... Nazi propaganda on there? I dunno, I don't know exactly what it takes to get a site kicked off of Geocities. Good luck.
Other CPUs (ARM etc) are ticking along just fine with no heatsinks and still have vast improvements ahead
I think we all know the x86 sucks as an ISA, but I don't see ARM or any other more-efficient architecture running at 2GHZ either. I bet they'd be running into the same problems.
That is, in the last five years, or are you guessing about how things were before you were in the business?
I'm just guessing. That's why I put that "mid-20's" disclaimer in there, not trying to mis-represent.
But right now I'm working on what's basically a video e-mail system. I (a skilled but by no means expert programmer) can accomplish this in a few weeks of work, because the existng components are all there. No need to re-invent the wheel, I mostly need to write the "glue".
Now, think about the work it would have taken to accomplish this, say, ten years ago. It could have been done, but it would have had to have been done from scratch. It would have taken months and months of work by a whole team.
That's what I'm talking about.
While I'm only in my mid 20's and I'm no veteran by any stretch, it seems like there have been huge leaps in programmer productivity made possible by things like OOP and off-the-shelf components.
However, I think they're equally balanced out by huger demands on programmers. Once it's realized that a programmer can do 2, 3, or 10 times as much work by using more efficient methods management is quick to pile on 2, 3, or 10 times as much work!
This isn't really unique to programming either. I think it's universally applicable to any area where technology permits greater productivity.
For example, look at all those ads from the 50's. Things like the microwave, the vaccuum, and the dishwasher were supposed to usher in a new era of leisure. Do we have more leisure? No, we have less, as those luxuries become necessities and we cram in more activities in out new-found time in order to stay competitive.
To use a crappy metaphor, it's why a ferrari performs better than a honda civic
:P
Oh, I don't know about that. You can expect to get 150,000 miles from the Civic even if you treat it like shit, but you'll be lucky to get 30,000 from the Ferrari!
I wonder if dreamcast hackers could (or already have?) come up with something like this. Maybe the DC does not have the CPU power to do it.
I really don't think the Dreamcast has nearly enough power. It's got a 200mhz RISC CPU with nice floating-point power, but by all accounts you need at least a P3 around 600mhz or so to decode the newest DivX-encoded movies.
I notice the article didnt even try to find a quiet cdrom. I have 2 in my PC and both are loud as the dickens.
:P
But how often are they spinning? The actual amount of time my CD-ROMs are spinning is probably and average of a few minutes a day... I probably spend an average of 20 total minutes a WEEK installing/ripping/burning, and the optical drives are silent the rest of the time.
If you're gaming, I suppose the drive would be spinning much more often, but then you've usually got the game music/sfx playing fairly loudly anyway
But think about how nature works. Sure, different species duplicate effort in coming up with solutions to environmental challenges, but a diverse ecosystem is much more viable long-term, producing more varied species and is more adaptable to change.
Seems to me we got a negative charge within the OSS community where they try to counter each and every project with a similar initiative, and in turn it just divides the developers into two camps and never gives edge to a single one.
See, your whole premise seems to be based upon the assumption that there's One Right Way to do things. If there was, yes. It would make more sense to have everybody working on a single project rather than competing ones.
We got Blender3d now. Why revive old corpses and divide the community again?
Yeah! Who needs choice? Screw that shit!
Plain and simple it's like a car, the ability to top out at 300 mph is usless when the speed limit is 55. DVD-AUDIO and Super CDs are worthless unless the system they are played on can keep up.
:P
Your post is 100% correct! I'd also like to suggest one thing that perhaps you hadn't considered: the placebo effect. Even if CD's and SACD/DVD-A sound the same Joe Consumer or Joe Audiophile-Wannabe's mediocre system... he might think his fancy SACD/DVD-A's sound better anyway.
There's a whole breed of consumers who are a notch below the "true" audiophiles in terms of know-how and savvy (and fanaticism) but are addicted to getting the latest electronic crap anyway simply for the sake of having the latest electronic crap. They aren't technically adept enough to know all of the in's and out's, but they the latest gear at Best Buy or Fry's and get a bad case of got-to-have-it technolust. While I don't see widespread adoption of these new formats, this class of consumer will probably be the prime target.
Also, I'd like to add that it's hard for me to type "DVD-A" without thinking of the DVDA acronym from Orgazmo!
What we need is a portable hard drive with a full set of connectors (lan/bluetooth/802.1ab/ethernet/serial (don't forget serial for those pesky old routers:) ) and an optional (detachable) small screen and some sort of expanding keyboard. Is that so much to ask for?
I share your concerns about the picture quality on these Sonys. However, these Sonys are *really tiny*. I doubt the device you're envisioning could be much smaller than one of these min-laptops.
how about... ...Vulcan
:)
Err, Star Trek mythos aside, when I think "Smith God", I think fire, I think heat.
You did read the part where they mention this is a dirty little iceball that's even colder than Pluto, right?
Sure, I know there's not actually any liquid water on Neptune, and you could pick faults with the other planets' nicknames, but...
Unless you have to save state information;
If you're talking about per-session state information, it's pretty easy to just set up your networking hardware to do per-connection round-robin load balancing, rather than per-request load balancing.