I sure am glad the Berman Hack-Back bill went down to defeat, because I downloaded all of the symphonies. Wouldn't want someone from the RIAA going into my network because they think I'm taking bread from the mouths of RCA Red Seal, Deutsche Grammaphon, or whatever classical label you'd care to name...
I mean, really...the Beeb does this to get people interested in Classical music. They certainly succeed, too...when this first appeared in Slashdot downloading was impossible for the next 48 hours after the article appeared. It was only thanks to archive.org and a few other sites that I was able to glom onto the whole set.
You can bet there won't be a "repeat performance" of something like this from the Beeb. Thanks a lot, pigopolists...
Yes, and when an Epson printer gets clogged with ink, it's basically dead.
This is a step backward for HP. The reason why my Deskjet 810c has been going and going like the Energizer Bunny since 1999 and my Apple StyleWriter 1200 (Canon print engine but same kind of configuration) since 1995 is because the print head is on the cartridge. New cartridge, new print head, no problem.
I think that HP doesn't just want to make money the Gillette way on cartridges, they want people to have to rebuy the printer every year or so. Screw that.
Big Eyes Small Mouth. TriStat DX system. Reminiscent of old-school Traveller with its minimalist rules. More role-playing, less roll-playing. I love it. AD&D D20 is still too complex for my tastes, and the AD&D system out in the 1980s was totally nuts with requiring bags full of polyhedra and a roll for almost every move.
Opening up Mac OS X to Whitebox would lead to the death of Apple. They are being quite astute in their insistence on tying the OS to their own Intel hardware. Finally someone comes up with an intelligent use of DRM circuitry. Well, that and crypto co-processing.
However, the reverse is not likely to be the case. One of the huge selling points of Macintel is hardware-assisted virtualization. You will be able to run Windows on Mac OS X with no hit on performance. You will be able to run x86 Linux distros, again with no hit on performance. Yes, there's PPC Linux right now, but of course there are far more Linux apps for x86 than PPC.
All this and the sweet goodness of Mac OS X? Suddenly Apple's computers are even more compelling. Who wouldn't want a MacIntel? I know I'm salivating over the prospect.
Combine this with the potential of extending the iPod to a PDA/Portable Media Player/Newton device, and suddenly Palm and WinCE don't look so nice. Add Mobile Phone capability and stir. Doesn't that sound sweet? The iPhone that is perennially rumored from Moto suddenly sounds like small potatoes.
No, Pixar has its own proprietary software and has used it since the beginning when they were still part of Lucasfilm. If you want to play with something resembling Pixar's software, try Martin Hash Animation Master. Both use true splines and patches as opposed to NURBS and Polygons.
Brooks Brown was the guy who was friends with Harris and Kleibold and warned the cops *a year before the shootings* that these guys were up to no good, that they were making bombs and planned to shoot up the school. If anyone has the right to make a comment about the connection (or lack thereof) between First Person Shooters and the Columbine Incident, it's Brown.
I don't know if I entirely agree with him...I noticed that I was getting a bit desensitized to real-world violence (on the news, in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11") after a few years of avidly playing Unreal Tournament, and put down for a while. However, he has definitely the right to say what he has to say, and by dint of what he's experience he's earned the right to say it with some level of authoritativeness.
These are perfect for my cheap-ass MP3 CD player, which will hard lock (pull the batteries!) if given an MP3 file it doesn't like.
This will be a nice companion for my trip to San Diego Comic-Con. ^_^ BTW the mp3music.bz site is holding up quite well to my 133c|-|1|\|6. Goddess bless DSL Extreme...my bandwith is rocking hard too.
The 1st Chair Violinist has a great deal of responsibility over and above being a hot violin soloist. S/He is usually the assistant conductor of the orchestra. S/He is the person who puts the orchestra through its rehearsals. S/He makes sure everyone has the right sheet music. S/He is basically the "second-in-command" of the orchestra.
All that, and they have to be a hot violin soloist too. It's really quite a set of responsibilities. No shit they get paid well.
Unfortunately the percussionists in the orchestra are the ones at the bottom of the totem pole. This was a fact of life that was quite depressing for my husband, who's a percussionist and was a member of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in the early part of the 1970s. Instead of classical, he took his chances on rock.;-)
The original length of the Compact Disk was designed so that Beethoven's 9th could fit on a single disk. Now, of course, we have the ability to cram 80 minutes worth of music onto a single CD.
BTW we just succeeded in slashdotting Auntie Beeb.
A few more good ones I've gotten this way: * White Zombie (the 1930s-vintage movie with Bela Lugosi, not the band) * Dementia 13, the first Francis Ford Coppola movie * Kimba the White Lion...sure, it doesn't have the original Japanese soundtrack and subtitles, it's got a crap Canadian dubtrack done on the cheap in the '80s, but dammit, it's Tezuka-sensei! * Some Pre-Code Betty Boop shorts, unfortunately with crappy colorization (thank Goddess for Archive.Org!) * Some early Gumby shorts, including "Gumbasia" which is a classic.
Of course you love Ruroni Kenshin, otherwise you wouldn't be calling yourself Sanosuke. ^_^
Anyway, a few titles you missed in your list:
Dramatic: Haibane Renmei Serial Experiments: Lain Neon Genesis Evangelion
Humorous: All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku OAV All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku TV Excel Saga (but not Puni Puni Poemy...ick!) FLCL (Yes, it's insane but that's the point!)
A bit of both: Samurai Champloo
The character design in Haibane Renmei and Serial Experiments: Lain by ABe Yoshitoshi is definitely worth a very careful look. The characters he designs (he was also designer on Niea Under 7) have large eyes, but they are identifiably Japanese.
The whole Big Eyes thing in Japanese animation is actually traceable to the influence of American animators like the Fleischer Brothers and Disney. Fleischer and Disney both made the choice to allow their characters to "act" with their eyes better. Look at the character design of Betty Boop and compare it with the stereotypical Japanese character. Big head, big eyes, small mouth, teeny nose or no nose...that's what Betty looks like too. It has nothing to do with an "inferiority complex" when the Japanese compare themselves with Westerners. It has everything to do with allowing their characters to ACT.
I hate to see companies like ADV buy up great titles and then sit on them for a time, translating, dubbing, preparing the merchandising and marketing. Not only does one have to wait until the show is old news, but then all of their labor manifests in a $30 price tag on the 3 episode DVD.
ADV is far from being the worst offender on this score. When they put out the "All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku" DVD (it had been out on VHS from them for years previous) they could have done it in two volumes with 3 episodes each. However, they didn't. They put it out on one DVD. Yes, it was a bare-bones release, but nobody was thinking of "DVD Extras" when Nuku Nuku first came out as an Original Animated Video back in 1992.
I think that Anime costs too much still. That's not an excuse for piracy or buying cheapy bootleg releases from Hong Kong but there is room for Anime releases to get their prices down to standard "sell-through" prices. The cliche of "drugs would be cheaper" is unnecessary.
However, fansubs fuel interest in titles. Look at "Haibane Renmei". It had a weird name and wasn't necessarily the most accessible concept in the world. But the fansubs got around and people got hooked. It's one of the finest Anime series there is. Also "Naruto" is going to be huge here because of the buzz generated by the fansubs. It wasn't even licensed in January, when I attended Anime Los Angeles, but there were whole tribes of "Naruto" cosplayers everywhere. How did people get hip to "Naruto?" The fansubs.
It is telling that Geneon, which is not only a distributor of anime but a producer, is largely getting it right with their releases. They have also been re-releasing older classic titles like "Trigun" and "Serial Experiments: Lain" in bargain releases.
Some of Anime's greatest moments have come from this sort of cultural mix. "Cowboy Bebop" and "Samurai Champloo" are also examples of the "take American pop culture and Japanese pop culture, blend well and animate" school of thought.
American takes on Anime have been surprisingly well received: case in point, "The Powerpuff Girls." PPG was a hit on Japanese TV as well as being a phenomenon on Cartoon Network. It worked so well that a new PPG series, "Dameshta! Powerpuff Z" is in the works. It will premiere simultaneously on the Japanese and US versions of Cartoon Network.
I'm not sure what's going on with "Samurai Jack" in Japan. I'm not even sure what's going on with "Samurai Jack" in the US. There was supposed to be a live action movie but nothing is on IMDB about it.
Unequivocal 10 out of 10. I am getting better speeds now than was initially provisioned, the customer service rocks, and the people there are 100% computer enthusiasts. They are friendly enough for your grandma but geek-friendly for anyone who is a regular here. And yes, you get static IPs! 3 on a basic static IP package, 5 on the high-speed high-performance tiers.
They serve 100% of SBC Last Mile customers in the US, and Verizon Last Mile customers in California. They also use Covad as a provider. They will support FIOS and DSL2 when they are rolled out by VZ and SBC respectively.
I think the reason why Microsoft didn't completely fold up the Mac Business Unit after Apple raised its middle finger in Microsoft's face with Safari and iWork was that the "Chief Software Architect" prefers working with Mac OS X over XP.
Who could blame him?
I believe this is also why, when MacIntel makes its appearance, that without fail there will be a brand new version of Virtual PC that will use Intel's hardware virtualization ideas and the Connectix Windows/Mac OS connectivity concepts to create a very highly optimized "run Windows on Mac x86" platform.
The loser in this equation, however, would be Linux and *BSDs other than Darwin. You can bet that this new Virtual PC product will NOT allow anything as a guest OS other than a Microsoft OS. Period. End of story.
Bill Gates is a weird mofo. Everyone remembers the hate side of his relationship with Apple and with Steve Jobs. But nobody remembers that for as much mutual animus these guys have, they also have a great deal of respect. And they both have a common enemy: Free/Open Source operating systems.
Yes, The Steve has been more adroit using F/OSS for his purposes. But ultimately, The Steve wants as dearly to embrace, extend and extinguish F/OSS as Bill does. Remember: Darwin alone != Mac OS X. It's Darwin+Aqua+Quartz+Carbon+Cocoa. They give away the lower-level OS. You just have to pay for their user experience.
Apple is working on a spreadsheet. They have applied for a trademark for "Numbers" which will probably be the finishing part of iWork. (not iWorks...iWorks was iWaltDisney's partner back in the day. ^_^) All they need do to top MS Office for Mac is to take their FileMaker Pro engine and retool it to be their Access-killer. Oh, there's not a version of Access in MS Office for Mac? Too bad, how sad...for Microsoft. ^_^
They might have to pull iWork together fairly quickly because I suspect that MS might just disband the MBU because of Apple's unsatisfactorily lackadaisical attitude about the prospect of Windows running as a guest OS on a future Mac OS X x86. Again, too bad, how sad...for MS.
If you are beating your head against the wall trying to run Mac Office 2004 on an older machine, you might want to try the previous version, Mac Office X. v.X is happy on a 300MHz iBook...it was happy with only 160MB RAM and is positively ecstatic with 544MB.
I intend to try this new version of NeoOffice when the dust settles, though. I try to run as much F/OSS on my machines as possible, even those running unfree OSes. There is a huge amount available for Mac OS X, and almost everything is available to Mac that is available to LinuxPPC if you run the X11 layer.
I have Debian Sarge running beautifully on my 600e. Sound and everything. http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is the place to go for Linux on ThinkPad goodness. Also get on the Linux-ThinkPad mailing list. Details also on ThinkWiki.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean Commander Otaco? Or his Irish counterpart, Commander O'Taco? Or the honorable octopus O-Tako? I'm confused here...
As much as I like old Macs, I think this would be a better recommendation.
I sure am glad the Berman Hack-Back bill went down to defeat, because I downloaded all of the symphonies. Wouldn't want someone from the RIAA going into my network because they think I'm taking bread from the mouths of RCA Red Seal, Deutsche Grammaphon, or whatever classical label you'd care to name...
I mean, really...the Beeb does this to get people interested in Classical music. They certainly succeed, too...when this first appeared in Slashdot downloading was impossible for the next 48 hours after the article appeared. It was only thanks to archive.org and a few other sites that I was able to glom onto the whole set.
You can bet there won't be a "repeat performance" of something like this from the Beeb. Thanks a lot, pigopolists...
Yes, and when an Epson printer gets clogged with ink, it's basically dead.
This is a step backward for HP. The reason why my Deskjet 810c has been going and going like the Energizer Bunny since 1999 and my Apple StyleWriter 1200 (Canon print engine but same kind of configuration) since 1995 is because the print head is on the cartridge. New cartridge, new print head, no problem.
I think that HP doesn't just want to make money the Gillette way on cartridges, they want people to have to rebuy the printer every year or so. Screw that.
Big Eyes Small Mouth. TriStat DX system. Reminiscent of old-school Traveller with its minimalist rules. More role-playing, less roll-playing. I love it. AD&D D20 is still too complex for my tastes, and the AD&D system out in the 1980s was totally nuts with requiring bags full of polyhedra and a roll for almost every move.
http://www.guardiansorder.com/games/tristat/
Bull.
Opening up Mac OS X to Whitebox would lead to the death of Apple. They are being quite astute in their insistence on tying the OS to their own Intel hardware. Finally someone comes up with an intelligent use of DRM circuitry. Well, that and crypto co-processing.
However, the reverse is not likely to be the case. One of the huge selling points of Macintel is hardware-assisted virtualization. You will be able to run Windows on Mac OS X with no hit on performance. You will be able to run x86 Linux distros, again with no hit on performance. Yes, there's PPC Linux right now, but of course there are far more Linux apps for x86 than PPC.
All this and the sweet goodness of Mac OS X? Suddenly Apple's computers are even more compelling. Who wouldn't want a MacIntel? I know I'm salivating over the prospect.
Combine this with the potential of extending the iPod to a PDA/Portable Media Player/Newton device, and suddenly Palm and WinCE don't look so nice. Add Mobile Phone capability and stir. Doesn't that sound sweet? The iPhone that is perennially rumored from Moto suddenly sounds like small potatoes.
I see tons of upside and almost zero downside.
No, Pixar has its own proprietary software and has used it since the beginning when they were still part of Lucasfilm. If you want to play with something resembling Pixar's software, try Martin Hash Animation Master. Both use true splines and patches as opposed to NURBS and Polygons.
Brooks Brown was the guy who was friends with Harris and Kleibold and warned the cops *a year before the shootings* that these guys were up to no good, that they were making bombs and planned to shoot up the school. If anyone has the right to make a comment about the connection (or lack thereof) between First Person Shooters and the Columbine Incident, it's Brown.
I don't know if I entirely agree with him...I noticed that I was getting a bit desensitized to real-world violence (on the news, in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11") after a few years of avidly playing Unreal Tournament, and put down for a while. However, he has definitely the right to say what he has to say, and by dint of what he's experience he's earned the right to say it with some level of authoritativeness.
These are perfect for my cheap-ass MP3 CD player, which will hard lock (pull the batteries!) if given an MP3 file it doesn't like.
This will be a nice companion for my trip to San Diego Comic-Con. ^_^ BTW the mp3music.bz site is holding up quite well to my 133c|-|1|\|6. Goddess bless DSL Extreme...my bandwith is rocking hard too.
The 1st Chair Violinist has a great deal of responsibility over and above being a hot violin soloist. S/He is usually the assistant conductor of the orchestra. S/He is the person who puts the orchestra through its rehearsals. S/He makes sure everyone has the right sheet music. S/He is basically the "second-in-command" of the orchestra.
;-)
All that, and they have to be a hot violin soloist too. It's really quite a set of responsibilities. No shit they get paid well.
Unfortunately the percussionists in the orchestra are the ones at the bottom of the totem pole. This was a fact of life that was quite depressing for my husband, who's a percussionist and was a member of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in the early part of the 1970s. Instead of classical, he took his chances on rock.
This is working. (Not slashdotted yet.)
All 9 are here. Outstanding. Sehr gut!
The original length of the Compact Disk was designed so that Beethoven's 9th could fit on a single disk. Now, of course, we have the ability to cram 80 minutes worth of music onto a single CD.
BTW we just succeeded in slashdotting Auntie Beeb.
A few more good ones I've gotten this way:
* White Zombie (the 1930s-vintage movie with Bela Lugosi, not the band)
* Dementia 13, the first Francis Ford Coppola movie
* Kimba the White Lion...sure, it doesn't have the original Japanese soundtrack and subtitles, it's got a crap Canadian dubtrack done on the cheap in the '80s, but dammit, it's Tezuka-sensei!
* Some Pre-Code Betty Boop shorts, unfortunately with crappy colorization (thank Goddess for Archive.Org!)
* Some early Gumby shorts, including "Gumbasia" which is a classic.
Thank you, 99 Cents Only Store!
Of course you love Ruroni Kenshin, otherwise you wouldn't be calling yourself Sanosuke. ^_^
Anyway, a few titles you missed in your list:
Dramatic:
Haibane Renmei
Serial Experiments: Lain
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Humorous:
All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku OAV
All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku TV
Excel Saga (but not Puni Puni Poemy...ick!)
FLCL (Yes, it's insane but that's the point!)
A bit of both:
Samurai Champloo
The character design in Haibane Renmei and Serial Experiments: Lain by ABe Yoshitoshi is definitely worth a very careful look. The characters he designs (he was also designer on Niea Under 7) have large eyes, but they are identifiably Japanese.
The whole Big Eyes thing in Japanese animation is actually traceable to the influence of American animators like the Fleischer Brothers and Disney. Fleischer and Disney both made the choice to allow their characters to "act" with their eyes better. Look at the character design of Betty Boop and compare it with the stereotypical Japanese character. Big head, big eyes, small mouth, teeny nose or no nose...that's what Betty looks like too. It has nothing to do with an "inferiority complex" when the Japanese compare themselves with Westerners. It has everything to do with allowing their characters to ACT.
Hope this helps,
Michelle
I hate to see companies like ADV buy up great titles and then sit on them for a time, translating, dubbing, preparing the merchandising and marketing. Not only does one have to wait until the show is old news, but then all of their labor manifests in a $30 price tag on the 3 episode DVD.
ADV is far from being the worst offender on this score. When they put out the "All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku" DVD (it had been out on VHS from them for years previous) they could have done it in two volumes with 3 episodes each. However, they didn't. They put it out on one DVD. Yes, it was a bare-bones release, but nobody was thinking of "DVD Extras" when Nuku Nuku first came out as an Original Animated Video back in 1992.
I think that Anime costs too much still. That's not an excuse for piracy or buying cheapy bootleg releases from Hong Kong but there is room for Anime releases to get their prices down to standard "sell-through" prices. The cliche of "drugs would be cheaper" is unnecessary.
However, fansubs fuel interest in titles. Look at "Haibane Renmei". It had a weird name and wasn't necessarily the most accessible concept in the world. But the fansubs got around and people got hooked. It's one of the finest Anime series there is. Also "Naruto" is going to be huge here because of the buzz generated by the fansubs. It wasn't even licensed in January, when I attended Anime Los Angeles, but there were whole tribes of "Naruto" cosplayers everywhere. How did people get hip to "Naruto?" The fansubs.
It is telling that Geneon, which is not only a distributor of anime but a producer, is largely getting it right with their releases. They have also been re-releasing older classic titles like "Trigun" and "Serial Experiments: Lain" in bargain releases.
Some of Anime's greatest moments have come from this sort of cultural mix. "Cowboy Bebop" and "Samurai Champloo" are also examples of the "take American pop culture and Japanese pop culture, blend well and animate" school of thought.
American takes on Anime have been surprisingly well received: case in point, "The Powerpuff Girls." PPG was a hit on Japanese TV as well as being a phenomenon on Cartoon Network. It worked so well that a new PPG series, "Dameshta! Powerpuff Z" is in the works. It will premiere simultaneously on the Japanese and US versions of Cartoon Network.
I'm not sure what's going on with "Samurai Jack" in Japan. I'm not even sure what's going on with "Samurai Jack" in the US. There was supposed to be a live action movie but nothing is on IMDB about it.
Sparc lappie...meh.
DSL Extreme.
Unequivocal 10 out of 10. I am getting better speeds now than was initially provisioned, the customer service rocks, and the people there are 100% computer enthusiasts. They are friendly enough for your grandma but geek-friendly for anyone who is a regular here. And yes, you get static IPs! 3 on a basic static IP package, 5 on the high-speed high-performance tiers.
They serve 100% of SBC Last Mile customers in the US, and Verizon Last Mile customers in California. They also use Covad as a provider. They will support FIOS and DSL2 when they are rolled out by VZ and SBC respectively.
http://www.dslextreme.com/
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.04/
Look for the Live CD for PPC.
HTH
No, he runs Mac OS X.
I think the reason why Microsoft didn't completely fold up the Mac Business Unit after Apple raised its middle finger in Microsoft's face with Safari and iWork was that the "Chief Software Architect" prefers working with Mac OS X over XP.
Who could blame him?
I believe this is also why, when MacIntel makes its appearance, that without fail there will be a brand new version of Virtual PC that will use Intel's hardware virtualization ideas and the Connectix Windows/Mac OS connectivity concepts to create a very highly optimized "run Windows on Mac x86" platform.
The loser in this equation, however, would be Linux and *BSDs other than Darwin. You can bet that this new Virtual PC product will NOT allow anything as a guest OS other than a Microsoft OS. Period. End of story.
Bill Gates is a weird mofo. Everyone remembers the hate side of his relationship with Apple and with Steve Jobs. But nobody remembers that for as much mutual animus these guys have, they also have a great deal of respect. And they both have a common enemy: Free/Open Source operating systems.
Yes, The Steve has been more adroit using F/OSS for his purposes. But ultimately, The Steve wants as dearly to embrace, extend and extinguish F/OSS as Bill does. Remember: Darwin alone != Mac OS X. It's Darwin+Aqua+Quartz+Carbon+Cocoa. They give away the lower-level OS. You just have to pay for their user experience.
Apple is working on a spreadsheet. They have applied for a trademark for "Numbers" which will probably be the finishing part of iWork. (not iWorks...iWorks was iWaltDisney's partner back in the day. ^_^) All they need do to top MS Office for Mac is to take their FileMaker Pro engine and retool it to be their Access-killer. Oh, there's not a version of Access in MS Office for Mac? Too bad, how sad...for Microsoft. ^_^
They might have to pull iWork together fairly quickly because I suspect that MS might just disband the MBU because of Apple's unsatisfactorily lackadaisical attitude about the prospect of Windows running as a guest OS on a future Mac OS X x86. Again, too bad, how sad...for MS.
If you are beating your head against the wall trying to run Mac Office 2004 on an older machine, you might want to try the previous version, Mac Office X. v.X is happy on a 300MHz iBook...it was happy with only 160MB RAM and is positively ecstatic with 544MB.
I intend to try this new version of NeoOffice when the dust settles, though. I try to run as much F/OSS on my machines as possible, even those running unfree OSes. There is a huge amount available for Mac OS X, and almost everything is available to Mac that is available to LinuxPPC if you run the X11 layer.
I have Debian Sarge running beautifully on my 600e. Sound and everything. http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is the place to go for Linux on ThinkPad goodness. Also get on the Linux-ThinkPad mailing list. Details also on ThinkWiki.
His "Clone Wars" shorts wound up being better than all three of the prequels.
But here it's the Spring of Jones. Gmail went down a few hours ago and it's only now come back up again. Thanks a lot guys.
I suppose that will teach me to rely on a public beta.