Sounds probable to me. Look at the Apple Music store. It has limited DRM by today's standards, but you still stand to lose all your music if you really f*ck up.
Wow, it looks like I'm on an Apple apologist kick here. Not a problem, they make good shit.
Anyway, there are many safeguards to prevent this from happening. One: Apple keeps records of all your purchases. You can get your music back for free if you have lost it.
You are allowed to backup your AAC files to CD-R. However, your machine must be one of the authorized three that can play them. (remember: most people don't have three Macs in their house, much less three Macs that all can run MacOS X.)
Final line of defense: burn everything you buy to CD-DA CD-Rs. Those will play on anything except the old clunky CD players that won't play burnt CDs. You can make up to 10 copies of a given playlist before you have to mix that playlist up. So you can have redundant, last line of defense backups of everything you buy.
Yes, but you can "de-authorize" one machine and "re-authorize" another if you wish. And how many people (other than geeks like us) have more than 3 computers in the house?
Again, let me repeat another solution to their very weak DRM:
Rip your AAC files to CD-DA.
Mix them up in your playlist.
Burn them to CD-R.
Re-rip them to whatever unencumbered format is your pleasure...MP3, Ogg, whatever. You can even rip 'em to WMA if you are a masochist.
The CD-R you just burned is not a waste either...you can play that in almost any CD player you want. (except old cranky ones that can't play CD-Rs, won't play CD-Rs, ever.)
I wouldn't say that's draconian DRM, by any means. It is mild DRM that will punish the big willful infringers but will not inconvenience the honest consumer who wants to play by the rules. It's a brilliant compromise.
Of course, if Microsoft decides to drop Office support for Mac, then we've got another problem:)
The fully Quartz-ified Open Office is on the way. Right now, OO.o can be run using X on X. However, this will change when the MacOS X version is released.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple pulled a Safari and got their hands into the OO.o project, creating a full-on MacOffice solution. Safari and the closed-source/proprietary Keynote is proving that Steve is not unwilling to take MS to the mat and provide superior Mac-centric solutions that directly compete with MS products.
Fearless prediction: if Microsoft disbands their Mac Business Software division, Apple will hire the whole lot of them to work in Cupertino. And MS will have to just sweat the fact that they will have lost the Mac market forever to products from Apple.
And I agree, I don't buy the arguement that if it's available for a reasonable price people will pay for it when it's so easy to get it for free.
One word: iTunes.
Right now people are downloading songs at a clip of a million a week. And these are Mac users with MacOS X only. When this makes its way onto Windozers...look out!
Steve has proven that if people are given a value-added service at a reasonable price, without the spyware and security hazards that P2P seems to be ridden with, they will choose the pay service over the free service. $0.99/song and $9.99/album is a damn good deal. Once the volume kicks in and the Windows users show up, watch the price per song actually go DOWN. Volume, baby! Volume!
I dislike that the Five Families of the Record Business will get their cut. My husband is a musician and I hate the RIAA even more because of that. The music industry has ripped off musicians from the very beginning, from the Edison Patents Trust on down. However, iTunes is a very compelling reason for me to bite the bullet and upgrade my Mac G3 Blue-and-white to Jagwire and to download iTunes 4.
Give them ease of use, limits on DRM*, a big pool of music that is growing exponentially day by day, and reasonable prices, and you will make money on downloadable music.
*Rip your paid-for AACs to CD-DA, Mix 'em up on your playlist, and Burn them to CD-R. Then Re-rip to MP3 or Ogg or whatever is your pleasure.
A "Blue And White" G3 can run MacOS X and run it well if you give it enough RAM. There are B&W mini-towers being sold used/reconditioned for less than $500 now. 256MB sticks of PC100 or PC133 RAM are not super-cheap, but cheap enough to not sweat too much. A copy of MacOS X 10.2, aka "Jagwire" costs way less than a copy of Windows XP Professional, and only a wee bit more than the XP Home upgrade. Plus it won't implode if you don't "Authorize" your copy in 60 days, what a surprise! Lots of B&Ws have SCSI cards so you can use an external SCSI burner with them, the firewire, while weak on these machines, is still somewhat usable. Buy a Lite-On CD-RW, a firewire case with an Oxford 911 chipset, and you have a burner iTunes 4 will use happily. Firewire cards with the TI chipset are floating around cheaply if you want to be absolutely sure Firewire burning on your computer will work right.
(There are also iMacs floating around with Firewire that are going for even cheaper...the iMac DV is cheap used and has great Firewire circuitry. Any iMac from thereafter will also have very usable Firewire. However, iMacs are certainly not as expandable as Minitowers, and since we are on a hackish forum I brought up the B&W because it's so expandable.)
Yes this is going to be more money than buying a $200 Microtel Lindows pre-loaded crappy computer at Wal*Mart, but Macs are built way better than anything like that. Think BMW, Mercedes or Acura. Don't think Hyundai or Kia. Macs are built to last, just ask the people who collect vintage Macs and have a fully-working collection.
It will be great when Apple rolls out iTunes for Windows. But if you are really, totally itching to try it, a used new-world G3 is a spiffy way to do it.
If you want to see tons of hentai sketches, go to an animation studio. Inevitably artists working on a show will draw some very nasty parody art based on what they are currently working on at the time. Probably a lot of what is now circulating on the Internet had its origins not with perverted fans, but with the sick and twisted artists who actually worked on the shows.
If anyone finds the "Ren & Stimpy discover sex and/or drugs" sketches that were floating around Spumco during the production of the show in 1990-92, they will have their childhood memories of that show thoroughly and completely ruined. I have seen these sketches with my own eyes...I know.
Indeed. And since I play a lot of old school games like the original Unreal Tournament, the GeForce4 MX with DDR is just fine for my LAN party box. It runs about $50 at Newegg from various manufacturers, and the 5200 is coming in at $75-$100 depending on which version you get.
Of course, my flagship box has the Ti4200...mmmm, antialiasing 'til the cows come home...sweet....
I have to agree with you here. I am more then willing to pay for music, provided it is a good value. When I go buy a CD for $9.99, get 15 great songs, some great artwork and a CD that I can use completely unrestricted..thats a good value. Problem is CDs rarely cost $9.99, they rarely have 15 great songs. But I can use a CD anyway I want. $.99 is too much for too little in my opinion. Being one of the audiophile snobs that/. loves to rip on, I do care and notice audio quality. Unless Apple is selling files that are the same or better quality then CD, I don't see this as a good thing for me and many others like me.
That's all well and good if you have an album that's all killer, no filler, every song is a keeper. Unfortunately that is very rare nowadays.
Case in point: "Quality" by Talib Kweli. I heard the song "Get By" on a streaming feed from KEXP in Seattle, WA (It was the only streaming radio station with a high-quality WiMP stream...I couldn't install Winamp at the last job I had) and immediately hit eBay looking for the album. I paid $10 for a barely-used copy, and found I had bought a $10 coaster save for the one song I liked.
Now, if iTunes had the song for download, I could just snarf the song for $0.99 plus tax, and save a little under $9 for other stuff. Like more songs from iTunes. Or lunch. Or a used Dreamcast game. Or whatever.:)
This is the best antidote to the crappy, filler-crammed albums out there that fueled P2P in the first place. Maybe now bands can concentrate on crafting GOOD SONGS. Like in the days when they sold 45rpm singles. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
VIA EPIA Mini-ITX. Cheap, reliable, small and quiet. Just add your favorite Free/Open Source Operating System and another nic and you are good to go. Way better than those WalMart specials.
Example: I heard a good song by Talib Kweli on the streaming radio station I used to listen to at work, "Get By." I liked it so much, I bought the the album it was on, "Quality." Bought it used, cost me $10. Rest of the album sucked.
Now, if "Get By" was downloadable using iTunes4, I could just buy that one track and save $9. I'd say that's fair. Steve got it right...again.
Looks like it's time to put MacOS X on the ol' G3...
I was actually very amused also to see that the Celery 2.2 really didn't give much of an edge over the PIII. Consider this: this is supposed to be a generational leap. Yes, I know about the MHz myth, I have a G3 Blue-and-white at home. You would expect to see a MASSIVE difference, though, between a PIII/700 and a chip that is supposedly 3X as fast. And you don't.
This should silence all the people who think that Pentium 4 must be an improvement over PIII. Pentium-M aka Centrino aka Banias is living proof that the PIII architecture can indeed scale to faster speeds with a little help. And that the P4 architecture, frankly, blows goats.
I would like to see a comparison between the two machines they put head to head, plus an Athlon XP Thoroughbred. I know that when I compare speed between my 733MHz PIII and my 1.4GHz/PR1800+ Athlon systems, there is a DRAMATIC difference in speed. Like the kind of spread that you would expect between the PIII and the Celery if only MHz matters.
Maybe it's the faster RAM. (DDR vs. PC133 Cas=2) But kernel builds are more than twice as fast between the two machines. UT performance is night-and-day between the two, but I blame the aging Rage128 video card and the shitty Linux DRI driver for it for the vast gulf in performance. The Athlon system has a GeForce 4Ti4200 and the nvidia binary driver.
Getting back to the issue at hand, there would certainly have to be a board swap in upgrading a PIII to a P4 Celery. You can get a crappy not-so-Elitegroup mobo for that $54 price, and pray it doesn't blow its caps immediately upon stressing it. Or you can spend a little more than twice the money and get a true Intel board that's built like a tank. You would also have to swap out power supplies, too. The case is not the problem. It is the power supply.
The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.
A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.
The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.
AMD made the 5x86 chip, which was basically extended 486 architecture. Made it up to 166MHz. Not a bad little chip, actually. I think it's still being used in the embedded market.
My complaint is not that Linus doesn't kowtow to RMS, in fact I disagree with many of RMS' views. My complaint is that Linus ducks the hard questions.
I gotta disagree here. Linus has addressed a lot of hard questions in the past, in his very pragmatic and non-doctrinaire kind of way. He believes that, for example, BitKeeper, the non-Free software he uses to do version control on the Kernel is the absolute best for the job, and he will use it until and unless something Free comes along that does everything BitKeeper does. While this enrages the Stallmanistas, it's the right thing to do. And it's an open challenge to everyone with competing software...time to get on the stick and create a BitKeeper workalike (or better!) under an Open license.
Likewise, he is saying here that he sees perfectly good uses for DRM as well as the bad stuff, and that although he disagrees with most uses, because there is demand for an Open DRM to work under Linux (probably from IBM and Transmeta if you want to know the truth of it) and because there are good reasons to use DRM (keeping confidential documents confidential, for example) he is not against DRM in Linux. I am not necessarily against it if it is an Open standard and it can be turned off at will and KEPT OFF at will. DRM makes perfect sense in government, law offices, medical offices (HIPAA!) and in enterprises with privileged data, trade secrets and the like. It doesn't make sense on home computers most of the time.
Frankly I'm glad we have a pragmatist at the helm of Linux rather than a doctrinaire. I admire Richard Stallman for his prodigious talents and his strong beliefs. However, people with strong beliefs who cannot see the other side of an argument do not belong as the "public face" of an endeavor as important as Linux. Kudos, Mr. Torvalds.
If you like Studio Ghibli's output, you will definitely enjoy Haibane Renmei. Haibane Renmei is a series, not a feature-length film, and therefore is paced differently. And even for most anime series it's paced differently. It unfolds at a slow, stately pace, so you will have to be patient with it. But yeah, anyone who likes Miyazaki will enjoy this. It has similarly strong, involving characters and has the visual look of a moving painting.
If you want to get a great example of just how wide-open a genre Anime is, take a look at this series, done by ABe, one of the people who were responsible for Serial Experiments: Lain.
It's beautiful, it grabs hold of your heart and won't turn it loose until you've seen the entire series and even then...seriously, it's great. And there is not a giant robot or a tentacle in sight.
It is not an action series, but a slice of life, a slice of a life you can't experience anywhere else. Right now it's available in fansub, but it will come to video stores as early as August if some reports are reliable.
If Haibane Renmei doesn't move you, your heart is made of stone.
I understand that the original idea for what humans were used for was indeed as you said: parallel computing. However, the suits didn't understand what the Warchovski brothers were talking about when they got to that part of the script. Hence the lame-ass "power plant" explanation.
It's gonna take a pretty amazing computer to equal or beat the processing power of a human brain. And, at the risk of repeating a cliche, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!"
This is why we NEED to leapfrog over IPv6 and adopt Protocol Seven! Eiri Masami can't control the whole Wired...it's too vast. When we adopt Protocol Seven, we will have a Wired that no governmental agency can control. If you don't need a computer or even a NIC to login, just your brain, they can't regulate it! The only thing they can do is turn the world into one big Faraday Cage, and they won't do that...will they?
Slashdot Mirror
The new "chapter" of Megatokyo promises to have lots of Ping-chan in it. Expect much more Chobits homage in the future.
Wow, it looks like I'm on an Apple apologist kick here. Not a problem, they make good shit.
Anyway, there are many safeguards to prevent this from happening. One: Apple keeps records of all your purchases. You can get your music back for free if you have lost it.
You are allowed to backup your AAC files to CD-R. However, your machine must be one of the authorized three that can play them. (remember: most people don't have three Macs in their house, much less three Macs that all can run MacOS X.)
Final line of defense: burn everything you buy to CD-DA CD-Rs. Those will play on anything except the old clunky CD players that won't play burnt CDs. You can make up to 10 copies of a given playlist before you have to mix that playlist up. So you can have redundant, last line of defense backups of everything you buy.
Sounds like your ass is very well covered to me.
Again, let me repeat another solution to their very weak DRM:
- Rip your AAC files to CD-DA.
- Mix them up in your playlist.
- Burn them to CD-R.
- Re-rip them to whatever unencumbered format is your pleasure...MP3, Ogg, whatever. You can even rip 'em to WMA if you are a masochist.
The CD-R you just burned is not a waste either...you can play that in almost any CD player you want. (except old cranky ones that can't play CD-Rs, won't play CD-Rs, ever.)I wouldn't say that's draconian DRM, by any means. It is mild DRM that will punish the big willful infringers but will not inconvenience the honest consumer who wants to play by the rules. It's a brilliant compromise.
The fully Quartz-ified Open Office is on the way. Right now, OO.o can be run using X on X. However, this will change when the MacOS X version is released.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple pulled a Safari and got their hands into the OO.o project, creating a full-on MacOffice solution. Safari and the closed-source/proprietary Keynote is proving that Steve is not unwilling to take MS to the mat and provide superior Mac-centric solutions that directly compete with MS products.
Fearless prediction: if Microsoft disbands their Mac Business Software division, Apple will hire the whole lot of them to work in Cupertino. And MS will have to just sweat the fact that they will have lost the Mac market forever to products from Apple.
One word: iTunes.
Right now people are downloading songs at a clip of a million a week. And these are Mac users with MacOS X only. When this makes its way onto Windozers...look out!
Steve has proven that if people are given a value-added service at a reasonable price, without the spyware and security hazards that P2P seems to be ridden with, they will choose the pay service over the free service. $0.99/song and $9.99/album is a damn good deal. Once the volume kicks in and the Windows users show up, watch the price per song actually go DOWN. Volume, baby! Volume!
I dislike that the Five Families of the Record Business will get their cut. My husband is a musician and I hate the RIAA even more because of that. The music industry has ripped off musicians from the very beginning, from the Edison Patents Trust on down. However, iTunes is a very compelling reason for me to bite the bullet and upgrade my Mac G3 Blue-and-white to Jagwire and to download iTunes 4.
Give them ease of use, limits on DRM*, a big pool of music that is growing exponentially day by day, and reasonable prices, and you will make money on downloadable music.
*Rip your paid-for AACs to CD-DA, Mix 'em up on your playlist, and Burn them to CD-R. Then Re-rip to MP3 or Ogg or whatever is your pleasure.
A "Blue And White" G3 can run MacOS X and run it well if you give it enough RAM. There are B&W mini-towers being sold used/reconditioned for less than $500 now. 256MB sticks of PC100 or PC133 RAM are not super-cheap, but cheap enough to not sweat too much. A copy of MacOS X 10.2, aka "Jagwire" costs way less than a copy of Windows XP Professional, and only a wee bit more than the XP Home upgrade. Plus it won't implode if you don't "Authorize" your copy in 60 days, what a surprise! Lots of B&Ws have SCSI cards so you can use an external SCSI burner with them, the firewire, while weak on these machines, is still somewhat usable. Buy a Lite-On CD-RW, a firewire case with an Oxford 911 chipset, and you have a burner iTunes 4 will use happily. Firewire cards with the TI chipset are floating around cheaply if you want to be absolutely sure Firewire burning on your computer will work right.
(There are also iMacs floating around with Firewire that are going for even cheaper...the iMac DV is cheap used and has great Firewire circuitry. Any iMac from thereafter will also have very usable Firewire. However, iMacs are certainly not as expandable as Minitowers, and since we are on a hackish forum I brought up the B&W because it's so expandable.)
Yes this is going to be more money than buying a $200 Microtel Lindows pre-loaded crappy computer at Wal*Mart, but Macs are built way better than anything like that. Think BMW, Mercedes or Acura. Don't think Hyundai or Kia. Macs are built to last, just ask the people who collect vintage Macs and have a fully-working collection.
It will be great when Apple rolls out iTunes for Windows. But if you are really, totally itching to try it, a used new-world G3 is a spiffy way to do it.
If you want to see tons of hentai sketches, go to an animation studio. Inevitably artists working on a show will draw some very nasty parody art based on what they are currently working on at the time. Probably a lot of what is now circulating on the Internet had its origins not with perverted fans, but with the sick and twisted artists who actually worked on the shows.
If anyone finds the "Ren & Stimpy discover sex and/or drugs" sketches that were floating around Spumco during the production of the show in 1990-92, they will have their childhood memories of that show thoroughly and completely ruined. I have seen these sketches with my own eyes...I know.
Indeed. And since I play a lot of old school games like the original Unreal Tournament, the GeForce4 MX with DDR is just fine for my LAN party box. It runs about $50 at Newegg from various manufacturers, and the 5200 is coming in at $75-$100 depending on which version you get.
Of course, my flagship box has the Ti4200...mmmm, antialiasing 'til the cows come home...sweet....
That's all well and good if you have an album that's all killer, no filler, every song is a keeper. Unfortunately that is very rare nowadays.
Case in point: "Quality" by Talib Kweli. I heard the song "Get By" on a streaming feed from KEXP in Seattle, WA (It was the only streaming radio station with a high-quality WiMP stream...I couldn't install Winamp at the last job I had) and immediately hit eBay looking for the album. I paid $10 for a barely-used copy, and found I had bought a $10 coaster save for the one song I liked.
Now, if iTunes had the song for download, I could just snarf the song for $0.99 plus tax, and save a little under $9 for other stuff. Like more songs from iTunes. Or lunch. Or a used Dreamcast game. Or whatever. :)
This is the best antidote to the crappy, filler-crammed albums out there that fueled P2P in the first place. Maybe now bands can concentrate on crafting GOOD SONGS. Like in the days when they sold 45rpm singles. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
VIA EPIA Mini-ITX. Cheap, reliable, small and quiet. Just add your favorite Free/Open Source Operating System and another nic and you are good to go. Way better than those WalMart specials.
Menchi would kick both their asses. She can shoot a chaingun. I rest my case.
Example: I heard a good song by Talib Kweli on the streaming radio station I used to listen to at work, "Get By." I liked it so much, I bought the the album it was on, "Quality." Bought it used, cost me $10. Rest of the album sucked.
Now, if "Get By" was downloadable using iTunes4, I could just buy that one track and save $9. I'd say that's fair. Steve got it right...again.
Looks like it's time to put MacOS X on the ol' G3...
Applescript is still in OSX.
Thanks, you have improved my Kmail filters file. You rock.
See you, Space Cowboy...
I was actually very amused also to see that the Celery 2.2 really didn't give much of an edge over the PIII. Consider this: this is supposed to be a generational leap. Yes, I know about the MHz myth, I have a G3 Blue-and-white at home. You would expect to see a MASSIVE difference, though, between a PIII/700 and a chip that is supposedly 3X as fast. And you don't.
This should silence all the people who think that Pentium 4 must be an improvement over PIII. Pentium-M aka Centrino aka Banias is living proof that the PIII architecture can indeed scale to faster speeds with a little help. And that the P4 architecture, frankly, blows goats.
I would like to see a comparison between the two machines they put head to head, plus an Athlon XP Thoroughbred. I know that when I compare speed between my 733MHz PIII and my 1.4GHz/PR1800+ Athlon systems, there is a DRAMATIC difference in speed. Like the kind of spread that you would expect between the PIII and the Celery if only MHz matters.
Maybe it's the faster RAM. (DDR vs. PC133 Cas=2) But kernel builds are more than twice as fast between the two machines. UT performance is night-and-day between the two, but I blame the aging Rage128 video card and the shitty Linux DRI driver for it for the vast gulf in performance. The Athlon system has a GeForce 4Ti4200 and the nvidia binary driver.
Getting back to the issue at hand, there would certainly have to be a board swap in upgrading a PIII to a P4 Celery. You can get a crappy not-so-Elitegroup mobo for that $54 price, and pray it doesn't blow its caps immediately upon stressing it. Or you can spend a little more than twice the money and get a true Intel board that's built like a tank. You would also have to swap out power supplies, too. The case is not the problem. It is the power supply.
They made a lot of mistakes when designing it, similar to mistakes made when Michael Spindler wanted ultra-cheap 603-based Macs and had his engineers take an LC-class motherboard and graft a PPC chip to it.
The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.
A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.
The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.
AMD made the 5x86 chip, which was basically extended 486 architecture. Made it up to 166MHz. Not a bad little chip, actually. I think it's still being used in the embedded market.
I gotta disagree here. Linus has addressed a lot of hard questions in the past, in his very pragmatic and non-doctrinaire kind of way. He believes that, for example, BitKeeper, the non-Free software he uses to do version control on the Kernel is the absolute best for the job, and he will use it until and unless something Free comes along that does everything BitKeeper does. While this enrages the Stallmanistas, it's the right thing to do. And it's an open challenge to everyone with competing software...time to get on the stick and create a BitKeeper workalike (or better!) under an Open license.
Likewise, he is saying here that he sees perfectly good uses for DRM as well as the bad stuff, and that although he disagrees with most uses, because there is demand for an Open DRM to work under Linux (probably from IBM and Transmeta if you want to know the truth of it) and because there are good reasons to use DRM (keeping confidential documents confidential, for example) he is not against DRM in Linux. I am not necessarily against it if it is an Open standard and it can be turned off at will and KEPT OFF at will. DRM makes perfect sense in government, law offices, medical offices (HIPAA!) and in enterprises with privileged data, trade secrets and the like. It doesn't make sense on home computers most of the time.
Frankly I'm glad we have a pragmatist at the helm of Linux rather than a doctrinaire. I admire Richard Stallman for his prodigious talents and his strong beliefs. However, people with strong beliefs who cannot see the other side of an argument do not belong as the "public face" of an endeavor as important as Linux. Kudos, Mr. Torvalds.
If you like Studio Ghibli's output, you will definitely enjoy Haibane Renmei. Haibane Renmei is a series, not a feature-length film, and therefore is paced differently. And even for most anime series it's paced differently. It unfolds at a slow, stately pace, so you will have to be patient with it. But yeah, anyone who likes Miyazaki will enjoy this. It has similarly strong, involving characters and has the visual look of a moving painting.
If you want to get a great example of just how wide-open a genre Anime is, take a look at this series, done by ABe, one of the people who were responsible for Serial Experiments: Lain.
It's beautiful, it grabs hold of your heart and won't turn it loose until you've seen the entire series and even then...seriously, it's great. And there is not a giant robot or a tentacle in sight.
It is not an action series, but a slice of life, a slice of a life you can't experience anywhere else. Right now it's available in fansub, but it will come to video stores as early as August if some reports are reliable.
If Haibane Renmei doesn't move you, your heart is made of stone.
So much for using this for evil leet case modding...bleah.
I understand that the original idea for what humans were used for was indeed as you said: parallel computing. However, the suits didn't understand what the Warchovski brothers were talking about when they got to that part of the script. Hence the lame-ass "power plant" explanation.
It's gonna take a pretty amazing computer to equal or beat the processing power of a human brain. And, at the risk of repeating a cliche, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!"
Sounds like the old saw about "Military Intelligence" to me...a contradiction in terms.
(Note: none of this has any bearing in Present Day, Present Time...or does it?)