So what about the hardware question? NeXT was a superior operating system on superior hardware. First they stopped making the superior hardware, then they stopped making the superior O/S. Why? No money in it.
Actually, they are still making a superior OS on superior hardware. They didn't go away, they took over Apple from within.
I think it's one of the most fascinating stories of the last 20 years how Steve Jobs somehow managed to steal his old company back.
I had no idea the Hunter series was supposed to be derived from "Vampire."
I just figured they were fun scrolling shooters.
On that level, they were terrific games. The only downside was that multi-play could result in getting your teammates "stuck", due to the limitations created by keeping all the characters on the same screen together. Some of the characters simply had to stay moving to stay alive in that game, so any unnatural limitations to movement always sucked.
One thing that ADV has been doing well lately is including cultural notes and references in the printed inserts which come with their DVD's.
For example, Azumanga Daioh, a series which is hilarious in Japanese but almost unwatchable in English, includes several pages of translation notes with each disk, so anybody who's curious about the Japan-centric jokes they would otherwise miss can learn about the subtle nuances of the show's humor if and when they feel like it.
That's much better than having the notes appear on-screen, especially for a light comedy like Azumanga.
As much as ADV has improved, Geneon still seems to do the best dubs. R.O.D. the TV and Last Exile were both done really well. (And the commentary tracks with the R.O.D. dub director and the kids who did the voices are uproarously funny.) I still prefer watching both those shows in Japanese with the original casts, but props to the dub teams for the solid work they did.
I'm not a subtitle zealot for the sake of "purity."
The truth is that dubs are often closer translations of the original script, because subtitles have to be brief enough for people to read them.
The reason I prefer subtitles (in all foreign-language entertainment, whether it be movies, anime, opera, etc.) is because the actor's vocal expression is a critical part of the performance. Japanese "seiyuu" are, for the most part, superstar talents and a big part of why I watch anime in the first place.
If I can't hear the voices of Ryô Hirohashi and Junko Noda, then I'm not really watching Haibane Renmei. I'm just seeing what it looks like while somebody else reads the script to me.
I disagree - the jazzy flavor of Cowboy Bebop was best watched in English. It just fits the show better. I hate the Japanese voices.
You mean it fits your expectations better.
1. Faye is not supposed to sound like she a mellow 40-year old. She's a few short years from being cryogenically unfrozen in her late teens. Physically, she's a twenty-something. Furthermore, look at her facial expressions. He's a wild maniac, not a calm seductress.
2. Spike should not sound like he took too much Sominex. In Japanese, he's a punk and a slacker. In English, he's a borderline narcoleptic.
3. Jet is NOT a black guy. Nor is he old and grizzled. (He's a former cop because he quit, not because he retired.)
Sounds like a lot of work. I just run Macs. Naked and unprotected on a DSL connection since the earliest days of broadband... never pwned, never infected.
Mind you, in that time I also briefly had a Linux server which was corrupted by warez kids and a Windows PC (for gaming) which I accidentally left turned on overnight that was briefly utilized by phishers... but I took both of those machines off line and have never had a problem since.
Anyways, a simple reinstal requiring a floppy drive hookup shouldn't cost more then $50-$60.
Swell... but not many people would buy an old P-III 400 MHz computer for $60, so why would anybody want to spend $60 getting an old one to work?
Were I unable to get a system like that working myself, I would simply donate it to a school, where kids can learn how to format and install computers by doing all the labor themselves, write it off on my taxes, and put my $60 towards buying a better system.
One of the big challenges Pixar & Disney faced in dubbing "Howl's Moving Castle" (Yes, I know it's credited to Disney, but it was actually supervised by Peter Docter, a long-time Pixar guy going back to Toy Story), was that the name "Howl" in Japanese is two distinct syllables (How-ru), so all the animation was done with two "mouth flaps" every time his name was spoken.
(Best dub I ever saw, by the way... That's not to say I'm not eagerly looking forward to the DVD so I can hear the original performances.)
Some of us consider using horrible voice actors as "butchering".
Ah, well then ADV certainly doesn't "butcher." All of their DVD's feature some of the top voice talent in all of Japan!
Oh... you are probably listening to the English dubs... You poor, misguided bastard. You really should know better by now.
(And don't give me that shit about the Bandai dubs like "Cowboy Bebop" being any better. Sure most of the English cast, apart from Wendee Lee, is relatively capable, but they are talking over what were vastly superior performances. Subtitles are the only way to go, short of actually learning the language.)
Think about it for a minute. A typical college kid who's working as a techie in a computer store is going to expect about $20/hr for their time. This means the cost to actually employ that kid (after taxes and regulatory requirements) is closer to $35/hr.
You will never get even close to 1/2 utilization out of your staff of repair kids, you need to collect at least double that from the customers ($70), and then another $20 for the cost of keeping your doors open (and for the store manager to spend at least part of his/her time making sure the techies aren't stealing all the 2 GB Ram sticks or slacking off or whatever.)
That leaves $80 a day of sweet, sweet profit, all for the joy of dealing with angry assholes who will often take out their frustrations on you. Gosh, I wonder why there aren't more places fighting to get a piece of that action?
From the users perspective, they could pay $100/hr to lose all their data and end up with the same crappy computer they always had, or for a mere $300 more they could have a shiny new computer with 5 times the CPU power, 4 times the memory, 4 times the hard drive space, a DVD burner, a massively better video card, and a pretty new keyboard. It's not surprising that a lot of people decide that they'd rather spend a little extra than pouring more money into a system which has been giving them fits.
I'm sure everybody who replied was just trying to be helpful regarding your Windows install, but they managed to prove your point quite well. A typical non-techie hearing all that advice would be utterly lost and baffled.
Hard drive space is about $0.50 per GB these days. I'll stick with uncompressed DVD rips, thanks anyway.
(Yes, it's excessive for most people to do that, but I usually watch my movies on a 119" screen with surround sound, so every small compromise in video & sound quality becomes glaringly obvious on my system.)
That said, thanks for the link. There are some disks I have which have horrible interlace issues, and perhaps converting them with Handbrake will actually result in them being cleaned up a little, depending on how good the de-interlace logic is.
I found it rather mortifying that none of the 3 criteria that these jokers included in their definition of a "true" RPG included actual role-play.
"Interactive stories" are almost always completely linear, or at best contain a few possible forks, in which you are just choosing one of several trains to hop on to.
"Character growth" is just an illusion. At the high levels of any RPG, you are fighting monsters which are exactly as challenging, relative to your character stats, so the only "growth" that has happened is the mass of pixels in front of your avitar, which still takes three minutes to kill, has changed from a silly-looking giant rat to a spooky-looking dragon.
So that leaves "a system of rules and statistics" to determine the outcome, which can often reduce the usefulness of tactical planning in these games. If your mystical ability to perfectly evaluate the challenge rating of the monster in front of you reveals it to be a relatively easy kill (but not too easy to be worth it), you can simply farm it for XP and move on. Yawn.
None of those things are important to me in an RPG. They can be elements of a fun game, but what makes an RPG an RPG is the roleplay and interaction between people. This is how it will always be until somebody comes up with an RPG which can pass a Turing test.
There was a previously mentioned idea of the capability of video-out jacks which could turn an iPod into less of a poor substitute for a portable TV and more of a portable video library to hook up without bringing a case full of DVDs.
People keep suggesting that, but for the life of me, I can't think of a time when I've gone to a friends house and wanted to bring along more than one or two movies. More often than not, if watching videos is the plan, the friend in question already has stuff available to watch, and we would be more likely to watch my stuff when they visit my place.
Are there people out there actually clamouring for the ability to bring 60 GB of video files with them everywhere they go?
Slashdot Mirror
So what about the hardware question? NeXT was a superior operating system on superior hardware. First they stopped making the superior hardware, then they stopped making the superior O/S. Why? No money in it.
Actually, they are still making a superior OS on superior hardware. They didn't go away, they took over Apple from within.
I think it's one of the most fascinating stories of the last 20 years how Steve Jobs somehow managed to steal his old company back.
I had no idea the Hunter series was supposed to be derived from "Vampire."
I just figured they were fun scrolling shooters.
On that level, they were terrific games. The only downside was that multi-play could result in getting your teammates "stuck", due to the limitations created by keeping all the characters on the same screen together. Some of the characters simply had to stay moving to stay alive in that game, so any unnatural limitations to movement always sucked.
Yeah... and since when did any corporation want to "minimize" our exposure to advertising.
They would gladly burn watermarks of their company logos into the corners of our vision if we were to let them do so.
After seeing disk 2 of Madlax, I think it's getting good enough that I'll give disk 3 a chance.
The music does suck, though. Hard to believe it came from the same folks as the kick-ass soundtrack to Noir.
That's okay, I can get my "cool music in a violent new anime series" fix from Gunslinger Girl and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
One thing that ADV has been doing well lately is including cultural notes and references in the printed inserts which come with their DVD's.
For example, Azumanga Daioh, a series which is hilarious in Japanese but almost unwatchable in English, includes several pages of translation notes with each disk, so anybody who's curious about the Japan-centric jokes they would otherwise miss can learn about the subtle nuances of the show's humor if and when they feel like it.
That's much better than having the notes appear on-screen, especially for a light comedy like Azumanga.
As much as ADV has improved, Geneon still seems to do the best dubs. R.O.D. the TV and Last Exile were both done really well. (And the commentary tracks with the R.O.D. dub director and the kids who did the voices are uproarously funny.) I still prefer watching both those shows in Japanese with the original casts, but props to the dub teams for the solid work they did.
But it cannot be denied that the English voice acting fits the flavor of the show best.
I still disagree. The Japanese voices are the flavor of the show.
The American voices are just what you are used to.
I'm not a subtitle zealot for the sake of "purity."
The truth is that dubs are often closer translations of the original script, because subtitles have to be brief enough for people to read them.
The reason I prefer subtitles (in all foreign-language entertainment, whether it be movies, anime, opera, etc.) is because the actor's vocal expression is a critical part of the performance. Japanese "seiyuu" are, for the most part, superstar talents and a big part of why I watch anime in the first place.
If I can't hear the voices of Ryô Hirohashi and Junko Noda, then I'm not really watching Haibane Renmei. I'm just seeing what it looks like while somebody else reads the script to me.
I disagree - the jazzy flavor of Cowboy Bebop was best watched in English. It just fits the show better. I hate the Japanese voices.
You mean it fits your expectations better.
1. Faye is not supposed to sound like she a mellow 40-year old. She's a few short years from being cryogenically unfrozen in her late teens. Physically, she's a twenty-something. Furthermore, look at her facial expressions. He's a wild maniac, not a calm seductress.
2. Spike should not sound like he took too much Sominex. In Japanese, he's a punk and a slacker. In English, he's a borderline narcoleptic.
3. Jet is NOT a black guy. Nor is he old and grizzled. (He's a former cop because he quit, not because he retired.)
Even having to spend $50 is too much.
To somebody who just bought a $2000 printer?
Puh-lease. They probably spend more on the toner carts for that thing.
I love OS X and I really don't care what platform per se it runs on. However, I've been boycotting Intel chips for years
Not if you've been using Macs, you haven't.
Who do you think owns the patents on those PCI slots and USB ports in the Mac? Guess where the chipsets that support them come from.
There's already plenty of "Intel inside" the Mac.
And shouldn't such a major processor change also entail a model name change?
Personally, I favor calling the new system the "Fuji."
(Because fuji apples taste better than macintosh apples.)
Sounds like a lot of work. I just run Macs. Naked and unprotected on a DSL connection since the earliest days of broadband... never pwned, never infected.
Mind you, in that time I also briefly had a Linux server which was corrupted by warez kids and a Windows PC (for gaming) which I accidentally left turned on overnight that was briefly utilized by phishers... but I took both of those machines off line and have never had a problem since.
Anyways, a simple reinstal requiring a floppy drive hookup shouldn't cost more then $50-$60.
Swell... but not many people would buy an old P-III 400 MHz computer for $60, so why would anybody want to spend $60 getting an old one to work?
Were I unable to get a system like that working myself, I would simply donate it to a school, where kids can learn how to format and install computers by doing all the labor themselves, write it off on my taxes, and put my $60 towards buying a better system.
5. A tiny box attached by a 3' cord to a pair of sunglasses (with ear buds) on which you can bring up a display screen.
One of the big challenges Pixar & Disney faced in dubbing "Howl's Moving Castle" (Yes, I know it's credited to Disney, but it was actually supervised by Peter Docter, a long-time Pixar guy going back to Toy Story), was that the name "Howl" in Japanese is two distinct syllables (How-ru), so all the animation was done with two "mouth flaps" every time his name was spoken.
(Best dub I ever saw, by the way... That's not to say I'm not eagerly looking forward to the DVD so I can hear the original performances.)
i make $9/hr canadian
Really? What's that in real money?
I keed, I keed!
I joke-a with you! I love the Canada! I keed because I love!
Some of us consider using horrible voice actors as "butchering".
Ah, well then ADV certainly doesn't "butcher." All of their DVD's feature some of the top voice talent in all of Japan!
Oh... you are probably listening to the English dubs... You poor, misguided bastard. You really should know better by now.
(And don't give me that shit about the Bandai dubs like "Cowboy Bebop" being any better. Sure most of the English cast, apart from Wendee Lee, is relatively capable, but they are talking over what were vastly superior performances. Subtitles are the only way to go, short of actually learning the language.)
Think about it for a minute. A typical college kid who's working as a techie in a computer store is going to expect about $20/hr for their time. This means the cost to actually employ that kid (after taxes and regulatory requirements) is closer to $35/hr.
You will never get even close to 1/2 utilization out of your staff of repair kids, you need to collect at least double that from the customers ($70), and then another $20 for the cost of keeping your doors open (and for the store manager to spend at least part of his/her time making sure the techies aren't stealing all the 2 GB Ram sticks or slacking off or whatever.)
That leaves $80 a day of sweet, sweet profit, all for the joy of dealing with angry assholes who will often take out their frustrations on you. Gosh, I wonder why there aren't more places fighting to get a piece of that action?
From the users perspective, they could pay $100/hr to lose all their data and end up with the same crappy computer they always had, or for a mere $300 more they could have a shiny new computer with 5 times the CPU power, 4 times the memory, 4 times the hard drive space, a DVD burner, a massively better video card, and a pretty new keyboard. It's not surprising that a lot of people decide that they'd rather spend a little extra than pouring more money into a system which has been giving them fits.
I'm sure everybody who replied was just trying to be helpful regarding your Windows install, but they managed to prove your point quite well. A typical non-techie hearing all that advice would be utterly lost and baffled.
Couldn't afford the 120", huh?
Why were you modded down? That was a shot at me, and I thought it was funny as hell.
Well, in spite of your sudden Karma loss, allow me to say, "good one."
Hard drive space is about $0.50 per GB these days. I'll stick with uncompressed DVD rips, thanks anyway.
(Yes, it's excessive for most people to do that, but I usually watch my movies on a 119" screen with surround sound, so every small compromise in video & sound quality becomes glaringly obvious on my system.)
That said, thanks for the link. There are some disks I have which have horrible interlace issues, and perhaps converting them with Handbrake will actually result in them being cleaned up a little, depending on how good the de-interlace logic is.
Agreed!
I found it rather mortifying that none of the 3 criteria that these jokers included in their definition of a "true" RPG included actual role-play.
"Interactive stories" are almost always completely linear, or at best contain a few possible forks, in which you are just choosing one of several trains to hop on to.
"Character growth" is just an illusion. At the high levels of any RPG, you are fighting monsters which are exactly as challenging, relative to your character stats, so the only "growth" that has happened is the mass of pixels in front of your avitar, which still takes three minutes to kill, has changed from a silly-looking giant rat to a spooky-looking dragon.
So that leaves "a system of rules and statistics" to determine the outcome, which can often reduce the usefulness of tactical planning in these games. If your mystical ability to perfectly evaluate the challenge rating of the monster in front of you reveals it to be a relatively easy kill (but not too easy to be worth it), you can simply farm it for XP and move on. Yawn.
None of those things are important to me in an RPG. They can be elements of a fun game, but what makes an RPG an RPG is the roleplay and interaction between people. This is how it will always be until somebody comes up with an RPG which can pass a Turing test.
You think being a business-class frequent flyer is "elitist"???
I worked very hard to get into a position where I wouldn't need to travel by plane very often. It's a shitty lifestyle, not a glamourous one.
There was a previously mentioned idea of the capability of video-out jacks which could turn an iPod into less of a poor substitute for a portable TV and more of a portable video library to hook up without bringing a case full of DVDs.
People keep suggesting that, but for the life of me, I can't think of a time when I've gone to a friends house and wanted to bring along more than one or two movies. More often than not, if watching videos is the plan, the friend in question already has stuff available to watch, and we would be more likely to watch my stuff when they visit my place.
Are there people out there actually clamouring for the ability to bring 60 GB of video files with them everywhere they go?
Reuters news service has "the ring of big petrol" to it???
Holy shit, where can I get a tin-foil hat? The conspiracy nuts were right!!!