I don't have the YUA DVDs, but I have most of the UY ones... why would you want to stop the menu? Like most DVDs, the menu is not applicable to stopping, as it's not technically "playing." All stop would do is exit the disc and put you back at your DVD player screen... Press eject if you don't want to watch the disc anymore...
In terms of logo assault, Animeigo is second only to HKDVDs in non-invasiveness.
Not supporting ADV is different from not supporting anime.
I support AnimEigo, Viz, CPM, Manga Ent, especially small newer companies like AnimeWorks. I'll buy manga from Kodansha, Kadokawa, Shogakukan, Del Rey, Dark Horse, even TokyoPop, though sadly I've dropped Viz since they think unlabelled censorship is cool...
But, In the 10 or so years I've been into anime, I've been burned so often by ADV, it's simply not worth it to do business with them.
My mom has told me she used to watch "Kimba the White Lion," and a less-known show called "Bush Baby." (Info I find on it says 1992, but apparently she watched it on TV in the 60s...)
I couldn't agree more. If ADV has taught me anything though, it's that most of the anime fan community is very faddish. Lots of people love ADV now, but I've yet to find one who remembers the Slayers movie impro-dub they did... or the fact that their tapes used to cost 2-3x as much as anyone else's, and sometimes contain a single 30-minute episode.
Though then again, CMX, and even Viz are censoring manga these days. Now that anime has gone mainstream, it seems that it's ok to redraw, rewrite, adlib, and just generally shred and reconsitute titles to get them to a wider audience. ("Robotech it!") Basically, if you like anime/manga and didn't start learning Japanese at the turn of the century, you're outta luck.:/ That is, with the exception of fansub and fansub pirate groups.:) I'm not using this as an excuse to get fansubs... I still buy plenty of manga, mostly Del Rey, and *gasp* Tokyopop (apart from certain cases like Initial D, they're pretty good now!) but I'm done playing games with ADV. They're monopolistic gougers who will do anything to an artists' work if it boosts the profit a little bit, and I'm not going to pay to support that.
If I had to guess, I'd say the catalyst was Evangelion. ADV sucked before that, but they didn't own half the titles in the industry because they were still somewhat small. After Eva, they suddenly had new logos, new promos, and a swack of licenses they probably still haven't moved on. If AnimEigo got it instead, the anime industry in North America would look a lot nicer... and pigs would be flying, since they could never afford it! (Who's even heard of AnimEigo now? Bubblegum Crisis? Urusei Yatsura? Riding Bean? Otaku no Video? Meh... forget it... if you haven't heard of any of these, just go back to Digimon.:/) I guess history has shown us: If you translate carefully, include additional subtitles for cultural notes, and include copious amounts of liner notes further explaining translation to the curious, then charge the least possible amount, you'll have no chance compared to those who rewrite the shows to fit their translation, include no notes, and charge 2x what someone would pay for a video of any other genre/medium. Kinda sad, really...
You hit it right on the mark. I keep seeing claims of why Linux is better than this half-imagined bogeyman called "Windows," but their claims stopped applying nearly 10 years ago. You'd have to be seriously out of the loop to think Windows still has a problem with BSODs (they're still technically possible... I had one 2 years ago when I used a stick of faulty RAM...) This has seriously quashed the credibility of the Linux evangelists for me... well, that and my masochistic habit of sampling a few distros every year or two has shown me that while everyday tasks are possible on Linux, the adjustment isn't as simple as they say.
I'd much rather buy a piece of software that comes with full documentation and support than receive the source code for something, pray it compiles, then search for a readme, find nothing, check a manpage that tells me to read the howto, which tells me to read a website, which has no instructions anyway, then search around and read a half-addressed FAQ written by another third party who stuck with the program long enough to figure some of it out, etc...
Linux evangelists claim simultaneously that Windows suffers from problems it hasn't in a decade, while assuring us that Linux (maybe SOME distro of it!) is perfect and ready for prime time. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but in terms of sales, it's BS on both sides.:/
Same here... my diploma covered coding in C++, Java, VS.NET, HTML, XML, WAP, and Perl, Oracle 9i setup, administration, DB planning and use, reverse/forward engineering with Rational Rose, Silverrun, Visio (lol), DOS/Netware/Win3.11/Win98/NT/2000/2003/Linux administration, even things like making CAT5, planning our careers, and Project Management as part of Systems Analysis & Design. UML left and right, etc. Basically a toolkit of useful entry-level knowledge was bestowed upon us, and we were told stories of nearby chemical plants hiring entire graduating classes.
Well, as it stands now, I've been watching a friend of mine who graduated before me search for work for a year or two, run out of cash, and go back to working construction sites. I've graduated, and have been looking for work for about 6 months. Meanwhile, I've heard that there are only about 3 instructors left in my program, and considering how strained it was when I was there with 5, I think the program's about to fold between overworked profs/lack of students/lack of funding.
I plan to stick with IT, at least as much as logistically possible, because it's what I know and love, and really, I don't want to do anything else. However, I at least realise this is crazy, and anyone who thinks the next while will be a breeze is either nuts, or already comfortably employed.:/
Your comment about medicine was right on the mark. We need a professional designation for IT workers, and it's going to be met one of two ways:
- Like engineering, a major catastrophe will claim hundreds of lives, and there will be a cry for some kind of legally recognised certification that sets IT workers (say, Information Systems Professionals maybe, but CIPS will never move on that...) apart from "computer guys."
- There have already been many lives lost due to lax coding and design regulations. It looks like engineering is going to take over IT, and if you're not in the cult of engineers, you get no credibility.:/
I'm hoping for the former, but expecting the latter...
The MS side does it for money, and the Linux side does it for passion. Unfortunately, most Linux proponents who are loud enough to be noticed tend to come off as fanatical, and I think that's hurting its image, and reducing the "street cred."
Windows vs Linux studies could be lumped in with cel phone EMF radiation studies... the winner is determined by whoever tips the scale while doing the study...:/
As always, but while this site claims tech coverage, it's mostly LINUX tech coverage.
What I want to know is what's a fair comparison anyway?
If it's MS-funded, it's probably skewed to Windows. If it's performed by Linux advocates, it's skewed. If it's done by a research company that doesn't care either way, they end up ruling that Linux is hard to use, and the/. crowd moans that they didn't set up the boxes right. Well, if it's not obvious how to set them up properly, that makes it pretty hard to use, doesn't it?
I say just ask around in the IT community, though it would really depend on who you know. Most people I've talked to either marginalize it as a non-option (my old boss, when I was extolling the virtues of Redhat 6.4...), consider it as a plague (most of my peers), or a neccesary evil you'll probably have to know sooner or later (my college profs.) Personally, I think it's a brilliant OS-extended-family-and-then-some for a server, but masochistic on the desktop.
So... what's a fair comparison? Even if they loaded a study with a team of Linux gurus, and Windows reps to set up the systems properly, that'd hardly be a realistic environment for either.:/
Yep. And until both you and CmdrTaco, and the countless others they wrong decide to quit the game for good, you're just reenforcing, and in fact PAYING them to do this to you. As long as the cash is rolling in, it's smooth sailing for Blizzard, and they will see no reason to change anything.
I wonder what they're going to do when all the non-title, non-copywritten, fantasy-appropriate, family-friendly names get used up and people have to start resorting to "_-=pxqrt0x29A=-_" like you see in games like Ragnarok (which has no such policy, but doesn't delete inactive players, and may ban for a completely illegible name.) Will they still ban you for that? Would they rather have characters wandering around with random real names like "Steve" the necromancer?
I've had a copy of WoW in a box on my shelf for a couple months, but I keep hearing about stupid crap like this and really, I don't think I WANT into such an anally-run pay-per-view dictatorship like what they have going now.
People have been raytracing photorealistic scenes for many years now. http://www.povray.org/ When I discovered it about 10 years ago, it had already been going for quite a while. REALTIME rendering though... that's the trick!:p
(There was an impressive realtime raytracing card demoed a while ago, but the scenes were very visibly simplified to make it render in realtime.:( )
I'd second his comment. Win98SE CAN run stable and fast if you keep it meticulously trimmed. Being relatively simple and still related to MS-DOS, it's very easy for someone with DOS knowledge to keep it running well. I'd even go so far as to say that things are in logical and intuitive places, though that could just be the years of DOS use speaking...
Admittedly, I only know one Mac user, but he's been using it since about OS 6/7. If you even mention OSX, he'll go into an angry tirade about all the functionality that's been removed (like InputSprockets) and the tremendous speed hit on anything below a G5. As far as he's concerned Apple, like Amiga "Was a great company... too bad they stopped making OSes. At least OS9 still works!"
Personally, I find all versions of MacOS frustrating and counter-intuitive even beyond the crap I had to go through with various Linux distros over the years, so give me Win98SE over MacOS any day!
I have a DVR (Bell/Echostar PVR-5100... crap!) It gets about 300-ish satellite channels. It also sits under my PC desk and collects dust, being fired up once or twice a week at most.
Just as there are fewer female gamers in NA because there are no games for girls, the male TV segment is plummeting because it's turning more and more into reality TV, gimmicky gameshows, and godawful sitcoms. Lessee.... "Fear Factor" or GTA:SA? "Survivor XVIII: Delaware" or surfing the net? Tough choice...
Right now I'm checking out the fansubs of Naruto (DB), G Gundam (B-A), Mahoraba (Froth-Bite), Popotan (triad), Mahou Shoujo Tai (AF-F), Yakitake Japan (A-E), Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (mahou) and a few others, and generally the subs are of good quality, perfect timing, and accurate translation leaning towards literal.
I don't know where these bad subs people keep mentioning come from, but as someone who would just as happily watch a raw release, I find they're far more accurate than say, ADV, Manga, or Pioneer.
Actually, I've only seen a few bad fansubs, notably the infamous HECTO/Shinsengumi Kenshin subs, and various HKDVDs that were translated from the Chinese script and timed by epileptic monkeys.
Nowadays it's pretty easy to find a good sub of most things: Go to animesuki.com and get the torrents from the group with the most seeders or leechers. You'll probably have a pretty good translation, complete with E/J "karaoke" subs on the OP/ED, and often even on-screen translation notes.
Since companies started "taking liberties" left and right ("Last one in is a rotten dragon ball!"), the only company not beaten by average fansubs seems to be AnimEigo. Sadly they can't seem to get their act together for getting new titles/keeping licenses/making non-defective first presses of DVDs, and so on, but I'll still support them.
The US anime industry is killing anime in the US
on
The Business of Anime
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· Score: 1
Fansubs aren't killing the US anime industry. There's actually a discussion thread somewhere on animenewsnetwork.com's forum about it, and there are pages of people who say they discover new series' through fansubs and then buy the licensed copies or at least get rid of the fansubs when a show is released here.
Now crappy translations, rewrites, and senseless cuts... THOSE are killing anime in the English-speaking world. If you're seriously a hardcore anime fan, just learn Japanese and skip all this BS. That way, you can just download raws and not even worry about it!:D
I'll second that. I always wonder what these guys do to get hacked so fast... jump straight into a "hacker" chatroom with an ancient copy of mIRC and beg for attacks?
I'm not saying security is good out of the box, but I have NEVER seen a fresh installation of Windows get compromised before I had a chance to update it... and I've never actually slipstreamed updates either. It's a myth, but I suppose it could theoretically happen if someone started hacking the second you connected to the net...
However, not being in the dark ages anymore, spelling has VERY specific rules, just as it would if you were programming. DateTime() is not the same at dtim3(), but if you play online games with chat, like MMOs, people will walk up to you and say things like "UR dnt fz munx b 4 ppk lol" as if they expect you to comprehend their undefined, misspelled abbreviations of god-knows-what.
This goes beyond just interpreting the rules differently; a disturbing number of people you meet online won't even show grade 6 writing abilities anymore.
I'm completely with you on that. Actually, I stopped reading after they made 2 mistakes on the first paragraph:
- The XBox was the first game console that was basically just a PC in terms of hardware/stats. That much is true, but Bandai/Apple's "Pippin" was basically just a PowerMac. It also had Internet connectivity. It tanked in the USA due partially due to comparatively low literacy rates, but mostly because "no one" had heard of the Internet when it was released.
- They made it sound like Halo running slow splitscreen was a dire warning of things to come since it was a launch title (and they had already hit the console's performance ceiling) when in the console world, launch titles are usually the rough ones with lower framerates and crude graphics. Then, once developers learn the ins and outs of the system, we start to see gorgeous, smooth-running games (like RE4)
These guys sound like they just got into gaming a couple years ago and can't be arsed to look anything up, so they just ramble.
I had a similar experience, except I'd been hooked on console gaming since the NES. After the utter disappointment of the N64, I didn't even look at the GameCube, especially since Nintendo had a reputation for only bringing kids titles to the US.
I'd held off on the PS2/XBox/Cube generation unless you count the Dreamcast among them. I love my GBA SP though, and picked up a 'cube one day. It was like everything I hated about "modern games" was gone - no incomprehensible hard to remember controls, no awkward glitches like walking through cracks in levels or AI that would spaz and do bizarre things, and so far, no games that just go "ok, you're dead now!" regardless of skill in order to make it seem "harder." It seemed that Nintendo still put in the time and effort to test and debug their games!
I love the amount of options and content they put into the GTA games, but they're so buggy and surreal that it's not worth my effort to do any missions - maybe instead of getting into a car, my character will just jog in little circles beside it. Maybe he'll smack into the car, stagger, and repeat. Maybe I'll get shot THROUGH a wall or building by the psychic cops (which seem to make up 1/4 of the city's population even when they're not materializing out of thin air!)...then I tried Resident Evil 4... it was the most seamless shooter I've ever played. I never got the "I'm alone in a world of stupid NPCs" feeling or the monotony of endless grinding so many games, especially shooters, give me now. Constant influx of new scenarios without seeming too fake or contrived. I think that was the real selling point for me with the Revolution. I'm eyeing the PS3, but I expect it to be better for big franchise games, cinematic "wow" factor, and whatever additional non-gaming features they throw in (especially anything integrated with the PSP.) Nintendo though, has proven to me that while they don't have a firehose flow of new games coming out, they almost ALWAYS deliver a planned, tested, polished quality gaming experience instead of just selling devkits and saying "go nuts!" to developers. Less free perhaps, but it seems to be working for them!
I had a few BSODs with Windows 2003 Server (I'm using it as my desktop OS and it's great:D). They were caused by a bad stick of RAM, and once it was replaced, everything ran smoothly. I don't think I've seen one since then in the last couple years.
Of course, even if MS kept improving quality at this rate and made the perfect OS years later, there would still be a ton of trolls on here that mock it for BSODs simply because they don't use Windows anymore and had a bad experience with 3.11:p
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I don't have the YUA DVDs, but I have most of the UY ones... why would you want to stop the menu? Like most DVDs, the menu is not applicable to stopping, as it's not technically "playing." All stop would do is exit the disc and put you back at your DVD player screen... Press eject if you don't want to watch the disc anymore...
In terms of logo assault, Animeigo is second only to HKDVDs in non-invasiveness.
Not supporting ADV is different from not supporting anime.
I support AnimEigo, Viz, CPM, Manga Ent, especially small newer companies like AnimeWorks. I'll buy manga from Kodansha, Kadokawa, Shogakukan, Del Rey, Dark Horse, even TokyoPop, though sadly I've dropped Viz since they think unlabelled censorship is cool...
But, In the 10 or so years I've been into anime, I've been burned so often by ADV, it's simply not worth it to do business with them.
My mom has told me she used to watch "Kimba the White Lion," and a less-known show called "Bush Baby." (Info I find on it says 1992, but apparently she watched it on TV in the 60s...)
Arg... ADV rant coming on... run!
:/ That is, with the exception of fansub and fansub pirate groups. :) I'm not using this as an excuse to get fansubs... I still buy plenty of manga, mostly Del Rey, and *gasp* Tokyopop (apart from certain cases like Initial D, they're pretty good now!) but I'm done playing games with ADV. They're monopolistic gougers who will do anything to an artists' work if it boosts the profit a little bit, and I'm not going to pay to support that.
:/) I guess history has shown us: If you translate carefully, include additional subtitles for cultural notes, and include copious amounts of liner notes further explaining translation to the curious, then charge the least possible amount, you'll have no chance compared to those who rewrite the shows to fit their translation, include no notes, and charge 2x what someone would pay for a video of any other genre/medium. Kinda sad, really...
I couldn't agree more. If ADV has taught me anything though, it's that most of the anime fan community is very faddish. Lots of people love ADV now, but I've yet to find one who remembers the Slayers movie impro-dub they did... or the fact that their tapes used to cost 2-3x as much as anyone else's, and sometimes contain a single 30-minute episode.
Though then again, CMX, and even Viz are censoring manga these days. Now that anime has gone mainstream, it seems that it's ok to redraw, rewrite, adlib, and just generally shred and reconsitute titles to get them to a wider audience. ("Robotech it!") Basically, if you like anime/manga and didn't start learning Japanese at the turn of the century, you're outta luck.
If I had to guess, I'd say the catalyst was Evangelion. ADV sucked before that, but they didn't own half the titles in the industry because they were still somewhat small. After Eva, they suddenly had new logos, new promos, and a swack of licenses they probably still haven't moved on. If AnimEigo got it instead, the anime industry in North America would look a lot nicer... and pigs would be flying, since they could never afford it! (Who's even heard of AnimEigo now? Bubblegum Crisis? Urusei Yatsura? Riding Bean? Otaku no Video? Meh... forget it... if you haven't heard of any of these, just go back to Digimon.
You hit it right on the mark. I keep seeing claims of why Linux is better than this half-imagined bogeyman called "Windows," but their claims stopped applying nearly 10 years ago. You'd have to be seriously out of the loop to think Windows still has a problem with BSODs (they're still technically possible... I had one 2 years ago when I used a stick of faulty RAM...) This has seriously quashed the credibility of the Linux evangelists for me... well, that and my masochistic habit of sampling a few distros every year or two has shown me that while everyday tasks are possible on Linux, the adjustment isn't as simple as they say.
:/
I'd much rather buy a piece of software that comes with full documentation and support than receive the source code for something, pray it compiles, then search for a readme, find nothing, check a manpage that tells me to read the howto, which tells me to read a website, which has no instructions anyway, then search around and read a half-addressed FAQ written by another third party who stuck with the program long enough to figure some of it out, etc...
Linux evangelists claim simultaneously that Windows suffers from problems it hasn't in a decade, while assuring us that Linux (maybe SOME distro of it!) is perfect and ready for prime time. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but in terms of sales, it's BS on both sides.
Same here... my diploma covered coding in C++, Java, VS.NET, HTML, XML, WAP, and Perl, Oracle 9i setup, administration, DB planning and use, reverse/forward engineering with Rational Rose, Silverrun, Visio (lol), DOS/Netware/Win3.11/Win98/NT/2000/2003/Linux administration, even things like making CAT5, planning our careers, and Project Management as part of Systems Analysis & Design. UML left and right, etc. Basically a toolkit of useful entry-level knowledge was bestowed upon us, and we were told stories of nearby chemical plants hiring entire graduating classes.
:/
Well, as it stands now, I've been watching a friend of mine who graduated before me search for work for a year or two, run out of cash, and go back to working construction sites. I've graduated, and have been looking for work for about 6 months. Meanwhile, I've heard that there are only about 3 instructors left in my program, and considering how strained it was when I was there with 5, I think the program's about to fold between overworked profs/lack of students/lack of funding.
I plan to stick with IT, at least as much as logistically possible, because it's what I know and love, and really, I don't want to do anything else. However, I at least realise this is crazy, and anyone who thinks the next while will be a breeze is either nuts, or already comfortably employed.
Your comment about medicine was right on the mark. We need a professional designation for IT workers, and it's going to be met one of two ways:
:/
- Like engineering, a major catastrophe will claim hundreds of lives, and there will be a cry for some kind of legally recognised certification that sets IT workers (say, Information Systems Professionals maybe, but CIPS will never move on that...) apart from "computer guys."
- There have already been many lives lost due to lax coding and design regulations. It looks like engineering is going to take over IT, and if you're not in the cult of engineers, you get no credibility.
I'm hoping for the former, but expecting the latter...
Hard to find qualified people? Bullshit. What about all the qualified people here who can't find jobs?
More like hard to find someone with 5 years of experience in a 3 year old technology.
The MS side does it for money, and the Linux side does it for passion. Unfortunately, most Linux proponents who are loud enough to be noticed tend to come off as fanatical, and I think that's hurting its image, and reducing the "street cred."
:/
Windows vs Linux studies could be lumped in with cel phone EMF radiation studies... the winner is determined by whoever tips the scale while doing the study...
As always, but while this site claims tech coverage, it's mostly LINUX tech coverage.
/. crowd moans that they didn't set up the boxes right. Well, if it's not obvious how to set them up properly, that makes it pretty hard to use, doesn't it?
:/
What I want to know is what's a fair comparison anyway?
If it's MS-funded, it's probably skewed to Windows.
If it's performed by Linux advocates, it's skewed.
If it's done by a research company that doesn't care either way, they end up ruling that Linux is hard to use, and the
I say just ask around in the IT community, though it would really depend on who you know. Most people I've talked to either marginalize it as a non-option (my old boss, when I was extolling the virtues of Redhat 6.4...), consider it as a plague (most of my peers), or a neccesary evil you'll probably have to know sooner or later (my college profs.) Personally, I think it's a brilliant OS-extended-family-and-then-some for a server, but masochistic on the desktop.
So... what's a fair comparison? Even if they loaded a study with a team of Linux gurus, and Windows reps to set up the systems properly, that'd hardly be a realistic environment for either.
Yep. And until both you and CmdrTaco, and the countless others they wrong decide to quit the game for good, you're just reenforcing, and in fact PAYING them to do this to you. As long as the cash is rolling in, it's smooth sailing for Blizzard, and they will see no reason to change anything.
I wonder what they're going to do when all the non-title, non-copywritten, fantasy-appropriate, family-friendly names get used up and people have to start resorting to "_-=pxqrt0x29A=-_" like you see in games like Ragnarok (which has no such policy, but doesn't delete inactive players, and may ban for a completely illegible name.) Will they still ban you for that? Would they rather have characters wandering around with random real names like "Steve" the necromancer?
I've had a copy of WoW in a box on my shelf for a couple months, but I keep hearing about stupid crap like this and really, I don't think I WANT into such an anally-run pay-per-view dictatorship like what they have going now.
"S> 1 WoW, NiB, 250z"
People have been raytracing photorealistic scenes for many years now. :p
:( )
http://www.povray.org/
When I discovered it about 10 years ago, it had already been going for quite a while.
REALTIME rendering though... that's the trick!
(There was an impressive realtime raytracing card demoed a while ago, but the scenes were very visibly simplified to make it render in realtime.
Very much so, but can you find a larger one? I'd say he was right...
Yeah... it's worse now than when he was on USA TechTV...
:/
It's kind of like all the irrelevance and inaccuracy of Dvorak, and all the excitement factor of Dave Chalk's old show, but with a very small set.
I'd second his comment. Win98SE CAN run stable and fast if you keep it meticulously trimmed. Being relatively simple and still related to MS-DOS, it's very easy for someone with DOS knowledge to keep it running well. I'd even go so far as to say that things are in logical and intuitive places, though that could just be the years of DOS use speaking...
Admittedly, I only know one Mac user, but he's been using it since about OS 6/7. If you even mention OSX, he'll go into an angry tirade about all the functionality that's been removed (like InputSprockets) and the tremendous speed hit on anything below a G5. As far as he's concerned Apple, like Amiga "Was a great company... too bad they stopped making OSes. At least OS9 still works!"
Personally, I find all versions of MacOS frustrating and counter-intuitive even beyond the crap I had to go through with various Linux distros over the years, so give me Win98SE over MacOS any day!
I have a DVR (Bell/Echostar PVR-5100... crap!) It gets about 300-ish satellite channels. It also sits under my PC desk and collects dust, being fired up once or twice a week at most.
Just as there are fewer female gamers in NA because there are no games for girls, the male TV segment is plummeting because it's turning more and more into reality TV, gimmicky gameshows, and godawful sitcoms. Lessee.... "Fear Factor" or GTA:SA? "Survivor XVIII: Delaware" or surfing the net? Tough choice...
Right now I'm checking out the fansubs of Naruto (DB), G Gundam (B-A), Mahoraba (Froth-Bite), Popotan (triad), Mahou Shoujo Tai (AF-F), Yakitake Japan (A-E), Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (mahou) and a few others, and generally the subs are of good quality, perfect timing, and accurate translation leaning towards literal.
I don't know where these bad subs people keep mentioning come from, but as someone who would just as happily watch a raw release, I find they're far more accurate than say, ADV, Manga, or Pioneer.
Actually, I've only seen a few bad fansubs, notably the infamous HECTO/Shinsengumi Kenshin subs, and various HKDVDs that were translated from the Chinese script and timed by epileptic monkeys.
Nowadays it's pretty easy to find a good sub of most things: Go to animesuki.com and get the torrents from the group with the most seeders or leechers. You'll probably have a pretty good translation, complete with E/J "karaoke" subs on the OP/ED, and often even on-screen translation notes.
Since companies started "taking liberties" left and right ("Last one in is a rotten dragon ball!"), the only company not beaten by average fansubs seems to be AnimEigo. Sadly they can't seem to get their act together for getting new titles/keeping licenses/making non-defective first presses of DVDs, and so on, but I'll still support them.
Fansubs aren't killing the US anime industry. There's actually a discussion thread somewhere on animenewsnetwork.com's forum about it, and there are pages of people who say they discover new series' through fansubs and then buy the licensed copies or at least get rid of the fansubs when a show is released here.
:D
Now crappy translations, rewrites, and senseless cuts... THOSE are killing anime in the English-speaking world. If you're seriously a hardcore anime fan, just learn Japanese and skip all this BS. That way, you can just download raws and not even worry about it!
I'll second that. I always wonder what these guys do to get hacked so fast... jump straight into a "hacker" chatroom with an ancient copy of mIRC and beg for attacks?
I'm not saying security is good out of the box, but I have NEVER seen a fresh installation of Windows get compromised before I had a chance to update it... and I've never actually slipstreamed updates either. It's a myth, but I suppose it could theoretically happen if someone started hacking the second you connected to the net...
However, not being in the dark ages anymore, spelling has VERY specific rules, just as it would if you were programming. DateTime() is not the same at dtim3(), but if you play online games with chat, like MMOs, people will walk up to you and say things like "UR dnt fz munx b 4 ppk lol" as if they expect you to comprehend their undefined, misspelled abbreviations of god-knows-what.
This goes beyond just interpreting the rules differently; a disturbing number of people you meet online won't even show grade 6 writing abilities anymore.
I'm completely with you on that. Actually, I stopped reading after they made 2 mistakes on the first paragraph:
- The XBox was the first game console that was basically just a PC in terms of hardware/stats. That much is true, but Bandai/Apple's "Pippin" was basically just a PowerMac. It also had Internet connectivity. It tanked in the USA due partially due to comparatively low literacy rates, but mostly because "no one" had heard of the Internet when it was released.
- They made it sound like Halo running slow splitscreen was a dire warning of things to come since it was a launch title (and they had already hit the console's performance ceiling) when in the console world, launch titles are usually the rough ones with lower framerates and crude graphics. Then, once developers learn the ins and outs of the system, we start to see gorgeous, smooth-running games (like RE4)
These guys sound like they just got into gaming a couple years ago and can't be arsed to look anything up, so they just ramble.
I had a similar experience, except I'd been hooked on console gaming since the NES. After the utter disappointment of the N64, I didn't even look at the GameCube, especially since Nintendo had a reputation for only bringing kids titles to the US.
...then I tried Resident Evil 4... it was the most seamless shooter I've ever played. I never got the "I'm alone in a world of stupid NPCs" feeling or the monotony of endless grinding so many games, especially shooters, give me now. Constant influx of new scenarios without seeming too fake or contrived. I think that was the real selling point for me with the Revolution. I'm eyeing the PS3, but I expect it to be better for big franchise games, cinematic "wow" factor, and whatever additional non-gaming features they throw in (especially anything integrated with the PSP.) Nintendo though, has proven to me that while they don't have a firehose flow of new games coming out, they almost ALWAYS deliver a planned, tested, polished quality gaming experience instead of just selling devkits and saying "go nuts!" to developers. Less free perhaps, but it seems to be working for them!
I'd held off on the PS2/XBox/Cube generation unless you count the Dreamcast among them. I love my GBA SP though, and picked up a 'cube one day. It was like everything I hated about "modern games" was gone - no incomprehensible hard to remember controls, no awkward glitches like walking through cracks in levels or AI that would spaz and do bizarre things, and so far, no games that just go "ok, you're dead now!" regardless of skill in order to make it seem "harder." It seemed that Nintendo still put in the time and effort to test and debug their games!
I love the amount of options and content they put into the GTA games, but they're so buggy and surreal that it's not worth my effort to do any missions - maybe instead of getting into a car, my character will just jog in little circles beside it. Maybe he'll smack into the car, stagger, and repeat. Maybe I'll get shot THROUGH a wall or building by the psychic cops (which seem to make up 1/4 of the city's population even when they're not materializing out of thin air!)
...except the whole dying and being brought back to life part...
I had a few BSODs with Windows 2003 Server (I'm using it as my desktop OS and it's great :D). They were caused by a bad stick of RAM, and once it was replaced, everything ran smoothly. I don't think I've seen one since then in the last couple years.
:p
Of course, even if MS kept improving quality at this rate and made the perfect OS years later, there would still be a ton of trolls on here that mock it for BSODs simply because they don't use Windows anymore and had a bad experience with 3.11