Because you're a human being with human rights. One of those rights is freedom of speech, and part of that freedom is the ability to control when, where and to whom to speak. The speech is what should be protected, not the company's stupid network.
If they don't want to hire people, fine. Let them buy an M$ wizzzzzzzard to set up their databases and sit in meetings. But if they want hard-working, knowledgeable, imaginative people, then they are going to have to accept the fact that they are HUMAN BEINGS, not machines.
Just because you're in a "building you don't own" doesn't mean you have to hand over control of your entire life to some middle-manager.
People are people FIRST, then "employees." This "the company rules the universe" routine is getting REALLY fatiguing.
The famous workplace, where your freedom is checked at the door.
For people so concerned with freedom, it is astonishing that the entirety of a person's basic rights are handed over like a movie ticket once the workday begins.
And to top it all off, everyone DEFENDS this by saying, "well, they sign your paycheck."
Newsflash: signing a paycheck != control someone's life.
Here are people who tell you what to do 40, 50, 60 hours a week. What time to sleep. How long to spend eating. What kind of house you can buy. Where you must live. What to say. How to dress. How many phone calls to make. What web sites to visit. And so on. It's worse than grade school. If you don't like it, you're "downsized."
Personal life is not to interfere in the workday. No personal activities of any kind are to be conducted at work, unless you're a manager and you have kids. Then you can "take the afternoon off" or leave early on Friday any time you feel like it. All time off is given begrudgingly, even if it is pre-approved.
Now they'll just help themselves to every word typed or spoken during the workday. Excuse me, but why is the workplace exempt from a person's inalienable rights? Why are companies allowed to treat people this way? Why is a paycheck carte blanche to control someone's life?
If it isn't company business, PAYCHECK OR NOT, it isn't company business. Period. People should be given the freedom to be people before corporate drones.
Most high-visibility anime today has cross-continent appeal
But there is one element that is driving a wedge between the McCulture conference room and the quality of anime: DVD.
Original subtitled DVDs outsell dubs, often. Having an uncut, subtitled DVD of any anime series is a must, and the production companies know it. The good news is that most of these companies (Pioneer in particular), because of their past successes, can insist on this despite the NA distributors reluctance. The result is that both markets are being served at half-price. Add the internet, and you have a range of mechanisms by which original anime becomes competitive with its own adaptation, and in most cases, it wins.
Pretty soon, the competition will become too expensive, and distributors will start adapting series closer to the original.
expect the cross-blanding of American and Japanese styles to continue at full speed.
I think with Disney occupied with defensive licensing and trying to shoehorn their tired, worn out characters into more and more dubious products, 500 small anime companies are going to start producing even better series and probably take about a third of the market share in the next 10-15 years.
This is the reality: distinct styling has no advantage in a global marketplace
If that were true, anime would never have gotten to this point.
hmm, how popular is Toonami compared to, say, Dexter's lab/Powerpuff Girls/other cartoon network original series?
(I'll proceed under the assumption that this isn't a troll.)
Funny that Dexter and PPG (two HEAVILY anime-influenced series) were mentioned.
Irrelevant, since one is prime time and one isn't. Nevertheless, Toonami was the #1 rated block of programming on the network at several points from 1998 - 2001.
The fact is, if anime were making that much money, you'd see it more in a broader medium.
One word: Pokemon. Movies, books, television (network and cable), video games, home video. If they could figure out how to do it, I'm sure there would be a Pokemon radio show.
there's some chicken and egg stuff
lol Been to Suncoast lately?
animators that know animation isn't just for kids
See, the animation industry here is just now figuring this out. It's been this way in Japan for decades. This is why anime actually employs writers while McCulture employs formulas.
Anyone that can say with a straight face that anime's popularity isn't conclusive is either being intellectually dishonest or is ignorant of the facts.
How many times have we read in a preview that a game looked great and "once they iron out a few small bugs" it's going to be the next big thing?
That's because the "game media" measures quality with the dollars*polygons number. More money = better game. More polygons = better game. No story, gameplay or anything genuinely new? Who cares?
By the way, I'd guess 90% of the "mega-polygon-fests" are now done almost entirely with standard toolsets. The engines, sound, models and animations are almost all done in slick, automatic GUIs with full 3D view options and instant in-engine integration. Very little actual "down to the metal" programming going on, and if there is, it is wasted effort, since the graphics almost all look the same from a technical standpoint.
Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course. I just wonder sometimes why it takes 14 full-time people two years (and $15M) to do ten levels of artwork and customize an engine.
The Metropolis review, the popularity of Toonami, the 20 feet of DVDs at Suncoast and now this. It's no longer a question of 'if.'
Toonami's popularity was described as "out-of-nowhere." Isn't it funny how executives always describe genuine quality-driven popularity as "out of nowhere?" Of course, the two shows that built Toonami: Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, weren't exactly "out of nowhere," but we can't actually expect the cynics to do any work now can we?
That an animated series can generate so much substantive discussion should just about wrap it for the "animation is for kids" crowd.
And without a publicly traded company where will such an organization get the seed funding it will need in its first 5 to perhaps 10 unprofitable years of operation?
Publically-traded shares are not meant to be "seed funding." There is no way, absolutely NO WAY that a company showing a projected 40 unprofitable quarters is going to get funded by any process, especially a public offering.
The bank wants collateral. VCs want 20% annual growth and an IPO, and investors want dividends and stock splits. None of these things can be had without profits.
get rid of the notion that it's allright to derive value by restricting the copying practices of other
Isn't this just the opposite extreme? Why not just restore the original balance of copyright and try that?
For the best example of this working, take a look at the patent system. 17 years. That's it. Companies make fortunes on patents. So do the companies that don't own them (after 17 years).
A 20 year copyright would dramatically improve the situation. Removing copyright completely would do significant damage to the economy, and make it near-impossible for anyone who's work is copyrighted to make a living.
They featured colour animation and 3D texture mapping.
Oh, stop it. 3D texture mapping on a 160x160 screen, Whoopdewhoop. How about some GAMEPLAY?
Nah, that's too difficult. Better to get some voxel-mapping and pixel-buffering and double-processing the texture memory so we can pipeline the vertexes and lighting into the gizmo matrix...blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH!!
Next up: The first $1 million PalmOS game budget, and the economics begin circling the drain.... AGAIN. So, how many companies go out of business this time?
Way to go, game industry! Whoops, you're late for your 10 'o clock meeting.
(famous words from every developers meeting ever scheduled)
DivX was supposed to be free! Free! Freeeeeeeee!!!
Guess not.
Of course the "If you use use DivX commercially" (translation: if you have ever or will ever make money with a computer) "then you must contact us" (because publishing the real price means no customers) "for permission" (permission is a convenient corporatism for NO)
But, somewhere, somehow, the checks have to go out on the 1st. I hope the Internet gets past this "never pay, no matter how cool it might be" approach to business. Think there's a lot of unemployment now? Wait till the value of information becomes zero because nobody can make even a modest living selling it.
Suppose a system administrator wants to leave an old version running for some reason? That's their decision. Linux is useful precisely because it doesn't have to be upgraded every five minutes.
DHTML menus depend on no events but the onmouseover and onmouseout events, which are the EXACT same in every popular browser since Netscae 3.0
Sure, as long as they are registered in the HTML. But if you try to register them in Javascript, you have the W3C "AddEventListener" method, and then you have the MS "AttachEvent" method.
There is no reason you should have empty divs in your code to begin with. Why are they there?
Who cares? The standard supports it, it shouldn't be broken, and it worked in IE5 and IE5.5 but broke in IE6. Far as I'm concerned, if it works in Mozilla it should work everywhere else.
I have no idea what bug this is. Vertical scrollbar bug?
Use window.open to create a pop-up. Set scrollbars=no. Create a background image that is the same size as the window client area. In IE there will be an empty, useless vertical scrollbar on the right side. The only way to get rid of it is to set scroll="no" in the element (a mind-bogglingly non-standard field), BUT then it leaves a fat hole in the page where the scroll bar used to be, so you have to set "margin:0" in the style sheet as well.
That bug took weeks to research and fix.
It doesn't affect DHTML menus directly, but it is an example of why it is such a gigantic pain to do DHTML anything, and why web sites cannot get past HTML 2 after four generations of browsers.
Of course, we won't be allowed to write them, since the licensing fees will be carefully balanced to close the market tighter than a bass drum in a thunderstorm.
Yes, of course, the long awaited sequel to "Happily Ever After." No doubt some writer somewhere had this burning need to get that on paper ASAP.
Don't forget the Peter Pan sequel too. One writer, guys. Just one. You make million$ a day, and all you need is ONE WRITER to come up with something original. ONE.
So this time they didn't use someone else's story, or make a sequel? Oh, wait, they reused characters originally drawn decades ago.. never mind.
While we're at it, anyone see the McDisney ads at Walt Donald's World? "Disney, 100 Years of Magic"
Now unless they count baby Walter's used diapers as "Disney Magic" I don't see how they can reach back to 1902. But I suppose anything's possible when the Marketing Dept. is involved.
Then again, I suppose the 79 years since 1923 isn't quite good enough for the boredroom "executives" who's only creative contribution is the fragrance in the conference room after the catered lunch of Mexican food.
I still think someone ought to make the following movie:
"REVENGE OF DISNEY"
Starring Jackie Chan as Walt E. Disney
A story about a victim of mistaken identity arriving at the very gates of the "Magic Kingdom." Looking around, he sees his own name and only the outline of his beloved character's disembodied head plastered over every flat surface in a display of wanton greed so profound that the enraged cartoonist vows to carry out a one-man campaign to wrest control of the entertainment behemoth from its corporate masters.
Following scenes of frantic, moving, dubbed speeches, gripping courtroom drama, and an action-packed chase through the back hallways of a cineplex on opening night, the film culminates in a spectacular 45-minute "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"-esque kung-fu fight scene in the Disney Corporation's board room as the screaming, elderly, bandanna-wearing animator defeats the entire company's senior management single-handed.
The film ends with Disney, having liquidated the company, and placing its entire portfolio in the public domain, opening an art school with a record $800 million endowment, then retiring to a life of drawing one of a kind cartoons for children in the park.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because they don't have anything to do, and the boss has been in all-day meetings for five weeks.
I've seen people making $60/hour idle for four months before. If people are not busy, it is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT the fault of management.
Why do you have any expectation of privacy?
Because you're a human being with human rights. One of those rights is freedom of speech, and part of that freedom is the ability to control when, where and to whom to speak. The speech is what should be protected, not the company's stupid network.
If they don't want to hire people, fine. Let them buy an M$ wizzzzzzzard to set up their databases and sit in meetings. But if they want hard-working, knowledgeable, imaginative people, then they are going to have to accept the fact that they are HUMAN BEINGS, not machines.
Just because you're in a "building you don't own" doesn't mean you have to hand over control of your entire life to some middle-manager.
People are people FIRST, then "employees." This "the company rules the universe" routine is getting REALLY fatiguing.
The famous workplace, where your freedom is checked at the door.
For people so concerned with freedom, it is astonishing that the entirety of a person's basic rights are handed over like a movie ticket once the workday begins.
And to top it all off, everyone DEFENDS this by saying, "well, they sign your paycheck."
Newsflash: signing a paycheck != control someone's life.
Here are people who tell you what to do 40, 50, 60 hours a week. What time to sleep. How long to spend eating. What kind of house you can buy. Where you must live. What to say. How to dress. How many phone calls to make. What web sites to visit. And so on. It's worse than grade school. If you don't like it, you're "downsized."
Personal life is not to interfere in the workday. No personal activities of any kind are to be conducted at work, unless you're a manager and you have kids. Then you can "take the afternoon off" or leave early on Friday any time you feel like it. All time off is given begrudgingly, even if it is pre-approved.
Now they'll just help themselves to every word typed or spoken during the workday. Excuse me, but why is the workplace exempt from a person's inalienable rights? Why are companies allowed to treat people this way? Why is a paycheck carte blanche to control someone's life?
If it isn't company business, PAYCHECK OR NOT, it isn't company business. Period. People should be given the freedom to be people before corporate drones.
Most high-visibility anime today has cross-continent appeal
But there is one element that is driving a wedge between the McCulture conference room and the quality of anime: DVD.
Original subtitled DVDs outsell dubs, often. Having an uncut, subtitled DVD of any anime series is a must, and the production companies know it. The good news is that most of these companies (Pioneer in particular), because of their past successes, can insist on this despite the NA distributors reluctance. The result is that both markets are being served at half-price. Add the internet, and you have a range of mechanisms by which original anime becomes competitive with its own adaptation, and in most cases, it wins.
Pretty soon, the competition will become too expensive, and distributors will start adapting series closer to the original.
expect the cross-blanding of American and Japanese styles to continue at full speed.
I think with Disney occupied with defensive licensing and trying to shoehorn their tired, worn out characters into more and more dubious products, 500 small anime companies are going to start producing even better series and probably take about a third of the market share in the next 10-15 years.
This is the reality: distinct styling has no advantage in a global marketplace
If that were true, anime would never have gotten to this point.
hmm, how popular is Toonami compared to, say, Dexter's lab/Powerpuff Girls/other cartoon network original series?
(I'll proceed under the assumption that this isn't a troll.)
Funny that Dexter and PPG (two HEAVILY anime-influenced series) were mentioned.
Irrelevant, since one is prime time and one isn't. Nevertheless, Toonami was the #1 rated block of programming on the network at several points from 1998 - 2001.
The fact is, if anime were making that much money, you'd see it more in a broader medium.
One word: Pokemon. Movies, books, television (network and cable), video games, home video. If they could figure out how to do it, I'm sure there would be a Pokemon radio show.
there's some chicken and egg stuff
lol Been to Suncoast lately?
animators that know animation isn't just for kids
See, the animation industry here is just now figuring this out. It's been this way in Japan for decades. This is why anime actually employs writers while McCulture employs formulas.
Anyone that can say with a straight face that anime's popularity isn't conclusive is either being intellectually dishonest or is ignorant of the facts.
How many times have we read in a preview that a game looked great and "once they iron out a few small bugs" it's going to be the next big thing?
That's because the "game media" measures quality with the dollars*polygons number. More money = better game. More polygons = better game. No story, gameplay or anything genuinely new? Who cares?
By the way, I'd guess 90% of the "mega-polygon-fests" are now done almost entirely with standard toolsets. The engines, sound, models and animations are almost all done in slick, automatic GUIs with full 3D view options and instant in-engine integration. Very little actual "down to the metal" programming going on, and if there is, it is wasted effort, since the graphics almost all look the same from a technical standpoint.
Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course. I just wonder sometimes why it takes 14 full-time people two years (and $15M) to do ten levels of artwork and customize an engine.
utterly unlike any American animated film.
Slowly, surely, inevitably...
anime, because of its stories and quality...
overtakes the U.S. animation companies...
and leaves them behind.
The Metropolis review, the popularity of Toonami, the 20 feet of DVDs at Suncoast and now this. It's no longer a question of 'if.'
Toonami's popularity was described as "out-of-nowhere." Isn't it funny how executives always describe genuine quality-driven popularity as "out of nowhere?" Of course, the two shows that built Toonami: Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, weren't exactly "out of nowhere," but we can't actually expect the cynics to do any work now can we?
That an animated series can generate so much substantive discussion should just about wrap it for the "animation is for kids" crowd.
The real message to the animation industry:
better wake up.
And without a publicly traded company where will such an organization get the seed funding it will need in its first 5 to perhaps 10 unprofitable years of operation?
Publically-traded shares are not meant to be "seed funding." There is no way, absolutely NO WAY that a company showing a projected 40 unprofitable quarters is going to get funded by any process, especially a public offering.
The bank wants collateral. VCs want 20% annual growth and an IPO, and investors want dividends and stock splits. None of these things can be had without profits.
Sounds like a business opportunity there... ;)
"This sucker is nuclear????"
"No, no, no, this sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need..."
"If it wasn't for the silly chaps, we'd still be living in the stone age."
--Sir Christopher Cockerell, Inventor of the Hovercraft
It takes absolutely no effort, risk or thought at all to badmouth a new idea. Such is the very cornerstone of most middle manager's careers.
The theory may not be sound, and the experiment might not work, but the man at least deserves respect for having the courage to take the risk.
get rid of the notion that it's allright to derive value by restricting the copying practices of other
Isn't this just the opposite extreme? Why not just restore the original balance of copyright and try that?
For the best example of this working, take a look at the patent system. 17 years. That's it. Companies make fortunes on patents. So do the companies that don't own them (after 17 years).
A 20 year copyright would dramatically improve the situation. Removing copyright completely would do significant damage to the economy, and make it near-impossible for anyone who's work is copyrighted to make a living.
We need to start making high quality music that people would enjoy.
"High quality" requires large amounts of time, which translates to non-trivial amounts of money. Non-trivial amounts of money can only be made by:
1) selling the product
2) Working another job, which makes it impossible to devote large amounts of time. Solution: see #1.
This cannot be avoided, regardless of the license or idealism. Period.
There are two absolute, inviolable rules of business:
1) Time is money
2) Good, Cheap, Fast: pick two.
Would that really violate copyright?
Yep. Public performance. The character actors at the park are a copyright of live appearances by Mickey Mouse ® © © ®
They featured colour animation and 3D texture mapping.
Oh, stop it. 3D texture mapping on a 160x160 screen, Whoopdewhoop. How about some GAMEPLAY?
Nah, that's too difficult. Better to get some voxel-mapping and pixel-buffering and double-processing the texture memory so we can pipeline the vertexes and lighting into the gizmo matrix...blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH!!
Next up: The first $1 million PalmOS game budget, and the economics begin circling the drain.... AGAIN. So, how many companies go out of business this time?
Way to go, game industry! Whoops, you're late for your 10 'o clock meeting.
(famous words from every developers meeting ever scheduled)
DivX was supposed to be free! Free! Freeeeeeeee!!!
Guess not.
Of course the "If you use use DivX commercially" (translation: if you have ever or will ever make money with a computer) "then you must contact us" (because publishing the real price means no customers) "for permission" (permission is a convenient corporatism for NO)
But, somewhere, somehow, the checks have to go out on the 1st. I hope the Internet gets past this "never pay, no matter how cool it might be" approach to business. Think there's a lot of unemployment now? Wait till the value of information becomes zero because nobody can make even a modest living selling it.
Near... far... wherever you are...
I believe that the mouse won't move on...
Once more... you close the drive door...
rip, mix, and blue screen...
our prices go up and on...
No.
Suppose a system administrator wants to leave an old version running for some reason? That's their decision. Linux is useful precisely because it doesn't have to be upgraded every five minutes.
It works. Leave it alone.
DHTML menus depend on no events but the onmouseover and onmouseout events, which are the EXACT same in every popular browser since Netscae 3.0
Sure, as long as they are registered in the HTML. But if you try to register them in Javascript, you have the W3C "AddEventListener" method, and then you have the MS "AttachEvent" method.
There is no reason you should have empty divs in your code to begin with. Why are they there?
Who cares? The standard supports it, it shouldn't be broken, and it worked in IE5 and IE5.5 but broke in IE6. Far as I'm concerned, if it works in Mozilla it should work everywhere else.
I have no idea what bug this is. Vertical scrollbar bug?
Use window.open to create a pop-up. Set scrollbars=no. Create a background image that is the same size as the window client area. In IE there will be an empty, useless vertical scrollbar on the right side. The only way to get rid of it is to set scroll="no" in the element (a mind-bogglingly non-standard field), BUT then it leaves a fat hole in the page where the scroll bar used to be, so you have to set "margin:0" in the style sheet as well.
That bug took weeks to research and fix.
It doesn't affect DHTML menus directly, but it is an example of why it is such a gigantic pain to do DHTML anything, and why web sites cannot get past HTML 2 after four generations of browsers.
Hopefully Mozilla will fix this.
As long as you siwch with the W3C DOM, most script written cleanly will work.
Until you try to use the event model. Then the proprietary stuff returns, through IE6.
IE6 doesn't support empty div blocks either.
IE6 STILL hasn't fixed the vertical scrollbar bug (from YEARS ago).
These bugs don't really require a lot of extra code, but the research to figure out how to get past them can take days. Is it worth $30? Probably so.
So whats stopping us from playing the games then?
Nothing.
Of course, we won't be allowed to write them, since the licensing fees will be carefully balanced to close the market tighter than a bass drum in a thunderstorm.
But that's ok. Right?
Yes, of course, the long awaited sequel to "Happily Ever After." No doubt some writer somewhere had this burning need to get that on paper ASAP.
Don't forget the Peter Pan sequel too. One writer, guys. Just one. You make million$ a day, and all you need is ONE WRITER to come up with something original. ONE.
Makes me gagging, dry-heaving sick.
creative talents of ... Disney
So this time they didn't use someone else's story, or make a sequel? Oh, wait, they reused characters originally drawn decades ago.. never mind.
While we're at it, anyone see the McDisney ads at Walt Donald's World? "Disney, 100 Years of Magic"
Now unless they count baby Walter's used diapers as "Disney Magic" I don't see how they can reach back to 1902. But I suppose anything's possible when the Marketing Dept. is involved.
Then again, I suppose the 79 years since 1923 isn't quite good enough for the boredroom "executives" who's only creative contribution is the fragrance in the conference room after the catered lunch of Mexican food.
I still think someone ought to make the following movie:
"REVENGE OF DISNEY"
Starring Jackie Chan as Walt E. Disney
A story about a victim of mistaken identity arriving at the very gates of the "Magic Kingdom." Looking around, he sees his own name and only the outline of his beloved character's disembodied head plastered over every flat surface in a display of wanton greed so profound that the enraged cartoonist vows to carry out a one-man campaign to wrest control of the entertainment behemoth from its corporate masters.
Following scenes of frantic, moving, dubbed speeches, gripping courtroom drama, and an action-packed chase through the back hallways of a cineplex on opening night, the film culminates in a spectacular 45-minute "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"-esque kung-fu fight scene in the Disney Corporation's board room as the screaming, elderly, bandanna-wearing animator defeats the entire company's senior management single-handed.
The film ends with Disney, having liquidated the company, and placing its entire portfolio in the public domain, opening an art school with a record $800 million endowment, then retiring to a life of drawing one of a kind cartoons for children in the park.
Truly an instant classic.
Wrong.
The numbers are authentic. You are mistakenly assuming that all cable stations have the same ratings, which they don't.
sell his CDs online. Then you could link there.
Right, so everyone can shriek "SPAM! SPAM!! SPAAAAAM!!!"
No thanks.