Anime fandom has the well-known process of fansubbing -- making home-made subtitled versions of Japanese videos. This involves changing what is put up on the screen (by overlaying subtitles) and then distributing the output to the end consumer.
If CleanFlix can't sell paid-for copies of movies that have been altered, regardless of poor taste, then where does that put fansubbers?
I agree that CleanFlix have used their legal powers for evil, but these powers are ones to which they should be entitled, regardless of intent.
I'll add the disclaimer that I *hate* dubs, generally. I usually can't stomach the arguments of people who say, "reading subtitles disturbs the continuity and distracts the eyes from the rest of the screen." This movie, however, is an exception.
I've watched this movie three times subtitled, and once dubbed now. Even after three viewings of the subtitled version, there were a lot of subtle, but really cool things that I missed, that I noticed at Tuesday's showing at the Guild 45th. And it wasn't like they were "deep" things, either -- everyone in the entire theater noticed them. The fact that our eyes were on the screen, rather than the subtitles, allowed us to see them.
With movies that have a lot of things happening on-screen, reading subtitles makes you miss things. Your argument that you read the subtitles subconsciously only means that you're looking at the bottom of the screen (away from the picture) subconsciously. You become zoned out from the visual content, and you miss the throwaway visuals.
That said, there were many things about this dub that I did not like. Such as the voice for Haku. How many inflection patterns does that guy know how to make? I counted two. Even when he was supposed to be supportive and consoling, he still used the "grim" voice. The only deviation from the "grim" voice was when he asked a question, which was really only three lines in the entire frickin' movie. I swear they pulled this guy from a TV commercial. And if he happens to be some famous actor that I just don't know about, then he couldn't possibly be famous for any sort of real talent.
Chihiro was similar, but for some reason she grated on me much less. I guess her acting, while mostly invariant, sounded more like what I'd expect her character to sound like.
And just so that you don't think I'm an impossible-to-please dub hater (close, but not quite), the voice for Lin was *awesome*. The emotions, the "I'm a bitch, just kidding" vocal transitions, the matching of attitude to facial expressions... this girl has some serious range.
Final verdict: A hellaciously fun movie, an adequate (though not spectacular) dub, in a format that allows the eyes to wander over the screen and catch all the little things.
To whomever modded my post as redundant, please read the timestamps before doing so in the future. I started writing that before the flurry of other "snip the wires" posts; it just so happened that somebody else hit he "Submit" button first. The "redundant" tag is meant to discourage people from posting without reading, not to punish people for their bad timing.
This would be a good idea for small, private universities, where there are few enough students that the IT department could feasibly inspect every computer, or in a 100% subsidized school like Cooper Union, where the school could just assign the network cards, recording the MAC address as they go off the line.
But at any reasonably large, underfunded school, such as the University of Washington, this couldn't possibly work. It's important that anyone be able to get onto the network as fast as possible, which means using off-the-shelf parts. C&C needs to make course web pages as easy to access as possible.
But you're right, that if you continue to misbehave, and continue to get caught, it's more trouble than it's worth.
They went to all this trouble to remove the analog loophole, going so far as to permanently attach the headphones...
But what's to prevent somebody from just cutting off the headphones and splicing another cable onto the end? It's trivial work for anyone with even the slightest bit of electrical ability.
I don't understand how it is possible to ban a person from the campus network. On IRC, it's fairly simple to ban a user's IP, or even their entire domain. But on a local network, in order to enforce a ban, you have to differentiate between every user on the network (you can't shut off an entire floor of the residence hall just because of one offending user).
The easiest way to shut off a user's access is to shut off his port. This happened to me when my computer was infected with Nimda last year (and I have a higher opinion of C&C for having the sense to do it). This will keep a total idiot off the network, but all it takes is an ethernet switch, 20 feet of CAT-5, and a friend down the hall, and you're back on.
Another way would be to ban you're computer's MAC address. This would probably work great for most users (they'd be like, "WTF, what's wrong with my computer? I can't connect from anywhere!")The problem is, this would ban the computer, but not the user. For under $20, you could get another network card and be back on in no time.
So how would you propose banning a user from a network where the user never has to identify him/herself?
The ACM may not be all that pervasive in every computer science department, but considering that the ACM puts on many of the industry's biggest conventions, I'd venture to say that it binds (or rather ought to bind) a good number of the programmers out there.
I would argue that Trusted Computing violates section 1.1, "Contribute to society and human well-being."
Of course, I'd say a bunch of us violate section 1.5, "Honor property rights including copyrights and patent," so it kind of makes the point moot...
Actually, mod chip detection really just forced people to get better mod chips that required you to solder seven wires instead of just four. Big deal. This came at a time when CD burners were expensive, and it was a lot cheaper to take your console to an import shop and have the mod redone for $40.
A year later you couldn't find a mod seller who didn't carry "stealth" mods.
Now, there once was going to be a Mod-Chip for the PS-2 that was going to eliminate the need for ANY knife trick, ANY boot disk, ANY game shark, etc etc, at the price of having 58 solder points. It was called the Messiah. There are several out there floating around as the Messiah chip, but to my knowledge, none of them actually are the origional planned chip.
Messiah lives, and it works exactly according to specification as of the last prototype that was released before the lawsuit (none of the DVD features people begged for, but all of the import/bootleg support). The only problem is that the thing is $80 for the chip alone. Check the consumer groups.
And in a small town, not only do the cops know the people, the people know the cops. It's a lot less disturbing to know that old Officer O'Malley knows how much you tend to get drunk at parties than to have every officer in Delaware know the same.
You probably know the small-town officers by reputation at least, even if you haven't met all of them. In a small town, you have a good idea just how corrupt or straight the police are, and can act accordingly ("you'd best watch out for that officer"). But in this case, you really don't know who has the information, or what they're going to do with it.
The PS2 had a pretty much botched launch, but somehow they managed to come out ahead in the end. The first generation of titles, for the most part, sucked. Why didn't the competition pick up on this and just destroy them with superior games?
Wait, what's that you say? There was no competition?
Right, the PS2 was first to market by about a year, while still coming sufficiently later than the Dreamcast to demolish its technical specs. By the time the other consoles had come out, the PS2's library had begun its onslaught of second-generation games, winning game of the year awards left and right. When the PS2 came out, the PSX was still going strong, with lots of popular games still coming out every month. These figures more than made up for the technical difficulties with the PS2.
Well, they're doing it again. The PS3 is set to come out in late 2004, they say, which is still at the trailing end of this generation's lifetime. They'll likely be first to market by a significant amount of time, during which developers will flounder and make cruddy games for the PS3, and people will still be buying PS2 games. By the time competitors get their slightly more powerful systems out, the developers will hopefully have a good grasp on how to make the PS3 work, and (they hope) Sony will triumph again.
Of course, a zillion things could go wrong with this business plan, and it's more or less unprecedented for a company to stay in the lead for more than two generations, but that's my guess on what they're thinking right now.
In the last generation, Nintendo and Microsoft were pretty close on Sony's heels to announce their new revolutionary systems. So now that Sony's hype machine has come forward, when are the competitors going to cast their hats in?
I believe that at least at the vaporware stage, there were four bidders in the market last time: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and VM Labs. Now the Nuon seems to be completely out of the picture, but when are the others going to come forward with their own mind-blowing specs?
I have a good friend who is a Japanese citizen. He hasn't spent more than six months in Japan since the time he was four. By all rational means, he should be a US citizen, and it probably wouldn't be very hard for him to become one. So I once asked him why he was still a resident alien, and his response was that he liked it.
Citizenship is overrated. You get to cast your vote in with several million others, thinking it will actually make a difference (and it generally doesn't), you get to flash a nifty blue passport instead of a red one, and that's about it. Sure, resident aliens may get hassled more at the border, but if you're a citizen of another well-developed, politically-stable and culturally-influential nation-state like Japan, you don't really get any more trouble than a US citizen would.
With residency, you have the ability to return to your home country freely to visit relatives and whatnot. Also, compared to many countries, US citizenship is very easy to obtain. If you're born in the US, you're automatically a citizen. If you live in the US for ten years or more, you can become a citizen. Do you know how hard it is to become a Japanese citizen? I don't know the specifics, but I'm told it requires a great more proof of dedication than ten years of residency. And since the laws don't allow dual citizenship past the age of 18, getting a US citizenship means losing your native citizenship.
And then there's the fact that resident aliens don't have to register for the draft...
It's a global market, folks - if you want to keep your jobs and their 80K salaries, you've got to be better at something than your international competition, just like a steel manufacturer or anybody else who competes in the global economy.
The problem is that you may have that special something that ought to set you apart from the other workers, but the HR departments won't take notice. They'll think, "okay, this guy says he can do X, but we'd have to pay him more. I'm sure this other guy from Ovbranistan can learn to do it just as well as he could, and we only have to pay him 66% of the normal wage.
HR is so narrow-minded these days that generally the things that make a good programmer aren't even factored into the decision process.
This article is what got me all riled up about not just the H1B situation, but industry hiring practices in general. It's worth a read.
I completely missed this. If you look, the telltale wings of the glider are still on the launcher after the rocket leaves. Does this mean that the glider is okay and can be reused? Maybe this wasn't an $87 million failure.
According to the article, the test wasn't even supposed begin until the rocket dropped it from an altitude of 20 km. The fact that it never got to that point means the test was botched, not the aircraft's design.
Your post seems to legitimize the fact that many schools across America are teaching as preparation for factory work; i.e. it's not about enjoying what you're doing, or making effort to excel, but about showing up and putting in your time. Really, who makes extra effort to excel when they don't enjoy it? Well, besides those abusive ultra-competitive households...
Do we really need more busywork in our schools? I've known students from schools that have fun and interesting programs like this, and from my unscientific experience, the ones who had classes like this generally have a much stronger long-term interest in math and science than those who didn't. It usually takes terrible University professors to beat it out of them...
The branch factor for checkers is too low. Current computers can defeat the strongest players in the world fairly consistently, and in a couple generations, it won't even be a contest.
David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur By JON PARELES
IN a Manhattan rehearsal studio, Gerry Leonard seemed to be noodling on his guitar as the rest of David Bowie's band waited. He played some sustained notes and a bit of minor-key arpeggio; he worked his effects pedals, adding echoes. A digital stutter entered the pattern, and suddenly the music gelled into "Sunday," the song that opens Mr. Bowie's new album, "Heathen," which will be released on Tuesday.
Chords from a phantom chorus wafted from a keyboard, and Mr. Bowie intoned: "It's the beginning of an end, and nothing has changed. Everything has changed."
Mr. Bowie sang somberly about searching for signs of life, about fear and hope. At the end of the song, he shivered like someone coming out of a trance. "Ahhh," he said and grinned. "Good morning!" It was just after 11 a.m. and Mr. Bowie, 55, had already worked out at the gym and given an extended interview before starting the day's rehearsal for his summer tour.
Lean and affable, he was wearing a skintight gray T-shirt and stylishly understated gray pants. His gaze, with different-colored eyes because of a childhood accident that paralyzed his left pupil, has grown less disconcerting; he laughs easily. When asked what he considered the central point of his work, he said, "I write about misery" and chuckled.
Visions of cataclysm and professional aplomb: that's Mr. Bowie's life in his fourth decade as a rock star. One of rock's most astute conceptualists since the 1960's, he has toyed with the possibilities of his star persona, turned concerts into theater and fashion spectacles, and periodically recharged his songs with punk, electronics and dance rhythms. Now he has emerged as one of rock's smartest entrepreneurs.
"Heathen" is the first album from Mr. Bowie's own recording company, Iso, which has major-label distribution through Sony. In 1997, he sold $55 million of Bowie Bonds backed by his song royalties; the next year, he founded the technology company Ultrastar and his own Internet service provider-cum-fan club, Bowienet (davidbowie.com). In a nod to his art-school background, his bowieart.com sells promising students' work without the high commissions of terrestrial galleries.
His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
With his wife, Iman, he has a 22-month-old daughter, Alexandria, for whom he's keeping to a minimum his time away from home in Manhattan. When Mr. Bowie signed on as a headliner for Moby's Area:Two tour this summer, he made sure the schedule allowed him to return home between each of the six East Coast dates. He is also organizing, and performing at, Meltdown, a contemporary music, film and visual arts festival in London. (One songwriter he booked is Norman Carl Odam, known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom he took Ziggy Stardust's last name in the 1970's; on "Heathen," he sings the Cowboy's "Gemini Spacecraft," about an astronaut obsessed with a girl he left behind.)
Mr. Bowie no longer expects to compete with performers in their 20's. "I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable," he said. "You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth."
HIS fans among musicians, including Moby and Nine Inch Nails, have toured with Mr. Bowie, introducing him to a younger generation.
Back in 1990, Mr. Bowie tried to jettison his past. He billed an arena tour as the last time he would play his old hits. "I really did think I meant that," he said. "I got quite a way into the 90's before I started thinking, `Well, if you want an audience, David, you may want to consider putting some songs into your sets that they've actually heard.' Yes, I know, I went back on my word completely and absolutely."
He's now more comfortable riffling through his huge body of work. This week, the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, opened "Sound + Vision," a retrospective of Mr. Bowie on video that continues through Sept. 15. A restored version of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the 1972 tour that defined glam-rock, will be released on July 10.
"Heathen" was produced by Tony Visconti, who last collaborated with Mr. Bowie on his 1980 album, "Scary Monsters." He worked on most of Mr. Bowie's 1970's albums, including the celebrated Berlin trilogy of "Low," " `
On "Heathen," Mr. Bowie knowingly hints at his past. He echoes the song " `Heroes' " in "Slow Burn," which wonders, "Who are we in times such as these?" He revives analog keyboard sounds like that of the Stylophone, a miniature electric organ played with a stylus that was heard on "Space Oddity" in 1969 and reappears in the new "Slip Away." When Mr. Bowie starts his tour with a show for fan-club members at Roseland on Tuesday, he plans to play all 12 songs on "Heathen," followed by all of "Low." Hearing the music 25 years later "makes the hairs on my arm stand up," he said.
To make "Low," Mr. Bowie recalled: "I had brought the idea of having fundamentally an R & B rhythm section working against this new zeitgeist of electronic ambience that was happening in Germany. It was terribly exciting to know that one had stumbled across something which was truly innovative.
"At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing myself so badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I'm so desperately unhappy, but I've got to pull through because I can't keep living like this. There's actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, shining through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right."
Drug problems are long behind him, Mr. Bowie said. He now hesitates to take even an Advil because. "I have such an addictive personality," he said.
Making "Heathen," he and Mr. Visconti were leery of nostalgia. "One thing we haven't tried to be is cutting edge," Mr. Bowie said. "The other thing we've tried not to do is to delve too far into the past and rely on our known strengths, our known previous work. We do know, between us, how to landscape a song and give it a real place, an identity and a character. I guess that's the vestiges of the more theatrical things."
The album starts with "Sunday" and ends with its title song, both hushed and haunted by mortality. In "Heathen," Mr. Bowie sings, "Still on the skyline, sky made of glass/ Made for a real world, all things must pass." The album was written before Sept. 11, however, and the songs join a long line of Mr. Bowie's apocalyptic scenarios.
"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen. It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that."
Between his own ruminations, he borrows "Gemini Spacecraft," the Pixies' "Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You"; in songs like "Afraid" and "I Would Be Your Slave," he sings about love, insecurity and transience.
"I tried to make a checklist of what exactly the album is about and abandonment was in there, isolation," he said. "And I thought, well, nothing's changed much. At 55, I don't really think it's going to change very much. As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
"When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, well, how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and over again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually came up with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."
I don't think the poster quite understands just how old that script is. When that script came out, I was a junior in high school. Right now, I'm a senior in college. No, I did not skip any grades.
While there are some things I don't agree with in that first attempt, there are also some things I think he did right. For instance, the insistance that there be no sound accompanying the explosions (it being in space and all). And while the various story choices may be suspect, I found the actual narrative and dialog to be quite good.
Have you even used Tivo? There's no comparing the two. I evaluated ShowShifter about six months ago, just because I was unsatisfied with the software that came with my ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon, and I found ShowShifter to be even worse. First of all, it doesn't record to a standard format, which means if you ever want to watch any of your shows, you have to do it through ShowShifter again. In addition, if you want to get better compression ratios by switching to a different codec, you're out of luck. There's only one format supported, and that's ShowShifter Format (.ssf, IIRC).
In addition, the evaluation period is way too short. One week wasn't enough time for me to watch a single thing I'd recorded, and since the file format was proprietary, I couldn't even watch it without paying $30.
It doesn't do any cataloguing or indexing, and makes no attempts to predict what will be on in the next day or two. That's the primary reason I like Tivo, and would be willing to pay for the service. Tivo isn't just some digital VCR where you set a timer and let it record. Tivo actually lets you tell it your favorite shows, and it does the scheduling for you. Like the Simpsons? Never miss an episode again, just tell it "season pass: Simpsons" and it does the rest.
ShowShifter, on the other hand, must be programmed manually, like your old VCR that you're starting to use less and less. Wait, that's not true. At least VCR's have VCR Plus. If you want a digital recording program, try the one that came with your TV tuner card. It's probably easier to use, has more options, and has less mickeymouse than ShowShifter.
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Anime fandom has the well-known process of fansubbing -- making home-made subtitled versions of Japanese videos. This involves changing what is put up on the screen (by overlaying subtitles) and then distributing the output to the end consumer.
If CleanFlix can't sell paid-for copies of movies that have been altered, regardless of poor taste, then where does that put fansubbers?
I agree that CleanFlix have used their legal powers for evil, but these powers are ones to which they should be entitled, regardless of intent.
I'll add the disclaimer that I *hate* dubs, generally. I usually can't stomach the arguments of people who say, "reading subtitles disturbs the continuity and distracts the eyes from the rest of the screen." This movie, however, is an exception.
I've watched this movie three times subtitled, and once dubbed now. Even after three viewings of the subtitled version, there were a lot of subtle, but really cool things that I missed, that I noticed at Tuesday's showing at the Guild 45th. And it wasn't like they were "deep" things, either -- everyone in the entire theater noticed them. The fact that our eyes were on the screen, rather than the subtitles, allowed us to see them.
With movies that have a lot of things happening on-screen, reading subtitles makes you miss things. Your argument that you read the subtitles subconsciously only means that you're looking at the bottom of the screen (away from the picture) subconsciously. You become zoned out from the visual content, and you miss the throwaway visuals.
That said, there were many things about this dub that I did not like. Such as the voice for Haku. How many inflection patterns does that guy know how to make? I counted two. Even when he was supposed to be supportive and consoling, he still used the "grim" voice. The only deviation from the "grim" voice was when he asked a question, which was really only three lines in the entire frickin' movie. I swear they pulled this guy from a TV commercial. And if he happens to be some famous actor that I just don't know about, then he couldn't possibly be famous for any sort of real talent.
Chihiro was similar, but for some reason she grated on me much less. I guess her acting, while mostly invariant, sounded more like what I'd expect her character to sound like.
And just so that you don't think I'm an impossible-to-please dub hater (close, but not quite), the voice for Lin was *awesome*. The emotions, the "I'm a bitch, just kidding" vocal transitions, the matching of attitude to facial expressions... this girl has some serious range.
Final verdict: A hellaciously fun movie, an adequate (though not spectacular) dub, in a format that allows the eyes to wander over the screen and catch all the little things.
To whomever modded my post as redundant, please read the timestamps before doing so in the future. I started writing that before the flurry of other "snip the wires" posts; it just so happened that somebody else hit he "Submit" button first. The "redundant" tag is meant to discourage people from posting without reading, not to punish people for their bad timing.
This would be a good idea for small, private universities, where there are few enough students that the IT department could feasibly inspect every computer, or in a 100% subsidized school like Cooper Union, where the school could just assign the network cards, recording the MAC address as they go off the line.
But at any reasonably large, underfunded school, such as the University of Washington, this couldn't possibly work. It's important that anyone be able to get onto the network as fast as possible, which means using off-the-shelf parts. C&C needs to make course web pages as easy to access as possible.
But you're right, that if you continue to misbehave, and continue to get caught, it's more trouble than it's worth.
They went to all this trouble to remove the analog loophole, going so far as to permanently attach the headphones...
But what's to prevent somebody from just cutting off the headphones and splicing another cable onto the end? It's trivial work for anyone with even the slightest bit of electrical ability.
I don't understand how it is possible to ban a person from the campus network. On IRC, it's fairly simple to ban a user's IP, or even their entire domain. But on a local network, in order to enforce a ban, you have to differentiate between every user on the network (you can't shut off an entire floor of the residence hall just because of one offending user).
The easiest way to shut off a user's access is to shut off his port. This happened to me when my computer was infected with Nimda last year (and I have a higher opinion of C&C for having the sense to do it). This will keep a total idiot off the network, but all it takes is an ethernet switch, 20 feet of CAT-5, and a friend down the hall, and you're back on.
Another way would be to ban you're computer's MAC address. This would probably work great for most users (they'd be like, "WTF, what's wrong with my computer? I can't connect from anywhere!")The problem is, this would ban the computer, but not the user. For under $20, you could get another network card and be back on in no time.
So how would you propose banning a user from a network where the user never has to identify him/herself?
The ACM may not be all that pervasive in every computer science department, but considering that the ACM puts on many of the industry's biggest conventions, I'd venture to say that it binds (or rather ought to bind) a good number of the programmers out there.
I would argue that Trusted Computing violates section 1.1, "Contribute to society and human well-being."
Of course, I'd say a bunch of us violate section 1.5, "Honor property rights including copyrights and patent," so it kind of makes the point moot...
Actually, mod chip detection really just forced people to get better mod chips that required you to solder seven wires instead of just four. Big deal. This came at a time when CD burners were expensive, and it was a lot cheaper to take your console to an import shop and have the mod redone for $40.
A year later you couldn't find a mod seller who didn't carry "stealth" mods.
Messiah lives, and it works exactly according to specification as of the last prototype that was released before the lawsuit (none of the DVD features people begged for, but all of the import/bootleg support). The only problem is that the thing is $80 for the chip alone. Check the consumer groups.
If I had a mod point right now, I'd use it here. This person knows his/her stuff.
And in a small town, not only do the cops know the people, the people know the cops. It's a lot less disturbing to know that old Officer O'Malley knows how much you tend to get drunk at parties than to have every officer in Delaware know the same.
You probably know the small-town officers by reputation at least, even if you haven't met all of them. In a small town, you have a good idea just how corrupt or straight the police are, and can act accordingly ("you'd best watch out for that officer"). But in this case, you really don't know who has the information, or what they're going to do with it.
The PS2 had a pretty much botched launch, but somehow they managed to come out ahead in the end. The first generation of titles, for the most part, sucked. Why didn't the competition pick up on this and just destroy them with superior games?
Wait, what's that you say? There was no competition?
Right, the PS2 was first to market by about a year, while still coming sufficiently later than the Dreamcast to demolish its technical specs. By the time the other consoles had come out, the PS2's library had begun its onslaught of second-generation games, winning game of the year awards left and right. When the PS2 came out, the PSX was still going strong, with lots of popular games still coming out every month. These figures more than made up for the technical difficulties with the PS2.
Well, they're doing it again. The PS3 is set to come out in late 2004, they say, which is still at the trailing end of this generation's lifetime. They'll likely be first to market by a significant amount of time, during which developers will flounder and make cruddy games for the PS3, and people will still be buying PS2 games. By the time competitors get their slightly more powerful systems out, the developers will hopefully have a good grasp on how to make the PS3 work, and (they hope) Sony will triumph again.
Of course, a zillion things could go wrong with this business plan, and it's more or less unprecedented for a company to stay in the lead for more than two generations, but that's my guess on what they're thinking right now.
In the last generation, Nintendo and Microsoft were pretty close on Sony's heels to announce their new revolutionary systems. So now that Sony's hype machine has come forward, when are the competitors going to cast their hats in?
I believe that at least at the vaporware stage, there were four bidders in the market last time: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and VM Labs. Now the Nuon seems to be completely out of the picture, but when are the others going to come forward with their own mind-blowing specs?
I have a good friend who is a Japanese citizen. He hasn't spent more than six months in Japan since the time he was four. By all rational means, he should be a US citizen, and it probably wouldn't be very hard for him to become one. So I once asked him why he was still a resident alien, and his response was that he liked it.
Citizenship is overrated. You get to cast your vote in with several million others, thinking it will actually make a difference (and it generally doesn't), you get to flash a nifty blue passport instead of a red one, and that's about it. Sure, resident aliens may get hassled more at the border, but if you're a citizen of another well-developed, politically-stable and culturally-influential nation-state like Japan, you don't really get any more trouble than a US citizen would.
With residency, you have the ability to return to your home country freely to visit relatives and whatnot. Also, compared to many countries, US citizenship is very easy to obtain. If you're born in the US, you're automatically a citizen. If you live in the US for ten years or more, you can become a citizen. Do you know how hard it is to become a Japanese citizen? I don't know the specifics, but I'm told it requires a great more proof of dedication than ten years of residency. And since the laws don't allow dual citizenship past the age of 18, getting a US citizenship means losing your native citizenship.
And then there's the fact that resident aliens don't have to register for the draft...
It's a global market, folks - if you want to keep your jobs and their 80K salaries, you've got to be better at something than your international competition, just like a steel manufacturer or anybody else who competes in the global economy.
The problem is that you may have that special something that ought to set you apart from the other workers, but the HR departments won't take notice. They'll think, "okay, this guy says he can do X, but we'd have to pay him more. I'm sure this other guy from Ovbranistan can learn to do it just as well as he could, and we only have to pay him 66% of the normal wage.
HR is so narrow-minded these days that generally the things that make a good programmer aren't even factored into the decision process.
This article is what got me all riled up about not just the H1B situation, but industry hiring practices in general. It's worth a read.
I completely missed this. If you look, the telltale wings of the glider are still on the launcher after the rocket leaves. Does this mean that the glider is okay and can be reused? Maybe this wasn't an $87 million failure.
According to the article, the test wasn't even supposed begin until the rocket dropped it from an altitude of 20 km. The fact that it never got to that point means the test was botched, not the aircraft's design.
Your post seems to legitimize the fact that many schools across America are teaching as preparation for factory work; i.e. it's not about enjoying what you're doing, or making effort to excel, but about showing up and putting in your time. Really, who makes extra effort to excel when they don't enjoy it? Well, besides those abusive ultra-competitive households...
Do we really need more busywork in our schools? I've known students from schools that have fun and interesting programs like this, and from my unscientific experience, the ones who had classes like this generally have a much stronger long-term interest in math and science than those who didn't. It usually takes terrible University professors to beat it out of them...
I was just going to say this! Too bad I was about 10 ksecs too late...
I am altering the deal. Pray that I don't alter it any further...
The branch factor for checkers is too low. Current computers can defeat the strongest players in the world fairly consistently, and in a couple generations, it won't even be a contest.
In other words, Chinook ownz you.
Here's the text
David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur
By JON PARELES
IN a Manhattan rehearsal studio, Gerry Leonard seemed to be noodling on his guitar as the rest of David Bowie's band waited. He played some sustained notes and a bit of minor-key arpeggio; he worked his effects pedals, adding echoes. A digital stutter entered the pattern, and suddenly the music gelled into "Sunday," the song that opens Mr. Bowie's new album, "Heathen," which will be released on Tuesday.
Chords from a phantom chorus wafted from a keyboard, and Mr. Bowie intoned: "It's the beginning of an end, and nothing has changed. Everything has changed."
Mr. Bowie sang somberly about searching for signs of life, about fear and hope. At the end of the song, he shivered like someone coming out of a trance. "Ahhh," he said and grinned. "Good morning!" It was just after 11 a.m. and Mr. Bowie, 55, had already worked out at the gym and given an extended interview before starting the day's rehearsal for his summer tour.
Lean and affable, he was wearing a skintight gray T-shirt and stylishly understated gray pants. His gaze, with different-colored eyes because of a childhood accident that paralyzed his left pupil, has grown less disconcerting; he laughs easily. When asked what he considered the central point of his work, he said, "I write about misery" and chuckled.
Visions of cataclysm and professional aplomb: that's Mr. Bowie's life in his fourth decade as a rock star. One of rock's most astute conceptualists since the 1960's, he has toyed with the possibilities of his star persona, turned concerts into theater and fashion spectacles, and periodically recharged his songs with punk, electronics and dance rhythms. Now he has emerged as one of rock's smartest entrepreneurs.
"Heathen" is the first album from Mr. Bowie's own recording company, Iso, which has major-label distribution through Sony. In 1997, he sold $55 million of Bowie Bonds backed by his song royalties; the next year, he founded the technology company Ultrastar and his own Internet service provider-cum-fan club, Bowienet (davidbowie.com). In a nod to his art-school background, his bowieart.com sells promising students' work without the high commissions of terrestrial galleries.
His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
With his wife, Iman, he has a 22-month-old daughter, Alexandria, for whom he's keeping to a minimum his time away from home in Manhattan. When Mr. Bowie signed on as a headliner for Moby's Area:Two tour this summer, he made sure the schedule allowed him to return home between each of the six East Coast dates. He is also organizing, and performing at, Meltdown, a contemporary music, film and visual arts festival in London. (One songwriter he booked is Norman Carl Odam, known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom he took Ziggy Stardust's last name in the 1970's; on "Heathen," he sings the Cowboy's "Gemini Spacecraft," about an astronaut obsessed with a girl he left behind.)
Mr. Bowie no longer expects to compete with performers in their 20's. "I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable," he said. "You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth."
HIS fans among musicians, including Moby and Nine Inch Nails, have toured with Mr. Bowie, introducing him to a younger generation.
Back in 1990, Mr. Bowie tried to jettison his past. He billed an arena tour as the last time he would play his old hits. "I really did think I meant that," he said. "I got quite a way into the 90's before I started thinking, `Well, if you want an audience, David, you may want to consider putting some songs into your sets that they've actually heard.' Yes, I know, I went back on my word completely and absolutely."
He's now more comfortable riffling through his huge body of work. This week, the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, opened "Sound + Vision," a retrospective of Mr. Bowie on video that continues through Sept. 15. A restored version of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the 1972 tour that defined glam-rock, will be released on July 10.
"Heathen" was produced by Tony Visconti, who last collaborated with Mr. Bowie on his 1980 album, "Scary Monsters." He worked on most of Mr. Bowie's 1970's albums, including the celebrated Berlin trilogy of "Low," " `
On "Heathen," Mr. Bowie knowingly hints at his past. He echoes the song " `Heroes' " in "Slow Burn," which wonders, "Who are we in times such as these?" He revives analog keyboard sounds like that of the Stylophone, a miniature electric organ played with a stylus that was heard on "Space Oddity" in 1969 and reappears in the new "Slip Away." When Mr. Bowie starts his tour with a show for fan-club members at Roseland on Tuesday, he plans to play all 12 songs on "Heathen," followed by all of "Low." Hearing the music 25 years later "makes the hairs on my arm stand up," he said.
To make "Low," Mr. Bowie recalled: "I had brought the idea of having fundamentally an R & B rhythm section working against this new zeitgeist of electronic ambience that was happening in Germany. It was terribly exciting to know that one had stumbled across something which was truly innovative.
"At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing myself so badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I'm so desperately unhappy, but I've got to pull through because I can't keep living like this. There's actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, shining through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right."
Drug problems are long behind him, Mr. Bowie said. He now hesitates to take even an Advil because. "I have such an addictive personality," he said.
Making "Heathen," he and Mr. Visconti were leery of nostalgia. "One thing we haven't tried to be is cutting edge," Mr. Bowie said. "The other thing we've tried not to do is to delve too far into the past and rely on our known strengths, our known previous work. We do know, between us, how to landscape a song and give it a real place, an identity and a character. I guess that's the vestiges of the more theatrical things."
The album starts with "Sunday" and ends with its title song, both hushed and haunted by mortality. In "Heathen," Mr. Bowie sings, "Still on the skyline, sky made of glass/ Made for a real world, all things must pass." The album was written before Sept. 11, however, and the songs join a long line of Mr. Bowie's apocalyptic scenarios.
"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen. It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that."
Between his own ruminations, he borrows "Gemini Spacecraft," the Pixies' "Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You"; in songs like "Afraid" and "I Would Be Your Slave," he sings about love, insecurity and transience.
"I tried to make a checklist of what exactly the album is about and abandonment was in there, isolation," he said. "And I thought, well, nothing's changed much. At 55, I don't really think it's going to change very much. As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
"When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, well, how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and over again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually came up with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."
I don't think the poster quite understands just how old that script is. When that script came out, I was a junior in high school. Right now, I'm a senior in college. No, I did not skip any grades.
While there are some things I don't agree with in that first attempt, there are also some things I think he did right. For instance, the insistance that there be no sound accompanying the explosions (it being in space and all). And while the various story choices may be suspect, I found the actual narrative and dialog to be quite good.
Have you even used Tivo? There's no comparing the two. I evaluated ShowShifter about six months ago, just because I was unsatisfied with the software that came with my ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon, and I found ShowShifter to be even worse. First of all, it doesn't record to a standard format, which means if you ever want to watch any of your shows, you have to do it through ShowShifter again. In addition, if you want to get better compression ratios by switching to a different codec, you're out of luck. There's only one format supported, and that's ShowShifter Format (.ssf, IIRC).
In addition, the evaluation period is way too short. One week wasn't enough time for me to watch a single thing I'd recorded, and since the file format was proprietary, I couldn't even watch it without paying $30.
It doesn't do any cataloguing or indexing, and makes no attempts to predict what will be on in the next day or two. That's the primary reason I like Tivo, and would be willing to pay for the service. Tivo isn't just some digital VCR where you set a timer and let it record. Tivo actually lets you tell it your favorite shows, and it does the scheduling for you. Like the Simpsons? Never miss an episode again, just tell it "season pass: Simpsons" and it does the rest.
ShowShifter, on the other hand, must be programmed manually, like your old VCR that you're starting to use less and less. Wait, that's not true. At least VCR's have VCR Plus. If you want a digital recording program, try the one that came with your TV tuner card. It's probably easier to use, has more options, and has less mickeymouse than ShowShifter.
At the same time, maybe procrastinators will come across this article and think, "hey, maybe I should be coding."
Worked for me...