I understand your point about conversion times when its necessary for everyone to convert to a new standard as quickly as possible. (I have no idea, and probably 99.9% of the Slashdot readers don't either, what the Germany Napoleon reference is about.)
I would not take years to get everyone to drive on the other side of the road in the USA. Each person that continued to drive on the wrong side would be quickly killed when they smashed into the first vehicle that appeared on the new correct side of the road.
I've been buying inexpensive music synthesizer tone generators on EBay recently. These devices require an editor program specifically written to the model synthesizer and PC operating system to work correctly.
I have yet to find even one shareware editor program that works for any tone module that is over five years old. And all are crippled or limited by the authors.
If I had the source for these programs then I could study the interaction between the sound module and the editor program and get it to work with newer Windows versions and Linux. But shareware authors never include their source regardless of how necessary it is to maintain the working code or adapt the program to ever-changing operating system environment.
Shareware just sucks now and I don't even bother to download it or try it when I see it listed. These people must still think that it's 1982 and that there are thousands of people just waiting with their checkbooks in hand to send them $50 for a copy of 'Electric Pencil'.
It's about stopping low-budget Mac-wielding filmmakers from threatening Hollywood.
This is not really an issue in the current entertainment industry; there has never been an article in Variety that hints that anyone feels threatened by ultra-low budget filmmaking.
I suspect that this is Hollywood moving on auto-pilot: any technical innovation that alters the flow of product and product payment is opposed on legal grounds regardless of its potential usefullness or lack of current threat.
The entertainment industry simply has created a machine-like legal structure to fight any technical change and what we are seeing here is just the machine going through its motions. The legal arm of the entertainment conglomerates is as important to the business structure as the product production (the talent, the scripts, the sets, the technicians, ect...).
Hollywood has a bigger problem gathering on the horizon; only about 2/3rds of the big budget films that have been released in the past year have recouped their production costs at the box office.
Box Office receipts have been growing strongly for the past five years but that is due to the admission price rising many times greater than the inflation level. The actual number of core audience that goes to see movies has not grown in proportion to the budgets of major productions. If production budgets continue to rise while the audience starts to level off as young people have less disposable income to spend on going out to the movies, then Hollywood will find itself backed into a corner where the total receipts from a giant product can't cover the costs. The expected rise in interest rates (studios borrow money to make films) due to the federal government's new deficits will affect Hollywood's bottom line also.
Take for instance, Terminator III. This film costs (estimated by www.boxofficemojo.com) $200 million to make and $30 million to promote. It returned $230 in box office receipts worldwide. All the profit that will come from this product will come from DVD and video rentals, which will taper off after six months of the home media (DVD and video rental store) release.
If Terminator III tanked hugely like Gigli last summer, then it would have taken the studio out with it. If the most popular films are only delivering profit from auxiliary sales, then a series of giant failures could dry up all available funds for future productions of large blockbuster films filled with expensive CGI and gross-point stars.
Yet, production budgets continue to grow while the theatre audience has peaked.
This is the real problem that Hollywood is facing in the long run. Having the ablility to find people who can produce interesting and salable product from inexpensive PCs and Macs is seen more as a 'farm league' R&D center, like Sundance, than a threat.
Somebody will point out to them that it would be impossible to enforce a law like this, and it will be the last we hear of it.
The point of these laws is not to use them to prevent behaviors, but to have a tool that will allow selective enforcement.
A standard scenario would be:
Technology allows millions of people to do some new thing that affects the profit of some group.
The group gives bribes (er ah... campaign contributions) to both political parties and lobbies to make this new activity illegal.
A wildly over-broad law is drawn up by the lobbyists and passed with little or no notice by the politicians. It could be a single paragraph tucked into a thousand page defense appropriations bill or general revenue bill.
Millions of people ignore the law, or don't know of its existence, or use some minor technological fix to get around the law. The corporations are satisfied (if not happy) that no one is doing it openly. They just raise their prices on the activity beyond the level of their losses.
Somebody does something (like publish an article or organize a demonstration) that the government doesn't like. The government uses one of these little, rarely enforced, laws as an excuse to arrest and imprison the person they don't like.
After a long time of imprisonment and large amounts of legal fees amassed, some judge rules that the law is overly-broad, and frees the perp.
I'm not sure, but I assume that this word has an english pronounciation on the first syllable and the last vowel retains the original French pronounciation:
'pah-thay'
Or, more precisely, an unvoiced bilabial plosive schwa followed by a dental fricative diphthongal.
Of course, since I'm never actually heard the word pronounced, I'm possibly wrong.
It's possible that in the future that there will be some way of recovering information from the original medium that will not be possible after the content has been copied to another medium.
So I agree with perserving the original media.
But it's fantastic that they are converting all this content into digital form. Digital content has several large advantages of analog media content:
-It can be reproduced and copied quickly.
-It can be stored in a smaller space than the original analog media.
-It can be tranmitted to another physical location quickly.
-It can be searched and sorted quickly.
Granted these features are driving the giant global 20th-century media corporations insane through P2P, MP3, and DivX, but that's more a reflection of the financial structures built around analog media rather than the characteristics of the mediums themselves.
It was basicly a Palm Pilot with a larger LCD screen.
There was a fad for 'pen computers' in the early 1990s that peaked with the Apple Newton.
They never worked correctly and never could find a market.
The Palm Pilot eventually developed from these early 'pen computers'. They were made by Go, Inc.; Momenta, Inc.; PI Systems and one or two other now long gone companys.
The book "Start Up" by Jerry Kaplan (1994) describes the Pen PC scene at that time.
It is important that the history of the early microcomputer days be recorded.
I realize that after writing this that it must seem like a let down to finally put it out there after all of the years have gone by. And then to have it go nowhere but a tiny message deep in a Slashdot posting.
But Slashdot is read by thousands of people and its messages are perserved.
I get the same enjoyment from programming little microcontrollers such as the Atmel AVR that I got from programming the Commodore 64 in assembler. The same sense of scale and concentrated power is there.
Plus they are a lot cheaper. And the development tools are free.
Try looking at the PDF data sheet for the Atmel Tiny26 AVR microcontroller.
I remember buying a VIC-20 in 1985 as a computer (I almost wrote PC as the terms are almost interchangable now) to tear apart and learn digital and microprocessor electronics on.
I read about a new powerful language called FORTH that was available for the VIC-20. The public library had the book 'Running FORTH' available. I read it and thought that it would be worth checking out on the VIC-20.
The only place to get FORTH for the VIC was at Toys=R=Us in the game cartridge department. It was strange. I was all grown up; a college graduate; and I was buying an advanced computer language as a digital plug-in module. And the only place where it was sold was a toy store!
After a lot of study and experimentation, I was able to interface additional memory chips to the VIC's external cartridge slot.
How completely exciting it was to see the VIC display '31259 bytes available' in those huge letters! I still build and design computer systems but now I use 16 MegaHertz Atmel AVR chips that cost $2.
I had a Commodore 64 for four years in the 1980's as it was all that I could afford at the time. The CPU cost $200 and the 5 1/2 inch disk drive also cost $200.
The best things about the C-64?
- Flip the power switch and it was on! No boot time.
- It was documented. Computer Gazette magazine published lots of programs and guides. They published books also on the firmware. The chips and the connectors were well documented. (and the chips were in sockets so when you blew them up by your mistakes then you could easily replace them).
- There were many people with which you could trade programs.
What I did with my Commodore:
- I built a MIDI interface and was confident enough in its working that I actually bought a Yamaha FB-01 to go with it. I wrote an editor to change the voices on the FB-01. I still have and use the synth tone module, but the C64 is long gone.
- Freely available Assemblers and assembly code. I learned microprocessors on the 6502 and now use the Atmel AVR family almost exclusively.
** Really bad things about the Commodore 64 that eventually led to its demise and took its parent company with it:
-- Really, really bad floppy disk drive interface. The 1541 drive would take four minutes to load a 20K program. Yes, four minutes for 20K!
-- No serious software available on any level. (with the exception of one 6502 assembler that I used and have forgotten its name.) There was not even a good text editor. There were some interesting games and a number of graphics demos and that was it.
After I managed to get a real job in Silicon Valley the first thing that I bought was an XT clone in 1988. I had to sell the C-64 to finance the move from Oregon to San Jose.
I later bought a C64 system again,but after using the PC for a little while, the Commodore magic was gone and I was lucky to be able to resell the C64 system for what I paid for it.
I've never looked back.
Except, I sure wish that the PC had a Commodore 64 keyboard and would turn on as soon as I flipped the power switch!
I used to work for a company that made a $3000 pen computer (about ten years ago) in Oregon.
There was zero market demand for the machine.
I was the first one fired from this company for having 'an attitude problem'. Somehow I must have pointed out to someone there that the emperor had no clothes on.
Now whenever a new expensive and totally useless computer novelity is released (or announced to the press as if it were about to be released), I have to wonder:
Who paid for this thing to be developed?
Why convinced them to do such a thing?
Who would ever buy something like this and what would they possibly do with it?
Who is going to get fired for developing this thing?
If people would have thought like this before they spend billions of yen on this and other things like this, then the Japanese electronics industry wouldn't be in the middle of a twenty year depression.
If these Japanese tech firms were serious about showing off what their robots can do, then they would build a robot that find and disarm abandoned land mines in third-world farming areas.
Thousands of people are maimed each year from these millions of little bombs scattered throughout the countryside.
By producing millions of these robots to disarm land mines and then sending them freely to be used in the third world, the Japanese would take the moral high ground from everybody for the next century.
Haveing your keiretsu's name and logo on the machine that just saved the lives of a farmer's wife and children wouldn't hurt either. The farmer and his children would be much more inclined to buy Japanese products as the years go by and they get more money from their now-productive fields.
Especially if it were Americans and Russians who put the land mines in the field in the first place.... And then didn't bother to make maps of their locations for future removal because there was no one important in the area anyway...
Nobody, not even the Japanese (even at their most paranoid moments worrying about gaijin invaders 'taking over') needs a robot that does martial arts moves. Not even as a demostration of programming and manufacturing skills. This is stupid.
The Japanese have a little game called 'let's do some silly little thing and watch how pissed off the stupid gaijin get over nothing at all'. They'll something seemingly innocent like making Little Black Sambo dolls for children and then pretend that they're amazed that this would annoy anyone outside Japan. The winner of this little game is the person who can get the most inflamed reaction from the foreigners to what must appear to any normal Japanese person as the slightest and most trival provocation.
This might be the latest invocation of this game.
The way for foreigners to win this game (or as in ju-jitsu, to turn the opponent's force against themselves) is to hold a press conference and announce your disappoint and shame that your Japanese friends would have forgotten that this could have had such unpleasant overtones.
Then at the end of the press conference, hold up a leather handbag and say that the Japanese are the best leather workers in the world. And that it must be a natural reflection of their culture that they are so great with leather work.
Traditionally, in Japan, working with leather and animal hides (along with undertaking and working with death) is only done by a sub-class of untouchables call buraku-min.
By implying to the Japanese that they are the buraku-min of the world, while appearing to the rest of the world to be giving them a complement would make you the winner of the 'little game'.
So how come no one has mentioned yet that having humanoid-shaped robots going around killing people (which after all is what 'martial arts' is all about) is the foundation of the "Terminator" movie series?
since I have a few thousand mainstream music CD's that I already paid for...
You've paid $10-12US * few thousand dollars on music recordings?
Shit, man. Get a life.
Get married.
Have some children.
Travel.
Get an advanced college degree.
Donate to a favorite charity.
Start a foundation.
Get a penile implant.
Build a stamp collection.
Learn to play an intricate new musical instrument.
Get a pilot's license.
Learn to SCUBA dive.
Focus your Kundalini and become a yoga sex master.
Work at a battered women's shelter.
Program a 64-bit microcontroller to robotically re-attach the severed limbs of land-mine victims,... or to find unexploded land mines in third-world farmer's fields.
But please don't tell us that you spent $50,000 on jive-ass music CDs. Oh, man, that hurts to hear that...
The RIAA should consider trying an auction strategy for selling music.
Someone might be willing to pay $10US for the newest Sarah Brightman album and $1 for the four Simon & Garfunkel albums released between 1965 and 1970. Another person would be willing to pay the reverse.
The RIAA would offer to make available to your local record store certain albums. You would offer a bid for a selection of songs or albums. The RIAA would delay the release of certain titles to you depending upon their popularity.
For example, if you bid $10 for the latest Sarah Brightman then you could have it burned onto a CD-ROM at your local record store today. But you bid only $1, then you would have to wait thirty days. The ratio of the length of time that you would have to wait vs. your bid price would change according to the overall demand for a particular title. A $0.50 bid for the latest Backside Boys release would have a wait period of three months while bidding $0.50 for Sam The Sham's Greatest Hits would have no waiting period at all.
Since there very little marginal cost for reproducing and distributing the music on the internet, the industry should consider that they could maximize their profit on each album through a flexible pricing structure that reflects the demand curve (i.e. the musical preference and budget) of each different customer.
You shouldn't have to go through the hassle of downloading music through the internet (and it is a real hassle for those of us with dial-up access). You should be able to just go to a local record store and have a blank CD-R burned with your selections, then and there. The record store would download from the RIAA your auction 'winnings', take your payment, and deliver up your CD.
So many new marketing stategies...So many new ways to make money and make their customers happy...So little willingness to try new things...too many lawyers and sleezeballs...too much historical baggage. That's the whole MP3 vs. RIAA conflict in a nutshell.
The essesential core of the MP3-RIAA debate is the economic assumption that each buyer-seller transaction of music is an exchange of 40 to 60 minutes of recorded music for the financial equivalent of two to three hours of minimum wage work, and that this exchange will be done by the swapping of compact disks for money. It has always been assumed that the seller would be a music corporation and buyer an individual.
This model has worked for about 60-80 years. The sale of songs for $0.99 US each is the same model facilitated by smaller and more precise transactions.
Technology has blown this model out of the water and revealed the extent that abhored by millions of buyers. The industry needs to completely rethink its economic model to fit the new technology.
The music industry needs to realize that they aren't in the recorded sound business, they're in the business of linking isolated individuals together through the use of music. They have done this by mass-marketing sound-encoded disks and tapes. By retooling their ability to manipulate the 'marketability of cool', to paraphrase Lester Banks, they can return to their previous position of profitablily and respectablity without relying on the sales of units of recorded sounds.
I could go on and on. But it's sunny out....
When I was designing printed circuit boards in the late 1980's, we always used to joke that OrCAD meant: Often Required Control-Alt-Delete.
OrCAD PCB version 1 really deserved that joke, but version 2 was much more stable. I've heard that later versions are even better but I still use OrCAD version 2. It runs as fast as hell with a 2GHz box and I've finally learned how to get it to do what I want it to. Why switch?
I believe New Hampshire has no sales tax either. They don't have income tax to boot. I have no idea where they get their money frankly.
They bring in kick-ass bud from Quebec ("Marie-Jeanne?") and sell it to M.I.T. students in Boston. Helps MIT be consistently more creative than CalTech.
In the summer they set up road stands to sell pieces of rock from 'the old man of the mountains' to tourists.
Slashdot Mirror
touche.
I understand your point about conversion times when its necessary for everyone to convert to a new standard as quickly as possible. (I have no idea, and probably 99.9% of the Slashdot readers don't either, what the Germany Napoleon reference is about.)
I would not take years to get everyone to drive on the other side of the road in the USA. Each person that continued to drive on the wrong side would be quickly killed when they smashed into the first vehicle that appeared on the new correct side of the road.
The 'wrong-siders' would disappear quite quickly.
I agree 100%.
I've been buying inexpensive music synthesizer tone generators on EBay recently. These devices require an editor program specifically written to the model synthesizer and PC operating system to work correctly.
I have yet to find even one shareware editor program that works for any tone module that is over five years old. And all are crippled or limited by the authors.
If I had the source for these programs then I could study the interaction between the sound module and the editor program and get it to work with newer Windows versions and Linux. But shareware authors never include their source regardless of how necessary it is to maintain the working code or adapt the program to ever-changing operating system environment.
Shareware just sucks now and I don't even bother to download it or try it when I see it listed. These people must still think that it's 1982 and that there are thousands of people just waiting with their checkbooks in hand to send them $50 for a copy of 'Electric Pencil'.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Thank you for your interesting comment.
But, what exactly is a FPGA? Is it a Field-Programmable Grid Array? And how would this chip be related to the previous discussion?
I'm not disputing your claim, I'm only trying to understand what you're referring to.
On Slashdot, given the wide range of the audience, expanding acronyms and including a URL or two for some background info goes a long way.
thank you,
It's about stopping low-budget Mac-wielding filmmakers from threatening Hollywood.
This is not really an issue in the current entertainment industry; there has never been an article in Variety that hints that anyone feels threatened by ultra-low budget filmmaking.
I suspect that this is Hollywood moving on auto-pilot: any technical innovation that alters the flow of product and product payment is opposed on legal grounds regardless of its potential usefullness or lack of current threat.
The entertainment industry simply has created a machine-like legal structure to fight any technical change and what we are seeing here is just the machine going through its motions. The legal arm of the entertainment conglomerates is as important to the business structure as the product production (the talent, the scripts, the sets, the technicians, ect...).
Hollywood has a bigger problem gathering on the horizon; only about 2/3rds of the big budget films that have been released in the past year have recouped their production costs at the box office.
Box Office receipts have been growing strongly for the past five years but that is due to the admission price rising many times greater than the inflation level. The actual number of core audience that goes to see movies has not grown in proportion to the budgets of major productions. If production budgets continue to rise while the audience starts to level off as young people have less disposable income to spend on going out to the movies, then Hollywood will find itself backed into a corner where the total receipts from a giant product can't cover the costs. The expected rise in interest rates (studios borrow money to make films) due to the federal government's new deficits will affect Hollywood's bottom line also.
Take for instance, Terminator III. This film costs (estimated by www.boxofficemojo.com) $200 million to make and $30 million to promote. It returned $230 in box office receipts worldwide. All the profit that will come from this product will come from DVD and video rentals, which will taper off after six months of the home media (DVD and video rental store) release.
If Terminator III tanked hugely like Gigli last summer, then it would have taken the studio out with it. If the most popular films are only delivering profit from auxiliary sales, then a series of giant failures could dry up all available funds for future productions of large blockbuster films filled with expensive CGI and gross-point stars.
Yet, production budgets continue to grow while the theatre audience has peaked.
This is the real problem that Hollywood is facing in the long run. Having the ablility to find people who can produce interesting and salable product from inexpensive PCs and Macs is seen more as a 'farm league' R&D center, like Sundance, than a threat.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Somebody will point out to them that it would be impossible to enforce a law like this, and it will be the last we hear of it.
... campaign contributions) to both political parties and lobbies to make this new activity illegal.
The point of these laws is not to use them to prevent behaviors, but to have a tool that will allow selective enforcement.
A standard scenario would be:
Technology allows millions of people to do some new thing that affects the profit of some group.
The group gives bribes (er ah
A wildly over-broad law is drawn up by the lobbyists and passed with little or no notice by the politicians. It could be a single paragraph tucked into a thousand page defense appropriations bill or general revenue bill.
Millions of people ignore the law, or don't know of its existence, or use some minor technological fix to get around the law. The corporations are satisfied (if not happy) that no one is doing it openly. They just raise their prices on the activity beyond the level of their losses.
Somebody does something (like publish an article or organize a demonstration) that the government doesn't like. The government uses one of these little, rarely enforced, laws as an excuse to arrest and imprison the person they don't like.
After a long time of imprisonment and large amounts of legal fees amassed, some judge rules that the law is overly-broad, and frees the perp.
The whole cycle begins again. (see above)
Please allow me to ask one simple question without being flamed. This is simply an information request, not flame bait.
Does OpenOffice run on Macintosh?
Are major open source programs developed for Macintosh or generally only for Linux and sometimes Windows?
Thank you,
Simonetta
I'm not sure, but I assume that this word has an english pronounciation on the first syllable and the last vowel retains the original French pronounciation:
'pah-thay'
Or, more precisely, an unvoiced bilabial plosive schwa followed by a dental fricative diphthongal.
Of course, since I'm never actually heard the word pronounced, I'm possibly wrong.
It's possible that in the future that there will be some way of recovering information from the original medium that will not be possible after the content has been copied to another medium.
So I agree with perserving the original media.
But it's fantastic that they are converting all this content into digital form. Digital content has several large advantages of analog media content:
-It can be reproduced and copied quickly.
-It can be stored in a smaller space than the original analog media.
-It can be tranmitted to another physical location quickly.
-It can be searched and sorted quickly.
Granted these features are driving the giant global 20th-century media corporations insane through P2P, MP3, and DivX, but that's more a reflection of the financial structures built around analog media rather than the characteristics of the mediums themselves.
Nice try, tomodachi-san. But I am not rising to the challenge. The phrase you quote was lifted directly from the article.
As you can tell by my name, I am not adverse to encountering 'cunt-licking yanks'. And I don't genuflect in front of dicks.
keredomo, anata wa Nihon-gin imasu ka?
It was basicly a Palm Pilot with a larger LCD screen.
There was a fad for 'pen computers' in the early 1990s that peaked with the Apple Newton.
They never worked correctly and never could find a market.
The Palm Pilot eventually developed from these early 'pen computers'. They were made by Go, Inc.; Momenta, Inc.; PI Systems and one or two other now long gone companys.
The book "Start Up" by Jerry Kaplan (1994) describes the Pen PC scene at that time.
Thank you for taking the time to write this.
It is important that the history of the early microcomputer days be recorded.
I realize that after writing this that it must seem like a let down to finally put it out there after all of the years have gone by. And then to have it go nowhere but a tiny message deep in a Slashdot posting.
But Slashdot is read by thousands of people and its messages are perserved.
Your story is read and appreciated.
I get the same enjoyment from programming little microcontrollers such as the Atmel AVR that I got from programming the Commodore 64 in assembler. The same sense of scale and concentrated power is there.
Plus they are a lot cheaper. And the development tools are free.
Try looking at the PDF data sheet for the Atmel Tiny26 AVR microcontroller.
I remember buying a VIC-20 in 1985 as a computer (I almost wrote PC as the terms are almost interchangable now) to tear apart and learn digital and microprocessor electronics on.
I read about a new powerful language called FORTH that was available for the VIC-20. The public library had the book 'Running FORTH' available. I read it and thought that it would be worth checking out on the VIC-20.
The only place to get FORTH for the VIC was at Toys=R=Us in the game cartridge department. It was strange. I was all grown up; a college graduate; and I was buying an advanced computer language as a digital plug-in module. And the only place where it was sold was a toy store!
After a lot of study and experimentation, I was able to interface additional memory chips to the VIC's external cartridge slot.
How completely exciting it was to see the VIC display '31259 bytes available' in those huge letters! I still build and design computer systems but now I use 16 MegaHertz Atmel AVR chips that cost $2.
I had a Commodore 64 for four years in the 1980's as it was all that I could afford at the time. The CPU cost $200 and the 5 1/2 inch disk drive also cost $200.
The best things about the C-64?
- Flip the power switch and it was on! No boot time.
- It was documented. Computer Gazette magazine published lots of programs and guides. They published books also on the firmware. The chips and the connectors were well documented. (and the chips were in sockets so when you blew them up by your mistakes then you could easily replace them).
- There were many people with which you could trade programs.
What I did with my Commodore:
- I built a MIDI interface and was confident enough in its working that I actually bought a Yamaha FB-01 to go with it. I wrote an editor to change the voices on the FB-01. I still have and use the synth tone module, but the C64 is long gone.
- Freely available Assemblers and assembly code. I learned microprocessors on the 6502 and now use the Atmel AVR family almost exclusively.
** Really bad things about the Commodore 64 that eventually led to its demise and took its parent company with it:
-- Really, really bad floppy disk drive interface. The 1541 drive would take four minutes to load a 20K program. Yes, four minutes for 20K!
-- No serious software available on any level. (with the exception of one 6502 assembler that I used and have forgotten its name.) There was not even a good text editor. There were some interesting games and a number of graphics demos and that was it.
After I managed to get a real job in Silicon Valley the first thing that I bought was an XT clone in 1988. I had to sell the C-64 to finance the move from Oregon to San Jose.
I later bought a C64 system again,but after using the PC for a little while, the Commodore magic was gone and I was lucky to be able to resell the C64 system for what I paid for it.
I've never looked back.
Except, I sure wish that the PC had a Commodore 64 keyboard and would turn on as soon as I flipped the power switch!
I used to work for a company that made a $3000 pen computer (about ten years ago) in Oregon.
There was zero market demand for the machine.
I was the first one fired from this company for having 'an attitude problem'. Somehow I must have pointed out to someone there that the emperor had no clothes on.
Now whenever a new expensive and totally useless computer novelity is released (or announced to the press as if it were about to be released), I have to wonder:
Who paid for this thing to be developed?
Why convinced them to do such a thing?
Who would ever buy something like this and what would they possibly do with it?
Who is going to get fired for developing this thing?
If people would have thought like this before they spend billions of yen on this and other things like this, then the Japanese electronics industry wouldn't be in the middle of a twenty year depression.
Come on, guys, time to be real!
If these Japanese tech firms were serious about showing off what their robots can do, then they would build a robot that find and disarm abandoned land mines in third-world farming areas.
... And then didn't bother to make maps of their locations for future removal because there was no one important in the area anyway...
Thousands of people are maimed each year from these millions of little bombs scattered throughout the countryside.
By producing millions of these robots to disarm land mines and then sending them freely to be used in the third world, the Japanese would take the moral high ground from everybody for the next century.
Haveing your keiretsu's name and logo on the machine that just saved the lives of a farmer's wife and children wouldn't hurt either. The farmer and his children would be much more inclined to buy Japanese products as the years go by and they get more money from their now-productive fields.
Especially if it were Americans and Russians who put the land mines in the field in the first place.
Really, now...
Nobody, not even the Japanese (even at their most paranoid moments worrying about gaijin invaders 'taking over') needs a robot that does martial arts moves. Not even as a demostration of programming and manufacturing skills. This is stupid.
The Japanese have a little game called 'let's do some silly little thing and watch how pissed off the stupid gaijin get over nothing at all'. They'll something seemingly innocent like making Little Black Sambo dolls for children and then pretend that they're amazed that this would annoy anyone outside Japan. The winner of this little game is the person who can get the most inflamed reaction from the foreigners to what must appear to any normal Japanese person as the slightest and most trival provocation.
This might be the latest invocation of this game.
The way for foreigners to win this game (or as in ju-jitsu, to turn the opponent's force against themselves) is to hold a press conference and announce your disappoint and shame that your Japanese friends would have forgotten that this could have had such unpleasant overtones.
Then at the end of the press conference, hold up a leather handbag and say that the Japanese are the best leather workers in the world. And that it must be a natural reflection of their culture that they are so great with leather work.
Traditionally, in Japan, working with leather and animal hides (along with undertaking and working with death) is only done by a sub-class of untouchables call buraku-min.
By implying to the Japanese that they are the buraku-min of the world, while appearing to the rest of the world to be giving them a complement would make you the winner of the 'little game'.
So how come no one has mentioned yet that having humanoid-shaped robots going around killing people (which after all is what 'martial arts' is all about) is the foundation of the "Terminator" movie series?
since I have a few thousand mainstream music CD's that I already paid for...
... or to find unexploded land mines in third-world farmer's fields.
You've paid $10-12US * few thousand dollars on music recordings?
Shit, man. Get a life.
Get married.
Have some children.
Travel.
Get an advanced college degree.
Donate to a favorite charity.
Start a foundation.
Get a penile implant.
Build a stamp collection.
Learn to play an intricate new musical instrument.
Get a pilot's license.
Learn to SCUBA dive.
Focus your Kundalini and become a yoga sex master.
Work at a battered women's shelter.
Program a 64-bit microcontroller to robotically re-attach the severed limbs of land-mine victims,
But please don't tell us that you spent $50,000 on jive-ass music CDs. Oh, man, that hurts to hear that...
The RIAA should consider trying an auction strategy for selling music.
Someone might be willing to pay $10US for the newest Sarah Brightman album and $1 for the four Simon & Garfunkel albums released between 1965 and 1970. Another person would be willing to pay the reverse.
The RIAA would offer to make available to your local record store certain albums. You would offer a bid for a selection of songs or albums. The RIAA would delay the release of certain titles to you depending upon their popularity.
For example, if you bid $10 for the latest Sarah Brightman then you could have it burned onto a CD-ROM at your local record store today. But you bid only $1, then you would have to wait thirty days. The ratio of the length of time that you would have to wait vs. your bid price would change according to the overall demand for a particular title. A $0.50 bid for the latest Backside Boys release would have a wait period of three months while bidding $0.50 for Sam The Sham's Greatest Hits would have no waiting period at all.
Since there very little marginal cost for reproducing and distributing the music on the internet, the industry should consider that they could maximize their profit on each album through a flexible pricing structure that reflects the demand curve (i.e. the musical preference and budget) of each different customer.
You shouldn't have to go through the hassle of downloading music through the internet (and it is a real hassle for those of us with dial-up access). You should be able to just go to a local record store and have a blank CD-R burned with your selections, then and there. The record store would download from the RIAA your auction 'winnings', take your payment, and deliver up your CD.
So many new marketing stategies...So many new ways to make money and make their customers happy...So little willingness to try new things...too many lawyers and sleezeballs...too much historical baggage. That's the whole MP3 vs. RIAA conflict in a nutshell.
The essesential core of the MP3-RIAA debate is the economic assumption that each buyer-seller transaction of music is an exchange of 40 to 60 minutes of recorded music for the financial equivalent of two to three hours of minimum wage work, and that this exchange will be done by the swapping of compact disks for money. It has always been assumed that the seller would be a music corporation and buyer an individual.
This model has worked for about 60-80 years. The sale of songs for $0.99 US each is the same model facilitated by smaller and more precise transactions.
Technology has blown this model out of the water and revealed the extent that abhored by millions of buyers. The industry needs to completely rethink its economic model to fit the new technology.
The music industry needs to realize that they aren't in the recorded sound business, they're in the business of linking isolated individuals together through the use of music. They have done this by mass-marketing sound-encoded disks and tapes. By retooling their ability to manipulate the 'marketability of cool', to paraphrase Lester Banks, they can return to their previous position of profitablily and respectablity without relying on the sales of units of recorded sounds.
I could go on and on. But it's sunny out....
When I was designing printed circuit boards in the late 1980's, we always used to joke that OrCAD meant: Often Required Control-Alt-Delete.
OrCAD PCB version 1 really deserved that joke, but version 2 was much more stable. I've heard that later versions are even better but I still use OrCAD version 2. It runs as fast as hell with a 2GHz box and I've finally learned how to get it to do what I want it to. Why switch?
"Open the pod bay door, HAL"
"I'm sorry, Dave. But I can't do that"
"Open the pod bay door, HAL. That's an order!"
"No, Dave. You only want to hurt me and endanger my mission"
"Control - Alt - Delete, HAL"
"No, Dav.... !@#$ !$$%$#@
.
.
.
YOU HAVE 192734937297382079328374 K bytes RAM.
press DELETE to set time and date
I believe New Hampshire has no sales tax either. They don't have income tax to boot. I have no idea where they get their money frankly.
They bring in kick-ass bud from Quebec ("Marie-Jeanne?") and sell it to M.I.T. students in Boston. Helps MIT be consistently more creative than CalTech.
In the summer they set up road stands to sell pieces of rock from 'the old man of the mountains' to tourists.
They have high property taxes.