Many Americans find anime a lot more appealing than a lot of stuff on TV because anime isn't as constrained by the American Standard that effects many of the popular programming.
That's definately part of the appeal. I think another part is that most of the crud (See Sturgeon's Law) never gets exported to the US. We see the same effect with British TV shows. Monty Python, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, etc make it over here, but most of the bad stuff doesn't.
If you look back at mainstream American TV, there's been a fair amount of really good stuff (e.g. Babylon 5, original Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Buffy) and a lot of decent stuff (I won't list examples out of fear of controversy). We just don't notice because we're getting all the crud mixed in with it. Unfortuantly, throught the miracle of American Media Dominance, the rest of the industrialized world gets our crud unfiltered. Those countries where English is not the primary language get our crud badly dubbed on top of everything, but I digress.
Another factor is the way Anime is promoted in the US: almost entirely by word of mouth recomendations. By only watching stuff that our tasteful - if more adventurous - friends have pre-screened, we avoid whatever crud does manage to make its way over here.
Anonymous publication and retrieval are tools for the politically oppressed. Freenet could, in theory, make any information of value unsuppressible. F'rinstance, an outlawed political group publishing a manifesto, someone reporting the actions of a corrupt government, that sort of thing. Suppose that during the demonstrations in Tiennamen Square, there had been only one camera in private hands; getting that video out would be a perfect job for Freenet.
What's wrong with usenet for anonymous publication? Posting is over SMTP, so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want. Once you post, the document is rapidly spread throughout the world's news servers and is permenantly cached by several servers.
The only problem I see with usenet is that your local ISP has a carnivore-like packet scanner, the MIB can catch you in the act of posting. You'd need to encrypt your message and send it to a confederate who decrypts it and posts it to usenet.
BTW, usenet is great for piracy as well. They'll never shut down alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*, alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.warez.*, and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. They're hosted by the ISPs, and the ISPs can use the phone company defence (ie, "We provide a medium for legitimate communication. Not our fault if people abuse it").
OK, then, which of the Four Green Pillars do you disagree with? They are...
I disagree with "Social Justice". It didn't work in Russia, and I doubt it will work here. If you think I'm exagerating, read the link. Look for the parts about a 100% income tax, nationalization or dissolution of all fortune 500 companies, direct government control of broadcast media, and the dissolution of the Senate.
I'm not sure where this 20x quieter thing comes from, but generally. a 10dB increase in sound output is considered "twice as loud." Note that a 3dB increase is twice as much energy (well, 3.0something, but close enough). Similarly, -3dB is the "half power point."
Your physics teacher will tell you that 10 dB is a 10x difference in the intensity of a sound wave.
Your psychology teacher, or your friendly local audiophile, will tell you that a 10x difference in wave intensity is only a 2x difference in perceived loudness.
Most slashdotters, geeks that we are, payed more attention in our physics classes. As a result, I forgot about the perception issue until just now.
I am currently listening to 128 kbps mp3s on a $25 pair of headphones. Whether or not I am an audiophile is left as a exercise to the reader.
That's twice as good in most categories compared to the Imac (right down the number of mouse buttons).
[Insert standard "Mhz Myth" argument here] [Insert standard "One Button Like God Intended" rant here]
Also, you forgot to factor in the labor involved in building and troubleshooting the computer. Most teachers would have to hire somebody to do this. Since this is a one-off build (I know if you're making dozens of the same computer you can do it faster, since you only need to troubleshoot once), assume four hours at $25/hour to build and troubleshoot. Since most teachers add Windows XP Home for $186.99, and Office XP Standard for $416.99, and you're looking at a total of $1,508.96 for your system.
Anyway, you're missing my point. My point is not that low end Macs are a better deal than low end PCs (they probably aren't). My point is that there are low end Macs which are affordable on a teacher's salary.
The BeIA OS, while impressive had serious bugs until the point we abandoned it. Calls and emails to Be went unreturned for months on end, and updates to fix bugs were few and far between.
Now that I think about it, this doesn't surprise me The already-too-small development team was split between BeIA, the Opera port, and BeOS R6. On top of this, many of the best people were leaving because they expected the company to fail, and they weren't being replaced because the money wasn't there.
But Linux was ported to it [the G4] by a people working in their spare time.
People didn't work on BeOS in their spare time. Linux had (and has) far more developer resources than Be ever did. At our peak, Be had ~20 programmers, several of whom were working on apps, not the OS itself.
They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS.
While we did stop making it, we never stopped supporting it. I remember doing installs and testing of 5.0 (the last release) on BeBoxen.
They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it. We kept supporting PPC 601-604 Macs until the end.
They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market
That was a last ditch effort to survive. We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
Compaq repeatedly assured Be of its enthusiasm for the project, and stated that only BeOS could meet the project's technical, cost, and delivery timeline requirements. Compaq assured Be that Windows CE was not suitable for the device.
In October 1998, however, Compaq informed Be that it had disclosed information about the Be Internet appliance project to Microsoft. Later that same month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer as part of a "Digital Appliances Review."
In early November, under pressure from Microsoft, Compaq informed Be that it was no longer interested in licensing BeOS.
I'd have stuck with BeOS if it would have been closer to unix. Something seemed terribly broken to me logging into a machine that has a shell prompt and automatically being root.
We'd always planned to do this. Multiuser logins was partially implemented during BeOS 5.0 development, but it was pushed back to 6.0 when we moved half our programmers to internet appliances. And Be ended up going out of buisness before 6.0 was finished.
Slashdot Mirror
... there are more non-tasty specieses than tasty ones. Just like the every-flavor beans.
Thanks! I just tried that test on my girlfriend, and it seems that she's a robot.
But I thought Xerox never came up with anything original!
Palm has apparently said they will sell the BeOS source code for 2 million dollars.
Got links?
How about just blowing those US submarines out of the water?
Think about what you just said. Eventually, the flaw in that plan will become obvious.
Hint: Think about what happens with any submarines you don't get. Think about what they carry.
[snip]the rising ocean levels that will destroy everything they have.
That's assuming they don't take the profits from the increased trade to build dikes and sea walls
Average ocean depth = 12,566 feet. 1/1,000,00 * 1/100 * 12,566 feet = 0.00150792 inches, or 36 micrometers.
A few feet would be a few tenths of a percent, not millionths.
Many Americans find anime a lot more appealing than a lot of stuff on TV because anime isn't as constrained by the American Standard that effects many of the popular programming.
That's definately part of the appeal. I think another part is that most of the crud (See Sturgeon's Law) never gets exported to the US. We see the same effect with British TV shows. Monty Python, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, etc make it over here, but most of the bad stuff doesn't.
If you look back at mainstream American TV, there's been a fair amount of really good stuff (e.g. Babylon 5, original Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Buffy) and a lot of decent stuff (I won't list examples out of fear of controversy). We just don't notice because we're getting all the crud mixed in with it. Unfortuantly, throught the miracle of American Media Dominance, the rest of the industrialized world gets our crud unfiltered. Those countries where English is not the primary language get our crud badly dubbed on top of everything, but I digress.
Another factor is the way Anime is promoted in the US: almost entirely by word of mouth recomendations. By only watching stuff that our tasteful - if more adventurous - friends have pre-screened, we avoid whatever crud does manage to make its way over here.
Anonymous publication and retrieval are tools for the politically oppressed. Freenet could, in theory, make any information of value unsuppressible. F'rinstance, an outlawed political group publishing a manifesto, someone reporting the actions of a corrupt government, that sort of thing. Suppose that during the demonstrations in Tiennamen Square, there had been only one camera in private hands; getting that video out would be a perfect job for Freenet.
What's wrong with usenet for anonymous publication? Posting is over SMTP, so you can put whatever you want in the from block, and you can post through any public SMTP server you want. Once you post, the document is rapidly spread throughout the world's news servers and is permenantly cached by several servers.
The only problem I see with usenet is that your local ISP has a carnivore-like packet scanner, the MIB can catch you in the act of posting. You'd need to encrypt your message and send it to a confederate who decrypts it and posts it to usenet.
BTW, usenet is great for piracy as well. They'll never shut down alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*, alt.binaries.multimedia, alt.binaries.warez.*, and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. They're hosted by the ISPs, and the ISPs can use the phone company defence (ie, "We provide a medium for legitimate communication. Not our fault if people abuse it").
OK, then, which of the Four Green Pillars do you disagree with? They are...
I disagree with "Social Justice". It didn't work in Russia, and I doubt it will work here. If you think I'm exagerating, read the link. Look for the parts about a 100% income tax, nationalization or dissolution of all fortune 500 companies, direct government control of broadcast media, and the dissolution of the Senate.
I think video games introduce kids to violence.
You haven't been around little kids much, have you? They figure violence out on their own around 18 months, and you have to teach them not to.
More info
Trusted CEOs of Enron and WorldCom?
Trusted polititicans?
In general you can trust people if:
- You through personal experience that they are trustworthy.
- You have thoughouly investigated their background.
- They believe the consequences of screwing you over are bad enough that screwing you over is not to their advantage.
- -- OR --
- The consequences to you of being screwed over are worse than the consequences of not trusting that person.
Of course, this doesn't apply to trusted computing, which actually means that your computer doesn't trust you, not that you trust your computer.And remember, if you lend someone $20 and you never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
So MS's smartphone can play chess... does this me Symbian's can play Go? :)
I'm waiting for a cellphone that can play Global Thermonuclear War.
+10db is twice as loud to the human ear!
You're right, but I'm not wrong. For a full explanation
I'm not sure where this 20x quieter thing comes from, but generally. a 10dB increase in sound output is considered "twice as loud." Note that a 3dB increase is twice as much energy (well, 3.0something, but close enough). Similarly, -3dB is the "half power point."
Your physics teacher will tell you that 10 dB is a 10x difference in the intensity of a sound wave.
Your psychology teacher, or your friendly local audiophile, will tell you that a 10x difference in wave intensity is only a 2x difference in perceived loudness.
Most slashdotters, geeks that we are, payed more attention in our physics classes. As a result, I forgot about the perception issue until just now.
I am currently listening to 128 kbps mp3s on a $25 pair of headphones. Whether or not I am an audiophile is left as a exercise to the reader.
My mistake. I was thinking 65 dB was the quiet PC, and the standard was 80. Teach me to rely on my short term memory. Your math looks right to me.
The PowerMac G4 cube (bottom of page 4, "Noise characteristics") was only 31 dB. That's 2,512 times quiter than this "silent" PC.
Decibels are a logarithmic scale. 80 dB is ten times as loud as 70 dB. 65 dB is actually 10*10^.5 = 31.6 times quieter than 80 dB.
That's twice as good in most categories compared to the Imac (right down the number of mouse buttons).
[Insert standard "Mhz Myth" argument here]
[Insert standard "One Button Like God Intended" rant here]
Also, you forgot to factor in the labor involved in building and troubleshooting the computer. Most teachers would have to hire somebody to do this. Since this is a one-off build (I know if you're making dozens of the same computer you can do it faster, since you only need to troubleshoot once), assume four hours at $25/hour to build and troubleshoot. Since most teachers add Windows XP Home for $186.99, and Office XP Standard for $416.99, and you're looking at a total of $1,508.96 for your system.
Anyway, you're missing my point. My point is not that low end Macs are a better deal than low end PCs (they probably aren't). My point is that there are low end Macs which are affordable on a teacher's salary.
I would think that even teachers would be able to afford $800 for a low end Mac at home, but Apple has been giving Macs to schools for free for years.
1) I will strangle anyone who says "4) ???, 5) Profit."
2) ???
3) Profit
The BeIA OS, while impressive had serious bugs until the point we abandoned it. Calls and emails to Be went unreturned for months on end, and updates to fix bugs were few and far between.
Now that I think about it, this doesn't surprise me The already-too-small development team was split between BeIA, the Opera port, and BeOS R6. On top of this, many of the best people were leaving because they expected the company to fail, and they weren't being replaced because the money wasn't there.
But Linux was ported to it [the G4] by a people working in their spare time.
People didn't work on BeOS in their spare time. Linux had (and has) far more developer resources than Be ever did. At our peak, Be had ~20 programmers, several of whom were working on apps, not the OS itself.
While we did stop making it, we never stopped supporting it. I remember doing installs and testing of 5.0 (the last release) on BeBoxen.
They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it. We kept supporting PPC 601-604 Macs until the end.
They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market
That was a last ditch effort to survive. We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
I'd have stuck with BeOS if it would have been closer to unix. Something seemed terribly broken to me logging into a machine that has a shell prompt and automatically being root.
We'd always planned to do this. Multiuser logins was partially implemented during BeOS 5.0 development, but it was pushed back to 6.0 when we moved half our programmers to internet appliances. And Be ended up going out of buisness before 6.0 was finished.