Sometime in the very early 90s the first generation MPEG player for DOS from Xing Technologies was circulating as a shareware app. IIRC The BBS distribution file came with an enclosed demo MPEG file featuring blurry footage of an alleged perpetual motion machine (sort of resembled a rickety bicycle wheel with a glowing light bulb). Does anyone remember seeing this? I've not been able to find the archive file again, or determine whether it did in fact come from Xing.
The Pet 4000 series was the ones with the 'killer poke' lethally tweakable video system. Did they actually catch fire or just smoke prettily?
Anyways fast forward ten years: You could burn the standard 13" color monitors on the IBM PS/2 model 30s with some malicious port calls to the MCGA video adapter. One of the tweaks destroyed vertical sync completely, collapsing the display to a single superbright horizontal scope line that would burn in noticably in just minutes.
"A great guide to the history of Doom..." - "An exceptional read" - "...but you will enjoy." -mkay, sure. So why was this item accepted?
Other than the highly suspect grammar, the strange non-sequiteurs and exclamations ("He's alive!!!"), the bulleted list of DOOM levels and what looks like verbatim transcripts from the game documentation, was there really enough meat on this for even a mediocre slashdot news story, you think?
Must be a slow day. Having read the HTML versions of the 'article', I must say I wasn't particularly inclined to download the 3.6 megabyte Microsoft Word document, though I assume I'd be rewarded with some BMP screenshots to go with the text.
To the author. If you had to publish this as non-HTML document, you could and should have used Adobe Acrobat instead of Mickysoft Word.
If you wanted to make a list of DOOM ports, try at least to keep the list complete and accurate. I didn't see any mentioning of the unix, linux, Macintosh, BeOS, Amiga or Windows CE ports of the game. In any case, a list of ports is really not that interesting either unless you provide some back story and details for each. You could also provide download links and perhaps try and find and talk to some of the people responsible for those release. You know, try a little harder.
Until you get your piece written properly, anyone remotely interested in the subject should instead go and visit Doomworld (http://doomworld.com/ports/index.shtml) which has good FAQs, interviews, articles and links instead of just copy/paste fluff.
My Pontiac has a dashboard Garmin GPS connected to an old 133MHz pentium laptop stashed under the seat. I can pull it out and place it on the passenger seat to interact with it. Mostly I just upload the navigation data from Street Atlas to the dashboard GPS since its display is quite adequate for most road navigation. This system is obviously not embedded into the dashboard and radio system as the nice luxury sedan solutions, but then it also didn't cost neither an arm or a leg. Look on eBay for old GPS receivers and laptops, there's tons of them. I recommend Delorme Street Atlas - you get good reliable maps and there's no subscription fee or ads or anything.
I shoot with a Nikon D1 in its native NEF file format to get the best picture quality (NEF stores the raw 12-bit values of each CCD pixel uncompressed). The D1 resolution is arguably pretty modest, but the color accuracy is astonishing -- as rich as slide film to look at.
These pictures are 4 megs apiece and obviously I need a good chunk of storage when I go shooting in the field, but I rarely delete any pictures. Whenever I get back to my car or hotel room I simply dump everything to my laptop and wipe the memory cards. A Digital Wallet would serve the same purpose.
I label my laptop harddisk photo folders like so:
/foto/2001-10-27-b-d1
Meaning this folder contains D1 photos,
the second set (b) of pictures dumped on the 27th of October 2001. This directory naming scheme is easy to work with. I use ACDsee to generate a thumbnails contact sheet for each folder.
Once I get back home I dump my laptop foto folder to CD-roms, using ACDsee to make contact sheets of all the photos.
The CD-roms go into Caselogic binders, and each CD is numbered and labeled with the range of dates and locations covered. Copies of the CD-rom folder contact sheets are kept on the laptop harddisk for easy browsing, and permits me to easily find the binder and CD-rom containing the picture I wanted to retrieve.
Presently I have some 30,000 photos in my collection. It would be a heck of a lot more bulky and cumbersome maintaining a comparable library of slides or 35mm negatives.
This is a goofy thought experiment - somewhat expensive but doesn't seem that difficult to implement.
I'll arbitrarily assume a per-feed post-compression datarate of 180 kilobits per second is adequate for a low-framerate delta compressed surveillance camera application. (At 5fps that's almost 4.5 kilobytes per deltaframe) - For 1000 feeds that's a datarate of 175megabits/sec, or 1.8 terabytes/day. Let's break down those numbers...
If you have one 1U dedicated hardware compressor station for each 8 feeds, 125 of those are needed (you can place them in racks of 8-10 units each around the monitored facility, to shorten the lossy analog signal paths from the different camera feeds) If each hardware compressor station produces a 180kbps stream for each of its 8 streams, that's 1440kbps or 1.4mbps which alone won't choke a 10mbps ethernet segment, though 125 times that will make a 100mbps ethernet segment barf. So split whole data capture network into 5 x 100mbit segments - very manageable, well within sustained load tolerance on each. (125/5=25) - 25 x 1.4mbps feeds = 35mbps each segment handling 200 feeds.
On the receiving end you need to dump to something. Why not tape? It's relatively inexpensive and if retrieval can be arbitrarily slow then it is not a bad solution - spinning disk arrays sound like overkill to me. Modern tapedecks have high capacity, high reliability and high data rates.
Assuming 32 gig capacity tapes and 40 tape stations recording in parallel (eight for each of the five network segments) let each tape station handle 25 feeds. That's 25 x 180kbps = 4.39 megabits per second, which is a reasonable buffered datarate, that gives you a per-tape capacity of 994 minutes, or about 16.5 hours between tape changes.
So - about every 16.5 hours some monkey^H^H^H^H^H^H archival lab technician has to change 40 tapes. (for 25 tape stations that's 10.3 hours between 25 tape changes, or 30 tapes every 12.2 hours, or 50 tapes every 20.7 hours, or whatever...)
To prevent tape underruns, the tape stations could each have two disk buffers each equal in size to the tape capacity and a tape write session would then just be dumping from one buffer, which would be deleted as the tape write session concludes succesfully, while the other session buffer is being filled by incoming data. Very likely the tapes can be written and even verified much quicker than it takes to accumulate data for one session, so in case of tape verify errors you could have a panic mode beeper-alerting a technician to put in a new blank tape because the previous one was a dud, and still have time to complete a second write-verify cycle well within the time of one session period. Harddisks are cheap, so consider putting as much as 3 or 4 buffers on each tape station to increase the headroom tolerance for human error and physical tapedrive breakdowns, cleaning and maintenance.
However you choose to do it, it seems like a manageable workload, and there's robotic systems that can do all this and much more. As for physical storage, you're looking at something like 58 tapes a day on average, or over 21,000 tapes a year. It sounds like a lot, but you won't need 'warehouses' or huge hosted server arrays to store all this data. All this assumes that offline storage and slow data retrieval is acceptable.
For redundancy, place a couple of spare tape stations on hot standby on each of the network segments, and have these spares with extended disk capacity receive and accumulate buffer copies of some of the feed streams in parallel with the master tape stations, so they can dump a master station's worth of buffers to tape if a master station fails. This gives you time to spin up a replacement preconfigured tape server to assume the role of the failed master tape station.
If anyone wants the spreadsheet I used to play with these numbers, contact me. kobot at kobotica dot com
It's a wrist camera that permits the wearer to take thumbnail sized blurry jpegs on surveillance camera type microlens. Other than ten minutes of 'Hey cute' play factor, what possible use could this have? Even in casual social situations where photo quality is of no concern, the apparent image resolution precludes the recorded pictures from being used for much more than instant messenger icons. It seems that the imager has less pixels than a damn palmpilot display, and that's almost certainly before the color filter. So the actual color detail resolution is probably closer to 80x80 pixels, which is roughly equivalent to my Vic 20 from 1980. Amazing new technology eh?
No - actually this sort of information is exceedingly trivial to obtain by use of plain old Javascript 1.1 - since the earliest Navigator 4.x clients there has been support for 'capturing' mouse events.
This is used every day for all sorts of legit purposes (DHTML tooltips, navigation tools, etc), stupid purposes (Trailing stars, decorative interactive layers effects) - It was only a matter of time before somebody made the inevitable logical leap and developed a nefarious spy tool using the same technology. All this is gonna accomplish is drive even more users to disable javascript in protest of foul play and I can't blame them. Greedy entrepeneurs always mess up all good things.
To accomplish this feat all that is taking place is attaching a logging function to the captured mouse events. You end up with a data structure you can presumably compress fairly quickly and then send as a string to a hidden form field. All the hyperlinks on the page simply point to a javascript function that submits with POST method a hidden form containing the hyperlink destination and the captured mouse event data. The form handler program on the host then records the mouse track for further processing and digest by drooling marketdroids. And all this takes place without any visible evidence or prior notification that the data logging takes place. I'm sure if the involuntary test subjects knew they were being monitored, they would be too conscious about their mouse patterns for the data to be worth anything.
Rentware : DIVX. Didn't anybody learn from this sordid mistake? Apparently not. Here we go again. This time it is Microsoft pushing for the same godawful, boneheaded concept.
Question: Can you still use your data when your application dies, because your subscription expired, because the company died?
Consider: So what if you go flat broke? You bought, ahem RENTED an application while you had the clams to pay for it, and now you don't have your clams no more. So now you can't use Word to type up a new resume. Doh!
Concern: So how many generations of NT/XP/whatever before you can't even start your computer without the OS validating its license key with Microsoft over the internet? You're really up the creek if you take your laptop on the road then, aren't you!
Extrapolate: It seems only the logical next step for Microsoft to start pushing for an IPIX-style per-document, per-file licensing scheme. As soon as that becomes the industry standard, you'll not only be paying your Microsoft taxes, you'll also see ads like...
On SALE! 10 Adobe Photoshop.PSD file save keys, only $20 with $10 mail-in rebate! ( Also lets you save 20 *free*.JPGs ) Click to pay with your Passport registered credit card...
For anyone interested in first-hand accounts of the trivial chores and unique solutions applied
to zero-G problems, Robert Godwin is compiling a terriffic set of volumes available from Amazon.com and elsewhere. Search for 'godwin nasa' and you'll find them.
Each of the thorougly researched Nasa Mission Reports books has massive amounts of data, diagrams and photos (CDs enclosed with each volume contains mpeg videos and low-rez scans of all the 70mm photos available from that mission.)
There's so many things you need to think about when you design a spacecraft cabin. How do people sleep? (in a bag), how do you fasten it to the cabin wall, (velcro?), how do you drink? Where do you put stuff to keep it from floating away? How do you go to the bathroom? (In the days before nice space shuttle zero G toilets) - you get to hear from the astronauts themselves exactly what it was like, the little things that pissed them off, the solutions they came up with to fix stuff when it broke. The latter Apollo missions each lasted about a week, which of course don't compare to the extended stays on board the ISS, Mir or even Skylab. But these books are still a great read. I particularly recommend the Apollo 11, 12 and 13 volumes. I just ordered the Apollo 14 book, I'm sure it will be as exciting and detailed as the rest.
The problem with actual big blocks or 'stacks' of anything is, nothing suitable for generating its own light would probably be transparent enough.
A big heaping chunk of very pure crystal or glass, still darkens, refracts, reflects and obscures the light - and running wires or channels or anything through that would darken it and render it more opaque. Plus, it would be very heavy, and require ridiculously expensive precision manufacturing - a good hires color LCD screen today cost several hundred bucks, and that's for just one sandwiched pixel addressable plane with some filters. Imagine the cost of a thousand sandwiched planes manufactured in a similar fashion?
Aerogels can be virtually invisible, and don't refract light any, has a porous structure perhaps suitable for a 3D addressing structure - but even a chunk of the stuff just a few inches thick, become nearly wholly opaque.
I think we're stuck with spinnies and concave mirrors for now. That's a technology which could potentially be mass manufactured at reasonable cost, though I agree that spinning stuff seems awful retro. The earliest TVs in the 1920s used a similar system, with a spinning disc projecting a very small lo-rez 2D image.
I thought the conclusion to the otherwise pretty reasonable article was the most stupid thing about it. The blank media tax is boneheaded and infuriating for anyone who uses these blank media and recording devices for entirely unrelated purposes and are requested to pick up the tab for the napster market. They did that in Europe and everybody got pissed. Myself, I use CDRs exclusively to store my own digital photos. Should I pay royalties to the record companies for storing my own creative content?
I disagree that digital video sucks. Most things on network TV these day is put together and edited digitally. Only low budget local TV stations still use linear editing on tapedecks. Studio quality high-end digital video cameras and editing equipment using high bitrate storage, produces very nice picture quality, and still frames of these all-digital picture sources look as nice as anything else you might have. There's quite a difference between Digital-S and Mini-DV, if all you have for digital video reference is the consumer format.
But the 'matrix' Eyecam stuff at superbowl was indeed a bit disappointing. It did look grainy, pixelated and murky, and the rotation was very crude. Although one can see how it was done (the numerous cameras trained at the same spot, digital instant playback with selectable camera source..) I'd like to know the specifics of the system. Like, what sort of cameras were used, what lenses, how were they all aimed at the same spot, what software and hardware was used to put it all together. Did they have field tracking cameras with crosshairs from two angles used to compute the location? What are the full range of capabilities of the system? Can they replay the whole game from any camera angle? Is the picture quality available good enough to do interpolation later on? How do the controller work?... and what could they do to improve the system (more, better cameras, higher framerate, split-frame offset shutter sync permitting super slowmotion, all that. Maybe there's an idea for an article there.
Not the same thing.
In the case of the HD tuner we're assuming you have a legal and prepaid signal source coming to your receiver.
DirectTV appearently were planning to selectively disconnect the best quality analog plugs so you could only watch the cruddy low rez version of the content on legacy HDTV sets. Now that's just not fair. You paid for it, you should have a right to view it as you please. And that's why a hack to guarantee analog full resolution signals from the HD decoder box is moral and right: You're not stealing anything; you're merely protecting your rights as a paying customer.
Who's stealing DVD content? You have to buy the discs before you can decrypt them. You purchased a product (at high cost), it's yours, you should have a right to pry the thing apart and do with it as you please.
With the case of DirectTV pirate decoder cards, you didn't pay anything and so in that sense you have no rights to access the signal... other than of course the fact that it's coming out of the sky therefore it's yours to use if you can figger out how. The dubious ethics of hackers MAKING MONEY for themselves reselling access to content that was never theirs to resell in the first place, are inexcusable in my opinion. At that point it does become theft.
I do think DirectTV did the right thing here. They obviously had to plug that hole and they did that in a quite elegant fashion. I do wish the media companies in protecting their precious Content would resort to technical warfare - outhack the hackers - rather than legal warfare, which is the nasty kind nobody likes.
(I hate DMCA, RIAA and MPAA as much as everyone else.)
I don't understand at all why the megalithic media corporations (MMCs) do all these stupid things. It presumably sounds so reasonable when they convince themselves that they need to "Protect" their precious Content against piracy, and that's why they absolutely feel they need to ship the precious Content with so much "Protection" regardless of what that means to the end users. They're just mere Consumers, after all. Consumers.
It appears that the media industry sees the ideal and most loyal consumers as immobile slabs of credit card enabled lard in la-z-boys, watching all the prepaid piped-in garbage (including the noxious advertisements) exactly on schedule when it's being broadcast, happily or meekly dealing with any and all obstacles the MMC throws in their way. The mere consumer should not be permitted to record or timeshift a show he already paid for; nor should the mere consumer be permitted to somehow access the precious Content outside the Proper Region. Imagine if those heathens in Europe or Asia got to see precious Content on DVD before their mandatory 8-month waiting period was up.
The future should have been so sweet. All the amazing technological media advancements over the past couple of decades have led to this point where affordable super high quality digital precision reproduction of sound and picture is available, often with greater fidelity than what was available in the recording studios just a few years back. The technology exists.
So what does Hollywood and MMCs do? They FUCK IT UP. About 1993 or so I saw an analog demo of HDTV. It was running off a special laserdisc, using a high resolution RGB projector to display the picture. It looked gorgeous, and the picture quality was stunning. I couldn't wait for HDTV broadcasts to begin and sets becoming available. Now, 8 years later... I'm not so sure it was worth the wait.
Oh, those demo HD sets showing Barney in vivid purple and gree down at Circuit City look... vivid... sure enough, but where's the signal? From satellite. HBO. Pay per view channels. Schedules. You can't choose what movies you want to watch. You can just see Todays Movie. Content Packages and Crap. Barney the fucking dinosaur.
Where's the recording and playback devices? Oh, you can't have any. We the MMC don't want you to record our programming, that's PIRACY! We're not ashamed to spit our expressed contempt of your kind in your face. So no you can't record. Or playback. Or do anything. HD content will never be available as prerecorded DVD-like media, even though the technology exist, and it would be incredibly cool and convenient, because you'd just PIRATE it. So you'll just have to be content with watching precious Content and Barney the fucking dinosaur when we tell you to watch it.
Really, who'd PIRATE a HD movie? Someone with smarts, motivation and access to expensive equipment. Someone who'd have the skills to eventually hack and bypass whatever digital encryption measures you throw in their way. These people will find a way to make their HD set top boxes playback analog signals and they'll tell everybody how to do it. Sooner or later they'll find a way to build devices to record the encrypted signal and use it with a recorder to allow timeshifting or whatever. It's the way things work. Progress moves around obstacles, and eventually erodes them.
A particularly hated and obnoxious obstacle will not be bypassed, it will be demolished. The technically able will have the stuff no matter what. But "average" users of the digital media systems (who pay as much as everyone else) will suffer and have nothing but crippled useless technology.
So who benefits? MMC think they're doing the Right Thing to Protect their IP and the mere Consumers should understand and appreciate this. And Hollywood cheers. But the future is not very bright, it's littered with useless roadblocks, barbed wire and legalese. Any new Thing that comes out will have DRM and all kinds of copy protection shit and the whole culture of taking a music tape on the road in someone else's car or bringing over some old MST tapes to watch, will be illegalized and made impossible if MMC and Hollywood has their way. The only way to stop them is to not fall for the hypocrisy and bullshit, never EVER feel sorry for them, and do try to get the technical smarts - use the net, look around, you'll find ways to bypass all this crap they throw at you, like zonehacked and macromedia hacked DVD players or DAT tapedecks or whatever. You still pay for the content, but you can get to use it on your terms, which is the same right you always had with the old VHS and cassette tape systems. So in fighting the good fight you're just maintaining status quo; by letting the MMCs get their way they gain territory and they shouldn't be permitted to control more than they already do.
That is, if you still care to get the Latest and Newest thing, and use all this New Fancy Tech, because if you ask me, it's getting harder and harder to appreciate any of the precious Content. I can't watch TV anymore, it's too full of Stupid Rays and Junk. I sometimes turn on TLC for Junkyard Wars or something, but that's it. And I can only get TLC if I buy a PACKAGE with 200 otehr channels I don't watch. I'm disgusted and fed up with MMC. Yet I like movies. Old movies. Not necessarily the Box Office shit HBO plays on HDTV subscription service.
DVD is probably the Last New Thing I am going to subscribe to for a while... ever since I got a Technical Solution to the MMC roadblocks on DVD, I've been able to watch any time I want and as many times I want any of the old movies I've collected (and paid for) from several Regions (zones 1,2 and 3), in nice quality on analog component video and I can make S-video duplicates if I -want-. It's too bad that it's still in the resolution of the Old 1940s TV standard, but the Fancy New High Definition Tech is too utterly fucked up right now for me to even consider getting into that market.
Maybe someday I can get a cheap HD set where I can playback my DVDs digitally and watch timeshifted or pre-recorded HD programming on a presumably illegal TiVo equivalent box.
I can to some extent understand why some major online content publishers would not want deep linking to their sites, because the deep linking would be bypassing whatever promotions and linking pages the content publishers had planned for the users' eyeballs to see before they got to the content, and all such concerns.
However, if you want to avoid deep linking to your site, the best and simplest and least disagreeable way to do so, is to have the script or proxies serving your pages on your site employ a rule to identify http requests with 'illegal' off-site referrers, i.e. deeplinked from the outside, and then just redirect those requests to the main page of the site, or to the parent section, or where-ever you want your visitors to go that makes sense for your business.
I know of a few sites that does this, and nobody should have any objections to the practice since there's no nebulous fee charging or dire threats of legal implications to anyone linking. In the end, the content publishers using this option gets their way, and nobody can deep-link to the individual pages of their site - or rather, people can, but the link doesn't work as intended.
Here you have a model where you could set up a link payment structure on a solid and agreeable foundation... As an interested webmaster seeking a linking agreement with the content owner, you could agree to pay a certain nominal fee for the privilege of having your site and domain included in the http bounce thing's green list of referring sites excluded from getting bounced.
Who could object to this practice? I certainly don't, but that also don't mean that as a webmaster I'd ever pay for such a basic privilege as linking. And as a site visitor I have a hostile reaction to being bounced to places I didn't intend to go. I usually leave such sites and never come back.
(This is also my typical reaction to sites that employs recursive javascript onUnload popup banners ad nauseam - I didn't ask for those windows to show up, and when I CLOSE the window it's because I'm not interested. When the window refuses to DIE, I know never to visit or have any further business with the site spawning the popup window OR any of the sites advertised on the popups. But nevermind.)
Anyway, what I meant to say was, if you DO use this scheme on your site, and most people getting to the site through search engine hits (not on the green list) and gets bounced to the main page of the site - I think instead of the users being 'nice' and exploring your no doubt wonderful site to find the page they already knew they wanted from the search engine link description, they'll just go back to the search engine results page and try the next link on the list.
You're really achieving nothing much but creating obstacles for the users. It is a folly to attempt building levies and dams to guide the link traffic away from their natural flow. It's what the users want, and if you piss your users off by giving them something they don't want, and throwing obstacles in their path, why do you think they'd ever want to come back to your site and have dealings with them?
A far more reasonable approach is to simply leave things OPEN. Quit making obstacles. Turn the hyperlink nature of the web to your advantage, build your business model around it, DON'T try to change the nature of the web to fit your business model. Build your revenue around that incoming traffic, and cherish every link and hit you get, because linking to your site is a GOOD thing. It's quite a compliment to have people voluntarily give you such advertising through link referrals.
Just make sure that each page on your site has enough jump vectors to entice users to further explore your site and all the stuff you want them to see, after they've read the article that they came for in the first place.
Princess Mononoke wasn't a preachy Ferngully-style eco-sermon. It was precisely the opposite. Miyazaki had the good sense to show how the different sides of the conflict each had legit and justifiable reasons for fighting for their different and conflicting causes.
Who is the villain in Mononoke? I'm not convinced there is one.
Your other point about the fluidity of the animation is absurd. How can well crafted handiwork possibly detract from the piece it is part of? To paraphrase what I think you're saying, Kubrick's movies suck, because they have great lighting. It is not 'obviously' taking away from the story to do a good job. Rather, it is a feast to the eyes to see well done animation. The quality of both character and special effects animation in this film is absolutely fantastic - consistently kept at 12fps.
Perhaps you are saying that Mononoke is technically inferior to TV-grade anime's 8,4 and sometimes 2 frames per second, with the wnole slew of cost-saving stick-on mouths in fixed-chin faces and endless looped or held perspectives on budget cookie cutter backgrounds? I honestly don't comprehend your perspective.
I picked up my copy of Princess Mononoke at the local Best Buy.
There were about 20 copies left this afternoon, so I don't think there'll be much panic finding copies before christmas.
I first saw the feature in the theater when it was out in limited release earlier this year. I was awed and impressed by the complex story and the depth and richness of the beautiful animation.
Miyazaki deserves much praise for his unique artistic vision. Here's a guy who can tell and visualize fantastic stories and entertain kids and grownups both without pandering or patronizing. I'm not really a big fan of anime in general, but you absolutely don't need to be, to appreciate this beautiful movie, and several others by the same director. His comic books are equally expressive and intelligent.
I had never heard the japanese language version, but I didn't like the English dubbed voices. They seemed inappropriate. Billy Bob Thornton and the voice of San were both completely wrong for the movie. I'm glad that Miramax included the original japanese language track on this DVD, even if I don't yet understand a word they're saying - that's what the subtitles are for.:) (There's naturally also the English dub track on the disc.)
The proper way to enjoy a movie like the film maker intended is to hear the voices of the original actors. You get appropriate inflections of the voices, you get lipsync, and you give the screen actors the dignity of not having half their performance erased and dubbed over by anonymous local actors.
Remember the scene from European Vacation with the Griswalds in Paris, where they watch an american movie on TV dubbed to French? That's how I feel about dubbing in general.
My English and German is pretty decent for a non-native speaker of either language, and I picked up both initially by watching movies in those languages, with subtitles. The more I watched as I grew up, the more I learned. Kind of like language lessons and entertainment at the same time.:)
I'm very thankful that it is not customary in my country to dub movies. It seems awfully emberrassing to hear the lines of well known screen actors spoken by nobodies with totally wrong voices.
The most important point about choosing sub over dub, is that once you begin to understand the language of the movie, perhaps thanks to the subtitles, you also 'get' the words spoken unfiltered by the translator's subjective interpretation or clumsy attempts at converting humor and untranslatable cultural references to your own language.
The DVD format allows the inclusion of multiple language, video and subtitle tracks, so at this point there's really no excuse to release a foreign language film to an U.S. audience with only the dubbed version included, when you can let the viewer choose which version to watch.
As for the subtitles, there's two English tracks to choose from - a literal translation from the spoken Japanese, and Neil Gaiman's translation of the screenplay. They're not so subtly different, since Gaiman had to fit words in that meant the same, but could be spoken in English in the same time and rhythm of the faster multisyllabic Japanese. Sometimes meaning was lost in that translation.
The literal japanese track makes the most sense even if it's kind of stiff. It's nice that they provided both tracks.. it is unfortunately still not universal standard practice among DVD makers to provide an English language subtitle track on all movies - it's really helpful to the hearing impaired to have the subtitle track going on the screen, even if you speak the language and can hear most of the dialog. Whenever there's a word you missed, you can just read the subtitles. And sometimes for whatever reason you might want to watch a movie with the sound off and just go by the subtitles. The flexibility of DVD in this regard is great.
The 5.1 digital surround sound track has identical mix on the Japanese and English versions, and it sounds GREAT. The surround effects used to great effect in the forest scenes, are scary-realistic. Even on my modest system the sense of being in the middle of the forest with things brushing through the undergrowth, was very powerful. There's mesmerizing moments of deep silence followed by subtle sound effects accenting the fluid, immersive screen action.
The picture on the disc is of nice quality, great color, super sharp detail and no digital compression artifacts to see, even in dark scenes. The widescreen presentation is anamorphic, i.e. the full vertical NTSC resolution, all 550 lines or so, are used to contain the widescreen image on 16:9 TVs.
Other than these amenities, Miramax didn't spend too much time and money on this release. Simple static menus, for what they're worth, and no extras except for the US theatrical trailer and interviews with the voice actors of the English dubbed version. It's a little bit insulting that they only thought to provide these interviews as if Billy Bob Thornton as gravely miscasted voice actor is any kind of authority on this Miyazaki masterpiece. I would much rather know about the film makers and how the movie was made, stills and special effects and storyboards and so on. But there's nothing like that on the disc.
I rank the movie among my 10 favourites, but the Miramax DVD is nothing more than mediocre; about on par with the disappointing Blade Runner DVD.
Yeah, that is too bad that they couldn't tell
which of the cockpit annunciators were illuminated at time of impact.
But really, NTSB / FAA would look silly for mandating or even proposing the continued use of ancient filament bulb technology in instrument illumination when LEDs are better, brighter, cooler, less ambiguous, more power efficient and more reliable. With LEDs you're less likely to have a 'bulb' burn out and give you a dangerous wrong readout, and typically a LED annunciator will outlast by ages the device or dashboard assembly it was part of. It seems to me that it is more important that the guys driving the things can see what they are doing, than the NTSB being able at postmortem to determine the state of things from little quaint glowing bits of filament.
There's also glass cockpits in many modern jet airliners, with relatively few free standing annunciators at all, most of the readouts appearing superimposed on the smart displays. You can't use a filament analysis on those either.
I agree that there is a need for cockpit data in crash analysis to help future accident prevention, but I'm disappointed that they don't opt for better and more reliable data gathering methods.
The 'black boxes' recovered at crash sites seem to always have really cruddy and ambiguous sound signals requiring very subjective interpretation, and only a dozen or so flight control readouts with little more than the flight path and state of the control surfaces recorded. It seems that the amount of data gathered by those antique recorders don't exceed more than a few kilobits of data per second, and with the capacity to only record for an hour or so before the tape loops and erases the old signal (providing the magnetic erase head even works.)
If FAA mandated it, modern digital technology could monitor much more data, and log all the flight controls and all the display readouts by use of inexpensive cockpit video cameras and video recorders pointed at the consoles, where forensic analysis could easily identify with an accurate timeline the status of illuminated annunciators, whether LED or filament bulbs.
Crash and fire proof solid state memory devices with no moving parts are all very much possible to manufacture, and presumably on cost comparable or below those of the mechanical contraptions that constitute the black (orange) boxes today.
There is a concern about intrusion of privacy on behalf of the pilots with the prospect of having a video record of cabin events, and I can understand that, but at the same time they are driving plane full of people, it's a big responsibility and it's important that when things go wrong that we can understand how and why. For instance, we couldn't tell for sure what happened to that EgyptAir liner, since no video record could tell investigators exactly what the crew were doing and for what reasons. The controversial audio record was ambiguous at best.
The video tapes of such a proposed monitoring system would only be used by NTSB after a crash anyway, and the proposed configuration in the designs I've seen would be aimed to only have the consoles and flight yokes in view, so off duty officers with their hands off the wheel would be free to goof off unseen by forensic investigators.
Actually, some LED assemblies for diffuse types are sold with tiny reflectors, fitted as a chrome collar around the base of the LED casing. I don't think it's used much these days, since modern high efficiency and high brightness LEDs are typically encased in what looks like clear acrylic, and the lens formed in the top of the LED, are reasonably efficient for most purposes. It usually depends on the shape of the die inside, and they're different from manufacturer to manufacturer, and depending on what chemicals are used to produce which wavelength. The Nichia blue and white LEDs are the best and brightest around, and their built in lenses are focused enough for practical flashlight purposes.
Honestly, if you haven't seen the fricking thing,
then I don't know why you feel you have to share
your uneducated guessing at what the movie might
have been like. And whoever moderated your post
'insightful', ought to get castrated. Taco, this moderation system don't work for shit.
The Emperor's New Groove was in fact pretty fucking funny! Everyone in the theater had
a good time, kids and grownups alike. The
Disney "Formula" wasn't applied this time,
at least not to the final cut, and whatever
edits and change of direction was applied to
the first version of the movie, including
the chopping of Sting's songs, was probably
all for the better. The end result is a tight,
loopy and very much enjoyable cartoon.
The characterizations by John Goodman,
Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton were
all a delight, and the animation is top
notch. Even if you don't like David Spade,
his gleefully obnoxious character Kuzco is
a perfect match.
On another note, I don't know what you hypocritical slashdot hippies are all screaming about boycotting MPAA and Disney, it's not as
if the revenue they'd miss on you all combined constitute more than a few fractions of one percent of the take of the theatrical
run of these things, so lighten the hell
up already.
Nobody is sabotaging your Grand
Movemement, all you had in the first place
was a storm in a glass of water. And that scheme
somebody mentioned, to sneak in on an 'alternative title' ticket and then go see the mainstream movie, that's a bit like rabid vegetarian activists sneaking a McBurger when they think nobody is watching, no? Defeats the purpose. And frankly, if you didn't care enough about cinema to see that 'alternative title' in the first place, I'm not sure what kind of statement your stealth ninja boycott actions are supposed to express.
"On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals.
This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. "
BT's patent is frivolous at best, what a lousy thing to try to do. This is akin to claiming the patent for steering wheels 100+ years after the automobile was invented. Hogwash! I lose more respect for patent attorneys every day.
But do check out Doug Engelbart's demo. Notice the functionality of the ancient technology used - instead of a bitmapped display, the whole screen you see is generated on a vector CRT (Asteroids!!), photographed in a box by a TV camera and then sent as a negative image to the operator's CRT (a TV, really.) This also allowed for the 'picture in picture' effect with the split screen, half showing the text display (notice the mouse cursor), the other half showing a remote TV image of the operator of the other console.
Other amazingly well thought out stuff is shown in this demo, including embedded hyperlinks and inlined illustrations, as well as a modern-looking file browser and a powerful hierarchical annotation system.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometime in the very early 90s the first generation MPEG player for DOS from Xing Technologies was circulating as a shareware app. IIRC The BBS distribution file came with an enclosed demo MPEG file featuring blurry footage of an alleged perpetual motion machine (sort of resembled a rickety bicycle wheel with a glowing light bulb). Does anyone remember seeing this? I've not been able to find the archive file again, or determine whether it did in fact come from Xing.
Anyways fast forward ten years: You could burn the standard 13" color monitors on the IBM PS/2 model 30s with some malicious port calls to the MCGA video adapter. One of the tweaks destroyed vertical sync completely, collapsing the display to a single superbright horizontal scope line that would burn in noticably in just minutes.
Other than the highly suspect grammar, the strange non-sequiteurs and exclamations ("He's alive!!!"), the bulleted list of DOOM levels and what looks like verbatim transcripts from the game documentation, was there really enough meat on this for even a mediocre slashdot news story, you think?
Must be a slow day. Having read the HTML versions of the 'article', I must say I wasn't particularly inclined to download the 3.6 megabyte Microsoft Word document, though I assume I'd be rewarded with some BMP screenshots to go with the text.
To the author. If you had to publish this as non-HTML document, you could and should have used Adobe Acrobat instead of Mickysoft Word.
If you wanted to make a list of DOOM ports, try at least to keep the list complete and accurate. I didn't see any mentioning of the unix, linux, Macintosh, BeOS, Amiga or Windows CE ports of the game. In any case, a list of ports is really not that interesting either unless you provide some back story and details for each. You could also provide download links and perhaps try and find and talk to some of the people responsible for those release. You know, try a little harder.
Until you get your piece written properly, anyone remotely interested in the subject should instead go and visit Doomworld (http://doomworld.com/ports/index.shtml) which has good FAQs, interviews, articles and links instead of just copy/paste fluff.
My Pontiac has a dashboard Garmin GPS connected to an old 133MHz pentium laptop stashed under the seat. I can pull it out and place it on the passenger seat to interact with it. Mostly I just upload the navigation data from Street Atlas to the dashboard GPS since its display is quite adequate for most road navigation. This system is obviously not embedded into the dashboard and radio system as the nice luxury sedan solutions, but then it also didn't cost neither an arm or a leg. Look on eBay for old GPS receivers and laptops, there's tons of them. I recommend Delorme Street Atlas - you get good reliable maps and there's no subscription fee or ads or anything.
These pictures are 4 megs apiece and obviously I need a good chunk of storage when I go shooting in the field, but I rarely delete any pictures. Whenever I get back to my car or hotel room I simply dump everything to my laptop and wipe the memory cards. A Digital Wallet would serve the same purpose.
I label my laptop harddisk photo folders like so: /foto/2001-10-27-b-d1
Meaning this folder contains D1 photos,
the second set (b) of pictures dumped on the 27th of October 2001. This directory naming scheme is easy to work with. I use ACDsee to generate a thumbnails contact sheet for each folder.
Once I get back home I dump my laptop foto folder to CD-roms, using ACDsee to make contact sheets of all the photos.
The CD-roms go into Caselogic binders, and each CD is numbered and labeled with the range of dates and locations covered. Copies of the CD-rom folder contact sheets are kept on the laptop harddisk for easy browsing, and permits me to easily find the binder and CD-rom containing the picture I wanted to retrieve.
Presently I have some 30,000 photos in my collection. It would be a heck of a lot more bulky and cumbersome maintaining a comparable library of slides or 35mm negatives.
I'll arbitrarily assume a per-feed post-compression datarate of 180 kilobits per second is adequate for a low-framerate delta compressed surveillance camera application. (At 5fps that's almost 4.5 kilobytes per deltaframe) - For 1000 feeds that's a datarate of 175megabits/sec, or 1.8 terabytes/day. Let's break down those numbers...
If you have one 1U dedicated hardware compressor station for each 8 feeds, 125 of those are needed (you can place them in racks of 8-10 units each around the monitored facility, to shorten the lossy analog signal paths from the different camera feeds) If each hardware compressor station produces a 180kbps stream for each of its 8 streams, that's 1440kbps or 1.4mbps which alone won't choke a 10mbps ethernet segment, though 125 times that will make a 100mbps ethernet segment barf. So split whole data capture network into 5 x 100mbit segments - very manageable, well within sustained load tolerance on each. (125/5=25) - 25 x 1.4mbps feeds = 35mbps each segment handling 200 feeds.
On the receiving end you need to dump to something. Why not tape? It's relatively inexpensive and if retrieval can be arbitrarily slow then it is not a bad solution - spinning disk arrays sound like overkill to me. Modern tapedecks have high capacity, high reliability and high data rates.
Assuming 32 gig capacity tapes and 40 tape stations recording in parallel (eight for each of the five network segments) let each tape station handle 25 feeds. That's 25 x 180kbps = 4.39 megabits per second, which is a reasonable buffered datarate, that gives you a per-tape capacity of 994 minutes, or about 16.5 hours between tape changes.
So - about every 16.5 hours some monkey^H^H^H^H^H^H archival lab technician has to change 40 tapes. (for 25 tape stations that's 10.3 hours between 25 tape changes, or 30 tapes every 12.2 hours, or 50 tapes every 20.7 hours, or whatever...)
To prevent tape underruns, the tape stations could each have two disk buffers each equal in size to the tape capacity and a tape write session would then just be dumping from one buffer, which would be deleted as the tape write session concludes succesfully, while the other session buffer is being filled by incoming data. Very likely the tapes can be written and even verified much quicker than it takes to accumulate data for one session, so in case of tape verify errors you could have a panic mode beeper-alerting a technician to put in a new blank tape because the previous one was a dud, and still have time to complete a second write-verify cycle well within the time of one session period. Harddisks are cheap, so consider putting as much as 3 or 4 buffers on each tape station to increase the headroom tolerance for human error and physical tapedrive breakdowns, cleaning and maintenance.
However you choose to do it, it seems like a manageable workload, and there's robotic systems that can do all this and much more. As for physical storage, you're looking at something like 58 tapes a day on average, or over 21,000 tapes a year. It sounds like a lot, but you won't need 'warehouses' or huge hosted server arrays to store all this data. All this assumes that offline storage and slow data retrieval is acceptable.
For redundancy, place a couple of spare tape stations on hot standby on each of the network segments, and have these spares with extended disk capacity receive and accumulate buffer copies of some of the feed streams in parallel with the master tape stations, so they can dump a master station's worth of buffers to tape if a master station fails. This gives you time to spin up a replacement preconfigured tape server to assume the role of the failed master tape station.
If anyone wants the spreadsheet I used to play with these numbers, contact me. kobot at kobotica dot com
It's a wrist camera that permits the wearer to take thumbnail sized blurry jpegs on surveillance camera type microlens. Other than ten minutes of 'Hey cute' play factor, what possible use could this have? Even in casual social situations where photo quality is of no concern, the apparent image resolution precludes the recorded pictures from being used for much more than instant messenger icons. It seems that the imager has less pixels than a damn palmpilot display, and that's almost certainly before the color filter. So the actual color detail resolution is probably closer to 80x80 pixels, which is roughly equivalent to my Vic 20 from 1980. Amazing new technology eh?
This is used every day for all sorts of legit purposes (DHTML tooltips, navigation tools, etc), stupid purposes (Trailing stars, decorative interactive layers effects) - It was only a matter of time before somebody made the inevitable logical leap and developed a nefarious spy tool using the same technology. All this is gonna accomplish is drive even more users to disable javascript in protest of foul play and I can't blame them. Greedy entrepeneurs always mess up all good things.
To accomplish this feat all that is taking place is attaching a logging function to the captured mouse events. You end up with a data structure you can presumably compress fairly quickly and then send as a string to a hidden form field. All the hyperlinks on the page simply point to a javascript function that submits with POST method a hidden form containing the hyperlink destination and the captured mouse event data. The form handler program on the host then records the mouse track for further processing and digest by drooling marketdroids. And all this takes place without any visible evidence or prior notification that the data logging takes place. I'm sure if the involuntary test subjects knew they were being monitored, they would be too conscious about their mouse patterns for the data to be worth anything.
I'm absolutely appalled...
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Each of the thorougly researched Nasa Mission Reports books has massive amounts of data, diagrams and photos (CDs enclosed with each volume contains mpeg videos and low-rez scans of all the 70mm photos available from that mission.)
There's so many things you need to think about when you design a spacecraft cabin. How do people sleep? (in a bag), how do you fasten it to the cabin wall, (velcro?), how do you drink? Where do you put stuff to keep it from floating away? How do you go to the bathroom? (In the days before nice space shuttle zero G toilets) - you get to hear from the astronauts themselves exactly what it was like, the little things that pissed them off, the solutions they came up with to fix stuff when it broke. The latter Apollo missions each lasted about a week, which of course don't compare to the extended stays on board the ISS, Mir or even Skylab. But these books are still a great read. I particularly recommend the Apollo 11, 12 and 13 volumes. I just ordered the Apollo 14 book, I'm sure it will be as exciting and detailed as the rest.
A big heaping chunk of very pure crystal or glass, still darkens, refracts, reflects and obscures the light - and running wires or channels or anything through that would darken it and render it more opaque. Plus, it would be very heavy, and require ridiculously expensive precision manufacturing - a good hires color LCD screen today cost several hundred bucks, and that's for just one sandwiched pixel addressable plane with some filters. Imagine the cost of a thousand sandwiched planes manufactured in a similar fashion?
Aerogels can be virtually invisible, and don't refract light any, has a porous structure perhaps suitable for a 3D addressing structure - but even a chunk of the stuff just a few inches thick, become nearly wholly opaque.
I think we're stuck with spinnies and concave mirrors for now. That's a technology which could potentially be mass manufactured at reasonable cost, though I agree that spinning stuff seems awful retro. The earliest TVs in the 1920s used a similar system, with a spinning disc projecting a very small lo-rez 2D image.
Amen, brother
I thought the conclusion to the otherwise pretty reasonable article was the most stupid thing about it. The blank media tax is boneheaded and infuriating for anyone who uses these blank media and recording devices for entirely unrelated purposes and are requested to pick up the tab for the napster market. They did that in Europe and everybody got pissed. Myself, I use CDRs exclusively to store my own digital photos. Should I pay royalties to the record companies for storing my own creative content?
But the 'matrix' Eyecam stuff at superbowl was indeed a bit disappointing. It did look grainy, pixelated and murky, and the rotation was very crude. Although one can see how it was done (the numerous cameras trained at the same spot, digital instant playback with selectable camera source..) I'd like to know the specifics of the system. Like, what sort of cameras were used, what lenses, how were they all aimed at the same spot, what software and hardware was used to put it all together. Did they have field tracking cameras with crosshairs from two angles used to compute the location? What are the full range of capabilities of the system? Can they replay the whole game from any camera angle? Is the picture quality available good enough to do interpolation later on? How do the controller work? ... and what could they do to improve the system (more, better cameras, higher framerate, split-frame offset shutter sync permitting super slowmotion, all that. Maybe there's an idea for an article there.
DirectTV appearently were planning to selectively disconnect the best quality analog plugs so you could only watch the cruddy low rez version of the content on legacy HDTV sets. Now that's just not fair. You paid for it, you should have a right to view it as you please. And that's why a hack to guarantee analog full resolution signals from the HD decoder box is moral and right: You're not stealing anything; you're merely protecting your rights as a paying customer.
With the case of DirectTV pirate decoder cards, you didn't pay anything and so in that sense you have no rights to access the signal... other than of course the fact that it's coming out of the sky therefore it's yours to use if you can figger out how. The dubious ethics of hackers MAKING MONEY for themselves reselling access to content that was never theirs to resell in the first place, are inexcusable in my opinion. At that point it does become theft.
I do think DirectTV did the right thing here. They obviously had to plug that hole and they did that in a quite elegant fashion. I do wish the media companies in protecting their precious Content would resort to technical warfare - outhack the hackers - rather than legal warfare, which is the nasty kind nobody likes.
(I hate DMCA, RIAA and MPAA as much as everyone else.)
It appears that the media industry sees the ideal and most loyal consumers as immobile slabs of credit card enabled lard in la-z-boys, watching all the prepaid piped-in garbage (including the noxious advertisements) exactly on schedule when it's being broadcast, happily or meekly dealing with any and all obstacles the MMC throws in their way. The mere consumer should not be permitted to record or timeshift a show he already paid for; nor should the mere consumer be permitted to somehow access the precious Content outside the Proper Region. Imagine if those heathens in Europe or Asia got to see precious Content on DVD before their mandatory 8-month waiting period was up.
The future should have been so sweet. All the amazing technological media advancements over the past couple of decades have led to this point where affordable super high quality digital precision reproduction of sound and picture is available, often with greater fidelity than what was available in the recording studios just a few years back. The technology exists.
So what does Hollywood and MMCs do? They FUCK IT UP. About 1993 or so I saw an analog demo of HDTV. It was running off a special laserdisc, using a high resolution RGB projector to display the picture. It looked gorgeous, and the picture quality was stunning. I couldn't wait for HDTV broadcasts to begin and sets becoming available. Now, 8 years later ... I'm not so sure it was worth the wait.
Oh, those demo HD sets showing Barney in vivid purple and gree down at Circuit City look ... vivid ... sure enough, but where's the signal? From satellite. HBO. Pay per view channels. Schedules. You can't choose what movies you want to watch. You can just see Todays Movie. Content Packages and Crap. Barney the fucking dinosaur.
Where's the recording and playback devices? Oh, you can't have any. We the MMC don't want you to record our programming, that's PIRACY! We're not ashamed to spit our expressed contempt of your kind in your face. So no you can't record. Or playback. Or do anything. HD content will never be available as prerecorded DVD-like media, even though the technology exist, and it would be incredibly cool and convenient, because you'd just PIRATE it. So you'll just have to be content with watching precious Content and Barney the fucking dinosaur when we tell you to watch it.
Really, who'd PIRATE a HD movie? Someone with smarts, motivation and access to expensive equipment. Someone who'd have the skills to eventually hack and bypass whatever digital encryption measures you throw in their way. These people will find a way to make their HD set top boxes playback analog signals and they'll tell everybody how to do it. Sooner or later they'll find a way to build devices to record the encrypted signal and use it with a recorder to allow timeshifting or whatever. It's the way things work. Progress moves around obstacles, and eventually erodes them.
A particularly hated and obnoxious obstacle will not be bypassed, it will be demolished. The technically able will have the stuff no matter what. But "average" users of the digital media systems (who pay as much as everyone else) will suffer and have nothing but crippled useless technology.
So who benefits? MMC think they're doing the Right Thing to Protect their IP and the mere Consumers should understand and appreciate this. And Hollywood cheers. But the future is not very bright, it's littered with useless roadblocks, barbed wire and legalese. Any new Thing that comes out will have DRM and all kinds of copy protection shit and the whole culture of taking a music tape on the road in someone else's car or bringing over some old MST tapes to watch, will be illegalized and made impossible if MMC and Hollywood has their way. The only way to stop them is to not fall for the hypocrisy and bullshit, never EVER feel sorry for them, and do try to get the technical smarts - use the net, look around, you'll find ways to bypass all this crap they throw at you, like zonehacked and macromedia hacked DVD players or DAT tapedecks or whatever. You still pay for the content, but you can get to use it on your terms, which is the same right you always had with the old VHS and cassette tape systems. So in fighting the good fight you're just maintaining status quo; by letting the MMCs get their way they gain territory and they shouldn't be permitted to control more than they already do.
That is, if you still care to get the Latest and Newest thing, and use all this New Fancy Tech, because if you ask me, it's getting harder and harder to appreciate any of the precious Content. I can't watch TV anymore, it's too full of Stupid Rays and Junk. I sometimes turn on TLC for Junkyard Wars or something, but that's it. And I can only get TLC if I buy a PACKAGE with 200 otehr channels I don't watch. I'm disgusted and fed up with MMC. Yet I like movies. Old movies. Not necessarily the Box Office shit HBO plays on HDTV subscription service.
DVD is probably the Last New Thing I am going to subscribe to for a while ... ever since I got a Technical Solution to the MMC roadblocks on DVD, I've been able to watch any time I want and as many times I want any of the old movies I've collected (and paid for) from several Regions (zones 1,2 and 3), in nice quality on analog component video and I can make S-video duplicates if I -want-. It's too bad that it's still in the resolution of the Old 1940s TV standard, but the Fancy New High Definition Tech is too utterly fucked up right now for me to even consider getting into that market.
Maybe someday I can get a cheap HD set where I can playback my DVDs digitally and watch timeshifted or pre-recorded HD programming on a presumably illegal TiVo equivalent box.
Or whatever.
The photos of the Dulux portable unit looked like it was photoshopped from a photo of one of Panasonic's models.
However, if you want to avoid deep linking to your site, the best and simplest and least disagreeable way to do so, is to have the script or proxies serving your pages on your site employ a rule to identify http requests with 'illegal' off-site referrers, i.e. deeplinked from the outside, and then just redirect those requests to the main page of the site, or to the parent section, or where-ever you want your visitors to go that makes sense for your business.
I know of a few sites that does this, and nobody should have any objections to the practice since there's no nebulous fee charging or dire threats of legal implications to anyone linking. In the end, the content publishers using this option gets their way, and nobody can deep-link to the individual pages of their site - or rather, people can, but the link doesn't work as intended.
Here you have a model where you could set up a link payment structure on a solid and agreeable foundation... As an interested webmaster seeking a linking agreement with the content owner, you could agree to pay a certain nominal fee for the privilege of having your site and domain included in the http bounce thing's green list of referring sites excluded from getting bounced.
Who could object to this practice? I certainly don't, but that also don't mean that as a webmaster I'd ever pay for such a basic privilege as linking. And as a site visitor I have a hostile reaction to being bounced to places I didn't intend to go. I usually leave such sites and never come back.
(This is also my typical reaction to sites that employs recursive javascript onUnload popup banners ad nauseam - I didn't ask for those windows to show up, and when I CLOSE the window it's because I'm not interested. When the window refuses to DIE, I know never to visit or have any further business with the site spawning the popup window OR any of the sites advertised on the popups. But nevermind.)
Anyway, what I meant to say was, if you DO use this scheme on your site, and most people getting to the site through search engine hits (not on the green list) and gets bounced to the main page of the site - I think instead of the users being 'nice' and exploring your no doubt wonderful site to find the page they already knew they wanted from the search engine link description, they'll just go back to the search engine results page and try the next link on the list.
You're really achieving nothing much but creating obstacles for the users. It is a folly to attempt building levies and dams to guide the link traffic away from their natural flow. It's what the users want, and if you piss your users off by giving them something they don't want, and throwing obstacles in their path, why do you think they'd ever want to come back to your site and have dealings with them?
A far more reasonable approach is to simply leave things OPEN. Quit making obstacles. Turn the hyperlink nature of the web to your advantage, build your business model around it, DON'T try to change the nature of the web to fit your business model. Build your revenue around that incoming traffic, and cherish every link and hit you get, because linking to your site is a GOOD thing. It's quite a compliment to have people voluntarily give you such advertising through link referrals.
Just make sure that each page on your site has enough jump vectors to entice users to further explore your site and all the stuff you want them to see, after they've read the article that they came for in the first place.
Princess Mononoke wasn't a preachy Ferngully-style eco-sermon. It was precisely the opposite. Miyazaki had the good sense to show how the different sides of the conflict each had legit and justifiable reasons for fighting for their different and conflicting causes.
Who is the villain in Mononoke? I'm not convinced there is one.
Your other point about the fluidity of the animation is absurd. How can well crafted handiwork possibly detract from the piece it is part of? To paraphrase what I think you're saying, Kubrick's movies suck, because they have great lighting. It is not 'obviously' taking away from the story to do a good job. Rather, it is a feast to the eyes to see well done animation. The quality of both character and special effects animation in this film is absolutely fantastic - consistently kept at 12fps.
Perhaps you are saying that Mononoke is technically inferior to TV-grade anime's 8,4 and sometimes 2 frames per second, with the wnole slew of cost-saving stick-on mouths in fixed-chin faces and endless looped or held perspectives on budget cookie cutter backgrounds? I honestly don't comprehend your perspective.
I first saw the feature in the theater when it was out in limited release earlier this year. I was awed and impressed by the complex story and the depth and richness of the beautiful animation.
Miyazaki deserves much praise for his unique artistic vision. Here's a guy who can tell and visualize fantastic stories and entertain kids and grownups both without pandering or patronizing. I'm not really a big fan of anime in general, but you absolutely don't need to be, to appreciate this beautiful movie, and several others by the same director. His comic books are equally expressive and intelligent.
I had never heard the japanese language version, but I didn't like the English dubbed voices. They seemed inappropriate. Billy Bob Thornton and the voice of San were both completely wrong for the movie. I'm glad that Miramax included the original japanese language track on this DVD, even if I don't yet understand a word they're saying - that's what the subtitles are for. :) (There's naturally also the English dub track on the disc.)
The proper way to enjoy a movie like the film maker intended is to hear the voices of the original actors. You get appropriate inflections of the voices, you get lipsync, and you give the screen actors the dignity of not having half their performance erased and dubbed over by anonymous local actors.
Remember the scene from European Vacation with the Griswalds in Paris, where they watch an american movie on TV dubbed to French? That's how I feel about dubbing in general.
My English and German is pretty decent for a non-native speaker of either language, and I picked up both initially by watching movies in those languages, with subtitles. The more I watched as I grew up, the more I learned. Kind of like language lessons and entertainment at the same time. :)
I'm very thankful that it is not customary in my country to dub movies. It seems awfully emberrassing to hear the lines of well known screen actors spoken by nobodies with totally wrong voices.
The most important point about choosing sub over dub, is that once you begin to understand the language of the movie, perhaps thanks to the subtitles, you also 'get' the words spoken unfiltered by the translator's subjective interpretation or clumsy attempts at converting humor and untranslatable cultural references to your own language.
The DVD format allows the inclusion of multiple language, video and subtitle tracks, so at this point there's really no excuse to release a foreign language film to an U.S. audience with only the dubbed version included, when you can let the viewer choose which version to watch.
As for the subtitles, there's two English tracks to choose from - a literal translation from the spoken Japanese, and Neil Gaiman's translation of the screenplay. They're not so subtly different, since Gaiman had to fit words in that meant the same, but could be spoken in English in the same time and rhythm of the faster multisyllabic Japanese. Sometimes meaning was lost in that translation.
The literal japanese track makes the most sense even if it's kind of stiff. It's nice that they provided both tracks .. it is unfortunately still not universal standard practice among DVD makers to provide an English language subtitle track on all movies - it's really helpful to the hearing impaired to have the subtitle track going on the screen, even if you speak the language and can hear most of the dialog. Whenever there's a word you missed, you can just read the subtitles. And sometimes for whatever reason you might want to watch a movie with the sound off and just go by the subtitles. The flexibility of DVD in this regard is great.
The 5.1 digital surround sound track has identical mix on the Japanese and English versions, and it sounds GREAT. The surround effects used to great effect in the forest scenes, are scary-realistic. Even on my modest system the sense of being in the middle of the forest with things brushing through the undergrowth, was very powerful. There's mesmerizing moments of deep silence followed by subtle sound effects accenting the fluid, immersive screen action.
The picture on the disc is of nice quality, great color, super sharp detail and no digital compression artifacts to see, even in dark scenes. The widescreen presentation is anamorphic, i.e. the full vertical NTSC resolution, all 550 lines or so, are used to contain the widescreen image on 16:9 TVs.
Other than these amenities, Miramax didn't spend too much time and money on this release. Simple static menus, for what they're worth, and no extras except for the US theatrical trailer and interviews with the voice actors of the English dubbed version. It's a little bit insulting that they only thought to provide these interviews as if Billy Bob Thornton as gravely miscasted voice actor is any kind of authority on this Miyazaki masterpiece. I would much rather know about the film makers and how the movie was made, stills and special effects and storyboards and so on. But there's nothing like that on the disc.
I rank the movie among my 10 favourites, but the Miramax DVD is nothing more than mediocre; about on par with the disappointing Blade Runner DVD.
But really, NTSB / FAA would look silly for mandating or even proposing the continued use of ancient filament bulb technology in instrument illumination when LEDs are better, brighter, cooler, less ambiguous, more power efficient and more reliable. With LEDs you're less likely to have a 'bulb' burn out and give you a dangerous wrong readout, and typically a LED annunciator will outlast by ages the device or dashboard assembly it was part of. It seems to me that it is more important that the guys driving the things can see what they are doing, than the NTSB being able at postmortem to determine the state of things from little quaint glowing bits of filament.
There's also glass cockpits in many modern jet airliners, with relatively few free standing annunciators at all, most of the readouts appearing superimposed on the smart displays. You can't use a filament analysis on those either.
I agree that there is a need for cockpit data in crash analysis to help future accident prevention, but I'm disappointed that they don't opt for better and more reliable data gathering methods.
The 'black boxes' recovered at crash sites seem to always have really cruddy and ambiguous sound signals requiring very subjective interpretation, and only a dozen or so flight control readouts with little more than the flight path and state of the control surfaces recorded. It seems that the amount of data gathered by those antique recorders don't exceed more than a few kilobits of data per second, and with the capacity to only record for an hour or so before the tape loops and erases the old signal (providing the magnetic erase head even works.)
If FAA mandated it, modern digital technology could monitor much more data, and log all the flight controls and all the display readouts by use of inexpensive cockpit video cameras and video recorders pointed at the consoles, where forensic analysis could easily identify with an accurate timeline the status of illuminated annunciators, whether LED or filament bulbs.
Crash and fire proof solid state memory devices with no moving parts are all very much possible to manufacture, and presumably on cost comparable or below those of the mechanical contraptions that constitute the black (orange) boxes today.
There is a concern about intrusion of privacy on behalf of the pilots with the prospect of having a video record of cabin events, and I can understand that, but at the same time they are driving plane full of people, it's a big responsibility and it's important that when things go wrong that we can understand how and why. For instance, we couldn't tell for sure what happened to that EgyptAir liner, since no video record could tell investigators exactly what the crew were doing and for what reasons. The controversial audio record was ambiguous at best.
The video tapes of such a proposed monitoring system would only be used by NTSB after a crash anyway, and the proposed configuration in the designs I've seen would be aimed to only have the consoles and flight yokes in view, so off duty officers with their hands off the wheel would be free to goof off unseen by forensic investigators.
Actually, some LED assemblies for diffuse types are sold with tiny reflectors, fitted as a chrome collar around the base of the LED casing. I don't think it's used much these days, since modern high efficiency and high brightness LEDs are typically encased in what looks like clear acrylic, and the lens formed in the top of the LED, are reasonably efficient for most purposes. It usually depends on the shape of the die inside, and they're different from manufacturer to manufacturer, and depending on what chemicals are used to produce which wavelength. The Nichia blue and white LEDs are the best and brightest around, and their built in lenses are focused enough for practical flashlight purposes.
The Emperor's New Groove was in fact pretty fucking funny! Everyone in the theater had a good time, kids and grownups alike. The Disney "Formula" wasn't applied this time, at least not to the final cut, and whatever edits and change of direction was applied to the first version of the movie, including the chopping of Sting's songs, was probably all for the better. The end result is a tight, loopy and very much enjoyable cartoon.
The characterizations by John Goodman, Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton were all a delight, and the animation is top notch. Even if you don't like David Spade, his gleefully obnoxious character Kuzco is a perfect match.
On another note, I don't know what you hypocritical slashdot hippies are all screaming about boycotting MPAA and Disney, it's not as if the revenue they'd miss on you all combined constitute more than a few fractions of one percent of the take of the theatrical run of these things, so lighten the hell up already.
Nobody is sabotaging your Grand Movemement, all you had in the first place was a storm in a glass of water. And that scheme somebody mentioned, to sneak in on an 'alternative title' ticket and then go see the mainstream movie, that's a bit like rabid vegetarian activists sneaking a McBurger when they think nobody is watching, no? Defeats the purpose. And frankly, if you didn't care enough about cinema to see that 'alternative title' in the first place, I'm not sure what kind of statement your stealth ninja boycott actions are supposed to express.
This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. "
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
-- Prior art, anyone?
BT's patent is frivolous at best, what a lousy thing to try to do. This is akin to claiming the patent for steering wheels 100+ years after the automobile was invented. Hogwash! I lose more respect for patent attorneys every day.
But do check out Doug Engelbart's demo. Notice the functionality of the ancient technology used - instead of a bitmapped display, the whole screen you see is generated on a vector CRT (Asteroids!!), photographed in a box by a TV camera and then sent as a negative image to the operator's CRT (a TV, really.) This also allowed for the 'picture in picture' effect with the split screen, half showing the text display (notice the mouse cursor), the other half showing a remote TV image of the operator of the other console.
Other amazingly well thought out stuff is shown in this demo, including embedded hyperlinks and inlined illustrations, as well as a modern-looking file browser and a powerful hierarchical annotation system.