This was my first computer too, built in 1978. A strange little CPU, the RCA 1802. It is probably what led to my eventual writing ground-test code for satellites that used them, and my general career using microcontrollers. You could battery power an ELF project, which made robots kind of neat for high-school projects. The 1802 still has a following, too: http://www.cosmacelf.com/
I'm sure the comparisons to Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star (nevermind Blake's 7 from 25 years ago) have been done to death ever since Firefly first aired. The thing is, it has some elements of these shows, yet it doesn't feel derivative of any of them. Yes, every time they land on a frontier world it feels like Trigun, but thats like saying Trigun feels like Big Jake or Cowboys (John Wayne films). The shows are borrowing from history, and attaching a bit of fiction along the way.
What I like is not where Whedon is necessarily getting his inspirations, but what he does with them on the screen. Firefly/Serenity is a lot of fun, and spared the heavy-handedness of the Trek and SW franchises. The show sort of takes itself half-seriously, and the latent humor in such an approach pays off rather well. I hope Whdeon gets to make more of this, although I read (somewhere on fireflyfans.net, I think) that Fox still owns TV rights.
Dr. Moog was perhaps the best at bridging the gap between artists and technology. He'd be the first to admit he was not the first synthesizer inventor, but he is widely regarded as the synthesizer pioneer because he worked closely with musicians to bring the technology out of the lab and into the studio. Many of his modules are the direct result of trial-and-error testing: he would build a module, say a coincidence switch, then have for example W. Carlos try to work with it and get feedback on what it did well and what needed improvement. It was several years of this sort of engineering->field use->feedback cycle that resulted in the Moog 15, Minimoog and so on. This was Bob's true skill: being able to turn the desires of the musician into something they could actually use.
Bob's booth at NAMM was a dozen feet from ours from 2001-2003. Bob was such a low-key guy, he often did what lots what other highbrow names in the music industry wouldn't do: he would do things himself. I still remember when he was there alone in the booth, tweaking one of his Minimoog Voyagers, and needed to borrow a soldering iron. Our booth's boss--who like the rest of us staffing the booth became EEs and synthgeeks *because* of the affable white-haired Doctor--had one when Bob walked over to politely ask to use it:
Fansubbers stopped flying "below the radar"
on
Fansubbers Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When a Japanese animation company notices one or more of their works showing up on tapes or dvds from and unknown source, and the show has all sorts of glitzy animated karaoke titles, font-and-color matched text, still frames of a 'subber group logo, etc. they don't say, "oh, a fansub," they say "what _company_ did this?!" That is when Gonzo / Bandai / Geneon / Bones / Gainax / Aniplex et al start the legal ball rolling because when the result looks commercial, and the authors of the bootleg work are going to be treated as if they were an infringing company. The fact it is an informal group of fans isn't going to lessen their ire: it is about the look of the finished product that concerns them, and whether the authors "have more heart/love" in their effort than an official release is irrelevant. Thus things like the Media Factory C&D.
Fansubbing was _almost_ dead around 1998 as domestic (USA) releases were ramping up to the point that the time lag between Japanese TV broadcast and US store-shelf purchase of the same show continued to shrink. Then came desktop video encoding, and the "digisub" was (re)born. Better capture hardware, better encoder schemes, better titling software and most of all--cheap, widespread broadband. Now a show is digitized as it is shown on TVT or WOWOW, etc and sent to a subber group in a matter of perhaps an hour. Subber groups, like Las Vegas hotels, vie constantly for one-upmanship thus you get the incredibly lavish animated title fonts, twirly song lyric titles, fade-in/outs etc. the results of which mean a fansub torrent of a given show will exist from 1 to 5 days after the original Japanese broadcast. Unfortunately the translation tends to be rather weak, but if the colloquialisms created by the groups are "hip" enough, people will accept them and think they're spot-on.
Then came bittorrent, and you have achieved the current position of digisubs. The problem the companies and their licensees now observe is loss of potential sales. Furthermore, when a show is popular enough, fansubber "morality" goes out the window in favor of the screaming masses who "want their anime now dammit!" Take the show Full Metal Alchemist, the most popular show of 2004. It was licensed for US distribution about halfway through the 51-episode run, and while 1 or 2 sub groups ceased subbing it, a dozen more jumped into place to take up the slack. Yes, some of these groups are outside the US, but the point illustrated is popularity vs. morality. It is going to happen again, too, with a show called "Bleach." ONE episode of FMA typically got *30,000* leechers, from ONE TORRENT! It is numbers like these that concern the animation companies and their licensees, and that is why the legal engine is going to start rolling--hard--on folks again.
Yet again something that will be tossed out under the Doctrine of Laches:
"Laches is recognized as an equitable defense available to defendants in patent infringement litigation under 35 U.S.C. Section 282 (1988). Laches enables the infringer to avoid liability if the patent holder delays too long before commencing litigation. The doctrine flows from the longstanding, fundamental legal principle that equity will not protect those who sleep on their rights."
Reference: The Doctrine of Laches and Patent Infringement Litigation at URL:
Given that Herbert stole most of the background for Dune from the immense story arc that Cordwainer Smith described in great detail in his vastly superior "Instrumentality of Mankind" collection of short stories, novellas and novel, Gainax has no need to bother with something like Dune. Gainax already borrowed from Smith the necessary ingredients to make the human-side of the struggle in Shin Seiki Evangelion. Besides, the last thing an epic story needs is Anno to try and write scripts again. Anno is a good _director_, but get him away from the writer's chair!
Now Yamaga has a superior talent when it comes to writing, as was evidenced by his story for Royal Space Force. I for one would like to see Gainax focus on Blue Uru, the 70 years-later sequel to Royal Space Force, but given that it took 12 years for RSF to break even (and thus paying back to Bandai the 800 million yen that Okada's golden tongue got the toy company to dump in Gainax's lap in 1985), it may take a while. Particularly now that animation budgets across the board in Japan have been slashed about 40% as of April 2000. There won't be any Cowboy Bebops or Blue Sub Sixes or Card Captor Sakuras made for a while. The production values are going to drop sharply, and "new material" scares anime bankrollers away in Japan in these recessions like crazy.
Hm, this is about Dune, isn't it. Maybe the Square guys in Hawaii could pull off a decent Dune movie. Of course they have to survive the $100 million price their FF movie is going to ring up, first. As it is Dune the book has two big problems when trying to convert it to the screen: 1) it takes too long to read (about 20 hours) to get the proper feel for a motion picture. 2) Too much of the story is told in interior monologue, which when tried in the 1984 screen version, fell flat.
The skiffy channel version is better at this, but there is just too much *book* to film and impress upon the viewer, animated or live-action.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my first computer too, built in 1978. A strange little CPU, the RCA 1802. It is probably what led to my eventual writing ground-test code for satellites that used them, and my general career using microcontrollers. You could battery power an ELF project, which made robots kind of neat for high-school projects. The 1802 still has a following, too: http://www.cosmacelf.com/
I'm sure the comparisons to Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star (nevermind Blake's 7 from 25 years ago) have been done to death ever since Firefly first aired. The thing is, it has some elements of these shows, yet it doesn't feel derivative of any of them. Yes, every time they land on a frontier world it feels like Trigun, but thats like saying Trigun feels like Big Jake or Cowboys (John Wayne films). The shows are borrowing from history, and attaching a bit of fiction along the way.
What I like is not where Whedon is necessarily getting his inspirations, but what he does with them on the screen. Firefly/Serenity is a lot of fun, and spared the heavy-handedness of the Trek and SW franchises. The show sort of takes itself half-seriously, and the latent humor in such an approach pays off rather well. I hope Whdeon gets to make more of this, although I read (somewhere on fireflyfans.net, I think) that Fox still owns TV rights.
Dr. Moog was perhaps the best at bridging the gap between artists and technology. He'd be the first to admit he was not the first synthesizer inventor, but he is widely regarded as the synthesizer pioneer because he worked closely with musicians to bring the technology out of the lab and into the studio. Many of his modules are the direct result of trial-and-error testing: he would build a module, say a coincidence switch, then have for example W. Carlos try to work with it and get feedback on what it did well and what needed improvement. It was several years of this sort of engineering->field use->feedback cycle that resulted in the Moog 15, Minimoog and so on. This was Bob's true skill: being able to turn the desires of the musician into something they could actually use.
Bob's booth at NAMM was a dozen feet from ours from 2001-2003. Bob was such a low-key guy, he often did what lots what other highbrow names in the music industry wouldn't do: he would do things himself. I still remember when he was there alone in the booth, tweaking one of his Minimoog Voyagers, and needed to borrow a soldering iron. Our booth's boss--who like the rest of us staffing the booth became EEs and synthgeeks *because* of the affable white-haired Doctor--had one when Bob walked over to politely ask to use it:
http://www.oldcrows.net/synthshop/moog_setup.jpg
That picture is what Bob was all about. Always tweaking, never afraid to do whatever was needed himself, even when it was showtime.
Goodbye, Bob--you were a great teacher but an even greater friend.
That is no iMac. It is a workstation.
When a Japanese animation company notices one or more of their works showing up on tapes or dvds from and unknown source, and the show has all sorts of glitzy animated karaoke titles, font-and-color matched text, still frames of a 'subber group logo, etc. they don't say, "oh, a fansub," they say "what _company_ did this?!" That is when Gonzo / Bandai / Geneon / Bones / Gainax / Aniplex et al start the legal ball rolling because when the result looks commercial, and the authors of the bootleg work are going to be treated as if they were an infringing company. The fact it is an informal group of fans isn't going to lessen their ire: it is about the look of the finished product that concerns them, and whether the authors "have more heart/love" in their effort than an official release is irrelevant. Thus things like the Media Factory C&D.
Fansubbing was _almost_ dead around 1998 as domestic (USA) releases were ramping up to the point that the time lag between Japanese TV broadcast and US store-shelf purchase of the same show continued to shrink. Then came desktop video encoding, and the "digisub" was (re)born. Better capture hardware, better encoder schemes, better titling software and most of all--cheap, widespread broadband. Now a show is digitized as it is shown on TVT or WOWOW, etc and sent to a subber group in a matter of perhaps an hour. Subber groups, like Las Vegas hotels, vie constantly for one-upmanship thus you get the incredibly lavish animated title fonts, twirly song lyric titles, fade-in/outs etc. the results of which mean a fansub torrent of a given show will exist from 1 to 5 days after the original Japanese broadcast. Unfortunately the translation tends to be rather weak, but if the colloquialisms created by the groups are "hip" enough, people will accept them and think they're spot-on.
Then came bittorrent, and you have achieved the current position of digisubs. The problem the companies and their licensees now observe is loss of potential sales. Furthermore, when a show is popular enough, fansubber "morality" goes out the window in favor of the screaming masses who "want their anime now dammit!" Take the show Full Metal Alchemist, the most popular show of 2004. It was licensed for US distribution about halfway through the 51-episode run, and while 1 or 2 sub groups ceased subbing it, a dozen more jumped into place to take up the slack. Yes, some of these groups are outside the US, but the point illustrated is popularity vs. morality. It is going to happen again, too, with a show called "Bleach." ONE episode of FMA typically got *30,000* leechers, from ONE TORRENT! It is numbers like these that concern the animation companies and their licensees, and that is why the legal engine is going to start rolling--hard--on folks again.
Looks like some telemetry was just received from Spirit:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2004/30.cfm
Yet again something that will be tossed out under the Doctrine of Laches:
m .n sf/articles/5731FF9F4372B6ED85256B43006EA07D?OpenD ocument
/**/
"Laches is recognized as an equitable defense available to defendants in patent infringement litigation under 35 U.S.C. Section 282 (1988). Laches enables the infringer to avoid liability if the patent holder delays too long before commencing litigation. The doctrine flows from the longstanding, fundamental legal principle that equity will not protect those who sleep on their rights."
Reference: The Doctrine of Laches and Patent Infringement Litigation at URL:
http://tinyurl.com/pzt
Original URL before tinyurling:
http://www.converium.com/web/converium/converiu
Crow
Now Yamaga has a superior talent when it comes to writing, as was evidenced by his story for Royal Space Force. I for one would like to see Gainax focus on Blue Uru, the 70 years-later sequel to Royal Space Force, but given that it took 12 years for RSF to break even (and thus paying back to Bandai the 800 million yen that Okada's golden tongue got the toy company to dump in Gainax's lap in 1985), it may take a while. Particularly now that animation budgets across the board in Japan have been slashed about 40% as of April 2000. There won't be any Cowboy Bebops or Blue Sub Sixes or Card Captor Sakuras made for a while. The production values are going to drop sharply, and "new material" scares anime bankrollers away in Japan in these recessions like crazy.
Hm, this is about Dune, isn't it. Maybe the Square guys in Hawaii could pull off a decent Dune movie. Of course they have to survive the $100 million price their FF movie is going to ring up, first. As it is Dune the book has two big problems when trying to convert it to the screen: 1) it takes too long to read (about 20 hours) to get the proper feel for a motion picture. 2) Too much of the story is told in interior monologue, which when tried in the 1984 screen version, fell flat.
The skiffy channel version is better at this, but there is just too much *book* to film and impress upon the viewer, animated or live-action.
Crow