As Sturgen pointed out, 90% of everything sucks. I am simply saying that not everything Miyazaki does is in the 10% that does not suck.
Your argument however is bizzare. None of those three steps is unique or unusual per se, and I never said they were. My point was that that was pretty much ALL that was going on in those Miyazaki films storywise, and no more - specifically, no significant plot development. Hence the frequent criticisms of pointlessness from critics who aren't totally wowed by the visuals or starving for non-Hollywoodness.
More to the point, you incorrectly took my comments as a blanket criticism of anime, when I was referring specifically to Miyazaki's works. Actually, he's pretty much the only guy in anime who makes movies with storytelling like that. It's somewhat avante-garde, and a signal of his status as an auteur.
For the record, I've watched more anime than you - somewhere around 500 different tv series, ova series, and movies, in their entirety - so don't lecture me. 90% of it sucks. When I look over it I see a vast wasteland of preposterous teen-oriented escapist fantasy, kiddy merchandising vehicles, mind-numbingly vapid exercises in fan service, and other such formulaic tripe. Existentialism is also wildly overrepresented and frequently shallow. There are in fact very few shows that could be called good or truly creative, and also very few actually geared towards an adult audience that wants more than panty shots.
Don't get me wrong - the animation quality of his films clearly beats everything else in the world hands down, he's got tons of imagination, the critics love him, and he's an institution in Japan. But his storytelling style is dull. Far too often his films go like this:
1) Protagonist(s) go somewhere they've never been before 2) Various unrelated showy magical stuff happens 3) The end
In other words there's little continuity or focus, and the storyline merely serves the visuals. I'm looking at you, Spirited Away, Totoro, and Kiki's Delivery Service. Such would appear to be the case with Howl's moving castle. Alternately, it's beat-you-over-the-head ecological fable (Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa).
Now that's not to say I haven't seen Miyazaki films that I liked - Castle in the Sky was a superior film, Castle of Cagliostro was the best of Lupin, and Porco Rosso had a sort of classic European feel to it. The trouble is the critics always go ga-ga over the visuals regardless of the other fundamentals (as they used to and still sometimes do for American blockbusters). So I'll be seeing Howl in the theaters, but I won't be recommending it to anybody until I do.
What if you don't remember what exactly is in the file, or when you used it or name or whatever? What if you've forgotten, or never even realized it existed? And even if you should run across it, how would you know whether it was important or not? What about identical file names? What about they system files?
It will be too easy for files to get lost. Say you don't label something properly, or you change the label, or you forget the name, or the name is unmemorable - what will happen to the file? Just sit there on your disk taking up space, never to be seen again?
And how about old/less useful files that are unnecessarily included in searches, forcing you to read over more file names to find what you want?
One handy feature about folders I've (automatically or intentionally) organized things in is it makes it easy to go back and figure out what I no longer need, and delete it, thus freeing up disk space and reducing clutter. Spotlight is designed to GENERATE clutter.
It's true much anime licensing and popularity in America - indeed the whole American Anime industry - stems from the free availability of fansubs and the BitTorrent swarms that help distribute them, but Naruto was not one of them. Naruto was clearly destined for a long-running anime series and inevitable licensing in America since about volume 2 of the manga, whether or not the fansubs were ever made. It is, dare I say it, the next Dragonball Z. In fact it'll be on Toonami in the fall. If only one anime series were to make it to American TV, this would be probably be it. The only thing holding up its licensing was probably the high price they were charging for it!
On top of that, the specific fansubbers of Naruto rely more on conventional IRC fileservers than BitTorrent than many other groups. So BitTorrent was not so important there either.
In fact, of all the anime which has made it to TV (aka the Adult Swim Action and Toonami line-ups), I can't think of any which were particularly "obscure". Pretty much all of them were major series from major studios in Japan too, and destined for the American Market. Fansubs and BT have certainly helped propel series onto DVD, but not TV yet.
Uh, biodiesel IS solar. Solar at well below 3% efficiency (conventional PV cells get ~15%). I'd have to crunch the numbers to be sure but I think you would do better generating synthetic fuel from atmospheric C02 using solar power and industrial processes directly.
I worry that this technology will somehow be used to obfuscate the fact that there are perfectly good ways of generating biodiesel without CO2-spewing power plants, thus covering up the whole advantage of carbon neutral systems.
On a large scale I'd be very worried about the effect, particularly the effect on currents and deep sea ecology.
Like wind energy, it's indirect solar, which is nice because you're harvesting the energy gathered from a large area in naturally concentrated form. But if you're drawing a significant fraction (or in the case of this system potentially more than it is actively collecting) you're going to have consequences. However a relative few installations which draw upon a negligible fraction of that energy should be OK. This sounds like an excellent way to make remote islands economically sustainable.
As for fusion power, I've seen research that suggests no human-scale system may be able to break even due to brehmstralung. Nuclear has issues, fossil fuel is unsustainable, wind hydro and ocean have potential environmental issues.
The best solution is solar, which is the ultimate source of all power anyway. Some folks claim that there's simply not enough room on earth to sustain our demand. If that's true it says a lot about our wastefulness. However, the best reply to that is "Who said anything about earth?" Space-based solar power is basically limitless, or at least can collect more power than the earth can dissipate as heat effectively. And unlike ground based systems, it can provide constant power regardless of weather, season, or time of day.
Procedural synthesis and Level of Detail (AKA rendering vertex data on the fly from generated objects)? I'm reading the article, and I'm amazed most of this really, really obvious stuff wasn't being done already. guess the old consoles just didn't have the power.
1) Neither the xbox360 nor the ps3 are designed to have anything stack on top of it. The gamecube certainly didn't. No desire for people to have more than one system eh?
2) The xbox and its controller are clearly designed to integrate gaming with other uses of the console and television screen, particularly for use of the xbox live service. In particular there was a special button on the controller for it. PS3 does not appear to have an equivalent, which could be a serious mistake. However, their blu-ray drive will help draw in purchases.
Well, multiply everything by a factor of 1000, except the dimensions which you should multiply by a factor of 10. I guess that scraps my whole theory eh? Not so powerful after all.
The first cells give 400 milliwatts per cubic centimeter. Assuming your computer consumes on the order of 65 watts (which is probably more than it does consume even at full blast) you'd need 165 cubic centimeters of material, or a cube 5.5 cm on a side, or a 1x13x13 cm panel. That's not that big. If, as they claim, battery efficiency is improved by an order of magnitude, then you only need 16 ccs of battery. That ain't much - roughly the size of a "C" cell battery, if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, you would only be using a fraction of the power at any given time, and you can't turn the nukebatt off! So it makes more sense to use a smaller nukebatt have a normal battery that stores excess generation and delivers extra power when necessary. A well designed computer would scale demand when the battery is low. You could even allow it to charge off the mains or dump excess power onto the mains (how's that for a universal power supply?)
What's interesting is you can easily run your car on that sort of system too. I'll be conservative about it. Say you use 2 gallons of gas a day - thats 2.6x10^9 joules per 86,400 seconds, for an average demand of 30 kilowatts. You'd need 75,000 ccs to meet that demand at 0.4 watt/cc - equivalent to 18 gallons. At 4 watt/cc, you'd need a mere 2 gallons worth! Again, charging from or dumping to the mains gives you more flexibility, and in fact makes a lot of sense since your car would be generating power where you are using it, thus matching location of generation with location of demand and avoiding transmission inefficiencies. Plus a true electric vehicle would make far more efficient use of the electrical energy than an ICE makes of gasoline, even with the inefficiency of temporary battery storage, and would simpler besides.
Of course cost and availability of tritium is an issue, as is safety and proliferation. And heat dissipation should not be ignored. But imagine... never having to stop for gas again.
Let me be frank. As web browsers go, there is Internet Explorer, and then there are all the others. It is in Microsoft's best interest to ensure that a substantial fraction of websites work on only their browser, thus maintaining control over the web. The easiest way to do this is by making Explorer render pages in an idiosyncratic way that web designers choose to follow rather than ones that will work on other browsers. It is in all the other browsers' best interests to prevent this. The only fair way to do this is by rendering pages according to a common standard. Which already exists and is the product of years of careful consideration. And yet, few browsers can actually implement it! But the longer this situation continues the more time Microsoft has to solidify its position. And the other web browsers have only themselves to blame by not meeting their own common standard.
I don't know why it's so hard to render things correctly, but so far WebCore is one of the few to do it right. Even if they had to break a few rules to get there, they still have found success where others have not.
Perhaps next you can explain why modern military small arms still have bayonets?
For killing unarmed civilians and keeping mobs at bay. Bullets cost money and have weight - you're better off saving them for the few people that can shoot back at you. You can kill tons of people with a knife, as long as they aren't fighting back.
Hand-drawn and -lettered overheads are kind of his thing, even in this day and age of Powerpoint. Maybe had issues with both displaying and accessing the transparencies at the same time. As to why he would use photocopies of his own drawings I don't know.
I've been a fan of Penrose for a while. Somewhere along the way I ran across the title and concept of this book and put it on my Amazon wish list. But before I ordered it I decided to try checking it out at Barne's and Noble (I know, I'm a bastard).
So here I am looking across the P shelf, and I see The Emperor's New Mind, but not The Road to Reality. Then I realized that thing I thought was a dictionary next to it was the book I was looking for. Thus began my inner debate as to just how much time I was planning on devoting to the subject. After flipping through though, I confirmed that this was in fact the book I had been looking for for so long, the one that would finally bring me up to speed on all the subjects requisite to actually understanding modern research. So, it's on order.
But that's my point. iTunes music store can promote music, without the RIAA. If iTMS had a subscription service, they could couple that with user playlists. RIAA bands would then have no advantage over the indie bands. Of course, the industry still controls booking large venues...
QT is a framework, accessible from any program. I think the idea here is you can now store and play video from iTunes. It makes perfect sense. Audio jukebox -> video jukebox. Why not? The catch is video consists of large files you probably can't and don't keep around on the hard drive very long. This could be just for early adopters with gigabytes to spare.
But it could also foreshadow the rumored iTunes subscription service which must of necessity handle temporary audio files. Such a system could handle temporary VIDEO downloads just as easily - AKA, online rentals. Something the iTunes store could easily accomodate. This new feature may be to prepare for that release.
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As Sturgen pointed out, 90% of everything sucks. I am simply saying that not everything Miyazaki does is in the 10% that does not suck.
Your argument however is bizzare. None of those three steps is unique or unusual per se, and I never said they were. My point was that that was pretty much ALL that was going on in those Miyazaki films storywise, and no more - specifically, no significant plot development. Hence the frequent criticisms of pointlessness from critics who aren't totally wowed by the visuals or starving for non-Hollywoodness.
More to the point, you incorrectly took my comments as a blanket criticism of anime, when I was referring specifically to Miyazaki's works. Actually, he's pretty much the only guy in anime who makes movies with storytelling like that. It's somewhat avante-garde, and a signal of his status as an auteur.
For the record, I've watched more anime than you - somewhere around 500 different tv series, ova series, and movies, in their entirety - so don't lecture me. 90% of it sucks. When I look over it I see a vast wasteland of preposterous teen-oriented escapist fantasy, kiddy merchandising vehicles, mind-numbingly vapid exercises in fan service, and other such formulaic tripe. Existentialism is also wildly overrepresented and frequently shallow. There are in fact very few shows that could be called good or truly creative, and also very few actually geared towards an adult audience that wants more than panty shots.
For my money Satoshi Kon is better, and arguably on his way to becoming more popular that Miyazaki among adults.
Don't get me wrong - the animation quality of his films clearly beats everything else in the world hands down, he's got tons of imagination, the critics love him, and he's an institution in Japan. But his storytelling style is dull. Far too often his films go like this:
1) Protagonist(s) go somewhere they've never been before
2) Various unrelated showy magical stuff happens
3) The end
In other words there's little continuity or focus, and the storyline merely serves the visuals. I'm looking at you, Spirited Away, Totoro, and Kiki's Delivery Service. Such would appear to be the case with Howl's moving castle. Alternately, it's beat-you-over-the-head ecological fable (Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa).
Now that's not to say I haven't seen Miyazaki films that I liked - Castle in the Sky was a superior film, Castle of Cagliostro was the best of Lupin, and Porco Rosso had a sort of classic European feel to it. The trouble is the critics always go ga-ga over the visuals regardless of the other fundamentals (as they used to and still sometimes do for American blockbusters). So I'll be seeing Howl in the theaters, but I won't be recommending it to anybody until I do.
Hello.
Mail bomb.
Assassination.
Fertilizer.
Same-sex marriages.
Patagonia.
Nader for President.
What if you don't remember what exactly is in the file, or when you used it or name or whatever? What if you've forgotten, or never even realized it existed? And even if you should run across it, how would you know whether it was important or not? What about identical file names? What about they system files?
It will be too easy for files to get lost. Say you don't label something properly, or you change the label, or you forget the name, or the name is unmemorable - what will happen to the file? Just sit there on your disk taking up space, never to be seen again?
And how about old/less useful files that are unnecessarily included in searches, forcing you to read over more file names to find what you want?
One handy feature about folders I've (automatically or intentionally) organized things in is it makes it easy to go back and figure out what I no longer need, and delete it, thus freeing up disk space and reducing clutter. Spotlight is designed to GENERATE clutter.
Intel on Macs, Microsoft on PowerPC... what is this world coming to?
It's true much anime licensing and popularity in America - indeed the whole American Anime industry - stems from the free availability of fansubs and the BitTorrent swarms that help distribute them, but Naruto was not one of them. Naruto was clearly destined for a long-running anime series and inevitable licensing in America since about volume 2 of the manga, whether or not the fansubs were ever made. It is, dare I say it, the next Dragonball Z. In fact it'll be on Toonami in the fall. If only one anime series were to make it to American TV, this would be probably be it. The only thing holding up its licensing was probably the high price they were charging for it!
On top of that, the specific fansubbers of Naruto rely more on conventional IRC fileservers than BitTorrent than many other groups. So BitTorrent was not so important there either.
In fact, of all the anime which has made it to TV (aka the Adult Swim Action and Toonami line-ups), I can't think of any which were particularly "obscure". Pretty much all of them were major series from major studios in Japan too, and destined for the American Market. Fansubs and BT have certainly helped propel series onto DVD, but not TV yet.
Uh, biodiesel IS solar. Solar at well below 3% efficiency (conventional PV cells get ~15%). I'd have to crunch the numbers to be sure but I think you would do better generating synthetic fuel from atmospheric C02 using solar power and industrial processes directly.
I worry that this technology will somehow be used to obfuscate the fact that there are perfectly good ways of generating biodiesel without CO2-spewing power plants, thus covering up the whole advantage of carbon neutral systems.
Forgive me for being doubtful, but I wonder how auto that configuration actually will be...
On a large scale I'd be very worried about the effect, particularly the effect on currents and deep sea ecology.
Like wind energy, it's indirect solar, which is nice because you're harvesting the energy gathered from a large area in naturally concentrated form. But if you're drawing a significant fraction (or in the case of this system potentially more than it is actively collecting) you're going to have consequences. However a relative few installations which draw upon a negligible fraction of that energy should be OK. This sounds like an excellent way to make remote islands economically sustainable.
As for fusion power, I've seen research that suggests no human-scale system may be able to break even due to brehmstralung. Nuclear has issues, fossil fuel is unsustainable, wind hydro and ocean have potential environmental issues.
The best solution is solar, which is the ultimate source of all power anyway. Some folks claim that there's simply not enough room on earth to sustain our demand. If that's true it says a lot about our wastefulness. However, the best reply to that is "Who said anything about earth?" Space-based solar power is basically limitless, or at least can collect more power than the earth can dissipate as heat effectively. And unlike ground based systems, it can provide constant power regardless of weather, season, or time of day.
Beat me to it!
IPV6 will involve more digits/typing/remembering than IPV4. Of course sysadmins are reluctant.
Procedural synthesis and Level of Detail (AKA rendering vertex data on the fly from generated objects)? I'm reading the article, and I'm amazed most of this really, really obvious stuff wasn't being done already. guess the old consoles just didn't have the power.
1) Neither the xbox360 nor the ps3 are designed to have anything stack on top of it. The gamecube certainly didn't. No desire for people to have more than one system eh?
2) The xbox and its controller are clearly designed to integrate gaming with other uses of the console and television screen, particularly for use of the xbox live service. In particular there was a special button on the controller for it. PS3 does not appear to have an equivalent, which could be a serious mistake. However, their blu-ray drive will help draw in purchases.
Oops. You're totally right.
Well, multiply everything by a factor of 1000, except the dimensions which you should multiply by a factor of 10. I guess that scraps my whole theory eh? Not so powerful after all.
The first cells give 400 milliwatts per cubic centimeter. Assuming your computer consumes on the order of 65 watts (which is probably more than it does consume even at full blast) you'd need 165 cubic centimeters of material, or a cube 5.5 cm on a side, or a 1x13x13 cm panel. That's not that big. If, as they claim, battery efficiency is improved by an order of magnitude, then you only need 16 ccs of battery. That ain't much - roughly the size of a "C" cell battery, if I'm not mistaken.
Of course, you would only be using a fraction of the power at any given time, and you can't turn the nukebatt off! So it makes more sense to use a smaller nukebatt have a normal battery that stores excess generation and delivers extra power when necessary. A well designed computer would scale demand when the battery is low. You could even allow it to charge off the mains or dump excess power onto the mains (how's that for a universal power supply?)
What's interesting is you can easily run your car on that sort of system too. I'll be conservative about it. Say you use 2 gallons of gas a day - thats 2.6x10^9 joules per 86,400 seconds, for an average demand of 30 kilowatts. You'd need 75,000 ccs to meet that demand at 0.4 watt/cc - equivalent to 18 gallons. At 4 watt/cc, you'd need a mere 2 gallons worth! Again, charging from or dumping to the mains gives you more flexibility, and in fact makes a lot of sense since your car would be generating power where you are using it, thus matching location of generation with location of demand and avoiding transmission inefficiencies. Plus a true electric vehicle would make far more efficient use of the electrical energy than an ICE makes of gasoline, even with the inefficiency of temporary battery storage, and would simpler besides.
Of course cost and availability of tritium is an issue, as is safety and proliferation. And heat dissipation should not be ignored. But imagine... never having to stop for gas again.
Let me be frank. As web browsers go, there is Internet Explorer, and then there are all the others. It is in Microsoft's best interest to ensure that a substantial fraction of websites work on only their browser, thus maintaining control over the web. The easiest way to do this is by making Explorer render pages in an idiosyncratic way that web designers choose to follow rather than ones that will work on other browsers. It is in all the other browsers' best interests to prevent this. The only fair way to do this is by rendering pages according to a common standard. Which already exists and is the product of years of careful consideration. And yet, few browsers can actually implement it! But the longer this situation continues the more time Microsoft has to solidify its position. And the other web browsers have only themselves to blame by not meeting their own common standard.
I don't know why it's so hard to render things correctly, but so far WebCore is one of the few to do it right. Even if they had to break a few rules to get there, they still have found success where others have not.
Perhaps next you can explain why modern military small arms still have bayonets?
For killing unarmed civilians and keeping mobs at bay. Bullets cost money and have weight - you're better off saving them for the few people that can shoot back at you. You can kill tons of people with a knife, as long as they aren't fighting back.
Hand-drawn and -lettered overheads are kind of his thing, even in this day and age of Powerpoint. Maybe had issues with both displaying and accessing the transparencies at the same time. As to why he would use photocopies of his own drawings I don't know.
Did he use hand-drawn overheads?
I've been a fan of Penrose for a while. Somewhere along the way I ran across the title and concept of this book and put it on my Amazon wish list. But before I ordered it I decided to try checking it out at Barne's and Noble (I know, I'm a bastard).
So here I am looking across the P shelf, and I see The Emperor's New Mind, but not The Road to Reality. Then I realized that thing I thought was a dictionary next to it was the book I was looking for. Thus began my inner debate as to just how much time I was planning on devoting to the subject. After flipping through though, I confirmed that this was in fact the book I had been looking for for so long, the one that would finally bring me up to speed on all the subjects requisite to actually understanding modern research. So, it's on order.
But that's my point. iTunes music store can promote music, without the RIAA. If iTMS had a subscription service, they could couple that with user playlists. RIAA bands would then have no advantage over the indie bands. Of course, the industry still controls booking large venues...
Maybe because non-RIAA bands and labels can sell directly through iTunes, thus disrupting their monopoly severely?
QT is a framework, accessible from any program. I think the idea here is you can now store and play video from iTunes. It makes perfect sense. Audio jukebox -> video jukebox. Why not? The catch is video consists of large files you probably can't and don't keep around on the hard drive very long. This could be just for early adopters with gigabytes to spare.
But it could also foreshadow the rumored iTunes subscription service which must of necessity handle temporary audio files. Such a system could handle temporary VIDEO downloads just as easily - AKA, online rentals. Something the iTunes store could easily accomodate. This new feature may be to prepare for that release.