Well, I hate to say this, but the really essential stuff in Reboot is the 2nd half or so of Season 2, and then all of Season 3 (actually there's a fair amount of worthless stuff in Season 3, but it's mixed in too closely with the really kick-ass stuff to ignore)
But when I first saw the show on ABC I also thought it was stupid. D'oh!
As for the CGI - well, perhaps it can be excused by keeping in mind that the story is set within the 'computer world' previously described by Tron. Not cyberspace, which is a UI metaphor, but the lives of the various programs and such that make computers work. Obviously it gets stretched a lot....
Yeah but Suncoast is really expensive, and they never have sales. Cheaper to order online. Amazon, Buy, etc all carry a lot of anime titles too, and they're much less expensive.
Heh. The Patlabor _movies_ are extremely serious. And very, very good, though you shouldn't expect to see a lot of action.
The Patlabor TV series, on the other hand, is frequently comedic. At least much of it that I've seen. Still good, but not on the same level as the movies (particularly Patlabor Movie 2)
Then of course, there's the difficult to find, but hilarious Dirty Pair Project Eden. (in Japanese - the Streamline dub is awful) The Pair are always great;)
That's stupid. There's no law that says that I have to be receptive to advertising, even if I make use of something that is paid for through advertising revenues.
The Betamax case that the Supreme Court heard ~20 years ago makes this awfully clear, if you really need a reference. I don't actually bother with Junkbuster though. iCab filters stuff out very nicely all on it's own.
Well, I seem to remember reading this in "Tog on Interface." Wish I had my copy in a conveniently located state. Tog worked for Apple for years on UI, and so it's very likely that his book would have information like that.
A quick poke around asktog indicates that the Lisa team* came up with the one button mouse in 1981. It was important because NO ONE with the exception of a few scattered researchers at Apple, PARC and elsewhere had ever used a GUI before. It was important to get people to roughly understand how to use the system fast - like 20 minutes fast. A one button mouse was much easier than a multibutton mouse.
While nowadays a multibutton mouse may indeed be superior (most people get the idea of GUIs these days), Apple is still in the habit of selling to novices, for whom the 20 minute rule is still rather important.
*The Lisa team had a lot of UI designers. The Mac team, on the other hand, had a lot of graphic designers. Tog blames Jobs for this; fortunately much of the Lisa stuff got moved to the Mac. Personally I still am looking for screenshots of Jef Raskin's Canon Cat. It's supposed to be great, from what I've heard.
No one's saying it's illegal. Just that Disney is a bunch of rat bastards. Hell, I'm from Florida and I despise them. They've ruined the middle part of my home state.
If you want something that's borderline illegal, take a look at the Lion King vs. Jungle King contraversy.
Meh. When they did testing in the early 80's, it was found that people got confused, the more mouse buttons there were. Thus, the one button mouse.
If you _want_ more buttons, there are a million third-party ADB and USB mice out there. Go get one of those and a driver to program the extra buttons with. No one's stopping you.
NeXT ended up being popular in business. But their initial target markets were higher education and IIRC graphics. I loved the idea of DPS, but I couldn't afford a NeXT machine.
The Mac just had more of the software though. Framemaker and Freehand wasn't enough for the NeXT to succeed.
Well... I'm a graphic designer. I only needed one PCI slot. For a SCSI card, and that's only because there aren't yet a bunch of firewire CDRW drives. But just as the iMac popularized USB for peripherals that would otherwise use ADB, serial, SCSI and parallel ports, so are the more recent machines making firewire popular.
Move RAIDs and such onto MacOS X driven servers with gigabit ethernet and there's no need for them on desktops.
The guys who traditionally need many many slots aren't actually graphic designers, but video editors. However, they would probably love the SMP machines, which are more expandable anyway. (provided that they haven't moved to unix boxes or nt or something)
For people who need more than an iMac but don't need expandability, which is a damn large segment of the Mac population, the cube makes a lot of sense. If I wasn't so poor (expect to be using a G3/400 B&W for a few more years) I'd get one. It sounds great.
Why didn't you mention Cowboy Bebop? Three very nice DVDs are out now - three more coming in the next few months. Brilliant series, up there with Eva, Esca, the Patlabor movies and Mac+.
Not to mention the classic Castle of Cagliostro.
Also, while I know it's an old favorite, the animation on the earlier BGCs hasn't aged well. I still love it, but I doubt that it would be a good introduction to anime for most people.
Naw - there is no new column. We're just in a period of transition.
The Cube IS the professional desktop. Look at what's happening to the older G4 minitowers in the Yosemite cases; they're getting additional processors. They're getting gigabit ethernet. And a BSD-based SMP-capable OS is right around the corner. The older style of G4 is going to become a line of servers, mark my words.
With much stuff capable of being offloaded onto the servers, or accessable externally via firewire (heh. many small peripherals working together) the computer doesn't have to be a giant monster anymore.
However, the Cube seems to me (first impression) to be somewhat overpriced. We'll see, though. I don't want to make firm decisions until I can mess around with one in the flesh. Maybe some of the stores around here will have some soon...
Gah! The NeXT cube was a horrendous manufacturing nightmare. There's plenty of juicy details in "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" but IIRC notable problems were:
*Steve insisted that it be a PERFECT cube. Normally there would be an inperceptable slant so that it could drop out of the mold. Special molds had to be developed at great expense to get the cubes out
*It had to be made out of magnesium, and it had to be black. Magnesium is not all that easy to work with; getting paint on it is even harder. Getting black paint on in such a way that it doesn't reveal all of the normal, minor defects in the case (e.g. teeny dents) was really tough. They had to talk to a lot of car manufacturers about it.
*The production facility had to be presentable so that when people who ordered NeXT cubes came over to the FACTORY to pick them up (yeah, this happens all the time in the computing world) they would be impressed. Particularly the production line had to move in a particular direction. It turned out that it didn't, and _everything_ had to be rearranged so that it looked good to Steve. Oh, and no one ever came to the factory to pick up cubes.
Nope, that's about right. Pinball machines have had a terrible history of getting banned. Because they were used for gambling. Kind of like Pachinko machines, IIRC.
I have no idea. What asciiMac does is, it takes the entire bitmapped display and converts it to colored ASCII on the fly, depending on the average luminance and color of the region each character fits into. Certainly you can't read anything on the screen - the overall luminance of the BITMAP of, say, an 'X' is unlikely to be represented by an X via asciiMac.
It was written for MacHack '98 and won first place. Very impressive, especially since you can even play QuickTime movies under it.
That's probably because E-Bay's prices are insufficiently creative to qualify for copyrights. Phone books traditionally can't be copyrighted either - they're just names and addresses and numbers.
Still this is all pretty bogus. E-Bay should charge a transaction fee on each auction, mediate the transfer of funds (holding it in escrow) and be happy to have other sites link to it.
Server my six-colored hairy butt! MacOS X Server was intended for the server market and is little more than NeXT software with a different logo. I've messed around with a copy, and it's ok, but no replacement for day to day work.
OS X is intended to be a consumer OS. (with handy server functionality, but that's secondary) For us Mac users, that means a GUI which is at least no worse than what we have now, and finally a stable OS.
However, the Woz would have remained at HP and never gone on to do anything with his microcomputer designs. On the whole, while I don't like Jobs either, I grew up on Apples.
Sweet... I would love to get a complete set of Reboot episodes (and the upcoming movie too) on DVD. The only thing cooler would be the Utterly Definitive Edition of The Wizard of Speed and Time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hate to say this, but the really essential stuff in Reboot is the 2nd half or so of Season 2, and then all of Season 3 (actually there's a fair amount of worthless stuff in Season 3, but it's mixed in too closely with the really kick-ass stuff to ignore)
But when I first saw the show on ABC I also thought it was stupid. D'oh!
As for the CGI - well, perhaps it can be excused by keeping in mind that the story is set within the 'computer world' previously described by Tron. Not cyberspace, which is a UI metaphor, but the lives of the various programs and such that make computers work. Obviously it gets stretched a lot....
Yeah but Suncoast is really expensive, and they never have sales. Cheaper to order online. Amazon, Buy, etc all carry a lot of anime titles too, and they're much less expensive.
Heh. The Patlabor _movies_ are extremely serious. And very, very good, though you shouldn't expect to see a lot of action.
;)
The Patlabor TV series, on the other hand, is frequently comedic. At least much of it that I've seen. Still good, but not on the same level as the movies (particularly Patlabor Movie 2)
Then of course, there's the difficult to find, but hilarious Dirty Pair Project Eden. (in Japanese - the Streamline dub is awful) The Pair are always great
That's stupid. There's no law that says that I have to be receptive to advertising, even if I make use of something that is paid for through advertising revenues.
The Betamax case that the Supreme Court heard ~20 years ago makes this awfully clear, if you really need a reference. I don't actually bother with Junkbuster though. iCab filters stuff out very nicely all on it's own.
Well, I seem to remember reading this in "Tog on Interface." Wish I had my copy in a conveniently located state. Tog worked for Apple for years on UI, and so it's very likely that his book would have information like that.
A quick poke around asktog indicates that the Lisa team* came up with the one button mouse in 1981. It was important because NO ONE with the exception of a few scattered researchers at Apple, PARC and elsewhere had ever used a GUI before. It was important to get people to roughly understand how to use the system fast - like 20 minutes fast. A one button mouse was much easier than a multibutton mouse.
While nowadays a multibutton mouse may indeed be superior (most people get the idea of GUIs these days), Apple is still in the habit of selling to novices, for whom the 20 minute rule is still rather important.
*The Lisa team had a lot of UI designers. The Mac team, on the other hand, had a lot of graphic designers. Tog blames Jobs for this; fortunately much of the Lisa stuff got moved to the Mac. Personally I still am looking for screenshots of Jef Raskin's Canon Cat. It's supposed to be great, from what I've heard.
And they're already beginning to show up on ebay. Heh.
Yes and now I _really_ feel the need to go out, buy three new iMacs and name them after the Powerpuff Girls ;)
(waiting for the glow-in-the-dark iMac...)
No one's saying it's illegal. Just that Disney is a bunch of rat bastards. Hell, I'm from Florida and I despise them. They've ruined the middle part of my home state.
If you want something that's borderline illegal, take a look at the Lion King vs. Jungle King contraversy.
Meh. When they did testing in the early 80's, it was found that people got confused, the more mouse buttons there were. Thus, the one button mouse.
If you _want_ more buttons, there are a million third-party ADB and USB mice out there. Go get one of those and a driver to program the extra buttons with. No one's stopping you.
Only now that part of HP is part of Agilent.
Yes, Agilent, with the only name and logo crappier than Lucent and the Coffee Mug Stain.
NeXT ended up being popular in business. But their initial target markets were higher education and IIRC graphics. I loved the idea of DPS, but I couldn't afford a NeXT machine.
The Mac just had more of the software though. Framemaker and Freehand wasn't enough for the NeXT to succeed.
They re-released The Little Mermaid in theaters at the same time as when Anastasia came out.
This is a common Disney tactic.
Well... I'm a graphic designer. I only needed one PCI slot. For a SCSI card, and that's only because there aren't yet a bunch of firewire CDRW drives. But just as the iMac popularized USB for peripherals that would otherwise use ADB, serial, SCSI and parallel ports, so are the more recent machines making firewire popular.
Move RAIDs and such onto MacOS X driven servers with gigabit ethernet and there's no need for them on desktops.
The guys who traditionally need many many slots aren't actually graphic designers, but video editors. However, they would probably love the SMP machines, which are more expandable anyway. (provided that they haven't moved to unix boxes or nt or something)
For people who need more than an iMac but don't need expandability, which is a damn large segment of the Mac population, the cube makes a lot of sense. If I wasn't so poor (expect to be using a G3/400 B&W for a few more years) I'd get one. It sounds great.
The guys who traditionally need a bunch of cards
Why didn't you mention Cowboy Bebop? Three very nice DVDs are out now - three more coming in the next few months. Brilliant series, up there with Eva, Esca, the Patlabor movies and Mac+.
Not to mention the classic Castle of Cagliostro.
Also, while I know it's an old favorite, the animation on the earlier BGCs hasn't aged well. I still love it, but I doubt that it would be a good introduction to anime for most people.
Naw - there is no new column. We're just in a period of transition.
The Cube IS the professional desktop. Look at what's happening to the older G4 minitowers in the Yosemite cases; they're getting additional processors. They're getting gigabit ethernet. And a BSD-based SMP-capable OS is right around the corner. The older style of G4 is going to become a line of servers, mark my words.
With much stuff capable of being offloaded onto the servers, or accessable externally via firewire (heh. many small peripherals working together) the computer doesn't have to be a giant monster anymore.
However, the Cube seems to me (first impression) to be somewhat overpriced. We'll see, though. I don't want to make firm decisions until I can mess around with one in the flesh. Maybe some of the stores around here will have some soon...
Gah! The NeXT cube was a horrendous manufacturing nightmare. There's plenty of juicy details in "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" but IIRC notable problems were:
*Steve insisted that it be a PERFECT cube. Normally there would be an inperceptable slant so that it could drop out of the mold. Special molds had to be developed at great expense to get the cubes out
*It had to be made out of magnesium, and it had to be black. Magnesium is not all that easy to work with; getting paint on it is even harder. Getting black paint on in such a way that it doesn't reveal all of the normal, minor defects in the case (e.g. teeny dents) was really tough. They had to talk to a lot of car manufacturers about it.
*The production facility had to be presentable so that when people who ordered NeXT cubes came over to the FACTORY to pick them up (yeah, this happens all the time in the computing world) they would be impressed. Particularly the production line had to move in a particular direction. It turned out that it didn't, and _everything_ had to be rearranged so that it looked good to Steve. Oh, and no one ever came to the factory to pick up cubes.
Who says 'abysmal failure?' He probably meant to say 'dismal failure' but got the b and the d mixed up.
Nope, that's about right. Pinball machines have had a terrible history of getting banned. Because they were used for gambling. Kind of like Pachinko machines, IIRC.
I have no idea. What asciiMac does is, it takes the entire bitmapped display and converts it to colored ASCII on the fly, depending on the average luminance and color of the region each character fits into. Certainly you can't read anything on the screen - the overall luminance of the BITMAP of, say, an 'X' is unlikely to be represented by an X via asciiMac.
It was written for MacHack '98 and won first place. Very impressive, especially since you can even play QuickTime movies under it.
I agree - it's got to be OS 'ecks'
"Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer 'extortion.' The 'X' makes it sound cool." - Bender, Futurama
I remember running ASCII Mac a couple years ago. Slow as hell, very funny and by far the most useless thing ever.
;)
I loved it for the 2.3 minutes that it was on my system
That's probably because E-Bay's prices are insufficiently creative to qualify for copyrights. Phone books traditionally can't be copyrighted either - they're just names and addresses and numbers.
Still this is all pretty bogus. E-Bay should charge a transaction fee on each auction, mediate the transfer of funds (holding it in escrow) and be happy to have other sites link to it.
Server my six-colored hairy butt! MacOS X Server was intended for the server market and is little more than NeXT software with a different logo. I've messed around with a copy, and it's ok, but no replacement for day to day work.
OS X is intended to be a consumer OS. (with handy server functionality, but that's secondary) For us Mac users, that means a GUI which is at least no worse than what we have now, and finally a stable OS.
However, the Woz would have remained at HP and never gone on to do anything with his microcomputer designs. On the whole, while I don't like Jobs either, I grew up on Apples.
Sweet... I would love to get a complete set of Reboot episodes (and the upcoming movie too) on DVD. The only thing cooler would be the Utterly Definitive Edition of The Wizard of Speed and Time.