I'd like to take this moment to advise anyone who thinks anime is "deep" or "mature" to step back and take a long, hard look at themselves.
Hey, we all have our bad habits, just fess up. I myself enjoy pro wrestling, Mike Tyson's punch-out, and redhead lesbian pr0n. And I'm okay with that. I don't try to convince others that these habits have any cultural value, because they probably don't.
To help you along your way, I've written a short play:
Anime, by Gizzmonic
ANIME GUY #1: Hey you, Anime Guy #2. I don't like you!
ANIME GUY #2: Well, I don't like you either!
ANIME GUY #1: Shall we fight?
ANIME GUY #2: No, I got a better idea. Let's like, grunt for a few minutes, okay?
ANIME GUY #1: GRRRRRRRR!!!
ANIME GUY #2: GRRRRRRRR!!!
Five minutes later:
ANIME GUY #1: Boy, I'm really not moving while I grunt. There's a few lines moving in the background though. Did I have a stroke?
ANIME GUY #2: Nope, you're just poorly animated. Let's try something new-here, I'll zap you with this laser!
ANIME GUY #1: Won't that hurt?
ANIME GUY #2: Nope, but it sure will blow up some buildings that don't appear to be anywhere near you!
ANIME GUY #1: Hmm. This is boring.
ANIME GUY #2: It's not boring, here, I'll disembowel you!
ANIME GUY #1: Zounds. I am disemboweled. (dies)
ANIME GUY #2: You are dead, and now your spirit will become one with the land. You see, mankind shouldn't tamper with the forces of nature, otherwise they could unleash a great evil!
SMOKEY THE BEAR: That's right, kids! And remember, stamp all fires dead out!
You know, sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder about that. God, it makes such difference in my life. If only Linus got to know me...we'd be friends, and we could hang out and play video games. Maybe he'd let me work on the kernel or something. That would just be so coooolllll....
Nintendo is not rich enough to mass manufacture its own DVD mechanisms. I'd bet my wife that the Gamecube DVD drives are just stock Panasonic DVD mechanisms in smaller packages, with a firmware or program that tells them which way to spin.
Compare this to the Dreamcast which used a proprietary "GD-ROM" technology which was considered immune to piracy. Dreamcasts were actually made of stock Yamaha CD-ROM mechanisms. Of course it was cracked about 7 months after the DC's US launch. Hackers just made a program that allowed them to access the program as a normal CD-ROM.
Forget their bad software (which has improved a lot over the years). Forget their strongarm (and illegal) business tactics.
For people who have been with Bungie since the original marathon, this is totally proof of MS's evil.
Bungie brought great gaming in the dark days of the Mac...they put twists on the FPS that were later imitated by the big boys at id (such as enemies getting mad at each other).
As soon as Bungie got acquired by MS, they rushed the terrible Oni out the door (obviously half-finished) and went Xbox only. I might have to buy one of those hideous green beasts (used, of course) just to play that excellent game called Halo.
On a completely unrelated topic, has anyone noticed that there's something different about the karma? It's now "excellent" on mine instead of a number. Anyone else getting this?
I hope this isn't permanent...I like to keep my karma around 30 (close to my age:). If it got too high , I would burn it, and it would make me feel younger:).
Now I'm stuck with "Excellent," which was great on my first-grade conduct report, but seems a bit off for Slashdot. I need the objectivity of numbers!
What would the Hindus do if their karma wasn't measured in numbers? They'd have no idea if they were being reborn as a flea or a donkey!:)
But spielberg did get the nod to direct the Off-Broadway musical "Petrified by Hot Grits," starring Natalie Portman and Slashdot's own Commander Taco! When reached for comment, Taco said, "Pour some hot grits down my pants!!!! Oops , I forgot to click "post anonymously!"
if you're a design/interface coder trying to exculpate yourself. Why worry about making the UI better? It's the @$#% users' faults, they never read the manual!
Video games do pretty well considering no one ever reads their manuals. Maybe you should try ripping off the UI from some popular console games or something!
That "complete Toy Operating System" known as Mac OS 9 and before is still used by millions of professionals every day in the fields of desktop publishing, video editing, compositing, etc...
How unlike a certain "GNU/OS" which was designed by a bunch of unemployed hackers and only lives in the professional world when moron zealots or cheap bastards decide to use it in place of more established UNIX OS's.
Inevitable death of commodity PC
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We're seeing the death of the commodity PC. There's just no money in it anymore, so Microsoft is coming up with this "secure" OS and strictly regulated approach to hardware in order to squeeze some more dough out. We've already seen Dell and Hpaq going down the tubes (relying on stuff like tying contracts to Dellnet, 24 hour tech support, etc to make money).
Even Mom and Pop PC shops are in on these shenangins (one of my old favorites is now becoming a 'technology consulting firm'). If Microsoft tells them to jump, you bet they'll follow..the same goes with small hardware makers like D-Link and Intel.
In a world of increasingly proprietary hardware, the only solution is buying from a company you can trust. I would suggest a Sun box or Mac for your next PC...or you'll probably have to do a lot of hacking just to get it to play MP3s.
For anyone looking for anime (and even for those who isn't) you might want to try your local Yellow Pages. I'm afraid most anime places are a bit technophobic and slow to get on the web (too much competition from P2p I'm sure;)
Anyway, if you're looking for an anime place near you and you can't find it online, you should probably try the yellow pages. Your town's Chamber of Commerce might be of help too.
Also, I can't confirm this, but some progressive libraries have anime DVD's for rent on the West Coast or so I've heard (probaly out where weed is legal;:). YMMV:)
Ren and Stimpy just isn't that great. The creator (John Kric) can't stop calling himself a genius, and even accused Trey Parker and Matt Stone of stealing the idea for Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo from him.
Face it, Ren and Stimpy never had any characters...it was just these ugly animals in "funny" situations...nothing really happened besides Ren picking his nose and Stimpy using the catbox. How can you watch one 30 minute episode of that, let alone 8?
Replace Renderman with a fuckin' PC video card? Maybe if the folks at LucasArts were weaned on paint thinner.
This sounds like your typical PC blowhard who believes his DVD player, Playstation, telephone, and eventually his computer will be replaced by a graphics accelerator.
Hey, you might need some justification for dropping $400 on that latest waffle iron from ATi, but you'll get none here.
And as for "improv animation," blow it out your ass. The reason that company quit is that it looks like shit. The closest you're going to get to that is games like Samba de Amio and Dance Dance Revolution.
Lastly, Mr. Dean Siren, what's your relationship with Strange Company and Machinima? Cause this sounds an awful lot like a puff piece from a PR flack...
The Sorenson codec has been the source of so many complaints on Slashdot.
Windows/Mac people say that Linux won't be a key player on the desktop until it can play movies encoded with Sorenson.
Linux people complain that Apple (or Sorenson) is denying Linux's credibility by withholding Quicktime Player...bad form from a company who's new OS was mostly poached from the opensource FreeBSD
Well, now that someone has provided the Sorenson codec through emulation, people will realize that it doesn't make much of a fucking difference either way, does it? I guess that means some people will have to find something better to whine about...
So, anyone who disparages the use of open source software is a "troll"? That makes it pretty easy to ignore things you might not want to hear, doesn't it?
I hope this didn't enrage anyone too much. I mean, who actually thinks that open source will conquer all proprietary software?
The author writes this from a very moderate point of view, and he certainly lists plenty of advantages to open source. However, he's right on the money about its disadvantages...actually, he's pretty darn nice. He doesn't even mention the problems that most open source hackers seem to have with creating software that can be used by non-computer experts.
The open source movement is too broad to be characterized by one point of view. If I had to break it down into two I would say it was these two archetypes:
1)People who think (or know) they can do it better than Microsoft, Adobe, etc.
2)Ideologues who believe "Open Source" as an ideology will spread and overtake all software alternatives.
Now, what good are ideologues for open source? It's a bad idea to convince people to use Linux for the sake of it.
My neighbor is the type of guy who thinks he's l33t because he runs a pirated version of Windows XP professional instead of Windows 98. He installed RedHat and it didn't last a week on his hard drive. You know why? Because with KDE and all the Windows ripoff stuff it has, he expected it to act just like Windows. He wasn't prepared for a different cut and paste, misbehaving X apps that take up half your screen, and odd problems with the USB bus.
This guy, who would be qualified as a "power user" by most demographic research, now thinks of Linux as a second-rate, broken Windows because some guy at his office couldn't stop telling him how great "Free Software" was. He'll probably never run anything but Windows again.
This is why ideologues are bad for open source. They make bombastic promises that won't stand up under scrutiny, such as "Linux is better than Windows in all cases," and they generally expose the nuttiness of the whole movement.
We need people who are more willing to promote open-source from its current merits, as hobbyists, gamers, and enthusiasts. They shouldn't be wearing a political banner on their arm. Pragmatism is what made America great, and it's a must in this situation.
Actually digital betacam(or digi-beta as we in the industry like to call it) already exists.
From the technical glossary of video terms:
Digital Betacam
Digital successor to the venerable Betacam SP format. Introduced by Sony in 1993, uses physically similar half-inch cassettes. Camcorders with 40-minute capacity are available, making Digital Betacam the first component digital ENG (electronic news gathering) format. Digital Betacam units play back, but do not record analogue Beta SP tapes.
So some hotshot Ferrari-drivin' game developer who makes more money than God likes to buy video cards every week to compare 'em?
You know what? What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates?
you know, bob down at the creek is like: "Hey, I caught this lobster, and it's scurrying abilities are really great, but the sloppy curvature of its claws really kills it for me..." and then slim replies, "Well, shit, I'm gonna overclock my lobster boat and catch so many lobsters they're gonna elect me King of Red Lobster! And it's got bump-mapping too!"
My point being: You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card, and dontcha forget itBR>
It seems that Intel is redoubling its efforts to squash those upstart rebels at AMD. If Intel eventually triumphs, we are looking at a very bleak future in high performance CPUs.
What happened to all the other high performance processors? MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC? They are/were all attached to high-performance UNIX workstations.
And what happened to those high-performance boxes? Ask the IT dude who's firing up his handbuilt Dual Athlon running Red Hat 7.2.
It's bad enough that the decrepit x86 architecture has lasted this long. With only Intel around, they will extend its lifetime indefinitately, filling our lives with overheating chips that run at twice the Mhz with half the performance...
Was this post a joke? Obviously the divide between "amateur filmmakers" and Hollywood production values is shrinking every day.
35 mm is prohibitively expensive to shoot on without major $$$ because of development costs. The MPAA doesn't have a monopoly on anything-people just don't look at the alternatives enough. This is a war of ideas that can be won.
Iridium is just one more example of Motorola overreaching its bounds. Like the classic manic depressive, Mot has grandiose plans but lacks the wherewithal to carry them to fruition.
The PowerPC lags behind its Intel and AMD competitors despite IBM's remarkable innovations in fabricating technology. The cellphone market, once Motorola's bread and butter, has been taken by the younger and hungrier Nokia. And we won't even get into the allegations of Motorola selling parts to make landmines to governments like Indonesia and Pakistan.
Motorola needs a drastic change in management, or it's not going to be around much longer. Last week I convinced my grandmother to dump all her Mot stock and go with Big Blue. I offer the same advice to all of you...
When I first looked at this book I was so excited. It would give me the excuse I would need to play with my LEGOS once again. It even has a cute LEGO doggie on the cover. Wait a moment, that cute doggie uses two LEGO Mindstorms kits. It has two RCXs.
Excuse me, are you sure you didn't just take your 6th grade English "Tom Sawyer" book report and do a find and replace with LEGO Mindstorms? If not, I would file this review under "marginally literate" and suggest an immediate rewrite.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, we all have our bad habits, just fess up. I myself enjoy pro wrestling, Mike Tyson's punch-out, and redhead lesbian pr0n. And I'm okay with that. I don't try to convince others that these habits have any cultural value, because they probably don't.
To help you along your way, I've written a short play:
Anime, by Gizzmonic
ANIME GUY #1: Hey you, Anime Guy #2. I don't like you!
ANIME GUY #2: Well, I don't like you either!
ANIME GUY #1: Shall we fight?
ANIME GUY #2: No, I got a better idea. Let's like, grunt for a few minutes, okay?
ANIME GUY #1: GRRRRRRRR!!!
ANIME GUY #2: GRRRRRRRR!!!
Five minutes later:
ANIME GUY #1: Boy, I'm really not moving while I grunt. There's a few lines moving in the background though. Did I have a stroke?
ANIME GUY #2: Nope, you're just poorly animated. Let's try something new-here, I'll zap you with this laser!
ANIME GUY #1: Won't that hurt?
ANIME GUY #2: Nope, but it sure will blow up some buildings that don't appear to be anywhere near you!
ANIME GUY #1: Hmm. This is boring.
ANIME GUY #2: It's not boring, here, I'll disembowel you!
ANIME GUY #1: Zounds. I am disemboweled. (dies)
ANIME GUY #2: You are dead, and now your spirit will become one with the land. You see, mankind shouldn't tamper with the forces of nature, otherwise they could unleash a great evil!
SMOKEY THE BEAR: That's right, kids! And remember, stamp all fires dead out!
ANIME GUY #2: The power is yours!
You know, sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder about that. God, it makes such difference in my life. If only Linus got to know me...we'd be friends, and we could hang out and play video games. Maybe he'd let me work on the kernel or something. That would just be so coooolllll....
Nintendo is not rich enough to mass manufacture its own DVD mechanisms. I'd bet my wife that the Gamecube DVD drives are just stock Panasonic DVD mechanisms in smaller packages, with a firmware or program that tells them which way to spin.
Compare this to the Dreamcast which used a proprietary "GD-ROM" technology which was considered immune to piracy. Dreamcasts were actually made of stock Yamaha CD-ROM mechanisms. Of course it was cracked about 7 months after the DC's US launch. Hackers just made a program that allowed them to access the program as a normal CD-ROM.
id Software is at the "peak of gaming" like Britney Spears is at the peak of womanhood.
For people who have been with Bungie since the original marathon, this is totally proof of MS's evil.
Bungie brought great gaming in the dark days of the Mac...they put twists on the FPS that were later imitated by the big boys at id (such as enemies getting mad at each other).
As soon as Bungie got acquired by MS, they rushed the terrible Oni out the door (obviously half-finished) and went Xbox only. I might have to buy one of those hideous green beasts (used, of course) just to play that excellent game called Halo.
On a completely unrelated topic, has anyone noticed that there's something different about the karma? It's now "excellent" on mine instead of a number. Anyone else getting this?
I hope this isn't permanent...I like to keep my karma around 30 (close to my age :). If it got too high , I would burn it, and it would make me feel younger :).
Now I'm stuck with "Excellent," which was great on my first-grade conduct report, but seems a bit off for Slashdot. I need the objectivity of numbers!
What would the Hindus do if their karma wasn't measured in numbers? They'd have no idea if they were being reborn as a flea or a donkey! :)
But spielberg did get the nod to direct the Off-Broadway musical "Petrified by Hot Grits," starring Natalie Portman and Slashdot's own Commander Taco! When reached for comment, Taco said, "Pour some hot grits down my pants!!!! Oops , I forgot to click "post anonymously!"
if you're a design/interface coder trying to exculpate yourself. Why worry about making the UI better? It's the @$#% users' faults, they never read the manual!
Video games do pretty well considering no one ever reads their manuals. Maybe you should try ripping off the UI from some popular console games or something!
How unlike a certain "GNU/OS" which was designed by a bunch of unemployed hackers and only lives in the professional world when moron zealots or cheap bastards decide to use it in place of more established UNIX OS's.
Even Mom and Pop PC shops are in on these shenangins (one of my old favorites is now becoming a 'technology consulting firm'). If Microsoft tells them to jump, you bet they'll follow..the same goes with small hardware makers like D-Link and Intel.
In a world of increasingly proprietary hardware, the only solution is buying from a company you can trust. I would suggest a Sun box or Mac for your next PC...or you'll probably have to do a lot of hacking just to get it to play MP3s.
For anyone looking for anime (and even for those who isn't) you might want to try your local Yellow Pages. I'm afraid most anime places are a bit technophobic and slow to get on the web (too much competition from P2p I'm sure ;)
:). YMMV :)
Anyway, if you're looking for an anime place near you and you can't find it online, you should probably try the yellow pages. Your town's Chamber of Commerce might be of help too.
Also, I can't confirm this, but some progressive libraries have anime DVD's for rent on the West Coast or so I've heard (probaly out where weed is legal;
Face it, Ren and Stimpy never had any characters...it was just these ugly animals in "funny" situations...nothing really happened besides Ren picking his nose and Stimpy using the catbox. How can you watch one 30 minute episode of that, let alone 8?
Replace Renderman with a fuckin' PC video card? Maybe if the folks at LucasArts were weaned on paint thinner.
This sounds like your typical PC blowhard who believes his DVD player, Playstation, telephone, and eventually his computer will be replaced by a graphics accelerator.
Hey, you might need some justification for dropping $400 on that latest waffle iron from ATi, but you'll get none here.
And as for "improv animation," blow it out your ass. The reason that company quit is that it looks like shit. The closest you're going to get to that is games like Samba de Amio and Dance Dance Revolution.
Lastly, Mr. Dean Siren, what's your relationship with Strange Company and Machinima? Cause this sounds an awful lot like a puff piece from a PR flack...
Windows/Mac people say that Linux won't be a key player on the desktop until it can play movies encoded with Sorenson.
Linux people complain that Apple (or Sorenson) is denying Linux's credibility by withholding Quicktime Player...bad form from a company who's new OS was mostly poached from the opensource FreeBSD
Well, now that someone has provided the Sorenson codec through emulation, people will realize that it doesn't make much of a fucking difference either way, does it? I guess that means some people will have to find something better to whine about...
Coin sized disc? Can I use them at the peep show instead of tokens?
Uh...what did you just do? Is your sig some sort of hint?
So, anyone who disparages the use of open source software is a "troll"? That makes it pretty easy to ignore things you might not want to hear, doesn't it?
The author writes this from a very moderate point of view, and he certainly lists plenty of advantages to open source. However, he's right on the money about its disadvantages...actually, he's pretty darn nice. He doesn't even mention the problems that most open source hackers seem to have with creating software that can be used by non-computer experts.
The open source movement is too broad to be characterized by one point of view. If I had to break it down into two I would say it was these two archetypes:
Now, what good are ideologues for open source? It's a bad idea to convince people to use Linux for the sake of it.
My neighbor is the type of guy who thinks he's l33t because he runs a pirated version of Windows XP professional instead of Windows 98. He installed RedHat and it didn't last a week on his hard drive. You know why? Because with KDE and all the Windows ripoff stuff it has, he expected it to act just like Windows. He wasn't prepared for a different cut and paste, misbehaving X apps that take up half your screen, and odd problems with the USB bus.
This guy, who would be qualified as a "power user" by most demographic research, now thinks of Linux as a second-rate, broken Windows because some guy at his office couldn't stop telling him how great "Free Software" was. He'll probably never run anything but Windows again.
This is why ideologues are bad for open source. They make bombastic promises that won't stand up under scrutiny, such as "Linux is better than Windows in all cases," and they generally expose the nuttiness of the whole movement.
We need people who are more willing to promote open-source from its current merits, as hobbyists, gamers, and enthusiasts. They shouldn't be wearing a political banner on their arm. Pragmatism is what made America great, and it's a must in this situation.
From the technical glossary of video terms:
Digital Betacam
Digital successor to the venerable Betacam SP format. Introduced by Sony in 1993, uses physically similar half-inch cassettes.
Camcorders with 40-minute capacity are available, making Digital Betacam the first component digital ENG (electronic news
gathering) format. Digital Betacam units play back, but do not record analogue Beta SP tapes.
I reclaim this first post for myself. Not for ACs, or for CLITs, but for myself. Call me selfish...
You know what? What if people were obsessed with lobsters the way that these guys were with fill rates?
you know, bob down at the creek is like: "Hey, I caught this lobster, and it's scurrying abilities are really great, but the sloppy curvature of its claws really kills it for me..." and then slim replies, "Well, shit, I'm gonna overclock my lobster boat and catch so many lobsters they're gonna elect me King of Red Lobster! And it's got bump-mapping too!"
My point being: You can stay up too late and have your weird z-buffered, anti-aliased dreams, but you can't get back that $400 you just dropped on the latest Bligblagdoodlehopper of a card, and dontcha forget itBR>
What happened to all the other high performance processors? MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC? They are/were all attached to high-performance UNIX workstations.
And what happened to those high-performance boxes? Ask the IT dude who's firing up his handbuilt Dual Athlon running Red Hat 7.2.
It's bad enough that the decrepit x86 architecture has lasted this long. With only Intel around, they will extend its lifetime indefinitately, filling our lives with overheating chips that run at twice the Mhz with half the performance...
35 mm is prohibitively expensive to shoot on without major $$$ because of development costs. The MPAA doesn't have a monopoly on anything-people just don't look at the alternatives enough. This is a war of ideas that can be won.
The PowerPC lags behind its Intel and AMD competitors despite IBM's remarkable innovations in fabricating technology. The cellphone market, once Motorola's bread and butter, has been taken by the younger and hungrier Nokia. And we won't even get into the allegations of Motorola selling parts to make landmines to governments like Indonesia and Pakistan.
Motorola needs a drastic change in management, or it's not going to be around much longer. Last week I convinced my grandmother to dump all her Mot stock and go with Big Blue. I offer the same advice to all of you...
Excuse me, are you sure you didn't just take your 6th grade English "Tom Sawyer" book report and do a find and replace with LEGO Mindstorms? If not, I would file this review under "marginally literate" and suggest an immediate rewrite.
Leave me out of this. I ain't goin' near that craggy skank.