I don't know if production is Japan is a requirement, but originally spoken in Japanese is not. For instance, the movie Vampire Hunter D, Bloodlust is considered anime and the dialog was done in English (even for the Japanese release). FWIW, WHD: B is a decent flick, and worth the price of a movie ticket. It's not of the calibre of the greats, but still pretty good.
BlackGriffen
Author Somewhat Off...
on
NY Times on Anime
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The piece was interesting, not for it's insights in to anime (it had none for an anime fan), but for it's insights in to the author's own cultural biases. For instance, the author claims that the main character in Ghost in the Shell questions whether she is "man, woman or even human." The major never questioned her gender, only her status as human. Basically, I'm saying that you shouldn't put too much stock in this article (other than the overall message that anime can be good, too), because the author was heavily influenced by his/her biases.
I've always aid that great art is great not because a person can read it, but because it can read a person. You can tell a lot about a person and his/her basic assumptions by how they interpret a work of art. It just goes to show that anime can be great art, too.
I can understand the rationale behind the decision, but abandoning a market that big is dangerous and foolish. Consider what happened to Word Perfect. The only market they abandoned to M$ was Macintosh users. Partly because of that, Word was able to fully develop in a space where it had no competition, and expand in to other markets. There were other factors, of course, but it makes my point: give the competition a space to grow in, and it will grow. Perhaps the Gimp will, with the addition of thousands of Asian hackers, finally mature past Photoshop. Even worse for Adobe would be if a company (like Macromedia) took advantage of this and kicked their butt.
You don't know a darn thing about how ratings are calculated, do you? There's this company called Neilson (spelling?) that randomly selects people to monitor to determine their viewing habits, and use statistics to determine the rest. The people who are being monitored know because they have to willingly put a Neilson box on their tube. Perhaps digital cable companies can monitor what people are viewing, but that's it.
BlackGriffen
They have to decrypt the signal before they send it to the CRT and/or LCD, and it will be possible to remove the CRT (or just piggy back off of the signal wire. All you need to do is hook the signal line up to a good amp, and take the signal from there), change the signal in to RCA, RF, or whatever your favorite transmission scheme. It's not possible to have the signal encrypted all the way to the CRT and have it still viewable. Even if it were (by some magical process) able to decrypt the signial within the CRT, the signal can't be encrypted after it leaves the tube (as the original poster implied).
Every time these freaking geniuses come up with another "protection" scheme, I'm reminded of that security expert who got tangled up with the RIAA who said (something like), "No protection scheme can possibly work if the recipient of the content isn't a trusted source."
"It has been suggested the the construction techniques could be used to construct a biosphere type enclosure in space because of it's light weight construction techniques, "
Light weight is nice, but secondary. The primary function of any has to be to remain sealed at 14.7 Psi internal pressure. If it can't do that, then any suggestion to use it is laughable. Basically, there is no air in space, and any space traveller will need about 1 atmosphere of pressure to survive. Next it will have to shield them from radiation and thermally insulate them (the temperature extremes on somewhere like the moon are insane because it doesn't have an atmosphere to even them out). Light weight is a distant third on concerns (although cost of construction is a barrier, and weight effects that, doing it safely is far more important).
They're trying to go straight to the human sized robots. They need to make large robots that plug in to a wall and stay in a factory first. Something like the loader they mentioned from the alien movie as a fork-lift replacement. This will let them perfect the control mechanisms and they can work on miniaturization and speed improvements from there. The article even says that the problem they're having is that actuators just aren't as efficient as muscles.
Wasn't there some kind of fibre that contracted more efficiently than muscles? I could swear I saw something like that on Beyond 2000 (hah! I just have to laugh remembering that name), The Next Step, or one of those Discovery channel shows...
BlackGriffen
You have this precisely backwards, my friend. M$ wants DirectX to be the only standard for 3D because that will strengthen their OS monopoly in a non-obvious way. I'd bet that their original intention was to use their OS as the leverage to take the 3D market, crush the competition, and make it so that Windows is the only OS capable of supported 3D at a cost-effective price. With all of the antitrust attention they've been getting, they can't exactly take that path without a great deal of risk. With the patents, however, M$ now has a "legitimate" method of crushing the competition. Crushing the competition using their OS is definitely an anti-trust violation, but crushing the competition with valid patents is arguably an anti-trust violation. The key is that since it can be validly argued either way, the best the opposition could hope for is a long and drawn out court battle with some of the deepest pockets in the world.
Remember, Bill always thinks in terms of how to gain an advantage. If these patents didn't potentially give M$ some key advantage, it wouldn't have bought them.
Not necessarily. It could be argued that with open source software, the user can fix any problem himself. With MS, the user is completely dependent on MS for fixes. With that logic the user could be considered one of the programmers. Every piece of OSS I've seen also comes with an explicit disclaimer stating: "Use at your own risk," that is very frank about the fact that the software is a work in progress. As long as vendors are prompt with fixes and honest about problems, I don't see a reason why there should be huge liability problems...
1 - the cost of production is insane! One raisin worth may be enough, but that raisin could cost as much as the space shuttle to produce and concentrate.
2 - storage. You let this stuff touch anything and boom! You'll need to use some sort of electromagnetic containment field that will likely take energy to produce and be a complicated aparatus that may offset antimatter's one benefit: it is extremely compact.
The sad thing is that these hurdles probably won't be bridged until we have some sort of major war and the military finds some burning need to be able to destroy the world with one bomb instead of thousands.
I say, good luck to NASA, but don't hold your breath.
If Linux and other Unices can continue to win big government contracts like this, it may be enough to wake up the corporate world, and even encourage adoption in order to be compatible with government systems...
Doesn't AT&T already offer this? I could have sworn my dad bought a deal like this for only $80 or so. Too bad AT&T cable is going out of business. Perhaps the really cheap price is why?
Interesting idea, but not quite. This is essentially nothing more than a good old fashioned mercenary war. The Northern alliance is our toady, and We're just standing behind them, striking from outside of the enemy's reach. If the Northern Alliance hadn't been there, we would have needed to send in ground troops. Let me spell it out:
Desert Storm: enemy decimated by air, but only ground troops were effective at taking territory. More than 10 years of bombardment later proves it.
Kosovo: Yeah we dropped a lot of bombs on Serbia, and they gave up. Just ask a Serbian, however, and he will tell you that the economic sanctions (that were also observed by Serbia's neighbors) were far more devestating.
Afghanistan: Special forces troops on the ground gather intelligence and target the drops. Territory is only taken when the Northern Alliance moves out.
Machines have a physical advantage: more durable, more disposable, etc. Machines are still light years behind the human brain in flexibility, however, and though more mechanization in warfare is inevitable (Robotech or Battletech anyone?), It's going to be a very long time before humans are outright replaced.
Since someone already asked about being required to have a driver's license, I won't ask again, I'll just waist your time mentioning it:D.
On a more relevant note, I thought that at least 48 of the 50 states had linked databases already. At least that's the impression I got from driver's ed 4 years ago. Will this just be the fed taking advantage of that database (as if it hadn't already), and forcing the last two states to join? Or is this just a fiction in my head?
You should be greatful for that 1024*768! Why, I got a blue iBook with a 12" screen and 800*600. You youngans are such ingrates! Why, I'd step over my own mother to get two more inches and another step of res! Sides, if ya don't like tha bigga screen, you can still buy the smaller one, ya cheap bastard.
The iMac that Steve announced is not the successor to the iMac. Look at the pricing: $1300-$1800. This is the successor to the G4 cube! The iMac is still being sold at the Apple Store, and it's a good thing, too, because the education market really can't hanlde a computer with an LCD, let along an LCD on an armature. They need good old fashioned durable CRTs. Note also that they didn't upgrade the G4 line: this is to make sure the new iMac is a success until they can replace the old iMac in the lineup. Once they've cleared out the old iMacs, they'll probably upgrade the Pro lineup since the "new iMac" won't have to compete with the low end machines any more.
Also consider that the list of features for the "new iMac" reads like the wish list for the G4 cube: include a monitor, etc.
People, this is Stevie's ego baby not willing to die! They should call it the G4 hemisphere. For my $0.02, this is what Apple should have done:
DDR ram w/ improved bus speeds on pro models,
Keep the old iMacs about where they're at,
Introduce the "new iMac", but call it what it is with the same marketing strategy.
Here's hoping that Apple hasn't fouled this up too severely.
Small correction from an amateur apple scripter here. I don't know if this will still work in OSX, but it certainly worked in OS9.
tell application "Finder"
activate
select "System Folder" of startup disk
delete selection/*this moves it to the trash*/
empty trash/*this empties the trash*/
end tell
/*less the C-style comments, of course*/
I used to use a script like this to erase my browser cookies every time I restarted (a common occurrence in OS9). One bug in it was that if I clicked on something while the script was halfway through running (the the Finder had selected the file but hadn't moved it to the trash), it would erase what I selected. We lost many Netscape aliases that way...
I think that an applescript virus would have a hard time self propagating, however, depending on how scriptable the email client was.
"Moreover, as an advanced society, do we really wish to combine our gene pool with that of an animal?"
How unbelievably arrogant! One gene isn't any better or worse than any other. It's like saying the 8 peg legos are better than the 4 peg legos, or vice versa. Humans possess precisely two advantages over animals: 1, opposable thumbs (=>our hands are extremely versatile); 2, a very flexible brain. That is it! Everything else you could think of that distinguishes us from animals stems from those two advantages (primarily the second). We are animals!
Of far greater concern than mixing the gene pool is mixing the blood pool. Mixing our blood with animals is dangerous because it could expose us to diseases that we aren't normally exposed to. And these diseases could adapt in to anything from a new plague to the next cold!
Perhaps uServe can't handle dynamic content, but it can handle a redirect to an Apache server on the same machine (or perhaps even combine the two more integrally: Apache handling the dynamic content, uSever sticking with the static). Anyone who could make dynamic content should be able to handle such a solution.
OSX could do this easily. So far, the option to turn it on is only presented for the terminal (and on by default for the dock and menus), but it shouldn't be hard to make a hack to do it for anything. But guess what? I tried it on my terminal windows, and immediately switched back. Why? Simple, when I have the terminal in the foreground, I want to be able to see what's in it well, when I don't need to see it, I just let other things cover it. Transparency is like so many other things in this day and age, it just doesn't live up to the hype.
No need. All it's going to take is a dedicated virus hacker cracking open anti-virus software with a hex editor/assembly language editor and finding the code that excludes lantern, and making his virus fit the bill. If the program is checking for an exact code match, then the virus writer's job gets a little more tricky, but it will mean that the anti-virus company was distributing Lantern; something the FBI would have to be extremely stupid to let them do.
Globalization is just the realization of an ancient trend of integration. This is a trend that starts before mankind even exists. The timeline goes something like this:
single cells -> single organisms
organisms -> schools/family groups/swarms/packs
(man starts here)
"family" groups -> clans/gens/tribes
clans/gens/tribes -> city states
city states -> nation state
nation state -> global state (we are here)
Does it end there? Heck no! As we move outward and colonize other stars, those worlds will initally be fully independent. So the progression continues (ad infinitum? maybe.)
For the conservative radicals the rub is that the global integration entails civilizational/cultural changes (note to the author of the article: the west is a civilization, not a culture), and conservatives, by definition, dislike change (no insult to people who call themselves "conservatives" since I am using the word in the sense of "those who wish to conserve the status quo/tradition"). The rub for the liberals comes from the fact that the oportunistic multi-nationals are quick enough to take advantage of the civilizational/cultural differences that are changing to make a profit before they can be ironed out. Eventually (I hope), the conservatives will lose, the incompatabilities will be fixed, and the liberals will shut up because the multinationals won't be able to capitalize on the differences that no longer exist (i.e. a culture permissive to child labor, an economy so bad 5 cents a day is enough for a worker to live on, etc.). Will all cultural/civilizational differences dissapear? I sure as hell hope not. I'm confident that the variety will remain, however, because at every step in the historical pattern the integrating constituents have maintained individuality, even if not autonomy.
BlackGriffen
Slashdot Mirror
if this thing will still work when they unplug it from the wall?
Would this be like an ObGyn passing out condoms with holes in them?
BlackGriffen
I don't know if production is Japan is a requirement, but originally spoken in Japanese is not. For instance, the movie Vampire Hunter D, Bloodlust is considered anime and the dialog was done in English (even for the Japanese release). FWIW, WHD: B is a decent flick, and worth the price of a movie ticket. It's not of the calibre of the greats, but still pretty good.
BlackGriffen
The piece was interesting, not for it's insights in to anime (it had none for an anime fan), but for it's insights in to the author's own cultural biases. For instance, the author claims that the main character in Ghost in the Shell questions whether she is "man, woman or even human." The major never questioned her gender, only her status as human. Basically, I'm saying that you shouldn't put too much stock in this article (other than the overall message that anime can be good, too), because the author was heavily influenced by his/her biases.
I've always aid that great art is great not because a person can read it, but because it can read a person. You can tell a lot about a person and his/her basic assumptions by how they interpret a work of art. It just goes to show that anime can be great art, too.
BlackGriffen
I can understand the rationale behind the decision, but abandoning a market that big is dangerous and foolish. Consider what happened to Word Perfect. The only market they abandoned to M$ was Macintosh users. Partly because of that, Word was able to fully develop in a space where it had no competition, and expand in to other markets. There were other factors, of course, but it makes my point: give the competition a space to grow in, and it will grow. Perhaps the Gimp will, with the addition of thousands of Asian hackers, finally mature past Photoshop. Even worse for Adobe would be if a company (like Macromedia) took advantage of this and kicked their butt.
BlackGriffen
You don't know a darn thing about how ratings are calculated, do you? There's this company called Neilson (spelling?) that randomly selects people to monitor to determine their viewing habits, and use statistics to determine the rest. The people who are being monitored know because they have to willingly put a Neilson box on their tube. Perhaps digital cable companies can monitor what people are viewing, but that's it. BlackGriffen
They have to decrypt the signal before they send it to the CRT and/or LCD, and it will be possible to remove the CRT (or just piggy back off of the signal wire. All you need to do is hook the signal line up to a good amp, and take the signal from there), change the signal in to RCA, RF, or whatever your favorite transmission scheme. It's not possible to have the signal encrypted all the way to the CRT and have it still viewable. Even if it were (by some magical process) able to decrypt the signial within the CRT, the signal can't be encrypted after it leaves the tube (as the original poster implied).
Every time these freaking geniuses come up with another "protection" scheme, I'm reminded of that security expert who got tangled up with the RIAA who said (something like), "No protection scheme can possibly work if the recipient of the content isn't a trusted source."
BlackGriffen
"It has been suggested the the construction techniques could be used to construct a biosphere type enclosure in space because of it's light weight construction techniques, "
Light weight is nice, but secondary. The primary function of any has to be to remain sealed at 14.7 Psi internal pressure. If it can't do that, then any suggestion to use it is laughable. Basically, there is no air in space, and any space traveller will need about 1 atmosphere of pressure to survive. Next it will have to shield them from radiation and thermally insulate them (the temperature extremes on somewhere like the moon are insane because it doesn't have an atmosphere to even them out). Light weight is a distant third on concerns (although cost of construction is a barrier, and weight effects that, doing it safely is far more important).
BlackGriffen
They're trying to go straight to the human sized robots. They need to make large robots that plug in to a wall and stay in a factory first. Something like the loader they mentioned from the alien movie as a fork-lift replacement. This will let them perfect the control mechanisms and they can work on miniaturization and speed improvements from there. The article even says that the problem they're having is that actuators just aren't as efficient as muscles. Wasn't there some kind of fibre that contracted more efficiently than muscles? I could swear I saw something like that on Beyond 2000 (hah! I just have to laugh remembering that name), The Next Step, or one of those Discovery channel shows... BlackGriffen
You have this precisely backwards, my friend. M$ wants DirectX to be the only standard for 3D because that will strengthen their OS monopoly in a non-obvious way. I'd bet that their original intention was to use their OS as the leverage to take the 3D market, crush the competition, and make it so that Windows is the only OS capable of supported 3D at a cost-effective price. With all of the antitrust attention they've been getting, they can't exactly take that path without a great deal of risk. With the patents, however, M$ now has a "legitimate" method of crushing the competition. Crushing the competition using their OS is definitely an anti-trust violation, but crushing the competition with valid patents is arguably an anti-trust violation. The key is that since it can be validly argued either way, the best the opposition could hope for is a long and drawn out court battle with some of the deepest pockets in the world.
Remember, Bill always thinks in terms of how to gain an advantage. If these patents didn't potentially give M$ some key advantage, it wouldn't have bought them.
BlackGriffen
Not necessarily. It could be argued that with open source software, the user can fix any problem himself. With MS, the user is completely dependent on MS for fixes. With that logic the user could be considered one of the programmers. Every piece of OSS I've seen also comes with an explicit disclaimer stating: "Use at your own risk," that is very frank about the fact that the software is a work in progress. As long as vendors are prompt with fixes and honest about problems, I don't see a reason why there should be huge liability problems...
BlackGriffen
There are two problems with anti-matter as fuel:
1 - the cost of production is insane! One raisin worth may be enough, but that raisin could cost as much as the space shuttle to produce and concentrate.
2 - storage. You let this stuff touch anything and boom! You'll need to use some sort of electromagnetic containment field that will likely take energy to produce and be a complicated aparatus that may offset antimatter's one benefit: it is extremely compact.
The sad thing is that these hurdles probably won't be bridged until we have some sort of major war and the military finds some burning need to be able to destroy the world with one bomb instead of thousands.
I say, good luck to NASA, but don't hold your breath.
BlackGriffen
If Linux and other Unices can continue to win big government contracts like this, it may be enough to wake up the corporate world, and even encourage adoption in order to be compatible with government systems...
This is the best news I've heard all day.
BlackGriffen
Doesn't AT&T already offer this? I could have sworn my dad bought a deal like this for only $80 or so. Too bad AT&T cable is going out of business. Perhaps the really cheap price is why?
BlackGriffen
Interesting idea, but not quite. This is essentially nothing more than a good old fashioned mercenary war. The Northern alliance is our toady, and We're just standing behind them, striking from outside of the enemy's reach. If the Northern Alliance hadn't been there, we would have needed to send in ground troops. Let me spell it out:
Desert Storm: enemy decimated by air, but only ground troops were effective at taking territory. More than 10 years of bombardment later proves it.
Kosovo: Yeah we dropped a lot of bombs on Serbia, and they gave up. Just ask a Serbian, however, and he will tell you that the economic sanctions (that were also observed by Serbia's neighbors) were far more devestating.
Afghanistan: Special forces troops on the ground gather intelligence and target the drops. Territory is only taken when the Northern Alliance moves out.
Machines have a physical advantage: more durable, more disposable, etc. Machines are still light years behind the human brain in flexibility, however, and though more mechanization in warfare is inevitable (Robotech or Battletech anyone?), It's going to be a very long time before humans are outright replaced.
Since someone already asked about being required to have a driver's license, I won't ask again, I'll just waist your time mentioning it :D.
On a more relevant note, I thought that at least 48 of the 50 states had linked databases already. At least that's the impression I got from driver's ed 4 years ago. Will this just be the fed taking advantage of that database (as if it hadn't already), and forcing the last two states to join? Or is this just a fiction in my head?
BlackGriffen
You should be greatful for that 1024*768! Why, I got a blue iBook with a 12" screen and 800*600. You youngans are such ingrates! Why, I'd step over my own mother to get two more inches and another step of res! Sides, if ya don't like tha bigga screen, you can still buy the smaller one, ya cheap bastard.
And another thing, when I was young...
;)
BlackGriffen
The iMac that Steve announced is not the successor to the iMac. Look at the pricing: $1300-$1800. This is the successor to the G4 cube! The iMac is still being sold at the Apple Store, and it's a good thing, too, because the education market really can't hanlde a computer with an LCD, let along an LCD on an armature. They need good old fashioned durable CRTs. Note also that they didn't upgrade the G4 line: this is to make sure the new iMac is a success until they can replace the old iMac in the lineup. Once they've cleared out the old iMacs, they'll probably upgrade the Pro lineup since the "new iMac" won't have to compete with the low end machines any more.
Also consider that the list of features for the "new iMac" reads like the wish list for the G4 cube: include a monitor, etc.
People, this is Stevie's ego baby not willing to die! They should call it the G4 hemisphere. For my $0.02, this is what Apple should have done:
DDR ram w/ improved bus speeds on pro models,
Keep the old iMacs about where they're at,
Introduce the "new iMac", but call it what it is with the same marketing strategy.
Here's hoping that Apple hasn't fouled this up too severely.
BlackGriffen
Small correction from an amateur apple scripter here. I don't know if this will still work in OSX, but it certainly worked in OS9.
/*this moves it to the trash*/
/*this empties the trash*/
tell application "Finder"
activate
select "System Folder" of startup disk
delete selection
empty trash
end tell
/*less the C-style comments, of course*/
I used to use a script like this to erase my browser cookies every time I restarted (a common occurrence in OS9). One bug in it was that if I clicked on something while the script was halfway through running (the the Finder had selected the file but hadn't moved it to the trash), it would erase what I selected. We lost many Netscape aliases that way...
I think that an applescript virus would have a hard time self propagating, however, depending on how scriptable the email client was.
BlackGriffen
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! ;P
BlackGriffen
"Moreover, as an advanced society, do we really wish to combine our gene pool with that of an animal?"
How unbelievably arrogant! One gene isn't any better or worse than any other. It's like saying the 8 peg legos are better than the 4 peg legos, or vice versa. Humans possess precisely two advantages over animals: 1, opposable thumbs (=>our hands are extremely versatile); 2, a very flexible brain. That is it! Everything else you could think of that distinguishes us from animals stems from those two advantages (primarily the second). We are animals!
Of far greater concern than mixing the gene pool is mixing the blood pool. Mixing our blood with animals is dangerous because it could expose us to diseases that we aren't normally exposed to. And these diseases could adapt in to anything from a new plague to the next cold!
Proceed with caution, mes amies!
BlackGriffen
Perhaps uServe can't handle dynamic content, but it can handle a redirect to an Apache server on the same machine (or perhaps even combine the two more integrally: Apache handling the dynamic content, uSever sticking with the static). Anyone who could make dynamic content should be able to handle such a solution.
BlackGriffen
OSX could do this easily. So far, the option to turn it on is only presented for the terminal (and on by default for the dock and menus), but it shouldn't be hard to make a hack to do it for anything. But guess what? I tried it on my terminal windows, and immediately switched back. Why? Simple, when I have the terminal in the foreground, I want to be able to see what's in it well, when I don't need to see it, I just let other things cover it. Transparency is like so many other things in this day and age, it just doesn't live up to the hype.
BlackGriffen
No need. All it's going to take is a dedicated virus hacker cracking open anti-virus software with a hex editor/assembly language editor and finding the code that excludes lantern, and making his virus fit the bill. If the program is checking for an exact code match, then the virus writer's job gets a little more tricky, but it will mean that the anti-virus company was distributing Lantern; something the FBI would have to be extremely stupid to let them do.
BlackGriffen
Globalization is just the realization of an ancient trend of integration. This is a trend that starts before mankind even exists. The timeline goes something like this: single cells -> single organisms organisms -> schools/family groups/swarms/packs (man starts here) "family" groups -> clans/gens/tribes clans/gens/tribes -> city states city states -> nation state nation state -> global state (we are here) Does it end there? Heck no! As we move outward and colonize other stars, those worlds will initally be fully independent. So the progression continues (ad infinitum? maybe.) For the conservative radicals the rub is that the global integration entails civilizational/cultural changes (note to the author of the article: the west is a civilization, not a culture), and conservatives, by definition, dislike change (no insult to people who call themselves "conservatives" since I am using the word in the sense of "those who wish to conserve the status quo/tradition"). The rub for the liberals comes from the fact that the oportunistic multi-nationals are quick enough to take advantage of the civilizational/cultural differences that are changing to make a profit before they can be ironed out. Eventually (I hope), the conservatives will lose, the incompatabilities will be fixed, and the liberals will shut up because the multinationals won't be able to capitalize on the differences that no longer exist (i.e. a culture permissive to child labor, an economy so bad 5 cents a day is enough for a worker to live on, etc.). Will all cultural/civilizational differences dissapear? I sure as hell hope not. I'm confident that the variety will remain, however, because at every step in the historical pattern the integrating constituents have maintained individuality, even if not autonomy. BlackGriffen