This isn't even capitalism. I think that Copyright law, and anything else from the government that prevents anyone for selling anything they want for whatever they can get for it is Socialism. When the government is also the only distributor, it is called Communism.
Ok, I just checked (I'm working from home today), the CD which so impressed me with its packaging is indeed an "Ever Anime" product. Guess that brings me back to another point. The quality of the packaging for at least some bootleg products is substantially better than anything legit. How is a consumer supposed to tell (appart from the pirate anime faq you mentioned). This is especially a problem when shopping online.
P.S. The CDs I got from animenation are legit according to your qualifications.
That is a heck of an accusation. Where is your documentation?
The CD's I've pruchased from Tokyo Kid have come in very high quality packaging and extras. They certainly looked legit. If these were bootleg CDs, I know why the music industry is in trouble. The packaging on the bootlegs is supperior to their own, how is the consumer to tell?
Pray-tell, do you work at the more expensive Anime shop down the street?
No clue about Motoi Sakuraba. I'm intentionally somewhat naive about who makes the music I buy. Instead I've purchased the soundtracks from games and movies that I've really enjoyed and have already spent enough time with to already be vested. Anyway, I have had a good deal of luck purchasing imports via animenation. I don't think that they are the least expensive vendor/importer, but they have a pretty wide selection and they are from my home town. Alternatively, Tokyo Kid in Boston's Harvard Square has quite a bit of imported music/figurines/movies, unfortunately, last time I checked, you had to call them to rather than buying stuff directly off of their website.
You could save even more money by buying 4 1GB compact flash cards. Those run slightly more than $200 each (depending on how much you believe pricewatch). The major reason for going with Flash memory over harddrives or optical media is that there are no moving parts. This should (I don't know if it does) mean lower power consumption, greater durability, and better tollerance of jolts and jiggles (like when you go jogging). It definitely means that flash media produce less audible noise than harddrives, CDs and DVDs.
On the other hand Flash media isn't exactly cheap yet, so I don't see it being used for anything that doesn't require long battery life, no fans, and jiggle-tollerance (no boob jokes).
This post also shows why advertisers are so nuts about getting teenagers to start buying their brands. I'm not aware of too many people who buy music from bands that wern't popular when they were in their teens and early twenties.
Personally, I have purchased several CDs recently, but they are nearlly all soundtrack/game music from Japan (Imports are expensive). I have "ripped" all of my CD's so that I can use them in portable electronic devices such a my notebook computer etc. I have not stollen any music, and if I could not have my music in digital formats I would stop buying it all together.
On a side note, as long as a computer can play the music at all, it is possible to rip it. It is just a matter of re-directing the sound output from the speakers to a virtual sound device. Even without that, the best the anti-digital music forces can hope for is one analog copy followed by an infinite number of digital copies.
Titania is also the name of the well-endowed barmaid in the episode of the Simpsons where Moe has Plastic Surgery.
Seriously though, this press-release sets off my B.S. sensor. A typical scientific press-release would include some basic stuff, like what Titania Nanotubes are. Additionally, from my understanding of how carbon nanotubes are made, and how they exist, I'm not sure that Titanium could be used to make nanotubes. Neither could Silicon, which is the chemically more similar. Carbon nanotubes can exist because Carbon gets to form 4 and only 4 bonds. The extra electron orbitals (d-orbitals in spectroscophy language) would screw this up.
Additionally, I don't think that combustion (say in cars, mentioned in the article), results in any free hydrogen, it should be water, carbon dioxide, and unburnt fuel.
I concur about Deep Freeze. It can be exited with a single keystroke. One of the computer labs in another department used it for a short period of time. They stopped using it because it only prevented clueless people from installing software. Several of the computers in that lab ended up being MP3/Movie servers.
Of course, the easy way to keep people from messing up the underlying computer would be to install GNU/LINUX and delete everything out of the user accounts at, say 4am (automated using crontab). Or you could offer persistant personalized accounts (at a premium) to your users using a NSF mounted drive for everyone's $HOME.
Guessing URL's. Heck, I play guess the IP-address.
Seriously though, a course about how to find information could start out quite simple and end up being quite advanced. You could start out with something as basic as different search engines and what techniques they use to return results and go all the way through how to organize information effectively. It sounds like it could really be a good class.
I'ld also consider doing some publicity stunts for your lab. You know, to try to get people excited. The easiest one might be a LAN party with prizes.
Whatever you do, I'ld suggest concentrating on locals though, not tourists. Very few vacationers want to sit in front of a computer, even if it is to play a video game.
Alternatively, if your town is in a really nice place (you said it was a tourist town), you could offer some (relatively) advanced workshops and try to bundle them with a local hotel/Bed & Breakfast and cater to corporate executives.
You could always build your own using a EPIA-M (or other EPIA) motherboard/processor combo from VIA, a car-stereo sized case from Casetronic or Morex, and a "slim" CD/CDRW/DVD, and a 2.5" Harddrive (and ram). Alternatively, if you already have wireless networking in your garage, you could skip the optical drive and just transfer files to it that way. When I built my slightly larger "living room" PC I think I ended up spending about 600-700$, so I'ld expect to pay about that for a car stereo sized one.
Turns out that in order to pack a computer into a very small space you really need to worry about heat. This is why most notebook computers (which are larger than this case, and other very small cases) run much slower than their desktop equivalents, for instance I think that the Centrino package from Intel starts witha 1.2 GHz processor (low end), and that is a brand new product. Anyway, the low power consumption chips are from Transmeta (I think 933MHz at 6 Watts) and VIA (Eden at 600Mhz at 6 Watts, C3 1GHz at 10 Watts?). Using said chips gets you away from the need for Fans (useful for computers in living rooms) and that lets you goto small form factors.
For more information check out mini-itx or the super small case offerings of casetronic or Morex. Both of Casetronic and Morex make at least one case that has the same physical dimensions as a car stereo. Keep in mind these cases typically require the 2.5" hard drives and "slim" CD/CDRW/DVD drives which drives up the overall cost of the system and limits performance.
hmmm..The story I heard was that Sony introduced the CD to the recording in some big meeting. I could be wrong.
With regaurd to the Playstation, it wasn't just that the precursors were unsuccessful, they weren't fully developed or thought through. I can remember several of these, and recall that the load times were attrociously long, making the players pretty much unusable (for entertainment at least). The Playstation was the first one that didn't sit there for minutes loading up the next level, the Playstation was inovative as being the first _useable_ CD based console.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Sony has a long history of creating devices that either have no market, or where the market is very small, and making solid desireable products. The best example is the Walkman. I think their worst disaster (that I can think of) is the BetaMax.
It would be even more funny if MS moved to a GPLed equivalent of the offending code.
Seriously, if MS did start lobying to change the intellectual property rights system in the US it would be great for everyone, including MS and *NIX users. I think that it would kill the business models of a bunch of companies though (SCO?), so such legislation would have a hard time, even with MS backing.
On the subject of inovation by MS and inovation by Sony. I think that Sony has to come out ahead. That corporation has produced either the first successful device in a class, or the class for several catagories of consumer electronics. For instance, the Walkman, the first dvd player + video game concole (PS/2), the first succesful CDROM based video game console (Playstation), and the compact disk just off the top of my head. Sony's RIAA/MPAA division was purchased recently, and has not yet been integrated into the rest of the corporation. As is evidenced by Sony Music pushing cactus data shield CDs while it's computer group is pushing VAIO's as complete home entertainment centers. Personally, I'm drooling over the Playstation 2 Enhanced (whatever it is called), a PS2 + DVR + DVD-R-RW + WebBrowser. Supposedly it is due out near the end of the year in Japan, and will eventually come to the US.
You're joking but that is actually a valid printer technology. I worked for a while with a medical device where price was less of an issue. The printer that we used used big chunks of colored wax which were melted and then used to print onto plain paper. I think that the cost per print was actually higher than inkjet technologies, so was the printer, however, the print finished and dried nearly instantly.
On the main subject, Minolta makes a ~700$ color laser printer. It is supposedly noisy and doesn't play well with *NIX, but it is a color laser.
Also, color laser printers seem to come in two flavors. The really really tall/long printers which have a single peice of paper pass four toner cartriges in a single pass, and the cheaper, more compact, but slower printers where the paper goes back and forth as the printer swaps out the toner cartriges for each color. I think the afore mentioned Minolta falls into the second catagory.
Also, higher end inkjet printers seem to have larger/cheaper ink tanks. And I think that there is at least one company which sells aftermarket kits to modify inkjet printers for a "continuous feed" system which basically adds huge external ink tanks.
Or you could buy a "cheap" laser printer (Okidata's okipage series, or HP's Laserjet 1200 > printers for example) for black and white printing (most of what most people need), and an inkjet printer for the rare cases when you need color prints.
However, unless you print large documents often, you're probably better off just getting an inkjet printer and paying for the ink.
Not to say anything about the IIgs, but old(er) software has a tendancy to work extremely well when ported to newer machines (if it can be, typically this is only for *NIX software). For instance, something developed for a 1979 computer will have just about no software bloat, so when run on an Athlon 2200+, it flies, and takes up a trivial amount of RAM. Developing software for very limited systems is actually useful, because it teaches how to write efficient code, which seems to be a lost art.
Completely offtopic, but high end analog equiptment can be very nice, and even better than digital equiptment. Unfortunately, it is ussually much, much more expensive to buy and maintain. Scientific research electronics are frequently analog, and very, very expensive.
Ok, now we need to answer the question of which games teach what.
I would like to point out that his discussion of playing games "proactively," or thinking about the design of the games and how they work. From that point of view, just about any game, played that way, should teach some fundamental rules of logic.
I actually have some trouble thinking of which "entertainment" games would be good for teaching individual facts. Several discuss how to make gunpowder (hardly what you want your kids to be doing), but most really screw up most of the fundamental science. Perhaps the best use of video games (also discussed in the article) would be to inspire children (and adults) to look stuff up. It's kind'a off topic, but I've read a lot about mythology since Stargate, SG1 started airing. Video games should be able to inspire similar interests.
A while ago, Adobe anounced that they would like to maintain only on distribution of each of their products, for Windows. I wonder if this is the beginning of that move. At the time, the slashdot discussion was how much that would hurt Apple.
Regaurdless of how you feel about the individuals involved in these projects, or how envious you are of their positions in US culture, I enjoyed these shows (at least the first two episodes), and suspect that the differences in our oppinions comes from cultural (and perhaps generational) differences. With regaurds to your assessment of Gary the Rat, I suggest that you read Kafka's "Metamorphosis" so you get at least one joke. Perhaps you should also take a look at some other exostentalist works, or some absurdist works as well.
The shows that you listed (especially the Simpsons and Futurama) are all very good. However, there are only a handfull of adult-oriented (in a clean way) animated shows on in the US (mostly on Fox). Let's see if I can name them all, think Sunday night, ok. King of the Hill and the Simpsons. I'm pretty sure that Fox has canceled Futurama (at least in my city).
In the early days of cinema (1920's and 1930's) Walt Disney, and others, made a concerted effort to portray animated features as "only for children." This label has stuck, and to some extent has been re-enforced by recent actions of the Walt Disney Corporation. For example, when Disney got the US distribution rights for Princess Mononoke, they showed previews for it before children's movies such as Winnie the Pooh. When the movie actually played in theaters, the dominate audience was mothers with young children, who left after the first decapitation. Surely those mothers now view all adult-oriented animation as extremely dangerous.
Didn't see any screenshots, but it sounds like it might be fun to watch.
More seriously, perhaps the people in th US are finally realizing that animation isn't just for children. TNN (I think) has also just started airing three new animated shows Ren & Stimpy's Adult Party Cartoon, Gerry the Rat (spelling?), and Stan Lee's Striperella (spelling?). While I'm not a huge Ren & Stimpy fan, all three seem pretty good. Kelsey Grammar's voice acting as a bitter and sarcastic giant rat is pretty good, and there seem to be quite a few running jokes (in just the first two episodes). Additionally, the show is able to deal with issues of race/class/ethanticity/whatever with species standing in for the politically untouchable subject (much as robots do in Futurama). Stripperella is obviously intended to be much more comical, and suceeds in at least two areas. First, the general atmosphere is a throwback to the 1960's batman series (campy villans, secret identities, etc., but no "Biff" or "Baff"). Second, the degree of normalcy that the public persona and the other exotic dancers enjoy is stressed to the point of being funny (or perhaps I'm not ready for porn to be mainstreamed).
Anyway, horay for more animation (that isn't aimed at kids).
In at least one terminal of the Atlanta Airport (think it is either D or C), there are no waterfountains, and the only water avalible is either from the taps in the bathroom (which is hot) or buying the bottled water from the "convience" stores. Fortunately, if one has time you can always walk down to the "International" Terminal where there is a half-way decent food court and waterfountains.
Slashdot Mirror
What SCO is doing is called extortion/blackmail.
P.S. The CDs I got from animenation are legit according to your qualifications.
The CD's I've pruchased from Tokyo Kid have come in very high quality packaging and extras. They certainly looked legit. If these were bootleg CDs, I know why the music industry is in trouble. The packaging on the bootlegs is supperior to their own, how is the consumer to tell?
Pray-tell, do you work at the more expensive Anime shop down the street?
No clue about Motoi Sakuraba. I'm intentionally somewhat naive about who makes the music I buy. Instead I've purchased the soundtracks from games and movies that I've really enjoyed and have already spent enough time with to already be vested. Anyway, I have had a good deal of luck purchasing imports via animenation. I don't think that they are the least expensive vendor/importer, but they have a pretty wide selection and they are from my home town. Alternatively, Tokyo Kid in Boston's Harvard Square has quite a bit of imported music/figurines/movies, unfortunately, last time I checked, you had to call them to rather than buying stuff directly off of their website.
On the other hand Flash media isn't exactly cheap yet, so I don't see it being used for anything that doesn't require long battery life, no fans, and jiggle-tollerance (no boob jokes).
Personally, I have purchased several CDs recently, but they are nearlly all soundtrack/game music from Japan (Imports are expensive). I have "ripped" all of my CD's so that I can use them in portable electronic devices such a my notebook computer etc. I have not stollen any music, and if I could not have my music in digital formats I would stop buying it all together.
On a side note, as long as a computer can play the music at all, it is possible to rip it. It is just a matter of re-directing the sound output from the speakers to a virtual sound device. Even without that, the best the anti-digital music forces can hope for is one analog copy followed by an infinite number of digital copies.
Seriously though, this press-release sets off my B.S. sensor. A typical scientific press-release would include some basic stuff, like what Titania Nanotubes are. Additionally, from my understanding of how carbon nanotubes are made, and how they exist, I'm not sure that Titanium could be used to make nanotubes. Neither could Silicon, which is the chemically more similar. Carbon nanotubes can exist because Carbon gets to form 4 and only 4 bonds. The extra electron orbitals (d-orbitals in spectroscophy language) would screw this up.
Additionally, I don't think that combustion (say in cars, mentioned in the article), results in any free hydrogen, it should be water, carbon dioxide, and unburnt fuel.
Of course, the easy way to keep people from messing up the underlying computer would be to install GNU/LINUX and delete everything out of the user accounts at, say 4am (automated using crontab). Or you could offer persistant personalized accounts (at a premium) to your users using a NSF mounted drive for everyone's $HOME.
Intro to LINUX would be pointless. Everthing is self explainatory.
Seriously though, a course about how to find information could start out quite simple and end up being quite advanced. You could start out with something as basic as different search engines and what techniques they use to return results and go all the way through how to organize information effectively. It sounds like it could really be a good class.
I'ld also consider doing some publicity stunts for your lab. You know, to try to get people excited. The easiest one might be a LAN party with prizes.
Whatever you do, I'ld suggest concentrating on locals though, not tourists. Very few vacationers want to sit in front of a computer, even if it is to play a video game.
Alternatively, if your town is in a really nice place (you said it was a tourist town), you could offer some (relatively) advanced workshops and try to bundle them with a local hotel/Bed & Breakfast and cater to corporate executives.
You could always build your own using a EPIA-M (or other EPIA) motherboard/processor combo from VIA, a car-stereo sized case from Casetronic or Morex, and a "slim" CD/CDRW/DVD, and a 2.5" Harddrive (and ram). Alternatively, if you already have wireless networking in your garage, you could skip the optical drive and just transfer files to it that way. When I built my slightly larger "living room" PC I think I ended up spending about 600-700$, so I'ld expect to pay about that for a car stereo sized one.
For more information check out mini-itx or the super small case offerings of casetronic or Morex. Both of Casetronic and Morex make at least one case that has the same physical dimensions as a car stereo. Keep in mind these cases typically require the 2.5" hard drives and "slim" CD/CDRW/DVD drives which drives up the overall cost of the system and limits performance.
Actually, it is the lawyers that always win. Perhaps we need to reform that profession as well.
With regaurd to the Playstation, it wasn't just that the precursors were unsuccessful, they weren't fully developed or thought through. I can remember several of these, and recall that the load times were attrociously long, making the players pretty much unusable (for entertainment at least). The Playstation was the first one that didn't sit there for minutes loading up the next level, the Playstation was inovative as being the first _useable_ CD based console.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Sony has a long history of creating devices that either have no market, or where the market is very small, and making solid desireable products. The best example is the Walkman. I think their worst disaster (that I can think of) is the BetaMax.
Seriously, if MS did start lobying to change the intellectual property rights system in the US it would be great for everyone, including MS and *NIX users. I think that it would kill the business models of a bunch of companies though (SCO?), so such legislation would have a hard time, even with MS backing.
On the subject of inovation by MS and inovation by Sony. I think that Sony has to come out ahead. That corporation has produced either the first successful device in a class, or the class for several catagories of consumer electronics. For instance, the Walkman, the first dvd player + video game concole (PS/2), the first succesful CDROM based video game console (Playstation), and the compact disk just off the top of my head. Sony's RIAA/MPAA division was purchased recently, and has not yet been integrated into the rest of the corporation. As is evidenced by Sony Music pushing cactus data shield CDs while it's computer group is pushing VAIO's as complete home entertainment centers. Personally, I'm drooling over the Playstation 2 Enhanced (whatever it is called), a PS2 + DVR + DVD-R-RW + WebBrowser. Supposedly it is due out near the end of the year in Japan, and will eventually come to the US.
Forget about Joe (or Jill) Artist, what about middle grade artists that have been perpetually screwed by their RIAA contracts.
On the main subject, Minolta makes a ~700$ color laser printer. It is supposedly noisy and doesn't play well with *NIX, but it is a color laser.
Also, color laser printers seem to come in two flavors. The really really tall/long printers which have a single peice of paper pass four toner cartriges in a single pass, and the cheaper, more compact, but slower printers where the paper goes back and forth as the printer swaps out the toner cartriges for each color. I think the afore mentioned Minolta falls into the second catagory.
Also, higher end inkjet printers seem to have larger/cheaper ink tanks. And I think that there is at least one company which sells aftermarket kits to modify inkjet printers for a "continuous feed" system which basically adds huge external ink tanks.
Or you could buy a "cheap" laser printer (Okidata's okipage series, or HP's Laserjet 1200 > printers for example) for black and white printing (most of what most people need), and an inkjet printer for the rare cases when you need color prints.
However, unless you print large documents often, you're probably better off just getting an inkjet printer and paying for the ink.
What can word do that LaTeX cannot? If you include the pstricks package, LaTeX is a complete programming language (including file manipulation etc.).
Completely offtopic, but high end analog equiptment can be very nice, and even better than digital equiptment. Unfortunately, it is ussually much, much more expensive to buy and maintain. Scientific research electronics are frequently analog, and very, very expensive.
I would like to point out that his discussion of playing games "proactively," or thinking about the design of the games and how they work. From that point of view, just about any game, played that way, should teach some fundamental rules of logic.
I actually have some trouble thinking of which "entertainment" games would be good for teaching individual facts. Several discuss how to make gunpowder (hardly what you want your kids to be doing), but most really screw up most of the fundamental science. Perhaps the best use of video games (also discussed in the article) would be to inspire children (and adults) to look stuff up. It's kind'a off topic, but I've read a lot about mythology since Stargate, SG1 started airing. Video games should be able to inspire similar interests.
A while ago, Adobe anounced that they would like to maintain only on distribution of each of their products, for Windows. I wonder if this is the beginning of that move. At the time, the slashdot discussion was how much that would hurt Apple.
Regaurdless of how you feel about the individuals involved in these projects, or how envious you are of their positions in US culture, I enjoyed these shows (at least the first two episodes), and suspect that the differences in our oppinions comes from cultural (and perhaps generational) differences. With regaurds to your assessment of Gary the Rat, I suggest that you read Kafka's "Metamorphosis" so you get at least one joke. Perhaps you should also take a look at some other exostentalist works, or some absurdist works as well.
In the early days of cinema (1920's and 1930's) Walt Disney, and others, made a concerted effort to portray animated features as "only for children." This label has stuck, and to some extent has been re-enforced by recent actions of the Walt Disney Corporation. For example, when Disney got the US distribution rights for Princess Mononoke, they showed previews for it before children's movies such as Winnie the Pooh. When the movie actually played in theaters, the dominate audience was mothers with young children, who left after the first decapitation. Surely those mothers now view all adult-oriented animation as extremely dangerous.
More seriously, perhaps the people in th US are finally realizing that animation isn't just for children. TNN (I think) has also just started airing three new animated shows Ren & Stimpy's Adult Party Cartoon, Gerry the Rat (spelling?), and Stan Lee's Striperella (spelling?). While I'm not a huge Ren & Stimpy fan, all three seem pretty good. Kelsey Grammar's voice acting as a bitter and sarcastic giant rat is pretty good, and there seem to be quite a few running jokes (in just the first two episodes). Additionally, the show is able to deal with issues of race/class/ethanticity/whatever with species standing in for the politically untouchable subject (much as robots do in Futurama). Stripperella is obviously intended to be much more comical, and suceeds in at least two areas. First, the general atmosphere is a throwback to the 1960's batman series (campy villans, secret identities, etc., but no "Biff" or "Baff"). Second, the degree of normalcy that the public persona and the other exotic dancers enjoy is stressed to the point of being funny (or perhaps I'm not ready for porn to be mainstreamed).
Anyway, horay for more animation (that isn't aimed at kids).
In at least one terminal of the Atlanta Airport (think it is either D or C), there are no waterfountains, and the only water avalible is either from the taps in the bathroom (which is hot) or buying the bottled water from the "convience" stores. Fortunately, if one has time you can always walk down to the "International" Terminal where there is a half-way decent food court and waterfountains.