More preaching to the converted ?
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
Nice article but the people who really need to be forced to read and comprehend it are SBC and Yahoo management.
For the past several months SBC has been attempting a hard sell to get me to 'upgrade' to Yahoo DSL and install their quality monitoring software. I haven't fallen for this in spite of increasingly frantic snail mails and emails. People on craigslist have reported that the 'upgrade' destablizes windows and the new email has alot of problems. I see this so-called upgrade as an attempt to install spyware and turn my dsl bill into the equivalent of a cell phone bill. Since I'm a linux user their software won't run on my machine anyway. I'm waiting to see if I get my service terminated for not signing up.
Anyway, how do we get these clueless newbies also known as CEOs to give up and realize that the internet isn't TV ?
The last time I checked blogdex the most popular topics by far were blogs themselves. I was kind of surprised to see that bloggers are now wondering whether people think they are nerds or not.
Actually if you filter stuff like the above out blogdex really does look like its telling you what people are thinking about these days.
If I'm able to get Netflix to consider making recent subtitled anime available to those who want it wouldn't that help the creators and hurt the bootleggers ?
With my netflix account I pay $20 US per month for unlimited rentals. I can usually get about 20 dvds due to the lag involved in mailing. If I can talk them into getting current stuff from Japan it will get even better !
A year ago I bought the then new Logitech dual pickup optical mouse and installed the drivers from the included CD. The install looked kind of suspicious so I ran ad-aware. It reported some kind of spyware components so I removed them. The system was clean before I installed the drivers.
This really blew my mind at the time. I can see someone who provides free software doing that using the excuse that they need to make money and pay the employees, etc. But spyware with a $49.99 USA mouse ! Jeez...............
I disagree with your comments on nudity but yes that panty stuff is really annoying. Check out the recent series Raimuriro Senkitan for some overuse that messes up an otherwise OK series. I didn't care for the pantsu kudasai episode of Chobits either although it made for some funny !triggers on irc for a while.
The good thing about anime is that although there is alot of formula stuff there is still more originality and ability to experiment than on American TV. One recent example would be Saikano (aka She, the ultimate weapon, aka Saishuheike Kanojo), about the end of the human race amoung other things. And consider Arjuna, something that pro-environmentalist would never be allowed on American TV.
I was selected by Netflix to participate in a customer focus group. I'm going to their Los Gatos offices on monday. In return I'm getting two months of free service. Hopefully I'll be able to suggest some improvements in their service to anime fans, and I'll ask to speak with someone in management if I can't fit it into the format of the meeting.
An obvious suggestion is that there are big gaps in their offerings to anime fans. They don't carry series like Crest of the Stars and FLCL or oldies like Otaku no Video. (I go to Nikaku Animart, the anime rental place in the San Jose Japantown neighborhood for stuff like that.)
Another obvious suggestion is that they aren't following new releases closely enough. Stuff like Banner of the Stars, Chobits,.hack, etc doesn't show up in their search, even though obscure art films about eskimos and show up months in advance of release.
I might be dreaming on this one but I'm going to try to discuss the lag time between releases in Japan and releases in the US with them. It seems silly to me that the Cowboy Bebop movie (movie not the series) was out in Japan several years ago but only recently came to the US. My suggestion is going to be that they deal directly with the Japanese companies themselves and not wait for the US distributors to license and dub the titles. AFAIK the majority of fans don't need the dubbing anyway and prefer subtitles. I'm wondering if they'd be interested in hearing that many Americans (yeah europeans, asians, and middle easterners too) are watching series like Chobits, Wolfs Rain, etc within days or weeks of airing in Japan, and with subtitles too. I may bring my chinese Hoshi no Koe dvd in as a prop. I don't think that one is out in the US yet, it wasn't last fall when I bought it. It looks to me like there is a tremendous demand for recent anime here that isn't being *commercially* fullfilled. =:) I hope they don't laugh too hard when I suggest they do something about it.
Anyway, anybody have any other suggestions for Netflix on how to improve services to anime fans ? Series you'd like to see, etc ?
www.dothack.com, this one explains how the ova series, the games, and the tv show relate. It's in english and no mention is made of the sequel series.hack//legend of the twilight bracelet, which is playing in Japan right now and being actively fansubbed.
Thanks for the above links, they answered my questions about the game. I still don't know why Bandai would do a sigle player game about a MMORPG world, maybe they were afraid they'd get in the same mess as the Sony game in the topic.
Last year in Japan there was a very popular anime series called.hack//sign about goings on in an Everquest style game called The World. A series of three playstation games directly related to the series came out also and as far as I know these games are SINGLE PLAYER !
Anybody know what the story is with MMORPGs in Japan or if I'm wrong about the single player nature of these games ?
The anime series was very good by the way and if you haven't seen it already I'd recommend you check it out.
So did you void her warranty ?
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Just curious !
Surprised he didn't mention heat or noise
on
Carmack on NV30 vs R300
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· Score: 0, Insightful
I guess he thought heat and noise are a minor matter that Nvidia could easily take care of. Either that or he's a pure software guy.
My own feelings about the Nvidia card are completely the opposite. I couldn't care less about how it handles things internally. Besides gaming I use my computer as a replacement for a dvd player and TV. During the quiet passages I don't want to hear the little fans and stuff. I like fps but lack of noise is at least as important.
(If you're wondering about this comment see the Tom's hardware review and listen to the mp3s. It was a preproduction unit tho.)
If individual songs were priced around a nickel (5 cents US) and album prices were a dollar or less online music sales would be a success and the companies involved might actually make more and not less money.
There is a precedent for this type of scenario. Remember Compuserve in the late 80s and early 90s ? It had several hundred thousand members and charged $6 and $12 per hour for access. Remember what happened when Netcom introduced the $20 per month flat rate plan ?
I realize that given the greed of the current music "industry" leaders this won't happen soon, but besides that does anybody think it *wouldn't* work and solve most of the "piracy" problems if it was given a chance ? Compuserve always said their prices were a bargain and no one could do it for less also.
I agree but what should the prices really be ?
on
Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 1
My own personal opinion is that if songs were about 5 cents US or less or you could get the whole album for 99 cents or less the piracy problem would go away and the industry would be making more money and not less because there would be no incentive to cheat.
There is a precedent for this scenario. Remember the early 90s when CompuServe charged $6 or $12 per hour for access and had several hundred thousand members. Remember what happened when Netcom introduced $20/month flat rate pricing ?
It's too bad that in reality the clueless newbies normally called content industry CEOs don't get this and maybe never will.
The monthly flat rate models I've seen for music access just don't work for me. Why ? I already have dsl, netflix, cable, cell phone, health club, etc. One more monthly bill just isn't possible.
If you haven't heard already BitTorrent is a download facility that forces the downloaders to start sharing their upload bandwidth even before the download is complete.
I tested this briefly 2 weeks ago. I tried sharing a 200 meg video file (a recent anime fansub release) on my dsl at home. At one point I had thirty people downloading and some of them were reporting speeds of 40-50 kB/s even though my dsl is only 12.8 kB/s max.
Get it at:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html
and start sharing !
If I can actually get to a mirror I may try sharing here myself.
Here. It's not hard to find as an import, the thing you have to watch for is that some of these companies provide English subtitles by people who obviously don't speak the language and never met anybody who did. Nausicaa is difficult to find as a downloadable fansub but you can get it if you're persistent.
You may be right about the early 80's. That's probably different than what I talked about in my earlier post. The situation in San Jose was that this fiber was intended for PCs in individual homes, not backbone infrastructure. Think personal OC-1 and everybody in my neighborhood being able to host slashdot. They eventually gave us dsl but I still feel burnt when I think about what might have been.
This question has bugged me for years. I know that if you're a medium sized isp you might have to pay bandwidth charges to a backbone provider. Therefore you're probably stuck passing the charges on to consumers. But what is the reason for this and where are some details ? I'd really appreciate some good links or references to books.
One thing that really sticks in my mind is that 5 years ago Pacific Bell was laying fiberoptic cable in my neighborhood (San Jose, California, USA). Right before they were about to deploy some kind of gigabit network of the future SBC bought them out and put a stop to it. Later they even had the fiber dug out, maybe to make sure that no one used it. What could the reason for this have really been ? I can't come up with anything except that they didn't want to give consumers too good a break too fast, they were hung up on 1980's penny-per-pixel pricing schemes, and that businesses paying thousands per month for T1 might want a break too.
Another thing thats bugged me for years is what the bandwidth situation would be if Al Gore hadn't privatized the internet around 1996 in exchange for a couple hundred thousand in contributions to the DNC by MCI and others. Wouldn't the current bandwidth scenario be more like the Information Highway and less like the Information Tollroad ?
Go to your local library or used book store and browse through a copy of Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programmers in the United States by Philip Kraft. This is a study of the programming profession by a sociologist that was first published in 1977. This book was not well liked by programmers at the time because Mr. Kraft basically got the programmers he interviewed to admit they didn't really have careers then critisized them for not doing anything about it.
It's worth a reread if you can find it. Although some of the details have changed in 25 years the parallels to todays situation are pretty amazing. One of the other more unpopular things he concluded in his studies was that programming careers were basically over when you hit your mid thirties. Too bad people generally believe what they want to believe.
Here's a link to a list by Gilles Poitras who has written several books on anime:
http://www.koyagi.com/recAnime.html
His list isn't as up to date as I'd like but it's a good starting point.
Another thing you could do is see if there is an anime club in your area and attend one of the meetings. Usually these things are just a couple hours of watching cartoons but they often come up with stuff you wouldn't have thought of on your own. If you live in the San Francisco bay area check out no name anime (www.nnanime.com)
I agree with all of the other recommendations but would add the following:
Blue Submarine 6 Grave of the Fireflies Perfect Blue Castle of Cagliostro Night on the Galactic Express Urusei Yatsura: Beatiful Dreamer 2
That last one is a little surrealistic and unusual but still one of my all time favorites.
A spoof site at www.vnunet.com/News/1127965 is what happened. Linuxtoday and LWN picked up on it and alot of people don't realize this site is a joke. Check out this quote from the article :
"Linux users are advised not to run exploits from unknown sources"
My all time favorite is Twilight of the Cockroaches. It always surprises me that so many people haven't heard of it. Check it out if you haven't seen it already, i consider it as good as Akira.
I read about this in LINUXformat but haven't tried it because I haven't gotten a WinTv-Go card yet. Their Novemeber 2001 issue is devoted to video for linux.
So why don't you download it, try it, and let us know how it works ?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice article but the people who really need to be forced to read and comprehend it are SBC and Yahoo management.
For the past several months SBC has been attempting a hard sell to get me to 'upgrade' to Yahoo DSL and install their quality monitoring software. I haven't fallen for this in spite of increasingly frantic snail mails and emails. People on craigslist have reported that the 'upgrade' destablizes windows and the new email has alot of problems. I see this so-called upgrade as an attempt to install spyware and turn my dsl bill into the equivalent of a cell phone bill. Since I'm a linux user their software won't run on my machine anyway. I'm waiting to see if I get my service terminated for not signing up.
Anyway, how do we get these clueless newbies also known as CEOs to give up and realize that the internet isn't TV ?
The last time I checked blogdex the most popular topics by far were blogs themselves. I was kind of surprised to see that bloggers are now wondering whether people think they are nerds or not.
Actually if you filter stuff like the above out blogdex really does look like its telling you what people are thinking about these days.
If I'm able to get Netflix to consider making recent subtitled anime available to those who want it wouldn't that help the creators and hurt the bootleggers ?
With my netflix account I pay $20 US per month for unlimited rentals. I can usually get about 20 dvds due to the lag involved in mailing. If I can talk them into getting current stuff from Japan it will get even better !
A year ago I bought the then new Logitech dual pickup optical mouse and installed the drivers from the included CD. The install looked kind of suspicious so I ran ad-aware. It reported some kind of spyware components so I removed them. The system was clean before I installed the drivers.
This really blew my mind at the time. I can see someone who provides free software doing that using the excuse that they need to make money and pay the employees, etc. But spyware with a $49.99 USA mouse ! Jeez...............
I disagree with your comments on nudity but yes that panty stuff is really annoying. Check out the recent series Raimuriro Senkitan for some overuse that messes up an otherwise OK series. I didn't care for the pantsu kudasai episode of Chobits either although it made for some funny !triggers on irc for a while.
The good thing about anime is that although there is alot of formula stuff there is still more originality and ability to experiment than on American TV. One recent example would be Saikano (aka She, the ultimate weapon, aka Saishuheike Kanojo), about the end of the human race amoung other things. And consider Arjuna, something that pro-environmentalist would never be allowed on American TV.
I was selected by Netflix to participate in a customer focus group. I'm going to their Los Gatos offices on monday. In return I'm getting two months of free service. Hopefully I'll be able to suggest some improvements in their service to anime fans, and I'll ask to speak with someone in management if I can't fit it into the format of the meeting.
.hack, etc doesn't show up in their search, even though obscure art films about eskimos and show up months in advance of release.
An obvious suggestion is that there are big gaps in their offerings to anime fans. They don't carry series like Crest of the Stars and FLCL or oldies like Otaku no Video. (I go to Nikaku Animart, the anime rental place in the San Jose Japantown neighborhood for stuff like that.)
Another obvious suggestion is that they aren't following new releases closely enough. Stuff like Banner of the Stars, Chobits,
I might be dreaming on this one but I'm going to try to discuss the lag time between releases in Japan and releases in the US with them. It seems silly to me that the Cowboy Bebop movie (movie not the series) was out in Japan several years ago but only recently came to the US. My suggestion is going to be that they deal directly with the Japanese companies themselves and not wait for the US distributors to license and dub the titles. AFAIK the majority of fans don't need the dubbing anyway and prefer subtitles. I'm wondering if they'd be interested in hearing that many Americans (yeah europeans, asians, and middle easterners too) are watching series like Chobits, Wolfs Rain, etc within days or weeks of airing in Japan, and with subtitles too. I may bring my chinese Hoshi no Koe dvd in as a prop. I don't think that one is out in the US yet, it wasn't last fall when I bought it. It looks to me like there is a tremendous demand for recent anime here that isn't being *commercially* fullfilled. =:)
I hope they don't laugh too hard when I suggest they do something about it.
Anyway, anybody have any other suggestions for Netflix on how to improve services to anime fans ?
Series you'd like to see, etc ?
www.dothack.com, this one explains how the ova series, the games, and the tv show relate. It's in english and no mention is made of the sequel series .hack//legend of the twilight bracelet, which is playing in Japan right now and being actively fansubbed.
Thanks for the above links, they answered my questions about the game. I still don't know why Bandai would do a sigle player game about a MMORPG world, maybe they were afraid they'd get in the same mess as the Sony game in the topic.
Last year in Japan there was a very popular anime series called .hack//sign about goings on in an Everquest style game called The World. A series of three playstation games directly related to the series came out also and as far as I know these games are SINGLE PLAYER !
Anybody know what the story is with MMORPGs in Japan or if I'm wrong about the single player nature of these games ?
The anime series was very good by the way and if you haven't seen it already I'd recommend you check it out.
Just curious !
I guess he thought heat and noise are a minor matter that Nvidia could easily take care of. Either that or he's a pure software guy.
My own feelings about the Nvidia card are completely the opposite. I couldn't care less about how it handles things internally. Besides gaming I use my computer as a replacement for a dvd player and TV. During the quiet passages I don't want to hear the little fans and stuff. I like fps but lack of noise is at least as important.
(If you're wondering about this comment see the Tom's hardware review and listen to the mp3s. It was a preproduction unit tho.)
If individual songs were priced around a nickel (5 cents US) and album prices were a dollar or less online music sales would be a success and the companies involved might actually make more and not less money.
There is a precedent for this type of scenario. Remember Compuserve in the late 80s and early 90s ? It had several hundred thousand members and charged $6 and $12 per hour for access. Remember what happened when Netcom introduced the $20 per month flat rate plan ?
I realize that given the greed of the current music "industry" leaders this won't happen soon, but besides that does anybody think it *wouldn't* work and solve most of the "piracy" problems if it was given a chance ? Compuserve always said their prices were a bargain and no one could do it for less also.
My own personal opinion is that if songs were about 5 cents US or less or you could get the whole album for 99 cents or less the piracy problem would go away and the industry would be making more money and not less because there would be no incentive to cheat.
There is a precedent for this scenario. Remember the early 90s when CompuServe charged $6 or $12 per hour for access and had several hundred thousand members. Remember what happened when Netcom introduced $20/month flat rate pricing ?
It's too bad that in reality the clueless newbies normally called content industry CEOs don't get this and maybe never will.
The monthly flat rate models I've seen for music access just don't work for me. Why ? I already have dsl, netflix, cable, cell phone, health club, etc. One more monthly bill just isn't possible.
His A Signal Shattered and Signal to Noise books are both very good. If you like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling you should check them out.
He also did a novelization of the game Halo but I never checked that one out.
I'm already getting twice the speed from your link that I got from the ftp mirrors. Thanks.
If you haven't heard already BitTorrent is a download facility that forces the downloaders to start sharing their upload bandwidth even before the download is complete.
I tested this briefly 2 weeks ago. I tried sharing a 200 meg video file (a recent anime fansub release) on my dsl at home. At one point I had thirty people downloading and some of them were reporting speeds of 40-50 kB/s even though my dsl is only 12.8 kB/s max.
Get it at:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html
and start sharing !
If I can actually get to a mirror I may try sharing here myself.
Here. It's not hard to find as an import, the thing you have to watch for is that some of these companies provide English subtitles by people who obviously don't speak the language and never met anybody who did. Nausicaa is difficult to find as a downloadable fansub but you can get it if you're persistent.
You may be right about the early 80's. That's probably different than what I talked about in my earlier post. The situation in San Jose was that this fiber was intended for PCs in individual homes, not backbone infrastructure. Think personal OC-1 and everybody in my neighborhood being able to host slashdot. They eventually gave us dsl but I still feel burnt when I think about what might have been.
This question has bugged me for years. I know that if you're a medium sized isp you might have to pay bandwidth charges to a backbone provider. Therefore you're probably stuck passing the charges on to consumers. But what is the reason for this and where are some details ? I'd really appreciate some good links or references to books.
One thing that really sticks in my mind is that 5 years ago Pacific Bell was laying fiberoptic cable in my neighborhood (San Jose, California, USA). Right before they were about to deploy some kind of gigabit network of the future SBC bought them out and put a stop to it. Later they even had the fiber dug out, maybe to make sure that no one used it. What could the reason for this have really been ? I can't come up with anything except that they didn't want to give consumers too good a break too fast, they were hung up on 1980's penny-per-pixel pricing schemes, and that businesses paying thousands per month for T1 might want a break too.
Another thing thats bugged me for years is what the bandwidth situation would be if Al Gore hadn't privatized the internet around 1996 in exchange for a couple hundred thousand in contributions to the DNC by MCI and others. Wouldn't the current bandwidth scenario be more like the Information Highway and less like the Information Tollroad ?
Go to your local library or used book store and browse through a copy of Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programmers in the United States by Philip Kraft. This is a study of the programming profession by a sociologist that was first published in 1977. This book was not well liked by programmers at the time because Mr. Kraft basically got the programmers he interviewed to admit they didn't really have careers then critisized them for not doing anything about it.
It's worth a reread if you can find it. Although some of the details have changed in 25 years the parallels to todays situation are pretty amazing. One of the other more unpopular things he concluded in his studies was that programming careers were basically over when you hit your mid thirties. Too bad people generally believe what they want to believe.
Here's a link to a list by Gilles Poitras who has written several books on anime:
http://www.koyagi.com/recAnime.html
His list isn't as up to date as I'd like but it's a good starting point.
Another thing you could do is see if there is an anime club in your area and attend one of the meetings. Usually these things are just a couple hours of watching cartoons but they often come up with stuff you wouldn't have thought of on your own. If you live in the San Francisco bay area check out no name anime (www.nnanime.com)
I agree with all of the other recommendations but would add the following:
Blue Submarine 6
Grave of the Fireflies
Perfect Blue
Castle of Cagliostro
Night on the Galactic Express
Urusei Yatsura: Beatiful Dreamer 2
That last one is a little surrealistic and unusual but still one of my all time favorites.
Ad-aware doesn't detect or remove the Brilliant Digital Entertainment stuff either. You have to use add/remove programs in the control panel.
I like that Cydoor mimic though, you might be able to put it in the windows system folder and fool other programs as well.
A spoof site at www.vnunet.com/News/1127965 is what happened. Linuxtoday and LWN picked up on it and alot of people don't realize this site is a joke. Check out this quote from the article :
"Linux users are advised not to run exploits from unknown sources"
My all time favorite is Twilight of the Cockroaches. It always surprises me that so many people haven't heard of it. Check it out if you haven't seen it already, i consider it as good as Akira.
I read about this in LINUXformat but haven't tried it because I haven't gotten a WinTv-Go card yet. Their Novemeber 2001 issue is devoted to video for linux.
So why don't you download it, try it, and let us know how it works ?