The companies referred to in the article work on kiddy-stuff. The situation is different for more otaku-friendly productions. Essentially it depends on how much equity the anime production company has in the show - so IG, Bones, etc have no problems there.
You're shitting me right? The article mentions "Studio apartments" - which I take to mean 1-rooms. A 12sqm 1room in one of Tokyo's satellite cities is 2 or 3 man yen per month. Hell, my 36sqm 2DK in Yokohama is 5.6man yen a month
It's worth pointing out that the people interviewed in the article who are complaining about the death of anime, are employed by production houses who work on the very family-friendly anime - and with specific reference to "Chibi Maruko-chan" there was a well-known legal case from the voice-actors last year, as they weren't being paid residuals. I suspect that the situation is rather different for companies which make otaku-friendly anime - and I [i]KNOW[/i] it's different for companies who work with NHK. Actually, it's the otaku-friendly anime, and bishoujo anime specifically, which is powering Japan's anime boom.
4tech as a network engineer, NTT Docomo as a consultant, JapanLaw as a translator, half a dozen GS-6 through GS-9's who work on the US bases, and I even know one guy banking 120K rewriting bank software from Cobol and Fortran to C++ and JAVA web front ends.
There seems to be a certain amount of "being an American" going on there (which won't help me, or my friends.)
And, of course, if you're working in Japan, promotion (and wages) is tied to your age. I don't know about DoCoMo, but the NTT Soft engineers we work with get a comparable wage to us.
Actually, we are waging a cultural battle that we are never going to win. Most of my friends in Tokyo who are in their 20's and still not married still live with their parents. And they average about 60K in income.
Who do they work for? I'd love to double my salary, and I'm sure all the other 20-something Engineers I know in Tokyo/Yokohama would agree.
DV over Firewire / TS over firewire (MPEG-2 Transport Stream : DTV) is easy, assuming you have software to play the images back.
You'll only really start to get issues when you start working with HDTV (And I'm specifically referring to the Japanese broadcast standards here, I'm unfamiliar with the American ones)
One of the problems in the story is that the guy in charge of developing the filters is patriotic, but an idiot, and he's working so hard that the other people who work with him can't stop the escalation of the problem.
My ignorant guess would be that there's something with regards to the MPEG patent licensing that prevents the details being released for piracy prevention reasons because the use of these accelerators would enable real-time/near real-time transcoding of DVDs, etc.
At last year's IBC, the MPEG-LA were showing off realtime transcoding of DVDs to MPEG-4, in software, on commodity hardware, so I rather doubt that's the reason
Really it's not worth it to translate 5 different languages and all this extra crap just for a couple thousand in sales. Europe doesn't buy enough games to make it worth while.
Congratulations for talking out of your arse. "Couple thousand" indeed.
Damn but I'm feeling angry today. No idea why.
Microsoft decided to release untranslated (ie English-language) non-localized versions of X-Box games in Japan.
You have no idea - no idea - just how badly Microsoft has fucked up in the Japanese market. X-Boxes are cheaper than Dreamcasts, and more shops sell DC games than X-Box games. Outside of Sega they have - basically - no developer support. Frankly they can't do anything to make the situation worse - I'd gamble that most people in Japan still buying X-Box games are from America originally.
(i.e. Finding the Turkey on Thanksgiving or the candy on Halloween, both American specific holidays)
Halloween, an American holiday? Here's a clue: It's "All Hallow's eve" and goes back to the middle ages, at least. History did not begin 200 years ago, no matter what you learned in school. And yes, Nintendo of Europe are fuckwits, as is Square. And Sony. Actually, if you're European, and you want to play console games you're basically fucked.
I'm just glad I live in Japan.
Game companies should never try to sell sequels without the genius of the original creators behind it...
Well, in Lucasarts alone, Day of the Tentacle was made by a different team to Maniac Mansion, and the Monkey Island creators left after making 2, so 3 and 4 had 2 completely different teams working on them.
It's maybe worth mentioning that in Japan they don't use HAVi, only AVC, which is a point-to-point protocol. From what I can understand, HAVi is a layer on top of AVC, but I could be wrong there.
In Japan at least, Pokemon seems to be administered by "The Pokemon Company" - I'm not sure if that's just a licencing company, or if it's a wholly owned subsidiary and running it that way makes more sense for some reason.
International? EU has postponed their laws on the subject. They might well be rejected now. (one can always hope)
It looks more and more likely that the compromise will be that
novel software patents will be allowed, though business patents will not. I'd be very surprised if something like this could ever be patented in Europe.
In fact, looking at their white paper - the patent link is broken - the system they appear to have patented is a system which automatically adds any taxes you have to pay onto the bill (so, for instance, if the buyer is in Europe, adding on VAT). How on earth can you patent something like that?
The men behind DET's far-reaching patents, Ed Pool and Douglas Mauer, claim to be the first inventors to "computerise the ability to do international business transactions".
Now, if I understand this right, until their "invention" you couldn't carry out international business transactions on the internet before '97? Now I'm fairly sure theres a mistake there...
Ah, there's the rub. You don't get glossy mens magazines in Japan. If it's a glossy magazine, it's for women. This (cough) may have caught me in the past, but I know better now...
1) I dunno what hobbies you have, but I've never paid that much for Newtype or Weekly Famitsu
2) Too true. But that whole "standing up" thing - you American? Only most countries are like that - commuting in Tokyo is just like commuting in London.
3) Depends on the magazine. The low quality stuff with a few pics of Megumi, some nudes, and the rest of it printed on the same low quality paper as most manga. The high quality stuff - "monthly schoolgirl mook" or whatever, they've wrapped, or at least they are in all the "Family Marts" near me - no Lawsons, just lots of "Family Mart". And Pachinko. And Hostess Bars. Maybe that's why they're shrinkwrapped where I live....
SCO really should be encouraging their customers to switch to a Unix-variant that has no legal issues outstanding.
If you believe SCO, then right now that's only OSX, Sun, and NT (well, yeah, you know what I mean with that last one). Even then, if I were a customer, with SCO's history I'd be concentrating on the right now
If I make a competitive product, and it becomes successful, does it steal from other companies in the same market?
I'm sorry, you appear to be confused about the Games Industry being a competitive industry. Sega and Nintendo are convicted monopolists, just like everyone's favourite software company...
Slashdot Mirror
You're shitting me right? The article mentions "Studio apartments" - which I take to mean 1-rooms. A 12sqm 1room in one of Tokyo's satellite cities is 2 or 3 man yen per month. Hell, my 36sqm 2DK in Yokohama is 5.6man yen a month
It's worth pointing out that the people interviewed in the article who are complaining about the death of anime, are employed by production houses who work on the very family-friendly anime - and with specific reference to "Chibi Maruko-chan" there was a well-known legal case from the voice-actors last year, as they weren't being paid residuals. I suspect that the situation is rather different for companies which make otaku-friendly anime - and I [i]KNOW[/i] it's different for companies who work with NHK. Actually, it's the otaku-friendly anime, and bishoujo anime specifically, which is powering Japan's anime boom.
The sad thing about that is that in the past, many of the Libdem MEPs have rebelled against the party policy, and voted FOR patents.
DV over Firewire / TS over firewire (MPEG-2 Transport Stream : DTV) is easy, assuming you have software to play the images back. You'll only really start to get issues when you start working with HDTV (And I'm specifically referring to the Japanese broadcast standards here, I'm unfamiliar with the American ones)
It's from the November issue, IIRC.
One of the problems in the story is that the guy in charge of developing the filters is patriotic, but an idiot, and he's working so hard that the other people who work with him can't stop the escalation of the problem.
Yahoo BB (another huge Japanese ISP) also aren't blocking it.
Means I can't talk to my North Korean friend either. Bugger.
It's maybe worth mentioning that in Japan they don't use HAVi, only AVC, which is a point-to-point protocol. From what I can understand, HAVi is a layer on top of AVC, but I could be wrong there.
The IPA (British equivalent of the RIAA) have specifically said that they won't go after individual users. You're safe, for now at least.
In Japan at least, Pokemon seems to be administered by "The Pokemon Company" - I'm not sure if that's just a licencing company, or if it's a wholly owned subsidiary and running it that way makes more sense for some reason.
In fact, looking at their white paper - the patent link is broken - the system they appear to have patented is a system which automatically adds any taxes you have to pay onto the bill (so, for instance, if the buyer is in Europe, adding on VAT). How on earth can you patent something like that?
1) I dunno what hobbies you have, but I've never paid that much for Newtype or Weekly Famitsu 2) Too true. But that whole "standing up" thing - you American? Only most countries are like that - commuting in Tokyo is just like commuting in London. 3) Depends on the magazine. The low quality stuff with a few pics of Megumi, some nudes, and the rest of it printed on the same low quality paper as most manga. The high quality stuff - "monthly schoolgirl mook" or whatever, they've wrapped, or at least they are in all the "Family Marts" near me - no Lawsons, just lots of "Family Mart". And Pachinko. And Hostess Bars. Maybe that's why they're shrinkwrapped where I live....