'Gee, *I* never touch this any more. That must make it useless!'
Seriously, I know weekends are slow, but come on -- how did this ever make the main page? What's next, discussions about indentation styles?
Probably the reason most people aren't aware of the Stand Alone Complex availability is that it isn't a legitimate DVD, but a bootleg produced out of China or Taiwan.
Hint #1: you can't generally get a full 26-episode season of an anime legitimately for under $100ish (if not more: see the original prices on the Cowboy Bebop and Trigun box sets).
Hint #2: No 'official' release is going to be region-free.
Hint #3: no legitimate release is going to squeeze 26 episodes onto 4 DVDs (the box set I saw) and (almost) no official release is going to have english that bad, not in this day and age.
On the bright side, Cartoon Network has just recently acquired the broadcast rights for GitS:SAC, so legitimate versions will no doubt be coming soon.
Oh, and for the record, virtually no legitimate anime soundtrack is going to be $10 or even $15 either. There's more information on anime bootlegs here for those who want it.
The 'original prototyper' Will Harvey mentions in the article is another brilliant software guy, Jeffrey Ventrella; I worked with him at Rocket Science too, and he had basically the same job there -- sit in a corner office and work on cool shit, then let the company figure out how to turn it into a product. All around, There has some of the brightest engineers I've ever met, and some of the best management I've seen, and I'm still not sure how they managed to turn out a product that's so shaky from a software engineering perspective. For instance, users can submit new models for hoverboards, but not for buggies, essentially because buggies were hardcoded into the initial version of the engine rather than being built on the Animob engine that Mr. Harvey mentions, so a buggy will break if it doesn't have exactly the same buggy model. It's a striking example of how shortsighted design decisions can come back to bite you.
The big issue they haven't solved yet is scalability. It's good to talk about thousands of servers the way he does, but last I checked the service was bogging down whenever more than a couple dozen people started clustering together too closely; I can't imagine them handling much more than 2x the number of people they've got now without collapsing under the weight. I definitely wish them the best and I hope they can pull it off -- it's a great concept -- but I'm not optimistic about their prospects.
My conclusion was that if Microsoft was able to dominate the web on the desktop, it would be a short matter of time before they could extend and dominate the web on the server. I knew that Mozilla was our last and only hope for winning this.
Guess what? Microsoft *does* dominate the web on the desktop. They have since Netscape went down (I know, I know, but everyone knows what I mean) and that really shows no fundamental sign of changing. IE is overwhelmingly the #1 browser according to all of the usage statistics out there; Mozilla is making huge gains, unquestionably, but the last I saw it was still under 10% of the market and, more to the point, its gains have come from cannibalizing older browsers (Netscape 3/4) more than IE (which seems to be maintaining a steady market share in the low 80s even despite Mozilla's gains).
But amazingly, and more to the point, that's had virtually no bearing on the web server world. Unless one takes 'a short matter of time' to be 8 to 10 years (twice as long as Netscape's dominance held out!) then there's no indication whatsoever that Microsoft will win the 'web war' server-side. IIS is eternally mired in the 20-30% market share range, while Apache has been a majority leader for more than a half-decade now (at least, according to NetCraft). I have no problems with the FireFox browser itself, but the original premise the author is touting, that MS browser dominance would lead inexorably to server dominance, seems even more absurd now than it did at the time.
As someone pointed out, The Dream Hunters was released a bit more recently, and while it wasn't by Gaiman himself, Jill Thompson's shojo-style Endless GN (At Death's Door) came out just a month or two ago and is heartily recommended for anyone who enjoyed the original series -- it may not be as deep as much of Gaiman's work, but it's every bit as entertaining and well-written. Bill Willingham has also done various small one-shots, mostly with Merv Pumpkinhead, and of course several other writers have dipped onto the well too (Mike Carey, etc). The Endless book looks fantastic, but I still want to see Gaiman do something with Donna Barr...
(Oh, and the man also gave what may be one of the finest award speeches I've ever heard, last year at Worldcon. "Fuck. I just won a Hugo...")
Actually, I have quite a bit more than 20GB of music (currently just over 30GB, all ripped from my own CD collection). And if I'm given the choice, I'd much rather carry it all with me just to avoid the hassle of having to decide what I'm likely to want to listen to or not listen to on any given trip. The extra disk space is insurance against the hassle of ever having to shuttle items in and out.
I had the pleasure of working at Atari Games (then masquerading as Time-Warner Interactive) for a year, almost a decade ago now. (My time there slotted right into the hole between Primal Rage and SFO Rush, just before the true renaissance). The thing that stands out to this day was how thoroughly suffused in arcade game culture the whole place was. Most of the employees owned at least one or two arcade units, which often shuffled between employees as people came and went (I had a Space Dungeon and my office-mate had a fantastic Off The Wall machine), and several had more substantial collections (one guy whose name I've sadly forgotten even had an old Quantum machine). They were doing what they loved to do and it showed in the games they made. Few of the places I've worked since then have shown nearly as much love and respect for their own culture.
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'Gee, *I* never touch this any more. That must make it useless!' Seriously, I know weekends are slow, but come on -- how did this ever make the main page? What's next, discussions about indentation styles?
...GitS: Innocence and the recent manga (published in the US by Dark Horse), GitS: Fan Serv-- errr, GitS: Man-Machine Interface?
- Hint #1: you can't generally get a full 26-episode season of an anime legitimately for under $100ish (if not more: see the original prices on the Cowboy Bebop and Trigun box sets).
- Hint #2: No 'official' release is going to be region-free.
- Hint #3: no legitimate release is going to squeeze 26 episodes onto 4 DVDs (the box set I saw) and (almost) no official release is going to have english that bad, not in this day and age.
On the bright side, Cartoon Network has just recently acquired the broadcast rights for GitS:SAC, so legitimate versions will no doubt be coming soon.Oh, and for the record, virtually no legitimate anime soundtrack is going to be $10 or even $15 either. There's more information on anime bootlegs here for those who want it.
The big issue they haven't solved yet is scalability. It's good to talk about thousands of servers the way he does, but last I checked the service was bogging down whenever more than a couple dozen people started clustering together too closely; I can't imagine them handling much more than 2x the number of people they've got now without collapsing under the weight. I definitely wish them the best and I hope they can pull it off -- it's a great concept -- but I'm not optimistic about their prospects.
Guess what? Microsoft *does* dominate the web on the desktop. They have since Netscape went down (I know, I know, but everyone knows what I mean) and that really shows no fundamental sign of changing. IE is overwhelmingly the #1 browser according to all of the usage statistics out there; Mozilla is making huge gains, unquestionably, but the last I saw it was still under 10% of the market and, more to the point, its gains have come from cannibalizing older browsers (Netscape 3/4) more than IE (which seems to be maintaining a steady market share in the low 80s even despite Mozilla's gains).
But amazingly, and more to the point, that's had virtually no bearing on the web server world. Unless one takes 'a short matter of time' to be 8 to 10 years (twice as long as Netscape's dominance held out!) then there's no indication whatsoever that Microsoft will win the 'web war' server-side. IIS is eternally mired in the 20-30% market share range, while Apache has been a majority leader for more than a half-decade now (at least, according to NetCraft). I have no problems with the FireFox browser itself, but the original premise the author is touting, that MS browser dominance would lead inexorably to server dominance, seems even more absurd now than it did at the time.
As someone pointed out, The Dream Hunters was released a bit more recently, and while it wasn't by Gaiman himself, Jill Thompson's shojo-style Endless GN (At Death's Door) came out just a month or two ago and is heartily recommended for anyone who enjoyed the original series -- it may not be as deep as much of Gaiman's work, but it's every bit as entertaining and well-written. Bill Willingham has also done various small one-shots, mostly with Merv Pumpkinhead, and of course several other writers have dipped onto the well too (Mike Carey, etc). The Endless book looks fantastic, but I still want to see Gaiman do something with Donna Barr... (Oh, and the man also gave what may be one of the finest award speeches I've ever heard, last year at Worldcon. "Fuck. I just won a Hugo...")
Actually, I have quite a bit more than 20GB of music (currently just over 30GB, all ripped from my own CD collection). And if I'm given the choice, I'd much rather carry it all with me just to avoid the hassle of having to decide what I'm likely to want to listen to or not listen to on any given trip. The extra disk space is insurance against the hassle of ever having to shuttle items in and out.
I did this about a year ago, based on some docs on , and it unfortunately didn't solve a problem I've had where trying to upload songs to the device after it's been filled up to a certain point (currently about 23GB) causes the player to lock up and the transfer to freeze. Oh, and it was remarkably easy to do (on my JB1). I ended up loosening the springs on the battery connector, but that was it for 'damage'.
I had the pleasure of working at Atari Games (then masquerading as Time-Warner Interactive) for a year, almost a decade ago now. (My time there slotted right into the hole between Primal Rage and SFO Rush, just before the true renaissance). The thing that stands out to this day was how thoroughly suffused in arcade game culture the whole place was. Most of the employees owned at least one or two arcade units, which often shuffled between employees as people came and went (I had a Space Dungeon and my office-mate had a fantastic Off The Wall machine), and several had more substantial collections (one guy whose name I've sadly forgotten even had an old Quantum machine). They were doing what they loved to do and it showed in the games they made. Few of the places I've worked since then have shown nearly as much love and respect for their own culture.