The only surprise here is that there were any animators doing cel work in Japan at all. As in the case of American animation, one would think that all of the cel work would have gone to South Korea by now. Though I hate to see people lose work to offshoring, I don't think that this alone will destroy Japanese anime. I'm more concerned that the recent popularity of anime in the U.S. will result in Japanese anime made for Americans. Just as suburbanized ethnic food tends to lack flavor (ie, suck), Americanized anime could be just as lacking in taste. Only time will tell.
I still foundly remember those Star Trek adventure games they published back in the early 90's. But especially Starfleet Command which as an old Starfleet Battles player, was a dream come true!
The ease of defeating this for the saavy is what makes this all such a joke! All these restrictions will do nothing to stop professional pirates. Indeed making casual copying more onerous will probably increase sales for the pirates.
I think that most computer users know now that making songs on your hard drive available to the whole world is illegal. So further restrictions are just going to further alienate consumers, particularly since I haven't read anything in this about reducing the cost of music CDs. The fact that the price of a new CD is much higher than the market wants is what drives piracy. Drop a new CD to $9.99 or less and give pirates a run for the money.
Not really sure what's up with Sun. It almost looks like some kind of endgame or death spiral. In any case, I don't think open sourcing Solaris will really cost them anything. As one poster speculated, it may simply be a ploy to get some free labor for bug fixes and enhancements, depending on what kind of license the source is released under.
With the rise of Linux, Solaris has been on the decline. Not only that, it seems that Sun's cpu development efforts have all but died. It's really hard to see what they are trying to do at this point. Open sourcing Solaris, may simply be a bone thrown out in lieu of open sourcing Java (at least GPL style that is).
If Sun is to survive, they should take a few pages from IBM's book wrt Linux. Heck steal the whole darn book! I think IBM has been able to fully embrace Linux and continue to be a factor on the hardware side as well in a way that fully leverages their investments in Linux. I don't see why Sun can't do something similar. And it probably wouldn't hurt to play nice with Windows too so they can offer complete solutions to the customer.
This is a good start to reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil and as one poster commented, closing the carbon loop. But I suspect the way this will pan out is as follows.
Somewhere along the way biodiesel will be a money making concern, then bar the door 'cause here comes Big Oil! Those guys aren't stupid, they know there are only a few more decades of petroleum coming out of the middle east, then game over. So I'm sure they're looking for ways to stay in business, biodiesel may be a way.
It'll be easier to get people to convert because it doesn't require them to do anything different other than abandoning gasoline engines for diesel over time. And don't worry, the auto companies want to stay in business too, so they'll play ball. The real concern is what things like this will do to the price and availability of food, but given that biodiesel comes from stuff we'd normally discard, the effect may not be much. And of course we still have emissions to contend with, but at least this is a way to get people to use solar energy, so to speak.
Uh Oh! Get ready to see office productivity take a nose dive and those afterhours electric bills skyrocket!;) Man, I love stuff like this, no muss, no fuss!
Becoming A Real Crime
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Stories like this seem to indicate that spam is becoming more of a "real, get sent to jail" kind of crime with cops and detectives tracking done spammers. Naturally one hopes that violent criminals won't be neglected by this new focus on spammers. Nevertheless, the prospect of real jail time and big fines may deter some from entering the spam market.
Of course, one effect of rounding up the stupid ones will be leaving behind to true spam geniuses. Going after those guys and girls should be real entertaining. Heck, maybe there's a reality based tv show in there somewhere. So you heard it from me first! Anyone got Fox's phone number?
I agree, given the aggressive launch schedule Sony is trying to follow for the PSP (fall 2005 US I think), shifting resources to PSP makes sense. It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of the Clie people were working on PSP too.
It is also likely that the PSP has a far greater profit potential than the Clie too. For the Clie they only get money on hardware and probably not too much since they have to pay PalmOS licensing fees along with competing with a dozen or so other PDAs. For PSP, they will likely lose money on the hardware but more than make it up in royalties paid by game publishers for the system. If Nintendo's success in the handheld console market is an indicator, then PSP could make some major dough for Sony.
As for battery life, etc..., with the Clie people working on PSP, I like their chances. They've got experienced, talented people and a clear target and path laid out by current portable king, Nintendo. So on the whole, I think dropping Clie to focus on PSP is a good bet. This isn't Game Gear again by any means. Sony has far greater resources than Sega ever did and has shown that they know how to fight in the games market.
Awesome is almost an understatement. I love stuff like this!:-) I wonder if the Nintendo engineers ever anticipated this, or perhaps tried it themselves. Finally, after seeing the picture, it must be said...
Right now it's really hard to say whether PSP development will be easier or not. That depends on Sony. If Sony has learned lessons from the PS2 rollout and has returned to the roots of the original Playstation, then life could be good. One of the things that made the original Playstation a hit was that it was easy to develop for. "Easy" is of course a relative term, but the point is that the hardware architechture and the available SDK and other middleware allowed a wide range of development houses to get onboard the new platform right away. If the PSP does this, then that should open the floodgates.
But easy or not, I suspect that we will first see a bunch of PSOne ports and other warmed over titles. But who cares as long as they are fun! It will be a little while before we see real competition between PSP, GBA, and DS anyway. So Nintendo doesn't have to worry on day one. Good competition should bring us all some good games and just maybe at lower prices. Well one can hope.
Well actually some local governments in the US have been known to publish offenders names in the local newspapers. I think Naperville IL publishes the names of people arrested for DUIs in one of the local papers. I don't think the papers are compelled to carry this, but to them it's just more ad money.
It seems to me that stories like this are just proving that many big development companies have always wanted two important things.
1. An inexpensive, fast, and stable OS with the strength of Unix.
2. Inexpensive plentiful hardware to run the OS and apps.
Boom, Linux shows up on cheap PCs and the proprietary Unices(?) on expensive hardware start to feel the pinch. In the end it looks like Linux and FreeBSD will dominate the high end while Windows dominates the desktop.
Now for some fan service: It seems likely that Windows is in real peril here, because while they can continue to do well on the desktop, we may be entering a post-PC age where non-PC devices may dominate. Like, I'd love to be able to send my mom email, but she doesn't really use a PC and rarely has an ISP. But she does use a cell phone (like who doesn't now), so text messaging may be the next best thing. I'm sure Microsoft is aware of this too and is betting the farm on Longhorn to stop anymore defections to Linux on the server/development end. I know it was Sun that got hurt in this case, but high profile stories like this won't help MS. If Longhorn doesn't deliver the goods, look for a long downward slide in market share.
Of course, in the end, maybe we'll see a Microsoft Linux distro! Eeck!
While it sounds cool on the surface to kill the vermiscripters (along with the lawyers and the spammers), it seems that we're creating new despised classes of people for the digital age. Geeks and nerds have never been very popular to begin with, and now the government is getting in a position where it can finally punish this despised class just as ethnic minorities have similarly suffered disproportionately at the hands of the government. For my money, I'd still rather get the truly violent off the streets rather than offing some pimply faced hacker.
So let's hope that this talk of killing virus writers won't become more than talk. Next thing you know, the Department of Justice will be rounding up file sharers for RIAA...oh wait...
Alas, it seems that the universal law is that 90% of everything is crap! (Actually I think SF writer Theodore Sturgeon said that...) Which means that inevitably most games whether movie based or not are going to suck.
Movie based games just get more publicity for sucking badly because of all of the hype. Fortunately most of the bads don't sell. But occasionally, buggy messes like Enter the Matrix actually do, ugh, which is enough to convince the powers that be to continue making movie based games. Oh well, if you do find yourself playing a bad game, perhaps some fun can be had in revelling in its suckitude!
OMG, the PSP's about the sexiest thing I've seen today (hope the wife doesn't see this...). I love good clean attractive design. Like the iPod, it has a look that just whispers "i am cool, buy me."
If the PSP has the goods in terms of games and performance, then Sony has just renewed its license to print money. In the US style is important, but in Japan it's essential. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Nintendo DS goes back to the drawing board for some work before release.
I never really liked the PS2 design, the PS and PSOne were much more attractive to me. But with the PSP, Sony has a machine that casual gamers and the fashion conscious will line up for. If they come out at about $199 in the US, they won't be able to keep up with demand.
Actually, the biggest problem with production of games for Linux is that same one as producing games for Windows. The PC games market is being eroded by the great success of the ever more powerful and ubiquitous games consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube). Game developers generally won't target a platform that won't make them any money. And consolidation in the industry is removing the desire to take the risk of innovative gameplay on multiple platforms.
That said, I would say that development tools are definitely an issue. No flames please, but the best tools I've used came from that company in Redmond. And if you're writing for Windows, why would you use anything else? They just make it too easy. So tools on par with Visual Studio.Net on Linux would certainly help. The tool should also make it easy to target Windows as well. Being able to target consoles would be so much icing on the cake.
The Windows compatibility of OS/2 did hinder its adoption to some extent, but probably helped it more than it hurt. I for one ran OS/2 because for my work it was a more stable way of running Windows apps while letting me take advantage of advanced features of OS/2 apps as they became available. Heck, I used to run Apache and Perl on OS/2!
OS/2 ultimately failed because the IBM didn't market it well and couldn't break the barrier that Windows bundling deals formed. Linux won't suffer this same kind of fate in part because nobody and everybody owns it. Linux couldn't die if it wanted to! I don't know if Linux will ever be much on the desktop in the US, but I suspect that in the rest of the world, Linux on the desktop will become the standard. That's the scenario that Microsoft is most concerned about.
Heh heh heh! My son and I spent hours on Christmas morning getting wasted by DDR Max 2 on the normal difficulty level. I finally discovered the beginner mode and at least began to learn the game and have more fun.
Heh heh heh! The first year of the Scavenger Hunt, my house (Shorey) actually did get _the_ Mike Royko's autograph! Our resident head actually knew him or at least someone who knew him.
Many years later, as a resident head myself, I had the honor of using my car for a drive-by fruiting. Yes, fruiting!:-)
It's never good to go after your customers, if you want to stay in business. Comcast may suffer a bit for this depending on how aggressive they get.
Given that ISPs have not been held responsible for what people do without their knowledge in the past, this raises the interesting question of why Comcast is doing this... I wonder, if maybe Comcast knows more about what their customers are doing, than they are letting on. This would essentially make them partially responsible, so now they have to cover themselves.
Hmmm, I think we're on the same side here. My point was that all of the talk about our bad educational system was just a smoke screen. Yes, there are problems, but the jobs would have left regardless, simply because someone else somewhere else could do the job for far less money. And what part of teaching our kids to be entrepreneurers is turning them into mindless consumers?
Interestingly enough, while our primary educational system has significant problems, our colleges and universities are still held in relatively high regard. I have a number of international friends I met in college and graduate school, including my wife from Hong Kong, who can vouch for that. I used to joke that we should send our kids overseas through the end of highschool, then bring them back for college!
I am soo glad to hear from someone about what I have suspected all along. The rest of the world is _not_ all that _much_ better educated than the US. The whole education is the problem is a lie and has always been a lie.
Where jobs go is only about money. As long as US corporations are free to ship jobs to wherever the cheapest labor is, they will do it! I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do this, but nothing says that my tax dollars should support it!
So what should we do? Education is still good, and we should do our best to build the best educational system in the world. But, we need to teach our kids about what capitalism really means and teach them to be entrepreneurs instead of disposable wage slaves.
I'm glad to see that AutoZone is not just rolling over on this case. As others have already noted, SCO is not likely to survive all of this litigation intact and probably never really intended to.
With that in mind, I would say the latest round of high profile lawsuits against both corporate and government bodies is the intentional beginning of the endgame. I think that the legal team orchestrating all of this has decided that it's time to fall on the sword and end it all. So they start a round of suits they know they cannot win and cannot survive so that they can finally call this thing to a close.
Obviously, there will never be any proof that this is what is happening. But the fact that the U.S. legal and financial systems allow this level of abuse is the saddest revelation of this whole affair.
There may actually be something there. I know, like when they touch hands one of them could become various kinds of animals and the other could be some kind of object. Then together they fight...errr...Nevermind...
Slashdot Mirror
The only surprise here is that there were any animators doing cel work in Japan at all. As in the case of American animation, one would think that all of the cel work would have gone to South Korea by now. Though I hate to see people lose work to offshoring, I don't think that this alone will destroy Japanese anime. I'm more concerned that the recent popularity of anime in the U.S. will result in Japanese anime made for Americans. Just as suburbanized ethnic food tends to lack flavor (ie, suck), Americanized anime could be just as lacking in taste. Only time will tell.
I still foundly remember those Star Trek adventure games they published back in the early 90's. But especially Starfleet Command which as an old Starfleet Battles player, was a dream come true!
The ease of defeating this for the saavy is what makes this all such a joke! All these restrictions will do nothing to stop professional pirates. Indeed making casual copying more onerous will probably increase sales for the pirates.
I think that most computer users know now that making songs on your hard drive available to the whole world is illegal. So further restrictions are just going to further alienate consumers, particularly since I haven't read anything in this about reducing the cost of music CDs. The fact that the price of a new CD is much higher than the market wants is what drives piracy. Drop a new CD to $9.99 or less and give pirates a run for the money.
Not really sure what's up with Sun. It almost looks like some kind of endgame or death spiral. In any case, I don't think open sourcing Solaris will really cost them anything. As one poster speculated, it may simply be a ploy to get some free labor for bug fixes and enhancements, depending on what kind of license the source is released under.
With the rise of Linux, Solaris has been on the decline. Not only that, it seems that Sun's cpu development efforts have all but died. It's really hard to see what they are trying to do at this point. Open sourcing Solaris, may simply be a bone thrown out in lieu of open sourcing Java (at least GPL style that is).
If Sun is to survive, they should take a few pages from IBM's book wrt Linux. Heck steal the whole darn book! I think IBM has been able to fully embrace Linux and continue to be a factor on the hardware side as well in a way that fully leverages their investments in Linux. I don't see why Sun can't do something similar. And it probably wouldn't hurt to play nice with Windows too so they can offer complete solutions to the customer.
This is a good start to reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil and as one poster commented, closing the carbon loop. But I suspect the way this will pan out is as follows.
Somewhere along the way biodiesel will be a money making concern, then bar the door 'cause here comes Big Oil! Those guys aren't stupid, they know there are only a few more decades of petroleum coming out of the middle east, then game over. So I'm sure they're looking for ways to stay in business, biodiesel may be a way.
It'll be easier to get people to convert because it doesn't require them to do anything different other than abandoning gasoline engines for diesel over time. And don't worry, the auto companies want to stay in business too, so they'll play ball. The real concern is what things like this will do to the price and availability of food, but given that biodiesel comes from stuff we'd normally discard, the effect may not be much. And of course we still have emissions to contend with, but at least this is a way to get people to use solar energy, so to speak.
Uh Oh! Get ready to see office productivity take a nose dive and those afterhours electric bills skyrocket! ;) Man, I love stuff like this, no muss, no fuss!
Stories like this seem to indicate that spam is becoming more of a "real, get sent to jail" kind of crime with cops and detectives tracking done spammers. Naturally one hopes that violent criminals won't be neglected by this new focus on spammers. Nevertheless, the prospect of real jail time and big fines may deter some from entering the spam market.
Of course, one effect of rounding up the stupid ones will be leaving behind to true spam geniuses. Going after those guys and girls should be real entertaining. Heck, maybe there's a reality based tv show in there somewhere. So you heard it from me first! Anyone got Fox's phone number?
I agree, given the aggressive launch schedule Sony is trying to follow for the PSP (fall 2005 US I think), shifting resources to PSP makes sense. It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of the Clie people were working on PSP too.
It is also likely that the PSP has a far greater profit potential than the Clie too. For the Clie they only get money on hardware and probably not too much since they have to pay PalmOS licensing fees along with competing with a dozen or so other PDAs. For PSP, they will likely lose money on the hardware but more than make it up in royalties paid by game publishers for the system. If Nintendo's success in the handheld console market is an indicator, then PSP could make some major dough for Sony.
As for battery life, etc..., with the Clie people working on PSP, I like their chances. They've got experienced, talented people and a clear target and path laid out by current portable king, Nintendo. So on the whole, I think dropping Clie to focus on PSP is a good bet. This isn't Game Gear again by any means. Sony has far greater resources than Sega ever did and has shown that they know how to fight in the games market.
Awesome is almost an understatement. I love stuff like this! :-) I wonder if the Nintendo engineers ever anticipated this, or perhaps tried it themselves. Finally, after seeing the picture, it must be said...
Cubes + Wires + TVs = Borg
Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated...
No wonder they fight so well!
Right now it's really hard to say whether PSP development will be easier or not. That depends on Sony. If Sony has learned lessons from the PS2 rollout and has returned to the roots of the original Playstation, then life could be good. One of the things that made the original Playstation a hit was that it was easy to develop for. "Easy" is of course a relative term, but the point is that the hardware architechture and the available SDK and other middleware allowed a wide range of development houses to get onboard the new platform right away. If the PSP does this, then that should open the floodgates.
But easy or not, I suspect that we will first see a bunch of PSOne ports and other warmed over titles. But who cares as long as they are fun! It will be a little while before we see real competition between PSP, GBA, and DS anyway. So Nintendo doesn't have to worry on day one. Good competition should bring us all some good games and just maybe at lower prices. Well one can hope.
Well actually some local governments in the US have been known to publish offenders names in the local newspapers. I think Naperville IL publishes the names of people arrested for DUIs in one of the local papers. I don't think the papers are compelled to carry this, but to them it's just more ad money.
It seems to me that stories like this are just proving that many big development companies have always wanted two important things.
1. An inexpensive, fast, and stable OS with the strength of Unix.
2. Inexpensive plentiful hardware to run the OS and apps.
Boom, Linux shows up on cheap PCs and the proprietary Unices(?) on expensive hardware start to feel the pinch. In the end it looks like Linux and FreeBSD will dominate the high end while Windows dominates the desktop.
Now for some fan service: It seems likely that Windows is in real peril here, because while they can continue to do well on the desktop, we may be entering a post-PC age where non-PC devices may dominate. Like, I'd love to be able to send my mom email, but she doesn't really use a PC and rarely has an ISP. But she does use a cell phone (like who doesn't now), so text messaging may be the next best thing. I'm sure Microsoft is aware of this too and is betting the farm on Longhorn to stop anymore defections to Linux on the server/development end. I know it was Sun that got hurt in this case, but high profile stories like this won't help MS. If Longhorn doesn't deliver the goods, look for a long downward slide in market share.
Of course, in the end, maybe we'll see a Microsoft Linux distro! Eeck!
While it sounds cool on the surface to kill the vermiscripters (along with the lawyers and the spammers), it seems that we're creating new despised classes of people for the digital age. Geeks and nerds have never been very popular to begin with, and now the government is getting in a position where it can finally punish this despised class just as ethnic minorities have similarly suffered disproportionately at the hands of the government. For my money, I'd still rather get the truly violent off the streets rather than offing some pimply faced hacker.
So let's hope that this talk of killing virus writers won't become more than talk. Next thing you know, the Department of Justice will be rounding up file sharers for RIAA...oh wait...
Alas, it seems that the universal law is that 90% of everything is crap! (Actually I think SF writer Theodore Sturgeon said that...) Which means that inevitably most games whether movie based or not are going to suck.
Movie based games just get more publicity for sucking badly because of all of the hype. Fortunately most of the bads don't sell. But occasionally, buggy messes like Enter the Matrix actually do, ugh, which is enough to convince the powers that be to continue making movie based games. Oh well, if you do find yourself playing a bad game, perhaps some fun can be had in revelling in its suckitude!
OMG, the PSP's about the sexiest thing I've seen today (hope the wife doesn't see this...). I love good clean attractive design. Like the iPod, it has a look that just whispers "i am cool, buy me."
If the PSP has the goods in terms of games and performance, then Sony has just renewed its license to print money. In the US style is important, but in Japan it's essential. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Nintendo DS goes back to the drawing board for some work before release.
I never really liked the PS2 design, the PS and PSOne were much more attractive to me. But with the PSP, Sony has a machine that casual gamers and the fashion conscious will line up for. If they come out at about $199 in the US, they won't be able to keep up with demand.
Actually, the biggest problem with production of games for Linux is that same one as producing games for Windows. The PC games market is being eroded by the great success of the ever more powerful and ubiquitous games consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube). Game developers generally won't target a platform that won't make them any money. And consolidation in the industry is removing the desire to take the risk of innovative gameplay on multiple platforms.
.Net on Linux would certainly help. The tool should also make it easy to target Windows as well. Being able to target consoles would be so much icing on the cake.
That said, I would say that development tools are definitely an issue. No flames please, but the best tools I've used came from that company in Redmond. And if you're writing for Windows, why would you use anything else? They just make it too easy. So tools on par with Visual Studio
The Windows compatibility of OS/2 did hinder its adoption to some extent, but probably helped it more than it hurt. I for one ran OS/2 because for my work it was a more stable way of running Windows apps while letting me take advantage of advanced features of OS/2 apps as they became available. Heck, I used to run Apache and Perl on OS/2!
OS/2 ultimately failed because the IBM didn't market it well and couldn't break the barrier that Windows bundling deals formed. Linux won't suffer this same kind of fate in part because nobody and everybody owns it. Linux couldn't die if it wanted to! I don't know if Linux will ever be much on the desktop in the US, but I suspect that in the rest of the world, Linux on the desktop will become the standard. That's the scenario that Microsoft is most concerned about.
Heh heh heh! My son and I spent hours on Christmas morning getting wasted by DDR Max 2 on the normal difficulty level. I finally discovered the beginner mode and at least began to learn the game and have more fun.
Heh heh heh! The first year of the Scavenger Hunt, my house (Shorey) actually did get _the_ Mike Royko's autograph! Our resident head actually knew him or at least someone who knew him.
:-)
Many years later, as a resident head myself, I had the honor of using my car for a drive-by fruiting. Yes, fruiting!
It's never good to go after your customers, if you want to stay in business. Comcast may suffer a bit for this depending on how aggressive they get.
Given that ISPs have not been held responsible for what people do without their knowledge in the past, this raises the interesting question of why Comcast is doing this... I wonder, if maybe Comcast knows more about what their customers are doing, than they are letting on. This would essentially make them partially responsible, so now they have to cover themselves.
Hmmm, I think we're on the same side here. My point was that all of the talk about our bad educational system was just a smoke screen. Yes, there are problems, but the jobs would have left regardless, simply because someone else somewhere else could do the job for far less money. And what part of teaching our kids to be entrepreneurers is turning them into mindless consumers?
Interestingly enough, while our primary educational system has significant problems, our colleges and universities are still held in relatively high regard. I have a number of international friends I met in college and graduate school, including my wife from Hong Kong, who can vouch for that. I used to joke that we should send our kids overseas through the end of highschool, then bring them back for college!
I am soo glad to hear from someone about what I have suspected all along. The rest of the world is _not_ all that _much_ better educated than the US. The whole education is the problem is a lie and has always been a lie.
Where jobs go is only about money. As long as US corporations are free to ship jobs to wherever the cheapest labor is, they will do it! I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do this, but nothing says that my tax dollars should support it!
So what should we do? Education is still good, and we should do our best to build the best educational system in the world. But, we need to teach our kids about what capitalism really means and teach them to be entrepreneurs instead of disposable wage slaves.
I'm glad to see that AutoZone is not just rolling over on this case. As others have already noted, SCO is not likely to survive all of this litigation intact and probably never really intended to.
With that in mind, I would say the latest round of high profile lawsuits against both corporate and government bodies is the intentional beginning of the endgame. I think that the legal team orchestrating all of this has decided that it's time to fall on the sword and end it all. So they start a round of suits they know they cannot win and cannot survive so that they can finally call this thing to a close.
Obviously, there will never be any proof that this is what is happening. But the fact that the U.S. legal and financial systems allow this level of abuse is the saddest revelation of this whole affair.
There may actually be something there. I know, like when they touch hands one of them could become various kinds of animals and the other could be some kind of object. Then together they fight...errr...Nevermind...