It's very weird with media. I can buy british import CD's cheaper than Brits can. I think the big reason is that either there are a lot of import tarrifs in britain (american products also cost a lot!), or the importers are few and get greedy ("I can get £17 for this CD?! Allright!")
But the fact of the matter is that almost everywhere on the planet (with the notable exception of countries with weak or unenforced copyright laws) entertainment costs 150-200% of what they do in the United States and Canada.
oh, and let me just finally add - that Princess Mononoke was not officially distributed by Disney, but by another company in the big corporate congolmerate, Mirimax. If they put the Disney name on it, nothing they could say or do would stop people from thinking it's a movie for small children, which it is not.
They did not cut the video at all. Indeed this (no cuts) was one of the stipulations of the sale of Miyazaki's (worldwide, including Japan!) rights to your friend and mine, DisneyCo.
I have seen not a fan-sub, but the japanese Laserdisc release (my flatmate happened to be in Japan on the date of it's release. He tells me that the Japanese Otaku don't seem to camp out before the stores open to make sure they get their copies, so he wound up with one of the first Mononoke Hime LD's sold in the world.) I don't know Japanese, but I didn't notice any scenes go away (I would have been more likely to notice better if I had watched them in the other order, though).
The reason the Disney version isn't total ass is that they got Neil Gaiman (of Sandman fame) to head up the dubbing process. (Initially he refused, until he realized that that just meant someone else would do it, possible someone who didn't care as much.) The biggest problem with the translation is Disney's fallacious belief that Big-Name-Actors = good voice actors.
And artists are, for the most part, a greedy and opportunistic breed.... no 'gift culture' for them, thank you very much.
I think this is the most rediculous statement I have heard on slashdot today. And I don't THINK it's meant as a troll even.
See how much art there is on the web, published SO THAT PEOPLE CAN SEE IT, not for page views or banner clicks or any of that shit.
Sonique skins, Enlightenment Themes - these all fit the model of a 'gift culture' perfectly. AND
There is plenty of money to be made coding. Therefore coders have the means to spend a large amount of time doing projects which they get no financial compensation for. It is NOT so easy to get "enough" money doing artwork, music, et cetera.
It was a new game, but not a new concept. Wolfenstein, Tetris, The Incredible Machine, Populous, Sim City, The Sims, Ultima Online, these were new gameplay.
Half-Life, Out Of This World, Full Throttle, Starcraft, are all examples of old gameplay, all fantastic games and exquisitely done.
They exist. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, the upcoming game Black & White are all pretty different from your standard game formulas.
Let me point out that those three groundbreaking games (I'm with you all the way, particularly wrt The Incredible Machine) were not a glut of innovation all at once, but trickled out over the course of about 10 years.
People have always made crappy, imitative and crappily imitative games. Oddly, game development is NOT different from other creative endeavors - truly imaginitive work is rare but delightful.
Stop complaining and have a brilliant idea, instead.
I think examples abound in the platform adventure world... Out Of This World, Abe's Odyssee, SkullMonkeys, all of those I would say were fun, mostly because of level and character design. Monkey Island and other Lucasart games (Full Throttle!!!) are other examples.
I think that every RTS blizzard makes (Starcraft, Warcraft (have you heard much about Warcraft 3? should be good)) relies VERY heavily on non-code based design (call it art or not). Starcraft, for instance, is really quite simple to code. But it's not so easy to make a game where there's good gameplay balance and such.
Similar - all of the Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat games - I literally DID write a fighting game engine in about 10 days. It wasn't fun to play, but that wsa the fault of the character design (which I would have done better at had I had more time before the deadline!). Really, you could swap in new character design files, and it could be as fun as SF2.
Is the quake engine fun to play? No. Is Quake? Hell, yeah!
Presumably if a new site offers something that the previous sites didn't, people will link to it. Everything about the internet is fickle, and Google is not going to fundamentally change that.
You seem very sure, and I would have felt similarly until this last week.. One of the users of our mp3 player software sent us some mail saying "Hey, I found you can make a 4 MB mp3 into a 240K uncompressed audio file, if you reduce it to 8khz 1 bit audio! Check it out, this sounds pretty good!" with a file attached.
Adding noise can REDUCE the percieved errors of quantitization. It's called dithering, and is common with images, and works (and is often done) with audio too.
I can think of a context in which this vaguely defined technology may make sense...
MP3 encoding relies upon a psycho-acoustic model of sound which is employed to decide which components to throw out. This is what Fraunhoffer has a patent on, and is why LAME is legal while BladeEnc is borderline at best.
Perhaps Kenwood has done something similar the the LAME team and cooked up an alternative psychoacoustic model for hearing which makes for better sounds than Fraunhoffer's.
Yeah, I reread what I said, and realize that it comes accross different from what I meant. "Open Source can be more trustworthy" rather than "Open source can be more trusted". Not that it always is, early on in a project, the opposite is probably true. The real obvious bugs haven't been fixed, and can be exploited. In a early revision closed source project you at least get security through obscurity, which while not a good long-term solution, is certainly a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Open source can be more trusted than closed source
Formally designed and reviewed software can be more trusted than chaotically assembled software.
These seem orthogonal to me (and to each other! wakka wakka wakka!). Sure, most all of the software out there is NOT formally designed for security first. A lot of it is open source, a lot of it isn't. Open source obviously doesn't make a programme or suite instantly bulletproof, neither does formal design and review. Nothing is 100% secure, trustworthy, or bug free. Loads of things can help or hurt the process.
Whether an app has a GUI or not is absolutely irrelevant to whether it can use stdin/stdout
This is only aspect of your post which I don't consider a flame, so it's all I'm going to respond to.
An app that does not have a GUI communicates with the user and/or other apps via standard input and output. A GUI app as a general rule does not. I THINK what you are saying is that there's no reason that all GUI apps can't have TTY modes of operation to supplement their usual GUI mode, but that's only reasonable if the information they are outputting is readily trasformable into unstructured ASCII text.
Dimensionality is the key. streams/pipes are flat data, linear in nature, as are TTYs, and the unix CLI approach of composing utilities. "cat | grep | sort | uniq | wc" - it's linear, they communicated with an unstructured stream of ASCII text, parsed and formatted for each |.
This linearity is not absolutely inherently tied to the CLI, it just suddenly gets hard to represent more sophisticated relationships componentisation may allow. A good component architecture is also necessary for passing large quantities of structured data - where parsing ASCII would become a lot of work. Examples of where this is useful abound in the GUI world - widgets, movie player codecs, image readers, browser windows, et cetera. COM allowed Windows to easily make the File->Open dialog just another explorer window, and god is that handy...
Sure, all these apps could output XML or something to stdout, and parse XML on stdin, but... is that really a better mechanism for passing structured information around that some other more advanced object model?
Tiff also SUPPORTS the LZW compression that Unisys owns the patent for, however many applications that use TIFF do not, and it's not used all the freaking time, like it is in GIF.
The elegance and power of the unix command line is due the fact that a whole bunch of tools all communicate with each other in a fairly standard way - the interchange of flat text through standard in/out. This is what gives me the ability that lets me find out how many different IPs visited my web server in August without (somebody) writing a utility specificially for that purpose.
With GUI stuff, flat text is no longer what programmes are taking in or putting out. Composing capabilities of multiple X programmes is difficult. The answer to this, IMO is a broadly used and supported componentisation. If the two most popular environments COULD agree on a sufficiently rich component object model, we might start to finally see GUI programmes not merely co-existing, but actually using and communicating with each other, giving REAL flexability and power.
I think that would be kind of cool.
Re:I won the last year's competition -- here's how
on
Rock-Paper-Scissors
·
· Score: 2
If the pixels are smaller than film grain then digital cameras win out, however. Pixelation is only a problem when it negatively affects the defninition of images.
Digital media may not be long lasting but digital data IS. You can't back up and restore photos in a lossless manner.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very weird with media. I can buy british import CD's cheaper than Brits can. I think the big reason is that either there are a lot of import tarrifs in britain (american products also cost a lot!), or the importers are few and get greedy ("I can get £17 for this CD?! Allright!")
But the fact of the matter is that almost everywhere on the planet (with the notable exception of countries with weak or unenforced copyright laws) entertainment costs 150-200% of what they do in the United States and Canada.
oh, and let me just finally add - that Princess Mononoke was not officially distributed by Disney, but by another company in the big corporate congolmerate, Mirimax. If they put the Disney name on it, nothing they could say or do would stop people from thinking it's a movie for small children, which it is not.
They did not cut the video at all. Indeed this (no cuts) was one of the stipulations of the sale of Miyazaki's (worldwide, including Japan!) rights to your friend and mine, DisneyCo.
I have seen not a fan-sub, but the japanese Laserdisc release (my flatmate happened to be in Japan on the date of it's release. He tells me that the Japanese Otaku don't seem to camp out before the stores open to make sure they get their copies, so he wound up with one of the first Mononoke Hime LD's sold in the world.) I don't know Japanese, but I didn't notice any scenes go away (I would have been more likely to notice better if I had watched them in the other order, though).
The reason the Disney version isn't total ass is that they got Neil Gaiman (of Sandman fame) to head up the dubbing process. (Initially he refused, until he realized that that just meant someone else would do it, possible someone who didn't care as much.) The biggest problem with the translation is Disney's fallacious belief that Big-Name-Actors = good voice actors.
Anyways enough rambling.
I think this is the most rediculous statement I have heard on slashdot today. And I don't THINK it's meant as a troll even.
AND
You can write free (libre & gratis) software using non-free tools, though. I do both every day.
It was a new game, but not a new concept. Wolfenstein, Tetris, The Incredible Machine, Populous, Sim City, The Sims, Ultima Online, these were new gameplay.
Half-Life, Out Of This World, Full Throttle, Starcraft, are all examples of old gameplay, all fantastic games and exquisitely done.
Evolutionary/revolutionary, blah.
They exist. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, the upcoming game Black & White are all pretty different from your standard game formulas.
Let me point out that those three groundbreaking games (I'm with you all the way, particularly wrt The Incredible Machine) were not a glut of innovation all at once, but trickled out over the course of about 10 years.
People have always made crappy, imitative and crappily imitative games. Oddly, game development is NOT different from other creative endeavors - truly imaginitive work is rare but delightful.
Stop complaining and have a brilliant idea, instead.
I think examples abound in the platform adventure world... Out Of This World, Abe's Odyssee, SkullMonkeys, all of those I would say were fun, mostly because of level and character design. Monkey Island and other Lucasart games (Full Throttle!!!) are other examples.
I think that every RTS blizzard makes (Starcraft, Warcraft (have you heard much about Warcraft 3? should be good)) relies VERY heavily on non-code based design (call it art or not). Starcraft, for instance, is really quite simple to code. But it's not so easy to make a game where there's good gameplay balance and such.
Similar - all of the Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat games - I literally DID write a fighting game engine in about 10 days. It wasn't fun to play, but that wsa the fault of the character design (which I would have done better at had I had more time before the deadline!). Really, you could swap in new character design files, and it could be as fun as SF2.
Is the quake engine fun to play? No. Is Quake? Hell, yeah!
Be that as it may, Google is selling yahoo a service, rather than advertising space.
Clearly he means "Scrumptious". Mmmmm...
Presumably if a new site offers something that the previous sites didn't, people will link to it. Everything about the internet is fickle, and Google is not going to fundamentally change that.
They've used other engines before with no detrimental effects, altavista, inktomi..
As far as I can tell the only thing this will do is give Google some more income without having anything to do with advertisements.
hotbot is also owned by lycos, so it's pretty reasonable that they share technology.
I guarantee you will hear the difference.
You seem very sure, and I would have felt similarly until this last week.. One of the users of our mp3 player software sent us some mail saying "Hey, I found you can make a 4 MB mp3 into a 240K uncompressed audio file, if you reduce it to 8khz 1 bit audio! Check it out, this sounds pretty good!" with a file attached.
Just goes to show.
Adding noise can REDUCE the percieved errors of quantitization. It's called dithering, and is common with images, and works (and is often done) with audio too.
I can think of a context in which this vaguely defined technology may make sense...
MP3 encoding relies upon a psycho-acoustic model of sound which is employed to decide which components to throw out. This is what Fraunhoffer has a patent on, and is why LAME is legal while BladeEnc is borderline at best.
Perhaps Kenwood has done something similar the the LAME team and cooked up an alternative psychoacoustic model for hearing which makes for better sounds than Fraunhoffer's.
Or perhaps it is indeed a load of crap.
Yeah, I reread what I said, and realize that it comes accross different from what I meant. "Open Source can be more trustworthy" rather than "Open source can be more trusted". Not that it always is, early on in a project, the opposite is probably true. The real obvious bugs haven't been fixed, and can be exploited. In a early revision closed source project you at least get security through obscurity, which while not a good long-term solution, is certainly a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Open source can be more trusted than closed source
Formally designed and reviewed software can be more trusted than chaotically assembled software.
These seem orthogonal to me (and to each other! wakka wakka wakka!). Sure, most all of the software out there is NOT formally designed for security first. A lot of it is open source, a lot of it isn't. Open source obviously doesn't make a programme or suite instantly bulletproof, neither does formal design and review. Nothing is 100% secure, trustworthy, or bug free. Loads of things can help or hurt the process.
Whether an app has a GUI or not is absolutely irrelevant to whether it can use stdin/stdout
... is that really a better mechanism for passing structured information around that some other more advanced object model?
This is only aspect of your post which I don't consider a flame, so it's all I'm going to respond to.
An app that does not have a GUI communicates with the user and/or other apps via standard input and output. A GUI app as a general rule does not. I THINK what you are saying is that there's no reason that all GUI apps can't have TTY modes of operation to supplement their usual GUI mode, but that's only reasonable if the information they are outputting is readily trasformable into unstructured ASCII text.
Dimensionality is the key. streams/pipes are flat data, linear in nature, as are TTYs, and the unix CLI approach of composing utilities. "cat | grep | sort | uniq | wc" - it's linear, they communicated with an unstructured stream of ASCII text, parsed and formatted for each |.
This linearity is not absolutely inherently tied to the CLI, it just suddenly gets hard to represent more sophisticated relationships componentisation may allow. A good component architecture is also necessary for passing large quantities of structured data - where parsing ASCII would become a lot of work. Examples of where this is useful abound in the GUI world - widgets, movie player codecs, image readers, browser windows, et cetera. COM allowed Windows to easily make the File->Open dialog just another explorer window, and god is that handy...
Sure, all these apps could output XML or something to stdout, and parse XML on stdin, but
Tiff also SUPPORTS the LZW compression that Unisys owns the patent for, however many applications that use TIFF do not, and it's not used all the freaking time, like it is in GIF.
The elegance and power of the unix command line is due the fact that a whole bunch of tools all communicate with each other in a fairly standard way - the interchange of flat text through standard in/out. This is what gives me the ability that lets me find out how many different IPs visited my web server in August without (somebody) writing a utility specificially for that purpose.
With GUI stuff, flat text is no longer what programmes are taking in or putting out. Composing capabilities of multiple X programmes is difficult. The answer to this, IMO is a broadly used and supported componentisation. If the two most popular environments COULD agree on a sufficiently rich component object model, we might start to finally see GUI programmes not merely co-existing, but actually using and communicating with each other, giving REAL flexability and power.
I think that would be kind of cool.
it wins
If you're using Windows, MSIE has an option to disable animations. I haven't tried it though.
Tools->Internet Options->Advanced->Multimedia->Play Animations
You will NEVER be rid of pixelation.
If the pixels are smaller than film grain then digital cameras win out, however. Pixelation is only a problem when it negatively affects the defninition of images.
Digital media may not be long lasting but digital data IS. You can't back up and restore photos in a lossless manner.
Who says you can't take it with you?