Sharing photos means uploading them, no? I'd assume the 7Mbit connections are asynchronous, so it's not a stretch to recommend a ~500kbit upload connection if you intend to send your ageing mother a bunch of straight-off-the-camera photo files at 3MB each.
I don't think it's false advertising. As the GP says, it's all "good for" and "ideal for", which is true.
Not entirely sure what these super turbo maximum deluxe packages do, but I believe the idea behind snatching auction deals is to have extremely low latency and fast download to be able to reload a closing auction as quickly as possible in order to get in the winning bid.;)
It could be that the mp3s encoded in the latest version of LAME could have closed the gap but it is also likely that the difference is exacerbated by the fact that I am playing the mp3s via the laptop's headphone jack hooked up to the stereo amp.
If you're curious about testing if you can hear the difference, it shouldn't be impossible to convert the encoded mp3 into a pure WAV file and burn it on a CD along with the original WAV before encoding, then playing them both on your CD player. The cut-off bits aren't likely to magically reappear just because it's back to WAV.
I attended the event in Stockholm and shot some pictures, if anyone's wondering what it was like: http://foto.muri.se/piracy/
It was very peaceful, very dull, and a bit loud to stand next to the speaker. The police was more concerned with people standing in the middle of the road than any violence breaking out, which probably says something for this particular type of "crime".
While I'm glad you enjoyed your stay in this country, I feel obliged to point out that you're not entirely qualified to put out these "facts" about Sweden. We do have homeless people, at least in Stockholm (the capital), crime and lots and lots of young people getting drunk every weekend. Um, and adults too.
I think Sweden is nearing a cliff with a long fall within a decade or two, as the older generation retires, and us youngsters are supposed to take over. Further, I think we're a bit too comfortable to take the workload they've had, which should have the wheels creaking. We've also dug ourselves into a bureaucracy that's getting incapable of even taking care of itself, let alone an entire population.
So this might seem like a slice of heaven to you, but I'm afraid it won't last.
There's another side to that coin, though. Suppose that your involvement in a film (or any other endeavor, for that matter) demonstrably adds $50 million of value to it (i.e., in increased revenues), for whatever reason. Or, suppose that 100,000 people are willing to pay $50 a head to watch you do your thing in a large stadium. How big a slice of that pie would you think you deserve, and if it's only a tiny slice, then who deserves the rest?
Good point. I'd rather see Brad Pitt buying a new yacht, than the MPAA hiring more lawyers. However, it's still a bizarre amount for any one human being to earn with two months work.
I loved both Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind, so, uh. Am I special now?
I enjoyed FF7 as well, but played it right after finishing 8, so it had less impact.
Mind you, I can't stand Baldur's Gate, so I guess this puts Morrowind outside the "western RPG sphere", which may be the reason I enjoyed it so. In Morrowind you're able to skill up with usage, something I found very pleasant back when I spent a gazillion happy hours in it. It differed from the D&D leveling BG2 uses (I think; never played D&D) in a way that I felt was freer. It was up to me to spend time skilling up acrobatics, etc.
I should probably mention that I liked Neverwinter Nights a whole big lot, so perhaps the trouble with BG2 was its horrible graphics. Or something. No, come to think of it, what I hated about BG2 was that I felt my job was to babysit a dozen characters at once, without knowing either one very well. Roleplaying that many characters at once isn't roleplaying, it's megalomanic.
You could say FF7/8 has you controlling a dozen characters as well, but the FF games are, as the parent post says, not very roleplayish to begin with. You only really control one character on his adventure, and the others tag along and follow your combat orders.
Regarding open-endedness, I think it only works if the game allows you to set your own goal, and then achieve it with a reward you find satisfactory. Simply handing you a toolbox and saying "look, you can do anything!" won't make me happy. I'd need an environment to perform this "anything" in, that for example allows me to sell whatever I create for an ultimately high price, or whatever, so I can see that what I made was indeed fabulous, rather than "possible".
Google has to do something in order to grow, and searching won't sustain them forever. While they're fabulous for finding random websites, I've noticed that I use Wikipedia now if I want to find information about something, since I know there'll always be something useful there. I'm not talking about vital stuff, but if I'm curious about a band, or a model, or an animal or who Winston Churchill was, I no longer resort to Google.
It's also my opinion that it's a good thing Google is doing this. They have the resources to produce some awesome stuff now, and that's what they seem to be trying. Perhaps I'm also slightly charmed by the idea of collecting the world's greatest engineers in one spot.
Mind you, I'm not too fond of all the stuff they're putting out at the moment, but they're bound to strike genius eventually.
I found Naruto to be badly animated with sub-par voice acting and heavy filletisis attacks (useless filler episodes with no content to make the public wait some more) from the very beginning, while Bleach followed much more closely the scenario of the original manga (impressively closely in fact, I think that it's to this date the anime that takes the less liberties with the original scenario, and it's nearly void of fillers).
I have a feeling this is going to end Real Soon Now, since the anime version of Bleach is catching up with the manga. Once that happens, there's not much the animators can do apart from pause the show entirely (impossible due to popularity, I suppose) or make fillers.
Personally, I can't stand the anime version of Bleach, because it's so goddamn ugly. The manga looks a gazillion times better.
Problem would be that I have other processes running that take (some) CPU. I'm not saying x264 doesn't play, I'm saying I don't feel it's playing back as smoothly as xvid does. On parts where the bitrate is particularly high, I get the same feeling as when playing Quake-style games with vsync off -- half-loaded frames. This problem goes away if I close down all other programs, but that's not really the way I want to use my computer.
I'm afraid the fansubbing community is slowly moving on to H264 codecs, so I doubt your Xbox will be a valid fansub player much longer. My Athlon 64 3000+ barely handles x264 video as it is.
I'm not too interested in whether it's overkill or not, but it sure as hell gets trickier trying to remember what IP you have.
I can't even imagine the pain of working in ISP customer support and asking, over the phone, for someone to recite their IP address.
When I was about 5 years old, I loved to read comic books. Trouble was, my parents wouldn't buy me new comics every day. In order to slake my thirst, I started rereading my comics.
However, rereading something isn't too much fun, since you already know what happens. My brain solved this by selectively wiping the storylines from my mind, so I could read it "fresh". This worked out quite nicely, and when I started reading Discworld novels at age 15, without affording to buy new parts all the time, I managed to reread every Discworld novel I owned three times (I currently have around 40 books by Pratchett).
Unfortunately, while this saves money, it's made me fairly useless when it comes to discussing books I've read, movies I've seen, anime I've watched, etc, with friends, since I've already forgotten most of it. It also makes reading sequels published 4 years later impossible without rereading the entire series first.
Point is, while I can easily memorize 100 decimals of pi, I can also enjoy watching reruns of DS9. And fail history exams.:)
I did the make buildworld-kernel-installkernel thingie, then I booted into single user mode and did mergemaster-installworld-mergemaster-boot.
Everything worked nicely. Then I started doing some insaneo find \! -newercn 'yesterday' -delete, on the directories you mentioned. After that I walked into the ports directory for ruby, ran make deinstall, and tried reinstall, whereupon it crashed out cpp.
And yeah, portupgrade -af was the thing I tried first, to my knowledge. It just found a stale dependency of pcre (because I upgraded it as pcre-utf8 later), nothing else was done. Then I did portupgrade -afrR, and it probably won't stop compiling until 2007.
Whoopsie. Perhaps deleting all those libraries right away wasn't such a brilliant plan.
It went fine until I tried to reinstall Ruby, upon which it broke out of the make, with a "cpp fails sanity check" error. Of course, after the libraries were gone, bash stopped working (missing libncurses.so.5 or such).
Rebooting into single mode and reinstalling the world (again) fixed that part, and once I'd switched shells to csh, portupgrade appears to be recompiling everything. I had to add -rR for it to do anything, though. Else it would just leave everything unbroken while reporting things were fabulous.
Should be interesting to see how the system works after portupgrade has finished, early next week or so...
Alright, I'll try that. It's a bit sad that upgrading can't be done via SSH, since the machine in question is running without a keyboard/monitor in my parents' house across the city.
Thanks for your reply.
The upgrading section of the handbook could definitely be made clearer, considering how lost I feel. It mentions using the new release's sysinstall, but says nothing of how to get it. Am I supposed to get the new boot disks and upgrade by running through the same procedure as when I did my fresh install, or download sysinstall in a package, or upgrade some hidden sysinstall port, or what?
The other path I can take is apparently to build everything from source, which sounds like fun. This isn't explained particularly well either, though.
Do I first cvsup stable-supfile and follow/usr/src/UPDATING by running: make buildworld make kernel KERNCONF=GENERIC *bootaloot* mergemaster -p make installworld mergemaster -i *bootaloot*
and then I'm done? Or am I supposed to follow this up by doing a cvsup ports-supfile and update the way you mention? Will that drag along OpenSSH to 4.1p1 along with the rest of the packages that are upgraded with 6.0, or do I need to tell my system to somehow upgrade them through ports? I've never pondered it before, but it seems the ports cvs is unrelated to release version, so I'm puzzled as to how portupgrade is supposed to know I want everything fresh and shiny with the 6.0 kernel.
Perhaps making world in/usr/src will upgrade OpenSSH and the rest along with making a new kernel, and I'm just ignorant as a toad in a dried up well, but the information hasn't exactly jumped at me in the handbook. As far as I can tell, the actual upgrade procedure is sort of missing, covered up with advice to backup things and selecting distribution. Not that I'm told exactly what I should backup (current kernel?/etc?/home? Everything, even the porn collection?)...
My main gripe with GMail is their spam filter, which is overly zealous. Every month GMail marks up 700+ letters as spam, of which 5 are genuine letters. Fishing these out is a pain, since there's a limit to how many lines of "GENUINE REPLICAS!!" you can read in one session. Another problem is that it habitually eats online order "receipts" (like Amazon.co.jp sends out when you've purchased something).
One might think this is a wonderful thing, since it should keep the inbox squeaky clean, but the fact is I _still_ get spam in my inbox, most of which seems ridiculously easy to spot. Also wish I could just mark all Russian mail as spam, since I don't know the language, but the spam filter has no configurability whatsoever.
Of course, with my old Yahoo! mail, I'd get a gazillion spam letters without even giving the address to anyone. (Why isn't there a death penalty on spam yet?!)
First of all, the US DVD prices are incredibly low. Paying $25 for 4 episodes is so ridiculously cheap that the complaints made seem foolish. I realize it's high by American standards, but compare this with what Japanese DVDs cost!
Amazon.co.jp sells Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2nd Gig DVDs, with two episodes per release, for 6300 yen. That's roughly $30 _per episode_! Meanwhile, Amazon.com sells the US release of four episodes a volume for $23. Bit of maths, and we suddenly realize that in Japan, anime costs 500% more than in the US. _Without_ subtitles and extra dubs.
Someone might argue that the Japanese get to see all these fabulous shows on TV first, but this is a silly argument. Most anime (excepting Naruto and other popular kiddie shows) is shown after midnight on cable channels, and I'm pretty sure not everyone has a subscription for these.
Then we have the statement that 99% of anime doesn't manage the trip over the ocean...
Today, in 2005, four out of five new anime series are licensed before half of the episodes have aired on Japanese television. The remaining 20% usually get licensed within a year of the first episode.
Most likely, this "99%" figure includes all anime produced before the year 2000, which makes it fairly meaningless. Are we really supposed to demand that American companies pick up obscure cartoons from the 1970's, animated in 5 frames per second? It's just not feasible, and thus the statement is retarded. Statistics used to get attention.
Next, digisubs: the way American licensors pick up shows these days, it's hard to justify the existence and practice of the hundreds ( http://www.animesuki.com/group.php ) of fansub groups out there. There really is a lot of e-penis contest going on with the releases, not to mention political disputes between groups.
However, not all anime does get licensed. There are cases like Pita-ten, a show which I personally adore, which is yet to be picked up for the US market, and it took ages before Hajime no Ippo finally had a release as Fighting Spirit. These shows have both been subtitled in full by digisubbers, for which I am grateful.
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Software patents seems like a brilliant scheme by lawyers to produce infinite work out of nothing.
Sharing photos means uploading them, no? I'd assume the 7Mbit connections are asynchronous, so it's not a stretch to recommend a ~500kbit upload connection if you intend to send your ageing mother a bunch of straight-off-the-camera photo files at 3MB each.
I don't think it's false advertising. As the GP says, it's all "good for" and "ideal for", which is true.
Not entirely sure what these super turbo maximum deluxe packages do, but I believe the idea behind snatching auction deals is to have extremely low latency and fast download to be able to reload a closing auction as quickly as possible in order to get in the winning bid. ;)
Himo=?????
Himo means pimp in Japanese. Does that help?
I attended the event in Stockholm and shot some pictures, if anyone's wondering what it was like: http://foto.muri.se/piracy/
It was very peaceful, very dull, and a bit loud to stand next to the speaker. The police was more concerned with people standing in the middle of the road than any violence breaking out, which probably says something for this particular type of "crime".
While I'm glad you enjoyed your stay in this country, I feel obliged to point out that you're not entirely qualified to put out these "facts" about Sweden. We do have homeless people, at least in Stockholm (the capital), crime and lots and lots of young people getting drunk every weekend. Um, and adults too.
I think Sweden is nearing a cliff with a long fall within a decade or two, as the older generation retires, and us youngsters are supposed to take over. Further, I think we're a bit too comfortable to take the workload they've had, which should have the wheels creaking. We've also dug ourselves into a bureaucracy that's getting incapable of even taking care of itself, let alone an entire population.
So this might seem like a slice of heaven to you, but I'm afraid it won't last.
Good point. I'd rather see Brad Pitt buying a new yacht, than the MPAA hiring more lawyers. However, it's still a bizarre amount for any one human being to earn with two months work.
I loved both Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind, so, uh. Am I special now?
I enjoyed FF7 as well, but played it right after finishing 8, so it had less impact.
Mind you, I can't stand Baldur's Gate, so I guess this puts Morrowind outside the "western RPG sphere", which may be the reason I enjoyed it so. In Morrowind you're able to skill up with usage, something I found very pleasant back when I spent a gazillion happy hours in it. It differed from the D&D leveling BG2 uses (I think; never played D&D) in a way that I felt was freer. It was up to me to spend time skilling up acrobatics, etc.
I should probably mention that I liked Neverwinter Nights a whole big lot, so perhaps the trouble with BG2 was its horrible graphics. Or something. No, come to think of it, what I hated about BG2 was that I felt my job was to babysit a dozen characters at once, without knowing either one very well. Roleplaying that many characters at once isn't roleplaying, it's megalomanic.
You could say FF7/8 has you controlling a dozen characters as well, but the FF games are, as the parent post says, not very roleplayish to begin with. You only really control one character on his adventure, and the others tag along and follow your combat orders.
Regarding open-endedness, I think it only works if the game allows you to set your own goal, and then achieve it with a reward you find satisfactory. Simply handing you a toolbox and saying "look, you can do anything!" won't make me happy. I'd need an environment to perform this "anything" in, that for example allows me to sell whatever I create for an ultimately high price, or whatever, so I can see that what I made was indeed fabulous, rather than "possible".
Google has to do something in order to grow, and searching won't sustain them forever. While they're fabulous for finding random websites, I've noticed that I use Wikipedia now if I want to find information about something, since I know there'll always be something useful there. I'm not talking about vital stuff, but if I'm curious about a band, or a model, or an animal or who Winston Churchill was, I no longer resort to Google.
It's also my opinion that it's a good thing Google is doing this. They have the resources to produce some awesome stuff now, and that's what they seem to be trying. Perhaps I'm also slightly charmed by the idea of collecting the world's greatest engineers in one spot.
Mind you, I'm not too fond of all the stuff they're putting out at the moment, but they're bound to strike genius eventually.
This website should explain it better than I can:
http://gobase.org/games/mobile/
I'd rather just watch Go game replays, though. :)
I eventually grew bored of typing out a dozen titles on IRC, and made a list with information links for people who are looking for anime to watch:
:)
http://www.lolikon.org/anime/
It's perfectly worksafe, btw.
I have a feeling this is going to end Real Soon Now, since the anime version of Bleach is catching up with the manga. Once that happens, there's not much the animators can do apart from pause the show entirely (impossible due to popularity, I suppose) or make fillers.
Personally, I can't stand the anime version of Bleach, because it's so goddamn ugly. The manga looks a gazillion times better.
Problem would be that I have other processes running that take (some) CPU. I'm not saying x264 doesn't play, I'm saying I don't feel it's playing back as smoothly as xvid does. On parts where the bitrate is particularly high, I get the same feeling as when playing Quake-style games with vsync off -- half-loaded frames. This problem goes away if I close down all other programs, but that's not really the way I want to use my computer.
I'm afraid the fansubbing community is slowly moving on to H264 codecs, so I doubt your Xbox will be a valid fansub player much longer. My Athlon 64 3000+ barely handles x264 video as it is.
I'm not too interested in whether it's overkill or not, but it sure as hell gets trickier trying to remember what IP you have. I can't even imagine the pain of working in ISP customer support and asking, over the phone, for someone to recite their IP address.
When I was about 5 years old, I loved to read comic books. Trouble was, my parents wouldn't buy me new comics every day. In order to slake my thirst, I started rereading my comics.
:)
However, rereading something isn't too much fun, since you already know what happens. My brain solved this by selectively wiping the storylines from my mind, so I could read it "fresh". This worked out quite nicely, and when I started reading Discworld novels at age 15, without affording to buy new parts all the time, I managed to reread every Discworld novel I owned three times (I currently have around 40 books by Pratchett).
Unfortunately, while this saves money, it's made me fairly useless when it comes to discussing books I've read, movies I've seen, anime I've watched, etc, with friends, since I've already forgotten most of it. It also makes reading sequels published 4 years later impossible without rereading the entire series first.
Point is, while I can easily memorize 100 decimals of pi, I can also enjoy watching reruns of DS9. And fail history exams.
I did the make buildworld-kernel-installkernel thingie, then I booted into single user mode and did mergemaster-installworld-mergemaster-boot.
Everything worked nicely. Then I started doing some insaneo find \! -newercn 'yesterday' -delete, on the directories you mentioned. After that I walked into the ports directory for ruby, ran make deinstall, and tried reinstall, whereupon it crashed out cpp.
And yeah, portupgrade -af was the thing I tried first, to my knowledge. It just found a stale dependency of pcre (because I upgraded it as pcre-utf8 later), nothing else was done. Then I did portupgrade -afrR, and it probably won't stop compiling until 2007.
Whoopsie. Perhaps deleting all those libraries right away wasn't such a brilliant plan.
:)
It went fine until I tried to reinstall Ruby, upon which it broke out of the make, with a "cpp fails sanity check" error. Of course, after the libraries were gone, bash stopped working (missing libncurses.so.5 or such).
Rebooting into single mode and reinstalling the world (again) fixed that part, and once I'd switched shells to csh, portupgrade appears to be recompiling everything. I had to add -rR for it to do anything, though. Else it would just leave everything unbroken while reporting things were fabulous.
Should be interesting to see how the system works after portupgrade has finished, early next week or so...
In the meantime, what did I do wrong?
Alright, I'll try that. It's a bit sad that upgrading can't be done via SSH, since the machine in question is running without a keyboard/monitor in my parents' house across the city. Thanks for your reply.
The upgrading section of the handbook could definitely be made clearer, considering how lost I feel. It mentions using the new release's sysinstall, but says nothing of how to get it. Am I supposed to get the new boot disks and upgrade by running through the same procedure as when I did my fresh install, or download sysinstall in a package, or upgrade some hidden sysinstall port, or what?
/usr/src/UPDATING by running:
/usr/src will upgrade OpenSSH and the rest along with making a new kernel, and I'm just ignorant as a toad in a dried up well, but the information hasn't exactly jumped at me in the handbook. As far as I can tell, the actual upgrade procedure is sort of missing, covered up with advice to backup things and selecting distribution. Not that I'm told exactly what I should backup (current kernel? /etc? /home? Everything, even the porn collection?)...
The other path I can take is apparently to build everything from source, which sounds like fun. This isn't explained particularly well either, though.
Do I first cvsup stable-supfile and follow
make buildworld
make kernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
*bootaloot*
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster -i
*bootaloot*
and then I'm done? Or am I supposed to follow this up by doing a cvsup ports-supfile and update the way you mention? Will that drag along OpenSSH to 4.1p1 along with the rest of the packages that are upgraded with 6.0, or do I need to tell my system to somehow upgrade them through ports? I've never pondered it before, but it seems the ports cvs is unrelated to release version, so I'm puzzled as to how portupgrade is supposed to know I want everything fresh and shiny with the 6.0 kernel.
Perhaps making world in
Anywho, pardon my ignorance.
I find Ctrl-A + spacebar to be a comfier way of flipping through screens, since I can do it with one hand. Maybe my screen has a weird configuration.
Wouldn't it be easier to just instantly blind half the crew with a swoosh of that array, rather than focus it on the hull for ten minutes?
My main gripe with GMail is their spam filter, which is overly zealous. Every month GMail marks up 700+ letters as spam, of which 5 are genuine letters. Fishing these out is a pain, since there's a limit to how many lines of "GENUINE REPLICAS!!" you can read in one session. Another problem is that it habitually eats online order "receipts" (like Amazon.co.jp sends out when you've purchased something).
One might think this is a wonderful thing, since it should keep the inbox squeaky clean, but the fact is I _still_ get spam in my inbox, most of which seems ridiculously easy to spot. Also wish I could just mark all Russian mail as spam, since I don't know the language, but the spam filter has no configurability whatsoever.
Of course, with my old Yahoo! mail, I'd get a gazillion spam letters without even giving the address to anyone. (Why isn't there a death penalty on spam yet?!)
Lots of disturbing posts on this subject.
First of all, the US DVD prices are incredibly low. Paying $25 for 4 episodes is so ridiculously cheap that the complaints made seem foolish. I realize it's high by American standards, but compare this with what Japanese DVDs cost!
Amazon.co.jp sells Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2nd Gig DVDs, with two episodes per release, for 6300 yen. That's roughly $30 _per episode_!
Meanwhile, Amazon.com sells the US release of four episodes a volume for $23. Bit of maths, and we suddenly realize that in Japan, anime costs 500% more than in the US. _Without_ subtitles and extra dubs.
Someone might argue that the Japanese get to see all these fabulous shows on TV first, but this is a silly argument. Most anime (excepting Naruto and other popular kiddie shows) is shown after midnight on cable channels, and I'm pretty sure not everyone has a subscription for these.
Then we have the statement that 99% of anime doesn't manage the trip over the ocean...
Today, in 2005, four out of five new anime series are licensed before half of the episodes have aired on Japanese television. The remaining 20% usually get licensed within a year of the first episode.
Most likely, this "99%" figure includes all anime produced before the year 2000, which makes it fairly meaningless. Are we really supposed to demand that American companies pick up obscure cartoons from the 1970's, animated in 5 frames per second? It's just not feasible, and thus the statement is retarded. Statistics used to get attention.
Next, digisubs: the way American licensors pick up shows these days, it's hard to justify the existence and practice of the hundreds ( http://www.animesuki.com/group.php ) of fansub groups out there. There really is a lot of e-penis contest going on with the releases, not to mention political disputes between groups.
However, not all anime does get licensed. There are cases like Pita-ten, a show which I personally adore, which is yet to be picked up for the US market, and it took ages before Hajime no Ippo finally had a release as Fighting Spirit. These shows have both been subtitled in full by digisubbers, for which I am grateful.