If you knew a shred about networking you would know that tracking this girl to her ISP was a trivial task.
True, but tracking that IP to that particular household involved a subpoena that was issued without a judge. While "legal" under the DMCA, it should not be as it does an end-round with the legal system and turns a corporation into a law enforcement agency.
would be the first to admit that the legal system is screwed up, but these aren't civil charges, and they aren't spurious. What the girl did would be classified as a felony offense, and no one is saying that she didn't distribute these files.
$3,500 to get out of a felony charge is a very small price to pay.
Yes, but the law was crafted not to make 15-year-old girls felons, but (on the insistance of the recording industry itself) to crack down on bootlegging. Now they're using a law for a task for which it was not written to extort money from normally law-abiding citizens.
Now, if you want to change the laws so that the penalties are less harsh, then by all means, go ahead. However, I doubt that your idea will get much traction. Most voting adults agree with the idea of copyrights.
First off, I'm not saying "Music should be free, let's abolish copyright!" I'm saying, "The world has changed and we need different tools for dealing with copyright offences." Changing the law isn't hard (heck, Sonny Bonno did it), it's just a matter of convincing a congressman to submit a reasonable bill. In fact, you'll find there are already several congressmen grumbling about the way the RIAA is handling itself.
As far as adults agreeing with copyright, I too agree with copyright. What I don't agree with are applying felony level penalties to children who are doing something so trivial as sharing MP3s. If they were selling them or the access to them, that would be one thing, but this sort of sharing should be treated as a misdemeanor offence at best
There is a huge difference between burning a mix CD for a couple of friends and sharing thousands of files with the entire world.
Yes, the world of difference is that you can *TRACK* the downloads over the internet. Make no mistake, the internet just made it a little easier to do the exact same thing many people were doing before (tape-trading through the mail). Perhaps it's a bit more wide spread and now even Gradma knows what it is, but it's existed ever since there's been tape recorders.
Before Napster, the music industry probably knew about tape trading , but it wasn't overt and there was no way of knowing how many people practiced it. Now the tracking of downloads is just as easy as the download itself.
The RIAA has turned a blind eye to sharing among friends forever (as is their right). They don't approve of sharing these same files over the Internet for everyone.
Actually, the RIAA doesn't approve of any type of copying, Fair-Use or no. If they could take that (fair use) away from us as well, they would. In fact, they are trying their hardest to do so with copy protected CDs, DRM, broadcast flags and other forms of technology.
If you don't like their game, listen to someone else's music. It's really quite simple.
I do listen to someone else's music and I do not P2P fileshare. This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, however. We aren't discussing if P2P sharing is "right", "legal" or "moral," we're discussing the penalties assigned to this sort of behavior.
Wrong. When tape recording and cd recording made an apperance they said the same tale. Those who dont pay attention to history are bound to relive it genius. Every time you buy a CDR or blank tape, some of the profits of the company that made it is going to the RIAA. Thats why they dont care if you copy, b/c they make money from it.
Actually, that depends on where you live. In Canada, I believe this is the case. In the USA, however, only the specifically labeled Audio CD-Rs have a levy on them. Audio CD-Rs also have some sort of identifier on them so only those types will work in the stand alone CD Recording decks. The cheap CD-Rs you get in bulk 50-100 packs send no money to the RIAA in the US.
As for the amount of the fine, well I would agree that at the high end it is a little steep. If the RIAA was serious about pursuing the multi-million dollar settlement (and pressing criminal charges) then I would feel differently about their actions. However, they are actually being quite reasonable with their $3,500 sum. I bet that it cost the RIAA more than $3,500 to catch and prosecute this girl. In fact, I bet that their lawyers fees for this one case add up to more than $3,500. The way the law is set up basically puts filesharers that get caught in a situation where the RIAA can wreck their lives. The fact that the RIAA basically let's these people get away with a "slap on the wrist" is fairly telling.
Except this isnt the case of "We're going to sue you for 10,000, but we'll take 3,500 if you settle," it's "We're going to sue you for 300 million dollars, a sum of money you'll never, ever see in your entire working life. If you want to avoid being in debt to us the rest of your life, you'd better take the 3,500 settlement."
The first statement is pretty reasonable. The second is extortion. These people really don't have much choice *BUT* to settle. If they try to fight the accusations and lose, the law, as it is written, will basically ruin both her entire life as well as her family's life.
All this for sharing music. On a first offence.
The copyright laws were written to heavily punish commercial copyright offences (Selling bootleg $2 pressed CD's) and not to punish the average Joe or Jane who rips off a copy to cassette or CD (or the internet). Perhaps it's time to revise the laws to create a lower infringement class for people engaging in this sort of infringement.
I won't comment on Mozilla as I don't use it, but Opera, at least, is much faster and better running than IE. Add in features such as pop-up blocking and mouse gestures and you wonder how anyone could possibly stand the piece of hulking crap that is IE.
Now, if we go to the way-back machine and look at IE 5.0 VS Netscape 4.7, I'd agree with you. At the time, IE was superior and deserved it's market share (though it was forced upon the Windows using public). IE hasn't really changed much (if at all) since then, however. It's still, in essence, a three-year-old browser.
Access to the work after it passes into the public domain. If it's encrypted and illegal to distribute the tools required to access it and the company that originally distributed the work is defunct, that piece of copyrighted work has been lost. You have to break the law to access our own history.
Copyright is a deal with the public. We let you have copyrights in exchange for the works going into the public domain. If the artists (or their agents) break their side of the agreement, don't be surprised when We the People do the same.
It's not a battery, but if you head over to the Register, they sell glowing keychains that last 30 years or so. You can't buy them in the US, though...
I'm not going to defend them too staunchly, as I agree with most of your points, but the OS was discussed (if not priced) in the article.
They specifically said they wanted Windows as the OS for the same reason they didn't want to use raid. They wanted to take the full hard drives out of the machine and put them in external USB 2.0 HD enclosures so they could easily access the data later. They elimatated Linux as a candidate as they wanted to be able to use the enclosures on their Windows desktops.
Personally, I would go with software raid 5 using Linux and ReiserFS and back old data out to DVD or possibly even external firewire/usb2.0 drives dedicated to the purpose.
Heh... I still can't believe they put a GeForce 5200 in that thing...
but they don't have the libraries of triple-A titles that the NES, SNES, PSX, and PS2 do.
Oh, I see you've never actually played a Saturn, Dreamcast, N64 or Xbox.
The Dreamcast wiped the floor with the PS2 the first year it came out (game-wise), but Sega just couldn't compete with Sony FUD. DOA, maybe. No games? You've got your head stuck in the sand (or Sony's butt, more likely).
Actually, another reason was probably time to market. The X-Box was a fairly quick project and using commodity parts probably helped them step their timetables up quite a lot.
Now that they have some time to plan, they can get away from the commodity parts and create something a bit more specific to their goals.
Strangely enough, that's not really true. On Studio Ghibli's latest film, The Cat Returns, they included a second disc titled "Giblies." In Japanese, the studio's name pronounced with a soft G (Jibli), but the second disc title has it spelled with a hard G.
Anyway, the entire disc is basically the animators playing around with various 3d software programs. You'd hardly recognize it as 3d! It's very stylistic and doesn't have that "puppet" feel at all. Of course, the entire thing is rendered with a special cell shader (not the type I'm used to seeing) and was overall very difficult to tell from a regular 2d animation.
Could Disney pull this off? Who knows, but it's at least a possibility.
And as soon as anyone became popular, their hosting costs would skyrocket and they'd have to drop their site because they couldn't afford to host it any longer.
So, all we'd be left with are mediocre web sites that not very many people would want to visit and pay-for sites with logins for the more popular sites.
You'll also note that Final Fantasy didn't do very well in Japan either. It was a horrible film written by a bunch of hacks who thought their game making success could translate into film.
Also, just as in any other medium, there are bad examples of stories and good examples of stories with the gems being few and far between. To watch a few shows in anime and say all anime stories are thin on plot would be to try and say that because the Wild Wild West movie was such a horrible movie that all American films are similarly bad. In fact, it doesn't take long to generate a list of truly horrid movies that have been shown here in just the past two years.
You want to see an example of good story? Try Haibane Renmei (Charcoal Feather Federation), Scrapped Princess, Planettes, Last Exile, and Master Keaton. Except for the last one, these are all shows filmed in the past two years. If you're looking for a genre that doesn't exist in the U.S., try a sports anime:-) Hikaru no Go is actually quite good, though it got canned before it finished.
The other problem is that most of the stuff that gets pushed over in the states is the Mass Market Appeal crap. Add brain-dead hacks writing the English version and you've seen the result:-) The subtitles are generally better, but not always.
So I guess what I'm really trying to say is that it's not fair to hold up the "Dungeons and Dragons" of Japanese filmography and bash an entire industry on your narrow observations.
Sounds like you want Outlook, not Office. You can buy them separately (though it does come bundled with MS Office). Outlook + OO is still cheaper than Office.
Not sure how well their product works, but Ximian may also be able to fill that role as well.
I'm just going to point out an interesting anecdote. It's just my experience, so take it with a grain of salt.
Where I work, we use Lotus Notes. If you've ever used it, you know it's not like the Outlook Express that most people use at home. We don't spend more than a minute or so with new employees letting them know the major points to look out for. We give them a shiny handout that explains the more detailed instructions. If they have problems, they call us.
It's really not that tough. A good 90% of the people I work with are Notes Pros by the end of the week. And no, the number of Engineers is dwarfed by the number of sales drones so it's not a matter of having "smarter" users. Admittedly, we get a few id-10-t's that couldn't remember their own name if it wasn't printed on their shirt, but it's really a pretty small number.
Oh, we also give the mechanics Open Office (on Windows) instead of MS Office. They don't run any of our standard VB apps, so they aren't tied to the platform and the Upper Management doesn't want to spend any money on them (we use >3 year machines for them). I don't think they even notice the difference...:-P
And in terms of numbers, I'm positive if you interviewed a large sample pool of anime fans, the vast majority would prefer subs. I'm sorry, thats just the general view of the community. I'm not putting down people who like dubs, I'm just stating the facts.
Actually, I think you're wrong. Judging from the number of people that go absolutely crazy about meeting English voice actor/actresses, I'd say that the Anime fandom is either equally split sub/dub or tilted in the favor of dubs. I've seen this first hand at all of the conventions I've been to (and that's quite a few).
You have to remember that most anime fans are being introducted to Anime through Cartoon Network these days. Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon and Pokemon have induced more people into the culture that you might think.
Personally, though, there aren't many dubbed anime shows I like. I guess I'm just picky. I absolutely hated what Disney did to my favorite Miyaziki film (Laputa) by dubbing the main characters with teenage+ voices and horribly ruining the subtitles. They even went so far as to change dialog and music in the English version. Arg! Anyway, I won't begrudge others of their dubs, just don't expect me to like them:-P
XP was crashing and no, it was not (faulty) hardware. The machine has been rock stable for 2 weeks now. I kept the machine up to date with patches and had all of the latest (non-beta) hardware drivers. I administer 200 machines at work and run WinXP on my office laptop. I have no problems dealing with it on these machines. I was not trying to say that XP is unstable (though it isn't exactly rock-like), but that it was not stable on my particular box and I got tired of trying to make it work properly.
Admittedly I know a lot of the problems were not explicitly XP's fault (Corel Painter 8's CTD, etc), but it was all the little headaches that were added together that made me decide to switch.
The fact that you use windows 2000 for games tells me right here and now that your are an idiot. XP is better for games, all the way around.
Win2k for gaming has not been a problem for me at all. It does everything I expect, doesn't have a stupid registration process for everytime I upgrade hardware (which I do somewhat often as it's a gaming box), doesn't have services that mysteriously turn themselves back on (MSN Messenger, etc.) and runs every single game I put on it flawlessly. So tell me, *WHY* should I use XP to play games? Oh, yeah, right... it's "Better." Forgive my ignorance. I think I'll just stick to Win2k until they stop making games for it. When they stop, I'll probably just stop buying games. I'm tired of paying Microsoft to abuse me in the name of fighting piracy. It's bad enough I have to deal with that sh*t from game makers.
mplayer handles odd formats? try playing back a wmv;)
Why would I want to? Don't have any, don't want any. But first, perhaps you should have gone to their website and hit their about page. Here's a quote:
Supported input formats
(S)VCD (Video CD) directly from CD-ROM or from CDRwin's.bin image file
DVD, directly from your DVD disk, using optional libdvdread for chapter support, and libdvdcss for decryption
MPEG 1/2 System Stream (PS/PES/VOB) and Elementary Stream (ES) file formats
RIFF AVI file format
ASF/WMV/WMA format
QT/MOV/MP4 format
RealAudio/RealVideo format
OGG/OGM files
VIVO format
FLI format
NuppelVideo format
yuv4mpeg format
FILM (.cpk) format
RoQ format
PVA format
supports reading from file, stdin, DVD drive or network via HTTP
Supported video and audio codecs
The most important video codecs:
MPEG1 (VCD) and MPEG2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video
MPEG4, DivX;-), OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5.02, XviD, and other MPEG4 variants
Windows Media Video v7 (WMV1), v8 (WMV2) and v9 (WMV3) used in.wmv files
RealVideo 1.0, 2.0 (G2), 3.0 (RP8), 4.0 (RP9)
Sorenson v1/v3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA and other common QuickTime codecs
3ivx decoder
Cinepak and Intel Indeo codecs (3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.0)
VIVO 1.0, 2.0, I263 and other h263(+) variants
MJPEG, AVID, VCR2, ASV2 and other hardware formats
FLI/FLC
native decoder for HuffYUV
various old simple RLE-like formats
And those are just the "highlights." The full list is longer. Hmmm... I'd probably need 2 or 5 different programs just to play what's on this list on Windows...
Who said you needed to use windows media player anyway? At least windows _has_ a unified method of installing and registering codecs. You don't have to worry if program X has the shit you need. Install one codec and it becomes available to all your media programs. In linux, you install things for the software only which is a fucking r
Ouch... Teach me to not use Preview before posting. Here's the same thing, only with a little whitespace:-)
Yeah, I know, there's probably 343 other personal accounts of people moving from OS to OS, but I'm going to post mine anyway:-P About 3-4 weeks ago, I got sick of my unstable WinXP machine and decided to reload it. Normally, I'd whip out my Win2k installation (that I have running on another machine that I use for games) and load that up, but I decided that I would give RedHat another try. The last time I used RH was version 7, I think, and the experience wasn't very satisfactory. In truth, it was mostly because I was loading it on a POS machine, but that's a differn't story:-P
Anwyay, I ordered a new HD (so I could easily switch back to the old OS in a pinch) and I downloaded the ISO's because I was too cheap to buy it at the store. Actually, that's really kind of inaccurate. First, I didn't know if I was going to keep it around, so there was no sense in spending any money on it and second, from what I read on the box at the store, you only get 4 months of the RHN subscription. If it were a year, I'd be more willing to fork out the cash. OK, you're right, I'm just cheap. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the reason I chose RedHat instead of something else is mostly because I have a Promise Raid 5 controller. In hindsight, it wasn't such a great purchase, but what's done is done. My next project will probably use software Raid 5 or a 3-Ware controller.
So, in comes the new hard drive and I start my installation. The install process fails 3-4 times. More specifically, it *looks* like the install went OK, but when booting there are LILO errors and all sorts of other problems. It's getting late, so instead of trying to fix all of the problems by hand, I get a flash of insight and try the automated CD Checking utility that you're presented with when you first boot the install CD's. Sure enough, two of the three CD's are bad (as I quickly verified by looking at the back of the CD and seeing the large scratches on them).
I gotta say, self-checking media is Da Bomb:-)
The next day (after creating a new install set and carefully putting the CD's in cases), I run the install again without problems. In my opinion, the RedHat install process is *MUCH* easier and straightforward than either Win2k or WinXP. I've installed a lot of Win2k machines from scratch and the process is hardly intuitive. Two thumbs up on this one! After I'm up and running, I give the OS a spin. It works pretty much as expected and on a GeForce 3 and a P4 2.4 GHz it runs well. I download Opera (I love mouse gestures) and Mozilla (I like the e-mail client. I should probably try the stand alone e-mail version, but I sticking to what I'm used to for now). Opera installed easily, but as Mozilla (1.2) was already installed on the system, I had to put the new version somewhere else. Today, I would have done an RPM -Ihv on it, but at the time I didn't know what to do. Also, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a windowed RPM manager that allows you to see what's installed and what version these programs are. RedHat has a slick Add/Remove programs interface, but it only handles the software that was installed from the CD.
The automated RHN software updates are pretty slick. Once I got the new SSL key installed, everything worked great. My only question is: why don't they have a new build of the ISOs out that have the new key? My next adventure involved figuring out how to install drivers for my Raid card and the nVidia card. The nVidia drivers were pretty easy (once I figured out how to stop X-Windows), but the Raid controller drivers kind of sucked. If a vendor is going to do binary drivers, they really need to follow nVidia's example. It took a couple of hours to figure everything out, but I eventually got the whole thing figured out, got the raid card mounted and even figured out how to automagically mount it in the startup sequ
Yeah, I know, there's probably 343 other personal accounts of people moving from OS to OS, but I'm going to post mine anyway:-P
About 3-4 weeks ago, I got sick of my unstable WinXP machine and decided to reload it. Normally, I'd whip out my Win2k installation (that I have running on another machine that I use for games) and load that up, but I decided that I would give RedHat another try. The last time I used RH was version 7, I think, and the experience wasn't very satisfactory. In truth, it was mostly because I was loading it on a POS machine, but that's a differn't story:-P
Anwyay, I ordered a new HD (so I could easily switch back to the old OS in a pinch) and I downloaded the ISO's because I was too cheap to buy it at the store. Actually, that's really kind of inaccurate. First, I didn't know if I was going to keep it around, so there was no sense in spending any money on it and second, from what I read on the box at the store, you only get 4 months of the RHN subscription. If it were a year, I'd be more willing to fork out the cash. OK, you're right, I'm just cheap. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the reason I chose RedHat instead of something else is mostly because I have a Promise Raid 5 controller. In hindsight, it wasn't such a great purchase, but what's done is done. My next project will probably use software Raid 5 or a 3-Ware controller.
So, in comes the new hard drive and I start my installation. The install process fails 3-4 times. More specifically, it *looks* like the install went OK, but when booting there are LILO errors and all sorts of other problems. It's getting late, so instead of trying to fix all of the problems by hand, I get a flash of insight and try the automated CD Checking utility that you're presented with when you first boot the install CD's. Sure enough, two of the three CD's are bad (as I quickly verified by looking at the back of the CD and seeing the large scratches on them).
I gotta say, self-checking media is Da Bomb:-)
The next day (after creating a new install set and carefully putting the CD's in cases), I run the install again without problems. In my opinion, the RedHat install process is *MUCH* easier and straightforward than either Win2k or WinXP. I've installed a lot of Win2k machines from scratch and the process is hardly intuitive. Two thumbs up on this one! After I'm up and running, I give the OS a spin. It works pretty much as expected and on a GeForce 3 and a P4 2.4 GHz it runs well. I download Opera (I love mouse gestures) and Mozilla (I like the e-mail client. I should probably try the stand alone e-mail version, but I sticking to what I'm used to for now). Opera installed easily, but as Mozilla (1.2) was already installed on the system, I had to put the new version somewhere else. Today, I would have done an RPM -Ihv on it, but at the time I didn't know what to do. Also, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a windowed RPM manager that allows you to see what's installed and what version these programs are. RedHat has a slick Add/Remove programs interface, but it only handles the software that was installed from the CD.
The automated RHN software updates are pretty slick. Once I got the new SSL key installed, everything worked great. My only question is: why don't they have a new build of the ISOs out that have the new key?
My next adventure involved figuring out how to install drivers for my Raid card and the nVidia card. The nVidia drivers were pretty easy (once I figured out how to stop X-Windows), but the Raid controller drivers kind of sucked. If a vendor is going to do binary drivers, they really need to follow nVidia's example. It took a couple of hours to figure everything out, but I eventually got the whole thing figured out, got the raid card mounted and even figured out how to automagically mount it in the startup sequence.
When I started copying files off of the array, I found my first issue. You probably already know this, but when I was copying files
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, sharing more than 10 songs would make it a felony... Then she'd also have a record.
Yes, but the law was crafted not to make 15-year-old girls felons, but (on the insistance of the recording industry itself) to crack down on bootlegging. Now they're using a law for a task for which it was not written to extort money from normally law-abiding citizens.
First off, I'm not saying "Music should be free, let's abolish copyright!" I'm saying, "The world has changed and we need different tools for dealing with copyright offences." Changing the law isn't hard (heck, Sonny Bonno did it), it's just a matter of convincing a congressman to submit a reasonable bill. In fact, you'll find there are already several congressmen grumbling about the way the RIAA is handling itself.
As far as adults agreeing with copyright, I too agree with copyright. What I don't agree with are applying felony level penalties to children who are doing something so trivial as sharing MP3s. If they were selling them or the access to them, that would be one thing, but this sort of sharing should be treated as a misdemeanor offence at best
Yes, the world of difference is that you can *TRACK* the downloads over the internet. Make no mistake, the internet just made it a little easier to do the exact same thing many people were doing before (tape-trading through the mail). Perhaps it's a bit more wide spread and now even Gradma knows what it is, but it's existed ever since there's been tape recorders.
Before Napster, the music industry probably knew about tape trading , but it wasn't overt and there was no way of knowing how many people practiced it. Now the tracking of downloads is just as easy as the download itself.
Actually, the RIAA doesn't approve of any type of copying, Fair-Use or no. If they could take that (fair use) away from us as well, they would. In fact, they are trying their hardest to do so with copy protected CDs, DRM, broadcast flags and other forms of technology.
I do listen to someone else's music and I do not P2P fileshare. This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, however. We aren't discussing if P2P sharing is "right", "legal" or "moral," we're discussing the penalties assigned to this sort of behavior.
Actually, that depends on where you live. In Canada, I believe this is the case. In the USA, however, only the specifically labeled Audio CD-Rs have a levy on them. Audio CD-Rs also have some sort of identifier on them so only those types will work in the stand alone CD Recording decks. The cheap CD-Rs you get in bulk 50-100 packs send no money to the RIAA in the US.
Except this isnt the case of "We're going to sue you for 10,000, but we'll take 3,500 if you settle," it's "We're going to sue you for 300 million dollars, a sum of money you'll never, ever see in your entire working life. If you want to avoid being in debt to us the rest of your life, you'd better take the 3,500 settlement."
The first statement is pretty reasonable. The second is extortion. These people really don't have much choice *BUT* to settle. If they try to fight the accusations and lose, the law, as it is written, will basically ruin both her entire life as well as her family's life.
All this for sharing music. On a first offence.
The copyright laws were written to heavily punish commercial copyright offences (Selling bootleg $2 pressed CD's) and not to punish the average Joe or Jane who rips off a copy to cassette or CD (or the internet). Perhaps it's time to revise the laws to create a lower infringement class for people engaging in this sort of infringement.
I call shenanegans.
I won't comment on Mozilla as I don't use it, but Opera, at least, is much faster and better running than IE. Add in features such as pop-up blocking and mouse gestures and you wonder how anyone could possibly stand the piece of hulking crap that is IE.
Now, if we go to the way-back machine and look at IE 5.0 VS Netscape 4.7, I'd agree with you. At the time, IE was superior and deserved it's market share (though it was forced upon the Windows using public). IE hasn't really changed much (if at all) since then, however. It's still, in essence, a three-year-old browser.
Here's the first one that comes to my mind:
Access to the work after it passes into the public domain. If it's encrypted and illegal to distribute the tools required to access it and the company that originally distributed the work is defunct, that piece of copyrighted work has been lost. You have to break the law to access our own history.
Copyright is a deal with the public. We let you have copyrights in exchange for the works going into the public domain. If the artists (or their agents) break their side of the agreement, don't be surprised when We the People do the same.
Look into "hiring" the cute old ladies at the local nursing home.
No, they absolutely have to be computer controlled.
Computer controlled old ladies? I think some scientists were working on Monkeys, but it may be a while before we get to old ladies...
It's not a battery, but if you head over to the Register, they sell glowing keychains that last 30 years or so. You can't buy them in the US, though...
I'm not going to defend them too staunchly, as I agree with most of your points, but the OS was discussed (if not priced) in the article.
They specifically said they wanted Windows as the OS for the same reason they didn't want to use raid. They wanted to take the full hard drives out of the machine and put them in external USB 2.0 HD enclosures so they could easily access the data later. They elimatated Linux as a candidate as they wanted to be able to use the enclosures on their Windows desktops.
Personally, I would go with software raid 5 using Linux and ReiserFS and back old data out to DVD or possibly even external firewire/usb2.0 drives dedicated to the purpose.
Heh... I still can't believe they put a GeForce 5200 in that thing...
Oh, I see you've never actually played a Saturn, Dreamcast, N64 or Xbox.
The Dreamcast wiped the floor with the PS2 the first year it came out (game-wise), but Sega just couldn't compete with Sony FUD. DOA, maybe. No games? You've got your head stuck in the sand (or Sony's butt, more likely).
Actually, another reason was probably time to market. The X-Box was a fairly quick project and using commodity parts probably helped them step their timetables up quite a lot.
Now that they have some time to plan, they can get away from the commodity parts and create something a bit more specific to their goals.
Actually, the big selling point is the familiarity with the Microsft DirectX API, which they will probably still use with the new console.
:-P
As we saw with Halo, porting to the PC isn't necessarily all roses
Strangely enough, that's not really true. On Studio Ghibli's latest film, The Cat Returns, they included a second disc titled "Giblies." In Japanese, the studio's name pronounced with a soft G (Jibli), but the second disc title has it spelled with a hard G.
Anyway, the entire disc is basically the animators playing around with various 3d software programs. You'd hardly recognize it as 3d! It's very stylistic and doesn't have that "puppet" feel at all. Of course, the entire thing is rendered with a special cell shader (not the type I'm used to seeing) and was overall very difficult to tell from a regular 2d animation.
Could Disney pull this off? Who knows, but it's at least a possibility.
And as soon as anyone became popular, their hosting costs would skyrocket and they'd have to drop their site because they couldn't afford to host it any longer.
So, all we'd be left with are mediocre web sites that not very many people would want to visit and pay-for sites with logins for the more popular sites.
You'll also note that Final Fantasy didn't do very well in Japan either. It was a horrible film written by a bunch of hacks who thought their game making success could translate into film.
:-) Hikaru no Go is actually quite good, though it got canned before it finished.
:-) The subtitles are generally better, but not always.
Also, just as in any other medium, there are bad examples of stories and good examples of stories with the gems being few and far between. To watch a few shows in anime and say all anime stories are thin on plot would be to try and say that because the Wild Wild West movie was such a horrible movie that all American films are similarly bad. In fact, it doesn't take long to generate a list of truly horrid movies that have been shown here in just the past two years.
You want to see an example of good story? Try Haibane Renmei (Charcoal Feather Federation), Scrapped Princess, Planettes, Last Exile, and Master Keaton. Except for the last one, these are all shows filmed in the past two years. If you're looking for a genre that doesn't exist in the U.S., try a sports anime
The other problem is that most of the stuff that gets pushed over in the states is the Mass Market Appeal crap. Add brain-dead hacks writing the English version and you've seen the result
So I guess what I'm really trying to say is that it's not fair to hold up the "Dungeons and Dragons" of Japanese filmography and bash an entire industry on your narrow observations.
Sounds like you want Outlook, not Office. You can buy them separately (though it does come bundled with MS Office). Outlook + OO is still cheaper than Office. Not sure how well their product works, but Ximian may also be able to fill that role as well.
I'm just going to point out an interesting anecdote. It's just my experience, so take it with a grain of salt.
:-P
Where I work, we use Lotus Notes. If you've ever used it, you know it's not like the Outlook Express that most people use at home. We don't spend more than a minute or so with new employees letting them know the major points to look out for. We give them a shiny handout that explains the more detailed instructions. If they have problems, they call us.
It's really not that tough. A good 90% of the people I work with are Notes Pros by the end of the week. And no, the number of Engineers is dwarfed by the number of sales drones so it's not a matter of having "smarter" users. Admittedly, we get a few id-10-t's that couldn't remember their own name if it wasn't printed on their shirt, but it's really a pretty small number.
Oh, we also give the mechanics Open Office (on Windows) instead of MS Office. They don't run any of our standard VB apps, so they aren't tied to the platform and the Upper Management doesn't want to spend any money on them (we use >3 year machines for them). I don't think they even notice the difference...
Actually, I think you're wrong. Judging from the number of people that go absolutely crazy about meeting English voice actor/actresses, I'd say that the Anime fandom is either equally split sub/dub or tilted in the favor of dubs. I've seen this first hand at all of the conventions I've been to (and that's quite a few).
You have to remember that most anime fans are being introducted to Anime through Cartoon Network these days. Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon and Pokemon have induced more people into the culture that you might think.
Personally, though, there aren't many dubbed anime shows I like. I guess I'm just picky. I absolutely hated what Disney did to my favorite Miyaziki film (Laputa) by dubbing the main characters with teenage+ voices and horribly ruining the subtitles. They even went so far as to change dialog and music in the English version. Arg! Anyway, I won't begrudge others of their dubs, just don't expect me to like them :-P
Might I suggest Decaf?
XP was crashing and no, it was not (faulty) hardware. The machine has been rock stable for 2 weeks now. I kept the machine up to date with patches and had all of the latest (non-beta) hardware drivers. I administer 200 machines at work and run WinXP on my office laptop. I have no problems dealing with it on these machines. I was not trying to say that XP is unstable (though it isn't exactly rock-like), but that it was not stable on my particular box and I got tired of trying to make it work properly.
Admittedly I know a lot of the problems were not explicitly XP's fault (Corel Painter 8's CTD, etc), but it was all the little headaches that were added together that made me decide to switch.
Win2k for gaming has not been a problem for me at all. It does everything I expect, doesn't have a stupid registration process for everytime I upgrade hardware (which I do somewhat often as it's a gaming box), doesn't have services that mysteriously turn themselves back on (MSN Messenger, etc.) and runs every single game I put on it flawlessly. So tell me, *WHY* should I use XP to play games? Oh, yeah, right... it's "Better." Forgive my ignorance. I think I'll just stick to Win2k until they stop making games for it. When they stop, I'll probably just stop buying games. I'm tired of paying Microsoft to abuse me in the name of fighting piracy. It's bad enough I have to deal with that sh*t from game makers.
Why would I want to? Don't have any, don't want any. But first, perhaps you should have gone to their website and hit their about page. Here's a quote:
And those are just the "highlights." The full list is longer. Hmmm... I'd probably need 2 or 5 different programs just to play what's on this list on Windows...
Ouch... Teach me to not use Preview before posting. Here's the same thing, only with a little whitespace :-)
:-P About 3-4 weeks ago, I got sick of my unstable WinXP machine and decided to reload it. Normally, I'd whip out my Win2k installation (that I have running on another machine that I use for games) and load that up, but I decided that I would give RedHat another try. The last time I used RH was version 7, I think, and the experience wasn't very satisfactory. In truth, it was mostly because I was loading it on a POS machine, but that's a differn't story :-P
:-)
Yeah, I know, there's probably 343 other personal accounts of people moving from OS to OS, but I'm going to post mine anyway
Anwyay, I ordered a new HD (so I could easily switch back to the old OS in a pinch) and I downloaded the ISO's because I was too cheap to buy it at the store. Actually, that's really kind of inaccurate. First, I didn't know if I was going to keep it around, so there was no sense in spending any money on it and second, from what I read on the box at the store, you only get 4 months of the RHN subscription. If it were a year, I'd be more willing to fork out the cash. OK, you're right, I'm just cheap. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the reason I chose RedHat instead of something else is mostly because I have a Promise Raid 5 controller. In hindsight, it wasn't such a great purchase, but what's done is done. My next project will probably use software Raid 5 or a 3-Ware controller.
So, in comes the new hard drive and I start my installation. The install process fails 3-4 times. More specifically, it *looks* like the install went OK, but when booting there are LILO errors and all sorts of other problems. It's getting late, so instead of trying to fix all of the problems by hand, I get a flash of insight and try the automated CD Checking utility that you're presented with when you first boot the install CD's. Sure enough, two of the three CD's are bad (as I quickly verified by looking at the back of the CD and seeing the large scratches on them).
I gotta say, self-checking media is Da Bomb
The next day (after creating a new install set and carefully putting the CD's in cases), I run the install again without problems. In my opinion, the RedHat install process is *MUCH* easier and straightforward than either Win2k or WinXP. I've installed a lot of Win2k machines from scratch and the process is hardly intuitive. Two thumbs up on this one! After I'm up and running, I give the OS a spin. It works pretty much as expected and on a GeForce 3 and a P4 2.4 GHz it runs well. I download Opera (I love mouse gestures) and Mozilla (I like the e-mail client. I should probably try the stand alone e-mail version, but I sticking to what I'm used to for now). Opera installed easily, but as Mozilla (1.2) was already installed on the system, I had to put the new version somewhere else. Today, I would have done an RPM -Ihv on it, but at the time I didn't know what to do. Also, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a windowed RPM manager that allows you to see what's installed and what version these programs are. RedHat has a slick Add/Remove programs interface, but it only handles the software that was installed from the CD.
The automated RHN software updates are pretty slick. Once I got the new SSL key installed, everything worked great. My only question is: why don't they have a new build of the ISOs out that have the new key? My next adventure involved figuring out how to install drivers for my Raid card and the nVidia card. The nVidia drivers were pretty easy (once I figured out how to stop X-Windows), but the Raid controller drivers kind of sucked. If a vendor is going to do binary drivers, they really need to follow nVidia's example. It took a couple of hours to figure everything out, but I eventually got the whole thing figured out, got the raid card mounted and even figured out how to automagically mount it in the startup sequ
Yeah, I know, there's probably 343 other personal accounts of people moving from OS to OS, but I'm going to post mine anyway :-P
About 3-4 weeks ago, I got sick of my unstable WinXP machine and decided to reload it. Normally, I'd whip out my Win2k installation (that I have running on another machine that I use for games) and load that up, but I decided that I would give RedHat another try. The last time I used RH was version 7, I think, and the experience wasn't very satisfactory. In truth, it was mostly because I was loading it on a POS machine, but that's a differn't story :-P
Anwyay, I ordered a new HD (so I could easily switch back to the old OS in a pinch) and I downloaded the ISO's because I was too cheap to buy it at the store. Actually, that's really kind of inaccurate. First, I didn't know if I was going to keep it around, so there was no sense in spending any money on it and second, from what I read on the box at the store, you only get 4 months of the RHN subscription. If it were a year, I'd be more willing to fork out the cash. OK, you're right, I'm just cheap. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the reason I chose RedHat instead of something else is mostly because I have a Promise Raid 5 controller. In hindsight, it wasn't such a great purchase, but what's done is done. My next project will probably use software Raid 5 or a 3-Ware controller.
So, in comes the new hard drive and I start my installation. The install process fails 3-4 times. More specifically, it *looks* like the install went OK, but when booting there are LILO errors and all sorts of other problems. It's getting late, so instead of trying to fix all of the problems by hand, I get a flash of insight and try the automated CD Checking utility that you're presented with when you first boot the install CD's. Sure enough, two of the three CD's are bad (as I quickly verified by looking at the back of the CD and seeing the large scratches on them).
I gotta say, self-checking media is Da Bomb :-)
The next day (after creating a new install set and carefully putting the CD's in cases), I run the install again without problems. In my opinion, the RedHat install process is *MUCH* easier and straightforward than either Win2k or WinXP. I've installed a lot of Win2k machines from scratch and the process is hardly intuitive. Two thumbs up on this one! After I'm up and running, I give the OS a spin. It works pretty much as expected and on a GeForce 3 and a P4 2.4 GHz it runs well. I download Opera (I love mouse gestures) and Mozilla (I like the e-mail client. I should probably try the stand alone e-mail version, but I sticking to what I'm used to for now). Opera installed easily, but as Mozilla (1.2) was already installed on the system, I had to put the new version somewhere else. Today, I would have done an RPM -Ihv on it, but at the time I didn't know what to do. Also, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a windowed RPM manager that allows you to see what's installed and what version these programs are. RedHat has a slick Add/Remove programs interface, but it only handles the software that was installed from the CD.
The automated RHN software updates are pretty slick. Once I got the new SSL key installed, everything worked great. My only question is: why don't they have a new build of the ISOs out that have the new key?
My next adventure involved figuring out how to install drivers for my Raid card and the nVidia card. The nVidia drivers were pretty easy (once I figured out how to stop X-Windows), but the Raid controller drivers kind of sucked. If a vendor is going to do binary drivers, they really need to follow nVidia's example. It took a couple of hours to figure everything out, but I eventually got the whole thing figured out, got the raid card mounted and even figured out how to automagically mount it in the startup sequence.
When I started copying files off of the array, I found my first issue. You probably already know this, but when I was copying files