$5 a month for the rest of my life for a huge library of music is an awesome deal. $5 a month for that library until the service folds and I'm left with no music isn't all that attractive.
I'd have to disagree with that, really.
If a subscription service dies, you just switch to another one. You haven't lost anything because you never bought anything in the first place. The DRM'd files on the harddrive are just a temporary cache, not a "collection" to worry about backing up. This assumes, of course, that you don't find yourself forced to buy proprietary hardware for each individual service, in which case you'd lose that investment.
(Whether subscription based services are really a good deal or not is another matter entirely that varies significantly from person to person.)
I don't think "best in the world" really has much to do with it. Human beings in general think in a local context, and refer to things out of habit based on the default values of their local culture. And that's hardly a recent development.
English sites probably catch an unfair amount of flak for this. If an article on slashdot.jp used the word "zenkoku" without specifying the country, it's unlikely anyone would complain, because people take the language of the site (Japanese) to define its locale defaults. Slashdot has an FAQ which clarifies its U.S. point-of-view default, which will have to suffice.
(As a side note, I do think that the way most Americans now think of themselves as citizens of one nation rather than citizens of individual states IS an interesting sign of the times.)
You gotta love the way these filters actively point out and emphasize "bad words" in places where nobody would have thought to see them without the filter helping.
My favorite was the chat filter (which had no option to turn it off on the client, naturally) in the MMORPG "Earth & Beyond" which ignored spaces in words in an attempt to defeat people writing "f u c k" and the like.
One of the words on the censored list was "fag." What this meant was, anytime anyone had a word ending in "f" followed by the word "a" followed by a word starting with "g", the letters were replaced by asterisks.
"Anyone know of a guild looking for..." became "Anyone know o* * *uild looking for..." etc.
Naturally, this would result in several WTFs followed by a discussion about "fags," using every other variation for the word that people could possibly think of. "Whoops, I'm sorry, I meant, 'Anyone know ochocolate thiefuild looking for...'" etc.
It works with Control Panel applets, but for some unknown reason you must hold shift before right-clicking (as original poster noted).
As for running Windows Explorer with RunAs, the answer is yes...kind of. Rather, what you run is IE, not Explorer, which gives you effectively the same thing. (As shown in the post that started this thread. Or just right-click an IE shortcut and select "Run As".) Note that these Explorer windows when running as another user will not automatically update folder views to reflect changes -- you must refresh them manually (F5).
All of this is of course documented horribly or not at all...
With that being said, I've always wondered what people fill their hard disk with
Sounds like a question for a Slashdot poll, if it hasn't been one already.
Personally, I take up an awful lot of space with VMWare virtual machine files.
I must be in the minority here, but I love the smooth feel of the scroll wheel on the new Intellimouse Explorer I just got a week ago. This is the first mouse I've ever used with a completely smooth scroll wheel; it was a surprise but I really like it.
XP Home Edition lacks the ability to turn off "simple file sharing" which also means no access to the NTFS Security GUI when running in normal mode.
There are workarounds, however, and I ran a Home Edition workstation with fine-grained ACLs for a while before eventually upgrading to Professional for other reasons.
1) Booting into Safe Mode will give access to the Security tab in Home Edition. This is obviously not convenient for day-to-day changes but is useful for major changes and setting up the system initially.
2) The command line tool CACLS ("Change ACLs") is available in Home Edition just as in Professional. CACLS does not provide full access to all NTFS permission settings, but handles most that would be used for general use.
Combining these two is enough to get anything done, but for more convenient full access to NTFS permissions settings from the command line without having to boot into Safe Mode in Home Edition, I recommend checking SetACL and SubInACL
I find grammar checkers useful for catching typos that spell checkers can't. I don't really think of the advice itself as all that important. (Much like not taking a spell checker's first suggestion.)
I would imagine the number of false positives may vary depending on the nature of one's writing, though. The trouble with Word's grammar checker (all grammar checkers?) is that there's not a way to teach it that a certain phrase is OK -- and even if there were, next time it would probably still mark a slight variation as incorrect.
Untrue. The U.S. and numerous other countries, including Japan, are part of an agreement that recognizes each others copyrights from and in all participating countries.
Can probably find multiple references to it in this thread if you search for "Berne Convention." Googling for that might be good, too.:)
Ah, yeah, obviously, it being copyright infringement doesn't change. (Actually, I just told someone else that same thing in another post someone else made about those sub-overlay programs.:)
I just think it's considerably closer to the spirit of what I thought would be the main purpose for unauthorized translation to exist at all -- an unfortunate, underground, "necessary evil" to deal with the fact that the length of copyright terms is so obscenely long now that waiting until works fall into the public domain to translate them takes longer than the lifetime of the people who want to see them, and having countless works be forever linguistically inaccessible to people just seems like such a horrible, pointless waste. Something to be done in as low-key a manner as possible. Something you wish was unnecessary. Not something to brag about.
At the point that fansubbers are bothering to come up with any kind of rationalization or codes of ethics at all, surely the method that comes the closest to the experience one would have if one didn't need a translation makes the most sense?
I think a lot of fansubbers way of thinking about distribution ethics is very narrow and ethno-centric. How do fansubbers feel about a Japanese-fluent speaker in Brazil downloading all of his Japanese entertainment because there will never be a Brazillian release? Is it the location that matters? Or is it the language? I'm fluent in Japanese, but my nationality is American. Where do I fit in? Are Japanese fluent people ethically obligated to buy Japanese works rather than acquire unauthorized copies of them, regardless of where they are located? Is someone in Japan who does not speak Japanese entitled to download videos rather than renting them? Are Japanese fluent speakers in Japan the only ones on the planet that are expected to fund these globally distributed (by fansubbers) video releases? That's a small group of people funding entertainment for the whole planet, if that's the case. No wonder videos in Japan are expensive.:)
Like I said originally -- it's the ethno-centric use of the words "released" and "licensed" and "official" that bother me, as if the Japanese release was "unofficial." It would be bad enough if the discussion was limited to Americans, but the fansub situation is now such that the status of a U.S. release apparently defines the ethical status of Japanese copyrights for "fans" across the entire globe -- the actual creators are insignificant; the U.S. middle-men are what matter. Isn't that kind of odd?
I guess I want to ask the fansubbers, what do they say to a Japanese resident who asks, "Why should I pay for these if you aren't?" While there are a few children's shows that really are supported by advertising, all of those late-night shows are supported by video and merchandising sales. And obviously direct-to-video releases are, not to mention pay-per-view and premium cable shows. The only reason the entire fansub community gets to enjoy what they enjoy is that the Japanese fan population is playing chump for the entire world. If I were a fan, I'd be embarrassed to be associated with that.
Mind you, as I've said elsewhere, despite feeling that way, it's hard to defend companies that put region restrictions on things in a deliberate effort to decrease sales...
I'm not sure if you mean DVD player computer software or a stand alone player. For computer software, I am thinking of utilities like this: http://www.darkwet.net/dvdsubber/about.asp
Since you obviously need a computer to download and make use of the fansub video files, and all modern codecs require greater CPU power than DVD decoding, the worst one might have to do to take advantage of these files on a machine that could already play downloaded fansub files is to buy a DVD drive.
In regards to DVD region coding on Japanese DVDs, the answer to that question is unfortunately most of the time yes, and that irritates me to no end, because on the one hand I want to recommend people do what I'm talking about above, but on the other hand, at the point that the publishers themselves are deliberately discouraging people from buying them with region lockouts, it's hard to feel sorry for them when people download them instead.
Region coding still doesn't change my general distaste for the "Japanese copyrights don't count" philosophy. If it were "region restricted work copyrights are only valid in those regions" I might find myself sympathizing with that.:)
That's a shame. I guess I'm just an idealist. I like to think of the internet as bringing people together, weakening borders, and eliminating some of the necessity for big media companies and middle-men publishers. Your distrust of foreign merchants is, well, foreign to me.:) I use international mail order all the time, although there are also domestic direct-import stores in many countries as well. At the point you are simply declaring "I'm not going to..." there's not much more to be said, though. *shrug*
My original post stands as written. I probably shouldn't have sidetracked it. The idea that violating Japanese copyrights is for some reason perfectly OK, but violating American copyrights is bad has a nationalistic if not racist tone with which I would not want to be associated with.
Then why not distribute just text files and not video? There are numerous softwares available to display synchronized text files with a separate video file or during DVD playback.
Or, at the very least, if it is truely that important to see a television show as soon as possible after the initial broadcast, shouldn't they cease video distribution upon the initial video sale release, regardless of which country those videos are sold in? (Presumably Japan would be first.) Since at that point, you can just order it from Amazon Japan and such.
Why is the availability of the video itself in the United States so ethically imporant to distributing that video to the entire world?
"there is absolutely no legal way to watch a dvd from japan here in the states."
This is false.
For starters, personal import of works with foreign copyrights is not only legal, but is specicially excepted from the laws regarding rights of sale and distribution in the U.S. (the text of the law makes a specific example of a tourist bringing back copyrighted works from a vacation as being just fine) The impact on academia of forbidding import of foreign works would be rather dramtic.
Second, you don't need to crack the region coding -- you just need a region 2 device. In my case, for example, I have an older DVD-ROM drive that I have set to region 1, and new one that is set to region 2. No cracking involved.
Third, the above presumes that all Japanese DVDs are automatically region 2 limited, which while common, is not universal and is up to individual publishers -- although I do think that deliberately region coding a disc is equivalent to telling people in other regions, "We don't want your money."
Re:I've never been a fan of fansub "ethics."
on
Fansubbers Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"The titles may never be released at all"
This is exactly what I am talking about. To you, "released" means "released in the United States." You didn't even think about that when you wrote it, did you? The titles ARE "released," just not where you live. If you were merely promoting distributing translated text files to be used with Japanese DVDs, I'd be on your side (despite the illegality of distributing an unauthorized translation of the script). But instead you act as if the videos sold in Japan somehow "don't count" as being "released" at all!
What really bugs me about all this is that it punishes the little guy the most. If you aren't a big Japanese corporation that can do international publishing, screw you. Your copyrights don't count. Making a small-budget OVA? Even if you make it available for international mail-order, no one would ever think of buying it -- after all it's not "licensed" (= sold by a big company in the United States) and thus your international copyrights are void, according to "fans."
That's completely false. The United States and Japan are both Berne Convention member countries. Japanese works are protected under international copyright law which the U.S. recognizes.
On top of that, distributing on the internet = distributing to the whole world (including Japan). Why is U.S. licensing so much more ethically significant than any other country's?
I could see someone justifying the idea of distributing TV shows that are not for sale in any form anywhere yet (i.e. Japanese DVD release is not out yet) -- in the exact same manner as justifying distributing a new episode of a U.S. TV to the worldwide internet -- which, incidentally, would not apply to OVAs, but I don't see how whether a Japanese show is sold in the U.S. or not determines whether it is OK to make copies of it for all human beings on the planet. It comes off sounding like the U.S. is the arbiter of world copyrights.
It bears mentioning that when you put these video files up on the net, they are just as accessible to people in the domestic Japanese market as anywhere else. I would tend to imagine that is of some concern, especially in the case of those late-night niche series that make all their money off video and merchandise sales, rather than advertising, like Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. They would need to approach foreign sites distributing video files just as much as they would approach Japanese ones.
It'd still be illegal, but it would probably drop below the radar, anyway. What you describe is my preferred method for dealing with the language barrier and the current obscenely long copyright terms that make waiting for titles to enter the public domain impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
$5 a month for the rest of my life for a huge library of music is an awesome deal. $5 a month for that library until the service folds and I'm left with no music isn't all that attractive.
I'd have to disagree with that, really. If a subscription service dies, you just switch to another one. You haven't lost anything because you never bought anything in the first place. The DRM'd files on the harddrive are just a temporary cache, not a "collection" to worry about backing up. This assumes, of course, that you don't find yourself forced to buy proprietary hardware for each individual service, in which case you'd lose that investment.
(Whether subscription based services are really a good deal or not is another matter entirely that varies significantly from person to person.)
I don't think "best in the world" really has much to do with it. Human beings in general think in a local context, and refer to things out of habit based on the default values of their local culture. And that's hardly a recent development.
English sites probably catch an unfair amount of flak for this. If an article on slashdot.jp used the word "zenkoku" without specifying the country, it's unlikely anyone would complain, because people take the language of the site (Japanese) to define its locale defaults. Slashdot has an FAQ which clarifies its U.S. point-of-view default, which will have to suffice.
(As a side note, I do think that the way most Americans now think of themselves as citizens of one nation rather than citizens of individual states IS an interesting sign of the times.)
You transmuted gummi into plastic?
You gotta love the way these filters actively point out and emphasize "bad words" in places where nobody would have thought to see them without the filter helping.
My favorite was the chat filter (which had no option to turn it off on the client, naturally) in the MMORPG "Earth & Beyond" which ignored spaces in words in an attempt to defeat people writing "f u c k" and the like.
One of the words on the censored list was "fag." What this meant was, anytime anyone had a word ending in "f" followed by the word "a" followed by a word starting with "g", the letters were replaced by asterisks.
"Anyone know of a guild looking for..." became "Anyone know o* * *uild looking for..." etc.
Naturally, this would result in several WTFs followed by a discussion about "fags," using every other variation for the word that people could possibly think of. "Whoops, I'm sorry, I meant, 'Anyone know ochocolate thiefuild looking for...'" etc.
It's included with XP.
It's "hidden" only in the sense that there's no shortcut to it (i.e. like regedit).
Run the command "conf" to run Netmeeting.
It works with Control Panel applets, but for some unknown reason you must hold shift before right-clicking (as original poster noted).
As for running Windows Explorer with RunAs, the answer is yes...kind of. Rather, what you run is IE, not Explorer, which gives you effectively the same thing. (As shown in the post that started this thread. Or just right-click an IE shortcut and select "Run As".) Note that these Explorer windows when running as another user will not automatically update folder views to reflect changes -- you must refresh them manually (F5).
All of this is of course documented horribly or not at all...
With that being said, I've always wondered what people fill their hard disk with
Sounds like a question for a Slashdot poll, if it hasn't been one already.
Personally, I take up an awful lot of space with VMWare virtual machine files.
The 2000 degragger doesn't defrag the MFT, but the XP defragger does.
XP still has no buit-in method of defragging the pagefile or registry hives, however.
I must be in the minority here, but I love the smooth feel of the scroll wheel on the new Intellimouse Explorer I just got a week ago. This is the first mouse I've ever used with a completely smooth scroll wheel; it was a surprise but I really like it.
I haven't actually seen another Windows based tool do that
Adobe provides a filter for the built-in Windows indexing service.
"Google Desktop Search can only be used when the account from which it was installed is logged in."
Yep, that lovely message is still there when I try to use it in my main work account.
Oh, well. Maybe next time.
XP Home Edition lacks the ability to turn off "simple file sharing" which also means no access to the NTFS Security GUI when running in normal mode.
There are workarounds, however, and I ran a Home Edition workstation with fine-grained ACLs for a while before eventually upgrading to Professional for other reasons.
1) Booting into Safe Mode will give access to the Security tab in Home Edition. This is obviously not convenient for day-to-day changes but is useful for major changes and setting up the system initially.
2) The command line tool CACLS ("Change ACLs") is available in Home Edition just as in Professional. CACLS does not provide full access to all NTFS permission settings, but handles most that would be used for general use.
Combining these two is enough to get anything done, but for more convenient full access to NTFS permissions settings from the command line without having to boot into Safe Mode in Home Edition, I recommend checking SetACL and SubInACL
I find grammar checkers useful for catching typos that spell checkers can't. I don't really think of the advice itself as all that important. (Much like not taking a spell checker's first suggestion.)
I would imagine the number of false positives may vary depending on the nature of one's writing, though. The trouble with Word's grammar checker (all grammar checkers?) is that there's not a way to teach it that a certain phrase is OK -- and even if there were, next time it would probably still mark a slight variation as incorrect.
Untrue. The U.S. and numerous other countries, including Japan, are part of an agreement that recognizes each others copyrights from and in all participating countries.
:)
Can probably find multiple references to it in this thread if you search for "Berne Convention." Googling for that might be good, too.
Re: unauthorized translation distribution
:)
:)
Ah, yeah, obviously, it being copyright infringement doesn't change. (Actually, I just told someone else that same thing in another post someone else made about those sub-overlay programs.
I just think it's considerably closer to the spirit of what I thought would be the main purpose for unauthorized translation to exist at all -- an unfortunate, underground, "necessary evil" to deal with the fact that the length of copyright terms is so obscenely long now that waiting until works fall into the public domain to translate them takes longer than the lifetime of the people who want to see them, and having countless works be forever linguistically inaccessible to people just seems like such a horrible, pointless waste. Something to be done in as low-key a manner as possible. Something you wish was unnecessary. Not something to brag about.
At the point that fansubbers are bothering to come up with any kind of rationalization or codes of ethics at all, surely the method that comes the closest to the experience one would have if one didn't need a translation makes the most sense?
I think a lot of fansubbers way of thinking about distribution ethics is very narrow and ethno-centric. How do fansubbers feel about a Japanese-fluent speaker in Brazil downloading all of his Japanese entertainment because there will never be a Brazillian release? Is it the location that matters? Or is it the language? I'm fluent in Japanese, but my nationality is American. Where do I fit in? Are Japanese fluent people ethically obligated to buy Japanese works rather than acquire unauthorized copies of them, regardless of where they are located? Is someone in Japan who does not speak Japanese entitled to download videos rather than renting them? Are Japanese fluent speakers in Japan the only ones on the planet that are expected to fund these globally distributed (by fansubbers) video releases? That's a small group of people funding entertainment for the whole planet, if that's the case. No wonder videos in Japan are expensive.
Like I said originally -- it's the ethno-centric use of the words "released" and "licensed" and "official" that bother me, as if the Japanese release was "unofficial." It would be bad enough if the discussion was limited to Americans, but the fansub situation is now such that the status of a U.S. release apparently defines the ethical status of Japanese copyrights for "fans" across the entire globe -- the actual creators are insignificant; the U.S. middle-men are what matter. Isn't that kind of odd?
I guess I want to ask the fansubbers, what do they say to a Japanese resident who asks, "Why should I pay for these if you aren't?" While there are a few children's shows that really are supported by advertising, all of those late-night shows are supported by video and merchandising sales. And obviously direct-to-video releases are, not to mention pay-per-view and premium cable shows. The only reason the entire fansub community gets to enjoy what they enjoy is that the Japanese fan population is playing chump for the entire world. If I were a fan, I'd be embarrassed to be associated with that.
Mind you, as I've said elsewhere, despite feeling that way, it's hard to defend companies that put region restrictions on things in a deliberate effort to decrease sales...
/me points at site label, "News for Nerds."
I'm not sure if you mean DVD player computer software or a stand alone player. For computer software, I am thinking of utilities like this: http://www.darkwet.net/dvdsubber/about.asp
:)
Since you obviously need a computer to download and make use of the fansub video files, and all modern codecs require greater CPU power than DVD decoding, the worst one might have to do to take advantage of these files on a machine that could already play downloaded fansub files is to buy a DVD drive.
In regards to DVD region coding on Japanese DVDs, the answer to that question is unfortunately most of the time yes, and that irritates me to no end, because on the one hand I want to recommend people do what I'm talking about above, but on the other hand, at the point that the publishers themselves are deliberately discouraging people from buying them with region lockouts, it's hard to feel sorry for them when people download them instead.
Region coding still doesn't change my general distaste for the "Japanese copyrights don't count" philosophy. If it were "region restricted work copyrights are only valid in those regions" I might find myself sympathizing with that.
Translation rights belong to the original copyright holder to begin with by default -- that's who they are "bought out" from. :)
That's a shame. I guess I'm just an idealist. I like to think of the internet as bringing people together, weakening borders, and eliminating some of the necessity for big media companies and middle-men publishers. Your distrust of foreign merchants is, well, foreign to me. :) I use international mail order all the time, although there are also domestic direct-import stores in many countries as well. At the point you are simply declaring "I'm not going to..." there's not much more to be said, though. *shrug*
My original post stands as written. I probably shouldn't have sidetracked it. The idea that violating Japanese copyrights is for some reason perfectly OK, but violating American copyrights is bad has a nationalistic if not racist tone with which I would not want to be associated with.
Then why not distribute just text files and not video? There are numerous softwares available to display synchronized text files with a separate video file or during DVD playback.
Or, at the very least, if it is truely that important to see a television show as soon as possible after the initial broadcast, shouldn't they cease video distribution upon the initial video sale release, regardless of which country those videos are sold in? (Presumably Japan would be first.) Since at that point, you can just order it from Amazon Japan and such.
Why is the availability of the video itself in the United States so ethically imporant to distributing that video to the entire world?
"there is absolutely no legal way to watch a dvd from japan here in the states."
This is false.
For starters, personal import of works with foreign copyrights is not only legal, but is specicially excepted from the laws regarding rights of sale and distribution in the U.S. (the text of the law makes a specific example of a tourist bringing back copyrighted works from a vacation as being just fine) The impact on academia of forbidding import of foreign works would be rather dramtic.
Second, you don't need to crack the region coding -- you just need a region 2 device. In my case, for example, I have an older DVD-ROM drive that I have set to region 1, and new one that is set to region 2. No cracking involved.
Third, the above presumes that all Japanese DVDs are automatically region 2 limited, which while common, is not universal and is up to individual publishers -- although I do think that deliberately region coding a disc is equivalent to telling people in other regions, "We don't want your money."
"The titles may never be released at all"
This is exactly what I am talking about. To you, "released" means "released in the United States." You didn't even think about that when you wrote it, did you? The titles ARE "released," just not where you live. If you were merely promoting distributing translated text files to be used with Japanese DVDs, I'd be on your side (despite the illegality of distributing an unauthorized translation of the script). But instead you act as if the videos sold in Japan somehow "don't count" as being "released" at all!
What really bugs me about all this is that it punishes the little guy the most. If you aren't a big Japanese corporation that can do international publishing, screw you. Your copyrights don't count. Making a small-budget OVA? Even if you make it available for international mail-order, no one would ever think of buying it -- after all it's not "licensed" (= sold by a big company in the United States) and thus your international copyrights are void, according to "fans."
That's completely false. The United States and Japan are both Berne Convention member countries. Japanese works are protected under international copyright law which the U.S. recognizes.
On top of that, distributing on the internet = distributing to the whole world (including Japan). Why is U.S. licensing so much more ethically significant than any other country's?
I could see someone justifying the idea of distributing TV shows that are not for sale in any form anywhere yet (i.e. Japanese DVD release is not out yet) -- in the exact same manner as justifying distributing a new episode of a U.S. TV to the worldwide internet -- which, incidentally, would not apply to OVAs, but I don't see how whether a Japanese show is sold in the U.S. or not determines whether it is OK to make copies of it for all human beings on the planet. It comes off sounding like the U.S. is the arbiter of world copyrights.
It bears mentioning that when you put these video files up on the net, they are just as accessible to people in the domestic Japanese market as anywhere else. I would tend to imagine that is of some concern, especially in the case of those late-night niche series that make all their money off video and merchandise sales, rather than advertising, like Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. They would need to approach foreign sites distributing video files just as much as they would approach Japanese ones.
It'd still be illegal, but it would probably drop below the radar, anyway. What you describe is my preferred method for dealing with the language barrier and the current obscenely long copyright terms that make waiting for titles to enter the public domain impossible.