I have a computer that is represented by an apple with a bite taken out of it. Talk about socially inappropriate; some people find seriously negative religious implications in such an image.
Not to mention that the default GUI for the operating system has "lickable" buttons. As a matter-of-fact, I think it was probably the marketing department that came up with that idea.
Linux is represented by a penguin, and my girlfriend, who is a Windows user, likes it and thinks it's cute. (Of course, she's also Japanese, a race of people who tend to think that many things are cute, usually right before they eat them.)
Heaven forbid that computers should be fun. I think we're far better off by having a window as a mascot. Or maybe a door. Life has way too much humor as it is.
Think about the keys he mentioned and check to see how often you use them as a writer. Since we're all writing in the English language here, it's likely we're also all using the same number of keys regularly. Do you honestly use any of the keys he mentioned? You might want to check them again.
He never mentioned the 26 alphabet letters, nor the top row of numbers and their associated shift characters, which I assume are the ones that a writer is going to use the most. One of the keys he mentioned is an accent key (reverse apostrophe), which isn't really useful in writing if it's not part of the associated character.
Most of the special characters a writer may need access to on a daily basis can be accessed through OSX's KeyCaps application, or Windows Character Map. Most English typers don't need, for example, access to German or French characters, and if they need them that badly, can order a French or German keyboard. I type in both German and Japanese, and find the input methods available with a standard US keyboard under OSX acceptable (I have a Japanese keyboard as well, and it doesn't differ significantly, except in the realm of punctuation.)
Finally, he also never said he was going to take your keyboard away; he just wants to have alternative choices available. I don't think this is unreasonable. Has the existencee of the Dvorak keyboard rained on your parade lately? What about ergonomic keyboards; are those evil, too?
You're posting on Slashdot and attempting to tell us that computers don't matter to you?
Are you on the wrong site, or just self-deluded?
If it doesn't matter which computer you use, you won't mind if we make you use a Mac, will you? It's all the same, right? After all, you have already expressed your admirable emotional detachment.
Then, one day I worked up the energy to call them yet again for help. This time, with a record of my previous contacts right in front of him, a rep told me that "the burner certainly did seem to be broken, sorry, and oh yeah, it was out of warranty so he couldn't do anything for me.
Did you try pointing out to him that your service history indicated that the drive was defective before the warranty expired? The documentation to prove it was right in front of him. 99% of the time, that's enough justification to count it as a warranty issue.
Real art can, and does, get censored, all the time. Art has always been a tool of politics for as long as history itself has been around. Just look at what John Ashcroft did to the statue of Justice, the prudish bastard (hung a shroud on it.) IMHO, in doing so he defaced a national art treasure, and nobody did a damn thing about it. You want to get offended, get offended about something serious like that.
I agree that, as an artist, it's annoying when somebody screws with your artistic intentions. Unfortunately, nobody is going to interpret your work the way you intended; even if they like it, there are going to be differences. In a way, this is a good thing, and you can choose to love it or hate it (I recommend the former, as you'll be spending a lot of time doing whichever you choose.)
The fact of the matter is, there are many prudish snobs out there who are providing a very vital service: buying your movies so that you can continue to be in business. Nobody said that you had to sacrifice your personal integrity by changing how you make your films, they are just implying that people are filtering how they watch it in private. As long as it's in private (and thereby not affecting public perception, at least, not officially) and they're paying, more power to them.
It's the mental filters you need to worry about, not the electronic ones. They're the hardest to change.
This is the sticky point that nobody seems to notice: how do you prove yourself as not guilty under a law that assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent?
You contact them and tell them that you're an upstanding individual who completely supports copyright law and doesn't pirate media in any form, and their response is, "Prove it."
The Mac is a viable alternative, specifically because of the pricing. I argue that people don't "really, really want Windows." "Want" implies "like," and even my PC friends who make fun of my Mac also dislike Windows on their PC. Kind of ironic; just goes to show you that 95% of the computer market is made up of masochists. Windows is part of the reason why people don't buy PCs. Linux is a great alternative and will get even better as more and more people realize that having power doesn't mean sacraficing user-friendliness. "My computer is hard to use because I need the power." That's a pretty dumb statement, when you think about it.
Buying Windows is a knee-jerk reaction because what people really don't want is to have to think about it. They want it to just work, which is not an unreasonable request. Simpler devices in the home are also met with the same even-handed dislike; think of the infinite jokes about programming a VCR's clock. There has never been a button called "set clock" on any electronic device ever made - not even clocks. Does this mean the current method is better? No. Because of custom and tradition. It's self-perpetuated masochism. Think about the traditional cable interfaces of SCSI and serial ports: they were clunky and fragile, simpley because the people who designed them had no clue about ergonomics. The engineer who designed it grunted, "It works. What more do you want?" and moved on. People were forced to use it because they had no choice. Now we have USB and Firewire, which are tough and compact, and serve the same purpose. Just goes to show you that we don't have to settle for crappy design, just because "it works."
Microsoft managed to leverage themselves onto every PC, regardless of how crappy the OS was, because of making deals. It wasn't about quality, it was about money, and the computer vendors subsequently dictating to the user what they'd have to buy. People are comfortable with Windows out of habit; they're comfortable with it because it's been around for as long as they can remember, not because it's fun or easy to use.
OSX's price includes three software upgrade coupons. You bring the coupon with you to the store, you get the upgrade. See Microsoft offering that.
99% of Mac hardware is no longer proprietary, with the exception of one critical component - the motherboard. The computer must be bought from Apple, yes; this looks bad for gung-ho computerphiles who want to build their own. That applies to 2% of the computer market. I built an entire animation render farm and two workstations at my last job, based on PCs and Windows, so I've run that gauntlet and know how it works. To build a decent workstation costs about as much as buying it already built from Apple or Dell pre-built, and it's not efficient. I'm talking about a DECENT workstation, not just a game computer and word processor: reliable parts, decent warranties, and decent tech support.
Of course, building a computer yourself is about on the same level as building your own car; it might appeal to/. readers, but not the majority of the population. Building it for your friends sounds like a compassionate and enlightened choice, until you realize that you are also volunteering to do tech support for the rest of your natural life.
Dollar-for-dollar, Macs are cheaper. Did the research. Wrote an article on it in Keyframe Magazine (LightWave 3D periodical) last year. Checked it against my PC friends' opinions while I was writing. We found that an equivalent PC would cost about $200 more than its Mac counterpart, item for item - but only if the PC manufacturer was offering a discount at that time. Some components had to be bought from another vendor, and could cost hundreds more.
The Mac price included 3-year support for hardware AND the OS. Buying 3-year support for Windows costs extra.
The Macs have the same access to every component that a PC does, with the exception of the motherboard. However, even PCs are proprietary in this respect; the only difference is that they rely on a distributed monopoly, rather than a singular one, as Apple users do. For example, PC users can only rely on two processor manufacturers, just as Macs do (IBM and Motorola.)
Despite the proprietary model the Mac is originally based on, a large part of this has fallen by the wayside. Everything else is standardized, so you can't complain that Apple forces you into buying other components from them. It's a better buy for the average computer user.
As for being forced to buy the casing - I don't like iMacs on principal, but they're pretty to look at and good for people like my parents (98% of the computer community.) I have no complaints about the tower cases at all, and I challenge anyone else to come up with a decent argument against them.
Yes, I am a Mac user. I like Macs. This is a conscious choice, not just a feeling. They offer me scalability. For example, I can run my choice of desktop manager, thanks to software projects such as XFree86; I am currently using Gnome, which is actually pretty snappy and can run side-by-side with OS X's Finder or completely separately. I also now have access to the open source community associated with Linux and BSD. I get regular updates from Apple, for free. It's a good time to be a Mac user.
I've found a place in Osaka that sells last year's G4 Sawtooth towers for $600 a pop. Why? Technology doesn't hold its value in consumer-hungry Japan. I'm going there tomorrow. How sweet it is.
Drawings and anime are two different things. Granted, "animation" is made up of a sequence of still drawings, technical crap, blah blah blah, but you're nit-picking. The drawings you're referring to, from Japanese "pillow books," are the first record from which is derived the modern Japanese charicature style, yes. Pillow books were sex how-to books, not entertainment per se (well, that depends on whether or not you got to participate in the lessons, I suppose.) They are the forerunner of many other forms of Japanese art as well. The original designer of Astro Boy was also influenced by America's "Betty Boop" cartoons, which were also fairly risque for a cartoon. He liked the style for its technical merits (BESM, or Big Eyes, Small Mouth), not for its titillation value.
Due to one bad review in a British newspaper of an anime that had nothing dirty about it, anime has been branded as pornographic by the English-speaking portion of western society. The original victim of this criticism was the OAV series, "Oh! My Goddess," AKA "Aa! Megami-sama" in Japan. This is an incredibly sweet, sometimes maudlin, romantic comedy about a Japanese student who dials a wrong number and ends up with a Nordic goddess as his girlfriend (short short version.)
Pornographic material is called "hentai" in Japan, whether it be in comic book, animated, or live-action form. It is prevalent if you're looking for it, just as porn magazines and videos in the US. It represents maybe less than 10% of all anime ever created. It's just like saying all American live-action movies are pornographic, based on the Puritanical criticism of someone living in another country seeing one American movie they didn't like and branding the entire genre thereafter as smut.
You have to wonder what kind of mind a censor has to have in order to be able to gauge what is pornographic and what isn't. "It takes one to know one," as the saying goes. What's more disgusting, the person with an open, healthy attitude about sex, or the closet pervert who cries foul and points and cover his eyes, all the while peeking between his fingers to get a better look? I seriously suspect that the loudest critics of sexual morals throughout the ages have been homely, sanctimonious men who were bitter because they weren't getting any, but were smart enough to cloak their attempts to drag everyone else down with them in the guise of searching for spiritual enlightenment, etc.
I live in Japan. I am super-otaku (someday, I will be ota-king!) I currently enjoy the luxury of living outside of the American corporate media system. How sweet it is.
When you charge somebody for doing your job, that's just common sense. Many programmers spent thousands of dollars on a college education - shouldn't they be renumerated for their investment and sacrafice of several years of their life?
Programmers have the hardest time marketing their product, namely, software. One of the few things we can thank Bill Gates for convincing IBM to pay licensing fees per copy for his original DOS operating system, thus paving the way for everyone else since then.
I have a friend who believes that all programmers should give him their software for free. I asked him how he expected them to eat and pay their bills. It's such a blindingly obvious question. The mind boggles.
Moved there. Got KDDI's service (DION) for the same price and the same performance. It's schweet. You couldn't pry me away from Japan with a crowbar and a team of wild monkeys.
If you're actually trying to input Japanese, which I do on a daily basis, then you realize that handwriting recognition can be a real blessing.
Many of the basic 2,048 Japanese "kanji" (Chinese characters) share pronunciation with other kanji, which means I can often be faced with a list of 167 possible matches. This is time-consuming when I know exactly which character I want and the computer doesn't.
When it comes time to look up an unknown kanji, handwriting recognition is also a major blessing; instead of trying to hunt down the kanji in an obscure index system or sort it out by component pieces, you can simply draw it in the interface, let the computer recognize it, and viola! you have a match much faster than painstakingly scanning through fifty candidates.
Keyboards are alphabet-centric. Not everybody finds that the best or only way to do business.
From what I understand, there's an open source version of the PDF format, which is what Apple used. This could be complete hooey, but made sense to me. If so, then Microsoft is just looking for an excuse to be as proprietary and annoying as ever. Completely in character.
I'm a computer animator by trade, but was feeling stuck at a dead-end job working for a studio affiliated with my own alma mater. I was working too much, getting paid to little, and not going where I wanted to go. I decided I needed a break.
So I applied for the JET Program (http://www.jetprogramme.org/) in order to teach English in Japan. I've always wanted to go there, it's a chance to experience the culture and the language, and it's a jumping-off point for the rest of the Far East. The pay is pretty good (monthly net take-home is about $2,8000 USD) and the hours are more than reasonable; you're contractually obligated to work 35 hours a week. The minimum contract is one year, renewable annually to a maximum of three.
No teaching experience required, although useful. You team-teach with a JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) so you don't have to go in cold-turkey and clueless. It helps to already have experience living abroad and learning other languages, although you can come here and not learn Japanese at all (I wouldn't recommend it.)
I wanted to see the world. I didn't want to feel stuck and waiting until I retire to have an adventure. I hung up the animator's hat for a while and decided to try something new.
I'm now living in Osaka, Japan and having a blast. When I come home, I'll have a generous amount in the bank. I can still animate in my spare time, which I plan on doing to beef up my demo reel. I will feel satisfied that I didn't waste my life doing the traditional white-picket fence route. Who you are is not defined by your job or your degree.
I'm living in Osaka, Japan right now, and the biggest hurdle the technology-savvy Japanese have to face in the telecommunications field is geography: Japan is 70% mountains.
Their solution? Wireless internet. Give your user a wireless internet card, then connect the receiver to a fiber-optic network offering 100Mbps. Works with Windows as well as OS 9 and OS X.
Currently, ADSL alone in Japan offers 12Mbps, for a slightly cheaper price than in the states.
I have one and it's the best thing I've ever bought. I don't expect it to be amazingly rugged, but combined with a protective sleeve and a leather cover for the keys, I expect it to last for a long time; at least three years. That's what I look for when I buy a system.
Apple has a bad reputation on laptops and flimsy hinges. The flexing thing on the monitor is something to watch out for, as is the fact that the thing gets freakin' hot when it sits directly on your lap (I rest mine on the carry pouch as an insulator).
I bought mine for computer animation purposes, and I expect it to serve my needs nicely. In addition to OS X, I also want to add a Linux distro to it eventually, to satisfy my techno-geek needs (any recommendations?)
Yes, rugged durability is a good thing. However, I still wash and wax my car to protect the finish. A little care goes a long way.
I was going to offer that correction as well, but a little more politely. It's a serious discussion offered in good faith; please try to respond in kind. Nit-picking over somebody's spelling as a means of questioning the validity of their opinions is a bit tacky. I'm sure we all have more important things to waste our bandwidth on.
I have to agree with that. It's not the lip-syncing technology - there's the logistics of a) how many languages do you re-render for, and b) the fact that re-rendering a single movie-res frame might take an hour or more, depending on the complexity.
Movies of this scale are a work of art, not something produced on a mass-production line. The headaches of coordinating all of those layers of render passes...ugh. Each image, for example, might be made up of dozens of layers, which have to be rendered out individually, then composited together by a talented artist. Even though you can automate this process, it's a short trip to the wall of implausibility.
Not to mention that, just because it's lip-synced really well doesn't beg that it be lip-synced really well in multiple languages. Every film ever produced up until now, animated or no, hasn't let this bother them.
Just an FYI: in Japan, a lot of American movies are shown subtitled, so they'll be able to appreciate the lipsyncing in its entirety. However, as somebody who's had experience with a foreign language, I can tell you with assurance - how do you tell when it's right or wrong if you don't even understand the language?
I've seen familiar American movies dubbed in German, and the German voice actors did a damn good job of writing and timing the script to the "lip-flapping."
I have a really simple method for creating fake video that fools the eye: shoot your spoof, insert the word, "LIVE" over it, and viola! That will cost you a lot less than $80,000, and is far more effective.
Seriously, as a professional animator and compositor in television post-production, all of this is not as easy as they say, regardless of the hype. You can't change pixels without something to work from, and if the technology were that damn good already, I'd be out of a job.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't literally involve pennies. Read the article.
I have a computer that is represented by an apple with a bite taken out of it. Talk about socially inappropriate; some people find seriously negative religious implications in such an image.
Not to mention that the default GUI for the operating system has "lickable" buttons. As a matter-of-fact, I think it was probably the marketing department that came up with that idea.
Linux is represented by a penguin, and my girlfriend, who is a Windows user, likes it and thinks it's cute. (Of course, she's also Japanese, a race of people who tend to think that many things are cute, usually right before they eat them.)
Heaven forbid that computers should be fun. I think we're far better off by having a window as a mascot. Or maybe a door. Life has way too much humor as it is.
Think about the keys he mentioned and check to see how often you use them as a writer. Since we're all writing in the English language here, it's likely we're also all using the same number of keys regularly. Do you honestly use any of the keys he mentioned? You might want to check them again.
He never mentioned the 26 alphabet letters, nor the top row of numbers and their associated shift characters, which I assume are the ones that a writer is going to use the most. One of the keys he mentioned is an accent key (reverse apostrophe), which isn't really useful in writing if it's not part of the associated character.
Most of the special characters a writer may need access to on a daily basis can be accessed through OSX's KeyCaps application, or Windows Character Map. Most English typers don't need, for example, access to German or French characters, and if they need them that badly, can order a French or German keyboard. I type in both German and Japanese, and find the input methods available with a standard US keyboard under OSX acceptable (I have a Japanese keyboard as well, and it doesn't differ significantly, except in the realm of punctuation.)
Finally, he also never said he was going to take your keyboard away; he just wants to have alternative choices available. I don't think this is unreasonable. Has the existencee of the Dvorak keyboard rained on your parade lately? What about ergonomic keyboards; are those evil, too?
For people that use a tool argument:
You're posting on Slashdot and attempting to tell us that computers don't matter to you?
Are you on the wrong site, or just self-deluded?
If it doesn't matter which computer you use, you won't mind if we make you use a Mac, will you? It's all the same, right? After all, you have already expressed your admirable emotional detachment.
Real art can, and does, get censored, all the time. Art has always been a tool of politics for as long as history itself has been around. Just look at what John Ashcroft did to the statue of Justice, the prudish bastard (hung a shroud on it.) IMHO, in doing so he defaced a national art treasure, and nobody did a damn thing about it. You want to get offended, get offended about something serious like that.
I agree that, as an artist, it's annoying when somebody screws with your artistic intentions. Unfortunately, nobody is going to interpret your work the way you intended; even if they like it, there are going to be differences. In a way, this is a good thing, and you can choose to love it or hate it (I recommend the former, as you'll be spending a lot of time doing whichever you choose.)
The fact of the matter is, there are many prudish snobs out there who are providing a very vital service: buying your movies so that you can continue to be in business. Nobody said that you had to sacrifice your personal integrity by changing how you make your films, they are just implying that people are filtering how they watch it in private. As long as it's in private (and thereby not affecting public perception, at least, not officially) and they're paying, more power to them.
It's the mental filters you need to worry about, not the electronic ones. They're the hardest to change.
This is the sticky point that nobody seems to notice: how do you prove yourself as not guilty under a law that assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent?
You contact them and tell them that you're an upstanding individual who completely supports copyright law and doesn't pirate media in any form, and their response is, "Prove it."
The Mac is a viable alternative, specifically because of the pricing. I argue that people don't "really, really want Windows." "Want" implies "like," and even my PC friends who make fun of my Mac also dislike Windows on their PC. Kind of ironic; just goes to show you that 95% of the computer market is made up of masochists. Windows is part of the reason why people don't buy PCs. Linux is a great alternative and will get even better as more and more people realize that having power doesn't mean sacraficing user-friendliness. "My computer is hard to use because I need the power." That's a pretty dumb statement, when you think about it.
/. readers, but not the majority of the population. Building it for your friends sounds like a compassionate and enlightened choice, until you realize that you are also volunteering to do tech support for the rest of your natural life.
Buying Windows is a knee-jerk reaction because what people really don't want is to have to think about it. They want it to just work, which is not an unreasonable request. Simpler devices in the home are also met with the same even-handed dislike; think of the infinite jokes about programming a VCR's clock. There has never been a button called "set clock" on any electronic device ever made - not even clocks. Does this mean the current method is better? No. Because of custom and tradition. It's self-perpetuated masochism. Think about the traditional cable interfaces of SCSI and serial ports: they were clunky and fragile, simpley because the people who designed them had no clue about ergonomics. The engineer who designed it grunted, "It works. What more do you want?" and moved on. People were forced to use it because they had no choice. Now we have USB and Firewire, which are tough and compact, and serve the same purpose. Just goes to show you that we don't have to settle for crappy design, just because "it works."
Microsoft managed to leverage themselves onto every PC, regardless of how crappy the OS was, because of making deals. It wasn't about quality, it was about money, and the computer vendors subsequently dictating to the user what they'd have to buy. People are comfortable with Windows out of habit; they're comfortable with it because it's been around for as long as they can remember, not because it's fun or easy to use.
OSX's price includes three software upgrade coupons. You bring the coupon with you to the store, you get the upgrade. See Microsoft offering that.
99% of Mac hardware is no longer proprietary, with the exception of one critical component - the motherboard. The computer must be bought from Apple, yes; this looks bad for gung-ho computerphiles who want to build their own. That applies to 2% of the computer market. I built an entire animation render farm and two workstations at my last job, based on PCs and Windows, so I've run that gauntlet and know how it works. To build a decent workstation costs about as much as buying it already built from Apple or Dell pre-built, and it's not efficient. I'm talking about a DECENT workstation, not just a game computer and word processor: reliable parts, decent warranties, and decent tech support.
Of course, building a computer yourself is about on the same level as building your own car; it might appeal to
Dollar-for-dollar, Macs are cheaper. Did the research. Wrote an article on it in Keyframe Magazine (LightWave 3D periodical) last year. Checked it against my PC friends' opinions while I was writing. We found that an equivalent PC would cost about $200 more than its Mac counterpart, item for item - but only if the PC manufacturer was offering a discount at that time. Some components had to be bought from another vendor, and could cost hundreds more.
The Mac price included 3-year support for hardware AND the OS. Buying 3-year support for Windows costs extra.
The Macs have the same access to every component that a PC does, with the exception of the motherboard. However, even PCs are proprietary in this respect; the only difference is that they rely on a distributed monopoly, rather than a singular one, as Apple users do. For example, PC users can only rely on two processor manufacturers, just as Macs do (IBM and Motorola.)
Despite the proprietary model the Mac is originally based on, a large part of this has fallen by the wayside. Everything else is standardized, so you can't complain that Apple forces you into buying other components from them. It's a better buy for the average computer user.
As for being forced to buy the casing - I don't like iMacs on principal, but they're pretty to look at and good for people like my parents (98% of the computer community.) I have no complaints about the tower cases at all, and I challenge anyone else to come up with a decent argument against them.
Yes, I am a Mac user. I like Macs. This is a conscious choice, not just a feeling. They offer me scalability. For example, I can run my choice of desktop manager, thanks to software projects such as XFree86; I am currently using Gnome, which is actually pretty snappy and can run side-by-side with OS X's Finder or completely separately. I also now have access to the open source community associated with Linux and BSD. I get regular updates from Apple, for free. It's a good time to be a Mac user.
I've found a place in Osaka that sells last year's G4 Sawtooth towers for $600 a pop. Why? Technology doesn't hold its value in consumer-hungry Japan. I'm going there tomorrow. How sweet it is.
Drawings and anime are two different things. Granted, "animation" is made up of a sequence of still drawings, technical crap, blah blah blah, but you're nit-picking. The drawings you're referring to, from Japanese "pillow books," are the first record from which is derived the modern Japanese charicature style, yes. Pillow books were sex how-to books, not entertainment per se (well, that depends on whether or not you got to participate in the lessons, I suppose.) They are the forerunner of many other forms of Japanese art as well. The original designer of Astro Boy was also influenced by America's "Betty Boop" cartoons, which were also fairly risque for a cartoon. He liked the style for its technical merits (BESM, or Big Eyes, Small Mouth), not for its titillation value.
Due to one bad review in a British newspaper of an anime that had nothing dirty about it, anime has been branded as pornographic by the English-speaking portion of western society. The original victim of this criticism was the OAV series, "Oh! My Goddess," AKA "Aa! Megami-sama" in Japan. This is an incredibly sweet, sometimes maudlin, romantic comedy about a Japanese student who dials a wrong number and ends up with a Nordic goddess as his girlfriend (short short version.)
Pornographic material is called "hentai" in Japan, whether it be in comic book, animated, or live-action form. It is prevalent if you're looking for it, just as porn magazines and videos in the US. It represents maybe less than 10% of all anime ever created. It's just like saying all American live-action movies are pornographic, based on the Puritanical criticism of someone living in another country seeing one American movie they didn't like and branding the entire genre thereafter as smut.
You have to wonder what kind of mind a censor has to have in order to be able to gauge what is pornographic and what isn't. "It takes one to know one," as the saying goes. What's more disgusting, the person with an open, healthy attitude about sex, or the closet pervert who cries foul and points and cover his eyes, all the while peeking between his fingers to get a better look? I seriously suspect that the loudest critics of sexual morals throughout the ages have been homely, sanctimonious men who were bitter because they weren't getting any, but were smart enough to cloak their attempts to drag everyone else down with them in the guise of searching for spiritual enlightenment, etc.
I live in Japan. I am super-otaku (someday, I will be ota-king!) I currently enjoy the luxury of living outside of the American corporate media system. How sweet it is.
When you charge somebody for doing your job, that's just common sense. Many programmers spent thousands of dollars on a college education - shouldn't they be renumerated for their investment and sacrafice of several years of their life?
Programmers have the hardest time marketing their product, namely, software. One of the few things we can thank Bill Gates for convincing IBM to pay licensing fees per copy for his original DOS operating system, thus paving the way for everyone else since then.
I have a friend who believes that all programmers should give him their software for free. I asked him how he expected them to eat and pay their bills. It's such a blindingly obvious question. The mind boggles.
Moved there. Got KDDI's service (DION) for the same price and the same performance. It's schweet. You couldn't pry me away from Japan with a crowbar and a team of wild monkeys.
If you're actually trying to input Japanese, which I do on a daily basis, then you realize that handwriting recognition can be a real blessing.
Many of the basic 2,048 Japanese "kanji" (Chinese characters) share pronunciation with other kanji, which means I can often be faced with a list of 167 possible matches. This is time-consuming when I know exactly which character I want and the computer doesn't.
When it comes time to look up an unknown kanji, handwriting recognition is also a major blessing; instead of trying to hunt down the kanji in an obscure index system or sort it out by component pieces, you can simply draw it in the interface, let the computer recognize it, and viola! you have a match much faster than painstakingly scanning through fifty candidates.
Keyboards are alphabet-centric. Not everybody finds that the best or only way to do business.
From what I understand, there's an open source version of the PDF format, which is what Apple used. This could be complete hooey, but made sense to me. If so, then Microsoft is just looking for an excuse to be as proprietary and annoying as ever. Completely in character.
So I applied for the JET Program (http://www.jetprogramme.org/) in order to teach English in Japan. I've always wanted to go there, it's a chance to experience the culture and the language, and it's a jumping-off point for the rest of the Far East. The pay is pretty good (monthly net take-home is about $2,8000 USD) and the hours are more than reasonable; you're contractually obligated to work 35 hours a week. The minimum contract is one year, renewable annually to a maximum of three.
No teaching experience required, although useful. You team-teach with a JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) so you don't have to go in cold-turkey and clueless. It helps to already have experience living abroad and learning other languages, although you can come here and not learn Japanese at all (I wouldn't recommend it.)
I wanted to see the world. I didn't want to feel stuck and waiting until I retire to have an adventure. I hung up the animator's hat for a while and decided to try something new.
I'm now living in Osaka, Japan and having a blast. When I come home, I'll have a generous amount in the bank. I can still animate in my spare time, which I plan on doing to beef up my demo reel. I will feel satisfied that I didn't waste my life doing the traditional white-picket fence route. Who you are is not defined by your job or your degree.
I'm living in Osaka, Japan right now, and the biggest hurdle the technology-savvy Japanese have to face in the telecommunications field is geography: Japan is 70% mountains.
Their solution? Wireless internet. Give your user a wireless internet card, then connect the receiver to a fiber-optic network offering 100Mbps. Works with Windows as well as OS 9 and OS X.
Currently, ADSL alone in Japan offers 12Mbps, for a slightly cheaper price than in the states.
I have one and it's the best thing I've ever bought. I don't expect it to be amazingly rugged, but combined with a protective sleeve and a leather cover for the keys, I expect it to last for a long time; at least three years. That's what I look for when I buy a system.
Apple has a bad reputation on laptops and flimsy hinges. The flexing thing on the monitor is something to watch out for, as is the fact that the thing gets freakin' hot when it sits directly on your lap (I rest mine on the carry pouch as an insulator).
I bought mine for computer animation purposes, and I expect it to serve my needs nicely. In addition to OS X, I also want to add a Linux distro to it eventually, to satisfy my techno-geek needs (any recommendations?)
Yes, rugged durability is a good thing. However, I still wash and wax my car to protect the finish. A little care goes a long way.
I was going to offer that correction as well, but a little more politely. It's a serious discussion offered in good faith; please try to respond in kind. Nit-picking over somebody's spelling as a means of questioning the validity of their opinions is a bit tacky. I'm sure we all have more important things to waste our bandwidth on.
Movies of this scale are a work of art, not something produced on a mass-production line. The headaches of coordinating all of those layers of render passes...ugh. Each image, for example, might be made up of dozens of layers, which have to be rendered out individually, then composited together by a talented artist. Even though you can automate this process, it's a short trip to the wall of implausibility.
Not to mention that, just because it's lip-synced really well doesn't beg that it be lip-synced really well in multiple languages. Every film ever produced up until now, animated or no, hasn't let this bother them.
Just an FYI: in Japan, a lot of American movies are shown subtitled, so they'll be able to appreciate the lipsyncing in its entirety. However, as somebody who's had experience with a foreign language, I can tell you with assurance - how do you tell when it's right or wrong if you don't even understand the language?
I've seen familiar American movies dubbed in German, and the German voice actors did a damn good job of writing and timing the script to the "lip-flapping."
So it's all pretty academic, basically.
I have a really simple method for creating fake video that fools the eye: shoot your spoof, insert the word, "LIVE" over it, and viola! That will cost you a lot less than $80,000, and is far more effective.
Seriously, as a professional animator and compositor in television post-production, all of this is not as easy as they say, regardless of the hype. You can't change pixels without something to work from, and if the technology were that damn good already, I'd be out of a job.