So the announcement that Media Blasters has licensed Queen's Blade is good news.

How could that possibly be good? you ask. It means that Media Blasters hasn't given up on anime for R1. This the first license announcement from Media Blaster in a hell of a long time, and it's nice to know they're still in the game.

And Queen's Blade is their kind of title, it has to be said. The real question is whether they'll release QB on BD. I don't think Media Blasters has ever released a title on BD before.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:56 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 97 words, total size 1 kb.

JP and Hinano have been posting some good stuff. I think this comment by Hinano speaks for itself:

just for the record, I Did not force jp to watch Boku no Corncob Buttsecks...

And we'll just leave that one sitting right there, and move on to the other post, about which I wanted to respond:

"What your bottom 5 anime say about you"

We did "top 5", so now it's "bottom 5"? OK, I'm game. I did a "bottom 4" several years ago, and I'm going to assume that those trophies are retired so I have to come up with a new list, not really in any order. And honesty forces me to admit that I bought all of these.

1. UFO Princess Valkyrie OVA. The whole UFOPV franchise is pretty mediocre, with the second series being the stand-out exception (in that it rises from the average "what a piece of shit" level up to "well, that one was mostly OK"). What the series did have going for it, even in its worst moments, was lots of fan service. And that's why the UFOPV OVA stands out: it didn't even have that going for it. the only fan service on the DVD is in the OP.

2. Demon Fighter Kocho. Apparently it was a 1-episode satire of a "Devil Hunter Yohko" which itself was none too good. Anyway, DFK is really down in the dregs. There's a fair amount of nudity, but the animation budget was so low that it wasn't really done very well. But what really makes this show one to avoid is the worst, most gawdawful henshin deck of all time, up there in the "where's the mind-bleach?" territory of sheer awfulness. I do have to admit that henshin deck was funny, though.

3. Animation Runner Kuromi. There were two of these, in fact. I ordered them both, for some reason. I don't think I ever even unwrapped the second one. The first one, which I watched once, is an industry inside joke pretty much. Lots of references which I could sense but didn't get to specific people and events in the anime industry, along with an overall message of, "MAN, this job really sucks big-time. We sure sacrifice a lot to bring you your cartoons, you know that?" Nominally it's a comedy, but it comes across more as a half hour of whining rather than as any kind of joke.

4. .Hack/Sign. When I wrote my review of it, years ago, I summarized it as "5 characters in search of something to talk about." There have been shows inspired by games, or created as marketing vehicles for games, but I daresay few as utterly dull as this one. Some things do happen, but most of the show consists of the characters meeting one another in the gaming world in various combinations to talk about what they said to other characters in the previous scene. After burning through about 20 episodes like that, eventually things kick into high gear, and a whole lot of really impressive but bewildering stuff happens, and the show finally comes to a screeching halt in a situation which is completely unresolved. Why? Because it ends where the first of the computer games begin. Turns out this series is one gigantic retcon intended to set up the first game. The game series has been very successful and many later titles have come out. There have been other anime, too, but I'm not even slightly curious and haven't checked them out, mainly because it looks as if you can only really understand and enjoy the franchise if you consume both the anime and the games, and I don't game anymore. Anyway, there's little or no character continuity between them. Each anime introduces an entirely new cast.

5. This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. This one suffers from the same problem as Animation Runner Kuromi, in that it was made for the staff rather than for the audience. It's a reunion for the cast and staff of Mahoromatic. And that meant they had to have characters for all of the seiyuu who were in Mahoromatic, whether they made sense in story terms or not. I bought it as a complete collection, and made it through the first DVD before giving up watching it. The first series had two androids, and this series has two magical girls with the same seiyuu. The original series had two guy buddies and three girl buddies, so this one does too. (Only they made one of the girl buddies into a cousin tsundere romantic interest.) The first episode has an awesome combat scene, and it promised much. It promised something that the rest of the series didn't deliver, sadly; there was no more combat like that until the very end, and such combat scenes as did happen later weren't anything like as good. I know this because I scanned through the whole thing to take frame grabs for the top rotation. The art is really good; the girls are cute. But the concept and the execution are entirely too precious and self-absorbed, and it reeked.

UPDATE: So what does this say about me? I guess what it says is that there was a time when I'd buy damned near anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:10 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 881 words, total size 5 kb.

The shooting has stopped now, which is about the only good thing there is to say.

Three gunmen got into Fort Hood somehow (or were already there) and started shooting indiscriminately. One is dead and the other two have been captured.

The current report on casualties is 12 dead and 31 wounded. But with that many people wounded, it's sure that at least some more will die.

Some reports I saw said that it was a terrorist attack, which ranks right up there on the "well DUH!" scale. The only real question is who they were and what they thought they wanted.

UPDATE: One name released now, maybe: Major Malik Nadal Hasan. Marvelous.

UPDATE: I wondered about this. One of the 12 dead is the gunman, so the toll now is 11 innocents.

Two unconfirmed rumors about Major Hasan: he was a recent convert to Islam, and he was a psychiatrist.

He reportedly opened fire with two pistols, and security men in the area killed him. The other two gunman are reported to have been using M-16's and I bet it'll come out that they are responsible for most of the deaths.

There are reports about one of the gunment having engaged a "SWAT team". I'm used to thinking of SWAT teams as being police. This was on a military base, and MPs would have been handling it. Do MPs have SWAT teams? I wouldn't think so; if they need heavier help, they're kind of surrounded by infantry and armor which could have helped out. So I think that was probably a misreport.

It wouldn't have been Texas police, local or state, because Fort Hood is a military reservation and Texas authorities don't have jurisdiction. Anyway, the Army doesn't need their help. I can't imagine that the Army called the Texas Rangers. (Except, maybe to tell them that something was going down, just in case it might also be going on outside Fort Hood.)

UPDATE: A perfect demonstration, although we didn't need one, of "fog of war". Now reports are that there was only one gunman, the guy who got killed. He really was able to do that much damage with just two pistols? I guess so.

So just who was it that the so-called SWAT team engaged? Reportedly a couple of them got hurt; who was firing on them?

UPDATE: But other reports are still talking about two other suspects. I think it's going to be tomorrow before all the confused reporting settles down.

UPDATE: Turns out that Major Hasan isn't dead. He was captured and reportedly isn't in any danger of dying.

At least not yet. If he does survive short term, he'll face court martial and potentially a hanging.

Which leads to an interesting question. Before a military execution can take place, the President has to sign off on it. Bush authorized an execution in one case I know of, a soldier who murdered his wife. I wonder if Obama will authorize it, come the day?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 502 words, total size 3 kb.

There something called a "trifecta" or a "trichotomy" or a "trisomy" or a "trilobite" or tri-something tri-like tri-that which seems to be all the rage now, so I thought I'd give it a tri... er, give it a try regarding Dragonaut.

What I watched:

What I wanted:

What I got:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:19 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Over at Pete's, he quotes J.P. saying that the Dragonaut license was part of a mega-deal.

So far as I know, that's correct. Funimation made a package deal with Gonzo and took everything on the shelf, up to and including Strike Witches. It may have been the only way they could get the Strike Witches license, though I'm not so sure it was really worth such pain and sacrifice.

Looking through some ANN announcements, I see the following Gonzo series have been announced by Funimation:

Blassreiter
Last Exile
Tower of Druga
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
Dragonaut
Kaze no Stigma
Linebarrels of Iron
Strike Witches
Vandread

Not known whether Saki is included in the deal.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:04 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 121 words, total size 1 kb.

Here's a different manifestation of Engineer's Disease: "Hey, I can do that!"

In this case, our hero decided he wanted to make flame come out of his hand, like the X-man character Pyro.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 01:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

Email:

Well, you closed comments on this thread and I really SHOULD expect that to mean you do NOT want input on the topic. However, there is the slight chance you closed them because of the Star Trek topic drift.

Yeah, that was the reason. The last comment just before I shut it down looked like the first rolling snowball of an avalanche of general ST commentary.

I am NOT going to say "you might want to...."

You have my eternal gratitude.

So I will say this -- I am an embedded software engineer for a company that produces storage arrays. Some RAID code in the industry was written using 32-bits for the LBA values which are used for addressing sectors on the hard drives. This value wraps at 2TB.

This is changing of course... but there may still be products which are limited to sub-2TB drives. Good old code will reject larger capacity drives (or not use the full capacity thereof). Bad old code will produce data corruption. I have no idea how or if that applies to the particular array you are using.

What I have is running Windows Home Server. It does redundant storage but it isn't using RAID.

In some ways what it's doing is better, in fact. They're handling redundant storage at the level of the file system instead of at the level of the drive controller. There are good sides and bad sides to that.

One of the good sides is that it means that redundancy is optional. When you set up directory structures, you can designate whether things put inside it are stored redundantly or not. If not, then there will only be one copy amongst the server's drives. If you say they should be, there will be two copies.

But as a user of WHS, the disks don't show up as separate devices in the file system. There's a place in the remote console program where you can see the drives, but that's just so that you can monitor device health and control whether given drives are active or not. At the level of the file system, all the drives merge together, and the entire storage of the WHS looks like a single file system to the client machines.

The decision about where any given file is to be stored is entirely up to the server. If a file is stored redundantly, then the system makes sure that there are two copies of it and that those copies are on different drives. But that process can accumulate garbage when done interactively, so there's a demon that runs once an hour which balances the drives, by moving files around. And there's other housework that needs to be done, some of which runs continuously in the background.

For example, when you first write a lot of files onto the WHS into a directory which is designated to be redundant, it only initially makes a single copy. A background process notices it and takes care of making redundant copies as soon as it can; this doesn't wait for the hourly demon run. But it can still take many minutes to catch up. That's because it runs at reduced priority compared to handling user requests.

I noticed this when I first copied my 300G fansub archive onto the WHS. Afterwards I was looking at the file system control frame, and over the course of ten minutes or so I could see the redundant area growing. (The pie chart shows the duplication as a separate slice.) But the redundant copies didn't start being made until after I finished my copy.

So what has this to do with the question of 2TB drives? Well, if there is a problem then I assume Windows Home Server will handle it just like Windows used to with drives which were too large: it'll format as much of the drive as it can address, and ignore the rest. If indeed the hardware or software cannot address a 2TB drive, then I may only get an increase of 1TB or 1.5TB or whatever it can address. But once that happens, the amount of new storage that it receives should work fine.

UPDATE: One of the interesting positive benefits of this approach is that drives don't have to be added in pairs. I could add a single new 1TB drive today, and after the drive was formatted and mounted, the next balancing run would take a hell of a long time, but thereafter the effective redundant storage available to me would rise by 512G.

Some redundantly-stored files would be duplicated on drives 1 & 2. Some on drives 2 & 3. And some on drives 1 & 3. All of that would be invisible to me, though.

If I add 2TB drives, I will add two. Adding a single one could cause logic problems for the redundancy system, since the two existing drives added together would be as large as the single new 2TB drive, and there are some files on the first 1TB drive that can't be moved.

UPDATE: I do not believe that Intel's SATA controller will have a problem. Their controller is designed to the SATA standard. If someone is selling 2TB SATA drives, then it means SATA can handle drives that large, and that means Intel's SATA controller can, too.

The only concern would be WHS itself, and I'm sure that if there's a software-imposed limitation, Windows Home Server will respond just as Windows always has: use as much as it can, and ignore the rest.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 11:23 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 933 words, total size 6 kb.

The perfect demonstration of the (low) quality of this series is the fact that ep 7 is a swimsuit episode.

I think maybe what I was expecting from this series was something maybe a bit like Divergence Eve/Misaki Chronicles, albeit I didn't expect it to be anything like as good. I was expecting a story about men and women fighting against a science fiction threat, to save the planet, and everyone being heroic and loyal and dedicated, and having a tough time because the foe is tough. Yeah, there was some internal intrigue in DE/MC, but mostly it's about loyal characters fighting hard for a good cause.

That isn't this series. This series is more like a high school romangst series except that half the characters are organic AI's who have super powers. There's even a love pentangle.

An asteroid-sized extraterrestial being of some kind moved into the solar system and took over the orbit of Pluto. They say. Humans named it Thanatos. The star charts we get shown have Pluto's orbit being circular and on the ecliptic, which it ain't. Anyway, the thing, whatever it is, fires off three small glowing things towards the Earth.

They arrive just as an orbital shuttle is being launched and one of them collides with the shuttle, destroying it. Our Hero is Jin, and he and his mother and sister were passengers. His father was the pilot. The explosion was curious in that it didn't turn all the passengers into jam, or even less. Jin came through it alive and pretty much unharmed. Only problem was that he was falling, and would die on impact. Except that something glowing came and caught him and carried him safely to the ground.

Since then he's become notorious, for two reasons. The government blamed the accident on his father and kept secret the three objects.

What were they? Well, apparently, dragons. One of those, I assume the one who collided with the shuttle, is dead and the body is stored in a big tank at ISDA, a military organization. The other two are named Toa and Widow. They are shape changers, capable of being either dragon in form or human in form. It was Toa who saved Jin, and apparently has been keeping an eye on him since. Not obvious why, except that the story requires it.

Moving right along, ISDA used cells from the corpse and started cloning dragons of their own, and somehow or other managed to figure out something called "Resonance". It means that at a certain point in development of the cloned dragon, a human sheds every stitch of clothing and goes into the chamber and puts a hand into the tank. The proto-dragon sticks the arm with tentacles and sucks out some blood, or something like that. If it fails, the human starts screaming, and then the human's body explodes. If it works, the human starts screaming, and then doesn't explode.

Once Resonance has been established between the two, they have a master/servant relationship thereafter. If all goes well. The dragons spend most of their time in human form, but they are effectively slaves. Their human masters are called "Dragonauts". The goal of the project at ISDA is to create enough dragonaut/dragon pairs to go out and attack that planetoid and destroy it.

It doesn't always work correctly even at that. There may be some sort of weird mental feedback between them. At the beginning, one of the pairs goes bozo, somehow. The dragon, in human form, becomes a serial killer. Eventually the dragon, in dragon form, eats its master, and one of the other dragons is ordered to kill that one.

Another case where it doesn't seem to have worked is Jin's childhood friend Kazuki. He goes through the resonance ceremony with a new dragon who ends up being named Gio. All instruments seem to suggest that it worked, and Kazuki lived through it. But when Gio hatches, he utterly ignores Kazuki and goes off on his own. At one point he claims that he won't take orders from anyone. No one knows just what is wrong, or why Gio didn't end up the same as the others, in part because they haven't been able to capture him to take readings and find out.

Kazuki flipped out when Gio and Jin ended forming a partnership. Jin is forming a relationship with Toa, without going through the Resonance thing, and Gio says that he exists to protect Toa. So they end up forming a loose partnership to try to find her, since she's run away.

Jin ends up riding Gio to the moon. Kazuki now hates Jin with a murderous passion, and I won't be surprised if it turns out that Gio goes the same way as Spirytus, the one that became a monster.

Lessee. Beneath all the SF glitz, what's happening is a love tesseract. Jin loves Toa. Toa loves Jin. Gio seems to love Toa. Gio and Jin are cooperating in ways that makes Kazuki jealous of Jin, because Kazuki thinks that Gio should love Kazuki.

Jin is nice to Sieglinde, and she starts liking him. Akira seems to be playing her own game, and helps Jin a few times. Blech. Our hero is actually building a harem.

Meanwhile there's all sorts of weird political intrigue going on, mainly because of someone named Garnet, who is commander of a competing military unit. Her folks have also been trying to create dragon/dragonaut pairs, only they always fail. The ISDA doesn't know about this, evidently. She seems to be the big-bad.

Just now I was looking at Wikipedia and picked up a few spoilers that make clear that the story is even worse than I thought. About Garnet: Turns out she is a dragon herself.

Anyway, I've had enough. I'll scan through the 13 eps I bought to take frame grabs, but I'm not going to watch any more of this crap.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 990 words, total size 6 kb.

It's not like I really need any more disk space in Deneb, my Windows Home Server. It's still got nearly 500G of free space, and I'm not using it up very rapidly.

But there are two empty HD slots left, and, well, you know how it is. "Wouldn't it be neat if..."

So I was looking at NewEgg today just to see what kind of drives were available and how much they'd cost. The server takes SATA 300 drives. And it turns out that both Hitachi and Western Digital now offer 2 TB drives in that format. (So does Seagate, but I don't like them as much.)

And they don't cost their weight in platinum, either. The WDC drive is $300 and the Hitachi drive is $180.

Which is just mind boggling. I remember a time when computer people used to speculate about whether there was or was not a terabyte of HD storage in existence in the entire world. Now I can buy twice that and hold it in the palm of my hand. Without going broke.

I'm not going to buy anything right now. (I've been buying too many toys lately and I need to let my bank account recover a bit.) But maybe in a month or two I'll look again, and it'll be interesting to see two things:

1. whether there will be even bigger drives available by then, and
2. how much the prices will have dropped.

UPDATE: I remember that there was a ST:TNG ep in which Data was asked how much storage he had, and he quoted a number like 12 terabytes. At the time that was immense, given that 512 megabyte drives were considered very large then. But the exponential growth has caught up with fiction. They probably ought to have used petabytes as a unit instead. Or maybe exabytes.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 05:09 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 310 words, total size 2 kb.

1 12 terabytes is probably not too far off for a human-level intelligence.  On the other hand, you can get 16GB right now on a card the size and thickness of your fingernail; the only reason we don't have compact 12TB SSDs already is cost.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 03, 2009 06:51 PM (PiXy!)

2

But Data has considerably more information stored than a normal human. In one ep it's shown that he has stored the entire body of medical knowledge as it exists at that time. It's also shown that he can speak French fluently; presumably he has, as a matter of routine, stored dozens or hundreds of languages.

That can chew up space pretty fast.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 03, 2009 06:54 PM (+rSRq)

3 This is why the clever writer uses fictional units of measure. 

Posted by: metaphysician at November 03, 2009 06:56 PM (vM63Z)

4

...and why engineers should not watch Star Trek.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 03, 2009 07:00 PM (+rSRq)

5 Though the reboot movie is quite good, as traditional pulp adventure sci-fi, rather than hard core speculative fiction.

Posted by: metaphysician at November 03, 2009 07:42 PM (vM63Z)

6 Let's not talk about Star Trek any more.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 03, 2009 08:02 PM (+rSRq)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Am I the only one who uses "Boozhe!" as an onomatopoeia for "hitting something particularly hard"? It's something I've been using since I was a kid, and it only just now occurred to me that I've never heard anyone else use it.

UPDATE: It would seem I am not.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 03:36 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.