nhyone

Do you need to separate OS and app on two partitions? Most likely the apps won't work when you reinstall the OS. Do you need a pagefile? If you have enough RAM (2.5 - 3GB), you can turn the pagefile off. Performance becomes a dog when you hit the pagefile anyway, so you'll rather run out of memory. Do you need to separate the OS and data? While preserving the data across OS reinstall is nice, you still want to backup just in case. More than one colleague had their partitions wiped out when they overlooked that the company's OS installer do a fresh install -- even across different HDs. Windows store the user data in the Users dir. Unless you move it out of the OS partition, you will still fragment your OS partition easily. As for fragmentation, Vista onwards use a more sensible approach of defragmenting to 64MB parts. That's sufficient to get good sequential speeds. Soon, when SSDs are common, there will be no more of this partitioning nonsense.

Season 1 or 2? Season 1 uses a 2-episode per story format with a 3-episode final story for a total of 25 episodes. The stories are mostly standalone that reveal the world and build up the characters. From the middle part onwards, they also start to build towards the final story. There are 11 stories and they are all very good (YMMV). If you like the characters and the world, you'll wish the stories go on forever. Some people don't like this format because they advance the main story very slowly. Season 2 has only one main story over 12 episodes. There are several side-stories that are resolved, but you never really feel for the minor characters because they are not built up sufficiently. The side stories feel like time-wasters. Ep 1-3: introducing the characters and background Ep 4-6: training and mission Ep 7-8: travelling to Tokyo Ep 9-10: searching for someone Ep 11, 12: finally, we get to know what the whole show is about

Since it's fake anyway, what's the difference between this and if I took screenshots using a macro lens and slide film?

Just finished watching DtB 2 and I must say I'm disappointed. It's so different from DtB 1. Even though some characters return, they are quite different or play a minor role. (Kind of like Roy Fokker in Macross Zero -- not what you are expecting.) Also, it is one long story arc spread over 12 episodes. It should make a better story if it were shorter -- maybe like the GitS SAC "movies". (The whole show is 4+ hours total. I'm thinking it can be cut down to 2-2.5 hours.)

No it doesn't. IE 8 finally does CSS 2.1 right. It is able to use the same stylesheet as the other browsers, such as FireFox 3. (No CSS hacks needed, unless you like rounded corners and translucent backgrounds.) And if you need IE 7, it's built into IE 8! Just toggle it. I have no need for a separate IE 7 anymore. And what's this iframe attack? Does it exploit some buffer overflow to escape from the browser sandbox and execute some native code? Otherwise I don't see how it can compromise your machine. Even ActiveX isn't run automatically anymore. (Is your IE patched?) (And if you are running on Vista/Win7, be sure to run IE in its protected mode. It'll limit any damage if compromised -- the browser is running in a limited account and has limited access to the registry/file system. To break it, the attacker needs to gain root level access -- yet another hurdle.) I use Opera for my daily surfing and I turn off Flash/Java. (They can be toggled quickly via F12) There is no need to block cookies or disable JavaScript. This works well enough for most sites.

If you have watched the Star Wars prequels, you owe it to yourself to watch this 7-part review: The reviewer has issues , but he still does a good job at the review. He dissects the plot, the characters and compares them to the real Star Wars movies. Note: the review is much better than the show.

Mercurial Morpheus, I'm surprised you said the R2's color was saturated. I thought it was rather mute -- definitely so compared to AnimEigo's. (Although your comparison shows it is not always the case.) And I disagree that the AE had minor EE. For a CRT perhaps. I couldn't bear to watch it on a LCD monitor/TV. But you brought up one good point. I had always assume the R2 colors were accurate... maybe they were not. Does anyone remember the colors from 27 years ago?

Judging by your comments, you think the right side is the R2? That's Animeigo's version. Update: oops, sorry, if you are referring to the linked article, I have only seen the first image before. The R2 color does look like that. But the grain is all gone, showing that it has gone through some strong denoise filter.

Whether you have good experience or not depends a lot whether you have the HW drivers, I think. When I upgraded from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I didn't have drivers for my graphics and HD. So no accelerated graphics. I needed a driver for my HD because my BIOS did not support partitions over 504MB natively. (I can't remember the details.) So it wasn't a pleasant experience. However, Windows 95 looked way cooler than Windows 3.11 and was clearly the way to go. We are still using the same interface today, 14 years later. I upgraded to Windows 98 without a problem. By then, I had gotten new hardware that had Windows 95 drivers. (Windows 95/98 are in the same family.) I watched a colleague struggled with Windows 2000 on his P-II (233MHz?) with 64MB RAM. It swapped to the HD constantly. I have a better experience -- on a P4 2.4GHz 512MB. I remember it as a slimmed-down XP. (W2k was considered bloated when it came out. Now it's slim. Same for XP.) IMO, Windows 2000 came out at the wrong time. It was too resource intensive and required new drivers. Anything that requires new drivers will usually spoil your day. When Windows XP came out, most HW already had Windows 2000 drivers, so it was much less problematic -- most HW had W2k drivers even though W2k itself wasn't popular for home use. For example, I got a notebook a few months before XP came out. (It was running Windows ME, which I found okay) I was able to upgrade to XP by using the W2k drivers. Then we were in an unusual period of stability for 5 years. (Actually less, because XP SP2 was a substantial change too.) Vista, everyone knew the story. It's not just that it's not ready. It has a new architecture, which means new drivers. Guess what happens when you try to upgrade an existing PC? Two years down the road with W7, everything is fine again. I'm able to upgrade my notebook from Vista to W7 using the Vista drivers. Rule of thumb - Don't upgrade old PC across OS architectures (XP->Vista, not okay; Vista->W7, okay) - Don't expect discontinued HW to have new drivers - For PC, just upgrade the HW. For notebook, forget about upgrading or buy a new one!

From Wiki, 4K = 4096*2048. The highest listed bitrate is 3.2Gb/s. With lossy compression, it can be 10x smaller. Should be doable in RAM or with multiple HDs.

The film vs digital debate reminds me of the film scanner vs DSLR debate when DSLRs were still 6Mp. A low-end film scanner, even at 2400dpi, has higher resolution. But 6Mp clean pixels, even when bayered, is hard to beat. Higher film resolution doesn't help much. Sure, you get more details, but they are blurred and mixed with the film grain. Personally, I doubt so. Anime just don't have very fine details. (Usually the animators stopped drawing beyond a certain size. This can be seen even in remastered DVDs.) Is encoding a problem? The Japanese like to max out their bitrate. Even if MPEG-2 isn't very efficient, I'm sure MPEG-2 at 9.3Mbps (leaving some for audio) is an even match for H.264 at 4Mbps. And H.264 fansubs already look good even at 2Mbps. The only reason worth buying is if the DVD has EE.

I upgraded a 2004-era computer (2.8GHz HT, 2.5GB RAM, 67GB HD) to Windows 7 RTM and the biggest limitation was the lack of Vista graphics driver. I could only run it in 1024x768. Using the XP driver crashed the OS frequently. A quick tip: be sure your PC components have Vista drivers before you upgrade. I contemplated upgrading the graphics card until I found that the standard VGA driver could support 1600x1200, but at 16-bit color. It was good enough for me. (This is a work PC.) So, most likely it's only the recent PCs that are worth upgrading, and they are already running Vista. Should you upgrade? I feel only for low-end and marginal PCs -- those slower than 2GHz, <=2GB RAM or <=80GB HD. My notebook was such a case: 1.2GHz, 2GB RAM, 75GB HD. Vista was a dog on it. Windows 7 runs very nicely. If you have a fast enough PC, I think Vista should already run fine on it. Although Windows 7 has many new features, the interface is so similar to Vista that a Vista user will be at ease immediately -- whereas a XP user will be almost totally lost. (Like I was when I used Vista for the first time. But now I'm used to it.)

So far no one has dared to try that after Macross II. However, the Macross he wants to do may not be what fans want to see. For example, I have been thinking that Macross sequels are not real sequels. No significant original characters or even robots remain. Sure, the universe is the same and is expanded and filled in. (That's why I was disappointed with Kawamori's answer -- we can't even do that?) But is Macross technology and universe alone sufficient to be a Macross sequel? Think about the two unrelated anime that were meshed together with Macross to form a trilogy... change a bit of dialogue, splice in a couple of scenes to connect them, that works for most part too, doesn't it? Anyway, this interview was over ten years ago and his stand may have changed. It'll be nice to get an up-to-date interview.

I'm disappointed with Kawamori's answer. Sometimes, I wonder if he is bitter being unable to move on from Macross and being "forced" to make sequels to the original SDF.

I kept my 1/48 VF-1S in plane mode for a long time and the whole topside has yellowed quite severely. Flip it over and it's just slightly yellowish. I kept it in office, exposed to fluorescent lights 24/7. No sunlight is necessary to yellow your toy!

I always have to re-login after a few days (or even a few hours?). It doesn't really affect me much, because I seldom post. However, I need to login to view attachments and that's annoying. I would like to know if this is a security feature or is it just the default board configuration? Does it track by IP, cos I surf at home and at work (shhh ). Can it be changed? I'm able to stay logged on on other forums, so it's not a cookie thing.

No, the one on the right is the Thora version.

Hmm.. the black level looks off for your images. Did you increase the video playback brightness? You did right by not downscaling. We should upscale the images to compare instead. I have captured the images (in JPEG) and put the 1080p and 720p images side by side. I didn't say which is which, though. (I can upload the PNGs to the board if anyone is interested, but I think the JPEQ suffices for this comparison.) One note: IE lags when scrolling. The other browsers are able to scroll smoothly. At this point, we can either conclude (a) there's not much diff even for a big budget anime like MF, or (b) the 1080p is not encoded optimally.

The timing (in mmss) is part of the filename. You need to get close to it, pause it then single-step through the frames to get the right one.

Does anyone know if the 1080p version shows more details? (It should, but you never know.) Screenshots will be nice. For example, I compared Thora's 720p and 1080p versions of Utawarerumono and the difference is very very slight. (Of course, the show itself does not have very detailed art.) I'll stick to the 720p until we get 3840x2160 resolution. To Keith: you can download the files from Thora's IRC channel. Instructions are in earlier posts. To Master Dex: you can turn off subtitles to tell which are soft-subs (and thus editable). Hardsubs cannot be turned off. Does it take much CPU time to render subs? Some MKV tools have been listed in earlier posts. You should be able to extract the subs and do whatever you want.

In case anyone doesn't want to click on the images separately, I've put them side-by-side for easy comparison: Macross Frontier: HDTV vs BluRay Notes 1. The images are in JPEG, not PNG, but I've not observed any diff at 100%. 2. Drag to move the images around. The two images will move in sync. 3. Double-click to zoom out. (Not useful)

If CM uses the standard packing, a box of 10 will get you two complete sets, one normal color and one variant color (?). It's likely you won't have the secret figure. These days, I forget about the secret figure, after paying through my nose for a few of them.

Hmm.. even the product shot looks so low quality.

Ok, ok, I take back what I said. First pair of images - detailed 2d art. Second pair - 3d scene. Third pair - normal character scene. The last pair of images are what I have in mind when I said there's no difference. The HDTV-rip looks more blur, but a little sharpening works wonders. The defocused background helps. (The scene simply isn't very detailed.) When I first saw the HDTV-rip, I double-checked if it weren't a BL-rip. Then, I was disappointed that the BL "looked the same". Now that I compared the images side-by-side, it's clear the BL-rip is better. (Note: images are around 1MB each.)

That's during the op only, right? How actually is Thora's encoding bad? The file size is big, but Thora's releases all compress as little as possible for the sake of "transparency". Personally, I find that Thora's video (~600MB) look the same as the HDTV-ripped one (~300MB) -- well, I didn't pause to view fast-motion scenes, since that's not how I watch a show. So if you say Thora release is bigger than necessary, yes, possibly. However, the less compression, the better, and HD space is cheap. I checked POPGO 720p release notes and it's around 1.5GB for 3 episodes? That's 500MB per episode, not much smaller.