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Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers
Give me IV any old day. Rupert writes with a review of the newly IMAX-ified Episode II of the Star Wars saga:
"Since it was my wife's birthday today, last night I took her to see Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones: IMAX edition. Notwithstanding the overuse of colons, this is a movie worth seeing, even if you think you already saw the movie.If you haven't already seen AotC, you no doubt have your reasons, and there isn't anything in this edition to make you change your mind. Likewise, the plot still has gaping holes and Anakin is still moody, so if those were enough to make you hate this movie, you won't want to see it again. The action sequences gain little from the new presentation, as objects move too fast across the large screen to follow.
On the other hand, if you want to see the pores in Natalie Portman's skin, or the individual hairs in Christopher Lee's beard, this is the movie you've been waiting for. I suspect that some time was spent re-rendering the digital characters. Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up, looking more real than the human actors.
Some scenes were cut from this edition. Some I didn't miss, such as Ani and Amidala frolicking in the meadow with the giant bed bugs. Others, such as almost all the scenes in Palpatine's office, and many of the Jedi Council made it even harder to follow what was going on.
You might be wondering where you can see the movie."
Always cut with the Groenig.
ari_j writes "It looks like Fox is giving us a new season of Futurama. From the page, "Season Premiere Sunday, Nov. 10th at 7PM/6C". Sure enough, my local Fox affiliate is carrying it as stated. From tv.yahoo.com: '"Crimes of the Hot", Episode #408.
Al Gore's head holds an emergency summit in Kyoto, Japan, to deal with global warming caused by robot emissions.'"
This does not look good on a resume. nautical9 writes "As a follow up to Henrick Schon's dismissal from Bell Labs last month for falsifying data, many of his former co-authors are retracting their articles from the AAAS's prestigious Science magazine. It's apparently the largest retraction for the journal ever. Bell labs is also pulling six different patent applications of his. Here's the Wired article."
Is this the basket you ordered for all your eggs? With regard to the AOL / ICQ integration CowboyNeal mentioned the other day, nxtw writes "At this moment, ICQ users can send messages to AIM users, but AIM users cannot send messages to ICQ users or be seen on your buddy list. However, AIM automatically postpends any screenname or group consisting of all numbers with -ICQ when added to your buddy list. (This applies to the beta AIM 5.1.3009 client.)"
They're in Australia, of course they have flying dreams. VileScum writes "Back in May a reader posted this story of an Australian Guy who built a 747 Sim in his garage. As reported in the Sydney Morning Hearld The builder and a group of his friends are now doing a round the world sim flight for charity. The full story can be found here. The details of the actual flight can be found here."
So...as far as I can tell, this edition removed all the political intrique and vague sense of plot, poured in more closeups of scenes we already either liked or hated, and ruined all the somewhat fun explosions and action scenes by running things so fast acrost the screen you can't see them?
With Futurama, I feel that folks just simply didn't appreciate what they had until it was gone.
And considering the timeslot that the FOX TV network placed it into, how could it not fail back then?
Either way, let's just hope that this time it's very successful. Please try to buy all of the products that they advertise. Also if you can start fan pages for Futurama and sell merchandise of Futurama logos at CafePress.com. That's what all the big sites do.
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
AIM and ICQ are both owned by AOL. ICQ is the original IM. And at one point was the most poular. There have occasionally been UNIX knockoffs, like the vastly inferior command line "talk" implementation, however it was incapable of letting you know whne new users had signed on, also, it could not do file transfers.
It's interesting talk can be a knockoff of ICQ when talk came first.
Absolutely. talk/ntalk is part of the original Unix networking application set... you know, those applications everyone forgot about and then disabled with their firewalls.
It is amazing to me how many "new ideas" are just the same old thing rediscovered. That alone doesn't bother me. It is that they don't remember the past that most irks me. That dooms us to repeating the same mistakes rather than improving on the original.
Whether it be IM, or the semantic web, its all been done before.
You moderators mark him as funny, but he has a point. Modern movies show in 24fps (most theaters double-shutter, so you get an effect 48 fps, but each frame is doubled). This is extremely noticeable on any pan. And before anyone jumps in with the, "Human eyes can only see 24fps anyway, so what's the point?" argument, let me just say you're wrong wrong wrong. 24 frames per second is near the bare minimum required for the human eye to distinguish motion rather than individual frames. I've never seen a study claiming a maximum value, but I'd expect it to be much higher than even the 60fps some people suggest. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to tell the difference between 60Hz refresh rate monitors and 100Hz refresh rates. Movies can get away with this because of intrinsic "artificats" like motion blur, that help create a better sense of motion in fewer frames. (Incidentally, that's also why 24fps in a video game feels really jerky, while 24fps in a movie is usually pretty smooth -- video games tend not to have motion blur, because it requires lots of computational power. It's easier to push out more frames for a smoother look, rather than add motion blur.)
Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time. I wouldn't expect it until TV broadcasts have switched completely to 720p (60 full frames per second, not 60 fields or half-frames), and DVDs are encoded at the same (rather than the current 480i encoding, and relying on special hardware to do 3:2 pulldown conversion for progressive display). Until then, the 24fps movie is too entrenched, I think.
Believe you me, I am no advocate of purely-closed source development. However in this situation, does the licence of the software really matter much when it comes to a simple application such as GAIM/Trillian? Personally, I don't Trillian at all (I've used it before, and its a beast)... But if someone turned it down just because it is closed source, I think that would be a bit narrowminded.
I'm not implying anything here, just giving my $0.02
# fuser -v
#
AOL did nothing with it, but now they will?
Oh, AOL "did" something important with their ICQ purchase:
They sat on it, and prevented the development of a competitor in a new application domain. ICQ was a rather new concept, and if Mirabilils had proceeded to improve & popularize it with venture capital, they could've undercut a lot of the popularity of network services like AOL (and now MSN). Instead, they sold out to AOL, who did nothing to encourage the future of the ICQ product.
I hope the guys at least got a nice big check out of it.
They killed it.
I was never really a fan of ICQ. The interface was horrible, and way, way over designed. The company's business model was 'give away the software, charge for the manual' and I think it affected their design decisions. You shouldn't need a 450 page manual for IM software.
The UI design was atrocious, and the system itself was pretty insecure, even by windows user standards.
Anyway, that's beside the point. People still used it, and it can take a long time for people to migrate from crappy software to software that doesn't suck. (just look at how long people used MacOS 6-9. Look how many people still use Netscape 4)
But by AOL buying ICQ they locked up the IM market, and killed innovation in ICQ. I don't think ICQ would have ever innovated, but they could have. And by AOL purchasing it they were able to get a strangle hold on the market... Until M$ decided to bundle MSN...
So it made business sense, although it didn't really benefit the world.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Programs like Trillian, that do what the author of this article suggests have been having a difficult time lately because they steal Yahoo, AOL, and Microsofts intellectual property, in an attempt to make money."
You mean
Step 1- Trillian.
Step 2-
Step 3- Profit.
I suppose if you look at it like that, Trillian might be about "stealing" other people's IP for making money.
I thought it was about having 1 client for 3 different IM systems (Yahoo, ICQ and AIM)
It's not that simple. "They" have no idea what I'm watching ever, unless I write them, tell them *and* they care enough to read the letter. The disconnection between the network and the viewer is too large. We need a better way to give feedback.
However, lens flare would look horribly out of place in a first-person shooter, IMHO.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Nooooo Noooo Noooo Noooo. The biggest problem is that damn CGI artists don't know what the word 'focus' means.
Just think about it... Even if Yoda is way the hell in the background, he will be perfectly in focus. Obviously that is not something that looks real... Focus gives us depth-perception in movies. Without it, everything feels flat (*cough* *cough* *cartoons* *cough*). Now, when they start spending a litte money on putting the CGI characters in foucs, our movie effects might start looking as realistic as they had before CGI.
(yes, cheap CGI looks better than cheap classic effects, but expesive classic effects looked MUCH better than CGI does.)
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