Slashdot Mirror
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."
Note that the "new" season of Futurama isn't quite new... The show is still just as cancelled as before.
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
With the formerly-missing musical number, "Blame Amidala."
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?
If there's one thing wrong with movies today, it's the frame-rate.
I would have to agree with the submitter. Yeah it was nice to see a few of the things larger than life, but motion blur was much more noticeable and I was miffed that they cut scenes out of the movie. During the drive back home me and my girlfriend spent more time talking about why they might have cut scenes out of the movie instead of talking about the "incredible IMAX experience".
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
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.
"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."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but 'talk' has been around far longer than ICQ has. It is not an IM client nor was it designed to be. It was created back in the days when people had to use text-only terminals on UNIX machines and needed a form of communication.
Trillian, illegal? All it does is use the protocol, they didn't steal the source or whatever. KaZaA only provides file sharing, it doesn't promote distributing illegal files. That's like saying Ford makes money of killing people when someone runs people over with his Taurus.
On another note, 'duplicating effort'? Why did your parents decide to breed? After all, they're just duplicating what Adam and Eve did so long ago...
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.
Trillian does have logging capabilities, they are in the preferences. I use Gaim myself, becuase Trillian is not available for my current platform--the feature set is almost identical however. Trillian does look alot better than (GTK) Gaim though. Then again, it is closed source.
Notwithstanding the overuse of colons, this is a movie worth seeing
Not worth seeing is another misuse of a colon - a link which I would recommend against visiting to those fortunate enough to have escaped seeing it. Please don't click on the link, but allow the unfortunate of us to laugh knowingly (and nervously, with nausia at the memory).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Note that the "new" season of Futurama isn't quite new... The show is still just as cancelled as before.
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
In terms of the first "IM" that's a chat system as we know it today I wouldn't be surprised if PowWow was one of the first (_the_ first maybe) internet ones. PowWow was great for it's time (Tribal Voices software i think). I'm not really sure I'd count Zephyr or talk in the same category as ICQ/AIM, but they definitely perform similar tasks. But yeah on your point, talk definitely preceded AIM or ICQ, lol n00b to the guy who says otherwise ;)
Somewhere hidden in the Trillian menus (I found it so long ago I forgot where it was) is the option to turn on conversation logging. Considering the standard conspiracy-theory crowd that normally frequents slashdot (no offense intended, of course ;) I would think that having this feature off as a default would be seen as a plus.
PS - I just spent the thirty seconds it took to find the options: Preferences -> Message History.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Umm... your a big old troll. But thats besides the point, how do rationalize a time zone post about fox tv from England?
"you And considering the timeslot that the FOX TV network placed it into, how could it not fail back then?""think of it as evolution in action"
If you skim the review about the IMAX Star Wars movie too quick like I did you may only pick up on quotes like:
"Since it was my wife's birthday today".
"Notwithstanding the overuse of colons."
"the plot still has gaping holes."
"Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up"
"Ani and Amidala frolicking"
http://www.kubuntu.org/
ah fuck just mod me down, his sig used to day england
"think of it as evolution in action"
Soon after AOL bought ICQ they made it run on their own proprietary protocol. Until recently it didn't let it interact with AIM, but now they have opened that up.
. . . . because they steal Yahoo, AOL, and Microsofts intellectual property, in an attempt to make money.
.No Advertisements! . . . . while certain corporations and **AA associations would like us to think otherwise is not stealing intellectual property . . .
My understanding is that Trillian, Gaim, and Fire were developed using standard reverse engineeing methods to duplicate the protocols required to communicate with services from Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. This is not stealing intellectual property, and Trillian Pro aside, considering Trillian is available free of charge and that Gaim and Fire are both GPL, I would venture to say that there is very little or no money being made.
Combined with the fact that you need a valid ID regestered with your choice(s) of IM services. . .
If you want an analogy. . . using an alternate IM program is like skipping commercials on a Tivo or ReplayTV . . .
I'd definitely put Zephyr in the same category as ICQ and AIM. It had presence notification and instant messaging. It also had cool stuff like categorized broadcast messages and scripting support.
To my way of thinking, everything since has been a poor Zephyr knock-off.
sigs are a waste of space
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.
And they laughed at my snackrifices to El Chupa Negre!
This guy is way out there
If by "almost identical" you mean "pales by comparison" then I'll take your word for it. In fact, the only features trillian has above gaim are pretty useless - skinning and MDI window capabilities. I guess you might include translucent windows, but who in the fuck uses that useless piece of crap? Until the *background* can be translucent, the *text and borders* solid, and buttons fade toward opaque, window translucency will be nothing more than a stupid hack.
Anyway, that being said, Gaim: 1) suppports more protocols and plugin authors at least have the ability to write support for protocols it doesnt support 2) is scriptable via perl and 3) is monetarily free keeping it out of that shitty grey area where cerullian studios makes money on a product that would not function without the continued work of aol/yahoo/msn, some of whom, at least, lose revenue when their users don't use their own clients.
Anyway, trillian sucks. The SDK sucks, it wouldn't be worth using if someone wrote a Win32 native GUI for GAIM. Too bad GAIM wasn't started on Qt...
It was her birthday?
Perhaps for Ep III they can develop cameras that will have the same resolution as the renderer that they use. (Maybe something like a digital IMAX, which doesn't exist to my knowledge)
wayner@pobox.com -- Wayne A Arthurton -- www.pobox.com/~wayner
I got back from seeing AOTC in an Imax dome (very cool!). I sat about just shy of the half way mark and found myself needing to turn my head to see all the action. I recommend that you sit at the top so the center is 10 to 15 degrees below your horizontal eyeline.
The Coruscant chase was made for IMAX!
Oh, and if you have friends that still haven't checked out this awesome flick, you may want to show them the DVD first (Nov 12). Because this movie is not exactly straightforward anyway, and with the cuts, they make the story harder to understand.
--Joey
You can check out Episode #404 right here.
--It's Pimptastic!--
You think this will work? Honestly, you really do?
A fool and his money...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
> I've heard anecdotal evidence that it was
> `too real' for the cinema experience.
Much like the old people who should be shot because when a letterbox movie appears on their screen, they feel "ripped off" that the full screen isn't shown.
If you crack their skulls open, you can actually watch the gears grinding.
All I have to say for realism is: people used to "dodge" the bullets of guns fired "at them" in movie theaters when movies came out.
I, for one, do want to see the fine peach fuzz on the tummy of Natalie in high res, high speed 10-story cinema, or at least on a 35" home TV.
I've heard anecdotal evidence that it was
`too real' for the cinema experience.
I can believe this comment. I have a Philips TV with 'Digital Natural Motion'. What this does is predict pixel movement, and fill in extra frames to effectively give you 100fps.
Picture quality is so crisp and smooth, that I've had comments like "it looks fake" or "it looks like the making of, not the actual movie".
Personally, I can't live without it. I go to the movies and think, crap, the pictures are all jumping round and blurry. I actually find it hard to follow action with such a low frame rate when I'm used to about 4x that. Flames and explosions look so crap without Digital Natural Motion.
Last I heard philips were going to put the Digital natural motion chips into DVD players and VCRs, so you don't have to buy the top of the line TV just to get natural motion. There are white papers on the net, but I can't find them just at the moment.
In short: I'm happy for movies to have 24fps, cause it all gets smoothed out to 100fps when I watch them anyway.
Verne.
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
...Episode II. Besides Natalie Portman (yum) am I missing anything? Heck I didn't even see Episode I until many many months after it hit the theaters. There were only a handful of folks in the audience. Wait, maybe that was opening day...
I saw it a few nights ago here in Calgary, and have been meaning to write up a review. Seems I was beaten to it... Aside from the cuts, there's a few things that readers have thus far failed to mention.
First, while I was worried about the digital transfer on the far larger IMAX screen ("pixels as big as fists pummeling your eyes!") the picture looked very nice and clean, with a couple of exceptions. On the very rare occassion, very thin lines that are close to horizontal or vertical get a distinct case of the "jaggies", where one can see the staircase effect of pixelisation. (This is most evident during the Lucasfilm logo at the opening and at a moment during the descent of Senator Amidala's ship to Corsucant).
Second, the sound is incredible. Those who haven't heard a well-tuned theatre - and IMAXi are amoung the world's best - will get a kick out of that aspect of the movie alone.
Last - a traditional IMAX movie focuses on vistas - grand sweeping praries and the like - and where Episode II is most like this, it works very well. At other points - closeups of actor's faces, in particular - the IMAX image can be too revealing, much as the higher resolution of HDTV is acknowledged to reveal the flaws of those appearing on television. There are other scenes - that of Anakin next to the Jawa sandcrawler while searching for his mother on Tatooine, for example - that the framing of the scene is just "off".
To those intending to go, I would recommend arriving early and getting seats near the center of the theatre, for the most compelling experience - again, big vistas work well from most any viewpoint, but not head-shots. For me, it was more than worth the price of admission.
Just sit on your ass and wait a day. Duh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I saw Star Wars IMAX on Saturday and didn't know until the end of the movie that they had removed the scenes. I seriously thought I had lost my mind after the library scene with Obi Wan was missing. Then after the dumb scene in Naboo was missing (the CG sucked) I thought I had fallen asleep or something! It made me crazy until I found out what happened!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
"flicker" like you see with A CRT or (I guess) movie is caused by the screen going from black to colored over and over again. You notice the change.
You don't notice flicker on things like LCDs because there is none. There is a 'frame rate' but the screen doesn't go black between each image.
Interestingly, I've never really noticed flicker at the movies even though the screen blanks only 48 times a second. 24hz flicker would be really obnoxious though.
Also, I can see flicker on a 72hz screen while moving images on it seem silky smooth.
One interesting effect of having a high enough frame rate is that you can actually see 'motion blur' with static images, for example with my old monitor I could do 640x480 at 120hz. Some 3d graphics would appear to blur as they moved, just like objects in the real world. You could probably produce some cool visual effects that at 120-200fps in a film. would be impossible at lower speeds.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Regarding the IMAX movie, does anybody know what scenes exactly were cut, or was it just little things here and there?
Regarding the ICQ/AIM "merger," who the hell cares? Honestly, I don't know one perosn that I've met in real life that uses ICQ. And in this day and age, who cares what platform you're using? Programs like Trillian can use them all at once, and you'd never know you were connecting to completely different servers!
And when you think about it, it all boils down to the users. What's the difference between AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Y!? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the subscribers. I know, I have AOL/TW as much as the next, but I don't have any qualms with using their servers and eating their bandwidth while chatting on Trillian without ads!
Check out CML, the cinematography mailing list. There this has been a holy war for many years.
Many believe that the higher frame rates of video subconsciously tell us that something is "real" and that good ol 24 fps film tells the subconscious: "You are watching a story"...
--
Is that all there is to relationships -sex and robotics?
However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool. :-)
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.
If I remember correctly, it was 300 million little $1 checks. :-)
But seriously, I would have done the same thing. The memory of Netscape v. MS was fresh in everyone's minds, and you can do a lot more good to a lot more people with the money.
http://kered.org
"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)
And only at 1000p HTDV resolution. That might look nice on your TV at home, and it might look nice in a standard movie theater, but the fact is that's pretty low res for movies. It's lower then regular 35 millimeter film.
OTOH, all they had to do was re-render the digital graphics at a higher resolution, which as someone else who's also seen it, seems to think they did.
If they had filmed this on regular film, or at, say 5 or 6 megapixles, you wouldn't have felt that way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
I recommend counselling. Seriously. By all means, see the film, but for your wife's birthday?!?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Yes, I have a wonderful wife. I say this with particular feeling right now as she is basking in afterglow and I'm posting to Slashdot. She understands my needs, see?
--
E_NOSIG
Whats wrong with text protocols? Seems to work fine for http, smtp, ftp and everything else on the 'net these days, except telnet.
Ease of implementation == good. we have tons of bandwidth, and chatting dosn't take much of it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Zephyr is nice as it goes, but a more interactive IM client is what I prefer. I think that Jabber is the best replacement for Zephyr. BTW, no need to talk of Zephyr in the past tense. It's still alive and well. I use it daily.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Jeez... The guy can build a frigging 747 simulator in his house but he can't resist using... The BLINK tag! ...
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
So, that's what I do at work.
It's pretty cool. There are some really large unsolved problems with it though - the biggest is that it's really tough to detect when objects go in front of each other (occlusions). If you don't detect them correctly, then you get really bad results. Of course, you can do things with a little human intervention, which lets you get almost perfect results, but the time that that takes is proportional to the number of source frames.
That's why you see those kind of effects for slow-motion (in Lost in Space or the Matrix) which has relatively few source frames, but I doubt we'll see it any time soon to increase framerate in movies, because 24fps for a whole movie is a whole lot of frames to manually tweak.
Powered by Web3.5 RC 2
"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." :)
Now, this I could belive. If you have watched the trends in digital imaging, the cameras today are already at the resolution limit of the lenses. Take for example the 2 biggest: Canon 1Ds & Kodak 14n, they are already shotting at 11 & 14 megapixels! Now, maybe I am wrong, but you are going to need seriously expensive glass to go with that resolution.
So, the reason why real actors will look fuzzy and CGI generated will look super-sharp is that Mr. Jackson Puss has gone through 8-15 pieces of glass, while digital Yoda only has gone through... ugh, probably none. May Pixar programmers should add lens fuzzyness to the sunlight flair and other defects?
The theater I went to is a part of a furniture store. Yes, a furniture store has a 3D IMAX theater!
The best part though was the vibrating seats whenever there was an explosion or other low-bass sound... That and the seats were made from Tempurpedic material, so they were ultra comfortable.
Actually if you sat directly on the northpole, you would have a very cold ass touching every longitudnal line so you would 'go around' the world forever.
--Joey
Did anyone bother to click on the link in the parent post? It's a prank -- there is no UPN story. Yes, I fell for it and got my hopes up. Please mod it down so nobody else does.
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?)
#ifdef SLIGHTLY_OFFTOPIC
However, super 8 at least allowed you to edit your films.
20 years later, it seems we're finally getting back the ability to easily edit film/video footage again at a reasonable cost. Why did 8mm film die when consumer video cameras had this horrible flaw? Pr0n (the home-made stuff) striking again?
#endif
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Umm, was that english? If so, why did I have to read it a dozen times to understand what you were trying to say?
How about we try it with a little punctuation?
It's interesting, 'talk' can be a knockoff of ICQ, when 'talk' came first.
Ahhh, my brain feels much better now. I know good grammar is an evil subject on slashdot, but at least do a good enough job that others can read what you are trying to say...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think that the real problem with 60 Hz. is flourescent lighting. Practically anything looks better than a screen which is being redrawn in sync with the (otherwise unseen) 60 Hz. flourescent lights.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I've been playing with one of those TVs for a weekend. The digital natural motion makes movies look like a cheap soap opera, news broadcast, or, indeed, 'making of' footage. And you can actually see that the explosions are just special effects. I tried watching Saving Private Ryan with DNM turned on, but I quickly turned it off. I suppose the real problem is that all the special effects in films were never meant to be watched in such smooth motion, and they only look convincing at the original framerate. Remember that there is quite a bit of processing between the original footage and the final movie, and it's there to make sure the movie looks good. If you then add things like DNM on top of that, you break all that. The right way to make movies look good at high framerates is to shoot the movie at the higher framerate first, and do all the processing to make sure it looks good at that framerate.
Yeah, I know. I have fooled with the Win32 compile of GAIM off and on. It's still very dodgy, though Gimp/win32 is pretty stable -- there are some other GTK apps that feel OK on windows too, but which ones elude me...
Anyway, nothing against GTK, I like it fine and I enjoy writing Perl/GTK very much, but QT does just have that good native widget feel and is stable on all architectures, even os x! TT does a good job.
I'm a junior at college. When I was a freshman the seniors all used zephyr and 'top' would always show it running on the login computers. Now people barely check their email in pine anymore (so most people never login to unix anymore) and I don't know of anyone using zephyer anymore. Sic transit gloria mundi as they say.
Well, the nice thing about Zephyr is that it was a protocol, and there were a number of clients for it. Rolling your own was pretty easy too. I'm not sure though by what you mean by "more interactive". Zephyr messages are delivered immediately, and you can reply immediately. That's pretty interactive.
sigs are a waste of space
So when I use zephyr, I always use the commandline version, and believe me, it's much less useful than an interactive client like AIM. Also getting zephyrgrams when you're in the middle of using Pine and having it screw up your display is pretty annoying :) All of the nice Zephyr classes are useful, but if you think zephyr use in general is down, use of zephyr classes is close to 0. The useful ones are defunct or not worth the bother because of better alternatives.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I meant to add that zephyr classes could be easily reproduced with Jabber, which is why I put it forth as a good replacement for AIM. It works well in an institutional setting as well, which makes it like zephyr again. But it is also more mature and robust than the hacked-together-ness that is zephyr.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Back when I was playing with Zephyr (which greatly predates Gaim... for that matter it predates ICQ & AIM) there was already a very nice X client (can't remember it's name) which was quite well established, providing a list of "friends" who were logged on, and allowed you to select one and send a message. It also provided message history from some friends (although by default I tended to let the messages post up in message boxes).
sigs are a waste of space