Slashdot Mirror
Firefly Likely to be Cancelled
rscrawford writes "Zap2It is reporting that Firefly, one of the best science fiction shows to make it on to network television in recent years, is going on hiatus: read, getting canceled. Well, it was an interesting, well-written, provocative and intelligent show on Fox; is anyone therefore surprised that they're doing away with it? It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. At least they're going to show the original 2-hour pilot in December. (And yet, somehow, Just Shoot Me continues...)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=40356&cid=4301 310
My prediction came true too. :)
It just sucked on so many levels I don't know where to start. Oh, wait. The audience was supposed to immediatly get all the tounge and cheek humor etc etc right off the back. I mean after years of watching Buffy it shouldn't be a problem.
Though that was exactly it! It was Buffy in space! Same style of humor, different setting. Why the hell should I waste my time watching this??? I'd rather watch re-runs of the 5th Wheel.
I could write more about this piece of trash but instead I'll write another letter to SCIFI begging them to keep farscape. I'll be sure to mention to them that what's was firefly posing as their competition has decided to take a uh... vacation.
www.savefarscape.com
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
Honestly, I wasn't a fan of this show, either. The whole "Gunsmoke in space" theme wasn't working for me, as I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
i have to agree.. i wasn't very impressed with the show. none of the characters seemed too interesting and i didn't like the "wild west" at all. we've got ships that can travel between planets in days but they're duking it out with six shooters? unlikely. i think joss is losing his touch, buffy has seen better days and firefly left a lot to be desired. i hope his next venture does better (no. i didn't mention angel, i try not to think about that show..)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
My big gripe is that the dialogue was horrible, and the plots, despite the fact that the show made a painfully obvious effort to not be Star Trek, were so obviously lifted from Star Trek.
I found the show to be marginally deeper than Andromeda, but that ain't saying much. The puzzling thing is that it was actually picked up by FOX.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I gave it a good 5-6 episodes to turn into something worth watching, but had given up. It's a piece of drek, and good riddance. I can't believe they axed something entertaining like Dark Angel for a lame implementation of Rodenberry's "Wagon Train to the Stars" pitch line for Star Trek.
What really baffles me is how the show can possibly require the budget it has. The visual F/X are nothing special, rarely extending beyond CGI-only external shots. There has been nothing that would require extensive makeup, prosthesis, animatronics, or anything else to justify the cost of this series.
Then again, maybe they had to pay the "artists" who created the theme enough to live on for the rest of their lives -- that track is a career-killer if I've ever heard one!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Just because you can write a C++ function does not turn you into Shakespeare. You wouldn't like it if Brandon Tartkoff started lecturing you about throwing exceptions, eh?
a point of argument that is otherwise unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral in any and all possible physical implementations.
Oh, I think you need to just fuck off. Having no DRM technology at all would be a bad, bad thing; Internet broadcasting right now is essentially dead because there's no way for broadcasters to charge for their work, and if we can fix that problem, we'll see whole new worlds of entertainment and education open up. It's not going to be the advent of the printing press or anything, but it'll be cool if we can just get this piracy problem solved.
Remember when Stephen King released that e-book of his? You could download the book for a buck, or something like that. I remember reading that the publisher collected something like $100 on sales of the e-book through the web site, and that they found cracked copies all over FTP sites, web sites, peer-to-peer networks, and so on. Ever since, no cheap e-books. Great solution for those people who wanted to read e-books and were willing to pay for the privilege.
Now imagine a world in which the home theater PC, HDTV, broadband Internet, and compression technology like MPEG-4 come together. Your home theater PC is connected to your HDTV and to your broadband connection. You use your remote to go to a web site-- Blockbuster.com, maybe-- and select a movie. Say, Episode III or Return of the King or whatever. You don't watch it in real time; you don't have the bandwidth for that. Instead, you download it over several hours. Say you order the movie in the morning; you've got it to watch by that night. When you press "play," you get a pristine HDTV picture with DTS sound, compressed just to the point where it's visually indistinguishable from the HD master, and the whole thing cost you about a dollar.
Impossible without perfect DRM. Never happen.
Now, when I say "perfect DRM," I mean a system that can be used for ephemeral copies of media, stuff like video-on-demand where you merely "rent" the data instead of buying it. If you want to buy the movie, you can get it on HD-DVD or whatever; the system I'm imagining is strictly for stuff that you might call broadcast applications if you squint a little.
Perfect DRM will make it trivial for you to download and view or play media from the Internet, but practically impossible for you to save that media in an unencrypted form, or for you to play it back on anything other than the computer/device that downloaded it. Since the media is ephemeral, issues like fair use and backup copies and all that simply don't apply. And by "practically impossible" I mean so inconvenient that it's just not worth the effort.
Do I know exactly how such a system will work? No. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you; I'd tell venture capitalists and bank managers only, and then only if they let me hold on to one of their kids as a guarantee of good faith. Because whoever figures out how to do this first will be a very, very rich man.
Now, if you want to bitch about how my idea is "unacceptable, infeasible, or immoral," go right ahead. You'll probably be wrong, but I'd love to hear you give it a shot.
I write in my journal