ENOUGH ALREADY... Least important reason to vote.
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Should You Vote?
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· Score: 2
This constant reinforcement by Katz about "turning kids' hearts dark" reeks of the same encapsulation most of the standard media attempt to confine politics into. Aware citizens and voters will know that this is mere scaremongering by an ill informed candidate. I'll bet that frat boy doesn't even know you can find porn online. As for Gore's crusade, this is a man who in an interview in Rolling Stone here talks about how The Matrix was his favorite movie of last year and who had a fundraiser with Hollywood the day after lambasting it.
Until such issues become solid legislation and real attempts to strip our liberties rather than conflagaration to get square middle class votes, and on that day we should fucking fight like a heavyweight champion - until then let's consider what's truly important. Neither of the candidates during the debate apart from scurillious scaremongering had anything intelligent or definite to say about the supposed "culture of violence". It's just hype
The next president will appoint 3 supreme court justices.
What the candidates' position on space exploration might be.
A fossil fuel crisis is looming. Our demands outstrip what's needed. Next president has the power to declare areas in Alaska a national monument to prevent oil drilling. May I remind you that the only the only single remaining natural salmon runs in the US is now in Alaska.
These are some of the issues I don't think have been highlighted enough in favor of assurances to people about their money. What's more important to me is which candidate is equipped and intelligent enough to understand that science governs progress at this point in time, and is prepared to understand it's appliance.
I think, for once in Slashdot's time, that we are finally faced with an outside train of thought in which all of us, pondering such thoughts, must admit only that at the moment we as a species do not know enough to make a judgment call either way. We should be humble enough to admit that this only raises more questions rather than defines and supports our particular ideologies. Rees' statements could be construed as ammunition for either athiesm or christianity, and each viewpoint will use it as such. But each viewpoint depends on human notions of complexity and beauty and what constitutes life.
Although I am a devout athiest, I can only say - and I think we all should - that there is information here which needs discussing, analyzing, theorizing. But no specific conclusions, because this issue is a lot bigger than sitting at your keyboard and blathering here.
On one final note, as an athiest, any evidence used to support the notion of a divine hand setting into motion the beginning of the universe can make sense, I concur. However, this does not mean that such divine presence means that any specific, and organized religious interpretation has any more credit than before. There is nothing here to suggest or bolster that Allah or Jehovah or Kronos or a chain of turtles had anything to do with it and therefore should live in accordance to their word or Law.
Maybe the ultimate reconciliation between science and religion will be when religion begins to focus on the greater, wider more cosmological notion of the divine rather than doctrine that should be applied to how people live and think. I think we as a species can sometimes to be humble enough to accept that there is something greater and bigger than all of us. But not in the form that still lingers on this planet, the poisons of dogma and doctrine and superstition.
Hold on there pardner... Matt Drudge's inflammatory use of the Cole bombing and the internal VOA memo have been blown out of total proportion due to lack of context...
How many people INSIDE the US listen to Voice of America? It's a radio station set up to offer, pretty much, propaganda of one sort to everyone else around the world. Not that that ain't bad. Very popular in East Germany for a few years there. More Americans listen to that welfare whore Rush Limbaugh (sitting on his pilodinal cyst eating pork rinds collecting welfare) than this radio program.
As such, it's controlled and disseminated in a strategic way, and at the moment in the Middle East, it's more important to the situation there for people to hear that the US cares about all the carnage in Israel / Palestine than US jingoism about our own losses.
Does that mean the the Cole incident is not a disturbing, horrific tragedy? Not at all. It means that strategically it's more important if we want a chance of influencing people in the Middle East with the voice of democracy to tell them and reinforce that their situation is more important.
Sheesh, when you read a document outside your sphere of knowledge, take the time to look at the signifiers. Intelligence supports the State Department on the repeal of such propaganda, because they're trying to control information for a purpose. I figure you right wingers would be over the moon, cause it fits into all your wanktastic Tom Clancy fantasies to see a document like that.
I think this is way off base - despite sharing a certain literary pedigree with games, comics are an inherently different medium to games. Movies, after all, present us with real humans in their full blown visual glory, and this is not an impediment to our identification.
I actually think that this level of abstraction has nothing to with what I call the empathy a player has with a game character. It has to do with far more esoteric elements, like dialogue and action and what other characters say about the player, the basics of character in traditional drama - and/or options given to players to shape that character.
For example, I feel that JC Denton in Deus Ex is, for the most part me, to some degree. I have shaped that character through various choices into representing how I tackle the game world, how he looks, how he behaves.
On the other hand, Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid completely elicits my empathy despite being a fully fledged character who I don't choose dialogue for, who doesn't grow in skills of my choice, and looks slightly less realistic due to old technology. But when *spoiler warning* a certain character got sniped and I had to find a way to rescue her, my heart was pounding. In that moment I had a complete game playing epiphany, I was honestly concerned for the character involved and was really determined to get some payback. This was because the game had taken the time out to develop a relationship and put it in crisis.
Now that in Metal Gear Solid 2 I can actually read the expression on Solid Snake's face I think the empathic response will grow. It's a stated intention of Hideo Kojima to insure that his face will be readable as much as possible to convey that emotion.
On the other hand, I really, really cared for my Avatar in Ultima V, rendered in glorious EGA - especially, in another special moment in gaming, when I was asked to free an innocent man, knowing that it would get me into deep shit and danger. I was posed with a choice that had more consequence than abstraction survival by dodging bricks, and as a result I felt like I was in the world. This much feeling for a stick man.
Abstraction of character in the best comic books almost come off as a psychic defense; the cartoonish look of Barefoot Gen (autobiographical comic about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima) or Maus have been stated as a means to try and work through the reality of the horrors portrayed.
The real important necessity for gaming, as I've been babbling about for years, is not the degree of visual realism, but rather the need for sharp characters and deeper plots than bad cliched retreads of the most juvenile and aesthetic elements of genre fiction. Get that right, and you'll see empathy skyrocket.
Hell, the moon mission, as some historical jokes have it, might have been about Kennedy having a secretary who told him she'd sleep with him when he put a man on the moon. Hence...
Obviously there was an enormous amount of nationalism and cold war paranoia that led to the moon missions. But I think that moment that Armstrong set foot on the planet, the majority of common people with no overriding interest in such matters completely forgot what was going on and were enchanted that a human was standing on another planet. Read some accounts of the time and you'll see. For maybe a microsecond I don't think anyone thought "they're going to build a missle base up there". I think they thought what The Onion describes as a headline from 1969 "HOLY SHIT. MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON."
In fact, one of the most interesting things to me is that NASA have never made the majority of psychological research they've done on astronauts public. One concept was that many astronauts suffered from "The Overview Effect", overwhelmed by seeing the planet without any boundaries. The Cold War had put them up there, but being up there they saw what a joke it was. Several astronauts, especially moon mission ones, sought spiritual answers after their voyage.
So anyways, as this planet gets more and more cynical, I'm more eager to get off it.
I've often wondered about what is it about human perception that continually raises a bar and becomes accustomed to the beauty of a current technologies graphical limits, and then when faced with a better revision can instantly find the old, much vaunted console or 3d engine incredibly ugly. What is it about perception that allows itself to instantly refine itself when faced with a better simulation? Often times and by mistake, it seems the correlation between playability and advanced realism seem to go hand in hand.
Don't tell me for a moment that Ultima Underworld is anywhere near as easy to play as Deus Ex just for the 3d engine. UU's 3d world is a small, low res window where objects remain perpetually two dimensional and distort perspective. Repetitive textures lead to no real geography - the brain must adjust and form an abstract sort of wireframe map in the brain. Just getting your bearings is much more difficult. But the only thing that seperates the games, really, is technology. The storyline, characters, work on interface, and richness of the world is comparable today, and both are games far above the norm.
In fact, one could find that richness and depth in a much uglier game than either, Ultima VII - but I remember when it was coming out being blown away by the screenshots. Too many console launches and neat graphics cards since then, my brain is spoiled. Sure, there's even a correlation between filmic graphics and the bar set - does anyone remember watching Terminator 2 and thinking, well that's quite shoddy work? It was the first I can remember seeing where there wasn't a single dodgy effects shot - but today it's showing its age. Awareness of the illusion leads to disbelief, which is probably more important to games than even movies.
What seperates the games I mention above from others is a unification at every time they came out to be best at everything they attempted - technology and design both. We often argue for one or the other without ever thinking that the true beauty is when both work hand in hand. Building these worlds is absolutely worth it, and the best games continue to show the promise of the medium in the future.
But current development cycles in gaming seem to stifle this. I won't even get into this, as it's a much broader issue, but gaming is being changed from the outside in by a nasty corporate culture, shortened development cycles combined with large, uncommunacative teams, lack of support upon release, runaway and ludicrous mismanaged budgets, and worst of all SUITS who don't understand gaming and don't care and want no interest in advancing it as an art form. They want their merchandised rights title on two consoles and PC and done NOW, and to fix the problem they're going to hire 100 more people.
Retro gaming is an oddity at best, and doesn't address the larger issues of gaming entering the cultural mainstream. I say this as someone who collects consoles, aware of what gaming is becoming. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire PC edition will outsell Deus Ex two to one, I have no doubt of that.
And as more people come to the party they will expect a union between technology and design, the more mainstream audiences will demand a greater visual realism from games. There's no avoiding it. What's important is to give them both.
Or at least, that's what I think, but then look at Diablo II. Three year old graphics and console style gameplay - maybe that's the future (no disrespect to Blizzard as I find the product as addictive as crack.
Maybe it's just what future generations need. A completely galvanizing, international effort to begin to explore and colonize Mars. Not for the sake of money, but for the sake of humanity. When was the last time humanity felt a unified interest in a human endeavour that surpassed all ideas of nationalism? Probably when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
And ultimately, Mars represents a chance not to mess up another planet, but perhaps in a bout of completely head up my ass hopeful idealism to get it right. A chance to start all over again, and this time, with such a precarious and concerted effort to terraform the planet, maybe we'll even begin to understand how precious, rare, and difficult sustainable environments are.
Someday that lovely Sol is gonna go. Mars is the first and perhaps one of the most essential steps to readying mankind to continue. And I, for one, think we ought to. So hands up who thinks our new information driven economy is a more lofty goal than mankind exploring alien worlds and bringing life to where it is not.
I, for one, long for the day when news is reporting about humans walking on the surface of Mars as opposed to blather about Metallica and MP3s. Don't the rest of you?
Anyone who's done a fair amount of dumpster diving knows that people THROW COMPUTER S**T AWAY all the damn time, perfectly good usable equipment. It's incredible. Just a few months ago I scored three 17 inch monitors off the street that were off to the dumps cause an architectural firm moved to flat screens.
Whether or not the lead leaks the fact is obsolence in this field is FAST and the result is that so much silicon and plastic and so on has got to pile up somewhere. Whether or not there is leakage from contaminants, these extremely non biodegradeable materials will have to take up some space because they get thrown away so often.
The other thing to think about is that geeks often forget that computation is ubiquitious and therefore everyone has computers and doesn't know what to do with old ones. Most people wouldn't know how to jury rig old systems together with obsolete parts and find a use for them - and those are the majority of computer users today.
For that matter, the computing industry as a whole is totally screwed by complete lack of ingenuity when it comes to recycling. Just recently I had a leftover case and p350 proc, and all I wanted was a very small, very cheap hard drive, new, to make a machine for my girlfriend. Since I'm in a small town in the US at the moment I can't go to my usual urban haunts with used parts, and my options are to basically buy a new 20 gig drive and that's it.
And one other thing - laminated chipboard is some of the most durable stuff on earth. It's nearly frigging invincible to the elements. And it's already started to pile up, and boy is it gonna get worse. Whether or not you think computers are safe to dump without contamination to the environment, fact is that the landfill is land that could, say, be a park for kids to play in.
Just some friendly idealism and simplicity from someone who considers outta sight outta mind to be one of the most dangerous attitudes out there.
This almost makes me want to stop reading /.
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Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 3
Talk about a self fulfilling prophecy that article was. Just look around.
I've returned to the U.S. for the first time in a year and I'm freaked out. Part of it, I suppose, is the craziness of election year. Part of it is genuine culture shock. I know living overseas that its boomtime for the economy and so on, but that didn't prepare me for how confused and despondent and cynical and unhappy everyone seems.
In the culture as a whole, all it seems there is to do is shop. The Net offered us freedom from that. But no longer. It's over. It's a big strip mall. We lost. When Britney Fucking Spears is singing about her email lover you know that ubiquity won out and what made us geeks special is lost forever. So we adapt or die. What we have to fight to preserve now are essential freedoms. It's the falling action, the final movement. At least some of us might get it together now.
You know, for all the talk of Napster blah blah blah, this week was a real eye opener about another side to the whole fucking story. My friend's in a band in Seattle. Recently Paul Schell, the idiot who fucked up the WTO situation, vetoed a law approved 7:1 by the city council to change laws regarding all ages shows so that they would retain the protection and safety that club owners need while lifting age restrictions so that young people could take part in a culture, a scene, a lifestyle - something other than going to the fucking mall.
My friends in a band were playing the Bumbershoot festival and called up Paul Schell in front of 700 audience members and got everyone to let him know what his chances of getting their votes are. It was great. In one coordinated moment it was made clear Mr. Schell had lost 700 votes. Audience was instructed to meet with people passing out fliers to learn about more constructive ways they can help.
This was real action on a micro level that could extend out, was active, was real, had consequences and reality to it. Unlike the bitching and moaning us creative typists who clog bandwidth with our universally fleeting opinions that register for about a nanosecond in the constantly updating Net, where things are to be forgotten as soon as possible.
And this band, who have NOT sold out, who have refused corporate sponsorship and money and even deals that would extend creative autonomny with corporate money - just out of passion and experience with their culture of music - they will barely make the poverty line in income off of their album this year. Most of them work full time in a non profit center shipping anti violence pamphlets to schools to make a living. Despite being "successful", with albums sold across the US, sold out shows, and real media coverage. So how many of their tracks can I find on Napster? Plenty.
What I find distressing about the current geek climate is that there has been no change in our culture to reflect the changes in society and politics. What I find is a bizzare generation of mostly male zealots who believe themselves to be the front runners for a massive change in civilization, entirely conservative at their core in their political beliefs as far as it extends to protecting their ability to make money and save on taxes - yet when it comes to the "liberty" of being able to rip off some other culture for their own enjoyment and because they can, the greed comes out in spades.
Seeing what I did in Seattle this week taught me that. We're completely adrift and need to wake up and change what's important and agree on major things as a whole, determine what's really fucking important instead of whining forever and forever until we are treated like a grown up AV club.
The situation here is unbelieveable. ZDNET UK, who have truly been champions on the issue of the unbelievable fact that local phone calls in the UK are still metered, have driven home some really disturbing facts.
One of the ones that got me was a report that ADSL, which was supposed to be released in April (the London exchanges have been for the most part open since March) was delayed because BT told OFTEL that there wasn't enough interest in their trials.
That's interesting, since I know about 20 people who couldn't get on one. Then I managed to coax out of a customer service operator an ADSL department phone number. Asked to join a trial, and was told that tons of people ask that but they're full up. Interesting, I say, referring to your company's refusal to release ADSL because you don't have enough triallists. Hemm, hawww... Uhhh... I absolutely swear that three days later this phone number wasn't working anymore.
So this is what us UKers face. ADSL for roughly 65-70 US dollars a month (when you can get 2 Mbps no contention in the US for 40 dollars a month) at a 50:1 contention ratio, ethernet not allowed, only USB modem. Did I say 50:1 contention ratio? Did I mention that some urban areas of London have such bad copper lines that you can hear the connection break when the wind blows?
Or you can get their damned Home Highway ISDN service, which is what I have opted for. Starting in June, with Surftime it should cost roughly 67 pounds for 24 / 7 dual channel ISDN and two seperate analog lines for phone calls (this is great for my setup, as my roommate and I need our own phone numbers and lines, and we can play Counterstrike together on the Net using a 64k channel each). But it gets even better, as I've just found out. BT always inadverently screw up the installation. What most people don't know is that the agreement you sign indicates they owe you a month of rental for each day that the installation is late. They don't tell you this, you have to read the fine print and bitch. Well, as a result, I now have 5 months free ISDN rental. Woo hoo! Starting to love this company's inefficiency. We've started joking that next week when the engineer comes we'll chop down the telephone pole until BT owes us for 30 months compensation.
One last thing about HH. It makes you sign a year long contact that is unvoidable by any means. If you move, you're screwed. No transferring the account. If you got HH before April 25th, you can switch to ADSL for free... If you sign a 3 year binding agreement. Nice company, huh? And make sure you don't use the BT Terminal Adapter. Pings of 70-100 compared to 30-40 in a net game.
For further reading, check this message board: Wireplay's forum for broadband. There's always insider info and tips here.
After Nanotech, nothing will ever be the same again. Period.
William Gibson co opted this phrase from Vernor Vinge - a technological singularity - to use in his recent trilogy. It's a point where some form of technology is so transformative that we cannot imagine beyond it - literally like falling into a black hole.
There was some complaint about the way Gibson ends his recent trilogy, but it's spot on. It's an admission - faced with this technology - there can be no more imagining, only intuition.
Because if the technology ever becomes viable to produce any substance or product endlessly, it changes every rule and boundary our society and culture is based on today. Stephenson had to cheat and force societal constraints on his world in order to discuss nanotech in The Diamond Age.
The truth is, the basic governing element of our species has been the procurement and transformation of resources, since we rose out of a lake in Africa. Remove that, and what do we become?
The implications are that there can be no accurate speculation. Those who live post nanotech live in a different universe than we do.
Thanks Zack. I made a serious typo which completely distorts the information.
Directly from the book now, with no extractions:
"... access to large quantities of ancient timber for an average price of a dollar and a half per thousand board feet."
So, the wood is sold to the privatized corporations for $1.50 per board foot, when the worth is $700 per thousand board feet. I didn't actually how shocking that was until you made me correct it. A dollar and a half spent for roughly $700 worth of raw materials... Damn.
Let's talk facts, coward, since you wouldn't like to supply any. This is offtopic, and you are a troll, but the notion of environment vs. advancement has come along and let's discuss our ingenuity vs. being smart enough to realise our actions determine the future with some facts. Your insights seem to bespeak a Great Northwesterner who works at Microsoft, sure you're liberal, but hey...
First, as someone who grew up in the Great Northwest, I suggest you take a flight over the state of Washington sometime. You'll see what no statistic can ever show - that the majority of forest land is GONE. There is a three foot buffer zone around highways to give the appearance of forestry, but an aerial view does much to bring it all home.
In British Columbia, clear cuts have stretched 180 square miles. It is a bald patch visible in SPACE. Ever wonder why the salmon industry vanished in the Northwest? Because clear cutting effects rivers and rivers effect salmon and thereby 5 million people lose their jobs when the natural salmon runs vanish. Ho Hum.
Here's a short excerpt from Carl Safina's (a director of programs for the National Audobon Society and professor at Yale) book Song For The Blue Ocean, a year long study to examine the truth behind ecological warnings. Bear in mind that Safina is an avowed fisherman who is concerned about people keeping their jobs, not a hippie tree hugger by any means. A read of this book will prove so. He examined such issues as the spotted owl and deforestation in the Northwest with as open a mind as possible, interviewing people representing all viewpoints, in order to assest in hindsight the truth behind these issues.
"In Alaska's panhandle, the 17 mil acre Tongass National Forest is the continent's last resovoir of ancient timber. Fifty year contracts signed in the 50s guarantee two companies (one Japanese owned) access to large quantities of timber for avg. $1.50 per board foot. The wood is worth $700 per thousand board feet. The Tongass sells more timber and loses more money than any other national forest, forty to sixty million dollars a year. In some years, it has lost 99 cents on every dollar it spent to sell trees."
In other words, it short sells ancient timber from parklands (public land) at a loss to private corporations. Ho hum.
Here's some facts for you:
"In nice round terms, a century of logging eliminated 90 percent of the ancient salmon forests of Oregon and Washington. About 5 percent is protected. All the remaining ancient forest on US soil in the Pacific Northwest will be gone before 2010 unless specifically protected."
As for the basis of these facts, I urge you to read the book and check his biblography, which is more than esteemed, all information coming from eminent scientific publications and journals. As for yours, where do they come from?
That is a misleading headline, to say the least. Though attempting to present this story humourlously, this is not along the lines of a college course in Klingon, Madonna Studies, or a Canadian University (I kid you not) that has "The Films of Keanu Reeves". What this sounds like is something that is long overdue and very, very necessary.
Gaming is stagnating, and that's a fact. Innovation? Try EA SPORTS XXXXXXXX SEPTEMBER EDITION. Another Dune 2 clone. Another 3d shooter. I think that the game industry took a wrong turn at a certain point and for the right reasons but we're still having to deal with the fallout. Namely, when CD drives allowed massive (relatively) storage with muldimedia there was all this talk about synergy between the movie industry and gaming. The result was crap games with shit interactivity and horrid FMV. What should have been reaped from Hollywood was storytelling that is rigourously tested, strong characterization, and an attempt to be something more. 99% of movies are crap, yes, but the ones that get away and are something extraordinary are so special because of what an epiphany they represent. I feel gaming has come close but nowhere near having the emotional effect of the greatest movies. The games that are widely loved by the hardcore gamers are the ones that come closest to sports, (and that's what deatmatches are really) which cannot do this. There is, in my mind, an arena for games which want to do more. This is why Metal Gear Solid, say, impressed me from a design perspective so much. It was an action adventure game with a unique interface and play style, highly recognizable and differentiated characters, and an actual attempt to say something about the world - all within the confines of a game. I think a glance at Quake 3 will confirm that there is a marked difference between design and coding. I'm not slamming Q3, I'm a huge admirer, and am in awe of John Carmack and his talents, but I do not think Quake 3 is a brilliant work of immersive design. Granted, it aims for a different experience.
One of the hardest things about the game industry is that cracking into designing, which I believe should be a specialized position, happens through moving up the ladder either as a coder or a play tester... And I'm sorry, but I just do not feel that coders (with the exception of Neal Stephenson) make great storytellers, nor the greatest human computer interaction gurus. It's about time designing was made a discipline of its own, and there was a way for people to get an overview of gaming and come to companies with some form of acceptable accreditation. The game designers I respect the most did not come from a traditional coding background, people like Warren Spector (who wrote novels and worked for TSR) or Rod Fung (who comes from a cinematography background)
PC gaming is in for a big shock soon, undoubtedly, with the new generation of consoles and the simple fact is that the games that sell well are no longer real PC games but bargain Deer Hunting titles. That's a fact. There's amazing, ridiculous amounts of money floating around, with nothing to show for (COUGH COUGH ION STORM) and designer's reputations based on tenuous connections to a track record (COUGH COUGH JOHN ROMERO). Hopefully the establishment of such a course will make the gaming industry listen and change their ways, and we'll be better off for it. Oh, and BTW, Alias/Wavefront is amazingly expensive stuff. One of the best things about this course is that I can see students getting a chance to use the really high end industry strength apps without having to warez them. I do CG in my free time as a film student trying to learn tools, and recently pricing Maya - there's even a yearly license fee for student use. If as a student I was able to get my hands on motion capture utilities, a terrific sound recording studio, people interested in the same thing (unlike film school where there's like 2 people who want to make something that people would actually want to see and everyone else wants to make "art"), and access to some high end apps sounds blissful and serious to me.
When I was first out shopping for DVD equipment I honestly told every dealer on the Tottenham court Road that I wanted to play Region 1 discs, explaining that I would be returning to Region 1 in the future. Every single time I was told by retailers that it was not legal for them to discuss or give me information about how to make sure the equipment I got would do such a thing... That's what they told me at the stores, and it's damn unusual given Tottenham Court Road's fetish for all things tech. Some browsing on the web, however, and I'm a happy puppy.
I honestly don't know if that law's set in stone, you'll obviously have seen magazine adverts for shops that offer code free players, but that was my experience.
Region coding is not about piracy. It's about staggered release schedules. This is why, even though extremely defeatable, region coding will not go away. A movie company makes prints of their movie and there's a limit to how many they can strike - these are exhibited in the U.S. first, for the most part, before moving on to the rest of the world. If a movie that's expected to do well doesn't go down successfully in the U.S., the staggered pattern allows a company to rethink its marketing and try it again in a new territory. This is the main reason behind region coding, not to mention that different companies have different rights to different territories (Fox has worldwide rights to Titanic, Paramount has it for North America).
Add to this the idiocy of the BBFC: they demand that SUPPLEMENTS on DVDs, such as outtakes and making of documentaries, need a BBFC certficate in order to pass, henceforth the DVD producer has to submit that material and a fee to the BBFC. This is supposedly one of the reasons Criterion doesn't release their discs in the UK.
Add to this that it is not technically illegal to chip, modify, or hack a DVD player to play all Region discs - but it is illegal for a store clerk to suggest to you how to do it or provide help with it. All European DVD players can play NTSC or PAL - and several have super easy hacks to defeat the coding, such as a combination to put in the remote. Search the web and thou shalt find...
Now it gets even weirder. Some DVDs in the UK are released as anamorphic (enhanced for widescreen TVs) when they aren't in the U.S. because of wider market penetration of widescreen TVs in Europe.
Region Coding is extremely defeatable. I recommend heartily anyone with a Windoze system to watch DVDs on to use the Creative Labs DXR3 kit - a DVD drive, and a dedicated decoder board ready for 5.1 surround sound for 150 - 200 US dollars. Go to This site and download a 500 k app that lets you defeat region coding piece o cake. Basically, for about 150 dollars for DXR3, 300 dollars for my Videologic 5.1 surround kit, and a simple app I have a region free DVD player routed to my 16x9 capable television.
I buy some Region DVDs of movies that haven't been released here in the U.K. because a) I'm an American, moving back to America in a year, and I want DVDs that will work there b) American DVDs tend to have more supplements and c) A movie in Central London will litearally cost you 20$ for a decent seat. This way I can watch a movie without a dim projector bulb and crappy reel changes and some idiot's mobile phone going off while they're talking during the movie.
Just saw on BBC news some stupidass entertainment journalism show where "news just in" that
"The mastermind of a piracy ring has been arrested in Norway for hacking DVDs, breaking their copy protection to make illegal copies of DVDs"
(Stock footage of hidden camera in some Asian market stall, panning rapidly by what may or may not be illegal DVDs)
Saw countless other examples in newspapers today. Just plain untruths, attempts to demonize Jon, and Linux or Xing never being mentioned once.
Personally, I think slashdot should drill this issue as hard as possible - because anyone who becomes convinced that the reality has to do with people wanting to run DVDs on the OS of their choice is NOT being reported. It's much juicier for them to say that some 16 year old screwed over the power elite of Hollywood through some nefarious scheme by an embittered nerd genius - and that's what they're running with.
I finally got off my ass and emailed katz about it. He responded fairly and appropriately, I must say. I can understand his reasons and find them perfectly valid...
However, I wish he would take part in the community as a whole, and post with us and take part in the real/. community. I think that would stop a lot of flames against him. He could've then addressed this with the community as a whole, and all would be well.
It was reported here and in Daily Variety that New Line Features bought the rights to Katz's book "Geeks" to be made into a feature film. New Line are a Time Warner company. The fact that Katz can rant so readily about TW / AOL's evil and yet profit from that corporation himself - even the behavior of most of our politicians isn't so disgustingly hypocritical. At least they don't sell us the notion of themselves as Anti Corporate.
In all seriousness, Noize... To some degree I enjoy the anonomity the Net affords my race and / or gender. By not offering information about myself, unless asked by someone I would like to carry on communicating with, then ridiculous real world assumptions about my person based on physical presence or shape of eyes vanish. While I was in college in Ireland - an extremely homogenous society - it was instantly assumed by most people upon first meeting that I had trouble with English. If I go into an Irish IRC channel, say, I can blag enough from my seven years spent there that most assume I'm from there. In other words, it cuts down on a lot of unnecessary and potentially embarassing crap I've had to put up living in small American logger towns, etc. Some people who may appear to be to others racist aren't necessarily - they're just ignorant, and I find there's a line between the two.
In fact, despite Katz's declarations, most of my female friends dig communications mediums such as IRC because of the anonymity it affords. I'm not too into my gender studies, being a small town boy and all that, but I find that in essence, the current text based medium that comprises most of the web is democratic to all races and genders because when you're just text it's the content of what you say more than anything else.
And I say this as someone who had to go to court on assault charges several years back after I got into a fight with someone who called me an Irish slur. That was a waste of three years of my life and money, and if I met the same punk in IRC and were allowed to vent my hostility with just wit and words it would've been better for both of us - I wouldn't have had to get stitches, and he wouldn't have had to been found guilty...
Though I suppose fifteen minutes in my infinitely juvenile presence on IRC is enough to assume I'm one of those dorkass twenty five year old boys who spends way too much money on Japanese import Gundam model kits.
I'm, like Mr Katz, a self avowed Windows user for work reasons (video editing). I can understand why he feels persecuted here, or out of the loop, or why he'd find criticism about that fact unfair. But...
I read and post to slashdot because its entire perview is anything but narrow or hostile. Options are present for me to filter out the information I regard as useless. Sometimes I post and get high karma. Sometimes I don't. It happens.
Time and time again I read about an issue on slashdot and find the User Comments more valuable than the post. An item on wearable computing might lead to a post by someone who actually makes them, and links to more information. My interest in technology and culture finds this site the perfect compliment to these curiosities, despite some people insisting that slashdot's focus should be more narrow.
However, I cannot help but feel Mr. Katz' recent articles are written only in reaction to the amount of negative posts he generates here. I do not understand this three part series' point whatsoever - the main criticism I find levelled at Katz by my friends who are literate, polite, non flaming linux users is that being a cultural person he is more interested in buzzwords than content - driving an issue based on its importance rather than providing any real insight - something I do not agree with completely but understand, and wish them to be able to express that opinion. I do not sit here flaming anonymously, but as myself.
I am a minority. I am non white. My mother was an immigrant from a low tech country to the U.S. I am not a coder. My expertise is in an analog tech format (filmmaking). I am everything that katz has suggested online communities are - but I am not a dangerous, hostile adolescent who uses the Net for juvenile vitriol.
I've found this community and many others on the net all the same - there are minorities and, yes, women present - as computing becomes more ubiquitious it will become even more diverse. There are flamers, and there are intelligent posters, and trolls. There is highly valuable news and some which is worthless to myself or others. At the end of the day, as the reader, I make slashdot to be my own - taking what I need and is important from it.
I don't see why this model is so deprecative to society, as Mr. Katz would have it. Anybody else feel like me despite the lunacy and annoyance that every Jeff K on the net generates, there is something more profound, just waiting for you to find it, instead of a hierarchy deciding it for us.
And just to keep it in one comment, I'd like to know what Mr. Katz would like to say to us slashdotters about the fact that he has sold his book to a company that will soon be owned (more than likely) by AOL - (Fine Line pictures is owned by Time Warner). Within his dealings of a traditional media hierarchy, does he not expect any influence from corporate control - as opposed to the freedom afforded us in this forum?
I hope it's real and I hope people would hurry up, so I could run Linux, which isn't practical for me at the momemnt because being a film student with a 3 grand Canopus DV REX broadcast NLE capture card I need full functionality and editing software that can do the following -
True PAL and NTSC support (different resolutions, framerates, 16x9 support, and interlace issues). In order to convert between the two, commerical software runs about 800 dollars. It's not as easy as having a simple converter box. If you're doing broadcast quality stuff there is a helluva lot of problems in converting the two, especially when it comes to color signals.
Ability to convert finished files into various formats at different resolutions and data rates. Scaleable monitors to different resolutions on desktop in real time.
Support of the 48.1 khz audio band, for DV sound editing - and native non square pixel support for DV.
True timecode support.
Avid is the king for filmmaking right now because of the myriad problems regarding the differing framerate for film (24 fps) and video - and its ability to recognize the limitations of film (you want to do a dissolve? You're going to have to strike a dupe print - unless you can afford to have your opticals done digitally), and its mastery of creating EDL for importing to neg cutters, etc. None of the home, relatively cheap NLE solutions have full support of this so far.
Win based video editing apps are so sloppy in so many ways, so if you want to beat them, listen to people who use NLEs regularly and listen to their lengthy list of complaints.
Cameron does not think he is too good to do Terminator 3 at all - the problem is contractural and legal. Cameron has to be one of the worst successes in Hollywood when it comes to looking after his own money and interests as long as he gets what he wants - in other words, he doesn't give a toss.
After all, everyone seems to forget he gave up all his money on Titanic in a show of financial responsibility (and although paid a post success bonus, remember, most everyone thought the film didn't stand a chance in hell of making a profit - least of all him). When it comes to The Terminator, way back when he sold the rights to the franchise for 1$ to his then producing partner / later ex wife Gale Anne Hurd - Cameron had some writing credits to his name and some work on Corman flicks but no directing credits, which he needed. He agreed to sell Hurd the rights for that low as long as no matter what happened he would get to direct the film.
After that it becomes a huge mess. Caroloco, who go bankrupt, end up with the rights as they chumped up for T2, and from there on its a nightmare. Basically, three times in his career a project hasn't happened because of stupidity, greed, beuracracy, and red tape (T3, Spiderman, The Minds of Billy Milligan). He has said he would love to do a T3 - it's just that he won't do it if it's not in his control, and as it stands now, it won't be.
And for the last damn time, Campbell will not play Spiderman. He's way too old. The Cameron treatment which is the basis of the Sony film (which they did manage to buy) has Spidey as a senior in high school.
Sam Raimi did not direct the Flintstones. He had a cameo role in it, as he has in many movies, but sometimes he gets confused with his brother Ted, an actor.
Raimi as a director and writer has collaborated with the Coen Brothers multiple times, and directed the Evil Dead trilogy, Crimewave, The Quick and the Dead, Darkman, and one of the best movies of last year, A Simple Plan.
His worst hour is For The Love of the Game... Which became even worse with that brouhaha over Costner being mad a shot of his dangly bits was cut out.
Slashdot Mirror
Until such issues become solid legislation and real attempts to strip our liberties rather than conflagaration to get square middle class votes, and on that day we should fucking fight like a heavyweight champion - until then let's consider what's truly important. Neither of the candidates during the debate apart from scurillious scaremongering had anything intelligent or definite to say about the supposed "culture of violence". It's just hype
The next president will appoint 3 supreme court justices.
What the candidates' position on space exploration might be.
A fossil fuel crisis is looming. Our demands outstrip what's needed. Next president has the power to declare areas in Alaska a national monument to prevent oil drilling. May I remind you that the only the only single remaining natural salmon runs in the US is now in Alaska.
These are some of the issues I don't think have been highlighted enough in favor of assurances to people about their money. What's more important to me is which candidate is equipped and intelligent enough to understand that science governs progress at this point in time, and is prepared to understand it's appliance.
Although I am a devout athiest, I can only say - and I think we all should - that there is information here which needs discussing, analyzing, theorizing. But no specific conclusions, because this issue is a lot bigger than sitting at your keyboard and blathering here.
On one final note, as an athiest, any evidence used to support the notion of a divine hand setting into motion the beginning of the universe can make sense, I concur. However, this does not mean that such divine presence means that any specific, and organized religious interpretation has any more credit than before. There is nothing here to suggest or bolster that Allah or Jehovah or Kronos or a chain of turtles had anything to do with it and therefore should live in accordance to their word or Law.
Maybe the ultimate reconciliation between science and religion will be when religion begins to focus on the greater, wider more cosmological notion of the divine rather than doctrine that should be applied to how people live and think. I think we as a species can sometimes to be humble enough to accept that there is something greater and bigger than all of us. But not in the form that still lingers on this planet, the poisons of dogma and doctrine and superstition.
How many people INSIDE the US listen to Voice of America? It's a radio station set up to offer, pretty much, propaganda of one sort to everyone else around the world. Not that that ain't bad. Very popular in East Germany for a few years there. More Americans listen to that welfare whore Rush Limbaugh (sitting on his pilodinal cyst eating pork rinds collecting welfare) than this radio program.
As such, it's controlled and disseminated in a strategic way, and at the moment in the Middle East, it's more important to the situation there for people to hear that the US cares about all the carnage in Israel / Palestine than US jingoism about our own losses.
Does that mean the the Cole incident is not a disturbing, horrific tragedy? Not at all. It means that strategically it's more important if we want a chance of influencing people in the Middle East with the voice of democracy to tell them and reinforce that their situation is more important.
Sheesh, when you read a document outside your sphere of knowledge, take the time to look at the signifiers. Intelligence supports the State Department on the repeal of such propaganda, because they're trying to control information for a purpose. I figure you right wingers would be over the moon, cause it fits into all your wanktastic Tom Clancy fantasies to see a document like that.
I actually think that this level of abstraction has nothing to with what I call the empathy a player has with a game character. It has to do with far more esoteric elements, like dialogue and action and what other characters say about the player, the basics of character in traditional drama - and/or options given to players to shape that character.
For example, I feel that JC Denton in Deus Ex is, for the most part me, to some degree. I have shaped that character through various choices into representing how I tackle the game world, how he looks, how he behaves.
On the other hand, Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid completely elicits my empathy despite being a fully fledged character who I don't choose dialogue for, who doesn't grow in skills of my choice, and looks slightly less realistic due to old technology. But when *spoiler warning* a certain character got sniped and I had to find a way to rescue her, my heart was pounding. In that moment I had a complete game playing epiphany, I was honestly concerned for the character involved and was really determined to get some payback. This was because the game had taken the time out to develop a relationship and put it in crisis.
Now that in Metal Gear Solid 2 I can actually read the expression on Solid Snake's face I think the empathic response will grow. It's a stated intention of Hideo Kojima to insure that his face will be readable as much as possible to convey that emotion.
On the other hand, I really, really cared for my Avatar in Ultima V, rendered in glorious EGA - especially, in another special moment in gaming, when I was asked to free an innocent man, knowing that it would get me into deep shit and danger. I was posed with a choice that had more consequence than abstraction survival by dodging bricks, and as a result I felt like I was in the world. This much feeling for a stick man.
Abstraction of character in the best comic books almost come off as a psychic defense; the cartoonish look of Barefoot Gen (autobiographical comic about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima) or Maus have been stated as a means to try and work through the reality of the horrors portrayed.
The real important necessity for gaming, as I've been babbling about for years, is not the degree of visual realism, but rather the need for sharp characters and deeper plots than bad cliched retreads of the most juvenile and aesthetic elements of genre fiction. Get that right, and you'll see empathy skyrocket.
Obviously there was an enormous amount of nationalism and cold war paranoia that led to the moon missions. But I think that moment that Armstrong set foot on the planet, the majority of common people with no overriding interest in such matters completely forgot what was going on and were enchanted that a human was standing on another planet. Read some accounts of the time and you'll see. For maybe a microsecond I don't think anyone thought "they're going to build a missle base up there". I think they thought what The Onion describes as a headline from 1969 "HOLY SHIT. MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON."
In fact, one of the most interesting things to me is that NASA have never made the majority of psychological research they've done on astronauts public. One concept was that many astronauts suffered from "The Overview Effect", overwhelmed by seeing the planet without any boundaries. The Cold War had put them up there, but being up there they saw what a joke it was. Several astronauts, especially moon mission ones, sought spiritual answers after their voyage.
So anyways, as this planet gets more and more cynical, I'm more eager to get off it.
Don't tell me for a moment that Ultima Underworld is anywhere near as easy to play as Deus Ex just for the 3d engine. UU's 3d world is a small, low res window where objects remain perpetually two dimensional and distort perspective. Repetitive textures lead to no real geography - the brain must adjust and form an abstract sort of wireframe map in the brain. Just getting your bearings is much more difficult. But the only thing that seperates the games, really, is technology. The storyline, characters, work on interface, and richness of the world is comparable today, and both are games far above the norm.
In fact, one could find that richness and depth in a much uglier game than either, Ultima VII - but I remember when it was coming out being blown away by the screenshots. Too many console launches and neat graphics cards since then, my brain is spoiled. Sure, there's even a correlation between filmic graphics and the bar set - does anyone remember watching Terminator 2 and thinking, well that's quite shoddy work? It was the first I can remember seeing where there wasn't a single dodgy effects shot - but today it's showing its age. Awareness of the illusion leads to disbelief, which is probably more important to games than even movies.
What seperates the games I mention above from others is a unification at every time they came out to be best at everything they attempted - technology and design both. We often argue for one or the other without ever thinking that the true beauty is when both work hand in hand. Building these worlds is absolutely worth it, and the best games continue to show the promise of the medium in the future.
But current development cycles in gaming seem to stifle this. I won't even get into this, as it's a much broader issue, but gaming is being changed from the outside in by a nasty corporate culture, shortened development cycles combined with large, uncommunacative teams, lack of support upon release, runaway and ludicrous mismanaged budgets, and worst of all SUITS who don't understand gaming and don't care and want no interest in advancing it as an art form. They want their merchandised rights title on two consoles and PC and done NOW, and to fix the problem they're going to hire 100 more people.
Retro gaming is an oddity at best, and doesn't address the larger issues of gaming entering the cultural mainstream. I say this as someone who collects consoles, aware of what gaming is becoming. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire PC edition will outsell Deus Ex two to one, I have no doubt of that.
And as more people come to the party they will expect a union between technology and design, the more mainstream audiences will demand a greater visual realism from games. There's no avoiding it. What's important is to give them both.
Or at least, that's what I think, but then look at Diablo II. Three year old graphics and console style gameplay - maybe that's the future (no disrespect to Blizzard as I find the product as addictive as crack.
Maybe it's just what future generations need. A completely galvanizing, international effort to begin to explore and colonize Mars. Not for the sake of money, but for the sake of humanity. When was the last time humanity felt a unified interest in a human endeavour that surpassed all ideas of nationalism? Probably when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
And ultimately, Mars represents a chance not to mess up another planet, but perhaps in a bout of completely head up my ass hopeful idealism to get it right. A chance to start all over again, and this time, with such a precarious and concerted effort to terraform the planet, maybe we'll even begin to understand how precious, rare, and difficult sustainable environments are.
Someday that lovely Sol is gonna go. Mars is the first and perhaps one of the most essential steps to readying mankind to continue. And I, for one, think we ought to. So hands up who thinks our new information driven economy is a more lofty goal than mankind exploring alien worlds and bringing life to where it is not.
I, for one, long for the day when news is reporting about humans walking on the surface of Mars as opposed to blather about Metallica and MP3s. Don't the rest of you?
Whether or not the lead leaks the fact is obsolence in this field is FAST and the result is that so much silicon and plastic and so on has got to pile up somewhere. Whether or not there is leakage from contaminants, these extremely non biodegradeable materials will have to take up some space because they get thrown away so often.
The other thing to think about is that geeks often forget that computation is ubiquitious and therefore everyone has computers and doesn't know what to do with old ones. Most people wouldn't know how to jury rig old systems together with obsolete parts and find a use for them - and those are the majority of computer users today.
For that matter, the computing industry as a whole is totally screwed by complete lack of ingenuity when it comes to recycling. Just recently I had a leftover case and p350 proc, and all I wanted was a very small, very cheap hard drive, new, to make a machine for my girlfriend. Since I'm in a small town in the US at the moment I can't go to my usual urban haunts with used parts, and my options are to basically buy a new 20 gig drive and that's it.
And one other thing - laminated chipboard is some of the most durable stuff on earth. It's nearly frigging invincible to the elements. And it's already started to pile up, and boy is it gonna get worse. Whether or not you think computers are safe to dump without contamination to the environment, fact is that the landfill is land that could, say, be a park for kids to play in.
Just some friendly idealism and simplicity from someone who considers outta sight outta mind to be one of the most dangerous attitudes out there.
I've returned to the U.S. for the first time in a year and I'm freaked out. Part of it, I suppose, is the craziness of election year. Part of it is genuine culture shock. I know living overseas that its boomtime for the economy and so on, but that didn't prepare me for how confused and despondent and cynical and unhappy everyone seems.
In the culture as a whole, all it seems there is to do is shop. The Net offered us freedom from that. But no longer. It's over. It's a big strip mall. We lost. When Britney Fucking Spears is singing about her email lover you know that ubiquity won out and what made us geeks special is lost forever. So we adapt or die. What we have to fight to preserve now are essential freedoms. It's the falling action, the final movement. At least some of us might get it together now. You know, for all the talk of Napster blah blah blah, this week was a real eye opener about another side to the whole fucking story. My friend's in a band in Seattle. Recently Paul Schell, the idiot who fucked up the WTO situation, vetoed a law approved 7:1 by the city council to change laws regarding all ages shows so that they would retain the protection and safety that club owners need while lifting age restrictions so that young people could take part in a culture, a scene, a lifestyle - something other than going to the fucking mall.
My friends in a band were playing the Bumbershoot festival and called up Paul Schell in front of 700 audience members and got everyone to let him know what his chances of getting their votes are. It was great. In one coordinated moment it was made clear Mr. Schell had lost 700 votes. Audience was instructed to meet with people passing out fliers to learn about more constructive ways they can help.
This was real action on a micro level that could extend out, was active, was real, had consequences and reality to it. Unlike the bitching and moaning us creative typists who clog bandwidth with our universally fleeting opinions that register for about a nanosecond in the constantly updating Net, where things are to be forgotten as soon as possible.
And this band, who have NOT sold out, who have refused corporate sponsorship and money and even deals that would extend creative autonomny with corporate money - just out of passion and experience with their culture of music - they will barely make the poverty line in income off of their album this year. Most of them work full time in a non profit center shipping anti violence pamphlets to schools to make a living. Despite being "successful", with albums sold across the US, sold out shows, and real media coverage. So how many of their tracks can I find on Napster? Plenty.
What I find distressing about the current geek climate is that there has been no change in our culture to reflect the changes in society and politics. What I find is a bizzare generation of mostly male zealots who believe themselves to be the front runners for a massive change in civilization, entirely conservative at their core in their political beliefs as far as it extends to protecting their ability to make money and save on taxes - yet when it comes to the "liberty" of being able to rip off some other culture for their own enjoyment and because they can, the greed comes out in spades.
Seeing what I did in Seattle this week taught me that. We're completely adrift and need to wake up and change what's important and agree on major things as a whole, determine what's really fucking important instead of whining forever and forever until we are treated like a grown up AV club.
One of the ones that got me was a report that ADSL, which was supposed to be released in April (the London exchanges have been for the most part open since March) was delayed because BT told OFTEL that there wasn't enough interest in their trials.
That's interesting, since I know about 20 people who couldn't get on one. Then I managed to coax out of a customer service operator an ADSL department phone number. Asked to join a trial, and was told that tons of people ask that but they're full up. Interesting, I say, referring to your company's refusal to release ADSL because you don't have enough triallists. Hemm, hawww... Uhhh... I absolutely swear that three days later this phone number wasn't working anymore.
So this is what us UKers face. ADSL for roughly 65-70 US dollars a month (when you can get 2 Mbps no contention in the US for 40 dollars a month) at a 50:1 contention ratio, ethernet not allowed, only USB modem. Did I say 50:1 contention ratio? Did I mention that some urban areas of London have such bad copper lines that you can hear the connection break when the wind blows?
Or you can get their damned Home Highway ISDN service, which is what I have opted for. Starting in June, with Surftime it should cost roughly 67 pounds for 24 / 7 dual channel ISDN and two seperate analog lines for phone calls (this is great for my setup, as my roommate and I need our own phone numbers and lines, and we can play Counterstrike together on the Net using a 64k channel each). But it gets even better, as I've just found out. BT always inadverently screw up the installation. What most people don't know is that the agreement you sign indicates they owe you a month of rental for each day that the installation is late. They don't tell you this, you have to read the fine print and bitch. Well, as a result, I now have 5 months free ISDN rental. Woo hoo! Starting to love this company's inefficiency. We've started joking that next week when the engineer comes we'll chop down the telephone pole until BT owes us for 30 months compensation.
One last thing about HH. It makes you sign a year long contact that is unvoidable by any means. If you move, you're screwed. No transferring the account. If you got HH before April 25th, you can switch to ADSL for free... If you sign a 3 year binding agreement. Nice company, huh? And make sure you don't use the BT Terminal Adapter. Pings of 70-100 compared to 30-40 in a net game.
For further reading, check this message board: Wireplay's forum for broadband. There's always insider info and tips here.
William Gibson co opted this phrase from Vernor Vinge - a technological singularity - to use in his recent trilogy. It's a point where some form of technology is so transformative that we cannot imagine beyond it - literally like falling into a black hole.
There was some complaint about the way Gibson ends his recent trilogy, but it's spot on. It's an admission - faced with this technology - there can be no more imagining, only intuition.
Because if the technology ever becomes viable to produce any substance or product endlessly, it changes every rule and boundary our society and culture is based on today. Stephenson had to cheat and force societal constraints on his world in order to discuss nanotech in The Diamond Age.
The truth is, the basic governing element of our species has been the procurement and transformation of resources, since we rose out of a lake in Africa. Remove that, and what do we become?
The implications are that there can be no accurate speculation. Those who live post nanotech live in a different universe than we do.
Directly from the book now, with no extractions:
"... access to large quantities of ancient timber for an average price of a dollar and a half per thousand board feet."
So, the wood is sold to the privatized corporations for $1.50 per board foot, when the worth is $700 per thousand board feet. I didn't actually how shocking that was until you made me correct it. A dollar and a half spent for roughly $700 worth of raw materials... Damn.
First, as someone who grew up in the Great Northwest, I suggest you take a flight over the state of Washington sometime. You'll see what no statistic can ever show - that the majority of forest land is GONE. There is a three foot buffer zone around highways to give the appearance of forestry, but an aerial view does much to bring it all home.
In British Columbia, clear cuts have stretched 180 square miles. It is a bald patch visible in SPACE. Ever wonder why the salmon industry vanished in the Northwest? Because clear cutting effects rivers and rivers effect salmon and thereby 5 million people lose their jobs when the natural salmon runs vanish. Ho Hum.
Here's a short excerpt from Carl Safina's (a director of programs for the National Audobon Society and professor at Yale) book Song For The Blue Ocean, a year long study to examine the truth behind ecological warnings. Bear in mind that Safina is an avowed fisherman who is concerned about people keeping their jobs, not a hippie tree hugger by any means. A read of this book will prove so. He examined such issues as the spotted owl and deforestation in the Northwest with as open a mind as possible, interviewing people representing all viewpoints, in order to assest in hindsight the truth behind these issues.
"In Alaska's panhandle, the 17 mil acre Tongass National Forest is the continent's last resovoir of ancient timber. Fifty year contracts signed in the 50s guarantee two companies (one Japanese owned) access to large quantities of timber for avg. $1.50 per board foot. The wood is worth $700 per thousand board feet. The Tongass sells more timber and loses more money than any other national forest, forty to sixty million dollars a year. In some years, it has lost 99 cents on every dollar it spent to sell trees."
In other words, it short sells ancient timber from parklands (public land) at a loss to private corporations. Ho hum.
Here's some facts for you:
"In nice round terms, a century of logging eliminated 90 percent of the ancient salmon forests of Oregon and Washington. About 5 percent is protected. All the remaining ancient forest on US soil in the Pacific Northwest will be gone before 2010 unless specifically protected."
As for the basis of these facts, I urge you to read the book and check his biblography, which is more than esteemed, all information coming from eminent scientific publications and journals. As for yours, where do they come from?
Gaming is stagnating, and that's a fact. Innovation? Try EA SPORTS XXXXXXXX SEPTEMBER EDITION. Another Dune 2 clone. Another 3d shooter. I think that the game industry took a wrong turn at a certain point and for the right reasons but we're still having to deal with the fallout. Namely, when CD drives allowed massive (relatively) storage with muldimedia there was all this talk about synergy between the movie industry and gaming. The result was crap games with shit interactivity and horrid FMV. What should have been reaped from Hollywood was storytelling that is rigourously tested, strong characterization, and an attempt to be something more. 99% of movies are crap, yes, but the ones that get away and are something extraordinary are so special because of what an epiphany they represent. I feel gaming has come close but nowhere near having the emotional effect of the greatest movies. The games that are widely loved by the hardcore gamers are the ones that come closest to sports, (and that's what deatmatches are really) which cannot do this. There is, in my mind, an arena for games which want to do more. This is why Metal Gear Solid, say, impressed me from a design perspective so much. It was an action adventure game with a unique interface and play style, highly recognizable and differentiated characters, and an actual attempt to say something about the world - all within the confines of a game. I think a glance at Quake 3 will confirm that there is a marked difference between design and coding. I'm not slamming Q3, I'm a huge admirer, and am in awe of John Carmack and his talents, but I do not think Quake 3 is a brilliant work of immersive design. Granted, it aims for a different experience.
One of the hardest things about the game industry is that cracking into designing, which I believe should be a specialized position, happens through moving up the ladder either as a coder or a play tester... And I'm sorry, but I just do not feel that coders (with the exception of Neal Stephenson) make great storytellers, nor the greatest human computer interaction gurus. It's about time designing was made a discipline of its own, and there was a way for people to get an overview of gaming and come to companies with some form of acceptable accreditation. The game designers I respect the most did not come from a traditional coding background, people like Warren Spector (who wrote novels and worked for TSR) or Rod Fung (who comes from a cinematography background)
PC gaming is in for a big shock soon, undoubtedly, with the new generation of consoles and the simple fact is that the games that sell well are no longer real PC games but bargain Deer Hunting titles. That's a fact. There's amazing, ridiculous amounts of money floating around, with nothing to show for (COUGH COUGH ION STORM) and designer's reputations based on tenuous connections to a track record (COUGH COUGH JOHN ROMERO). Hopefully the establishment of such a course will make the gaming industry listen and change their ways, and we'll be better off for it. Oh, and BTW, Alias/Wavefront is amazingly expensive stuff. One of the best things about this course is that I can see students getting a chance to use the really high end industry strength apps without having to warez them. I do CG in my free time as a film student trying to learn tools, and recently pricing Maya - there's even a yearly license fee for student use. If as a student I was able to get my hands on motion capture utilities, a terrific sound recording studio, people interested in the same thing (unlike film school where there's like 2 people who want to make something that people would actually want to see and everyone else wants to make "art"), and access to some high end apps sounds blissful and serious to me.
I honestly don't know if that law's set in stone, you'll obviously have seen magazine adverts for shops that offer code free players, but that was my experience.
Add to this the idiocy of the BBFC: they demand that SUPPLEMENTS on DVDs, such as outtakes and making of documentaries, need a BBFC certficate in order to pass, henceforth the DVD producer has to submit that material and a fee to the BBFC. This is supposedly one of the reasons Criterion doesn't release their discs in the UK.
Add to this that it is not technically illegal to chip, modify, or hack a DVD player to play all Region discs - but it is illegal for a store clerk to suggest to you how to do it or provide help with it. All European DVD players can play NTSC or PAL - and several have super easy hacks to defeat the coding, such as a combination to put in the remote. Search the web and thou shalt find...
Now it gets even weirder. Some DVDs in the UK are released as anamorphic (enhanced for widescreen TVs) when they aren't in the U.S. because of wider market penetration of widescreen TVs in Europe.
Region Coding is extremely defeatable. I recommend heartily anyone with a Windoze system to watch DVDs on to use the Creative Labs DXR3 kit - a DVD drive, and a dedicated decoder board ready for 5.1 surround sound for 150 - 200 US dollars. Go to This site and download a 500 k app that lets you defeat region coding piece o cake. Basically, for about 150 dollars for DXR3, 300 dollars for my Videologic 5.1 surround kit, and a simple app I have a region free DVD player routed to my 16x9 capable television.
I buy some Region DVDs of movies that haven't been released here in the U.K. because a) I'm an American, moving back to America in a year, and I want DVDs that will work there b) American DVDs tend to have more supplements and c) A movie in Central London will litearally cost you 20$ for a decent seat. This way I can watch a movie without a dim projector bulb and crappy reel changes and some idiot's mobile phone going off while they're talking during the movie.
"The mastermind of a piracy ring has been arrested in Norway for hacking DVDs, breaking their copy protection to make illegal copies of DVDs"
(Stock footage of hidden camera in some Asian market stall, panning rapidly by what may or may not be illegal DVDs)
Saw countless other examples in newspapers today. Just plain untruths, attempts to demonize Jon, and Linux or Xing never being mentioned once.
Personally, I think slashdot should drill this issue as hard as possible - because anyone who becomes convinced that the reality has to do with people wanting to run DVDs on the OS of their choice is NOT being reported. It's much juicier for them to say that some 16 year old screwed over the power elite of Hollywood through some nefarious scheme by an embittered nerd genius - and that's what they're running with.
However, I wish he would take part in the community as a whole, and post with us and take part in the real /. community. I think that would stop a lot of flames against him. He could've then addressed this with the community as a whole, and all would be well.
I take back my harsh words...
It was reported here and in Daily Variety that New Line Features bought the rights to Katz's book "Geeks" to be made into a feature film. New Line are a Time Warner company. The fact that Katz can rant so readily about TW / AOL's evil and yet profit from that corporation himself - even the behavior of most of our politicians isn't so disgustingly hypocritical. At least they don't sell us the notion of themselves as Anti Corporate.
In fact, despite Katz's declarations, most of my female friends dig communications mediums such as IRC because of the anonymity it affords. I'm not too into my gender studies, being a small town boy and all that, but I find that in essence, the current text based medium that comprises most of the web is democratic to all races and genders because when you're just text it's the content of what you say more than anything else.
And I say this as someone who had to go to court on assault charges several years back after I got into a fight with someone who called me an Irish slur. That was a waste of three years of my life and money, and if I met the same punk in IRC and were allowed to vent my hostility with just wit and words it would've been better for both of us - I wouldn't have had to get stitches, and he wouldn't have had to been found guilty...
Though I suppose fifteen minutes in my infinitely juvenile presence on IRC is enough to assume I'm one of those dorkass twenty five year old boys who spends way too much money on Japanese import Gundam model kits.
That's about all I have to say.
I read and post to slashdot because its entire perview is anything but narrow or hostile. Options are present for me to filter out the information I regard as useless. Sometimes I post and get high karma. Sometimes I don't. It happens.
Time and time again I read about an issue on slashdot and find the User Comments more valuable than the post. An item on wearable computing might lead to a post by someone who actually makes them, and links to more information. My interest in technology and culture finds this site the perfect compliment to these curiosities, despite some people insisting that slashdot's focus should be more narrow.
However, I cannot help but feel Mr. Katz' recent articles are written only in reaction to the amount of negative posts he generates here. I do not understand this three part series' point whatsoever - the main criticism I find levelled at Katz by my friends who are literate, polite, non flaming linux users is that being a cultural person he is more interested in buzzwords than content - driving an issue based on its importance rather than providing any real insight - something I do not agree with completely but understand, and wish them to be able to express that opinion. I do not sit here flaming anonymously, but as myself.
I am a minority. I am non white. My mother was an immigrant from a low tech country to the U.S. I am not a coder. My expertise is in an analog tech format (filmmaking). I am everything that katz has suggested online communities are - but I am not a dangerous, hostile adolescent who uses the Net for juvenile vitriol.
I've found this community and many others on the net all the same - there are minorities and, yes, women present - as computing becomes more ubiquitious it will become even more diverse. There are flamers, and there are intelligent posters, and trolls. There is highly valuable news and some which is worthless to myself or others. At the end of the day, as the reader, I make slashdot to be my own - taking what I need and is important from it.
I don't see why this model is so deprecative to society, as Mr. Katz would have it. Anybody else feel like me despite the lunacy and annoyance that every Jeff K on the net generates, there is something more profound, just waiting for you to find it, instead of a hierarchy deciding it for us.
And just to keep it in one comment, I'd like to know what Mr. Katz would like to say to us slashdotters about the fact that he has sold his book to a company that will soon be owned (more than likely) by AOL - (Fine Line pictures is owned by Time Warner). Within his dealings of a traditional media hierarchy, does he not expect any influence from corporate control - as opposed to the freedom afforded us in this forum?
True PAL and NTSC support (different resolutions, framerates, 16x9 support, and interlace issues). In order to convert between the two, commerical software runs about 800 dollars. It's not as easy as having a simple converter box. If you're doing broadcast quality stuff there is a helluva lot of problems in converting the two, especially when it comes to color signals.
Ability to convert finished files into various formats at different resolutions and data rates. Scaleable monitors to different resolutions on desktop in real time.
Support of the 48.1 khz audio band, for DV sound editing - and native non square pixel support for DV.
True timecode support.
Avid is the king for filmmaking right now because of the myriad problems regarding the differing framerate for film (24 fps) and video - and its ability to recognize the limitations of film (you want to do a dissolve? You're going to have to strike a dupe print - unless you can afford to have your opticals done digitally), and its mastery of creating EDL for importing to neg cutters, etc. None of the home, relatively cheap NLE solutions have full support of this so far.
Win based video editing apps are so sloppy in so many ways, so if you want to beat them, listen to people who use NLEs regularly and listen to their lengthy list of complaints.
Cameron does not think he is too good to do Terminator 3 at all - the problem is contractural and legal. Cameron has to be one of the worst successes in Hollywood when it comes to looking after his own money and interests as long as he gets what he wants - in other words, he doesn't give a toss.
After all, everyone seems to forget he gave up all his money on Titanic in a show of financial responsibility (and although paid a post success bonus, remember, most everyone thought the film didn't stand a chance in hell of making a profit - least of all him). When it comes to The Terminator, way back when he sold the rights to the franchise for 1$ to his then producing partner / later ex wife Gale Anne Hurd - Cameron had some writing credits to his name and some work on Corman flicks but no directing credits, which he needed. He agreed to sell Hurd the rights for that low as long as no matter what happened he would get to direct the film.
After that it becomes a huge mess. Caroloco, who go bankrupt, end up with the rights as they chumped up for T2, and from there on its a nightmare. Basically, three times in his career a project hasn't happened because of stupidity, greed, beuracracy, and red tape (T3, Spiderman, The Minds of Billy Milligan). He has said he would love to do a T3 - it's just that he won't do it if it's not in his control, and as it stands now, it won't be.
And for the last damn time, Campbell will not play Spiderman. He's way too old. The Cameron treatment which is the basis of the Sony film (which they did manage to buy) has Spidey as a senior in high school.
Sam Raimi did not direct the Flintstones. He had a cameo role in it, as he has in many movies, but sometimes he gets confused with his brother Ted, an actor.
Raimi as a director and writer has collaborated with the Coen Brothers multiple times, and directed the Evil Dead trilogy, Crimewave, The Quick and the Dead, Darkman, and one of the best movies of last year, A Simple Plan.
His worst hour is For The Love of the Game... Which became even worse with that brouhaha over Costner being mad a shot of his dangly bits was cut out.