The page linked is, of course, the one from BT's hyperlink patent story we discussed recently. One of the videos on the site demonstrates the use of that very thing.
My guess would be that they are starting with Prodigy because that early eighties linking is both closer to what the patent describes, and also Prodigy were more clearly responsible for the linking. With the web, do you hit the commitee for inventing the html standard, Netscape for building the browser, AOL for running the network or the designer of the web page?
Liam sampled the engaged tone to use as the backing on the 12" single of Charley all those years ago. Since they have only just realised, they now want royalties for everything, since its that sample-fest that launched his (and his drug dealing mate's) career.
n.b. Some, all or none of the above is complete bollocks.
BT are a privatised corporation - they used to be Government owned and run (actually, while the BBC is paid for by a tax they defend their independance fiercely), but were sold off during the 1980s to pay for tax breaks.
As for the whole patent thing, I've no idea when the patent runs out, and I'm not even going near the question of if its defendable. Let the lawyers argue that one out.
I've met Peters Bracke and Staddon (although I've not really had a chance to chat with Peter Bracke) and believe me, they geek out on film and DVD at least as much as/. readers do about Linux. When Staddon took over, Fox were releasing non-anamorphic, overpriced, featureless, less than wonderfully mastered discs like the original Die Hard releases. Now we have many of the best discs in the world from them thanks to Peter's team of experts - you only have to look at the great five star edition that replaced that original release to see that.
These people are great at what they do, but they do it because they love it - you can't say that Martin Scorcese is a bad director because he loves film, so why should those who work in other areas of the industry be any different?
aah, I see. I was hoping that the publisher you bought the rights off might be of the mindset to take a smaller cut on the title where it entailed purchase of the original release. i.e. regard a Linux/Amiga port as like an expansion disc rather than a sequel.
Mind you, I didn't get a discount from Universal when I bought Lost World (I think its fun, ok?) on DVD, despite already having the laserdisc and VHS releases, which is the nearest equivalent I can think of.
Here's another suggestion then- how about something like a Bleemcast! equivalent then; charge less for your port, but require the data files off the 'original' version. I know that Bleem! is dead though, so this obviously doesn't work _that_ well.
Its just that what killed UT and Q3A on Linux was that it was cheaper to buy the discounted Windows version and get the free binaries than it was to buy the Linux-specific one, and people do balk at paying £35 twice for the privilege of getting it running on both platforms. Mind you, they seem to be ok at paying the same price for DVDs even if they bought the VHS release, so maybe its a mindset thing after all.
CDDB charging is even worse, but what I meant by the IMDb reference is the ever increasing number of pop-ups, pop-unders and other advertising, seemingly designed to make the use of the free service as horrible as possible. My point was that while everyone else seems to be piling on ever more intrusive and obstructive ways of keeping you on the site to advertise irrelevant crap at you or make you pay for things, Google is quietly making a profit providing a service that is a pleasure to use. The only adverts I see there are ones relevant to the search I make and it keeps the bandwidth use down with a clean design so its fast despite being phenomenally popular. Why would you use something like Yahoo!, where you get the same results (its powered by Google anyway), in four times the time with popups and crap that make it difficult to find the important info?
According to the article in today's Guardian Newspaper, Google is running a profit that they recognise is down to being good, thin, and useable, so we hopefully won't see it go the way of the IMDb etc.
Read on. Its a rather wise observation of many reasonably intelligent people at that time of their life. I also did rather well at school, and my nice set of 'A' rated A-levels made me rather big-headed as well. Its the following bit where you go off to University and promptly get knocked back down to size as you're surrounded by a load of people who also thought like this thats important.
The original disc sucked. If you wanted it you were welcome to buy it or not buy it. If you don't want to pay to get the better disc now then don't do that either. But in this case its been so long its like complaining that AMD now sell an XP2000+ chip, when you only bought a K6-3 recently, so you should go back to stealing your hardware from the nearest wholesaler.
What do I find annoying? The fact that I can't get a nice anamorphic Special Edition disc of Mission: Impossible (the decent Brian De Palma film, not that abomination that sullied John Woo's reputation) because Paramount released a shite version a few years ago and don't want to offend people like you.
I stand corrected - thats one quality source. I do know that its perfectly possible that those bitrates can look good (the classic example being the rather wonderful single layer transfer of The Fifth Element), but as you say with dark sequences guessing whats going to need large amounts of bitrate is very difficult. I saw a bit of the testing for encoding the X-Files movie when I was at Fox one time, and I can certainly agree that some scenes just eat bandwidth for breakfast in order to get them looking good.
Also, one man's quite good is another's unacceptably poor - just look at all the posts in this (or any other/. DVD discussion) thread where people are happy with either Off-Air VHS or DiVX;-) encodings.
Frankly I've never seen a disc with "four hours of high quality video". I'd alledge that your book is wrong, or at least outdated. What I thought was 3.5 hours of quality video when Das Boot came out three years ago now looks overcompressed, and a more accurate comparison would be the way that it was felt necessary to insert an intermission and disc change into the 183 minute Pearl Harbor in order to maintain the best possible picture and sound quality. Mpeg2 picture encoding is a nebulous art, and generalisations like the above are very difficult however. I would point out though, that Fox have only four episodes per disc on their X-Files episodes, and even some of them could do with some more bits.
I'll try not to make the standard slashdot assumption about you being American (I'm from the UK myself), but if you can play R1 discs then you should know that a (fairly cheap) disc of The Gathering and In The Beginning was released before Christmas. Warner are apparently using the popularity of that disc to decide if its worth doing the whole series; they got burned in the US with abysmal sales of the VHS and Laserdisc episodes, as they continue to deny saying anything about a DVD release and so didn't believe that we are all waiting for them.
1) PS2 does a serviceable 5.1 DTS in game for SSX Tricky and some of the upcoming EA titles - EA has worked out with DTS how to use one of the two vector units to encode realtime in software.
2) XBox does encode DD 5.1 in hardware (best used in Halo), but that hardware doesn't support DTS (well, it _was_ developed with Dolby, so what did you expect).
3) Gamecube only supports 5.1 through the rare Dolby ProLogic II system (as used in Rogue Leader), and the game hardware has no digital out to supply either DD or DTS. If you can decode it fully though (its backwards compatible to DPL1 for reasonable surround) its pretty good; I thought it almost as good as DD 5.1 when I tried it.
The PS2, XBox and Panny Cube can all pass both DD 5.1 and DTS for DVD playback however, which seems to be the source of confusion.
No, Sony don't make you buy a remote. You can just use the Dualshock to control the player if you want; DVD Consortium fees are in the price of the unit.
Personally, I've already got a perfectly good player (it should be noted that PS2 can't outperform even the cheapest of cheap standalone players) for watching my DVD collection; I want to buy a console, and the Gamecube suits my needs best.
Gamecube discs aren't even just 3cm DVD discs; for added fun they are written in the opposite direction - outside to in, so the spiral is the other way round. They really don't like making it easy.
Oh dear. Something weird going on with the mod system when its only the posts at 0 or -1 that remind people for the nth time. Not everyone loses money on console hardware sales. This is one myth that just won't go away.
Actually thats why I'd go further than Carmack on this one. I don't just think the abstract creative design (as he has just defined it) is 1% of the total effort in creating the game, its only about 1% of the effort for the design team. Creating the basic scenario for the game is something anyone thinks they can do, so 'anyone' thinks they can be a games designer. Its when working out how that would be implemented, constantly keeping things structured while knowing when to break with that design document when the code shows it failing that a top designer makes their keep. Otherwise the original, infamous, version of Half-life would have been what we got, rather than Valve junking everything that was shown to be failing and trying again.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that perhaps Daikatana wouldn't have been so bad if someone would have said "I don't care what the design plan says, this bit isn't fun - make it not suck".
Re:Apple Hype - the reverse?
on
Apple PDA?
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· Score: 1
Particularly given our anonymous collegue's reminder about how Apple make money with hardware, not software, if you're going to wildly speculate how about wondering if they could do an x86 version of a Cube-alike? I'd certainly pay over the odds for a nice looking box that still let me play Half Life.
More seriously, I'd love to see ATI lose the 'default graphics card' hat to be replaced with a nice shiny NVidia GeForce 3 based model in the new machines. That would make for interesting times, and a head-on argument with Microsoft.
Re:Nightmarish "Progress"
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
This argument fails the moment anyone realises that its not a one economy per country relation however. Much of Scandanavia, for instance, has a very similiar economy, and France and Germany are also very tied. Meanwhile the North of England has quite a different economy to that of the South-East, but that doesn't stop it having a common currency. Is the economy of Ohio tied that closely to that of California, for instance?
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Thats a good point in theory (although I make it a point never to lend cash to people likely to be involved in drug busts...) but in practice there isn't any 'registering' of bills to people at the moment anyway, so this doesn't work.
Besides, at its very worst this would only be as bad as buying something on credit card, and I can't think of a time I bought something with cash to avoid it being on my statement.
Thats a serious level of counterfeiting!
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
I'm not going to bother arguing about the relative strength of the US Dollar and Sterling; after all your currency is already considered an international one for many business transactions. I _will_ be mildly alarmed that you appear to plan counterfeiting enough of them that you have to consider how much your fake Sterling would cause the currency to devalue!
Slashdot Mirror
The page linked is, of course, the one from BT's hyperlink patent story we discussed recently. One of the videos on the site demonstrates the use of that very thing.
Well, at the risk of sounding like I support censorship on a site like this...
Perhaps your employer just doesn't want you going to sites that are unlikely to be anything business related?
My guess would be that they are starting with Prodigy because that early eighties linking is both closer to what the patent describes, and also Prodigy were more clearly responsible for the linking. With the web, do you hit the commitee for inventing the html standard, Netscape for building the browser, AOL for running the network or the designer of the web page?
Liam sampled the engaged tone to use as the backing on the 12" single of Charley all those years ago. Since they have only just realised, they now want royalties for everything, since its that sample-fest that launched his (and his drug dealing mate's) career.
n.b. Some, all or none of the above is complete bollocks.
BT are a privatised corporation - they used to be Government owned and run (actually, while the BBC is paid for by a tax they defend their independance fiercely), but were sold off during the 1980s to pay for tax breaks.
As for the whole patent thing, I've no idea when the patent runs out, and I'm not even going near the question of if its defendable. Let the lawyers argue that one out.
I've met Peters Bracke and Staddon (although I've not really had a chance to chat with Peter Bracke) and believe me, they geek out on film and DVD at least as much as /. readers do about Linux. When Staddon took over, Fox were releasing non-anamorphic, overpriced, featureless, less than wonderfully mastered discs like the original Die Hard releases. Now we have many of the best discs in the world from them thanks to Peter's team of experts - you only have to look at the great five star edition that replaced that original release to see that.
These people are great at what they do, but they do it because they love it - you can't say that Martin Scorcese is a bad director because he loves film, so why should those who work in other areas of the industry be any different?
aah, I see. I was hoping that the publisher you bought the rights off might be of the mindset to take a smaller cut on the title where it entailed purchase of the original release. i.e. regard a Linux/Amiga port as like an expansion disc rather than a sequel.
Mind you, I didn't get a discount from Universal when I bought Lost World (I think its fun, ok?) on DVD, despite already having the laserdisc and VHS releases, which is the nearest equivalent I can think of.
Here's another suggestion then- how about something like a Bleemcast! equivalent then; charge less for your port, but require the data files off the 'original' version. I know that Bleem! is dead though, so this obviously doesn't work _that_ well.
Its just that what killed UT and Q3A on Linux was that it was cheaper to buy the discounted Windows version and get the free binaries than it was to buy the Linux-specific one, and people do balk at paying £35 twice for the privilege of getting it running on both platforms. Mind you, they seem to be ok at paying the same price for DVDs even if they bought the VHS release, so maybe its a mindset thing after all.
CDDB charging is even worse, but what I meant by the IMDb reference is the ever increasing number of pop-ups, pop-unders and other advertising, seemingly designed to make the use of the free service as horrible as possible. My point was that while everyone else seems to be piling on ever more intrusive and obstructive ways of keeping you on the site to advertise irrelevant crap at you or make you pay for things, Google is quietly making a profit providing a service that is a pleasure to use. The only adverts I see there are ones relevant to the search I make and it keeps the bandwidth use down with a clean design so its fast despite being phenomenally popular. Why would you use something like Yahoo!, where you get the same results (its powered by Google anyway), in four times the time with popups and crap that make it difficult to find the important info?
According to the article in today's Guardian Newspaper, Google is running a profit that they recognise is down to being good, thin, and useable, so we hopefully won't see it go the way of the IMDb etc.
Read on. Its a rather wise observation of many reasonably intelligent people at that time of their life. I also did rather well at school, and my nice set of 'A' rated A-levels made me rather big-headed as well. Its the following bit where you go off to University and promptly get knocked back down to size as you're surrounded by a load of people who also thought like this thats important.
The original disc sucked. If you wanted it you were welcome to buy it or not buy it. If you don't want to pay to get the better disc now then don't do that either. But in this case its been so long its like complaining that AMD now sell an XP2000+ chip, when you only bought a K6-3 recently, so you should go back to stealing your hardware from the nearest wholesaler.
What do I find annoying? The fact that I can't get a nice anamorphic Special Edition disc of Mission: Impossible (the decent Brian De Palma film, not that abomination that sullied John Woo's reputation) because Paramount released a shite version a few years ago and don't want to offend people like you.
I stand corrected - thats one quality source. I do know that its perfectly possible that those bitrates can look good (the classic example being the rather wonderful single layer transfer of The Fifth Element), but as you say with dark sequences guessing whats going to need large amounts of bitrate is very difficult. I saw a bit of the testing for encoding the X-Files movie when I was at Fox one time, and I can certainly agree that some scenes just eat bandwidth for breakfast in order to get them looking good.
/. DVD discussion) thread where people are happy with either Off-Air VHS or DiVX;-) encodings.
Also, one man's quite good is another's unacceptably poor - just look at all the posts in this (or any other
Frankly I've never seen a disc with "four hours of high quality video". I'd alledge that your book is wrong, or at least outdated. What I thought was 3.5 hours of quality video when Das Boot came out three years ago now looks overcompressed, and a more accurate comparison would be the way that it was felt necessary to insert an intermission and disc change into the 183 minute Pearl Harbor in order to maintain the best possible picture and sound quality. Mpeg2 picture encoding is a nebulous art, and generalisations like the above are very difficult however. I would point out though, that Fox have only four episodes per disc on their X-Files episodes, and even some of them could do with some more bits.
I'll try not to make the standard slashdot assumption about you being American (I'm from the UK myself), but if you can play R1 discs then you should know that a (fairly cheap) disc of The Gathering and In The Beginning was released before Christmas. Warner are apparently using the popularity of that disc to decide if its worth doing the whole series; they got burned in the US with abysmal sales of the VHS and Laserdisc episodes, as they continue to deny saying anything about a DVD release and so didn't believe that we are all waiting for them.
Great Idea!
That way us Europeans get to read all the stories 5 or more hours before the Americans do. Or not...
Or, to correct matters,
1) PS2 does a serviceable 5.1 DTS in game for SSX Tricky and some of the upcoming EA titles - EA has worked out with DTS how to use one of the two vector units to encode realtime in software.
2) XBox does encode DD 5.1 in hardware (best used in Halo), but that hardware doesn't support DTS (well, it _was_ developed with Dolby, so what did you expect).
3) Gamecube only supports 5.1 through the rare Dolby ProLogic II system (as used in Rogue Leader), and the game hardware has no digital out to supply either DD or DTS. If you can decode it fully though (its backwards compatible to DPL1 for reasonable surround) its pretty good; I thought it almost as good as DD 5.1 when I tried it.
The PS2, XBox and Panny Cube can all pass both DD 5.1 and DTS for DVD playback however, which seems to be the source of confusion.
No, Sony don't make you buy a remote. You can just use the Dualshock to control the player if you want; DVD Consortium fees are in the price of the unit.
Personally, I've already got a perfectly good player (it should be noted that PS2 can't outperform even the cheapest of cheap standalone players) for watching my DVD collection; I want to buy a console, and the Gamecube suits my needs best.
Gamecube discs aren't even just 3cm DVD discs; for added fun they are written in the opposite direction - outside to in, so the spiral is the other way round. They really don't like making it easy.
Oh dear. Something weird going on with the mod system when its only the posts at 0 or -1 that remind people for the nth time. Not everyone loses money on console hardware sales. This is one myth that just won't go away.
Actually thats why I'd go further than Carmack on this one. I don't just think the abstract creative design (as he has just defined it) is 1% of the total effort in creating the game, its only about 1% of the effort for the design team. Creating the basic scenario for the game is something anyone thinks they can do, so 'anyone' thinks they can be a games designer. Its when working out how that would be implemented, constantly keeping things structured while knowing when to break with that design document when the code shows it failing that a top designer makes their keep. Otherwise the original, infamous, version of Half-life would have been what we got, rather than Valve junking everything that was shown to be failing and trying again.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that perhaps Daikatana wouldn't have been so bad if someone would have said "I don't care what the design plan says, this bit isn't fun - make it not suck".
Particularly given our anonymous collegue's reminder about how Apple make money with hardware, not software, if you're going to wildly speculate how about wondering if they could do an x86 version of a Cube-alike? I'd certainly pay over the odds for a nice looking box that still let me play Half Life.
More seriously, I'd love to see ATI lose the 'default graphics card' hat to be replaced with a nice shiny NVidia GeForce 3 based model in the new machines. That would make for interesting times, and a head-on argument with Microsoft.
This argument fails the moment anyone realises that its not a one economy per country relation however. Much of Scandanavia, for instance, has a very similiar economy, and France and Germany are also very tied. Meanwhile the North of England has quite a different economy to that of the South-East, but that doesn't stop it having a common currency. Is the economy of Ohio tied that closely to that of California, for instance?
Thats a good point in theory (although I make it a point never to lend cash to people likely to be involved in drug busts...) but in practice there isn't any 'registering' of bills to people at the moment anyway, so this doesn't work.
Besides, at its very worst this would only be as bad as buying something on credit card, and I can't think of a time I bought something with cash to avoid it being on my statement.
I'm not going to bother arguing about the relative strength of the US Dollar and Sterling; after all your currency is already considered an international one for many business transactions. I _will_ be mildly alarmed that you appear to plan counterfeiting enough of them that you have to consider how much your fake Sterling would cause the currency to devalue!