Umm, GTA _DOESN'T_ have a big storyline. That didn't start happening until GTA III.
Furthermore, I'd say that Gilbert is right to say that the imposition of a storyline into the GTA template is done in a rather simplistic manner, as it just crowbars a linear story into the essentially non-linear environment.
e-foof? I doubt it. It seems more like a typosquat of 'effoff', which is probably what they're expecting to hear from the MPAA's lawyers in about 24 hours.
Given that the main page states such things as "We also made Northern Ireland what it is to day" and has a picture of the Orange Order's flag, I think that's putting it mildly...
I can practically count on one hand the times I find a link to a YouTube video where the actual copyright owner has uploaded it, rather than it being a snippet of TV show, a film clip or a whole music video.
Right now, it's a pain for the owners to constantly watch YouTube and remove them, particularly when it's usually fans of the people involved uploading them in barely-watchable low quality, just for fun.
If people are starting to make actual money from this, however, the studios are going to smack it with an absolutele vengeance, just on principle, surely?
"I want this guy dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground! I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!"
But they _are_ just using MPEG 2, rather than the much, much nicer-looking VC1 codec being used for HD-DVD releases. VC1 is in the specifications for Blu Ray, and releases hitting before the end of the year will be using it, but it'll be a few months as Sony's disc mastering software didn't support it until the latest version that shipped recently.
Also, many of the digital sources used for catalogue titles, while not SD, are old HD ones at 1080i@60fps from 6 or so years ago, not the latest 1080p@24 lossless captures. They've been antialiased to stop flickering at 1080i, and so look softer than the new films.
Alternatively, you can view my copy of "Twister". I bought the re-release with DTS, extras and most importantly a much better picture to replace the first one which didn't really look any better than my laserdisc of it.
Yes, I bought (i) a lasterdisc player and (ii) multiple copies of Twister. I suck.
The problem that a lot of people are doing is looking at the pricetags of these 1st-gen players, and assuming that this means the format is dead.
DVD players started out that expensive, too. I can already import Toshiba's HD-DVD player from the US for less money than my first DVD player cost. Given that it does as good a job at upscaling normal DVDs to HD resolutions as a $250 normal player, that's half the cost that isn't really a risk already should I need one (and any A/V nutcase does).
Neither Toshiba with HD-DVD nor Sony and Samsung with Blu Ray can manufacture the players fast enough to keep up with the demand from those A/V enthusiasts as it is, and by the time they need to find more mainstream people to sell to, they should be able to drop those prices a little (plus that mainstream are more likely to have got an HDTV).
I think that HD-DVD, at least, will work out at the moment. The real war is just hotting up, and it's HD-DVD's (currently) vastly superior release list vs. Best Buy employees trying to persuade customers to buy the box at twice the price and several more times the sales bonus because "HD-DVD will fail".
You're absolutely right that it's true in a few years but not today.
Where both you and the article have slipped up, however, is by assuming that this is a showstopping problem. I don't think that either camp is expecting to sell players to world+dog by Christmas. At $500+ for HD-DVD and $1000+ for Blu Ray that hardly seems a likely outcome whatever the penetration of HDTV.
Mainly, however, they're just not capable of making the things in those kinds of numbers yet. This is all about launching now to get the high-spending A/V enthusiasts onboard now, so the R+D costs have been offset and the prices brought down by the time everyone else wants one in a couple of years.
Remember, DVD launched in '97, but it was with '99 films like The Matrix that the mainstream started to take interest.
I'm guessing from your use of the dollar sign that you're American. That country has a rather lower population density than the UK, and so people often have rather larger living rooms. Here in the UK, people are relatively happy to pay the extra money to lose several feet of floorspace to an ugly box.
Also, the UK TV market is such that there really aren't any CRT TVs over about 21" that aren't utterly horrid any more. I bought one of the last half-decent 32" 16x9 ones about 2 years ago, and I paid £650 for it. If I were to replace it tomorrow, I'd buy a 32" Toshiba at £1100, and get an extra 2" of visible screen area thanks to the way CRTs are measured along with my HD, progressively scanned image.
I've got a player that claims to play them, too. It's pretty random as to whether downloaded files will hang partway through or just plain not play, or drop frames because the processing can't cope.
This may well be the case, though the latest generation of LCDs is perfectly fine for most people (check out the new Sony V-series Bravias or Panasonic's 50 and 60 series for the best). However, there is a lot more to overall image quality than colour fidelity. Geometry, bloom distortion and colour alignment are a non-issue with LCD, simply due to the way LCD works. However, I've yet to see a 32" or larger 16x9 CRT set that didn't have these problems to some degree or another, so it's all a question of where you're prepared to compromise.
Although it does occur to me that the black model is exclusive to Europe (white worldwide, and two shades of blue for the far-east being the other options). So in fact there really shouldn't be a lot of black Lites coming from Hong Kong sources.
Except that you Americans are only getting white ones (insert alternative racism joke here). And here in Europe, where the machines were supposed to be going, you're more likely to find someone take offence by calling them American than Black...
That still leaves a second class of "bogus" reports, where (say) NVidia find a way to cause a fault with (say) ATI's drivers, and so set up as many boxes as they can reproducing it as frequently as possible to damage their rival's standing.
After all, when was the last time you didn't see the monthly driver update from both manufacturers contain a list of little changes for each dodgily written game that came out the month before?
Not that they need to be Amaray ones. Personally, I prefer Alpha's locking mechanism, as I've had fewer discs pop out in the mail.
But yes, DVD cases are better than CD cases because the plastic isn't as brittle. They even make them at CD height, for those that don't like the "looks good on a bookshelf" thing.
1) why do you want to upload your ringtone in.wav? It's a senseless waste of memory, that you could either do other things with, or leave out of the phone and make it that tiny bit smaller.
2) if you're going to allow the phone to use the.mp3 format for ringtones, why wouldn't you allow it to play those files in other circumstances? That's the real reason so many phones have mp3 players in them; it's a pretty trivial feature to add.
They do. Then they delist the virtual one from the search engine, because their site isn't meant to be for looking at some stranger's screenshots.
Also, this is not news; it was in the click-through agreement from way back, and people who actually draw their own pictures in photoshop or whatever have already hit the problem, had an argument with Flickr and lost once already.
If nerd X isn't allowed to post homemade hentai, I see no reason why they would let nerd Y post a 3rd-rate imitation of same in Second Life.
I'll give you two. The shield and the weapon limit.
The rechargable shield killed the urge to constantly quicksave every 5 seconds in case of a cheap ambush that PC games have been trapped in, and to some extent haven't truly escaped. Which is just as well, because as a console title it didn't even give you the option of a quicksave. So you no longer wandered down an invisible corridor attempting the 'perfect' run from a health point of view, but carried on fighting when PC gamers would have hit F9 already. This alone would have been enough to hold its place in history.
The limitation to two weapons also demanded some tactical thinking. The balance was far better than most games, too; fighting was no longer about just using the "best" weapon that you still had ammo for, but choosing the right gun for the situation, and if necessary switching to make the most of what the enemy had left you. Coupled with the always-available grenades, you had a much more dynamic battlefield than anything ID ever gave us.
I'd argue that the AI 'felt' a lot more impressive too, due to the quality of characterisation in those Covenant. Obviously you disagree, which is fair enough.
"Did you just call Microsoft and Geometry Wars 'a success'?"
Why yes, I did. Microsoft got a larger number of people to pay money for downloaded content than expected. The fact that Geometry Wars _Fucking_Rocks_ helped, but yes - Microsoft have demonstrated there is a market for premium content with consoles, just as Apple demonstrated one was present for music. Yen signs clearly appeared in the eyes of Sony and Nintendo execs, and now they're doing the same thing. I really didn't expect it to be a contentious suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, GTA _DOESN'T_ have a big storyline. That didn't start happening until GTA III.
Furthermore, I'd say that Gilbert is right to say that the imposition of a storyline into the GTA template is done in a rather simplistic manner, as it just crowbars a linear story into the essentially non-linear environment.
If they didn't want to sound agressive, they probably wouldn't have told me to eff off in their company name.
e-foof? I doubt it. It seems more like a typosquat of 'effoff', which is probably what they're expecting to hear from the MPAA's lawyers in about 24 hours.
Oh, I agree. I just like quoting Mamet's Untouchables script more.
Given that the main page states such things as "We also made Northern Ireland what it is to day" and has a picture of the Orange Order's flag, I think that's putting it mildly...
I can practically count on one hand the times I find a link to a YouTube video where the actual copyright owner has uploaded it, rather than it being a snippet of TV show, a film clip or a whole music video.
Right now, it's a pain for the owners to constantly watch YouTube and remove them, particularly when it's usually fans of the people involved uploading them in barely-watchable low quality, just for fun.
If people are starting to make actual money from this, however, the studios are going to smack it with an absolutele vengeance, just on principle, surely?
Scotch is a drink. Or some sticky tape. People are Scottish.
Sorry, that one bugs me.
I think the phrase you're looking for is:
"I want this guy dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground! I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!"
yes?
Now you mention it, Blu Ray's other big hitter this week is Underworld Evolution. I'm beginning to see how Sony's mind works...
On the other hand, HD-DVD has topless Halle Berry in that clunker Swordfish, so they're both in on the act.
They aren't HD upconversions.
But they _are_ just using MPEG 2, rather than the much, much nicer-looking VC1 codec being used for HD-DVD releases. VC1 is in the specifications for Blu Ray, and releases hitting before the end of the year will be using it, but it'll be a few months as Sony's disc mastering software didn't support it until the latest version that shipped recently.
Also, many of the digital sources used for catalogue titles, while not SD, are old HD ones at 1080i@60fps from 6 or so years ago, not the latest 1080p@24 lossless captures. They've been antialiased to stop flickering at 1080i, and so look softer than the new films.
Alternatively, you can view my copy of "Twister". I bought the re-release with DTS, extras and most importantly a much better picture to replace the first one which didn't really look any better than my laserdisc of it.
Yes, I bought (i) a lasterdisc player and (ii) multiple copies of Twister. I suck.
The problem that a lot of people are doing is looking at the pricetags of these 1st-gen players, and assuming that this means the format is dead.
DVD players started out that expensive, too. I can already import Toshiba's HD-DVD player from the US for less money than my first DVD player cost. Given that it does as good a job at upscaling normal DVDs to HD resolutions as a $250 normal player, that's half the cost that isn't really a risk already should I need one (and any A/V nutcase does).
Neither Toshiba with HD-DVD nor Sony and Samsung with Blu Ray can manufacture the players fast enough to keep up with the demand from those A/V enthusiasts as it is, and by the time they need to find more mainstream people to sell to, they should be able to drop those prices a little (plus that mainstream are more likely to have got an HDTV).
I think that HD-DVD, at least, will work out at the moment. The real war is just hotting up, and it's HD-DVD's (currently) vastly superior release list vs. Best Buy employees trying to persuade customers to buy the box at twice the price and several more times the sales bonus because "HD-DVD will fail".
You're absolutely right that it's true in a few years but not today.
Where both you and the article have slipped up, however, is by assuming that this is a showstopping problem. I don't think that either camp is expecting to sell players to world+dog by Christmas. At $500+ for HD-DVD and $1000+ for Blu Ray that hardly seems a likely outcome whatever the penetration of HDTV.
Mainly, however, they're just not capable of making the things in those kinds of numbers yet. This is all about launching now to get the high-spending A/V enthusiasts onboard now, so the R+D costs have been offset and the prices brought down by the time everyone else wants one in a couple of years.
Remember, DVD launched in '97, but it was with '99 films like The Matrix that the mainstream started to take interest.
I'm guessing from your use of the dollar sign that you're American. That country has a rather lower population density than the UK, and so people often have rather larger living rooms. Here in the UK, people are relatively happy to pay the extra money to lose several feet of floorspace to an ugly box.
Also, the UK TV market is such that there really aren't any CRT TVs over about 21" that aren't utterly horrid any more. I bought one of the last half-decent 32" 16x9 ones about 2 years ago, and I paid £650 for it. If I were to replace it tomorrow, I'd buy a 32" Toshiba at £1100, and get an extra 2" of visible screen area thanks to the way CRTs are measured along with my HD, progressively scanned image.
I've got a player that claims to play them, too. It's pretty random as to whether downloaded files will hang partway through or just plain not play, or drop frames because the processing can't cope.
Blu Ray making the first shot? I take it you failed to notice all the HD-DVD releases in recent months.
Furthermore, if you'd rather buy Ultraviolet than Serenity, Apollo 13 or Bourne Supremacy then, well, I pity your taste.
"Color clarity is markedly inferior on LCD!"
This may well be the case, though the latest generation of LCDs is perfectly fine for most people (check out the new Sony V-series Bravias or Panasonic's 50 and 60 series for the best). However, there is a lot more to overall image quality than colour fidelity. Geometry, bloom distortion and colour alignment are a non-issue with LCD, simply due to the way LCD works. However, I've yet to see a 32" or larger 16x9 CRT set that didn't have these problems to some degree or another, so it's all a question of where you're prepared to compromise.
Although it does occur to me that the black model is exclusive to Europe (white worldwide, and two shades of blue for the far-east being the other options). So in fact there really shouldn't be a lot of black Lites coming from Hong Kong sources.
Except that you Americans are only getting white ones (insert alternative racism joke here). And here in Europe, where the machines were supposed to be going, you're more likely to find someone take offence by calling them American than Black...
That still leaves a second class of "bogus" reports, where (say) NVidia find a way to cause a fault with (say) ATI's drivers, and so set up as many boxes as they can reproducing it as frequently as possible to damage their rival's standing.
After all, when was the last time you didn't see the monthly driver update from both manufacturers contain a list of little changes for each dodgily written game that came out the month before?
Not that they need to be Amaray ones. Personally, I prefer Alpha's locking mechanism, as I've had fewer discs pop out in the mail.
But yes, DVD cases are better than CD cases because the plastic isn't as brittle. They even make them at CD height, for those that don't like the "looks good on a bookshelf" thing.
Two things:
.wav? It's a senseless waste of memory, that you could either do other things with, or leave out of the phone and make it that tiny bit smaller.
.mp3 format for ringtones, why wouldn't you allow it to play those files in other circumstances? That's the real reason so many phones have mp3 players in them; it's a pretty trivial feature to add.
1) why do you want to upload your ringtone in
2) if you're going to allow the phone to use the
They do. Then they delist the virtual one from the search engine, because their site isn't meant to be for looking at some stranger's screenshots.
Also, this is not news; it was in the click-through agreement from way back, and people who actually draw their own pictures in photoshop or whatever have already hit the problem, had an argument with Flickr and lost once already.
If nerd X isn't allowed to post homemade hentai, I see no reason why they would let nerd Y post a 3rd-rate imitation of same in Second Life.
I'll give you two. The shield and the weapon limit.
The rechargable shield killed the urge to constantly quicksave every 5 seconds in case of a cheap ambush that PC games have been trapped in, and to some extent haven't truly escaped. Which is just as well, because as a console title it didn't even give you the option of a quicksave. So you no longer wandered down an invisible corridor attempting the 'perfect' run from a health point of view, but carried on fighting when PC gamers would have hit F9 already. This alone would have been enough to hold its place in history.
The limitation to two weapons also demanded some tactical thinking. The balance was far better than most games, too; fighting was no longer about just using the "best" weapon that you still had ammo for, but choosing the right gun for the situation, and if necessary switching to make the most of what the enemy had left you. Coupled with the always-available grenades, you had a much more dynamic battlefield than anything ID ever gave us.
I'd argue that the AI 'felt' a lot more impressive too, due to the quality of characterisation in those Covenant. Obviously you disagree, which is fair enough.
Quoth a particularly dumb AC:
"Did you just call Microsoft and Geometry Wars 'a success'?"
Why yes, I did. Microsoft got a larger number of people to pay money for downloaded content than expected. The fact that Geometry Wars _Fucking_Rocks_ helped, but yes - Microsoft have demonstrated there is a market for premium content with consoles, just as Apple demonstrated one was present for music. Yen signs clearly appeared in the eyes of Sony and Nintendo execs, and now they're doing the same thing. I really didn't expect it to be a contentious suggestion.