Of course, where your argument falls down to some extent is that the RC simulator
a) claims to be a simulator, and realistic, and b) uses the same control system as a real RC vehicle.
Clicking on a head-shaped collection of polygons is rather different to aiming and firing a gun, and it's clearly a fantasy.
This does, however, lead to a rather contentious thought I had yesterday, when hearing a news item about the increase in fatal accidents among younger drivers. Are the anti-games lobby missing the real target here? I don't think there is a causal relationship between playing FPS games and psychotic rampages, but how many boy racer idiots think that their modded-up Citroen Saxo will handle as easily as Gran Turismo when they do something dumb at speed?
Australia has got Lost Highway in 5.1 and correct framing? Thanks for the info. I'd already bought the UK PAL release because it was correctly framed, but that only has 2.0, and the 5.1 mix is particularly good on that film.
I usually go for the US, because they usually get a good treatment and I prefer NTSC to PAL for the reasons I mentioned. But (unlike my friend, who is an editor and insists that a film designed to run for 100 minutes should not finish in 96, even if he can't tell the difference in practice) I'm not so picky about it that I'll refuse to buy a PAL film. It's just one of the things (alongside price, extras, import hassle, sound format and so on) that I consider when buying.
How do I know that DTS doesn't make anywhere near as much improvement over Dolby as a different mix?
1) A vs. B vs. C trials from mates in the industry with access to the sources. DTS is better, but not by nearly as much as some people make out.
2) You can do it yourself by buying one of the many DVDs (try Twister, it's the first one I noticed) that used the exact same mix for both. There isn't very much difference. Then go grab something people claim to be much better in DTS. U-571 is exactly the same, except that the sub channel is overcooked by 4dB in comparison to both the home Dolby and theatrical mix. Saving Private Ryan has sound effects that can only be heard in the DTS mix, others that can only be heard on the Laserdisc Dolby release, and the DVD's Dolby mix is different again.
Dolby 5.1 home mixes get reworked to ensure that they sound ok and not too tinny when mixed down to stereo; as the sub channel is not part of the downmix, there needs to be the correct amount of bass in the main channels to sound 'good' on low-end systems. This is where most of the improvement comes from with DTS.
Finally, I'm really curious as to how DTS is supposed to sound far superior on a good pair of headphones, when what we're discussing is the changes introduced in the balance across all six speakers. Four of which headphones don't have.
"Try listening on a computer with high-end sound card and headphones. I defy you to notice PAL speed-up when your audio equipment doesn't stink."
Oh, it's not that. While I've only got the high-end of Pioneer's line for an amp and Celestion speakers, I have the same problem on my mate's Meridian & Monitor Audio setup. You hit the mark with
"Now, I only notice it if I compare side-by-side or back-to-back with NTSC."
I only really notice it if it's something that I know from the correct speed (usually if I have the score CD), but because I know it's there I tend to worry even if I can't hear it.
But yes, I'd give up and buy PAL if the NTSC release was misframed. Though I wouldn't be buying Timecop in any region...
As for DTS vs. Dolby, I'll take correct-pitch Dolby over incorrect DTS any day of the week. On a decent setup Dolby is very, very close to DTS. Unless, as is often the case, the DTS is a different master. I guarantee that 50% of the time a person raves about how much better DTS supposedly is, they're actually espousing the superior sound mix and not the encode at all. The other 50% of the time, they just prefer the fact that the DTS is 4dB louder.
Personally, I'd absolutely count GTA, particularly now San Andreas has stats levelling to worry about.
But I'm speaking as someone who thinks he doesn't normally like RPGs at all, because all the ones I'd tried were Japanese-style "repetitive turn-based strategy games interspersed by some wandering around and a whole lot of cutscenes". But with all the Elder Scrolls hype around at the moment and my machine not being up to running Oblivion, I bought Morrowind really cheaply the other day.
I'm really rather liking it. As I say, I'm not an RPG person, but I've played a fair bit of GTA, and this is feeling an awful lot like GTA with a fantasy setting instead of that urban gangster stuff that never really appealed while I got on with enjoying the whole sandbox idea.
I've got a whole bunch of missions I can go on, I can choose which one to try next, or I can ignore all of them for a while and go earn cash and weapons by performing assorted crimes while ensuring that I don't get spotted by the cops doing them. Sounds pretty GTA to me.
I don't know about you, but I sit a hell of a lot closer to my 17" PC monitor than I do to my 32" widescreen TV. Sure, the PC monitor is smaller, but it fills a lot more of my vision, and so the resolution is more noticeable. Also, I use it for staring at black text on a white background, which shows up individual pixels an awful lot more than a moving, photo-based TV picture does.
It's a matter of personal preference, really. I find the 24fps -> 25fps speedup in PAL releases, or more accurately the associated change in the soundtrack, far more distracting than the slight jump from 3:2 pulldown that you get with NTSC.
I do know people who feel the reverse, and always try to buy PAL, so I definitely recognise that it's just a choice of which compromise you want. My surround setup cost twice as much as my TV, so it's little surprise I'm more interested in the audio side.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD are able to store the image at 1080p@24, and then have the player convert that to whichever output format you require. But you can choose to store the video at a whole variety of other formats too, so it might end up being different from disc to disc. For instance, all the currently-announced discs will store what extras they have as standard 480i@60, because (i) that was what they were shot in, and (ii) it's a waste of space to use anything better anyway.
Umm, just to clear up a couple of points in your post:
1) BluRay is just as bad as HD-DVD when it comes to downconverting for non-HDCP outputs, which is to say that the feature is there, but the studios claim they won't be using it.
2) HD-DVD is actually not going to have region encoding, so there will be no need for them to hide a multi-region menu for all of us in the UK that import our films to get them at 60Hz rather than 50Hz. BluRay will apparently still be having region encoding, but they have at least put Japan and the US in the same region this time, so an R1 player will suit most people.
3) Code revocation existed in the DVD spec as well, but since CSS was such a rubbish encryption scheme, DVD Jon managed to use that one broken code to lever the entire keyspace open, and so there was never really a point at which it would have been useful to use. I don't expect for one moment that they will revoke keys on hardware players and break them, as the resulting support nightmare for the manufacturer would be too damaging to the format - this is going to be used against software players (where customers will get the chance to download a patch with the 'problems' fixed) only.
Both DAT and DCC rather suffered because they were cassette mechanisms (with all the worries about being eaten by the machine) at a time when the consumer was already used to the track-skipping convenience of CD, and CD-R drives were starting to become popular.
Actually, I _really_ liked The Algebraist; I thought it's the best thing he's done in years. Yes, it's not quite as twisty or downright nasty as some of his earlier work, but it's just so much fun.
Also, on a supremely shallow note, the UK hardback (at least; I've not seen the others) is just a gorgeous thing with a really nice typeface that I found a lot easier on the eyes than his early books. There have been new covers for all the old books as well; I keep meaning to see if they've been given it - I had to give up on Walking On Glass because the text was so dense it gave me a headache.
Just about every TV currently on sale in Europe will cope with a 60Hz signal (and this has been the case for years).
However, US TVs usually won't have a clue what to do with a 50Hz PAL signal. Fortunately, Microsoft already demand Euro releases for both XBoxes have 60Hz capability, so I really hope Sony do the same.
Microsoft mandates that every 360 game has to be able to run at 60Hz, because otherwise people running in HD over VGA would hit problems. The vast majority of PAL Gamecube, XBox and PS2 games offer 60Hz options, and have for a long while.
I'll be extremely disappointed with Sony if the PS3 can't do the same.
What do you mean we won't understand? Us Europeans all know about Rugby, which is basically the Realitime equivalent of your turn-based football game, without the padding, and it's the same there.
That may well be the case. I'd expect that it's the record company keeping a higher rate, rather than Apple, however. Undertheigloo use the AWAL (Artists Without A Label) service to get on iTunes, and so their royalty rate is much higher than if they were signed with a major, but I can't see those majors agreeing to a smaller cut from Apple than the indies get.
"each song downloaded for the iPod is 99 cents, of which only 5 cents goes elsewhere"
Are you absolutely certain about this? Because my brother's band get around 40p of the 79p that the UK version of iTMS sell their tracks for, and that's after the taxman and their record company have had their shares as well.
Of course, the irony here is that it's mostly people like me who don't want to spend lots of money upgrading that, well, don't want to spend lots of money.
If I could afford to blow lots of cash on all those bits, I'd buy a decent midrange graphics card. Or an XBox 360.
According to someone in the same department at that branch, Gadd brought the laptop in partly because it wouldn't work with image files (the association between JPEGs and an image viewer program was lost).
So, in order to confirm that everything was fine again, he opened some random files to check everything was ok. Oops.
Sharing over wi-fi is a novel idea (though liable to be battery hungry), I fail to see what refusing to support DRM is going to gain you.
iPod, iRiver, Creative and all the others will play unprotected mp3 files, some will even support Ogg if you're that rabidly in search of openness already. When you say "remove DRM" what you actually mean is "refuse to play files that already contain DRM".
I fail to see why refusing to support file formats that many people already have music in would help matters.
Slashdot Mirror
That will never work. If you want to patent something that has that much prior art, you need to work the phrase "via the Internet" in there somewhere.
Of course, where your argument falls down to some extent is that the RC simulator
a) claims to be a simulator, and realistic, and
b) uses the same control system as a real RC vehicle.
Clicking on a head-shaped collection of polygons is rather different to aiming and firing a gun, and it's clearly a fantasy.
This does, however, lead to a rather contentious thought I had yesterday, when hearing a news item about the increase in fatal accidents among younger drivers. Are the anti-games lobby missing the real target here? I don't think there is a causal relationship between playing FPS games and psychotic rampages, but how many boy racer idiots think that their modded-up Citroen Saxo will handle as easily as Gran Turismo when they do something dumb at speed?
"They are playing with fire"
Of course they are - according to the summary, they're fire-sharers. Playing with fire is a pretty defining aspect.
A couple of thousand prime targets? Try one or two spammers.
Australia has got Lost Highway in 5.1 and correct framing? Thanks for the info. I'd already bought the UK PAL release because it was correctly framed, but that only has 2.0, and the 5.1 mix is particularly good on that film.
I usually go for the US, because they usually get a good treatment and I prefer NTSC to PAL for the reasons I mentioned. But (unlike my friend, who is an editor and insists that a film designed to run for 100 minutes should not finish in 96, even if he can't tell the difference in practice) I'm not so picky about it that I'll refuse to buy a PAL film. It's just one of the things (alongside price, extras, import hassle, sound format and so on) that I consider when buying.
How do I know that DTS doesn't make anywhere near as much improvement over Dolby as a different mix?
1) A vs. B vs. C trials from mates in the industry with access to the sources. DTS is better, but not by nearly as much as some people make out.
2) You can do it yourself by buying one of the many DVDs (try Twister, it's the first one I noticed) that used the exact same mix for both. There isn't very much difference. Then go grab something people claim to be much better in DTS. U-571 is exactly the same, except that the sub channel is overcooked by 4dB in comparison to both the home Dolby and theatrical mix. Saving Private Ryan has sound effects that can only be heard in the DTS mix, others that can only be heard on the Laserdisc Dolby release, and the DVD's Dolby mix is different again.
Dolby 5.1 home mixes get reworked to ensure that they sound ok and not too tinny when mixed down to stereo; as the sub channel is not part of the downmix, there needs to be the correct amount of bass in the main channels to sound 'good' on low-end systems. This is where most of the improvement comes from with DTS.
Finally, I'm really curious as to how DTS is supposed to sound far superior on a good pair of headphones, when what we're discussing is the changes introduced in the balance across all six speakers. Four of which headphones don't have.
"Try listening on a computer with high-end sound card and headphones. I defy you to notice PAL speed-up when your audio equipment doesn't stink."
Oh, it's not that. While I've only got the high-end of Pioneer's line for an amp and Celestion speakers, I have the same problem on my mate's Meridian & Monitor Audio setup. You hit the mark with
"Now, I only notice it if I compare side-by-side or back-to-back with NTSC."
I only really notice it if it's something that I know from the correct speed (usually if I have the score CD), but because I know it's there I tend to worry even if I can't hear it.
But yes, I'd give up and buy PAL if the NTSC release was misframed. Though I wouldn't be buying Timecop in any region...
As for DTS vs. Dolby, I'll take correct-pitch Dolby over incorrect DTS any day of the week. On a decent setup Dolby is very, very close to DTS. Unless, as is often the case, the DTS is a different master. I guarantee that 50% of the time a person raves about how much better DTS supposedly is, they're actually espousing the superior sound mix and not the encode at all. The other 50% of the time, they just prefer the fact that the DTS is 4dB louder.
Personally, I'd absolutely count GTA, particularly now San Andreas has stats levelling to worry about.
But I'm speaking as someone who thinks he doesn't normally like RPGs at all, because all the ones I'd tried were Japanese-style "repetitive turn-based strategy games interspersed by some wandering around and a whole lot of cutscenes". But with all the Elder Scrolls hype around at the moment and my machine not being up to running Oblivion, I bought Morrowind really cheaply the other day.
I'm really rather liking it. As I say, I'm not an RPG person, but I've played a fair bit of GTA, and this is feeling an awful lot like GTA with a fantasy setting instead of that urban gangster stuff that never really appealed while I got on with enjoying the whole sandbox idea.
I've got a whole bunch of missions I can go on, I can choose which one to try next, or I can ignore all of them for a while and go earn cash and weapons by performing assorted crimes while ensuring that I don't get spotted by the cops doing them. Sounds pretty GTA to me.
I don't know about you, but I sit a hell of a lot closer to my 17" PC monitor than I do to my 32" widescreen TV. Sure, the PC monitor is smaller, but it fills a lot more of my vision, and so the resolution is more noticeable. Also, I use it for staring at black text on a white background, which shows up individual pixels an awful lot more than a moving, photo-based TV picture does.
So it isn't obviously false at all.
It's a matter of personal preference, really. I find the 24fps -> 25fps speedup in PAL releases, or more accurately the associated change in the soundtrack, far more distracting than the slight jump from 3:2 pulldown that you get with NTSC.
I do know people who feel the reverse, and always try to buy PAL, so I definitely recognise that it's just a choice of which compromise you want. My surround setup cost twice as much as my TV, so it's little surprise I'm more interested in the audio side.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD are able to store the image at 1080p@24, and then have the player convert that to whichever output format you require. But you can choose to store the video at a whole variety of other formats too, so it might end up being different from disc to disc. For instance, all the currently-announced discs will store what extras they have as standard 480i@60, because (i) that was what they were shot in, and (ii) it's a waste of space to use anything better anyway.
Umm, just to clear up a couple of points in your post:
1) BluRay is just as bad as HD-DVD when it comes to downconverting for non-HDCP outputs, which is to say that the feature is there, but the studios claim they won't be using it.
2) HD-DVD is actually not going to have region encoding, so there will be no need for them to hide a multi-region menu for all of us in the UK that import our films to get them at 60Hz rather than 50Hz. BluRay will apparently still be having region encoding, but they have at least put Japan and the US in the same region this time, so an R1 player will suit most people.
3) Code revocation existed in the DVD spec as well, but since CSS was such a rubbish encryption scheme, DVD Jon managed to use that one broken code to lever the entire keyspace open, and so there was never really a point at which it would have been useful to use. I don't expect for one moment that they will revoke keys on hardware players and break them, as the resulting support nightmare for the manufacturer would be too damaging to the format - this is going to be used against software players (where customers will get the chance to download a patch with the 'problems' fixed) only.
Both DAT and DCC rather suffered because they were cassette mechanisms (with all the worries about being eaten by the machine) at a time when the consumer was already used to the track-skipping convenience of CD, and CD-R drives were starting to become popular.
Actually, I _really_ liked The Algebraist; I thought it's the best thing he's done in years. Yes, it's not quite as twisty or downright nasty as some of his earlier work, but it's just so much fun.
Also, on a supremely shallow note, the UK hardback (at least; I've not seen the others) is just a gorgeous thing with a really nice typeface that I found a lot easier on the eyes than his early books. There have been new covers for all the old books as well; I keep meaning to see if they've been given it - I had to give up on Walking On Glass because the text was so dense it gave me a headache.
Fire blanket for precisely these situations? Check.
Snowbank? Umm, not within a couple of hundred miles, no.
HD-DVD has already announced they won't be doing region-encoding for movies. Hopefully, BluRay will drop their one, though they haven't yet.
They have moved the US and Japan into the same region, however, so for the vast majority of stuff you'll be fine with a US machine.
Just about every TV currently on sale in Europe will cope with a 60Hz signal (and this has been the case for years).
However, US TVs usually won't have a clue what to do with a 50Hz PAL signal. Fortunately, Microsoft already demand Euro releases for both XBoxes have 60Hz capability, so I really hope Sony do the same.
Microsoft mandates that every 360 game has to be able to run at 60Hz, because otherwise people running in HD over VGA would hit problems. The vast majority of PAL Gamecube, XBox and PS2 games offer 60Hz options, and have for a long while.
I'll be extremely disappointed with Sony if the PS3 can't do the same.
Alternatively, change in the other direction. A comparison between The Bard's Tale and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion would be far more relevant.
Similarly, you could look at some of the following:
Lotus Turbo Esprit vs. Driver: Parallel Lines
Saboteur vs. Ninja Gaiden Black
Revs vs. Gran Turismo 4
3D Monster Maze vs. Doom 3
But then I'm revealing my UK heritage, and most of those Spectrum and BBC games don't mean much to Americans.
What do you mean we won't understand? Us Europeans all know about Rugby, which is basically the Realitime equivalent of your turn-based football game, without the padding, and it's the same there.
That may well be the case. I'd expect that it's the record company keeping a higher rate, rather than Apple, however. Undertheigloo use the AWAL (Artists Without A Label) service to get on iTunes, and so their royalty rate is much higher than if they were signed with a major, but I can't see those majors agreeing to a smaller cut from Apple than the indies get.
"each song downloaded for the iPod is 99 cents, of which only 5 cents goes elsewhere"
Are you absolutely certain about this? Because my brother's band get around 40p of the 79p that the UK version of iTMS sell their tracks for, and that's after the taxman and their record company have had their shares as well.
Of course, the irony here is that it's mostly people like me who don't want to spend lots of money upgrading that, well, don't want to spend lots of money.
If I could afford to blow lots of cash on all those bits, I'd buy a decent midrange graphics card. Or an XBox 360.
According to someone in the same department at that branch, Gadd brought the laptop in partly because it wouldn't work with image files (the association between JPEGs and an image viewer program was lost).
So, in order to confirm that everything was fine again, he opened some random files to check everything was ok. Oops.
True. To give Microsoft their dues, Windows Media Player sucks an awful lot less than Sony's SonicStage.
But it's still sucking in comparison to iTunes.
Sharing over wi-fi is a novel idea (though liable to be battery hungry), I fail to see what refusing to support DRM is going to gain you.
iPod, iRiver, Creative and all the others will play unprotected mp3 files, some will even support Ogg if you're that rabidly in search of openness already. When you say "remove DRM" what you actually mean is "refuse to play files that already contain DRM".
I fail to see why refusing to support file formats that many people already have music in would help matters.