The real complaint they have is the hacking around of Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball.
Team Ninja made a blatently sexist load of shite where the main aim of the game is to win the money required to buy the skimpiest bikini for the digital women they spent so much time accurately recreating the chest-bouncing physics for.
However, because they like to have some semblance of decency about what they do for a living, you never actually get to see anything, and they've got plausible deniability that it's really all about the volleyball.
A bunch of fans decided that this was a silly copout, and 'fixed' that problem, thereby making them look as much a part of the dirty mac brigade as some had accused them of in advance. They found this offensive, and want to stop such things.
Given how practically every female main character seems to attract 3rd-party nude patches, and their advertising campaign being entirely based around "Look, Girls!!!", it's hard to believe they didn't see it coming.
DVD-A and SACD still aren't doing particularly well, however. I seriously considered getting a player recently myself, as at least there are a couple of albums on the formats that I would actually purchase at last.
However, a bit of A/B listening demonstrated that the same amount of money spent on a decent CD player (I went for NAD's superlative 521BEE) gave a better sound than what would have been a low-end everything player, with the added advantage of not buying all my albums over again.
CDs, on good equipment, still sound amazing, so unless you want 5.1 gimmickry, why upgrade?
I was wondering that, too - since the rest of the world never used the "long box" (a nasty kludge designed to help US stores fit CDs into the 12" bins they used for vinyl) in the first place, the implication is that I should think the 'album' died 20 years ago.
And yet there's somewhere north of 1000 CDs sitting on my shelves.
No way in hell. It's better than ever.
on
Death of the Album?
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· Score: 5, Informative
What is dying is singles. Just look at the sales figures; internet downloads (legal and illegal) are killing the CD single off bigtime. Not surprising when (to use UK figures) it is 3-4 pounds for the disc, with only 2 B-sides (usually remixes that few care about), or 79p for the track you actually want from iTunes (assuming you don't just copy it).
Meanwhile, everyone who wants actual physical product in their hands buys albums, which have come down significantly in price in recent years. Here in the UK, sales measured by number of actual discs sold are well up; it's only when the record companies are doing their "piracy is killing us, honest" that they go on about how they haven't seen a huge increase in sales by value.
Particulate pollution has a confirmed, explicable cooling effect, due to the way it increases the planet's albedo, reflecting more of the Sun's energy back into space.
Greenhouse-gas pollution has a confirmed, explicable warming effect, as these gases reduce the radiation coming from the planet out into space.
Two seperate, competing pollution problems. Thirty years ago, the particulate pollution was thought to be more of a worry. As we've significantly decreased particulate emissions though the cleaning up of heavy industry, and the move from coal to gas-fired power stations, the warming effect of CO2 appears even more significant that scientists first feared.
If you need the screen, keyboard and mouse anyway, why buy a Mac Mini though? You'd be better off with a low-end iMac; the price difference once you add-in a flat screen isn't that huge, particularly if you're happy with a second-hand G4 iMac (which is still as fast as the Mini). A big part of the Mini's appeal is to those who already have all the other bits, and don't want to buy them again.
oops - forgot about that. Still, the argument holds for any other playwright or screenwriter, and I'm fairly sure he didn't do all the acting on his own...
The concept of "found" art is well established, from Duchamp onwards. I'd argue that just as you're creating art by photographing an interesting pattern in the clouds, you're creating art by the decisions you make in the exact framing and composition of a section of the Mandelbrot set.
If the music created by the likes of Brian Eno using procedural techniques counts as art (and I'd certainly suggest it does), I fail to see why other programmers generating visual art by procedural techniques wouldn't.
This also reminds me of the early days of computer animation, before the likes of Pixar made it abundantly clear that computers are just Tools to be used by artists like any other, and not somehow magically creating the art themselves.
You might as well argue that Shakespeare wasn't an artist, because he just wrote the instructions to control the actors, and didn't perform the plays himself.
I assumed we're talking from a reference frame of us lot, rather than the particle. After all, those photons are moving (oddly enough) at the speed of light, and haven't noticed any time passing at all, let alone a million years.
I thought that at least 99% of the time a control-click was the same as a right-click in Macland? You've still got your control key, and it's even closer to your mousing controller with a trackpad.
It really does look like someone just cross-referenced a list of all MGM DVDs with a lookup to the IMDb to find out which films were listed as 1.66:1 or 1.85:1, without the slightest bit of fact checking first.
Some of these, given MGM's slipshod efforts with budget titles, may even actually be misframed, but the films I know well aren't.
I'd imagine that the list of new titles will consist of (a) the new MGM releases that don't actually come with any kind of booklet at all (grr...) and/or (b) films shot for 2.39:1, where the statement that you see more image in the widescreen release is true.
In any case, the discs are indeed correctly framed in every instance I've looked.
Actually (and I say this as a non-Mac owner, admittedly), in my experience the shipping of the one-button mouse is a Good Thing.
Because not all users have a right mouse-button, it maintains the very sensible UI rule that you should be able to do everything without using it - all features you'd RMB for are available in the menu.
Windows is horribly inconsistent about what the RMB is actually for, and you don't know whether or not a feature actually exists until you try right-clicking on random objects to have a look.
Extra buttons and wheels are undoubtably useful things for shortcuts, but the design principle that everything should be available in a consistent manner without HAVING to use them is great for those of us that don't use them very often.
Step 2: Wonder why the US Justice system is so fecking dumb.
(steps 3 and 4 presumably being ??? and Profit!)
There's nothing wrong with the discs, they are correctly framed. The problem is that a particularly evil lawyer can argue that the booklets are misleading in their siplification of how a 1.33:1 version of a film is made.
Anyone found sending their favorite movies back to get a mere seven dollars for them should be laughed out of town.
It _is_ however a complete list of MGM DVDs released before September 2003 (when they stopped including the booklets with the 'misleading' information) that were shot Flat with a theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1 or 1.85:1.
The lawsuit is because the 1.33:1 releases of these films are not strictly Pan And Scan, but Open Matte. It's a pretty fucking petty lawsuit if you ask me, and there's no way in hell I'd give up my correctly framed release of The Terminator for a pitiful $7.
I've got the Rob Reiner-supervised Criterion laserdisc of This Is Spinal Tap. My brother has the MGM DVD release. Both have pretty much the same framing, as far as I can tell. The lawsuit is because the booklets explaining widescreen are wrong.
As stated elsewhere, 'fixing the DVDs' involves removing the "misleading" explanation of how they make a correctly framed disc, and how that image compares to the 1.33:1 release.
Your DVDs are already 'right', it's just that 'wrong' doesn't look like it does in the booklet.
Fortunately, it isn't. The lawsuit is because the info in the little "why widescreen?" section of MGM's booklets is 'misleading' (read: oversimplifying).
For instance, I saw Hannibal on the list. I know for a fact, because I (engage namedrop mode) spoke to Charlie De Lauzirika at Scott Free around the time of the DVD launch (disengage) that the disc is indeed correctly framed. Charlie is rightfully proud of the outstanding job done on the mastering of that disc.
1.85:1, or 'flat' films are shot on a 1.37 frame, with frame guides on the viewfinder to enable the matte to be applied later. For the 'pan and scan' release, they actually open up the matte to reveal the full frame, occasional boom mikes and all.
The particularly daft thing is that, for shots involving optical or digital effects MGM are usually right. In order to avoid wasting valuable effects work on areas of the frame that will never be seen in the cinema, they usually hard-matte these, and so a 1.33:1 transfer has to resort to panning and scanning again. I've yet to see an MGM disc where they've incorrectly dealt with this hard-matting, either.
MGM denies any wrongdoing because there is nothing wrong with the discs themselves. This can't be stated enough about the issue:
They are all as near as damnit correctly framed.
There are minor issues if you want to get picky - MGM frame their discs at a 1.77:1 to give a full 16:9 full frame, rather than the "correct" US framing of 1.85:1. The difference would be lost in overscan anyway by most people, though, so I can't say it bothers me much.
The lawsuit is actually about the fact that MGM have a little booklet image showing how you're missing information from the sides if you watch Pan 'n' Scan films. This is actually incorrect for most 1.85:1 films, as the 1.33:1 release isn't really a Pan 'n' Scan.
It's instead an Open Matte, which is where they remove the top and bottom frame mattes to reveal image that wasn't supposed to be there. This is still wrong, as there can be boom mikes up there, random crap down the bottom and generally the shot has not been framed to look right like that.
So no, you can't use this lawsuit to replace your 'faulty' MGM discs with 'correct' ones; you've already got correctly framed discs. All that MGM have done wrong is be misleading by oversimplifying their explanation of the 'widescreen' process in their booklets. If they'd just left the consumer confused, like every other DVD manufacturer, then this would never have happened.
The problem, if memory serves, is that it's a lot easier to sling a probe out along the plane than it is to send it "up or down" with any speed - simply because it's being launched from Earth any probe will already have a substantial amount of momentum in the plane.
I've got over 60Gb of media on my home machine right now - otherwise known as 5 hours of my 50-year-old parents' holiday video that needs editing down and writing to DVD at some point. They'd do it themselves if they had a capable box.
Thanks - that's what I was referring to. Both games recognise Taiwan as a 'nation' only in that they include the FIFA-approved national side in the tournament.
If China have a problem, I suggest they take it up with FIFA.
To be boringly serious for a moment, the reason for the FIFA ban is due to the way that it agrees with FIFA's definition of national teams, and not China's, if memory serves.
Slashdot Mirror
The real complaint they have is the hacking around of Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball.
Team Ninja made a blatently sexist load of shite where the main aim of the game is to win the money required to buy the skimpiest bikini for the digital women they spent so much time accurately recreating the chest-bouncing physics for.
However, because they like to have some semblance of decency about what they do for a living, you never actually get to see anything, and they've got plausible deniability that it's really all about the volleyball.
A bunch of fans decided that this was a silly copout, and 'fixed' that problem, thereby making them look as much a part of the dirty mac brigade as some had accused them of in advance. They found this offensive, and want to stop such things.
Given how practically every female main character seems to attract 3rd-party nude patches, and their advertising campaign being entirely based around "Look, Girls!!!", it's hard to believe they didn't see it coming.
DVD-A and SACD still aren't doing particularly well, however. I seriously considered getting a player recently myself, as at least there are a couple of albums on the formats that I would actually purchase at last.
However, a bit of A/B listening demonstrated that the same amount of money spent on a decent CD player (I went for NAD's superlative 521BEE) gave a better sound than what would have been a low-end everything player, with the added advantage of not buying all my albums over again.
CDs, on good equipment, still sound amazing, so unless you want 5.1 gimmickry, why upgrade?
I was wondering that, too - since the rest of the world never used the "long box" (a nasty kludge designed to help US stores fit CDs into the 12" bins they used for vinyl) in the first place, the implication is that I should think the 'album' died 20 years ago.
And yet there's somewhere north of 1000 CDs sitting on my shelves.
What is dying is singles. Just look at the sales figures; internet downloads (legal and illegal) are killing the CD single off bigtime. Not surprising when (to use UK figures) it is 3-4 pounds for the disc, with only 2 B-sides (usually remixes that few care about), or 79p for the track you actually want from iTunes (assuming you don't just copy it).
Meanwhile, everyone who wants actual physical product in their hands buys albums, which have come down significantly in price in recent years. Here in the UK, sales measured by number of actual discs sold are well up; it's only when the record companies are doing their "piracy is killing us, honest" that they go on about how they haven't seen a huge increase in sales by value.
Particulate pollution has a confirmed, explicable cooling effect, due to the way it increases the planet's albedo, reflecting more of the Sun's energy back into space.
Greenhouse-gas pollution has a confirmed, explicable warming effect, as these gases reduce the radiation coming from the planet out into space.
Two seperate, competing pollution problems. Thirty years ago, the particulate pollution was thought to be more of a worry. As we've significantly decreased particulate emissions though the cleaning up of heavy industry, and the move from coal to gas-fired power stations, the warming effect of CO2 appears even more significant that scientists first feared.
If you need the screen, keyboard and mouse anyway, why buy a Mac Mini though? You'd be better off with a low-end iMac; the price difference once you add-in a flat screen isn't that huge, particularly if you're happy with a second-hand G4 iMac (which is still as fast as the Mini). A big part of the Mini's appeal is to those who already have all the other bits, and don't want to buy them again.
oops - forgot about that. Still, the argument holds for any other playwright or screenwriter, and I'm fairly sure he didn't do all the acting on his own...
The concept of "found" art is well established, from Duchamp onwards. I'd argue that just as you're creating art by photographing an interesting pattern in the clouds, you're creating art by the decisions you make in the exact framing and composition of a section of the Mandelbrot set.
If the music created by the likes of Brian Eno using procedural techniques counts as art (and I'd certainly suggest it does), I fail to see why other programmers generating visual art by procedural techniques wouldn't.
This also reminds me of the early days of computer animation, before the likes of Pixar made it abundantly clear that computers are just Tools to be used by artists like any other, and not somehow magically creating the art themselves.
You might as well argue that Shakespeare wasn't an artist, because he just wrote the instructions to control the actors, and didn't perform the plays himself.
I assumed we're talking from a reference frame of us lot, rather than the particle. After all, those photons are moving (oddly enough) at the speed of light, and haven't noticed any time passing at all, let alone a million years.
I thought that at least 99% of the time a control-click was the same as a right-click in Macland? You've still got your control key, and it's even closer to your mousing controller with a trackpad.
Just because you're going to kill someone with your supernatural powers, doesn't mean you have to be rude.
It really does look like someone just cross-referenced a list of all MGM DVDs with a lookup to the IMDb to find out which films were listed as 1.66:1 or 1.85:1, without the slightest bit of fact checking first.
Some of these, given MGM's slipshod efforts with budget titles, may even actually be misframed, but the films I know well aren't.
I'd imagine that the list of new titles will consist of (a) the new MGM releases that don't actually come with any kind of booklet at all (grr...) and/or (b) films shot for 2.39:1, where the statement that you see more image in the widescreen release is true.
In any case, the discs are indeed correctly framed in every instance I've looked.
Actually (and I say this as a non-Mac owner, admittedly), in my experience the shipping of the one-button mouse is a Good Thing.
Because not all users have a right mouse-button, it maintains the very sensible UI rule that you should be able to do everything without using it - all features you'd RMB for are available in the menu.
Windows is horribly inconsistent about what the RMB is actually for, and you don't know whether or not a feature actually exists until you try right-clicking on random objects to have a look.
Extra buttons and wheels are undoubtably useful things for shortcuts, but the design principle that everything should be available in a consistent manner without HAVING to use them is great for those of us that don't use them very often.
I can "fix" those "wrong" DVDs for you now.
Step 1: Thow the booklet away.
Step 2: Wonder why the US Justice system is so fecking dumb.
(steps 3 and 4 presumably being ??? and Profit!)
There's nothing wrong with the discs, they are correctly framed. The problem is that a particularly evil lawyer can argue that the booklets are misleading in their siplification of how a 1.33:1 version of a film is made.
Anyone found sending their favorite movies back to get a mere seven dollars for them should be laughed out of town.
It isn't a complete list of MGM DVDs, no.
It _is_ however a complete list of MGM DVDs released before September 2003 (when they stopped including the booklets with the 'misleading' information) that were shot Flat with a theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1 or 1.85:1.
The lawsuit is because the 1.33:1 releases of these films are not strictly Pan And Scan, but Open Matte. It's a pretty fucking petty lawsuit if you ask me, and there's no way in hell I'd give up my correctly framed release of The Terminator for a pitiful $7.
I've got the Rob Reiner-supervised Criterion laserdisc of This Is Spinal Tap. My brother has the MGM DVD release. Both have pretty much the same framing, as far as I can tell. The lawsuit is because the booklets explaining widescreen are wrong.
As stated elsewhere, 'fixing the DVDs' involves removing the "misleading" explanation of how they make a correctly framed disc, and how that image compares to the 1.33:1 release.
Your DVDs are already 'right', it's just that 'wrong' doesn't look like it does in the booklet.
It would indeed be stinky if true.
Fortunately, it isn't. The lawsuit is because the info in the little "why widescreen?" section of MGM's booklets is 'misleading' (read: oversimplifying).
For instance, I saw Hannibal on the list. I know for a fact, because I (engage namedrop mode) spoke to Charlie De Lauzirika at Scott Free around the time of the DVD launch (disengage) that the disc is indeed correctly framed. Charlie is rightfully proud of the outstanding job done on the mastering of that disc.
1.85:1, or 'flat' films are shot on a 1.37 frame, with frame guides on the viewfinder to enable the matte to be applied later. For the 'pan and scan' release, they actually open up the matte to reveal the full frame, occasional boom mikes and all.
The particularly daft thing is that, for shots involving optical or digital effects MGM are usually right. In order to avoid wasting valuable effects work on areas of the frame that will never be seen in the cinema, they usually hard-matte these, and so a 1.33:1 transfer has to resort to panning and scanning again. I've yet to see an MGM disc where they've incorrectly dealt with this hard-matting, either.
MGM denies any wrongdoing because there is nothing wrong with the discs themselves. This can't be stated enough about the issue:
They are all as near as damnit correctly framed.
There are minor issues if you want to get picky - MGM frame their discs at a 1.77:1 to give a full 16:9 full frame, rather than the "correct" US framing of 1.85:1. The difference would be lost in overscan anyway by most people, though, so I can't say it bothers me much.
The lawsuit is actually about the fact that MGM have a little booklet image showing how you're missing information from the sides if you watch Pan 'n' Scan films. This is actually incorrect for most 1.85:1 films, as the 1.33:1 release isn't really a Pan 'n' Scan.
It's instead an Open Matte, which is where they remove the top and bottom frame mattes to reveal image that wasn't supposed to be there. This is still wrong, as there can be boom mikes up there, random crap down the bottom and generally the shot has not been framed to look right like that.
So no, you can't use this lawsuit to replace your 'faulty' MGM discs with 'correct' ones; you've already got correctly framed discs. All that MGM have done wrong is be misleading by oversimplifying their explanation of the 'widescreen' process in their booklets. If they'd just left the consumer confused, like every other DVD manufacturer, then this would never have happened.
The problem, if memory serves, is that it's a lot easier to sling a probe out along the plane than it is to send it "up or down" with any speed - simply because it's being launched from Earth any probe will already have a substantial amount of momentum in the plane.
I've got over 60Gb of media on my home machine right now - otherwise known as 5 hours of my 50-year-old parents' holiday video that needs editing down and writing to DVD at some point. They'd do it themselves if they had a capable box.
So it's easily done.
Thanks - that's what I was referring to. Both games recognise Taiwan as a 'nation' only in that they include the FIFA-approved national side in the tournament.
If China have a problem, I suggest they take it up with FIFA.
To be boringly serious for a moment, the reason for the FIFA ban is due to the way that it agrees with FIFA's definition of national teams, and not China's, if memory serves.