What? As best I can recall, it had been taken off the market before 9/11 - and it had been in full-scale release, including shrinkwrapped boxes on the store shelves, long before then. I was one of the beta testers during the live release, and the main problem with it was *not* that it was a terrorist-related plot, but that there was no frickin' *game* there. Sure, you could get cell phone messages and faxes, but there wasn't jack to *do*.
Re:Sick of reviewers, critics, skeptics, guides, e
on
Taken?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, get a grip. Anime can be tentacle rape. And there's nothing that says it has to be 'captivating, wonderful film.' It's not new - it's been around as long as animation has been made in Japan - and it's just as much of an art form as any other mass media. It's a mass media. There's good anime. There's bad anime. There's tentacle rape anime. There's magical girl anime. There's five-people-in-giant-robots-saving-the-world anime. Some of it is pretty good. Some of it stinks to high heaven. Saying that all anime is 'captivating, wonderful' is like saying that all novels are 'captivating, wonderful,' or all comic books are 'captivating, wonderful,' or... hell, pick a mass media. By insisting that all anime is incredibly good, you're basically showing that you have absolutely no ability to critically evaluate it. A hint: Any art form or mass media in which a single fight scene can take twenty half-hour episodes to get through, not including the digressions away from said fight scene to show other, minor characters fighting, is not automatically captivating. Nor, I would like to point out, is it automatically wonderful. So, I reiterate: Get a grip.
Considering that this camera will sell for six thousand dollars... and this is the important bit... how likely is it that Canon intends it for "everyday photos or for vacation photos"? This camera isn't intended to replace film for "every-day use". It's intended to replace film for professionals.
They don't have a case: they offer no evidence that he used his program to affect their fonts. In pure copyright terms, that's it - there's no other issue. In DMCA terms, there's other issues at hand, all of which have been adequately dealt with by the party in question... but in copyright, the mere existence of a brick does not presuppose that the brick will inevitably be thrown through a window.
And yes, we... or at least I... would side with the person who bloody well created the code, and support his or her right to put what license on said code he or she wants, which is the real issue here.
Dude. Sure, they're not talking about the plot structure, because the bleedin' plot is very different. The princess in The Hidden Fortress doesn't have to be rescued from imprisonment halfway through. The samurai doesn't die and the samurai isn't a callow youth fresh from the farms. The tall peasant and the short peasant are both greedy, cowardly arguing types who have to be dragged into the plot.
True, Lucas liked Kurosawa's shooting style and some of the shots... but that's Kurosawa's shooting and editing style in all his movies, Hidden Fortressas well asHigh and Low, Ikiru, Yojimbo, and even Seven Samurai. There's no unique shooting and editing style that was only used in Hidden Fortress, so pointing to that movie as The One True Source doesn't work, unless you can prove that Lucas only ever sawHidden Fortress, which I sincerely doubt you can do, considering that the man helped get funding for Kurosawa to produce Kagemusha and Ran (You're not going to drop twenty million on a man without seeing more than one movie he made,y'see.)
As for the plot and characters: Lucas thought he could do something with a few of the concepts, in conjunction with, say, elements from Flash Gordon, Star Blazers, fairy tales, World War II fighter-pilot movies (take a look at the attack on the Death Star, then go watch The Dam Busters,) a little bit of half-baked David-Carradine-in-Kung-Fu mysticism, and on and on and on. There's no one source, and The Hidden Fortress is not the one source, because, as I believe I just mentioned in this very sentence, there is no one source.
You can legitimately argue that Lucas swiped a lot. It's true. He did. You can legitimately argue that Star Wars isn't tremendously original. It's true. There's a whole bunch in there that can be traced back to other sources. You can't argue that Star Wars was derived soley from The Hidden Fortress, because it ain't, and if you take your "hey, I know something that YOU don't know" blinders off, you might be able to see that.
Re:star wars was ripped off a japanese film
on
Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, it wasn't. It swiped a few elements, sure, but if you'd ever actually, you know, seenThe Hidden Fortress, you'd see that there's many, many differences. The goal of the characters in Star Wars is not just survival until they reach safe territory, there is no following-in-your-father's-footsteps theme in Kurosawa's movie, the one short and one tall peasant are squabbling, greedy, and have to be threatened and bribed before they'll cooperate, there's no climactic battle that winds up in the destruction of a really big castle or anything similar. Lucas was (I haven't a clue if he is still) a big admirer of Akira Kurosawa, and there's no argument that he did use several cinematic and plot elements from The Hidden Fortress, but to say that it's a "rewritten" version of it is wholly ludicrous.
This is just another example of people quoting without understanding, really. I'm no fan of Lucas, and I believe that his success with Star Wars really is more of a reflection of his ability to imitate Kurosawa in general and recast Kurosawa's stylistic tropes and whatnot in a widely-acceptable-to-American-audiences pulp-fiction format. That belief, though, is a far cry from claiming that Lucas just filed the serial numbers off of Hidden Fortress - one, at the very least, is arguable, and the other is easily disproved just by comparing the plots of the two movies.
But... dude... he *has* been shown to be a liar. Remember the time he claimed to have hacked into the Oscar-results database, only to have to admit later that he'd just looked at a file on an ABC.com FileMaker server with *their* guesses as to who'd win?
Or how about the time he took a scoop from Coming Attractions, pulled off who it was addressed to, and ran it on his site as an exclusive AICN story?
Or, hell, how about the time he claimed _Armageddon_ was a good movie?
For CAD and 3D modeling applications, a GeForce2MX is about as fast as a full-bore GeForce2 - the extra power of the 2 is in multitexturing, which you don't need if you're working in wireframe.
Also, DDR is not automatically faster than SDR - you can get a DDR 2MX, for instance... it just has a 64-bit wide memory bus instead of 128 bit. This isn't a situation where we can say that the DDR Radeon is automatically faster than the SDR GeForce.
Plus, I have a *lot* more faith in nvidia's driver authoring team than ATI's.
Chording may be easy to learn, but it's a prime example of lousy user interface design. There's no way to design a chordable keyboard that can be used with no documentation, which is pretty much required for a device to fly these days. On a normal one key-one letter keyboard, if nothing else, you can stare at the letters printed on top of the keys and hunt and peck your way through a letter. Even if you're used to QWERTY and someone hands you a Dvorak keyboard, you can still use it at a basic level without having to practice and without having to have a book telling you the combinations. Even Palm's Graffiti is still vaguely usable without documentation, because there's a one-for-one correlation between letters appearing on the screen and shapes you draw on the screen... chording keyboards, however, don't have that. However easy one might be to learn *with* the documentation, it'd take days of trial and error to accomplish anything without it.
Re:3D Realism is becoming dangerous.
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
So, the floating armor and health meters, plus the crosshair, plus the weapon, plus the fact that you're shooting at characters wearing science fictiony armor, are perfectly realistic to you? You see those every day in your own life?
Moron.
I also ordered and read _Look to Windward_ from the UK, and I'm having a hard time believing that this guy and I read the same book. _Look to Windward_ is disjointed, shallow, lacking in characterization, and definitely lacking in the complexity that was present in _Use of Weapons_ and _Consider Phlebas_. It's two hundred pages of a single character doing absolutely nothing besides moping around, followed by two pages of actual story... and if we want that, Dave Sim did it brilliantly in _Melmoth_. There's material about life in the Culture that was done better in _Player of Games_, material about Minds that was done better in _Excession_, material about Special Circumstances's screwups that was done better in _Use of Weapons_... this is, basically, a pretty lousy book all by itself, and once you compare what qualities it *does* have with other books by Banks, it suffers - badly - in the comparison. If you have to have all Banks's work... wait for paperback. Possibly even wait for it to appear in paperback in used bookstores.
Because it's the same game.
You're Loki. You have game X. It runs under Linux. You sell to the Linux people. You sell 5000 copies of said game.
With a little extra work, you-as-Loki can have game X run under Linux *and* FreeBSD without any need for the FreeBSD users to write their own install scripts. Now, you're selling to the Linux people and the FreeBSD people. You might then sell 5500 copies of game X. Same game. Same disc. Almost the same amount of work as before, but now you're selling an additional 500 copies. See?
(Disclaimer: Personally, I doubt that the FreeBSD community is going to buy 10% of the games that the Linux community buys, but, hey, it's just an example.)
BSDi has merged with/bought into/assimilated/what-have-you FreeBSD, which, if I'm remembering aright, has the largest user base of the *BSDs.
Also, really, it's not going to take much money at all to do this - making sure their install scripts speak both FreeBSD and Linux and like that.
I currently don't buy games to use on my FreeBSD system, but this isn't because I wouldn't if given the chance, it's because it's a freakin' pain in the butt to get any of the current commercial Linux games running under it.
And sure, I use FreeBSD as a server OS. I prefer, though, to have the same OS on my desktop as I do on my server so I don't have to stop and say "Wait, which unix am I in now?" before beating on any settings.
Re:Cool... is this the modernized Amiga?
on
AtheOS
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· Score: 1
"A UNIX-like OS designed from the ground up around a solid GUI could be really nice." Yeah, but we already have one - BeOS. AtheOS sounds cool, but do we really need another not-*exactly*-compatible-GUI-and-OS at this point?
Speaking of people who don't know WTF they're talking about: They're not worried about the *reactor* on that there probe, they're worried that there may be Terran life left on it that would contaminate Europa - which, by the way, we don't think Europa has life on it. We *don't know*. It might have life on it. It might not. We don't know. Not knowing and not wanting to obfuscate the issue for later is very different from "we now think..." Furthermore, Galileo's pretty damaged as it is: they're not wasting it, they're just trying to get the most useful (or interesting) data out of it before it dies completely. Jupiter orbit isn't the safest possible place to put a space probe - it's damn unhealthy for electronics. And what this has to do with Boeing accidentally sending parts for the ISS to the landfill, I haven't a clue. Why not try to grind your ill-informed axe somewhere more appropriate?
Slashdot Mirror
And are they good diggers?
What? As best I can recall, it had been taken off the market before 9/11 - and it had been in full-scale release, including shrinkwrapped boxes on the store shelves, long before then. I was one of the beta testers during the live release, and the main problem with it was *not* that it was a terrorist-related plot, but that there was no frickin' *game* there. Sure, you could get cell phone messages and faxes, but there wasn't jack to *do*.
"Ringworld." Not "Ring World." Hope this helps.
"Shouldn't the users have some say?" Well, shouldn't the people who have to work with the guy have some say, too?
It's either fraud, stupidity, or MAME-in-a-box.
Oh, get a grip. ... hell, pick a mass media. By insisting that all anime is incredibly good, you're basically showing that you have absolutely no ability to critically evaluate it. A hint: Any art form or mass media in which a single fight scene can take twenty half-hour episodes to get through, not including the digressions away from said fight scene to show other, minor characters fighting, is not automatically captivating. Nor, I would like to point out, is it automatically wonderful. So, I reiterate: Get a grip.
Anime can be tentacle rape. And there's nothing that says it has to be 'captivating, wonderful film.' It's not new - it's been around as long as animation has been made in Japan - and it's just as much of an art form as any other mass media. It's a mass media. There's good anime. There's bad anime. There's tentacle rape anime. There's magical girl anime. There's five-people-in-giant-robots-saving-the-world anime. Some of it is pretty good. Some of it stinks to high heaven. Saying that all anime is 'captivating, wonderful' is like saying that all novels are 'captivating, wonderful,' or all comic books are 'captivating, wonderful,' or
Considering that this camera will sell for six thousand dollars ... and this is the important bit ... how likely is it that Canon intends it for "everyday photos or for vacation photos"?
This camera isn't intended to replace film for "every-day use". It's intended to replace film for professionals.
Jeez, man. Anybody who's posting to this already knows all this. In detail. Better than you do. Get a grip.
Did you read the article and the linked page?
... but in copyright, the mere existence of a brick does not presuppose that the brick will inevitably be thrown through a window.
... or at least I ... would side with the person who bloody well created the code, and support his or her right to put what license on said code he or she wants, which is the real issue here.
They don't have a case: they offer no evidence that he used his program to affect their fonts. In pure copyright terms, that's it - there's no other issue. In DMCA terms, there's other issues at hand, all of which have been adequately dealt with by the party in question
And yes, we
Dude. Sure, they're not talking about the plot structure, because the bleedin' plot is very different. The princess in The Hidden Fortress doesn't have to be rescued from imprisonment halfway through. The samurai doesn't die and the samurai isn't a callow youth fresh from the farms. The tall peasant and the short peasant are both greedy, cowardly arguing types who have to be dragged into the plot.
... but that's Kurosawa's shooting and editing style in all his movies, Hidden Fortress as well as High and Low, Ikiru, Yojimbo, and even Seven Samurai. There's no unique shooting and editing style that was only used in Hidden Fortress, so pointing to that movie as The One True Source doesn't work, unless you can prove that Lucas only ever saw Hidden Fortress, which I sincerely doubt you can do, considering that the man helped get funding for Kurosawa to produce Kagemusha and Ran (You're not going to drop twenty million on a man without seeing more than one movie he made,y'see.)
True, Lucas liked Kurosawa's shooting style and some of the shots
As for the plot and characters: Lucas thought he could do something with a few of the concepts, in conjunction with, say, elements from Flash Gordon, Star Blazers, fairy tales, World War II fighter-pilot movies (take a look at the attack on the Death Star, then go watch The Dam Busters,) a little bit of half-baked David-Carradine-in-Kung-Fu mysticism, and on and on and on. There's no one source, and The Hidden Fortress is not the one source, because, as I believe I just mentioned in this very sentence, there is no one source.
You can legitimately argue that Lucas swiped a lot. It's true. He did. You can legitimately argue that Star Wars isn't tremendously original. It's true. There's a whole bunch in there that can be traced back to other sources. You can't argue that Star Wars was derived soley from The Hidden Fortress, because it ain't, and if you take your "hey, I know something that YOU don't know" blinders off, you might be able to see that.
No, it wasn't. It swiped a few elements, sure, but if you'd ever actually, you know, seen The Hidden Fortress, you'd see that there's many, many differences. The goal of the characters in Star Wars is not just survival until they reach safe territory, there is no following-in-your-father's-footsteps theme in Kurosawa's movie, the one short and one tall peasant are squabbling, greedy, and have to be threatened and bribed before they'll cooperate, there's no climactic battle that winds up in the destruction of a really big castle or anything similar. Lucas was (I haven't a clue if he is still) a big admirer of Akira Kurosawa, and there's no argument that he did use several cinematic and plot elements from The Hidden Fortress, but to say that it's a "rewritten" version of it is wholly ludicrous.
This is just another example of people quoting without understanding, really. I'm no fan of Lucas, and I believe that his success with Star Wars really is more of a reflection of his ability to imitate Kurosawa in general and recast Kurosawa's stylistic tropes and whatnot in a widely-acceptable-to-American-audiences pulp-fiction format. That belief, though, is a far cry from claiming that Lucas just filed the serial numbers off of Hidden Fortress - one, at the very least, is arguable, and the other is easily disproved just by comparing the plots of the two movies.
But ... dude ... he *has* been shown to be a liar. Remember the time he claimed to have hacked into the Oscar-results database, only to have to admit later that he'd just looked at a file on an ABC.com FileMaker server with *their* guesses as to who'd win?
Or how about the time he took a scoop from Coming Attractions, pulled off who it was addressed to, and ran it on his site as an exclusive AICN story?
Or, hell, how about the time he claimed _Armageddon_ was a good movie?
Dude, the iMacs don't have nvidia chips. They're still using Rage 128s.
For CAD and 3D modeling applications, a GeForce2MX is about as fast as a full-bore GeForce2 - the extra power of the 2 is in multitexturing, which you don't need if you're working in wireframe. Also, DDR is not automatically faster than SDR - you can get a DDR 2MX, for instance ... it just has a 64-bit wide memory bus instead of 128 bit. This isn't a situation where we can say that the DDR Radeon is automatically faster than the SDR GeForce.
Plus, I have a *lot* more faith in nvidia's driver authoring team than ATI's.
Chording may be easy to learn, but it's a prime example of lousy user interface design. There's no way to design a chordable keyboard that can be used with no documentation, which is pretty much required for a device to fly these days. On a normal one key-one letter keyboard, if nothing else, you can stare at the letters printed on top of the keys and hunt and peck your way through a letter. Even if you're used to QWERTY and someone hands you a Dvorak keyboard, you can still use it at a basic level without having to practice and without having to have a book telling you the combinations. Even Palm's Graffiti is still vaguely usable without documentation, because there's a one-for-one correlation between letters appearing on the screen and shapes you draw on the screen ... chording keyboards, however, don't have that. However easy one might be to learn *with* the documentation, it'd take days of trial and error to accomplish anything without it.
So, the floating armor and health meters, plus the crosshair, plus the weapon, plus the fact that you're shooting at characters wearing science fictiony armor, are perfectly realistic to you? You see those every day in your own life? Moron.
No, if I was talking about _Atlas Shrugged_, I'd have said "One thousand pages of a single character doing absolutely nothing..."
I also ordered and read _Look to Windward_ from the UK, and I'm having a hard time believing that this guy and I read the same book. _Look to Windward_ is disjointed, shallow, lacking in characterization, and definitely lacking in the complexity that was present in _Use of Weapons_ and _Consider Phlebas_. It's two hundred pages of a single character doing absolutely nothing besides moping around, followed by two pages of actual story ... and if we want that, Dave Sim did it brilliantly in _Melmoth_. There's material about life in the Culture that was done better in _Player of Games_, material about Minds that was done better in _Excession_, material about Special Circumstances's screwups that was done better in _Use of Weapons_ ... this is, basically, a pretty lousy book all by itself, and once you compare what qualities it *does* have with other books by Banks, it suffers - badly - in the comparison. If you have to have all Banks's work ... wait for paperback. Possibly even wait for it to appear in paperback in used bookstores.
Because it's the same game. You're Loki. You have game X. It runs under Linux. You sell to the Linux people. You sell 5000 copies of said game. With a little extra work, you-as-Loki can have game X run under Linux *and* FreeBSD without any need for the FreeBSD users to write their own install scripts. Now, you're selling to the Linux people and the FreeBSD people. You might then sell 5500 copies of game X. Same game. Same disc. Almost the same amount of work as before, but now you're selling an additional 500 copies. See? (Disclaimer: Personally, I doubt that the FreeBSD community is going to buy 10% of the games that the Linux community buys, but, hey, it's just an example.)
BSDi has merged with/bought into/assimilated/what-have-you FreeBSD, which, if I'm remembering aright, has the largest user base of the *BSDs. Also, really, it's not going to take much money at all to do this - making sure their install scripts speak both FreeBSD and Linux and like that.
I currently don't buy games to use on my FreeBSD system, but this isn't because I wouldn't if given the chance, it's because it's a freakin' pain in the butt to get any of the current commercial Linux games running under it. And sure, I use FreeBSD as a server OS. I prefer, though, to have the same OS on my desktop as I do on my server so I don't have to stop and say "Wait, which unix am I in now?" before beating on any settings.
"A UNIX-like OS designed from the ground up around a solid GUI could be really nice." Yeah, but we already have one - BeOS. AtheOS sounds cool, but do we really need another not-*exactly*-compatible-GUI-and-OS at this point?
Speaking of people who don't know WTF they're talking about: They're not worried about the *reactor* on that there probe, they're worried that there may be Terran life left on it that would contaminate Europa - which, by the way, we don't think Europa has life on it. We *don't know*. It might have life on it. It might not. We don't know. Not knowing and not wanting to obfuscate the issue for later is very different from "we now think..." Furthermore, Galileo's pretty damaged as it is: they're not wasting it, they're just trying to get the most useful (or interesting) data out of it before it dies completely. Jupiter orbit isn't the safest possible place to put a space probe - it's damn unhealthy for electronics. And what this has to do with Boeing accidentally sending parts for the ISS to the landfill, I haven't a clue. Why not try to grind your ill-informed axe somewhere more appropriate?