When we say "non-interactive movie" we're not just talking about FMV here. Were talking about those annoying scenes where the characters are blathering on and on at each other and you're just sitting there clicking the B button over and over again wishing they could just print it all up on the screen so you can just read it instead of having to read in the choppy unpleasant manner of RPG videogames. And notice less and less of the pop-up questions where you actually get to choose what to say? Thats the sort of thing. In my opinion, that stuff's worse then FMV, at least in FMV you don't have to keep clicking to watch the story unfold.
How about those 15-minute breaks of scripted animations, blackouts, trasforms, and tons upon tons of clicky-text, with little bits where you get to walk your character across the screen? Those parts where the screen goes all black and theres another buttload of badly-translated slow-moving click-boxes while you wait for your character to wake-up or start dreaming.
That's why the rest of us keep our gaming and storytelling separate. The story telling in RPG videogames is fscking annoying. For pity's sake, you're on DVD & gig disks now - no text allowed anymore, it'd better be well done voice with no more freaking clicking. Even playstation didn't have much excuse (there were 1-disk PC RPG's that were all voice instead of text).
I think Square is very talented and competent at storytelling and computer animation - and I think their skills are wasted on RPG videogames. If they'd made a real Final Fantasy movie (one that was cute and magical, like the FF games) - not a wannabe American Sci-fi movie, then they'd be where they belong - in cinema, in television, in OAV's - not freaking click-fests.
The best case I ever heard against patents occured when my older brother was working for my dad. Dad works in an optical physics firm, designing a sort of wide-area digital microscope. They were brainstorming solutions for the problem, and my brother, who was new to the business, made a suggestion.
Dad's response "thats perfect. Unfortunately, its exactly what our competator uses, and they've the patent." So the competator took a naturally occuring idea and patented it giving them that much closer to monopoly in the industry.
I don't have an alternate solution, but its obvious something's broken here.
The agreement goes more like this - if you don't load Windows on every box you make, and nothing but windows (I am a jealous god, and will have no others before me) then M$ will make windows so expensive for you that you won't be able to sell windows boxen at all and remain competative. Thus, you will be forced into a specialized second string market of non-preloaded computers, and probably go out of business. That's probably what it says.
Its Inuit, dumbass. But otherwise, yeah, you're right. Plus, I'm always annoyed how people consider folks like Halle Berry "black" - fuck, she's as black as I am native (my great great grandpa was named Sandals, an' thats all). Americans have the nasty tendancy to see anyone with slightly dark skin and curly hair and call them black, no matter how dilute the genes are.
I was particularly pissed when they put her in X-Men for Storm. Storm was african. Not just black, but born and raised in Africa. Halle Berry would look white to an african. No, not "half black" - she would look white. This whole "black pride" to someone who's a product of people who realised that there were more important things then race just seems silly.
My biggest complaint was how they turned Gimli into Lieutenant Worf - his job is to grunt and give all of the bad suggestions. He exists solely as a loudmouth and source of bad ideas.
They removed the whole chivalry side of the character, the thing that made him respectable, that made him more then just a dumb dwarf. Damnit, he was my favourite character.
That, and I kept wanting the elves to say yrch instea of orcs, but I guess that's too much to ask.
One in particular that I ran into back when I was a kid - I was picking up a newer model soundblaster from a local computer store. I asked them if it could do general Midi, particularly emluating an MP-401 or a Roland system? They said yes, straight to my face. I mentioned that this was important to me, that it didn't just use the useless non-wavetable midi system of the old SB-16's and 8-bits.
This was, of course, bullshit. I tried to return it, but they would only give me store credit, and I didn't want anything else from them (mainly they had printers and full systems, very little in the way of parts).
I also had massive difficulty with the driver disk they gave me, so I mailed the company, and was informed that the card they gave me was an OEM edition specifically designed for use in certain systems, never intended to be sold separately.
At the time I didn't know this was standard procedure for the computer industry (I don't by anything but OEM, and most of it isn't meant for use outside pre-built boxes) so I ratted the store out for selling me that card.
Really, I feel kinda sleazy about it - the store was gone within a month, I wonder if it was my fault? Still, they did it to themselves, trying to rip off a middle schooler.
Whatever, that's the closest thing I know to the subject.
I was more annoyed that they avoid the concept that characters were getting killed and not sent to the "next dimension". Really, don'tcha think the kids should get a realistic understanding of how the universe works? I mean, the bad guys even get killed in Disney movies (not as graphically, mind you, but Ursula was stabbed to death if I remember). But somehow, DBZ has to remove all references to death. It just seems quite absurd.
As long as they post their source code and credit us in the program I dont have a problem with this, give the GPL the props it deserves. I dont even know what to think, I wish they contacted me or any of the other gnutella developers or protocol maintainers before doing this.
That doesn't sound holier then thou - he knew they were within their rights, he accepted this a long time ago, back when he started using GPL code. Everyone does, its the price and the payment. He knows he couldn't stop them, that they have every right to do this. He's just wishing it could have been discussed over the table, so at least he could've been informed that his project was about to be forked, maybe to have an open dialogue - but instead, he found out about their move when the rest of us did. I really think you're being too hard on the guy, he doesn't sound unreasonable or holier-then-thou at all. He's not preaching, he's not ranting, and he knows his rights and responsibilities under the GPL - he says he wishes not demands or anything - never said they had to. Would've been nice, that's all.
Besides, imagine yourself in that place - be a hell of a shock to your system - the highest complement and the lowest bitchslap, all rolled into one.
Actually, I was somewhat dissapointed in the dub. For one thing, I'd heard that Gillian Anderson's voice for Moro was going to be incredibly distorted to be appropriate to the wolf god, but instead it was Gillian Anderson, with a rumbling background, sounding bored. Not the Moro I heard in Japanese. The monk (whose name I've fogotten) had a terrible voice, didnt' fit his apperiance at all. Plus, I like Gaiman, but his script was overtranslated and clumsy. A fansub I saw just called many of the gods by their japanese names "the shishigiri" for the forest god, "the tatagami" for the "demons" because they realised that translations would cause confusion, better to just learn new words. The tatagami wasn't any sort of demon - demon implies evil, while the tatagami was just consumed by hatred, which is different. When I showed the DVD version to some friends, they found it often confusing, and bits like this were the reason. Calling it a Tatagami lets the audience learn what it is by observing. Calling it a Demon God forces an inaccurate idea of what the artists behind the movie were trying to portray.
Same with calling Jigen a "monk" - which might be the literal translation, but monk carries different connotations for westerners. By using poor approximations of Japanese words, the movie very often causes confusion. Really, it made much more sense in a badly done, blurry sub that left a few untranslatable words in then it did after Miramax and Gaiman got through with it.
Whilst I scratch my head and try and figure out how that POS brought to us by Celine (I'm a Canadian, we hate her too) and Leo made so much cash - even in Japan.
I found TA had an excellent approach - you have one main builder to start, and he has a spell that can do incredible damage, but you don't attack with him 'cause if he dies its game over (if you don't play with that option turned on, its your own fault for screwing up the gameplay). Also, if two of these Commanders fight, they blow up extra-big when they die, so its impossible to kill one with another, as it'll always make a tie.
My problem with libertarianism is more then the simple "fuck the poor" mentality, its this belief that everyone poor is fucked by themselves, its their own fault. What about those born into poverty? What about some crackwhore's son, born with a biological addiction, stunted growth, and weak lungs - no money, no living conditions, no hope. Here in Canada, he gets free healthcare, theres the childcare laws, welfare to make sure he has enough to live on. In a libertarian system, he's dead. Very, very dead - he won't even get an education, so he has no chance to climb, unless he pulls of something spectacular. Is his situation his fault? What did he do? The crackwhore fucked herself, but what right has she to put a child in that position?
If you're only argument is that this is the typical "please think of the children" bleeding heart response, then go fuck yourself and die. Libertarianism is about everyone having a chance to succeed on their own merits and benefit from their success. If the system doens't grant each person the same chance at success (just starting chance, where you go from there is your business), the system is oligarchical and oppressive.
I hear Libertarianism too often from rich children raised in private schools, to whom it must seem very very easy to succeed in life, and failure could only come from terminal stupidity. And yes, I realise that you're not like that, you weren't well off, but still, you might have it better then some. Some whose education is negligible because they had poor schools, who have diseases that they never had the chance to get the money to treat. Your education was free though, as well as your access to the road you biked on. Theoretically, the government was there to provide you with protection, whether or not it was used. What if those things weren't in place, and instead every one of those was a paid service? Could you have done it then?
Libertarianism might work, it might be efficient, it might even be reasonable. But it is too quick to ignore those who are in their situations by no fault of their own.
Interesting stuff, but not really a very cutting-edge idea. The line between art and science was destroyed a long time ago, its just been a little more obvious with computers. Special effects for movies, techno music, video games, things like that have been around since the 70s. Just because people don't appreciate the science doesn't mean that the artist didn't have to be scientific to pull it off.
Speak for yourself. I bank with a small credit union operating out of the local university. Sure, my debit has a $1CAN transaction fee, but otherwise its excellent, and I know everyone there. I'm not rich, in fact right now I've got about $400 in that account. Banks do not have to be huge. The only problem is they've only got 3 ATM machines anywhere - one in front of the bank, one at the airport, and one downtown. Of course, the bank is a five minute walk from my house, so its not like that's much of a problem unless I'm out of town,
If I'm out of town? Oh well, I guess CIBC gets a buck or two of mine when I withdraw through their machine. Still, I get to know my banker, and stick up for the little guys instead of working with a big multimerger montser.
Not only that, they're saying it'll have much less beefy power then most equipment on the market - it sounds like they're not even pushing for graphical processing gear in there. Probably the games for this device would be solitare, nibbles, and tetris, not Doom and Kart games.
That shot was in software renderer, which lacked coloured lighting or good alpha blending, not to mention smooth textures, circular particles for particle systems, and other warm fuzzy things voodoo 2 era 3d accelerators provided.
Where'd you see that price for a dreamcast? Been thinking about picking one up (Virtual On, Powerstone II, and Sonic II are not to be missed, not to mention 4-player Marver vs Capcom)
You know, I almost agreed with you until you made your arguments universal. Yes, there are some real freaks out there - there are some real freaks in here too - does that mean the internet sucks? Agreed, most anime is crap, and somehow the crap manages to maintain a substantial following (I remember trying to watch the pilot episode of something called "nurse angel" egad that was painful) but there is a good volume of good stuff out there, just like there are always a few episodes of star trek that are fun to watch.
Besides, you're posting on slashdot. Odds are, half the world finds you just as scary.
That was self-interest. The US stands to lose out if an international alliance against them gains control of Europe. Soviets with german and british engineering would have been a Bad Thing for the US.
Part of the problem was that the apollo program crippled the SSTO projects. All the best scientists that were working on jet aircraft became involved in rocketry. Look at the SR-71 - its very existence at the time would be like M-16's in world war one. Its a marvel of engineering. Getting one of those things into space seems almost like no big deal - and yet they lost all that when they decided they needed everyone to work one a big fscking missile. I'm not saying the Apollo project was a bad idea, it was the best PR space could get, and besides it was just *right* to do it. But still, something might have been lost in the process, something with more long-term gain. The shuttle isn't even cheaper - most disposable rocket launches are unmanned just for launching satellites, and they do that way cheaper then the shuttle.
Slashdot Mirror
When we say "non-interactive movie" we're not just talking about FMV here. Were talking about those annoying scenes where the characters are blathering on and on at each other and you're just sitting there clicking the B button over and over again wishing they could just print it all up on the screen so you can just read it instead of having to read in the choppy unpleasant manner of RPG videogames. And notice less and less of the pop-up questions where you actually get to choose what to say? Thats the sort of thing. In my opinion, that stuff's worse then FMV, at least in FMV you don't have to keep clicking to watch the story unfold.
How about those 15-minute breaks of scripted animations, blackouts, trasforms, and tons upon tons of clicky-text, with little bits where you get to walk your character across the screen? Those parts where the screen goes all black and theres another buttload of badly-translated slow-moving click-boxes while you wait for your character to wake-up or start dreaming.
That's why the rest of us keep our gaming and storytelling separate. The story telling in RPG videogames is fscking annoying. For pity's sake, you're on DVD & gig disks now - no text allowed anymore, it'd better be well done voice with no more freaking clicking. Even playstation didn't have much excuse (there were 1-disk PC RPG's that were all voice instead of text).
I think Square is very talented and competent at storytelling and computer animation - and I think their skills are wasted on RPG videogames. If they'd made a real Final Fantasy movie (one that was cute and magical, like the FF games) - not a wannabe American Sci-fi movie, then they'd be where they belong - in cinema, in television, in OAV's - not freaking click-fests.
The best case I ever heard against patents occured when my older brother was working for my dad. Dad works in an optical physics firm, designing a sort of wide-area digital microscope. They were brainstorming solutions for the problem, and my brother, who was new to the business, made a suggestion.
Dad's response "thats perfect. Unfortunately, its exactly what our competator uses, and they've the patent." So the competator took a naturally occuring idea and patented it giving them that much closer to monopoly in the industry.
I don't have an alternate solution, but its obvious something's broken here.
The agreement goes more like this - if you don't load Windows on every box you make, and nothing but windows (I am a jealous god, and will have no others before me) then M$ will make windows so expensive for you that you won't be able to sell windows boxen at all and remain competative. Thus, you will be forced into a specialized second string market of non-preloaded computers, and probably go out of business. That's probably what it says.
Its Inuit, dumbass. But otherwise, yeah, you're right. Plus, I'm always annoyed how people consider folks like Halle Berry "black" - fuck, she's as black as I am native (my great great grandpa was named Sandals, an' thats all). Americans have the nasty tendancy to see anyone with slightly dark skin and curly hair and call them black, no matter how dilute the genes are.
I was particularly pissed when they put her in X-Men for Storm. Storm was african. Not just black, but born and raised in Africa. Halle Berry would look white to an african. No, not "half black" - she would look white. This whole "black pride" to someone who's a product of people who realised that there were more important things then race just seems silly.
My biggest complaint was how they turned Gimli into Lieutenant Worf - his job is to grunt and give all of the bad suggestions. He exists solely as a loudmouth and source of bad ideas.
They removed the whole chivalry side of the character, the thing that made him respectable, that made him more then just a dumb dwarf. Damnit, he was my favourite character.
That, and I kept wanting the elves to say yrch instea of orcs, but I guess that's too much to ask.
One in particular that I ran into back when I was a kid - I was picking up a newer model soundblaster from a local computer store. I asked them if it could do general Midi, particularly emluating an MP-401 or a Roland system? They said yes, straight to my face. I mentioned that this was important to me, that it didn't just use the useless non-wavetable midi system of the old SB-16's and 8-bits.
This was, of course, bullshit. I tried to return it, but they would only give me store credit, and I didn't want anything else from them (mainly they had printers and full systems, very little in the way of parts).
I also had massive difficulty with the driver disk they gave me, so I mailed the company, and was informed that the card they gave me was an OEM edition specifically designed for use in certain systems, never intended to be sold separately.
At the time I didn't know this was standard procedure for the computer industry (I don't by anything but OEM, and most of it isn't meant for use outside pre-built boxes) so I ratted the store out for selling me that card.
Really, I feel kinda sleazy about it - the store was gone within a month, I wonder if it was my fault? Still, they did it to themselves, trying to rip off a middle schooler.
Whatever, that's the closest thing I know to the subject.
I was more annoyed that they avoid the concept that characters were getting killed and not sent to the "next dimension". Really, don'tcha think the kids should get a realistic understanding of how the universe works? I mean, the bad guys even get killed in Disney movies (not as graphically, mind you, but Ursula was stabbed to death if I remember). But somehow, DBZ has to remove all references to death. It just seems quite absurd.
rtfa. Its LED's in the eyes, just the status lights, not actual cables. Those are in the paws.
That doesn't sound holier then thou - he knew they were within their rights, he accepted this a long time ago, back when he started using GPL code. Everyone does, its the price and the payment. He knows he couldn't stop them, that they have every right to do this. He's just wishing it could have been discussed over the table, so at least he could've been informed that his project was about to be forked, maybe to have an open dialogue - but instead, he found out about their move when the rest of us did. I really think you're being too hard on the guy, he doesn't sound unreasonable or holier-then-thou at all. He's not preaching, he's not ranting, and he knows his rights and responsibilities under the GPL - he says he wishes not demands or anything - never said they had to. Would've been nice, that's all.
Besides, imagine yourself in that place - be a hell of a shock to your system - the highest complement and the lowest bitchslap, all rolled into one.
Actually, I was somewhat dissapointed in the dub. For one thing, I'd heard that Gillian Anderson's voice for Moro was going to be incredibly distorted to be appropriate to the wolf god, but instead it was Gillian Anderson, with a rumbling background, sounding bored. Not the Moro I heard in Japanese. The monk (whose name I've fogotten) had a terrible voice, didnt' fit his apperiance at all. Plus, I like Gaiman, but his script was overtranslated and clumsy. A fansub I saw just called many of the gods by their japanese names "the shishigiri" for the forest god, "the tatagami" for the "demons" because they realised that translations would cause confusion, better to just learn new words. The tatagami wasn't any sort of demon - demon implies evil, while the tatagami was just consumed by hatred, which is different. When I showed the DVD version to some friends, they found it often confusing, and bits like this were the reason. Calling it a Tatagami lets the audience learn what it is by observing. Calling it a Demon God forces an inaccurate idea of what the artists behind the movie were trying to portray.
Same with calling Jigen a "monk" - which might be the literal translation, but monk carries different connotations for westerners. By using poor approximations of Japanese words, the movie very often causes confusion. Really, it made much more sense in a badly done, blurry sub that left a few untranslatable words in then it did after Miramax and Gaiman got through with it.
Whilst I scratch my head and try and figure out how that POS brought to us by Celine (I'm a Canadian, we hate her too) and Leo made so much cash - even in Japan.
I found TA had an excellent approach - you have one main builder to start, and he has a spell that can do incredible damage, but you don't attack with him 'cause if he dies its game over (if you don't play with that option turned on, its your own fault for screwing up the gameplay). Also, if two of these Commanders fight, they blow up extra-big when they die, so its impossible to kill one with another, as it'll always make a tie.
My problem with libertarianism is more then the simple "fuck the poor" mentality, its this belief that everyone poor is fucked by themselves, its their own fault. What about those born into poverty? What about some crackwhore's son, born with a biological addiction, stunted growth, and weak lungs - no money, no living conditions, no hope. Here in Canada, he gets free healthcare, theres the childcare laws, welfare to make sure he has enough to live on. In a libertarian system, he's dead. Very, very dead - he won't even get an education, so he has no chance to climb, unless he pulls of something spectacular. Is his situation his fault? What did he do? The crackwhore fucked herself, but what right has she to put a child in that position?
If you're only argument is that this is the typical "please think of the children" bleeding heart response, then go fuck yourself and die. Libertarianism is about everyone having a chance to succeed on their own merits and benefit from their success. If the system doens't grant each person the same chance at success (just starting chance, where you go from there is your business), the system is oligarchical and oppressive.
I hear Libertarianism too often from rich children raised in private schools, to whom it must seem very very easy to succeed in life, and failure could only come from terminal stupidity. And yes, I realise that you're not like that, you weren't well off, but still, you might have it better then some. Some whose education is negligible because they had poor schools, who have diseases that they never had the chance to get the money to treat. Your education was free though, as well as your access to the road you biked on. Theoretically, the government was there to provide you with protection, whether or not it was used. What if those things weren't in place, and instead every one of those was a paid service? Could you have done it then?
Libertarianism might work, it might be efficient, it might even be reasonable. But it is too quick to ignore those who are in their situations by no fault of their own.
Interesting stuff, but not really a very cutting-edge idea. The line between art and science was destroyed a long time ago, its just been a little more obvious with computers. Special effects for movies, techno music, video games, things like that have been around since the 70s. Just because people don't appreciate the science doesn't mean that the artist didn't have to be scientific to pull it off.
Argentina, Mexico and Cuba are third worlkd countries? Well fuck you too.
well, they couldn't very well call it a privy, now could they?
Speak for yourself. I bank with a small credit union operating out of the local university. Sure, my debit has a $1CAN transaction fee, but otherwise its excellent, and I know everyone there. I'm not rich, in fact right now I've got about $400 in that account. Banks do not have to be huge. The only problem is they've only got 3 ATM machines anywhere - one in front of the bank, one at the airport, and one downtown. Of course, the bank is a five minute walk from my house, so its not like that's much of a problem unless I'm out of town,
If I'm out of town? Oh well, I guess CIBC gets a buck or two of mine when I withdraw through their machine. Still, I get to know my banker, and stick up for the little guys instead of working with a big multimerger montser.
Not only that, they're saying it'll have much less beefy power then most equipment on the market - it sounds like they're not even pushing for graphical processing gear in there. Probably the games for this device would be solitare, nibbles, and tetris, not Doom and Kart games.
They get Mario Kart Advance. Damn, that game is just too good.
Its a movie - its Osama Bin Laden playing Nostradamus, of course.
That shot was in software renderer, which lacked coloured lighting or good alpha blending, not to mention smooth textures, circular particles for particle systems, and other warm fuzzy things voodoo 2 era 3d accelerators provided.
Where'd you see that price for a dreamcast? Been thinking about picking one up (Virtual On, Powerstone II, and Sonic II are not to be missed, not to mention 4-player Marver vs Capcom)
You know, I almost agreed with you until you made your arguments universal. Yes, there are some real freaks out there - there are some real freaks in here too - does that mean the internet sucks? Agreed, most anime is crap, and somehow the crap manages to maintain a substantial following (I remember trying to watch the pilot episode of something called "nurse angel" egad that was painful) but there is a good volume of good stuff out there, just like there are always a few episodes of star trek that are fun to watch.
Besides, you're posting on slashdot. Odds are, half the world finds you just as scary.
That was self-interest. The US stands to lose out if an international alliance against them gains control of Europe. Soviets with german and british engineering would have been a Bad Thing for the US.
Part of the problem was that the apollo program crippled the SSTO projects. All the best scientists that were working on jet aircraft became involved in rocketry. Look at the SR-71 - its very existence at the time would be like M-16's in world war one. Its a marvel of engineering. Getting one of those things into space seems almost like no big deal - and yet they lost all that when they decided they needed everyone to work one a big fscking missile. I'm not saying the Apollo project was a bad idea, it was the best PR space could get, and besides it was just *right* to do it. But still, something might have been lost in the process, something with more long-term gain. The shuttle isn't even cheaper - most disposable rocket launches are unmanned just for launching satellites, and they do that way cheaper then the shuttle.