Haven't read the article, because it's slashdoted, but I assume it's about the fact that the Ogg container was initially designed as a transport stream format for audio.
The article goes considerably beyond that, arguing that the container is flawed even as an audio format. Here's the money quote (emphasis mine):
When challenged, [Ogg campaigners] will occasionally assume an apologetic tone, explaining how Ogg was only ever designed for simple audio-only streams (ignoring it is as bad for these as for anything), and this is no doubt true. Why then, I ask again, do they continue to tout Ogg as the one-size-fits-all solution they already admitted it is not?
This isn't a mod, though. By changing an existing product, modders typically don't distribute material that infringes upon existing intellectual property (theoretically, at least: I know this isn't always true in practice).
TSL was an entirely new project, built using a new engine, and prominently featuring Sierra IP. In order to release it, the team would have had to release offending IP by definition, and so it's a different kettle of fish. However, given that the team already had a non-commercial license from the previous IP holder, I won't dispute that it makes Activision look like scumbags.
IANAL, but as I understand it there's not much difference between a merger and an acquisition. Properly speaking, a merger happens when when company acquires another. There's a commonly accepted practical difference that has to do with what the company looks like after the acquisition, but that's all.
When a publisher purchases a studio and keeps it more or less intact and removed, that's considered an acquisition. Similarly so when a company is purchased and essentially broken down for spare parts/intellectual property. But when the acquired company is integrated into the acquiring company (and especially when there's a name change involved), it's considered a merger.
Square Enix is an example: legally speaking, Enix bought Square, but the resulting corporate hierarchy more closely resembled Square than Enix. As you say, Activision is another example.
You can't "lose the rights to another party." You just lose your exclusive right to that trademark. If I was to release a portable music player called the "iPod," Apple chose not to sue me into the next century, and the courts found that they had neglected to enforce their trademark on the name, that doesn't mean that I'd now be able to sue anyone using the name. It just means that anyone who wanted to could chose to name their media player "iPod" and Apple couldn't do a thing about it. It happens quite a bit, actually: aspirin, escalator, zipper, thermos, cola, etc.
That being said, I don't know if trademarks are really at issue in this case. The designers were granted a right to use Sierra IP in their agreement with Vivendi, but they pointedly were not granted a right to use Sierra trademarks. Before the 2005 cease and desist letter that led to the original non-commercial license, the project was entitled "King's Quest IX," but the name was changed to the non-trademark-infringing "The Silver Lining" at Vivendi's insistence. The issue now would seem to be the more general licensing of copyrighted IP at all, and the copyright law is different than trademark law. For one, you can't lose a copyright due to non-enforcement, IIRC.
I think the problem is, per the original agreement, the game was always subject to the Vivendi's approval before release. Now that the IP belongs to Activision, the game is theoretically subject to their approval. All Activision needs to do to kill the project dead is to refuse to approve anything.
It's a crying shame, because the TSL guys were cooperative and accommodating every step of the way. They sought out a license in the first place, and complied with every change requested of them without complaint (they dropped the "King's Quest" name from the project a few years back because Vivendi/Sierra weren't willing to grant a fan license on the trademark, for instance). But I suppose, in the long run, it's not unexpected.
Yeah, you can still play back AVI containers in Windows, but Windows has been pushing WMV in its stead for years now, for better or for worse. Windows 7 comes with out-of-the-box support for MP4 containers, if I remember correctly, as well.
AVI has been a functionally dead container format for close to decade, in all honesty. It's survived in zombie form because the only alternatives were either too bogged down in proprietary fluff (ASF/WMV) or not user friendly enough to set up for most Windows and Mac users (MKV and MP4). It had its lifespan prolonged by hardware manufacturers like Sony, but its falling further and further behind the technology curve, and the trends seem to be behind MP4, even in the dedicated hardware market.
And as for DivX/Xvid (since TFA fails to grasp the difference between codec and container), well, that's much ado about nothing: HandBrake will still happily encode MPEG-4 Part 2/Xvid-compliant video. It's just eliminating the Xvid encoder itself in favor of FFmpeg. And if you're not familiar enough with the situation to recognize that how little difference this makes, chances are you probably aren't affected by the decision at all.
Oh, please. Square Enix isn't issuing C&D letters to anyone for making games. They've got a legitimate interest in protecting their property. I don't happen to care for current IP law, but the developers of this project really should have recognized that they ran the risk of this sort of thing from day one. I rather doubt they were making any sort of principled stand against the tyranny of intellectual property, and suspect they just figured that SE wouldn't notice them.
Wake me when they start going after folks who aren't directly recycling SE-created characters, settings, resources, and code.
How do you know its decent? What qualifies as "decent," anyway? From your and my perspective, probably just a good game (of course, our tastes and preferences probably vary), but Square Enix, like any company, is probably more concerned with what makes them money. And what's the market for this sort of thing, honestly?
Besides, is this really a precedent that a company like Square Enix wants to be setting? The next thing you know, every wannabe hacker starts bombarding SE with licensing requests, and SE needs a submissions department.
"As a legit cart"? Er, when was the last time you saw a SNES game on sale at Wal-Mart? GameStop? Anywhere this side of eBay?
Seriously, though, "stating their willingness to assign all copyrights... for some nominal fee" would be an incredibly bad idea. Not only would Square Enix have no reason to agree (since they own the original work, and the derivative is worthless without it), it would look like to all the world like extortion.
And the simple fact of the matter is that while Square Enix might be able to find a limited market for such a product on places like Steam, XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare, that market probably wouldn't be sufficient to cover even the costs of testing a 98%-complete amateur hack. It would win them some kudos from a hardcore fan community that is in all likelihood a negligibly small part of their consumer base.
No, it wasn't. It wasn't a particularly impressive remake, I'll grant you, but it did have various features added that were in neither the PlayStation version, nor the SNES original (bonus dungeon, IIRC).
AFAIK there weren't Windows 3.11 but "Windows 3.1" and "Windows 3.11 for Workgroups".
Windows 3.11 (not Windows 3.11 for Workgroups) did exist, but it wasn't a major release. It was primarily an minor, service pack-like upgrade of Windows 3.1. Since this was back in the day before Windows Update, not many people actually installed it, or even knew about it. I don't think Microsoft released it in its own right except for a select few OEMs.
For that matter, there was, IIRC, a Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) for Workgroups, as well, though it didn't get the same amount of traction as its successor, and was quickly replaced/upgraded to the more familiar 3.11. But I believe WfW 3.1 was the first version of Windows to implement SMB shares.
With the exception of maybe one or two episodes (like the one where they wind up going back in time and preventing JFK's assassination while looking for a good Indian restaurant), I found little worthwhile in season 7.
Season 8 was a vast improvement, though, in that it actually bothered to be funny. True, by this point the series had drifted so far from the original premise that it was hardly the same show, but at least it was still amusing. And I enjoyed the addition of Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister) as a semi-regular character.
The ending of "Only the Good...", though, was a brilliant moment. If you ask me, I couldn't have thought of a better way to end the show, the upcoming new episodes notwithstanding.
iTunes doesn't sell MP3s, though. They sell lossy AAC files in an MP4 container. So it's unlikely that they'd have ID3 frames in the first place.
I haven't purchased any DRM-free songs from iTunes, but I'd suspect that the information is stored as standard MP4 atoms, and that the iTunes editing interface just doesn't give you the ability to modify them. In which case you could presumably use a standard MP4 tool to remove the information, if you were so inclined.
That's just a guess, of course. It's obviously not clear from TFA.
I think Win2K was probably the best balance between reliability and functionality that the Windows series ever managed.
That said, I've never had much of a problem with XP, and it fixed some quirky little compatibility issues with some legacy software I'd been using. If you strip away some of the unnecessary cruft like the theme/visual style engine, there really aren't too many differences between it and Win2000.
Of course, I don't have too many quibbles with Vista, either. I actually like the changes to Explorer, and there are a number of minor cosmetic changes of which I approve. But I did need to do some tweaking in a few cases to make it play nicely with some older programs. I got them to work, ultimately, but that's largely because I'm both knowledgeable enough and have sufficient patience to tinker. And that's more than should be expected of your average user, really.
It wasn't a question of total incompatibility. Most software designed for Windows 95/98 worked just fine in Windows 2000. But there were enough bugs that it probably made Microsoft nervous about rushing out the OS.
Windows XP fixed a number of these issues (I have one or two games that refused to run on Windows 2000, for instance, that more or less work in Windows XP). But, really, the biggest factor was probably time. By the time the NT series went consumer with XP, manufacturers had had enough time to get more familiar with programming for WinNT, and the software and hardware issues had receded sufficiently.
There are still a few games, in particular, out there that don't play nicely with the WinNT line (not counting the UAC restrictions introduced in Vista that played merry havoc with a number of older titles). But they tend to be niche titles, and not many people care nowadays.
Mostly, though, it just made the entire thing a bit pointless: it wasn't as capable or as stable as Windows 2000, which predated it. It was an upgrade that, well, wasn't.
Point taken, but, to be fair, Bob wasn't exactly an operating system. It was an alternate shell for Windows 3.1 and 95.
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then, so I don't think its really in the running for "least popular." MS-DOS 4.0 (not 4.01) is also definitely in the running for "buggiest software ever released by Microsoft," but that's another story....
For me, the biggest problem was the removal of real mode DOS access. For someone moving from Windows 98 and still relying on a lot of DOS programs that didn't always play nice with protected mode. At least with Windows 2000, you didn't have to deal with the 9x series' infamous flakiness and instability nearly as often.
The interface improvements (all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000) were an improvement, sure, but in all other respects, Windows Me was less functional and less reliable than Windows 98SE. It wasn't that you it was so bad as to be unusable, but it was hardly worth the price of the upgrade.
As others have said, Mike Nelson started RiffTrax in 2006, while Cinematic Titanic was announced towards the tail end of 2007. What's more, RiffTrax was an offshoot of the work Mike had been doing with Legend Films, providing DVD commentary tracks for various old films (including Night of the Living Dead and Reefer Madness, to name just two). So Mike's "second act" came well before Joel's.
Mike's delivery is obviously different than Joel's delivery, but Mike was head writer of MST3K since the middle of its first season, so he's clearly got the chops for it. As for why Mike isn't involved in Cinematic Titanic? As you say, there are lots of reasons, but probably the two most likely are that he (and Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett) already had a regular movie riffing gig with Legend Films / RiffTrax, and (arguably more importantly) that he had relocated from to the San Diego area, which put him half a country away from most of the rest of the Cinematic Titanic team.
Personally, I'm just amused by the fact that just about everyone from the MST3K cast and writing staff are back in the riffing business. The only ones who haven't are executive producer / co-creator Jim Mallon (who apparently had a falling out with Joel, causing Joel's departure from the show), and writer Paul Chaplin. They all clearly enjoyed the work, and it makes it all the more sad that the show ended when (and under the circumstances) it did.
Elected representatives are supposed to remain in touch with the districts they represent. Having them remain in Washington, D.C. 11 and 1/2 months a year makes it difficult to do that.
Not, of course, that every representative uses his or her vacation time to keep in touch with his or her constituents, mind you. But that's part of the point, at least.
Felicia Day had a recurring role on the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which predated her Internet fame in The Guild.
Whedon typically recasts actors he's familiar with in other roles. Most of the stars of Firefly wound up doing guest stints on either Buffy or Angel, and at least two more are lined up for his upcoming Dollhouse.
Watch the linked video. Tagruato is a Japan-based multinational: their operations are worldwide. The viral marketing video is about the collapse of the Tagruato-owned Chuai Station in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off the coast of New England. If the monster came from the ocean, it was most likely the Atlantic, not the Pacific.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't read the article, because it's slashdoted, but I assume it's about the fact that the Ogg container was initially designed as a transport stream format for audio.
The article goes considerably beyond that, arguing that the container is flawed even as an audio format. Here's the money quote (emphasis mine):
This isn't a mod, though. By changing an existing product, modders typically don't distribute material that infringes upon existing intellectual property (theoretically, at least: I know this isn't always true in practice).
TSL was an entirely new project, built using a new engine, and prominently featuring Sierra IP. In order to release it, the team would have had to release offending IP by definition, and so it's a different kettle of fish. However, given that the team already had a non-commercial license from the previous IP holder, I won't dispute that it makes Activision look like scumbags.
IANAL, but as I understand it there's not much difference between a merger and an acquisition. Properly speaking, a merger happens when when company acquires another. There's a commonly accepted practical difference that has to do with what the company looks like after the acquisition, but that's all.
When a publisher purchases a studio and keeps it more or less intact and removed, that's considered an acquisition. Similarly so when a company is purchased and essentially broken down for spare parts/intellectual property. But when the acquired company is integrated into the acquiring company (and especially when there's a name change involved), it's considered a merger.
Square Enix is an example: legally speaking, Enix bought Square, but the resulting corporate hierarchy more closely resembled Square than Enix. As you say, Activision is another example.
You can't "lose the rights to another party." You just lose your exclusive right to that trademark. If I was to release a portable music player called the "iPod," Apple chose not to sue me into the next century, and the courts found that they had neglected to enforce their trademark on the name, that doesn't mean that I'd now be able to sue anyone using the name. It just means that anyone who wanted to could chose to name their media player "iPod" and Apple couldn't do a thing about it. It happens quite a bit, actually: aspirin, escalator, zipper, thermos, cola, etc.
That being said, I don't know if trademarks are really at issue in this case. The designers were granted a right to use Sierra IP in their agreement with Vivendi, but they pointedly were not granted a right to use Sierra trademarks. Before the 2005 cease and desist letter that led to the original non-commercial license, the project was entitled "King's Quest IX," but the name was changed to the non-trademark-infringing "The Silver Lining" at Vivendi's insistence. The issue now would seem to be the more general licensing of copyrighted IP at all, and the copyright law is different than trademark law. For one, you can't lose a copyright due to non-enforcement, IIRC.
I think the problem is, per the original agreement, the game was always subject to the Vivendi's approval before release. Now that the IP belongs to Activision, the game is theoretically subject to their approval. All Activision needs to do to kill the project dead is to refuse to approve anything.
It's a crying shame, because the TSL guys were cooperative and accommodating every step of the way. They sought out a license in the first place, and complied with every change requested of them without complaint (they dropped the "King's Quest" name from the project a few years back because Vivendi/Sierra weren't willing to grant a fan license on the trademark, for instance). But I suppose, in the long run, it's not unexpected.
mozilla doesn't like being linked from slashdot.
thats quite interesting. why not?
Slashdot effect.
Yeah, you can still play back AVI containers in Windows, but Windows has been pushing WMV in its stead for years now, for better or for worse. Windows 7 comes with out-of-the-box support for MP4 containers, if I remember correctly, as well.
AVI has been a functionally dead container format for close to decade, in all honesty. It's survived in zombie form because the only alternatives were either too bogged down in proprietary fluff (ASF/WMV) or not user friendly enough to set up for most Windows and Mac users (MKV and MP4). It had its lifespan prolonged by hardware manufacturers like Sony, but its falling further and further behind the technology curve, and the trends seem to be behind MP4, even in the dedicated hardware market.
And as for DivX/Xvid (since TFA fails to grasp the difference between codec and container), well, that's much ado about nothing: HandBrake will still happily encode MPEG-4 Part 2/Xvid-compliant video. It's just eliminating the Xvid encoder itself in favor of FFmpeg. And if you're not familiar enough with the situation to recognize that how little difference this makes, chances are you probably aren't affected by the decision at all.
I suspect that we'll see just that. That's the problem with issuing a C&D letter so late in the game.
Given that it's a ROM hack, there probably isn't "source" in the traditional sense, though.
Oh, please. Square Enix isn't issuing C&D letters to anyone for making games. They've got a legitimate interest in protecting their property. I don't happen to care for current IP law, but the developers of this project really should have recognized that they ran the risk of this sort of thing from day one. I rather doubt they were making any sort of principled stand against the tyranny of intellectual property, and suspect they just figured that SE wouldn't notice them.
Wake me when they start going after folks who aren't directly recycling SE-created characters, settings, resources, and code.
How do you know its decent? What qualifies as "decent," anyway? From your and my perspective, probably just a good game (of course, our tastes and preferences probably vary), but Square Enix, like any company, is probably more concerned with what makes them money. And what's the market for this sort of thing, honestly?
Besides, is this really a precedent that a company like Square Enix wants to be setting? The next thing you know, every wannabe hacker starts bombarding SE with licensing requests, and SE needs a submissions department.
"As a legit cart"? Er, when was the last time you saw a SNES game on sale at Wal-Mart? GameStop? Anywhere this side of eBay?
Seriously, though, "stating their willingness to assign all copyrights... for some nominal fee" would be an incredibly bad idea. Not only would Square Enix have no reason to agree (since they own the original work, and the derivative is worthless without it), it would look like to all the world like extortion.
And the simple fact of the matter is that while Square Enix might be able to find a limited market for such a product on places like Steam, XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare, that market probably wouldn't be sufficient to cover even the costs of testing a 98%-complete amateur hack. It would win them some kudos from a hardcore fan community that is in all likelihood a negligibly small part of their consumer base.
No, it wasn't. It wasn't a particularly impressive remake, I'll grant you, but it did have various features added that were in neither the PlayStation version, nor the SNES original (bonus dungeon, IIRC).
Windows 3.11 (not Windows 3.11 for Workgroups) did exist, but it wasn't a major release. It was primarily an minor, service pack-like upgrade of Windows 3.1. Since this was back in the day before Windows Update, not many people actually installed it, or even knew about it. I don't think Microsoft released it in its own right except for a select few OEMs.
For that matter, there was, IIRC, a Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) for Workgroups, as well, though it didn't get the same amount of traction as its successor, and was quickly replaced/upgraded to the more familiar 3.11. But I believe WfW 3.1 was the first version of Windows to implement SMB shares.
With the exception of maybe one or two episodes (like the one where they wind up going back in time and preventing JFK's assassination while looking for a good Indian restaurant), I found little worthwhile in season 7.
Season 8 was a vast improvement, though, in that it actually bothered to be funny. True, by this point the series had drifted so far from the original premise that it was hardly the same show, but at least it was still amusing. And I enjoyed the addition of Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister) as a semi-regular character.
The ending of "Only the Good...", though, was a brilliant moment. If you ask me, I couldn't have thought of a better way to end the show, the upcoming new episodes notwithstanding.
iTunes doesn't sell MP3s, though. They sell lossy AAC files in an MP4 container. So it's unlikely that they'd have ID3 frames in the first place.
I haven't purchased any DRM-free songs from iTunes, but I'd suspect that the information is stored as standard MP4 atoms, and that the iTunes editing interface just doesn't give you the ability to modify them. In which case you could presumably use a standard MP4 tool to remove the information, if you were so inclined.
That's just a guess, of course. It's obviously not clear from TFA.
I think Win2K was probably the best balance between reliability and functionality that the Windows series ever managed.
That said, I've never had much of a problem with XP, and it fixed some quirky little compatibility issues with some legacy software I'd been using. If you strip away some of the unnecessary cruft like the theme/visual style engine, there really aren't too many differences between it and Win2000.
Of course, I don't have too many quibbles with Vista, either. I actually like the changes to Explorer, and there are a number of minor cosmetic changes of which I approve. But I did need to do some tweaking in a few cases to make it play nicely with some older programs. I got them to work, ultimately, but that's largely because I'm both knowledgeable enough and have sufficient patience to tinker. And that's more than should be expected of your average user, really.
It wasn't a question of total incompatibility. Most software designed for Windows 95/98 worked just fine in Windows 2000. But there were enough bugs that it probably made Microsoft nervous about rushing out the OS.
Windows XP fixed a number of these issues (I have one or two games that refused to run on Windows 2000, for instance, that more or less work in Windows XP). But, really, the biggest factor was probably time. By the time the NT series went consumer with XP, manufacturers had had enough time to get more familiar with programming for WinNT, and the software and hardware issues had receded sufficiently.
There are still a few games, in particular, out there that don't play nicely with the WinNT line (not counting the UAC restrictions introduced in Vista that played merry havoc with a number of older titles). But they tend to be niche titles, and not many people care nowadays.
Ah, ah, but I never said it should. :-)
Mostly, though, it just made the entire thing a bit pointless: it wasn't as capable or as stable as Windows 2000, which predated it. It was an upgrade that, well, wasn't.
Point taken, but, to be fair, Bob wasn't exactly an operating system. It was an alternate shell for Windows 3.1 and 95.
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then, so I don't think its really in the running for "least popular." MS-DOS 4.0 (not 4.01) is also definitely in the running for "buggiest software ever released by Microsoft," but that's another story....
For me, the biggest problem was the removal of real mode DOS access. For someone moving from Windows 98 and still relying on a lot of DOS programs that didn't always play nice with protected mode. At least with Windows 2000, you didn't have to deal with the 9x series' infamous flakiness and instability nearly as often.
The interface improvements (all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000) were an improvement, sure, but in all other respects, Windows Me was less functional and less reliable than Windows 98SE. It wasn't that you it was so bad as to be unusable, but it was hardly worth the price of the upgrade.
...or doesn't it count because no one even tried to take it seriously?
As others have said, Mike Nelson started RiffTrax in 2006, while Cinematic Titanic was announced towards the tail end of 2007. What's more, RiffTrax was an offshoot of the work Mike had been doing with Legend Films, providing DVD commentary tracks for various old films (including Night of the Living Dead and Reefer Madness, to name just two). So Mike's "second act" came well before Joel's.
Mike's delivery is obviously different than Joel's delivery, but Mike was head writer of MST3K since the middle of its first season, so he's clearly got the chops for it. As for why Mike isn't involved in Cinematic Titanic? As you say, there are lots of reasons, but probably the two most likely are that he (and Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett) already had a regular movie riffing gig with Legend Films / RiffTrax, and (arguably more importantly) that he had relocated from to the San Diego area, which put him half a country away from most of the rest of the Cinematic Titanic team.
Personally, I'm just amused by the fact that just about everyone from the MST3K cast and writing staff are back in the riffing business. The only ones who haven't are executive producer / co-creator Jim Mallon (who apparently had a falling out with Joel, causing Joel's departure from the show), and writer Paul Chaplin. They all clearly enjoyed the work, and it makes it all the more sad that the show ended when (and under the circumstances) it did.
Elected representatives are supposed to remain in touch with the districts they represent. Having them remain in Washington, D.C. 11 and 1/2 months a year makes it difficult to do that.
Not, of course, that every representative uses his or her vacation time to keep in touch with his or her constituents, mind you. But that's part of the point, at least.
Felicia Day had a recurring role on the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which predated her Internet fame in The Guild.
Whedon typically recasts actors he's familiar with in other roles. Most of the stars of Firefly wound up doing guest stints on either Buffy or Angel, and at least two more are lined up for his upcoming Dollhouse.
Watch the linked video. Tagruato is a Japan-based multinational: their operations are worldwide. The viral marketing video is about the collapse of the Tagruato-owned Chuai Station in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off the coast of New England. If the monster came from the ocean, it was most likely the Atlantic, not the Pacific.