This is really a misunderstanding of the issue here.
All three companies intend their console businesses to be profitable overall. While Sony and Microsoft clearly want to wipe each other out, none actually wants the businesses to make a loss at the end of the day.
Game console businesses have two sources of revenue (well, three now, with the recent addition of online services) - the major two being the console itself, and the game sales.
The expenses are the costs of making the consoles (including the costs of the console's development), and the costs of reproducing the games media together with the royalties that get paid to the developers to cover their costs and profits.
What Microsoft and Sony are doing is lumping the whole lot together. The problem for them is that the consoles cost considerably more to build than anyone would be prepared to pay. So they're selling them for a price that doesn't recover costs, and hoping revenues from game sales (and online services) will counter the losses they're making on that. This is called the razor blade model, as it reflects a supposed business model used by Gillette where the prices of razor blades were designed to offset subsidies given to razor blade holders.
Despite a prevailing wisdom that this is common in the games console industry, for the most part it's a recent development. Sega did it for one console, and failed miserably. Microsoft did this for the XBox, but there's no evidence that Sony or Nintendo did the same thing for the PS2 or Gamecube.
What Nintendo just said is that that's not the model they're using. The Wii is low cost because it's low cost, not because it's subsidized. While the exact hardware specs of the Wii are still unconfirmed, it is known that many developers received overclocked Gamecubes as development platforms early in the Wii's history. The graphics are designed to look good on standard definition TV sets (480 lines of resolution, or thereabouts.)
Nintendo plans to make a (small) profit on each Wii, and on the games. As such, each sell is guaranteed positive revenue. If it has to make more consoles and finds it sells fewer games than expected, they're not going to go into the red because of that.
Despite barely making a dent in sales last time around, Nintendo ended up being the most healthy in the games console business of all three players. Nintendo can follow this strategy for decades, be in "third place" every time, and, as long as they're realistic, they'll stay alive and healthy even if Sony and Microsoft, following the opposite strategy, end up close to death's door.
It's reserved for the party or parties that would actually get something relevent to the case at hand. Someone defending themselves in a P2P piracy suit is highly unlikely to explain any good reason why there'd be evidence exonerating them on a recording industry owned computer.
Heh. I wonder which scenario would have resulted in more screaming, and cries of childabuse?
1. The current situation. Lucas transfers a good quality version of the original version of the trilogy, already processed and considered high quality by its existing owners, to DVD. Unfortunately it's not anamorphic.
2. Lucas hires a group to do a full restoration on the original. Some time in 2008, the restoration is finished and the content is transfered to DVD. Several million dollars have been spent on the process, and it's not obvious the money will be recovered by increased sales over the sales of the DVD as it would have been had it been a laserdisc transfer. Increases in price will result in fewer sales, so Lucas prices each "HD" edition at $50. This is despite the fact he doesn't even like the original versions and doesn't want to be associated with them.
3. Lucas announces a "See it as you originally saw it" program. At great expense, various reels are restored so that all versions ever shown in the cinemas can be seen. Some effort is done to find originals and determine artifacts that would have been visible to viewers at the time. If you saw it in mono on a theater in SF, six months after release, with the blue and green washed from the picture, then digital enhancements are used to attempt to reproduce this. If you watched the version where Luke stands on Tatooine and watches the battle in the sky, then you get to see a cut that includes that scene. The price is several tens of thousands per set of 35mm reels, but enough fans are idio^H^H^H^Hhardcore enough to ensure the reels get bought and people get the chance to see it as they did originally.
I think option 1 is actually preferable. But there's just no satisfying everyone. If I were George Lucas, I'd want to dump the entire series - withdraw all unsold DVDs, press no more, and let the world know I think my own fans are a bunch of arseholes.
The several to do with Robert Harris do a pretty good job.
No, they don't. They do not answer the specific issues I raised. My comments, as was clearly obvious by what I wrote, were responses to the mindless requotes of Robert Harris, not vice-versa.
Who am I going to believe? An extremely well rspected movie buff who knows people in the industry, and someone who actually works in film restoration?
I'm not asking you to disbelieve him. I'm asking you to accept the obvious that the work he proposes is possible is neither cheap nor instantaneous. It is utterly mindless to claim otherwise. I've repeated this three times now.
I love all this "you didn't ask for HD" nonsense... WTF are you? The Devil from Bedazzled? Explicitly having to say these things is ridiculous. While folk didn't say "HD" they also didn't say "From the easiest to find source"
Who gives a shit?
Letterboxed DVDs are by far the majoritian method of distributing widescreen DVDs. If you wanted HD, you should have asked for that. Laserdisc transfers are fairly normal - they're reasonable quality transfers from a source that generally has already been cleaned up. Hell, look at the Criterion Collection.
There's nothing wrong, or unusual, in what's been released. It just isn't quite what you'd want to show on an HD TV. As it exists for historical reasons only, it's better quality than it needs to be.
You got what you asked for. As the other person who responded pointed out, the only way in which you "didn't" was if you were expecting 35mm prints, complete with pops in the audio and little coloured chemical artifacts on the picture, so you could get exactly what you saw in the cinema. I'd love, however, to have seen the bitching if Lucas had announced that he was going to re-release original SW, but only in a customized, $x,000, set of 35mm movie rolls, provided only to people who can tell them what cinema and what date they saw the film at, so it can be cut to match the experience exactly.
A DVD transfer of a good source is a good thing, especially for something of historical value only.
However, the RIAA has limited its lawsuits to copyright infringment. It happens to be in the news because there's a hell of a lot of copyright infringement going on.
The MPAA however has successfully lobbied for laws to make illegal, as in "Being thrown in a Federal Prison illegal", not "Pay up in a civil suit" tort, playing a DVD on an unlicensed DVD player.
Remember that. You can copy a DVD, and you'll be sued. But you can make a DVD player, for the sole purpose of playing bought and paid for DVDs, and the movie industry will try to throw you in prison.
That's how I see it. And that's why the MPAA, for me, is immeasurably more evil than the RIAA ever will be. While you're correct that you only need a few hundred thousand dollars to record and produce a professional, high quality, piece of music, it's not as if anyone has to pirate that music anyway - nobody can argue that the lawsuits - when applied to actual pirates - are unjust.
Not sure how that's insightful. The "problem" appears to be that Lucas didn't give you more than what you asked for. You asked for the original, he gave you the original, but now you're bitching that it's not pseudo-HD.
A better analogy might be you want a kiss, your lips meet, you kiss, and then you demand to know why you didn't get a blowjob. After all, you asked for a kiss.
There are no comments that refute what I said. As you may have noticed, I specifically addressed the various people who are claiming that Lucas could have restored the originals and claim that he's lying. Unless you can show me a post that demonstrates that it would not, as I pointed out, cost millions to do so, and that it would also not, as I pointed out, take years?
It's not craptastic. It's based upon the original laserdisc version. It'll look excellent on most screens. It'll be "not as perfect" as anamorphic DVDs on HD screens, but not bad either.
As others have pointed out, there's no set of reels that they can simply load into a projector and produce a high quality version of the original to digitize and turn into a DVD. Yes, some are claiming that that's no excuse. They're wrong.
Those pretending that Lucas is lying or some other BS with this excuse usually give a multitude of reasons along the lines of "Yeah, but if George Lucas were to get every possible copy he can find, and then spend millions on film restoration, he might be able to get a remastered copy that kind of looks like the original, albeit with different colouring and stuff." That's true and all, and while I'm sure Lucas can afford to make a loss on a DVD appealing only to a large hardcore group of fans, there's no reason why he should, especially if he doesn't actually like and doesn't want to be associated with the version of the movie the fans are demanding in the first place.
Lucas did just give "us" what "we wanted". We wanted, and asked for, an untouched version that's close to what we saw in the cinema when we were all seven years old. We got it. We never asked for "HD". We never asked for something greater than the laserdisc version.
It seems to me the guy can't get a break. He released a film he didn't want to release, that he doesn't like, and released a moderately high quality version. Now you're all bitching at him because he didn't waste another few years, and countless millions of dollars that wouldn't have been recovered in sales, on cleaning it up.
I think, with hindsight, Lucas must be kicking himself wondering why the hell he even bothered.
No such thing was said at the keynote. The blogs were buzzing before the presentation with a "leaked" agenda that referred to a "TubePort" device which connected via a wireless link between a USB dongle and the device itself. The entire agenda turns out to be a hoax, and TubePort has no resemblance with iTV.
Given iTV supports Airport, it's improbable that it does none of the decoding itself. Raw, uncompressed, 640x480, 24fps video would saturate all existing and proposed 802.11 standards. The available evidence, including the wide variety of ports on the back, is that this is a stripped down computer, not a dumb device.
The X-Box 360 is being marketed as a games console and has no serious non-game media services. The iTV is emphatically not trying to compete with that.
I wonder if you can think of any major media company that's about to release a machine it is pushing as some kind of major revolution in media, say, trying to push some kind of media format as part of the system, one that it's claiming is a computer, and, perhaps, that's conveniently priced at twice the price of the $300 iTV, that you could argue Steve Jobs is really sending a message to?
Interesting that they did a preview of a product they're not ready to formally announce yet. Rather uncharacteristic. I guess they feel their hand is being forced. Perhaps they're trying to steal thunder from Vista Media Center Edition or whatever it's called? You'd think they'd at least finalize the name, though. Really odd.
I don't think that's the case. What Apple appears to be doing is dropping a huge hint in terms of how they expect the whole downloadable visual media thing to work.
Before the announcement, most people were talking about "downloadable movies" in terms of watching them on iPods. This was seen by most people as completely ridiculous, even assuming a "video iPod" was just around the corner with a larger screen. So the talk moved towards the idea that perhaps you were supposed to watch the movies on your laptop, or hook up a video card to your computer that would pipe the output to a TV. These are all ugly options for various reasons, and they certainly take away from the idea of this as more than a gimmick.
Now imagine the year 2010. You have broadband in common with 95% of the country. You flop in front of the TV, and select the program you want to watch and watch it. The programs come from a variety of sources: free video blogs, CNN newscasts available on a subscription basis, serials available on a subscription basis, free sample pilots, plus movies you're either renting or downloading.
How are you doing this?
With the products Apple announced today (and some its already announced.) That's how. You already could buy TV shows from Apple. You can now buy DVDs, and (once Jobs and the studios work something out) the chances are that movies on a PPV basis will probably be available too. The other thing necessary is the TV, the whole "flop on the couch" thing, and that's iTV.
They couldn't have announced the products they did today without announcing iTV. The question isn't why they pre-announced the iTV today, it's why they announced the movie store today without the iTV being ready.
Well, this announcement's kind of significant. Apple's taking a risk here, but if they pull it off, what you're seeing, once all the pieces are in place (such as the "iTV") is an entire reinvention of visual media delibery. That is, this announcement may well be the most radical thing in that field since the VCR and cable television.
Of course, nobody cares about that, most of the postings here are "OMG! A blue iPod! I so want that!!" Still, this is the forum that brought you "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
iTunes 7, the Movie Store (with the pre-existing TV shows), and the "iTV" (name pending.) Cool. Be interesting to see if Apple can pull it off.
The release date and price are likely to be announced this week (likely as in "We know Nintendo has called an event later this week, and pretty much every sign points to it being this.") So be patient. An announcement this week followed by a September 30th release doesn't strike me as undoable. Might even be nice if the announcement was of the form "It's $199, and available today!"
The RIAA isn't suing people at random, and then smothering them in lawsuits until they pay up. It's looking for people who are using P2P networking software to make available copies of music that they have no authorization to do so (and whose rights belong to the RIAA's members), and then using the law to determine who is doing this, and suing them.
This they're doing by identifying IP addresses, obtaining information from ISPs on users of those IP addresses, and then suing those users.
In every case there is a clear intent to commit an act of copyright infringement by someone. On occasion, because the ISP screws up, or because the person responsible for the account is not the person who was using it, and they're unable or unwilling, to identify the actual infringer, the "wrong person" is sued.
But you can bet that in the VAST majority of cases, the defendent is guilty as hell. Those that aren't are victims of a combination of the RIAA's imperfections, and the person who was actually committing the act of copyright infringement in the first place, and those who encouraged him or her to do so.
I have to say I agree with the person you're responding to. You are asking too much, and blaming the faults of others on the phone itself and its designers.
Verizon do have a history of crippling the phones they sell so they can extract more in OTA charges. The fact is though that the RAZR, as designed, is a fairly stylish, reliable, phone. The vast majority of users are very happy with it. Motorola isn't selling the same phones it was pushing out faster than it could design them three years ago.
I passed over it myself after deciding the V635 met my needs slightly better. The V635's a very solid phone, has crashed maybe three times since I got it. Battery life is good, not "the best" out there, but more than acceptable. Like most of Motorola's stuff, the V635 contains a significant amount of good, new, technology, well implemented - for example, the Transflash card, the high quality megapixel camera, the cleanly implemented Bluetooth. But I've met plenty of people with RAZRs who couldn't be happier.
The real problem in your case is you went with Verizon. Verizon, in my experience, has never put quality first, and it's simply not possible to buy a phone from them and know in advance what you're getting. IS-95 ("CDMA") advocates will tell you that many US carriers picked it for its supposed capacity and reliability. In my view, Verizon picked it because it's sufficiently controllable that they can exercise unparalleled control over their customers in a way they wouldn't be able to with an international standard like GSM. I didn't need T-Mobile's permission to put my V635 online.
In the mean time, unquestionably, you're running a phone that's been modified by a third party (Verizon), and you're complaining about its poor reliability as a result. I'm not saying don't complain to Motorola - DO complain, DO let them know that them letting Verizon do this is undermining your confidence in their products, but DO complain to Verizon too, and make sure you give the blame where it's deserved, not just to one manufacturer, in an industry where every cellphone manufacturer has to whore their designs to stand a chance of getting their products on the shelves.
Interestingly none of the large rocks between Jupiter and the Sun count as planets either under the new definition, as none can seriously be described as having cleared their paths (the relative lack of debris is largely due to Jupiter.)
Ordinary English speaking people, using common definitions of the words: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and possibly others are planets.
Astronomers being dicks: Actually you're wrong, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are the only planets. You need to lose this emotional attachment to the word "planet".
English people to Astronomers being dicks: Actually you're not an astronomer. According to the new definition we just made up, an Astronomer is a person who looks at the skies, is well rounded with much gravitas, and has cleared the path of credibility to be taken seriously by ordinary non-astronomers. As a jack-ass, you clearly aren't that. You need to lose this emotional attachment to the word "astronomer".
Astronomers being dicks: *curses* Damn. Foiled again.
Worth pointing out that the "part of the G5 family" stuff is based upon Hannibal hearing a rumour that it was offered as a laptop equivalent of the G5. This, by itself, makes no sense whatsoever. It's a relatively recent chip, the main maker of PowerPC laptops is Apple, they wouldn't have been interested in a 729MHz G5 to replace their ~1.5GHz G4s, and if IBM did have a ~1.5GHz Broadway low-powered enough to be usable in a laptop, what the hell is Nintendo doing using a version that runs at half the speed?
Until now, all rumours have suggested it's simply a faster, better made, Gekko (which itself is derived from the G3, which is probably why the page you linked to redirects to the G3.) I think setting ones-self up for it being unbelievably more than that is probably setting ones-self up for disappointment.
The "It runs at 7xxMHz" and "It was offered as a laptop G5" "facts" clash. One of them has to be false. The 7xxMHz thing has been consistant and is the kind of thing developers would know about. Plus, Hannibal's reasoning for it being a major disappointment ("That it would make the Wii just an overclocked gamecube with a DVD player") is ridiculous. You might just as well call the Commodore 64 an overclocked KIM-I. Or the Nintendo DS an overclocked GBA.
I have had a pretty much similar experience with the U.S. network providers. Certainly in Europe the coverage is significantly better and the total cost of ownership of a phone seems a lot less than people are paying in the U.S.
I've heard this argument about it costing more in the US frequently, but in my experience it's a misrepresentation. I've compared them from time to time with UK tariffs, which may be artificially high, I'm not sure, and US cellphone tariffs are extremely attractive.
The major difference is that on the low end, you can just about get away with a slightly better plan in Europe than in the US, but - get this - it's only useful and cheap if you're not a cellphone user. Essentially, pay as you go in Europe generally has lower minimums that last longer. So whereas in the US, you may have to pay $10 a month to keep your account open (though T-Mobile will keep an account open for a year for every top-up once you've paid at least $100 once), in Europe that may be what you have to pay for an entire year's worth of being connected. Europeans tend to forget though that one reason for that is that mobile operators can depend upon a significant number of PAYG users having their bills paid for by others in the form of incoming calls, which are charged at high rates to the originator of the call.
So if you don't use your phone that often - maybe a hundred minutes or less a year - or get a lot of incoming calls, you, personally, don't have to pay much. Overall though, in the latter case, the bills for owning your mobile will be high, it's just they're paid for by other people.
My wife and I are on a US tariff that gives us the following (and it's not even that great by modern US standards:
700 shared "any time" minutes.
Unmetered (that is, free, not part of the 700 allowance) calls between our mobiles (and all other mobiles on T-Mobile US's network
Unlimited (that is, free, not part of the 700 allowance) calls at nights and weekends
Unlimited text and multimedia messages (except outgoing International)
Unlimited GPRS
For that we're paying around $90 a month, inclusive of taxes, that amounts to (if I have the calculations correct) 25GBP per phone per month. Now, typically, we make (well) over 2,000 minutes of calls per month (it varies, we've had bills showing more than 4,000 minutes in the past, back when we were planning the wedding), and between the unmetered call types and the 700 minute call allowance, we're always well within our limits (we've never had to pay overage since we got the plan.) The only time we pay more than the $90 fee is when we make outgoing international calls or outgoing international text messages.
If we were living alone, we could get similar plans for around $50 a month, with plans with slightly less features available for less. Some operators, notably MetroPCS, offer completely unmetered, no contract, plans for well under $50.
I looked, and I'm loath to see anything comparable in the UK. The best I can find are some temporary offers from Orange that offer unlimited calls between Orange cellphones, or (on a seperate plan!) to landlines (one of these is limited to off-peak, I can't remember which), and an offer from Vodafone to "stop the clock" making off-peak calls limited to one hour cost "three minutes" of airtime.
For that reason, people don't really use mobile phones to talk in the UK that often. Texting is the "big thing". This isn't something many have noticed because until recently landlines were also only available with metered calls, even local calls, so people are used to watching what they say and how long they speak for on phones.
The thing most people who make the comparison fail to do is ask "Which place has the better plans if I want to use my phone?" As a general rule, the more you use it, the better the US plans are and the worse the "We must meter everything!" attitude the European telecommuni
We already did run out of IP addresses years ago. Most computers connected to the Internet don't even have "real" IP addresses, most of us are using NAT.
For most of us, only the machine or machines that directly communicate with the ISP, plus some outside facing servers, have real IP addresses. NAT has proven to be a great hack that's got us by for a while, but with the rise in VoIP and other applications that are having difficulty "just working" when they can't just hook up to a network and expect to be addressable, this problematic and far from ideal hack is showing its flaws.
There seems to be an army of people dedicated to ensuring that we never actually see the benefits of faster hardware. We're throwing more crap layers of software on our machines faster than the CPU speeds can increase.
This type of technology though really isn't that bad. I invite you to take a look at Jake2, a version of Quake II written in Java which performs about as well as the original.
I used to think the same way as you do, but the technology has really improved. JIT ensures there's no reason why it should run slower, and indeed, because you can optimize - Gentoo style - for the processor you're running the app on, it can actually be faster. Managed code actually uses superior memory management to traditional malloc()-heap type systems. Meanwhile you have the benefits of a system with sane pointer handling and where every subroutine in your program can be locked down, efficiently and almost transparently.
The early versions of Java, and the attempts to create usable subsets of what is effectively an enterprise operating system to run on mobile phones and other low-powered devices, coupled with all the guff about "platform independence", have given Java and associated technologies a poorer reputation than they deserve.
That's interesting. My comment about the CPL was based upon the Wikipedia page. I couldn't get the FAQ to load (actually, I still can't, it comes up as an attachment, I try to save it, and it just hangs.) And I certainly couldn't find a license page.
Thanks for linking to that. That's interesting. A little disappointing too. Why the hell did they change it (assuming Wikipedia was correct)?
It's quite simply an attempt to make Python available for.NET (and presumably the CLR in general.) That's it.
This is the way programming is going. We're moving from CPU-specific unmanaged programming to platform independent abstracted managed environments. One day your entire operating system will run that way. But even today, you see these environments popping up in places where they add security and robustness.
Web applications, for instance. So you have a giant web-app, maybe you're using components from three or four third parties. If you're using.NET or Java, you can integrate these components with any language that runs on the.NET or Java platforms. That means something simple, that can be done in two lines of Python (which my loves-Java-like-a ricer-loves-Gentoo collegue assures me is the average length of a complete Python application;-) can be run in that environment simply by using IronPython or Jython. And when I say "that environment", I mean your two liner will have as much access as a C# or Java program would have. No writing of C stubs to link the two environments necessary.
That's why IronPython (and Jython) are great things. Indeed, the fact you can integrate Python and Java/C# and half a dozen other languages so transparently in these types of environments gives you some idea of the power managed environments give you. We haven't seen anything like this since Unix.
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This is really a misunderstanding of the issue here.
All three companies intend their console businesses to be profitable overall. While Sony and Microsoft clearly want to wipe each other out, none actually wants the businesses to make a loss at the end of the day.
Game console businesses have two sources of revenue (well, three now, with the recent addition of online services) - the major two being the console itself, and the game sales.
The expenses are the costs of making the consoles (including the costs of the console's development), and the costs of reproducing the games media together with the royalties that get paid to the developers to cover their costs and profits.
What Microsoft and Sony are doing is lumping the whole lot together. The problem for them is that the consoles cost considerably more to build than anyone would be prepared to pay. So they're selling them for a price that doesn't recover costs, and hoping revenues from game sales (and online services) will counter the losses they're making on that. This is called the razor blade model, as it reflects a supposed business model used by Gillette where the prices of razor blades were designed to offset subsidies given to razor blade holders.
Despite a prevailing wisdom that this is common in the games console industry, for the most part it's a recent development. Sega did it for one console, and failed miserably. Microsoft did this for the XBox, but there's no evidence that Sony or Nintendo did the same thing for the PS2 or Gamecube.
What Nintendo just said is that that's not the model they're using. The Wii is low cost because it's low cost, not because it's subsidized. While the exact hardware specs of the Wii are still unconfirmed, it is known that many developers received overclocked Gamecubes as development platforms early in the Wii's history. The graphics are designed to look good on standard definition TV sets (480 lines of resolution, or thereabouts.)
Nintendo plans to make a (small) profit on each Wii, and on the games. As such, each sell is guaranteed positive revenue. If it has to make more consoles and finds it sells fewer games than expected, they're not going to go into the red because of that.
Despite barely making a dent in sales last time around, Nintendo ended up being the most healthy in the games console business of all three players. Nintendo can follow this strategy for decades, be in "third place" every time, and, as long as they're realistic, they'll stay alive and healthy even if Sony and Microsoft, following the opposite strategy, end up close to death's door.
It's reserved for the party or parties that would actually get something relevent to the case at hand. Someone defending themselves in a P2P piracy suit is highly unlikely to explain any good reason why there'd be evidence exonerating them on a recording industry owned computer.
Heh. I wonder which scenario would have resulted in more screaming, and cries of childabuse?
1. The current situation. Lucas transfers a good quality version of the original version of the trilogy, already processed and considered high quality by its existing owners, to DVD. Unfortunately it's not anamorphic.
2. Lucas hires a group to do a full restoration on the original. Some time in 2008, the restoration is finished and the content is transfered to DVD. Several million dollars have been spent on the process, and it's not obvious the money will be recovered by increased sales over the sales of the DVD as it would have been had it been a laserdisc transfer. Increases in price will result in fewer sales, so Lucas prices each "HD" edition at $50. This is despite the fact he doesn't even like the original versions and doesn't want to be associated with them.
3. Lucas announces a "See it as you originally saw it" program. At great expense, various reels are restored so that all versions ever shown in the cinemas can be seen. Some effort is done to find originals and determine artifacts that would have been visible to viewers at the time. If you saw it in mono on a theater in SF, six months after release, with the blue and green washed from the picture, then digital enhancements are used to attempt to reproduce this. If you watched the version where Luke stands on Tatooine and watches the battle in the sky, then you get to see a cut that includes that scene. The price is several tens of thousands per set of 35mm reels, but enough fans are idio^H^H^H^Hhardcore enough to ensure the reels get bought and people get the chance to see it as they did originally.
I think option 1 is actually preferable. But there's just no satisfying everyone. If I were George Lucas, I'd want to dump the entire series - withdraw all unsold DVDs, press no more, and let the world know I think my own fans are a bunch of arseholes.
Because, let's be honest here, they are.
Who gives a shit?
Letterboxed DVDs are by far the majoritian method of distributing widescreen DVDs. If you wanted HD, you should have asked for that. Laserdisc transfers are fairly normal - they're reasonable quality transfers from a source that generally has already been cleaned up. Hell, look at the Criterion Collection.
There's nothing wrong, or unusual, in what's been released. It just isn't quite what you'd want to show on an HD TV. As it exists for historical reasons only, it's better quality than it needs to be.
You got what you asked for. As the other person who responded pointed out, the only way in which you "didn't" was if you were expecting 35mm prints, complete with pops in the audio and little coloured chemical artifacts on the picture, so you could get exactly what you saw in the cinema. I'd love, however, to have seen the bitching if Lucas had announced that he was going to re-release original SW, but only in a customized, $x,000, set of 35mm movie rolls, provided only to people who can tell them what cinema and what date they saw the film at, so it can be cut to match the experience exactly.
A DVD transfer of a good source is a good thing, especially for something of historical value only.
However, the RIAA has limited its lawsuits to copyright infringment. It happens to be in the news because there's a hell of a lot of copyright infringement going on.
The MPAA however has successfully lobbied for laws to make illegal, as in "Being thrown in a Federal Prison illegal", not "Pay up in a civil suit" tort, playing a DVD on an unlicensed DVD player.
Remember that. You can copy a DVD, and you'll be sued. But you can make a DVD player, for the sole purpose of playing bought and paid for DVDs, and the movie industry will try to throw you in prison.
That's how I see it. And that's why the MPAA, for me, is immeasurably more evil than the RIAA ever will be. While you're correct that you only need a few hundred thousand dollars to record and produce a professional, high quality, piece of music, it's not as if anyone has to pirate that music anyway - nobody can argue that the lawsuits - when applied to actual pirates - are unjust.
Not sure how that's insightful. The "problem" appears to be that Lucas didn't give you more than what you asked for. You asked for the original, he gave you the original, but now you're bitching that it's not pseudo-HD.
A better analogy might be you want a kiss, your lips meet, you kiss, and then you demand to know why you didn't get a blowjob. After all, you asked for a kiss.
There are no comments that refute what I said. As you may have noticed, I specifically addressed the various people who are claiming that Lucas could have restored the originals and claim that he's lying. Unless you can show me a post that demonstrates that it would not, as I pointed out, cost millions to do so, and that it would also not, as I pointed out, take years?
It's not craptastic. It's based upon the original laserdisc version. It'll look excellent on most screens. It'll be "not as perfect" as anamorphic DVDs on HD screens, but not bad either.
As others have pointed out, there's no set of reels that they can simply load into a projector and produce a high quality version of the original to digitize and turn into a DVD. Yes, some are claiming that that's no excuse. They're wrong.
Those pretending that Lucas is lying or some other BS with this excuse usually give a multitude of reasons along the lines of "Yeah, but if George Lucas were to get every possible copy he can find, and then spend millions on film restoration, he might be able to get a remastered copy that kind of looks like the original, albeit with different colouring and stuff." That's true and all, and while I'm sure Lucas can afford to make a loss on a DVD appealing only to a large hardcore group of fans, there's no reason why he should, especially if he doesn't actually like and doesn't want to be associated with the version of the movie the fans are demanding in the first place.
Lucas did just give "us" what "we wanted". We wanted, and asked for, an untouched version that's close to what we saw in the cinema when we were all seven years old. We got it. We never asked for "HD". We never asked for something greater than the laserdisc version.
It seems to me the guy can't get a break. He released a film he didn't want to release, that he doesn't like, and released a moderately high quality version. Now you're all bitching at him because he didn't waste another few years, and countless millions of dollars that wouldn't have been recovered in sales, on cleaning it up.
I think, with hindsight, Lucas must be kicking himself wondering why the hell he even bothered.
ROKR, SLVR, and other Motorola phones run iTunes for mobile phones. That's what the driver is for.
Sorry. It's a great rumour, but the Apple cellphone is not going to happen.
No such thing was said at the keynote. The blogs were buzzing before the presentation with a "leaked" agenda that referred to a "TubePort" device which connected via a wireless link between a USB dongle and the device itself. The entire agenda turns out to be a hoax, and TubePort has no resemblance with iTV.
Given iTV supports Airport, it's improbable that it does none of the decoding itself. Raw, uncompressed, 640x480, 24fps video would saturate all existing and proposed 802.11 standards. The available evidence, including the wide variety of ports on the back, is that this is a stripped down computer, not a dumb device.
You might be able to add storage via USB, it has a USB port. Just a thought.
Right now though we don't have any real specs for it, other than what was shown at the keynote, so "it has no storage" may be untrue.
The X-Box 360 is being marketed as a games console and has no serious non-game media services. The iTV is emphatically not trying to compete with that.
I wonder if you can think of any major media company that's about to release a machine it is pushing as some kind of major revolution in media, say, trying to push some kind of media format as part of the system, one that it's claiming is a computer, and, perhaps, that's conveniently priced at twice the price of the $300 iTV, that you could argue Steve Jobs is really sending a message to?
I don't think that's the case. What Apple appears to be doing is dropping a huge hint in terms of how they expect the whole downloadable visual media thing to work.
Before the announcement, most people were talking about "downloadable movies" in terms of watching them on iPods. This was seen by most people as completely ridiculous, even assuming a "video iPod" was just around the corner with a larger screen. So the talk moved towards the idea that perhaps you were supposed to watch the movies on your laptop, or hook up a video card to your computer that would pipe the output to a TV. These are all ugly options for various reasons, and they certainly take away from the idea of this as more than a gimmick.
Now imagine the year 2010. You have broadband in common with 95% of the country. You flop in front of the TV, and select the program you want to watch and watch it. The programs come from a variety of sources: free video blogs, CNN newscasts available on a subscription basis, serials available on a subscription basis, free sample pilots, plus movies you're either renting or downloading.
How are you doing this?
With the products Apple announced today (and some its already announced.) That's how. You already could buy TV shows from Apple. You can now buy DVDs, and (once Jobs and the studios work something out) the chances are that movies on a PPV basis will probably be available too. The other thing necessary is the TV, the whole "flop on the couch" thing, and that's iTV.
They couldn't have announced the products they did today without announcing iTV. The question isn't why they pre-announced the iTV today, it's why they announced the movie store today without the iTV being ready.
Well, this announcement's kind of significant. Apple's taking a risk here, but if they pull it off, what you're seeing, once all the pieces are in place (such as the "iTV") is an entire reinvention of visual media delibery. That is, this announcement may well be the most radical thing in that field since the VCR and cable television.
Of course, nobody cares about that, most of the postings here are "OMG! A blue iPod! I so want that!!" Still, this is the forum that brought you "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
iTunes 7, the Movie Store (with the pre-existing TV shows), and the "iTV" (name pending.) Cool. Be interesting to see if Apple can pull it off.
The release date and price are likely to be announced this week (likely as in "We know Nintendo has called an event later this week, and pretty much every sign points to it being this.") So be patient. An announcement this week followed by a September 30th release doesn't strike me as undoable. Might even be nice if the announcement was of the form "It's $199, and available today!"
Actually, no, that's complete BS.
The RIAA isn't suing people at random, and then smothering them in lawsuits until they pay up. It's looking for people who are using P2P networking software to make available copies of music that they have no authorization to do so (and whose rights belong to the RIAA's members), and then using the law to determine who is doing this, and suing them.
This they're doing by identifying IP addresses, obtaining information from ISPs on users of those IP addresses, and then suing those users.
In every case there is a clear intent to commit an act of copyright infringement by someone. On occasion, because the ISP screws up, or because the person responsible for the account is not the person who was using it, and they're unable or unwilling, to identify the actual infringer, the "wrong person" is sued.
But you can bet that in the VAST majority of cases, the defendent is guilty as hell. Those that aren't are victims of a combination of the RIAA's imperfections, and the person who was actually committing the act of copyright infringement in the first place, and those who encouraged him or her to do so.
I have to say I agree with the person you're responding to. You are asking too much, and blaming the faults of others on the phone itself and its designers.
Verizon do have a history of crippling the phones they sell so they can extract more in OTA charges. The fact is though that the RAZR, as designed, is a fairly stylish, reliable, phone. The vast majority of users are very happy with it. Motorola isn't selling the same phones it was pushing out faster than it could design them three years ago.
I passed over it myself after deciding the V635 met my needs slightly better. The V635's a very solid phone, has crashed maybe three times since I got it. Battery life is good, not "the best" out there, but more than acceptable. Like most of Motorola's stuff, the V635 contains a significant amount of good, new, technology, well implemented - for example, the Transflash card, the high quality megapixel camera, the cleanly implemented Bluetooth. But I've met plenty of people with RAZRs who couldn't be happier.
The real problem in your case is you went with Verizon. Verizon, in my experience, has never put quality first, and it's simply not possible to buy a phone from them and know in advance what you're getting. IS-95 ("CDMA") advocates will tell you that many US carriers picked it for its supposed capacity and reliability. In my view, Verizon picked it because it's sufficiently controllable that they can exercise unparalleled control over their customers in a way they wouldn't be able to with an international standard like GSM. I didn't need T-Mobile's permission to put my V635 online.
In the mean time, unquestionably, you're running a phone that's been modified by a third party (Verizon), and you're complaining about its poor reliability as a result. I'm not saying don't complain to Motorola - DO complain, DO let them know that them letting Verizon do this is undermining your confidence in their products, but DO complain to Verizon too, and make sure you give the blame where it's deserved, not just to one manufacturer, in an industry where every cellphone manufacturer has to whore their designs to stand a chance of getting their products on the shelves.
Interestingly none of the large rocks between Jupiter and the Sun count as planets either under the new definition, as none can seriously be described as having cleared their paths (the relative lack of debris is largely due to Jupiter.)
Ordinary English speaking people, using common definitions of the words: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and possibly others are planets.
Astronomers being dicks: Actually you're wrong, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are the only planets. You need to lose this emotional attachment to the word "planet".
English people to Astronomers being dicks: Actually you're not an astronomer. According to the new definition we just made up, an Astronomer is a person who looks at the skies, is well rounded with much gravitas, and has cleared the path of credibility to be taken seriously by ordinary non-astronomers. As a jack-ass, you clearly aren't that. You need to lose this emotional attachment to the word "astronomer".
Astronomers being dicks: *curses* Damn. Foiled again.
Worth pointing out that the "part of the G5 family" stuff is based upon Hannibal hearing a rumour that it was offered as a laptop equivalent of the G5. This, by itself, makes no sense whatsoever. It's a relatively recent chip, the main maker of PowerPC laptops is Apple, they wouldn't have been interested in a 729MHz G5 to replace their ~1.5GHz G4s, and if IBM did have a ~1.5GHz Broadway low-powered enough to be usable in a laptop, what the hell is Nintendo doing using a version that runs at half the speed?
Until now, all rumours have suggested it's simply a faster, better made, Gekko (which itself is derived from the G3, which is probably why the page you linked to redirects to the G3.) I think setting ones-self up for it being unbelievably more than that is probably setting ones-self up for disappointment.
The "It runs at 7xxMHz" and "It was offered as a laptop G5" "facts" clash. One of them has to be false. The 7xxMHz thing has been consistant and is the kind of thing developers would know about. Plus, Hannibal's reasoning for it being a major disappointment ("That it would make the Wii just an overclocked gamecube with a DVD player") is ridiculous. You might just as well call the Commodore 64 an overclocked KIM-I. Or the Nintendo DS an overclocked GBA.
I've heard this argument about it costing more in the US frequently, but in my experience it's a misrepresentation. I've compared them from time to time with UK tariffs, which may be artificially high, I'm not sure, and US cellphone tariffs are extremely attractive.
The major difference is that on the low end, you can just about get away with a slightly better plan in Europe than in the US, but - get this - it's only useful and cheap if you're not a cellphone user. Essentially, pay as you go in Europe generally has lower minimums that last longer. So whereas in the US, you may have to pay $10 a month to keep your account open (though T-Mobile will keep an account open for a year for every top-up once you've paid at least $100 once), in Europe that may be what you have to pay for an entire year's worth of being connected. Europeans tend to forget though that one reason for that is that mobile operators can depend upon a significant number of PAYG users having their bills paid for by others in the form of incoming calls, which are charged at high rates to the originator of the call.
So if you don't use your phone that often - maybe a hundred minutes or less a year - or get a lot of incoming calls, you, personally, don't have to pay much. Overall though, in the latter case, the bills for owning your mobile will be high, it's just they're paid for by other people.
My wife and I are on a US tariff that gives us the following (and it's not even that great by modern US standards:
For that we're paying around $90 a month, inclusive of taxes, that amounts to (if I have the calculations correct) 25GBP per phone per month. Now, typically, we make (well) over 2,000 minutes of calls per month (it varies, we've had bills showing more than 4,000 minutes in the past, back when we were planning the wedding), and between the unmetered call types and the 700 minute call allowance, we're always well within our limits (we've never had to pay overage since we got the plan.) The only time we pay more than the $90 fee is when we make outgoing international calls or outgoing international text messages.
If we were living alone, we could get similar plans for around $50 a month, with plans with slightly less features available for less. Some operators, notably MetroPCS, offer completely unmetered, no contract, plans for well under $50.
I looked, and I'm loath to see anything comparable in the UK. The best I can find are some temporary offers from Orange that offer unlimited calls between Orange cellphones, or (on a seperate plan!) to landlines (one of these is limited to off-peak, I can't remember which), and an offer from Vodafone to "stop the clock" making off-peak calls limited to one hour cost "three minutes" of airtime.
For that reason, people don't really use mobile phones to talk in the UK that often. Texting is the "big thing". This isn't something many have noticed because until recently landlines were also only available with metered calls, even local calls, so people are used to watching what they say and how long they speak for on phones.
The thing most people who make the comparison fail to do is ask "Which place has the better plans if I want to use my phone?" As a general rule, the more you use it, the better the US plans are and the worse the "We must meter everything!" attitude the European telecommuni
We already did run out of IP addresses years ago. Most computers connected to the Internet don't even have "real" IP addresses, most of us are using NAT.
For most of us, only the machine or machines that directly communicate with the ISP, plus some outside facing servers, have real IP addresses. NAT has proven to be a great hack that's got us by for a while, but with the rise in VoIP and other applications that are having difficulty "just working" when they can't just hook up to a network and expect to be addressable, this problematic and far from ideal hack is showing its flaws.
This type of technology though really isn't that bad. I invite you to take a look at Jake2, a version of Quake II written in Java which performs about as well as the original.
I used to think the same way as you do, but the technology has really improved. JIT ensures there's no reason why it should run slower, and indeed, because you can optimize - Gentoo style - for the processor you're running the app on, it can actually be faster. Managed code actually uses superior memory management to traditional malloc()-heap type systems. Meanwhile you have the benefits of a system with sane pointer handling and where every subroutine in your program can be locked down, efficiently and almost transparently.
The early versions of Java, and the attempts to create usable subsets of what is effectively an enterprise operating system to run on mobile phones and other low-powered devices, coupled with all the guff about "platform independence", have given Java and associated technologies a poorer reputation than they deserve.
That's interesting. My comment about the CPL was based upon the Wikipedia page. I couldn't get the FAQ to load (actually, I still can't, it comes up as an attachment, I try to save it, and it just hangs.) And I certainly couldn't find a license page.
Thanks for linking to that. That's interesting. A little disappointing too. Why the hell did they change it (assuming Wikipedia was correct)?
It's quite simply an attempt to make Python available for .NET (and presumably the CLR in general.) That's it.
This is the way programming is going. We're moving from CPU-specific unmanaged programming to platform independent abstracted managed environments. One day your entire operating system will run that way. But even today, you see these environments popping up in places where they add security and robustness.
Web applications, for instance. So you have a giant web-app, maybe you're using components from three or four third parties. If you're using .NET or Java, you can integrate these components with any language that runs on the .NET or Java platforms. That means something simple, that can be done in two lines of Python (which my loves-Java-like-a ricer-loves-Gentoo collegue assures me is the average length of a complete Python application ;-) can be run in that environment simply by using IronPython or Jython. And when I say "that environment", I mean your two liner will have as much access as a C# or Java program would have. No writing of C stubs to link the two environments necessary.
That's why IronPython (and Jython) are great things. Indeed, the fact you can integrate Python and Java/C# and half a dozen other languages so transparently in these types of environments gives you some idea of the power managed environments give you. We haven't seen anything like this since Unix.
All hail James Gosling!