How will game companies lure us after graphics become photorealistic? More variety? Better physics or AI? Games for girls and the elderly? Content on demand? More team play? Player-created content? Better sound? Better inputs? More handhelds than just Game Boy?
As a tech company buying into an entertainment company, Apple could share the fate of AOL Time Warner and Sony-Columbia: its music and hardware departments may end up fighting eachother over piracy. How does Apple plan to make these departments work together, rather than against eachother?
Read Salam Pax's Weblog. It's apparently a weblog from a man living in Baghdad, who wrote, in English, about his life in the months leading up to this war. It's full of details that makes Baghdad feel much more human than the prison city our media portrays it as. However it still is not biased, and is equally skeptical of Saddam and Bush. Since few Americans can get Al Jazeera, which is still biased in its own way, this weblog may be the closest Americans can get to a true insider's view of Iraq. One insider, anyway. His last post was on March 24, hopefully because his ISP went out, rather than because of anything happening to him. The sooner Baghdad gets back its internet access, the sooner we'll hear more first person accounts unfitered by any media interest.
Japanese people will pay more for smaller devices, but in USA where "bigger is better", people expect smaller devices to cost less. Therefore, if WinCE costs more than a few dollars per unit, Linux based devices will be noticable less expensive, and thus more competitive.
The biggest long term benefit of digital projection in movie theaters won't be image quality, it will be selection. Movie theaters will be able to show different movies based on the time of day and day of the week, like a TV station. They'll be able to go from such extremes as dedicating every screen in the building to a single title on the opening weekend of a big budget release, to showing 30 different movies per screen per week.
This will benefit small studios and productions far more than large ones, so it's odd that digital video's biggest proponent is George Lucas.
Actually, this isn't so much an homage to King Kong as it is an homage too the Star Wars prequels. After creating three great movies, he sells out and makes overproduced crap that would flop if not for the momentum he built up with his earlier movies. Like Lucas with Star Wars I-III, Jackson will proclaim that "Everyone likes action and hates good writing, just like me." Despite being critically panned, these remakes and their merchandise will "earn" hundreds of millions. Unfortunately for Peter Jackson, these remakes will not enter the history books as the biggest franchise wreckers of all time because they're unrelated to his original works. Unlike the Star Wars prequels, Jackson's remakes will not "rape our childhoods", they will merely rape his reputation.
Bandwidth Caps and Complicated Billing
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Customers will feel intimidated by this if their ISP charges extra for big downloads. People already hate all the forms they have to fill out for taxes. If gaming on demand requires more than one form for billing, people will avoid it because it's too complicated. And how will it work for players under 18? If it works by some charge card system, how will their parents set limits? And how easy will it be for the kids, who usually know the technology better than the parents, to cheat those limits?
Language is probably a bigger barrier on the internet than any firewall or censorware. You can only search Google with words you know. If there are web sites written in a language no one knows anymore, they are effectively lost.
This article is very broad but too shallow. It's Microsoft centric to the point of leaving out a lot of critical info.
For example, worldwide, PlayStation 2 is more than twice as popular as Xbox and Gamecube combined, and Xbox is losing Microsoft several hundred million dollars per year, which Microsoft may not make up in the long run. Despite being the most technically advanced console, most of Xbox's games use only a fraction of its power because most of them are PS2 ports because PS2 is where the money is. Windows has gained MS no advantage in the living room because Xbox, despite running "Wintel" hardware, doesn't run Windows software, and game publishers prefer PS2's huge user base to Xbox's ease of programming. Xbox Live is unlikely to get more than a small fraction of Xbox's already small user base because, despite being the best online gaming service, it's an add-on and game console owners traditionally don't buy add-ons. And by the time the (probably) primarily online Xbox 2 comes around in 2005 or 2006, Sony and maybe AOL will have their own competing online entertainment centers.
I can't judge the validity of the rest of the article because I'm only really familiar with video games, but if it's as negligent in every section then you'd better read some alternate viewpoints before taking its advice.
I thought a big part of what makes blue laser DVDs better than red laser DVDs is not just the bit density but also better compression. For $3800, shouldn't it be able to do real time MPEG4 compression? Or am I mistaking architectures for codecs? Can MPEG2 handle the best codecs?
Don't spend $70 on each Final Fantasy game when you can check out the vastly superior stories and music it ripped off from the library. For free. Since you don't have the attention span for Tolkien and Beethoven, at least check out some movies. For free.
Oh, don't wait for anime to become popular. Just watch it now while you're still amazed by it. By the time you're my age, your standards wiill be so impossibly high that nothing will impress you anymore.
Americans may start recognizing manga and anime once they start competing for the same awards that "real" books and movies do. This year Spirited Away is likely to be nominated for Best Animated Picture, and might even win it. Other Japanese producers have said that they're now shooting for the Oscars as well. Even if they don't get big budget releases in the summer, getting a moderate November/December release and then monopolizing the "Best Animated Picture" box cover for home video will get some respect.
So far, almost all of Star Trek has been shown from the human, Federation, US perspective. Since Star Trek is supposed to be about humanity's interaction with foreign life and cultures, Star Trek should be shown from the foreigners' perspectives.
One standard which would improve Star Trek tremendously would be to familiarize the audience with a foreign culture enough so that by the time the Federation interacts with it, we'll already know, and often agree with, how the foreign culture will react.
Deep Space Nine came closer to that ideal than any other Star Trek. It had the least amount of space travel, but probably the most development of secondary characters. It devoted several episodes each to the Ferengi, Cardassians, Changelings, Jem Hadar, Klingons, Bajorans and the alternate universe.
But Star Trek now needs to do better than that. They need to devote entire movies to the other races and whole seasons, if not to their view of themselves, then their view of humans. A Klingon opera could make a great movie, if not for sheer Peter Jackson-esque artistic value then at least for All Your Base-style campiness, probably both. Voyager and Enterprise have really only been about Starfleet's reaction to the universe, but Star Trek must now be about the universe's reaction to Starfleet.
CDs have been around since 1984, so shouldn't CDs have suffered the same problem? Or are CDs and DVDs made with very different processes? Does the fact that DVDs use smaller pits than CDs make DVDs less durable?
How Americans Can Buy American
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The book How Americans Can Buy American by Roger Simmermaker explains this from a consumer/taxpayer perspective. The book's main idea is that manufacturing companies, regardless of where they manufacture, pay most of their taxes in their country of headquarter, so consumers should buy from companies owned domestically. Then it lists several thousand brands and corporations and their country of headquarter. It's a neat book to bring to the store, but it's also scary to see that companies like Universal Pictures, Stanley Tools and Chrysler are foreign owned. I suppose in the book's next edition we'll see more Indian brands in the IT section.
If popularity, compatibility, openness and ubiquitiy are keys to a technology's success, why is console gaming more popular than PC gaming despite being single vendor, taxed and censored by hardware manufacturers, and far less open and inflexible? How is console gaming so popular despite a complete replacement of available formats every five years? How could console gaming be so popular when said overhauls make thousands of games unplayable, usually never to be re-released?
Maybe copyrights should last only as long as the profit period. For example, most movies make most of their income within one year of publication, including home video. Most video games and music make most of their income within a few months of publication.
IMO, big media corporations' big strength is not their copyrights but their infrastructure. We all know the difference between good-but-unpopular entertainment and a bad-but-popular entertainment. What makes so much bad entertainment popular is the marketing machine behind it. Even if there were no copyrights, you can't copy a marketing machine. It has to be built, or rather, trained and hired.
If there were no copyrights, brands could be copied, but studios couldn't. Everybody would be allowed to make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, but ony Disney and a few other studios could do it well. Without copyrights, entertainment companies would have to rely entirely upon uncopyable things like amusement parks and live shows, but Disney, Universal and WB (Six Flags) are already doing that.
Entertainment rating systems and law enforcement have opposite priorities. Mass murder is a far, far worse crime than profanity or indecent exposure, but movie and game ratings feel just the opposite. It's true that all countries are too lax on violence; a game or movie with mass murder can get in the PG-to-T range as long as the viewer/player can't see the suffering, but only USA is so irrationally strict on profanity and nudity. Amelie got an R in USA, but a PG or PG-13 in the rest of the world.
Only in USA do people prefer to see death more than life.
If music was harder to copy, would music publishers be less eager to tax media? Ever since the NES in 1985, video games have had some sort of copy protection. Have game publishers been persuing media levies as vigorously?
Here in Melbourne, FL, that would be dangerous for bicyclists and inconvenient for motorists. The speed limit on the the main roads is 45 MPH with most people going 50. Fortunately our sidewalks are usually spacious and have good visibility, so bicyclists and pedestrians can coexist pretty well.
To me saying "why do we need all this power" is kind of sacreligous.
To me saying "why do we need more than 40 FPS" is kind of sacreligious. If you're wondering why, it's because we'd need motion blur instead, which takes even more processing power. When the frame rate is 60, motion blur usually isn't needed to make motion seem smooth.
"If you find a Snickers wrapper on the ground you could read its RFID and track it back to the person who bought it and fine him for littering."
Or if you're a cop who needs to meet his quota, you could pull some wrappers out of a trash can, take a picture of it on the ground as "proof", then do the above. That's assuming the trash can doesn't have its own microwave to protect its users.
Most Chinese people have little money; many work for under $5 a day. That means that if Nintendo revives a cartrige based console in China, its games won't be as counterfieted as a CD based system, but they'll be more expensive, ruling out many people. Maybe Nintendo could bring back one of their old consoles, but with a CD drive so they could sell their old games for a few dollars apiece. It wouldn't cost much more than a portable CD player, require very little R&D, and the games would cost little enough to reduce counterfieting somewhat.
Slashdot Mirror
How will game companies lure us after graphics become photorealistic? More variety? Better physics or AI? Games for girls and the elderly? Content on demand? More team play? Player-created content? Better sound? Better inputs? More handhelds than just Game Boy?
As a tech company buying into an entertainment company, Apple could share the fate of AOL Time Warner and Sony-Columbia: its music and hardware departments may end up fighting eachother over piracy. How does Apple plan to make these departments work together, rather than against eachother?
Read Salam Pax's Weblog. It's apparently a weblog from a man living in Baghdad, who wrote, in English, about his life in the months leading up to this war. It's full of details that makes Baghdad feel much more human than the prison city our media portrays it as. However it still is not biased, and is equally skeptical of Saddam and Bush. Since few Americans can get Al Jazeera, which is still biased in its own way, this weblog may be the closest Americans can get to a true insider's view of Iraq. One insider, anyway. His last post was on March 24, hopefully because his ISP went out, rather than because of anything happening to him. The sooner Baghdad gets back its internet access, the sooner we'll hear more first person accounts unfitered by any media interest.
Japanese people will pay more for smaller devices, but in USA where "bigger is better", people expect smaller devices to cost less. Therefore, if WinCE costs more than a few dollars per unit, Linux based devices will be noticable less expensive, and thus more competitive.
The biggest long term benefit of digital projection in movie theaters won't be image quality, it will be selection. Movie theaters will be able to show different movies based on the time of day and day of the week, like a TV station. They'll be able to go from such extremes as dedicating every screen in the building to a single title on the opening weekend of a big budget release, to showing 30 different movies per screen per week.
This will benefit small studios and productions far more than large ones, so it's odd that digital video's biggest proponent is George Lucas.
Actually, this isn't so much an homage to King Kong as it is an homage too the Star Wars prequels. After creating three great movies, he sells out and makes overproduced crap that would flop if not for the momentum he built up with his earlier movies. Like Lucas with Star Wars I-III, Jackson will proclaim that "Everyone likes action and hates good writing, just like me." Despite being critically panned, these remakes and their merchandise will "earn" hundreds of millions. Unfortunately for Peter Jackson, these remakes will not enter the history books as the biggest franchise wreckers of all time because they're unrelated to his original works. Unlike the Star Wars prequels, Jackson's remakes will not "rape our childhoods", they will merely rape his reputation.
Customers will feel intimidated by this if their ISP charges extra for big downloads. People already hate all the forms they have to fill out for taxes. If gaming on demand requires more than one form for billing, people will avoid it because it's too complicated. And how will it work for players under 18? If it works by some charge card system, how will their parents set limits? And how easy will it be for the kids, who usually know the technology better than the parents, to cheat those limits?
Language is probably a bigger barrier on the internet than any firewall or censorware. You can only search Google with words you know. If there are web sites written in a language no one knows anymore, they are effectively lost.
...the actor's guild on strike against beings that do not exist. That will be a triumph of surreal/dada-ism.
Already done.
This article is very broad but too shallow. It's Microsoft centric to the point of leaving out a lot of critical info.
.
For example, worldwide, PlayStation 2 is more than twice as popular as Xbox and Gamecube combined, and Xbox is losing Microsoft several hundred million dollars per year , which Microsoft may not make up in the long run. Despite being the most technically advanced console, most of Xbox's games use only a fraction of its power because most of them are PS2 ports because PS2 is where the money is. Windows has gained MS no advantage in the living room because Xbox, despite running "Wintel" hardware, doesn't run Windows software, and game publishers prefer PS2's huge user base to Xbox's ease of programming. Xbox Live is unlikely to get more than a small fraction of Xbox's already small user base because, despite being the best online gaming service, it's an add-on and game console owners traditionally don't buy add-ons . And by the time the (probably) primarily online Xbox 2 comes around in 2005 or 2006, Sony and maybe AOL will have their own competing online entertainment centers
I can't judge the validity of the rest of the article because I'm only really familiar with video games, but if it's as negligent in every section then you'd better read some alternate viewpoints before taking its advice.
I thought a big part of what makes blue laser DVDs better than red laser DVDs is not just the bit density but also better compression. For $3800, shouldn't it be able to do real time MPEG4 compression? Or am I mistaking architectures for codecs? Can MPEG2 handle the best codecs?
Don't spend $70 on each Final Fantasy game when you can check out the vastly superior stories and music it ripped off from the library. For free. Since you don't have the attention span for Tolkien and Beethoven, at least check out some movies. For free.
Oh, don't wait for anime to become popular. Just watch it now while you're still amazed by it. By the time you're my age, your standards wiill be so impossibly high that nothing will impress you anymore.
Americans may start recognizing manga and anime once they start competing for the same awards that "real" books and movies do. This year Spirited Away is likely to be nominated for Best Animated Picture, and might even win it. Other Japanese producers have said that they're now shooting for the Oscars as well. Even if they don't get big budget releases in the summer, getting a moderate November/December release and then monopolizing the "Best Animated Picture" box cover for home video will get some respect.
So far, almost all of Star Trek has been shown from the human, Federation, US perspective. Since Star Trek is supposed to be about humanity's interaction with foreign life and cultures, Star Trek should be shown from the foreigners' perspectives.
One standard which would improve Star Trek tremendously would be to familiarize the audience with a foreign culture enough so that by the time the Federation interacts with it, we'll already know, and often agree with, how the foreign culture will react.
Deep Space Nine came closer to that ideal than any other Star Trek. It had the least amount of space travel, but probably the most development of secondary characters. It devoted several episodes each to the Ferengi, Cardassians, Changelings, Jem Hadar, Klingons, Bajorans and the alternate universe.
But Star Trek now needs to do better than that. They need to devote entire movies to the other races and whole seasons, if not to their view of themselves, then their view of humans. A Klingon opera could make a great movie, if not for sheer Peter Jackson-esque artistic value then at least for All Your Base-style campiness, probably both. Voyager and Enterprise have really only been about Starfleet's reaction to the universe, but Star Trek must now be about the universe's reaction to Starfleet.
We need an unfiltered look at The Other.
Chinese bootleggers and fantasy geeks have something in common: we both like writing "what if" fanfics!
CDs have been around since 1984, so shouldn't CDs have suffered the same problem? Or are CDs and DVDs made with very different processes? Does the fact that DVDs use smaller pits than CDs make DVDs less durable?
The book How Americans Can Buy American by Roger Simmermaker explains this from a consumer/taxpayer perspective. The book's main idea is that manufacturing companies, regardless of where they manufacture, pay most of their taxes in their country of headquarter , so consumers should buy from companies owned domestically. Then it lists several thousand brands and corporations and their country of headquarter. It's a neat book to bring to the store, but it's also scary to see that companies like Universal Pictures, Stanley Tools and Chrysler are foreign owned. I suppose in the book's next edition we'll see more Indian brands in the IT section.
If popularity, compatibility, openness and ubiquitiy are keys to a technology's success, why is console gaming more popular than PC gaming despite being single vendor, taxed and censored by hardware manufacturers, and far less open and inflexible? How is console gaming so popular despite a complete replacement of available formats every five years? How could console gaming be so popular when said overhauls make thousands of games unplayable, usually never to be re-released?
Maybe copyrights should last only as long as the profit period. For example, most movies make most of their income within one year of publication, including home video. Most video games and music make most of their income within a few months of publication.
IMO, big media corporations' big strength is not their copyrights but their infrastructure. We all know the difference between good-but-unpopular entertainment and a bad-but-popular entertainment. What makes so much bad entertainment popular is the marketing machine behind it. Even if there were no copyrights, you can't copy a marketing machine. It has to be built, or rather, trained and hired.
If there were no copyrights, brands could be copied, but studios couldn't. Everybody would be allowed to make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, but ony Disney and a few other studios could do it well. Without copyrights, entertainment companies would have to rely entirely upon uncopyable things like amusement parks and live shows, but Disney, Universal and WB (Six Flags) are already doing that.
Entertainment rating systems and law enforcement have opposite priorities. Mass murder is a far, far worse crime than profanity or indecent exposure, but movie and game ratings feel just the opposite. It's true that all countries are too lax on violence; a game or movie with mass murder can get in the PG-to-T range as long as the viewer/player can't see the suffering, but only USA is so irrationally strict on profanity and nudity. Amelie got an R in USA, but a PG or PG-13 in the rest of the world.
Only in USA do people prefer to see death more than life.
If music was harder to copy, would music publishers be less eager to tax media? Ever since the NES in 1985, video games have had some sort of copy protection. Have game publishers been persuing media levies as vigorously?
Here in Melbourne, FL, that would be dangerous for bicyclists and inconvenient for motorists. The speed limit on the the main roads is 45 MPH with most people going 50. Fortunately our sidewalks are usually spacious and have good visibility, so bicyclists and pedestrians can coexist pretty well.
To me saying "why do we need all this power" is kind of sacreligous.
To me saying "why do we need more than 40 FPS" is kind of sacreligious. If you're wondering why, it's because we'd need motion blur instead, which takes even more processing power. When the frame rate is 60, motion blur usually isn't needed to make motion seem smooth.
"If you find a Snickers wrapper on the ground you could read its RFID and track it back to the person who bought it and fine him for littering."
Or if you're a cop who needs to meet his quota, you could pull some wrappers out of a trash can, take a picture of it on the ground as "proof", then do the above. That's assuming the trash can doesn't have its own microwave to protect its users.
Most Chinese people have little money; many work for under $5 a day. That means that if Nintendo revives a cartrige based console in China, its games won't be as counterfieted as a CD based system, but they'll be more expensive, ruling out many people. Maybe Nintendo could bring back one of their old consoles, but with a CD drive so they could sell their old games for a few dollars apiece. It wouldn't cost much more than a portable CD player, require very little R&D, and the games would cost little enough to reduce counterfieting somewhat.