For all the QT6 delays Apple caused by refusing to pay MPEG-4 license fees, you'd think they'd include open formats like Ogg Vorbis and VP3 as a bit of a retort. Why'd they exclude them?
Arcade Revival in USA
on
Net-Nexus Seoul
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This article describes something that could happen in USA: A revival of arcades based on broadband.
One of the major appeals of arcades was that they let you play on technology more powerful than anything at home, with your friends, for as little as 25 cents. They steadily lost that advantage in the 1990s until they got to today's point where home games are MORE powerful, and arcades games cost 50c to $1 per play.
But what if they got that advantage back? What if arcades were based on broadband? I've noticed that in USA broadband is far more likely to be set up in large buildings and institutions than in homes. And when it does become popular in homes, the standard connection for large organizations might jump ahead again.
I'd like to see broadband arcades where you could play with people in the same room and people hundreds of miles away at the same time! And of course it would allow for voice chat, and maybe videophoning as well. The arcade owner would only have to install hardware and software once: The cabinet/cocpit itself would auto-update software forever after. And it should cost have a reasonable cost, the way arcades used to.
Would you go?
Psychoacoustics? Tilt sensing headphones?
on
Quake For the Blind
·
· Score: 2
Assuming headphone usage, are today's sound cards fast and flexible enough to generate all the subtle echoes and muffles necessary to accurately recreate direction and distance through sound? Do sound cards have aural equivalents to nVidia's programmable shaders and Cg? And when will headphones get tilt sensors to eliminate the need for head turning controls in video games? Actually, how good are the tilt sensors that Microsoft uses in their controllers?
Console makers always overpromise.
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
MS is just following the console tradition of talking about three consoles for every one they actually bring to market.
When Nintendo made the NES, they talked about making it a "Trojan Horse" that would bring content on demand and online shopping, including stock trading, to the living room. They also talked about several SNES CD-ROM drives and a N64 disk drive. And they talked about Game Boy Advance six years before they brought it to market.
Sony talked about PlayStation 2, 3 and 4 back in 1995.
Atari talked about their 16-bit console "Panther" in 1991, and Matsushita talked about the 3DO "M2" in 1996. They marketed neither.
Sega did actually bring out every console they promised, but only the Genesis / Mega Drive was profitable. They tried to support 11 others that lost money, including unheard-of combinations like Genesis + Sega CD + 32X.
Dumb Terminals in the Living Room
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
The only way I can see that content creator-approved "multimedia convergence" and content on demand in the living room will happen is through dumb terminals on broadband.
The MPAA and RIAA, and eventually ISDA, will only feel safe when their content/software resides nowhere in the world but on a few dozen hard drives in their offices. Only dumb terminals can let them to do that and still provide all the conveniences and flexibility comparable to the WWW. And since they'll demand maximum DRM, they'll thus demand minimum client-side caching, which means each client will need lots of bandwith and very low latency.
As long as Microsoft is talking about giving consumers hard drives, they won't have the content provider's cooperation.
Share Movies and Music too!
on
Free as in Books?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
While we're waiting for Bookcrossing to share CDs and DVDs, you can already donate and borrow movies and music by the carload from your library. I donate every manga and anime I buy to the library.
Specialty stores are great, but manga and anime need to show up in mainstream stores to really succeed because they're so convenient and because many people probably feel that specialty stores are creepy. Luckily, Barnes & Noble has a comics shelf or two (much of which is manga), and Suncoast has several shelves of anime. Movie theaters and Blockbuster need improvement.
In the mean time, I've been giving manga and anime to my library for free circulation. That's as good a place for exposure as any.
Southeast of Orlando and south of Kennedy Space Center is Famous Faces and Funnies, which has a great selection of manga, US comics, action figures, and some anime on DVD. They also carry some Japanese language manga, and know a lot about what they sell. The store is very spacious and brightly lit. They have to keep it that way because it's in a popular shopping center with a supermarket.
For a while they were showing some anime at a 2nd run theater every Friday night, like 3 movies for $5, and despite having a poor projector and a smoky theater, it was great being around all those people who really liked anime. But it was kinda against copyright since they were showing VHSs so they quit.
I was thinking that with real time CGI characters, there could be a call-in TV show where viewers could speak with their favorite characters, sort of like "President Clinton Answers Childrens' Questions". It's probably already possible with puppets, but perhaps with CGI it could be more elaborate.
However, it is uknown as to whether or not microsoft will be able to invade your privacy, since they make the system. Have to double check that EULA!
Palladium will be the first MS product without an EULA because they'll have already taken those rights out of the Constitution. How else can they implement this?
The problem I see with PC audio is not the quality of the cards but getting people to hook up decent speakers and listening to them. People seem to reserve their best amps and speakers for the living room and car. Already in 1991 the Sega Genesis and SNES were putting out better sound than cheap TV speakers could reproduce. DVD consoles at least may get hooked to home speakers reserved for movies, and incidentally also use it for games. MP3s have got a lot more people to listen to their PCs, but that's just a drop of the sound today's PCs and consoles can put out.
One way I see of getting people to get better sound out of their PCs and consoles is headphones. For just $20 the Koss KTX-PRO (also called the Optimus Titanium 35 Pro at Radio Shack) headphones will get you better sound than hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of amps and speakers. As for the surround effect, the Dolby Headphone algorithm supposedly simulates it with DVDs made for 5.1 speakers. It's nice that most PCs have headphone jacks; I wish consoles would as well. Many console games, and PC games as well, I would assume, have great soundtracks that never get heard.
All the Palms I've seen use only about half of the full surface area as an LCD. The rest goes to hard-wired handwriting recognition space and buttons. I'd like the entire front of it to be one all-purpose touchscreen, and let the software decide what each pixel does. That would make viewing pictures and movies easier as well.
This is a big reason why paper is more popular than other PDAs, and why Game Boy is more popular than other handheld video games. One way to get it is either with a reflective LCD or an OLED. I'm looking forward to the latter.
Once broadband gets the speed and latency necessary to run a videophone, it'll be enough to run games as a dumb terminal. Online games could, instead of storing and running the game on the player's local computer and sending only the most critical data over the line, run entirely on the server, sending only I/O data over the line. The code would reside and run on a few dozen servers under the developer's and publisher's control, rather than on millions of hard drives out of their control.
This would not only make cheating hard but it would also make copyright violation hard. It would also go against how people like to use their PCs, so this system would probably run on some living room box that AOL will rent to you.
Many/.ers have said that technology is either going to hurt current business models, make them available to more people, or make artists rely more on live performances than any tech/recording based business. But after all this talk about business models, can't technology make the actual art of music better?
Think of broadband. Right now it's used mainly for copying files and playing violent games. But imagine if it was used for music: Just as you can assemble a team of players online to go shoot up other teams, you could assemble a team of singers or instrument players. Once telephony goes CD-quality and grows from one-on-one chat to many-to-many chat, it could be used as a way of singing!
There's also surround sound. Dolby is working on surround sound through headphones. Imagine putting a tilt sensor on your headphones so you could turn your head at any angle and the sound would seem to stay in place, rather than follow your head as it does with current headphones. This would require music to be stored in a MIDI- or MOD-like format with XYZ tags rather than as a waveform recording, but it would allow a lot of flexibility and interactivity. This could soon be used in games; imagine if it was used in the creation and listening of music.
These are just two examples I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably think of much more enticing ways. But the main idea is that while everybody is talking about how technology affects the distribution process, the most important thing, in the long run, is how it'll enhance the actual art of music.
After all, what was rock and roll before the electric guitar?
And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt headphones, so Don't Do It. Thanks.
Do you wonder if there's a soul behind those synthetic faces? There sure is; it's Japanese. The Japanese are the most likely to perfect synthespians. They already got off to a rocky start with Final Fantasy.
All the pieces are in place: their economy is terrible, they take cartoons seriously, and they envy Americans.
A holy grail of Japanese animation is to look and sound exactly like an American live action movie. They could save their economy by replacing Hollywood actors with Tokyo animators. They could make movies their next great export, after cars and electronics. I think Americans won't lead the synthespian wave: We love our actors too much and we have little to gain. The Japanese don't love American actors (economically) and they have everything to gain.
Final Fantasy's failure to profit has scared them, but they're already improving. They're learning how to write and act like Americans from Americans. That's what Square has done with Kingdom Hearts, translated by Disney and starring Haley Joel Osment. And the Metal Gear games, made in Japan and voice acted in USA, also sell well in USA.
My current hobby is donating movies to my local library with spare money. Not just any movies, but movies at the movies at the top of IMDB's fan favorite lists in each category. The Brevard County Public Libraries now have Grave of the Fireflies and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, thanks to me.
>>> Something people don't seem to recognize is that video games have become a lot more "real" in just the last five years. Real to the point that a person can get their health back by having sex with a prostitute.
This is news? Health-restoring whores were already commonplace in 1988 in Zelda II! It's true:
1: Walk into any town. 2: Talk to any scarlet woman outdoors. 3: If she invites you in, follow. 4: She'll give you her "special medicine" to restore your life!
While the graphics weren't very realistic, it still got the point across to everyone who played Zelda II. Let's be glad that legislators took 14 years to get the message!
Slashdot Mirror
For all the QT6 delays Apple caused by refusing to pay MPEG-4 license fees, you'd think they'd include open formats like Ogg Vorbis and VP3 as a bit of a retort. Why'd they exclude them?
This article describes something that could happen in USA: A revival of arcades based on broadband.
One of the major appeals of arcades was that they let you play on technology more powerful than anything at home, with your friends, for as little as 25 cents. They steadily lost that advantage in the 1990s until they got to today's point where home games are MORE powerful, and arcades games cost 50c to $1 per play.
But what if they got that advantage back? What if arcades were based on broadband? I've noticed that in USA broadband is far more likely to be set up in large buildings and institutions than in homes. And when it does become popular in homes, the standard connection for large organizations might jump ahead again.
I'd like to see broadband arcades where you could play with people in the same room and people hundreds of miles away at the same time! And of course it would allow for voice chat, and maybe videophoning as well. The arcade owner would only have to install hardware and software once: The cabinet/cocpit itself would auto-update software forever after. And it should cost have a reasonable cost, the way arcades used to.
Would you go?
Assuming headphone usage, are today's sound cards fast and flexible enough to generate all the subtle echoes and muffles necessary to accurately recreate direction and distance through sound? Do sound cards have aural equivalents to nVidia's programmable shaders and Cg? And when will headphones get tilt sensors to eliminate the need for head turning controls in video games? Actually, how good are the tilt sensors that Microsoft uses in their controllers?
MS is just following the console tradition of talking about three consoles for every one they actually bring to market.
When Nintendo made the NES, they talked about making it a "Trojan Horse" that would bring content on demand and online shopping, including stock trading, to the living room. They also talked about several SNES CD-ROM drives and a N64 disk drive. And they talked about Game Boy Advance six years before they brought it to market.
Sony talked about PlayStation 2, 3 and 4 back in 1995.
Atari talked about their 16-bit console "Panther" in 1991, and Matsushita talked about the 3DO "M2" in 1996. They marketed neither.
Sega did actually bring out every console they promised, but only the Genesis / Mega Drive was profitable. They tried to support 11 others that lost money, including unheard-of combinations like Genesis + Sega CD + 32X.
The only way I can see that content creator-approved "multimedia convergence" and content on demand in the living room will happen is through dumb terminals on broadband.
The MPAA and RIAA, and eventually ISDA, will only feel safe when their content/software resides nowhere in the world but on a few dozen hard drives in their offices. Only dumb terminals can let them to do that and still provide all the conveniences and flexibility comparable to the WWW. And since they'll demand maximum DRM, they'll thus demand minimum client-side caching, which means each client will need lots of bandwith and very low latency.
As long as Microsoft is talking about giving consumers hard drives, they won't have the content provider's cooperation.
While we're waiting for Bookcrossing to share CDs and DVDs, you can already donate and borrow movies and music by the carload from your library. I donate every manga and anime I buy to the library.
Specialty stores are great, but manga and anime need to show up in mainstream stores to really succeed because they're so convenient and because many people probably feel that specialty stores are creepy. Luckily, Barnes & Noble has a comics shelf or two (much of which is manga), and Suncoast has several shelves of anime. Movie theaters and Blockbuster need improvement.
In the mean time, I've been giving manga and anime to my library for free circulation. That's as good a place for exposure as any.
Southeast of Orlando and south of Kennedy Space Center is Famous Faces and Funnies, which has a great selection of manga, US comics, action figures, and some anime on DVD. They also carry some Japanese language manga, and know a lot about what they sell. The store is very spacious and brightly lit. They have to keep it that way because it's in a popular shopping center with a supermarket.
For a while they were showing some anime at a 2nd run theater every Friday night, like 3 movies for $5, and despite having a poor projector and a smoky theater, it was great being around all those people who really liked anime. But it was kinda against copyright since they were showing VHSs so they quit.
I was thinking that with real time CGI characters, there could be a call-in TV show where viewers could speak with their favorite characters, sort of like "President Clinton Answers Childrens' Questions". It's probably already possible with puppets, but perhaps with CGI it could be more elaborate.
...if our leaders didn't try to mandate religion. That's something they should consider.
When people invented writing, town criers thought it would put them out of work, but instead it gave them work as journalists.
However, it is uknown as to whether or not microsoft will be able to invade your privacy, since they make the system. Have to double check that EULA!
Palladium will be the first MS product without an EULA because they'll have already taken those rights out of the Constitution. How else can they implement this?
So where does this put Wal Mart in the copyright war?
The problem I see with PC audio is not the quality of the cards but getting people to hook up decent speakers and listening to them. People seem to reserve their best amps and speakers for the living room and car. Already in 1991 the Sega Genesis and SNES were putting out better sound than cheap TV speakers could reproduce. DVD consoles at least may get hooked to home speakers reserved for movies, and incidentally also use it for games. MP3s have got a lot more people to listen to their PCs, but that's just a drop of the sound today's PCs and consoles can put out.
One way I see of getting people to get better sound out of their PCs and consoles is headphones. For just $20 the Koss KTX-PRO (also called the Optimus Titanium 35 Pro at Radio Shack) headphones will get you better sound than hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of amps and speakers. As for the surround effect, the Dolby Headphone algorithm supposedly simulates it with DVDs made for 5.1 speakers. It's nice that most PCs have headphone jacks; I wish consoles would as well. Many console games, and PC games as well, I would assume, have great soundtracks that never get heard.
All the Palms I've seen use only about half of the full surface area as an LCD. The rest goes to hard-wired handwriting recognition space and buttons. I'd like the entire front of it to be one all-purpose touchscreen, and let the software decide what each pixel does. That would make viewing pictures and movies easier as well.
...until the MPAA blocks free eclipses too?
This is a big reason why paper is more popular than other PDAs, and why Game Boy is more popular than other handheld video games. One way to get it is either with a reflective LCD or an OLED. I'm looking forward to the latter.
Of course they'll lock out all copyrighted images, sounds and texts, but will we need a license to look at the sky and our reflection?
One possible answer is dumb terminals.
Once broadband gets the speed and latency necessary to run a videophone, it'll be enough to run games as a dumb terminal. Online games could, instead of storing and running the game on the player's local computer and sending only the most critical data over the line, run entirely on the server, sending only I/O data over the line. The code would reside and run on a few dozen servers under the developer's and publisher's control, rather than on millions of hard drives out of their control.
This would not only make cheating hard but it would also make copyright violation hard. It would also go against how people like to use their PCs, so this system would probably run on some living room box that AOL will rent to you.
Many /.ers have said that technology is either going to hurt current business models, make them available to more people, or make artists rely more on live performances than any tech/recording based business. But after all this talk about business models, can't technology make the actual art of music better?
Think of broadband. Right now it's used mainly for copying files and playing violent games. But imagine if it was used for music: Just as you can assemble a team of players online to go shoot up other teams, you could assemble a team of singers or instrument players. Once telephony goes CD-quality and grows from one-on-one chat to many-to-many chat, it could be used as a way of singing!
There's also surround sound. Dolby is working on surround sound through headphones. Imagine putting a tilt sensor on your headphones so you could turn your head at any angle and the sound would seem to stay in place, rather than follow your head as it does with current headphones. This would require music to be stored in a MIDI- or MOD-like format with XYZ tags rather than as a waveform recording, but it would allow a lot of flexibility and interactivity. This could soon be used in games; imagine if it was used in the creation and listening of music.
These are just two examples I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably think of much more enticing ways. But the main idea is that while everybody is talking about how technology affects the distribution process, the most important thing, in the long run, is how it'll enhance the actual art of music.
After all, what was rock and roll before the electric guitar?
And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt headphones , so Don't Do It. Thanks.
Do you wonder if there's a soul behind those synthetic faces? There sure is; it's Japanese. The Japanese are the most likely to perfect synthespians. They already got off to a rocky start with Final Fantasy.
All the pieces are in place: their economy is terrible, they take cartoons seriously, and they envy Americans.
A holy grail of Japanese animation is to look and sound exactly like an American live action movie. They could save their economy by replacing Hollywood actors with Tokyo animators. They could make movies their next great export, after cars and electronics. I think Americans won't lead the synthespian wave: We love our actors too much and we have little to gain. The Japanese don't love American actors (economically) and they have everything to gain.
Final Fantasy's failure to profit has scared them, but they're already improving. They're learning how to write and act like Americans from Americans. That's what Square has done with Kingdom Hearts, translated by Disney and starring Haley Joel Osment. And the Metal Gear games, made in Japan and voice acted in USA, also sell well in USA.
So I think the Japanese will do it. They need to.
My current hobby is donating movies to my local library with spare money. Not just any movies, but movies at the movies at the top of IMDB's fan favorite lists in each category. The Brevard County Public Libraries now have Grave of the Fireflies and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, thanks to me.
>>> Something people don't seem to recognize is that video games have become a lot more "real" in just the last five years. Real to the point that a person can get their health back by having sex with a prostitute.
This is news? Health-restoring whores were already commonplace in 1988 in Zelda II! It's true:
1: Walk into any town.
2: Talk to any scarlet woman outdoors.
3: If she invites you in, follow.
4: She'll give you her "special medicine" to restore your life!
While the graphics weren't very realistic, it still got the point across to everyone who played Zelda II. Let's be glad that legislators took 14 years to get the message!
In Japan, they require by law that events this popular (Dragon Quest games) get moved to Sunday. Should we do the same?