My apologies if this is redundant, but in the movies it seemed pretty damned easy to get blown to bits and killed - TIE Fighters, X-Wings, etc. In the movies where the life of people like Porkins isn't important, this isn't a biggie. However, if your Jedi character you've been paying tons of money and time to level up gets blown to smithereens by some kid, you're gonna be pissed. Is it hard to get killed in this expansion? Is it just an accepted risk? How do they balance the "X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter" dogfighter mentality versus the need to keep their long time players, um, playing?
It has been some time since I last used VB, but I seem to recall (Delphi definately has this) that you could "tie" components to the form so that they would grow and shrink as the form resizes.
I think the only way to do this in VB6 was to recalculate the size of the form when resized and change the location coordinates of the controls appropriately.
Could be wrong though - never was a hardcore VB6 junkie.
In their FAQ they acknowledge that they know they aren't DRM protected and can be shared.
Not to nitpick, but your post almost makes it sound like Metallica went the next step and authorized sharing of these concerts. They haven't. They do have a site called Metallica Vault which I was about to say had three shows when the St. Anger album was released and probably will never be updated again, but I look now and see that they have, apparently, put new shows up. They do allow and supposedly encourage people to share items from this site.
The Live Metallica site you mentioned is one of a few sites like it (Primus and others have ones more or less identical) - the MP3/FLAC options are so uniform that my guess is that it's probably some company out there that's putting these sites together for artists (or perhaps the labels are doing it).
One negative thing about the sites is that there's a window in which you must download the files. You can't come back and download them later. While I understand the reasoning, it's still kind of annoying. Still, I guess it underscores the notion that the lack of DRM says that they've already made their money off of the concert and are trying to make a little more. If some people get the files for free, then whatever.
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask this.
So is there any one really good place to find out about that kid whose parents sent him off to college early (child prodigy) and when he disappeared they thought D&D killed him? He had just moved in with some friends and said "fuck the world" but the press went with the "D&D is devil worship" angle, even making that TV Movie with Tom Hanks (whose D&D-like name escapes me).
Kid goes on to become a virtual "comic book guy" store-owning type and eventually does commit suicide, presumably unrelated to D&D.
Is there any good place to find out information on this person and the accusations that D&D has faced over the years?
The trick to the "informed vote" thing is this - the value of an informed vote is very small. Let's say there are two candidates and Candidate A is going to win by a landslide, like getting 90% of the vote. You're going to vote for Candidate A as well. Thing is, you do some research and discover that Candidate B is better (for some reason) and decide to vote for Candidate B instead. Candidate A is going to win anyway. The effort you took to learn why Candidate B is better wasn't worth it. For that matter it wouldn't be worth it to find out Candidate A was better either. In an election where the winner is a foregon conclusion, simply voting at all isn't worth it for the average person.
For that matter, most voters don't want to be informed - the worst thing to happen would be if you discovered your candidate was bad for the job. Bush could eat live babies at the debate and I still have friends that would comment on how John Kerry is a joke since he has a dark tan.
Of course, in this election where it's so close, this is why people like Sean Penn are getting pissed at Parker & Stone - they need uninformed and undecided voters to come to the Kerry camp so their candidate can win (since I think very few undecided voters will vote for Bush if they vote at all).
Google could put out another "wrapper around IE" like MyIE2 but that would defeat the purpose
They could put out a custom Mozilla but what would be the point?
Oh! I know! They could come out with a special browser, forked off of Mozilla, which could do all kinds of non-standard web stuff - like little squiggly lines in GMail when you misspell something. Bridge the ultimate gap between thin and thick apps. And make it crossplatform.
Of course then they would have to publish those non-HTML Standard things, so we'd have the Google Web Extensions. But then you would have to write to those non-standard extensions. And people would have to run GBrowser. So instead of two standards (IE, standards based) we would have three. Essentially this is what Microsoft did in the first place, which is why we have two standards to begin with.
I would prefer the XML document format to Word's format particularly because I can use different XSLT to display the data, meaning our clients would have greater control over their web sites without having to contact us for a lot of the changes
Actually, the OOO format is a compressed file containing many files, including the xml file with the document's text in it. The Word 2003 XML Document format, however, is one big XML file. Wouldn't that be easier than also having PHP dig through the zip file?
I think you would have an easier time convincing your clients to pay for an Office 2003 upgrade than not pay for (but switch to) OpenOffice.org (which is kinda sad).
My Wife was complaining that, in her opinion, the Harry Potter books were getting worse and worse. I haven't read past book #2 so I can't say what I think on the matter, but it did make me think of something.
In 1978 when Stephen King submitted The Stand to his publisher, he was told it was too long. It was his fourth novel and the publisher had this formula based on how many his previous books had sold and how much they expected this next book to sell and how long it could be to maximize profit. The Stand was over 1200 pages long and it had to be trimmed to 800 pages.
In 1994, Stephen King could do anything he wanted, so he decided to go back and put in 350 or so of those pages (50 he decided were better left out) and came out with The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
When J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter book, they wouldn't even let her put her full name on the book - the "J.K." were her initials, used to disguise the fact that she was a woman to any little boys who would want to buy the books. Also the books weren't very long. Now her novels are 800+ pages.
So my theory is that Rowling ran into the same problem King had - being told to cut down the books, and it made the books better. Now her publisher pretty much puts out whatever she wants and the books suffer as a result.
Anyway, the version I looked at was pretty crappy; it was blurry like I would expect a VHS version to be.
Well, either you wound up with a bad version, or you have high standards. The one I have is, make no mistake, less than standard DVD quality, but it's better than VHS and, most importantly, won't degrade over time (i.e., it can't wear out).
Was your version anamorphic? There's an anamorphic one floating about which is apparently bad on the visuals - probably the 2+ hour movie being a bit much for the resolution required for anamorphic.
They're widescreen, but non-anamorphic. Or at least mine were. Word is there's a set floating around that is anamorphic but but the video quality is actually worse. The video quality on these is pretty damn good - you'll definitely know you're watching an unofficial DVD, but it's scores better than VHS, more durable, and has the extras of the laserdiscs.
Note that the commentary track is not screen-specific (i.e., it's not Lucas & crew sitting around watching the movie). I believe this hails from back when Laserdisc commentaries were rare and so few people did that. What it is is a bunch of audio clips from interviews, documentaries, etc. It's done such that the thing you're hearing has to do with what you're seeing but it's not like the people were sitting there and commenting in real time. The upcoming DVD's, I believe, will have a commentary like this.
Also note that there's an obsessive 67-page thread on the OT.com forums on it dissecting all the various versions (many will sell you DVD's with the OT on them) and people discussing making their own DVD's from laserdisc. Apparently there's some short scenes that go missing now and again from all the various reissues. And now that dual-layer DVD burners are coming into vogue there's people discussing making higher quality anamorphic discs.
There are actual torrents of Laserdisc to DVD conversions on there for fans of the original
At the risk of the storm troopers kicking in my door, I have these. They're real, and they're fantastic. They're ~4.7GB images, so the video quality for 2+ hour movies is not as good as it could be (the bit budget on a 2-layer DVD-R would provide for more) but they're really pretty good, all things considered. They even have Dolby Digial 2.0 surround and - get this - the audio commentaries from the definitive collection, complete with on-screen text. The menus even have easter eggs and production notes, along with the definitive collection logos. Make no mistake - whoever made these did it as a labor of love.
There's also a fourth disc of extras (not sure if it's on suprnova) that comprises most of the extras from the definitive collection, such as documentaries, old trailers, etc. It's geek ecstasy and it's an interesting look back at Lucas when he was seemingly quite content with his creations.
A website I won't link to out of courtesy (slashdotting) has images you can download and print out that look like and work like DVD covers. They have covers that look like the style of the currently released DVD's and covers that have the original movie posters. I opted gor the movie poster ones. Printed out on a color laser printer, the untrained eye can't tell a difference between them and the episode 1 and 2 DVD cover spines on a shelf (save for the reflective gold ink on the official ones).
Now I must say, after getting these, watching them, etc., I'm content with the DVD's coming out later this month. Sure, I would still like official releases of the theatrical cuts, but these work for me. Heck, since for some reason they've decided to make the spines of the official widescreen releases silver I won't even have "duplicates" on my shelf.
So to recap, get these laserdisc --> DVD-R rips. They're worth however many days it takes to download them. Find a DVD burner somewhere, somehow. Buy the officials (like I am). Be happy that you have both.
Michael Moore is a genius and is good for America.
I'll explain.
He comes out with Fahrenheit 9/11. It's full of things. It's a very effective piece of propoganda. And there's almost nothing in it which is false or a lie.
It's been my experience that it's by and large intelligent people who go see his films. Think about it - it's the intelligent people who will give his work the time of day. It's been my experience that the people who say "he's a damn dirty liar and I won't support that" haven't done their research and are on the whole the ones who would rather not hear anything he has to say.
Consequently it's these same intelligent people who walk out of the theater saying "wow, that was pretty bad for Bush & Co. - but I bet it's only one side of the story". And it is.
Moore tells you about the VA Hospitals Bush closed down, but not about the ones he opened up.
Moore tells about the opinon piece that says Gore won, but he doesn't tell you about the dozen stories that say he lost.
Moore tells you about the judges Bush couldn't get appointed, but not about the ones he did.
56% of Americans have either seen the film or plan to see the film. There's no way in hell that 56% of Americans are informed about politics. So they learn a lot from Fahrenheit 9/11. Then they learn a lot more from the people against F911. Then they learn even more from the people who are against the people who are against F911. And they decide for themselves who they want to believe more. Or more importantly they decide for themselves which information is important to them.
And then they're informed. In ways they never would have been before. I wouldn't know most of this stuff if I hadn't seen the film and then read all the debates. And I wouldn't have read the debates if it weren't for the Internet. Hell, Michael Moore used footage he got from the Internet to make the movie.
And that's why Michael Moore is a genius. Thanks to him there's a ton more informed voters out there, if for no other reason than people need to see the movie and get their ducks in order in order to hate Moore and his arguments. In many ways he's leveled the playing field.
If I had to put money down, I'd Mr. Sinus are interested in dick/fart jokes and "racy" humor. But I haven't seen their show, so it's only speculation.
They did the movie Top Gun at QuakeCon this year. Apparently they did a movie at last year's QuakeCon as well. It was pretty funny. It was obviously thought of well in advance and was definitely funnier than improvisied comments that the average idiot can do.
The theme of their comments, though, was to essentially make fun of the rumors that (Top Gun star) Tom Cruise is gay. Every chance they got to make fun of him being (rumored to be) gay they did. And to their credit, there's a lot of Top Gun that can be considered gay when you look at it that way (shower scenes, volleyball game, etc.).
The truly amusing part was that I went to go see it with a friend of mine who's gay. I figured for sure he'd be offended (especially since a lot of the crowd had derogatory gay comments to shout out) but he thought the whole thing was hilarious.
The thing about MST3K was that it had to stay with "safe" humor (for television) and it couldn't spend much to license movies. Mr. Sinus has those advantages - they can be as raunchy as they want to be and they can use any movie, in theory, since they don't have to pay rebroadcast rights. Of course, I'm not sure if they're getting any rights or even if they'd need to. That could be their next lawsuit. Funny that they don't get sued until QuakeCon gives them more exposure. I bet the exposure of this story gets them in trouble with the MPAA.
A system like this called 'The Game Channel', which I think was from Sega, tried this a few years ago over Cable, for $9.95 a month. It went bust
In all fairness, the service ran for four years (1994-1998). It was likely discontinued since the target system, the Genesis, was more or less defunct and the concept at the time wouldn't really scale to Saturn or Dreamcast proportions. Some argue it still won't (i.e., most of this thread).
You do have legal copyright on anything you create, without having to file it with the copyright office.
Pretending for a minute that the persons were both in the US, I think that automatic copyright thing you mentioned only lasts three years. You have to file copyright in those three years. Of course since the domain was registered in 1996 and the book was published in 2000, the copyright wouldn't work anyway unless she had filed for it.
Do we have a final word on GB/GBC/GBA reverse compatibility? I'd hate to get a GBA SP and then this thing come out and I could have saved my time/money.
Of course that's probably the exact reason Nintendo hasn't said anything (if they haven't).
Games should fit current specifications, rather than demand more.
They already do. Sure, a video card upgrade may be in order for this game, but you don't think they made concessions for RAM? They'd have everyone have a gig of RAM if they could.
I think you're mixing up the BYOC LAN Party aspect of Quake and the rest of it. True, there's a limited number of BYOC spots and it's possible to never get in, but anyone can come to the rest of the convention - all you have to do is register.
Akin to that, as much as I like alternative formats - my car plays MP3's. My boom box plays MP3's. My DVD players play MP3's (though one also does WMA). I hate it when I download something and it's in OGG or MPC or some other offbeat format. If my players don't support it I'm not interested. Sure, I could go out and re-buy everything and make sure I support whatever wacky formats people devise, but why bother when 95% of the things I need are in MP3 anyway?
And this is exactly what id Software has done with DOOM, Quake and Quake II. Of course the source was GPL'd long after the commercial life of the game and the engine (which answers the question of why not - engine licensing), but a few people have made commercial and noncommercial games with their engines using all new resources.
Hmmm. According to CNN money Bowling for Columbine grossed about US$ 120M
Bowling for Columbine only took in $21M domestically. The figure in the CNN article also includes DVD sales and rentals. So what we have here is a Kill Bill situation where considerably more people want to rent/own it on DVD than see it in theaters (though in BfC's defense, it was never in that many theaters)
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My apologies if this is redundant, but in the movies it seemed pretty damned easy to get blown to bits and killed - TIE Fighters, X-Wings, etc. In the movies where the life of people like Porkins isn't important, this isn't a biggie. However, if your Jedi character you've been paying tons of money and time to level up gets blown to smithereens by some kid, you're gonna be pissed. Is it hard to get killed in this expansion? Is it just an accepted risk? How do they balance the "X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter" dogfighter mentality versus the need to keep their long time players, um, playing?
Could be wrong though - never was a hardcore VB6 junkie.
The Live Metallica site you mentioned is one of a few sites like it (Primus and others have ones more or less identical) - the MP3/FLAC options are so uniform that my guess is that it's probably some company out there that's putting these sites together for artists (or perhaps the labels are doing it).
One negative thing about the sites is that there's a window in which you must download the files. You can't come back and download them later. While I understand the reasoning, it's still kind of annoying. Still, I guess it underscores the notion that the lack of DRM says that they've already made their money off of the concert and are trying to make a little more. If some people get the files for free, then whatever.
So is there any one really good place to find out about that kid whose parents sent him off to college early (child prodigy) and when he disappeared they thought D&D killed him? He had just moved in with some friends and said "fuck the world" but the press went with the "D&D is devil worship" angle, even making that TV Movie with Tom Hanks (whose D&D-like name escapes me).
Kid goes on to become a virtual "comic book guy" store-owning type and eventually does commit suicide, presumably unrelated to D&D.
Is there any good place to find out information on this person and the accusations that D&D has faced over the years?
For that matter, most voters don't want to be informed - the worst thing to happen would be if you discovered your candidate was bad for the job. Bush could eat live babies at the debate and I still have friends that would comment on how John Kerry is a joke since he has a dark tan.
Of course, in this election where it's so close, this is why people like Sean Penn are getting pissed at Parker & Stone - they need uninformed and undecided voters to come to the Kerry camp so their candidate can win (since I think very few undecided voters will vote for Bush if they vote at all).
They could put out a custom Mozilla but what would be the point?
Oh! I know! They could come out with a special browser, forked off of Mozilla, which could do all kinds of non-standard web stuff - like little squiggly lines in GMail when you misspell something. Bridge the ultimate gap between thin and thick apps. And make it crossplatform.
Of course then they would have to publish those non-HTML Standard things, so we'd have the Google Web Extensions. But then you would have to write to those non-standard extensions. And people would have to run GBrowser. So instead of two standards (IE, standards based) we would have three. Essentially this is what Microsoft did in the first place, which is why we have two standards to begin with.
Oh God, they must be stopped!
I think you would have an easier time convincing your clients to pay for an Office 2003 upgrade than not pay for (but switch to) OpenOffice.org (which is kinda sad).
My Wife was complaining that, in her opinion, the Harry Potter books were getting worse and worse. I haven't read past book #2 so I can't say what I think on the matter, but it did make me think of something.
In 1978 when Stephen King submitted The Stand to his publisher, he was told it was too long. It was his fourth novel and the publisher had this formula based on how many his previous books had sold and how much they expected this next book to sell and how long it could be to maximize profit. The Stand was over 1200 pages long and it had to be trimmed to 800 pages.
In 1994, Stephen King could do anything he wanted, so he decided to go back and put in 350 or so of those pages (50 he decided were better left out) and came out with The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
When J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter book, they wouldn't even let her put her full name on the book - the "J.K." were her initials, used to disguise the fact that she was a woman to any little boys who would want to buy the books. Also the books weren't very long. Now her novels are 800+ pages.
So my theory is that Rowling ran into the same problem King had - being told to cut down the books, and it made the books better. Now her publisher pretty much puts out whatever she wants and the books suffer as a result.
So sometimes having constraints is better.
Was your version anamorphic? There's an anamorphic one floating about which is apparently bad on the visuals - probably the 2+ hour movie being a bit much for the resolution required for anamorphic.
That is left as an exercise for the reader...
Note that the commentary track is not screen-specific (i.e., it's not Lucas & crew sitting around watching the movie). I believe this hails from back when Laserdisc commentaries were rare and so few people did that. What it is is a bunch of audio clips from interviews, documentaries, etc. It's done such that the thing you're hearing has to do with what you're seeing but it's not like the people were sitting there and commenting in real time. The upcoming DVD's, I believe, will have a commentary like this.
Also note that there's an obsessive 67-page thread on the OT.com forums on it dissecting all the various versions (many will sell you DVD's with the OT on them) and people discussing making their own DVD's from laserdisc. Apparently there's some short scenes that go missing now and again from all the various reissues. And now that dual-layer DVD burners are coming into vogue there's people discussing making higher quality anamorphic discs.
There's also a fourth disc of extras (not sure if it's on suprnova) that comprises most of the extras from the definitive collection, such as documentaries, old trailers, etc. It's geek ecstasy and it's an interesting look back at Lucas when he was seemingly quite content with his creations.
A website I won't link to out of courtesy (slashdotting) has images you can download and print out that look like and work like DVD covers. They have covers that look like the style of the currently released DVD's and covers that have the original movie posters. I opted gor the movie poster ones. Printed out on a color laser printer, the untrained eye can't tell a difference between them and the episode 1 and 2 DVD cover spines on a shelf (save for the reflective gold ink on the official ones).
Now I must say, after getting these, watching them, etc., I'm content with the DVD's coming out later this month. Sure, I would still like official releases of the theatrical cuts, but these work for me. Heck, since for some reason they've decided to make the spines of the official widescreen releases silver I won't even have "duplicates" on my shelf.
So to recap, get these laserdisc --> DVD-R rips. They're worth however many days it takes to download them. Find a DVD burner somewhere, somehow. Buy the officials (like I am). Be happy that you have both.
I'll explain.
He comes out with Fahrenheit 9/11. It's full of things. It's a very effective piece of propoganda. And there's almost nothing in it which is false or a lie.
It's been my experience that it's by and large intelligent people who go see his films. Think about it - it's the intelligent people who will give his work the time of day. It's been my experience that the people who say "he's a damn dirty liar and I won't support that" haven't done their research and are on the whole the ones who would rather not hear anything he has to say.
Consequently it's these same intelligent people who walk out of the theater saying "wow, that was pretty bad for Bush & Co. - but I bet it's only one side of the story". And it is.
Moore tells you about the VA Hospitals Bush closed down, but not about the ones he opened up.
Moore tells about the opinon piece that says Gore won, but he doesn't tell you about the dozen stories that say he lost.
Moore tells you about the judges Bush couldn't get appointed, but not about the ones he did.
People have made it their goal to point out the one-sided arguments in the film while others have pointed out the fallacies in those arguments against the film.
56% of Americans have either seen the film or plan to see the film. There's no way in hell that 56% of Americans are informed about politics. So they learn a lot from Fahrenheit 9/11. Then they learn a lot more from the people against F911. Then they learn even more from the people who are against the people who are against F911. And they decide for themselves who they want to believe more. Or more importantly they decide for themselves which information is important to them.
And then they're informed. In ways they never would have been before. I wouldn't know most of this stuff if I hadn't seen the film and then read all the debates. And I wouldn't have read the debates if it weren't for the Internet. Hell, Michael Moore used footage he got from the Internet to make the movie.
And that's why Michael Moore is a genius. Thanks to him there's a ton more informed voters out there, if for no other reason than people need to see the movie and get their ducks in order in order to hate Moore and his arguments. In many ways he's leveled the playing field.
The theme of their comments, though, was to essentially make fun of the rumors that (Top Gun star) Tom Cruise is gay. Every chance they got to make fun of him being (rumored to be) gay they did. And to their credit, there's a lot of Top Gun that can be considered gay when you look at it that way (shower scenes, volleyball game, etc.).
The truly amusing part was that I went to go see it with a friend of mine who's gay. I figured for sure he'd be offended (especially since a lot of the crowd had derogatory gay comments to shout out) but he thought the whole thing was hilarious.
The thing about MST3K was that it had to stay with "safe" humor (for television) and it couldn't spend much to license movies. Mr. Sinus has those advantages - they can be as raunchy as they want to be and they can use any movie, in theory, since they don't have to pay rebroadcast rights. Of course, I'm not sure if they're getting any rights or even if they'd need to. That could be their next lawsuit. Funny that they don't get sued until QuakeCon gives them more exposure. I bet the exposure of this story gets them in trouble with the MPAA.
And to think I got married...
Of course that's probably the exact reason Nintendo hasn't said anything (if they haven't).
I think you're mixing up the BYOC LAN Party aspect of Quake and the rest of it. True, there's a limited number of BYOC spots and it's possible to never get in, but anyone can come to the rest of the convention - all you have to do is register.
Akin to that, as much as I like alternative formats - my car plays MP3's. My boom box plays MP3's. My DVD players play MP3's (though one also does WMA). I hate it when I download something and it's in OGG or MPC or some other offbeat format. If my players don't support it I'm not interested. Sure, I could go out and re-buy everything and make sure I support whatever wacky formats people devise, but why bother when 95% of the things I need are in MP3 anyway?
And this is exactly what id Software has done with DOOM, Quake and Quake II. Of course the source was GPL'd long after the commercial life of the game and the engine (which answers the question of why not - engine licensing), but a few people have made commercial and noncommercial games with their engines using all new resources.