Incase it escaped anyone's radar Worldcom owns OzEmail, which according to an IT news website is ranked the No. 2 Australian ISP after Telstra. This most likely means that Worldcom will have to sell off OzEmail to recover some assets for it's creditors, but this is not all bad because it means it's original owners could buy it back for far cheaper than they sold it for. There is some more information at this link and this link.
Possible legal solution for DVD playback on Linux
on
2600 Drops DeCSS Appeal
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I was thinking about this whole problem about Linux users not being able to legally play encrypted DVDs on their computers because DeCSS has been deemed illegal. We all know that the licenses for CSS keys and DVD playback cost money so a free and legal DVD player Linux is not possible, so with that said why don't commercial Linux distros like Mandrake, Redhat etc apply for licenses and sell it with their boxed set versions? It would make playing DVDs on Linux legal and it would provide an incentive to buy the box-set versions rather than just download the ISOs.
I'd take a DVD over a DivX any day. I like the extra features on them and the quality is noticeably better.
I never understood why people make DivX rips of their DVDs for backup purposes. The loss of features and quality (as you're are technically transcoding) in the conversion process seems to far out weigh the convenience of not getting out of your chair to find that DVD disc.
Mind you I must admit I wouldn't mind a DivX copy of AOTC and/or FOTR to tide me over till the DVD releases later this year, but I am prepared to wait and support films I enjoyed.
Re:slashdot sucks, view this post on it's own to s
on
Free as in Books?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Trolls have sunk to whole new level when they start using the mouse over event to trigger the browser to open a new window pointing to goatse.
It would be rather ironic too, considering consoles are killing the arcade games industry as far as I understand. Years ago arcade machines had better games and hardware than consoles, now it is the other way round so there is less reason to play arcade games.
I do not believe that the government should restrict any speech that does not cause direct harm to an individual (e.g. hosting web pages with pirated software or child pornography should not be illegal IMHO)
I don't know what crack you are smoking but child pornography does cause harm to individuals, namely psychological and physical harm to the child victims. Child pornography is illegal for a reason and that is to protect children from that kind of harm.
I don't know how reliable the user ratings are at www.download.com are but it is interesting to note that Mozilla 1.0 has a rating of 87% whilst IE 6.0 is at 54%.
While Mozilla may never come out on top it can reduce Internet Explorers browser share, and always competition is a good thing with software because it will encourage Microsoft to make IE more secure.
This Start Wars CG stuff is crap. Did you see some of those graphics? Taking a bite of CG fruit from 3 inches way? Gimme a break.
I say bring back scale models! Watch the old movies. See how the X-Wings look real? That's because they are! How about that AT-AT or "Chicken-Walker"? They looked great, too. They're just small, but hell, WE can't tell.
While scale models may look great in the space fights of the original trilogy than can look crap when composited with real actors. If you don't believe me then cast your mind back to the unscary model from Terminator 1 or ED-209 from Robocop. Granted the CG was overdone in Episode 2 but by the same token there is some stuff you can't do effectively with models, with the droid army battle springing to mind. Though I am surprised that every single clone trooper in the movie was CG.
While I am no film student Cinelerra sounds like great news for fan films and such and independent film makers when it is described as follows:-
If you want to make movies, you want the compositing and editing that the big boys use, you want the efficiency of an embedded UNIX operating system combined with the power of a general purpose PC, or you just want to defy the establishment, the time has come.
I wonder if this program could be used for rotoscoping (light sabers) and special effects with its compositing functions. It's really great how technology has become cheap enough for budget film makers to be able to produce their own short films ladden with eye candy and special effects we have come to expect from Hollywood.
Considering the concurrent proposals to introduce legislation to allow banning of organisations suspected of terrorist links, am I the only one suspecting Australia is about to have a whole lot less political parties?
As scary as that possibility is fortunately it looks like is unlikely to happen, at least to the full extent of the initial bill. The anti-terrorism bill issued by Attorney-General Daryl Williams that was going to give him the ability to ban political groups/parties deemed terrorist in their actions so far has been rejected by senators. Thus forcing Williams to back down on the anti-terrorism bill.
I am not sure how this affects the proposed changes to the Telecomunications Interception Act, because I am not sure if this one big anti-terrorism bill or a series of seperate bills. Eitherway it reflects the fact that most senators in Australia are sane and wont stand for these crazy new laws, at least in their current form.
Now if only the government would come to their senses about the mistreatment of refugees, though that's whole other issue,
Firstly I don't think your comment is a troll, yes it is an opinion I don't agree with but it is a valid opinion none the less.
We may get to see for the first time in an English-speaking country the first example of the domino effect claimed by the US National Rifle Association... where banning the private possession of firearms inevitably leads to control of political speech and association ending in totalitarian democracy.
The possession of firearms is not entirely illegal in Australia. Self-loading guns are readily available but there are restrictions on high capacity self-loading rimfire rifles, self-loading centrefire rifles and shotguns and pump-action shotguns. These were the types of guns mainly used in Australian gun massacres. For more information on this consult this link.
How you can say that banning of certain types of weapons leads to control of political speech I am not sure. Sure guns are needed in the instance of a revolution against the government when it fails the people, but that is a last resort after democracy has failed.
The only suggestions I have for Aussies if this doesn't get stopped, and if it's gotten this far, your elected officials probably no longer care...
In that case you'll be glad to hear that so far these new anti-terrorism bills proposed the Attorney-General Daryl Williams have been rejected by senators forcing Williams to back down on the anti-terrorism bill. Whilst I am not sure if this is a different bill to that in this topic is an anti-terrorism bill and reflects the fact that most senators in Australia are sane and what stand for these crazy new laws.
Sometimes I get the feeling that even if Netscape/Mozilla were 100 times better than IE the the majority of Windows users would still use IE because it is simply there by default. IE despite all its faults and security holes gets the job done for most users so why would they bother using anything else?
Now don't get me wrong I reckon Mozilla is a great browser, better than IE ver 5 in my opinion but I think it's in for a hard time making a huge dent in MSIE's monopoly, at least as long they bundle and integrate IE with their operating system.
Re:Anyone else got Linux going for real on it yet?
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Shuttle SS40G Mini-PC
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· Score: 3, Informative
Funnily enough the author of the article is using tiny computer as a Linux box and discusses the results in the conclusion. To sum up the author tried Red Hat 7.1 on it and it seemed to recognise everything except for the onboard video. Below is the full quote to which I am referring.
As I said earlier, I'm using the SS40G with a Seagate Hard Drive, etc. But what is it being used for? A small Linux box, that's what. Yeah, I know I need to get those drive painted silver. It will happen eventually. No, really I'm serious. Anyway, just a brief discussion of how Linux is working on it. Pretty good. I installed Red Hat 7.1 on it, and it seems to have recognized everything so far (though I'm not sure about sound), except for the onboard video. I need to try Mandrake 8.2 since it's a newer release, and see what happens. There are third party drivers for the SiS740 chipset, but I would much rather have it supported natively by Linux than have to install and configure it all by hand. I can always throw in something like a PCI Matrox G200 and use that for video, but it would be nice to use what is already there since I'm not intending to use it to run games. Perhaps once I have some more time with it using Linux, I will do a brief write-up on how it is working.
Some what off-topic but for those people wondering about the whole debate of whether the plural of Lego is simply Lego, as opposed to Legos, I found an interesting take on it at this Lego sculpture faq. Funnily enough, as you shall notice at the bottom of the quote, the author mentions this whole question is a great source of debate on Slashdot. I guess we shall find out soon enough if that is actually the case.
# Which is correct as the plural of LEGO: 'Lego' or 'Legos'?
# Neither, actually. The word 'LEGO', when used as a noun, should only refer to the company that makes the product. Otherwise 'LEGO' is supposed to be used as an adjective. Thus, when referring to the pieces, neither 'lego' nor 'legos' is correct... rather one should say: 'LEGO bricks' or 'LEGO pieces' or whatever (using LEGO as an adjective -- and one should really capitalize all of the letters, and put the little 'circle-R' symbol after it (®)). This is all a matter of protecting the trademark of 'LEGO' for the company (using it otherwise degenerates the strength of the trademark). This is not to say that I use the word correctly 100% of the time... but that's the answer to the question (it's always fun/painful to read the near-flame-wars that start at slashdot.org over this topic... and generally, both sides are wrong). Other questions.
Why limit yourself to an 747 simulator when you could build your own X-Wing cockpit, load up an old copy of LucasArt's X-Wing or the more recent X-Wing Alliance and experience the closest thing to destroying the Death Star. For the complete experience you could even dress up as an X-Wing pilot.
Surprisingly no one seems to have done this already, at least according to a quick Google search I did beforehand. You could also do something similiar in terms of a Pod Racer like the arcade game by Sega that was around a few years ago, as there is that Pod Racing game which Lucas Arts put out.
Mozilla/Netscape usage & anti-Netscape sentime
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is not intended as flamebait by any means, but does anyone know what sort of browser share Mozilla/Netscape have? I have been following and pushing both browsers for the past year, encouraging others to try them out, but when checking the browser statistics for my website they don't have any entry at all. Right now the breakdown for my site is about 97% Internet Explorer 5+ and 3% Netscape 4, which is a real shame. Does anyone out there have any more promising browser usuage stats?
It is also interesting guaging people response to Mozilla/Netscape on sites other than Slashdot. It seems like there is real anti-Netscape sentiment out there, an example being the response to Netscape 7 at deviantart where there is loads of "Netscape sucks" one liners. I could be wrong on this, but it seems ever since Netscape 4 a lot of people seem unprepared to give Netscape a second chance. Perhaps it is "cool" to hate Netscape because they are owned by AOL, I don't know
Anyway that aside, Mozilla is great is most definitely stable enough for public consumption as the last few releases haven't crashed on me at all. As soon as I get home I'll download RC3.
While I never got a change to try out the BBC Ogg Vorbis streams (because my net connection is a mere 56k modem shared to 3 computers) I am quite interested to hear how it would have sounded with the encoding settings they have used. Below is a quote from the BBC website explaining the settings they used.
Currently there is a Radio 4 stream, and two Radio 1 streams using different quality settings to ices. The _low is using -q 0, whilst the _high is using -q 3. I'd be interested to know if anyone can tell much difference between them (challenge for all you audiophiles out there:)
Now I have been mucking around with Ogg Vorbis for a few months and I have encountered some quite impressive results. On my website I have music downloads and I store them at -q 2, which equates to a nominal bitrate of 80-96 and in my opinion is on par with a MP3 using VBR ranging between 112-160. At this setting it still has a few minor artifacts but for the most part they aren't noticable and thus makes a good setting for free music downloads.
Furthermore I encode my CD collection at -q 5 and on my decent stereo and headphones I can't tell the difference between the original CD and the Ogg Vorbis track. For those interested this stores my guitar based music at an average bit-rate of 160-190 and electronic at 190-250 roughly speaking.
Anyway long story short, from my past experience it sounds like the high quality stream at a quality setting of 3.00, which I am guessing equates to a nominal bit-rate of 135 or so would have sounded pretty darn good. Definitely better than FM reception and perhaps almost as good as CD quality depending on the setup used. Can anyone verify or comment on this?
Not without the special astro-droid grade soundcard and speakers. Its internal sound system could only manage C64-like bleeps and whistles.
Is that so? In that case R2-D2 must possess some damn impressive bleeping and whistling ability to he recreate the audio from Obi-wan's message in Episode II and likewise Leia's message for Obi-wan in Episode IV.
Fear over action - not the Doom I remember
on
E3 Doom III Preview
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· Score: 5, Insightful
According to this quote from John Carmack it looks like we are going to be getting a Doom game quite different its successors. Hell it looks more like Resident Evil or Half Life than the original Doom games.
John Carmack: Doom III is pushing the fear factor over the raw action. As you make the worlds more and more believable, you are forced to tone down the "superhero" aspects of the game. I still think that a good game can be built around "toon time" action, but that isn't what Doom III is going to be about. The monsters are going to be much more independently fearsome, rather than just acting as moving gun turrets.
I don't know about the rest of you but for me Doom was the action orientated gameplay, where for example often you had to take on over a dozen imps with a mere shotgun. It would be great to relive that experience all over again in a 3D fully environment powered by a cutting engine.
However perhaps this shift isn't all bad because part of the reason Doom was all action orientated in that it lacked a substantial story. Yet for the first time it looks Doom will have a proper story with science fiction writer Matthew Costello doing the story and dialog. Also the shift way from action can be attributed to the fact that 3D models aren't as efficent as Doom's 2D sprites when you want to put lots of enemies on screen.
Despite the gameplay differences hopefully there will be some camoes of the original Doom enemies or weapons in the game.
After trying Linux Mandrake out a couple of months ago, one thing that crossed my mind is how ready Linux is for schools. Linux distros these days contain all the basic tools needed for productivity. You have several different office applications (Abiword, KOffice, StarOffice, OpenOffice) to choose from for word processing and spreadsheets and then you also have scientific tools like Scilab (a clone of Matlab I am told). Though admittedly I am not sure if there are Powerpoint and Access alternatives for Linux, perhaps someone could shed some light on this.
Now consider the Windows alternative, that would entail getting a site license for Windows, Microsoft Office, Matlab and who knows what else. This would not only cost quite a bit of money but I imagine would also create a pile of added paperwork due to the multiple licenses. Then with Windows you have to contend with issues of kids installing software on the school machines such as games, and macro and email viruses which from past experience spread like crazy in schools.
As far as I am concerned Linux is more than ready for schools. Sure it may be different to Windows which most children would be accustomed to using at home but children these days are quite tech savvy and I assume they would pick up Linux interface quite quickly (perhaps faster than adults?). The only major issue to consider is inoperability issues such as opening Word 97/2000 files but this could be resolved by encouraging children to save in RTF format which presents no problem.
You have hit the nail on the head, in some ways AOTC and Spiderman are two different beasts. Whilst I have yet to see Spiderman I imagine its a far more self-contained film in that you don't need to read the comics to understand the plot.
AOTC on the otherhand exists to both compliment and set the backdrop for the classic Star Wars trilogy. Personally I enjoyed AOTC not in it's own right, but the back story it provided in terms of the origins of Storm Trooper, Boba Fett, the Empire etc. It was brilliant how it all came together in the last 30 minutes.
Regardless of which one is deemed the "better" film of two, one thing I do like about Attack of the Clones is that its release date of May 16 was pretty much synchronised throughout the world. Living in Australia it can be quite frustrating to read about all these great films currently showing in America and having to wait a month or two till it starts showing here. Spiderman is an example, you people in the US have been able to see it since early May but those of us in Australia have to wait till June.
Out of curiousity does anyone know what factors determine whether a film gets a synchronised global release or not?
Hollywood needs to learn that in order to survive it needs to change their business model so that it adapts to changes in technology, rather than change/control technology to suit aging business models. A perfect example of this is the following paragraph taken from the article in regards to VCRs.
THE VCR SCARE. In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, famously proclaimed that the videocassette recorder was as threatening to the movies as the Boston Strangler was to a woman walking alone. Twenty years later, video rentals account for 46% of studio revenues, vs. the 24% collected at the box office.
Sounds like history is repeating itself and the MPAA hasn't learnt anything from the past. The MPAA needs to stop being stubburn about changing their business model and start adopting new technologies rather than fighting them off. People like George Lucas have the right idea, as I hear he makes most of his profits off the merchandise.
The BETA version of the Neverwinter Aurora Toolset provides most of the functionality of the final toolset that will be included in the retail version of Neverwinter Nights. The final toolset will allow users who purchase Neverwinter Nights to create their own adventures with the fully functional game editor that has been used by BioWare in the creation of the official NWN campaign. Just as a Beta Test provides consumers an early look at a game while the development team continues to test the game and define issues, Infogrames has determined that this toolset can provide that experience to players but is in NO WAY FINAL, and thus technical support will not be available.
There is also an introduction on how to use the toolset at the Bioware website. It will be interesting to see what creations this toolset yeilds because there has been many games with great toolsets but almost no mods to speak of. An example that springs to mind is the underrated Dark Reign 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Incase it escaped anyone's radar Worldcom owns OzEmail, which according to an IT news website is ranked the No. 2 Australian ISP after Telstra. This most likely means that Worldcom will have to sell off OzEmail to recover some assets for it's creditors, but this is not all bad because it means it's original owners could buy it back for far cheaper than they sold it for. There is some more information at this link and this link.
I was thinking about this whole problem about Linux users not being able to legally play encrypted DVDs on their computers because DeCSS has been deemed illegal. We all know that the licenses for CSS keys and DVD playback cost money so a free and legal DVD player Linux is not possible, so with that said why don't commercial Linux distros like Mandrake, Redhat etc apply for licenses and sell it with their boxed set versions? It would make playing DVDs on Linux legal and it would provide an incentive to buy the box-set versions rather than just download the ISOs.
I'd take a DVD over a DivX any day. I like the extra features on them and the quality is noticeably better.
I never understood why people make DivX rips of their DVDs for backup purposes. The loss of features and quality (as you're are technically transcoding) in the conversion process seems to far out weigh the convenience of not getting out of your chair to find that DVD disc.
Mind you I must admit I wouldn't mind a DivX copy of AOTC and/or FOTR to tide me over till the DVD releases later this year, but I am prepared to wait and support films I enjoyed.
Trolls have sunk to whole new level when they start using the mouse over event to trigger the browser to open a new window pointing to goatse.
It would be rather ironic too, considering consoles are killing the arcade games industry as far as I understand. Years ago arcade machines had better games and hardware than consoles, now it is the other way round so there is less reason to play arcade games.
I do not believe that the government should restrict any speech that does not cause direct harm to an individual (e.g. hosting web pages with pirated software or child pornography should not be illegal IMHO)
I don't know what crack you are smoking but child pornography does cause harm to individuals, namely psychological and physical harm to the child victims. Child pornography is illegal for a reason and that is to protect children from that kind of harm.
It's probably just you, I use Mozilla 1.0 and it renders fine for me. I have yet to encounter any rendering problems with Mozilla.
I don't know how reliable the user ratings are at www.download.com are but it is interesting to note that Mozilla 1.0 has a rating of 87% whilst IE 6.0 is at 54%.
While Mozilla may never come out on top it can reduce Internet Explorers browser share, and always competition is a good thing with software because it will encourage Microsoft to make IE more secure.
This Start Wars CG stuff is crap. Did you see some of those graphics? Taking a bite of CG fruit from 3 inches way? Gimme a break.
I say bring back scale models! Watch the old movies. See how the X-Wings look real? That's because they are! How about that AT-AT or "Chicken-Walker"? They looked great, too. They're just small, but hell, WE can't tell.
While scale models may look great in the space fights of the original trilogy than can look crap when composited with real actors. If you don't believe me then cast your mind back to the unscary model from Terminator 1 or ED-209 from Robocop. Granted the CG was overdone in Episode 2 but by the same token there is some stuff you can't do effectively with models, with the droid army battle springing to mind. Though I am surprised that every single clone trooper in the movie was CG.
While I am no film student Cinelerra sounds like great news for fan films and such and independent film makers when it is described as follows:-
If you want to make movies, you want the compositing and editing that the big boys use, you want the efficiency of an embedded UNIX operating system combined with the power of a general purpose PC, or you just want to defy the establishment, the time has come.
I wonder if this program could be used for rotoscoping (light sabers) and special effects with its compositing functions. It's really great how technology has become cheap enough for budget film makers to be able to produce their own short films ladden with eye candy and special effects we have come to expect from Hollywood.
Considering the concurrent proposals to introduce legislation to allow banning of organisations suspected of terrorist links, am I the only one suspecting Australia is about to have a whole lot less political parties?
As scary as that possibility is fortunately it looks like is unlikely to happen, at least to the full extent of the initial bill. The anti-terrorism bill issued by Attorney-General Daryl Williams that was going to give him the ability to ban political groups/parties deemed terrorist in their actions so far has been rejected by senators. Thus forcing Williams to back down on the anti-terrorism bill.
I am not sure how this affects the proposed changes to the Telecomunications Interception Act, because I am not sure if this one big anti-terrorism bill or a series of seperate bills. Eitherway it reflects the fact that most senators in Australia are sane and wont stand for these crazy new laws, at least in their current form.
Now if only the government would come to their senses about the mistreatment of refugees, though that's whole other issue,
Firstly I don't think your comment is a troll, yes it is an opinion I don't agree with but it is a valid opinion none the less.
We may get to see for the first time in an English-speaking country the first example of the domino effect claimed by the US National Rifle Association... where banning the private possession of firearms inevitably leads to control of political speech and association ending in totalitarian democracy.
The possession of firearms is not entirely illegal in Australia. Self-loading guns are readily available but there are restrictions on high capacity self-loading rimfire rifles, self-loading centrefire rifles and shotguns and pump-action shotguns. These were the types of guns mainly used in Australian gun massacres. For more information on this consult this link.
How you can say that banning of certain types of weapons leads to control of political speech I am not sure. Sure guns are needed in the instance of a revolution against the government when it fails the people, but that is a last resort after democracy has failed.
The only suggestions I have for Aussies if this doesn't get stopped, and if it's gotten this far, your elected officials probably no longer care...
In that case you'll be glad to hear that so far these new anti-terrorism bills proposed the Attorney-General Daryl Williams have been rejected by senators forcing Williams to back down on the anti-terrorism bill. Whilst I am not sure if this is a different bill to that in this topic is an anti-terrorism bill and reflects the fact that most senators in Australia are sane and what stand for these crazy new laws.
Sometimes I get the feeling that even if Netscape/Mozilla were 100 times better than IE the the majority of Windows users would still use IE because it is simply there by default. IE despite all its faults and security holes gets the job done for most users so why would they bother using anything else?
Now don't get me wrong I reckon Mozilla is a great browser, better than IE ver 5 in my opinion but I think it's in for a hard time making a huge dent in MSIE's monopoly, at least as long they bundle and integrate IE with their operating system.
Why limit yourself to an 747 simulator when you could build your own X-Wing cockpit, load up an old copy of LucasArt's X-Wing or the more recent X-Wing Alliance and experience the closest thing to destroying the Death Star. For the complete experience you could even dress up as an X-Wing pilot.
Surprisingly no one seems to have done this already, at least according to a quick Google search I did beforehand. You could also do something similiar in terms of a Pod Racer like the arcade game by Sega that was around a few years ago, as there is that Pod Racing game which Lucas Arts put out.
This is not intended as flamebait by any means, but does anyone know what sort of browser share Mozilla/Netscape have? I have been following and pushing both browsers for the past year, encouraging others to try them out, but when checking the browser statistics for my website they don't have any entry at all. Right now the breakdown for my site is about 97% Internet Explorer 5+ and 3% Netscape 4, which is a real shame. Does anyone out there have any more promising browser usuage stats?
It is also interesting guaging people response to Mozilla/Netscape on sites other than Slashdot. It seems like there is real anti-Netscape sentiment out there, an example being the response to Netscape 7 at deviantart where there is loads of "Netscape sucks" one liners. I could be wrong on this, but it seems ever since Netscape 4 a lot of people seem unprepared to give Netscape a second chance. Perhaps it is "cool" to hate Netscape because they are owned by AOL, I don't know
Anyway that aside, Mozilla is great is most definitely stable enough for public consumption as the last few releases haven't crashed on me at all. As soon as I get home I'll download RC3.
While I never got a change to try out the BBC Ogg Vorbis streams (because my net connection is a mere 56k modem shared to 3 computers) I am quite interested to hear how it would have sounded with the encoding settings they have used. Below is a quote from the BBC website explaining the settings they used.
:)
Currently there is a Radio 4 stream, and two Radio 1 streams using different quality settings to ices. The _low is using -q 0, whilst the _high is using -q 3. I'd be interested to know if anyone can tell much difference between them (challenge for all you audiophiles out there
Now I have been mucking around with Ogg Vorbis for a few months and I have encountered some quite impressive results. On my website I have music downloads and I store them at -q 2, which equates to a nominal bitrate of 80-96 and in my opinion is on par with a MP3 using VBR ranging between 112-160. At this setting it still has a few minor artifacts but for the most part they aren't noticable and thus makes a good setting for free music downloads.
Furthermore I encode my CD collection at -q 5 and on my decent stereo and headphones I can't tell the difference between the original CD and the Ogg Vorbis track. For those interested this stores my guitar based music at an average bit-rate of 160-190 and electronic at 190-250 roughly speaking.
Anyway long story short, from my past experience it sounds like the high quality stream at a quality setting of 3.00, which I am guessing equates to a nominal bit-rate of 135 or so would have sounded pretty darn good. Definitely better than FM reception and perhaps almost as good as CD quality depending on the setup used. Can anyone verify or comment on this?
Not without the special astro-droid grade soundcard and speakers. Its internal sound system could only manage C64-like bleeps and whistles.
Is that so? In that case R2-D2 must possess some damn impressive bleeping and whistling ability to he recreate the audio from Obi-wan's message in Episode II and likewise Leia's message for Obi-wan in Episode IV.
According to this quote from John Carmack it looks like we are going to be getting a Doom game quite different its successors. Hell it looks more like Resident Evil or Half Life than the original Doom games.
John Carmack: Doom III is pushing the fear factor over the raw action. As you make the worlds more and more believable, you are forced to tone down the "superhero" aspects of the game. I still think that a good game can be built around "toon time" action, but that isn't what Doom III is going to be about. The monsters are going to be much more independently fearsome, rather than just acting as moving gun turrets.
I don't know about the rest of you but for me Doom was the action orientated gameplay, where for example often you had to take on over a dozen imps with a mere shotgun. It would be great to relive that experience all over again in a 3D fully environment powered by a cutting engine.
However perhaps this shift isn't all bad because part of the reason Doom was all action orientated in that it lacked a substantial story. Yet for the first time it looks Doom will have a proper story with science fiction writer Matthew Costello doing the story and dialog. Also the shift way from action can be attributed to the fact that 3D models aren't as efficent as Doom's 2D sprites when you want to put lots of enemies on screen.
Despite the gameplay differences hopefully there will be some camoes of the original Doom enemies or weapons in the game.
After trying Linux Mandrake out a couple of months ago, one thing that crossed my mind is how ready Linux is for schools. Linux distros these days contain all the basic tools needed for productivity. You have several different office applications (Abiword, KOffice, StarOffice, OpenOffice) to choose from for word processing and spreadsheets and then you also have scientific tools like Scilab (a clone of Matlab I am told). Though admittedly I am not sure if there are Powerpoint and Access alternatives for Linux, perhaps someone could shed some light on this.
Now consider the Windows alternative, that would entail getting a site license for Windows, Microsoft Office, Matlab and who knows what else. This would not only cost quite a bit of money but I imagine would also create a pile of added paperwork due to the multiple licenses. Then with Windows you have to contend with issues of kids installing software on the school machines such as games, and macro and email viruses which from past experience spread like crazy in schools.
As far as I am concerned Linux is more than ready for schools. Sure it may be different to Windows which most children would be accustomed to using at home but children these days are quite tech savvy and I assume they would pick up Linux interface quite quickly (perhaps faster than adults?). The only major issue to consider is inoperability issues such as opening Word 97/2000 files but this could be resolved by encouraging children to save in RTF format which presents no problem.
You have hit the nail on the head, in some ways AOTC and Spiderman are two different beasts. Whilst I have yet to see Spiderman I imagine its a far more self-contained film in that you don't need to read the comics to understand the plot.
AOTC on the otherhand exists to both compliment and set the backdrop for the classic Star Wars trilogy. Personally I enjoyed AOTC not in it's own right, but the back story it provided in terms of the origins of Storm Trooper, Boba Fett, the Empire etc. It was brilliant how it all came together in the last 30 minutes.
Regardless of which one is deemed the "better" film of two, one thing I do like about Attack of the Clones is that its release date of May 16 was pretty much synchronised throughout the world. Living in Australia it can be quite frustrating to read about all these great films currently showing in America and having to wait a month or two till it starts showing here. Spiderman is an example, you people in the US have been able to see it since early May but those of us in Australia have to wait till June.
Out of curiousity does anyone know what factors determine whether a film gets a synchronised global release or not?
Hollywood needs to learn that in order to survive it needs to change their business model so that it adapts to changes in technology, rather than change/control technology to suit aging business models. A perfect example of this is the following paragraph taken from the article in regards to VCRs.
THE VCR SCARE. In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, famously proclaimed that the videocassette recorder was as threatening to the movies as the Boston Strangler was to a woman walking alone. Twenty years later, video rentals account for 46% of studio revenues, vs. the 24% collected at the box office.
Sounds like history is repeating itself and the MPAA hasn't learnt anything from the past. The MPAA needs to stop being stubburn about changing their business model and start adopting new technologies rather than fighting them off. People like George Lucas have the right idea, as I hear he makes most of his profits off the merchandise.
Here is some further information on the toolset taken from nwn.bioware.com/downloads/toolset.html
The BETA version of the Neverwinter Aurora Toolset provides most of the functionality of the final toolset that will be included in the retail version of Neverwinter Nights. The final toolset will allow users who purchase Neverwinter Nights to create their own adventures with the fully functional game editor that has been used by BioWare in the creation of the official NWN campaign. Just as a Beta Test provides consumers an early look at a game while the development team continues to test the game and define issues, Infogrames has determined that this toolset can provide that experience to players but is in NO WAY FINAL, and thus technical support will not be available.
There is also an introduction on how to use the toolset at the Bioware website. It will be interesting to see what creations this toolset yeilds because there has been many games with great toolsets but almost no mods to speak of. An example that springs to mind is the underrated Dark Reign 2.