I'd quite like to see this film, but where's the tech spec for the DVD? From the lack of one, I can only assume that this is Region 1/NTSC?
Just goes to remind us what a disaster the DVD region encoding is. Its a system that can only help large conglomerates staging their worldwide releases, not small operations who'd like to sell to all and sundry via the 'net.
Ho hum. Wish more folk would release their wares on Region 0, like the good folks at MindCandy did.
BTW, Aardman had been going for a long, long time. Those of us who grew up in the UK have been watching their stuff all our lives on Vision On, Take Hart, and Morph. The rest of the world probably saw their work first on music video - Peter Gabriel's 'So' was out 3 years before W&G. So its probably more accurate to say that Aardman got their start by years of slog on TV work.
As for "hopes to fund future films by selling his old ones" I think that's also the business plan of Disney, Universal, Sony....;)
Somewhat relevant - a couple of months ago I got several SMS spams on my mobile advertising a premium rate phone service, which didn't list the call prices and looked dodgy anyway. I showed them to a friend who works in the mobile industry, who mentioned ICSTIS - they regulate premium rate services in the UK.
I went to their website, read up on what they'd take action on, and filed a complaint.
A month later, they got back to me to say that they had... 1) stopped the service immediately as it looked like they were operating in breach of the code 2) held an inquiry, decided that they were in breach of the code in lots of ways and passed judgment.... 3)...banning them from operating a premium rate line for a year 4)...fining them 15000 5)...and getting them to pay back the money they'd made on calls to the service.
w00t! Heck I know 15k isn't a lot but the scum were shut down. Nice to see the system work.
Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has structures, indeed.
Now if he'd actually said that, he would have been making a shallow comparison. What he said was, he gets similar pleasure from reading code and poetry. Well, each to his own.
As for your own notions: For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is to give the reader enough freedom to free him(her)self of the structure.
Well, implying that you know the intent of all poets is a shallow comment too, is it not? Laying aside for a moment that artists are often intent on their art being so nebulous as to avoid trite definitions like the one above, plenty of poems do have structure; some even have metre. If the structure doesn't matter, then why use structure at all? Do changes of metre within a poem mean nothing? Would the poem be changed by expressing it with a different metre?
The answer is obviously yes. And that's what the poster says: New poems in new forms are new programs in new languages; exciting ideas renewed, refreshed, expressed in different ways.. I'm guessing this is what you're referring to when you assume he asserts that all poems are about structure, when all I see is an interest in the structure - or lack of it - in poems.
This system is similarly aimed at architectural work. However it looks more like the Teddy stuff, as its based on generating points in 3d from 2d sketches (possibly scanned in) by looking at the perspective in the drawing.
It's not true 3d though - they assume all the points drawn lie on a unit sphere, and project them onto that. However this is good enough to provide panoramic views from building sketches, for example.
What was going through his mind was probably that this was a gang member from one minority group (Cubans) talking about a gang from another minority group. Unless street gangs have suddenly adopted a forward-thinking racial integration policy, they may well refer to each other like that.
Here is the script. The "single line" most objected to is probably this one:
UMBERTO: Hey, ladies. You know what I'm gonna do? UMBERTO: I'm gonna kill me a Haitian. And then? UMBERTO: And then I'm going to make love like a man.
GTA:VC isn't alone in depicting gang characters as speaking like this. Its heavily influenced by films like the one this line came from:
TONY: So nothin'. Fuckin' I just don't like Columbians that's what. They're animals!
...which is from Scarface. Its hardly an incitement to race crime, its just a depiction of the speech patterns of an obvioulsy repellent character.
I'm not sure. If you read the patent claims, you'll see they are/all/ to do with allowing filenames longer than 8.3 to be stored, and used. I don't know any details about/formatting/ with FAT, which is what microsoft purports to be licensing, but I can't see how that's connected to these patents.
It seems to me that MS is on a sticky wicket here. The patents are probably unnecessary for stick manufacturers, so they throw in the FUD about "other, as yet not granted, patents are also covered by this license". The $250K per mfr cap also sounds pretty low to me. Low enough that manufacturers won't want to try their luck in court.
What are they going to get from this? (thumb in the air) $50m (assuming they get 200 manufacturers paying full whack!)? Chump change for MS, but it more than covers a few lawyers letters, and if you take care of the pennies, the pounds take care of themselves...
emmmm.... I have to say I wouldn't recommend BG:DA. It looks beautiful, but after playing for a short time I realized I wanted the magic sword spell (which flies off and beats people up for you, often attacking before you've spotted the bad guy). I restarted and concentrated on getting that, but once I got it, the game was trivially easy to beat. I'd spend all my time behind boxes pushed into doorways where I acted as the bait while my sword beat the crap out of everything. Most of the time I spent watching tv on the other side while the sword did the work. The very last fight was more difficult, but it could be gamed too (with a different technique).
I only completed BG:DA because thats the kind of obsessive-compulsive person I am, but it was a bit disappointing that this one feature unbalanced it so badly. On the other hand, if you force yourself to never ever use the magic sword I'm sure its a fine game.
The new site seems to be broken, you can't read the comments. The URLs (eg http://www.linuxgazette.com//131#131) go nowhere, and the expand/flatten/whatever the comment tree buttons do nothing (I reckon I'm in caching/cookie hell here but its exactly the same in both IE6 and Moz1.5). After figuring out that the site uses drupal as its CMS, I realized the URLs should be, e.g.
(for a comment on node 134). Looks like their URL rewriting is screwy. Anyway, hope this helps folk who wanted to read the site when it comes back up, seems/.ed right now.
While we're at it, Experts Exchange looks to be jinxing Google somehow. Its popping up on a wide variety of technical searches with links to questions, almost invariably with no answers. The things I was looking for are invariably there on mailing lists, project websites etc and appear instantly with "-"experts-exchange"" in the search. It's been happening for a few months now and seems to be getting worse.
I reckon people using the site are blogging their questions or answers, screwing up PageRank for that site as a result.
"...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."
I don't think there are any sacred cows left in the west.
Command and Conquer: Generals came out a year ago. Its set 20 years from now and one of the playable sides is the "Global Liberation Army", who use chemical and biological weapons against US and Chinese forces, as well as suicide bombers, car bombs, etc.
So here you have a game which is not about a conflict our grandfathers were involved with, but touches nerves still raw from current events.
I was watching a documentary last night on the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's assasination, which was full of 3D graphics reconstructing the Zapruder film and then replaying it from Oswald's viewpoint. I was struck by the thought that someone, somewhere, must be turning that into a game, too.
You have to bow down before the might of the internet when it can not only tell you that "bags" and "shotgun" are playground slang for the same thing, but the relative likelihood of each one being used in different parts of New Zealand.
Its a trademark, not a registered trademark. RH don't own it per se, a trademark is just your assertion that you used it first. Its the legal equivalent of "bagsies".
The thing that really drove it home for me how bad forums are is this set of reviews for Rockstar's Manhunt title - not released until this Thursday.
This site lets users review games before they're even out. As a result, there's a bizarre mix of "10/10 it will r00l", "1/10 this game is sick", along with 10/10s from people who never bothered to change the default rating (and are just asking where to get a demo), and oddest of all, people who rate it from 5-9 based on their understanding of screenshots and rumours.
Worst. Review. Ever.
And I'd just like to take this opportunity to rate Half-Life 3 a 7.5 out of 10 - I expect solid gameplay and stunning graphics, and some nice twists, but to be ultimately left wanting more. Can't wait for its release in, er, 2006.
He could achieve this goal by devaluing the dollar to 1/5 of its current value (or so).
There's about $0.6 trillion in circulation in the US. Supposing for simplicity's sake that multiplying the available currency by 5 would devalue the currency to 1/5 of its current value, that means we need an additional 2.4 trillion dollars.
I can trump that 2001 short story with William Gibson's 1993 book "Virtual Light" (I'm sure by now someone else will have mentioned it on this thread), which invented the term "augmented reality" for this stuff (IIRC).
Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pick-pocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich--or get you killed.
For those who haven't read it, the shades showed overlayed architectural diagrams on top of San Francisco -- not all that different from what these guys suggest.
you're forgetting that the GT franchise has appaling physics. No car damage, cars don't flip, etc. The only thing stopping you putting an F1 car on a dirt track and taking it round without it smashing to pieces is that the game's menus won't let you.
I've done a bit of digging, and I'm beginning to doubt the attribution of this quote to Emma Goldman.
Its not listed on the site you refer to, or in her many entries in the Columbia, Oxford, Chambers or Encarta books of quotations (I popped into the bookshop at lunch). Its not in any of her works or transcribed speeches available online. Strangely if you search on google groups the quote doesn't appear until 1988, later becoming attributed to Goldman, Arnoldo, Cousin Woodman, Anonymous, and Renaud (I'm sure there are others). None of the attributions I could find online referred to the written or spoken source of the quote - whereas pretty much all other quotes attributed to Goldman can be traced back this way.
I don't think its entirely coincidental that in 1987 - just prior to this quote first appearing online - Ken Livingstone (UK politician, currently mayor of London) wrote a book called If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it.
Ken might've been quoting Goldman - he'd definitely have heard of her - but I can't find any evidence at all to back that up. (I couldn't find his book to check)
I'm only curious, not trying to knock you. But do you know where Goldman said this?
"A group of American companies is attempting this week to persuade the European Union to relax its rules governing data protection, claiming they are bad for business. [...] The EU passed the Data Protection Directive in 1998, and this has subsequently been implemented into national law by all but two--Ireland and Luxemburg--of the EU's member states.
As well as regulating the buying and selling of personal data about European citizens and forcing Web sites to tell users when data about them is collected and allow users to refuse disclosure, the Data Protection Directive also restricts the flow of information about Europeans to companies based in countries with--in the view of the EU--more lax privacy standards.
The Global Privacy Alliance says that this directive makes it hard for companies to engage in the kind of data flow that they claim is vital for modern e-enabled businesses."
That would be the kind of data flow where they take your medical data, and farm it out to a country with no effective privacy laws, then?
Its interesting that the EU law would not only have prevented your medical data going to Pakistan, it would have prevented it going to the US - because far from having "strict standards to protect patients' medical data", the US laws allow moving private data to countries with lower privacy standards!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd quite like to see this film, but where's the tech spec for the DVD? From the lack of one, I can only assume that this is Region 1/NTSC?
;)
Just goes to remind us what a disaster the DVD region encoding is. Its a system that can only help large conglomerates staging their worldwide releases, not small operations who'd like to sell to all and sundry via the 'net.
Ho hum. Wish more folk would release their wares on Region 0, like the good folks at MindCandy did.
BTW, Aardman had been going for a long, long time. Those of us who grew up in the UK have been watching their stuff all our lives on Vision On, Take Hart, and Morph. The rest of the world probably saw their work first on music video - Peter Gabriel's 'So' was out 3 years before W&G. So its probably more accurate to say that Aardman got their start by years of slog on TV work.
As for "hopes to fund future films by selling his old ones" I think that's also the business plan of Disney, Universal, Sony....
kirigami.
Somewhat relevant - a couple of months ago I got several SMS spams on my mobile advertising a premium rate phone service, which didn't list the call prices and looked dodgy anyway. I showed them to a friend who works in the mobile industry, who mentioned ICSTIS - they regulate premium rate services in the UK.
...banning them from operating a premium rate line for a year ...fining them 15000 ...and getting them to pay back the money they'd made on calls to the service.
I went to their website, read up on what they'd take action on, and filed a complaint.
A month later, they got back to me to say that they had...
1) stopped the service immediately as it looked like they were operating in breach of the code
2) held an inquiry, decided that they were in breach of the code in lots of ways and passed judgment....
3)
4)
5)
w00t! Heck I know 15k isn't a lot but the scum were shut down. Nice to see the system work.
-Baz
Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has structures, indeed.
Now if he'd actually said that, he would have been making a shallow comparison. What he said was, he gets similar pleasure from reading code and poetry. Well, each to his own.
As for your own notions: For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is to give the reader enough freedom to free him(her)self of the structure.
Well, implying that you know the intent of all poets is a shallow comment too, is it not? Laying aside for a moment that artists are often intent on their art being so nebulous as to avoid trite definitions like the one above, plenty of poems do have structure; some even have metre. If the structure doesn't matter, then why use structure at all? Do changes of metre within a poem mean nothing? Would the poem be changed by expressing it with a different metre?
The answer is obviously yes. And that's what the poster says: New poems in new forms are new programs in new languages; exciting ideas renewed, refreshed, expressed in different ways.. I'm guessing this is what you're referring to when you assume he asserts that all poems are about structure, when all I see is an interest in the structure - or lack of it - in poems.
-Baz
This system is similarly aimed at architectural work. However it looks more like the Teddy stuff, as its based on generating points in 3d from 2d sketches (possibly scanned in) by looking at the perspective in the drawing.
It's not true 3d though - they assume all the points drawn lie on a unit sphere, and project them onto that. However this is good enough to provide panoramic views from building sketches, for example.
I'm surprised noone mentioned this already... play Quake 3 Arena as Bush, Gore, Lieberman, Nader, Cheyney and others.
Here is the script. The "single line" most objected to is probably this one:
UMBERTO: Hey, ladies. You know what I'm gonna do?
UMBERTO: I'm gonna kill me a Haitian. And then?
UMBERTO: And then I'm going to make love like a man.
GTA:VC isn't alone in depicting gang characters as speaking like this. Its heavily influenced by films like the one this line came from:
TONY: So nothin'. Fuckin' I just don't like Columbians that's what. They're animals!
I'm not sure. If you read the patent claims, you'll see they are /all/ to do with allowing filenames longer than 8.3 to be stored, and used. I don't know any details about /formatting/ with FAT, which is what microsoft purports to be licensing, but I can't see how that's connected to these patents.
It seems to me that MS is on a sticky wicket here. The patents are probably unnecessary for stick manufacturers, so they throw in the FUD about "other, as yet not granted, patents are also covered by this license". The $250K per mfr cap also sounds pretty low to me. Low enough that manufacturers won't want to try their luck in court.
What are they going to get from this? (thumb in the air) $50m (assuming they get 200 manufacturers paying full whack!)? Chump change for MS, but it more than covers a few lawyers letters, and if you take care of the pennies, the pounds take care of themselves...
-Baz
'nuff said.
If the moon flew planes into our skyscrapers, we would have people on it inside of a week. :)
If current events are any guide, we'd have troops bogged down in a quagmire, looking for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction
But I'm sure we'd hear reports that they'd discovered some deeply suspicious green cheese.
emmmm.... I have to say I wouldn't recommend BG:DA. It looks beautiful, but after playing for a short time I realized I wanted the magic sword spell (which flies off and beats people up for you, often attacking before you've spotted the bad guy). I restarted and concentrated on getting that, but once I got it, the game was trivially easy to beat. I'd spend all my time behind boxes pushed into doorways where I acted as the bait while my sword beat the crap out of everything. Most of the time I spent watching tv on the other side while the sword did the work. The very last fight was more difficult, but it could be gamed too (with a different technique).
I only completed BG:DA because thats the kind of obsessive-compulsive person I am, but it was a bit disappointing that this one feature unbalanced it so badly. On the other hand, if you force yourself to never ever use the magic sword I'm sure its a fine game.
The new site seems to be broken, you can't read the comments. The URLs (eg http://www.linuxgazette.com//131#131) go nowhere, and the expand/flatten/whatever the comment tree buttons do nothing (I reckon I'm in caching/cookie hell here but its exactly the same in both IE6 and Moz1.5). After figuring out that the site uses drupal as its CMS, I realized the URLs should be, e.g.
3 1
/.ed right now.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/view/134/131#1
(for a comment on node 134). Looks like their URL rewriting is screwy. Anyway, hope this helps folk who wanted to read the site when it comes back up, seems
While we're at it, Experts Exchange looks to be jinxing Google somehow. Its popping up on a wide variety of technical searches with links to questions, almost invariably with no answers. The things I was looking for are invariably there on mailing lists, project websites etc and appear instantly with "-"experts-exchange"" in the search. It's been happening for a few months now and seems to be getting worse.
I reckon people using the site are blogging their questions or answers, screwing up PageRank for that site as a result.
-Baz
"...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."
I don't think there are any sacred cows left in the west.
Command and Conquer: Generals came out a year ago. Its set 20 years from now and one of the playable sides is the "Global Liberation Army", who use chemical and biological weapons against US and Chinese forces, as well as suicide bombers, car bombs, etc.
So here you have a game which is not about a conflict our grandfathers were involved with, but touches nerves still raw from current events.
I was watching a documentary last night on the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's assasination, which was full of 3D graphics reconstructing the Zapruder film and then replaying it from Oswald's viewpoint. I was struck by the thought that someone, somewhere, must be turning that into a game, too.
-Baz
apparently so
You have to bow down before the might of the internet when it can not only tell you that "bags" and "shotgun" are playground slang for the same thing, but the relative likelihood of each one being used in different parts of New Zealand.
Redhat already owns the trademark on fedora
Really?
Its a trademark, not a registered trademark. RH don't own it per se, a trademark is just your assertion that you used it first. Its the legal equivalent of "bagsies".
-Baz
The thing that really drove it home for me how bad forums are is this set of reviews for Rockstar's Manhunt title - not released until this Thursday.
This site lets users review games before they're even out. As a result, there's a bizarre mix of "10/10 it will r00l", "1/10 this game is sick", along with 10/10s from people who never bothered to change the default rating (and are just asking where to get a demo), and oddest of all, people who rate it from 5-9 based on their understanding of screenshots and rumours.
Worst. Review. Ever.
And I'd just like to take this opportunity to rate Half-Life 3 a 7.5 out of 10 - I expect solid gameplay and stunning graphics, and some nice twists, but to be ultimately left wanting more. Can't wait for its release in, er, 2006.
-Baz
can be found here.
He could achieve this goal by devaluing the dollar to 1/5 of its current value (or so).
There's about $0.6 trillion in circulation in the US. Supposing for simplicity's sake that multiplying the available currency by 5 would devalue the currency to 1/5 of its current value, that means we need an additional 2.4 trillion dollars.
A dollar bill is 66x156mm, so that currency has an area of about 24,710 square km. Now, New Hampshire is roughly 24,000 square km.
I think we can safely conclude that his plan involves covering New Hampshire with a microwave collector constructed entirely from dollar bills.
I can trump that 2001 short story with William Gibson's 1993 book "Virtual Light" (I'm sure by now someone else will have mentioned it on this thread), which invented the term "augmented reality" for this stuff (IIRC).
Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pick-pocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich--or get you killed.
For those who haven't read it, the shades showed overlayed architectural diagrams on top of San Francisco -- not all that different from what these guys suggest.
you're forgetting that the GT franchise has appaling physics. No car damage, cars don't flip, etc. The only thing stopping you putting an F1 car on a dirt track and taking it round without it smashing to pieces is that the game's menus won't let you.
(obvious I know...) Here's what google thinks about microsoft. Not at all complimentary.
I've done a bit of digging, and I'm beginning to doubt the attribution of this quote to Emma Goldman.
Its not listed on the site you refer to, or in her many entries in the Columbia, Oxford, Chambers or Encarta books of quotations (I popped into the bookshop at lunch). Its not in any of her works or transcribed speeches available online. Strangely if you search on google groups the quote doesn't appear until 1988, later becoming attributed to Goldman, Arnoldo, Cousin Woodman, Anonymous, and Renaud (I'm sure there are others). None of the attributions I could find online referred to the written or spoken source of the quote - whereas pretty much all other quotes attributed to Goldman can be traced back this way.
I don't think its entirely coincidental that in 1987 - just prior to this quote first appearing online - Ken Livingstone (UK politician, currently mayor of London) wrote a book called If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it.
Ken might've been quoting Goldman - he'd definitely have heard of her - but I can't find any evidence at all to back that up. (I couldn't find his book to check)
I'm only curious, not trying to knock you. But do you know where Goldman said this?
-Baz
Why *doesn't* AOL start putting MS patches on their CD's?
Because Microsoft told everybody not to, I guess (I know this is about cover-mounted CDs, but thats typically how people get infected with AOL).
Remember this:
"A group of American companies is attempting this week to persuade the European Union to relax its rules governing data protection, claiming they are bad for business.
[...]
The EU passed the Data Protection Directive in 1998, and this has subsequently been implemented into national law by all but two--Ireland and Luxemburg--of the EU's member states.
As well as regulating the buying and selling of personal data about European citizens and forcing Web sites to tell users when data about them is collected and allow users to refuse disclosure, the Data Protection Directive also restricts the flow of information about Europeans to companies based in countries with--in the view of the EU--more lax privacy standards.
The Global Privacy Alliance says that this directive makes it hard for companies to engage in the kind of data flow that they claim is vital for modern e-enabled businesses."
That would be the kind of data flow where they take your medical data, and farm it out to a country with no effective privacy laws, then?
Its interesting that the EU law would not only have prevented your medical data going to Pakistan, it would have prevented it going to the US - because far from having "strict standards to protect patients' medical data", the US laws allow moving private data to countries with lower privacy standards!