Can't see how this will be a good thing. The only good Dreamworks might do get some "well known" people to do voice acting (not that I care as I am a sub-snob) and perhaps get a somewhat large exposure at big cinemas. Other than that, this is more or less a bad thing. The American Anime-only distribution companies like ADV and the like by the fans, for the fans. They care about their fans and do their best to make their fans happy. Dreamworks and other Hollywood stuidos couldn't give a flying fuck about the fans and just want to make some cash. They will rape the movie any way they can if they think it will earn them a couple more bucks. Disney/Miramax wanted to rape Princess Mononoke by censoring it, and they would have if they weren't restricted by the contract. Tri-Star did an all right job with Metropolis but the translation was sub-ADV. I can't imagine what Dreamworks, another animation studio known more for "kiddie" movies, plans to do with this, but I don't think Dreamworks buying the distribution rights is going to be beneficial to anime fans.
Actually something like that happened today at our Stockton, CA office. No lie! Some contracter burst an AC line and it started leaking coolant. The SysAdmin out there went in the server room and he thought that the smoke caused by the leak was a fire and he pulled the fire alarm, causing the building to be evacuated.
I think IMAX is really cool, but things not designed to play on an IMAX screen don't necessarily translate well. The IMAX screen over at Navy Pier in Chicago does showings of various non-imax movies during weekends at midnight. So, some friends of mine and I went to see the Matrix there.
First "regular" movie I saw on an IMAX was Hannibal when they were showing it on the IMAX at the Metreon in San Francisco (durring Hannibal's opening week). I was kinda surprised when the ticket ripping guy told us to go to the IMAX theater, and kinda wondered how it would work on the gigundo screen. Worked out pretty well IMHO. It didn't appear grainy or anything. The only problem was that since we got there late and had to sit near the front, it was difficult to focus on the whole screen. Also I noticed that they did only filled about 3/4ths of the screen. Still, when I went to see it again on a regular screen (what can I say, I liked Hannibal) it just didn't compare. I'm surprised that places with IMAXes don't show regular run movies more often.
The problem of course is that they will also piss off the occassional users of p2p software, that don't place much burden on the network
Wouldn't bother me, an occasional mp3 downloader, if SBC did this to my DSL. I would go back to what I did before the days of Napster et al: IRC - the original black market of the internet. The thing about IRC is that everyone knows what is really used for- porn, warez, and mp3s- It's just that nobody seems to care. And the best part is that it doesn't have enough mainstream press to draw any attention to itself. It's an all around winner!
Actually, a dot-bomb company tried to do something similar to this. PrintCafe attempted to subpoena Pud from Fucked Company to obtain the identities of "Ex-DLJ, sucky-me, and idiot!", whom they were going to sue for posting defamatory comments on the anonymous Fucked Company message boards.
You can see the whole saga here, including all the crap Pud received from PrintCafe's lawyers. It even says "PrintCafe Inc. v. Ex-DLJ, sucky-me, and idiot!" on the documents. Funny shit.
I live in Oakland and I can barely pick up KALX in my car. College stations like KALX and KUSF may play some unique and interesting music, but unless you are standing right next to the transmitter you aren't gonna be able to hear it.
Gotta love Bay Area Radio though:
KSJO (The Rock): ClearChannel
KCNL (Channel 104.9): ClearChannel
KMEL: ClearChannel
KYLD (Wild 94.9): ClearChannel
KIOI (Star 101.3): ClearChannel
KLLC (Alice): Viacom
KITS (Live 105): Viacom
KSAN (The Bone): Susquehanna (whoever they are)
KFOG: Susquehanna
You don't even know. Vinyl is far superior to CD, but more for asthetic reasons than technical. Vinyl has soul. It lets you really experience the music; watching the recond as it slowly spins, the stylus vibrating, resonating the analog perfection of the sound. You don't just hear a recording, but rather you can feel the life and the richness of the music. CDs are just soulless 1s and 0s. And BTW as long as you take care of your records, use a high end cartidige, and don't use worn stylii, there really aren't any noticable pops and hisses.
True dat! Wasn't Eminem's album heavily downloaded but still had incredibly strong sales? I think Em might be on to something: Moby sucks!
Moby sounds like a certain whiney metal band: "Wah! My CD isn't selling well! It must be because of those eeeeevil CD pirates." It pisses me off that "CD pirates" are everyone's scapegoat these days, refusing to acknowledge the posibility that their sales are low because they suck. Can't tell you how often I see that whiney metal bands CDs on the used rack at Amoeba.
Like the 2600 days, in the 80s, games had limited graphics, so you had to have decent "plots" and gameplay
I dunno about 80s games having decent plots. These days every game has some kind of plot and some dialog, and the plots of modern games are much more involved (not to mention better translated). Games in the 80s may have had one sentence at the very beginning letting you know what is going on ("Now is beginning of a fantastic story"). These days, you will hardly find a game that doesn't have CGI cutscenes explaining in great detail the current scenario. Genres that were previously notorious for not having plots are now much more likely to have one. Think about old FPS games like Doom. It did indeed have a plot (in the instruction manual), but that plot was barely reflected in the game. Newer FPS games like Halo have cutscenes, dialog, and an involved story (not just one printed in the manual for good measure). Even arcade games, games that are played for 15 minutes at a time, are starting to contain more detailed storylines. You hardly ever saw that in the 80's.
We have come a long way since "All your base are belong to us". True, games in the 80's may have had more original gameplay, but when it comes to storyline and involvement, those games can't compare to what we have today.
The GBA has become nothing more than a rehash system where Nintendo can re-release old games and make a quick buck on them again. If you take a look at the current GBA games available, a vast ammount of them are ports of Super Nintendo games, or updates of old Gameboy games. The ones that aren't are usually ports of Playstation games. So now what? Apparently they ran out of good SNES and GB games to port and are going to start digging up NES games for their "new" system? I've played these games before, Nintendo. How about some original games now?
Don't forget about my favorite wine, Electric Reindeer Chardonnay. This is actually a real wine. The company I work for sells it for $4.99 a bottle. Real high quality stuff.
If a CD won't read in your drive, there are tons of ways around this. Why didn't you simply install an ATAPI CD-ROM, just temporarily to install the software? Or why didn't you stick it in a computer that had an ATAPI CD and install over your network? What kind of geek are you that you can't hack together some kind of crude solution?
So you propose absolute originality? Wouldn't this preclude Disney from making films based on fairy tales? I.e. roughly half of the animated features they've made to date?
You're comment got me thinking about just how many of Disney animated movies are shameless ripoffs. Let's see:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Nope
Pinocchio - Nope
Dumbo - Nope
Bambi - Nope
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - Nope
Cinderella - Nope
Alice in Wonderland - Nope
Peter Pan - Nope
Lady and the Tramp - Nope
Sleeping Beauty - Nope
101 Dalmatians - Nope
The Sword in the Stone - Nope
The Jungle Book - Nope
The Aristocats - Yep
Robin Hood - Nope
The Many Adventures of Winnie-The-Pooh - Nope
The Rescuers - Nope
The Fox and the Hound - Nope
The Black Cauldron - Nope
The Great Mouse Detective - Nope
Oliver and Company - Not Really ("Based on Oliver Twist")
The Little Mermaid - Nope
The Rescuers Down Under - Yep (allthough it is a sequel to an "adaptation", this movie is an original story)
Beauty and the Beast - Nope
Aladdin - Nope
The Lion King - Not really
Pocahontas - Not really
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Nope
Hercules - Nope
Mulan - Not really
Tarzan - Nope
The Emperor's New Groove - Yep
Atlantis - Yep
So in 75 years of making animated features, just about every last one of them has been either based on a fairy tale, novel, or folk lore. Geez. If Disney had to be original in order to copyright their work, they would be really screwed. Of course it is okay for Disney to rip something off and call it their own. If you want to use a PVR to time shift TV shows or watch DVDs on a Linux box though, watch out, cuz that's obviously a sinny-sin-sin.
They need to bundle the DVD kit anyway, to compete on price/features with the PS/2, which already has that functionality built in at that price
What for? So you don't get a remoteless DVD player with the Xbox? Think of the features you are getting. A hard drive (save $30 on a memory card right there. Use the money you save on memory cards to purchase that coveted DVD addon. Also, Sony plans to charge like $100 for their HDD addon). Built in ethernet (Sony is gonna charge you another $50 for that whenever they get around to releasing it). A graphics processor that is more than 2x as powerful (a feature the PS2 will never have).
To summarize:
Xbox ($200) + HDD (Included) + Ethernet (Included) + DVD Player ($30) + Remote (Indcluded with DVD package) = $230
PS2 ($200) + HDD ($100) + Ethernet ($50) + DVD Player (Included) + DVD Remote ($30) = $380.
I'm not dissing on the PS2, I'm just saying stop whining about how the Xbox doesn't come with DVD.
is there a dvdovernight.com type company that's doing video game rentals via internet/usps?
Yes, there is actually. It's call RedOctane and it is, like you said, a DVD Overnight/Netflix service for video games. Only $18.95 a month too. Pretty slick.
As for your comments about Blockbuster, I totally agree that they suck, but not so much because they are a huge evil conglomorate. It's because they have the crappiest selection of movies ever; especially DVDs. I can never, ever find anything except new releases and popular/trendy movies. Their stores may be large and clean (usually), but a dirty little hole in the wall video place typically has 10 times the selection Blockbuster has. Also Blockbuster is a huge advocate of censorship.
National socialism? You mean like the Nationalsozialist party in Germany? I'm all for that. Allthough I am a little surprised that the French would be.
That's why I love my Doc Marten's. They are probably the only guilt free piece of attire that I own. Sure my Dockers and whatever may be made in Indonesia by a five year old working 80 hours a week, but at least my shoes are humane.
In my life I have only registered one peice of Shareware, and that was an old Apogee shareware game called Boppin'. Just about every shareware/commercial demo application has some quality freeware/OSS alternative these days, even if you use Windows. I can eaily be a cheapskate without breaking the law.
It least it's better than IBM's arbitrarily renamed server lines. The RS/6000 is now called the "pSeries". Power? Punishment, maybe? The S/390 is now the "zSeries". Zippy, perhaps? The AS/400 has become the "iSeries". Sounds like a Mac ripoff (although they do use PPC processors). The only one that makes sense is their Intel based "xSeries". X of course standing for x86.
How is working at a supermarket an "iregular" job that only a "total nutcase" would take? Because it is "unskilled labor" and doesn't require an education? That may be true, but that does not mean it is idle, easy work that doesn't require some work and dedication. Because it is low paying? Not really. Safeway cashiers make up to like $19/hour. That's not too shabby, and is a lot more than many office workers make. My friend was an assistant manager at Safeway and he was making about $23/hour plus overtime. That's more than I make working on a helpdesk. And I have heard that store managers at large supermarkets can make up to $80k/yr. That's more than many IT jobs pay. Don't think you are all high and mighty because you work in an office doing "skilled work" or whatever.
I don't think so. A full version of Windows 2000 costs $300. They are charging you $150 to install an operating system. Shit, they charge you $250 for Debian, something they didn't even pay for. What a scam. Especially considering OEM computer makers use images and can image a new computer in like 10 minutes. I don't know how they can justify any of their prices.
Let's see... They charge $2000 for 266Mhz computer (I don't care how small it is), $250/$450 for the OS, and other assorted unreasonable prices for the other accessories, and their web site sucks? Can we say Fucked Company?
Eh... I would rather get the tabletop model. Add a few cigarette burns and you have yourself a pizza parlor authentic.
Those Hanaho cabinets are nice but they are a little pricey at $3000. You do get a PC included but it a PIII 600 Mhz but that could be had for $200 or so. Only a 17" monitor. That's a lot smaller than most real arcade machines. Hanaho's JAMMA cabinets start at 27". And the only games you get with this thing are a few Capcom Arcade Classics CPS1 games (older games like Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight.) All other games must be somehow "aquired". One would be much better off building a cabinet. I would build one but I don't have the skillz. Plus I live in an apartment and have no work area. And no tools. Taco's cabinet is pretty tight though.
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Can't see how this will be a good thing. The only good Dreamworks might do get some "well known" people to do voice acting (not that I care as I am a sub-snob) and perhaps get a somewhat large exposure at big cinemas. Other than that, this is more or less a bad thing. The American Anime-only distribution companies like ADV and the like by the fans, for the fans. They care about their fans and do their best to make their fans happy. Dreamworks and other Hollywood stuidos couldn't give a flying fuck about the fans and just want to make some cash. They will rape the movie any way they can if they think it will earn them a couple more bucks. Disney/Miramax wanted to rape Princess Mononoke by censoring it, and they would have if they weren't restricted by the contract. Tri-Star did an all right job with Metropolis but the translation was sub-ADV. I can't imagine what Dreamworks, another animation studio known more for "kiddie" movies, plans to do with this, but I don't think Dreamworks buying the distribution rights is going to be beneficial to anime fans.
Out of control
Really? I live in tha Oaktown and I've never heard of that. Where is it?
First "regular" movie I saw on an IMAX was Hannibal when they were showing it on the IMAX at the Metreon in San Francisco (durring Hannibal's opening week). I was kinda surprised when the ticket ripping guy told us to go to the IMAX theater, and kinda wondered how it would work on the gigundo screen. Worked out pretty well IMHO. It didn't appear grainy or anything. The only problem was that since we got there late and had to sit near the front, it was difficult to focus on the whole screen. Also I noticed that they did only filled about 3/4ths of the screen. Still, when I went to see it again on a regular screen (what can I say, I liked Hannibal) it just didn't compare. I'm surprised that places with IMAXes don't show regular run movies more often.
Wouldn't bother me, an occasional mp3 downloader, if SBC did this to my DSL. I would go back to what I did before the days of Napster et al: IRC - the original black market of the internet. The thing about IRC is that everyone knows what is really used for- porn, warez, and mp3s- It's just that nobody seems to care. And the best part is that it doesn't have enough mainstream press to draw any attention to itself. It's an all around winner!
You can see the whole saga here, including all the crap Pud received from PrintCafe's lawyers. It even says "PrintCafe Inc. v. Ex-DLJ, sucky-me, and idiot!" on the documents. Funny shit.
And it worked!
Thank you Jebus!
Gotta love Bay Area Radio though:
KSJO (The Rock): ClearChannel
KCNL (Channel 104.9): ClearChannel
KMEL: ClearChannel
KYLD (Wild 94.9): ClearChannel
KIOI (Star 101.3): ClearChannel
KLLC (Alice): Viacom
KITS (Live 105): Viacom
KSAN (The Bone): Susquehanna (whoever they are)
KFOG: Susquehanna
Thank god for the free market system.
Moby sounds like a certain whiney metal band: "Wah! My CD isn't selling well! It must be because of those eeeeevil CD pirates." It pisses me off that "CD pirates" are everyone's scapegoat these days, refusing to acknowledge the posibility that their sales are low because they suck. Can't tell you how often I see that whiney metal bands CDs on the used rack at Amoeba.
I dunno about 80s games having decent plots. These days every game has some kind of plot and some dialog, and the plots of modern games are much more involved (not to mention better translated). Games in the 80s may have had one sentence at the very beginning letting you know what is going on ("Now is beginning of a fantastic story"). These days, you will hardly find a game that doesn't have CGI cutscenes explaining in great detail the current scenario. Genres that were previously notorious for not having plots are now much more likely to have one. Think about old FPS games like Doom. It did indeed have a plot (in the instruction manual), but that plot was barely reflected in the game. Newer FPS games like Halo have cutscenes, dialog, and an involved story (not just one printed in the manual for good measure). Even arcade games, games that are played for 15 minutes at a time, are starting to contain more detailed storylines. You hardly ever saw that in the 80's.
We have come a long way since "All your base are belong to us". True, games in the 80's may have had more original gameplay, but when it comes to storyline and involvement, those games can't compare to what we have today.
The GBA has become nothing more than a rehash system where Nintendo can re-release old games and make a quick buck on them again. If you take a look at the current GBA games available, a vast ammount of them are ports of Super Nintendo games, or updates of old Gameboy games. The ones that aren't are usually ports of Playstation games. So now what? Apparently they ran out of good SNES and GB games to port and are going to start digging up NES games for their "new" system? I've played these games before, Nintendo. How about some original games now?
Don't forget about my favorite wine, Electric Reindeer Chardonnay. This is actually a real wine. The company I work for sells it for $4.99 a bottle. Real high quality stuff.
If a CD won't read in your drive, there are tons of ways around this. Why didn't you simply install an ATAPI CD-ROM, just temporarily to install the software? Or why didn't you stick it in a computer that had an ATAPI CD and install over your network? What kind of geek are you that you can't hack together some kind of crude solution?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Nope
Pinocchio - Nope
Dumbo - Nope
Bambi - Nope
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - Nope
Cinderella - Nope
Alice in Wonderland - Nope
Peter Pan - Nope
Lady and the Tramp - Nope
Sleeping Beauty - Nope
101 Dalmatians - Nope
The Sword in the Stone - Nope
The Jungle Book - Nope
The Aristocats - Yep
Robin Hood - Nope
The Many Adventures of Winnie-The-Pooh - Nope
The Rescuers - Nope
The Fox and the Hound - Nope
The Black Cauldron - Nope
The Great Mouse Detective - Nope
Oliver and Company - Not Really ("Based on Oliver Twist")
The Little Mermaid - Nope
The Rescuers Down Under - Yep (allthough it is a sequel to an "adaptation", this movie is an original story)
Beauty and the Beast - Nope
Aladdin - Nope
The Lion King - Not really
Pocahontas - Not really
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Nope
Hercules - Nope
Mulan - Not really
Tarzan - Nope
The Emperor's New Groove - Yep
Atlantis - Yep
So in 75 years of making animated features, just about every last one of them has been either based on a fairy tale, novel, or folk lore. Geez. If Disney had to be original in order to copyright their work, they would be really screwed. Of course it is okay for Disney to rip something off and call it their own. If you want to use a PVR to time shift TV shows or watch DVDs on a Linux box though, watch out, cuz that's obviously a sinny-sin-sin.
What for? So you don't get a remoteless DVD player with the Xbox? Think of the features you are getting. A hard drive (save $30 on a memory card right there. Use the money you save on memory cards to purchase that coveted DVD addon. Also, Sony plans to charge like $100 for their HDD addon). Built in ethernet (Sony is gonna charge you another $50 for that whenever they get around to releasing it). A graphics processor that is more than 2x as powerful (a feature the PS2 will never have).
To summarize:
Xbox ($200) + HDD (Included) + Ethernet (Included) + DVD Player ($30) + Remote (Indcluded with DVD package) = $230
PS2 ($200) + HDD ($100) + Ethernet ($50) + DVD Player (Included) + DVD Remote ($30) = $380.
I'm not dissing on the PS2, I'm just saying stop whining about how the Xbox doesn't come with DVD.
As for your comments about Blockbuster, I totally agree that they suck, but not so much because they are a huge evil conglomorate. It's because they have the crappiest selection of movies ever; especially DVDs. I can never, ever find anything except new releases and popular/trendy movies. Their stores may be large and clean (usually), but a dirty little hole in the wall video place typically has 10 times the selection Blockbuster has. Also Blockbuster is a huge advocate of censorship.
National socialism? You mean like the Nationalsozialist party in Germany? I'm all for that. Allthough I am a little surprised that the French would be.
That's why I love my Doc Marten's. They are probably the only guilt free piece of attire that I own. Sure my Dockers and whatever may be made in Indonesia by a five year old working 80 hours a week, but at least my shoes are humane.
In my life I have only registered one peice of Shareware, and that was an old Apogee shareware game called Boppin'. Just about every shareware/commercial demo application has some quality freeware/OSS alternative these days, even if you use Windows. I can eaily be a cheapskate without breaking the law.
It least it's better than IBM's arbitrarily renamed server lines. The RS/6000 is now called the "pSeries". Power? Punishment, maybe? The S/390 is now the "zSeries". Zippy, perhaps? The AS/400 has become the "iSeries". Sounds like a Mac ripoff (although they do use PPC processors). The only one that makes sense is their Intel based "xSeries". X of course standing for x86.
How is working at a supermarket an "iregular" job that only a "total nutcase" would take? Because it is "unskilled labor" and doesn't require an education? That may be true, but that does not mean it is idle, easy work that doesn't require some work and dedication. Because it is low paying? Not really. Safeway cashiers make up to like $19/hour. That's not too shabby, and is a lot more than many office workers make. My friend was an assistant manager at Safeway and he was making about $23/hour plus overtime. That's more than I make working on a helpdesk. And I have heard that store managers at large supermarkets can make up to $80k/yr. That's more than many IT jobs pay. Don't think you are all high and mighty because you work in an office doing "skilled work" or whatever.
Let's see... They charge $2000 for 266Mhz computer (I don't care how small it is), $250/$450 for the OS, and other assorted unreasonable prices for the other accessories, and their web site sucks? Can we say Fucked Company?
Sorry. The correct link for Taco's cabinet is here
Those Hanaho cabinets are nice but they are a little pricey at $3000. You do get a PC included but it a PIII 600 Mhz but that could be had for $200 or so. Only a 17" monitor. That's a lot smaller than most real arcade machines. Hanaho's JAMMA cabinets start at 27". And the only games you get with this thing are a few Capcom Arcade Classics CPS1 games (older games like Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight.) All other games must be somehow "aquired". One would be much better off building a cabinet. I would build one but I don't have the skillz. Plus I live in an apartment and have no work area. And no tools. Taco's cabinet is pretty tight though.