Gamecenter's bust to the RTS far from credible
on
Vanishing Game Genres
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· Score: 2
Sacrifice looked to be the most well-crafted game at E3 and a lot of fun. It's ludicrous to eulogize the RTS as "dead and buried" while praising the very fresh and playable Homeworld and eliding upcoming games that are actively reinventing the genre like Sacrifice, Black and White and Halo. Gamecenter's eulogy for the RTS convinces me only that they dislike some recent RTS games so much that they've become jaded on the subject.
[Re: GNU GPL and BSD license] Without copyright, those licenses wouldn't be needed.
Assuming copyright laws were repealed tomorrow, how would I make sure source follows binaries? Everything created would be in the public domain. Some person could distribute a version of Linux with all kinds of proprietary modifications they've made, but keep their modified source a secret. Since they didn't have Linux licensed to them under the GPL, this would be perfectly legit. I guess we could hire thugs to kick down this person's door and seize their source code modifications, so maybe we wouldn't technically need copyright licensing to enforce the terms of the GPL... =^) Anyway, this is why you see rms wanting to legislate enforced-sharing terms similar to the GNU GPL rather than just abolishing copyright.
Like take this one "group of peopl eneed hero(s) find and actor playing a hero and mistake him for a real hero. They contract him to help through misunderstanding (he thinks they know hes an actor and want him to act for them). Truth is discovered, he initially tries to run, ends up rising to the occasion and saving the day".
Very common story. In the past few years 2 movies that I know of used it. Galaxey Quest, A Bugs life, and I know I have seen it before even that.
It's a comedic variant of the type of story seen in The Music Man.
Why would you bother to edit out the cigarette and leave the smoke? Would it be that hard for even young kids to make the connection? And on a side note, when did showing someone smoke on TV become unacceptable?
There's just no way that an American cartoon produced today can portray casual smoking to a young audience. It's almost like having a character transform into his secret identity by drinking cleaning fluid and jumping into an abandoned refrigerator. An absurd smoking toothpick is far more justifiable than actual clear-as-day cigarette smoking.
It is a shame, though. Just last night this subject came up and the example was given that it would be practically impossible these days for a show to have even a somewhat sympathetic character smoking, like J. Jonah Jameson puffing on a cigar, unless maybe it's the episode where he gets jaw cancer.
If I recall correctly, there were a few characters in Looney Toones that smoked.
Speaking of legal advice, aren't I allowed to have MP3s for trial purposes, as long as I delete them within 24 hours?
Dude, I seriously love this one, it cracks me up. Legal advice straight from the offices of the prestigious (bubble-pipe smoking) lawyer Nelson Muntz, Esq. It's as if, what, there's some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle embodied in copyright law? I wonder what maroon on what BBS originally came up with this.
"Five second rule. That cookie just touched the ground. That cookie is still good!"
I guess the regular PlayStation2 wasn't challenging enough to program for... Seriously, do you run RenderMan on this thing? What would you do with the Graphics Synthesizers then? Will it support OpenGL 1.2? Would you be using the other 15 EE's as coprocessors then? I at least give credit to Sony for sticking with their ambitious plans for the EE, but come on, this seems really presumptious -- glomming 16 PS2's together and calling it macaroni.
What could possess them to put this system together? Sixteen-way multiplayer? Did Square order a bunch of these? Hmm. Wait, I've got it... they're demo machines for showing pre-release PS2 games on at E3 and ECTS! Now it all makes sense.:^)
They're Japanese. The Japanese say "CG" almost compulsively. It's one of those English buzzwords you see surrounded by katakana -- CG this, CG that. It's applied to anything from Toy Story to art hand-drawn in Photoshop (i.e. things we wouldn't normally call CGI in the Western world). And by the way, CGI has stood for Computer Generated Imagery since before Tim Berners-Lee set hands on a NeXT system.
I agree that region coding is really inconvenient.
The backup thing... I guess I'm not on the same wavelength on. I don't have backups for my books, records, CDs or CD-ROMs, VHS videos, LaserDiscs, Genesis or Dreamcast games, or DVDs, and don't see why I should bother making them. It seems to be more trouble to back them up than to replace one that did go bad (not that any of them have, knock on wood). Then again, I'm not one for life insurance either...
Anyway, region coding is a hassle but the current implementation is a good balance. For the majority of people who don't care, it encourages local distribution instead of middleman importers. For those who would much rather just have the same thing us Americans get, code-free players are now widely available if you don't mind picking a particular model or voiding your warranty (hey, there has to be some kind of trade-off). To me, that system is a reasonable compromise.
You have to wait ten minutes for e.g. Disney discs to even load while your television is turned off while the disc's ads play.
Yeah, I guess I haven't run into this, but it certainly does suck. My Apex seems to be able to skip through ads that don't allow going to the title screen (it has other issues, but that works). I've also never played the regular version of Tarzan, which seems to be the most notorious offender. But unskippable ads are a disc-by disc issue, just like bad encoding and lame menus.
I mean, it's a reasonable thing for the format to provide hard-to-skip "this film has been formatted to fit your TV" blurbs, the infamous FBI/public performance warnings, licensing screens, and the like. Creating a hard-to-use disc by abusing that feature is the studio's decision. I think per-disc quality issues are likely to take care of itself.
The region coding thing, as goldfish mentioned in another reply, is probably the most egregious feature of the DVD format itself. Myself, I guess I've been living with this in video games for years and made my peace with the fact (and it's certainly easier to get a region-free DVD player than a region-free PlayStation), plus I'm in Region 1. But that's what I'd call DVD's most inconvenient feature. So I bought a region-free player last year and have yet to watch any out-of-region movies on it.:)
The players and movies are cheaper and of higher quality than LaserDisc, and they allow very straightforward access and many special features. I just don't see how DVD is not consumer-friendly. Now, the format's not hacker-friendly, granted... oh wait, yes it is. Now Divx, that was consumer-hostile. Now it's gone. DVD, so to speak, rules. I'm waiting for another box full to arrive this week (thanks, DVD Talk).
Maybe cos as at this moment, MacOS X is still *vapour*.
Not at all, in fact I understand that it's been in wide beta testing for the last half-year. I assume you were being facetious, but I wouldn't want anyone to get the impression MacOS X, though a while off from release, is mere vapor -- after all, it seems Alias|Wavefront certainly has a functional enough copy...
So you need to back up 60 or 80 gigs? D-VHS tapes can hold about 44GB of data (so get two). Looks like all you'd need is to get a deck (about $700 these days for the best-in-category PV-HD1000), connect it with 1394, and dump out all that data onto tape ($15 a pop -- less than 50 cents a gigabyte). Plus, it's a VHS-compatible VCR. Nifty, yes/no?
One thing I've learned in the last year, and with BVHV in particular, is that the best course of action is to wait for the collector's edition. I waited on buying A Bug's Life and Tarzan and got the spectacular collector's editions instead, and will do the same for Toy Story/Toy Story 2. The extra few months waiting is no big deal to me personally, and I certainly don't mind missing the regular editions.
So I suggest you wait this one out. Mononoke has just the right market for a deluxe version. Remember that Kiki's Delivery Service was released in two versions (dubbed pan-and-scan and subbed widescreen). Even if a special edition isn't released, there's still the opportunity to get the Japanese disc when it comes out (hopefully with English subtitles?) And we've waited, what, five years now anyway? If you can, I recommend you wait it out and see what happens as the Japanese DVD release comes around.
Whatever you do, don't say it's a surprise if you hear about a North American special edition DVD of Mononoke later on!
I would say music copyrights aren't about money, they're about economics. It's a fundamental argument of scarcity: there is a limited amount of skill & talent in the world to produce good music/books/software, so it should be governed by economic means. That implies a marketplace with sound notions of property.
Sure, intellectual property law is all about economics, but I don't think it addresses skill and talent in a meaningful way. It's all about the product: encouraging production of intellectual property.
The principle is that you will produce far more copyrightable works and patentable inventions if you allow them to be copyrighted and patented. In addition, without such protection, there's a lot more secret, proprietary, and contractually limited ideas and inventions out there. I believe this turns out to be a good thing, especially in the long run. It promotes the progress of science and useful arts, etc.
However, the law has become increasingly more oriented toward protecting financial interests at the expense of the broader public interest, and so I agree with your call for IP reform.
However, I note that the strong IP protection that the US has afforded is a major reason that we lead the world in scientific, creative, and information endeavors. It's simply so much more profitable to produce and own intellectual property which can be sold around the world than to manufacture widgets. I would even say that the business interests behind modern national and international IP law have delivered not just huge profits for themselves, but have in fact enabled the new information economy.
It's hard to come up with a non-atrocious name for whatever "C#" is. "C sharp" just seems like another name that companies try to cram down the rest of the world's throat and that consumers just shake their head at. Maybe it should be pronounced "chhh" or "see comment."
Now that I think of it, why not get technical and use the famous Bell Labs technical term for #? Oh wait, that would make it Coctothorpe. Not much of a ring to it.
That is, I wonder when "For the Birds" will debut in theaters. It'll probably be one of those one-week-wonders I mentioned, considering that Pixar is not going to have a movie in theaters this year.
I think all you really have to do to get a short film qualified for an Academy award is to have a one-week theatrical run in LA. I went to see one of these earlier this year. It was a reel of 5 or 6 short subjects, one after the other. I was there mostly to see the Diablo II cinematic, which Blizzard (assumably) paid to include in the program.
Since I appear to be bubbling over with animation opinions today, I might as well say that the Diablo II "short" was OK, with some pretty fun stuff. The really impressive short (which wasn't nominated) turned out to be "Sentinelles," a CGI piece from a Québecois animator named Guy Lampron. It was a nice surprise which made the whole experience cool.
Hey, speaking of which, I wonder when the new short from Pixar, "For the Birds," is going to debut in the US. Looks like you can be pretty sure it's not going to be on pixar.com first!
So sue me, Bunny was probably the most blah animated short I saw from '98. The radiosity didn't seem to help it along much, and the motion blur was strangely off. It was technically quite accomplished, no doubt, but on the whole it was unsatisfying.
Now, what did get me excited was the story and expressiveness of the stunning "More" by Mark Osborne, which was also nominated that year. Then again, it's not about "death" and it's animated with clay, not global illumination equations, so maybe it's not quite as glamorous. =^)
I don't think Titan A.E. is in danger of winning many Academy Awards, unless they add categories for achievement in uneven CGI quality, stilted dialogue, poor voice direction, or "most stubbornly reliant on choppy rotoscoping." I kid, however, because despite these shortcomings it manages to be an enjoyable movie. Just don't hold out a lot of hope come Oscar time. =^)
That satisfies the first major qualification, a theatrical (not Internet) debut. However, you also need (basically to pay for) a theatrical exhibition in LA and New York for a week to qualify. In any case, the point is correct: getting a theater to show your film is not a Herculean effort compared to actually making a movie.
To address your second point, I do not believe the AMPAS has ever required MPAA certification -- they are very much separate organizations.
No, actually I believe you were thinking of Titan A.E., which showed digitally in New York (only) and which Fox made a big deal about delivering digitally to that theater from the West Coast.
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Sacrifice looked to be the most well-crafted game at E3 and a lot of fun. It's ludicrous to eulogize the RTS as "dead and buried" while praising the very fresh and playable Homeworld and eliding upcoming games that are actively reinventing the genre like Sacrifice, Black and White and Halo. Gamecenter's eulogy for the RTS convinces me only that they dislike some recent RTS games so much that they've become jaded on the subject.
Without copyright, those licenses wouldn't be needed.
Assuming copyright laws were repealed tomorrow, how would I make sure source follows binaries? Everything created would be in the public domain. Some person could distribute a version of Linux with all kinds of proprietary modifications they've made, but keep their modified source a secret. Since they didn't have Linux licensed to them under the GPL, this would be perfectly legit. I guess we could hire thugs to kick down this person's door and seize their source code modifications, so maybe we wouldn't technically need copyright licensing to enforce the terms of the GPL... =^) Anyway, this is why you see rms wanting to legislate enforced-sharing terms similar to the GNU GPL rather than just abolishing copyright.
Very common story. In the past few years 2 movies that I know of used it. Galaxey Quest, A Bugs life, and I know I have seen it before even that.
It's a comedic variant of the type of story seen in The Music Man.
There's just no way that an American cartoon produced today can portray casual smoking to a young audience. It's almost like having a character transform into his secret identity by drinking cleaning fluid and jumping into an abandoned refrigerator. An absurd smoking toothpick is far more justifiable than actual clear-as-day cigarette smoking.
It is a shame, though. Just last night this subject came up and the example was given that it would be practically impossible these days for a show to have even a somewhat sympathetic character smoking, like J. Jonah Jameson puffing on a cigar, unless maybe it's the episode where he gets jaw cancer.
If I recall correctly, there were a few characters in Looney Toones that smoked.
Actually, things went way beyond that in that era.
Dude, I seriously love this one, it cracks me up. Legal advice straight from the offices of the prestigious (bubble-pipe smoking) lawyer Nelson Muntz, Esq. It's as if, what, there's some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle embodied in copyright law? I wonder what maroon on what BBS originally came up with this.
"Five second rule. That cookie just touched the ground. That cookie is still good!"
Ohhhh, so that's why those two penguins are there when I boot up. I always thought it stood for Supports Multiple Penguins. Silly me.
What could possess them to put this system together? Sixteen-way multiplayer? Did Square order a bunch of these? Hmm. Wait, I've got it... they're demo machines for showing pre-release PS2 games on at E3 and ECTS! Now it all makes sense. :^)
They're Japanese. The Japanese say "CG" almost compulsively. It's one of those English buzzwords you see surrounded by katakana -- CG this, CG that. It's applied to anything from Toy Story to art hand-drawn in Photoshop (i.e. things we wouldn't normally call CGI in the Western world). And by the way, CGI has stood for Computer Generated Imagery since before Tim Berners-Lee set hands on a NeXT system.
The backup thing... I guess I'm not on the same wavelength on. I don't have backups for my books, records, CDs or CD-ROMs, VHS videos, LaserDiscs, Genesis or Dreamcast games, or DVDs, and don't see why I should bother making them. It seems to be more trouble to back them up than to replace one that did go bad (not that any of them have, knock on wood). Then again, I'm not one for life insurance either...
Anyway, region coding is a hassle but the current implementation is a good balance. For the majority of people who don't care, it encourages local distribution instead of middleman importers. For those who would much rather just have the same thing us Americans get, code-free players are now widely available if you don't mind picking a particular model or voiding your warranty (hey, there has to be some kind of trade-off). To me, that system is a reasonable compromise.
Yeah, I guess I haven't run into this, but it certainly does suck. My Apex seems to be able to skip through ads that don't allow going to the title screen (it has other issues, but that works). I've also never played the regular version of Tarzan, which seems to be the most notorious offender. But unskippable ads are a disc-by disc issue, just like bad encoding and lame menus.
I mean, it's a reasonable thing for the format to provide hard-to-skip "this film has been formatted to fit your TV" blurbs, the infamous FBI/public performance warnings, licensing screens, and the like. Creating a hard-to-use disc by abusing that feature is the studio's decision. I think per-disc quality issues are likely to take care of itself.
The region coding thing, as goldfish mentioned in another reply, is probably the most egregious feature of the DVD format itself. Myself, I guess I've been living with this in video games for years and made my peace with the fact (and it's certainly easier to get a region-free DVD player than a region-free PlayStation), plus I'm in Region 1. But that's what I'd call DVD's most inconvenient feature. So I bought a region-free player last year and have yet to watch any out-of-region movies on it. :)
The players and movies are cheaper and of higher quality than LaserDisc, and they allow very straightforward access and many special features. I just don't see how DVD is not consumer-friendly. Now, the format's not hacker-friendly, granted... oh wait, yes it is. Now Divx, that was consumer-hostile. Now it's gone. DVD, so to speak, rules. I'm waiting for another box full to arrive this week (thanks, DVD Talk).
Not at all, in fact I understand that it's been in wide beta testing for the last half-year. I assume you were being facetious, but I wouldn't want anyone to get the impression MacOS X, though a while off from release, is mere vapor -- after all, it seems Alias|Wavefront certainly has a functional enough copy...
So you need to back up 60 or 80 gigs? D-VHS tapes can hold about 44GB of data (so get two). Looks like all you'd need is to get a deck (about $700 these days for the best-in-category PV-HD1000), connect it with 1394, and dump out all that data onto tape ($15 a pop -- less than 50 cents a gigabyte). Plus, it's a VHS-compatible VCR. Nifty, yes/no?
Don't forget .int (international), the quintessential top-level domain.
So I suggest you wait this one out. Mononoke has just the right market for a deluxe version. Remember that Kiki's Delivery Service was released in two versions (dubbed pan-and-scan and subbed widescreen). Even if a special edition isn't released, there's still the opportunity to get the Japanese disc when it comes out (hopefully with English subtitles?) And we've waited, what, five years now anyway? If you can, I recommend you wait it out and see what happens as the Japanese DVD release comes around.
Whatever you do, don't say it's a surprise if you hear about a North American special edition DVD of Mononoke later on!
Sure, intellectual property law is all about economics, but I don't think it addresses skill and talent in a meaningful way. It's all about the product: encouraging production of intellectual property.
The principle is that you will produce far more copyrightable works and patentable inventions if you allow them to be copyrighted and patented. In addition, without such protection, there's a lot more secret, proprietary, and contractually limited ideas and inventions out there. I believe this turns out to be a good thing, especially in the long run. It promotes the progress of science and useful arts, etc.
However, the law has become increasingly more oriented toward protecting financial interests at the expense of the broader public interest, and so I agree with your call for IP reform.
However, I note that the strong IP protection that the US has afforded is a major reason that we lead the world in scientific, creative, and information endeavors. It's simply so much more profitable to produce and own intellectual property which can be sold around the world than to manufacture widgets. I would even say that the business interests behind modern national and international IP law have delivered not just huge profits for themselves, but have in fact enabled the new information economy.
Hey, that was cool, thanks. By the way, VFXPro has an article about the many visual effects of Titan AE.
Now that I think of it, why not get technical and use the famous Bell Labs technical term for #? Oh wait, that would make it Coctothorpe. Not much of a ring to it.
That is, I wonder when "For the Birds" will debut in theaters. It'll probably be one of those one-week-wonders I mentioned, considering that Pixar is not going to have a movie in theaters this year.
Since I appear to be bubbling over with animation opinions today, I might as well say that the Diablo II "short" was OK, with some pretty fun stuff. The really impressive short (which wasn't nominated) turned out to be "Sentinelles," a CGI piece from a Québecois animator named Guy Lampron. It was a nice surprise which made the whole experience cool.
Hey, speaking of which, I wonder when the new short from Pixar, "For the Birds," is going to debut in the US. Looks like you can be pretty sure it's not going to be on pixar.com first!
Now, what did get me excited was the story and expressiveness of the stunning "More" by Mark Osborne, which was also nominated that year. Then again, it's not about "death" and it's animated with clay, not global illumination equations, so maybe it's not quite as glamorous. =^)
I don't think Titan A.E. is in danger of winning many Academy Awards, unless they add categories for achievement in uneven CGI quality, stilted dialogue, poor voice direction, or "most stubbornly reliant on choppy rotoscoping." I kid, however, because despite these shortcomings it manages to be an enjoyable movie. Just don't hold out a lot of hope come Oscar time. =^)
To address your second point, I do not believe the AMPAS has ever required MPAA certification -- they are very much separate organizations.
No, actually I believe you were thinking of Titan A.E., which showed digitally in New York (only) and which Fox made a big deal about delivering digitally to that theater from the West Coast.
And regarding the title -- how could a net film be a "film" anyhow? Would being spooled from a DAT drive count?