There is an ebook reader for GBA called Gameboy Advance Ebook that's already pretty good. You can make an ebook out of any text file you have and easily set chapter marks. It even saves your place when you turn it off. The next version promises subpixel rendering and support for various fonts.
It's not the best solution in the world with the GBA screen being so small, but I've read a couple of books on it and it's a nice inexpensive solution. You have to have a flash cart to transfer it to the GBA though, of course.
This is exactly the same thing that my uncle said when I told him about some of these games (he served during Viet Nam, but never in combat).
I can certainly understand that sentiment, but I think it's understood that any kind of game like this doesn't "make you feel like you were there". Take the Half-Life mod "Day of Defeat". The weapon characterisics are realistic, the sounds the guns make, the environment, etc, but I don't think anyone says, "No, I didn't fight in WWII, but I played DoD, so I know what it was like for those guys.".
Is it disrespectful? Perhaps. Making a game out of a tragedy seems rather crass, but for the people making and playing it it was so long ago that it seems like the ancient past, even though there are still vets living today. But I don't think anyone playing it believes it simulates what the vets went through.
Here in Houston it's popular for rap artists to slow their stuff down by 50% or more, a practice made popular by the late DJ Screw. I understand it sounds great when you've been drinking cough syrup all day (no I'm not kidding).
In the CMYK standard printing process, the ink markings superimpose, so grays are achieved with different sizes of black dots, and red is obtained by superimposing yellow (-blue) and magenta (-green). This means that instead of being adjacent as in the picture, the cells would have to be stacked.
I worked in a pre-press shop for a couple of years, so I've worked with printing on a very low level. The color dots don't need to be directly stacked on one another to achieve a certain color. In fact each color is printed at a seperate angle so the dots are rarely directly on top of one another
Take a magnifying glass to your sunday comics and you can see that the black dots are at one angle (usually straight up and down) and each other color is rotated slightly. Even at relatively large dot sizes (72 dpi) the dots seem to merge together to form whatever color they're looking for.
Since the dots are arranged in groups of four in this paper you could achieve the same result, except it may look a bit more like a computer image (made up of distinct pixels in a grid) as opposed to a magazine picture (pixels for each color are rotated). It also sounds like they can make the dots whatever size they want, which is how it is done in printing:
The larger the applied voltage, the more the ink retracts. The ink is therefore capable of a continuous grey scale, not just of a two-tone contrast.
And even if the dots were stacked directly on top of each other it would still work. The ink is spread so thin that it's transparent, that's why yellow on top of magenta shows as red. So if they could stack it somehow it would show correctly (assuming the ink they use is like regular ink in that way).
I think he does explain that. His point seems to be that all that amazing stuff that Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov wrote about is either a reality or not worth the bother even though we could do it. We could make flying cars (someone already has), but they're not useful.
We understand, too, that everything we haven't made yet is so far in the future it's not interesting in the same way it was in the 50's. Artificial intelligence was exciting in the 50's because a robotic house maid was right around the corner. Now we know how incredibly difficult the problem is, and that it's not likely to be solved within our lifetime, so it's less exciting.
It's odd, I never really understood that science fiction got started for a reason (the industrial revolution?), and that one day it would basically end. Really, if you're living in a Star Trek world reading about starships wouldn't be any great novelty or mental exercise. I guess we're close enough to that reality now that less people are excited by sci-fi writers' imaginings.
I think the Stupid Movie Physics site makes a good point about this:
There's an old axiom in fiction writing which says it's okay to ask a reader to believe the impossible but not the improbable. For example, it's okay to say that a maniac has activated an antimatter bomb in the wall safe, but it's not okay to say that someone miraculously guessed the right combination on the first try.
This makes sense. Obviously if I'm watching a movie about a robot that comes from the future I'm willing to suspend some disbelief and enjoy it. If the robot suddenly built a railgun out of common household products I would be annoyed at the impossibility of it.
When you go to a play you agree to believe that those people on stage are actually sitting around the dinner table talking or whatever and ignore that they're actors on a stage. You don't agree that they can hack into the FBI in 30 seconds. Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean you throw your brain out the window, it means that you are willing to accept certain basic fictions so the story can be told.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of BSA headquarters there's a group of people who have this all planned out.
BSA Drone #1: Okay, first year we'll say piracy dropped a small amount thanks to our efforts. This will convince the companies and congress that our efforts are successful, but we need more help.
BSA Drone #2: Right, then during year 2 we'll get some more laws passed and get people used to more extrememe copy pretection.
BSA Drone #1: Right! They bought into the XP activation, now we can roll out the next step.
BSA Drone #2: Which is...?
BSA Drone #1: Tying activation to a bank account! It's the only way to be sure they're not pirates! Then when we have that in place we'll report a drop of 5% and complain loudly about OSS making it impossible to do audits.
BSA Drone #2: So stage 3 is requiring all government and big business customers to go 100% closed source. Brilliant!
Indie companies are still going to get ripped off they just get ripped of by an electronic distributor instead of an offline one.
Bands will still get very little cash for their effort.
Do you have any facts to back that up, or are you just trying to sell your own micropayment system?
From the article:
Poneman said the decision to join the iTunes store would come down to the compensation package that Apple is offering, which he has not yet seen.
And:
But, he cautioned, were Sub Pop to join iTunes, the inclusion of music from many of the signature bands on the label's roster would have to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
So why would they get screwed if each band can opt-in if they want? At this point we have no idea what deal Apple is giving them, but since this is pure distribution without any physical costs associated with it I would imagine it's a heck of a lot better than other distributors.
Micropayments with the vast majority going to the artists would eleviate these problems.
Micropayments may work for the top 1% of a given field (web comics, online music), but I've never heard of anyone making a decent living off of it, and certainly not the average group.
Everything by Vonnegut is good. Some are less good (like Slapstick and Jailbird), but they're all worth reading.
For first-timers I'd recommend Slaughterhouse 5, Cat's Cradle, and Player Piano in that order. Definately not Breakfast of Champions or Timequake unless you're familiar with his writing, they won't make much sense.
If you like short stories he's got some great collections. "Welcome to the Monkey House" for geeky sci-fi stuff, Bagombo Snuff Box for good old fasion short stories.
I just wish he was 50 years younger so he could keep writing. He proved to me that "literature" could be fun to read and funny at the same time it was "serious literature". Mark Twain was his predecessor and (I think) Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) is his spiritual succesor.
Apologies to Mr. Vonnegut for reproducing his work here, but maybe it'll encourage some people to read it:
"When you think about it, boys,' he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- join in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing, and loved ones from combining with oxygen. I tell you boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City."
...
"I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day, and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do any kind of work the Russians have have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? The volunteer firemen, that's who."
Actaully it's NOT by Vonnegut. Some fan/author asked permission to write it (as Vonnegut mentioned "Venus on the Half Shell" as a story Trout wrote in one of his books). I think Vonnegut regertted it later, as it wasn't a very good book, but I haven't read it.
I'm a video editor and if you think consumer format wars are a pain, take a look at all the TV stations across the country so unsure of what the next "standard" will be that they aren't switching to anything.
To answer your question 99% of TV stations use BetaSP for recording and editing. I was rather young when the Betamax/VHS wars were going on, but I don't think professional Beta decks were ever the same as consumer Betamax. The pros picked Beta because it was better, period. Watching a BetaSP tape is just about as good as a DVD on a standard TV.
The coming formats will prolly be either DigiBeta or DVCAM, but there's still a couple of flavors of MiniDV and ProHi8. And that doesn't even get into HD recording which is still up in the air. We don't do any HD work, but the only formats I know of for it are D-VHS and HDCAM.
Some stations actually tried to switch to S-VHS a while ago and got burned because of it's nasty generation loss when editing.
But as far as BetaSP goes, I'm 90% sure Sony is still making the decks. We bought ours about a year ago brand new. I've never even seen a Betamax tape so I don't know if it's compatible with BetaSP, but every TV station in the country would be in serious trouble if Sony stopped making BetaSP decks.
Just to stay on topic a bit here, we're a small shop and we burn all of our archives to DVD-R Data (we edit in Final Cut Pro on a Mac). We picked that standard cause it came with the Mac, basically. But I've been happy with it. If a clients wants a DVD video of a project we just burn it in iDVD and we haven't had any problems (except the guy who wanted to play it in his old PC).
Frankly I would like to see some kind of optical media take over, but that's just cause I always feel like I'm back in the stone age at the end of a project. Dump the tape to the computer, do all your non-linear editing, tweak graphics, re-edit parts with NO generation loss, then go back to the 20th century and record it real-time to a strip of magnetic tape. Ideally I could just FTP the finished file to the TV station, but at the rate they're adopting new technology it'll be a while.
What are you talking about? I checked out his (Samir Gupta's) history and it seems like everything he's ever posted here has been well-written and thoughtful
Yes, it does seem that way, but if you look a little deeper you'll see that he freely makes up facts in order to sound that way. Perhaps troll isn't the right word. Can you think of a word for a guy who has been claiming to work for Sega , and who has been annoying users since at least 1994?
True, he does generate discussion, but he generates more noise by constantly lying
I've been rather unimpressed with any kind of acting in games. Remember James Earl Jones in Command & Conquer? It was embarassing to watch. Then again, the C&C cut-scenes are in need of competent writers. Go pick up an old copy of Dune 2000 and you can see just how lame the Dune story can be.
But there's a difference between selling your likeness and maybe a little voice work as opposed to actually acting in a video game. I don't think any actors take that medium very seriously. And the ones that do aren't any good. Would the story in Starcraft have seemed as cool if it was Kerrigan was played by a big-breasted, no talent babe with rubber tentacles on her head?
I personally don't see the appeal of a game with a 3D likeness of a famous actor. The Matrix game sounds neat, but getting to play as Keanu "Whoa" Reeves wouldn't entice me to buy the game. Neither would looking at a lo-poly model of a beautiful actress.
This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.
The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.
As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."
There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:
1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.
2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.
I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.
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I would second this. I don't know what software (if your editing digially) you're using, but I do my work in Final Cut Pro, and if you just dump an mp3 onto the timeline it sounds very nasty. Pops, skips, noise, it's totally useless. But if I convert it to a quicktime file in sounds perfectly smooth.
We have a voice over talent (who I've never met face to face) who emails all her VO work to us as mp3 files. We just convert to quicktime and it's fine. If the file sounds worse in your project than it does just playing it on your computer I'd suspect the problem is incompatibility between the mp3 and your editing software, not the file itself.
I repectfully disagree with some of your points here.
Snow Crash was originally written as a storyline for a comic/graphic novel.
You're right about that, I had forgotten. But it seemed your implication was that it was JUST a "comic book novel", which I disagree with.
And you're complaining about Gibson having bad endings? Gibson endings are somewhat cryptic...something big and groundbreaking has happened...a paradigm shift, you could say. But the full effect of that shift simply hasn't been realized yet. But what's important is the idea that no matter how similar everything looks, everything has changed. Though cryptic, there IS an ending.
Yes, I am complaining about Gibson's endings. I agree that Stephenson's endings can leave something to be desired (Diamond Age, The Big U), but that doesn't make Gibson's endings any better. It doesn't seem to me that a cryptic ending is any better than a hasty one. I guess I find Gibson's endings so frustrating because he seems to be leading up to something, bringing all the different stories together, then something random happens and the story's over.
Let's take All Tomorrow's Parties as an example. I think I'm remembering correctly that the ending had the holographic woman "faxing" herself to all the convienence stores that had just installed the "physical fax" machines or whatever they were called. Okay, ignoring the actual possilbility of this, how does this relate to the rest of the story? I admit my memory is fuzzy about the details of the book, but it seemed unrelated to the rest of the story despite being an event that would likely change the world.
Compare that with the ending of Snow Crash: Hiro prevents the distribution of the virus and makes a name for himself in computer security, solving the two major problems in the book (The spread of the virus and Hiro's unemployment). Sure it's handed to you on a plate, unlike Gibson's ending, but the story has an ending instead of just another event that could have happened in the middle of the book.
Yes, Stephenson knows more about how thngs work. Big deal. If I intend to learn about cryptography, I'll read a cryptography text.
I don't read Stephenson to learn about technology, I enjoy it because it's technically accurate. Watch a movie that involves something you know a lot about, whether it's WWII or computers or law, if they get the details wrong it's very hard to enjoy it or take it seriously. If Saving Private Ryan had all the soldiers armed with AK-47s it would be very distracting and downright painful for WWII buffs. There's a limit to how much inaccuracy you can take before it becomes annoying.
Stephenson tries to write a novel for enjoyment and then crams in some satire and technology, but in the end, it's a story for fun. Gibson's writing is instead to make you think about ideas.
I find quite the opposite. Stephenson writes about ideas and makes it fun, while Gibson writes about ideas and makes it (in my opinion) purposefully abstruse in order to seem more serious and possibly to hide is lack of understanding about real technology. This idea a novel must be difficult in order to be "serious" is one of the main things Vonnegut was fighting against.
Nothing I've read about by Stephenson is serious. It's humor for humor's sake, rather than for the sake of getting a point across.
There are a lot of very interesting serious ideas at the heart of Stephenson's books. Government control of cryptography, the implications of a true virtual reality, nanotechnology, electronic currency, etc. I think these are the reasons he writes the stories, then puts them in an entertaining setting.
I'm sure you disagree, but that's my take on it. For the record, I enjoyed Snow Crash a lot
I do disagree, but I can see your point of view. I don't know if this is a generational thing or just a difference of our outlook on life, but it's very easy for me to take absurdist stories seriously. That's one of the reasons I like Heller and Vonnegut. Catch-22 was completely ridiculous in the way characters behaved, and very fun to read but it's easy to understand what he's really talking about. I like Chuck Palahniuk for the same reason. I rank Fight Club with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5.
I enjoyed Gibson's novels (to a degree) when I read them, but I wouldn't recommend them. But I certainly don't believe he's a bad author or that he's some kind of phony. I just didn't click with him. Same with Tolkien, I'm the kind of geek that likes sci-fi and fantasy, and the idea of a really deep fantasy series appeals to me, but I just find something lacking in the delivery, buit 50 million geeks can't be wrong and I'm not gonna say they are.
The way I see it Gibson is Thomas Pynchon and Stephenson is Kurt Vonnegut.
I think they come from very different schools of writing. Gibson believes in complex language and leaving lots of things unsaid, whereas Stephenson makes it very clear what's happening and what his characters are feeling.
Personally I think the Vonnegut style is more difficult to write in a "serious novel" (as opposed to thriller novels). I understand that lots of people like obfuscated stories, but that doesn't mean they're better (or worse), and calling Stephenson's novels comic books is rather condescending.
Crytonomicon did ramble on a bit, but it was interesting the whole way through. I haven't read Pattern Recognition, but I've read the rest of Gibson's books. I loved Neuromancer when I read it in high school, but as I got older and read the rest of his stuff I got annoyed at most of his style. I really miss the technical accuracy of Stephenson, Gibson leaves so much unsaid it seems like he knows the story but isn't telling us, and his endings always have some big event that's supposed to wrap things up but seems completely unrelated to the rest of the story and leaves you thinking "...well, ok. I guess that's the end."
You could obviously say that I'm too dumb to understand his style, and that's certainly possible, although I don't consider myself that dense. I read lots of books by lots of authors. I read all his books because I really wanted to like him, but it was so hard to. Then I read Stephenson and thought, "this is what I was looking for." Snow Crash was purposefully over the top ("Hiro Protagaonist"? Come on), but just because a novel has comedy in it doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously. Is Catch-22 just a silly comic novel? Breakfast of Champions? Huckleberry Finn?
I know I'm ranting, but I had a writing teacher in college who thought Pynchon-style stories were the ultimate in writing. I find that opinion quite arrogant. You can tell by my handle I'm a Vonnegut fan.
Well, #1: clearly you're not american, or you would see that as a sort-of-joke:)
Clear Channel doesn't own ALL the radio stations in America, but they do own about 1200 stations, that's 24 stations per state. They often own several stations per city in major markets. They are the main company responsible for the homogenous nature of radio in America. They operate by defining a single playlist for ALL their stations across America, thus you hear the same 40 songs being played all day on most of the popular stations across the country.
#2: They do indeed have too many commercials and play the same songs over and over, but they have taught the teeny boppers that that is how radio should be. If they put a song on their playlist it's gonna make money, cause everyone (who listens to radio) is gonna hear it 5000 times until they believe that it's good music.
Basically Clear Channel is to the pop music business what Microsoft is to OSes. Lots of people don't like them, but they're gigantic and there's not much other choice.
Despite a lot of the stories and speculation on here I've met mostly nice people in game. Yes, there are kiddies who in it for the excitement of trading and the quest for the deck that will destroy all opponent (like this deck ).
But there are a lot more people who are civilized and friendly. If you don't want to spend gobs of money just join (or create) a guild where money isn't the guiding force. You can create "buddy lists" (although I really hate that name) of people who are fun to play against, and block any kiddies you come across.
I've been playing for a couple of weeks (I got in on the tail end of the beta), and I have only met one jerk. I said hi, he said, "you already sound like a fag", so I blocked him and resigned the game. If everyone does this these people will find it hard to find an oponnent.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the best solution in the world with the GBA screen being so small, but I've read a couple of books on it and it's a nice inexpensive solution. You have to have a flash cart to transfer it to the GBA though, of course.
This is exactly the same thing that my uncle said when I told him about some of these games (he served during Viet Nam, but never in combat).
I can certainly understand that sentiment, but I think it's understood that any kind of game like this doesn't "make you feel like you were there". Take the Half-Life mod "Day of Defeat". The weapon characterisics are realistic, the sounds the guns make, the environment, etc, but I don't think anyone says, "No, I didn't fight in WWII, but I played DoD, so I know what it was like for those guys.".
Is it disrespectful? Perhaps. Making a game out of a tragedy seems rather crass, but for the people making and playing it it was so long ago that it seems like the ancient past, even though there are still vets living today. But I don't think anyone playing it believes it simulates what the vets went through.
Trent Reznor and DJ Screw perhaps ;)
Here in Houston it's popular for rap artists to slow their stuff down by 50% or more, a practice made popular by the late DJ Screw. I understand it sounds great when you've been drinking cough syrup all day (no I'm not kidding).
Only it doesn't sound richer, just slower...
Here's an image showing a close-up of a CMYK image.
(And if I remember correctly black is actually printed at 45 degrees, not straight up and down like I said)
I worked in a pre-press shop for a couple of years, so I've worked with printing on a very low level. The color dots don't need to be directly stacked on one another to achieve a certain color. In fact each color is printed at a seperate angle so the dots are rarely directly on top of one another
Take a magnifying glass to your sunday comics and you can see that the black dots are at one angle (usually straight up and down) and each other color is rotated slightly. Even at relatively large dot sizes (72 dpi) the dots seem to merge together to form whatever color they're looking for.
Since the dots are arranged in groups of four in this paper you could achieve the same result, except it may look a bit more like a computer image (made up of distinct pixels in a grid) as opposed to a magazine picture (pixels for each color are rotated). It also sounds like they can make the dots whatever size they want, which is how it is done in printing:
The larger the applied voltage, the more the ink retracts. The ink is therefore capable of a continuous grey scale, not just of a two-tone contrast.
And even if the dots were stacked directly on top of each other it would still work. The ink is spread so thin that it's transparent, that's why yellow on top of magenta shows as red. So if they could stack it somehow it would show correctly (assuming the ink they use is like regular ink in that way).
I think he does explain that. His point seems to be that all that amazing stuff that Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov wrote about is either a reality or not worth the bother even though we could do it. We could make flying cars (someone already has), but they're not useful.
We understand, too, that everything we haven't made yet is so far in the future it's not interesting in the same way it was in the 50's. Artificial intelligence was exciting in the 50's because a robotic house maid was right around the corner. Now we know how incredibly difficult the problem is, and that it's not likely to be solved within our lifetime, so it's less exciting.
It's odd, I never really understood that science fiction got started for a reason (the industrial revolution?), and that one day it would basically end. Really, if you're living in a Star Trek world reading about starships wouldn't be any great novelty or mental exercise. I guess we're close enough to that reality now that less people are excited by sci-fi writers' imaginings.
But I'm still gonna pick up Heinlein's new book.
There's an old axiom in fiction writing which says it's okay to ask a reader to believe the impossible but not the improbable. For example, it's okay to say that a maniac has activated an antimatter bomb in the wall safe, but it's not okay to say that someone miraculously guessed the right combination on the first try.
This makes sense. Obviously if I'm watching a movie about a robot that comes from the future I'm willing to suspend some disbelief and enjoy it. If the robot suddenly built a railgun out of common household products I would be annoyed at the impossibility of it.
When you go to a play you agree to believe that those people on stage are actually sitting around the dinner table talking or whatever and ignore that they're actors on a stage. You don't agree that they can hack into the FBI in 30 seconds. Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean you throw your brain out the window, it means that you are willing to accept certain basic fictions so the story can be told.
This is a pointless post, but I found this funny:
"A campus map is available for those of you who wish to visit. Guided tours are irrelevant. Parking is futile. You will be assimilated."
Remminds me of my time at the University of Texas...
With these methodologies you have to wonder...
Here's some conspiracy thoughts:
Somewhere deep in the bowels of BSA headquarters there's a group of people who have this all planned out.
BSA Drone #1: Okay, first year we'll say piracy dropped a small amount thanks to our efforts. This will convince the companies and congress that our efforts are successful, but we need more help.
BSA Drone #2: Right, then during year 2 we'll get some more laws passed and get people used to more extrememe copy pretection.
BSA Drone #1: Right! They bought into the XP activation, now we can roll out the next step.
BSA Drone #2: Which is...?
BSA Drone #1: Tying activation to a bank account! It's the only way to be sure they're not pirates! Then when we have that in place we'll report a drop of 5% and complain loudly about OSS making it impossible to do audits.
BSA Drone #2: So stage 3 is requiring all government and big business customers to go 100% closed source. Brilliant!
BSA Drone #1: Let's get a taco.
Bands will still get very little cash for their effort.
Do you have any facts to back that up, or are you just trying to sell your own micropayment system?
From the article:
Poneman said the decision to join the iTunes store would come down to the compensation package that Apple is offering, which he has not yet seen.
And:
But, he cautioned, were Sub Pop to join iTunes, the inclusion of music from many of the signature bands on the label's roster would have to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
So why would they get screwed if each band can opt-in if they want? At this point we have no idea what deal Apple is giving them, but since this is pure distribution without any physical costs associated with it I would imagine it's a heck of a lot better than other distributors.
Micropayments with the vast majority going to the artists would eleviate these problems.
Micropayments may work for the top 1% of a given field (web comics, online music), but I've never heard of anyone making a decent living off of it, and certainly not the average group.
Everything by Vonnegut is good. Some are less good (like Slapstick and Jailbird), but they're all worth reading.
For first-timers I'd recommend Slaughterhouse 5, Cat's Cradle, and Player Piano in that order. Definately not Breakfast of Champions or Timequake unless you're familiar with his writing, they won't make much sense.
If you like short stories he's got some great collections. "Welcome to the Monkey House" for geeky sci-fi stuff, Bagombo Snuff Box for good old fasion short stories.
I just wish he was 50 years younger so he could keep writing. He proved to me that "literature" could be fun to read and funny at the same time it was "serious literature". Mark Twain was his predecessor and (I think) Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) is his spiritual succesor.
"When you think about it, boys,' he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers -- join in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing, and loved ones from combining with oxygen. I tell you boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City."
"I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day, and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do any kind of work the Russians have have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? The volunteer firemen, that's who."
--"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" Kurt Vonnegut
Actaully it's NOT by Vonnegut. Some fan/author asked permission to write it (as Vonnegut mentioned "Venus on the Half Shell" as a story Trout wrote in one of his books). I think Vonnegut regertted it later, as it wasn't a very good book, but I haven't read it.
I'm a video editor and if you think consumer format wars are a pain, take a look at all the TV stations across the country so unsure of what the next "standard" will be that they aren't switching to anything.
To answer your question 99% of TV stations use BetaSP for recording and editing. I was rather young when the Betamax/VHS wars were going on, but I don't think professional Beta decks were ever the same as consumer Betamax. The pros picked Beta because it was better, period. Watching a BetaSP tape is just about as good as a DVD on a standard TV.
The coming formats will prolly be either DigiBeta or DVCAM, but there's still a couple of flavors of MiniDV and ProHi8. And that doesn't even get into HD recording which is still up in the air. We don't do any HD work, but the only formats I know of for it are D-VHS and HDCAM.
Some stations actually tried to switch to S-VHS a while ago and got burned because of it's nasty generation loss when editing.
But as far as BetaSP goes, I'm 90% sure Sony is still making the decks. We bought ours about a year ago brand new. I've never even seen a Betamax tape so I don't know if it's compatible with BetaSP, but every TV station in the country would be in serious trouble if Sony stopped making BetaSP decks.
Just to stay on topic a bit here, we're a small shop and we burn all of our archives to DVD-R Data (we edit in Final Cut Pro on a Mac). We picked that standard cause it came with the Mac, basically. But I've been happy with it. If a clients wants a DVD video of a project we just burn it in iDVD and we haven't had any problems (except the guy who wanted to play it in his old PC).
Frankly I would like to see some kind of optical media take over, but that's just cause I always feel like I'm back in the stone age at the end of a project. Dump the tape to the computer, do all your non-linear editing, tweak graphics, re-edit parts with NO generation loss, then go back to the 20th century and record it real-time to a strip of magnetic tape. Ideally I could just FTP the finished file to the TV station, but at the rate they're adopting new technology it'll be a while.
What are you talking about? I checked out his (Samir Gupta's) history and it seems like everything he's ever posted here has been well-written and thoughtful
Yes, it does seem that way, but if you look a little deeper you'll see that he freely makes up facts in order to sound that way. Perhaps troll isn't the right word. Can you think of a word for a guy who has been claiming to work for Sega , and who has been annoying users since at least 1994?
True, he does generate discussion, but he generates more noise by constantly lying
Evidence of lies: Holo-Genesis, Gameboy porn, Super Marx Brothers, Lying about his degree.
Thanks to tigress for the info.
I've been rather unimpressed with any kind of acting in games. Remember James Earl Jones in Command & Conquer? It was embarassing to watch. Then again, the C&C cut-scenes are in need of competent writers. Go pick up an old copy of Dune 2000 and you can see just how lame the Dune story can be.
But there's a difference between selling your likeness and maybe a little voice work as opposed to actually acting in a video game. I don't think any actors take that medium very seriously. And the ones that do aren't any good. Would the story in Starcraft have seemed as cool if it was Kerrigan was played by a big-breasted, no talent babe with rubber tentacles on her head?
I personally don't see the appeal of a game with a 3D likeness of a famous actor. The Matrix game sounds neat, but getting to play as Keanu "Whoa" Reeves wouldn't entice me to buy the game. Neither would looking at a lo-poly model of a beautiful actress.
Just FYI folks, this guy is a troll. Check out his posting history. Mod accordingly.
This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.
The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.
As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."
There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:
1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.
2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.
I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.
I would second this. I don't know what software (if your editing digially) you're using, but I do my work in Final Cut Pro, and if you just dump an mp3 onto the timeline it sounds very nasty. Pops, skips, noise, it's totally useless. But if I convert it to a quicktime file in sounds perfectly smooth.
We have a voice over talent (who I've never met face to face) who emails all her VO work to us as mp3 files. We just convert to quicktime and it's fine. If the file sounds worse in your project than it does just playing it on your computer I'd suspect the problem is incompatibility between the mp3 and your editing software, not the file itself.
I repectfully disagree with some of your points here.
Snow Crash was originally written as a storyline for a comic/graphic novel.
You're right about that, I had forgotten. But it seemed your implication was that it was JUST a "comic book novel", which I disagree with.
And you're complaining about Gibson having bad endings? Gibson endings are somewhat cryptic...something big and groundbreaking has happened...a paradigm shift, you could say. But the full effect of that shift simply hasn't been realized yet. But what's important is the idea that no matter how similar everything looks, everything has changed. Though cryptic, there IS an ending.
Yes, I am complaining about Gibson's endings. I agree that Stephenson's endings can leave something to be desired (Diamond Age, The Big U), but that doesn't make Gibson's endings any better. It doesn't seem to me that a cryptic ending is any better than a hasty one. I guess I find Gibson's endings so frustrating because he seems to be leading up to something, bringing all the different stories together, then something random happens and the story's over.
Let's take All Tomorrow's Parties as an example. I think I'm remembering correctly that the ending had the holographic woman "faxing" herself to all the convienence stores that had just installed the "physical fax" machines or whatever they were called. Okay, ignoring the actual possilbility of this, how does this relate to the rest of the story? I admit my memory is fuzzy about the details of the book, but it seemed unrelated to the rest of the story despite being an event that would likely change the world.
Compare that with the ending of Snow Crash: Hiro prevents the distribution of the virus and makes a name for himself in computer security, solving the two major problems in the book (The spread of the virus and Hiro's unemployment). Sure it's handed to you on a plate, unlike Gibson's ending, but the story has an ending instead of just another event that could have happened in the middle of the book.
Yes, Stephenson knows more about how thngs work. Big deal. If I intend to learn about cryptography, I'll read a cryptography text.
I don't read Stephenson to learn about technology, I enjoy it because it's technically accurate. Watch a movie that involves something you know a lot about, whether it's WWII or computers or law, if they get the details wrong it's very hard to enjoy it or take it seriously. If Saving Private Ryan had all the soldiers armed with AK-47s it would be very distracting and downright painful for WWII buffs. There's a limit to how much inaccuracy you can take before it becomes annoying.
Stephenson tries to write a novel for enjoyment and then crams in some satire and technology, but in the end, it's a story for fun. Gibson's writing is instead to make you think about ideas.
I find quite the opposite. Stephenson writes about ideas and makes it fun, while Gibson writes about ideas and makes it (in my opinion) purposefully abstruse in order to seem more serious and possibly to hide is lack of understanding about real technology. This idea a novel must be difficult in order to be "serious" is one of the main things Vonnegut was fighting against.
Nothing I've read about by Stephenson is serious. It's humor for humor's sake, rather than for the sake of getting a point across.
There are a lot of very interesting serious ideas at the heart of Stephenson's books. Government control of cryptography, the implications of a true virtual reality, nanotechnology, electronic currency, etc. I think these are the reasons he writes the stories, then puts them in an entertaining setting.
I'm sure you disagree, but that's my take on it. For the record, I enjoyed Snow Crash a lot
I do disagree, but I can see your point of view. I don't know if this is a generational thing or just a difference of our outlook on life, but it's very easy for me to take absurdist stories seriously. That's one of the reasons I like Heller and Vonnegut. Catch-22 was completely ridiculous in the way characters behaved, and very fun to read but it's easy to understand what he's really talking about. I like Chuck Palahniuk for the same reason. I rank Fight Club with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5.
I enjoyed Gibson's novels (to a degree) when I read them, but I wouldn't recommend them. But I certainly don't believe he's a bad author or that he's some kind of phony. I just didn't click with him. Same with Tolkien, I'm the kind of geek that likes sci-fi and fantasy, and the idea of a really deep fantasy series appeals to me, but I just find something lacking in the delivery, buit 50 million geeks can't be wrong and I'm not gonna say they are.
The way I see it Gibson is Thomas Pynchon and Stephenson is Kurt Vonnegut.
I think they come from very different schools of writing. Gibson believes in complex language and leaving lots of things unsaid, whereas Stephenson makes it very clear what's happening and what his characters are feeling.
Personally I think the Vonnegut style is more difficult to write in a "serious novel" (as opposed to thriller novels). I understand that lots of people like obfuscated stories, but that doesn't mean they're better (or worse), and calling Stephenson's novels comic books is rather condescending.
Crytonomicon did ramble on a bit, but it was interesting the whole way through. I haven't read Pattern Recognition, but I've read the rest of Gibson's books. I loved Neuromancer when I read it in high school, but as I got older and read the rest of his stuff I got annoyed at most of his style. I really miss the technical accuracy of Stephenson, Gibson leaves so much unsaid it seems like he knows the story but isn't telling us, and his endings always have some big event that's supposed to wrap things up but seems completely unrelated to the rest of the story and leaves you thinking "...well, ok. I guess that's the end."
You could obviously say that I'm too dumb to understand his style, and that's certainly possible, although I don't consider myself that dense. I read lots of books by lots of authors. I read all his books because I really wanted to like him, but it was so hard to. Then I read Stephenson and thought, "this is what I was looking for." Snow Crash was purposefully over the top ("Hiro Protagaonist"? Come on), but just because a novel has comedy in it doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously. Is Catch-22 just a silly comic novel? Breakfast of Champions? Huckleberry Finn?
I know I'm ranting, but I had a writing teacher in college who thought Pynchon-style stories were the ultimate in writing. I find that opinion quite arrogant. You can tell by my handle I'm a Vonnegut fan.
Well, #1: clearly you're not american, or you would see that as a sort-of-joke :)
Clear Channel doesn't own ALL the radio stations in America, but they do own about 1200 stations, that's 24 stations per state. They often own several stations per city in major markets. They are the main company responsible for the homogenous nature of radio in America. They operate by defining a single playlist for ALL their stations across America, thus you hear the same 40 songs being played all day on most of the popular stations across the country.
#2: They do indeed have too many commercials and play the same songs over and over, but they have taught the teeny boppers that that is how radio should be. If they put a song on their playlist it's gonna make money, cause everyone (who listens to radio) is gonna hear it 5000 times until they believe that it's good music.
Basically Clear Channel is to the pop music business what Microsoft is to OSes. Lots of people don't like them, but they're gigantic and there's not much other choice.
Once again, the onion teaches us all a valuable lesson.
Despite a lot of the stories and speculation on here I've met mostly nice people in game. Yes, there are kiddies who in it for the excitement of trading and the quest for the deck that will destroy all opponent (like this deck ).
But there are a lot more people who are civilized and friendly. If you don't want to spend gobs of money just join (or create) a guild where money isn't the guiding force. You can create "buddy lists" (although I really hate that name) of people who are fun to play against, and block any kiddies you come across.
I've been playing for a couple of weeks (I got in on the tail end of the beta), and I have only met one jerk. I said hi, he said, "you already sound like a fag", so I blocked him and resigned the game. If everyone does this these people will find it hard to find an oponnent.
Wasn't that Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy?