Not to mention "A Piece of the Action" showed us that even years later, Kirk hadn't learned to drive a car like that (and why would he?). I fear the makers of this movie haven't done their homework on Trek nearly as much as they promised they would.
Indeed, it's now impossible to find Quatro in stores; the whole line appears to have lasted only from 2004 to '06. I recently wanted to find some Quatro sets to introduce my new niece to LEGO (got to start kids off right;) and was agog to discover not only could I no longer find Quatro sets in LEGO's online store, but people were offering them secondhand online, and asking outrageous prices, like multiple hundreds of dollars for tubs of a few dozen bricks. I had no idea the line had been discontinued so quickly, and no idea people were asking the same sorts of prices for these they'd ask for discontinued Star Wars sets, sets from the old Classic Space and Castle lines, etc.
Duplo sets are still easy to find, though, in my experience. That line's been around a lot longer than Quatro, too, and doesn't seem to be slowing down. I think Duplo will be around a long time to come.
Alas, I have yet to be able to visit a LEGO Store anywhere (though I hope to soon!), but as I understand it, the US stores have the cups, but European LEGO Stores have bags, and one pays by weight.
They do offer bulk brick assortments, though, and always have. While the usual price-per-piece ratio for most new sets typically works out to around ten or fifteen US cents per brick (with wide variation depending upon the specific parts, of course), it's certainly possible to get assortments that work out to around five or six cents a brick, and sometimes it gets lower. I bought four copies of the wonderful bulk tub 4679 - Bricks and Creations a few years ago for $20 each; that's 1513 wildly varied pieces for a little over 1.3 cents apiece, and I got four copies. Of course, seeking out specific bricks rather than whatever they put in those assortments is another matter, but still...
What does this legal judgement mean, as far as how things will be different? There've already been copycat brands like Mega Bloks, Best-Lock, and perhaps any number of others I'm forgetting or never heard of, and they've been around for years, even decades. Is this legal decision just putting a capper on the previous litigation? IANAL, naturally...
Just under a third of the Senate, including Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, supported an amendment that would have stripped immunity from the bill. They were defeated on a 66-32 vote. Republican rival John McCain did not attend the vote.
Obama ended up voting for the final bill, as did Specter. Feingold voted no.
It might be more comprehensible once you realize that even with HD DVD's acknowledged advantages, Blu-ray titles were still outselling HD DVDs by a fair margin. If you're Warner Bros. and you're trying to decide which of two formats to support, and practically all your cross-platform hi-def releases are selling more copies on Blu-ray than on HD DVD (even when the HD DVD version has more features, as 300 does), which format are you more likely to pick?
Remember, too, that everyone (studios, consumers, retailers, etc.) wanted the format war to end, and with Blu-ray already having an edge in studio support (Disney, Fox/MGM, Sony/Columbia) over HD DVD (Universal, Paramount), if Warner went with Blu-ray it would surely decide the war instantly since Blu-ray would have the overwhelming majority of exclusive studio support, whereas if Warner went with HD DVD it'd give the two platforms roughly equal studio support, thus prolonging or even stalemating the war.
Both of those facts gave Warner ample reason to go with Blu-ray, and that's even before taking into account any kind of payoff or "consideration" from the BDA. There simply wasn't much reason for them to go HD DVD-exclusive; at most, they could've remained neutral and continued to release on both platforms for a while longer.
Personally, if I were fired from the position of director of science curriculum for the state of Texas for giving "the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design," I'd proudly put it at the top of my list of accomplishments on my résumé. And if I were in charge of hiring administrative personnel for some scientific institution, I'd be more likely to want someone who'd violated stupid rules intended to keep science curriculum directors from supporting actual science at the expense of religion.
Actually, I think the biggest problem is that just not enough Mac users buy games. It's not just that there aren't enough Macs powerful enough to handle more demanding games, though that might be a factor; just not enough people buy the games, period.
Even if it's only a small portion of the overall user base, there are still lots of people with the latest and greatest, high-end, pro Macs that are capable of running games well; unfortunately, it appears lots of them just aren't interested in games. A game whose system requirements put it easily within reach of hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Macs out there in the installed base is still likely to sell only a few thousand copies; there are very very few games in Mac game history that have ever moved more than 10-20k units or so on the platform. IMG's Tuncer Deniz just talked about the realities of the Mac market a few days ago ("I remember one Activision executive yelling at me at E3 a few years back, "We sold 3000 copies of Quake III: Arena and you expect us to continue to make games for the Mac"?").
I think that for games to really flourish on the Mac will require Apple's involvement - not just in schmoozing with developers and providing them with various kinds of support, and of course putting out games-capable hardware, but perhaps actually evangelizing games to its own customers. Perhaps it should bundle more games on new Macs (and not limit bundled games to the "consumer" Macs), give games slightly more prominence in the Apple Stores, etc. Maybe they should set up a program to match ad dollars for publishers willing to put "For PC and Mac" at the end of their TV spots, or put profiles of new Mac games in the main column in the "Hot News" section of their site (or occasionally even link to them from the main page). It'd be cool if Steve Jobs featured games in his Stevenotes more often. Whatever it does, I think Apple should do something to help push games to its user base.
"Found"? It was never hidden. It was plainly visible, clearly intentionally, from day one. I'm absolutely flabbergasted people think this is some insidious new development or that it's been sneaked in in hopes people won't see it.
Have the people expressing shock and outrage never used iTunes, or what? Seriously, the purchaser info is RIGHT THERE in the same tab in the "Get Info" window that displays the track length, play count, file format, bitrate, and other data that's clearly, readily, deliberately accessible to users, and IT HAS BEEN EVER SINCE THE STORE OPENED IN 2003.
It was certainly one of SW's many inspirations - a key one, to be sure, and one that more SW fans (and more movie lovers in general, for that matter) ought to see.
Even the "Vader recovers control of his fighter" bit was added later, as was the "Episode IV" in the opening crawl. It's pretty clear here that he's not even watching the original, but the crappy "Special Edition"
It's clear from his references to "dinosaurs" in Mos Eisley and the like that he's watching the "Special Edition" or, more likely, the 2004 DVD version (similar but not identical to the 1997 SE), and it's true "Episode IV: A New Hope" was added after the original release (it was just Star Wars in 1977; it got the full title in 1981), but the final shots of Vader surviving the battle and recovering control of his spinning TIE were always in the movie. That wasn't added later.
The movie first appeared with its expanded title ("Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope") in its April '81 reissue (its first release after the initial release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back). It had been just plain "Star Wars" in '77 and in its '78 and '79 reissues, but from '81 every theatrical, home video and television presentation had it as Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, until last September's DVD rereleases of the original trilogy with both the '04 DVD versions and the original theatrical versions.
The novelization (credited to Lucas, but actually ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster) doesn't use "A New Hope," but does identify itself as part of "The Adventures of Luke Skywalker," derived from a larger work called "The Journal of the Whills."
Different reports have variously indicated one or the other as the party responsible. On the one hand, we have reports indicating EMI approached Apple and suggested this, and that the price boost was Apple's idea (along with the higher bitrate), and there's the established fact EMI had experimented with a handful of DRM-free MP3 downloads sold at Yahoo! Music. On the other hand, other reports indicate EMI asked for a few million up front from Apple ostensibly to offset the presumed boost in piracy, and there's the established fact of Steve's public letter on Apple's site, and EMI officials in some reports were quoted as saying they'd already been aware of Steve's stance on DRM even long before the public letter. If one reads just one or two reports about the deal, it can easily look like either EMI or Apple (but not both) is the bold, consumer-friendly innovator, but if one reads enough of the reports, it's harder to know. In the absence of really detailed information on the deal, I'm inclined to just give them both credit for it.
Oh, of course we're glad that Microsoft is going to start start offering its music downloads DRM-free, just as we would be for any other vendor doing the same. It's just that until now, Microsoft had been openly showing disdain for the idea of doing away with DRM - they claimed it was necessary to protect the music download business model; someone on the Zune team responded to Jobs' open letter calling for the abandonment of DRM "naive and irresponsible." Now, all of a sudden, mere days after the Apple / EMI announcement, they're suddenly all about unprotected music on the Zune and meeting the "needs of its customers." They've done a total about-face from the position they were advocating just weeks ago. Would that have happened without the Apple-EMI announcement? I'm kind of doubtful. As noted, I don't think their announcement is a bad thing in and of itself; it's just that coming so soon after Apple & EMI's announcement, which itself had followed Steve's public letter and EMI's MP3 experiments on Yahoo!, when all the while Microsoft publicly expressed a completely contrary position until this week, it just feels more than a little of "me-too"-ish, and some of us find that amusing.
Apple then decided to charge extra for the convenience, by coupling it with a higher bitrate.
According to this, EMI demanded $5 million up front from Apple to cover the cost of all the 'lost' sales that would surely result from piracy of the DRM-free files. I'd hazard a guess that might have something to do with the price-per-track increase, too.
They want me to pay about the same price of a full retail CD that I could rip to whatever bitrate I like without DRM, but for a lower quality digital version in a proprietary format?
Actually, no. They want you to pay $9.99 or so for a typical album, which is a bit below what most of them retail for on CD (256kbps, DRM-free albums will be priced the same as albums are now; it's just the price of individual tracks that's going up).
Well... maybe. Probably not, though, actually. While some albums are currently priced at $.99 x the # of tracks, most of them are priced at some specific tier ($9.99, $10.99, etc.) that saves at least a little money versus buying all the tracks individually, and according to the new announcement, album prices will stay the same - it's just the price for an individual track that's going up. That 12 track album, even in 256kbps DRM-free format, should still cost $11.88 (or more likely, $10.99 or $9.99).
I wouldn't be surprised if only new songs (the ones the labels want to charge more for) are offered DRM free.
According to the articles and press releases, all EMI material - the entire catalog, new and otherwise - will be offered DRM-free; moreover, anyone who's already gotten EMI material from the iT(M)S will be able to upgrade to DRM-free (and higher bitrate) versions for 30 cents per track.
19) Halo: Combat Evolved -- simply because it has always been a DirectX game and a Microsoft game. Kind of a shame, really -- I hear Bungie had planned Linux and OS X ports before Microsoft bought them.
There is an OS X port, actually. I never heard about a planned Linux port, though (but Bungie had licensed a Linux port of Myth II: Soulblighter prior to their sale to MS; perhaps you're thinking of that?)...
Maybe so, but if the question is not about "the best" games but the most important, Quake may still deserve inclusion more than Unreal. Quake was there first, and had more influence in terms of igniting the whole multiplayer FPS phenomenon (so did Doom, for that matter).
I don't know about Linux, but more than half those titles are available for Macintosh, actually:
20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
01) World of Warcraft
So, thirteen of the twenty are available for the Mac, I'm surprised and pleased to say. If only I had more money and time for games...
Several months ago Warner bought Rykodisc, which had all the Zappa stuff, and one consequence was that a bunch (all? I'm not sure) of Ryko material disappeared from multiple outlets, not just iTunes, for some sort of accounting transition or something. It's supposed to return to download availability eventually (though presumably not all stores - the Zappa stuff was available at eMusic, for example, but presumably Warner's not about to forget its a major label with major label demands and let a part of its catalog go on eMusic just because it was there before when it was on some indie label).
Frank would have been displeased, of course, since he spent a chunk of his career/life pissed at Warner for their treatment of him and fought to get out from under their thumb.
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Not to mention "A Piece of the Action" showed us that even years later, Kirk hadn't learned to drive a car like that (and why would he?). I fear the makers of this movie haven't done their homework on Trek nearly as much as they promised they would.
Duplo sets are still easy to find, though, in my experience. That line's been around a lot longer than Quatro, too, and doesn't seem to be slowing down. I think Duplo will be around a long time to come.
Alas, I have yet to be able to visit a LEGO Store anywhere (though I hope to soon!), but as I understand it, the US stores have the cups, but European LEGO Stores have bags, and one pays by weight.
What does this legal judgement mean, as far as how things will be different? There've already been copycat brands like Mega Bloks, Best-Lock, and perhaps any number of others I'm forgetting or never heard of, and they've been around for years, even decades. Is this legal decision just putting a capper on the previous litigation? IANAL, naturally...
It might be more comprehensible once you realize that even with HD DVD's acknowledged advantages, Blu-ray titles were still outselling HD DVDs by a fair margin. If you're Warner Bros. and you're trying to decide which of two formats to support, and practically all your cross-platform hi-def releases are selling more copies on Blu-ray than on HD DVD (even when the HD DVD version has more features, as 300 does), which format are you more likely to pick?
Remember, too, that everyone (studios, consumers, retailers, etc.) wanted the format war to end, and with Blu-ray already having an edge in studio support (Disney, Fox/MGM, Sony/Columbia) over HD DVD (Universal, Paramount), if Warner went with Blu-ray it would surely decide the war instantly since Blu-ray would have the overwhelming majority of exclusive studio support, whereas if Warner went with HD DVD it'd give the two platforms roughly equal studio support, thus prolonging or even stalemating the war.
Both of those facts gave Warner ample reason to go with Blu-ray, and that's even before taking into account any kind of payoff or "consideration" from the BDA. There simply wasn't much reason for them to go HD DVD-exclusive; at most, they could've remained neutral and continued to release on both platforms for a while longer.
Personally, if I were fired from the position of director of science curriculum for the state of Texas for giving "the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design," I'd proudly put it at the top of my list of accomplishments on my résumé. And if I were in charge of hiring administrative personnel for some scientific institution, I'd be more likely to want someone who'd violated stupid rules intended to keep science curriculum directors from supporting actual science at the expense of religion.
Even if it's only a small portion of the overall user base, there are still lots of people with the latest and greatest, high-end, pro Macs that are capable of running games well; unfortunately, it appears lots of them just aren't interested in games. A game whose system requirements put it easily within reach of hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Macs out there in the installed base is still likely to sell only a few thousand copies; there are very very few games in Mac game history that have ever moved more than 10-20k units or so on the platform. IMG's Tuncer Deniz just talked about the realities of the Mac market a few days ago ("I remember one Activision executive yelling at me at E3 a few years back, "We sold 3000 copies of Quake III: Arena and you expect us to continue to make games for the Mac"?").
I think that for games to really flourish on the Mac will require Apple's involvement - not just in schmoozing with developers and providing them with various kinds of support, and of course putting out games-capable hardware, but perhaps actually evangelizing games to its own customers. Perhaps it should bundle more games on new Macs (and not limit bundled games to the "consumer" Macs), give games slightly more prominence in the Apple Stores, etc. Maybe they should set up a program to match ad dollars for publishers willing to put "For PC and Mac" at the end of their TV spots, or put profiles of new Mac games in the main column in the "Hot News" section of their site (or occasionally even link to them from the main page). It'd be cool if Steve Jobs featured games in his Stevenotes more often. Whatever it does, I think Apple should do something to help push games to its user base.
Have the people expressing shock and outrage never used iTunes, or what? Seriously, the purchaser info is RIGHT THERE in the same tab in the "Get Info" window that displays the track length, play count, file format, bitrate, and other data that's clearly, readily, deliberately accessible to users, and IT HAS BEEN EVER SINCE THE STORE OPENED IN 2003.
It was certainly one of SW's many inspirations - a key one, to be sure, and one that more SW fans (and more movie lovers in general, for that matter) ought to see.
It's clear from his references to "dinosaurs" in Mos Eisley and the like that he's watching the "Special Edition" or, more likely, the 2004 DVD version (similar but not identical to the 1997 SE), and it's true "Episode IV: A New Hope" was added after the original release (it was just Star Wars in 1977; it got the full title in 1981), but the final shots of Vader surviving the battle and recovering control of his spinning TIE were always in the movie. That wasn't added later.
The novelization (credited to Lucas, but actually ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster) doesn't use "A New Hope," but does identify itself as part of "The Adventures of Luke Skywalker," derived from a larger work called "The Journal of the Whills."
Different reports have variously indicated one or the other as the party responsible. On the one hand, we have reports indicating EMI approached Apple and suggested this, and that the price boost was Apple's idea (along with the higher bitrate), and there's the established fact EMI had experimented with a handful of DRM-free MP3 downloads sold at Yahoo! Music. On the other hand, other reports indicate EMI asked for a few million up front from Apple ostensibly to offset the presumed boost in piracy, and there's the established fact of Steve's public letter on Apple's site, and EMI officials in some reports were quoted as saying they'd already been aware of Steve's stance on DRM even long before the public letter. If one reads just one or two reports about the deal, it can easily look like either EMI or Apple (but not both) is the bold, consumer-friendly innovator, but if one reads enough of the reports, it's harder to know. In the absence of really detailed information on the deal, I'm inclined to just give them both credit for it.
Oh, of course we're glad that Microsoft is going to start start offering its music downloads DRM-free, just as we would be for any other vendor doing the same. It's just that until now, Microsoft had been openly showing disdain for the idea of doing away with DRM - they claimed it was necessary to protect the music download business model; someone on the Zune team responded to Jobs' open letter calling for the abandonment of DRM "naive and irresponsible." Now, all of a sudden, mere days after the Apple / EMI announcement, they're suddenly all about unprotected music on the Zune and meeting the "needs of its customers." They've done a total about-face from the position they were advocating just weeks ago. Would that have happened without the Apple-EMI announcement? I'm kind of doubtful. As noted, I don't think their announcement is a bad thing in and of itself; it's just that coming so soon after Apple & EMI's announcement, which itself had followed Steve's public letter and EMI's MP3 experiments on Yahoo!, when all the while Microsoft publicly expressed a completely contrary position until this week, it just feels more than a little of "me-too"-ish, and some of us find that amusing.
According to this, EMI demanded $5 million up front from Apple to cover the cost of all the 'lost' sales that would surely result from piracy of the DRM-free files. I'd hazard a guess that might have something to do with the price-per-track increase, too.
The posts quoting a price of $1.30 are rounding up. The actual price will be $1.29.
Actually, no. They want you to pay $9.99 or so for a typical album, which is a bit below what most of them retail for on CD (256kbps, DRM-free albums will be priced the same as albums are now; it's just the price of individual tracks that's going up).
There is an OS X port, actually. I never heard about a planned Linux port, though (but Bungie had licensed a Linux port of Myth II: Soulblighter prior to their sale to MS; perhaps you're thinking of that?)...
Maybe so, but if the question is not about "the best" games but the most important, Quake may still deserve inclusion more than Unreal. Quake was there first, and had more influence in terms of igniting the whole multiplayer FPS phenomenon (so did Doom, for that matter).
I just checked the list out to respond to another post, and it turns out 13 of the 20 games on the list have made it to the Mac.
20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
01) World of Warcraft
So, thirteen of the twenty are available for the Mac, I'm surprised and pleased to say. If only I had more money and time for games...
Frank would have been displeased, of course, since he spent a chunk of his career/life pissed at Warner for their treatment of him and fought to get out from under their thumb.