This is my big concern. There are still lots of games that run best under OS 9 and earlier (many will run in Classic mode, but without 3d hardware acceleration and the like). I think Apple needs to do this, but it's not good for me personally - I'm very interested in a lot of games, but I haven't been able to get a new computer for a few years, so there are lots of games from the past few years that I've been waiting to play that won't run well or at all on the hardware I have, but that also won't run optimally under Classic, since they aren't OS X-native. I'll just have to try to get a new Mac before January if I want to finally get to play all those games that are too old to run natively under OS X and too new to run well on my current (non-current) machine. Of course, I've been wanting to buy a new Mac anyway, so no change there; it just hasn't had the same sense of urgency it does now (and just to keep some perspective, I am aware that in the grand scheme of things, it's really not important at all compared to my grad studies, the people I love, etc.; it's just something I want).
I never did send in screen shots for any of Activision's patches. I always meant to get around to it (I earned the ones for Pitfall!, Chopper Command, and Starmaster, at least, and possibly others) but never did. Pathetic as it may be, I've been regretting it ever since (yes, that's correct - I have no life;).
Good point, since I bet you've used a fuel cell powered notebook and had it explode on your lap.
You're talking hypothetical, and so was he. What's the difference?
No, I haven't had one explode on my lap. The difference is that I wasn't saying I had, or indeed that anyone had; I didn't say anything about fuel cell laptops at all. I merely pointed out that no PowerBooks were known to have exploded, and that at least one Dell had; this was in response to the poster who implied a PowerBook had exploded. I wasn't being hypothetical, and I simply didn't say anything one way or the other about fuel cell laptops.
You're right - one's far more likely to die from something mundane than from a killer space rock. The killer space rocks remain (something of) a concern anyway because if there is one, it can kill a hell of a lot of people. Is there a flight of stairs or a nest of bees that can depopulate continents?
Of Apple's current systems, the new iMacs (the LCD ones) and the eMacs both use NVidia chips, not ATI. The Power Mac G4s use both NVidia and ATI (a given stock configuration having one or the other, and people buying directly from Apple can get custom configurations with whichever they want), and it's been this way for a while now. Only the portables and the old-style CRT iMacs are ATI-only.
As for Carmack, he's very much known for giving his honest opinion. He's certainly never been inclined to hold back legitimate, often quite scathing criticisms of Apple, and it was only when Apple adopted OpenGL as its 3d API of choice that he really began offering praise.
That toxic nuclear material came from the environment in the first place.
After being "burned" in a power plant there's less of it than when you started,
what with that pesky first law of thermodynamics and all.
Then it's returned to the environment, typically in a more geologically stable place than where it came from.
Wow, thank goodness we have nuclear plants to take all that dangerous naturally-occuring toxic nuclear material we have just lying around everywhere and process it into something safe that we have no trouble storing. I shudder to think of all the people who get cancer by going outside and picking up rocks. Good thing those geologically stable places just magically appear in time to store our wastes whenever we generate them, too - if only they could accomodate the naturally-occuring toxic nuclear material in the environment *sigh*...
You've obviously never had a Powerbook with a Lithium battery.
You obviously haven't, either (or are you saying you've had a PowerBook explode in your lap?). If you're referring to the widely-reported PowerBook 5300 battery recall, you're apparently unaware it stemmed from the ignition of two batteries in Apple's product testing; not one of them was ever reported to have exploded or ignited in actual use in the field (as opposed to at least one battery in a Dell laptop in 2000, for example).
The DGA is probably the only film industry body more fascist than the MPAA. They attempted to FORCE George Lucas to put his name at the beginning of Star Wars in 1978. He refused, they fined him, and he left the organization.
Actually, it wasn't the original Star Wars; even the DGA couldn't fine a director for putting his own credit where he wanted it. They fined him for not putting Irvin Kershner's name at the beginning of Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back, despite the fact that a stylistic precedent had been set for the films' credits with the original, and Kershner had already agreed to be credited at the end of the film.
I don't know what the DGA would have done had Lucas not been a member; perhaps they'd have sued him (since he was the film's executive producer, owner, and person who made the credit decision) to put a director credit at the beginning, but since Lucas was a DGA member they decided to punish him by fining him. He paid the fine, and immediately quit the organization. I presume he's still no longer a member, despite having taken up directing again; one certainly supposes his clout in the industry is enough to overcome whatever barriers exist to non-DGA directors getting their films distributed, but I really don't know how any of that might work.
I saw a talk by John Knoll a month ago at the Visual Effects Society in Marin. He pointed out that ILM continued to work on EP2 even after the movie was out in theaters. George continued to send new cuts out the door as new prints were being made. At the time there were 45-50 versions of Star Wars in theaters. Undoubtedly, the version that you get on DVD will be different than those versions. I don't see any major changes, but they'll probably add later versions of shots and some slightly different timing.
This isn't actually a new thing. Kubrick showed a different cut of 2001 in New York than he did in LA when the movie premiered. And of course George continues to revise episodes 4/5/6. The scary thing is that George is considering usign all-digital cinema to dist 'patches' to films. After the film has been running in theaters for several weeks, he can remotely add new sequences and then announce 'all new footage' so that Star Wars fans will have to come back for another viewing.
Indeed, Lucas himself has done the exact same thing with the original Star Wars films, as I've previously pointed out. There were three different versions of what was then called simply Star Wars playing simultaneously in its original '77 release, there were four versions of Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back for a short while in '80, and even two (minutely) different versions of Star Wars - Return of the Jedi offered in '83, and A New Hope in particular continued to undergo transformations until all three got substantially revised for the '97 "Special Editions" (details in my earlier post linked above).
The only difference between what he did with his films then and your ideas about what he might do now is that in the late '70s / early '80s he didn't make a big noise about there being different versions of one of the films playing at a given time. Of course, it's also true he's changed a bit since then, and as unfortunate as it might be I can certainly see different versions in release simultaneously being advertised now as a way to get the fans to go more times (though it's interesting that it apparently didn't happen here, if there were really upwards of forty different "distros" of Star Wars - Attack of the Clones out simultaneously at some times within the past few months - could Lucas & LFL actually be exercising some restraint???:O )...
The fact that we're not willing to pay $25 a metric ton is much more damning.
No kidding. Hell, I'm not rich (I'm a college student), but I'll pay $25 if that's all it takes to mill a metric ton of the stuff; I bet enough ordinary people would be willing to do the same to cover the whole load, if it would really save people from starvation for a year. Considering some of the really dumb stuff our government spends our taxes on anyway, I don't see any good reason not to just pay for it. According to the article, the U.N. World Food Program says the region will need 1 million metric tons; that's $25 million to mill it all. Given the circumstances, it sounds like a trivial amount.
I'd just like to know whether milling would really satisfy all the concerns. The article doesn't seem to say anything about Zimbabwe people not wanting to eat GE corn; it just indicates that if it took root in their own fields, it would kill their exports, and might incur IP liability. It sounds as though Zimbabwe wouldn't have any objections if only the corn were milled.
I boycott all products in ads in ads now. If I can remember the product in an ad, I assume that its overpriced to pay for the ad and likely no good and buy the competition instead.
What products are you able to buy using that policy?
I doubt it. AppleWorks is not only too good a product to discontinue (from the POV of users, which granted isn't necessarily Apple's), but also one Apple's supported for too long, and one that apparently continues to provide Apple with decent returns on its years of investment and development.
I could easily see Apple maintaining AppleWorks while simultaneously contributing to (or publishing under its own brand?) a Mac version of StarOffice/OpenOffice. Perhaps Apple could continue to bundle AppleWorks on its consumer systems while bundling StarOffice on its pro systems. Or perhaps it could license StarOffice from Sun and work with them to create its own, highly Mac-ified version and offer it as a higher-end alternative to the more consumer-oriented AppleWorks. Either of these could happen in much the same way they position iMovie and iDVD versus Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro for consumers and professionals, respectively.
not positive if we're talking about the same thing, but the rev. A iMacs had a slot that resembled a PCI slot very closely, and i believe it was infact one. you could buy an aftermarket voodoo 2 banshee for it, i believe, that really made the video fly on those old iMacs. apple got wind of this and shut them down almost as fast as they shut down griffin and their iPod-turned IR tv remote control mod (which would be bad ass, and a good reason to buy an iPod....oh well)
The Voodoo2 card (not Voodoo Banshee) was made by MicroConversions and publicized as much as they could, so Apple "getting wind of it" is a somewhat misleading characterization - this was a product (the iMac GameWizard) sold openly and advertised, not some secretive hack like a blue box that was sold on the QT. Apple didn't kill the product (though they did remove the "mezzanine" slot from iMacs sold from January '99 on); MicroConversions went out of business for a number of reasons (customers sort of rebelled against the company for its high prices and unsatisfactory driver support). IIRC, another company bought up unsold iMac GameWizard inventory and continued to distribute them; I believe they even announced intentions to continue manufacturing them, although I'm not sure whether these plans ever went through. The market for them (gamers with early iMacs) is finite and fairly small, so I wouldn't expect the cards to continue to be manufactured forever anyway.
It's the same idea as explorers in the 1600's searching for gold in America. It's no ones jurisdiction, so they can do what they darn well please and claim the land for their own afterwards (or before).
Never mind, of course, the fact there were millions of inhabitants of the Americas already - heck, those explorers sure didn't (though by the time the 1600s had rolled around, those millions had already dwindled precipitously as a result of the actions of the explorers of the 1500s and late 1400s, true)...
(A better way) Would be if h.s. was like college, where you could choose a focus class in things like scuba, karate, swimming, running, sailing, canoeing, diving, judo, etc.
Agreed, but how are high schools supposed to teach stuff like that? There may be some schools with the means (maybe even some schools that do offer those things), but given school budgets, locations, and any number of other concerns, how is the average U.S. high school going to offer scuba, karate, sailing, canoeing, judo, and other such things? I'm sure it might be possible to offer one or two of those things, but the array of choices you propose seems pretty unfeasible to me, at least for the majority of schools.
I'm sorry, but high school sucks enough without arrogant liberals like yourself trying to suck every last pleasure out of life. Come on, being able to get a freakin SODA POP at school shouldn't be a controversy.
"raise money for the school (and large companies)."
Or maybe they are there because people enjoy drinking soda. Please stop seeing life through a narrow Marxist lense. Gosh, Heaven forbid people buying things and enjoying them. Must be a conspiracy...
Yeah, and people enjoy smoking, too. Do you think we should have cigarette vending machines in schools, as well? Yeesh.
I'm sorry, but high school sucks enough without arrogant conservatives like yourself trying to suck every last dollar out of students.
Please stop seeing life through a narrow capitalist lens. Gosh, Heaven forbid, people looking after kids. Must be a conspiracy...
I saw the original short on Sci-Fi's Exposure series. Of the various shorts featured in that episode, Tripping the Rift was easily the most puerile, insulting, and just plain stupid segment. It was a lot like the kinds of coarse, inept parody stories my friends and I would devise as 12-year-old geeks back in junior high, only much worse. It's pathetic and sad that this, of all things, would get picked up for a series when there are surely many far more deserving shows.
The movies have been changed a lot already - and not just with the Special Editions. There were several versions of A New Hope alone prior to the SE (although most of the differences were minor in comparison to the new changes made for it). First of all, when the film came out back in May of '77, there were three different sound mixes - ones for 70 mm, 35 mm Dolby Stereo, and 35 mm mono - each of which not only had different emphasis and prominence given some sounds, lines of dialogue, etc., but which had actual sounds and lines unique to itself - lines of dialogue heard only in one mix, or alternate sounds in another, and so on. Then of course, when Empire came out, the first film was given a whole new title - it had indeed originally been just Star Wars (after all, it hadn't been known until the film was released that it would be successful enough to sustain sequels). When the film was first shown and then reissued in '78 and '79, it was Star Wars; after Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, the original was reissued in 1981 as Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope.
Meanwhile, Empire was undergoing changes itself. The postproduction crunch was so great that there weren't just sounds but actual visuals that differed between the 70 mm and 35 mm prints. They weren't major, of course, but there were lots of little things like scene transitions being straight cuts in one version and wipes or dissolves in the other, certain visual effects elements being composited differently (or not at all - for example, the Millennium Falcon's dish antenna is visible in the frame beside Luke when he falls from the weather vane in one version but not in the other), and so on, as well as different sound effects here and there. Not only that, but there was an additional effects shot or two finished just as the film was released: some of the establishing material of the rebel fleet at the end, with the Falcon docked on the medical frigate, wasn't originally there. It was decided that it wasn't sufficiently clear where the Falcon was and where the characters were in relation to each other, so well beyond the last minute ILM was called in to provide this tiny snippet of additional visuals; it was then edited into the last reel of the movie, and prints of that reel were then struck and sent out to theaters to replace the original reel. It took a couple (few?) weeks to replace them all, so depending on where one lived, one could conceivably have gone to see the movie four times in the first month it was released, and seen four different versions.
Also, for whatever reason, the 70 mm prints of Return of the Jedi didn't use at the beginning the new recording of the Main Title theme that John Williams had recorded along with the rest of the Jedi score, but used the minutely different recording made for Empire three years earlier (it's an extremely minor difference, and probably undetectable to most people, but there it is).
Star Wars was something of a moving target even once it hit video; the earliest videos ever released of the original movie don't feature part of one of Threepio's lines in the Death Star control room regarding the tractor beam. Most later editions featured this line (taken from one of the different mixes described above), although it was absent again on the new mix created for the THX remasters done in 1993 for a laserdisc boxed set (recycled in 1995 for VHS). This mix also featured several other sonic differences from the previous video releases, BTW (listen to the different sounds made by the debris of Alderaan as it hits the Falcon in the different versions). All this, and everything else above, happened before the Special Editions.
Those clamoring for a different version of The Phantom Menace might be interested to know, if they don't already, that the DVD version has been expanded a bit with some cool additional material in the pod race and in establishing shots on Coruscant. The running time is probably a minute and a half longer or so. Of course, it's nothing of real consequence, and doesn't address any of the movie's real flaws, but it does add to the movie (if only a tiny, little, inconsequential bit). Who knows whether he's done with it, though...
Moreover, getting away from Star Wars, when THX-1138 came out in 1971, the studio made changes to Lucas's cut (as studios do); when the film was rereleased in 1978 (after you-know-what had made Lucas a household name), Lucas was able to get the studio to put back the material, and the reissue featured what would surely have been called a "director's cut" had the term been in vogue. The '71 cut was 88 minutes; in '78, it was more like 93. The same thing happened with American Graffiti - when this '73 film was reissued in '78, the newly cloutful Lucas restored three scenes deleted from the '73 cut. All home video versions of American Graffiti have had this longer cut, although for some reason all video versions of THX-1138 revert to the shorter studio cut; the 1978 reissue has been the only way to see the longer version to date. Not only that, but for the 25th anniversary of Graffiti Lucas digitally altered the opening shot of Mel's Diner at the very beginning - the sky now has sunset-streaked clouds (compare an old, pre-1998 VHS or laserdisc of the movie with the recent VHS and DVD release - it's the first shot at the beginning, after the Universal and Lucasfilm logos).
Need more? Lucas has reedited all the episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to meld each chronologically-adjacent pair into a two-hour-ish "movie," in some cases adding considerable quantities of footage to do so (much of it newly shot; reportedly, the youngest Indy, Corey Carrier, who plays Indy at ages 8 to 10 or so, has been digitally shrunk and reproportioned to resemble his visual age at the time the series was originally made). That's not to mention different versions of Young Indy to begin with, with one episode having originally had different sets of "bookends" (the framing sequences with an older Indy reminiscing about his experiences).
The point is: GL has been tinkering with and reworking his stuff for decades. It's nothing new. To me, the only issue is whether his changes are for better or worse; I have to say that most of the stuff I'm seeing rumors of now would suck, as do many of the changes made for the SEs. However, in all honesty, a lot of the alterations he's made to his work - in the SW SEs and elsewhere - really are worthwhile. Is the SE better than the original, overall? No, and neither are the new films as good as the old (although AotC is at least a real improvement over TPM), and that's the problem. Simply put, I think Lucas lost a lot of his creative faculties back around 1993; his creative decisions since then have largely been bad, where the ones before weren't. Argh, and oh well. I hope he regains whatever he lost. We'll see.
(Oh, and god help me for actually knowing all this stuff - I'm such a geek. If only there were someplace I could go - some sort of common gathering place for others like me - where geeks can speak freely, and converse with others of their ilk...)
It should be noted, though, that Star Wars didn't really have merchandising at first; it simply wasn't anticipated, precisely because movies had never been able to sustain the kinds of merchandising franchises that SW engendered. Nowadays there are toys, snack foods with tie-in packaging, t-shirts, posters, and all other sorts of stuff imaginable available in stores weeks before a movie opens, but when the original Star Wars first hit (fewer than 40) theaters on May 25th, 1977, the only ancillary products available were the novelization and soundtrack album (which were standard accompaniments for lots of movies even then, even for movies that otherwise don't have merchandise), and the first few issues of the Marvel Comics adaptation (which were seen in the same light as the novelization, and pushed by Fox to help promote the film to its expected target audience [future Slashdot readers;)], since before the movie opened, nobody knew it would become the phenomenon it did). Hell, toymaker Kenner, which wound up making ungodly numbers of SW toys over the next several years and a huge profit upon them, didn't even get the rights until just after the movie opened; action figures weren't widely available until January of '78. The point here is that mass merchandising wasn't anticipated or effected until the original film had proven itself a cultural phenomenon on its own terms - that's why it was cultivated into such a colossal marketing/licensing behemoth. It proved such things were possible, something not known before the film came out.
I guess I may be denser than some, but what is the news here?
We have a LOCAL LAW (important part) that states that children We have a judge that says that the law is OK.
These must be the same people that say that certain movie titles are not appropriate for children So again... I fail to see what the
problem is here.
There are a couple problems with the judge's ruling. First of all, movie ratings aren't a legal mandate; they're an internal mechanism of the industry. As far as I know (of course, IANAL), it's not actually illegal for a theater to admit children to R-rated or NC-17-rated movies; they just don't do it out of adherence to the directives of their owners, fear of backlash from their communities, etc. The law isn't as broad in its barring of certain visual experiences from minors as you seem to think, at least as far as I'm aware.
Secondly, and more importantly, the judge ruled that games "are not" speech, which has ramifications beyond whether minors can be legally barred from playing games with questionable content; these ramifications are the real reason for concern here, IMHO. It's true that most games aren't out to express political ideals or present scientific information or otherwise present substantial ideas, but that doesn't mean they can't. It's certainly possible to have a game present artistic, political, educational, etc. expression, and that should be protected. Just because most current games are empty calories doesn't invalidate the whole medium.
Remember, videogames are still a fairly nascent medium; what we're seeing now is kind of like what movies were like in 1910. What if a judge had ruled around the beginning of the 20th century that movies were an entertainment novelty more akin to kaleidoscopes, burlesque shows, and magic tricks (not an unfair assessment of lots of early films), and hence "were not speech," just because they hadn't yet realized their potential? What would have happened to films like Citizen Kane, Salt of the Earth, and Spartacus, had they not been protected as free speech?
Moreover, free speech laws protect music, visual imagery, and narratives, among other things; if games can contain all of these protected elements, why should they suddenly lose protection just by having interactive elements and requiring electronic hardware for playback?
Imagine - we could have the coolest OS names anywhere (after "Plan 9," of course) - Mac OS XII: Son of Copland, Mac OS XIII: Aqua Boogaloo, Mac OS XV: Revenge of Steve Jobs...
I don't know who you're talking about either, but if he was really any kind of expert on dinosaurs, he must have been a paleontologist. Anthropologists study human beings.;)
Slashdot Mirror
This is my big concern. There are still lots of games that run best under OS 9 and earlier (many will run in Classic mode, but without 3d hardware acceleration and the like). I think Apple needs to do this, but it's not good for me personally - I'm very interested in a lot of games, but I haven't been able to get a new computer for a few years, so there are lots of games from the past few years that I've been waiting to play that won't run well or at all on the hardware I have, but that also won't run optimally under Classic, since they aren't OS X-native. I'll just have to try to get a new Mac before January if I want to finally get to play all those games that are too old to run natively under OS X and too new to run well on my current (non-current) machine. Of course, I've been wanting to buy a new Mac anyway, so no change there; it just hasn't had the same sense of urgency it does now (and just to keep some perspective, I am aware that in the grand scheme of things, it's really not important at all compared to my grad studies, the people I love, etc.; it's just something I want).
Oh, I'm sure /. will have it down long before that. ;)
I never did send in screen shots for any of Activision's patches. I always meant to get around to it (I earned the ones for Pitfall!, Chopper Command, and Starmaster, at least, and possibly others) but never did. Pathetic as it may be, I've been regretting it ever since (yes, that's correct - I have no life ;).
No, I haven't had one explode on my lap. The difference is that I wasn't saying I had, or indeed that anyone had; I didn't say anything about fuel cell laptops at all. I merely pointed out that no PowerBooks were known to have exploded, and that at least one Dell had; this was in response to the poster who implied a PowerBook had exploded. I wasn't being hypothetical, and I simply didn't say anything one way or the other about fuel cell laptops.
You're right - one's far more likely to die from something mundane than from a killer space rock. The killer space rocks remain (something of) a concern anyway because if there is one, it can kill a hell of a lot of people. Is there a flight of stairs or a nest of bees that can depopulate continents?
As for Carmack, he's very much known for giving his honest opinion. He's certainly never been inclined to hold back legitimate, often quite scathing criticisms of Apple, and it was only when Apple adopted OpenGL as its 3d API of choice that he really began offering praise.
Wow, thank goodness we have nuclear plants to take all that dangerous naturally-occuring toxic nuclear material we have just lying around everywhere and process it into something safe that we have no trouble storing. I shudder to think of all the people who get cancer by going outside and picking up rocks. Good thing those geologically stable places just magically appear in time to store our wastes whenever we generate them, too - if only they could accomodate the naturally-occuring toxic nuclear material in the environment *sigh*...
You obviously haven't, either (or are you saying you've had a PowerBook explode in your lap?). If you're referring to the widely-reported PowerBook 5300 battery recall, you're apparently unaware it stemmed from the ignition of two batteries in Apple's product testing; not one of them was ever reported to have exploded or ignited in actual use in the field (as opposed to at least one battery in a Dell laptop in 2000, for example).
Actually, it wasn't the original Star Wars; even the DGA couldn't fine a director for putting his own credit where he wanted it. They fined him for not putting Irvin Kershner's name at the beginning of Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back, despite the fact that a stylistic precedent had been set for the films' credits with the original, and Kershner had already agreed to be credited at the end of the film.
I don't know what the DGA would have done had Lucas not been a member; perhaps they'd have sued him (since he was the film's executive producer, owner, and person who made the credit decision) to put a director credit at the beginning, but since Lucas was a DGA member they decided to punish him by fining him. He paid the fine, and immediately quit the organization. I presume he's still no longer a member, despite having taken up directing again; one certainly supposes his clout in the industry is enough to overcome whatever barriers exist to non-DGA directors getting their films distributed, but I really don't know how any of that might work.
Indeed, Lucas himself has done the exact same thing with the original Star Wars films, as I've previously pointed out. There were three different versions of what was then called simply Star Wars playing simultaneously in its original '77 release, there were four versions of Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back for a short while in '80, and even two (minutely) different versions of Star Wars - Return of the Jedi offered in '83, and A New Hope in particular continued to undergo transformations until all three got substantially revised for the '97 "Special Editions" (details in my earlier post linked above).
The only difference between what he did with his films then and your ideas about what he might do now is that in the late '70s / early '80s he didn't make a big noise about there being different versions of one of the films playing at a given time. Of course, it's also true he's changed a bit since then, and as unfortunate as it might be I can certainly see different versions in release simultaneously being advertised now as a way to get the fans to go more times (though it's interesting that it apparently didn't happen here, if there were really upwards of forty different "distros" of Star Wars - Attack of the Clones out simultaneously at some times within the past few months - could Lucas & LFL actually be exercising some restraint??? :O )...
No kidding. Hell, I'm not rich (I'm a college student), but I'll pay $25 if that's all it takes to mill a metric ton of the stuff; I bet enough ordinary people would be willing to do the same to cover the whole load, if it would really save people from starvation for a year. Considering some of the really dumb stuff our government spends our taxes on anyway, I don't see any good reason not to just pay for it. According to the article, the U.N. World Food Program says the region will need 1 million metric tons; that's $25 million to mill it all. Given the circumstances, it sounds like a trivial amount.
I'd just like to know whether milling would really satisfy all the concerns. The article doesn't seem to say anything about Zimbabwe people not wanting to eat GE corn; it just indicates that if it took root in their own fields, it would kill their exports, and might incur IP liability. It sounds as though Zimbabwe wouldn't have any objections if only the corn were milled.
I could easily see Apple maintaining AppleWorks while simultaneously contributing to (or publishing under its own brand?) a Mac version of StarOffice/OpenOffice. Perhaps Apple could continue to bundle AppleWorks on its consumer systems while bundling StarOffice on its pro systems. Or perhaps it could license StarOffice from Sun and work with them to create its own, highly Mac-ified version and offer it as a higher-end alternative to the more consumer-oriented AppleWorks. Either of these could happen in much the same way they position iMovie and iDVD versus Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro for consumers and professionals, respectively.
The Voodoo2 card (not Voodoo Banshee) was made by MicroConversions and publicized as much as they could, so Apple "getting wind of it" is a somewhat misleading characterization - this was a product (the iMac GameWizard) sold openly and advertised, not some secretive hack like a blue box that was sold on the QT. Apple didn't kill the product (though they did remove the "mezzanine" slot from iMacs sold from January '99 on); MicroConversions went out of business for a number of reasons (customers sort of rebelled against the company for its high prices and unsatisfactory driver support). IIRC, another company bought up unsold iMac GameWizard inventory and continued to distribute them; I believe they even announced intentions to continue manufacturing them, although I'm not sure whether these plans ever went through. The market for them (gamers with early iMacs) is finite and fairly small, so I wouldn't expect the cards to continue to be manufactured forever anyway.
"One of these days" - as if they haven't already???
Agreed, but how are high schools supposed to teach stuff like that? There may be some schools with the means (maybe even some schools that do offer those things), but given school budgets, locations, and any number of other concerns, how is the average U.S. high school going to offer scuba, karate, sailing, canoeing, judo, and other such things? I'm sure it might be possible to offer one or two of those things, but the array of choices you propose seems pretty unfeasible to me, at least for the majority of schools.
"raise money for the school (and large companies)."
Or maybe they are there because people enjoy drinking soda. Please stop seeing life through a narrow Marxist lense. Gosh, Heaven forbid people buying things and enjoying them. Must be a conspiracy...
Yeah, and people enjoy smoking, too. Do you think we should have cigarette vending machines in schools, as well? Yeesh.
I'm sorry, but high school sucks enough without arrogant conservatives like yourself trying to suck every last dollar out of students.
Please stop seeing life through a narrow capitalist lens. Gosh, Heaven forbid, people looking after kids. Must be a conspiracy...
I saw the original short on Sci-Fi's Exposure series. Of the various shorts featured in that episode, Tripping the Rift was easily the most puerile, insulting, and just plain stupid segment. It was a lot like the kinds of coarse, inept parody stories my friends and I would devise as 12-year-old geeks back in junior high, only much worse. It's pathetic and sad that this, of all things, would get picked up for a series when there are surely many far more deserving shows.
Meanwhile, Empire was undergoing changes itself. The postproduction crunch was so great that there weren't just sounds but actual visuals that differed between the 70 mm and 35 mm prints. They weren't major, of course, but there were lots of little things like scene transitions being straight cuts in one version and wipes or dissolves in the other, certain visual effects elements being composited differently (or not at all - for example, the Millennium Falcon's dish antenna is visible in the frame beside Luke when he falls from the weather vane in one version but not in the other), and so on, as well as different sound effects here and there. Not only that, but there was an additional effects shot or two finished just as the film was released: some of the establishing material of the rebel fleet at the end, with the Falcon docked on the medical frigate, wasn't originally there. It was decided that it wasn't sufficiently clear where the Falcon was and where the characters were in relation to each other, so well beyond the last minute ILM was called in to provide this tiny snippet of additional visuals; it was then edited into the last reel of the movie, and prints of that reel were then struck and sent out to theaters to replace the original reel. It took a couple (few?) weeks to replace them all, so depending on where one lived, one could conceivably have gone to see the movie four times in the first month it was released, and seen four different versions.
Also, for whatever reason, the 70 mm prints of Return of the Jedi didn't use at the beginning the new recording of the Main Title theme that John Williams had recorded along with the rest of the Jedi score, but used the minutely different recording made for Empire three years earlier (it's an extremely minor difference, and probably undetectable to most people, but there it is).
Star Wars was something of a moving target even once it hit video; the earliest videos ever released of the original movie don't feature part of one of Threepio's lines in the Death Star control room regarding the tractor beam. Most later editions featured this line (taken from one of the different mixes described above), although it was absent again on the new mix created for the THX remasters done in 1993 for a laserdisc boxed set (recycled in 1995 for VHS). This mix also featured several other sonic differences from the previous video releases, BTW (listen to the different sounds made by the debris of Alderaan as it hits the Falcon in the different versions). All this, and everything else above, happened before the Special Editions.
Those clamoring for a different version of The Phantom Menace might be interested to know, if they don't already, that the DVD version has been expanded a bit with some cool additional material in the pod race and in establishing shots on Coruscant. The running time is probably a minute and a half longer or so. Of course, it's nothing of real consequence, and doesn't address any of the movie's real flaws, but it does add to the movie (if only a tiny, little, inconsequential bit). Who knows whether he's done with it, though...
Moreover, getting away from Star Wars, when THX-1138 came out in 1971, the studio made changes to Lucas's cut (as studios do); when the film was rereleased in 1978 (after you-know-what had made Lucas a household name), Lucas was able to get the studio to put back the material, and the reissue featured what would surely have been called a "director's cut" had the term been in vogue. The '71 cut was 88 minutes; in '78, it was more like 93. The same thing happened with American Graffiti - when this '73 film was reissued in '78, the newly cloutful Lucas restored three scenes deleted from the '73 cut. All home video versions of American Graffiti have had this longer cut, although for some reason all video versions of THX-1138 revert to the shorter studio cut; the 1978 reissue has been the only way to see the longer version to date. Not only that, but for the 25th anniversary of Graffiti Lucas digitally altered the opening shot of Mel's Diner at the very beginning - the sky now has sunset-streaked clouds (compare an old, pre-1998 VHS or laserdisc of the movie with the recent VHS and DVD release - it's the first shot at the beginning, after the Universal and Lucasfilm logos).
Need more? Lucas has reedited all the episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to meld each chronologically-adjacent pair into a two-hour-ish "movie," in some cases adding considerable quantities of footage to do so (much of it newly shot; reportedly, the youngest Indy, Corey Carrier, who plays Indy at ages 8 to 10 or so, has been digitally shrunk and reproportioned to resemble his visual age at the time the series was originally made). That's not to mention different versions of Young Indy to begin with, with one episode having originally had different sets of "bookends" (the framing sequences with an older Indy reminiscing about his experiences).
The point is: GL has been tinkering with and reworking his stuff for decades. It's nothing new. To me, the only issue is whether his changes are for better or worse; I have to say that most of the stuff I'm seeing rumors of now would suck, as do many of the changes made for the SEs. However, in all honesty, a lot of the alterations he's made to his work - in the SW SEs and elsewhere - really are worthwhile. Is the SE better than the original, overall? No, and neither are the new films as good as the old (although AotC is at least a real improvement over TPM), and that's the problem. Simply put, I think Lucas lost a lot of his creative faculties back around 1993; his creative decisions since then have largely been bad, where the ones before weren't. Argh, and oh well. I hope he regains whatever he lost. We'll see.
(Oh, and god help me for actually knowing all this stuff - I'm such a geek. If only there were someplace I could go - some sort of common gathering place for others like me - where geeks can speak freely, and converse with others of their ilk...)
It should be noted, though, that Star Wars didn't really have merchandising at first; it simply wasn't anticipated, precisely because movies had never been able to sustain the kinds of merchandising franchises that SW engendered. Nowadays there are toys, snack foods with tie-in packaging, t-shirts, posters, and all other sorts of stuff imaginable available in stores weeks before a movie opens, but when the original Star Wars first hit (fewer than 40) theaters on May 25th, 1977, the only ancillary products available were the novelization and soundtrack album (which were standard accompaniments for lots of movies even then, even for movies that otherwise don't have merchandise), and the first few issues of the Marvel Comics adaptation (which were seen in the same light as the novelization, and pushed by Fox to help promote the film to its expected target audience [future Slashdot readers ;)], since before the movie opened, nobody knew it would become the phenomenon it did). Hell, toymaker Kenner, which wound up making ungodly numbers of SW toys over the next several years and a huge profit upon them, didn't even get the rights until just after the movie opened; action figures weren't widely available until January of '78. The point here is that mass merchandising wasn't anticipated or effected until the original film had proven itself a cultural phenomenon on its own terms - that's why it was cultivated into such a colossal marketing/licensing behemoth. It proved such things were possible, something not known before the film came out.
There are a couple problems with the judge's ruling. First of all, movie ratings aren't a legal mandate; they're an internal mechanism of the industry. As far as I know (of course, IANAL), it's not actually illegal for a theater to admit children to R-rated or NC-17-rated movies; they just don't do it out of adherence to the directives of their owners, fear of backlash from their communities, etc. The law isn't as broad in its barring of certain visual experiences from minors as you seem to think, at least as far as I'm aware.
Secondly, and more importantly, the judge ruled that games "are not" speech, which has ramifications beyond whether minors can be legally barred from playing games with questionable content; these ramifications are the real reason for concern here, IMHO. It's true that most games aren't out to express political ideals or present scientific information or otherwise present substantial ideas, but that doesn't mean they can't. It's certainly possible to have a game present artistic, political, educational, etc. expression, and that should be protected. Just because most current games are empty calories doesn't invalidate the whole medium.
Remember, videogames are still a fairly nascent medium; what we're seeing now is kind of like what movies were like in 1910. What if a judge had ruled around the beginning of the 20th century that movies were an entertainment novelty more akin to kaleidoscopes, burlesque shows, and magic tricks (not an unfair assessment of lots of early films), and hence "were not speech," just because they hadn't yet realized their potential? What would have happened to films like Citizen Kane, Salt of the Earth, and Spartacus, had they not been protected as free speech?
Moreover, free speech laws protect music, visual imagery, and narratives, among other things; if games can contain all of these protected elements, why should they suddenly lose protection just by having interactive elements and requiring electronic hardware for playback?
The judge's ruling is a mistake.
I'd favor going with "OS XI," "OS XII," "OS XIII," "OS XIV," etc., myself.
Imagine - we could have the coolest OS names anywhere (after "Plan 9," of course) - Mac OS XII: Son of Copland, Mac OS XIII: Aqua Boogaloo, Mac OS XV: Revenge of Steve Jobs...
-Safe assumption - the Nomad works better with Windows, no 3rd party software needed.
I'd consider this more a drawback to the Nomad than an advantage, myself... ;)
I don't know who you're talking about either, but if he was really any kind of expert on dinosaurs, he must have been a paleontologist. Anthropologists study human beings. ;)