I'm in Glasgow city centre and signed a year-long contract for 2Mb/s for £40/mo last month.
Is the 8Mbps service available in that area? And do you actually *need* it anyway?
I'm sick of reading about "f*****g high speed" connections with stupidly small download quotas. Frankly, in most cases, I'd rather have 256Kbps and an unlimited quota than 1Mbps and a stupidly small quota (such as 1Gb per month). This kind of thing does happen. How many people want a high-speed connection with a restrictive quota?
I'd say the "restricted" deals are worthwhile only if you want an always-on connection, but aren't planning on downloading lots. In which case, are you really going to fork out a lot more each month just to download your miniscule amount of data in 15mins/day instead of 8?
Whenever you do something like use a Steadicam or a crane shot or slow-motion, you remind the audience that they're watching a movie, and the level of emotional engagement goes down. The theory is that by getting rid of a lot of that stuff --using handheld cameras and natural light, using body mics instead of looping dialogue in post --you help the audience forget they're watching a movie
I *hate* overuse of "shaky camera" to make things look realistic.
Not for the reactionary, "bad quality" reasons that some people give, but because it's a cliche, and it's fake.
For example, trailer for chat show: Host speaking to someone else. Filmed from a distance (supposedly), imperfect focussing and shaky camera.
Got *right* up my nose, because they were trying to make something pre-scripted look like genuine documentary footage. But it was so obviously a scripted puff-piece for the program, and even if it wasn't, the camera work wouldn't have been that unprofessional. So it came over as totally fake, and unpleasant.
With drama; well, let me ask; how often have you seen a drama and mistaken it for real life? Not often, I'll bet. Because, even the best acting doesn't bear much resemblance to what you'd get if you filmed real life with an invisible camera- and when you go for the 'documentary' look and feel, *especially* the "filmed from a distance" look and feel- you're trying to emulate the filming of real life.
But you're not, you're filming acting.
So what you end up with, rather than a convincing fake-documentary feel, is acting filmed in a style that's trying to be realistic, but ends up simply looking like another overused gimmicky style trying desparately to capture a sense of "immediacy", going over the top, and just looking fake and tacky.
That is exactly where they initially promoted it, but AWT performance was terrible and few had the broadband to download the jars in a reasonable time.
Bingo! How old is this guy? From Java's launch in the mid-90s, the selling point was as a client-side Internet language that you could use through your browser.
*That* was the hype; applets, applets, applets!
I guess we could blame Microsoft for attempting to foul things up, but the truth is that for 99% of the things Java was initially promoted for, JavaScript was faster (loading) and hence better.
As for AWT performance; Swing on top of *that* was painful on my 233MHz PC. Reminded me of my 68000-based Amiga 500.
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters.
Yeah, but you'd hardly deny that the German keyboard is basically QWERTY with a couple of minor differences and additions. And yeah, it has some extra keys, but 'QWERTY' only really describes the number/letter keys at most; otherwise, compare a typewriter and PC keyboard and note that the non-letter keys (and even the symbol placement) is likely to be very different.
Actually, I'm surprised that you didn't quote the French AZERTY layout; that's more different to QWERTY than the German layout is. (Wonder if they did that because French has- I assume- different statistical occurrences of letters than English?)
And let's talk to Philips about this silly "compact cassette" thing, and sony and philips about this "compact disc" thing. I hate to say it, but a lot of "standards" usually start life as some sort of proprietary technology...
Well, yeah. The Compact Cassette *did* start out as proprietery technology. And you know why it took off?
Because, under pressure from Sony, Philips decided to license the technology free of charge to anyone. It was shortly after that that the Compact Cassette was adopted by many manufacturers and became "standard".
Had Philips not (effectively) made it non-proprietery, it's unlikely that it would have had the same level of success. So, yeah, it started out proprietery. And it didn't take off until that situation changed.
Socialism doesn't start with concentration camps, that's where it ends.
Trite.
You're implying that because the Nazis called themselves "National Socialist" that they actually were socialist?
Well, okay. And the People's Democratic Republic of China is 'democratic' (for the same reason), so living in a democracy implies living under an oppressive regime where those opposed to the government are killed or tortured.
And (with reference to the other reply) yes, it's funny how no-one ever uses Sweden as an example of socialism, despite the fact that what they had there was closer to true socialism than anything the USSR, Nazis or North Korea came up with.
On the other hand, I wouldn't expect any better from someone who has a link to another PETA propoganda site in their sig.
Personally, I put printer vendors up there with Hitler
*Blinks* Sod Godwin's law, I think comparing everything with Nazis is just plain unimaginative (both uncreative and didn't really get what the Nazis did) and lazy. The printer companies should (at worst) be massively fined, and the management sacked.
Now what the Nazis did and what *should* have happened to those involved in that is so far away that it doesn't even bear comparison.
or something..
Or 'something'. You've obviously thought this out pretty well...
If they claim they don't make money off region coding cartridges, why are they doing it? Sounds like bullshit to me.
Customer service, *obviously*.
"Region coding allows us to ensure that customers in each of our markets can be optimally supported by customer service advisors trained in the specifics of that market."
I can't even remember them declining, it seemed one day you could still buy the Quaver themed computer packs based on a crisps (potato chips to you Americans)character, I kid you know and the next they were no where to be seen.
Uh, perhaps Commodore going bankrupt could have a lot to do with that? Dixons and some other places sold off the remaining CD32s (don't know if they still kept other Amigas then) cheap, and didn't get any more in.
The Amiga market was basically being eaten away by the growth of the PC market; when I got my A500+ at the end of 1991, the Amiga was the computer everyone was exchanging games for at secondary school. A year later, everyone was into the PC and interest in the Amiga was pretty much dead.
The A1200 came out just a bit too late to stand a good chance against the PC onslaught. It was C= keeping up (at best) with the PC at a time when the A500 was becoming very dated (and hideously underpowered).
Basically, I think that when one company started getting out of the market, they all did. It was the same with budget games for the 8-bit machines; they went from being stocked pretty much everywhere to being a thing of the past in a period of 12-18 months or so.
Shops sell less --> Less produced --> Shops sell less --> Less produced --> Some shops stop altogether --> Most companies stop producing --> Sensible shops (most) get out of the market --> Hobbyist niche and/or commercial death.
Although they could be apocryphal, I have heard tales of fish and creatures exploding after being brought up from the depths. Since I can't remember where I saw this, however, I'm prepared to accept that you know more about the matter than me.
No, I haven't seen 'The Abyss'; even if I had, do you think I'd trust anything Hollywood put out for factual accuracy?!
Two things popped into my head before I read the Snopes article:-
(1) Aren't they well-preserved specimens considering that most people would be *far* too busy with other things to notice them and take them out of the sun before they decayed badly?
(2) If they were really new deep-sea creatures, wouldn't beasties from that depth have exploded upon depressurisation?
I don't have a virus scanner or spyware detector... of course I happen to not use Windows at all...
Oh, you don't, do you? Well, you know how the Linux guys were proclaiming that anyone who used Google and so on was actually using "Linux on the desktop"?
Well, I guess the same applies in reverse every time you visit a website running on Windows. Doesn't it?
(Personally, I'd say "I don't think so..." to both cases)
The UK? I WINTER in the UK when I can. Try living in North Dakota. We go to Scotland in March just to get a bit of sunshine and warmth.
Ha ha ha..... bwa ha ha ha! (Falls off chair laughing)
This has *got* to be a joke. I've lived in Scotland all of my life, and I still think the weather from October to April or so sucks.
And temperature isn't everything; even though the coldest days in winter tend to be those with clear blue skies (no insulation), there is also no rain at those times, no permeating damp and best of all, you get to see the sun. Overcast weather for days on end is *depressing*.
The west coast of Scotland, BTW, is far worse than the east coast when it comes to grey skies and precipitation.
OTOH, it's a pretty nice place if you get some sunny summer weather, or even winter sun.
>>Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.
> Don't worry, I'm sure it was your "friend" who told you what to type...
"Erm.... some guys put spyware on my PC and stole my password.... Sorry, didn't catch that.... Oh, I mean, you're right, it *was* the same paedophile hackers that store child porn on other people's machines. I think they're terrorists as well, you can't trust anyone these days."
MP3 degrades the sound in two different ways:
[...] I brought a CD with 4 audio tracks, all the same, "Dogs" from the album Animals (Pink Floyd) (My emphasis!)
MP3 degrades the sound in another way; it doesn't do quadraphonic;-)
Maybe I'm being stereotypical, but my mental stereotype of a Pink Floyd fan is someone with an expensive hi-fi, obsessed with quality sound. Frankly, I'd expect them to be the target audience for DVD-A and SACD.
As a genuine question (re: backing up as WAVs; and if you're that concerned, storage is probably cheap enough to get away with saving as lossless, though you could still compress it as FLAC or whatever)...
....don't you find the CD *itself* lacks the sound quality you'd want? I mean, I know DVA-A and SACD are aimed at people who like quality hi-fi who want an excuse to buy the same stuff for a fifth time, but I can also believe that the CD itself is limited. Not that I object to CD sound quality personally, but I can understand other people being able to notice its limitations, especially on the kind of material they listen to.
Hell, 128k joint stereo sounds like the CD to me, I don't know any better.
Really seems to depend on the codec; I can get 128kbps MP3s with notlame that sound really good through moderately decent headphones, but I download other people's 128kbps MP3s and you can hear the artifacts clearly.
Have they been re-encoded once or more (losing quality), re-encoded from a slower bitrate, or was the encoder that did it just severely crap? Who knows.
I notice that 192kbps MP3s seem to be more common now than they were during my first wave of filesharing, I mean legally downloading...
BTW, the music business has been amoral and full of bullshit since.... well, the 1950s at least. The mafia had their fingers in a *lot* of pies at that time.
I remember seeing The Matrix Reloaded in the theatre and I was the only one who let out a cheer when I saw that Trinity was actaully using an ssh command from a bash terminal when hacking in to shut down the power to that building. =P
It's little details like that (cf. other Hollywood computer GUIs that exist nowhere else) which cost little in terms of effort or cost to do, but pay off well in terms of getting the geeks talking. (Yes, for this purpose, I consider myself a geek).
>> and I'm not sure what they want to get out of this.
> Yes $ you $ are, $ you $ just $ aren't $ aware $ of $ it...
Okay; lemme rephrase that... I'm not sure what they *expect* to get out of this.
Will the Tron nostalgics go and see it? If it's not like the original, and it's not good enough to stand on its own merits, possibly not.
Will kids go and see it? Depends how good it is; as I mentioned above, the plot of Tron has been done in a more sophisticated manner by The Matrix, and it won't be fresh in the way it was 23 years ago.
Personally speaking, I wouldn't go to see it; although I'm almost old enough to be in the "saw Tron first time round" group, I didn't.
Sequels to cult movies aren't guaranteed successes anyway; what about the sequel to 2001, 2010? That flopped.
In my opinion, a lot of the appeal of the first movie was in the "Wow" factor of it.
You put your finger on it. I remember hearing on the Tron DVD that they were wanting to do "Tron 2" (as a movie) and thinking "what is the point?"
Tron was never a great movie; visually it was outstanding (I don't want to repeat myself, so click here), but if they were to do a sequel it would have to replicate the visual impact. The still images of the proposed "Tron 2" looked like pretty computer graphics that could have been done anywhere.
A remake or a sequel would have to try very hard to do justice to the original and be fresh and innovative; the best way to do that would be to do some great visuals, combine it with a more sophisticated (for todays' audiences) computer-based plot, and create something like.... 'The Matrix'. Oops.
I agree 100%. Tron was a landmark movie in some ways, but things have moved on, and I'm not sure what they want to get out of this. People *will* be disappointed, and kids will wonder what the deal is.
I don't understand exclusive anythings when it comes to advertising - from "exclusive" movie trailers to "exclusive" game demos.
Because human nature being what it is, and rabid geeks being what they are, this makes a piece of advertising seem somewhat more interesting and desirable.
It's like Gucci, or another luxury brand. If everyone had it, no-one would care (the Burberry brand in the UK has lost all cred for this very reason). But if something is 'exclusive' and hard to get, and the geeks have to put a little effort into seeing it, the perceived value goes up a lot, which rubs off onto the perceived value (and hence quality) of the film.
Everyone else will get to see the same advertising puff in similar or identical form a couple of weeks later...
It's the same with a lot of 'exclusive' crap. Personally, I couldn't give a damn about most of it.
"Dennis the Menace, The Movie"? That's a totally fscked up idea!
They already did that horrible animation, didn't they? All the characters had cockney-lite accents, despite the fact the cartoon has always been created in Scotland (though, as they said, Dennis the Menace always came from where the reader came from, and the London-centric nature of British TV means that a London accent is 'generic').
And they probably couldn't sell it as Dennis the Menace in the US, for the same reason that the American Dennis the Menace cartoon was shown on British TV as just "Dennis". (As someone pointed out, the American Dennis was just a mischevous kid; the British one *was* a menace).
Brad Pitt as Walter the Softy? That brings to mind some sort of reverse Tyler Durden situation (Spoiler follows for the few that haven't seen Fight Club). Is Walter just a figment of Dennis's imagination, the soft side that he daren't expose?
Oh yeah, and Kevin Spacey as Dennis' Dad is a great idea!
Slashdot Mirror
Britain gets screwed on a lot of things. Have you seen our petrol prices? :)
The difference is almost entirely down to tax; not the same situation as with Internet access.
I'm in Glasgow city centre and signed a year-long contract for 2Mb/s for £40/mo last month.
Is the 8Mbps service available in that area? And do you actually *need* it anyway?
I'm sick of reading about "f*****g high speed" connections with stupidly small download quotas. Frankly, in most cases, I'd rather have 256Kbps and an unlimited quota than 1Mbps and a stupidly small quota (such as 1Gb per month). This kind of thing does happen. How many people want a high-speed connection with a restrictive quota?
I'd say the "restricted" deals are worthwhile only if you want an always-on connection, but aren't planning on downloading lots. In which case, are you really going to fork out a lot more each month just to download your miniscule amount of data in 15mins/day instead of 8?
Whenever you do something like use a Steadicam or a crane shot or slow-motion, you remind the audience that they're watching a movie, and the level of emotional engagement goes down. The theory is that by getting rid of a lot of that stuff --using handheld cameras and natural light, using body mics instead of looping dialogue in post --you help the audience forget they're watching a movie
I *hate* overuse of "shaky camera" to make things look realistic.
Not for the reactionary, "bad quality" reasons that some people give, but because it's a cliche, and it's fake.
For example, trailer for chat show: Host speaking to someone else. Filmed from a distance (supposedly), imperfect focussing and shaky camera.
Got *right* up my nose, because they were trying to make something pre-scripted look like genuine documentary footage. But it was so obviously a scripted puff-piece for the program, and even if it wasn't, the camera work wouldn't have been that unprofessional. So it came over as totally fake, and unpleasant.
With drama; well, let me ask; how often have you seen a drama and mistaken it for real life? Not often, I'll bet. Because, even the best acting doesn't bear much resemblance to what you'd get if you filmed real life with an invisible camera- and when you go for the 'documentary' look and feel, *especially* the "filmed from a distance" look and feel- you're trying to emulate the filming of real life.
But you're not, you're filming acting.
So what you end up with, rather than a convincing fake-documentary feel, is acting filmed in a style that's trying to be realistic, but ends up simply looking like another overused gimmicky style trying desparately to capture a sense of "immediacy", going over the top, and just looking fake and tacky.
That is exactly where they initially promoted it, but AWT performance was terrible and few had the broadband to download the jars in a reasonable time.
Bingo! How old is this guy? From Java's launch in the mid-90s, the selling point was as a client-side Internet language that you could use through your browser.
*That* was the hype; applets, applets, applets!
I guess we could blame Microsoft for attempting to foul things up, but the truth is that for 99% of the things Java was initially promoted for, JavaScript was faster (loading) and hence better.
As for AWT performance; Swing on top of *that* was painful on my 233MHz PC. Reminded me of my 68000-based Amiga 500.
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters.
Yeah, but you'd hardly deny that the German keyboard is basically QWERTY with a couple of minor differences and additions. And yeah, it has some extra keys, but 'QWERTY' only really describes the number/letter keys at most; otherwise, compare a typewriter and PC keyboard and note that the non-letter keys (and even the symbol placement) is likely to be very different.
Actually, I'm surprised that you didn't quote the French AZERTY layout; that's more different to QWERTY than the German layout is. (Wonder if they did that because French has- I assume- different statistical occurrences of letters than English?)
And let's talk to Philips about this silly "compact cassette" thing, and sony and philips about this "compact disc" thing. I hate to say it, but a lot of "standards" usually start life as some sort of proprietary technology...
Well, yeah. The Compact Cassette *did* start out as proprietery technology. And you know why it took off?
Because, under pressure from Sony, Philips decided to license the technology free of charge to anyone. It was shortly after that that the Compact Cassette was adopted by many manufacturers and became "standard".
Had Philips not (effectively) made it non-proprietery, it's unlikely that it would have had the same level of success. So, yeah, it started out proprietery. And it didn't take off until that situation changed.
Socialism doesn't start with concentration camps, that's where it ends.
Trite.
You're implying that because the Nazis called themselves "National Socialist" that they actually were socialist?
Well, okay. And the People's Democratic Republic of China is 'democratic' (for the same reason), so living in a democracy implies living under an oppressive regime where those opposed to the government are killed or tortured.
And (with reference to the other reply) yes, it's funny how no-one ever uses Sweden as an example of socialism, despite the fact that what they had there was closer to true socialism than anything the USSR, Nazis or North Korea came up with.
On the other hand, I wouldn't expect any better from someone who has a link to another PETA propoganda site in their sig.
Personally, I put printer vendors up there with Hitler
*Blinks* Sod Godwin's law, I think comparing everything with Nazis is just plain unimaginative (both uncreative and didn't really get what the Nazis did) and lazy. The printer companies should (at worst) be massively fined, and the management sacked.
Now what the Nazis did and what *should* have happened to those involved in that is so far away that it doesn't even bear comparison.
or something..
Or 'something'. You've obviously thought this out pretty well...
If they claim they don't make money off region coding cartridges, why are they doing it? Sounds like bullshit to me.
Customer service, *obviously*.
"Region coding allows us to ensure that customers in each of our markets can be optimally supported by customer service advisors trained in the specifics of that market."
Or some such weasel-word bullshit.
I can't even remember them declining, it seemed one day you could still buy the Quaver themed computer packs based on a crisps (potato chips to you Americans)character, I kid you know and the next they were no where to be seen.
Uh, perhaps Commodore going bankrupt could have a lot to do with that? Dixons and some other places sold off the remaining CD32s (don't know if they still kept other Amigas then) cheap, and didn't get any more in.
The Amiga market was basically being eaten away by the growth of the PC market; when I got my A500+ at the end of 1991, the Amiga was the computer everyone was exchanging games for at secondary school. A year later, everyone was into the PC and interest in the Amiga was pretty much dead.
The A1200 came out just a bit too late to stand a good chance against the PC onslaught. It was C= keeping up (at best) with the PC at a time when the A500 was becoming very dated (and hideously underpowered).
Basically, I think that when one company started getting out of the market, they all did. It was the same with budget games for the 8-bit machines; they went from being stocked pretty much everywhere to being a thing of the past in a period of 12-18 months or so.
Shops sell less --> Less produced --> Shops sell less --> Less produced --> Some shops stop altogether --> Most companies stop producing --> Sensible shops (most) get out of the market --> Hobbyist niche and/or commercial death.
Although they could be apocryphal, I have heard tales of fish and creatures exploding after being brought up from the depths. Since I can't remember where I saw this, however, I'm prepared to accept that you know more about the matter than me.
No, I haven't seen 'The Abyss'; even if I had, do you think I'd trust anything Hollywood put out for factual accuracy?!
Two things popped into my head before I read the Snopes article:-
(1) Aren't they well-preserved specimens considering that most people would be *far* too busy with other things to notice them and take them out of the sun before they decayed badly?
(2) If they were really new deep-sea creatures, wouldn't beasties from that depth have exploded upon depressurisation?
I don't have a virus scanner or spyware detector... of course I happen to not use Windows at all...
Oh, you don't, do you? Well, you know how the Linux guys were proclaiming that anyone who used Google and so on was actually using "Linux on the desktop"?
Well, I guess the same applies in reverse every time you visit a website running on Windows. Doesn't it?
(Personally, I'd say "I don't think so..." to both cases)
The UK? I WINTER in the UK when I can. Try living in North Dakota. We go to Scotland in March just to get a bit of sunshine and warmth.
Ha ha ha..... bwa ha ha ha! (Falls off chair laughing)
This has *got* to be a joke. I've lived in Scotland all of my life, and I still think the weather from October to April or so sucks.
And temperature isn't everything; even though the coldest days in winter tend to be those with clear blue skies (no insulation), there is also no rain at those times, no permeating damp and best of all, you get to see the sun. Overcast weather for days on end is *depressing*.
The west coast of Scotland, BTW, is far worse than the east coast when it comes to grey skies and precipitation.
OTOH, it's a pretty nice place if you get some sunny summer weather, or even winter sun.
I'm all in favor of jamming cell phones in theatres.
I'm all in favor of jamming them up the user's ass if they use them in a cinema.
That's nothing like a programming language, but more like Boolean expressions, kid.
Really? You'll be telling us next that our u83r-1337 HTML-coding skills don't count as "programming". Hah!
>>Well, that was suppose to be anonymous. Ahh well.
> Don't worry, I'm sure it was your "friend" who told you what to type...
"Erm.... some guys put spyware on my PC and stole my password.... Sorry, didn't catch that.... Oh, I mean, you're right, it *was* the same paedophile hackers that store child porn on other people's machines. I think they're terrorists as well, you can't trust anyone these days."
MP3 degrades the sound in two different ways: [...] I brought a CD with 4 audio tracks, all the same, "Dogs" from the album Animals (Pink Floyd) (My emphasis!)
;-)
....don't you find the CD *itself* lacks the sound quality you'd want? I mean, I know DVA-A and SACD are aimed at people who like quality hi-fi who want an excuse to buy the same stuff for a fifth time, but I can also believe that the CD itself is limited. Not that I object to CD sound quality personally, but I can understand other people being able to notice its limitations, especially on the kind of material they listen to.
MP3 degrades the sound in another way; it doesn't do quadraphonic
Maybe I'm being stereotypical, but my mental stereotype of a Pink Floyd fan is someone with an expensive hi-fi, obsessed with quality sound. Frankly, I'd expect them to be the target audience for DVD-A and SACD.
As a genuine question (re: backing up as WAVs; and if you're that concerned, storage is probably cheap enough to get away with saving as lossless, though you could still compress it as FLAC or whatever)...
Hell, 128k joint stereo sounds like the CD to me, I don't know any better.
Really seems to depend on the codec; I can get 128kbps MP3s with notlame that sound really good through moderately decent headphones, but I download other people's 128kbps MP3s and you can hear the artifacts clearly.
Have they been re-encoded once or more (losing quality), re-encoded from a slower bitrate, or was the encoder that did it just severely crap? Who knows.
I notice that 192kbps MP3s seem to be more common now than they were during my first wave of filesharing, I mean legally downloading...
BTW, the music business has been amoral and full of bullshit since.... well, the 1950s at least. The mafia had their fingers in a *lot* of pies at that time.
I'm waiting for the sequal to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
I understand that there is some sort of pseudo-sequel called "Shock Treatment", which will be on IMDB, but I've never seen it.
I remember seeing The Matrix Reloaded in the theatre and I was the only one who let out a cheer when I saw that Trinity was actaully using an ssh command from a bash terminal when hacking in to shut down the power to that building. =P
It's little details like that (cf. other Hollywood computer GUIs that exist nowhere else) which cost little in terms of effort or cost to do, but pay off well in terms of getting the geeks talking. (Yes, for this purpose, I consider myself a geek).
>> and I'm not sure what they want to get out of this.
> Yes $ you $ are, $ you $ just $ aren't $ aware $ of $ it...
Okay; lemme rephrase that... I'm not sure what they *expect* to get out of this.
Will the Tron nostalgics go and see it? If it's not like the original, and it's not good enough to stand on its own merits, possibly not.
Will kids go and see it? Depends how good it is; as I mentioned above, the plot of Tron has been done in a more sophisticated manner by The Matrix, and it won't be fresh in the way it was 23 years ago.
Personally speaking, I wouldn't go to see it; although I'm almost old enough to be in the "saw Tron first time round" group, I didn't.
Sequels to cult movies aren't guaranteed successes anyway; what about the sequel to 2001, 2010? That flopped.
In my opinion, a lot of the appeal of the first movie was in the "Wow" factor of it.
You put your finger on it. I remember hearing on the Tron DVD that they were wanting to do "Tron 2" (as a movie) and thinking "what is the point?"
Tron was never a great movie; visually it was outstanding (I don't want to repeat myself, so click here), but if they were to do a sequel it would have to replicate the visual impact. The still images of the proposed "Tron 2" looked like pretty computer graphics that could have been done anywhere.
A remake or a sequel would have to try very hard to do justice to the original and be fresh and innovative; the best way to do that would be to do some great visuals, combine it with a more sophisticated (for todays' audiences) computer-based plot, and create something like.... 'The Matrix'. Oops.
I agree 100%. Tron was a landmark movie in some ways, but things have moved on, and I'm not sure what they want to get out of this. People *will* be disappointed, and kids will wonder what the deal is.
I don't understand exclusive anythings when it comes to advertising - from "exclusive" movie trailers to "exclusive" game demos.
Because human nature being what it is, and rabid geeks being what they are, this makes a piece of advertising seem somewhat more interesting and desirable.
It's like Gucci, or another luxury brand. If everyone had it, no-one would care (the Burberry brand in the UK has lost all cred for this very reason). But if something is 'exclusive' and hard to get, and the geeks have to put a little effort into seeing it, the perceived value goes up a lot, which rubs off onto the perceived value (and hence quality) of the film.
Everyone else will get to see the same advertising puff in similar or identical form a couple of weeks later...
It's the same with a lot of 'exclusive' crap. Personally, I couldn't give a damn about most of it.
"Dennis the Menace, The Movie"? That's a totally fscked up idea!
They already did that horrible animation, didn't they? All the characters had cockney-lite accents, despite the fact the cartoon has always been created in Scotland (though, as they said, Dennis the Menace always came from where the reader came from, and the London-centric nature of British TV means that a London accent is 'generic').
And they probably couldn't sell it as Dennis the Menace in the US, for the same reason that the American Dennis the Menace cartoon was shown on British TV as just "Dennis". (As someone pointed out, the American Dennis was just a mischevous kid; the British one *was* a menace).
Brad Pitt as Walter the Softy? That brings to mind some sort of reverse Tyler Durden situation (Spoiler follows for the few that haven't seen Fight Club). Is Walter just a figment of Dennis's imagination, the soft side that he daren't expose?
Oh yeah, and Kevin Spacey as Dennis' Dad is a great idea!