anything in the OT Novels that doesn't contradict the movies outright is officially considered canon by Lucasfilm.
"When it comes to absolute canon, the real story of Star Wars, you must turn to the films themselves - and only the films. Even novelizations are interpretations of the film, and while they are largely true to George Lucas' vision (he works quite closely with the novel authors), the method in which they are written does allow for some minor differences."
how can someone create such a dark and fantastic universe and make it so compelling int he first 3 movies, and then fill it with things like jar jar and "surfing on lava" (whoa gnarly yo!) and other idiocies in the last 3
Because 4-6 were heavily influenced by other people. Look at the credits for ESB - Lucas didn't write that script or direct the film.
1-3 are basically a public exhibition of Lucas' private jizzfest brought on by him now having enough money to not have to listen to anyone else when they tell him particular ideas are bad.
If you read the very early drafts of the scripts for the first films (e.g. "The Adventures of Starkiller"), you can tell he's always been drawn to the fromage factor.
Now, if they fired Lucas and made the Zahn books into movies then they could rekindle the franchise, but Lucas would never allow that.
Come on, the Zahn books were even worse than the prequels.
The story arc was *identical* to the original trilogy, but with such "clever" substitutions as a mining city built on top of AT-ATs instead of antigravity systems, and the Katana (nice breach of continuity, that name) fleet instead of the two Death Stars.
The characterizations were only vaguely reminiscent of those in the films. Every planet had a name with seven apostrophes in it. The evil Ewok ninja creatures were totally dorky, and so were the bevy of characters (e.g. Thrawn, Mara Jada) who were always conveniently off-screen during the films. It was full of lame prequel-esque stunts like the one where Luke slides down a wall by holding his saber in one hand to gouge a recess and his other to grip it as it's created.
The only official Star Wars material I've read that was worse than the Zahn books was the Crystal one with the machines that suck people's souls out with arcs of electricity.
I do agree about the surfing on lava thing. I knew Lucas was going to figure out some way to make this potentially awesome film terrible. This just further convinces me that he's going to do something totally stupid to the original trilogy for the DVD release, like stick some Gungans in the Mos Eisley cantina and/or piloting ships at the battle of Endor.
The similarities arise from the similar circumstances of origion of the two dialects. Both are designed to be extremely terse, due to limited available "bandwidth." In the case of l33t, any time spent of the numpad detracts from game play, while with ham, you need to key out each letter with multiple strokes.
What?
I've been watching "1337" evolve and devolve for over a decade. It may *now* involve a lot of numeric keypad usage, but I can't believe it started as a way to be efficient.
Ten or twelve years ago there was hardly any number usage at all, just the dorky "i aM a HaXoR, aLL VoWeLZ R LoWeRCaSe" capitalization. I would see variations like using zeroes for o, fours for a, ones for l, threes for e, and sevens for t, but writing it "3Y3 4M 4 H4X0R, 4LL V0W3LZ R NuMB3RZ" actually takes more effort than spelling it normally.
I see it as being a deliberate obfuscation, like slang or the illegible writing style that taggers use.
I was going to post something less colourfully phrased if no one else had.
The author of the article is either inept or trolling. Unless you are doing something dumb like downloading tons of shareware apps, installing them briefly, then uninstalling them, the registry should be fine.
Of course, he *does* seem to be the kind of person that does exactly that, based on his "I downloaded a random 'registry cleaner' program and trusted it with my computer's stability, and now my PC doesn't work!" thing.
The hotfix issue is a legitimate complaint, but anyone who is running Windows 2000 (an enterprise operating system) at home should be comfortable with making slipstreamed install CDs - especially if the user is someone with dialup access who regularly formats and reinstalls their system.
I'm sure MS would be happy to provide physical CDs with the updates on them if more than a tiny fraction of users were willing to pay a small fee for the convenience. It's not like Linux users get magic free CDs mailed to them from the groups that package the distributions.
I wonder if tasers are ever going to become controlled devices.
Just to be irritatingly picky, I'm going to point out that there's a difference between a taser and a stun gun.
"Taser" is actually an acronym for "Thomas A. Smith Electric Rifle," and is a handheld weapon which fires barbs into its target with compressed air. The barbs are tethered to the gun with wires which transmit the electricity.
A stun "gun" is a handheld device that has two short metal probs that you physically touch to the target, like a tiny cattle prod.
A true taser has the advantage of being able to be used from a distance, so if you are a police officer dealing with e.g. a crazy person swinging a sword in public and don't want to gun them down, you can try the taser first.
People in 1933 Germany were quite happy to put up with Hitler's new policies, and give up "some" of their civil rights, for a variety of perfectly valid reasons too...
I recently picked up Triumph of the Will on DVD. I would recommend it for viewing by any citizen of the modern world. There are many parts that gave me an ominous feeling of deja vu. It was also the source of the quote in my sig.
the powers granted to the government by the law are themselves state secrets! This has gone beyond evil into insanity.
So passes the glory of the United States, eh? 224 years wasn't a bad run from inception to the government pissing on the Constitution. Hopefully 2000-2004 will give some good inspiration to whoever writes the next one.
Can everybody in the US please get over the need to relate everything in the entire world to terrorism?
There was one attack, 2.5 years ago. It was a horrible thing, but if someone wants to do something like it again there are uncountable ways that are easier than getting their hands on an as-yet-nonexistent private orbital craft and a weapon capable of surviving re-entry.
As someone else suggested, there are lots of ways to get around the travel time in Morrowind.
You can purchase transport at all of the major cities in the game. If you complete the Boots of Blinding Speed quest you can increase your speed 200 points whenever you feel like it. If you collect the Propylon indices, you can teleport between the various Dwemer fortresses. If you have any magic skills, you can learn Mark/Recall, Divine Intervention, and Almsivi Intervention. There are two handy magical items (Amulet of Levitation and Blade of the Wind(?)) that let you levitate basically as much as you want to get over mountains.
The skill system is awesome, IMO. I am usually not a fan of RPGs at all, but basing levels and skills on how much you use them made me really interested in Morrowind.
The only complaint I had about the game was the over-abundance of Cliff Racers.
Maybe I read a little too much of Infiltration, but I am really interested in underground tunnel systems, abandoned subway lines, etc. If there were any in my area, I would be checking them out too.
If he's got a perfectly legit reason to want to know, then he should tell us.
Unless the "legitimate" HBO releases had Chinese descriptions on the boxes and subtitles on the disks, I don't think so.
That would be easy enough to translate.
Why do you find it so hard to imagine that there are legitimate DVDs made and sold in China?
I'm sure there are, just not a season's worth of TV episodes for $15, no matter what the quality of the packaging is.
Have you seen the bootleg Star Wars DVDs? The only way you can tell they're bootlegs is because there won't be a legitimate release of them until the fall.
The DVDs I'm talking about have full menus, commentary tracks, various subtitles. I don't think LDs have these features. The bootlegs are about US$1, and variable in quality.
Actually, my GoG DVDs have all those features, minus the commentary. I'm sure that even if there were a legit release there would be no commentary anyway, they were never blockbuster films.
The bootleg Star Wars DVDs have all those features. The bootleg Wonderful Days DVD I almost bought on eBay (until I found an importer of the legit 2 disc version from Korea) had all those features.
These DVDs have good art and the text isn't the gibberish that bootlegs usually have, and other fetures that lead me to believe they're actually licensed.
I've seen plenty of bootleg DVDs that fit this description. I actually ended up with a set of three (God of Gamblers, God of Gamblers Return, and God of Gamblers 3). I'm not sure that even the importer I bought them from knew they were illicit. They're real DVDs with real cover art, menus, and so on.
Whoever bootlegged the DVDs you saw probably just duplicated the content of the legitimate releases, which is why it looks better than a normal bootleg.
My GoG DVDs were ripped from the laserdisc versions, for example.
If these have LEDs now, I'm sure the next 11 years will give researchers plenty of time to add power laces and a voice chip that sounds like Stephen Hawking's.
As for the description of gravity being incorrect, I hate to tell you this, but general relativity solves *so* many problems that cannot be solved otherwise that it's preposterous at this point to consider anything else.
Newton's physics accurately describe a lot of things - and are still very useful - but they are *not* a correct description of the way the universe really works.
General Relativity is the same way. It accurately describes many things, but eventually it will be superceded by a more complete theory.
I think the answer to the dark matter problem and the quantum theory of gravity is one in the same.
I agree.
A friend and I read The Elegant Universe and both came to the same conclusion - "dark matter" doesn't exist. The gravitational effects are due to gravitons entering our universe either from another brane, or from our own brane folded over in a higher dimension.
For those who haven't read it, according to string theory all particles except the graviton are bound to their "home" brane. Gravitons may move freely between branes. A brane is a "slice" of a larger, hyperdimensional structure called "the bulk." Our universe occupies one brane out of the bulk.
Is The Boeing Company large enough for you? The admins have been running around patching like fools the past few days either by hand, or an SMS push.
Ever since the company got owned by the Slammer virus, they have been very proactive in mandating patches.
We've probably seen each other at the SMS conferences in Bellevue =). I'm not going to reveal who I work for on Slashdot (it's another large Northwest company, a bit smaller than Boeing), but we have a similar patch policy now, and SMS is the main engine for getting them out to workstations.
Out of all the patches we've sent out, only a few have caused problems and that was because of poorly coded software on the workstations, particularly third-party-written/third-party-hosted web apps and browser add-ons. It certainly seems a small price to pay compared to another Blaster.
Well since we're talking about graphics in modern games here I'm gonna through out a pet peve of mine about morrowind. ... But why are the models and textures so crappy!
Probably because the game world is so huge - and all of it was created by hand, instead of algorithmically like the previous Elder Scrolls games.
There are always tradeoffs in game-making. Another aspect of Morrowind that sticks out if you think about it is that nearly all of the story is told in text form, probably because it would have been prohibitively expensive and space-consuming to use quality recorded dialogue for all the possible story branches.
While you may be legitimately trying to provide some help here, I am starting to get the impression that your account was made for karma whoring and/or trying to advertise your business, given that you've done this with every single front page story today as far as I can tell.
Mirroring people's content without their permission is probably not something they would take kindly to. I know that I would rather have the site I run go down than be sitting on a webserver I have no control over.
This is also a site which depends on advertising revenue. It may be a ghetto mod site whose writers have a poor grasp of spelling and grammar, but it is still unethical to deprive them of their ad fees by leeching away their viewers to your mirror.
Finally, the site is holding up just fine. I don't see any reason for a mirror to be necessary at all.
Re:The problem with HDTV right now...
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You wouldn't see any more detail from your DVD. It wasn't encoded from HD.
I mentioned this in a reply to another comment, but I see not everyone is reading it, so here is a longer explanation:
NTSC has an effective vertical resolution of 482 pixels. A letterboxed image occupies about a third to a half of the vertical space on the TV depending on the aspect ratio. That means that only 160-241 pixels are allocated for the vertical resolution, out of the actual ~480 (again, depending on the aspect ratio and whether or not it's an anamorphic disc) that are present on the DVD.
Just by switching to an HDTV, I could double or triple the vertical resolution of the films I'm watching.
No, but given that my 4:3 TV set gives widescreen DVDs an effective vertical resolution of something like 200-300 pixels, an HDTV would still be a massive improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
anything in the OT Novels that doesn't contradict the movies outright is officially considered canon by Lucasfilm.
"When it comes to absolute canon, the real story of Star Wars, you must turn to the films themselves - and only the films. Even novelizations are interpretations of the film, and while they are largely true to George Lucas' vision (he works quite closely with the novel authors), the method in which they are written does allow for some minor differences."
-- Starwars.com
how can someone create such a dark and fantastic universe and make it so compelling int he first 3 movies, and then fill it with things like jar jar and "surfing on lava" (whoa gnarly yo!) and other idiocies in the last 3
Because 4-6 were heavily influenced by other people. Look at the credits for ESB - Lucas didn't write that script or direct the film.
1-3 are basically a public exhibition of Lucas' private jizzfest brought on by him now having enough money to not have to listen to anyone else when they tell him particular ideas are bad.
If you read the very early drafts of the scripts for the first films (e.g. "The Adventures of Starkiller"), you can tell he's always been drawn to the fromage factor.
Now, if they fired Lucas and made the Zahn books into movies then they could rekindle the franchise, but Lucas would never allow that.
Come on, the Zahn books were even worse than the prequels.
The story arc was *identical* to the original trilogy, but with such "clever" substitutions as a mining city built on top of AT-ATs instead of antigravity systems, and the Katana (nice breach of continuity, that name) fleet instead of the two Death Stars.
The characterizations were only vaguely reminiscent of those in the films. Every planet had a name with seven apostrophes in it. The evil Ewok ninja creatures were totally dorky, and so were the bevy of characters (e.g. Thrawn, Mara Jada) who were always conveniently off-screen during the films. It was full of lame prequel-esque stunts like the one where Luke slides down a wall by holding his saber in one hand to gouge a recess and his other to grip it as it's created.
The only official Star Wars material I've read that was worse than the Zahn books was the Crystal one with the machines that suck people's souls out with arcs of electricity.
I do agree about the surfing on lava thing. I knew Lucas was going to figure out some way to make this potentially awesome film terrible. This just further convinces me that he's going to do something totally stupid to the original trilogy for the DVD release, like stick some Gungans in the Mos Eisley cantina and/or piloting ships at the battle of Endor.
The similarities arise from the similar circumstances of origion of the two dialects. Both are designed to be extremely terse, due to limited available "bandwidth." In the case of l33t, any time spent of the numpad detracts from game play, while with ham, you need to key out each letter with multiple strokes.
What?
I've been watching "1337" evolve and devolve for over a decade. It may *now* involve a lot of numeric keypad usage, but I can't believe it started as a way to be efficient.
Ten or twelve years ago there was hardly any number usage at all, just the dorky "i aM a HaXoR, aLL VoWeLZ R LoWeRCaSe" capitalization. I would see variations like using zeroes for o, fours for a, ones for l, threes for e, and sevens for t, but writing it "3Y3 4M 4 H4X0R, 4LL V0W3LZ R NuMB3RZ" actually takes more effort than spelling it normally.
I see it as being a deliberate obfuscation, like slang or the illegible writing style that taggers use.
I was going to post something less colourfully phrased if no one else had.
The author of the article is either inept or trolling. Unless you are doing something dumb like downloading tons of shareware apps, installing them briefly, then uninstalling them, the registry should be fine.
Of course, he *does* seem to be the kind of person that does exactly that, based on his "I downloaded a random 'registry cleaner' program and trusted it with my computer's stability, and now my PC doesn't work!" thing.
The hotfix issue is a legitimate complaint, but anyone who is running Windows 2000 (an enterprise operating system) at home should be comfortable with making slipstreamed install CDs - especially if the user is someone with dialup access who regularly formats and reinstalls their system.
I'm sure MS would be happy to provide physical CDs with the updates on them if more than a tiny fraction of users were willing to pay a small fee for the convenience. It's not like Linux users get magic free CDs mailed to them from the groups that package the distributions.
I wonder if tasers are ever going to become controlled devices.
Just to be irritatingly picky, I'm going to point out that there's a difference between a taser and a stun gun.
"Taser" is actually an acronym for "Thomas A. Smith Electric Rifle," and is a handheld weapon which fires barbs into its target with compressed air. The barbs are tethered to the gun with wires which transmit the electricity.
A stun "gun" is a handheld device that has two short metal probs that you physically touch to the target, like a tiny cattle prod.
A true taser has the advantage of being able to be used from a distance, so if you are a police officer dealing with e.g. a crazy person swinging a sword in public and don't want to gun them down, you can try the taser first.
Y.H.B.T.Y.H.L.H.A.N.D
I see even the ancients weren't above dropping a sarcastic "have a nice day" at the end of their posts.
it was the code to almost all Capcom brand games.
Konami.
People in 1933 Germany were quite happy to put up with Hitler's new policies, and give up "some" of their civil rights, for a variety of perfectly valid reasons too...
I recently picked up Triumph of the Will on DVD. I would recommend it for viewing by any citizen of the modern world. There are many parts that gave me an ominous feeling of deja vu. It was also the source of the quote in my sig.
the powers granted to the government by the law are themselves state secrets! This has gone beyond evil into insanity.
So passes the glory of the United States, eh? 224 years wasn't a bad run from inception to the government pissing on the Constitution. Hopefully 2000-2004 will give some good inspiration to whoever writes the next one.
Can everybody in the US please get over the need to relate everything in the entire world to terrorism?
There was one attack, 2.5 years ago. It was a horrible thing, but if someone wants to do something like it again there are uncountable ways that are easier than getting their hands on an as-yet-nonexistent private orbital craft and a weapon capable of surviving re-entry.
but really is mute point
The point may be moot, but it is never "mute."
As someone else suggested, there are lots of ways to get around the travel time in Morrowind.
You can purchase transport at all of the major cities in the game. If you complete the Boots of Blinding Speed quest you can increase your speed 200 points whenever you feel like it. If you collect the Propylon indices, you can teleport between the various Dwemer fortresses. If you have any magic skills, you can learn Mark/Recall, Divine Intervention, and Almsivi Intervention. There are two handy magical items (Amulet of Levitation and Blade of the Wind(?)) that let you levitate basically as much as you want to get over mountains.
The skill system is awesome, IMO. I am usually not a fan of RPGs at all, but basing levels and skills on how much you use them made me really interested in Morrowind.
The only complaint I had about the game was the over-abundance of Cliff Racers.
Have you never just been curious about something?
Maybe I read a little too much of Infiltration, but I am really interested in underground tunnel systems, abandoned subway lines, etc. If there were any in my area, I would be checking them out too.
If he's got a perfectly legit reason to want to know, then he should tell us.
Papers please, citizen.
Unless the "legitimate" HBO releases had Chinese descriptions on the boxes and subtitles on the disks, I don't think so.
That would be easy enough to translate.
Why do you find it so hard to imagine that there are legitimate DVDs made and sold in China?
I'm sure there are, just not a season's worth of TV episodes for $15, no matter what the quality of the packaging is.
Have you seen the bootleg Star Wars DVDs? The only way you can tell they're bootlegs is because there won't be a legitimate release of them until the fall.
The DVDs I'm talking about have full menus, commentary tracks, various subtitles. I don't think LDs have these features. The bootlegs are about US$1, and variable in quality.
Actually, my GoG DVDs have all those features, minus the commentary. I'm sure that even if there were a legit release there would be no commentary anyway, they were never blockbuster films.
The bootleg Star Wars DVDs have all those features. The bootleg Wonderful Days DVD I almost bought on eBay (until I found an importer of the legit 2 disc version from Korea) had all those features.
These DVDs have good art and the text isn't the gibberish that bootlegs usually have, and other fetures that lead me to believe they're actually licensed.
I've seen plenty of bootleg DVDs that fit this description. I actually ended up with a set of three (God of Gamblers, God of Gamblers Return, and God of Gamblers 3). I'm not sure that even the importer I bought them from knew they were illicit. They're real DVDs with real cover art, menus, and so on.
Whoever bootlegged the DVDs you saw probably just duplicated the content of the legitimate releases, which is why it looks better than a normal bootleg.
My GoG DVDs were ripped from the laserdisc versions, for example.
If these have LEDs now, I'm sure the next 11 years will give researchers plenty of time to add power laces and a voice chip that sounds like Stephen Hawking's.
As for the description of gravity being incorrect, I hate to tell you this, but general relativity solves *so* many problems that cannot be solved otherwise that it's preposterous at this point to consider anything else.
Newton's physics accurately describe a lot of things - and are still very useful - but they are *not* a correct description of the way the universe really works.
General Relativity is the same way. It accurately describes many things, but eventually it will be superceded by a more complete theory.
I think the answer to the dark matter problem and the quantum theory of gravity is one in the same.
I agree.
A friend and I read The Elegant Universe and both came to the same conclusion - "dark matter" doesn't exist. The gravitational effects are due to gravitons entering our universe either from another brane, or from our own brane folded over in a higher dimension.
For those who haven't read it, according to string theory all particles except the graviton are bound to their "home" brane. Gravitons may move freely between branes. A brane is a "slice" of a larger, hyperdimensional structure called "the bulk." Our universe occupies one brane out of the bulk.
Is The Boeing Company large enough for you? The admins have been running around patching like fools the past few days either by hand, or an SMS push.
Ever since the company got owned by the Slammer virus, they have been very proactive in mandating patches.
We've probably seen each other at the SMS conferences in Bellevue =). I'm not going to reveal who I work for on Slashdot (it's another large Northwest company, a bit smaller than Boeing), but we have a similar patch policy now, and SMS is the main engine for getting them out to workstations.
Out of all the patches we've sent out, only a few have caused problems and that was because of poorly coded software on the workstations, particularly third-party-written/third-party-hosted web apps and browser add-ons. It certainly seems a small price to pay compared to another Blaster.
Well since we're talking about graphics in modern games here I'm gonna through out a pet peve of mine about morrowind.
...
But why are the models and textures so crappy!
Probably because the game world is so huge - and all of it was created by hand, instead of algorithmically like the previous Elder Scrolls games.
There are always tradeoffs in game-making. Another aspect of Morrowind that sticks out if you think about it is that nearly all of the story is told in text form, probably because it would have been prohibitively expensive and space-consuming to use quality recorded dialogue for all the possible story branches.
While you may be legitimately trying to provide some help here, I am starting to get the impression that your account was made for karma whoring and/or trying to advertise your business, given that you've done this with every single front page story today as far as I can tell.
Mirroring people's content without their permission is probably not something they would take kindly to. I know that I would rather have the site I run go down than be sitting on a webserver I have no control over.
This is also a site which depends on advertising revenue. It may be a ghetto mod site whose writers have a poor grasp of spelling and grammar, but it is still unethical to deprive them of their ad fees by leeching away their viewers to your mirror.
Finally, the site is holding up just fine. I don't see any reason for a mirror to be necessary at all.
You wouldn't see any more detail from your DVD. It wasn't encoded from HD.
I mentioned this in a reply to another comment, but I see not everyone is reading it, so here is a longer explanation:
NTSC has an effective vertical resolution of 482 pixels. A letterboxed image occupies about a third to a half of the vertical space on the TV depending on the aspect ratio. That means that only 160-241 pixels are allocated for the vertical resolution, out of the actual ~480 (again, depending on the aspect ratio and whether or not it's an anamorphic disc) that are present on the DVD.
Just by switching to an HDTV, I could double or triple the vertical resolution of the films I'm watching.
Are HD DVD films available in the US yet?
No, but given that my 4:3 TV set gives widescreen DVDs an effective vertical resolution of something like 200-300 pixels, an HDTV would still be a massive improvement.
The fat corporations represented by the MPAA and RIAA have been fleecing the public for years. They are the real criminals.
Yeah, those poor consumers, who will get lined up and gunned down if they don't purchase the latest music and movies.