Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 1
Firefly went 13 episodes - B5 goes on for years. Makes absolutely no sense.
My understanding is that a B5 episode was a *lot* cheaper to make than a Firefly episode. It was also hanging by a thread at the end, too. Only TNT saved it from having four seasons instead of five.
Fox seems to like setting up production for expensive sci-fi series (Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond), then freaking out when they don't immediately capture the attention of a billion viewers and cancelling them.
As others have said before, I'm sure if The X-Files was premiering now, it would be cancelled after six months too.
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 1
Maybe they cancel shows because you're only watching them on DVD. Maybe if you'd watch some commercials now and then...
How does watching commercials help? Unless you're a Nielsen family or have a Tivo, I can't really see it making a difference.
The Firefly fans even had a letter-writing campaign to the advertisers who booked time during the series, and it wasn't enough.
I think Fox's problem was probably laying out so much money per episode when they weren't *sure* it was going to do well. They have enough, though, they could have at least given it a full season and a decent time slot to see what happened. Most people I know never even heard of it because it wasn't on long enough.
It's really too bad, because it was an *excellent* series. I watched the entire DVD set in a few days, because every episode is great. The DVD set is pretty cheap too (see sig), I'm thinking of buying a few more to help boost sales =).
Given that typical rights holders charge thousands of dollars for short samples, I can't imagine that he could reasonably get permission for what he'd done.
I am all for legitimate enforcement of IP rights, but not when it ends up preventing someone from releasing another work of art.
It isn't really practical for low-volume releases to have all of the samples cleared and/or licensed.
It's too bad people have decided that sampling is somehow devaluing of the original product, because it's unlikely we'll ever see another Skinny Puppy or classic Front Line Assembly type of band.
I am definitely in favour of protecting IP, but as long as musicians who sample credit the original source (like citing works in an article or research paper), I don't see what the problem is.
It's not like people are *not* going to buy a movie because they already have 3 seconds of dialogue from it, or in this case not going to buy the White Album because they already have some manipulated chunks of it with new vocals.
In fact, I am *more* likely to buy movies and music if I hear it sampled. A few years ago I went on a rampage of buying all of the movies sampled by Skinny Puppy that I could find.
Yes, that's correct. In 2061 there were a number of uses for the massive amounts of diamond mentioned, including preserving the World Trade Center (I think? It's been awhile since I read it, but it was one of the famous buildings on the East Coast) by covering it with a thin layer.
I thought 2001 and 2010 were better, but all three were far superior to 3001.
*Is* there even a proper name for "5 million trillion trillion"? I've heard that the British use some funny system where a billion is a million million instead of a thousand million, and if that's true they might have a name for it, but do people who use normal number-naming schemes?
How do they link what they're carrying to that particular person?
Probably similar to how you'd do it on a website.
The first time that person buys something with a credit or debit card, their name is matched up to every unique RFID on their person. After that, you could identify them any time they visit your store, just like using cookies to track when repeat customers come to your website.
Unlike cookies, there would be nothing to prevent a retailer from tracking the IDs of merchandise from other stores. Every time the same person goes into the store of the retailer that's tracking them with *any* of the ID'd items they've had in there before, the systems there can re-inventory them and add all of the new tags it picks up to the database.
If this hypothetical location was a grocery store or some other frequently-visited place, I could see building up a fairly accurate profile.
e.g. Ben Lincoln is 25, wears wears veggie combat boots, carries an umbrella from Nordstrom, buys a lot of soda pop - but nothing with caffeine in it, buys alcohol occassionally, other food shopping habits (etc.), probably has braces since he buys special floss at the drug store upstairs and then brings it into our store, probably is a gamer since we scanned him with Metroid Zero Mission (which he bought during the day and had in his shoulder bag from a defunct local manufacturer) awhile ago, probably is a sci-fi reader since we also scanned him with an Alastair Reynolds book at the same time, et cetera.
Once I've bought anything there, all they have to do is look for any of those IDs and can be pretty sure it's me. There would probably need to be some sort of pruning logic in case I gave my umbrella away or whatever (so that whoever ends up with it doesn't end up triggering additions to my profile if they visit the store), but it's not like the data they collect needs to be 100% accurate anyway.
I don't know if any retailer has plans for a system like this, but I could see it being pretty straightforward to design.
It's his favorite genre, the last game of this genre and the creator of the best games of the genre, all going to the toilets together, because one has to design his games for the console first, now, period.
I see this same attitude with *my* favourite series (see sig), and I still don't understand it.
How is a game designed for a PC instead of a console allegedly superior? Is it the ton of unnecessary control options? The ability to play with a keyboard and mouse? The possibility of bragging to your friends about how your $400 video card gives you 5 more fps?
Part of the reason I switched to console games is that I vastly prefer the more straightforward control schemes (I hate the keyboard + mouse combination) and knowing that if I buy a game for any of my systems, I don't need to worry about whether or not it will run.
The *only* possible advantage I see to PC gaming over consoles is the ability to mod games, and none of the games I'm interested in support that anyway.
Is that about Legacy of Kain: Defiance? Awesome game.
I'm glad you agree =).
I would definitely recommend checking out the first Soul Reaver if you liked Defiance. The combat isn't as sophisticated (it's closer to Ico, if you've played that), but it's got a great Metroid-esque exploration element and of course provides the backstory for the games that came afterwards.
+1 bonus pre-emptively removed for being offtopic.
I watched the miniseries when it came out and thought it was okay, if a bit cliched.
Then I bought the original series DVD set, and watched the whole thing. It does have a noticeable fromage factor in places (e.g. Muffit, reusing a lot of the space footage in *every* episode, the robots in "Greetings from Earth"), but it's obvious to me that the creators really cared about telling an interesting story of their own.
There was so much about the original that had its own feel - the design of the costumes, the sets, the ships, the Cylons - and in the remake they've all been replaced by generic sci-fi designs.
90% or more of the elements in the remake could have been designed for any space action film - Wing Commander in particular comes to mind. I was *especially* disappointed with the new Cylons. It's obvious that they only make an appearance for a few seconds because the CG is so poorly animated. I also thought the new Raiders with the scanning eye on the front were incredibly cheesy.
That having been said, there were a few things I thought were clever - particularly one of the plot twists near the end that I will not explain to avoid spoiling anyone.
I also liked that "Caprica" was actually the university in Canada that I went to (BG is higher class than The Sixth Day or The Fly II, both of which also filmed there).
Basically I feel like the creators of the new series started changing things not because it was a good idea, but just for the sake of doing it, Rick Berman-style.
I guess a new series could turn out well, but I get the impression that it won't. Sci-fi should have let Richard Hatch do his follow-up idea instead of "reimagining" the story.
Was that an actual part of a spam? I ask, because normally I don't get them, but I was going through our email abuse box at work and came across one that said:
Five situations Chum should try. 1. "Doggiestyle? Right, here I come.. and still I come, no, it's not a dildo, it's still me!" 2. "You like this, baby? What? I cut my dick off and now I've got a huge dead man's cock dangling here? NO WAY!" 3. "You don't tell me you've just called off this threesome 'cuz my dick is small, HOW ABOUT THESE EXTRA INCHES, BITCH?" 4. "Are you sure your uvula doesn't like my extra inch cockslaps?" 5. "Gotta change my whole boxer wardrobe 'cuz my cock always dangles out. Three extra inches.. fuck Natural Gain Plus!"
I mean, seriously. Especially number 2. Are spammers really getting that desperate, and more importantly does it actually make people buy these alleged products?
That's why you should burn CDs of all online music purchases, which you can always rip to your favorite format.
Yes, then you can lose two or more times the quality of the original recording, and you're still storing your music on CD.
If you're going to go to that much trouble, what is the advantage of buying downloadable music versus just buying a pressed audio CD and then ripping to Ogg Vorbis or mp3?
For me, the answer is "none," which is why I do still buy CDs.
Re:"Co-opt Java"
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nobody uses java for "internet downloadable applications", or even intranet downloadable ones.
Retek does, and it's one of - if not *the* - most popular set of apps for the backend of the retail industry in the US.
VB code is better than that. Well,.NET is at least. VB less than or equal to 6 is pretty lame. In.NET it would be:
For each User in LinuxUsers
Daryl.BankAcct += User.BankAcct
User.BankAcct = 0 Next
And of course Daryl would be an object of class CAsshat, LinuxUsers would be an array of objects of class CUser, and both would implement interface IFinances.
BankAcct is a public property, not a variable, and is defined in IFinances.
Then came Outrun, Space Harrier etc and what was that game called out at the same time as Outrun (and the TopGun movie) where you were flying something like an F-14 Tomcat?
Afterburner. That would be a fun machine to own, especially if you could track down one with the motion cockpit.
Just go to a hardware store. They sell screws. Maybe they'll be slotted instead of philips, but they will have something. I've never seen a hardware store that didn't carry screws.
Hardware stores don't generally carry screws that are appropriate for PCs, at least in my experience. The threading is generally wrong, or the screws are too long, etc.
You could pre-cache the next level in Halo off the disc, or the next cutscene worth of dialogue, and basically eliminate load times altogether
I don't know the full details of this, but Halo *does* do at least some caching of level data.
Hackers were able made those crazy Halo videos with towers of Master Chiefs and flamethrowers and so on by hex editing the cache file off of the hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefly went 13 episodes - B5 goes on for years. Makes absolutely no sense.
My understanding is that a B5 episode was a *lot* cheaper to make than a Firefly episode. It was also hanging by a thread at the end, too. Only TNT saved it from having four seasons instead of five.
Fox seems to like setting up production for expensive sci-fi series (Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond), then freaking out when they don't immediately capture the attention of a billion viewers and cancelling them.
As others have said before, I'm sure if The X-Files was premiering now, it would be cancelled after six months too.
Maybe they cancel shows because you're only watching them on DVD. Maybe if you'd watch some commercials now and then...
How does watching commercials help? Unless you're a Nielsen family or have a Tivo, I can't really see it making a difference.
The Firefly fans even had a letter-writing campaign to the advertisers who booked time during the series, and it wasn't enough.
I think Fox's problem was probably laying out so much money per episode when they weren't *sure* it was going to do well. They have enough, though, they could have at least given it a full season and a decent time slot to see what happened. Most people I know never even heard of it because it wasn't on long enough.
It's really too bad, because it was an *excellent* series. I watched the entire DVD set in a few days, because every episode is great. The DVD set is pretty cheap too (see sig), I'm thinking of buying a few more to help boost sales =).
Hopefully the film thing will pan out.
Its not impossible to get sampling permission
Given that typical rights holders charge thousands of dollars for short samples, I can't imagine that he could reasonably get permission for what he'd done.
I am all for legitimate enforcement of IP rights, but not when it ends up preventing someone from releasing another work of art.
It isn't really practical for low-volume releases to have all of the samples cleared and/or licensed.
It's too bad people have decided that sampling is somehow devaluing of the original product, because it's unlikely we'll ever see another Skinny Puppy or classic Front Line Assembly type of band.
I am definitely in favour of protecting IP, but as long as musicians who sample credit the original source (like citing works in an article or research paper), I don't see what the problem is.
It's not like people are *not* going to buy a movie because they already have 3 seconds of dialogue from it, or in this case not going to buy the White Album because they already have some manipulated chunks of it with new vocals.
In fact, I am *more* likely to buy movies and music if I hear it sampled. A few years ago I went on a rampage of buying all of the movies sampled by Skinny Puppy that I could find.
Mod parent up, he's right, it was the UN building. My memory is getting fuzzy in my old age.
Yes, that's correct. In 2061 there were a number of uses for the massive amounts of diamond mentioned, including preserving the World Trade Center (I think? It's been awhile since I read it, but it was one of the famous buildings on the East Coast) by covering it with a thin layer.
I thought 2001 and 2010 were better, but all three were far superior to 3001.
They should put the number's real name
*Is* there even a proper name for "5 million trillion trillion"? I've heard that the British use some funny system where a billion is a million million instead of a thousand million, and if that's true they might have a name for it, but do people who use normal number-naming schemes?
How do they link what they're carrying to that particular person?
Probably similar to how you'd do it on a website.
The first time that person buys something with a credit or debit card, their name is matched up to every unique RFID on their person. After that, you could identify them any time they visit your store, just like using cookies to track when repeat customers come to your website.
Unlike cookies, there would be nothing to prevent a retailer from tracking the IDs of merchandise from other stores. Every time the same person goes into the store of the retailer that's tracking them with *any* of the ID'd items they've had in there before, the systems there can re-inventory them and add all of the new tags it picks up to the database.
If this hypothetical location was a grocery store or some other frequently-visited place, I could see building up a fairly accurate profile.
e.g. Ben Lincoln is 25, wears wears veggie combat boots, carries an umbrella from Nordstrom, buys a lot of soda pop - but nothing with caffeine in it, buys alcohol occassionally, other food shopping habits (etc.), probably has braces since he buys special floss at the drug store upstairs and then brings it into our store, probably is a gamer since we scanned him with Metroid Zero Mission (which he bought during the day and had in his shoulder bag from a defunct local manufacturer) awhile ago, probably is a sci-fi reader since we also scanned him with an Alastair Reynolds book at the same time, et cetera.
Once I've bought anything there, all they have to do is look for any of those IDs and can be pretty sure it's me. There would probably need to be some sort of pruning logic in case I gave my umbrella away or whatever (so that whoever ends up with it doesn't end up triggering additions to my profile if they visit the store), but it's not like the data they collect needs to be 100% accurate anyway.
I don't know if any retailer has plans for a system like this, but I could see it being pretty straightforward to design.
Well I'll be darned. I'd never seen one of those before (I'm 25), but I guess they really were doing that up until a few years before I was born.
Oh, yeah, I'm not saying the idea of sentient fighters was dumb, but the giant head with scanning eye on the front sure was.
difficult to use interface.
I am not really a Deus Ex fan, but I played the demo and I thought the interface was nicely done. What didn't people like about it?
It's his favorite genre, the last game of this genre and the creator of the best games of the genre, all going to the toilets together, because one has to design his games for the console first, now, period.
I see this same attitude with *my* favourite series (see sig), and I still don't understand it.
How is a game designed for a PC instead of a console allegedly superior? Is it the ton of unnecessary control options? The ability to play with a keyboard and mouse? The possibility of bragging to your friends about how your $400 video card gives you 5 more fps?
Part of the reason I switched to console games is that I vastly prefer the more straightforward control schemes (I hate the keyboard + mouse combination) and knowing that if I buy a game for any of my systems, I don't need to worry about whether or not it will run.
The *only* possible advantage I see to PC gaming over consoles is the ability to mod games, and none of the games I'm interested in support that anyway.
Is that about Legacy of Kain: Defiance? Awesome game.
I'm glad you agree =).
I would definitely recommend checking out the first Soul Reaver if you liked Defiance. The combat isn't as sophisticated (it's closer to Ico, if you've played that), but it's got a great Metroid-esque exploration element and of course provides the backstory for the games that came afterwards.
+1 bonus pre-emptively removed for being offtopic.
Also - what was up with the entire crew of the new series wearing tanktops backwards? That was just silly-looking.
I've got to agree.
I watched the miniseries when it came out and thought it was okay, if a bit cliched.
Then I bought the original series DVD set, and watched the whole thing. It does have a noticeable fromage factor in places (e.g. Muffit, reusing a lot of the space footage in *every* episode, the robots in "Greetings from Earth"), but it's obvious to me that the creators really cared about telling an interesting story of their own.
There was so much about the original that had its own feel - the design of the costumes, the sets, the ships, the Cylons - and in the remake they've all been replaced by generic sci-fi designs.
90% or more of the elements in the remake could have been designed for any space action film - Wing Commander in particular comes to mind. I was *especially* disappointed with the new Cylons. It's obvious that they only make an appearance for a few seconds because the CG is so poorly animated. I also thought the new Raiders with the scanning eye on the front were incredibly cheesy.
That having been said, there were a few things I thought were clever - particularly one of the plot twists near the end that I will not explain to avoid spoiling anyone.
I also liked that "Caprica" was actually the university in Canada that I went to (BG is higher class than The Sixth Day or The Fly II, both of which also filmed there).
Basically I feel like the creators of the new series started changing things not because it was a good idea, but just for the sake of doing it, Rick Berman-style.
I guess a new series could turn out well, but I get the impression that it won't. Sci-fi should have let Richard Hatch do his follow-up idea instead of "reimagining" the story.
Star Wars lumbers on with dialogue-ridden prequels (and yet unseen postquels)
I see you are taking a dim view and assuming that even theoretically speaking, Episodes VII-IX will be unworthy of the title "sequels."
Conrad [Black] is a man who used to own a line of newspapers.
He lost his papers? I went to university in Canada, and that thought fills me with glee.
Was that an actual part of a spam? I ask, because normally I don't get them, but I was going through our email abuse box at work and came across one that said:
Five situations Chum should try.
1. "Doggiestyle? Right, here I come.. and still I come, no, it's not a dildo, it's still me!"
2. "You like this, baby? What? I cut my dick off and now I've got a huge dead man's cock dangling here? NO WAY!"
3. "You don't tell me you've just called off this threesome 'cuz my dick is small, HOW ABOUT THESE EXTRA INCHES, BITCH?"
4. "Are you sure your uvula doesn't like my extra inch cockslaps?"
5. "Gotta change my whole boxer wardrobe 'cuz my cock always dangles out. Three extra inches.. fuck Natural Gain Plus!"
I mean, seriously. Especially number 2. Are spammers really getting that desperate, and more importantly does it actually make people buy these alleged products?
That's why you should burn CDs of all online music purchases, which you can always rip to your favorite format.
Yes, then you can lose two or more times the quality of the original recording, and you're still storing your music on CD.
If you're going to go to that much trouble, what is the advantage of buying downloadable music versus just buying a pressed audio CD and then ripping to Ogg Vorbis or mp3?
For me, the answer is "none," which is why I do still buy CDs.
Nobody uses java for "internet downloadable applications", or even intranet downloadable ones.
Retek does, and it's one of - if not *the* - most popular set of apps for the backend of the retail industry in the US.
VB code is better than that. Well, .NET is at least. VB less than or equal to 6 is pretty lame. In .NET it would be:
For each User in LinuxUsers
Daryl.BankAcct += User.BankAcct
User.BankAcct = 0
Next
And of course Daryl would be an object of class CAsshat, LinuxUsers would be an array of objects of class CUser, and both would implement interface IFinances.
BankAcct is a public property, not a variable, and is defined in IFinances.
Then came Outrun, Space Harrier etc and what was that game called out at the same time as Outrun (and the TopGun movie) where you were flying something like an F-14 Tomcat?
Afterburner. That would be a fun machine to own, especially if you could track down one with the motion cockpit.
Just go to a hardware store. They sell screws. Maybe they'll be slotted instead of philips, but they will have something. I've never seen a hardware store that didn't carry screws.
Hardware stores don't generally carry screws that are appropriate for PCs, at least in my experience. The threading is generally wrong, or the screws are too long, etc.
You could pre-cache the next level in Halo off the disc, or the next cutscene worth of dialogue, and basically eliminate load times altogether
I don't know the full details of this, but Halo *does* do at least some caching of level data.
Hackers were able made those crazy Halo videos with towers of Master Chiefs and flamethrowers and so on by hex editing the cache file off of the hard drive.
So I'm wondering - what's the point ?
If you RT entire FA, they mention the goal - finding an "island of stability" of elements which do not decay and may have unusual properties.