Digital Consumer Enablement, you say? That would turn DRM into DCE.
Now, we've played this alphabet-soup game plenty of times before, and it's interesting to note that a name-change like this comes about just as "Digital Restrictions Management" is starting to overshadow the industry-approved term in the minds of the public.
Therefore, I hereby propose that from this day forward DCE shall be known to stand for Digitally Crippled Entertainment.
Mr. Zitter, we can play this game for as long as you like. And our side will always win.
Advent Children was among the worst movies of the year, and you are spot-on in your recommendation to watch it muted. With all due respect, however, your suggestion of switching to Japanese dialogue is, in this geek's eyes, a shade misguided as watching in Japanese solves nothing--the problems run deeper than voice-overs or language itself. I saw both the English and Japanese versions, having fallen prey to fans of the film telling me "it's better in Japanese, trust me, see it that way." So I gave it a whirl, figuring at least the worst that could happen is I'd lose another 90 minutes of my life.
Fool me once (The Grudge/Ju-On), shame on you. Fool me twice, just shoot me in the head.
Now, before you revoke my geek badge, I have nothing against Japanese culture or media, my J-console-game collection is extensive, and I watch anime from time to time (albeit not as much as I used to, but still a fair amount--recently it's been Ergo Proxy, which is amazing and available in 720p as icing on the cake). However, no amount of appreciation for Japanese pop culture could salvage this frelling pile of dren.
It was nothing either way but 90 minutes of pandering pointlessness with a slick CG shine.
The heroes were all superhuman and I never once felt the slightest hint of suspense. Is it asking too much to have these characters whom we have come to know and (presumably) love overcome some real adversity and demonstrate some strength of character, whether it be in intelligence, creativity, quick thinking, resourcefulness, or something other than flying through the air in slow motion and smiling/winking at the camera?
The writers failed to make me care about Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo's motives, due in part to making them so implausibly, unrealistically man-gorgeous that I was completely unable to take them seriously as antagonists (I know, I know, it's a Japanese cultural thing and it's all over games/anime/manga, but all I can say is at least people know not to fuck with Dr. Doom or Emperor Palpatine), and also in part to the jarring (lack of) introduction we were given to these characters. It's one thing to throw the audience right in the middle of an action scene with the hero facing an unknown villain and then follow the hero as he finds out about who they are, what they want, etc. The way it was done here, though, had all the characters acting as though they had some existing knowledge of the villains and it made me feel as though I'd missed some crucial part of the plot.
The Geostigma/SSS was poorly explained almost to the point of passing lip-service instantly forgotten at the onset of the next fight scene. Also, its apparent cure was similarly contrived and forced, feeling like yet another way to stuff in a fan-pleaser.
Speaking of fight scenes, some of the camera motion threatened to forcefully reintroduce me to my lunch. The spiral down the side of Orthanc in Fellowship was bad enough, but at least it was over in a couple seconds...almost a full half-hour of it in FF7AC's final motorcycle-chase/action/fight sequence was just unforgivable.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, for as panned and reviled as it is by the fanboys, is at least a respectable exercise in filmmaking even if it has few ties to its namesake game series. This stems from the film taking the time to properly introduce and develop characters, make the audience feel for them, make them seem human, and then string events together in a cohesive, meaningful fashion to form that elusive animal called a "plot." Poor game adaptation, but a decent film with a moderately engaging plot, some funny moments, and characters that seem far more real personality-wise than the planks of wood in AC. I know the character models bungee-jump in the Uncanny Valley, but at least they act, talk, and sound real. Far better than the overabundance of brooding stares and unconvincing overly-emotionally-charged conflict of AC.
AC, on the other hand, is a "thank-you" to FF7 fans and a "fuck you" to anyone else interested in seeing an enjoyable movie.
And, for example, I use heatpipe cooling in my systems. These function by sucking away the heat emitted by the CPU, thus satisfying the "sucker" criterion.
We need a 3rd party... We have them. Plenty of them. Just having them isn't enough if people don't vote for them. Spread the word, get people to look beyond the Republicrats, and then we have a chance to really shake things up.
Please fix the (apparent) memory management, or rather mis-management, problem. Maybe this is something external to Firefox, or maybe it's a problematic extension, but it should NOT take 30 seconds for a context menu to show up on a G5 Quad. Furthermore, my hard disk should NOT be going batshit when I have 2.5 GB of real, honest-to-Bob memory for Firefox to play with.
Anyone else experience this ludicrous right-click delay? It's not enough to drive me away from Firefox (or, rather, extensions are enough to get me to stay), but it is nothing short of maddening.
How can they truly stop it, though, if it's open-source? All that would need to happen is for one person to have downloaded the source.tar and distributed it far and wide, unofficially. Let a programming team in a foreign country pick up the project and keep it alive.
This is why I really wonder about the sanity of some of the developers of these ripping apps--if you know there's a real, tangible threat from the industry, why-oh-why do you never release your source? DVD Decrypter, DVDFab, and DVD Shrink are all (at least, at one point I thought they were) closed-source even if some are/were free.
I understand the desire for notoriety in the warez scene, but sometimes the greater good must be served. Open the source.
I think I can top that (no pun intended...for those who get it). I once had to explain to someone that BSD was BSD, and not another acronym that sounds suspiciously similar to it. Don't get me started on the phoenetics of "BSD UNIX."
I'm inclined to say that Dell is more important to Microsoft than Microsoft is to Dell.
Remember that PC hardware stands on its own and free operating systems exist to drive it. However, Windows does not stand on its own and requires hardware to run.
Add to that the fact that many, many people do not distinguish between the OS and the PC (or even the "computer" and the "hard drive" for that matter, but I digress) and they'll blame problems with --anything-- to do with their PC squarely on Dell, and you have a culture that strongly associates the OEM with everything computer-related.
When you have the company with the greater amount of mindshare also creating the components that are more flexible (versus the OS which, as previously mentioned, requires hardware) you have a situation in favor of the OEM telling the software company what for.
Simply put, it only takes a few commercials from Dell about "the power of open source" to get people doubting Microsoft.
YMMV, of course, and this is just my experience dealing with the public for 7 years working in a library. Thank Cthulhu that's over.
Long-time Firefox/Adblock user here with something of an itchy trigger finger where Adblock is concerned. I've gone as far as completely gutting graphic-intensive web layouts via Adblock just to get pages to load quicker (Gradients on Slashdot? I see no gradients...) and every graphical ad, sponsor/partner link, or anything else commercial-looking I see usually gets the Adblock Special.
Well, for a long time I was willing to leave Google's text ads alone on the grounds of them being unobtrusive and generally not degrading my browsing experience. They stayed well enough out of the way that it wasn't worth it to me to block them for the minimal improvement I'd see in my load times and the minimal reduction I'd see in corporate crap sullying the pages I'm trying to read. Add to that the fact that the Google text ads were easily enough identified at a glance that they were always instantly recognizable and avoidable and there was never any compelling reason for me to risk harming a few non-profit websites I enjoy by screwing them out of ad revenue.
No more. Visual presence isn't the only factor to consider when determining which ads get the death sentence, though it has long (and for many, I suspect) been the most significant. Google's ads may not be visually offensive, but if they start down the road of Big Brothering me, no PC I touch will ever display a Google ad again. I know Google is a favorite of geeks everywhere, and those who know me know I'm a big fan of a lot of their products, but this rampant near-delirious compulsion to track everyone everywhere for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop. If I want to buy something online, I will seek it out myself, god dammit. This "the ads are relevant, you might find something you like" smacks of "it's for your own good" far too much for my liking.
Developers of technologies like Adblock and BugMeNot are heroes of the common man's internet and should be lauded as such. I think Greasemonkey likely falls in the same category, though I admit to not yet having used it due to a lack of knowledge of Javascript. Any tool to enhance and enforce control over one's own system is unequivocally, incontestably a good thing and I have a feeling we'll need more and more of them to counteract and undermine the efforts of commercial interests who want to sleaze their way to more ad impressions and massively pervasive marketing. Hmm, there's a fun acronym^W canonical abbreviation to accompany MMORPG. MPM. 's got a ring to it.
Re:from MPAA to DELL
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Except that the MPAA doesn't manufacture the drives either. Granted, you have a point where movies on HDDVD/BD are concerned, but corporate users can still back up 50+ GB of data without the need for any licensing from the movie industry. In fact, wasn't that how DVD+R came into being in the first place? Companies wanted the storage benefits of DVD-R without having to pay tribute to the "king" that was/is the DVD Forum.
Then again, Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway do stand to make or lose quite a bit based on "Ooh shiny!" from home/residential/non-corporate users and their desire for HD-everything. Dell, though, should be able to make something of a stand given how many companies I've seen that have massive Dell-based infrastructures in place and doubtless have contracts with Dell for all their kit.
Hmm, I wonder if any media companies are among Dell's corporate customers. That could make for an interesting scenario. Almost mutually-assured destruction. "Want to force your DRM terms on us/our chipmakers? That's funny, we can't seem to find any records of your volume discount or, oh, what's this, even your on-site service agreements."
I thought ATSC (of which 720p/1080(i|p) are part) was neither PAL nor NTSC, though. I could very well be mistaken, but I remember reading something about how ATSC had the benefit of doing away with the incompatibilities between PAL and NTSC signals.
That was, at best, only the 2nd coolest part of DBA, though. 1st coolest was the hidden track, "White Roses," which could only be accessed via a recorded analog modem signal in another of the album's tracks. The signal pointed to, I think, a BBS site containing a message from the band's frontman (and at the time of DBA, the only remaining member of the band) on where to search. The song had to be downloaded from the internet to be played at all.
Contender for 2nd-coolest was the mere fact that track 8, "Ozar Midrashim 1.1," was the intro theme for "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver" and later the theme for the series as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn straight. I love the Powerglove. It's so bad.
-Lucas
Suing maybe?
Hey, hey, before you say anything, he's just the kind of psycho who would sue other lawyers for infringing on his lawsuit patent.
And I, for one, welcome UnicORn.
OMG PONIES!
The notice may be bogus, but the DMCA itself is wrong and malicious.
Ah. Another Gentoo user.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH...
Digital Consumer Enablement, you say? That would turn DRM into DCE.
Now, we've played this alphabet-soup game plenty of times before, and it's interesting to note that a name-change like this comes about just as "Digital Restrictions Management" is starting to overshadow the industry-approved term in the minds of the public.
Therefore, I hereby propose that from this day forward DCE shall be known to stand for Digitally Crippled Entertainment.
Mr. Zitter, we can play this game for as long as you like. And our side will always win.
Agreed. See "Chaos Legion" for another prime example of style over substance. At least it had some replayability in sudden-death mode.
...And the complete lack of a plot?
Advent Children was among the worst movies of the year, and you are spot-on in your recommendation to watch it muted. With all due respect, however, your suggestion of switching to Japanese dialogue is, in this geek's eyes, a shade misguided as watching in Japanese solves nothing--the problems run deeper than voice-overs or language itself. I saw both the English and Japanese versions, having fallen prey to fans of the film telling me "it's better in Japanese, trust me, see it that way." So I gave it a whirl, figuring at least the worst that could happen is I'd lose another 90 minutes of my life.
Fool me once (The Grudge/Ju-On), shame on you. Fool me twice, just shoot me in the head.
Now, before you revoke my geek badge, I have nothing against Japanese culture or media, my J-console-game collection is extensive, and I watch anime from time to time (albeit not as much as I used to, but still a fair amount--recently it's been Ergo Proxy, which is amazing and available in 720p as icing on the cake). However, no amount of appreciation for Japanese pop culture could salvage this frelling pile of dren.
It was nothing either way but 90 minutes of pandering pointlessness with a slick CG shine.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, for as panned and reviled as it is by the fanboys, is at least a respectable exercise in filmmaking even if it has few ties to its namesake game series. This stems from the film taking the time to properly introduce and develop characters, make the audience feel for them, make them seem human, and then string events together in a cohesive, meaningful fashion to form that elusive animal called a "plot." Poor game adaptation, but a decent film with a moderately engaging plot, some funny moments, and characters that seem far more real personality-wise than the planks of wood in AC. I know the character models bungee-jump in the Uncanny Valley, but at least they act, talk, and sound real. Far better than the overabundance of brooding stares and unconvincing overly-emotionally-charged conflict of AC.
AC, on the other hand, is a "thank-you" to FF7 fans and a "fuck you" to anyone else interested in seeing an enjoyable movie.
And, for example, I use heatpipe cooling in my systems. These function by sucking away the heat emitted by the CPU, thus satisfying the "sucker" criterion.
Dark Helmet, is that you?
Please fix the (apparent) memory management, or rather mis-management, problem. Maybe this is something external to Firefox, or maybe it's a problematic extension, but it should NOT take 30 seconds for a context menu to show up on a G5 Quad. Furthermore, my hard disk should NOT be going batshit when I have 2.5 GB of real, honest-to-Bob memory for Firefox to play with.
Anyone else experience this ludicrous right-click delay? It's not enough to drive me away from Firefox (or, rather, extensions are enough to get me to stay), but it is nothing short of maddening.
How can they truly stop it, though, if it's open-source? All that would need to happen is for one person to have downloaded the source .tar and distributed it far and wide, unofficially. Let a programming team in a foreign country pick up the project and keep it alive.
This is why I really wonder about the sanity of some of the developers of these ripping apps--if you know there's a real, tangible threat from the industry, why-oh-why do you never release your source? DVD Decrypter, DVDFab, and DVD Shrink are all (at least, at one point I thought they were) closed-source even if some are/were free.
I understand the desire for notoriety in the warez scene, but sometimes the greater good must be served. Open the source.
[unrealtournament2003]
WII-CKED SICK
[/unrealtournament2003]
A few resources for those who are interested in seeing "la resistance" to these sick, twisted bastards:
Anti-WWASP
Anti-WWASP's forum
TBFight
And they brainwash the parents at the same time:
Creepy seminar
I think I can top that (no pun intended...for those who get it). I once had to explain to someone that BSD was BSD, and not another acronym that sounds suspiciously similar to it. Don't get me started on the phoenetics of "BSD UNIX."
Now THAT's dedication. Did you manually crack the CD-Key algorithm in the garage behind your house a la "A Beautiful Mind?"
I'm inclined to say that Dell is more important to Microsoft than Microsoft is to Dell.
Remember that PC hardware stands on its own and free operating systems exist to drive it. However, Windows does not stand on its own and requires hardware to run.
Add to that the fact that many, many people do not distinguish between the OS and the PC (or even the "computer" and the "hard drive" for that matter, but I digress) and they'll blame problems with --anything-- to do with their PC squarely on Dell, and you have a culture that strongly associates the OEM with everything computer-related.
When you have the company with the greater amount of mindshare also creating the components that are more flexible (versus the OS which, as previously mentioned, requires hardware) you have a situation in favor of the OEM telling the software company what for.
Simply put, it only takes a few commercials from Dell about "the power of open source" to get people doubting Microsoft.
YMMV, of course, and this is just my experience dealing with the public for 7 years working in a library. Thank Cthulhu that's over.
Then how can you possibly be pro-grammar?
Sorry, sorry, I couldn't resist. Oh god, not the cabbage again. *ducks*
Long-time Firefox/Adblock user here with something of an itchy trigger finger where Adblock is concerned. I've gone as far as completely gutting graphic-intensive web layouts via Adblock just to get pages to load quicker (Gradients on Slashdot? I see no gradients...) and every graphical ad, sponsor/partner link, or anything else commercial-looking I see usually gets the Adblock Special.
Well, for a long time I was willing to leave Google's text ads alone on the grounds of them being unobtrusive and generally not degrading my browsing experience. They stayed well enough out of the way that it wasn't worth it to me to block them for the minimal improvement I'd see in my load times and the minimal reduction I'd see in corporate crap sullying the pages I'm trying to read. Add to that the fact that the Google text ads were easily enough identified at a glance that they were always instantly recognizable and avoidable and there was never any compelling reason for me to risk harming a few non-profit websites I enjoy by screwing them out of ad revenue.
No more. Visual presence isn't the only factor to consider when determining which ads get the death sentence, though it has long (and for many, I suspect) been the most significant. Google's ads may not be visually offensive, but if they start down the road of Big Brothering me, no PC I touch will ever display a Google ad again. I know Google is a favorite of geeks everywhere, and those who know me know I'm a big fan of a lot of their products, but this rampant near-delirious compulsion to track everyone everywhere for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop. If I want to buy something online, I will seek it out myself, god dammit. This "the ads are relevant, you might find something you like" smacks of "it's for your own good" far too much for my liking.
Developers of technologies like Adblock and BugMeNot are heroes of the common man's internet and should be lauded as such. I think Greasemonkey likely falls in the same category, though I admit to not yet having used it due to a lack of knowledge of Javascript. Any tool to enhance and enforce control over one's own system is unequivocally, incontestably a good thing and I have a feeling we'll need more and more of them to counteract and undermine the efforts of commercial interests who want to sleaze their way to more ad impressions and massively pervasive marketing. Hmm, there's a fun acronym^W canonical abbreviation to accompany MMORPG. MPM. 's got a ring to it.
Except that the MPAA doesn't manufacture the drives either. Granted, you have a point where movies on HDDVD/BD are concerned, but corporate users can still back up 50+ GB of data without the need for any licensing from the movie industry. In fact, wasn't that how DVD+R came into being in the first place? Companies wanted the storage benefits of DVD-R without having to pay tribute to the "king" that was/is the DVD Forum.
Then again, Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway do stand to make or lose quite a bit based on "Ooh shiny!" from home/residential/non-corporate users and their desire for HD-everything. Dell, though, should be able to make something of a stand given how many companies I've seen that have massive Dell-based infrastructures in place and doubtless have contracts with Dell for all their kit.
Hmm, I wonder if any media companies are among Dell's corporate customers. That could make for an interesting scenario. Almost mutually-assured destruction. "Want to force your DRM terms on us/our chipmakers? That's funny, we can't seem to find any records of your volume discount or, oh, what's this, even your on-site service agreements."
I thought ATSC (of which 720p/1080(i|p) are part) was neither PAL nor NTSC, though. I could very well be mistaken, but I remember reading something about how ATSC had the benefit of doing away with the incompatibilities between PAL and NTSC signals.
That was, at best, only the 2nd coolest part of DBA, though. 1st coolest was the hidden track, "White Roses," which could only be accessed via a recorded analog modem signal in another of the album's tracks. The signal pointed to, I think, a BBS site containing a message from the band's frontman (and at the time of DBA, the only remaining member of the band) on where to search. The song had to be downloaded from the internet to be played at all.
Contender for 2nd-coolest was the mere fact that track 8, "Ozar Midrashim 1.1," was the intro theme for "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver" and later the theme for the series as a whole.