As others have essentially asked, did you drink the Kool-Aid or what? In any case, if it's moving on - let it. I'll still be here enjoying my existing films - new movies are all crap anyway, LOL.
I've been told by others the same thing, and I think you guys are dead wrong.
You see, I am a stereotypical early adopter in many respects. I don't have the cash to always go out and buy the new thing the day it comes out (I'm not a gadget-whore), but I generally have something that has to do with technology long before my peer group. It's not hard to sell me on NEW, USEFUL technology, either. Now, keep in mind that all my statements are coming from someone that would be in the store, credit card in hand, to buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player day-and-date when it's released, *IF* it had any useful advancements that will benefit my viewing experience. It won't. Because I already get a super-crisp, clear, incredibly detailed image from DVD that more than satisifies me.
Yes, many outlets sold a lot of HDTV-"ready" TV's this year (many of which which aren't true HDTV - the cheaper it is the less likely it is to be one), but again...while a few people write that they "HUNGER" for HDTV content, most people are BEYOND satisified with DVD. Again, most people do not use DVD to it's potential even yet - and for the few people who "crave" HDTV content it's more of a label than anything else. Yes, there are differences to the trained eye. But, to average-Joe, a properly adjusted TV with an anamaphoric enhanced, progressive-scan, component output DVD-video, is incredible.
The move from video tape to optical disc was inevitable. However, what some people just aren't realizing is that just slapping "HD" on a disc box and player isn't going to sell it to the average person - it may sell it to people obsessed with labels, but Joe and Jane consumer are going to ask, "What does this do for me?" They will be told, "You can buy new discs, of movies you already had, and pay a grand for a new player, and watch the same movies you've already seen..." Unless John Travolta jumps out of the screen during "Grease Lightning" and does the car-dance on their living room coffee table, it's going to be a tough sell.
I'm not saying no one will ever buy them, but they will be a niche item for years to come, in spite of HDTV (or psudo-HDTV, i.e. "HDTV-ready) monitor sales. There are a LOT of people like me who are more informed than Joe and Jane consumer who are choosing not to participate in this round because we are happy with what we have.
In the end, is more resolution really going to make films any "better"? Is someone watching a properly connected DVD player with "Pulp Fiction" in it going to have a more profound experience because they watch the same film in one of these new formats?
If there was a compelling reason I would support it. I don't see that reason. And if I don't see that reason (someone that is dedicated enough to what I watch to be typing this in my living room via my media server, which delivers video all over my home), chances are, people who aren't "into" media as I am won't either.
The studios are pushing for this format, not the consumer. They may have run out and bought a new TV this Christmas, but you are going to have to show them one hell of a compelling reason to extend that purchase into a new player and new films. Nothing compelling exists for the majority of the public at this time - and as I originally stated - like Laserdisc, these will be a niche item, where you may buy some super-special Blu-ray or HDTV edition of "The Matrix" trilogy, but for average, everyday viewing most people will rely on good old DVD.
Finally, we'll see how gung-ho people are about these formats when the actual implementation of their DRM is known. Those in-the-know enough to want one of these things already should know some of the proposals that have been made - that basicly mean you don't own the media you buy any
"I remember a few years ago people were making the very same argument for why DVDs would be a failure."
The difference is, people didn't adopt DVD because of the quality alone. They did it because of the convenience of a disc format above all else. The quality difference is going to be negligible for the vast majority of people out there, nothing even remotely as signifigant as VHS to DVD was. Let's not also forget the move from Pan and Scan to Widescreen, which worked both ways : some people were turned on by how much better it was, while it took others a very long time to understand and enjoy it (some still don't, which is why you see seperate P/S releases).
Like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, no, LD could not record. The big box sets of an LD title (that included 2-6 LD's) were expensive, but most movies came out at $30-40 (especially if you ordered at some place like Ken Cranes). This was actually signifigantly less than VHS cost at the time for most new releases; remember, VHS has rental pricing; I remember being the coolest teen on the block when Pulp Fiction came out, as I had a beautiful widescreen copy at like $35 and everyone else was watching rental copies and trying to make bad dubs of it because to purchse one would have been $99.98.
But LD was far from perfect : you had to flip discs, they were big and bulky, it was still analog, so while it looked better it wasn't signifigant enough for most people to change. Had LD caught on, players and software pricing would have changed. As the market matured and knew it's audience, it put out content commesurate with them; I don't think you would have seen $125 "Rocky Horror Picture Show" boxed sets had LD become a commercial success.
Technical comparisons aside, however, in terms of adoption and marketing I do very much think this new HD disc market is going to repeat Laserdisc's run. The discs and players will remain expensive and will remain a niche market until a superior format comes out that, for whatever reason, does capture the public's interest. Many people are talking about holo-dvd in a decade or so, which actually does seem promising.
At this point, DVD has been such a success that there are hundreds of millions of players out there, and billions of discs, and it's not going to dissapear. VHS has become a victim of the format itself - it degrades over time and can't last forever. The true life-span of a pressed DVD has yet to be determined, but it likely will be around as long as you and I are still breathing if properly taken care of.
The comparison between these new formats and LD simply is the market they will serve, and the general public will remain uninterested. As to HD displays, I think it will be a long time before the average purchase is HD. Most families have more than one TV, and while the main living room display may best CRT in the next few years (though not anytime soon, at least beyond "HDTV ready", which most consumers don't get isn't HDTV), Susie and Joey's room will remain CRTs. And, until true HDTV's break the sub-$400 price mark (again, not these psudo-HDTV-"ready" things), most people will stick where they are.
Even when they do upgrade, they aren't going to immediately adopt one of these new formats. A SD-DVD, progressive-scan player, composite inputs, playing an anamaphoric-enhanced DVD looks great - and will continue to satisfy most consumers for quite some time to come.
"but the difference between 1080i and p is a noticeable difference."
...To a very small minority of consumers.
Sure, if you take Joe Bob off the street, put him in front of two identical monitors, and sit there and point out the differences...I'm sure he'd "notice" a slight difference.
But, does it matter? And the answer is, it doesn't, not to most people. DVD is a great format, with still more potential. Have you ever noticed that the press right now talks just about the 4.7GB single-layer discs. When was the last time you bought a single layer disc commercially from a film studio? They are on miniumum DVD-9's for most films, although DVD-18 is expensive and not totally perfected, it still exists within the normal DVD standard.
As I said in another post, most people are not even watching the DVDs they already have to their potential. No list of specifications, no "super-extra-super-special" internet special feature, is going to trump the fact that most people are completely satisfied with DVD. They also haven't solidified how the draconian DRM is going to be executed - if even some of the best case scenarios take place, they are going to be more of a deterrent than anything. Do you want control of the discs you buy? I don't know about you, but I'll never buy a player that could concievably tell me I can't play my discs in someone else's player. And neither will the vast majority of the public.
It's the next LaserDisc. I've had a DVD player since late 1996, I've had a Laserdisc since the late-80's. I'm usually an early adopter, but this time I can't see myself buying any of these players for at least 3-4 years. To the average consumer out there, who has just finally embraced DVD in the last couple of years, this is all going to look like Greek to them; they are going to look at their copy of "The Fifth Element", and an HD-copy that costs twice as much, and just shake there head and walk out of the store. It will be years before the average person even has HDTV, let alone needs some new format to watch on the system.
I actually loved LD, but the hard facts of the matter are that it didn't catch on with the mass market because they were satisified with VHS. The jump from VHS to DVD was much more profound for the average viewer than DVD to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. So, it's not an insult for me to say it's going to be the next LD - I'm simply saying that it's going to remain the domain of early-adopters and techies, and by the time the general public is ready for any new format it will be superior to either of the new DVD formats.
The other truth of the matter is, for most intents and purposes, the average person has never exploited how good DVD looks in the first place. They use S-video at best. An anamaphoric-enhanced DVD release (as most theatrical DVDs have been since the 90's), on a progressive scan DVD player with component inputs on a widescreen TV looks damn good. Better than most people will ever wish to have in their home.
The big mistake all of the movie companies are making is that they think we are all itching for something new. We aren't. We don't care. Very few people care about this technology. We'll be well into the next decade before we start lamenting that Wal-Mart is carrying more Blu-Ray/HD discs than DVD. The studios and certain techies keep throwing numbers out there, telling us all what we are supposedly missing...and the joke is going to be on them when these things hit the market with a resounding thud.
LOL. It's not about disliking TYPES of music, it's the varying quality of music within that genre, by the same artists I think most people are talking about.
Example - let's use the CD I talked about earlier, Britney's BOMT. I like pop/bubblegum/etc. type of music. BOMT is a damn fine song - just try to get it out of your head. There are a couple of other songs - like Crazy and one or two ballads that are nice. The rest of the album? Filler. Half-finished songs with bad hooks and barely coherent lyrics.
This is a prime example of what's out there right now - the album has two or three "finished" tracks desitined to be singles, and the record companies could give a shit what else is on there.
To deny that this has become worse over the years is simply ignoring the truth; pointing it out is not a renouncement of the genre or a product of age, but an acknowledgement that the quality of material on a single album tends to vary much more than it used to.
As I said below, it's because we live in a singles driven marketplace where singles aren't available for sale anymore - it's download, or buy the whole CD even though it's 80% filler/crap. It's funny - this is the reason for the rise of downloading and the record companies did it themselves. By being greedy and wanting album sales above all else and holding back singles from the commercial marketplace, they held music hostage - and downloading was the direct result of people being fed up of paying $18.98 to get one or two decent tracks.
It's not getting old (heh I'm only 25), it's acknowledging that music distribution has changed quite a bit since the days of going down to the drugstore to get the latest 45 - heck, it's changed since the days artists reliably released those CD singles in the US we willingly paid $5-6 for.
AE
You're right about the problem...
on
Death of the Album?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...but not about the cause.
Technology isn't the problem, it's marketing and distribution. Albums are sold on one or two songs because the advertising - radio, clips on MTV, even concerts in most cases - has given us a singles-driven marketplace in a market where singles, for the most part, are no longer available for purchase. How did Britney Spears become the youngest female artist to debut her first album at #1? Because they had been playing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" constantly for six months, but there was no way to purchase it. By the time the album dropped, the demand had built to such a point most people never clicked past the first couple of songs (at least not more than once).
Because the suits are only concerned with marketing, they don't care how crappy the rest of the album is as long as there are one or two decent singles. This has led to the decline of the album because most artists don't have the power - or even desire - to do anything better.
So no, technology hasn't done this. Sure, technology makes it easier to shuffle songs around and mix them to our own desires, but most of us desire to listen to the music in the way it was intended or that provides the most fufilling listening experience; in this age of flash marketing it's just that many artists don't produce albums that benefit from being played in order, in most cases much of the disc usually isn't worth playing at all.
I don't blame this on the fact that technology allows me flexibility to customize my listening experience, I blame it on the producers and record companies that don't give me a reason not to.
That sounds awesome...Trek on HBO means Trek with cussin', which is all good by me. But the question remains - which of the ladies of Trek will be seduced with $$$ to go topless? My God, HBO could double it's household penetration (pun intended) if Trekkies thought they could get a peek at Deanna Troi's peaks.;)
AE
Rick the Red said : "That depends on what you mean by 'butchered'. I buy the widescreen version so that I can see the entire film as it was originally shot."
Ah, but do you realize that the way the film was originally shot (as in, the film captured on the day of shooting) is different from what the director intended you to see on the day the film opens in a theater? I'm not talking about FX post-production or anything like that, but the fact that most films are shot "open frame" capturing much more on the top and sides than the director intends on the final product.
Directors take advantage of this frequently now because they don't want their films butchered in pan/scan (an early example given is often Cameron's Aliens). Since they generally weren't given control of that process, they adjust the process they can and shoot (and do post on) the full frame just so their film doesn't get butchered in pan/scan on home video, yet they shoot for a certain widescreen ratio as intended to be shown in theaters.
That's what it comes down to - do you want to see what the director intended you to see in the theater, or do you want to see the "failsafe" print they made to ensure that someone else doesn't fuck up their film later? If you are someone who wants the latter, then most widescreen DVDs you buy aren't what you are looking for because virtually all of the films in the past 20 years are going to be affected like this.
AE
Ten years too late...They ruined Usenet in 1995 when they uncerimoniously dumped their users untrained onto the Internet, and only after Usenet has become the biggest SPAM-hell on Earth do they abandon it.
Kind of like bombing the hell out of a country, occupying it, and then just when you've reduced it to rubble, saying "see ya later!"./sigh
AE
As I said on the Bronze:Beta board...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not gonna let a bunch of suits get me down.
We got 12 seasons of Buffyverse - more than 250 episodes by the time they are done.
"Angel", and "Buffy", will live forever in our DVD players, and the suits can't take that away.
Audio
As somone pointed out above, Wal-Mart has rather lax return policies, and they used to be even more so. During the SuperNES era, games were ridiculously expensive ($50+), and the quality of many of the games released sucked. Fifty bucks is a big deal to a 12-year old kid, and imagine the disapointment of getting a game home and it sucking out loud, and knowing that's the last game you'd get before Chrismas.;)
One soloution, as mentioned above, is returning one as "defective", getting a sealed copy, and returning it to another store. However, I have heard of Wal-Marts calling other Wal-Marts for slightly suspicious returns.
Anyway, instead we used to visit our local frame shop (no, not a web design firm, a place that frames pictures) and pay $3-5 dollars to have the game shrink-wrapped and return them to Wal-Mart. Even without a reciept they would automatically give us full retail price, cash. Although it's not as automatic now, Wal-Mart will pretty much take back anything that is in salable condition. If the framer ever questioned it, it was a gift that you wanted to test out.;)
Before I'm flamed, I always made sure the game I returned was in absolutely mint condition, all instruction manuals, etc, minty fresh. And I figure if someone was unhappy if they purchased it after, they could just return it for the same title. Only the evil empire would get screwed.:)
>The most common explanation for early "memories" >(like pre-3 years old) is that you had heard the >story when you were old enough to remember
Although I agree with you in theory, and this is probably generally this case, I have several very clear memories from my 2nd birthday and the days following it. It had to do with a toy I got and different things I did with it.
My family isn't the type to tell stories, lol, and in fact, at my 10th birthday party I remember shocking everyone when I told them about remembering my 2nd birthday. I told them where everyone was sitting and what they were talking about. Kind of freaked them out, lol.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this should go in the "never too late to bash SOE dept.?"
AudioEfex
As others have essentially asked, did you drink the Kool-Aid or what? In any case, if it's moving on - let it. I'll still be here enjoying my existing films - new movies are all crap anyway, LOL.
I've been told by others the same thing, and I think you guys are dead wrong.
You see, I am a stereotypical early adopter in many respects. I don't have the cash to always go out and buy the new thing the day it comes out (I'm not a gadget-whore), but I generally have something that has to do with technology long before my peer group. It's not hard to sell me on NEW, USEFUL technology, either. Now, keep in mind that all my statements are coming from someone that would be in the store, credit card in hand, to buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player day-and-date when it's released, *IF* it had any useful advancements that will benefit my viewing experience. It won't. Because I already get a super-crisp, clear, incredibly detailed image from DVD that more than satisifies me.
Yes, many outlets sold a lot of HDTV-"ready" TV's this year (many of which which aren't true HDTV - the cheaper it is the less likely it is to be one), but again...while a few people write that they "HUNGER" for HDTV content, most people are BEYOND satisified with DVD. Again, most people do not use DVD to it's potential even yet - and for the few people who "crave" HDTV content it's more of a label than anything else. Yes, there are differences to the trained eye. But, to average-Joe, a properly adjusted TV with an anamaphoric enhanced, progressive-scan, component output DVD-video, is incredible.
The move from video tape to optical disc was inevitable. However, what some people just aren't realizing is that just slapping "HD" on a disc box and player isn't going to sell it to the average person - it may sell it to people obsessed with labels, but Joe and Jane consumer are going to ask, "What does this do for me?" They will be told, "You can buy new discs, of movies you already had, and pay a grand for a new player, and watch the same movies you've already seen..." Unless John Travolta jumps out of the screen during "Grease Lightning" and does the car-dance on their living room coffee table, it's going to be a tough sell.
I'm not saying no one will ever buy them, but they will be a niche item for years to come, in spite of HDTV (or psudo-HDTV, i.e. "HDTV-ready) monitor sales. There are a LOT of people like me who are more informed than Joe and Jane consumer who are choosing not to participate in this round because we are happy with what we have.
In the end, is more resolution really going to make films any "better"? Is someone watching a properly connected DVD player with "Pulp Fiction" in it going to have a more profound experience because they watch the same film in one of these new formats?
If there was a compelling reason I would support it. I don't see that reason. And if I don't see that reason (someone that is dedicated enough to what I watch to be typing this in my living room via my media server, which delivers video all over my home), chances are, people who aren't "into" media as I am won't either.
The studios are pushing for this format, not the consumer. They may have run out and bought a new TV this Christmas, but you are going to have to show them one hell of a compelling reason to extend that purchase into a new player and new films. Nothing compelling exists for the majority of the public at this time - and as I originally stated - like Laserdisc, these will be a niche item, where you may buy some super-special Blu-ray or HDTV edition of "The Matrix" trilogy, but for average, everyday viewing most people will rely on good old DVD.
Finally, we'll see how gung-ho people are about these formats when the actual implementation of their DRM is known. Those in-the-know enough to want one of these things already should know some of the proposals that have been made - that basicly mean you don't own the media you buy any
"I remember a few years ago people were making the very same argument for why DVDs would be a failure." The difference is, people didn't adopt DVD because of the quality alone. They did it because of the convenience of a disc format above all else. The quality difference is going to be negligible for the vast majority of people out there, nothing even remotely as signifigant as VHS to DVD was. Let's not also forget the move from Pan and Scan to Widescreen, which worked both ways : some people were turned on by how much better it was, while it took others a very long time to understand and enjoy it (some still don't, which is why you see seperate P/S releases).
But LD was far from perfect : you had to flip discs, they were big and bulky, it was still analog, so while it looked better it wasn't signifigant enough for most people to change. Had LD caught on, players and software pricing would have changed. As the market matured and knew it's audience, it put out content commesurate with them; I don't think you would have seen $125 "Rocky Horror Picture Show" boxed sets had LD become a commercial success.
Technical comparisons aside, however, in terms of adoption and marketing I do very much think this new HD disc market is going to repeat Laserdisc's run. The discs and players will remain expensive and will remain a niche market until a superior format comes out that, for whatever reason, does capture the public's interest. Many people are talking about holo-dvd in a decade or so, which actually does seem promising.
At this point, DVD has been such a success that there are hundreds of millions of players out there, and billions of discs, and it's not going to dissapear. VHS has become a victim of the format itself - it degrades over time and can't last forever. The true life-span of a pressed DVD has yet to be determined, but it likely will be around as long as you and I are still breathing if properly taken care of.
The comparison between these new formats and LD simply is the market they will serve, and the general public will remain uninterested. As to HD displays, I think it will be a long time before the average purchase is HD. Most families have more than one TV, and while the main living room display may best CRT in the next few years (though not anytime soon, at least beyond "HDTV ready", which most consumers don't get isn't HDTV), Susie and Joey's room will remain CRTs. And, until true HDTV's break the sub-$400 price mark (again, not these psudo-HDTV-"ready" things), most people will stick where they are.
Even when they do upgrade, they aren't going to immediately adopt one of these new formats. A SD-DVD, progressive-scan player, composite inputs, playing an anamaphoric-enhanced DVD looks great - and will continue to satisfy most consumers for quite some time to come.
Sure, if you take Joe Bob off the street, put him in front of two identical monitors, and sit there and point out the differences...I'm sure he'd "notice" a slight difference.
But, does it matter? And the answer is, it doesn't, not to most people. DVD is a great format, with still more potential. Have you ever noticed that the press right now talks just about the 4.7GB single-layer discs. When was the last time you bought a single layer disc commercially from a film studio? They are on miniumum DVD-9's for most films, although DVD-18 is expensive and not totally perfected, it still exists within the normal DVD standard.
As I said in another post, most people are not even watching the DVDs they already have to their potential. No list of specifications, no "super-extra-super-special" internet special feature, is going to trump the fact that most people are completely satisfied with DVD. They also haven't solidified how the draconian DRM is going to be executed - if even some of the best case scenarios take place, they are going to be more of a deterrent than anything. Do you want control of the discs you buy? I don't know about you, but I'll never buy a player that could concievably tell me I can't play my discs in someone else's player. And neither will the vast majority of the public.
It's the next LaserDisc. I've had a DVD player since late 1996, I've had a Laserdisc since the late-80's. I'm usually an early adopter, but this time I can't see myself buying any of these players for at least 3-4 years. To the average consumer out there, who has just finally embraced DVD in the last couple of years, this is all going to look like Greek to them; they are going to look at their copy of "The Fifth Element", and an HD-copy that costs twice as much, and just shake there head and walk out of the store. It will be years before the average person even has HDTV, let alone needs some new format to watch on the system.
The other truth of the matter is, for most intents and purposes, the average person has never exploited how good DVD looks in the first place. They use S-video at best. An anamaphoric-enhanced DVD release (as most theatrical DVDs have been since the 90's), on a progressive scan DVD player with component inputs on a widescreen TV looks damn good. Better than most people will ever wish to have in their home.
The big mistake all of the movie companies are making is that they think we are all itching for something new. We aren't. We don't care. Very few people care about this technology. We'll be well into the next decade before we start lamenting that Wal-Mart is carrying more Blu-Ray/HD discs than DVD. The studios and certain techies keep throwing numbers out there, telling us all what we are supposedly missing...and the joke is going to be on them when these things hit the market with a resounding thud.
Example - let's use the CD I talked about earlier, Britney's BOMT. I like pop/bubblegum/etc. type of music. BOMT is a damn fine song - just try to get it out of your head. There are a couple of other songs - like Crazy and one or two ballads that are nice. The rest of the album? Filler. Half-finished songs with bad hooks and barely coherent lyrics.
This is a prime example of what's out there right now - the album has two or three "finished" tracks desitined to be singles, and the record companies could give a shit what else is on there.
To deny that this has become worse over the years is simply ignoring the truth; pointing it out is not a renouncement of the genre or a product of age, but an acknowledgement that the quality of material on a single album tends to vary much more than it used to.
As I said below, it's because we live in a singles driven marketplace where singles aren't available for sale anymore - it's download, or buy the whole CD even though it's 80% filler/crap. It's funny - this is the reason for the rise of downloading and the record companies did it themselves. By being greedy and wanting album sales above all else and holding back singles from the commercial marketplace, they held music hostage - and downloading was the direct result of people being fed up of paying $18.98 to get one or two decent tracks.
It's not getting old (heh I'm only 25), it's acknowledging that music distribution has changed quite a bit since the days of going down to the drugstore to get the latest 45 - heck, it's changed since the days artists reliably released those CD singles in the US we willingly paid $5-6 for.
AE
Technology isn't the problem, it's marketing and distribution. Albums are sold on one or two songs because the advertising - radio, clips on MTV, even concerts in most cases - has given us a singles-driven marketplace in a market where singles, for the most part, are no longer available for purchase. How did Britney Spears become the youngest female artist to debut her first album at #1? Because they had been playing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" constantly for six months, but there was no way to purchase it. By the time the album dropped, the demand had built to such a point most people never clicked past the first couple of songs (at least not more than once).
Because the suits are only concerned with marketing, they don't care how crappy the rest of the album is as long as there are one or two decent singles. This has led to the decline of the album because most artists don't have the power - or even desire - to do anything better.
So no, technology hasn't done this. Sure, technology makes it easier to shuffle songs around and mix them to our own desires, but most of us desire to listen to the music in the way it was intended or that provides the most fufilling listening experience; in this age of flash marketing it's just that many artists don't produce albums that benefit from being played in order, in most cases much of the disc usually isn't worth playing at all.
I don't blame this on the fact that technology allows me flexibility to customize my listening experience, I blame it on the producers and record companies that don't give me a reason not to.
AE
That sounds awesome...Trek on HBO means Trek with cussin', which is all good by me. But the question remains - which of the ladies of Trek will be seduced with $$$ to go topless? My God, HBO could double it's household penetration (pun intended) if Trekkies thought they could get a peek at Deanna Troi's peaks. ;)
AE
Rick the Red said : "That depends on what you mean by 'butchered'. I buy the widescreen version so that I can see the entire film as it was originally shot." Ah, but do you realize that the way the film was originally shot (as in, the film captured on the day of shooting) is different from what the director intended you to see on the day the film opens in a theater? I'm not talking about FX post-production or anything like that, but the fact that most films are shot "open frame" capturing much more on the top and sides than the director intends on the final product. Directors take advantage of this frequently now because they don't want their films butchered in pan/scan (an early example given is often Cameron's Aliens). Since they generally weren't given control of that process, they adjust the process they can and shoot (and do post on) the full frame just so their film doesn't get butchered in pan/scan on home video, yet they shoot for a certain widescreen ratio as intended to be shown in theaters. That's what it comes down to - do you want to see what the director intended you to see in the theater, or do you want to see the "failsafe" print they made to ensure that someone else doesn't fuck up their film later? If you are someone who wants the latter, then most widescreen DVDs you buy aren't what you are looking for because virtually all of the films in the past 20 years are going to be affected like this. AE
Ten years too late...They ruined Usenet in 1995 when they uncerimoniously dumped their users untrained onto the Internet, and only after Usenet has become the biggest SPAM-hell on Earth do they abandon it.
/sigh
Kind of like bombing the hell out of a country, occupying it, and then just when you've reduced it to rubble, saying "see ya later!".
AE
I'm not gonna let a bunch of suits get me down. We got 12 seasons of Buffyverse - more than 250 episodes by the time they are done. "Angel", and "Buffy", will live forever in our DVD players, and the suits can't take that away. Audio
As somone pointed out above, Wal-Mart has rather lax return policies, and they used to be even more so. During the SuperNES era, games were ridiculously expensive ($50+), and the quality of many of the games released sucked. Fifty bucks is a big deal to a 12-year old kid, and imagine the disapointment of getting a game home and it sucking out loud, and knowing that's the last game you'd get before Chrismas. ;)
One soloution, as mentioned above, is returning one as "defective", getting a sealed copy, and returning it to another store. However, I have heard of Wal-Marts calling other Wal-Marts for slightly suspicious returns.
Anyway, instead we used to visit our local frame shop (no, not a web design firm, a place that frames pictures) and pay $3-5 dollars to have the game shrink-wrapped and return them to Wal-Mart. Even without a reciept they would automatically give us full retail price, cash. Although it's not as automatic now, Wal-Mart will pretty much take back anything that is in salable condition. If the framer ever questioned it, it was a gift that you wanted to test out. ;)
Before I'm flamed, I always made sure the game I returned was in absolutely mint condition, all instruction manuals, etc, minty fresh. And I figure if someone was unhappy if they purchased it after, they could just return it for the same title. Only the evil empire would get screwed. :)
>The most common explanation for early "memories" >(like pre-3 years old) is that you had heard the >story when you were old enough to remember Although I agree with you in theory, and this is probably generally this case, I have several very clear memories from my 2nd birthday and the days following it. It had to do with a toy I got and different things I did with it. My family isn't the type to tell stories, lol, and in fact, at my 10th birthday party I remember shocking everyone when I told them about remembering my 2nd birthday. I told them where everyone was sitting and what they were talking about. Kind of freaked them out, lol.