> But since 1995, when AMC opened the first megaplex, the > 24-screen Grand in Dallas, the movie landscape has been > reconfigured.
The Grand was not the first Megaplex. Jack Loek's Theaters' <a href="http://cinematreasures.org/theater/7219/">St udio 28</a> in Grand Rapids, Michigan has had 20 screens since 1988. I'm sure there are other examples as well. Pity the author didn't do some better research.
Why is nobody mentioning the dot-com that started it all, Excite? Yes the website is still up, but it's no where near the glory they once were, not since they went bankrupt in 2001 and got bought up by some other firm.
Will consumers soon be getting the full 13.1 audio system that we hear in movie theaters?
Guh wha? Where did they get the idea that theaters use 13.1 channels? Do you seriously think that each of those speakers is it's own channel?
Movie theaters use the same 5.1 formats that home theaters use, albeit slightly different codecs. You've got your left, center, and right speakers along the front wall. Everything on the left wall is the left surround, everything on the right wall is the right surround. If it's an EX theater, then the back wall is another channel, otherwise it's just the left and right surrounds as well. Even if it is an EX theater, that's not a true rear sound channel in most instances. Both Dolby Digital:EX and DTS:ES use a matrixing technology to extrapolate the rear center using the same technology in Pro-Logic and NEO:6. So called 7.1 systems simply duplicate that rear center for a left and right rear.
SDDS improved upon this by adding two more channels to the front. DTS has also duplicated this for DTS8 which is in less then 50 theaters nationwide. DTS also has a 10 channel format which will be used in the future once the new XD10 model DTS units are more widespread.
I did recently find out that DTS has a true 6.1 discrete ES format, but it's only available in home theaters, and I don't know of any movies that take advantage of it.
How do I know all this? I'm a projections engineer at our local movie theater. I'm also an audio enthusiast.
> Meanwhile the seeders are feeding the rarest pieces to the > people it sees as the ones who upload the most to others
Not true, the seeders have no idea what your computer is sending to other people, only the tracker does. The seeders know what parts they have already sent out, and try to keep it evenly distributed, but if a leecher says it only needs a specific chunk, the seeder will send that chunk. That's how that "optimize for preview" feature in Azureus works, it just tells the seeder that it needs chunks at the start of the file.
The belief that bittorrent forces the user to upload is a misnomer, the client authors simply refuse to let the user not upload. The mac version of the official client wont let you set your uprate any lower then 2K/s on each torrent, as is the same for Azureus.
Now, there are several Trackers that wont let you download if you aren't uploading enough.
Unless you're living in some asian country, you probably aren't buying a crappy copy, you're probably downloading it for free off the net. And despite what the articles keep saying, cams are not the majority of the pirated copies. I see a lot more screeners and TeleCines online these days, which are sometimes damn good transfers. It wont be long before these start showing up with 5.1 sound tracks.
(I'm surprised they aren't already, the DTS disks are easy to rip with the proper software)
Considering how more and more people are hooking up their PCs to their home theaters, you probably get as good of a performance at home as you would in the theater.
Interesting that a board designed for low profile would have a vertically mounted PCI slot. Doesn't it make more sense for the slot to go horizontally?
This is my thought as well. We have an Australian shepherd who is just as capable. All the things the describe as being special about this dog, we've witnessed in our own little Chynna. She even knows which shoes belong to which family member.
The only people impressed by this are people who've never worked with the smarter canine breeds (ie, the herding breeds)
For those of you who complain about prices, I'd just like to make a few things clear as a member of the cinema workforce.
In a first run theater (meaning, theaters that show movies when they come out), the theater itself has very little control of the cost of the movie. The studios set the prices, and get 95% of the ticket sale. The amount we get back from each ticket is barely enough to cover the cost of running the box office. Unless they're doing close to sell out shows each weekend, they are often taking a loss on ticket sales.
This is why concessions cost so much, it's the only thing that the theater makes any money off of. Concessions is what pays for the staff that are needed to keep the theater open.
It's actually a rather ironic situation, really. The movie studios have pushed their rates up so high that they are slowly killing off their distribution mechanism. Ticket sales are down nationwide, and have been declining steadily over the past 5-10 years. Movies continue to break earnings records only because the studios are pushing ticket prices up and up.
Now, as for presentation quality, that one is entirely the theater's fault, and is largely due to greed by the big chain cinemas (CHOUGHregalCHOUGH). They cut back on equipment repair, print management, and quality staff hiring so that they can boost their bottom line.
I'm fortunate enough to work for a family owned chain that cares more about the performance, but I know they are the minority.
Incidentally, theaters aren't the only places that work this way. Gas stations also make only pennies per gallon. All their profits come from food sales.
> I watched the first two episodes. > That thing stunk worse than a turd on the sidewalk in August.
You just answered your own question. Very few shows are good the first few episodes. Look at TNG, most of the first season had horrible acting. You have to give the cast time to flesh into their characters. Firefly didn't get really good until about the sixth episode.
It also didn't help that Fox didn't air the Pilot until after the show was canceled.
That's the theory, but that didn't keep Sony from killing Virtual Game Station. Sony stood to only make money on that emulator as well, but they did it because of pride.
Microsoft might want to kill this thing just because they can.
In 1904 the US Patent Office gave Guglielmo Marconi a patent for the invention of Radio, disregarding Nicola Tesla's three existing patents for the same mechanism. In 1943 Marconi tried to sue the government for patent infringement for using radios in WW1. The government responded by taking away his patent and giving it back to Tesla (tho sadly Tesla had died 3 months earlier). (Specifics at PBS)
This kind of move is going to backfire on SCO, just watch.
Every one seems to be bitching about the fact that this does not share the exact same story as the I, Robot book. You all seem to be forgetting that I, Robot is a collection of stories, not just one. Azimov wrote almost 50 short stories dealing with the three laws of robotics, only 9 of which were published in I, Robot.
When I see this trailer, I see those other stories. The plot twist is going to be from one of four stories: A) Somehow the thee laws are being left out at the production phase. B) One of the laws has been corrupted, changing the logic order. C) One of the robots logically found his way around the three laws, giving him probable cause to kill the humans, and has spread that logic to the other robots. D) A human has accidentally given an order to the robots which put the three laws in conflict, creating a middle ground.
The writers have taken all of his stories and blended them into a singular piece, and I for one like the idea.
This also doesn't look like an action movie, it looks like a suspense drama with bits of comedy and action in it. I am eagerly looking forward to this.
There's a behavior file (htc) that you can link to on all your webpages that makes IE properly render PNG transparency, if that's what you mean. You can get it here from WebFX.
"Most of the higher-quality copies come from within the industry, often copied from "screener" discs sent out during the annual awards season."
BZZZZT! Wrong! This guys been listening to the MPAA for too long. Online movies don't come from award show screeners. If that were the case then it would take months for a movie to show up online.
Screener divx rips come from the tapes they sound out to movie reviewers for newspapers and trade magazines... People like Ebert and Roeper.
This is why MPAA's banning of award show screeners is just stupid. Those tapes aren't likely to show up online.
Oh please, I doubt many people factor in health concerns when deciding if to go to a movie. This flu isn't that big of a threat. Somebody saw the movie Outbreak a few too many times...
The reason people aren't going to theaters is because theaters no longer give a showing that's worth the cost. Don't kid yourself, the big cinemas are just as bad, worse in some ways because they care more about their bottom line then the little guys.
Movie piracy is up because nobody wants to spend $50 to take their family to a film (yes, that is how much an average family of 4 spends to see an evening movie). As you say, the quality of presentation has dropped dramatically. It's pathetic how poor theaters are these days. The food has gotten worse, the costs have gone up, and the playback of the film has become atrocious. It's been 3 years since I saw a movie where something wasn't wrong with the presentation. If the projector didn't just stop working entirely, then the movie was out of focus. Granted, we don't have any landmark theaters around here...
Again, that gets down to bottom line. Why pay a good salary to a career projectionist with 10 years experience under his belt when you can teach some kid how to thread and start a movie for minimal wage.
While I don't own an iPod myself, several of my friends have owned them since the first release, and they still run fine. This guy gets bad battery and starts bitching because he didn't spend $40 on a warrantee, it's just plain foolishness.
$99 to have Apple replace the battery is not that extreme considering how much labor is involved in doing so. This isn't a case of somebody popping open a door and dropping in a new battery, you have to take the entire thing apart. If you don't want to pay the $99, fine, go buy the battery for $50, do it yourself and risk damaging the iPod. At least if an Apple tech fucks up they'll replace the unit, probably with a better one then you sent them.
yes, someone could steal your actual hardware, but doing that paints a much larger target on the thief's back. Breaking and entering is a much larger crime then data theft. A guy sitting in his car, if he gets caught, is likely to get a slap on the wrist compared to what the guy breaking down your door could get. The guy in the car is less likely to be noticed, whereas the man walking off with your computer is very conspicuous.
Lets also not forget that hardware theft is covered by insurance... data theft is not.
why isn't music distributed mainly in a high quality format on DVDs with tons of extra goodies
They do, they're called DVD-Audio disks, and I know that (at least at Borders) they cost the same as a standard CD. Problem is, DVDs take more expensive playback hardware then CDs. Even the cheapest portable DVD player costs $250. Compare that to $40 for a cheap CD player, $90 for a good one. The majority of people don't buy CDs to listen to at home, they buy them to listen to while at the gym, while driving to work, while walking between classes.
Then there's people like me who buy CDs just to turn them into MP3s and listen at work via iTunes. I encode my CDs instantly, and then put them into storage. Granted, while there's methods for ripping an AC3 file and playing it back, it's not as well supported as MP3s. I sure as hell can't do it in iTunes. There's no consumer level software for burning your own DVD-Audio disks, and almost no software at all for making DTS-CDs. If you want to listen to ripped AC3 audio, you'd have to spend at least $50 on a 5.1 speaker system, and that's assuming your PC has the necessary outputs.
It'll be at least two years before DVD hardware becomes cheap enough to make the media a feasible standard release platform for music.
And BTW, there are several companies that build crap cars which haven't died, because they sell those crap cars cheaply.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, considering that HBO reported my IP to Cox and got my internet service shut down because of this, no it hasn't occurred to me at all.
Clearly somebody doesn't get the concept of satire...
Just an addendum to the article you linked:
t udio 28</a> in Grand Rapids, Michigan has had 20 screens since 1988. I'm sure there are other examples as well. Pity the author didn't do some better research.
> But since 1995, when AMC opened the first megaplex, the
> 24-screen Grand in Dallas, the movie landscape has been
> reconfigured.
The Grand was not the first Megaplex. Jack Loek's Theaters' <a href="http://cinematreasures.org/theater/7219/">S
Why is nobody mentioning the dot-com that started it all, Excite? Yes the website is still up, but it's no where near the glory they once were, not since they went bankrupt in 2001 and got bought up by some other firm.
Guh wha? Where did they get the idea that theaters use 13.1 channels? Do you seriously think that each of those speakers is it's own channel?
Movie theaters use the same 5.1 formats that home theaters use, albeit slightly different codecs. You've got your left, center, and right speakers along the front wall. Everything on the left wall is the left surround, everything on the right wall is the right surround. If it's an EX theater, then the back wall is another channel, otherwise it's just the left and right surrounds as well. Even if it is an EX theater, that's not a true rear sound channel in most instances. Both Dolby Digital:EX and DTS:ES use a matrixing technology to extrapolate the rear center using the same technology in Pro-Logic and NEO:6. So called 7.1 systems simply duplicate that rear center for a left and right rear.
SDDS improved upon this by adding two more channels to the front. DTS has also duplicated this for DTS8 which is in less then 50 theaters nationwide. DTS also has a 10 channel format which will be used in the future once the new XD10 model DTS units are more widespread.
I did recently find out that DTS has a true 6.1 discrete ES format, but it's only available in home theaters, and I don't know of any movies that take advantage of it.
How do I know all this? I'm a projections engineer at our local movie theater. I'm also an audio enthusiast.
> Meanwhile the seeders are feeding the rarest pieces to the
> people it sees as the ones who upload the most to others
Not true, the seeders have no idea what your computer is sending to other people, only the tracker does. The seeders know what parts they have already sent out, and try to keep it evenly distributed, but if a leecher says it only needs a specific chunk, the seeder will send that chunk. That's how that "optimize for preview" feature in Azureus works, it just tells the seeder that it needs chunks at the start of the file.
The belief that bittorrent forces the user to upload is a misnomer, the client authors simply refuse to let the user not upload. The mac version of the official client wont let you set your uprate any lower then 2K/s on each torrent, as is the same for Azureus.
Now, there are several Trackers that wont let you download if you aren't uploading enough.
Unless you're living in some asian country, you probably aren't buying a crappy copy, you're probably downloading it for free off the net. And despite what the articles keep saying, cams are not the majority of the pirated copies. I see a lot more screeners and TeleCines online these days, which are sometimes damn good transfers. It wont be long before these start showing up with 5.1 sound tracks. (I'm surprised they aren't already, the DTS disks are easy to rip with the proper software) Considering how more and more people are hooking up their PCs to their home theaters, you probably get as good of a performance at home as you would in the theater.
Interesting that a board designed for low profile would have a vertically mounted PCI slot. Doesn't it make more sense for the slot to go horizontally?
Huh, guess they didn't think of that.
WA would be the two letter abbreviation for the state of Washington.
This is my thought as well. We have an Australian shepherd who is just as capable. All the things the describe as being special about this dog, we've witnessed in our own little Chynna. She even knows which shoes belong to which family member. The only people impressed by this are people who've never worked with the smarter canine breeds (ie, the herding breeds)
You also have poor grammer. That should be "a pirate" and "an idiot"
For those of you who complain about prices, I'd just like to make a few things clear as a member of the cinema workforce.
In a first run theater (meaning, theaters that show movies when they come out), the theater itself has very little control of the cost of the movie. The studios set the prices, and get 95% of the ticket sale. The amount we get back from each ticket is barely enough to cover the cost of running the box office. Unless they're doing close to sell out shows each weekend, they are often taking a loss on ticket sales.
This is why concessions cost so much, it's the only thing that the theater makes any money off of. Concessions is what pays for the staff that are needed to keep the theater open.
It's actually a rather ironic situation, really. The movie studios have pushed their rates up so high that they are slowly killing off their distribution mechanism. Ticket sales are down nationwide, and have been declining steadily over the past 5-10 years. Movies continue to break earnings records only because the studios are pushing ticket prices up and up.
Now, as for presentation quality, that one is entirely the theater's fault, and is largely due to greed by the big chain cinemas (CHOUGHregalCHOUGH). They cut back on equipment repair, print management, and quality staff hiring so that they can boost their bottom line.
I'm fortunate enough to work for a family owned chain that cares more about the performance, but I know they are the minority.
Incidentally, theaters aren't the only places that work this way. Gas stations also make only pennies per gallon. All their profits come from food sales.
> I watched the first two episodes.
> That thing stunk worse than a turd on the sidewalk in August.
You just answered your own question. Very few shows are good the first few episodes. Look at TNG, most of the first season had horrible acting. You have to give the cast time to flesh into their characters. Firefly didn't get really good until about the sixth episode.
It also didn't help that Fox didn't air the Pilot until after the show was canceled.
That's the theory, but that didn't keep Sony from killing Virtual Game Station. Sony stood to only make money on that emulator as well, but they did it because of pride. Microsoft might want to kill this thing just because they can.
This kind of move is going to backfire on SCO, just watch.
Every one seems to be bitching about the fact that this does not share the exact same story as the I, Robot book. You all seem to be forgetting that I, Robot is a collection of stories, not just one. Azimov wrote almost 50 short stories dealing with the three laws of robotics, only 9 of which were published in I, Robot.
When I see this trailer, I see those other stories. The plot twist is going to be from one of four stories:
A) Somehow the thee laws are being left out at the production phase.
B) One of the laws has been corrupted, changing the logic order.
C) One of the robots logically found his way around the three laws, giving him probable cause to kill the humans, and has spread that logic to the other robots.
D) A human has accidentally given an order to the robots which put the three laws in conflict, creating a middle ground.
The writers have taken all of his stories and blended them into a singular piece, and I for one like the idea.
This also doesn't look like an action movie, it looks like a suspense drama with bits of comedy and action in it. I am eagerly looking forward to this.
There's a behavior file (htc) that you can link to on all your webpages that makes IE properly render PNG transparency, if that's what you mean. You can get it here from WebFX.
Amen to that!
BZZZZT! Wrong! This guys been listening to the MPAA for too long. Online movies don't come from award show screeners. If that were the case then it would take months for a movie to show up online.
Screener divx rips come from the tapes they sound out to movie reviewers for newspapers and trade magazines... People like Ebert and Roeper.
This is why MPAA's banning of award show screeners is just stupid. Those tapes aren't likely to show up online.
Oh please, I doubt many people factor in health concerns when deciding if to go to a movie. This flu isn't that big of a threat. Somebody saw the movie Outbreak a few too many times...
The reason people aren't going to theaters is because theaters no longer give a showing that's worth the cost. Don't kid yourself, the big cinemas are just as bad, worse in some ways because they care more about their bottom line then the little guys.
Movie piracy is up because nobody wants to spend $50 to take their family to a film (yes, that is how much an average family of 4 spends to see an evening movie). As you say, the quality of presentation has dropped dramatically. It's pathetic how poor theaters are these days. The food has gotten worse, the costs have gone up, and the playback of the film has become atrocious. It's been 3 years since I saw a movie where something wasn't wrong with the presentation. If the projector didn't just stop working entirely, then the movie was out of focus. Granted, we don't have any landmark theaters around here...
Again, that gets down to bottom line. Why pay a good salary to a career projectionist with 10 years experience under his belt when you can teach some kid how to thread and start a movie for minimal wage.
$99 to have Apple replace the battery is not that extreme considering how much labor is involved in doing so. This isn't a case of somebody popping open a door and dropping in a new battery, you have to take the entire thing apart. If you don't want to pay the $99, fine, go buy the battery for $50, do it yourself and risk damaging the iPod. At least if an Apple tech fucks up they'll replace the unit, probably with a better one then you sent them.
Christ.. bitch bitch bitcb.
yes, someone could steal your actual hardware, but doing that paints a much larger target on the thief's back. Breaking and entering is a much larger crime then data theft. A guy sitting in his car, if he gets caught, is likely to get a slap on the wrist compared to what the guy breaking down your door could get. The guy in the car is less likely to be noticed, whereas the man walking off with your computer is very conspicuous. Lets also not forget that hardware theft is covered by insurance... data theft is not.
Uhm, no it hasn't. It is a mach-o binary now, but it is definitely NOT cocoa.
why isn't music distributed mainly in a high quality format on DVDs with tons of extra goodies They do, they're called DVD-Audio disks, and I know that (at least at Borders) they cost the same as a standard CD. Problem is, DVDs take more expensive playback hardware then CDs. Even the cheapest portable DVD player costs $250. Compare that to $40 for a cheap CD player, $90 for a good one. The majority of people don't buy CDs to listen to at home, they buy them to listen to while at the gym, while driving to work, while walking between classes. Then there's people like me who buy CDs just to turn them into MP3s and listen at work via iTunes. I encode my CDs instantly, and then put them into storage. Granted, while there's methods for ripping an AC3 file and playing it back, it's not as well supported as MP3s. I sure as hell can't do it in iTunes. There's no consumer level software for burning your own DVD-Audio disks, and almost no software at all for making DTS-CDs. If you want to listen to ripped AC3 audio, you'd have to spend at least $50 on a 5.1 speaker system, and that's assuming your PC has the necessary outputs. It'll be at least two years before DVD hardware becomes cheap enough to make the media a feasible standard release platform for music. And BTW, there are several companies that build crap cars which haven't died, because they sell those crap cars cheaply.
And that right there is why I have no interest in SWG or Everquest, no matter how cool the game sounds.