Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..
Nah. Nullsoft/AOL would have had to have a music store from the getgo in order to compete with the vast library that iTMS has amassed. iTunes is now synonomous with cheap music with a decent interface.
Nullsoft/AOL would just not be able to compete at this late stage in the game. Others have tried but it seems that Apple is continuing to win that battle.
Is this good? Maybe not. We certainly don't want a single viable option for music playing/purchasing but I really don't think that an open source project from Nullsoft/AOL will be able to compete *now*.
TV-out with an old Voodoo3 3000 and a simple 16 bit cheap SoundBlaster from 10 years ago to cheap cables. I mean, after all, it's mostly divx or another format for downloaded movies.
For serious music I usually burn the SHNs/FLACs to CD and play them in my stereo.
I have tried using my Tivo for MP3s but I just don't see the point. Maybe if I could use it for video I would. That would be a lot easier than screwing around with TV-out and waiting for the screen to resize, etc. I have a feeling that won't come to fruition from Tivo though;)
Promote offerings with targeted ads and recommendations.
Microsoft TV Foundation 1.7 is also rich in opportunities for you to promote not just on-demand content, but high-definition TV, digital video recording, and to cross-sell voice and data services.
Use our optional Microsoft TV Best Bets recommendation engine to present consumers with movies based on their viewing history and critics' picks.
Link any static ad from the IPG or Managed Content Service to a VOD stream so consumers can play a movie preview or a promotion for your high speed service by just clicking the ad.
Use our optional Microsoft TV Business Pack application to schedule and manage promotions and ads and to track comprehensive impressions and click-through rates.
Ooh ooh, just what I want to pay extra for every month! MSFT's intrusion into the home CATV market with their own solution that brings me MORE advertising that's marketed directly towards me via the spyware running on their OS!/tinfoil
Sell and secure HDTV homes. Microsoft TV Foundation 1.7 helps you attract and retain your most valuable consumers by highlighting high-definition TV programming:
Let viewers search for exclusive HDTV listings in the IPG.
Let viewers launch exclusive HDTV listings from the TV menu.
Highlight HDTV listings in the IPG with a distinctive icon.
Mmmm, secure HDTV. Don't want any of those pesky users exercizing their rights! Let's make sure that we can keep them from recording what you don't want them to. That way you can target them with even MORE advertising because they will be forced to watch what WE want them to watch.
Umm, was that before or after the story about movieblogging hit the front page causing a flood of hits to my mobile picture gallery linked from the moblog story from last week?
Re:Gamers taking day off from work
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
I have taken days off of work to go and do plenty of fun things. Camping, geocaching, drinking, have the satellite installer come and put a dish on my roof, wait for the UPS man so I can sign for the package.
AOL still has a few more years left in them. Cable and DSL haven't quite become ubiquitous, and there are enough people in the "heartland" who aren't familiar enough with the Internet to know better.
Their new commercials purport to make the Internet better - that's the market AOL has to reach, people who think their software is the Internet.
People with Cable/DSL still have their AOL accounts and use it over Broadband because they don't want to lose their email account, they don't want to lose all the "wonderful" extras that AOL provides, and they don't want to know that they have been getting ripped off for 10 years by using their service.
Education will put AOL to a slow death unless they drastically reform their business to revolve around the things they do get right (like messaging) instead of "access" and "customer support" (both in scare quotes for obvious reasons).
This comment is so wrong on so many levels that it's not even worth explaining.
Seriously, whose life is 1) so exciting that video clips are required for full appreciation and 2) not too exciting to have enough time to record the whole thing on video?
The things that I do are exciting for me. They might also be exciting for others in my family or my circle of friends. Remember that blogs are nothing more than an online diary which may or may not be intended for others.
If you don't think that someone's life is important then what the fuck are you doing reading through their blog? Go to another more interesting section of the web and ignore their page all together.
Me? I'm happy to have a photographic account of what happened on some random night.
Kerry was "in striking distance" in Florida and Ohio, said the Drudge Report.
And last election FoxNews claimed victory for Bush well before it was officially called. All media outlets have their own biases that they use daily on a large cross-section of stories. Hell, some news stations go so far as to create near pandemonium out of stories like "Are our college students on death row in their dorm rooms?" when they are comparing jail cell fires to dorms?
Big plans and big claims are to be expected from folks - pajama-clad or not - who are dabbling with new technology and new modalities of public expression.
Coming from someone writing for the big dogs I can honestly say I'm not surprised. What the hell else was he going to say? "Oh, the mainstream media is fucking dead. The Internet will take over as the true purveyor of news? Yeah, that would have been printed...
You did not see any of the networks or the AP put out misleading reports of a Kerry lead nationally - or in the battleground states of Florida or Ohio. The editors, producers and executives who run these MSM organizations, in typical responsible, dinosaur fashion, know it would be wrong to do so.
From the little bit of flipping I did between the Daily Show, FoxNews, and NBC I was seeing quite a bit more information coming earlier from FoxNews about which states Bush had won and what they were projecting... I didn't see that so much from NBC and I certainly didn't see it on the Daily Show;-) I guess it could have been the same with any other channel and it might have just been their methods/algorithms but take it for what it's worth.
His constant comparison of the blogs to his school newspaper is rather annoying and honestly quite childish. Perhaps we should heed his words and pretty much ignore what we see on the Internet from the "media outlets". If he really wanted me to listen to what he said he should have done some quote for quote comparisons between the blogs and traditional media outlet's stories and shown where exactly the blogs were lacking. Maybe that would have even helped the blogs.
Making mention of Drudge as your main point is really sad. Drudge has a lot of funny stuff but you have to take most of it at face value. I certainly don't read it often mostly because it's fluff and bullshit. Perhaps this guy should have done some googling and found some valid political blog sites and then done his comparison.
In case you hadn't noticed, this very article (which you say "blew away" the RIAA's world view) confirms that piracy is responsible for 1/4 to 1/3 of the drop in sales. I don't know about you, but to me, that seems pretty significant.
In case you hadn't noticed, and you obviously didn't, the entire article parrots the 1000s of threads that have rehashed this debate over and over again for years...
Basically it is giving information on both sides (as a good article should) and it mentions that it is possible that the industry is fucking shit up for themselves *AND* that it is possible that piracy is as well.
Umm, if you read the article (which you obviously didn't) it included 90% of what I mentioned in my original post and even though you were trolling your comment does ring true...
I mentioned in my original post that the industry would respond to the Economist's article by saying that it was just a rehashing of Internet forum whining.
Of course they won't listen to it. It says that they are the cause for most of their ills. They are the ones that are recruiting shitty music, pushing it to shitty/controlled radio, not embracing the Internet, wasting time on lawsuits instead of their original purpose, and not buying up the independents that they used to get some of the best fringe talent from.
The Economist just blew away their views on how their little corner of the world works.
I have a feeling that the music industry will claim that this article is nothing more than a conglomoration of Internet forum non-sense and that their business-model is acceptable and will continue. Afterall, they can claim whatever they want, the media/controlled-radio will distribute it, and the public is stupid.
For regular users of the software the learning curve is worth the time. For those that just want to type a quick document but still want to be able to perform operations on the document want to do so without having to look at cryptic key combinations or find options buried in hidden menus.
Most computer users these days are "casual users" and don't care to learn more than point and click. The "power users" might be offended by the fact that they are being left out but the simple fact of the matter is that the "casual users" are the ones in the majority and the ones that the companies cater to.
The WordPerfect suit that Novell will file seeks unspecified damages arising from Microsoft's efforts to eliminate competition in the office productivity applications market during the time that Novell owned the WordPerfect word-processing application and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet application. The suit is based in part on facts proved by the United States Government in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft. In that suit, Microsoft was found to have unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems by eliminating competition in related markets.
Now, I can't stand MSFT's business tactics as much as the next Slashdotter but WordPerfect missed the fucking boat on a lot of shit when it came to the migration from DOS to Windows...
Novell bought out WordPerfect 3/94. They were supporting legacy versions of WordPerfect for DOS and updating several versions for Windows. How they expected to compete against Word was really beyond me. Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold.
I have fond memories of WP5.1 for DOS but I am so glad that we have moved away from SHIFT+ALT+CTRL F11 for foo. WordPerfect took over from WordStar because of superior interface and design. While many people adore WP I wonder if it is more of a holdover from years gone by rather than actual superiority.
Personally, Word is easy to get and use and it happens to be better than what Corel/Novell was offering at the time and that's why it won out. Maybe this lawsuit was better served 10 years ago in 1994 and not now in 2004.
Sales of home videos on DVD and VHS crossed the $1-billion mark in July, setting a record for the month, Video Store magazine reported Thursday. The spending figure of $1.01 billion was 6.5 percent above last July's. Ninety-three percent of the figure was spent on DVD purchases compared with 86 percent in July 2003 and 72 percent in July 2002. The top-selling DVD for the month was Cold Mountain, the Miramax-produced film, distributed by Disney's Buena Vista Home Video. Unit sales were estimated at 2.19 million.
DVDShrink (the program I mention before) is idiot proof. Put disc in, hit copy. There are a lot of option to remove audio streams you don't want, etc. But yes, even the 5 minutes of prep isn't worth it for a lot of movies.
I am familiar with that wonder of a program (and DVDDecrypter) but I always have to remove a ton (including credits at times) in order to make the bloated dual layer discs fit onto the DVDR's:(
Sometimes I spend upwards of several hours between the editing and burn time.
BTW -- Thanks for clearing up the original statement. I had a feeling which camp you were in but I wasn't sure;)
"An intermittently charming remake of the 1992 Tom Selleck yarn Mr. Baseball." -- Malene Arpe, TORONTO STAR
"Commits the cardinal sin of not being quite as funny as its star." -- Robert K. Elder, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"The script is much like a nine-inning sitcom that uses an obvious formula to tell a familiar story while garnering cheap laughs." -- Sara Gebhardt, WASHINGTON POST
"Although the writing and direction are flabby, the drama contrived and the romance utterly unbelievable." -- Ann Hornaday, WASHINGTON POST
If the movies are so bad why are people stealing them (sorry, infringing on their copywrite)? I bet I could find a torrent of Garfield the movie if I realy wanted to.
They are stealing them to steal them. I know that some people here don't like the fact of "I'm not going to pay $9/ticket to see a movie but I'll download it for free" issue but it does exist.
There's a market for free movies even if they do suck. I refuse to spend money on a movie that I just know (or was told) blows.
Honestly, the only real reason that bullshit suck movies do well is because there is only a small number of movies made and people need something to do with their 2.5 kids on a Saturday night.
A: Some people who were sued raised hell. But by and large, if you look at the big picture, it was important to make the point that this cannot be free. Piracy has a tremendous negative impact on consumers.
No, the movie industry has had a tremendous negative impact on itself. Expensive movies that fail turn into expensive losses. STOP MAKING SHITTY FUCKING MOVIES that cost 100+ million dollars. Believe me, I don't feel sorry for the MPAA when they have to shell out millions to big name actors to get them to act in a movie that sucks.
In fact, if anything, piracy has had a great impact on consumers. The MPAA has been forced to push movies out quickly to consumers at low costs. Walmart has some great titles for under $8. Target routinely has newer releases for under $15 and some under $10 on sale.
A: My son Jon was executive producer of the recent film Mr. 3000. A few days after the film was released, a member of my staff found it being sold as a DVD just a few blocks from our offices. I called my son to give him the bad news, and he told me this is happening to all the current films. And then he said, "And what are you going to do about it, Dad?"
Is this quote supposed to make me feel bad? That the head of the MPAA is fighting for the rights of his son who is a producer? I don't. In fact, it turns me off more than anything.
A: I have very good teachers here. I think of myself as having adequate knowledge, but the principles are easy to understand. We have to embrace new technologies, but also enforce the law.
Perhaps you should learn to embrace the wants and needs of the consumers and be less worried about pissing everyone off.
Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg's slim but richly illustrated children's book of the same name, The Polar Express was made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process.
I am appalled at how this article trivializes the wonder that the original book The Polar Express creates. I just want to say that calling the book "slim" might be true of the physical thickness of the book but the story and pictures contained within are fantastic. As a child I was riveted by this story and at one time seriously believed that this magic train could whisk me away to see the inner workings of all the Christmas fairytales you hear as a child.
My mother has passed the tradition of reading this book down to my youngest cousin (1st grader) and they are planning on taking my cousin to see this movie soon after it comes out.
I am really looking forward to seeing the movie myself and seeing how closely Zemeckis mimics my own mind's interpretation and expansion of the story and pictures. It *is* possible to recreate a story on the big screen from a novel and have it hold the same feeling that it did in print. I am crossing my fingers that the special effects and large budget don't take away from the real story that sits behind all the new-aged fanciness.
No, but you bitch about more crap on/. than I do and that is saying something.
Then why are you listed as one of my "fans"? You must have appreciated something that I said at one point or another. Or are you just making everyone your "friend" for no reason?
You sound like you need a drink and/or need to get laid.;->
Well that's quite the pointless comment as I'm an alcoholic with a fiancee. If I was married you could say I needed to get laid though;)
Slashdot Mirror
Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..
Nah. Nullsoft/AOL would have had to have a music store from the getgo in order to compete with the vast library that iTMS has amassed. iTunes is now synonomous with cheap music with a decent interface.
Nullsoft/AOL would just not be able to compete at this late stage in the game. Others have tried but it seems that Apple is continuing to win that battle.
Is this good? Maybe not. We certainly don't want a single viable option for music playing/purchasing but I really don't think that an open source project from Nullsoft/AOL will be able to compete *now*.
TV-out with an old Voodoo3 3000 and a simple 16 bit cheap SoundBlaster from 10 years ago to cheap cables. I mean, after all, it's mostly divx or another format for downloaded movies.
;)
For serious music I usually burn the SHNs/FLACs to CD and play them in my stereo.
I have tried using my Tivo for MP3s but I just don't see the point. Maybe if I could use it for video I would. That would be a lot easier than screwing around with TV-out and waiting for the screen to resize, etc. I have a feeling that won't come to fruition from Tivo though
That is exactly what I do. Two seperate types of backups going to three seperates machines.
A daily backup of important files (and stuff that is changed daily) goes to all machines in one shot at ~6am.
A weekly backup of EVERYTHING goes to three different machines every Sunday at ~5am.
Now, I realize that all three could be screwed simulataneously but at least I know that TWO of those machines have automated backup to CDRW daily.
Yeah, it's paranoid, it's redundant, but it's my data and it's important to me. If I lost my 2300 pictures I'd be lost.
You get ads anyways with CATV or satelite. Nobody is offering ad-free TV in any form, so it's either ads or no programming whatsoever.
That's what TiVo is supposed to be for. Removal of ads and timeshifting.
Promote offerings with targeted ads and recommendations.
/tinfoil
Microsoft TV Foundation 1.7 is also rich in opportunities for you to promote not just on-demand content, but high-definition TV, digital video recording, and to cross-sell voice and data services.
Use our optional Microsoft TV Best Bets recommendation engine to present consumers with movies based on their viewing history and critics' picks.
Link any static ad from the IPG or Managed Content Service to a VOD stream so consumers can play a movie preview or a promotion for your high speed service by just clicking the ad.
Use our optional Microsoft TV Business Pack application to schedule and manage promotions and ads and to track comprehensive impressions and click-through rates.
Ooh ooh, just what I want to pay extra for every month! MSFT's intrusion into the home CATV market with their own solution that brings me MORE advertising that's marketed directly towards me via the spyware running on their OS!
Sell and secure HDTV homes.
Microsoft TV Foundation 1.7 helps you attract and retain your most valuable consumers by highlighting high-definition TV programming:
Let viewers search for exclusive HDTV listings in the IPG.
Let viewers launch exclusive HDTV listings from the TV menu.
Highlight HDTV listings in the IPG with a distinctive icon.
Mmmm, secure HDTV. Don't want any of those pesky users exercizing their rights! Let's make sure that we can keep them from recording what you don't want them to. That way you can target them with even MORE advertising because they will be forced to watch what WE want them to watch.
Timeshifting be damned!
Umm, was that before or after the story about movieblogging hit the front page causing a flood of hits to my mobile picture gallery linked from the moblog story from last week?
I have taken days off of work to go and do plenty of fun things. Camping, geocaching, drinking, have the satellite installer come and put a dish on my roof, wait for the UPS man so I can sign for the package.
Man, that's intense.
AOL still has a few more years left in them. Cable and DSL haven't quite become ubiquitous, and there are enough people in the "heartland" who aren't familiar enough with the Internet to know better.
Their new commercials purport to make the Internet better - that's the market AOL has to reach, people who think their software is the Internet.
People with Cable/DSL still have their AOL accounts and use it over Broadband because they don't want to lose their email account, they don't want to lose all the "wonderful" extras that AOL provides, and they don't want to know that they have been getting ripped off for 10 years by using their service.
Education will put AOL to a slow death unless they drastically reform their business to revolve around the things they do get right (like messaging) instead of "access" and "customer support" (both in scare quotes for obvious reasons).
This comment is so wrong on so many levels that it's not even worth explaining.
Seriously, whose life is 1) so exciting that video clips are required for full appreciation and 2) not too exciting to have enough time to record the whole thing on video?
The things that I do are exciting for me. They might also be exciting for others in my family or my circle of friends. Remember that blogs are nothing more than an online diary which may or may not be intended for others.
If you don't think that someone's life is important then what the fuck are you doing reading through their blog? Go to another more interesting section of the web and ignore their page all together.
Me? I'm happy to have a photographic account of what happened on some random night.
Kerry was "in striking distance" in Florida and Ohio, said the Drudge Report.
;-) I guess it could have been the same with any other channel and it might have just been their methods/algorithms but take it for what it's worth.
.02
And last election FoxNews claimed victory for Bush well before it was officially called. All media outlets have their own biases that they use daily on a large cross-section of stories. Hell, some news stations go so far as to create near pandemonium out of stories like "Are our college students on death row in their dorm rooms?" when they are comparing jail cell fires to dorms?
Big plans and big claims are to be expected from folks - pajama-clad or not - who are dabbling with new technology and new modalities of public expression.
Coming from someone writing for the big dogs I can honestly say I'm not surprised. What the hell else was he going to say? "Oh, the mainstream media is fucking dead. The Internet will take over as the true purveyor of news? Yeah, that would have been printed...
You did not see any of the networks or the AP put out misleading reports of a Kerry lead nationally - or in the battleground states of Florida or Ohio. The editors, producers and executives who run these MSM organizations, in typical responsible, dinosaur fashion, know it would be wrong to do so.
From the little bit of flipping I did between the Daily Show, FoxNews, and NBC I was seeing quite a bit more information coming earlier from FoxNews about which states Bush had won and what they were projecting... I didn't see that so much from NBC and I certainly didn't see it on the Daily Show
His constant comparison of the blogs to his school newspaper is rather annoying and honestly quite childish. Perhaps we should heed his words and pretty much ignore what we see on the Internet from the "media outlets". If he really wanted me to listen to what he said he should have done some quote for quote comparisons between the blogs and traditional media outlet's stories and shown where exactly the blogs were lacking. Maybe that would have even helped the blogs.
Making mention of Drudge as your main point is really sad. Drudge has a lot of funny stuff but you have to take most of it at face value. I certainly don't read it often mostly because it's fluff and bullshit. Perhaps this guy should have done some googling and found some valid political blog sites and then done his comparison.
That's my worthless
In case you hadn't noticed, this very article (which you say "blew away" the RIAA's world view) confirms that piracy is responsible for 1/4 to 1/3 of the drop in sales. I don't know about you, but to me, that seems pretty significant.
In case you hadn't noticed, and you obviously didn't, the entire article parrots the 1000s of threads that have rehashed this debate over and over again for years...
Basically it is giving information on both sides (as a good article should) and it mentions that it is possible that the industry is fucking shit up for themselves *AND* that it is possible that piracy is as well.
Umm, if you read the article (which you obviously didn't) it included 90% of what I mentioned in my original post and even though you were trolling your comment does ring true...
I mentioned in my original post that the industry would respond to the Economist's article by saying that it was just a rehashing of Internet forum whining.
Thank you for solidifying that statement.
Of course they won't listen to it. It says that they are the cause for most of their ills. They are the ones that are recruiting shitty music, pushing it to shitty/controlled radio, not embracing the Internet, wasting time on lawsuits instead of their original purpose, and not buying up the independents that they used to get some of the best fringe talent from.
The Economist just blew away their views on how their little corner of the world works.
I have a feeling that the music industry will claim that this article is nothing more than a conglomoration of Internet forum non-sense and that their business-model is acceptable and will continue. Afterall, they can claim whatever they want, the media/controlled-radio will distribute it, and the public is stupid.
It's just the learning curve that's a bitch.
For regular users of the software the learning curve is worth the time. For those that just want to type a quick document but still want to be able to perform operations on the document want to do so without having to look at cryptic key combinations or find options buried in hidden menus.
Most computer users these days are "casual users" and don't care to learn more than point and click. The "power users" might be offended by the fact that they are being left out but the simple fact of the matter is that the "casual users" are the ones in the majority and the ones that the companies cater to.
The WordPerfect suit that Novell will file seeks unspecified damages arising from Microsoft's efforts to eliminate competition in the office productivity applications market during the time that Novell owned the WordPerfect word-processing application and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet application. The suit is based in part on facts proved by the United States Government in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft. In that suit, Microsoft was found to have unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems by eliminating competition in related markets.
Now, I can't stand MSFT's business tactics as much as the next Slashdotter but WordPerfect missed the fucking boat on a lot of shit when it came to the migration from DOS to Windows...
Novell bought out WordPerfect 3/94. They were supporting legacy versions of WordPerfect for DOS and updating several versions for Windows. How they expected to compete against Word was really beyond me. Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold.
I have fond memories of WP5.1 for DOS but I am so glad that we have moved away from SHIFT+ALT+CTRL F11 for foo. WordPerfect took over from WordStar because of superior interface and design. While many people adore WP I wonder if it is more of a holdover from years gone by rather than actual superiority.
Personally, Word is easy to get and use and it happens to be better than what Corel/Novell was offering at the time and that's why it won out. Maybe this lawsuit was better served 10 years ago in 1994 and not now in 2004.
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On *is* progress! If it weren't for Elvis rock 'n roll wouldn't be where it is today! ;-)
I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".
Then why do the other search engines still carry it? It seems like Google has something confused and not the government.
September 2004:
Sales of home videos on DVD and VHS crossed the $1-billion mark in July, setting a record for the month, Video Store magazine reported Thursday. The spending figure of $1.01 billion was 6.5 percent above last July's. Ninety-three percent of the figure was spent on DVD purchases compared with 86 percent in July 2003 and 72 percent in July 2002. The top-selling DVD for the month was Cold Mountain, the Miramax-produced film, distributed by Disney's Buena Vista Home Video. Unit sales were estimated at 2.19 million.
DVDShrink (the program I mention before) is idiot proof. Put disc in, hit copy. There are a lot of option to remove audio streams you don't want, etc. But yes, even the 5 minutes of prep isn't worth it for a lot of movies.
:(
;)
I am familiar with that wonder of a program (and DVDDecrypter) but I always have to remove a ton (including credits at times) in order to make the bloated dual layer discs fit onto the DVDR's
Sometimes I spend upwards of several hours between the editing and burn time.
BTW -- Thanks for clearing up the original statement. I had a feeling which camp you were in but I wasn't sure
I'm one of those people.
;)
That will download but won't pay or the other way around? I'm not clear on that.
That all said, we rent DVDs once in a while yet very few of those are worth the effort to copy with DVD Shrink to DVD-R.
If it's not even worth the $2 blank DVDR and the time you have to spend ripping/stripping/burning it then it must have been bad
Yeah, it got some pretty shit reviews:
"An intermittently charming remake of the 1992 Tom Selleck yarn Mr. Baseball."
-- Malene Arpe, TORONTO STAR
"Commits the cardinal sin of not being quite as funny as its star."
-- Robert K. Elder, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"The script is much like a nine-inning sitcom that uses an obvious formula to tell a familiar story while garnering cheap laughs."
-- Sara Gebhardt, WASHINGTON POST
"Although the writing and direction are flabby, the drama contrived and the romance utterly unbelievable."
-- Ann Hornaday, WASHINGTON POST
If the movies are so bad why are people stealing them (sorry, infringing on their copywrite)? I bet I could find a torrent of Garfield the movie if I realy wanted to.
They are stealing them to steal them. I know that some people here don't like the fact of "I'm not going to pay $9/ticket to see a movie but I'll download it for free" issue but it does exist.
There's a market for free movies even if they do suck. I refuse to spend money on a movie that I just know (or was told) blows.
Honestly, the only real reason that bullshit suck movies do well is because there is only a small number of movies made and people need something to do with their 2.5 kids on a Saturday night.
A: Some people who were sued raised hell. But by and large, if you look at the big picture, it was important to make the point that this cannot be free. Piracy has a tremendous negative impact on consumers.
No, the movie industry has had a tremendous negative impact on itself. Expensive movies that fail turn into expensive losses. STOP MAKING SHITTY FUCKING MOVIES that cost 100+ million dollars. Believe me, I don't feel sorry for the MPAA when they have to shell out millions to big name actors to get them to act in a movie that sucks.
In fact, if anything, piracy has had a great impact on consumers. The MPAA has been forced to push movies out quickly to consumers at low costs. Walmart has some great titles for under $8. Target routinely has newer releases for under $15 and some under $10 on sale.
A: My son Jon was executive producer of the recent film Mr. 3000. A few days after the film was released, a member of my staff found it being sold as a DVD just a few blocks from our offices. I called my son to give him the bad news, and he told me this is happening to all the current films. And then he said, "And what are you going to do about it, Dad?"
Is this quote supposed to make me feel bad? That the head of the MPAA is fighting for the rights of his son who is a producer? I don't. In fact, it turns me off more than anything.
A: I have very good teachers here. I think of myself as having adequate knowledge, but the principles are easy to understand. We have to embrace new technologies, but also enforce the law.
Perhaps you should learn to embrace the wants and needs of the consumers and be less worried about pissing everyone off.
Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg's slim but richly illustrated children's book of the same name, The Polar Express was made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process.
I am appalled at how this article trivializes the wonder that the original book The Polar Express creates. I just want to say that calling the book "slim" might be true of the physical thickness of the book but the story and pictures contained within are fantastic. As a child I was riveted by this story and at one time seriously believed that this magic train could whisk me away to see the inner workings of all the Christmas fairytales you hear as a child.
My mother has passed the tradition of reading this book down to my youngest cousin (1st grader) and they are planning on taking my cousin to see this movie soon after it comes out.
I am really looking forward to seeing the movie myself and seeing how closely Zemeckis mimics my own mind's interpretation and expansion of the story and pictures. It *is* possible to recreate a story on the big screen from a novel and have it hold the same feeling that it did in print. I am crossing my fingers that the special effects and large budget don't take away from the real story that sits behind all the new-aged fanciness.
I really hope it doesn't ruin a great story.
No, but you bitch about more crap on /. than I do and that is saying something.
;->
;)
Then why are you listed as one of my "fans"? You must have appreciated something that I said at one point or another. Or are you just making everyone your "friend" for no reason?
You sound like you need a drink and/or need to get laid.
Well that's quite the pointless comment as I'm an alcoholic with a fiancee. If I was married you could say I needed to get laid though