Trust me, I am shocked at the lengths this administration has tried to go to initiate it's fascist agenda. And I am even more shocked at how far they have been allowed to go on this path before people woke up. I hate to play this card, but 9-11 really freaked everyone out over here, and I think everyone has become very confused about things. This made people a little more pliant in what they were willing to accept. But all this has gone on too long and people are waking back up. Not too late I hope. We are definitely in a crisis situation right now, and honestly I think the American people should be perusing a more aggressive course to rid us from these zealots. Like impeachment of the entire cabinet (if that were possible). But I will defend the country's founding principles and I believe they will defend us. At least from ourselves.
The sooner these stupid DRM schemes are defeated, the faster the new hi-def technologies will be adopted by the public at large. If either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD were totally and permanently cracked today, then they would become sooo much more attractive. I think it would convince more people to adopt the cracked platform. Sales would go up and lots of stuff would get pirated. But they wouldn't see the increase in sales as a result of a more flexible DRM-less platform- all we would hear about is the increase of piracy and all the money lost. But it all goes hand in hand. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Please, I am so sick of the Americans-are-fat-and-lazy shit. Myself, and *all* the people I know are intensely concerned and act on our concerns. Do you think this could not happen somewhere else? With the right sequence of events this could happen *anywhere* and most likely already has. It appalls me that any regime could gain so much power in this country, and I certainly harbor a fair amount of resentment at the people who were ignorant enough to vote them in for a second term. Truly, current events pose as big a test to the strength of our constitution as they may have ever seen. But people aren't going let this shit go on. I expect that Gozales will be relieved of his post over these comments. And it may take time, but I believe more rational, and decent, politicians will be elected, and that our country will turn away from all this totalitarian bullshit. And it will happen through the actions and will of the people. I am pretty cynical about a lot of things, and I certainly don't believe that American style government is perfect, but I do believe it keeps the government mostly beholden to the people. It just doesn't work fast enough sometimes, and this is one of those times.
Nonsense. Competition is good for the industry. While Microsoft are hardly known for being innovators, they have proven an ability to evolve an established idea. Google's book search will become better because of the competition Microsoft poses.
Even if all this tech came together and formed a great hybrid player, it still doesn't resolve the central issue of which format to support. I mean, what format are you going to buy your media in? It's great it supports both, you can always rent or Netflix either, but you still may find yourself several years down the road with a library of movies in an obsolete format. The player is only a small part of the problem.
Additionally, it doesn't solve the issue for the retailer either. Space in stores is finite, and you can be sure that no retailer wants to reduce the variety of merchandise just so they can carry three formats of every title.
Considering how well Congress has asserted itself during the corse of events since 9-11, ceding to almost every single one of the president's demands no matter how illegal or illogical, I define "no oversight" to mean "Congressional oversight."
It's only a matter of time now until game sales start to dry up, but will the industry look back and undertand why people stopped buying? Endless mediocre movie game tie-ins and now advertisments. No doubt they'll take an attitude of willfull obliviousness to this and instead claim it's piracy hurting their sales.
Now, if they were to offer FREE games that were ad supported, well that might be a different story. That might revolutionize the industry. But my guess is they are still going to charge $50 for the same product, only now it'll be all tarted up with product placements and annoying billboards.
Although the article has already been deemed innacurate on it's main point, it's still makes valid points. The new chapter was too short for the price, and the time between episodes is too long.
I'd like to add my own point: Steam sucks. Easily the most bug ridden piece of crap I have ever seen come out of a profesional studio. I hadn't run it since I finished HL2 almost a year ago, and when I started it, it crashed twice trying to update itself. Upon trying to purchase the game it locked up validating my credit card. During the download it froze, crashed, or froze then refused to quit, or stopped downloading, or downloaded at a measly 14k/s despite an otherwise healthy cable internet connection... over and over. It took constant vigilance on my part to manually keep the download going. In the end it took almost 10 hours to retrieve the entire game, four hours more than it took me to play it through. Valve *really* needs to get their storefront in order, particularly since the game itself is such a masterpiece. It's like trying to buy a Mercedes from a retarded kid over the phone.
I use a combination of Flash and After Effects the most frequently. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Flash is fast and easy, but not aprticularly full featured. But it's hard to underestimate how helpful it can be to just hit 'play' and see an immediate playback without any rendering times.
After Effects is way more powerful. It makes hard things easy, but it also makes easy things hard. It offers a lot of control over so many differnt aspects, which you need to do complex things, but can be a hindrance if you just need to knock out some shit real fast.
Flash has basic drawing tools, which are mediocre but functional. After Effects offers klunky painting tools. Flash is great with vector based artwork but quickly bogs down and gets buggy with raster graphics. AE loves raster graphics and allows you to layer up lots of cool (suprise) effects and such.
Flash isn't very precise when it comes to synching audio. Animations slowly fall out of synch becuse Flash screws up the audio. At 24 FPS, synch will slip about 1 second for every three minutes. So if I don't have to deliver a SWF, I will work in Flash on a scene by scene basis and then import those scenes into AE to make my final composite. It's also nice to be able to change frame rates in AE, which you can't easily do in Flash mid-project.
In my projects, I usually start in Flash, setting up the layouts and doing the character animation. Then I'll bring it into AE to composite the shots, handle camera moves and effects. I love the 2.5-D camera. I don't generally handle much audio so I'll bring in an already mixed down track. Final output is handle by AE.
Of course, this technique is particular to my style of animaiton, and may not work for you. I wouldn't recommend Flash for anything close to feature film quality animation. There have been some very good TV shows done using Flash (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the Venture Bros.) but honestly, it's not a professional quality animation program on it's own. It still even in version 8, has too many quirky bugs and limitations. It's very difficult to do resource management. There is no way to make global changes (like changing a character's skin tone)- it doesn't even have a way to select all of a particular color on a frame. You have to manually go through and select every area.. these are basic tools that have exsisted for decades in Adobe's products. I am extremely excited that Adobe bough Macromedia because I have felt that, as far as design and animation goes, the program has offered no substantial new features since it was called Futuresplash.
Anyway, I am ranting.. I still use Flash every day and deal with it. At it's core its a great program. AE too.
Just because some arrogant and corrupt congressman introduces an obviously anti-constitutional bill, everyone assumes the American Democracy is a complete failure. Bunk! Of course politicians listen to coorporations- this is not a new concept and has been going on at least since the dawn of politics, and certainly since the dawn of this republic. But politicians listen to YOU too dammit! If every U.S. Citizen in this forum wrote to their congressmen to protest this bill, IT WOULD BE DEFEATED, I guarantee you. All they need a sufficient public outcry.
Sucks for them but true. If/when someone manages to crack all their layers of protection so people can make easy "backups" of content, that will trump all other advantages one format has over the other.
No, actually Blu-Ray discs are slightly thicker. I don't have the actual figure.. some thousandths of a inch, but significant enough that Blu-Ray discs won't fit into the current DVD player like HD-DVD can.
That's not to say someone can't make a Blu-ray/DVD hybrid machine, but there's not much point in that. A DVD/HD-DVD disc could be purchased by someone who currently owns a regular DVD player but thinks that, in the future, they will upgrade once the prices fall. So the consumer future-proofs their purchase (at presumably no extra cost) and the retailer only has to stock one version of that title.
I haven't seen any evidence that the industry is heading this way, I'm just sayin' it's possible.
Yes, but the fight over consumer dollars starts in a fight over shelf space. Do you think retailers are excited about having to stock not two, but three movie disc formats? DVD, DHD-DVD, Blu-Ray... Four if they are stupid enough to carry PSP movies. Assuming the ammount of floor space they devote to media remains the same, they will have to cut the n umber of available titles by 1/3 just to accomidate the stock. Courting the retailers is really more important than consumers.
In this regard I think HD-DVD has a huge advantage. Because the physical media are the same dimensions, they have the potential to made dual-format discs. If you could buy the DVD/HD-DVD version of a movie on the same disc, retailers are going to favor that format.
If you are being legally charged for piracy, then wouldn't logic follow that the Canadian government has endorsed piracy as legal behavior? I would think this is fantastic news actually. If I took 70% of the price of a blank CD-R that wouldn't actually buy me much music. But I could fit hundreds of pirated MP3's on a single CD-R. What a bargin! Is one required to purchase CD-R's to take advantage of legal piracy? I can't wait till this one comes to the US!
Sorry mate, got to disagree (mostly) with you on this one. Dexter was pretty damn good- an honestly funny show which is rare in children's animation these days. The voices were partcularly sharp and the art direction was very good. Samurai Jack was fantastic in almost every aspect- great plots, beautiful artwork and superb direction. The Star Wars stuff was ok- but his hands were tied by the Lucas people in many respects. The second series was better than the first, and had a lot more of his style reflected in them. I am pretty jazzed about him directing the Dark Crystal sequel, although I am a bit leery of the distance between films. My main worry is that they will replace the excellent puppets and costumes with some over animated and underwhelming CG crap.
There is a certain ammount of truth to this, but you have to realize that this powermongering is practically their job description rather than an abberation. Their *jobs* are to whip people into a rabid frenzy about the impending release of a commercial product. And in fact, when exsersized properly, it does produce sizable profit. They aren't interested in the long trail of sales of product that is always available. They want people to get one stop shy of a riot over a product - then release it to this group who will buy it in droves, creating an instant explosion of profit. And the profits here are very impressive when this is done properly, far exceeding the long trail money made from always-available content. The ability to create this level of buzz is solely dependant upon denying the public access to something until just the right moment, something the internet and piracy makes unreliable at best, and impossible at worst.
After getting an upsampling DVD player for my Hi def set, I would have to say that I would be very hesitant to spend any significant sums to get a better image. Sure, true HD is better, but not *that* much better. A nicely upsampled DVD delivered over HDMI looks pretty damned good, and I won't have to replace my library or get in the middle of an expensive format war.
The history of technology has demonstrated time and time again that the cheaper, not better, product will dominate. Everyone has been pitting this as Blu Ray against HD-DVD, but standard DVD is the 800 pound gorilla here and it doesn't look particularly bad. I don't think the image quality of Hi-def is such a vast improvement to intice people to migrate, which will push both formats to the fringe groups who fixate on extreme quality.
I think a lot of people are going to feel this way. Sony's strategy to sneak the technology into people's houses via PS3 is not a bad move, but even that won't guarantee success. Sony has an uneven history of promoting new formats and having a user base doesn't mean diddly if there is no driving consumer demand (think Atrac and Betamax).
Dude, I'm not going to sit here and defend any DRM scheme, but your comment is a bunch of FUD. There is very little truth in your statement. I sincerely doubt Sony, as stupid as they seem to have gotten letely, would implement any of this, even if they could.
First to market? I don't recall MS being first to market with pretty much anything. They come late to market with buggy software and rely on monopolistic business practices to remain in the lead.
Of course I'm not saying anything everyone here doesn't already know...
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, I am shocked at the lengths this administration has tried to go to initiate it's fascist agenda. And I am even more shocked at how far they have been allowed to go on this path before people woke up. I hate to play this card, but 9-11 really freaked everyone out over here, and I think everyone has become very confused about things. This made people a little more pliant in what they were willing to accept. But all this has gone on too long and people are waking back up. Not too late I hope. We are definitely in a crisis situation right now, and honestly I think the American people should be perusing a more aggressive course to rid us from these zealots. Like impeachment of the entire cabinet (if that were possible). But I will defend the country's founding principles and I believe they will defend us. At least from ourselves.
The sooner these stupid DRM schemes are defeated, the faster the new hi-def technologies will be adopted by the public at large. If either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD were totally and permanently cracked today, then they would become sooo much more attractive. I think it would convince more people to adopt the cracked platform. Sales would go up and lots of stuff would get pirated. But they wouldn't see the increase in sales as a result of a more flexible DRM-less platform- all we would hear about is the increase of piracy and all the money lost. But it all goes hand in hand. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Please, I am so sick of the Americans-are-fat-and-lazy shit. Myself, and *all* the people I know are intensely concerned and act on our concerns. Do you think this could not happen somewhere else? With the right sequence of events this could happen *anywhere* and most likely already has. It appalls me that any regime could gain so much power in this country, and I certainly harbor a fair amount of resentment at the people who were ignorant enough to vote them in for a second term. Truly, current events pose as big a test to the strength of our constitution as they may have ever seen. But people aren't going let this shit go on. I expect that Gozales will be relieved of his post over these comments. And it may take time, but I believe more rational, and decent, politicians will be elected, and that our country will turn away from all this totalitarian bullshit. And it will happen through the actions and will of the people. I am pretty cynical about a lot of things, and I certainly don't believe that American style government is perfect, but I do believe it keeps the government mostly beholden to the people. It just doesn't work fast enough sometimes, and this is one of those times.
Nonsense. Competition is good for the industry. While Microsoft are hardly known for being innovators, they have proven an ability to evolve an established idea. Google's book search will become better because of the competition Microsoft poses.
you forgot... Halflife
Even if all this tech came together and formed a great hybrid player, it still doesn't resolve the central issue of which format to support. I mean, what format are you going to buy your media in? It's great it supports both, you can always rent or Netflix either, but you still may find yourself several years down the road with a library of movies in an obsolete format. The player is only a small part of the problem. Additionally, it doesn't solve the issue for the retailer either. Space in stores is finite, and you can be sure that no retailer wants to reduce the variety of merchandise just so they can carry three formats of every title.
Actually, I think Slashdot has a patent on doing exactly that.
Are all the stories today going to get tagged 'itsatrap' ? So much cynicism.
I couldn't help but notice that the ad banners are filled with 'Dice' ads. And apparently not related.
Considering how well Congress has asserted itself during the corse of events since 9-11, ceding to almost every single one of the president's demands no matter how illegal or illogical, I define "no oversight" to mean "Congressional oversight."
It's only a matter of time now until game sales start to dry up, but will the industry look back and undertand why people stopped buying? Endless mediocre movie game tie-ins and now advertisments. No doubt they'll take an attitude of willfull obliviousness to this and instead claim it's piracy hurting their sales. Now, if they were to offer FREE games that were ad supported, well that might be a different story. That might revolutionize the industry. But my guess is they are still going to charge $50 for the same product, only now it'll be all tarted up with product placements and annoying billboards.
Although the article has already been deemed innacurate on it's main point, it's still makes valid points. The new chapter was too short for the price, and the time between episodes is too long. I'd like to add my own point: Steam sucks. Easily the most bug ridden piece of crap I have ever seen come out of a profesional studio. I hadn't run it since I finished HL2 almost a year ago, and when I started it, it crashed twice trying to update itself. Upon trying to purchase the game it locked up validating my credit card. During the download it froze, crashed, or froze then refused to quit, or stopped downloading, or downloaded at a measly 14k/s despite an otherwise healthy cable internet connection... over and over. It took constant vigilance on my part to manually keep the download going. In the end it took almost 10 hours to retrieve the entire game, four hours more than it took me to play it through. Valve *really* needs to get their storefront in order, particularly since the game itself is such a masterpiece. It's like trying to buy a Mercedes from a retarded kid over the phone.
I use a combination of Flash and After Effects the most frequently. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Flash is fast and easy, but not aprticularly full featured. But it's hard to underestimate how helpful it can be to just hit 'play' and see an immediate playback without any rendering times. After Effects is way more powerful. It makes hard things easy, but it also makes easy things hard. It offers a lot of control over so many differnt aspects, which you need to do complex things, but can be a hindrance if you just need to knock out some shit real fast. Flash has basic drawing tools, which are mediocre but functional. After Effects offers klunky painting tools. Flash is great with vector based artwork but quickly bogs down and gets buggy with raster graphics. AE loves raster graphics and allows you to layer up lots of cool (suprise) effects and such. Flash isn't very precise when it comes to synching audio. Animations slowly fall out of synch becuse Flash screws up the audio. At 24 FPS, synch will slip about 1 second for every three minutes. So if I don't have to deliver a SWF, I will work in Flash on a scene by scene basis and then import those scenes into AE to make my final composite. It's also nice to be able to change frame rates in AE, which you can't easily do in Flash mid-project. In my projects, I usually start in Flash, setting up the layouts and doing the character animation. Then I'll bring it into AE to composite the shots, handle camera moves and effects. I love the 2.5-D camera. I don't generally handle much audio so I'll bring in an already mixed down track. Final output is handle by AE. Of course, this technique is particular to my style of animaiton, and may not work for you. I wouldn't recommend Flash for anything close to feature film quality animation. There have been some very good TV shows done using Flash (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the Venture Bros.) but honestly, it's not a professional quality animation program on it's own. It still even in version 8, has too many quirky bugs and limitations. It's very difficult to do resource management. There is no way to make global changes (like changing a character's skin tone)- it doesn't even have a way to select all of a particular color on a frame. You have to manually go through and select every area.. these are basic tools that have exsisted for decades in Adobe's products. I am extremely excited that Adobe bough Macromedia because I have felt that, as far as design and animation goes, the program has offered no substantial new features since it was called Futuresplash. Anyway, I am ranting.. I still use Flash every day and deal with it. At it's core its a great program. AE too.
Why is it obvious that he's an American? Using the word 'mate' instead of 'pal' or 'buddy' is not a particularly Amarican phrasing.
Seriously... why did this opinion, which has already been hashed out a bazillion times since bootcamp was released, become interesting again?
Just because some arrogant and corrupt congressman introduces an obviously anti-constitutional bill, everyone assumes the American Democracy is a complete failure. Bunk! Of course politicians listen to coorporations- this is not a new concept and has been going on at least since the dawn of politics, and certainly since the dawn of this republic. But politicians listen to YOU too dammit! If every U.S. Citizen in this forum wrote to their congressmen to protest this bill, IT WOULD BE DEFEATED, I guarantee you. All they need a sufficient public outcry.
Sucks for them but true. If/when someone manages to crack all their layers of protection so people can make easy "backups" of content, that will trump all other advantages one format has over the other.
No, actually Blu-Ray discs are slightly thicker. I don't have the actual figure.. some thousandths of a inch, but significant enough that Blu-Ray discs won't fit into the current DVD player like HD-DVD can. That's not to say someone can't make a Blu-ray/DVD hybrid machine, but there's not much point in that. A DVD/HD-DVD disc could be purchased by someone who currently owns a regular DVD player but thinks that, in the future, they will upgrade once the prices fall. So the consumer future-proofs their purchase (at presumably no extra cost) and the retailer only has to stock one version of that title. I haven't seen any evidence that the industry is heading this way, I'm just sayin' it's possible.
Yes, but the fight over consumer dollars starts in a fight over shelf space. Do you think retailers are excited about having to stock not two, but three movie disc formats? DVD, DHD-DVD, Blu-Ray... Four if they are stupid enough to carry PSP movies. Assuming the ammount of floor space they devote to media remains the same, they will have to cut the n umber of available titles by 1/3 just to accomidate the stock. Courting the retailers is really more important than consumers. In this regard I think HD-DVD has a huge advantage. Because the physical media are the same dimensions, they have the potential to made dual-format discs. If you could buy the DVD/HD-DVD version of a movie on the same disc, retailers are going to favor that format.
If you are being legally charged for piracy, then wouldn't logic follow that the Canadian government has endorsed piracy as legal behavior? I would think this is fantastic news actually. If I took 70% of the price of a blank CD-R that wouldn't actually buy me much music. But I could fit hundreds of pirated MP3's on a single CD-R. What a bargin! Is one required to purchase CD-R's to take advantage of legal piracy? I can't wait till this one comes to the US!
Sorry mate, got to disagree (mostly) with you on this one. Dexter was pretty damn good- an honestly funny show which is rare in children's animation these days. The voices were partcularly sharp and the art direction was very good. Samurai Jack was fantastic in almost every aspect- great plots, beautiful artwork and superb direction. The Star Wars stuff was ok- but his hands were tied by the Lucas people in many respects. The second series was better than the first, and had a lot more of his style reflected in them. I am pretty jazzed about him directing the Dark Crystal sequel, although I am a bit leery of the distance between films. My main worry is that they will replace the excellent puppets and costumes with some over animated and underwhelming CG crap.
There is a certain ammount of truth to this, but you have to realize that this powermongering is practically their job description rather than an abberation. Their *jobs* are to whip people into a rabid frenzy about the impending release of a commercial product. And in fact, when exsersized properly, it does produce sizable profit. They aren't interested in the long trail of sales of product that is always available. They want people to get one stop shy of a riot over a product - then release it to this group who will buy it in droves, creating an instant explosion of profit. And the profits here are very impressive when this is done properly, far exceeding the long trail money made from always-available content. The ability to create this level of buzz is solely dependant upon denying the public access to something until just the right moment, something the internet and piracy makes unreliable at best, and impossible at worst.
After getting an upsampling DVD player for my Hi def set, I would have to say that I would be very hesitant to spend any significant sums to get a better image. Sure, true HD is better, but not *that* much better. A nicely upsampled DVD delivered over HDMI looks pretty damned good, and I won't have to replace my library or get in the middle of an expensive format war.
The history of technology has demonstrated time and time again that the cheaper, not better, product will dominate. Everyone has been pitting this as Blu Ray against HD-DVD, but standard DVD is the 800 pound gorilla here and it doesn't look particularly bad. I don't think the image quality of Hi-def is such a vast improvement to intice people to migrate, which will push both formats to the fringe groups who fixate on extreme quality.
I think a lot of people are going to feel this way. Sony's strategy to sneak the technology into people's houses via PS3 is not a bad move, but even that won't guarantee success. Sony has an uneven history of promoting new formats and having a user base doesn't mean diddly if there is no driving consumer demand (think Atrac and Betamax).
Dude, I'm not going to sit here and defend any DRM scheme, but your comment is a bunch of FUD. There is very little truth in your statement. I sincerely doubt Sony, as stupid as they seem to have gotten letely, would implement any of this, even if they could.
First to market? I don't recall MS being first to market with pretty much anything. They come late to market with buggy software and rely on monopolistic business practices to remain in the lead. Of course I'm not saying anything everyone here doesn't already know...