Folks, anyone else out there realize that $900 is extremely expensive for the average joe to spend on a TV? Let's see, the majority of TVs are bought by late teens and 20-somethings, heading out into the world, or college bound to fit in their tiny apartments or basement flats. As they have famillies, SOME will become wealthy enough to spend $500 on a 30" TV, most will be happy with a 20" (as my familly has been for years), an elite few will be purchasing $800 widescreen, rear projection systems with surround sound equipment. The/. community is a VERY BAD sample of mainstream society. Most (not all)/.ers are middle class to to upper class citizens, as they had the fortune of being able to be introduced to high techology at an early age (I know there's a few of you here and there that are exceptions, but you are a minority). Also, we LOVE gadgets and technology, and various forms of entertainment. And still, from what I'm seeing, the majority of people even HERE wouldn't even benefit from HD.
Take off your rosie colored glasses and realize:
the average familly has a 20"-30" TV
the average individual living on their own has a 15"-20" TV
even though it has become a common catch phrase in our culture, very few people have "Home Entertainment Systems" this was a term circulated by TV manufacturers as a sort of "Everybody's doing it!" tactic.
I haven't done a direct comparison, but going to take a guess that HD will only be of real significantly noticable difference on 40"+ TVs. That's an extremely tiny part of the market. Most everyone else is fat and happy, and would rather spend their time trying to figure out a way of paying less at the pump.
Funny, I consider myself a film buff, I even work as a video editor and producer at a TV station, my life litterally revolves around the tube, yet I have zero interest in any of this HD stuff. When I see a movie, I don't care if it has the nth degree of resolution. My favorite movie of the year was "Good Night & Good Luck", how is HD going to help that? Even if "King Kong" was the hit movie of the year, I really don't see how HD is going to "increase my viewing pleasure", the graphics were neat enough as it was. This is 100% hype driven by video equipment manufacturers. Hollywood doesn't care (in fact, they'll be the big losers of this, because it might make more people stay home then go to the theatre), the mainstream public doesn't care, NOONE CARES! When The NES begot the SNES, the entire gaming community was ready for a change in quality, when VHS begot DVD, most people were ready for a media distrobution change to match their music media (notice I didn't say "quality", DVD adoption wasn't about quality, it was about convenience). People would still be using VHS if it weren't for the added convenience of DVDs, HD doesn't add any convenience. I seriously think that the HD revolution is going to die even before it gets off the ground. When 95% of the population goes to the store, see sa DVD version of a movie and an HD version of the same movie for twice the price, and buys the DVD version, suddenly the HD manufacturers are going to look a bit green around the gills.
The immediate future of movie distorbution is in cheap, simple, low-bandwidth internet distrobution. The population won't care if quality takes a hit, just as audio quality took a hit with the iPod. The TV manufacturers know this, so they're desperate to get a new media off the ground before traditional media distrobution becomes a thing of the past. Even if HD gets off the ground, they're only buying a little time, maybe a year or two. I bet you anything that even if everyone switches over to HD, the average citizen will be willing to fall back to non-HD if renting a movie becomes as simple as iTMS.
Thank you. That pretty much hits the nail on the head. It is difficult trying to explain the basics of natural selection to someone who doesn't understand it. But yeah, even though the mutational process may be random, the effect is that only the "good" mutations survive, it will look as if only mostly possitive mutations will have a wide effect on a species. Whether or not a virus is actually an organism is irrelivent, they still go through the same basic evolutionary process that organisms do.
For an example, let's say I'm putting a bunch of beatles through a siv. The bigger beatles that don't fall through the cracks get thrown into a meat grinder and come out in someone's hotdog. The smaller beatles are all allowed to breed, and then every so often, I put them through the siv, and so on and so forth. In the end, since all the bigger beatles are thrown into hotdogs and aren't allowed to breed, the genes of the smaller beatles will be left, and eventually, all the offspring of the beatles will fall through the siv. I can continue doing this process by making the screen smaller and smaller, and I will eventually make smaller and smaller beatles.
Now, simply superimpose the concept of the siv into that which keeps an organism from passing from one host to another. If the organism that can pass from one host to another have a better chance of surviving and spreading their genes (they do, since they can escape from the host before it either dies, or has a chance for the immune system to kill off the parasite), then eventually, the organisms that have the better "passing" genes will become the dominant strain, and multiply so that all the organisms have the "passing" genes.
lol, that is one of the dumbest, most blinded statements I've heard in a long time. There probably have been already millions that have changed into "damaged" forms which can't be transmitted. You know what happens to them? They don't get transmitted, which means those forms stop right there. The problem is, the moment a single virus developes that is MORE easilly transferable, it will be able to grow much faster in numbers than any other form of the virus. It's natural selection, the only variables in this case are time and chance. So, if the virus, as a whole, mutates into something else, I hate to say it, but it's not going to get less transferable, it will only become more transferable.
All I ask from a game adaptation is that it stays faithful to the game. It looks like Gans has done this.
If you ask me, I HATE it when people use the term "faithful to", when describing a remake/tribute. All I care is that a good film comes out. I don't need it to be proven in another medium as to whether the original is any good or not. When I cover another band's rock song, or some video game music, I tend to TRY to stray as far as I can from the original, while still using influences from the original, my only goal is to make good music, if what comes out is a completely different piece, then so be it, it's the same with movies. If Woo were to make a Metroid movie in which Samus was a guy living in the streets of New York fighting crime loards, and it turned out to be an amazing film, I'd still say it was worth it.
All *I* ask, is that a good movie is made, who cares if it's "faithful" or not. What's it to you? I go to the movies hoping to see a good movie, and so does everyone else. I think this is one of the biggest things plaguing the creation of video game movies, instead of concentrating on making a good film, the writers spend most of their time worrying about how not to piss off fans.
I really am offended by the other person on here who basically labelled all gamers and horror fans dirty little pervs with no lives. I suppose watching Hollywood RomComs with Sarah Jessica Parker and going to dinner parties makes you so much better than everyone else?
This is slashdot, dude. I'm guessing he's more likely to be a non-fiction buff or art film lover than a teeniebopper. I may disagree with him, especially on the assumption that gamers have no lives. I also think horror films have their charm, though I'm not much of a fan, personally, I admit they do serve some fairly good psycholocial purposes (Catharsis, self assurence, pride). But there's nothing to assume that this guy's a teeniebopper, if anything, he's probably a snob. And as annoying as snobs can be, we can learn a lot from them.
Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
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Why? I think, considering the person, it's a perfectly good name!
Actually, that's a pretty short-sided way of looking at it. Really, Bluetooth won, at least for the moment. Name any other wireless syncronization protocol that anyone has ever heard of? The fact that a substantial percentage of cellphones, pdas and other wireless accessories use Bluetooth is real world proof of its success. The fact is that Bluetooth created a market where none was (for a short distance, low power, wireless synchronization protocol, it started as a fairly niche market. That said, Bluetooth wasn't marketing to consumers so much as to hardware manufacturers themselves. The need for a good name is much less in the professional market.
But, if you ask me "tooth" makes all the difference. Noone wants to look inside your mouth, and noone likes going to the dentist, 'nuff said. If it doesn't deal with oral hygene (and even sometimes when it does) don't use the words "tooth" "teeth" or "toothy" for anything.
So I'll agree with you that Bluetooth is a bad name, but its reasons for being bad don't effect the "BluRay" naming convention.
As I hinted at, but should have made clearer, the one time that accronyms are not deminished is when a word is made out of them. Things like "SCSI" (pronounced "Scuzzy") "SCUBA" (pronounced "Scooba"), and the like, are made more personable by creating an easy to say, and usually fairly cute, word. As I said, if FBI stood for "Friends of Birdies and Igloos" it would usually be pronounced "Feebee", not "F.B.I." So, basically if an accronym is made from something possitive or neutral, a word is created out of it, if the connotation of the term is generally negative, the letters themselves are usually said. CD, DVD, HD-DVD are exceptions, all though, subconciously, the fact that they are said just as the letters themselves (because they have to be), makes them not as possitive and personable sounding.
Yes, I wrote about this before, but I think you've got it backwards.
Try this, say "H. D. D. V. D" three times fast, and you'll see a problem: it's long, it's cryptic, and it's hard to use in conversation. It becomes very "techy" sounding, and has no charm, it conjures no imagery what-so-ever. "Blue Ray", on the other hand, is two simple words that are already used in everyday conversation. When put together, they create wild space age imagery, not of the "techy" kind, but of the "wow" factor. It's two sylables compared to it's competitor's five. Blue is a color commonly associated with the calm and understated, and synergizes with the more aggressive imagry of its "Ray" counterpart. After all, "RedRay" immediately conjures up images of fire, blood, and bad 70s B sci-fi flicks.
As a graphic designer, I'll votche for BluRay having much more possibilities for aesthetically pleasing logos. It's use of lower-case letters (which give it a more personable feeling), combined with it's cute spelling make it endeering. It has symmetry, and varried "skyline" (the shape the tops of the letters make).
HD-DVD, on the other hand, is made of mostly sharp edged letters, all upper-case, very impersonal, intimidating, and institutional in nature. Accronyms are not comforting to people. FBI, CIA, IRS, WTF... all negative connotations. People tend to make accryonms of subjects that are undesirable or discomforting, since shortenning the name gets it over and done with being said more quickly. I assure you that if the FBI really stood for "the Friends of Birds and Igloos", people would much less rarely refer to it as "The F.B.I"... and when they did, they would call it "Feebee". A product with an accronym in its name has a harder time endeering itself
Yes, all these perceptions are going to be subconscious, yet, most of the innitial judgements about the product are going to stem from the subconcious "feeling" you get when you first see or hear about it. Thus, a name and a logo can litterally shape and define a product for the consumer before they even see it. Steve Jobs and his staff were geniouses when they shortened the cryptic "Performa 7300/200" to "iMac", there's no coincidence that the relative success of the iMac was shaped by it's more personable and less intimidating portrayal... and that all starts with a name.
Funny, I run all those programs too, but not because I have to.
Safari, as a basic web browser is JUST AS GOOD as Firefox. It has an uncanny nack for rendering pages identically to Firefox as well, in just about the same amount of time. Do I still use it? No, I use Firefox, Why? Because of the plugins and additional features... but that's really not very important, and shouldn't be for most people. Most people should use Safari instead of Firefox simply because the interface is slightly easier and it doesn't need as much configuring.
iChat, as a basic AIM client, is just as good as adium. It supports AIM, which is practically the only thing anyone uses anymore (I haven't added one MSN contact to my adium list yet), it's a lot more stable than Adium (not saying much, I know), its file xfer WORKS. Do I use it on a regular basis? No, I use Adium. Why? Because of the features and the customizable interface. But again, most people should be using iChat, and I probably should even be using iChat, seeing as though I have to let all my contacts down every time they want to send me a file. Oh well, "Quit > Adium" "Start > iChat", and we're back in business.
I DO use Mail. I tried Thunderbird, I didn't like it, I switched back. Now, the older version of Mail pissed me off: it crashed all the time, the "tray" was a total waste of screen realestate, and it was just slow. So I switched to Thunderbird, begrudingly. When Mail 2.0 came out, they fixed all that, and I moved back. I've used everything from Eudora to Netscape Mail/Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Outlook. Nothing beats OS X Mail (at least nothing I've used so far, which is most of the mainstream clients).
Frankly, for all those programs you mentioned, I would be about as well off if I used their Apple counterparts. The only program you listed that I think is close to as perfect a product as they come is Firefox, which is brilliant. I do sorta wish that Mozzilla would spend the hour or so to create a nice "Aqua" style interface, I'm pretty turned off by the icon heavy interface they bundle with it now. Adium is "pretty", but it's extremely unstable and usually fails at file transfers. Thunderbird adds nothing that Mail already has, and its interface is clunkier and doesn't integrate as well with the OS.
So I totally dissagree, the software that Apple bundles with their OS is quite functional, and usually worlds better than their Windows counterparts. Mail.app + Address Book + iCal > Outlook (by a LONG SHOT, I have to use Outlook at work, it's a fucking joke), iTunes > Windows Media Player (even more laughable than Outlook), Safari vs. IE... let's not even go there, okay? And iChat vs. MSN messanger, only if you have any MSN contacts... I have yet to meet anyone who uses an MSN account on a regular basis.
Here's a question, which is better, Adium or Trillian? I can't decide. Trillian was clunkier, but its file transfer worked, and it didn't crash. It also was starting to become coorperatized around the time I left the PC world behind, so I don't know how it is now.
See? Totally do-able as a piece of passable hollywood schlock, and all you had to do was rip off another game movie that almost got it right, Resident Evil.
The problem is, it would be nice for filmmakers to raise the bar above "passable hollywood schlock", that's bassically what all game movies strive to be, and it's idiotic, noone feels good about enjoying blatent coorperate whore-ism with little artistic motivation. How about taking a page from Kubrick's book of tricks? Huge sections of 2001 were done without dialog, and it built incredible amounts of tension. It became stifling and made your hair stand on end, because you're so used to having sound and dialog forced down your throat every moment... it was refreshing yet extremely uncomfortable, which made for a great thrill ride. If you think about it, Metroid owes some of it's roots to 2001. Alien basically took the atmosphere of 2001 and the plot of the 1950s cold war sci-fi movie, "The Thing". Metroid owes its very existance to Alien.
Imagine if the story was framed so that the action sequences were few and far between (though intense) among long silent scenes of Samus' sneeking around attempting to reach farther and farther into the depths of the pirate base. The movie is interspliced with scenes of her back in the gunship (sans-suit so we can see her full expression), engaging in dialog with the ship's computer, while relaying her findings, and maybe venting a bit. We are also treated to long flashbacks of when she was a young girl, and we eventually see the original colony destruction unfold, triggered by her encountering familiar places in Zebes. A common idea would be to begin the movie in civilization, somehow, either on a populated transport vessel, or a spacestation... but I say scrap it, I think it would be a lot more atmospheric if the movie started right off with samus in the gunship, landing on Zebes. The whole movie could be quite stylized and very unique, if done with some artistic grace.
For some reason, Natalie Portman just sticks in my mind, as of late, as my current vision of Samus. She has an extremely expressive face, which would be key to the roll as there would be little dialog, she also has the ability to exude a certain intensity that would be needed. I have yet to see "V", but just in remembering the past things she's done, for some reason, she just sticks in my mind as a good choice if I were a casting director. I'm just worried that a movie will just try to find a big boobed, blond Angelina Jolie, type, basically make Samus into a space-faring Laura Croft. This would kill it for me. She should be pretty, but don't force her sex appeal down my throat!
Oh well, I'm not getting my hopes up for a great movie, if Woo ever does finally do it. But how he'll find a way to get doves on Zebes is beyond me.
There are good game stories out there. Sometimes you find them where you don't expect. (Grandia and Grandia II, for example, for all their cliches, have genuinely good dialogue and character development in them.)
I will totally agree with your assessment of Grandia II (haven't played I), great dialog and character portrayal it has... great plot it does NOT have, though I would say that character portrayal is probably more important than plot any day (and is more aggredously absent from most games). Same with practially any other Game Arts game (that's been given a just translation), ie: Lunar: SSSC. I wouldn't discount some of the FF games for having at least decent character portrayal, though: 8 and 9 had their moments. Let's be realistic, compared to MOST console RPGs, the FF series does offer a fairly high caliber of dialog and narrative, even if it's pulp in comparison to litterature and film. I've played a lot of RPGs in my day, and sadly, most of them are much more cringe-worthy than the FF series. Grandia II and Lunar being rare exceptions. But after trudging through narrative disasters like Xenogears and Chrono Cross, I have a renued respect for the depths of crap that the FF series is able to avoid. Still, there IS much left to be desired. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement.
That said, even though I've never played any game that had much of any real narrative sophistication, some do okay at what they're attempting to do. Dragon Quest VIII succeeds very well in being an innocent, lovable fantasy adventure, and I would put it and some of the work in Zelda on the level of older Disney or Miazaki films. None are "Good Night & Good Luck", but they still succeed in being what they are. Now, when a game starts to overstep its bounds and tries to act like it's more than it actually is (*caugh* Xenogears *caugh*) I can't help but roll my eyes. And, unfortunately, it's a trend that stifles console RPGs.
Ummm, calm it there, tiger. I think you're confusing demographics. If anything, environmentalist types come from educated, intellectual backgrounds, who, statistically, get married later in life, have less children, and are more likely to use birth control. The reality is that it's middle-america... mid-western catholic or fundy protestant types, or the low-income, uneducated, and uninformed that have the largest number of rugrats. A lot of the people I know are environmentalists, and I tend to consider myself one, and if they have any children at all, it's usually just one or two.
The very demographic you're refering to is one of the only ones who actually understands what a vasectomy is. I think you're more refering to the suberban soccer-mom demographic, which though may be full of educated professionals, is quite far from environmentalism. In fact, they're almost soully responsible for the rise in popularity of SUVs and are the ultimate consumers/poluters. Go to church on Sunday, hear about how everyone else is going to hell but you, drag 6 kids in a Ford Explorer to hockey practice and marching band, go to the NASCAR racetrack on Saturday, watch Fox News, and vote for Bush, think you're doing the world a favor, and then piss on everyone else. I think that's the demographic you're refering to.
...why video games have never made great movies. I think a big problem is that most game movies require that you've played the game to understand the movie. This doesn't make any sense, since the game stood on its own and didn't require any back story. Even sequals to video games are meant to stand on their own. I'm playing Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, never having played an MGS title in my life, and I'm loving it. But even the most obvious choices of games for the big screen fail in their ability to be self-contained.
The bottom line is that these are all cash cow titles. Noone makes a video game movie because they want to make great cinema or great art, they think that having an established fanbase will make the movie a sure success. Strangely, they're usually wrong, because catering to a small fanbase almost always means alienating everyone else, and that "everyone else" is most movie goers. The budgets for these films are too big to rely soully on small, pre-established fanbases. Serenity demonstrated that quite well, for the most part fans enjoyed it (I was a bit lukewarm to it, myself, however), but it didn't stand on its own, and was a total boxoffice flop.
I'm not convinced that movies made from video games can't be good, it's really no different from making a movie from a comicbook series, and that has become surprisingly refined as of late: two great Batman movies, two wonderful X-Men films, arguably a good Spiderman movie, and everyone seems to be raiving about V... it seems that comic book movies are on the rise and becoming more and more sophisticated, in their own rite. But when I saw Batman Begins, I didn't have to know anything about the history of the Batman franchise, and I didn't. I came out feeling like I'd just seen a great action movie, one of the best... and the fact that it was from a comic book was fairly irrelivant, and even pretty moot.
Maybe the percieved proximity of cinema to games tends to cause some laziness on the part of the writers and directors. Since modern video games are so cinematic in nature, directors make the mistake of simply directing the movie like the game was directed, which is a big mistake, since when it comes to pacing and lack of interactivity, the differences between even the most cinematic games and films are still quite different. Novels and graphic novels, on the other hand, are far enough removed that the flow of the narrative has to be completely recreated. And, as we've seen time and time again, a good adeptation is possible: anything from Brokeback Mountain to Sin City (though I, personally, was repulsed by the latter, I can't deny it's success for accomplishing what it set out to do). A good adeptation of a video game is possible, but it hasn't been demonstrated yet. And it has nothing to do with the cinematic nature of the original game. Silent Hill is one of the most "cinematic" games out there, and it seems that the movie has not lived up to expectation. The Metal Gear Solid series could be said to make a great movie... hell it's basically done by a film crew already, but I have no doubt that it could be ruined if not done in the right hands. The bottom line is, MGS has no better chance of making a great movie than Tetris; under the right guidence, practically any idea can be done thoughtfully.
I just hope to god John Woo doesn't follow through with doing a Metroid movie... he hasn't made a good film in years (if ever). The lack of dialog in the series would make it VERY hard to make a good movie, but if done right, with a really unique sense of artistic vision, could be amazing... and John Woo hasn't really proven himself to be much of a visionary.
I think that most of us can at least point to at least a few games and draw parallels to other works traditionally recognized as being "art". I've heard examples such as FF7s "death of Aris" evoking similar emotional responses to parts of other traditionally dramatic narratives, Oblivion exploring the human condition, Max Payne exploring what it means to be human, Myst retains a similar high level of visual artistry to most traditional paintings... the list goes on.
The question I pose is that 95% of the examples given by Slashdot posters are examples of games that CONTAIN art, not games that ARE art. This is because a lot of the rudimentary definitions of art contain specific criteria to be met by individual mediums. I have heard the arguement that a game has art, but if you took away all the cut scenes from that RPG, it would scene to contain art. I have two problems with that... for one, you've just defined art out of games, as cut scenes are movies, not games. In a cut scene, all gameplay stops, more often than not, the player puts down the controller, and watches events unfold on the screen for a couple of minutes, this is not a game, this is a movie. Now, I love cut scenes, and I love movies, but if you require cut scenes in a game in order to qualify as "art", you've just defined art out of the GAME altogether.
Even before we need to define "what is art", we must, then, ask "what is a game?" Many games are an extension of traditional narrative forms. RPGs are mostly a combination of cinema and literature, with an interactive element thrown into the mix. Myst could be considered a series of paintings, all of which may exude the same criteria as those in an art gallery. Is Myst, then, in its artistic definition, no more than a simple art gallery? What about if we were to remove all of these elements? If Myst was played as a text based adventure, could we begin to look at its puzzle elements as having artistic qualities? The real meat of the definition of gaming is in the process of which the player progresses through the game world. IE: Myst could be a game without the imagery, but it would simply be a gallery without its interactive puzzle elements.
The problem is, from a medium standpoint, no game explores any medium that isn't already included in the definition of another art form: still visuals, moving picturess, music, literature, even skulpture are all represented in games, yet you can break almost any game into a collection of these pre-defined elements. The only constant that breaks the mould is interactivity. Is interactivity, in of itself, then, a separate medium? (let is keep in mind that games are not the only interactive form out there) Can it in itself contain artistic qualities?
These are the REAL questions we should be restling with... not whether FF7s cutscenes are good enough to qualify as "high art" or "good art". Most of the statements I've heard are entirely subjective in nature, and betray the writer's opinion of the work at hand. Art should be more than that, is possible to dislike a work of art while still realizing that it is, in fact, artistic. One must come to terms with the fact that a harliquin dime novel fits the definition of art as much as a Shakesperian tragedy, although its quality and value may be up for speculation. Let's not get sidetracked by these personal value judgements if we are to truly define the artistic elements of a medium.
Actually, no, Apple doesn't make much, if anything off of iTMS. about 95% of their revenue goes to the record labels, and the other little bit goes into upkeep on the service. They basically break even with iTMS, but the iPod is where all the money is made. That is why all companies who have sued apple over an iTunes related issue, have sued them for a piece of the pie in iPod sales, which is really screwed up, though slightly understandable in a twisted sorta way.
Last night, as I was working at my job as a TV board op, I saw a commercial for some online product (tax filing software, or something), that blatently used a Safari look-a-like browser in an OSX setting, although no logos were shown. The thing that astounded me, though, is how much trouble they went to to make it look ALMOST but not quite like Safari/OSX. The window had the tell-tail "stop light" (red-yellow-green) circle widgets in left corner (Mac OS windows always place widgets on the left side, because they're all made by a bunch of pinko-commies;) The only thing that made me realize it was a fake was that the Safari buttons, though using exactly the same shape, style, and bevels, had slightly different icons, ones that were a bit more stylized (arrows were a little more curvy, reload button looked a little more twirly)... but it was only an incredibly minor point.
The question is, why? Why did they go through so much trouble either photo-shopping in, or creating a firefox theme that looked "oh-so-much but not-quite" Safari? I can't imagine there would be any legal repercussions having that last degree of likeness.
Wait, how does Ogg support more "freedom" than AAC? Both are open source, and both don't have drm. If you meant just in the general sense of "being free to use different audio formats", then sure. Maybe I didn't quite understand what you were saying. Funny thing is, if a company came up with a DRMed Ogg format tomorrow, a number of OSS fans (I'm an OSS fan myself, however) would all suddenly start spouting the processing power problem with OGG, and say that FLAC is really the one and only good audio format. I love the OSS community, but sometimes they're just way too predictable.
Oh, and Sounding Better + Smaller Files + requiring more processing power != better, especially in the world of portable electronics.
"When you support AAC, you're supporting Terrorism! Oh, Nose!"
Also, if you're modding in this thread, you shouldn't also be posting. It pretty much removes any credibility you have, if you to argue your point while simultaneously attempting to make sure dissenters aren't heard.
The hillarious thing is that that's not possible on Slashdot. The only way you can reply to a modded post is by chosing to remove your mod. This means that he didn't notice the big warning that popped up when he posted, telling him that his mod would be wiped.
In summery: Thanks for letting us all know that you're a moron!
Gap less playback. Just can't live without it when listening to live recordings.
Finally! At last, one arguement that makes at least some sense! Yes, this is one of the few things that pisses me off about the iPod. I listen to a lot of concept albums, which tend to connect tracks, since the album is considered one unified work. My own albums do the same. Why so many music players (even CD players) over the years haven't been able to cope with this problem, I don't know, maybe I'm just not well versed enough in the nuances of digital music formatting (I work mostly with WAVs in my audio engineering). I remember when that horrid old program, WinAmp, which I used to use back in my Windows days, finally came out with a gapless playback plugin; even that worked only about half the time, and when it did, there was a two second delay between pausing and playing music that was just aggrivating.
One of the funny things, though, is that iTunes is one of the few major CD burning programs out there that gets it right, allowing CDs to be made without gaps, even Nero couldn't quite cut it back when I used it.
The reality is that Apple is in the business of making money. Why do you think it's so difficult to download quicktime without itunes?
I'm really not following your logic here: Apple is in the business of making money, yes... but how is this connected to them "requiring" (and no, they don't require it, but as you said, it is strongly recommended, so let's just assume for a sec that it's required) another FREE program?
Here are a few things to consider:
iTunes is Free.
QuickTime Player (which is the auto download) is Free.
QuickTime Pro is not even advertised until you open the QuickTime Player software, this is neither required nor even mentioned in the instructions for installing iTunes.
Apple doesn't make any money with QuickTime Pro, most of the fees are for licensing out the codecs included in it.
Apple doesn't make any money on iTMS... 95% or so goes to the RIAA, while the rest is used for server upkeep.
I just saved a bundle on my car insurence by switching to Geico.
ALL of this is just infostructure for the iPod, which is their real source of income. If you want to blame any kind of money making scheme on Apple, it's ALL about the iPod. None of this other stuff would even exist (well, QuickTime would) without the iPod.
Ditto. He's not the only person who thinks Ogg sounds horrid. I, myself, haven't tried it, so I don't have a real opinion one way or the other, but I know a number of people who have real problems with OGGs audio limitations, and use AAC exclusively for that reason. The parent poster also refuses to take into account processing power (and thus battery life) into his definition of "superior"... which is simply ignorant, and when compared to AAC, OGGs suddenly seem a lot less SUPERIOR.
Let him sit on his ivory tower for a while. in 3 years, when everyone has realized that Ogg is not a viable option for portable music, and has ceased to make codecs for it, let's just hope we're a little more mature and don't all yell "told you so".
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Folks, anyone else out there realize that $900 is extremely expensive for the average joe to spend on a TV? Let's see, the majority of TVs are bought by late teens and 20-somethings, heading out into the world, or college bound to fit in their tiny apartments or basement flats. As they have famillies, SOME will become wealthy enough to spend $500 on a 30" TV, most will be happy with a 20" (as my familly has been for years), an elite few will be purchasing $800 widescreen, rear projection systems with surround sound equipment. The /. community is a VERY BAD sample of mainstream society. Most (not all) /.ers are middle class to to upper class citizens, as they had the fortune of being able to be introduced to high techology at an early age (I know there's a few of you here and there that are exceptions, but you are a minority). Also, we LOVE gadgets and technology, and various forms of entertainment. And still, from what I'm seeing, the majority of people even HERE wouldn't even benefit from HD.
Take off your rosie colored glasses and realize:I haven't done a direct comparison, but going to take a guess that HD will only be of real significantly noticable difference on 40"+ TVs. That's an extremely tiny part of the market. Most everyone else is fat and happy, and would rather spend their time trying to figure out a way of paying less at the pump.
Funny, I consider myself a film buff, I even work as a video editor and producer at a TV station, my life litterally revolves around the tube, yet I have zero interest in any of this HD stuff. When I see a movie, I don't care if it has the nth degree of resolution. My favorite movie of the year was "Good Night & Good Luck", how is HD going to help that? Even if "King Kong" was the hit movie of the year, I really don't see how HD is going to "increase my viewing pleasure", the graphics were neat enough as it was. This is 100% hype driven by video equipment manufacturers. Hollywood doesn't care (in fact, they'll be the big losers of this, because it might make more people stay home then go to the theatre), the mainstream public doesn't care, NOONE CARES! When The NES begot the SNES, the entire gaming community was ready for a change in quality, when VHS begot DVD, most people were ready for a media distrobution change to match their music media (notice I didn't say "quality", DVD adoption wasn't about quality, it was about convenience). People would still be using VHS if it weren't for the added convenience of DVDs, HD doesn't add any convenience. I seriously think that the HD revolution is going to die even before it gets off the ground. When 95% of the population goes to the store, see sa DVD version of a movie and an HD version of the same movie for twice the price, and buys the DVD version, suddenly the HD manufacturers are going to look a bit green around the gills.
The immediate future of movie distorbution is in cheap, simple, low-bandwidth internet distrobution. The population won't care if quality takes a hit, just as audio quality took a hit with the iPod. The TV manufacturers know this, so they're desperate to get a new media off the ground before traditional media distrobution becomes a thing of the past. Even if HD gets off the ground, they're only buying a little time, maybe a year or two. I bet you anything that even if everyone switches over to HD, the average citizen will be willing to fall back to non-HD if renting a movie becomes as simple as iTMS.
Thank you. That pretty much hits the nail on the head. It is difficult trying to explain the basics of natural selection to someone who doesn't understand it. But yeah, even though the mutational process may be random, the effect is that only the "good" mutations survive, it will look as if only mostly possitive mutations will have a wide effect on a species. Whether or not a virus is actually an organism is irrelivent, they still go through the same basic evolutionary process that organisms do.
For an example, let's say I'm putting a bunch of beatles through a siv. The bigger beatles that don't fall through the cracks get thrown into a meat grinder and come out in someone's hotdog. The smaller beatles are all allowed to breed, and then every so often, I put them through the siv, and so on and so forth. In the end, since all the bigger beatles are thrown into hotdogs and aren't allowed to breed, the genes of the smaller beatles will be left, and eventually, all the offspring of the beatles will fall through the siv. I can continue doing this process by making the screen smaller and smaller, and I will eventually make smaller and smaller beatles.
Now, simply superimpose the concept of the siv into that which keeps an organism from passing from one host to another. If the organism that can pass from one host to another have a better chance of surviving and spreading their genes (they do, since they can escape from the host before it either dies, or has a chance for the immune system to kill off the parasite), then eventually, the organisms that have the better "passing" genes will become the dominant strain, and multiply so that all the organisms have the "passing" genes.
lol, that is one of the dumbest, most blinded statements I've heard in a long time. There probably have been already millions that have changed into "damaged" forms which can't be transmitted. You know what happens to them? They don't get transmitted, which means those forms stop right there. The problem is, the moment a single virus developes that is MORE easilly transferable, it will be able to grow much faster in numbers than any other form of the virus. It's natural selection, the only variables in this case are time and chance. So, if the virus, as a whole, mutates into something else, I hate to say it, but it's not going to get less transferable, it will only become more transferable.
If you ask me, I HATE it when people use the term "faithful to", when describing a remake/tribute. All I care is that a good film comes out. I don't need it to be proven in another medium as to whether the original is any good or not. When I cover another band's rock song, or some video game music, I tend to TRY to stray as far as I can from the original, while still using influences from the original, my only goal is to make good music, if what comes out is a completely different piece, then so be it, it's the same with movies. If Woo were to make a Metroid movie in which Samus was a guy living in the streets of New York fighting crime loards, and it turned out to be an amazing film, I'd still say it was worth it.
All *I* ask, is that a good movie is made, who cares if it's "faithful" or not. What's it to you? I go to the movies hoping to see a good movie, and so does everyone else. I think this is one of the biggest things plaguing the creation of video game movies, instead of concentrating on making a good film, the writers spend most of their time worrying about how not to piss off fans.
This is slashdot, dude. I'm guessing he's more likely to be a non-fiction buff or art film lover than a teeniebopper. I may disagree with him, especially on the assumption that gamers have no lives. I also think horror films have their charm, though I'm not much of a fan, personally, I admit they do serve some fairly good psycholocial purposes (Catharsis, self assurence, pride). But there's nothing to assume that this guy's a teeniebopper, if anything, he's probably a snob. And as annoying as snobs can be, we can learn a lot from them.
Why? I think, considering the person, it's a perfectly good name!
Tetris did it with 8 bits! :P
Actually, that's a pretty short-sided way of looking at it. Really, Bluetooth won, at least for the moment. Name any other wireless syncronization protocol that anyone has ever heard of? The fact that a substantial percentage of cellphones, pdas and other wireless accessories use Bluetooth is real world proof of its success. The fact is that Bluetooth created a market where none was (for a short distance, low power, wireless synchronization protocol, it started as a fairly niche market. That said, Bluetooth wasn't marketing to consumers so much as to hardware manufacturers themselves. The need for a good name is much less in the professional market.
But, if you ask me "tooth" makes all the difference. Noone wants to look inside your mouth, and noone likes going to the dentist, 'nuff said. If it doesn't deal with oral hygene (and even sometimes when it does) don't use the words "tooth" "teeth" or "toothy" for anything.
So I'll agree with you that Bluetooth is a bad name, but its reasons for being bad don't effect the "BluRay" naming convention.
As I hinted at, but should have made clearer, the one time that accronyms are not deminished is when a word is made out of them. Things like "SCSI" (pronounced "Scuzzy") "SCUBA" (pronounced "Scooba"), and the like, are made more personable by creating an easy to say, and usually fairly cute, word. As I said, if FBI stood for "Friends of Birdies and Igloos" it would usually be pronounced "Feebee", not "F.B.I." So, basically if an accronym is made from something possitive or neutral, a word is created out of it, if the connotation of the term is generally negative, the letters themselves are usually said. CD, DVD, HD-DVD are exceptions, all though, subconciously, the fact that they are said just as the letters themselves (because they have to be), makes them not as possitive and personable sounding.
Yes, I wrote about this before, but I think you've got it backwards.
Try this, say "H. D. D. V. D" three times fast, and you'll see a problem: it's long, it's cryptic, and it's hard to use in conversation. It becomes very "techy" sounding, and has no charm, it conjures no imagery what-so-ever. "Blue Ray", on the other hand, is two simple words that are already used in everyday conversation. When put together, they create wild space age imagery, not of the "techy" kind, but of the "wow" factor. It's two sylables compared to it's competitor's five. Blue is a color commonly associated with the calm and understated, and synergizes with the more aggressive imagry of its "Ray" counterpart. After all, "RedRay" immediately conjures up images of fire, blood, and bad 70s B sci-fi flicks.
As a graphic designer, I'll votche for BluRay having much more possibilities for aesthetically pleasing logos. It's use of lower-case letters (which give it a more personable feeling), combined with it's cute spelling make it endeering. It has symmetry, and varried "skyline" (the shape the tops of the letters make).
HD-DVD, on the other hand, is made of mostly sharp edged letters, all upper-case, very impersonal, intimidating, and institutional in nature. Accronyms are not comforting to people. FBI, CIA, IRS, WTF... all negative connotations. People tend to make accryonms of subjects that are undesirable or discomforting, since shortenning the name gets it over and done with being said more quickly. I assure you that if the FBI really stood for "the Friends of Birds and Igloos", people would much less rarely refer to it as "The F.B.I"... and when they did, they would call it "Feebee". A product with an accronym in its name has a harder time endeering itself
Yes, all these perceptions are going to be subconscious, yet, most of the innitial judgements about the product are going to stem from the subconcious "feeling" you get when you first see or hear about it. Thus, a name and a logo can litterally shape and define a product for the consumer before they even see it. Steve Jobs and his staff were geniouses when they shortened the cryptic "Performa 7300/200" to "iMac", there's no coincidence that the relative success of the iMac was shaped by it's more personable and less intimidating portrayal... and that all starts with a name.
Funny, I run all those programs too, but not because I have to.
Safari, as a basic web browser is JUST AS GOOD as Firefox. It has an uncanny nack for rendering pages identically to Firefox as well, in just about the same amount of time. Do I still use it? No, I use Firefox, Why? Because of the plugins and additional features... but that's really not very important, and shouldn't be for most people. Most people should use Safari instead of Firefox simply because the interface is slightly easier and it doesn't need as much configuring.
iChat, as a basic AIM client, is just as good as adium. It supports AIM, which is practically the only thing anyone uses anymore (I haven't added one MSN contact to my adium list yet), it's a lot more stable than Adium (not saying much, I know), its file xfer WORKS. Do I use it on a regular basis? No, I use Adium. Why? Because of the features and the customizable interface. But again, most people should be using iChat, and I probably should even be using iChat, seeing as though I have to let all my contacts down every time they want to send me a file. Oh well, "Quit > Adium" "Start > iChat", and we're back in business.
I DO use Mail. I tried Thunderbird, I didn't like it, I switched back. Now, the older version of Mail pissed me off: it crashed all the time, the "tray" was a total waste of screen realestate, and it was just slow. So I switched to Thunderbird, begrudingly. When Mail 2.0 came out, they fixed all that, and I moved back. I've used everything from Eudora to Netscape Mail/Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Outlook. Nothing beats OS X Mail (at least nothing I've used so far, which is most of the mainstream clients).
Frankly, for all those programs you mentioned, I would be about as well off if I used their Apple counterparts. The only program you listed that I think is close to as perfect a product as they come is Firefox, which is brilliant. I do sorta wish that Mozzilla would spend the hour or so to create a nice "Aqua" style interface, I'm pretty turned off by the icon heavy interface they bundle with it now. Adium is "pretty", but it's extremely unstable and usually fails at file transfers. Thunderbird adds nothing that Mail already has, and its interface is clunkier and doesn't integrate as well with the OS.
So I totally dissagree, the software that Apple bundles with their OS is quite functional, and usually worlds better than their Windows counterparts. Mail.app + Address Book + iCal > Outlook (by a LONG SHOT, I have to use Outlook at work, it's a fucking joke), iTunes > Windows Media Player (even more laughable than Outlook), Safari vs. IE... let's not even go there, okay? And iChat vs. MSN messanger, only if you have any MSN contacts... I have yet to meet anyone who uses an MSN account on a regular basis.
Here's a question, which is better, Adium or Trillian? I can't decide. Trillian was clunkier, but its file transfer worked, and it didn't crash. It also was starting to become coorperatized around the time I left the PC world behind, so I don't know how it is now.
The problem is, it would be nice for filmmakers to raise the bar above "passable hollywood schlock", that's bassically what all game movies strive to be, and it's idiotic, noone feels good about enjoying blatent coorperate whore-ism with little artistic motivation. How about taking a page from Kubrick's book of tricks? Huge sections of 2001 were done without dialog, and it built incredible amounts of tension. It became stifling and made your hair stand on end, because you're so used to having sound and dialog forced down your throat every moment... it was refreshing yet extremely uncomfortable, which made for a great thrill ride. If you think about it, Metroid owes some of it's roots to 2001. Alien basically took the atmosphere of 2001 and the plot of the 1950s cold war sci-fi movie, "The Thing". Metroid owes its very existance to Alien.
Imagine if the story was framed so that the action sequences were few and far between (though intense) among long silent scenes of Samus' sneeking around attempting to reach farther and farther into the depths of the pirate base. The movie is interspliced with scenes of her back in the gunship (sans-suit so we can see her full expression), engaging in dialog with the ship's computer, while relaying her findings, and maybe venting a bit. We are also treated to long flashbacks of when she was a young girl, and we eventually see the original colony destruction unfold, triggered by her encountering familiar places in Zebes. A common idea would be to begin the movie in civilization, somehow, either on a populated transport vessel, or a spacestation... but I say scrap it, I think it would be a lot more atmospheric if the movie started right off with samus in the gunship, landing on Zebes. The whole movie could be quite stylized and very unique, if done with some artistic grace.
For some reason, Natalie Portman just sticks in my mind, as of late, as my current vision of Samus. She has an extremely expressive face, which would be key to the roll as there would be little dialog, she also has the ability to exude a certain intensity that would be needed. I have yet to see "V", but just in remembering the past things she's done, for some reason, she just sticks in my mind as a good choice if I were a casting director. I'm just worried that a movie will just try to find a big boobed, blond Angelina Jolie, type, basically make Samus into a space-faring Laura Croft. This would kill it for me. She should be pretty, but don't force her sex appeal down my throat!
Oh well, I'm not getting my hopes up for a great movie, if Woo ever does finally do it. But how he'll find a way to get doves on Zebes is beyond me.
That said, even though I've never played any game that had much of any real narrative sophistication, some do okay at what they're attempting to do. Dragon Quest VIII succeeds very well in being an innocent, lovable fantasy adventure, and I would put it and some of the work in Zelda on the level of older Disney or Miazaki films. None are "Good Night & Good Luck", but they still succeed in being what they are. Now, when a game starts to overstep its bounds and tries to act like it's more than it actually is (*caugh* Xenogears *caugh*) I can't help but roll my eyes. And, unfortunately, it's a trend that stifles console RPGs.
Ummm, calm it there, tiger. I think you're confusing demographics. If anything, environmentalist types come from educated, intellectual backgrounds, who, statistically, get married later in life, have less children, and are more likely to use birth control. The reality is that it's middle-america... mid-western catholic or fundy protestant types, or the low-income, uneducated, and uninformed that have the largest number of rugrats. A lot of the people I know are environmentalists, and I tend to consider myself one, and if they have any children at all, it's usually just one or two.
The very demographic you're refering to is one of the only ones who actually understands what a vasectomy is. I think you're more refering to the suberban soccer-mom demographic, which though may be full of educated professionals, is quite far from environmentalism. In fact, they're almost soully responsible for the rise in popularity of SUVs and are the ultimate consumers/poluters. Go to church on Sunday, hear about how everyone else is going to hell but you, drag 6 kids in a Ford Explorer to hockey practice and marching band, go to the NASCAR racetrack on Saturday, watch Fox News, and vote for Bush, think you're doing the world a favor, and then piss on everyone else. I think that's the demographic you're refering to.
...why video games have never made great movies. I think a big problem is that most game movies require that you've played the game to understand the movie. This doesn't make any sense, since the game stood on its own and didn't require any back story. Even sequals to video games are meant to stand on their own. I'm playing Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, never having played an MGS title in my life, and I'm loving it. But even the most obvious choices of games for the big screen fail in their ability to be self-contained.
The bottom line is that these are all cash cow titles. Noone makes a video game movie because they want to make great cinema or great art, they think that having an established fanbase will make the movie a sure success. Strangely, they're usually wrong, because catering to a small fanbase almost always means alienating everyone else, and that "everyone else" is most movie goers. The budgets for these films are too big to rely soully on small, pre-established fanbases. Serenity demonstrated that quite well, for the most part fans enjoyed it (I was a bit lukewarm to it, myself, however), but it didn't stand on its own, and was a total boxoffice flop.
I'm not convinced that movies made from video games can't be good, it's really no different from making a movie from a comicbook series, and that has become surprisingly refined as of late: two great Batman movies, two wonderful X-Men films, arguably a good Spiderman movie, and everyone seems to be raiving about V... it seems that comic book movies are on the rise and becoming more and more sophisticated, in their own rite. But when I saw Batman Begins, I didn't have to know anything about the history of the Batman franchise, and I didn't. I came out feeling like I'd just seen a great action movie, one of the best... and the fact that it was from a comic book was fairly irrelivant, and even pretty moot.
Maybe the percieved proximity of cinema to games tends to cause some laziness on the part of the writers and directors. Since modern video games are so cinematic in nature, directors make the mistake of simply directing the movie like the game was directed, which is a big mistake, since when it comes to pacing and lack of interactivity, the differences between even the most cinematic games and films are still quite different. Novels and graphic novels, on the other hand, are far enough removed that the flow of the narrative has to be completely recreated. And, as we've seen time and time again, a good adeptation is possible: anything from Brokeback Mountain to Sin City (though I, personally, was repulsed by the latter, I can't deny it's success for accomplishing what it set out to do). A good adeptation of a video game is possible, but it hasn't been demonstrated yet. And it has nothing to do with the cinematic nature of the original game. Silent Hill is one of the most "cinematic" games out there, and it seems that the movie has not lived up to expectation. The Metal Gear Solid series could be said to make a great movie... hell it's basically done by a film crew already, but I have no doubt that it could be ruined if not done in the right hands. The bottom line is, MGS has no better chance of making a great movie than Tetris; under the right guidence, practically any idea can be done thoughtfully.
I just hope to god John Woo doesn't follow through with doing a Metroid movie... he hasn't made a good film in years (if ever). The lack of dialog in the series would make it VERY hard to make a good movie, but if done right, with a really unique sense of artistic vision, could be amazing... and John Woo hasn't really proven himself to be much of a visionary.
I think that most of us can at least point to at least a few games and draw parallels to other works traditionally recognized as being "art". I've heard examples such as FF7s "death of Aris" evoking similar emotional responses to parts of other traditionally dramatic narratives, Oblivion exploring the human condition, Max Payne exploring what it means to be human, Myst retains a similar high level of visual artistry to most traditional paintings... the list goes on.
The question I pose is that 95% of the examples given by Slashdot posters are examples of games that CONTAIN art, not games that ARE art. This is because a lot of the rudimentary definitions of art contain specific criteria to be met by individual mediums. I have heard the arguement that a game has art, but if you took away all the cut scenes from that RPG, it would scene to contain art. I have two problems with that... for one, you've just defined art out of games, as cut scenes are movies, not games. In a cut scene, all gameplay stops, more often than not, the player puts down the controller, and watches events unfold on the screen for a couple of minutes, this is not a game, this is a movie. Now, I love cut scenes, and I love movies, but if you require cut scenes in a game in order to qualify as "art", you've just defined art out of the GAME altogether.
Even before we need to define "what is art", we must, then, ask "what is a game?" Many games are an extension of traditional narrative forms. RPGs are mostly a combination of cinema and literature, with an interactive element thrown into the mix. Myst could be considered a series of paintings, all of which may exude the same criteria as those in an art gallery. Is Myst, then, in its artistic definition, no more than a simple art gallery? What about if we were to remove all of these elements? If Myst was played as a text based adventure, could we begin to look at its puzzle elements as having artistic qualities? The real meat of the definition of gaming is in the process of which the player progresses through the game world. IE: Myst could be a game without the imagery, but it would simply be a gallery without its interactive puzzle elements.
The problem is, from a medium standpoint, no game explores any medium that isn't already included in the definition of another art form: still visuals, moving picturess, music, literature, even skulpture are all represented in games, yet you can break almost any game into a collection of these pre-defined elements. The only constant that breaks the mould is interactivity. Is interactivity, in of itself, then, a separate medium? (let is keep in mind that games are not the only interactive form out there) Can it in itself contain artistic qualities?
These are the REAL questions we should be restling with... not whether FF7s cutscenes are good enough to qualify as "high art" or "good art". Most of the statements I've heard are entirely subjective in nature, and betray the writer's opinion of the work at hand. Art should be more than that, is possible to dislike a work of art while still realizing that it is, in fact, artistic. One must come to terms with the fact that a harliquin dime novel fits the definition of art as much as a Shakesperian tragedy, although its quality and value may be up for speculation. Let's not get sidetracked by these personal value judgements if we are to truly define the artistic elements of a medium.
"Hey man, check out my rad new Hi Def DVD player! It has awesome resolution, and it even supports DRM!"
Actually, no, Apple doesn't make much, if anything off of iTMS. about 95% of their revenue goes to the record labels, and the other little bit goes into upkeep on the service. They basically break even with iTMS, but the iPod is where all the money is made. That is why all companies who have sued apple over an iTunes related issue, have sued them for a piece of the pie in iPod sales, which is really screwed up, though slightly understandable in a twisted sorta way.
Last night, as I was working at my job as a TV board op, I saw a commercial for some online product (tax filing software, or something), that blatently used a Safari look-a-like browser in an OSX setting, although no logos were shown. The thing that astounded me, though, is how much trouble they went to to make it look ALMOST but not quite like Safari/OSX. The window had the tell-tail "stop light" (red-yellow-green) circle widgets in left corner (Mac OS windows always place widgets on the left side, because they're all made by a bunch of pinko-commies ;) The only thing that made me realize it was a fake was that the Safari buttons, though using exactly the same shape, style, and bevels, had slightly different icons, ones that were a bit more stylized (arrows were a little more curvy, reload button looked a little more twirly)... but it was only an incredibly minor point.
The question is, why? Why did they go through so much trouble either photo-shopping in, or creating a firefox theme that looked "oh-so-much but not-quite" Safari? I can't imagine there would be any legal repercussions having that last degree of likeness.
Remind me again, who are the "good guys" on that show?
I don't find it hillarious so much as realistic ;)
Wait, how does Ogg support more "freedom" than AAC? Both are open source, and both don't have drm. If you meant just in the general sense of "being free to use different audio formats", then sure. Maybe I didn't quite understand what you were saying. Funny thing is, if a company came up with a DRMed Ogg format tomorrow, a number of OSS fans (I'm an OSS fan myself, however) would all suddenly start spouting the processing power problem with OGG, and say that FLAC is really the one and only good audio format. I love the OSS community, but sometimes they're just way too predictable.
Oh, and Sounding Better + Smaller Files + requiring more processing power != better, especially in the world of portable electronics.
"When you support AAC, you're supporting Terrorism! Oh, Nose!"
The hillarious thing is that that's not possible on Slashdot. The only way you can reply to a modded post is by chosing to remove your mod. This means that he didn't notice the big warning that popped up when he posted, telling him that his mod would be wiped.
In summery: Thanks for letting us all know that you're a moron!
Finally! At last, one arguement that makes at least some sense! Yes, this is one of the few things that pisses me off about the iPod. I listen to a lot of concept albums, which tend to connect tracks, since the album is considered one unified work. My own albums do the same. Why so many music players (even CD players) over the years haven't been able to cope with this problem, I don't know, maybe I'm just not well versed enough in the nuances of digital music formatting (I work mostly with WAVs in my audio engineering). I remember when that horrid old program, WinAmp, which I used to use back in my Windows days, finally came out with a gapless playback plugin; even that worked only about half the time, and when it did, there was a two second delay between pausing and playing music that was just aggrivating.
One of the funny things, though, is that iTunes is one of the few major CD burning programs out there that gets it right, allowing CDs to be made without gaps, even Nero couldn't quite cut it back when I used it.
I'm really not following your logic here: Apple is in the business of making money, yes... but how is this connected to them "requiring" (and no, they don't require it, but as you said, it is strongly recommended, so let's just assume for a sec that it's required) another FREE program?
Here are a few things to consider:ALL of this is just infostructure for the iPod, which is their real source of income. If you want to blame any kind of money making scheme on Apple, it's ALL about the iPod. None of this other stuff would even exist (well, QuickTime would) without the iPod.
Ditto. He's not the only person who thinks Ogg sounds horrid. I, myself, haven't tried it, so I don't have a real opinion one way or the other, but I know a number of people who have real problems with OGGs audio limitations, and use AAC exclusively for that reason. The parent poster also refuses to take into account processing power (and thus battery life) into his definition of "superior"... which is simply ignorant, and when compared to AAC, OGGs suddenly seem a lot less SUPERIOR.
Let him sit on his ivory tower for a while. in 3 years, when everyone has realized that Ogg is not a viable option for portable music, and has ceased to make codecs for it, let's just hope we're a little more mature and don't all yell "told you so".