Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers 282
Give me IV any old day. Rupert writes with a review of the newly IMAX-ified Episode II of the Star Wars saga:
"Since it was my wife's birthday today, last night I took her to see Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones: IMAX edition. Notwithstanding the overuse of colons, this is a movie worth seeing, even if you think you already saw the movie.If you haven't already seen AotC, you no doubt have your reasons, and there isn't anything in this edition to make you change your mind. Likewise, the plot still has gaping holes and Anakin is still moody, so if those were enough to make you hate this movie, you won't want to see it again. The action sequences gain little from the new presentation, as objects move too fast across the large screen to follow.
On the other hand, if you want to see the pores in Natalie Portman's skin, or the individual hairs in Christopher Lee's beard, this is the movie you've been waiting for. I suspect that some time was spent re-rendering the digital characters. Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up, looking more real than the human actors.
Some scenes were cut from this edition. Some I didn't miss, such as Ani and Amidala frolicking in the meadow with the giant bed bugs. Others, such as almost all the scenes in Palpatine's office, and many of the Jedi Council made it even harder to follow what was going on.
You might be wondering where you can see the movie."
Always cut with the Groenig.
ari_j writes "It looks like Fox is giving us a new season of Futurama. From the page, "Season Premiere Sunday, Nov. 10th at 7PM/6C". Sure enough, my local Fox affiliate is carrying it as stated. From tv.yahoo.com: '"Crimes of the Hot", Episode #408.
Al Gore's head holds an emergency summit in Kyoto, Japan, to deal with global warming caused by robot emissions.'"
This does not look good on a resume. nautical9 writes "As a follow up to Henrick Schon's dismissal from Bell Labs last month for falsifying data, many of his former co-authors are retracting their articles from the AAAS's prestigious Science magazine. It's apparently the largest retraction for the journal ever. Bell labs is also pulling six different patent applications of his. Here's the Wired article."
Is this the basket you ordered for all your eggs? With regard to the AOL / ICQ integration CowboyNeal mentioned the other day, nxtw writes "At this moment, ICQ users can send messages to AIM users, but AIM users cannot send messages to ICQ users or be seen on your buddy list. However, AIM automatically postpends any screenname or group consisting of all numbers with -ICQ when added to your buddy list. (This applies to the beta AIM 5.1.3009 client.)"
They're in Australia, of course they have flying dreams. VileScum writes "Back in May a reader posted this story of an Australian Guy who built a 747 Sim in his garage. As reported in the Sydney Morning Hearld The builder and a group of his friends are now doing a round the world sim flight for charity. The full story can be found here. The details of the actual flight can be found here."
Futurama (Score:5, Informative)
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
Re:Futurama (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Futurama (Score:5, Informative)
My girlfriends father is an animation producer and this exact scenario is happening to him.
Re:Futurama (Score:3, Interesting)
Don Del Grande has made a handy list of what football games are where this season, and thus what the chances of Furutama (being the first show on the block, and most likely to be run into by long games) will be shown are. That post is here from google's archive [google.com].
Most likely, your best chance to catch these shows is when it goes to Cartoon Network come next year (5 times a week).
Not informative or funny. (Score:3, Informative)
SWEp2IMAX: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut! (Score:5, Funny)
ATOC...argh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget A-B-C plotlines and 2 dimensional charcters (Score:5, Funny)
Not as funny as you'd think (Score:5, Insightful)
You moderators mark him as funny, but he has a point. Modern movies show in 24fps (most theaters double-shutter, so you get an effect 48 fps, but each frame is doubled). This is extremely noticeable on any pan. And before anyone jumps in with the, "Human eyes can only see 24fps anyway, so what's the point?" argument, let me just say you're wrong wrong wrong. 24 frames per second is near the bare minimum required for the human eye to distinguish motion rather than individual frames. I've never seen a study claiming a maximum value, but I'd expect it to be much higher than even the 60fps some people suggest. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to tell the difference between 60Hz refresh rate monitors and 100Hz refresh rates. Movies can get away with this because of intrinsic "artificats" like motion blur, that help create a better sense of motion in fewer frames. (Incidentally, that's also why 24fps in a video game feels really jerky, while 24fps in a movie is usually pretty smooth -- video games tend not to have motion blur, because it requires lots of computational power. It's easier to push out more frames for a smoother look, rather than add motion blur.)
Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time. I wouldn't expect it until TV broadcasts have switched completely to 720p (60 full frames per second, not 60 fields or half-frames), and DVDs are encoded at the same (rather than the current 480i encoding, and relying on special hardware to do 3:2 pulldown conversion for progressive display). Until then, the 24fps movie is too entrenched, I think.
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:5, Funny)
My GOD, boy, are you trying to kill the movie industry? Film is expensive! The material costs would would be enormous.
A typical film runs what, about $70M? Take out the fees for crappy actors who need all that money for hookers and you are left with about $1200 for the film. Once you start using more film, the studios would be bankrupt.
Phfff... it's never gonna happen.
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:2)
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
Roger Ebert has been praising [volksmovie.com] a system called Maxivision48 [maxivisioncinema.com] which is 48 fps (and can dynamically switch to 24 fps to save money).
Also, Douglas Trumbull's ShowScan system has been around for a while, but has only been used for a few specialty attractions. I've read comments that said that ShowScan was too realistic and not "cinematic." That reminds me of the CD vs. vinyl debate.
I've never seen either system.
Re: Realistic vs. Cinematic (Score:4, Informative)
Many believe that the higher frame rates of video subconsciously tell us that something is "real" and that good ol 24 fps film tells the subconscious: "You are watching a story"...
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:3, Informative)
Never mind that the cost of the actual film and processing would double.
People who complain about flicker and suchsort when going to see a movie are probably watching the movie in a shitty theater with a substandard projector. The first time I saw Spider-man it looked flawless. I saw it a mere 3 days later, at a different theater, and there were all kinds of problems (wobbling, a bit of flicker, etc.).
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically people are used to a certain feel and look of projected film. "
Yeah, I think you are right. I've seen lens flare in games that at no time ever made use of a real camera, much less a lens. And I have to say it helped out, it felt more real because of the artificial defect.
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:3, Interesting)
If filmakers don't like the look of a crisp 48fps movie, I'm betting its because they haven't tried to get used to it. The human brain is never hardwired to look at a TV or movie screen at 24fps and think "this is a story." Perhaps the framrate helps us quickly understand we're not looking through a real window. As the Theater is alive and well, I think "real" movies would go over huge if they were simply tried. I'd love to actually comprehend Yoda's moves in Episode 2.
TV coverage games (Score:3, Insightful)
However, lens flare would look horribly out of place in a first-person shooter, IMHO.
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:4, Informative)
I can't remember the name of the company, but somebody is fishing the idea around Hollywood of 48 fps film. Saw it on Ebert about a year ago.
I predict that soon after theaters are equipped with digital projectors we'll start seeing >24fps movies. There's technology you can get today that uses morphing algorithms to expand 24fps all the way up to 60 fairly convincingly. As a matter of fact, Lost in Space used that technology quite a bit to slow some scenes down. I bet one day they'll take movies and re-process them up to 60fps.
Framerate Enhancement using morphing (Score:2, Informative)
So, that's what I do at work [byu.edu].
It's pretty cool. There are some really large unsolved problems with it though - the biggest is that it's really tough to detect when objects go in front of each other (occlusions). If you don't detect them correctly, then you get really bad results. Of course, you can do things with a little human intervention, which lets you get almost perfect results, but the time that that takes is proportional to the number of source frames.
That's why you see those kind of effects for slow-motion (in Lost in Space or the Matrix) which has relatively few source frames, but I doubt we'll see it any time soon to increase framerate in movies, because 24fps for a whole movie is a whole lot of frames to manually tweak.
Re:Framerate Enhancement using morphing (Score:2)
Ever hear of 'Icarus'? It's a camera tracking package. Part of me wonders if the technology there would help. Although it's not perfect either.
Oh well. Maybe they'll rerender Toy Story for us. =)
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:2, Insightful)
If 24fps makes people feel like they're watching a movie at the theater as opposed to watching the local news, then that's what everyone (aside from the news, probably) will use. It's all about perceived quality - just because we can create a 200fps playback system doesn't mean we should, especially if everyone is already happy with 24fps! (see also: how most people don't care about the difference between standard- and high-def.)
The only high-def stuff that's being done in 720p these days is sports. Everything else is moving towards 24p, which means 1920x1080 @ 24 frames/second (the "p" means progressive scan.) Even live stuff is starting to get shot at 24p - the recent MTV video music awards were a good example of this.
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:5, Informative)
As far as higher frame rate projection, IMAX also used a 48 fps system for some productions, but it seems to have been discontinued, probably due to the need for more specialized equipment and for practical reasons (used too much film and was more troublesome)
There is also the MaxiVision format. It uses standard 35mm motion picture film, but with a special frame size that's larger than the typical film frame, and can be filmed and projected at either 24 or 48 fps. The image quality at 48 fps is substantially better, even greater than the difference between regular video and HDTV. I can only imagine what IMAX at 48 fps would look like!
And last but not least, there was the Showscan process, which used 70mm film exposed and projected at 60 fps with a single bladed shutter. The image is much crisper and brighter; the faster frame rate reduced motion blur and also provided more image information (and the 70mm film image has higher definition). The image was smaller than an IMAX image though, but the quality was at least as good.
When Douglas Trumbull was developing the Showscan process, he had extensive tests done to determine the optimal projection rate, up to at least 72 fps and possibly 100 fps. 60 fps was found to be the best rate; anything higher had very little improvement in image quality or perception of motion, and would merely use more film than necessary. I've read articles that some scientists have experimented on determining the "frame rate" of human vision, and it seems to be close to the rate used by Showscan (can't remember the exact number, but it was around 60-70 fps, and very few people could perceive anything higher than 80 fps)
Sadly, Showscan never caught on as well as IMAX did and the Showscan corporation went into receivership. If you never got to see it, it was extremely impressive: I saw the Niagara Falls film and it's pretty amazing to see single individual drops of water in the Falls in 70mm at 60 fps! HDTV (and by extension SW:AOTC) looks like an old Super 8 home movie in comparison. It truly was more vivid than being there...the theater was located a few hundred yards from the Falls themselves so it was an easy comparison to make. The only thing close to it would be to see IMAX at 48 fps, but even IMAX's new DMR process is simply up-rezzing 35mm and HDTV images. While it's pretty damn good (I saw Apollo 13 and it was amazing, I'm sure AOTC will be too) it doesn't quite capture the exquisiteness of an original 70mm IMAX or Showscan frame.
With all of the impetus towards cutting costs, using digital production techniques, and consolidating on lesser-quality but universal digital formats, it's unlikely that anyone will continue to produce films in special, high-quality film formats, especially since most of them require special projectors and/or theaters.
Re:Showscan (Score:3, Funny)
> `too real' for the cinema experience.
Much like the old people who should be shot because when a letterbox movie appears on their screen, they feel "ripped off" that the full screen isn't shown.
If you crack their skulls open, you can actually watch the gears grinding.
All I have to say for realism is: people used to "dodge" the bullets of guns fired "at them" in movie theaters when movies came out.
I, for one, do want to see the fine peach fuzz on the tummy of Natalie in high res, high speed 10-story cinema, or at least on a 35" home TV.
Re:Showscan (Score:4, Interesting)
`too real' for the cinema experience.
I can believe this comment. I have a Philips TV with 'Digital Natural Motion'. What this does is predict pixel movement, and fill in extra frames to effectively give you 100fps.
Picture quality is so crisp and smooth, that I've had comments like "it looks fake" or "it looks like the making of, not the actual movie".
Personally, I can't live without it. I go to the movies and think, crap, the pictures are all jumping round and blurry. I actually find it hard to follow action with such a low frame rate when I'm used to about 4x that. Flames and explosions look so crap without Digital Natural Motion.
Last I heard philips were going to put the Digital natural motion chips into DVD players and VCRs, so you don't have to buy the top of the line TV just to get natural motion. There are white papers on the net, but I can't find them just at the moment.
In short: I'm happy for movies to have 24fps, cause it all gets smoothed out to 100fps when I watch them anyway.
Verne.
Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't notice flicker on things like LCDs because there is none. There is a 'frame rate' but the screen doesn't go black between each image.
Interestingly, I've never really noticed flicker at the movies even though the screen blanks only 48 times a second. 24hz flicker would be really obnoxious though.
Also, I can see flicker on a 72hz screen while moving images on it seem silky smooth.
One interesting effect of having a high enough frame rate is that you can actually see 'motion blur' with static images, for example with my old monitor I could do 640x480 at 120hz. Some 3d graphics would appear to blur as they moved, just like objects in the real world. You could probably produce some cool visual effects that at 120-200fps in a film. would be impossible at lower speeds.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)
I shoot motion picture film, as a student. So take all this for whatever it's worth. You probably won't ever see 120-200fps in film for a couple of reasons.
For one, there's just not enough light to expose it properly. Shooting 24fps at f2.0 is hard enough on your average B&W reversal stock, which is ASA 160, IIRC. The fastest motion films that Kodak will sell you go to about 800 speed, but that's only three or four steps up from the 160.
I know Kubrick used some specially-made wide lenses to shoot "Barry Lyndon" in candle-light, but I think they were only as open as f0.5 or f0.7. Again, only a couple steps away from f2.0, which is as wide as the average camera lens will go.
So you'd need some massive wattage to get anywhere. But beyond that, there are mechanical issues: there's a claw that pulls film through the gate by its sprockets. The Bolex and Arriflex cameras I've used won't go any faster than 48fps, because apparently you start tearing the film itself when you go much past that.
So maybe there's specialized cameras out there-- they'd need a huge aperture and smooth mechanics, and the film would need to be super-fast and probably large and durable. Which most film is not.
Hope somebody out there might care about all of this enough to make it worth my writing. You can't really compare film and, say, monitors by numbers alone, as most people seem to want to do. Too many differences. They just happen to both result in moving 2D images.
Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)
I'll see your bullshit and raise you a moron. Special Lenses for Barry Lyndon [visual-memory.co.uk].
Re:Not as funny as you'd think (Score:2)
Yes, distinguishably [dictionary.com] choppy motion.
Many movies encoded for streaming use an even lower fps, around 15 or less. Sure, they still convey motion, but you wouldn't call it smooth, would you?
Super 8 is jerky as hell... (Score:2)
#ifdef SLIGHTLY_OFFTOPIC
However, super 8 at least allowed you to edit your films.
20 years later, it seems we're finally getting back the ability to easily edit film/video footage again at a reasonable cost. Why did 8mm film die when consumer video cameras had this horrible flaw? Pr0n (the home-made stuff) striking again?
#endif
The IMAX experience. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The IMAX experience. (Score:2, Informative)
By the way they cut scenes from Apollo 13 (IMAX) for this same reason too.
Re:The IMAX experience. (Score:5, Informative)
This article [vanguardreport.com] has the details.
Re:The IMAX experience. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The IMAX experience. (Score:2)
art (Score:5, Funny)
I think George Lucas was in my class.
Re:art (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, my sex education teacher said the same thing...
Fox is still retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
The football game preceding Futurama is not over til 7 PM. I would guess that at least 50% of the games cause Futurama to be delayed. In addition, they expect people to sit through shows in between new Futurama and new Simpsons that are not new episodes of either. I don't care what they are, they suck, and many people will not want to watch Futurama at 7 and have nothing to watch for 30 minutes. 7 PM is also very early, and I see no reason why Fox doesn't just air new episodes from 8-10 rather than air 4 new shows and 2 reruns between 7 PM and 10 PM.
Re:Fox is still retarded (Score:4, Insightful)
Enterprise is in the same boat with UPN... always preempted by a sports event. (sorry, but a sci-fi fan is usually a sporting event hater, espically the jokes like American Football and Baseball.... Hockey on the other hand is good
Being in the televison media business I see a few things that look really boneheaded... and it's not because of anything like really really stupid executives approving the lineup.. It's all about money and viewership ratings coupled with image.. Fox wants the NBC image and is trying desperately to get there (and losing lots of viewers in the process) While little networks like UPN are clobber them in the long run.
Futurama was doomed because the Exec's wanted it to fail and they tried really hard to destroy it... It's a testament to Matt G. and his crew that it survived as long as it did... That in the face of engineered doom by the exec's they made it as long as they did...
Look at any show that doesn't meet the $$$ demographic model... it is preempted for some silly group of millionare's playing a game and moved around to ensure that any viewers trying to get interested in it will give up.
Re:Fox is still retarded (Score:2)
Re:Fox is still retarded (Score:2, Insightful)
These shows captured the spirit and the nobility of the comedic robot at its best. Their stuttering steps, their amazing weeble-like ability not to fall over, and of course their strange and hilarious voices [mchawking.com]. To denounce robots in comedy is foolish and demonstrates a degree of ignorance on your part Mr. Coward.
Pull Patent Applications? Why Bother? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd sell the patents to one of those outfits that collects submarine patents and then uses them to extort money from small companies.
Re:Pull Patent Applications? Why Bother? (Score:2)
Reason why AOTC was cut so badly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reason why AOTC was cut so badly... (Score:2, Interesting)
For once it's on-topic! (Score:4, Funny)
Not worth seeing is another misuse of a colon [goatse.cx] - a link which I would recommend against visiting to those fortunate enough to have escaped seeing it. Please don't click on the link, but allow the unfortunate of us to laugh knowingly (and nervously, with nausia at the memory).
Re:For once it's on-topic! (Score:2, Funny)
Regarding Futurama (Score:2, Informative)
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
Adult IMAX Movie? (Score:4, Funny)
"Since it was my wife's birthday today".
"Notwithstanding the overuse of colons."
"the plot still has gaping holes."
"Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up"
"Ani and Amidala frolicking"
Re:Adult IMAX Movie? (Score:2)
Well actually we picked the kids up from the kind folks who were babysitting at short notice, went home, dealt with getting the kids into bed 2.5 hours past their bedtime, then got into bed and went straight to sleep.
I should have done like John [slashdot.org] did, and gone at noon. He also got the benefit of an empty theater, whereas the 6:30pm showing was sold out.
Oh, one more manner in which reality departs from the fantasy that began this post: I look far more like Jabba than any of the leading characters.
Re:Adult IMAX Movie? (Score:2)
Maybe for Episode III.
New episodes of Futurama (Score:2, Funny)
forget Star Wars... (Score:4, Funny)
Can I have your wife? (Score:4, Funny)
It was her birthday?
Take my wife. Please. (Score:2)
Re:Take my wife. Please. (Score:3, Funny)
More human than a human (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps for Ep III they can develop cameras that will have the same resolution as the renderer that they use. (Maybe something like a digital IMAX, which doesn't exist to my knowledge)
Re:More human than a human (Score:2)
It's because george shot on digital. (Score:2)
OTOH, all they had to do was re-render the digital graphics at a higher resolution, which as someone else who's also seen it, seems to think they did.
If they had filmed this on regular film, or at, say 5 or 6 megapixles, you wouldn't have felt that way.
Imax Advice (Score:5, Informative)
The Coruscant chase was made for IMAX!
Oh, and if you have friends that still haven't checked out this awesome flick, you may want to show them the DVD first (Nov 12). Because this movie is not exactly straightforward anyway, and with the cuts, they make the story harder to understand.
--Joey
More episodes (Score:2)
Haven't seen.. (Score:2)
Another couple of things to note about CloneMAX... (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw it a few nights ago here in Calgary, and have been meaning to write up a review. Seems I was beaten to it... Aside from the cuts, there's a few things that readers have thus far failed to mention.
First, while I was worried about the digital transfer on the far larger IMAX screen ("pixels as big as fists pummeling your eyes!") the picture looked very nice and clean, with a couple of exceptions. On the very rare occassion, very thin lines that are close to horizontal or vertical get a distinct case of the "jaggies", where one can see the staircase effect of pixelisation. (This is most evident during the Lucasfilm logo at the opening and at a moment during the descent of Senator Amidala's ship to Corsucant).
Second, the sound is incredible. Those who haven't heard a well-tuned theatre - and IMAXi are amoung the world's best - will get a kick out of that aspect of the movie alone.
Last - a traditional IMAX movie focuses on vistas - grand sweeping praries and the like - and where Episode II is most like this, it works very well. At other points - closeups of actor's faces, in particular - the IMAX image can be too revealing, much as the higher resolution of HDTV is acknowledged to reveal the flaws of those appearing on television. There are other scenes - that of Anakin next to the Jawa sandcrawler while searching for his mother on Tatooine, for example - that the framing of the scene is just "off".
To those intending to go, I would recommend arriving early and getting seats near the center of the theatre, for the most compelling experience - again, big vistas work well from most any viewpoint, but not head-shots. For me, it was more than worth the price of admission.
How to go around the world without going anywhere? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How to go around the world without going anywhe (Score:3, Funny)
--Joey
Made me think I was nuttz! (Score:2)
Scenes/WHO CARES!? (Score:2)
Regarding the IMAX movie, does anybody know what scenes exactly were cut, or was it just little things here and there?
Regarding the ICQ/AIM "merger," who the hell cares? Honestly, I don't know one perosn that I've met in real life that uses ICQ. And in this day and age, who cares what platform you're using? Programs like Trillian can use them all at once, and you'd never know you were connecting to completely different servers!
And when you think about it, it all boils down to the users. What's the difference between AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Y!? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the subscribers. I know, I have AOL/TW as much as the next, but I don't have any qualms with using their servers and eating their bandwidth while chatting on Trillian without ads!
Re:Scenes/WHO CARES!? (Score:2)
AotC in Omnimax not all that great (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool. :-)
Counselling (Score:2, Funny)
Since it was my wife's birthday today, last night I took her to see Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones: IMAX edition.
I recommend counselling. Seriously. By all means, see the film, but for your wife's birthday?!?
Re:Counselling (Score:2)
OTOH, maybe she's a baking geek. She loves kitchen gadgets, and trying new recipes, modifying the source until the finished product is to her satisfaction.
Simulator (Score:2, Funny)
Rendered vs. Real (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, this I could belive. If you have watched the trends in digital imaging, the cameras today are already at the resolution limit of the lenses. Take for example the 2 biggest: Canon 1Ds & Kodak 14n, they are already shotting at 11 & 14 megapixels! Now, maybe I am wrong, but you are going to need seriously expensive glass to go with that resolution.
So, the reason why real actors will look fuzzy and CGI generated will look super-sharp is that Mr. Jackson Puss has gone through 8-15 pieces of glass, while digital Yoda only has gone through... ugh, probably none. May Pixar programmers should add lens fuzzyness to the sunlight flair and other defects?
Re:Rendered vs. Real (Score:3, Insightful)
Just think about it... Even if Yoda is way the hell in the background, he will be perfectly in focus. Obviously that is not something that looks real... Focus gives us depth-perception in movies. Without it, everything feels flat (*cough* *cough* *cartoons* *cough*). Now, when they start spending a litte money on putting the CGI characters in foucs, our movie effects might start looking as realistic as they had before CGI.
(yes, cheap CGI looks better than cheap classic effects, but expesive classic effects looked MUCH better than CGI does.)
AoTC: Vibrating Seats (Score:2, Interesting)
The best part though was the vibrating seats whenever there was an explosion or other low-bass sound... That and the seats were made from Tempurpedic [tempurpedic.com] material, so they were ultra comfortable.
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting talk can be a knockoff of ICQ when talk came first.
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:2)
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:3, Interesting)
To my way of thinking, everything since has been a poor Zephyr knock-off.
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:2)
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:2)
How about we try it with a little punctuation?
It's interesting, 'talk' can be a knockoff of ICQ, when 'talk' came first.
Ahhh, my brain feels much better now. I know good grammar is an evil subject on slashdot, but at least do a good enough job that others can read what you are trying to say...
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but 'talk' has been around far longer than ICQ has. It is not an IM client nor was it designed to be. It was created back in the days when people had to use text-only terminals on UNIX machines and needed a form of communication.
Trillian, illegal? All it does is use the protocol, they didn't steal the source or whatever. KaZaA only provides file sharing, it doesn't promote distributing illegal files. That's like saying Ford makes money of killing people when someone runs people over with his Taurus.
On another note, 'duplicating effort'? Why did your parents decide to breed? After all, they're just duplicating what Adam and Eve did so long ago...
Intellectual Property Theft?! (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding is that Trillian, Gaim, and Fire were developed using standard reverse engineeing methods to duplicate the protocols required to communicate with services from Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. This is not stealing intellectual property, and Trillian Pro aside, considering Trillian is available free of charge and that Gaim and Fire are both GPL, I would venture to say that there is very little or no money being made.
Combined with the fact that you need a valid ID regestered with your choice(s) of IM services. . .
If you want an analogy. . . using an alternate IM program is like skipping commercials on a Tivo or ReplayTV . . .
Re:Intellectual Property Theft?! (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if they patented the idea.
Re:Eliminating duplicity (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean
Step 1- Trillian.
Step 2-
Step 3- Profit.
I suppose if you look at it like that, Trillian might be about "stealing" other people's IP for making money.
I thought it was about having 1 client for 3 different IM systems (Yahoo, ICQ and AIM)
Re-discovering old ideas (Score:3, Insightful)
It is amazing to me how many "new ideas" are just the same old thing rediscovered. That alone doesn't bother me. It is that they don't remember the past that most irks me. That dooms us to repeating the same mistakes rather than improving on the original.
Whether it be IM, or the semantic web, its all been done before.
Re:Easy way around AIM/ICQ (Score:2, Offtopic)
Trillian [trillian.cc] does have logging capabilities, they are in the preferences. I use Gaim myself, becuase Trillian is not available for my current platform--the feature set is almost identical however. Trillian does look alot better than (GTK) Gaim though. Then again, it is closed source.
Re:Easy way around AIM/ICQ (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not implying anything here, just giving my $0.02
Re:Easy way around AIM/ICQ (Score:2)
Anyway, that being said, Gaim: 1) suppports more protocols and plugin authors at least have the ability to write support for protocols it doesnt support 2) is scriptable via perl and 3) is monetarily free keeping it out of that shitty grey area where cerullian studios makes money on a product that would not function without the continued work of aol/yahoo/msn, some of whom, at least, lose revenue when their users don't use their own clients.
Anyway, trillian sucks. The SDK sucks, it wouldn't be worth using if someone wrote a Win32 native GUI for GAIM. Too bad GAIM wasn't started on Qt...
Re:Easy way around AIM/ICQ (Score:2, Informative)
PS - I just spent the thirty seconds it took to find the options: Preferences -> Message History.
Re:Surely the typical case (Score:2)
Umm... your a big old troll. But thats besides the point, how do rationalize a time zone post about fox tv from England?
"you And considering the timeslot that the FOX TV network placed it into, how could it not fail back then?"Re:Surely the typical case (Score:2)
Re:Surely the typical case (Score:2)
You think this will work? Honestly, you really do?
A fool and his money...
-B
Actually... (Score:2)
Re:AoTC & ICQ (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, AOL "did" something important with their ICQ purchase:
They sat on it, and prevented the development of a competitor in a new application domain. ICQ was a rather new concept, and if Mirabilils had proceeded to improve & popularize it with venture capital, they could've undercut a lot of the popularity of network services like AOL (and now MSN). Instead, they sold out to AOL, who did nothing to encourage the future of the ICQ product.
I hope the guys at least got a nice big check out of it.
Re:AoTC & ICQ (Score:2)
But seriously, I would have done the same thing. The memory of Netscape v. MS was fresh in everyone's minds, and you can do a lot more good to a lot more people with the money.
They did do something with it (Score:3, Insightful)
I was never really a fan of ICQ. The interface was horrible, and way, way over designed. The company's business model was 'give away the software, charge for the manual' and I think it affected their design decisions. You shouldn't need a 450 page manual for IM software.
The UI design was atrocious, and the system itself was pretty insecure, even by windows user standards.
Anyway, that's beside the point. People still used it, and it can take a long time for people to migrate from crappy software to software that doesn't suck. (just look at how long people used MacOS 6-9. Look how many people still use Netscape 4)
But by AOL buying ICQ they locked up the IM market, and killed innovation in ICQ. I don't think ICQ would have ever innovated, but they could have. And by AOL purchasing it they were able to get a strangle hold on the market... Until M$ decided to bundle MSN...
So it made business sense, although it didn't really benefit the world.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
Re:They did do something with it (Score:2)
It happened about the same time as TOC, mostly because MS wanted to force AOL's hand. This was during the whole MS/AIM interoperability debacle.
text protocols are just nasty. and don't get me started on XML-based protocols.. (hi Temas/Jer, other random Jabber guys i've hashed this over with =)
-josh, former OSCAR RE geek and all-around binary protocol cheerleader.
hrm? (Score:2)
Ease of implementation == good. we have tons of bandwidth, and chatting dosn't take much of it.
Re:hrm? (Score:2)
delimited protocols don't scale terribly well. you have to do a lot of "grab some data, scan for the delimeter, if not there, buffer and grab some more" crap.
especially in C, implementations become a lot trickier, finickier, and break much more subtly when you start using delimited protocols.
and it only makes trivial/prototype implementations easier. implementation in C with a fully encapsulated protocol is trivial (especially something based on TLVs like OSCAR, which is a really wonderful protocol to work on), but trickier in things like perl, where access to binary data isn't as common.
there are a lot of factors that affect this, but in general, looking for delimiters in a large message body is almost as expensive as routing that message. putting the message body length in the packet/chunk header is much more efficient, but still has more overhead than is really needed. and nobody does it that way in IM =) (HTTP does it)
(i used to work for ActiveBuddy [activebuddy.com], where we handled tens of thousands of messages per second. The MSN stuff was notably more complicated at the protocol-reading level than the AIM stuff. And when you're shooting for 10+kmessages/s, the extra code Really Matters (none of the processing was done on this machine, its job was to translate to an internal protocol) )