cgeorge

Quick! Someone encourage kids to waste gssoline, get drunk in the woods, litter, play on dangerous rock-faces, and be generally destructive to the environment! That'll work.

I can see these people waking up one morning and saying to themselves: "I'm going to skip thinking today. Let's cause a controversy!"

@refinedsugar
The payoff of Paramount IS important, but not because of the ethics involved. The normal profit earned from sales of Paramount's HD-DVD titles plus $150 million was probably greater than their expected total additional profits with Blu-ray titles over the contractual time period. It was a very short-term decision, but this is a common occurance at Paramount these days. From the point-of-view of Fox and Warner, any payoff from Sony et al is simply extra icing, since they are already selling titles at a rate of 2 to 1 and 3 to 1 in favor of Blu-ray (in the U.S.) and as high as 9 to 1 in other countries on the vast majority of their titles. For them, they aren't losing much by being exclusive to Blu-ray, and any payoff (if it exists or not) is free cash. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Fox and Warner never had any intention of going HD-DVD, but drug them through negotiations for the sole purpose of bumping up Sony's offer (which Warner claims never existed, but we'll see). For them, it is infinitely more important for the 'war' to end so that they can focus on getting people to buy titles in HD that they already bought on DVD. When a 'war' is involved, people give up outright if there is no clear winner. The long-term sustainability of physical HD media requires that marketshare is firmly controlled before an alternative (i.e. digital downloads) starts getting headlines. As digital audio has yet to fully standardize itself and many kinks in DRM, quality, and formats still exist, I don't see this happening for at least a few years, but once bandwidth expands to support the data, it'll be coming around quite quickly.

Well, I don't really care what he has on the site. It's obviously a publicity stunt for the movie. However, if you look closely, he did steal images from the real site (even including a trademark symbol), so he did violate copyright in that way. I could see him having to pay a reasonable fine and having to change the images for doing that, but turning over the domain makes no sense. Of course, there's no way of telling whether or not the New York Post is actually involved with this, simply creating a false news story to make people think that they are suing him. It's been done before.

Heh, I still have the realtime MoSys demonstration made for Thornado on a prerelease "project dolphin" dev kit. I don't know why I kept it all these years, but it's still here.

The object in the foreground is a plastic figurine of Duke that is located in the dev office. In the background is a desk chair (to the left) and a computer monitor (to the right). On the monitor is an image that appears to be Duke facing right (look for the outline of his head and his right arm, possibly holding a chain gun, it's a bit overexposed, so it's hard to make out). This is the kind of teaser photo that Nintendo and Rare used to use during the beginning of the N64 era. They generate photos that people will commonly focus on the wrong viewpoint, when in fact, what is said to be in the picture is really there, just out of focus.