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Paul Allen has died at age 65:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/paul-allen-co-founder-microsoft-dies
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, has died. He was 65.
Allen's company Vulcan said in a statement that he died Monday. Earlier this month Allen said the cancer he was treated for in 2009, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had returned.
Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.
Of course the article has more information. There was more to Paul Allen that just mentioned above. Bound to hit multiple sources with different takes so be on the lookout for something from a source you like.
takyon: Allen Institute bio and Vulcan Inc. statement.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:18AM (5 children)
I'd say that's possible.
At one point in my career I was the tech guy in the room with a bunch of TV executives who were freaking out about Napster-style piracy, what it would mean for their careers, etc. I remarked that they should make entertainment with branching narratives that they can add to at will and let the audience choose which branch to follow as they watch. If you have a rich universe like Tolkien or Star Trek or something you can produce spin-offs that hook into the main storyline ad infinitum. Also, you can't pirate it.
I read last week Netflix is starting to experiment with that very thing. Who knows if it will succeed, but it did make me wonder if I too had planted a seed in those conversations.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:40AM (2 children)
I remember this was tried when DVDs came out in the 90s. One of the big "features" that the marketing department pounded into adverts was DVDs "interactivity", from mini games, to having the ability to select from multiple storylines, to even multiple camera angles, so that you can pick which camera angle you something from.
I remember the hype that the first Matrix DVD would support multiple camera angles, so you can pick from which angle you want to see the (back then) mindblowing CGI.
Thing is, I don't know if the DVD ever actually had those different angles, because I, like 99% of people, just wanted to go with whatever the director decided was the best camera angle. After all, he is the professional, and is paid big money to get it right. Why would I override his cinematic choice?
And this led to a more profound realisation. DVDs and movies are "consumer" items in the proper sense of the word. When people sit to watch a movie, they want to be entertained passively. They are not looking to be a director picking camera angles, or a scriptwriter, deciding how the narrative unfolds from a multiple choice selection. It kills the mood, and the suspense, and interrupts the moment.
Like with a storyteller, you want the story told to you, to the best of the ability of the people who put their time, money and effort into it.
For those who do want to be "in charge", there is an entire genre of games that allow you to do so, interactively prompting you to make decisions that will affect the narrative, and most of them being 3D, you have control over whatever camera position perspective you want.
What would be the benefit to bring that to the cinema experience?
Also, DVDs were perfectly possible to pirate, including the multiple narratives and camera angles (they were just different video streams on the DVD). Indeed if you did a bit-for-bit image of a DVD you had it all, the interactive games, the menus, all program logic, the multiple angles, extra features, etc....
Yet despite this, most people were happy with just the main video stream off the DVD, converted to DivX or whatever and posted online.
As for the logic and interactivity of DVDs, it is interesting to note that after the novelty wore off, these technologies were almost exclusively used for one thing, to fill the spare space with adverts and copyright warnings, and then use the logic to forbid you from skipping of fast forwarding those bits.
So much potential, and in the end all most people know about it is that its the tech that was used for spamming you, while preventing you to skip the spam (which ironically, made the pirated versions more desirable, as they were nothing but the actual stream you want to watch).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:09PM
Dragon's Lair ftw
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:13PM
VR could be the thing to change this. Certainly, a VR movie still requires cinematography choices and direction, but it would use 360-degree cameras (maybe 180° in some cases) and viewers have different headsets and fields of view (peripheral details in a film could attract more attention when using a 200° horizontal FOV headset instead of a first-gen 100-110° FOV headset).
Even this can be tough to realize. Telltale Games, that adventure game studio that is shutting down, was often criticized for the linearness of their episodic games. You make some choices, but ultimately end up at the same plot points.
Among recent titles, Witcher 3 may have done it a lot better.
Maybe AI/machine learning will allow much more complicated game storylines. Either running on the player's machine, or being used to do "heavy lifting" back at the game studio so that they can create large amounts of content faster.
Didn't Blu-ray try to revitalize the interactivity idea with mandatory Java support? Pretty sure that went nowhere. Now consumer optical discs are on the way out and the streaming services co-exist with apps/games on smart TVs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday October 17 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)
Why can't this be pirated? I've tried to think of limitations, and I can't think of any really. Even in live versions of it, simply because the feed could be hijacked and multiplexed from somewhere. All you end up being though is a participant with a "broken remote".
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:02AM
They could as a voyeur, but the idea is that those who are there legitimately collectively decide which path to follow. At the time I proposed the idea Lost was a popular show, and one of the things that the fans did was to minutely analyze all the scenes to find hints. So if there was a decal on a crate in the background, for instance, that was something that was significant to the Lostheads.
I thought, what if those elements were easter eggs that revealed more deep background or plot twists that revealed dimensions that people following the main story line wouldn't be privy to? See, if you were watching the episode on a tablet and tapped on the element you noticed, and enough other viewers did (to meet some threshhold), the whole audience would be taken down the rabbit hole for the backstory or sub-plot. You could weave stuff in and out of that superstructure almost without limit.
So the question for the pirates would be, how do you rip that off? Because if you watched the episode with one audience who voted differently than the last time it aired, then you'd not get the same rip. It would be like copying one facet of the diamond and trying to pass it off as the whole thing.
Washington DC delenda est.