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.
Related: Billionaire Boater Destroys almost 14,000 square feet of Reef in Cayman Islands
Scientists Force Genetically Engineered Mouse to Watch Classic Film Noir
Stratolaunch: The World's Largest Plane Rolls Out
Paul Allen Finds Lost World War II Cruiser USS Indianapolis
Allen Brain Atlas Releases Data on Live Human Brain Cells
World's Largest Plane is Designed to Lift Rockets Into the Stratosphere
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An anchor chain on the 300-foot mega-yacht, the MV Tatoosh, owned by billionaire Paul Allen, has destroyed almost 14,000 sq.ft of reef in the West Bay replenishment zone, the Department of Environment confirmed following a survey of the area. DoE officials said more than 80% of the coral in the area has been damaged by the luxury boat's chain. Local divers conducted an in-water survey of the coral reef damage last week and the DoE expects to publish the detail findings next week.
Early findings already indicate extensive damage and investigations into the circumstances of the incident are ongoing, with the assistance of staff aboard the Microsoft billionaire's superyacht, which was anchored close to the Doc Poulson wreck and The Knife dive site, officials said.
"In addition to assessing the damage and determining the cause of this incident, we are also paying close attention to lessons learned so that we can more effectively prevent these accidents while still hosting visiting yachts," a spokesperson for the DoE said.
Scientists have built a brain observatory that monitors mouse brain activity in response to visual stimuli:
Letting mice watch Orson Welles movies may help scientists explain human consciousness. At least that's one premise of the Allen Brain Observatory, which launched Wednesday and lets anyone with an Internet connection study a mouse brain as it responds to visual information.
"Think of it as a telescope, but a telescope that is looking at the brain," says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which created the observatory.
[...] There's no easy way to study a person's brain as it makes sense of visual information. So the observatory has been gathering huge amounts of data on mice, which have a visual system that is very similar to the one found in people. The data come from mice that run on a wheel as still images and movies appear on a screen in front of them. For the mice, it's a lot like watching TV on a treadmill at the gym.
But these mice have been genetically altered in a way that allows a computer to monitor the activity of about 18,000 neurons as they respond to different images. "We can look at those neurons and from that decode literally what goes through the mind of the mouse," Koch says. Those neurons were pretty active when the mice watched the first few minutes of Orson Welles' film noir classic Touch of Evil. The film is good for mouse experiments because "It's black and white and it has nice contrasts and it has a long shot without having many interruptions," Koch says.
At one point, the camera follows a couple through the streets of a Mexican border town. As a mouse watches the action, its brain activity changes in response to the images. For example, brain cells that respond to vertical lines start firing as the couple moves past a building with vertical columns. That response is just one tiny part of the brain system that allows a mouse to create an internal map of its world. Other experiments show which brain cells fire when a mouse recognizes another animal, like a butterfly.
Stratolaunch, the giant aircraft designed to lift rockets into the stratosphere for drop-and-launch has been rolled out for the first time.
The initial construction on the massive plane Paul Allen has been quietly building in the California desert is complete, and the vehicle, which would be the world's largest plane with a wingspan wider than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, was wheeled out of its hangar for the first time on Wednesday.
[...] But why is Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks, building such a massive plane? It's not to carry passengers, but rather rockets. The bigger the plane, the larger the rockets, or the greater the number.
Allen's Stratolaunch company has partnered with Orbital ATK to "air launch" the company's Pegasus XL, a rocket capable of delivering small satellites, weighing as much as 1000 pounds, to orbit. The rockets would be tethered to the belly of the giant plane, which would fly them aloft, and once at an altitude of 35,000 feet or so, the rockets would drop and "air launch" to space.
"With airport-style operations and quick turn-around capabilities," the company said it believes "air launch" is a cheaper and more efficient way to get satellites into space than rockets that launch vertically and can be extraordinarily expensive.
See also:
The Register
Ars Technica (pictures)
Seventy-two years after two torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine sank cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), the ship's wreckage was found resting on the seafloor on Saturday – more than 18,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean's surface.
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, led a search team, assisted by historians from the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in Washington, D.C., to accomplish what past searches had failed to do – find Indianapolis, considered the last great naval tragedy of World War II.
[...] On July 30, 1945, what turned out to be the final days of World War II, Indianapolis had just completed a secret mission to the island Tinian, delivering components of the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima which would ultimately help end the war. The ship sunk in 12 minutes, before a distress signal could be sent or much of the life-saving equipment was deployed, according to a statement from the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C. Because of the secrecy surrounding the mission, the ship wasn't listed as overdue
Around 800 of the ship's 1,196 sailors and Marines survived the sinking, but after four to five days in the water, suffering exposure, dehydration, drowning, and shark attacks, only 316 survived.
"I'm very happy that they found it. It's been a long 72 years coming," said a statement released by Indianapolis survivor Arthur Leenerman, 93 years-old from Mahomet, Ill. "I have wished for years that they would find it. The lost at sea families will feel pretty sad but I think finding the ship will also give them some closure. I'm glad that the search was successful. It will be interesting to see where it was found and how deep it was resting. "
The ship's story has become part folklore, thanks in large part to the chilling monologue in the 1975 film "Jaws" when fisherman Quint tells about being aboard Indianapolis when it was sunk.
Source: USNI News
The Allen Institute for Brain Science has released an open-access database of live human brain cells:
It contains data on the electrical properties of about 300 cortical neurons taken from 36 patients and 3D reconstructions of 100 of those cells, plus gene expression data from 16,000 neurons from three other patients.
Neurosurgeons near Seattle, Washington provided cells from epilepsy and brain tumor patients that were previously considered to be medical waste.
Previously: A Blueprint for How to Build a Human Brain
Related: Millions of Functional Human Cells Can be Created in Days With OPTi-OX
A plane being developed by Paul Allen could lower the cost of launching to low-Earth orbit:
Rockets have been the way to get satellites into orbit since the dawn of the space age. But Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen hopes to shake that up with help from the world's biggest airplane.
"Stratolaunch" is a 500,000-pound beast with twin fuselages and a wingspan of 385 feet. Allen's Seattle-based company is developing it as a platform for lifting rockets into the stratosphere before launching them into space. It's seen as a cheaper, more reliable route to low-Earth orbit (LEO) — the sweet spot for many kinds of satellites.
The plane is still in development and has yet to fly, but last December it taxied out onto the runway at the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, California. In another test last Sunday, it hit a new top taxi speed of 46 miles per hour [40 knots]. If all goes according to plan, the plane will take its first test flight next year. As to when Stratolaunch might begin commercial operations, no date has been given.
Twitter video of rollout.
Also at Flying Magazine.
Previously: Stratolaunch: The World's Largest Plane Rolls Out
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:15AM (16 children)
Nothing at all about any BASIC interpreters that he wrote on government timesharing boxen at harvard.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:04AM (15 children)
to promote Xenix as the next generation Microsoft OS to replace DOS, his departure leading to Windows and eventually OS/2, and then NT development, and the mess microsoft made of things after it.
Allen was Microsoft's Woz in much the same way Bill Gates was Microsoft's Steve Jobs.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:34AM (9 children)
I never actually used it but someone sent me a book about it when I was in the slammer.
It had standard input, output and error.
For OS/2 to have succeeded, it should not in any way have tried to be Just Like $OS But Better. It should have been a better OS unto its own.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:55AM (8 children)
News to me that OS/2 was trying to be like Unix, and I've used both. It was more like DOS/Windows, but better. It failed because IBM's heart wasn't in it, and it lacked a personality cult behind it, like Windows had Gates (the supposedly lovable geek) and Mac had Jobs (the supposedly lovable salesman).
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:58AM (7 children)
I was very deeply invested in this at the time and you're correct about how things went down. I'm guessing, based on experience at other companies, is because of factions within IBM trying to kill it and other company politics. And also that ms was a more nimble competitor acting like it was trying to save its own life while IBM aced liked they'd already won and did not have to work that hard.
It was frustrating to watch because OS/2 was much better experience...when it worked. Running four instances of Castle Wolfenstein simultaneously seemed like the greatest thing ever at the time. Even better than a full window drag on my Alpha at work.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:21PM
My business partner and I bought a 386 box back around 1990, we also bought windows 3.1.
I'm not sure of the Win version but for sure it was 1990.
Chuck was having a grand old time exploring what he could do with Windows. He took exceptional delight in the multitasking of the fireworks screensaver.
One could see each individual firework spread just a tiny little bit, then another firework and so on until it came back around to the first.
I thought it quite cool myself.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:36PM (4 children)
My personal experience with OS/2 Warp was not good. The cool part was that it could run DOS programs noticeably faster than DOS could. Paid $80 for it, only to learn after I'd opened the package that networking was not included. If I wanted networking, that would be an additional package for another $150 to $170. That was a deal killer. Showed me that IBM didn't get it, didn't get that networking was the future. Or, perhaps they did get it, and thought to gouge customers with this shabby treatment in which all important networking capability was held back, until customers coughed up lots more money. Whichever, that was stupid of IBM and I was very unhappy with that omission. They fooled me once, and I sure wasn't going to bite on another piece only to find out something more was not working or not included.
IBM had a window of opportunity in the early 1990s, as Microsoft themselves bumbled about and sneered at networking as something that end users didn't really need. Took MS a year or two to start taking networking seriously and get cracking on Internet Explorer and what eventually became Windows 95. IBM rolled out OS/2 first, and could have really hurt MS if they hadn't blown it with their own stupid networking move.
That's just one of several times I've been burned by commercial software. Like, another networking fail was Master of Orion 2, which was shipped without the multiplayer over a network feature finished and working. Struggled for hours to get that part to work, not knowing that those jerks had done that. Some 3 months later, they released a "patch" that "fixed" the "bugs" with networked multiplayer. Liars.
As for Paul Allen, I haven't noticed much about him beyond his role as a founder of MS. Sure, founded a few charity and research organizations, but mostly it seems he played around with big sports teams. What's with the likes of Cuban and Allen wanting to bother with a sports team?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:36PM (3 children)
You sure?
I still remember "net share/use..." with LANs on coax cables on MS-DOS 3.5/4.x
And Trumpet Winsock [thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com] - it was Win3.11 with a US Robotics modem and Trumpet that got me to sunsite.unc.edu and/or ftp.funet.fi for the earliest linux floppies. Sometime in 1995 if my memory still serves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
Oh yes, even if MS was on board with LANs, circa 1992 they were definitely pooh poohing the whole idea of the Internet. Supposedly Bill Gates himself was the person who realized that attitude was wrong and lead the change in opinion, turned MS around. But that may be giving Gates too much credit, and there are hints that "genius founder personally saves the company from a grave strategic blunder" was some revisionist history.
And was not Trumpet Winsock 3rd party software? Because at that time Microsoft was dropping the ball?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:29PM
As the boss, only Gates was in a position to turn MS around, but at one time he was actually resisting including TCP/IP capability in Windows. The earlier versions of Windows 95 did not even have Internet Explorer installed by default. He only turned round after nearly everyone else in the World (including his own staff) was goading or laughing at him for being behind the curve. So much for the "Great Seer".
Whatever MS did as a company, Gates must be held personally responsible for his book "The Road Ahead", and in the first edition (late 1995) it is clear that he missed the point of the internet. The book was received with some derision by knowledgable reviewers; The New York Times for example said that Gates "has been caught flat-footed by [the Internet's] sudden emergence". Gates (or his ghost writer) hastily produced a revised second edition in response to the criticism; MS company policy was also revised. I like to say that Gates' "Road Ahead" contained a U-turn.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:57PM
And Trumpet Winsock [thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com] - it was Win3.11 with a US Robotics modem and Trumpet that got me to sunsite.unc.edu and/or ftp.funet.fi for the earliest linux floppies. Sometime in 1995 if my memory still serves.
He had to be forced / tricked into shipping with a TCP/IP stack by his underlings. He was against it. If you can find the story it is interesting. Furthermore, though it has also mostly been erased from the WWW, Bill Gates was calling the Internet a passing fad [wired.com] as late as the second half of the 1990's.
Back to OS/2, the reason that could not take off was because Bill had promised IBM to develop applications for it. IBM and M$ had been partners in developing OS/2 but M$ would stand for the lion's share of initial applications. However, weeks before launch, Bill let IBM know that 1) M$ would not be delivering any OS/2 applications, and 2) M$ had been using the time and resources that would have gone to OS/2 for developing Windows-only applications. There was no time for IBM to pick up the mess before launch. Also M$ ran a successful vaporware campaign with the help of the trade press getting most of the market to "wait and see" what Windows would become. That dragged on for a few years before M$ delivered even half-baked product and people had gotten used to not buying OS/2 by then.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:33PM
You mention "greatest thing ever". That reminded me of something I saw like 20 years ago at least. Was visiting this super geek and checking out his pad while he helped me with my issue. He had a ton of really cool stuff that you could basically only get by stealing it at Comdex. In his case, companies gave him problematic equipment to figure out their firmware bugs. He got to keep a lot of the equipment including a wireless bridge setup that could do 30 miles. This was 20 years ago, and walking into the coolest room you'd ever see.
By far the coolest thing I saw that blew my mind away (keeping in mind this was before multi-monitor was mainstream), were 6 monitors in a row. One Apple, a few PCs, something I didn't recognize, than three different systems playing something like EverCrack. One of them wasn't even playing the game, but showing positions of players in real time via a protocol hack. The two players were grinding.
He took the mouse on the Apple machine and moved it across all the monitors to start messing with the RPG game he was playing. Moved smoothly across all the different machines, and it occurred to me that he only had one keyboard and mouse, but was controlling a ton of machines in the room. All without a KVM switch of any kind.
That was pretty much the coolest thing I've seen, and was totally unexpected.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:35AM
Allen has probably left behind a much greater legacy than Woz with his philanthrophy and science/AI institutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen#Science_and_research [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute_for_Brain_Science [wikipedia.org]
It will be interesting to see whether these institutes get another huge cash infusion from his estate. He never married or had children.
Oh, and:
Looks like a 1.3% stake in Microsoft could be up for sale.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:07AM (3 children)
Xenix, MS's version of Unix, was a Microsoft aim from early days. As a project it pre-dated DOS, which was bought only as a stopgap to secure the foothold on the IBM PC, and Xenix as the successor to DOS remained an aim until superseded by the OS/2 project.
Unfortunately the public just continued to suck up DOS, so in the end MS just decided to put a GUI on DOS, which, in its earlier days, was the can of worms called WIndows.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:39AM (2 children)
Unfortunately the public just continued to suck up DOS, so in the end MS just decided to put a GUI on DOS, which, in its earlier days, was the can of worms called WIndows.
Your looking at it from the wrong direction. I hope that is not intentional. There was never any pull from the public. The push was from the OEMs due to the illegal per-processor fees [www.ecis.eu] (warning for PDF) that forced the OEMs to pay for DOS for each PC sold regardless of OS.
Allen himself was a patent troll [businessinsider.com], known for suing everyone over anything [wired.com]. That is on top of the damage he did to the industry through spreading M$ products. He, Gates, Ballmer, Myhrvold, and the others there have held the industry back a few decades. They need to be taken to task over that.
As for his "buddies", Gates and Ballmer, they were plotting behind his back to rob him [techrights.org] once they learned he was ill and probably would die soon.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:57PM (1 child)
It was push and pull. DOS and Windows were generally pre-installed, so the buyer bought apps that ran on DOS or Windows, and after that the buyer resisted any change of OS that broke their apps. Eg, Windows 9x was only kept going for years because so many games and consumer-grade printers* would not run on anything else, not even on WinNT/XP that should have superseded Win9x by 1996/7.
* Those "Designed for Windows 95" stickers which gave Joe Public a warm feeling were really saying that the thing would not work with anything else.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:42PM
Let's not get too deep ino M$ revisionism. Those "Designed for Windows 95" stickers came with a lot of strings attached, at least for the software packages sprouting such nonsense. In order to develop for Windows 95 you had to also sign a contract to also develop for Windows NT. The latter contract came with a stipulation restricting development on any competing operating systems. That meant that MacOS and GNU/Linux could not be developed by the same teams. Few software houses were willing or able to support three isolated development teams, so we know how that went. There's probably still someting at Groklaw about that.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @08:47AM (2 children)
Brace yourselves for a media bullshit-storm. It will be nothing compared whth when Gates goes though.
Here we go, from the Guardian article :
A casual reader would think he invented the thing. What he and Gates did was write some software, most notably an interpreter for Basic (a language that already existed) for a micro-computer (the Altair 8800, that already existed). Then for their big break they bought DOS (an OS that already existed) from another company and re-packaged it for IBM.
Again, with the reference to size, anyone would think he had anything to do with developing hardware. Moreover, the Altair 8800 was no-where near the size of a room, nor other micros; it's why they were called "micro-computers".
What bollocks. It was not the first micro-computer, and writing software for them was not a new idea.
TFA says nothing about Allen having to endure Gates' tantrums. He famously said that working with Gates was like
"being in Hell" [engadget.com]. I love that photo though, the one where Allen looks like Gates' grandfather.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 17 2018, @01:03AM (1 child)
My first experience with a computer, was in sixth grade, on a field trip to Pittsburgh. All us little kids were allowed into a room, with glass windows and a view into the room that housed a huge-ass computer. Windows further along the room had a view into another, larger room, where keypunch operators processed cards. We understood nothing, really, but we got to see a computer, and people working with the computer. That was one of the features of a day at the Carnegie-Melon institute.
Move forward about a decade, to 1980, and I was taking business administration classes. A group of us had an open invitation to study and work together at a local business. The warmest place in the building was in the computer room. Again, I know nothing about that computer, aside from the fact that it was a "mainframe". That sucker stood about 3 feet high, from it's pedestal legs, to the top. About five feet long, and maybe 4 feet wide. It would have fit into a standard pickup truck bed, I think. If my recollection is off, it still would have fit comfortably into the back of a twelve foot box truck delivery truck, with plenty of room to walk around it.
Those Microsoft people may have worked with computers the size of a room, at some point in their lives, but it isn't really likely. They were just kids like myself when those huge-ass machines were in "common use". Except, they weren't very common at all.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:36AM
In city centres back in the 70's and 80's, big company offices sometimes had their mainframes at ground floor visible through floor-to-ceiling windows from outside. They wanted to show the world that they were modern. I don't think even then that computers were "as big as a room", but they were in their own rooms. What I recall is that most of the kit was in what looked like head-height standard 19" equipment racks, with some washing-machine sized cabinets that were disk drives or (double width) line printers. In fact the size of the equipment was not much different from big data server rooms today, only the total computing power is magnitudes greater now.
I used mainframes for engineering analysis in the 80's and never saw the computer. I coded by hand on data forms and posted them to the IT department where they got typed onto cards. A few days later I would be posted back a line print-out of the results (more usually an error report or even a memory dump an inch thick) and a box with the cards for keeping or re-use. We also started using micros (we had an HP 9825*) and mini-computers (we had a DEC PDP11).
About 1985, like most geeks then, I got a home computer, running CP/M. I never even heard of Microsoft or Gates until about 1990; it really annoys me when I hear people saying that Gates/Allen were responsible for the "computer revolution".
* I heard a story that seeing an HP 9825 was what prompted Steve Jobs to get into computing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @10:56AM (7 children)
I visited friends that worked at Interval Research Corp (a Paul Allen company) in the 1990s. Attended one of their internal symposiums which I understood were very frequent. After the presentation it turned into a brainstorming session with ~30 really bright people. That day the topic was "agents" on the Internet and how they might be used.
Some years earlier, I'd heard that a niche/hobby product of mine had been dissed online (from my point of view it hadn't been installed properly...), but it was on AOL or some other commercial network that I didn't subscribe to. Learned about it from a friend who was on the correct forum to read the complaint. Anyway, the details don't matter, the point was that I'd had an early taste of the power of networks and bad news.
At Interval, I remember asking if the Internet could support an agent that would watch for my name or other key words across the whole network, something like an automatic citation search. While Allen's Interval company never profited from it, something like 10 years later Google Alerts was introduced and I started using it. I've often wondered if my comment planted a seed in someone who attended that symposium.......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_Research_Corporation [wikipedia.org]
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:32AM
Probably not. It was just as likely they came up with the idea independently. Or they had been inspired by Kibo from Usenet [wikipedia.org]. Or all three at once.
Kibo (James Perry) had some scripts that monitored all of Usent for his user name, "kibo", and popped in soon after to leave some nonsequitur comment. It was novel at the time and gave him the appearance of being omnipresent.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:22AM (4 children)
It's remarkable that there isn't more discussion about this. Paul Allen was one of the main dudes at Microsoft, the company that many of us loved to hate for decades. Windows still runs on the majority of the world's computers.
Does the lack of interest indicate, however, that Microsoft and Windows no longer feel relevant?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:12PM
Probably, but also younger generations didn't live through it.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:18PM (1 child)
Probably more related to people refraining from speaking ill of the dead, like how he robbed the public for his own benefit: https://blog.generationopportunity.org/articles/2016/06/15/richard-sherman-stop-using-public-funds-to-pay-for-stadiums/ [generationopportunity.org]
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:30PM
You would occasionally here Paul was up to something, but mostly felt like it was only in the news because he was associated with Bill. Conversely if Bill was to go we would all be chatting it up as we've all got opinions on him and things he's done over the years.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by rockchalkie on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:44PM
Windows does not run on the majority of the world's computers.
From wikipedia:
"There are three big personal computing platforms.[2] Google claims over 2.7 billion users[3] with Android while Microsoft has claimed over 1.4 billion users for Windows. The third "platform" – or strictly two (or three) platforms – Apple's iOS and macOS combined, is claimed to have over 1.3 billion users."
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:51AM
Yes, I'll get down modded for this, but ... will his casket be blue with mostly indecipherable white text on it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday October 16 2018, @01:57PM
Paul Allen was one of the partners in one of the biggest patent trolls [seattletimes.com] of all time. Intellectual Vultures. [intellectualventures.com]
Er . . . um, I mean . . . Intellectual Ventures.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.