Day: September 20, 2001

Fanboy Review of Phantom Menace DVD

Slashdot linked to this review of the upcoming Phantom Menace DVD. Unfortunately it’s such a fanboy review, I got the feeling that if George Lucas had released Phantom Menace on Betamax that this would have been offered as a reason to go out and find a working Beta player.

But I do have a point beyond ripping on fanboy web sites. One of the things that this review and other, less enthusiastic, reviews of the DVD have mentioned is the inclusion of a documentary, “The Beginning,” which is (based on the reviews I’ve seen so far), one of those “Making of…” films that doesn’t actually suck.

Anyway, the documentary gives some clues as to why Phantom Menace sucked so bad. At one point, Steven Spielberg shows up on the set and Lucas actually tells Spielberg (apparently being very serious) that the final droid/Gungan battle to is “literally War and Peace.”

Comparing a CGI droid battle to one of the greatest novels ever written proves that Lucas has simply lost his mind. No wonder his movies are so boring now (I fell asleep during Phantom Menace and had to be woken up by one of the 12 year olds I took to see it).

Terrorism, FPS and Disrespect

Somebody at the university I work at moved pretty quickly to shut down what was a pretty surreal contrast of images during last week’s terrorist attack.

The building I work in is about 20 yards from the student union and I venture over there five or six times on an average day. About a year ago somebody thought it would be a good idea to block off part of the common eating area and stick in 10 computers. Link them together with a cheapo server and throw Half-Life and Quake III on each computer, and you had a 24-hour LAN party.

So last week, while the 6 or 7 video monitors are all showing CNN’s latest reports on the terrorist attack, people were still over there playing one of those Half-Life mods that involves one side portraying terrorists and the other side being the antiterrorists (a typical mission, for example, might be one group guarding a non-combatant while the other group is trying to kill him).

That went on pretty much all week, but today someone was in early in the morning yanking out all of the computers. Signs were put up a little later saying the systems had been removed due to “Vandalism and disrespect.”

The vandalism was an ongoing problem, mostly the electronic variety with people figuring out how to get around the security measures on the systems and then wiping the OS, etc. But I suspect the disrespect part was complaints from people about people playing terrorist-inspired videogames even while the World Trade Center/Pentagon tragedy was unfolding

Further Proof that Palm Doesn’t Get It

CNET reports that Palm unleashed its lawyers on Palm-related fan web sites. A letter sent to the operator of one such site, for example, said,

Palm Inc. is proud to have a positive and productive relationship with Web sites promoting the Palm OS. We do not in any way want this relationship to deteriorate. However, we must insist that you work with us to re-brand your Web site in a manner that does not infringe Palm’s trademark rights.

Rebranding? They want such sites to stop using the term “Palm”, especially in domain names, in favor of “Palm OS.”

This is beyond bizarre. Apparently it is part of some broader marketing strategy by Palm to include Palm OS devices such as the Sony Clie and the Handspring Visor (which sounds about right — that’s the sort of idiotic result that comes about whenever you get an internal focus group together within a sizable corporation).

This is especially stupid for Palm because it means all new domain names for the best known Palm-related web sites, which means that for many users finding Palm related web sites will become somewhat more difficult in the short term.

At least two of the sites hit by the letters asking for a name change went out and registered domain names with “Pocket” in them, alluding to Microsoft’s handheld OS.

Just another small indication that Palm no longer has a clue.