Tag Archives: Disney
Star Wars saga available for digital download
For the first time ever, the Star Wars movies have been made available for digital download. Until now, Star Wars was The Beatles (or AC/DC, if you prefer) of movies, not available for digital download anywhere. New co-owners Disney and Fox have made the movies downloadable through the expected channels including iTunes and Amazon.
To be fair, these are the (in my opinion) abominations that have additional CGI incorporated by George Lucas, and not the original footage that until now have only been available on LaserDisc. Although I’m not one of those hardcore Star Wars fanatics, I do think the movies are masterworks and the originals should be available, regardless of who you think shot first. The picture below hurts every time I see it, never mind the scene itself.
Seriously?
Either way, I’m hoping Disney releases the original movies as their original theatrical release without all the added computer graphics.
Some throwbacks for Thursday
I am knee-deep in a technical specifications review today, so unfortunately I have to be brief, but luckily Disney and the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara, California came through for me. Based on emails I received from them I thought I would make a post about the past, one relating to the Internet and one relating to Operating Systems as we talked about in class.
First, I received an email from Disney Interactive that had the above header image in it, and it said “Join Disney for a trip back to the ’90s!
Well I’m always up for something like that, so I clicked the link and it took me to a webpage that is a glorious tribute to what the web looked like – and it did actually used to look like this – back in the mid 1990s. That’s a picture of it below, it’s completely functional with animated gifs and flashing colors and scrolling text (sadly no dancing babies), and you can get to it by following this link. Don’t miss it!
News for Friday
A lot is going on today, so I thought I’d provide briefs of some of the bigger stories that are happening rather than three gargantuan posts. I’ll put those off until next week.
iPhone 6 finally becomes available
The first, and I suspect biggest, story of the day is that the iPhone 6 is finally being launched, and people are going crazy all over the world. Unfortunately, all that excitement can lead to some problems. For example, here is a video of a guy in Australia, the first person to buy one over there, dropping it on the concrete right after buying it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbehPQfu3K0
Then there’s the guy who decided to perform a drop test of the new phones immediately after buying them. Kids, please don’t try this at home.
Larry Ellison steps down
Larry Ellison, co-founder of business-software powerhouse Oracle and fifth-richest man in the world is stepping down from his executive position at the very company he co-founded. Although he hardly wants for money, there is some speculation as to why he is doing it and if the timing is significant; he’s 70, after all, but you’d never know it. He will stay on as the Chief Technology Officer, though, so it isn’t as though he’ll have no impact, in fact, he’ll better be able to steer future developments and change from the new position.
Larry Ellison
Toonotown Rewritten comes out of beta, opens for everyone
In mid-2003, Disney, wanting a piece of the online-gaming pie, released a kid-friendly yet surprisingly clever online game called Toontown Online. In the game, whose art direction and settings were based somewhat on the cartoon world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, players created a humanoid, bipedal toon from a variety of animals (you could be a horse, monkey, cat, dog, that sort of thing), and went into the streets of Toontown to fight cogs. Cogs were black-and-white corporate stereotypes such as pencil-pushers, glad-handers, and micromanagers who were trying to turn Toontown corporate, convert all houses and shops into towering skyscrapers, and remove all of its color. Using gags such as throwing pies, squirting water from a flower, and dropping safes, players would have to defeat the cogs and return the color and the buildings to the town.
Toontown Online
Well, Disney being Disney, they shut it down in September of 2013 to focus on other ventures. What’s incredible here is that a team of 20 people located all over the world and led by a teenager in Maryland, recreated the whole thing, even made improvements, supplied their own servers, and are opening it up to the public today under the slightly new name of Toontown Rewritten, with no intent of ever charging for the experience. I’m surprised Disney didn’t quash it immediately, but they’re in a tough place. The whole project is such a labor of love that to do so would foster significant ill will, but I can’t help but think that if it becomes more and more popular they will be forced to step in in some manner.
