I understand what their plan is, I just question how well it will work. For starters, MS is going up against a big company in Sony. In your example, the local company has to just roll over and take it. Sony can fight back competitively, and they aren't afraid to do so.
I know MS isn't stupid. They didn't get to be the huge company that they are by being bad at business. Like you, I have no doubt that this is going to play out over a long time period, and the future is really up in the air at this point. I just think it's been a really risky move on MS' part, and I'm not convinced it's going to pay off. But hey, you need to take chances if you want to make the big bucks. If MS wins, they will have earned it. But if they don't win, I won't be that surprised either.
I dunno. I think there's room for three console makers in the market, it's just that MS and Sony have gotten so aggressive that there's going to end up being just two. They've launched this war of attrition where things are just going to keep getting more intense until one of them collapses. MS has the deeper pockets, but Sony has more experience and a big lead (and is making money with their console). Nintendo, to their credit, has refused to participate in that game, and will still be around no matter how badly Sony and MS beat up on each other. They may even prosper a bit more due to the war between their rivals.
The problem is that you usually have to choose between better gameplay, or a more factual interpretation. This is going to always be the case in any sort of game, because the real world is complicated and has a lot of difficult problems.
Simcity has its biases because there's only so much time to program, only so much computing power to simulate stuff, and only so much complexity that a player can deal with and still have any fun.
I think there's more of a difference between a "game" and a "simulator" than most people realize. If you play a good simulator like you would a game, it's probably not going to go so well. If you play a simulator like it was real life, you'll end up with better results, but it probably will be less fun. Granted, there are people who really enjoy firing up MS Flight Simulator and trying to do a real accurate flight down the east coast. But that's really a different case than a game.
A really accurate version of sim city wouldn't be much fun. Getting things done in cities is a slow and political process, full of frustration and wasted time. Not a recipe for a fun or successful game. If you want something that accurately simulates pedestrian flow through urban spaces, you're going to need some custom software, and it's not going to be as easy as tweaking some existing game.
Sort of like how having easy access to food isn't better than starving, rather it just creates a whole different set of health problems?
There are about a zillion things that can be done on a computer with a GUI that can't be done on the command line. And another zillion things that can be done way more easily.
Calling their handhelds their equivalent to XP(Windows) for Microsoft is kind of accurate, but it's not entirely accurate in this case. The thing is, that even without their portable line, and just the Gamecube, Nintendo would probably be surviving. They've made money off of the gamecube, even if it is third place in terms of sales. The GBA isn't really subsidizing the gamecube, it's just something else that Nintendo does, which happens to make them lots of money.
Microsoft lost over $500 million dollars selling Xboxes. There aren't many companies in the world that could afford to do business like that. It's really quite amazing. They are, of course, taking a longer view of things, hoping to build a marketshare that will eventually lead to profit down the line. I think that's a very questionable strategy, it reminds me a lot of the dot com era.
I think the way that Sony was so quickly able to dominate Nintendo with the original Playstation is a good indication of how fickle gamers can be. Marketshare from one generation of consoles does not guarantee success in the next. Sony didn't kick ass with the PS2 because of more raw power. Its games don't look that much better than the N64. It won because of things it did differently (innovation). Integrated DVD player, optical media, backwards compaitibility, etc.
When you cut through all the marketing and whatnot, the Xbox360 and the PS3 are basically the same, consoles with a whole bunch more power than the current generation. The games are what's going to differentiate them, and it sounds like games for both systems are going to be kind of complicated and expensive to develop for. Nintendo's still being pretty vague with their plans for the revolution, so I'm not going to comment on it too much.
Yeah, you're missing the whole damn point of the article.
Nintendo does not live or die on the marketshare of the gamecube compared to the PS2 and Xbox. Just like the sales of Revolution consoles compared to the PS3 and Xbox360 won't entirely determine their future.
Did Nintendo lose market share over the current generation of consoles. Yes. Is that threatening their viability as a video game company? Not as much as you'd think.
A couple points that you should have gotten out of the article. First, even without the Gameboy and DS stuff, just the Gamecube, Nintendo would've been profitable. That's the number one thing you have to do to stay in business.
Second, selling a zillion of something isn't necessarily a good thing if you lose money on each one. The Xbox is sort of a special case here, because MS is taking a longer term view of things, and has a ginormous pile of money the subsidize their video game losses.
Third, Nintendo can't afford to operate that way, and so they don't. They're not playing the marketshare at all costs game. They realize that, while bragging about how you sold more consoles than the other guy is fun to say, it doesn't necessarily do squat to your bank account. Giving Nintendo a hard time for not playing that game is to miss the point of their business plan, similar to how you missed the point of this article.
Well, all of the other new ones have sucked and been basically worthless. It was like they purposely targeted the smallest niches they could find, which will never work, because a TLD needs to get some collective mindshare before people will recognize it as a URL.
If I saw a sign that said planes.travel.info or something like that, I'd be inclined to think that it's some sort of slogan or something that an overzealous designer formatted in a dumb way. While planes.travel.com or *.net just jumps out and says internet address to most everyone nowadays..coop?.aero? those look like typos or something. And.biz just looks so unprofessional that it hurts. But.xxx could be different. There's plenty of porn on the web. It's not a tough connection to make. And the porn sites have been on the front lines of internet since pretty much the beginning, putting all the new technologies through their paces. They're more qualified to make a new TLD work than anyone else.
They'll pick up on it cause it's easy to understand. Since there are hordes of non-tech savvy internet users, it's pretty much all.com to them. You could probably find plenty of people who could be easily convinced that.xxx means it's on an completely different internet, and therefore harder to find.
The concept behind PICS isn't terribly complicated, but the simpler you make it, the more likely people are going to try and run with it. Not that any.xxx legislation would work.
I don't think there will be moving as much as just duplication. If I ran ultrasluttysluts.com, I'd buy ultrasluttysluts.xxx as well. And I wouldn't care which one anyone went to.
And new sites will probably buy both. I don't know enough about the porn industry to be able to predict if they'd want to regulate themselves enough to make the switch. I imagine most of them wouldn't mind. They're trying to make money, and people complaining and giving them a hard time about corrupting their children just slows them down a little. If moving to.xxx would shut up some of those parents, I'm sure the porn site operators would be all for that, so they can get back to their business.
The flipside is that there are lots of established sites, and switching URL's is a good way to confuse a lot of your customers.
Over all, having four devices would take more power, because I'd have four batteries to charge, but I'd expect each one to last longer than a device combining all four.
None of my gadgets have screens that glow when it's sitting in my pocket. My ipod screen doesn't light up unless I'm navigating the menus. Same with my cell phone. Or my digital camera.
If they're all on one device, however, then that battery is going to have to supply four times as much power, because any time I need to do anything, the same screen will light up. Not to mention all the other random stuff that those devices need power for.
Basically, I like the fact that I can use my mp3 player as much as I want, and if the battery runs out, I just can't listen to music anymore. If running down my iPod also meant that my phone would die as well, then I'd be a lot more cautious with my music listening, and needing to do that is not compelling to me.
Seriously. You're playing a fantasy game. When you get into the game, you're trying to transplant yourself into a world that cannot really exist. So why should anyone be trying to make it look exactly like the real world?
If I want to feel like I'm walking through a forest, then I'll go outside and find a forest. Forests are awesome and beautiful, but they're not something that I need to play a game to experience. Now, a game might be enhanced by taking place in an extraordinarily spooky forest, or one with impossibly large trees, or something else, in which case some creative art can only help.
Add in the fact that, the more realistic things try to look, the more we notice things that aren't right, and you end up very sensitive to mistakes that remind you that it's just a game, and break the immersion.
well, yeah, you could certainly create a layer interface that the user interacted with, and which then interfaced with the DS code and made it think it was a touch screen. But in terms of the user experience, it's very different. So in my mind, that doesn't really count.
At a really basic level, you can emulate just about any computer/console with any other if you took enough time to do it. Isn't that one of the laws of Turing Complete machines or something? Basically since when you boil it down, all computers are just crunching ones and zeros, any one can feasibly do what any other can, given enough time. (I don't really know what I'm talking about, just trying to remember random stuff that I've read)
It just might not run fast enough/have the correct input/output to do it in a way that an end user would find at all acceptable. So what's the point then? Maybe just the geek factor, but with games it isn't terribly useful.
Well, I think for what it's capable of, the PSP battery life sounds reasonable. But there's also plenty of people for whom four and a half hours would end up being a little short. I went to the beach a couple months ago. five hour ride each way, my DS being used basically the whole drive. the 10hours+ battery life came in handy because sometimes things get hectic and busy and I forget my charger.
I guess the point is, I generally only remember to charge my portable when the battery dies. So having it die less is nice. Not trying to poop on the PSP, just saying that more battery life is definitely a good thing.
There's two problems here though. Number one, the DS has two screens. Maybe the PSP could fake that convincingly enough. But number two, the DS has a touch screen. That's a tough piece of hardware to emulate. If someone figures out how to implement that purely in software is a damn genius, and deserves gazillions of dollars.
The problem is that apparently you don't even have to implement something to get it patented. There was an article on slashdot a while back about Sony( I think) getting a patent on using radio waves or something to interface with the brain and create experiences for us sort of Matrix-style. They flat out said that they don't have the technology to do that, and don't expect to for quite some time, but they haven't been convinced that it's impossible.
Now I think that was more of a publicity stunt then an actual grab at useful intellectual property, but what's to keep someone less scrupulous from trying to predict the future a little and patent some of the ideas they come up with? There's all sorts of neat things with physics and AI that games will hopefully implement in the future, we just don't quite have the hardware to do it yet. But that doesn't mean I can't think of some of it, and pursue patents.
Sitting on an idea doesn't cost anything. I'd have to pay a lawyer to write out all the paperwork at the beginning, but a lawyer isn't going to be spending his time banging out code for me otherwise, so I'm not really slowing down my development either. This will turn out like every other industry seems to be. A few big players cross licensing everything so that they can keep working while cutting out the new guys; and some tiny IP only companies squatting on patents and then trying to screw the big names out of ridiculous amounts of money.
The problem is, patenting things like "ideas", and "gameplay" can get a little hazy. Add in the innate human brain's ability to detect similarities and patterns, and you'll be seeing infringement everywhere you look. Everything is built upon something else to some degree. And if they don't get you with a gameplay patent, they'll trip you up with some patented technical detail in your programming.
What if the guys who made marble madness had patented "Using an electronic input device to control a digital sphere through the visual representation of a three dimensional world"? I'm no patent lawyer, so I don't know how much sense that makes, but it reads about as basic and vague to me as most of the patent summaries I browse do.
By that measure, things like bowling games or Super Monkey Ball could be threatened. Is there a connection between Super Money Ball and marble madness? Yeah, on a really superficial level. Do the games play at all alike? Nope. Were the designers inspired by Marble Madness? Maybe. Did they ruthlessly steal expensively developed ideas from the Marble Madness developers? No.
Even Katamari Damacy could be argued to fall under a patent like that. And that's generally considered one of the most fun, original games of the past year.
I'm going to agree that any kind of software patents are going to be very harmful to the industry as a whole. And just shifting the current patent system to something like video games is going to pretty much be death to it.
The lawyer's argument is basically, getting patents is a way for the current players to make more money and cement their position on top of the biz. You can't seriously make the argument that, in this case, patents will spur on innovation, because there's been leaps and bounds of innovation in the relatively patent free video game universe since its inception.
If you want to take the opinion that we're just as much a part of nature as anything else, then I think it's inaccurate to say that we have a responsibility to preserve the planet.
We should be careful of what we do for our own sake, because whether our acts are natural or not, we will have to live with the consequences.
Humans are fortunate enough to have intelligence, which gives us all sorts of cool potential. Part of that is the potential to make long term predictions about our actions. Trying to avoid results that will make life tougher for us in the future is simply pragmatic. It's too bad that forward thinking tends to be so hard for so many people.
Right on. And really, the hardware is to the point where, except for a few particular areas (games, intense video editing, etc), there's more than enough speed in just about any computer that you're going to buy today.
I'd say I qualify as a power user, and I spend a whole lot of time on my computer doing various things. Nine times out of ten, when I'm waiting on something, it's my internet connection. The speed of my actual computer has not, for the most part, been the actual issue. It can more than keep up with how fast I work. Some games can tax it, and not everything is instantaneous, but it's all quick enough that I can cope. Definitely a different situation than seven or eight years ago when I couldn't wait to upgrade with anything I could get my hands on.
A Dual G5 Powermac can do - addition -subtraction -multiplication -division
So it shouldn't cost much more than a typical calculator that I can buy at walmart? Oh, what? It can do lots of other stuff too? You mean it's a whole computer in there? That's why it costs more?
Right, so you want to ignore all the normal computer functionality available in a macmini, replace all that with TiVo functionality, and then buy it for the price of a TiVo? Maybe you're missing the point here. There are a number of companies that sell DVR's, perhaps you should go buy one of those.
Yeah, It wasn't really the "embrace and extend" thing that MS did that was bad. it was the third step, which was to not share their extensions.
It's really a semantic argument I guess. In the confines of the term "embrace and extend", extending is something bad. While writing "extensions" to software, or suggesting "extensions" to a standard is something that happens all the time.
Standards aren't codified to stop all development and make things boring. They're written so that there's one place and system for making extensions, and sharing them.
Hah! You'd think so. I did too. I live in New Orleans, she lives in New Jersey. When I go visit, I can expect to spend the better part of a day fixing stuff. Then, without fail, she remembers a whole other list of stuff she wants fixed/changed/installed a couple hours before I'm supposed to leave.
Well, as a fairly laid back apple fan boy, it's been my observation that Apple's fans are also some of its harshest critics. For example, when Aqua was first announced, plenty of hardcore apple websites were nitpicking it to death, despite the fact that their own exposure to it was a webcast of a demo that Steve Jobs did for a half hour.
They just tend to get really defensive when "outsiders"(meaning windows users) start criticising the mac. Partially because windows has been such a POS operating system. It's like someone driving an old rusty noisy car driving up to my cleaner, well kept vehicle and giving me crap because he doesn't like my hubcaps. Maybe my hubcaps could be better, but if you're not offering me something superior, then you're wasting my time.
Secondly, there's been a lot of bitterness because MS and their windows monopoly has made things a lot tougher for other OS'es. Their breaking HTML,.doc compatibility issues, and a million other things seemed to be doing their best to take the fun out of computing, even when I consciously avoid MS software.
Seriously. My mom refuses to get a mac, because she says she doesn't want to take the time to learn anything new. Even if it took her an extra hour to get stuff done for the first week after switching, she'd make that time up in about a month or two not having to deal with her computer getting its ass kicked by malware like she does now.
I've done lots of reading up on xHTML and CSS. I have an appreciation for webstandards. And it's certainly easier to get consistent results than it was in the past. But I'm not talking about simple layouts. We're talking about a graphic designer (who was originally trained as an architect (that makes it worse, trust me;)), designing very complex things, lots of blocks and shapes overlapping, and trying to fit ridiculous amounts of content into a 700px by 500px box because she thinks that any sort of scrolling is the ultimate sign of failure.
Really, IE makes the whole thing a lot harder than it has to be. It's closer to trivial to make it work under mozilla, safari, opera, etc, but then have to break all that to get IE to cooperate.
It's not an impossible task. I finally accomplished most of what she wanted. It just took inordinately long, and was not fun. And if she ever wants to add more content or different content to many pages, it's going to break all over again. That's all basically a result of her lack of understanding about how websites work, and her refusal to accept things that I tried to explain from the beginning. But, either way, I don't care, cause I don't work for her anymore. yay.
I don't really know what goes on in a satellite radio reciever, but my roommate has one in his car, and that sucker gets really hot. Amazingly hot. He spent some time reading up on forums and it seems that it does that for everyone, but he was concerned that it was broken at first.
I know he's just trying to make sirius look more viable since they seem to be losing out to XM, but shouldn't he consider Apple's general attitude towards not announcing stuff ahead of time and keep his mouth shut.
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I understand what their plan is, I just question how well it will work. For starters, MS is going up against a big company in Sony. In your example, the local company has to just roll over and take it. Sony can fight back competitively, and they aren't afraid to do so.
I know MS isn't stupid. They didn't get to be the huge company that they are by being bad at business. Like you, I have no doubt that this is going to play out over a long time period, and the future is really up in the air at this point. I just think it's been a really risky move on MS' part, and I'm not convinced it's going to pay off. But hey, you need to take chances if you want to make the big bucks. If MS wins, they will have earned it. But if they don't win, I won't be that surprised either.
I dunno. I think there's room for three console makers in the market, it's just that MS and Sony have gotten so aggressive that there's going to end up being just two. They've launched this war of attrition where things are just going to keep getting more intense until one of them collapses. MS has the deeper pockets, but Sony has more experience and a big lead (and is making money with their console). Nintendo, to their credit, has refused to participate in that game, and will still be around no matter how badly Sony and MS beat up on each other. They may even prosper a bit more due to the war between their rivals.
The problem is that you usually have to choose between better gameplay, or a more factual interpretation. This is going to always be the case in any sort of game, because the real world is complicated and has a lot of difficult problems.
Simcity has its biases because there's only so much time to program, only so much computing power to simulate stuff, and only so much complexity that a player can deal with and still have any fun.
I think there's more of a difference between a "game" and a "simulator" than most people realize. If you play a good simulator like you would a game, it's probably not going to go so well. If you play a simulator like it was real life, you'll end up with better results, but it probably will be less fun. Granted, there are people who really enjoy firing up MS Flight Simulator and trying to do a real accurate flight down the east coast. But that's really a different case than a game.
A really accurate version of sim city wouldn't be much fun. Getting things done in cities is a slow and political process, full of frustration and wasted time. Not a recipe for a fun or successful game. If you want something that accurately simulates pedestrian flow through urban spaces, you're going to need some custom software, and it's not going to be as easy as tweaking some existing game.
Sort of like how having easy access to food isn't better than starving, rather it just creates a whole different set of health problems?
There are about a zillion things that can be done on a computer with a GUI that can't be done on the command line. And another zillion things that can be done way more easily.
Calling their handhelds their equivalent to XP(Windows) for Microsoft is kind of accurate, but it's not entirely accurate in this case. The thing is, that even without their portable line, and just the Gamecube, Nintendo would probably be surviving. They've made money off of the gamecube, even if it is third place in terms of sales. The GBA isn't really subsidizing the gamecube, it's just something else that Nintendo does, which happens to make them lots of money.
Microsoft lost over $500 million dollars selling Xboxes. There aren't many companies in the world that could afford to do business like that. It's really quite amazing. They are, of course, taking a longer view of things, hoping to build a marketshare that will eventually lead to profit down the line. I think that's a very questionable strategy, it reminds me a lot of the dot com era.
I think the way that Sony was so quickly able to dominate Nintendo with the original Playstation is a good indication of how fickle gamers can be. Marketshare from one generation of consoles does not guarantee success in the next. Sony didn't kick ass with the PS2 because of more raw power. Its games don't look that much better than the N64. It won because of things it did differently (innovation). Integrated DVD player, optical media, backwards compaitibility, etc.
When you cut through all the marketing and whatnot, the Xbox360 and the PS3 are basically the same, consoles with a whole bunch more power than the current generation. The games are what's going to differentiate them, and it sounds like games for both systems are going to be kind of complicated and expensive to develop for. Nintendo's still being pretty vague with
their plans for the revolution, so I'm not going to comment on it too much.
Yeah, you're missing the whole damn point of the article.
Nintendo does not live or die on the marketshare of the gamecube compared to the PS2 and Xbox. Just like the sales of Revolution consoles compared to the PS3 and Xbox360 won't entirely determine their future.
Did Nintendo lose market share over the current generation of consoles. Yes. Is that threatening their viability as a video game company? Not as much as you'd think.
A couple points that you should have gotten out of the article. First, even without the Gameboy and DS stuff, just the Gamecube, Nintendo would've been profitable. That's the number one thing you have to do to stay in business.
Second, selling a zillion of something isn't necessarily a good thing if you lose money on each one. The Xbox is sort of a special case here, because MS is taking a longer term view of things, and has a ginormous pile of money the subsidize their video game losses.
Third, Nintendo can't afford to operate that way, and so they don't. They're not playing the marketshare at all costs game. They realize that, while bragging about how you sold more consoles than the other guy is fun to say, it doesn't necessarily do squat to your bank account. Giving Nintendo a hard time for not playing that game is to miss the point of their business plan, similar to how you missed the point of this article.
Well, all of the other new ones have sucked and been basically worthless. It was like they purposely targeted the smallest niches they could find, which will never work, because a TLD needs to get some collective mindshare before people will recognize it as a URL.
.coop? .aero? those look like typos or something. And .biz just looks so unprofessional that it hurts. But .xxx could be different. There's plenty of porn on the web. It's not a tough connection to make. And the porn sites have been on the front lines of internet since pretty much the beginning, putting all the new technologies through their paces. They're more qualified to make a new TLD work than anyone else.
If I saw a sign that said planes.travel.info or something like that, I'd be inclined to think that it's some sort of slogan or something that an overzealous designer formatted in a dumb way. While planes.travel.com or *.net just jumps out and says internet address to most everyone nowadays.
They'll pick up on it cause it's easy to understand. Since there are hordes of non-tech savvy internet users, it's pretty much all .com to them. You could probably find plenty of people who could be easily convinced that .xxx means it's on an completely different internet, and therefore harder to find.
.xxx legislation would work.
The concept behind PICS isn't terribly complicated, but the simpler you make it, the more likely people are going to try and run with it. Not that any
I don't think there will be moving as much as just duplication. If I ran ultrasluttysluts.com, I'd buy ultrasluttysluts.xxx as well. And I wouldn't care which one anyone went to.
.xxx would shut up some of those parents, I'm sure the porn site operators would be all for that, so they can get back to their business.
And new sites will probably buy both. I don't know enough about the porn industry to be able to predict if they'd want to regulate themselves enough to make the switch. I imagine most of them wouldn't mind. They're trying to make money, and people complaining and giving them a hard time about corrupting their children just slows them down a little. If moving to
The flipside is that there are lots of established sites, and switching URL's is a good way to confuse a lot of your customers.
Over all, having four devices would take more power, because I'd have four batteries to charge, but I'd expect each one to last longer than a device combining all four.
None of my gadgets have screens that glow when it's sitting in my pocket. My ipod screen doesn't light up unless I'm navigating the menus. Same with my cell phone. Or my digital camera.
If they're all on one device, however, then that battery is going to have to supply four times as much power, because any time I need to do anything, the same screen will light up. Not to mention all the other random stuff that those devices need power for.
Basically, I like the fact that I can use my mp3 player as much as I want, and if the battery runs out, I just can't listen to music anymore. If running down my iPod also meant that my phone would die as well, then I'd be a lot more cautious with my music listening, and needing to do that is not compelling to me.
Seriously. You're playing a fantasy game. When you get into the game, you're trying to transplant yourself into a world that cannot really exist. So why should anyone be trying to make it look exactly like the real world?
If I want to feel like I'm walking through a forest, then I'll go outside and find a forest. Forests are awesome and beautiful, but they're not something that I need to play a game to experience. Now, a game might be enhanced by taking place in an extraordinarily spooky forest, or one with impossibly large trees, or something else, in which case some creative art can only help.
Add in the fact that, the more realistic things try to look, the more we notice things that aren't right, and you end up very sensitive to mistakes that remind you that it's just a game, and break the immersion.
well, yeah, you could certainly create a layer interface that the user interacted with, and which then interfaced with the DS code and made it think it was a touch screen. But in terms of the user experience, it's very different. So in my mind, that doesn't really count.
At a really basic level, you can emulate just about any computer/console with any other if you took enough time to do it. Isn't that one of the laws of Turing Complete machines or something? Basically since when you boil it down, all computers are just crunching ones and zeros, any one can feasibly do what any other can, given enough time. (I don't really know what I'm talking about, just trying to remember random stuff that I've read)
It just might not run fast enough/have the correct input/output to do it in a way that an end user would find at all acceptable. So what's the point then? Maybe just the geek factor, but with games it isn't terribly useful.
Well, I think for what it's capable of, the PSP battery life sounds reasonable. But there's also plenty of people for whom four and a half hours would end up being a little short. I went to the beach a couple months ago. five hour ride each way, my DS being used basically the whole drive. the 10hours+ battery life came in handy because sometimes things get hectic and busy and I forget my charger.
I guess the point is, I generally only remember to charge my portable when the battery dies. So having it die less is nice. Not trying to poop on the PSP, just saying that more battery life is definitely a good thing.
There's two problems here though. Number one, the DS has two screens. Maybe the PSP could fake that convincingly enough. But number two, the DS has a touch screen. That's a tough piece of hardware to emulate. If someone figures out how to implement that purely in software is a damn genius, and deserves gazillions of dollars.
The problem is that apparently you don't even have to implement something to get it patented. There was an article on slashdot a while back about Sony( I think) getting a patent on using radio waves or something to interface with the brain and create experiences for us sort of Matrix-style. They flat out said that they don't have the technology to do that, and don't expect to for quite some time, but they haven't been convinced that it's impossible.
Now I think that was more of a publicity stunt then an actual grab at useful intellectual property, but what's to keep someone less scrupulous from trying to predict the future a little and patent some of the ideas they come up with? There's all sorts of neat things with physics and AI that games will hopefully implement in the future, we just don't quite have the hardware to do it yet. But that doesn't mean I can't think of some of it, and pursue patents.
Sitting on an idea doesn't cost anything. I'd have to pay a lawyer to write out all the paperwork at the beginning, but a lawyer isn't going to be spending his time banging out code for me otherwise, so I'm not really slowing down my development either. This will turn out like every other industry seems to be. A few big players cross licensing everything so that they can keep working while cutting out the new guys; and some tiny IP only companies squatting on patents and then trying to screw the big names out of ridiculous amounts of money.
The problem is, patenting things like "ideas", and "gameplay" can get a little hazy. Add in the innate human brain's ability to detect similarities and patterns, and you'll be seeing infringement everywhere you look. Everything is built upon something else to some degree. And if they don't get you with a gameplay patent, they'll trip you up with some patented technical detail in your programming.
What if the guys who made marble madness had patented "Using an electronic input device to control a digital sphere through the visual representation of a three dimensional world"? I'm no patent lawyer, so I don't know how much sense that makes, but it reads about as basic and vague to me as most of the patent summaries I browse do.
By that measure, things like bowling games or Super Monkey Ball could be threatened. Is there a connection between Super Money Ball and marble madness? Yeah, on a really superficial level. Do the games play at all alike? Nope. Were the designers inspired by Marble Madness? Maybe. Did they ruthlessly steal expensively developed ideas from the Marble Madness developers? No.
Even Katamari Damacy could be argued to fall under a patent like that. And that's generally considered one of the most fun, original games of the past year.
I'm going to agree that any kind of software patents are going to be very harmful to the industry as a whole. And just shifting the current patent system to something like video games is going to pretty much be death to it.
The lawyer's argument is basically, getting patents is a way for the current players to make more money and cement their position on top of the biz. You can't seriously make the argument that, in this case, patents will spur on innovation, because there's been leaps and bounds of innovation in the relatively patent free video game universe since its inception.
If you want to take the opinion that we're just as much a part of nature as anything else, then I think it's inaccurate to say that we have a responsibility to preserve the planet.
We should be careful of what we do for our own sake, because whether our acts are natural or not, we will have to live with the consequences.
Humans are fortunate enough to have intelligence, which gives us all sorts of cool potential. Part of that is the potential to make long term predictions about our actions. Trying to avoid results that will make life tougher for us in the future is simply pragmatic. It's too bad that forward thinking tends to be so hard for so many people.
Right on. And really, the hardware is to the point where, except for a few particular areas (games, intense video editing, etc), there's more than enough speed in just about any computer that you're going to buy today.
I'd say I qualify as a power user, and I spend a whole lot of time on my computer doing various things. Nine times out of ten, when I'm waiting on something, it's my internet connection. The speed of my actual computer has not, for the most part, been the actual issue. It can more than keep up with how fast I work. Some games can tax it, and not everything is instantaneous, but it's all quick enough that I can cope. Definitely a different situation than seven or eight years ago when I couldn't wait to upgrade with anything I could get my hands on.
A Dual G5 Powermac can don
- addition
-subtraction
-multiplication
-divisio
So it shouldn't cost much more than a typical calculator that I can buy at walmart? Oh, what? It can do lots of other stuff too? You mean it's a whole computer in there? That's why it costs more?
Right, so you want to ignore all the normal computer functionality available in a macmini, replace all that with TiVo functionality, and then buy it for the price of a TiVo? Maybe you're missing the point here. There are a number of companies that sell DVR's, perhaps you should go buy one of those.
Yeah, It wasn't really the "embrace and extend" thing that MS did that was bad. it was the third step, which was to not share their extensions.
It's really a semantic argument I guess. In the confines of the term "embrace and extend", extending is something bad. While writing "extensions" to software, or suggesting "extensions" to a standard is something that happens all the time.
Standards aren't codified to stop all development and make things boring. They're written so that there's one place and system for making extensions, and sharing them.
Hah! You'd think so. I did too. I live in New Orleans, she lives in New Jersey. When I go visit, I can expect to spend the better part of a day fixing stuff. Then, without fail, she remembers a whole other list of stuff she wants fixed/changed/installed a couple hours before I'm supposed to leave.
Well, as a fairly laid back apple fan boy, it's been my observation that Apple's fans are also some of its harshest critics. For example, when Aqua was first announced, plenty of hardcore apple websites were nitpicking it to death, despite the fact that their own exposure to it was a webcast of a demo that Steve Jobs did for a half hour.
.doc compatibility issues, and a million other things seemed to be doing their best to take the fun out of computing, even when I consciously avoid MS software.
They just tend to get really defensive when "outsiders"(meaning windows users) start criticising the mac. Partially because windows has been such a POS operating system. It's like someone driving an old rusty noisy car driving up to my cleaner, well kept vehicle and giving me crap because he doesn't like my hubcaps. Maybe my hubcaps could be better, but if you're not offering me something superior, then you're wasting my time.
Secondly, there's been a lot of bitterness because MS and their windows monopoly has made things a lot tougher for other OS'es. Their breaking HTML,
Seriously. My mom refuses to get a mac, because she says she doesn't want to take the time to learn anything new. Even if it took her an extra hour to get stuff done for the first week after switching, she'd make that time up in about a month or two not having to deal with her computer getting its ass kicked by malware like she does now.
I've done lots of reading up on xHTML and CSS. I have an appreciation for webstandards. And it's certainly easier to get consistent results than it was in the past. But I'm not talking about simple layouts. We're talking about a graphic designer (who was originally trained as an architect (that makes it worse, trust me ;)), designing very complex things, lots of blocks and shapes overlapping, and trying to fit ridiculous amounts of content into a 700px by 500px box because she thinks that any sort of scrolling is the ultimate sign of failure.
Really, IE makes the whole thing a lot harder than it has to be. It's closer to trivial to make it work under mozilla, safari, opera, etc, but then have to break all that to get IE to cooperate.
It's not an impossible task. I finally accomplished most of what she wanted. It just took inordinately long, and was not fun. And if she ever wants to add more content or different content to many pages, it's going to break all over again. That's all basically a result of her lack of understanding about how websites work, and her refusal to accept things that I tried to explain from the beginning. But, either way, I don't care, cause I don't work for her anymore. yay.
I don't really know what goes on in a satellite radio reciever, but my roommate has one in his car, and that sucker gets really hot. Amazingly hot. He spent some time reading up on forums and it seems that it does that for everyone, but he was concerned that it was broken at first.
I know he's just trying to make sirius look more viable since they seem to be losing out to XM, but shouldn't he consider Apple's general attitude towards not announcing stuff ahead of time and keep his mouth shut.