yeah, I knew it wasn't an exact fit, but it got the point across, and I couldn't think of anything better. I don't like "prior art" any more, because it seems to me that art is something that was already created, but didn't inherently exist.
Windows is a trademarked name for a limited and specific set of commercial software, developed through the work of thousands of engineers/programmers, at a costs way into the millions of dollars.
Googol is a word that some kid made up to describe a big number that existed a priori. Even if you could sell a googol of something(that'd be a whole hell of a lot), you can't sell a googol itself.
It's one of those paradoxes that you can bring up to question the whole idea of God. Sort of like, if God is all powerful, can he create a rock so big that even he can't lift it?
If I claim that human beings have free will, but at the same time, God is capable of seeing and knowing all, then he must know what choices I'm going to make. And so whatever sort of creation (of the earth, universe, whatever) that God put into motion at the beginning, he must've known that it would eventually lead to me having whatever decision to make, and what choice I would select. So did I really get to make the choice at all? Or was I set up?
I certainly feel like I have free will. I'm confident that I could make a decision and take an action that noone could ever expect. The next time I see my mom, I could walk up to her and punch her in the eye for no reason. Did God know I was about to do that? Is it all part of some greater plan?
So do we even really have choice? If not, then why does this plan that God has made us all players in have such a crappy script? What's the point of it all?
I dunno. People have spent lifetimes trying to figure this out, and haven't gotten anywhere. I think I'll go play desert combat instead.
You'd maybe be right except that the patent system is not a world wide entity, and there are many of places where US or european patents are easily ignored. If litigation and fears of it halt all the innovation in the western world, it'll just be that much easier for other countries to catch up and then surpass.
A lot of us find the small size of the GBA SP to be one of its best advantages. As for the games' qualities, if you're talking just graphics, then yes, they're SNES quality. If you're talking gameplay value, well, a big chunk of the games have original NES quality gameplay, because they're almost direct ports. And you know what, that's a great thing, because there were a lot of really great NES games. There's also some excellent SNES ports, as well as plenty of other original games.
Will two screens be all that useful for a racing game, maybe not. Is a computer mouse the an ideal steering mechanism for a racing game? Not really, but that doesn't mean mice are a bad idea. Just because two screens won't necessarily make everything better doesn't mean they have no value. And also, these two screens are fairly small, so I question how hard it will be to monitor both of them (if the game's interface is designed well, naturally). Sweeping my eyes up and down across both DS screens should take less time than looking across my 19" computer monitor.
Yeah, never mind the fact that I routinely have to carry a large amount of stuff that can't get wet. Perhaps I could just get two smaller cars, and chain them together instead.
However slowly, a lot of the third world countries are industrialising/modernising. And if you're actually trying to run a legitimate business, it's often preferrable to have a legal infrastructure to your operations. If you start making enough money using things that you don't legally own, you're going to eventually get busted, whether you're stealing electricity, or stealing software.
The advantages of linux and the like extend beyond price alone. Linux did not exist in a viable form when the windows empire took hold of the states, but it has a fighting chance in some of these new markets. While I doubt that linux will ever reach a point of domination similar to what windows has gotten, (honestly, would any reasonable person want it to?), it will force a lot of interoperability efforts on behalf of MS.
Don't be so paranoid. They'd have to pay an awful lot of talented people to get the volume of linux viruses up to a level where windows would compare favorably. And that effort would be nowhere near the risk of the horrible PR that would be generated when someone revealed that MS was paying them to write these linux viruses.
Yeah, that'll hopefully show everyone how stupid the RIAA is being, but the downside to that is Apple would stand to lose even more than the RIAA, and through no real fault of their own.
I think that's pretty sad considering how Apple really got the whole legal music downloading deal moving along, and they're consistently very innovative for a big comptuer company.
While there are certainly going to be people who will let work become a 24hr event by doing it at home (there already are lots of them in fact), I think you're being overly negative for no reason.
Being away from an office and in your home gives you much more control over your work space, your schedule, and your job in general, provided you have the self-discipline to handle it.
Work is a fact of life. Not many people are born into enough wealth to sit around all day, and most of those who are still feel like working. It's not an inherently evil thing, so don't pretend like it is.
The difference between sony's hype and nintendo's hype has always amused me. Sony talks about numbers and cinematic graphics and whatnot, and the fancy technologies built into the hardware while Nintendo talks about trying to get developers excited about the possibilities of two screens, or their new controller design, with certain buttons being prioritized, and how that might lead to new types of games.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but it makes me believe that Nintendo, as a company, just might have a better philosophy and culture in regards to gaming.
The virtual boy had a lot of problems, no doubt. It was so completely out there, so entirely different than anything else. I don't think the DS is so wacky that people will be afraid of it. Plus it probably won't give everyone headaches in the same way.
Honestly, I cannot imagine how sony intends to get reasonable battery life out of the PSP if it really has all this good stuff that they're claiming. On a console system, the two most important things in order of relevance are games and hype. On a portable, it's games, battery life, and hype. I think the useability of the different systems is where this battle is going to be won and/or lost.
Ideally, we elect our officials and provide money for government so that they'll create laws that best benefit our country and its citizens. That's what they're there for. The fact that they often do a crappy job doesn't invalidate all the legislature out there.
If you want to give all of your money away to some cause so that the government gets none of it, then that's fine, more power to you. If you want to find loopholes around the tax laws to pass the money on, go ahead.
Yeah, the government wastes lots of money, I don't approve of everything that my taxes go towards, but then again the govenment has been involved in the creation of a lot of infrastructure that I use every day. And that stuff takes money. I'd prefer that as much money as is possible comes from dead people, as opposed to from my money.
This was part of the reason given for making the gamecube zelda game cel-shaded. The problem with making realistic looking games is that everyone has a very good idea what reality looks like, so any way that your game falls short will be very apparent. Duplicating the real world is a tough thing to do. But cel-shading puts a game into its own sort of universe, making it easy for the gamer to forgive things that are missing, or wrong (suspension of disbelief).
And of course, there are still plenty of game ideas which are so far disconnected from reality that a realistic visual world wouldn't make sense. How do you make a realistic looking sonic the hedgehog? A realistic looking hedghog can't do all those sonicy things.
Listen, admitting potential problems of pure capitalism does not equal communism. Just like anti-trust legislation, inheritance tax exists for the greater good of the country's citizens at large.
Let's just assume that Bill Gates earned all his money through his skills in business and computers or whatever. This large pile of wealth makes him a very powerful person. Is it necessarily in the best interests of our country to have that much power pass on to his kids, just because they happen to be his kids?
I went to college with a bunch of assholes who refused to believe that they deserved anything less than everything they wanted, just because their parents had big bank accounts. And none of them were from billionaire families.
And it's not like the government is going to take all of the money. If they took two thirds of it, there's still billions to be spread around. Some people are going to inherit way more money than I can ever imagine having.
actually, this all sounds pretty decent to me. It's a small town, they can't be expected to hire a hundred specialists, and so someone at the department asks for help from someone who knows more about it. And they catch the guy. What's the problem here? Sounds to me like the detective was acting like, well...a detective.
Was Mitnick the only person who could've helped them, due to his ex-con hacker status? Doubtful. Could the phone companies have been better about it? Probably. If something similar happens again, will the cops know better how to deal with it? They should.
I don't think it's necessarily quite that sinister in this case. I think it's more about apple makes their store, then a bunch of other companies decide they need to open up something asap, and so everyone's just throwing together whatever they can to get things moving, and there's chaos as a result.
The collaboration will start to happen as more and more of these companies realize that the system they jury-rigged together isn't going to cut it, and that they'll save money by working with someone else.
Apple is the big question here though. Their system seems to be well thought out, seems to be working well, and they're feeling pretty secure with their exclusive ownership of it. Part of that's about keeping all the money for themselves, part of it is their belief in controlling the consistency of the experience. How that'll play out for them remains to be seen. Will it hold everything back? Will Apple just lose relevency? Do they have some other tricks up their sleeve? Should be interesting to watch.
Your parent comment didn't even mention the actual usability of the app. It was merely talking about the appearance, and it put forwards a good point.
Design is more than just what pieces you throw together. It's all about carefully choosing those pieces, understanding how they relate, and then compositing them carefully. And doing that correctly improves a program's appearance and usability. It's an important lesson to keep in mind, whatever type of use your interface is going to have.
Exactly. By the time anything becomes national or global, it has already become more of a beurocracy than anything else, by the very nature of organizations of that size. The people at the top are too far disconnected from people on the ground doing real work, and even if they have good intentions, they're not going to be able to make proper decisions. Although it's cliched, the saying "think globally, act locally" is some of the best advice for environmentalists.
I think the argument over what's outside of the universe is almost semantic. Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't the definition of the Universe in it's pure form the encapsulation of everything that exists? Like if we discovered that subspace a la Star Trek actually existed, subspace wouldn't be an alternate universe, it's just that our definition of the universe has expanded. Likewise, if we were to realize that outside of this "funnel shaped universe" is an unbelievably huge number of those plastic balls in the playpen's at Mcdonalds, then our definition of the Universe grows to include them?
That's not how infinity works though. The set of all even numbers {2,4,6,8,...} is infinitely large, but there's still room for lots of numbers between them. 1, 3, 5.345245...
That being said, yeah, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean there's an infinite amount of matter.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, I knew it wasn't an exact fit, but it got the point across, and I couldn't think of anything better. I don't like "prior art" any more, because it seems to me that art is something that was already created, but didn't inherently exist.
Good luck getting an architect to design a building with only four sides.
Windows is a trademarked name for a limited and specific set of commercial software, developed through the work of thousands of engineers/programmers, at a costs way into the millions of dollars.
Googol is a word that some kid made up to describe a big number that existed a priori. Even if you could sell a googol of something(that'd be a whole hell of a lot), you can't sell a googol itself.
some early-twenties geek with the writing level of an eleven year old.
It's one of those paradoxes that you can bring up to question the whole idea of God. Sort of like, if God is all powerful, can he create a rock so big that even he can't lift it?
If I claim that human beings have free will, but at the same time, God is capable of seeing and knowing all, then he must know what choices I'm going to make. And so whatever sort of creation (of the earth, universe, whatever) that God put into motion at the beginning, he must've known that it would eventually lead to me having whatever decision to make, and what choice I would select. So did I really get to make the choice at all? Or was I set up?
I certainly feel like I have free will. I'm confident that I could make a decision and take an action that noone could ever expect. The next time I see my mom, I could walk up to her and punch her in the eye for no reason. Did God know I was about to do that? Is it all part of some greater plan?
So do we even really have choice? If not, then why does this plan that God has made us all players in have such a crappy script? What's the point of it all?
I dunno. People have spent lifetimes trying to figure this out, and haven't gotten anywhere. I think I'll go play desert combat instead.
You'd maybe be right except that the patent system is not a world wide entity, and there are many of places where US or european patents are easily ignored. If litigation and fears of it halt all the innovation in the western world, it'll just be that much easier for other countries to catch up and then surpass.
A lot of us find the small size of the GBA SP to be one of its best advantages. As for the games' qualities, if you're talking just graphics, then yes, they're SNES quality. If you're talking gameplay value, well, a big chunk of the games have original NES quality gameplay, because they're almost direct ports. And you know what, that's a great thing, because there were a lot of really great NES games. There's also some excellent SNES ports, as well as plenty of other original games.
Will two screens be all that useful for a racing game, maybe not. Is a computer mouse the an ideal steering mechanism for a racing game? Not really, but that doesn't mean mice are a bad idea. Just because two screens won't necessarily make everything better doesn't mean they have no value. And also, these two screens are fairly small, so I question how hard it will be to monitor both of them (if the game's interface is designed well, naturally). Sweeping my eyes up and down across both DS screens should take less time than looking across my 19" computer monitor.
Yeah, never mind the fact that I routinely have to carry a large amount of stuff that can't get wet. Perhaps I could just get two smaller cars, and chain them together instead.
The advantages of linux and the like extend beyond price alone. Linux did not exist in a viable form when the windows empire took hold of the states, but it has a fighting chance in some of these new markets. While I doubt that linux will ever reach a point of domination similar to what windows has gotten, (honestly, would any reasonable person want it to?), it will force a lot of interoperability efforts on behalf of MS.
Don't be so paranoid. They'd have to pay an awful lot of talented people to get the volume of linux viruses up to a level where windows would compare favorably. And that effort would be nowhere near the risk of the horrible PR that would be generated when someone revealed that MS was paying them to write these linux viruses.
This is basically a patent on the reality of spam. A bunch of noise that makes email/IM/p2p such a mess that it's hard to find anything that you want.
If only someone held a patent on spam, maybe that'd lower the volume of it somewhat.
Yeah, that'll hopefully show everyone how stupid the RIAA is being, but the downside to that is Apple would stand to lose even more than the RIAA, and through no real fault of their own.
I think that's pretty sad considering how Apple really got the whole legal music downloading deal moving along, and they're consistently very innovative for a big comptuer company.
While there are certainly going to be people who will let work become a 24hr event by doing it at home (there already are lots of them in fact), I think you're being overly negative for no reason.
Being away from an office and in your home gives you much more control over your work space, your schedule, and your job in general, provided you have the self-discipline to handle it.
Work is a fact of life. Not many people are born into enough wealth to sit around all day, and most of those who are still feel like working. It's not an inherently evil thing, so don't pretend like it is.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but it makes me believe that Nintendo, as a company, just might have a better philosophy and culture in regards to gaming.
The virtual boy had a lot of problems, no doubt. It was so completely out there, so entirely different than anything else. I don't think the DS is so wacky that people will be afraid of it. Plus it probably won't give everyone headaches in the same way.
Honestly, I cannot imagine how sony intends to get reasonable battery life out of the PSP if it really has all this good stuff that they're claiming. On a console system, the two most important things in order of relevance are games and hype. On a portable, it's games, battery life, and hype. I think the useability of the different systems is where this battle is going to be won and/or lost.
Ideally, we elect our officials and provide money for government so that they'll create laws that best benefit our country and its citizens. That's what they're there for. The fact that they often do a crappy job doesn't invalidate all the legislature out there.
If you want to give all of your money away to some cause so that the government gets none of it, then that's fine, more power to you. If you want to find loopholes around the tax laws to pass the money on, go ahead.
Yeah, the government wastes lots of money, I don't approve of everything that my taxes go towards, but then again the govenment has been involved in the creation of a lot of infrastructure that I use every day. And that stuff takes money. I'd prefer that as much money as is possible comes from dead people, as opposed to from my money.
This was part of the reason given for making the gamecube zelda game cel-shaded. The problem with making realistic looking games is that everyone has a very good idea what reality looks like, so any way that your game falls short will be very apparent. Duplicating the real world is a tough thing to do. But cel-shading puts a game into its own sort of universe, making it easy for the gamer to forgive things that are missing, or wrong (suspension of disbelief).
And of course, there are still plenty of game ideas which are so far disconnected from reality that a realistic visual world wouldn't make sense. How do you make a realistic looking sonic the hedgehog? A realistic looking hedghog can't do all those sonicy things.
Listen, admitting potential problems of pure capitalism does not equal communism. Just like anti-trust legislation, inheritance tax exists for the greater good of the country's citizens at large.
Let's just assume that Bill Gates earned all his money through his skills in business and computers or whatever. This large pile of wealth makes him a very powerful person. Is it necessarily in the best interests of our country to have that much power pass on to his kids, just because they happen to be his kids?
I went to college with a bunch of assholes who refused to believe that they deserved anything less than everything they wanted, just because their parents had big bank accounts. And none of them were from billionaire families.
And it's not like the government is going to take all of the money. If they took two thirds of it, there's still billions to be spread around. Some people are going to inherit way more money than I can ever imagine having.
actually, this all sounds pretty decent to me. It's a small town, they can't be expected to hire a hundred specialists, and so someone at the department asks for help from someone who knows more about it. And they catch the guy. What's the problem here? Sounds to me like the detective was acting like, well...a detective.
Was Mitnick the only person who could've helped them, due to his ex-con hacker status? Doubtful. Could the phone companies have been better about it? Probably. If something similar happens again, will the cops know better how to deal with it? They should.
except these people are probably planning on outsourcing all their future inventors to cut costs ;)
I don't think it's necessarily quite that sinister in this case. I think it's more about apple makes their store, then a bunch of other companies decide they need to open up something asap, and so everyone's just throwing together whatever they can to get things moving, and there's chaos as a result.
The collaboration will start to happen as more and more of these companies realize that the system they jury-rigged together isn't going to cut it, and that they'll save money by working with someone else.
Apple is the big question here though. Their system seems to be well thought out, seems to be working well, and they're feeling pretty secure with their exclusive ownership of it. Part of that's about keeping all the money for themselves, part of it is their belief in controlling the consistency of the experience. How that'll play out for them remains to be seen. Will it hold everything back? Will Apple just lose relevency? Do they have some other tricks up their sleeve? Should be interesting to watch.
Design is more than just what pieces you throw together. It's all about carefully choosing those pieces, understanding how they relate, and then compositing them carefully. And doing that correctly improves a program's appearance and usability. It's an important lesson to keep in mind, whatever type of use your interface is going to have.
Exactly. By the time anything becomes national or global, it has already become more of a beurocracy than anything else, by the very nature of organizations of that size. The people at the top are too far disconnected from people on the ground doing real work, and even if they have good intentions, they're not going to be able to make proper decisions. Although it's cliched, the saying "think globally, act locally" is some of the best advice for environmentalists.
I think the argument over what's outside of the universe is almost semantic. Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't the definition of the Universe in it's pure form the encapsulation of everything that exists? Like if we discovered that subspace a la Star Trek actually existed, subspace wouldn't be an alternate universe, it's just that our definition of the universe has expanded. Likewise, if we were to realize that outside of this "funnel shaped universe" is an unbelievably huge number of those plastic balls in the playpen's at Mcdonalds, then our definition of the Universe grows to include them?
That's not how infinity works though. The set of all even numbers {2,4,6,8,...} is infinitely large, but there's still room for lots of numbers between them. 1, 3, 5.345245...
That being said, yeah, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean there's an infinite amount of matter.