Then I want to pose a straightforward devil's advocate question. What is different about what you just described from every other patent in existence?
Every patent is a design for a widget. The patent for that widget is a guide/physical steps/algorithm for building that widget. Why does physically moving stuff instead of logically moving information make one patentable and fine and the other "as wrong as it gets"?
Actually, they did fix the sound control from being directly tied to the scroll wheel. There is now an option in the hotkey selection window to allow the scroll wheel to seek or be ignored and subsequently mapped to a hotkey.
I just noticed the setting this release. Since it was a pulldown option instead of just using hotkey mapping, it was non-obvious.
Nope, not what I intended. The visual and measured portion of the percentage scale is from 0-100. Where the sqrt of the maximum value of the scale is 10. That is where I was saying that the natural milestone or increment is.
To apply it to what you were saying. The range of numbers in your scale is that you have a set of 100 Hundredths. Since we are talking about a range of hundredths, treating the hundredths as a discrete entity, the sqrt(100) of the set of hundredths is 10 hundredths. Not mathematically correct if all units are considered, but numerically accurate with a discrete set, or just an interesting aside if nothing else.
Numerically 10% could be considered "magic" because it is the square root of 100%. So, in a sense, it is a natural milestone that scales regardless of the number of fingers or base.
Another idea that I have toyed with is to have quasi-fixed length auctions based around how much someone is willing to pay. You display a list of possible bid amounts bounded by a (un)reasonable minimum and maximum. Then depending on how much is bid, end the auction at an earlier time. So if a two week auction has a range of $0 - $100 of possible bids, if someone bids $50, then the auction ending is shortened to half the time left, or a week. If someone bids $95 to $100, the auction is shortened to hours away or even a "buy it now" option respectively.
The cool thing about this is it naturally makes bid sniping worthless, gives value to bidding more, and allows people to get things quicker on average, so it increases the volume of sales and customer satisfaction at the same time.
Unfortunately, the $25B/gram is an ideal price. With the actual production estimates at around 30 nanograms per year by 2020, the best case scenario is a couple hundred treatments by the end of the century. Not too bad, I suppose, for budding new technology, but there are a lot of other development breakthroughs that need to be made before this is even a remote treatment option for the next couple generations. Hopefully our tech accelerates fast enough that next generation's teens are building anti-matter containment chambers for science fairs, but I'm guessing that the technology entrance is a little higher than the boyscout breeder reactors of the present.
Unfortunately, Anti-matter is currently the most expensive substance on the planet. At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram. I suggest they spend their time on a more practical solution to the cancer problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
They might as well say aether can also cure cancer. It would probably be cheaper to discover/create.
Along with the points made by others, you should be able to interact with the world in ways the developer may not have directly intended. Red Faction went quite a ways in this regard to allow destructible environments. If I want to jump through a window, it should break. If I shoot a rocket at a wall, the wall should give. Maybe I want to use that hole as a detour. Of course, that event should alert the locals that I'm a rocket toting machine. In an action game, should never be "trapped" in a portion of a level when there are obvious artificial restrictions on your exits.
I hope they do revoke the keys. The cat and mouse game needs to be played, and the keys need to be cracked, and revoked again. It is the only way that the consumer that buys the revoked players can see the garbage that is the current DRM model. Once these formats are severely hindered, and possibly fail, maybe a more sane solution to the copy protection can be agreed upon.
Unfortunately, about the only "RPG" game that assumes you have a hero character is actually an RTS. The RTS games that employ the hero unit mentality basically give you a role to play, and a short adventure to play it in. Your character has all of the best powers pretty much off the bat. The problem is the local story is probably not too fleshed out, unless you're in a campaign. The end result is kind of a boring RPG, which is why RPG games usually start your character at the bottom.
I used to think about the whole upgrade path thing before too, but really beyond a video card, I've found that upgrading a PC is not as feasible as it once was. It is often cheaper or easier to just buy a new one in the end anyway and use the old one for a guest machine. I look at my couple year old computer now, and I think of what actually needs upgrading. I can't upgrade the processor because the new ones don't fit the motherboard. So, I would have to replace most of the internals anyway to fit the newer PCI express slots. And after all that is done, my machine that is usable for everything but this years games would have to be wastefully thrown out.
Statistics and math tuning should be selectively applied to add polish to the game play. If you try to balance everything out using math you tend to blur the lines of creativity. Especially in RTS games and good RPG games, interesting game play comes from the potential imbalances in the game that require tactics to overcome and choices to be made. Between which faction you choose, or whether to be a Paladin or Shaman in WoW (which has now has had it's uniqueness "balanced" away), it's the unbalanced choices that help people feel that their decisions make a difference in a game.
Correct to an extent. Even assuming that full DX10 games actually hit the market in the next few years, 1up's article which announced that the Xbox 360 wasn't going to be fully DX10 capable quotes an ATI representative (probably only slightly biased) that the 360 is running a special DX9 that, as relating to the game Crysis, makes it so that "DX10 visuals can be replicated on the Xbox360, but it can't be properly called DX10." So, the 360 still has graphical growth to hold it over, and should be reasonably comparable to the majority of the DX10 games for the near future.
With the increase in home theater systems, and Xbox 360 adoption, Microsoft has actually moved the major drive for DX10 graphics to their console. While this move pushes them into the living room, it lowers the need for people to move to Vista and DX10. We all know that games drive the video card/driver market. With the games now on the 360, the computer OS being Vista is less relevant.
Exactly right. If done correctly, run-time loadable firmware is a very efficient solution to keeping devices and interfaces up to date. The main requirement put on the device manufacturer is a binary linkable or ascii #include'able firmware driver and a spec for the driver to tell the device to load and interface with the firmware. OS "drivers" can then be packaged with the firmware and tailored to it specifically. Since they can be a single package, version compatibility issues disappear.
I'm semi-surprised by the angst against downloadable firmware. If anything, the problem really is the usual big company resistance to provide specs for their hardware interfaces.
It won't be an issue for too long. The cloning of livestock debate will be heated for a while, but before long, it will follow the path of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH). BGH was a hot button issue for several years, but now everyone grabs their gallon of milk without even looking at what the label says. So even if they specifically label the meat, the farmers will take an initial hit due to controversy, get government kickbacks, and wait until people become indifferent again to make even greater profits.
True. My logic stemmed from that I could take the backup and throw it on any other machine close at hand and fire up the email or other app and get access to the data. The flaw in my logic is that I have the spare machine to use, and plenty of Knoppix/Ubuntu/etc. disks laying around to use if I didn't, where the "average" user probably only has one machine. Good point.
That is true in the sense of completely losing or corrupting your data. The other edge of the sword is access to your data. When systems go down, and you can't get to your Gmail or other remote hosted account or service, who can you really call? You are stuck. If all I need is a phone number or photo that I stored a year ago, I can always grab my DVD backup of my email or images and use it. If your online service is gone or the internet access is failing, you are completely locked out of your data.
I also use and mostly trust Gmail. That said, I had a situation in the past where I needed to call an important someone back at a certain time, and the phone number was in an email stored on a web email site (not Gmail). This site conveniently went down for some un-scheduled maintenance or something for a few hours. Yes, I should have written the number down, but the moral is when you put your trust in services where there is no real recourse when they mess up, you need to make the effort to backup the critical online information as well to ensure that you maintain access to it.
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Then I want to pose a straightforward devil's advocate question. What is different about what you just described from every other patent in existence? Every patent is a design for a widget. The patent for that widget is a guide/physical steps/algorithm for building that widget. Why does physically moving stuff instead of logically moving information make one patentable and fine and the other "as wrong as it gets"?
Actually, they did fix the sound control from being directly tied to the scroll wheel. There is now an option in the hotkey selection window to allow the scroll wheel to seek or be ignored and subsequently mapped to a hotkey. I just noticed the setting this release. Since it was a pulldown option instead of just using hotkey mapping, it was non-obvious.
Nope, not what I intended. The visual and measured portion of the percentage scale is from 0-100. Where the sqrt of the maximum value of the scale is 10. That is where I was saying that the natural milestone or increment is.
To apply it to what you were saying. The range of numbers in your scale is that you have a set of 100 Hundredths. Since we are talking about a range of hundredths, treating the hundredths as a discrete entity, the sqrt(100) of the set of hundredths is 10 hundredths. Not mathematically correct if all units are considered, but numerically accurate with a discrete set, or just an interesting aside if nothing else.
Numerically 10% could be considered "magic" because it is the square root of 100%. So, in a sense, it is a natural milestone that scales regardless of the number of fingers or base.
Another idea that I have toyed with is to have quasi-fixed length auctions based around how much someone is willing to pay. You display a list of possible bid amounts bounded by a (un)reasonable minimum and maximum. Then depending on how much is bid, end the auction at an earlier time. So if a two week auction has a range of $0 - $100 of possible bids, if someone bids $50, then the auction ending is shortened to half the time left, or a week. If someone bids $95 to $100, the auction is shortened to hours away or even a "buy it now" option respectively.
The cool thing about this is it naturally makes bid sniping worthless, gives value to bidding more, and allows people to get things quicker on average, so it increases the volume of sales and customer satisfaction at the same time.
Unfortunately, the $25B/gram is an ideal price. With the actual production estimates at around 30 nanograms per year by 2020, the best case scenario is a couple hundred treatments by the end of the century. Not too bad, I suppose, for budding new technology, but there are a lot of other development breakthroughs that need to be made before this is even a remote treatment option for the next couple generations. Hopefully our tech accelerates fast enough that next generation's teens are building anti-matter containment chambers for science fairs, but I'm guessing that the technology entrance is a little higher than the boyscout breeder reactors of the present.
Unfortunately, Anti-matter is currently the most expensive substance on the planet. At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram. I suggest they spend their time on a more practical solution to the cancer problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
They might as well say aether can also cure cancer. It would probably be cheaper to discover/create.
"Wocka Wocka Wocka." -Fozzie
Along with the points made by others, you should be able to interact with the world in ways the developer may not have directly intended. Red Faction went quite a ways in this regard to allow destructible environments. If I want to jump through a window, it should break. If I shoot a rocket at a wall, the wall should give. Maybe I want to use that hole as a detour. Of course, that event should alert the locals that I'm a rocket toting machine. In an action game, should never be "trapped" in a portion of a level when there are obvious artificial restrictions on your exits.
I hope they do revoke the keys. The cat and mouse game needs to be played, and the keys need to be cracked, and revoked again. It is the only way that the consumer that buys the revoked players can see the garbage that is the current DRM model. Once these formats are severely hindered, and possibly fail, maybe a more sane solution to the copy protection can be agreed upon.
Unfortunately, about the only "RPG" game that assumes you have a hero character is actually an RTS. The RTS games that employ the hero unit mentality basically give you a role to play, and a short adventure to play it in. Your character has all of the best powers pretty much off the bat. The problem is the local story is probably not too fleshed out, unless you're in a campaign. The end result is kind of a boring RPG, which is why RPG games usually start your character at the bottom.
I used to think about the whole upgrade path thing before too, but really beyond a video card, I've found that upgrading a PC is not as feasible as it once was. It is often cheaper or easier to just buy a new one in the end anyway and use the old one for a guest machine. I look at my couple year old computer now, and I think of what actually needs upgrading. I can't upgrade the processor because the new ones don't fit the motherboard. So, I would have to replace most of the internals anyway to fit the newer PCI express slots. And after all that is done, my machine that is usable for everything but this years games would have to be wastefully thrown out.
Statistics and math tuning should be selectively applied to add polish to the game play. If you try to balance everything out using math you tend to blur the lines of creativity. Especially in RTS games and good RPG games, interesting game play comes from the potential imbalances in the game that require tactics to overcome and choices to be made. Between which faction you choose, or whether to be a Paladin or Shaman in WoW (which has now has had it's uniqueness "balanced" away), it's the unbalanced choices that help people feel that their decisions make a difference in a game.
Correct to an extent. Even assuming that full DX10 games actually hit the market in the next few years, 1up's article which announced that the Xbox 360 wasn't going to be fully DX10 capable quotes an ATI representative (probably only slightly biased) that the 360 is running a special DX9 that, as relating to the game Crysis, makes it so that "DX10 visuals can be replicated on the Xbox360, but it can't be properly called DX10." So, the 360 still has graphical growth to hold it over, and should be reasonably comparable to the majority of the DX10 games for the near future.
With the increase in home theater systems, and Xbox 360 adoption, Microsoft has actually moved the major drive for DX10 graphics to their console. While this move pushes them into the living room, it lowers the need for people to move to Vista and DX10. We all know that games drive the video card/driver market. With the games now on the 360, the computer OS being Vista is less relevant.
I'm semi-surprised by the angst against downloadable firmware. If anything, the problem really is the usual big company resistance to provide specs for their hardware interfaces.
It won't be an issue for too long. The cloning of livestock debate will be heated for a while, but before long, it will follow the path of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH). BGH was a hot button issue for several years, but now everyone grabs their gallon of milk without even looking at what the label says. So even if they specifically label the meat, the farmers will take an initial hit due to controversy, get government kickbacks, and wait until people become indifferent again to make even greater profits.
True. My logic stemmed from that I could take the backup and throw it on any other machine close at hand and fire up the email or other app and get access to the data. The flaw in my logic is that I have the spare machine to use, and plenty of Knoppix/Ubuntu/etc. disks laying around to use if I didn't, where the "average" user probably only has one machine. Good point.
That is true in the sense of completely losing or corrupting your data. The other edge of the sword is access to your data. When systems go down, and you can't get to your Gmail or other remote hosted account or service, who can you really call? You are stuck. If all I need is a phone number or photo that I stored a year ago, I can always grab my DVD backup of my email or images and use it. If your online service is gone or the internet access is failing, you are completely locked out of your data. I also use and mostly trust Gmail. That said, I had a situation in the past where I needed to call an important someone back at a certain time, and the phone number was in an email stored on a web email site (not Gmail). This site conveniently went down for some un-scheduled maintenance or something for a few hours. Yes, I should have written the number down, but the moral is when you put your trust in services where there is no real recourse when they mess up, you need to make the effort to backup the critical online information as well to ensure that you maintain access to it.