Who's going to risk developing stuff when you're sued left and right before you even know somebody filed a patent for it while you RDed? This can potentially kill off alot of inventing.
And THIS is truely the main point against software patents.
The patent system was created to encourage people to invent. In modern times, it is having the opposite effect.
Instead of encouraging *creative* innovation, they are just encouraging "first post"-style patents on aspects of software development which would have ultimately been achieved anyway.
The fundamental problem with the patent system is that the more patents the PTO approves, the more revenue they make.
This feedback system needs to be reversed. They need to benefit by turning away frivolous patents, not by encouraging them.
As I understand it now, it costs a small amount of money to have your patent reviewed, and then upon approval, a large amount of money to have it officially registered. Perhaps if they switched these two so that it cost more up front to have a patent reviewed and a much smaller amount to have it registered (if it passes review), then this problem of abusively high approval rates would diminish substantially.
The problem especially with software patents is that many aspects of software development have an innate path of evolution.
Things like the Huffman encoder would have been discovered by someone eventually, given enough time. It would have certianly have been discovered by now.
Note I say 'discovered' not 'invented' becuase discovering how to do a huffman encoder is not all that different than discovering the 10-billionth digit of pi.
They are so large probably becuase the data you are downloading is NOT literally a patch, but instead just an archive of files meant to completely replace the existing files.
Why do something elegantly when you have a reputation for bloat?
I honestly begin to wonder if security is deliberately kept as a minimal concern with Windows so that people who own versions of the operating system that have fallen out of support are *forced* to upgrade.
What recourse does a person running an older version of windows have if their "obsolete" operating system becomes completely unusable due to prominent exploits?
This could be especially problematic if you are depending on some really complicated applications which will not run on the newer operating systems.
Related: Has anyone ever been to MGM in Florida and done the THX sound effects studio? You sit in a pitch black room with headphones on and it sounds like you are actually getting a haircut, getting your hair blow dried (and you feel heat - but there's not any), + you get annoyed by a fly in the room... I remember the voiceover saying that the darkness of the room tuned your senses - particularly your ears.
A combination of very hi-fi microphones placed in a physical mock-up of a human head (so that the microphones pick up at the position of the opening of the fake ear canals) and good quality headphones (especially those with excellent low-frequency) to play back the sound at those exact same points on your head creates this effect, commonly referred to as binaural or 3D Audio.
It's pretty awesome and quite a good trick especially if the lights are turned off so that your visual sensory input doesn't dampen the effect when you see nothing there.
Here's a quick page you can scan through of the equipment involved.
They would pr obably get more pl ayers int erested in joi ning them if the y fixed the pr oblem with the r andom extra spacin g in their FA Q.
WTF? I've seen this occasionally before. How does this happen?
I gave up quickly with trying to read their site as it is a real pain in the ass to keep re-parsing their sentences to try to put together the right letters to re-form the words.
An translation to real money would open up the companies to far too much litigation. Real money would make the virtual items begin to take on some aspects of real items.
The companies running the MMOs would have to resolve virtual item and property ownership claims and would open themselves up to serious litigation. I can see players would be filing lawsuits against other players for using exploits to damage their virtual property.
And how about one really major thing I haven't seen mentioned so far...
Income Taxes.
You can bet if real money is changing hands that the government will want to take a chunk of it. You'd have to give your social security number when you sign up for a game. Your "virtual income" will be reported to the IRS, since you could liquidate any virtual items or currency into real-life money at any time.
How excited would you be when you realize that new virtual uber-item you just looted is going to increase your income taxes?
We will be filling out tax forms and claiming depreciation on virtual items when the virtual economy hits a dupe bug. Tax audits would get quite interesting as well.
When we get into taxes, things get really really messy. But what about other aspects of the game?
Would in-game crafters need to acquire a real-life business license?
Would griefing become a criminal offense?
Slander against a particular virtual-item merchant could result in lawsuits...
I can see that this would really degenerate into a real hell, and I think all of the fun would be sucked out of the games.
maby ingles isnt his langguge........ its not like most teh ppl on teh web is a ingles speeker neway!!1
-
OK, I've just realized I've been reading forums for MMO games way too much lately. What's depressing is I've seen a lot worse abuses of the English language in those forums than my parody above. =)
This reminds me of an article I read or heard not too long ago about how a national health care system would improve economic productivity by much more than what would be immediately obvious on the surface.
Just think of all the BS we have to go through to get, maintain, and use health insurance, and how our economy could benefit as a result of that productive energy being spent on something else.
And it's not just the patient that has to waste time with BS insurance bureaucracy, it's also your doctor's office, the pharmacies, your employer, etc... Just look at all the excessive paperwork as an example of how much energy is being wasted.
Ah, I can hear the McCarthyists grumbling already...
For example, after the last patch I cannot follow anyone or anything. Whenever I try to use the follow command, I run in a straight line into infinity.
I had this problem once back in beta. Toggling my "Chase Cam" fixed it. I think it's the numericpad decimal point key which toggles this.
You see, if I can't get close to the monster, I can't hit it.
The problem with being in-range to attack as a brawler is quite valid. Range for attacking purposes is calculated to the center of the beast you are attacking. Some of these beasts are HUGE, and you can be literally standing beneath them visually and still get "out of range".
I also heard from one player that the beasts attack from the space where their head is located, but since they can only receive damage at their 3D object center, it gets kind of difficult to battle in any sensibible way.
Although several servers have been down for maintenance, all of this is, really, just birth pains
The worst problem with these unannounced 6-8 hour "emergency maintenance" sessions is that some people can't get to their harvesters during their gaming window that day, which can result in some seriously nasty losses, which the CSRs are very unlikely to rectify.
But harvesters are a very very sore point all their own in this game. Harvesters are horribly implemented and have irrational costs considering their hit-and-miss usefulness.
If I were SOE, I have a whole friggin' brigade of programmers designing dungeons and zones with lots and lots of "Crushbone Factor" in each and every one.
I wonder how much the Franchise Approval process is slowing them down. This could be a significant liability if it is not streamlined.
Re:Yah that was the original plot actually genius
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I'm hoping in the last movie the battery story will be exposed as a ruse for the "real" reason (whatever it may be).
This is a very interesting idea which deserves some thought.
If the devices were some kind of nanotechnology which would live near the surface of our skin, we could become solar powered =)
Well, the geeks would probably not be, but they could always use different nanos which would work off magnetic induction (from all of the computer equipment) =)
I agree. Here's just one example of how screwed up things are right now...
Resource harvesters are player-built structures like houses which can be placed down on the land, and will extract resources from the ground 24/7 so long as they have power and energy.
Players can also "manually" extract resources by a process called "sampling", but it requires that the character stay in one spot while they gather the resources.
As of now, harvesters do not gather nearly as many resources as a player who is sampling in the same spot.
Also, resources in SWG shift around with time, so a "sweet spot" you have placed your harvester on may disappear all of the sudden, with no warning.
Now this would not be so bad, except that you cannot "re-deed" (pick up) your harvester and use it again without losing all of the energy and maintenance fees which you have fed into the harvester. You lose them all. Money and energy go *poof* when re-deeding.
So it is easy to see why many players like to sample instead of use harvesters to gether resources.
The problem is, many people are sampling since they can get over five times more resources in the same time period compared to harvesters.
The problem with sampling is that it is horrendously boring. To sample, you select a resource, then click the 'sample' button. After a few minutes and about 20-50 sample events/attempts, your character will run out of action and/or mind pools.
In the meantime, typically 5-10 minutes, you have absoultely nothing to do in the game but sit there and stare at your character. Sampling requires the player to do nothing after the process starts.
Suffice it to say, most players have begun to use macros to sample for them while they get up from the computer and go watch TV or nap or whatever.
To combat the macro samplers, the developers report that they are going to make the process a lot more "fun" by adding "critical events". According to players on the test server, these critical events only occur once every 15 minutes or so, but they pop up a dialog box, which we assume is there to stop the macro samplers.
So this "fix" does nothing to solve the problem, and even at that is a very weak solution to macro sampling.
Instead of fixing the problem (harvesters), the developers are implementing a system to make macroing more difficult.
So now, while sitting back in my chair staring in a zombie-like trance at the screen, I might occasionally get a dialog box which may improve my sample attempts. This is more "fun" how?
So they put all of this effort into slowing down the macroing, but they have so far given no indication of putting any effort into stopping the problem which causes the macroing (the harvesters).
In summary, they like to fix the symptoms, not the problems.
I could be wrong about all of this, but I tend to be pessimistic when there is no communication. I seriously hope that I am wrong, because I want to enjoy this game. My in-game profession relies a lot on resource gathering, and as it is now it's just more work than fun, and it looks like the next update will only tip the scales even worse in the same direction.
the weather guys that are working on the global warming and other climate modeling want a 500 petaflop sustained speed, massive memory machine to get the granularity that they want.
Do they realize a machine like this would probably generate so much heat that it would have a significant effect on the very climate system they are trying to predict? =)
Which is ridiculous since the thermal pads and heatsinks they ship with their processors won't keep the CPU under 65C under normal load.
At least not on my Athlon. I replaced the heatsink with a monster and huge fan. Now I sleep well in my apartment since all the white noise drounds out my neighbors. =)
Only problem is the A/C bill has gone up...
And I'm not kidding... my room is 5-6 degrees warmer than the living room, even with a large fan pointed towards the top of my doorway to push the hot air out =)
My mom, despite a reasonably technical background, bought a Kodak PLUSDigital [pricegrabber.com] camera -- which sounded to her like a "disposable digital" camera. In reality, it was simply a standard, film-based camera with CD-ROM processing included in the price.
This is so blantatly deceptive. We need a way to hold companies accountable for this kind of crossing-the-line marketing bullshit.
There used to be a day when marketing was a way to simply announce your product and give it a positive image, not blatantly trick people into buying it by making them think they're getting something else.
The kodak marketing department knew full well that they would make sales off of people by tossing the word "digital" into the name. I can imagine hundreds of grandmothers across the land buying their grandson a "digital camera" for their birthday, only to find out they were tricked by kodak.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's going to risk developing stuff when you're sued left and right before you even know somebody filed a patent for it while you RDed? This can potentially kill off alot of inventing.
And THIS is truely the main point against software patents.
The patent system was created to encourage people to invent. In modern times, it is having the opposite effect.
Instead of encouraging *creative* innovation, they are just encouraging "first post"-style patents on aspects of software development which would have ultimately been achieved anyway.
The fundamental problem with the patent system is that the more patents the PTO approves, the more revenue they make.
This feedback system needs to be reversed. They need to benefit by turning away frivolous patents, not by encouraging them.
As I understand it now, it costs a small amount of money to have your patent reviewed, and then upon approval, a large amount of money to have it officially registered. Perhaps if they switched these two so that it cost more up front to have a patent reviewed and a much smaller amount to have it registered (if it passes review), then this problem of abusively high approval rates would diminish substantially.
The problem especially with software patents is that many aspects of software development have an innate path of evolution.
Things like the Huffman encoder would have been discovered by someone eventually, given enough time. It would have certianly have been discovered by now.
Note I say 'discovered' not 'invented' becuase discovering how to do a huffman encoder is not all that different than discovering the 10-billionth digit of pi.
Ok, the message "I LOVE SAN" may be obvious, but how about the following jumbled text, which comes right after it...
Something like:
bill.....gates.....you.make.....hi.possi.......
Of which at least one interpretation could be:
"Bill Gates, you make this possible."
They are so large probably becuase the data you are downloading is NOT literally a patch, but instead just an archive of files meant to completely replace the existing files.
Why do something elegantly when you have a reputation for bloat?
That said, none of my machines have been infucted
Was that a deliberate misspelling? =)
I honestly begin to wonder if security is deliberately kept as a minimal concern with Windows so that people who own versions of the operating system that have fallen out of support are *forced* to upgrade.
What recourse does a person running an older version of windows have if their "obsolete" operating system becomes completely unusable due to prominent exploits?
This could be especially problematic if you are depending on some really complicated applications which will not run on the newer operating systems.
Related: Has anyone ever been to MGM in Florida and done the THX sound effects studio? You sit in a pitch black room with headphones on and it sounds like you are actually getting a haircut, getting your hair blow dried (and you feel heat - but there's not any), + you get annoyed by a fly in the room ... I remember the voiceover saying that the darkness of the room tuned your senses - particularly your ears.
A combination of very hi-fi microphones placed in a physical mock-up of a human head (so that the microphones pick up at the position of the opening of the fake ear canals) and good quality headphones (especially those with excellent low-frequency) to play back the sound at those exact same points on your head creates this effect, commonly referred to as binaural or 3D Audio.
It's pretty awesome and quite a good trick especially if the lights are turned off so that your visual sensory input doesn't dampen the effect when you see nothing there.
Here's a quick page you can scan through of the equipment involved.
And if you're especially masochistic...
Authoring Windows Applications In Assembly Language
They would pr obably get more pl ayers int erested in joi ning them if the y fixed the pr oblem with the r andom extra spacin g in their FA Q.
WTF? I've seen this occasionally before. How does this happen?
I gave up quickly with trying to read their site as it is a real pain in the ass to keep re-parsing their sentences to try to put together the right letters to re-form the words.
I agree.
An translation to real money would open up the companies to far too much litigation. Real money would make the virtual items begin to take on some aspects of real items.
The companies running the MMOs would have to resolve virtual item and property ownership claims and would open themselves up to serious litigation. I can see players would be filing lawsuits against other players for using exploits to damage their virtual property.
And how about one really major thing I haven't seen mentioned so far...
Income Taxes.
You can bet if real money is changing hands that the government will want to take a chunk of it. You'd have to give your social security number when you sign up for a game. Your "virtual income" will be reported to the IRS, since you could liquidate any virtual items or currency into real-life money at any time.
How excited would you be when you realize that new virtual uber-item you just looted is going to increase your income taxes?
We will be filling out tax forms and claiming depreciation on virtual items when the virtual economy hits a dupe bug. Tax audits would get quite interesting as well.
When we get into taxes, things get really really messy. But what about other aspects of the game?
Would in-game crafters need to acquire a real-life business license?
Would griefing become a criminal offense?
Slander against a particular virtual-item merchant could result in lawsuits...
I can see that this would really degenerate into a real hell, and I think all of the fun would be sucked out of the games.
lossen up d00d!
teh guyz post pwnzed SCO!
maby ingles isnt his langguge........ its not like most teh ppl on teh web is a ingles speeker neway!!1
-
OK, I've just realized I've been reading forums for MMO games way too much lately. What's depressing is I've seen a lot worse abuses of the English language in those forums than my parody above. =)
But it's so cold up there.
Can't California split off and join Canada? =)
This reminds me of an article I read or heard not too long ago about how a national health care system would improve economic productivity by much more than what would be immediately obvious on the surface.
Just think of all the BS we have to go through to get, maintain, and use health insurance, and how our economy could benefit as a result of that productive energy being spent on something else.
And it's not just the patient that has to waste time with BS insurance bureaucracy, it's also your doctor's office, the pharmacies, your employer, etc... Just look at all the excessive paperwork as an example of how much energy is being wasted.
Ah, I can hear the McCarthyists grumbling already...
I'd also say it is a pretty decent description of the typical slashdot reader
So is this.
Super Geek.
Not entirely accurate...
"Waveguide Bends: With photonic crystals, it is possible to create waveguides that permit 90 degree bends with 100% transmission."
Good site by the way...
I had this problem once back in beta. Toggling my "Chase Cam" fixed it. I think it's the numericpad decimal point key which toggles this.
The problem with being in-range to attack as a brawler is quite valid. Range for attacking purposes is calculated to the center of the beast you are attacking. Some of these beasts are HUGE, and you can be literally standing beneath them visually and still get "out of range".
I also heard from one player that the beasts attack from the space where their head is located, but since they can only receive damage at their 3D object center, it gets kind of difficult to battle in any sensibible way.
The worst problem with these unannounced 6-8 hour "emergency maintenance" sessions is that some people can't get to their harvesters during their gaming window that day, which can result in some seriously nasty losses, which the CSRs are very unlikely to rectify.
But harvesters are a very very sore point all their own in this game. Harvesters are horribly implemented and have irrational costs considering their hit-and-miss usefulness.
I wonder how much the Franchise Approval process is slowing them down. This could be a significant liability if it is not streamlined.
I'm hoping in the last movie the battery story will be exposed as a ruse for the "real" reason (whatever it may be).
This is a very interesting idea which deserves some thought.
If the devices were some kind of nanotechnology which would live near the surface of our skin, we could become solar powered =)
Well, the geeks would probably not be, but they could always use different nanos which would work off magnetic induction (from all of the computer equipment) =)
Uh... right, so how are you supposed to know that?
With these.
I agree. Here's just one example of how screwed up things are right now...
Resource harvesters are player-built structures like houses which can be placed down on the land, and will extract resources from the ground 24/7 so long as they have power and energy.
Players can also "manually" extract resources by a process called "sampling", but it requires that the character stay in one spot while they gather the resources.
As of now, harvesters do not gather nearly as many resources as a player who is sampling in the same spot.
Also, resources in SWG shift around with time, so a "sweet spot" you have placed your harvester on may disappear all of the sudden, with no warning.
Now this would not be so bad, except that you cannot "re-deed" (pick up) your harvester and use it again without losing all of the energy and maintenance fees which you have fed into the harvester. You lose them all. Money and energy go *poof* when re-deeding.
So it is easy to see why many players like to sample instead of use harvesters to gether resources.
The problem is, many people are sampling since they can get over five times more resources in the same time period compared to harvesters.
The problem with sampling is that it is horrendously boring. To sample, you select a resource, then click the 'sample' button. After a few minutes and about 20-50 sample events/attempts, your character will run out of action and/or mind pools.
In the meantime, typically 5-10 minutes, you have absoultely nothing to do in the game but sit there and stare at your character. Sampling requires the player to do nothing after the process starts.
Suffice it to say, most players have begun to use macros to sample for them while they get up from the computer and go watch TV or nap or whatever.
To combat the macro samplers, the developers report that they are going to make the process a lot more "fun" by adding "critical events". According to players on the test server, these critical events only occur once every 15 minutes or so, but they pop up a dialog box, which we assume is there to stop the macro samplers.
So this "fix" does nothing to solve the problem, and even at that is a very weak solution to macro sampling.
Instead of fixing the problem (harvesters), the developers are implementing a system to make macroing more difficult.
So now, while sitting back in my chair staring in a zombie-like trance at the screen, I might occasionally get a dialog box which may improve my sample attempts. This is more "fun" how?
So they put all of this effort into slowing down the macroing, but they have so far given no indication of putting any effort into stopping the problem which causes the macroing (the harvesters).
In summary, they like to fix the symptoms, not the problems.
I could be wrong about all of this, but I tend to be pessimistic when there is no communication. I seriously hope that I am wrong, because I want to enjoy this game. My in-game profession relies a lot on resource gathering, and as it is now it's just more work than fun, and it looks like the next update will only tip the scales even worse in the same direction.
the weather guys that are working on the global warming and other climate modeling want a 500 petaflop sustained speed, massive memory machine to get the granularity that they want.
Do they realize a machine like this would probably generate so much heat that it would have a significant effect on the very climate system they are trying to predict? =)
... and watch slashmorons crave your superior geek wang.
What's wrong with having a Wang?
I hear all the geek women love them... =)
Which is ridiculous since the thermal pads and heatsinks they ship with their processors won't keep the CPU under 65C under normal load.
At least not on my Athlon. I replaced the heatsink with a monster and huge fan. Now I sleep well in my apartment since all the white noise drounds out my neighbors. =)
Only problem is the A/C bill has gone up...
And I'm not kidding... my room is 5-6 degrees warmer than the living room, even with a large fan pointed towards the top of my doorway to push the hot air out =)
Ah, yes... the typical Slashdot meta-thread =) ... very well summarized =)
Wow.. you just invented a new idea for mall photo kiosks =)
This is so blantatly deceptive. We need a way to hold companies accountable for this kind of crossing-the-line marketing bullshit.
There used to be a day when marketing was a way to simply announce your product and give it a positive image, not blatantly trick people into buying it by making them think they're getting something else.
The kodak marketing department knew full well that they would make sales off of people by tossing the word "digital" into the name. I can imagine hundreds of grandmothers across the land buying their grandson a "digital camera" for their birthday, only to find out they were tricked by kodak.
Fucking bastard marketing assholes.