There's only one, huge, flaming hole in your plan.
Copyrights take zero time and zero dollars to get.
Patents can take several years and hundreds of dollars.
Other than that, there's nothing stopping anyone from PatentLefting any patent they have. But why spend all that time and money filing forms only to give it away, when you can just publicise your invention and then claim prior art if someone tries to patent past you?
"In particular, I'd like to see how all four of the categories of publications could score below average."
If you RTFA closely, you'll see that they're comparing it against GameRankings.com. So, yes, it IS the secret, hiden, fansite category that's throwing off the numbers.
In many games, the NPC/targets/AIs/whatevers are just another object, like a brick, that gets dropped into the game world. For Halo 2 though, they made them just like any other player, only instead of taking their input controls from your xbox controller, they take them from a piece of code. Instead of having that code look at an image on screen (like you as a player do when playing the game) they instead examine all of these tags that exist in the game world; where you see a clump of pixels and think "wall", the AI has been told "cover.value=+2.8", and can react accordingly.
This approach allows for the AI to react much more realistically and intelligently with the environment without requiring an impossible amount of effort. It also allows improvements in the AI code to be isolated from the design of the levels (as long as the rules of this "tagging" interface are obeyed by both sides of the programming aisle).
I wonder how much of this tagging was done by hand, vs. how much was done by automated analysis.
(As an aside, the grav-lift on Collossus needs to be turned off for CTF, Assault, and Oddball games. Am I right?)
Where sitcom and anime fans alike can post in excruciating detail the events of every episode of their favorite shows... for the... uhh... benefit of human knowledge?
Where new graduates, overstuffed with their new expertise, can cloud any subject with enough unexplained jargon and unimportant minutia to make even a simple subject appear beyond the ken of those beneath them.
Where even a simple subject is turned into a catalog of unwritten entries by some well-meaning font of trivia, such that it burries the actual article.
Don't get me wrong, I love the project, I've contributed in the past; but anyone who says there aren't any problems, or that all the problems will eventually be fixed by "the community" needs to step back and get some perspective.
You'd never know who in the city was AI or another real person.
Yes you would. Characters controlled by real people don't ever walk, especially on sidewalks.
Re:No, A Dual Joystick Controller Really Is Better
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
1. In all my years of Quake, I never had a problem with this. Most "hard core" players have their sensitivity set so high that they can turn 2 or 3 360s in the space of their pad.
2. I've never understood WASD. Firstly, you're usually going forward, not backward; why put forward off the homerow? Secondly, why move your hand out of the usual homerow position? SDFC is the way to go. That gives your pinky a lot of room to work with on q, a, and z (not to mention shift, ctrl, and even capslock). I usually map W and R to the same function so I can access it wether I'm moving left or right (ditto with X and V). Only rarely has "out of fingers" been a problem (while trying to crouch and change weapons while moving and doing something else that I can't remember).
3. A high-quality joystick is higher quality than a low-quality mouse? Wow, stop the presses.
4. Another news flash: low quality (and non-usb) keyboards are also not very good.
All that said, after refusing to play Halo for two years, I got used to playing Halo with the controller very quickly, and am looking forward to playing Halo 2 this afternoon, on the controller.
I've been looking for an intelligent pro-Bush person to try to convince me that voting for Kerry is anything but the logical choice.
So far, there has been little attempt and no success. Please, point these people to me. My east-coast post-college psuedo-intellectual social group only has a few weak Bush supporters who prefer not to argue about it.
(The pro-life argument is the closest thing I've seen to a competent pro-Bush argument, but I'm not pro-life and it's not my biggest issue.)
Seriously, the original metroid let you play with Samus unsuited (either by beating it in under 2 hours or with the JUSTIN BAILEY code). I'd've loved to see that in Prime.(Heck, for all I know it's there; I got sick of the game toward the end and refused to play through it on the harder difficulty levels. I really wanted to see the Fusion suit in full 3D too, but never bought a GBA.) Maybe in Prime 2.
I 3 Metroid.
IRV is simple enough (just rank the candidates from favorite to least favorite) and it would keep people from having to vote tactically, thus weakening the two party system.
While it's simple, your claim that IRV removes tactical voting is a lie.
Yes, it means that if you/really/ do prefer Nader, you can put him as your number 1, and still not give a vote to Bush by putting Kerry as your number 2. But if you EVER expect Nader (or another 3rd party candidate) to have a realistic chance of winning, IRV can betray you. This explains it better.
(Also, it's CONDORCET, not CONCORDANT, voting that people are probably meaning to refer to.)
Simply deciding to commit criminal and civil copyright violation is not some noble protest
Two disagreements with that sentence. One, I'm pretty sure copyright is an entirerly civil matter (and with INDUCE seeming to be dead in the water, it looks it'll be staying that way in the immediate future).
Two, it could be a noble protest, but only if you don't try to hide the fact from the affected parties and authorities; I'd love to see a U.S. citizen braver than me publicly host a copy of "Steamboat Willy" off of a U.S.-located server right next to their name, address, and phone number. And submit the story to slashdot. They'd be my new hero.
But the point of patents (and copyright) was to protect the individual from the industry. If you invent a clever device, but can't afford the start-up costs to manufacturer it, you could show it to a company that has the infrastructure, but without patent protection they could just take it as their own.
And yet somehow, it all got turned around. Now patents are used by industry to squash individuals and other industry.
do not understand how patents can be bad for some technical fields and good for others. They work just fine for machines and medicines then why not for software?
Because medicines and machines, once developed, are usefull for decades to come, vs. software that lasts maybe 3, 5 years. Because research into medicines likely wouldn't happen without the promise of a limited time monopoly, as it's highly expensive and speculative. Unlike software, where you can get people to work for free from home in their spare time on incremental improvements (see: Linux). (Okay, yeah, that comparisson probably isn't completely fair, but it makes the point.) Because with machines you have to patent something that's actually revolutionary, versus software where you can prefix the letter "e-" or the words "one-click-" to an idea and get a patent for it.
I concur. It seems the grandparent put in the keywords "Linux" and "best" and acheived the expected return...
Anyway. What Linux DOES show is that really great and usefull things can come out when information is shared; which is nominally what the whole IP system was suppose to be for, you get a LIMITED time monopoly as an incentive, in exchange for the world getting to know and share and improve on your work in the future. Something like Linux is what we hope to happen in any environment after the patents have already expired.
This comes across as more of a litigation problem, not really a patent problem.
Did you see the word "trial" and "judge" and get lost?
Yes, it's a law problem; a patent law problem. Patent law is a subset of law. Law determines litigation. So you're right, but only in the most vacuous way. If you read the aritcle, you'll see that they point to two changes in patent law (how easy it is to get patents and what sort of patent cases are heard by judges vs. heard by juries) that have led to the current patent debacle.
My biggest complaint about Wikipedia is that I'm seeing a growing number of articles that seem to be written more to impress the authors peers than to inform.
For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.
I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.
It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.
I got as far as page 2 before leaving in disgust. I could follow it all easily enough (B.S. in ECE) and hit all the right technical points, but it was just so poorly written! Terribly sentence structure, terrible paragraph structure, several glaring spelling mistakes... I give it an A- for science&technology, but an F in English.
And if the author uses the word "basically" one more time, I'll throttle him.
...grab $10 or so and pop down to your local arcade[.] Ask some of the other players there if you need any help[.]
This is something I'd agree with, but I would like to add: if you're playing in the arcade, for the first few times, get a partner who's played before to go with you. Nothing sucks more than paying a dollar and only getting 1-1/2 songs.
Okay, now that that's out of the way... don't listen to these people that say "forget DDR, just go outside and run!" If you think the game is fun, that motivating factor will be much more important than how "efficient" your workout is. Even if running is 10 times as effective as DDR (and I doubt it's more than even one and a half), if you don't actually DO IT it doesn't matter.
As for the game itself, if you've got a PS2 or XboX, pick up any of the mixes available for that system (MAX or MAX2 for PS2 or Ultramix for XboX) in the pack that comes with a pad; that pad will work fine for a beginner. After you wear it out playing on it, then worry about getting a $100 pad or two. If you're going w/ PC, get StepMania or PyDance (as other have already suggested) and hit DDRUK to get the songs. Pick up a cheap ($30) pad and a good PS2->USB adapter (again, other folks posted good advice about that earlier).
As you play, constantly stretch your limits, and take advantage of playing at home instead of the arcade. Turn on the "event mode" option so you can play continuously w/o returning to the main menu. Turn failure off, (it's unmotivating). Try at least one song that you KNOW you can't pass each time you play.
And remember, it's always a good idea to check with your doctor before starting a new exercise regime; they can tell you a lot better about water and nutrient intakes than anyone on slashdot; they're better educated on it plus they know your medical history and condition better than we do.
Oh, and have fun:) I've played this game about 5-15 hours a week for almost two years, and it never gets old.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyrights take zero time and zero dollars to get.
Patents can take several years and hundreds of dollars.
Other than that, there's nothing stopping anyone from PatentLefting any patent they have. But why spend all that time and money filing forms only to give it away, when you can just publicise your invention and then claim prior art if someone tries to patent past you?
If you RTFA closely, you'll see that they're comparing it against GameRankings.com. So, yes, it IS the secret, hiden, fansite category that's throwing off the numbers.
This approach allows for the AI to react much more realistically and intelligently with the environment without requiring an impossible amount of effort. It also allows improvements in the AI code to be isolated from the design of the levels (as long as the rules of this "tagging" interface are obeyed by both sides of the programming aisle).
I wonder how much of this tagging was done by hand, vs. how much was done by automated analysis.
(As an aside, the grav-lift on Collossus needs to be turned off for CTF, Assault, and Oddball games. Am I right?)
"The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians."
Come on people, it's not even a long one!
Where new graduates, overstuffed with their new expertise, can cloud any subject with enough unexplained jargon and unimportant minutia to make even a simple subject appear beyond the ken of those beneath them.
Where even a simple subject is turned into a catalog of unwritten entries by some well-meaning font of trivia, such that it burries the actual article.
Don't get me wrong, I love the project, I've contributed in the past; but anyone who says there aren't any problems, or that all the problems will eventually be fixed by "the community" needs to step back and get some perspective.
2. I've never understood WASD. Firstly, you're usually going forward, not backward; why put forward off the homerow? Secondly, why move your hand out of the usual homerow position? SDFC is the way to go. That gives your pinky a lot of room to work with on q, a, and z (not to mention shift, ctrl, and even capslock). I usually map W and R to the same function so I can access it wether I'm moving left or right (ditto with X and V). Only rarely has "out of fingers" been a problem (while trying to crouch and change weapons while moving and doing something else that I can't remember).
3. A high-quality joystick is higher quality than a low-quality mouse? Wow, stop the presses.
4. Another news flash: low quality (and non-usb) keyboards are also not very good.
All that said, after refusing to play Halo for two years, I got used to playing Halo with the controller very quickly, and am looking forward to playing Halo 2 this afternoon, on the controller.
In mentions several practical uses in the second linked article. Who marked this insightful?
The two-year graph is even more... interesting.
So far, there has been little attempt and no success. Please, point these people to me. My east-coast post-college psuedo-intellectual social group only has a few weak Bush supporters who prefer not to argue about it.
(The pro-life argument is the closest thing I've seen to a competent pro-Bush argument, but I'm not pro-life and it's not my biggest issue.)
Seriously, the original metroid let you play with Samus unsuited (either by beating it in under 2 hours or with the JUSTIN BAILEY code). I'd've loved to see that in Prime.(Heck, for all I know it's there; I got sick of the game toward the end and refused to play through it on the harder difficulty levels. I really wanted to see the Fusion suit in full 3D too, but never bought a GBA.) Maybe in Prime 2. I 3 Metroid.
It's only more complicated on the back-end.
So yeah, it's hard to explain how it works, but the UI is nice, and that was enough for Windows.
Yes, it means that if you /really/ do prefer Nader, you can put him as your number 1, and still not give a vote to Bush by putting Kerry as your number 2. But if you EVER expect Nader (or another 3rd party candidate) to have a realistic chance of winning, IRV can betray you. This explains it better.
(Also, it's CONDORCET, not CONCORDANT, voting that people are probably meaning to refer to.)
Two, it could be a noble protest, but only if you don't try to hide the fact from the affected parties and authorities; I'd love to see a U.S. citizen braver than me publicly host a copy of "Steamboat Willy" off of a U.S.-located server right next to their name, address, and phone number. And submit the story to slashdot. They'd be my new hero.
But the point of patents (and copyright) was to protect the individual from the industry. If you invent a clever device, but can't afford the start-up costs to manufacturer it, you could show it to a company that has the infrastructure, but without patent protection they could just take it as their own. And yet somehow, it all got turned around. Now patents are used by industry to squash individuals and other industry.
Because medicines and machines, once developed, are usefull for decades to come, vs. software that lasts maybe 3, 5 years. Because research into medicines likely wouldn't happen without the promise of a limited time monopoly, as it's highly expensive and speculative. Unlike software, where you can get people to work for free from home in their spare time on incremental improvements (see: Linux). (Okay, yeah, that comparisson probably isn't completely fair, but it makes the point.) Because with machines you have to patent something that's actually revolutionary, versus software where you can prefix the letter "e-" or the words "one-click-" to an idea and get a patent for it.
Need I go on?
Anyway. What Linux DOES show is that really great and usefull things can come out when information is shared; which is nominally what the whole IP system was suppose to be for, you get a LIMITED time monopoly as an incentive, in exchange for the world getting to know and share and improve on your work in the future. Something like Linux is what we hope to happen in any environment after the patents have already expired.
Did you see the word "trial" and "judge" and get lost?
Yes, it's a law problem; a patent law problem. Patent law is a subset of law. Law determines litigation. So you're right, but only in the most vacuous way. If you read the aritcle, you'll see that they point to two changes in patent law (how easy it is to get patents and what sort of patent cases are heard by judges vs. heard by juries) that have led to the current patent debacle.
For example, I was reading some articles about music theory the other day (something I kno^Kew nothing about), and it was *dense* like a brick. If the point of the articles were to educate, then they were failing; they were describing beginner-level information, but they were doing it in a way that goes over the heads of most beginers.
I've noticed the same thing happening to some articles I've helped with. I try to write in a way that's accessible to the layman, but then later some self-important expert comes by and adds extra minutiae that obfuscate the points of the article, extra un-explained un-linked vocabulary that confuses the reader, and meaningless tangents that distract from the focus.
It's hard to keep up (and so, I haven't been). But please, keep my words in mind when editing! Particularly if you wrote the bits on music theory. Remember, you're writing to educate BEGINERS, not to impress your peers with how much trivia and jargon you know.
And if the author uses the word "basically" one more time, I'll throttle him.
Star Control 2. If you've played it, you know, if not, the open source re-make is making good progress. A shame that #3 was so bad.
How about parity? Parity bit good...
Okay, now that that's out of the way... don't listen to these people that say "forget DDR, just go outside and run!" If you think the game is fun, that motivating factor will be much more important than how "efficient" your workout is. Even if running is 10 times as effective as DDR (and I doubt it's more than even one and a half), if you don't actually DO IT it doesn't matter.
As for the game itself, if you've got a PS2 or XboX, pick up any of the mixes available for that system (MAX or MAX2 for PS2 or Ultramix for XboX) in the pack that comes with a pad; that pad will work fine for a beginner. After you wear it out playing on it, then worry about getting a $100 pad or two. If you're going w/ PC, get StepMania or PyDance (as other have already suggested) and hit DDRUK to get the songs. Pick up a cheap ($30) pad and a good PS2->USB adapter (again, other folks posted good advice about that earlier).
As you play, constantly stretch your limits, and take advantage of playing at home instead of the arcade. Turn on the "event mode" option so you can play continuously w/o returning to the main menu. Turn failure off, (it's unmotivating). Try at least one song that you KNOW you can't pass each time you play.
And remember, it's always a good idea to check with your doctor before starting a new exercise regime; they can tell you a lot better about water and nutrient intakes than anyone on slashdot; they're better educated on it plus they know your medical history and condition better than we do.
Oh, and have fun :) I've played this game about 5-15 hours a week for almost two years, and it never gets old.