Slashdot is useful to get a sense of what the legal landscape is like. Some comments are to the effect: "I am not a lawyer, but my lawyer told me this." Or "I am not a lawyer, but here is the statute [cornell.edu], and here is how a court has interpreted it [eff.org]." When you do see an attorney after reading the comments, you don't have to wait for the attorney to explain the basics. This saves time, and time is money, especially at the typical copyright and trade secret specialist's rate.
That said, you're right about one thing: anything you read on Slashdot is not legal advice.
I had a spare $100 so I'm trying to buy a controlling interest.
I recognize an attempt at a joke, but in the interest of correctness, I feel a need to point out that Yahoo! Finance says SCO's market capitalization is in the neighborhood of $43.3 million. How you plan to turn $100 into $22 million is the subject of your next joke.
The end of the story seems to be that the patent supposedly expires sometime about now, either last December or this June, depending on who you ask.
It is this June because 35 USC 154 grants the greater of filing + 20 and grant + 17 for patents subsisting as of 6 months after URAA. I just clarified this in the Wikipedia article.
I saw nothing in FuckedCompany.com's free section about SCO v. IBM, but there's no way of knowing for sure without paying $75 per MONTH (not year but month) for a subscription to FC.
any and all patents on System V expired in the year 2000
Not so fast. Patents subsisting in the United States as of 1995 or so (when the United States signed a patent cooperation treaty) have been extended to grant + 17 years (the old term) or filing + 20 years (the new term), whichever is later. And don't you think for a minute that SCO won't team up with drug companies and lobby for a Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act.
Worst case scenario, they were pending for 2 years
Worse than that: Worst case is that SCO pulled a Rambus and kept the patents pending for nine years.
And anyone designing a public web site and willing to discard 10% of customers [by abandoning GIF for PNG] is also a fringe player.
Ten percent? I haven't had a single complaint about people not being able to view the images of my PNG-based site. The fact is that Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 and later, Netscape 4.5 and later, and all versions of Mozilla and Konqueror can display PNG images at least as well as they display still GIF images. The biggest thing I can see that keeps PNG from replacing GIF is that IE does not support PNG's animated cousin out of the box, making it unsuitable for animated advertisements.
No, the Guy Pearce joke should be about Memento. In that movie, Pearce played a man who could not form new memories because of traumatic damage to his hippocampus. (Saying much further would spoil the plot.)
I can't remember the last time I paid Unisys for using a GIF...
When was the last time you bought a copy of GraphicConverter, Fireworks, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or any other program licensed under U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts? The price of each of those programs includes a royalty paid to Unisys.
I didn't say Metal Gear had its worldwide debut on the NES; I said only that I saw it on the NES, that its franchise appeared on Nintendo hardware before it appeared on Sony hardware. Heck, I've never even seen an MSX computer. Others may claim that the MSX computer was not a console. Did the MSX computer ever become popular in North America?
Compare almost any first gen PS1 game with one of the last gen PS1 games to see what I mean. They almost look like they are for totally different hardware platforms.
The first couple generations of games wrote to hardware only through the PSX BIOS, and PSX programming resembled programming for a general-purpose computer. Sony didn't open up the register-level interface until about two years into the original PlayStation's life. Thus, a fellow could almost consider the early PS1 and the later PS1 two different consoles.
The GBA and the GC combined, almost reach the sales of the PS2.
Where I come from, there are three kinds of lies: lies with short legs, lies with long noses, and statistics. Are you talking overall sales, or only the previous fiscal quarter? (The PS2's head start may not be relevant to some arguments.) Units, or dollars? (A GBA and a GCN put together cost only slightly more than a single PS2 system.)
This makes either the GBA or the GCN the first console to host two Metroid titles.
That honor would go to the Super NES, which had Metroid II for Super Game Boy and Super Metroid for Super NES.
However, the release of GameCube Game Boy Player at the end of May means that the GameCube already has three published Metroid titles: Metroid II for Game Boy, Metroid Prime for GameCube, and Metroid Fusion for Game Boy Advance.
[I define a "video game console" as] a "black box" whose primary function is to play video games and whose software and hardware are optimized primarily (if not solely) for that purpose.
Like the Amiga computer?
Even if your PC is used mostly to play games, the operating system it runs is too generalized for the machine to be called a games console.
By "the operating system", you're referring to Linux, right? The general opinion of the median Slashdot user is that Microsoft Windows operating systems aren't good for much more than playing games.
You'll never confuse Super Mario Bros. with Super Mario World or Super Mario 64.
But they all have Mario, and he even looks roughly the same from Super Mario All*Stars (the Super NES port of the 8-bit Mario games) all the way up through Sunshine. Kids will want the latest Mario game no matter what. Heck, they bought Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie, Mario Paint, Super Mario Kart, Mario Tennis (one of the only Virtual Boy games to be ported to Game Boy Color), and Mario Party, even though they were nothing like the other Mario games, just because they had Mario in it. Also watch the kids snap up Pokemon toys even though the system that the Pokemon games started out on (the monochrome Game Boy) has been dead for a couple years because a franchise outlasts the console that starts it.
The point is that a franchise established on one console carries over to the next console made by the same company, and latecomers such as Sony and Microsoft will have problems coming up with exclusive franchises unless they steal them from another platform *cough* MGS *cough* Final Fantasy *cough* Halo *cough*.
SNES trumped the Genesis in both graphics (sprites, colors as well as the effects you mention)
Sprites? 80 (Genesis) vs. 128 (Super NES) isn't a big difference, especially with mid-frame streaming to sprite registers (common in scrolling shooters). Colors? The difference between 3 bits per channel (Genesis) and 5 bits per channel (Super NES) didn't show up in the cheap TVs of the day[1], especially when many later Genesis games used temporal palette dithering to fake another bit in the video DAC. Similar tricks let Genesis programmers fake more than four color palettes by cutting each in half and temporally dithering each half. Except perhaps for Mode 7, almost any graphical effect that could be done on a Super NES could be faked on the Genesis.
and sound (the Genesis' sound processor was the CPU of the Master System while the SNES used a Sony chip designed specifically for it).
The Super NES definitely had the Genesis beat in sound quality, but loading sound data into memory on the Genesis was quicker because unlike the Super NES's SPC700, the Genesis's Zilog Z80 processor had cart bus access and didn't have to go through a slow parallel port to the CPU.
And guess what? Several Game Boy Advance games contain instruments that have been sampled from Yamaha FM synthesizers such as the Adlib (SB's sound chip) and the Genesis's sound chip. These include Pac-Attack by Namco and Sonic Advance by Sega.
Just as the Genesis re-used the Master System CPU to take care of sound, the Saturn uses the Genesis CPU in the same way.
But then it'd have to include the Master System CPU, the Genesis CPU, and the Saturn CPUs, along with the Master System and Genesis video circuitry (yes, some early Genesis games did run in SMS video mode). Now we're talking beaucoup bucks.
IIRC, that was mostly from Nintendo's decision to continue using cartridges instead of CDs
If Capcom could fit Resident Evil complete with video clips on a 512-megabit N64 Game Pak, why couldn't Konami fit Metal Gear Solid?
Anyway, I wasn't emphasizing that the franchises left Nintendo but rather that the MGS and FF franchises did start out on a Ninte
It's also spun in the opposite direction to normal DVDs
Bullshit. When viewed from the label side, CDs spin clockwise, and so do DVDs. When I open my GameCube console's disc door after an intense round of Super Smash Bros. Melee, sometimes the disc is still spinning, and it's spinning clockwise.
However, the second layer of a DVD disc does have a spiral that also runs clockwise but outside-in rather than inside-out. As caouchouc wrote, the GameCube runs the dolphin OS which has its own filesystem, and I'm guessing that the dolphin filesystem stores the boot sector and directory track on the beginning of layer 2. Such a "reverse spiral" specification could possibly have given rise to the backwards rotation rumor.
When an abbreviation is heavily overloaded, a Google search on only the abbreviation produces less than relevant results. Before you insult somebody, try teaching him or her, possibly by providing a query string that returns more relevant results.
In general, the optical media-based consoles do relatively little reading of data within a level
In games such as Valve's Half-Life and some RPGs where you can walk from room to room without a concept of a "level", this adds up. Even the PC version of Half-Life had noticeable loading freezes on the computers of the time. In games such as Nintendo's WarioWare where a typical level lasts only two seconds, this adds up as well.
Portable CD-players are pretty popular despite occasional skipping
That's because they only need to read sequentially. A Red Book conforming CD player needs to read 75 sequential blocks of audio a second. Most portable CD players read 150 blocks a second, putting the excess into a buffer, and when the data stream from the mechanism is interrupted, they empty the buffer into the DAC until the mechanism can catch up again. However, such buffering would not work in a random access situation such as a video game.
big-name games (... Grand Theft Auto)... And that's not even mentioning in-house titles like Gran Turismo.
I'd rather be playing Grand Theft Turismo, where you get to race the cars you steal.
16:9.
Puzzle games in such an aspect ratio are going to suck. (Or are you claiming that puzzle games belong on an N-Gage system with its vertical screen?) What's so bad about the GBA's 15:10 again?
3d audio.
Out of 2cm speakers typical of handheld devices?
1.8 GB storage on 60mm discs.
Discs scratch, skip when bumped (especially damning on handhelds), transfer slowly, and drain the battery (especially damning on handhelds). And if the games let you save your progress, the system now has to have two slots: one for the disc and one for the memory card. The handheld is starting to look pretty thick.
this handheld only allows for first person shooter games.
I recognize an attempt at a joke, but...
PSP is a firearm and it's also a vaporware handheld game console. Mac 10 is a firearm and it's also an operating system. Just because something's named after a gun doesn't mean that consumers will confuse it with a gun.
Fairchild Channel F console: 1976. Atari 2600 Video Computer System: 1977. Nintendo Entertainment System: 1985. Sega Master System: 1986. Sony PlayStation: 1994. Microsoft Xbox: 2001. Who was first to market again and had the chance to establish franchises that could possibly reappear on later consoles? Surely not Sony. Even among companies still in the video game business (Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft) or among companies still selling proprietary console hardware in the States (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft), Sony still isn't first to market.
You forget the generational cycles in the video game industry.
Because NVIDIA and ATI each release more than one new real-time graphics hardware product each year, the PC does not have generational cycles. Because it's easy now to connect multiple controllers to a PC's USB hub and to display the video on a 36-inch TV (720p yum!), I consider the PC just as much a part of the video game industry as the PS2. To exclude the Wintel platform from this discussion, please precisely define "video game console". (It'll be tough because Linux for PS2 exists.)
Besides, even if console hardware does have generations, franchises don't.
We're not exactly comparing a Genesis with an SNES.
Which was better again? From what I had read of the systems' specifications, the Genesis had more video memory bandwidth, but the Super NES had background scaling and rotation.
if the Sega Saturn had been backwards-compatible, Sony would be the one out of the hardware business.
No, Sega would still have been out of business because backwards compatibility was apparently more expensive to fabricate in 1994 when the Sega Saturn was coming out than in 2000 when the PS2 came out. It would have been a back-compat layer on top of a back-compat layer, and including it in the Saturn might have pushed its introductory price above the already expensive $400.
You seem to believe that [relying on copyrighted game worlds is] a liability.
You're right. It's an asset. If the franchises are not cash cows, then why do companies such as The Walt Disney Company so fiercely defend their monopolies on such worlds? And that's why Sony had a problem in the early days of the PS1: it had a hard time establishing its own franchises because Sony wasn't first to market. Most of the franchises that carried the PS1 and PS2 (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, etc) were carried over from the NES by other companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is not a replacement for a lawyer.
Slashdot is useful to get a sense of what the legal landscape is like. Some comments are to the effect: "I am not a lawyer, but my lawyer told me this." Or "I am not a lawyer, but here is the statute [cornell.edu], and here is how a court has interpreted it [eff.org]." When you do see an attorney after reading the comments, you don't have to wait for the attorney to explain the basics. This saves time, and time is money, especially at the typical copyright and trade secret specialist's rate.
That said, you're right about one thing: anything you read on Slashdot is not legal advice.
I had a spare $100 so I'm trying to buy a controlling interest.
I recognize an attempt at a joke, but in the interest of correctness, I feel a need to point out that Yahoo! Finance says SCO's market capitalization is in the neighborhood of $43.3 million. How you plan to turn $100 into $22 million is the subject of your next joke.
The end of the story seems to be that the patent supposedly expires sometime about now, either last December or this June, depending on who you ask.
It is this June because 35 USC 154 grants the greater of filing + 20 and grant + 17 for patents subsisting as of 6 months after URAA. I just clarified this in the Wikipedia article.
has anyone flipped this Pud's way?
I saw nothing in FuckedCompany.com's free section about SCO v. IBM, but there's no way of knowing for sure without paying $75 per MONTH (not year but month) for a subscription to FC.
any and all patents on System V expired in the year 2000
Not so fast. Patents subsisting in the United States as of 1995 or so (when the United States signed a patent cooperation treaty) have been extended to grant + 17 years (the old term) or filing + 20 years (the new term), whichever is later. And don't you think for a minute that SCO won't team up with drug companies and lobby for a Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act.
Worst case scenario, they were pending for 2 years
Worse than that: Worst case is that SCO pulled a Rambus and kept the patents pending for nine years.
And anyone designing a public web site and willing to discard 10% of customers [by abandoning GIF for PNG] is also a fringe player.
Ten percent? I haven't had a single complaint about people not being able to view the images of my PNG-based site. The fact is that Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 and later, Netscape 4.5 and later, and all versions of Mozilla and Konqueror can display PNG images at least as well as they display still GIF images. The biggest thing I can see that keeps PNG from replacing GIF is that IE does not support PNG's animated cousin out of the box, making it unsuitable for animated advertisements.
No, the Guy Pearce joke should be about Memento . In that movie, Pearce played a man who could not form new memories because of traumatic damage to his hippocampus. (Saying much further would spoil the plot.)
I can't remember the last time I paid Unisys for using a GIF...
When was the last time you bought a copy of GraphicConverter, Fireworks, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or any other program licensed under U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts? The price of each of those programs includes a royalty paid to Unisys.
Refusing to sell a license may be held against a copyright owner under the market value clause of the fair use law.
What's next? Is the RIAA going to send snitches out in public to rat on local bands for playing cover tunes?
Public performance of cover songs is not RIAA's jurisdiction but rather BMI's, and BMI does exactly that
I didn't say Metal Gear had its worldwide debut on the NES; I said only that I saw it on the NES, that its franchise appeared on Nintendo hardware before it appeared on Sony hardware. Heck, I've never even seen an MSX computer. Others may claim that the MSX computer was not a console. Did the MSX computer ever become popular in North America?
Compare almost any first gen PS1 game with one of the last gen PS1 games to see what I mean. They almost look like they are for totally different hardware platforms.
The first couple generations of games wrote to hardware only through the PSX BIOS, and PSX programming resembled programming for a general-purpose computer. Sony didn't open up the register-level interface until about two years into the original PlayStation's life. Thus, a fellow could almost consider the early PS1 and the later PS1 two different consoles.
The GBA and the GC combined, almost reach the sales of the PS2.
Where I come from, there are three kinds of lies: lies with short legs, lies with long noses, and statistics. Are you talking overall sales, or only the previous fiscal quarter? (The PS2's head start may not be relevant to some arguments.) Units, or dollars? (A GBA and a GCN put together cost only slightly more than a single PS2 system.)
[first console compatible with two Metroid titles] would be the Dreamcast
Super Game Boy came before the Saturn, let alone the Dreamcast.
This makes either the GBA or the GCN the first console to host two Metroid titles.
That honor would go to the Super NES, which had Metroid II for Super Game Boy and Super Metroid for Super NES.
However, the release of GameCube Game Boy Player at the end of May means that the GameCube already has three published Metroid titles: Metroid II for Game Boy, Metroid Prime for GameCube, and Metroid Fusion for Game Boy Advance.
[I define a "video game console" as] a "black box" whose primary function is to play video games and whose software and hardware are optimized primarily (if not solely) for that purpose.
Like the Amiga computer?
Even if your PC is used mostly to play games, the operating system it runs is too generalized for the machine to be called a games console.
By "the operating system", you're referring to Linux, right? The general opinion of the median Slashdot user is that Microsoft Windows operating systems aren't good for much more than playing games.
You'll never confuse Super Mario Bros. with Super Mario World or Super Mario 64.
But they all have Mario, and he even looks roughly the same from Super Mario All*Stars (the Super NES port of the 8-bit Mario games) all the way up through Sunshine. Kids will want the latest Mario game no matter what. Heck, they bought Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie, Mario Paint, Super Mario Kart, Mario Tennis (one of the only Virtual Boy games to be ported to Game Boy Color), and Mario Party, even though they were nothing like the other Mario games, just because they had Mario in it. Also watch the kids snap up Pokemon toys even though the system that the Pokemon games started out on (the monochrome Game Boy) has been dead for a couple years because a franchise outlasts the console that starts it.
The point is that a franchise established on one console carries over to the next console made by the same company, and latecomers such as Sony and Microsoft will have problems coming up with exclusive franchises unless they steal them from another platform *cough* MGS *cough* Final Fantasy *cough* Halo *cough*.
SNES trumped the Genesis in both graphics (sprites, colors as well as the effects you mention)
Sprites? 80 (Genesis) vs. 128 (Super NES) isn't a big difference, especially with mid-frame streaming to sprite registers (common in scrolling shooters). Colors? The difference between 3 bits per channel (Genesis) and 5 bits per channel (Super NES) didn't show up in the cheap TVs of the day[1], especially when many later Genesis games used temporal palette dithering to fake another bit in the video DAC. Similar tricks let Genesis programmers fake more than four color palettes by cutting each in half and temporally dithering each half. Except perhaps for Mode 7, almost any graphical effect that could be done on a Super NES could be faked on the Genesis.
and sound (the Genesis' sound processor was the CPU of the Master System while the SNES used a Sony chip designed specifically for it).
The Super NES definitely had the Genesis beat in sound quality, but loading sound data into memory on the Genesis was quicker because unlike the Super NES's SPC700, the Genesis's Zilog Z80 processor had cart bus access and didn't have to go through a slow parallel port to the CPU.
And guess what? Several Game Boy Advance games contain instruments that have been sampled from Yamaha FM synthesizers such as the Adlib (SB's sound chip) and the Genesis's sound chip. These include Pac-Attack by Namco and Sonic Advance by Sega.
Just as the Genesis re-used the Master System CPU to take care of sound, the Saturn uses the Genesis CPU in the same way.
But then it'd have to include the Master System CPU, the Genesis CPU, and the Saturn CPUs, along with the Master System and Genesis video circuitry (yes, some early Genesis games did run in SMS video mode). Now we're talking beaucoup bucks.
IIRC, that was mostly from Nintendo's decision to continue using cartridges instead of CDs
If Capcom could fit Resident Evil complete with video clips on a 512-megabit N64 Game Pak, why couldn't Konami fit Metal Gear Solid?
Anyway, I wasn't emphasizing that the franchises left Nintendo but rather that the MGS and FF franchises did start out on a Ninte
Is there anything like an Xbox-controller-to-USB converter?
The Xbox controller is a USB device with a differently shaped connector and a data protocol that slightly breaks the HID standard, but drivers exist for at least Windows.
I don't work for the ZTNET Store, which sells adapters to connect various game console controllers to a USB port.
After all, you didn't see the original ... MGS on the N64, either.
I'm sorry. I saw the original Metal Gear on the 8-bit NES.
It's also spun in the opposite direction to normal DVDs
Bullshit. When viewed from the label side, CDs spin clockwise, and so do DVDs. When I open my GameCube console's disc door after an intense round of Super Smash Bros. Melee, sometimes the disc is still spinning, and it's spinning clockwise.
However, the second layer of a DVD disc does have a spiral that also runs clockwise but outside-in rather than inside-out. As caouchouc wrote, the GameCube runs the dolphin OS which has its own filesystem, and I'm guessing that the dolphin filesystem stores the boot sector and directory track on the beginning of layer 2. Such a "reverse spiral" specification could possibly have given rise to the backwards rotation rumor.
When an abbreviation is heavily overloaded, a Google search on only the abbreviation produces less than relevant results. Before you insult somebody, try teaching him or her, possibly by providing a query string that returns more relevant results.
In general, the optical media-based consoles do relatively little reading of data within a level
In games such as Valve's Half-Life and some RPGs where you can walk from room to room without a concept of a "level", this adds up. Even the PC version of Half-Life had noticeable loading freezes on the computers of the time. In games such as Nintendo's WarioWare where a typical level lasts only two seconds, this adds up as well.
Portable CD-players are pretty popular despite occasional skipping
That's because they only need to read sequentially. A Red Book conforming CD player needs to read 75 sequential blocks of audio a second. Most portable CD players read 150 blocks a second, putting the excess into a buffer, and when the data stream from the mechanism is interrupted, they empty the buffer into the DAC until the mechanism can catch up again. However, such buffering would not work in a random access situation such as a video game.
You're addicted to Tetris, and Tetris is a gateway drug. Ever tried hard drugs?
big-name games (... Grand Theft Auto) ... And that's not even mentioning in-house titles like Gran Turismo.
I'd rather be playing Grand Theft Turismo, where you get to race the cars you steal.
16:9.
Puzzle games in such an aspect ratio are going to suck. (Or are you claiming that puzzle games belong on an N-Gage system with its vertical screen?) What's so bad about the GBA's 15:10 again?
3d audio.
Out of 2cm speakers typical of handheld devices?
1.8 GB storage on 60mm discs.
Discs scratch, skip when bumped (especially damning on handhelds), transfer slowly, and drain the battery (especially damning on handhelds). And if the games let you save your progress, the system now has to have two slots: one for the disc and one for the memory card. The handheld is starting to look pretty thick.
USB 2.0.
As a host or as a device?
this handheld only allows for first person shooter games.
I recognize an attempt at a joke, but...
PSP is a firearm and it's also a vaporware handheld game console. Mac 10 is a firearm and it's also an operating system. Just because something's named after a gun doesn't mean that consumers will confuse it with a gun.
Discounting Sega, [Sony] were first to market.
Fairchild Channel F console: 1976. Atari 2600 Video Computer System: 1977. Nintendo Entertainment System: 1985. Sega Master System: 1986. Sony PlayStation: 1994. Microsoft Xbox: 2001. Who was first to market again and had the chance to establish franchises that could possibly reappear on later consoles? Surely not Sony. Even among companies still in the video game business (Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft) or among companies still selling proprietary console hardware in the States (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft), Sony still isn't first to market.
You forget the generational cycles in the video game industry.
Because NVIDIA and ATI each release more than one new real-time graphics hardware product each year, the PC does not have generational cycles. Because it's easy now to connect multiple controllers to a PC's USB hub and to display the video on a 36-inch TV (720p yum!), I consider the PC just as much a part of the video game industry as the PS2. To exclude the Wintel platform from this discussion, please precisely define "video game console". (It'll be tough because Linux for PS2 exists.)
Besides, even if console hardware does have generations, franchises don't.
We're not exactly comparing a Genesis with an SNES.
Which was better again? From what I had read of the systems' specifications, the Genesis had more video memory bandwidth, but the Super NES had background scaling and rotation.
if the Sega Saturn had been backwards-compatible, Sony would be the one out of the hardware business.
No, Sega would still have been out of business because backwards compatibility was apparently more expensive to fabricate in 1994 when the Sega Saturn was coming out than in 2000 when the PS2 came out. It would have been a back-compat layer on top of a back-compat layer, and including it in the Saturn might have pushed its introductory price above the already expensive $400.
You seem to believe that [relying on copyrighted game worlds is] a liability.
You're right. It's an asset. If the franchises are not cash cows, then why do companies such as The Walt Disney Company so fiercely defend their monopolies on such worlds? And that's why Sony had a problem in the early days of the PS1: it had a hard time establishing its own franchises because Sony wasn't first to market. Most of the franchises that carried the PS1 and PS2 (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, etc) were carried over from the NES by other companies.