By asserting that the 'rounded corners' critique is invalidated simply by pointing to multiple claims in a design patent, you might be the one repeating an ignorant meme here. If NONE of the claimed attributes are unique on their own (rounded corners, beveling, device face comprised mostly of screen, small number of buttons, rectangular grid of icons, etc.) and various combinations of them have been widely used in other electronic devices over the past 50 years, how does one magically end up with a truly unique design? Piling up on dozens of commonplace look-and-feel features does not increase uniqueness. It seems more like an attempt to limit competition by monopolizing a basic design that the industry is already converging on.
Double-blind experiments are a tiny subset of the types of studies which happen in engineering and science. Yes, they do serve the useful purpose of mitigating 'fudging' of the results by the subjects and the researchers themselves, which is important when the chances of conflict of interest or bias are high (such as with drug trials).
As has been pointed out though, there are significant benefits to having researchers be more hands-on with their experiments. These range from making sure the experimental plan is being properly followed, sanity checks on the measured data (before weeks are wasted gathering bad data), revisions to the plans or equipment if required, coming up with additional tests in a slightly modified setup to verify any 'surprises' in the data, etc. You might be surprised at how often overlooked issues are discovered just by the person being there.
Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks every researcher is going to fudge data, compute a thousand different test statistics to fit their preconceived outcomes, modify the experiment in senseless ways until it gives them the outcomes they want, hide data that doesn't fit a certain model, etc., then I doubt any system of experimentation is going to be good enough for you.
You make a very strong point. There are often statistical and mathematical modeling assumptions that the researchers are aware of ahead of time, subtle pitfalls in the experimental setup that must be avoided to produce the type of data needed, etc., that the technicians/engineers will be unaware of unless the researchers themselves are directly involved in the experiments. By the same token, it's a good idea to have an engineer involved in the data collection review the research prior to publication to catch any obvious flaws in the modeling assumptions or misuse of the data (even if he doesn't understand everything in the paper). 'Separation of duties' is something that comes from laziness or time/budget constraints rather than being a template for solid scientific work.
You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.
I'd like to hear her comments on people that press the up and down buttons when they simply want to go down. It irritates the hell out of me because I believe this practice increases the average travel time for people already on the elevator as well as the impatient double-button-pusher himself.
For example, say someone on floor 6 (who wants to go to the ground floor) presses both buttons and then gets on while the elevator is on its way up. The extra delay caused by the unnecessary stop at floor 6 means, statistically speaking, that people on floors 7 and up will have more time to summon the elevator before it reaches its highest floor and eventually descends to floor 6 again on its way to the bottom.
When the double-button-pusher issues their goofy "Oh, I'll just get on for the ride... " comment, I frown menacingly and stare at them for the duration of the trip.
No, not really. You can take 'serious' to include any casual player who has enough intelligence to see how the input controls affect the gaming experience. It's pretty hard to argue that touch screen simply aren't up to the task for all but the most trivial of time-waster games.
On the other hand, if you discount the craptastic experience and define "main gaming platform" based only on the number of titles available while also ignoring the revenue potential that would attract better titles, you're completely right that Android is a powerhouse in the gaming world.
I was a little bit surprised just how many games--most of them commercial--have been written natively for Android, and they're not even all casual. I would take issue with anyone who doesn't consider Android to be one of the main gaming platforms today.
So what exactly would be a competitive (non-casual) game on Android or any mobile device? You're kidding yourself if you think any remotely serious gamer considers phones/tablets with touch screen interfaces a respectable platform for gaming.
For your point about Android being a "main gaming platform", number of devices in the wild isn't all that important to developers unless it can be translated into money for their game. At $3, you've got to sell a hell of a lot of copies (like Angry Birds number of copies) to make a profit on a AAA title.
None of this really says anything about the viability of a Linux console, I just think you picked a bad example to try to show that Linux has already been a success in the gaming arena.
Makes it sound like 700% gains are for everyone in the network. So we're to believe that occasionally discarding the buffered requests of a large subset of users magically solves a persistent congestion problem where more bandwidth is being demanded than is available? I suspect there will be a few happy users (who received priority) along with lots of sad faces.
Very few people search the patent database looking for technical information. The 'inventions' generally aren't novel, and the ones that are are usually better documented (sans lawyer speak) in the open literature, textbooks, downloadable presentations, etc. The whole idea of patents furthering progress through the dissemination of original technical contributions is bullocks and has been forever.
The "some that might argue" that are fools ignorant of the communications technology in cellular phones. Apple abuses their FRAND free ride on the significant communications R&D that has taken place over the last 20 years and tries to gouge everyone else on artsy fartsy design and software patents that wouldn't exist without the complicity of clueless patent examiners.
I'm not against publishing negative findings as long as the results aren't a forgone conclusion. There is a such a huge number of slight variations and dead ends to every problem though, not all of them are worth writing a paper about.
I haven't done a lot of publishing in open literature, but many times, the papers that fly through the vetting process with little effort are are on topics that are somewhat straightforward/trivial. And would thus not be as likely to be useful as a citation. The interesting topic raises many more questions and is more likely to require multiple tries to get through the review, but ultimately is more useful and more likely to get a citation.
My experience is the exact opposite. Papers that address new topics or ones that are 'all the rage', even when there isn't much substance to them, get preferential treatment from reviewers. See MIMO and Cognitive Radio in the field of wireless communications. These areas are cash cows for grant money until the next flavor of the day comes along, and the fact that very little practical impact was made is quickly forgotten.
Same thing when novel but inferior algorithms are presented. For example, I once saw polynomial prediction applied to a specific problem where linear prediction had already been well studied - the results were worse in every possible way, but the novelty factor was enough to push it through.
In contrast, classical topics that are considered 'old' or 'well-studied' (but are by no means 'solved' and are still quite relevant) are poorly received. The reviewers tend to lazily dismiss the work without giving it due consideration.
On the other hand, an actual message that is statistically well approximated by white noise carries maximum information because it contains no redundancy (maximum entropy).
by a total count of 30 to 13. However, the competition becomes much closer when the innovation count is normalized to word totals - 0.59% for Mitty compared to 0.40% for Barry. Not a bad effort by both candidates, but I happen to know several businessmen who hover around 3% on their bad days. "Leverage" and "synergy" hardly made an appearance. Clearly, America is doomed regardless of who wins the election.
There are hundreds of millions of mobile devices out there and mobile gamers don't seem to care about ultra realistic graphics and seeing every drop of blood. Mobile gaming is all about gameplay.
False dichotomy. Just because you're playing a game on a device that's incapable of decent video resolution and frame rate doesn't imply that "it's all about gameplay". Far from it, actually, since any notion of good gameplay on mobile devices is hamstrung by horrid touch screen interfaces and an expected price of $1.
Let's try your analogy on food: "There are millions of consumers of fast food and they don't seem to care about the frills and atmosphere offered by real restaurants. Dining at McDonalds is all about nutrition."
I can't agree that it was an "awesome idea". Game engine data is vastly more efficient than video data, by a factor of at least 10. Typical broadband connections, with their dodgy reliability and bandwidth caps, simply aren't up to the task of absorbing that inefficiency. You make a valid point about compatibility, but I much prefer the idea of installing the game locally and having it run smoothly at a comparatively low bit rate.
Which might be funny if it hadn't already been beaten to death. There's actually a more subtle joke in there, which is that the Wikipedia basher, having smugly demonstrated his profound knowledge of the topic at hand with just a few keystrokes, never bothers to reveal his superior source of information.
While it's ridiculous to even bother responding to something like this, I'll give it a go anyway. Portraying Fischer's angry rants about jews as worthy of consideration is nothing more than a thin attempt to equate chess skill with general intelligence, taken to an extreme that even the media and advertisers (who love to abuse this perception) would consider absurd. Would you actually buy a book on running a successful business because it was authored by Garry Kasparov? I seriously hope not.
There are ample quotes floating around on the internet from people who knew Fischer and followed his plight speculating that mental illness played a big part of some of the things he said and did later on in his life. He kept out of the U.S. to avoid taxes and sanctions for playing a match in Yugoslavia, claimed to have been robbed by a Jew managing his finances, and this seems to be the main source of his anti-US and anti-jew ramblings. Hopefully you would agree that this is not a very strong foundation for the statements quoted in your post.
It's not so much that it was an NSFW link that was the problem, it's that it was being misrepresented as something else to get people to click it. You seem especially proud of your low user id, having brought it up twice now (congratulations, would you like a medal?). And I'm the one with special snowflake syndrome? Umhummm.
newfag? I hadn't realized I was on 4chan. It's funny to see a little clique band together to defend someone spamming the message that gay porn links should not be removed from slashdot. He's also citing the "cover our ass" site disclaimer, which has a lot more to do with avoiding lawsuits than serving as a guide for user conduct. Do you have any common sense at all?
Would you shut the fuck up now? You've made half a dozen posts rambling on about how gay porn isn't against the 'official' rules, ignoring the main point that it's an annoyance and should be deleted. You're probably one of those assholes that also thinks the financial sector has done nothing wrong because everything was 'legal'.
It's a fake. It's the corporate distillation of a movement it saw as a threat into something that can "value add" and make money.
First example: XBox Live Indie Games. It's just like homebrew, except it's shackled and chained. You can't distribute XBL indie games for free, you must charge at least $1. The free demo 8 minute time limit is enforced by Microsoft, not the developer, and they can't bypass that. You can't deploy to XBox without paying the $99/year fee. Indie games are capped on size, no one can release more than X number of games, they can't run native code, they're capped on performance, they can't run online servers for simultaneous play, they can't be released without peer approval, they're content filtered... the list continues.
I honestly don't understand why people bag on XBLIG so much.
First, the $1 price tag really isn't a big deal now, is it? That's quite a reasonable price for any game that can provide at least a few hours of entertainment. Given the option, I suspect the majority of XBLIG developers would charge a bit just to try to recover some small amount of money for the time invested, especially considering you're not allowed (AFAIK) to earn money through in-game advertising. As you point out, there is always a demo version available free of charge, so nobody is paying money for games that end up sucking.
I would also say that the $99 per year developer fee is by no means onerous. You receive the XNA C# libraries, a good amount of example code, avatar animation packages as well as a pretty decent 3D modelling and animation tool (SoftImage mod) for that fee.
Peer approval is actually a good thing, if for no other reason than to keep the thousands of fart apps from cluttering the XBLIG marketplace. This is done by the XNA community rather than MS, and the standard for approval is quite low - they're only providing violence ratings for your game and making sure nothing fishy is going on. No legitimate game has ever been rejected for arbitrary reasons like you see in Apple's app store.
Finally, do you really think MS is making any serious money off of XBLIG? They give the developers 70% of the sales proceeds, so I highly doubt that. It's more likely a loss for them. There have been a few games that sold more than 100,000 copies, making some decent money for the developer, but those are few and far between.
By your definition of "not bad". A lot of players actually care more about multi-player instead of single player, and Quake III is still regarded as one of the most competitive and well designed games in that respect.
But perhaps not that surprising considering Romero has moved to 'social' game development. Considering the dreck that falls under that category, such as Zynga's games, you might ask whether it really is all about the money now? That is, at least until he decides to do something else entirely different next year - his Wikipedia bio suggests he changes gaming studios and wives about as often as he changes underwear.
Slashdot Mirror
By asserting that the 'rounded corners' critique is invalidated simply by pointing to multiple claims in a design patent, you might be the one repeating an ignorant meme here. If NONE of the claimed attributes are unique on their own (rounded corners, beveling, device face comprised mostly of screen, small number of buttons, rectangular grid of icons, etc.) and various combinations of them have been widely used in other electronic devices over the past 50 years, how does one magically end up with a truly unique design? Piling up on dozens of commonplace look-and-feel features does not increase uniqueness. It seems more like an attempt to limit competition by monopolizing a basic design that the industry is already converging on.
Double-blind experiments are a tiny subset of the types of studies which happen in engineering and science. Yes, they do serve the useful purpose of mitigating 'fudging' of the results by the subjects and the researchers themselves, which is important when the chances of conflict of interest or bias are high (such as with drug trials).
As has been pointed out though, there are significant benefits to having researchers be more hands-on with their experiments. These range from making sure the experimental plan is being properly followed, sanity checks on the measured data (before weeks are wasted gathering bad data), revisions to the plans or equipment if required, coming up with additional tests in a slightly modified setup to verify any 'surprises' in the data, etc. You might be surprised at how often overlooked issues are discovered just by the person being there.
Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks every researcher is going to fudge data, compute a thousand different test statistics to fit their preconceived outcomes, modify the experiment in senseless ways until it gives them the outcomes they want, hide data that doesn't fit a certain model, etc., then I doubt any system of experimentation is going to be good enough for you.
You make a very strong point. There are often statistical and mathematical modeling assumptions that the researchers are aware of ahead of time, subtle pitfalls in the experimental setup that must be avoided to produce the type of data needed, etc., that the technicians/engineers will be unaware of unless the researchers themselves are directly involved in the experiments. By the same token, it's a good idea to have an engineer involved in the data collection review the research prior to publication to catch any obvious flaws in the modeling assumptions or misuse of the data (even if he doesn't understand everything in the paper). 'Separation of duties' is something that comes from laziness or time/budget constraints rather than being a template for solid scientific work.
You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.
I'd like to hear her comments on people that press the up and down buttons when they simply want to go down. It irritates the hell out of me because I believe this practice increases the average travel time for people already on the elevator as well as the impatient double-button-pusher himself.
For example, say someone on floor 6 (who wants to go to the ground floor) presses both buttons and then gets on while the elevator is on its way up. The extra delay caused by the unnecessary stop at floor 6 means, statistically speaking, that people on floors 7 and up will have more time to summon the elevator before it reaches its highest floor and eventually descends to floor 6 again on its way to the bottom.
When the double-button-pusher issues their goofy "Oh, I'll just get on for the ride ... " comment, I frown menacingly and stare at them for the duration of the trip.
Ah yes, the "serious" gamer.
No, not really. You can take 'serious' to include any casual player who has enough intelligence to see how the input controls affect the gaming experience. It's pretty hard to argue that touch screen simply aren't up to the task for all but the most trivial of time-waster games.
On the other hand, if you discount the craptastic experience and define "main gaming platform" based only on the number of titles available while also ignoring the revenue potential that would attract better titles, you're completely right that Android is a powerhouse in the gaming world.
I was a little bit surprised just how many games--most of them commercial--have been written natively for Android, and they're not even all casual. I would take issue with anyone who doesn't consider Android to be one of the main gaming platforms today.
So what exactly would be a competitive (non-casual) game on Android or any mobile device? You're kidding yourself if you think any remotely serious gamer considers phones/tablets with touch screen interfaces a respectable platform for gaming.
For your point about Android being a "main gaming platform", number of devices in the wild isn't all that important to developers unless it can be translated into money for their game. At $3, you've got to sell a hell of a lot of copies (like Angry Birds number of copies) to make a profit on a AAA title.
None of this really says anything about the viability of a Linux console, I just think you picked a bad example to try to show that Linux has already been a success in the gaming arena.
Makes it sound like 700% gains are for everyone in the network. So we're to believe that occasionally discarding the buffered requests of a large subset of users magically solves a persistent congestion problem where more bandwidth is being demanded than is available? I suspect there will be a few happy users (who received priority) along with lots of sad faces.
Very few people search the patent database looking for technical information. The 'inventions' generally aren't novel, and the ones that are are usually better documented (sans lawyer speak) in the open literature, textbooks, downloadable presentations, etc. The whole idea of patents furthering progress through the dissemination of original technical contributions is bullocks and has been forever.
The "some that might argue" that are fools ignorant of the communications technology in cellular phones. Apple abuses their FRAND free ride on the significant communications R&D that has taken place over the last 20 years and tries to gouge everyone else on artsy fartsy design and software patents that wouldn't exist without the complicity of clueless patent examiners.
I'm not against publishing negative findings as long as the results aren't a forgone conclusion. There is a such a huge number of slight variations and dead ends to every problem though, not all of them are worth writing a paper about.
I haven't done a lot of publishing in open literature, but many times, the papers that fly through the vetting process with little effort are are on topics that are somewhat straightforward/trivial. And would thus not be as likely to be useful as a citation. The interesting topic raises many more questions and is more likely to require multiple tries to get through the review, but ultimately is more useful and more likely to get a citation.
My experience is the exact opposite. Papers that address new topics or ones that are 'all the rage', even when there isn't much substance to them, get preferential treatment from reviewers. See MIMO and Cognitive Radio in the field of wireless communications. These areas are cash cows for grant money until the next flavor of the day comes along, and the fact that very little practical impact was made is quickly forgotten.
Same thing when novel but inferior algorithms are presented. For example, I once saw polynomial prediction applied to a specific problem where linear prediction had already been well studied - the results were worse in every possible way, but the novelty factor was enough to push it through.
In contrast, classical topics that are considered 'old' or 'well-studied' (but are by no means 'solved' and are still quite relevant) are poorly received. The reviewers tend to lazily dismiss the work without giving it due consideration.
On the other hand, an actual message that is statistically well approximated by white noise carries maximum information because it contains no redundancy (maximum entropy).
by a total count of 30 to 13. However, the competition becomes much closer when the innovation count is normalized to word totals - 0.59% for Mitty compared to 0.40% for Barry. Not a bad effort by both candidates, but I happen to know several businessmen who hover around 3% on their bad days. "Leverage" and "synergy" hardly made an appearance. Clearly, America is doomed regardless of who wins the election.
There are hundreds of millions of mobile devices out there and mobile gamers don't seem to care about ultra realistic graphics and seeing every drop of blood. Mobile gaming is all about gameplay.
False dichotomy. Just because you're playing a game on a device that's incapable of decent video resolution and frame rate doesn't imply that "it's all about gameplay". Far from it, actually, since any notion of good gameplay on mobile devices is hamstrung by horrid touch screen interfaces and an expected price of $1.
Let's try your analogy on food: "There are millions of consumers of fast food and they don't seem to care about the frills and atmosphere offered by real restaurants. Dining at McDonalds is all about nutrition."
I can't agree that it was an "awesome idea". Game engine data is vastly more efficient than video data, by a factor of at least 10. Typical broadband connections, with their dodgy reliability and bandwidth caps, simply aren't up to the task of absorbing that inefficiency. You make a valid point about compatibility, but I much prefer the idea of installing the game locally and having it run smoothly at a comparatively low bit rate.
Which might be funny if it hadn't already been beaten to death. There's actually a more subtle joke in there, which is that the Wikipedia basher, having smugly demonstrated his profound knowledge of the topic at hand with just a few keystrokes, never bothers to reveal his superior source of information.
While it's ridiculous to even bother responding to something like this, I'll give it a go anyway. Portraying Fischer's angry rants about jews as worthy of consideration is nothing more than a thin attempt to equate chess skill with general intelligence, taken to an extreme that even the media and advertisers (who love to abuse this perception) would consider absurd. Would you actually buy a book on running a successful business because it was authored by Garry Kasparov? I seriously hope not.
There are ample quotes floating around on the internet from people who knew Fischer and followed his plight speculating that mental illness played a big part of some of the things he said and did later on in his life. He kept out of the U.S. to avoid taxes and sanctions for playing a match in Yugoslavia, claimed to have been robbed by a Jew managing his finances, and this seems to be the main source of his anti-US and anti-jew ramblings. Hopefully you would agree that this is not a very strong foundation for the statements quoted in your post.
It's not so much that it was an NSFW link that was the problem, it's that it was being misrepresented as something else to get people to click it. You seem especially proud of your low user id, having brought it up twice now (congratulations, would you like a medal?). And I'm the one with special snowflake syndrome? Umhummm.
newfag? I hadn't realized I was on 4chan. It's funny to see a little clique band together to defend someone spamming the message that gay porn links should not be removed from slashdot. He's also citing the "cover our ass" site disclaimer, which has a lot more to do with avoiding lawsuits than serving as a guide for user conduct. Do you have any common sense at all?
You should check on your own post history before calling anyone that. I was shocked to find out that both you and Desler are huge Apple dick riders.
Would you shut the fuck up now? You've made half a dozen posts rambling on about how gay porn isn't against the 'official' rules, ignoring the main point that it's an annoyance and should be deleted. You're probably one of those assholes that also thinks the financial sector has done nothing wrong because everything was 'legal'.
It's a fake. It's the corporate distillation of a movement it saw as a threat into something that can "value add" and make money.
First example: XBox Live Indie Games. It's just like homebrew, except it's shackled and chained. You can't distribute XBL indie games for free, you must charge at least $1. The free demo 8 minute time limit is enforced by Microsoft, not the developer, and they can't bypass that. You can't deploy to XBox without paying the $99/year fee. Indie games are capped on size, no one can release more than X number of games, they can't run native code, they're capped on performance, they can't run online servers for simultaneous play, they can't be released without peer approval, they're content filtered... the list continues.
I honestly don't understand why people bag on XBLIG so much.
First, the $1 price tag really isn't a big deal now, is it? That's quite a reasonable price for any game that can provide at least a few hours of entertainment. Given the option, I suspect the majority of XBLIG developers would charge a bit just to try to recover some small amount of money for the time invested, especially considering you're not allowed (AFAIK) to earn money through in-game advertising. As you point out, there is always a demo version available free of charge, so nobody is paying money for games that end up sucking.
I would also say that the $99 per year developer fee is by no means onerous. You receive the XNA C# libraries, a good amount of example code, avatar animation packages as well as a pretty decent 3D modelling and animation tool (SoftImage mod) for that fee.
Peer approval is actually a good thing, if for no other reason than to keep the thousands of fart apps from cluttering the XBLIG marketplace. This is done by the XNA community rather than MS, and the standard for approval is quite low - they're only providing violence ratings for your game and making sure nothing fishy is going on. No legitimate game has ever been rejected for arbitrary reasons like you see in Apple's app store.
Finally, do you really think MS is making any serious money off of XBLIG? They give the developers 70% of the sales proceeds, so I highly doubt that. It's more likely a loss for them. There have been a few games that sold more than 100,000 copies, making some decent money for the developer, but those are few and far between.
By your definition of "not bad". A lot of players actually care more about multi-player instead of single player, and Quake III is still regarded as one of the most competitive and well designed games in that respect.
But perhaps not that surprising considering Romero has moved to 'social' game development. Considering the dreck that falls under that category, such as Zynga's games, you might ask whether it really is all about the money now? That is, at least until he decides to do something else entirely different next year - his Wikipedia bio suggests he changes gaming studios and wives about as often as he changes underwear.