What about phrases like "by clicking on this link you agree to let us call your house" kind of things (where the link containers a token for identification purposes). Having a filter auto-follow links could be really dangerous then.
As eff'ed up as the legal system may be now, as wrong as many of the standard provisions of a EULA may be, contracts remain an agreement between two people and/or corporations; a computer's automated agreement can not be considered binding, or all hell breaks loose, legally speaking. Hacking other people's computers is already bad enough, the legal system will not stand for that also meaning that the hacker can impose binding contracts on you, without your knowlege, by making your "computer" agree to things.
Before anybody posts any kind of cynical "Oh but those wacky politicians will stoop to anything..."... no, no they won't. This would hurt them every bit as much as us, probably more so because this kind of thing is damaging in proportion to the legal power you have, rather then the inversely proportional they prefer. "They" are not out to explicitly hurt "us" so much as they are out to help "them".
What I am interested in, though, is what makes you qualified to offer that assessment of the Dreamcast's abilities? Do I have any reason to believe that you're not merely spouting conjecture off the top of your head?
Why, I'm the president of Sega, of course. Also the lead designer of the team who made the Dreamcast. Plus I'm the guy on the factory line who made the chips that connected the Dreamcast to the console controller. And the lead designer of the PowerVR chip. Could I be more qualified?
I'm qualified to make that assessment, but you pretty much have to believe or not believe based on the case I made (not much, this is Slashdot after all, do you expect AAA material?) and your own experience. Do you expect me to scan in my diploma for your personal pleasure? There is nothing I could say that you could necessarily believe.
You're kidding right? The driving physics of most driving games are much more sophisticated than GTA3. E.G., Gran Turismo, an older PS2 game, has a more sophisticated driving engine.
No, I'm not kidding. I don't recall saying that GTA3 was the most sophisticated driving simulation ever, merely that it could not have been done on the Dreamcast without losing something. Please do not put words in my mouth.
(Note that Gran Turismo can be done, because losing polygons isn't such a big deal on that game, because it focuses on the driving. Having a lot of objects in the world factors into this. And yes, I've played Crazy Taxi, both of them, on the Dreamcast; GTA3 is still a good deal more sophisticated.)
See, I disagree with the argument a lot of people give that older games are superior to newer ones because 'the gameplay was better.'
There's certainly two sides to that. There is a lot of gameplay that has died because nowadays it's too trivial for anyone to pay $50... or even $10... for it, yet it's still fun. The periodic "classics" collections partially alleviate this by bundling a lot of them together.
A lot of this gameplay is surprisingly sensitive to various subtle parameters and the vast majority of freeware Flash-based re-incarnations of the classics suck pretty badly, because while they wear the outward shape of the classic they are trying to emulate they are missing the soul. If you have any question about whether these games have some really cool gameplay, compare them to their (pathetic) imitators. They are unique.
On the other hand, I was playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time this weekend, and it was occurring to me that that is the first game I've seen in the console world that IMHO even the Dreamcast couldn't have adequately handled. (Yes, it has a Grand Theft Auto II but I've heard it's not the same at all.) Granted, the vast majority of the gameplay is perfectly doable on a Commodore 64 class machine, and much of it was indeed done, but for the driving physics, which are a huge portion of the game, contributing to its fun. Nothing much until the Playstation 2-class machines (including PCs) could have done that.
(OT note: The violence of GTA3 is highly overrated; the universe is violent because everybody is immortal, and it's all cartoon violence. "Kill" anyone and wait around and you'll see doctors swooping in and restoring them to full health; it's not much of an extrapolation to say that when it doesn't happen it's an engine failure or a failure of the game to capture the world, not a fundamental aspect of the game. Only main chars die, excluding your character. If we were all effectively immortal too, our world would look a lot more like GTA3, with much more "casual" muggings and murders and sloppy driving and such.)
As usual, the answer to "Is introversion nature or nuture?" is "Nature and nuture is an outdated dichoctomy that needs to be dispensed with; genes react to environment and environment reacts to genes and can not be seperated."
(OK, that's not the "usual" answer yet, but it's the correct one.)
Anecdotally, I've heard that I was reasonably outgoing as child, until I started going to school with the twin sins of being unattractive (due to some serious teeth issues which were only correctly diagnosed in 4th grade) and knowlegeable (dear God was kindergarten ever boring; I literally remember the single, solitary fact I learned, and it was accidental, not on the cirriculum; the teacher accidentally used the word "opposite" and had to explain it). After that I became extremely introverted as a defense mechanism, which continues to this day.
No, I'm not socially incapable, I've just learned how to live without it, again, by force of necessity. (Actually, if I say so myself I'm actually pretty perceptive; I'm constantly surprising my wife by being right off of very little information, sometimes even on such big issues as "she's being abused by her parents" that you're really going out on a limb by predicting.) I sometimes call myself "asocial"... not "antisocial", just "asocial".
Nature or nuture? Yes. The introversion was always there in potential, but it took a certain extremely socially hostile environment to bring it out.
Oh, you naive critter -- never underestimate what marketing can do to preferences.
Should have replied to this earlier, but I was on an Internet-free vacation.
Do you actually know what a Zipf distribution is? Actually, in the absense of marketing, I'd expect the distribution to be roughly Poisson; roughly proportionately fewer groups as you get larger in size. This is the distribution that occurs when increased size tends to increase growth; in other words, sustaining roughly the same percentage growth across several years.
The Zipf distribution tends to occur when an increase in size is accompanied by an increase in the ability to steal size from others; it results in a highly rarified top and a whole lot of small fry getting nowhere. That's the website model; since we web surfers tend to prefer large sites, large sites get larger and stomp out the smaller ones. How many mini-Slashdots is Slashdot preventing from forming, or experiencing, say, 10% of Slashdot's success, merely by existing? Slashdot is on top of the Zipf curve in its market and despite its many flaws, isn't going anywhere. (One of the great flaws of the dot-com bubble; being first wasn't important, growth was. Nobody can unseat Amazon now with any degree of reliability, and their very existance and size means it's difficult to attain their level, so competing with Amazon would almost be insanity now, since they are at the top of their Zipf curve.)
Saying that music perferences have a Zipf distribution is tantamount to saying that marketing has distorted the market significantly.
Now, I think, we get down to the heart of the matter. This isn't an attack on Linux per se. It isn't about IP or patents or copyrights. This is about trying to destroy the GPL. I think this statement, more than anything else, shows that MS really is behind this whole thing.
Up to this point I have been skeptical on that issue because it's easy to see a conspiracy where there is none. But I am forced to concede that that press release is exactly the press release that Microsoft would like to release, but don't think they can in a politic way.
The "SCO as a proxy for Microsoft" theory just got a lot more credible.
By the way, it's not clear that I mean the whole patent, including the description, is no more then a requirements specification, not just the claim. For all the verbiage, there's nearly nothing of value to an engineer there. The vast majority of that patent describes e-commerce systems in general; this is largely because "one-click order processing" is a minor adjustment to normal procedure rather then a breakthrough.
This is almost never true, in my experience, and these types of patents represent the corpus of my practice. Care to take one in particular? (Hint: the patent in the article isn't your best example.)
At this point this is probably almost a private debate, since the article is now quite old, so I'll ask you a direct question before answering, so as to better tune my response. Are you a lawyer, a programmer, or both? (And to which proportion, if both?)
As you might guess, if you're just a lawyer, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.
Nice pabulum, but what do you mean? Useless to whom?
Useless to me, a computer scientist. Taking ten pages to explain that your invention works on a network, and over a modem, and if the user uses a mouse, and if the files are stored locally, and if the files are stored on a LAN server, and if the files are on a server over the Internet is not useful. The vast majority of the claims are typically useless garbage; anything can be used that way. The claims have no distinguishing power between any two software patents.
To take another patent that has been litigated and won, how about the how about the One-Click patent? The entire first claim has only one valid point in it, bolded:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising:
under control of a client system,
displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.
The rest is either applicable to all e-commerce patents, fully implied by that statement (what, they're going to send the client a single-click button without the "single-action ordering component of the server system" to back it up?), or just useless filler ("receiving the request"? What, they're going to psychically divine the request?).
I present claims 13-26 as evidence of my "the single action is a sound generated by a user/selection using a television remote control/depressing of a key on a key pad/selecting using a pointing device/etc... all possible permutations of basic hardware and software setups" claim. (Those are quotes.)
Meanwhile, this patent is uselessly vauge because to the extent that it protects a valid innovation, it provides no details about how to implement the system. "15. The method of claim 11 wherein the displaying includes displaying an HTML document provided by the server system." may sound like a HOW-TO to you, but that's no more then a requirements specification to an engineer, it's not even the beginnings of a design, let alone a usable system.
Finally, it's uselessly vague because it presents no guidelines on how to distinguish from another potential "single-click" ordering system that does not infringe this patent. Rather then patenting a single implementation or even a single design, it patents the whole idea and that's a serious perversion of the patent system.
To summarize, that's
too vague to meaningfully describe an invention
too vague to implement to any degree at all
too vague to be a useful discriminant about whether something violates a patent (resulting in an excessively broad in
THe article claims that from 50 total subpoenas being checked, they can deduce overall proportions of artist representation in the subpoenas, which is, frankly, a load of crock; with a sample size that small, margin of error would be enormous.
Ah, one of the great statistical fallacies... "sample sizes must be large to be valid". Not entirely correct.
Assuming a distribution, and reasonably random sampling, a sample of 50 would be plenty for single-digit accuracy, by my BOTE calculation. The problem is, what distribution shall we choose? Song preferences are clearly not Gaussian; personally, I'd guess Zipf.
But that's only a guess; not knowing the distribution is a complete stopper, and it can only be answered with extensive surveying of lots of data, which isn't about to happen for this study. It's not the sample size preventing good statistics, though, it's lack of knowledge of the distribution, which is a completely different matter. (Actually, it's a bigger problem, requiring much more data to be collected to answer the question, well beyond merely scanning the sued people.)
"drawing" a GUI with something like Powerbuilder, Eclipse, or JBuilder is clearly a lot more effective than coding it, even with EMACS.
Is it? I've started coding my GUIs largely by hand and I can make them sing and dance in ways that users love, and forms-based builders can't even think about approaching. It's only more effective for highly static GUI panels, and the reality is nearly nothing should be static, it should be getting generated from external, easy-manipulable data sources. The forms builders afford (in the user-interface sense) poor and lazy (in a bad way) design.
Generic design patterns that you could "plug" into via some sort of object and run from there.
For what it's worth, either you can trivially do that now (like Singleton), or it's effectively impossible (like MVC). IIRC, "the" Patterns book explicitly disclaims the possibility of this, because they're just too high-level.
As a concrete for-instance, Python has first class support for "Iterators". But they are very specific iterators, and there's a discussion going on right now in the newsgroup about a slightly different sort of iterator, one that you could tell was empty. The type of "iterator" Python natively supports can't do that (it's a minimal commitment iterator, meant to be used in situations where you may not know whether the iterator is empty until you try it, and I've used this property before), yet that doesn't make it the One True Iterator; there's a place for iterators that know they are empty, or can be rewound, etc.
If that's the kind of support you want, you can have it, but that's not really full Pattern support, more like Pattern-inspired features.
I'll refrain from most of my other criticisms since they are matters of taste... oh hell, Bruce-Eckel-on-checked-exceptions-I'd-kill-myself- if-I-had-to-use-them. *gasp* sorry, had to toss that one in.;-)
I don't know if it's possible to do an elegant language with all that, but if it is, I think we should have one. Every other language lacks some of the above features. I would like to see a langauge that really had everything.
It's not. Seriously. The closest thing to what you mentioned is C++, with some external libraries added for things like garbage collection.
A lot of your features collide. Having pointers and references makes it very difficult for the GC, and you can typically get into situations where the GC is lost. (Unless by "pointers" you mean what is called "smart pointers" in C++, which will slow down you down). Having manual resource management and automatic GC is asking for pain. Enforced contracts + templates + multiple inheritance + interfaces (esp. as interfaces are a hack around Java not having multiple inheritance!) is asking for pain; I can't even imagine the syntax.
Virtual machine + native execution is almost, but not quite contradictory; the best way to accomplish that is to blur the distinction which we've already got. Is Java + JIT, or C# + JIT, running in a virtual machine or natively? Basically, the answer is "yes".
Remember that every language feature interacts with every other one and necessarily complicates the language. Like I said, C++ is the closest thing to meeting everything on that list, and it's notoriously complex... and it's not because they "like" it that way, it's because it has to be. Throwing more stuff on top of it won't help.
"Perfection is not acheived when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." The art of langauge design right now is not to throw the kitchen sink in, but to figure out what features we truly need to get the job done well, and which features afford (in the user interface sense) bad designs.
The old Perl way would have been to say "Look, now we have a simple parameter passing scheme like that one Python, one which has been proven to work." The Perl 6 way is to start with a series of odd little features, then keep modifying them and adding sugar to them until the end result, after a number of iterations of this, ends up being something that looks and works like Python's parameter passing scheme, but takes ten pages of explaining to fully explain,
This thought keeps occurring to me. Actually, without any intent to devolve into a Perl vs. Python flamewar, I've been thinking that a lot with quite a few of these Exegesises. Python certainly doesn't have all of what's supposed to go into Perl 6, but it has a lot of it already there, and a lot of the other stuff isn't necessary because that's just not the way things work in Python.
To be fair, Perl is letting you limit the incoming parameters via code, whereas Python limits them via philosophy ("Better to ask forgiveness")... but for all that verbiage, that's about all Perl 6 can do with parameter passing that Python can't.
(Anyone adding pipelines to code I have to subsequently maintain will be shot without trial. I don't care how nifty the feature is, you're better off writing it longhand under nearly all circumstances for maintainability.)
Some nifty ideas here, though; I'm tempted to see if I can't implement "any" and "all" in terms of Python, at least for in-program comparisions. (Although Python is clean... I wonder how many of the cute tricks would subsequently propogate correctly and work correctly as well...?)
Weather was simply the first thing that came to mind because it's computationally intensive and does not have to happen very rapidly. How about this one: Deformable terrain. The job of creating the assorted pieces and of deciding how they will act can be farmed out in cases where the player does not have a chance to directly interact with them, especially when they are out of sight.
Computationally intensive + non-real-time = precompute and cache it at the manufacturing plant.
You can't do anything else because the domain of processes that needs lots and lots of power, but doesn't need lots and lots of power (since you can't guarentee that everyone will have enough cells), is about as small as I'm making it sound by saying it that way.
You're being a fan boy. The best cure would be to learn more about what Sony is claiming they're going to do, perhaps even try to implement it yourself partially, and you'll start to understand why the only purpose of that cell bullshit is marketing; to make it sound like less of a toy to certain people, and to make clueless people like you drool over something that doesn't even make sense, financially, computationally, or in any other way.
"Holy shit! This rain took fifteen hours to generate, instead of being a randomly generated or scripted event! This is so much more fun!" "Holy shit! This hill took like ten minutes to generate! This is so much more fun!" Generation time is uncorrelated with fun. The first civilization had random maps, and it wasn't new at the time. I've seen games with "tectonic models", and they are only marginally different from games that used affinity to bundle terrain types. Realism is highly overrated.
This software would operate on a deeper level than it would if it operated with the words and symbols themselves. It would utilize a map of the deep structures of language, instead of a map of the less-meaningful words and grammars.
Actually, as a result, it operates on a shallower level. In fact, it's almost like you wrote this comment for an article in a parallel universe where statistical translation was the norm, and somebody was just now proposing symbolic translation, so much so that it's almost spooky.
This translation technique is so shallow it doesn't even particularly care what languages it works with. In a way, it can't really be said to be "translating" in the traditional sense; it's just correlating phrases with no clue what they are.
Traditional symbolic translation is better described by what you said:
Therefore, instead of playing with messy grammars and sentence structures, we can simply have a catalogue of thoughts as represented by words, and correlate that catalogue with a different set of words to facilitate translation.
Word(/phrase) -> symbol -> word(/phrase) is traditional tranlation. This is word -> word translation.
It's working better because we've had little or no success creating the middle part of the symbolic translation; matching the symbology used in our head has proven impossible to date. This works better by skipping that step, which introduces horrible distortions by forcing the words to fit into an incredibly poor symbology (compared to what we're actually using).
However, in theory, traditional translation should still have a brighter future; this is a hack around our ignorance, perhaps even a good one, but eventually we will want to extract the symbols.
(Incidentally, it's also why this same technique can't be used to match words -> symbols; we don't know how to represent the symbols yet! This kind of technique could eventually potentially be hybridized with something else to attack that problem, but simple, direct application can't result in the complicated relationships between symbols that exist, and we'd want a computer to "understand" those relations before we'd say it was truly translating or understanding English.)
Anyways, just flip your comments around 180 degrees and you're pretty close.
Well, that's is why there is the European Union Privacy Directive, which regulates what kind of data may be stored and processed, and what other rights you have on your data.
And we all know that governments absolutely always follow such directives. Especially bereaucratic organizations with no oversight, like spy agencies, or, if significant members of the EU have their way building the EU government, nearly the entire EU government.
Without oversight, such protections are useless, literally useless. Something Europe seems to have completely forgotten and the US keeps just barely remembering.
To say that it is "negligible" is patently false.... MS has literally billions of $ in the bank...
*cough* Ahem.
Compare their profit they make from my copy of Windows XP to the cost to them to distribute a copy of their security patch to me. I stand by negligible distribution costs.
I'm just bringing up some points that I rarely, if ever, hear discussed.
Most people aren't in the habit of spending a lot of time discussing obviously wrong points presented with no evidence whatsoever backing them up.
So, your blood pressure went up a few points when you read it.
The only conceivable reason you'd have raised anybody's blood pressure is by annoying them by posting idiotic statements and by extension, making people who may happen to agree with the positions you advocate by implication also look stupid. In other words, you've passed the level of stupidity where you primary anger your "own kind".
It actually relaxes me; there's a certain pleasure in laying the smack down on the Internet, and there's always the hope, that faint hope, that you might actually use this opportunity to re-examine your views and come up with something at least vaguely related to the real world.
Actually, the automotive industry normally does charge extra for safety features when they first come out. Only later does it become standard.... The real difference here, is that the competitive automotive industry provides safety as an option until overwhelming demand requires it, while a company who becomes a monopoly can then charge extra for what is obviously a needed item.
Gotta disagree. The real difference here is that car safety features are physical and therefore not free, whereas once security updates are created, the cost of distribution is negligible.
Chysler was (at least) once sued for not providing anti-lock brakes during a time when all anti-lock brake systems were entirely analog. The car was old, and by the time the accident occurred, anti-lock was a fairly common feature, so they figure, hey, sue Chrysler for not forcing them to buy anti-lock brakes.
Problem is, while it is theoretically possible to ship cars with analog-based anti-lock brake systems, they add thousands of dollars to the price of the car and unavoidable add hundreds of pounds of weight; it's a system begging for digital control. Oh, and reliability was such that it would never work in the real world; too many moving parts that had to work with too much precision for the system to work right; slight misalignments would make the system do weird things, potentially for just one tire, which could destabalize the entire car completely.
The point? Well, two, actually. One is that installing such a system would not necessarily have saved anyone and the car would probably have killed someone earlier when the brakes failed. But second, nobody would have bought that car. Even if the government had (extremely foolishly) mandated the installation of such systems, the general public's reaction would be to significantly slow down their purchase of new cars because they suddenly jumped by %25 or more in cost (for dubious gains).
Similarly for airbags. Similarly for every other safety system. It takes time (and money!) to do them, it then takes time n(and money!) to do them right, and only then can you take the time to do it cheaply without sacrificing safety. That's the last step.
Microsoft providing patches is utterly incomparable to car manufacturors safety equipment. There just isn't the ongoing, per-car safety equipment cost that things in the real world have. Once Microsoft has tested a patch, it's very cheap to distribute. Car manufacturors must charge more for adding things to a car, safety related or otherwise, or go out of business, period, end of discussion. Microsoft is almost in the opposite position; they must support their buggy software for "free"... or face the same penalty as a lot of people start to have serious second thoughts about setting up Microsoft in a position to profit from their own bugs. (It isn't just nerds who have read the Dilbert comics others have referred to...)
Remember, as invincible as Microsoft seems only two divisions are making significant money, and OS is one of them. They can not afford to dick around like this, with Linux poised to continue nibbling away in every domain from servers to desktops to embedded.
A description in an abstract has no legal bearing on the scope of the patent granted, nor does excerpts of language drawn from the specification. The claim is the thing. Arguing in general terms from a broad sweeping apprimation of the patent craft is simply quibbling about a straw man.
There's no reasonable way to describe a true implementation of these ideas fully in the twenty or so pages most of these sorts of patents consume.
If you think a claim from a patent is valid, spell out the claim, offer a plausible construction of the claim and tell us what is the prior art. then we have a useful conversation going.
Generally speaking, while that may be useful in non-software domains, software patent claims are uselessly vague. Showing prior art for a patent claim that literally boils down to "Sending encrypted data with a network" (as opposed to the next claim, which could involve sending encrypted data with a modem) is so easy, the legal system refuses to believe it, so they make it impossible, because while specified prior art certainly invalidates the broad claim, it doesn't quite match the exact implementation or something stupid like that. Frankly, I have a hard time keeping all the rationalizations that make software patents possible straight; they are so nonsensical that they make no sense to me anymore.
If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.
To pick a nit, I'd submit there's a major difference between movie license and franchise license. Of the games you list, the only one that might be considered truly movie licensed is Golden Eye, and given the enduring popularity of the James Bond franchise, even that is stretching it.
X-Wing and Tie Fighter were emphatically not movie licensed; there isn't a Star Wars movie five years either side of the original X-Wing (maybe more, I'm being conservative). GI Joe was popular for decades. I don't recall if TMNT had any movie-specific games, but it did have a lot of non-movie specific games.
Now, this is a Star Wars movie-licensed game. It is not immune to licensing crapiness.
Actually, Star Wars does have one of the few truly movie-based games that I did not read uniformly bad things about, and that was the Pod Racer games. Still, an exception does not a trend make.
Anyways, just a little nit, but when seen this way, the movie license sucks trend holds very strongly, whereas franchise licenses sometimes work out OK. (The best Star Trek games were set in the Original Series universe, 20-25+ years after the show went off the air, for instance.)
Slashdot Mirror
What about phrases like "by clicking on this link you agree to let us call your house" kind of things (where the link containers a token for identification purposes). Having a filter auto-follow links could be really dangerous then.
As eff'ed up as the legal system may be now, as wrong as many of the standard provisions of a EULA may be, contracts remain an agreement between two people and/or corporations; a computer's automated agreement can not be considered binding, or all hell breaks loose, legally speaking. Hacking other people's computers is already bad enough, the legal system will not stand for that also meaning that the hacker can impose binding contracts on you, without your knowlege, by making your "computer" agree to things.
Before anybody posts any kind of cynical "Oh but those wacky politicians will stoop to anything..."... no, no they won't. This would hurt them every bit as much as us, probably more so because this kind of thing is damaging in proportion to the legal power you have, rather then the inversely proportional they prefer. "They" are not out to explicitly hurt "us" so much as they are out to help "them".
What I am interested in, though, is what makes you qualified to offer that assessment of the Dreamcast's abilities? Do I have any reason to believe that you're not merely spouting conjecture off the top of your head?
Why, I'm the president of Sega, of course. Also the lead designer of the team who made the Dreamcast. Plus I'm the guy on the factory line who made the chips that connected the Dreamcast to the console controller. And the lead designer of the PowerVR chip. Could I be more qualified?
I'm qualified to make that assessment, but you pretty much have to believe or not believe based on the case I made (not much, this is Slashdot after all, do you expect AAA material?) and your own experience. Do you expect me to scan in my diploma for your personal pleasure? There is nothing I could say that you could necessarily believe.
Yeesh.
You're kidding right? The driving physics of most driving games are much more sophisticated than GTA3. E.G., Gran Turismo, an older PS2 game, has a more sophisticated driving engine.
No, I'm not kidding. I don't recall saying that GTA3 was the most sophisticated driving simulation ever, merely that it could not have been done on the Dreamcast without losing something. Please do not put words in my mouth.
(Note that Gran Turismo can be done, because losing polygons isn't such a big deal on that game, because it focuses on the driving. Having a lot of objects in the world factors into this. And yes, I've played Crazy Taxi, both of them, on the Dreamcast; GTA3 is still a good deal more sophisticated.)
See, I disagree with the argument a lot of people give that older games are superior to newer ones because 'the gameplay was better.'
There's certainly two sides to that. There is a lot of gameplay that has died because nowadays it's too trivial for anyone to pay $50... or even $10... for it, yet it's still fun. The periodic "classics" collections partially alleviate this by bundling a lot of them together.
A lot of this gameplay is surprisingly sensitive to various subtle parameters and the vast majority of freeware Flash-based re-incarnations of the classics suck pretty badly, because while they wear the outward shape of the classic they are trying to emulate they are missing the soul. If you have any question about whether these games have some really cool gameplay, compare them to their (pathetic) imitators. They are unique.
On the other hand, I was playing Grand Theft Auto III for the first time this weekend, and it was occurring to me that that is the first game I've seen in the console world that IMHO even the Dreamcast couldn't have adequately handled. (Yes, it has a Grand Theft Auto II but I've heard it's not the same at all.) Granted, the vast majority of the gameplay is perfectly doable on a Commodore 64 class machine, and much of it was indeed done, but for the driving physics, which are a huge portion of the game, contributing to its fun. Nothing much until the Playstation 2-class machines (including PCs) could have done that.
(OT note: The violence of GTA3 is highly overrated; the universe is violent because everybody is immortal, and it's all cartoon violence. "Kill" anyone and wait around and you'll see doctors swooping in and restoring them to full health; it's not much of an extrapolation to say that when it doesn't happen it's an engine failure or a failure of the game to capture the world, not a fundamental aspect of the game. Only main chars die, excluding your character. If we were all effectively immortal too, our world would look a lot more like GTA3, with much more "casual" muggings and murders and sloppy driving and such.)
As usual, the answer to "Is introversion nature or nuture?" is "Nature and nuture is an outdated dichoctomy that needs to be dispensed with; genes react to environment and environment reacts to genes and can not be seperated."
(OK, that's not the "usual" answer yet, but it's the correct one.)
Anecdotally, I've heard that I was reasonably outgoing as child, until I started going to school with the twin sins of being unattractive (due to some serious teeth issues which were only correctly diagnosed in 4th grade) and knowlegeable (dear God was kindergarten ever boring; I literally remember the single, solitary fact I learned, and it was accidental, not on the cirriculum; the teacher accidentally used the word "opposite" and had to explain it). After that I became extremely introverted as a defense mechanism, which continues to this day.
No, I'm not socially incapable, I've just learned how to live without it, again, by force of necessity. (Actually, if I say so myself I'm actually pretty perceptive; I'm constantly surprising my wife by being right off of very little information, sometimes even on such big issues as "she's being abused by her parents" that you're really going out on a limb by predicting.) I sometimes call myself "asocial"... not "antisocial", just "asocial".
Nature or nuture? Yes. The introversion was always there in potential, but it took a certain extremely socially hostile environment to bring it out.
Oh, you naive critter -- never underestimate what marketing can do to preferences.
Should have replied to this earlier, but I was on an Internet-free vacation.
Do you actually know what a Zipf distribution is? Actually, in the absense of marketing, I'd expect the distribution to be roughly Poisson; roughly proportionately fewer groups as you get larger in size. This is the distribution that occurs when increased size tends to increase growth; in other words, sustaining roughly the same percentage growth across several years.
The Zipf distribution tends to occur when an increase in size is accompanied by an increase in the ability to steal size from others; it results in a highly rarified top and a whole lot of small fry getting nowhere. That's the website model; since we web surfers tend to prefer large sites, large sites get larger and stomp out the smaller ones. How many mini-Slashdots is Slashdot preventing from forming, or experiencing, say, 10% of Slashdot's success, merely by existing? Slashdot is on top of the Zipf curve in its market and despite its many flaws, isn't going anywhere. (One of the great flaws of the dot-com bubble; being first wasn't important, growth was. Nobody can unseat Amazon now with any degree of reliability, and their very existance and size means it's difficult to attain their level, so competing with Amazon would almost be insanity now, since they are at the top of their Zipf curve.)
Saying that music perferences have a Zipf distribution is tantamount to saying that marketing has distorted the market significantly.
Now, I think, we get down to the heart of the matter. This isn't an attack on Linux per se. It isn't about IP or patents or copyrights. This is about trying to destroy the GPL. I think this statement, more than anything else, shows that MS really is behind this whole thing.
Up to this point I have been skeptical on that issue because it's easy to see a conspiracy where there is none. But I am forced to concede that that press release is exactly the press release that Microsoft would like to release, but don't think they can in a politic way.
The "SCO as a proxy for Microsoft" theory just got a lot more credible.
Water striders.
Copyright is not the threat to freedom. Indeed, copyright will be one of the utterly necessary tools to secure it, though it may not resemble its current form much. Copyright abuse is a threat to freedom, and the inability of the current system to correctly use copyright is a threat to freedom, but the answer is not to give up all copyright; that's tantamount to just giving up, because with no protection from the corporations, we lose, immediately.
By the way, it's not clear that I mean the whole patent, including the description, is no more then a requirements specification, not just the claim. For all the verbiage, there's nearly nothing of value to an engineer there. The vast majority of that patent describes e-commerce systems in general; this is largely because "one-click order processing" is a minor adjustment to normal procedure rather then a breakthrough.
At this point this is probably almost a private debate, since the article is now quite old, so I'll ask you a direct question before answering, so as to better tune my response. Are you a lawyer, a programmer, or both? (And to which proportion, if both?)
As you might guess, if you're just a lawyer, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.
Nice pabulum, but what do you mean? Useless to whom?
Useless to me, a computer scientist. Taking ten pages to explain that your invention works on a network, and over a modem, and if the user uses a mouse, and if the files are stored locally, and if the files are stored on a LAN server, and if the files are on a server over the Internet is not useful. The vast majority of the claims are typically useless garbage; anything can be used that way. The claims have no distinguishing power between any two software patents.
To take another patent that has been litigated and won, how about the how about the One-Click patent? The entire first claim has only one valid point in it, bolded:
The rest is either applicable to all e-commerce patents, fully implied by that statement (what, they're going to send the client a single-click button without the "single-action ordering component of the server system" to back it up?), or just useless filler ("receiving the request"? What, they're going to psychically divine the request?).
I present claims 13-26 as evidence of my "the single action is a sound generated by a user/selection using a television remote control/depressing of a key on a key pad/selecting using a pointing device/etc... all possible permutations of basic hardware and software setups" claim. (Those are quotes.)
Meanwhile, this patent is uselessly vauge because to the extent that it protects a valid innovation, it provides no details about how to implement the system. "15. The method of claim 11 wherein the displaying includes displaying an HTML document provided by the server system." may sound like a HOW-TO to you, but that's no more then a requirements specification to an engineer, it's not even the beginnings of a design, let alone a usable system.
Finally, it's uselessly vague because it presents no guidelines on how to distinguish from another potential "single-click" ordering system that does not infringe this patent. Rather then patenting a single implementation or even a single design, it patents the whole idea and that's a serious perversion of the patent system.
To summarize, that's
THe article claims that from 50 total subpoenas being checked, they can deduce overall proportions of artist representation in the subpoenas, which is, frankly, a load of crock; with a sample size that small, margin of error would be enormous.
Ah, one of the great statistical fallacies... "sample sizes must be large to be valid". Not entirely correct.
Assuming a distribution, and reasonably random sampling, a sample of 50 would be plenty for single-digit accuracy, by my BOTE calculation. The problem is, what distribution shall we choose? Song preferences are clearly not Gaussian; personally, I'd guess Zipf.
But that's only a guess; not knowing the distribution is a complete stopper, and it can only be answered with extensive surveying of lots of data, which isn't about to happen for this study. It's not the sample size preventing good statistics, though, it's lack of knowledge of the distribution, which is a completely different matter. (Actually, it's a bigger problem, requiring much more data to be collected to answer the question, well beyond merely scanning the sued people.)
"drawing" a GUI with something like Powerbuilder, Eclipse, or JBuilder is clearly a lot more effective than coding it, even with EMACS.
;-)
Is it? I've started coding my GUIs largely by hand and I can make them sing and dance in ways that users love, and forms-based builders can't even think about approaching. It's only more effective for highly static GUI panels, and the reality is nearly nothing should be static, it should be getting generated from external, easy-manipulable data sources. The forms builders afford (in the user-interface sense) poor and lazy (in a bad way) design.
Just a thought to add to the pile.
Generic design patterns that you could "plug" into via some sort of object and run from there.
- if-I-had-to-use-them. *gasp* sorry, had to toss that one in. ;-)
For what it's worth, either you can trivially do that now (like Singleton), or it's effectively impossible (like MVC). IIRC, "the" Patterns book explicitly disclaims the possibility of this, because they're just too high-level.
As a concrete for-instance, Python has first class support for "Iterators". But they are very specific iterators, and there's a discussion going on right now in the newsgroup about a slightly different sort of iterator, one that you could tell was empty. The type of "iterator" Python natively supports can't do that (it's a minimal commitment iterator, meant to be used in situations where you may not know whether the iterator is empty until you try it, and I've used this property before), yet that doesn't make it the One True Iterator; there's a place for iterators that know they are empty, or can be rewound, etc.
If that's the kind of support you want, you can have it, but that's not really full Pattern support, more like Pattern-inspired features.
I'll refrain from most of my other criticisms since they are matters of taste... oh hell, Bruce-Eckel-on-checked-exceptions-I'd-kill-myself
I don't know if it's possible to do an elegant language with all that, but if it is, I think we should have one. Every other language lacks some of the above features. I would like to see a langauge that really had everything.
It's not. Seriously. The closest thing to what you mentioned is C++, with some external libraries added for things like garbage collection.
A lot of your features collide. Having pointers and references makes it very difficult for the GC, and you can typically get into situations where the GC is lost. (Unless by "pointers" you mean what is called "smart pointers" in C++, which will slow down you down). Having manual resource management and automatic GC is asking for pain. Enforced contracts + templates + multiple inheritance + interfaces (esp. as interfaces are a hack around Java not having multiple inheritance!) is asking for pain; I can't even imagine the syntax.
Virtual machine + native execution is almost, but not quite contradictory; the best way to accomplish that is to blur the distinction which we've already got. Is Java + JIT, or C# + JIT, running in a virtual machine or natively? Basically, the answer is "yes".
Remember that every language feature interacts with every other one and necessarily complicates the language. Like I said, C++ is the closest thing to meeting everything on that list, and it's notoriously complex... and it's not because they "like" it that way, it's because it has to be. Throwing more stuff on top of it won't help.
"Perfection is not acheived when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." The art of langauge design right now is not to throw the kitchen sink in, but to figure out what features we truly need to get the job done well, and which features afford (in the user interface sense) bad designs.
The old Perl way would have been to say "Look, now we have a simple parameter passing scheme like that one Python, one which has been proven to work." The Perl 6 way is to start with a series of odd little features, then keep modifying them and adding sugar to them until the end result, after a number of iterations of this, ends up being something that looks and works like Python's parameter passing scheme, but takes ten pages of explaining to fully explain,
This thought keeps occurring to me. Actually, without any intent to devolve into a Perl vs. Python flamewar, I've been thinking that a lot with quite a few of these Exegesises. Python certainly doesn't have all of what's supposed to go into Perl 6, but it has a lot of it already there, and a lot of the other stuff isn't necessary because that's just not the way things work in Python.
To be fair, Perl is letting you limit the incoming parameters via code, whereas Python limits them via philosophy ("Better to ask forgiveness")... but for all that verbiage, that's about all Perl 6 can do with parameter passing that Python can't.
(Anyone adding pipelines to code I have to subsequently maintain will be shot without trial. I don't care how nifty the feature is, you're better off writing it longhand under nearly all circumstances for maintainability.)
Some nifty ideas here, though; I'm tempted to see if I can't implement "any" and "all" in terms of Python, at least for in-program comparisions. (Although Python is clean... I wonder how many of the cute tricks would subsequently propogate correctly and work correctly as well...?)
Weather was simply the first thing that came to mind because it's computationally intensive and does not have to happen very rapidly. How about this one: Deformable terrain. The job of creating the assorted pieces and of deciding how they will act can be farmed out in cases where the player does not have a chance to directly interact with them, especially when they are out of sight.
Computationally intensive + non-real-time = precompute and cache it at the manufacturing plant.
You can't do anything else because the domain of processes that needs lots and lots of power, but doesn't need lots and lots of power (since you can't guarentee that everyone will have enough cells), is about as small as I'm making it sound by saying it that way.
You're being a fan boy. The best cure would be to learn more about what Sony is claiming they're going to do, perhaps even try to implement it yourself partially, and you'll start to understand why the only purpose of that cell bullshit is marketing; to make it sound like less of a toy to certain people, and to make clueless people like you drool over something that doesn't even make sense, financially, computationally, or in any other way.
"Holy shit! This rain took fifteen hours to generate, instead of being a randomly generated or scripted event! This is so much more fun!" "Holy shit! This hill took like ten minutes to generate! This is so much more fun!" Generation time is uncorrelated with fun. The first civilization had random maps, and it wasn't new at the time. I've seen games with "tectonic models", and they are only marginally different from games that used affinity to bundle terrain types. Realism is highly overrated.
This software would operate on a deeper level than it would if it operated with the words and symbols themselves. It would utilize a map of the deep structures of language, instead of a map of the less-meaningful words and grammars.
Actually, as a result, it operates on a shallower level. In fact, it's almost like you wrote this comment for an article in a parallel universe where statistical translation was the norm, and somebody was just now proposing symbolic translation, so much so that it's almost spooky.
This translation technique is so shallow it doesn't even particularly care what languages it works with. In a way, it can't really be said to be "translating" in the traditional sense; it's just correlating phrases with no clue what they are.
Traditional symbolic translation is better described by what you said:
Therefore, instead of playing with messy grammars and sentence structures, we can simply have a catalogue of thoughts as represented by words, and correlate that catalogue with a different set of words to facilitate translation.
Word(/phrase) -> symbol -> word(/phrase) is traditional tranlation. This is word -> word translation.
It's working better because we've had little or no success creating the middle part of the symbolic translation; matching the symbology used in our head has proven impossible to date. This works better by skipping that step, which introduces horrible distortions by forcing the words to fit into an incredibly poor symbology (compared to what we're actually using).
However, in theory, traditional translation should still have a brighter future; this is a hack around our ignorance, perhaps even a good one, but eventually we will want to extract the symbols.
(Incidentally, it's also why this same technique can't be used to match words -> symbols; we don't know how to represent the symbols yet! This kind of technique could eventually potentially be hybridized with something else to attack that problem, but simple, direct application can't result in the complicated relationships between symbols that exist, and we'd want a computer to "understand" those relations before we'd say it was truly translating or understanding English.)
Anyways, just flip your comments around 180 degrees and you're pretty close.
Well, that's is why there is the European Union Privacy Directive, which regulates what kind of data may be stored and processed, and what other rights you have on your data.
And we all know that governments absolutely always follow such directives. Especially bereaucratic organizations with no oversight, like spy agencies, or, if significant members of the EU have their way building the EU government, nearly the entire EU government.
Without oversight, such protections are useless, literally useless. Something Europe seems to have completely forgotten and the US keeps just barely remembering.
To say that it is "negligible" is patently false.... MS has literally billions of $ in the bank...
*cough* Ahem.
Compare their profit they make from my copy of Windows XP to the cost to them to distribute a copy of their security patch to me. I stand by negligible distribution costs.
I'm just bringing up some points that I rarely, if ever, hear discussed.
Most people aren't in the habit of spending a lot of time discussing obviously wrong points presented with no evidence whatsoever backing them up.
So, your blood pressure went up a few points when you read it.
The only conceivable reason you'd have raised anybody's blood pressure is by annoying them by posting idiotic statements and by extension, making people who may happen to agree with the positions you advocate by implication also look stupid. In other words, you've passed the level of stupidity where you primary anger your "own kind".
It actually relaxes me; there's a certain pleasure in laying the smack down on the Internet, and there's always the hope, that faint hope, that you might actually use this opportunity to re-examine your views and come up with something at least vaguely related to the real world.
Thanks for the amusement.
Actually, the automotive industry normally does charge extra for safety features when they first come out. Only later does it become standard.... The real difference here, is that the competitive automotive industry provides safety as an option until overwhelming demand requires it, while a company who becomes a monopoly can then charge extra for what is obviously a needed item.
Gotta disagree. The real difference here is that car safety features are physical and therefore not free, whereas once security updates are created, the cost of distribution is negligible.
Chysler was (at least) once sued for not providing anti-lock brakes during a time when all anti-lock brake systems were entirely analog. The car was old, and by the time the accident occurred, anti-lock was a fairly common feature, so they figure, hey, sue Chrysler for not forcing them to buy anti-lock brakes.
Problem is, while it is theoretically possible to ship cars with analog-based anti-lock brake systems, they add thousands of dollars to the price of the car and unavoidable add hundreds of pounds of weight; it's a system begging for digital control. Oh, and reliability was such that it would never work in the real world; too many moving parts that had to work with too much precision for the system to work right; slight misalignments would make the system do weird things, potentially for just one tire, which could destabalize the entire car completely.
The point? Well, two, actually. One is that installing such a system would not necessarily have saved anyone and the car would probably have killed someone earlier when the brakes failed. But second, nobody would have bought that car. Even if the government had (extremely foolishly) mandated the installation of such systems, the general public's reaction would be to significantly slow down their purchase of new cars because they suddenly jumped by %25 or more in cost (for dubious gains).
Similarly for airbags. Similarly for every other safety system. It takes time (and money!) to do them, it then takes time n(and money!) to do them right, and only then can you take the time to do it cheaply without sacrificing safety. That's the last step.
Microsoft providing patches is utterly incomparable to car manufacturors safety equipment. There just isn't the ongoing, per-car safety equipment cost that things in the real world have. Once Microsoft has tested a patch, it's very cheap to distribute. Car manufacturors must charge more for adding things to a car, safety related or otherwise, or go out of business, period, end of discussion. Microsoft is almost in the opposite position; they must support their buggy software for "free"... or face the same penalty as a lot of people start to have serious second thoughts about setting up Microsoft in a position to profit from their own bugs. (It isn't just nerds who have read the Dilbert comics others have referred to...)
Remember, as invincible as Microsoft seems only two divisions are making significant money, and OS is one of them. They can not afford to dick around like this, with Linux poised to continue nibbling away in every domain from servers to desktops to embedded.
A description in an abstract has no legal bearing on the scope of the patent granted, nor does excerpts of language drawn from the specification. The claim is the thing. Arguing in general terms from a broad sweeping apprimation of the patent craft is simply quibbling about a straw man.
Normally I'd agree, but the typical technical patent simply is a restatement of the abstract, in all possible permutations of basic hardware and software setups. See the anatomy of a trivial patent for examples of that sort of thing. Combined with the way the Patent Office (and the rest of the system) is forced to take a broad view of patents, it regrettably is fairly valid to argue from the abstract alone.
There's no reasonable way to describe a true implementation of these ideas fully in the twenty or so pages most of these sorts of patents consume.
If you think a claim from a patent is valid, spell out the claim, offer a plausible construction of the claim and tell us what is the prior art. then we have a useful conversation going.
Generally speaking, while that may be useful in non-software domains, software patent claims are uselessly vague. Showing prior art for a patent claim that literally boils down to "Sending encrypted data with a network" (as opposed to the next claim, which could involve sending encrypted data with a modem) is so easy, the legal system refuses to believe it, so they make it impossible, because while specified prior art certainly invalidates the broad claim, it doesn't quite match the exact implementation or something stupid like that. Frankly, I have a hard time keeping all the rationalizations that make software patents possible straight; they are so nonsensical that they make no sense to me anymore.
I call it a conspiracy of common cause.
Happens all the time.
If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.
To pick a nit, I'd submit there's a major difference between movie license and franchise license. Of the games you list, the only one that might be considered truly movie licensed is Golden Eye, and given the enduring popularity of the James Bond franchise, even that is stretching it.
X-Wing and Tie Fighter were emphatically not movie licensed; there isn't a Star Wars movie five years either side of the original X-Wing (maybe more, I'm being conservative). GI Joe was popular for decades. I don't recall if TMNT had any movie-specific games, but it did have a lot of non-movie specific games.
Now, this is a Star Wars movie-licensed game. It is not immune to licensing crapiness.
Actually, Star Wars does have one of the few truly movie-based games that I did not read uniformly bad things about, and that was the Pod Racer games. Still, an exception does not a trend make.
Anyways, just a little nit, but when seen this way, the movie license sucks trend holds very strongly, whereas franchise licenses sometimes work out OK. (The best Star Trek games were set in the Original Series universe, 20-25+ years after the show went off the air, for instance.)