I'm sure there'll be an 'illuminator' ring built into the bezel by at least the second wave of backlight-free screens. There are just too many practical situations where it's convenient to be able to see your mobile screen in low-to-no ambient light situations.
meetings/classes with a projector in use at the pub or theatre in bed outside at night in a car/plane/train at night etc.
Saying things might change in the future just doesn't matter. If it -does- turn around, it can be re-evaluated whenever that -actually- happens.
And odds are by the PS3 makes sense, it'll be cheaper to have bought a 360 or wii today and a PS3 then, rather than buy a PS3 today and twiddle your thumbs in the interim. Gamers like games. They don't gain anything by denying themselves games in some odd form of platform loyalty.
That whole 'fan' thing is just silly. It used to be XBox fans defending claims that their console has a worse selection of games with lines like: 'but it's more powerful!' 'b-b-but A/V quality' 'its doing better than the PS2 did at the same point in its release!' and 'just wait until A and B killer titles release'
And now it's almost perfectly reversed. Proving once again that people who talk about platforms and potential rather than games are only useful as comic relief.
Exactly. If you look at the products that, e.g., the Chinese make for the Chinese market -- they've already 'cut us out'.
But that doesn't mean they want to stop doing production runs of American designs for the American markets. Not when there's still a pile of cash to be made from factories that would otherwise sit idle. As their own market becomes larger and larger it'll naturally be less and less advantageous for both of us to continue the relationship - and we'll amicably part ways and our manufacturing will move on down the line.
Yesterday, Taiwan. Today, China. Tomorrow, Vietnam/Cambodia. and so on.
Manufacturing will go fully automated (and probably distributed) long before globalism shrinks the pool of cheap labor to a point where the US would get burned for coughing up our manufacturing infrastructure.
I don't like Flash because I don't like the idea of large chunks of the web being built on proprietary standards.
What flash did, that was good, is vector graphics and proper animation. That was stuff html didn't do well, when it even tried, but that does have a good place on the web. I just don't think we need to rely on a proprietary plug-in for it. That functionality should be encapsulated in an html extension, and any browser that cares to support the extension should be free to do so.
But what flash does, and will do, is increasingly large bits of platform crap. We do not need flash to stream video. We have it, because there was no good standard video codec back in the day, and video plug-ins were kind of left in the ghetto. Now that we have h.264 - that any number of players can play - we don't need flash.
And we don't need flash as a chubby client for asynchronous apps. We have ajax and that'll work well-enough to get us through the development of an open standard to do such apps in a better way.
Proprietary standards blow, because we're left to the whim of the company in question as to whether new platforms are viable. New browsers, new operating systems, new devices - you'll need Adobe to see the ROI and see eye-to-eye with the new platform's goals to get their blessing. And that's a barrier to entry the Internet works far better without.
Or maybe you think the internet was better off when ActiveX and IE were assumed? Because we're headed to a place where the IE/ActiveX years come back in the form of AIR. (Why do you think Microsoft is so keen to replace it with Silverlight?)
I'd like to think we'd learned our lesson. The masses might still bring it to pass. But that doesn't mean it's good technologically.
and I'm talking about the sites of interest probably just offering plain h.264 streams, now that they'll be maintaining an h.264 repository anyway.
either way, it'd be fairly straightforward to write an applet that ignores the flash and latches onto the h.264 stream. Unless adobe tries to obfuscate the data stream. Which I wouldn't put past them but it wouldn't make the problem that much harder.
I can certainly sympathize with complaints about the disparity between violence/sexuality when it comes to ratings and with complaints that console makers that are obviously targeting adults shouldn't ban adult content.
But if developers want to explore topics outside of what is mainstream - why don't they just distribute these games outside the mainstream? Surely they don't need 20M from a publisher to realize their artistic expression. Why not just crank out an independently-released adult game in between blockbuster titles every now and again. If you get these worthwhile titles out into the open and demonstrate the market, you'll have a much better chance at getting Microsoft, Sony and the ESRB to change their tune.
They already know that -- that's why they seed the networks with new albums from time to time. Trick is: DRM-free music obviates everything that the labels provide to musicians. The manufacturing, the distribution, the guaranteed shelf-space, etc.
If swapping DRM-free music became the legal, accepted industry standard - they'd be cut out of the loop. They'd die. Why do you think they're fighting so hard?
It's too bad that Sony didn't do this. They might have had a better response if they had.
I don't know how much more they could've said it. Every time their PR people open their mouths it's "Blu-ray" this and "computer in your living room" that.
Trick is, it's a Playstation. Playstation is now synonymous with 'games' they way Nintendo is. You could print in big block letters "THIS THING DOES NOT PLAY GAMES" and people would still buy the PS3 to play games and nothing more.
It goes back to the 'don't care' portion of your rhetorical. They simply don't care. Regardless of how you position these boxes, gamers just want to play games.
Similarly: Nintendo isn't winning because they stayed away from HD and next-gen disc formats. They stayed away last-gen and that didn't help them any. The Wii is selling like gangbusters because it provides a social game experience that's unmatched anywhere else. Nintendo focused on what gamers were focused on: the fun. If the Wii did HD video it'd still be selling like gangbusters: and their HD cables would be just as under-utilized as those of the 360 and PS3.
ultimately (IMO) the "smaller is better" and "everything in one device" approach seems doomed to fail....Do people really need to be that connected? Probably not.
Do you need to be that connected so you can browse the web? Maybe not. But sending and receiving communications in whatever format you want: be it email, voice, txt, pics, chat and/or videochat? That's the purpose of cell phones, taken to its logical conclusion in the digital age.
And if you're going to give people workable email and videochat, why not allow them to browse? People don't have to use it, but the capability has to exist in hardware so it's basically free to include.
As to your battery concerns, there's nothing stopping someone from releasing a smartphone that earmarks x% of battery capacity for phone use, and cuts off the garnish apps before the entire device is dead (e.g. gaming, music, video, wifi). They'd just have to put some basic smarts in the battery pack to rotate which cells are prevented from running down and add some basic power management to the OS. I'm actually surprised Apple (self-proclaimed kings of the 'it just works'-world) didn't cram something like that into the iPhone.
IMO, truly personal computers are going to redefine computing and being connected is an important part of that. Not only connected to the internet, mind you - but connected to everyone and everything around you. While random internet browsing might always suck, any number of peer-to-peer clients, web-based device interfaces and mososo apps could easily justify the otherwise superfluous browser.
Example: It isn't ideal to read slashdot on my n800 - but i do enjoy being able to upload to flickr, check on my router logs/configs and schedule torrents from wherever I happen to be sitting and without waiting for a machine to boot up.
My guess is that their addition to multi-core processing, and the meat of the alleged infringement, revolves around dynamic, exclusive assignment of chunks of shared memory to each worker core.
Setting up and stacking shared memory so that each worker core doesn't have to copy-in its working data set, nor copy out its results and still maintain data integrity gives a huge performance advantage. That is, core A is assigned shared memory chunk M1 exclusively, and when it's done processing, the control core assigns exclusive control of M1 to core B, so it can continue processing; Rather than core A copying in the contents of M1, then processing and then copying back out its results.
Simply shifting exclusive control saves you the time of shuffling all that data between each core and shared memory and lets do more with the same local-memory and memory bandwidth. Even today, most of the multi-threaded apps I've seen burn a considerable number of cycles copying 'shared' data in to a worker thread/core and results back out.
I would be surprised if that wasn't novel hardware design in 1989, though I'm certainly open to the possibility that it wasn't. Before 1989 I was a bit more concerned with the health risks associated with exposure to cooties.
American residential lots are bigger and mixed commercial/residential areas don't really exist in suburbia. The practical differences of all that space are much larger than you're giving them credit for.
We can't walk anywhere. We don't have mass transit worth a damn. So we drive. Everywhere. And even we don't like all this driving, so we combine trips. Alot. Can a mini get an adult, two kids and groceries back and forth? Sure. But not when you throw in football/hockey equipment and/or an instrument or two, and/or a couple bags of softener salt, and/or a dog or two, and/or a couple bags from clothes shopping, and/or school supply shopping and/or a couple week's worth of non-perishables and maybe some dry cleaning. Even in a full-size sedan mixing two or three of those trips will be a squeeze at least a couple times a month.
Sure, we could split those trips up and still use a sedan comfortably. But who the hell wants to? The shops are all on one end of town, and your house on the other. You'd wind up burning even more gas and time going back and forth. And it's not like suburban shopping is itself an enjoyable diversion, as it might be in a city with sane zoning laws.
The landscape is cut up, the destinations separated by space, concrete barriers and often pedestrian-hostile traffic-flow. So we Drive. Park. Shop. Load up. Drive to the next store. Repeat. It's another one of those reasons we get head-scratchers like indoor malls, strip malls and giant one-stop behemoths -- all built around our annoyance with our own suburban zoning and our propensity to combine trips.
We also have an outdoor/roadtrip culture that sees the family + luggage + recreational gear jumping in the car and driving a couple hundred miles a few times a year. (Skiing/snowmobiling/fishing/camping/etc). Not even full-size sedans are really suited to that task -- which is why the station wagons sprung up shortly after American suburbia exploded. As style changed, mini-vans replaced station wagons and now most SUVs are just 'more stylish' wagons or minivans.
But its not like they're buying an Escalade instead of a Camry. 90% are buying the SUV because they're in mini-van-denial. As previously noted: most American families have more than one vehicle, and in the vast majority of cases they have a reasonable sedan too. We just move around enough junk, often enough, that the alternatives make less sense than having an SUV.
Sure, but when you point out problems in your competitors products, I expect either: a little more from your product, or a little deeper insight. I see neither.
Games aren't really stagnating, your just bored with them. There is a difference.
No-one said they weren't fun, just that the design is stagnant.
In general, you do have a great point: Why should anyway care that some crotchety bastards think the genre is stagnant, when more people than ever are paying $15/mo to play a Diku?
It's similar to the old: If five hundred thousand people are happily playing EQ, why would you think anything's wrong with the design? The answer to that, of course, is nine million people happily playing WoW.
When design stagnates, it doesn't mean no-one's having fun. It just means that if the next game is the same, it can't grow the market.
He's building a game. We don't know whether it will be better or not.
Also, he left Origin in 2000 and ostensibly started conceptualizing Tabula Rasa shortly thereafter. That's a 3D Realms-style dry spell, punctuated with his occassional 'massmogs are niche/stagnant/whatever' articles. Granted, TR will almost certainly hit shelves before DNF, but 3DRealms already had a Vaporware Lifetime Achievement award after 7 years. Surely he's due some 'pipe down until you ship' sentiment.
The other sticking point is that anyone who's followed the genre for more than a couple years knows the popular games are stagnating to a degree. And anyone who has any appreciable knowledge of the genre knows they've been stuck for more than 10 years -- all the most popular games are still pretty much derivatives of Diku, itself not a very big step away from D&D. One would more accurately say that massmogs have been largely stagnant since the first bastard child of Gygax and Bartle.
And yet the subtle change between EQ's level grind and WoW's level grind had a much larger practical impact on Diku play than the 'moral choices' seen thus far in Tabula Rasa. Granted, TR's still beta, but the system itself looks like a more slight update to faction mechanics than WoW's update to quest mechanics. So calling everyone onto the carpet while your own contribution is still minor compared to theirs, is ill-advised.
However, I do grant Garriott any and all respect for whatever role he had in UO releasing as a Koster-land. Even if he merely hired the guy who actually had good ideas, that's worth some points. Unfortunately, TR's less ambitious design does make it look like he only green-lit such a bold design because he didn't know any different.
Also, the bonus points one gets for 'leaving a comfy job' are significantly diminished when you're already fabulously wealthy. I think the rule is: first personal castle takes half and extraplanetary property takes the other half. Any subsequent castles or russian rovers make him a valid target of scorn if he ever doesn't have his own company.;)
When you have a capable smartphone at a meeting you can fall back on plausible deniability: you could be taking notes. I know I much prefer thumbpad-chatting with my n800 in plain sight over trying to discretely t9 anything useful.
Put the wifi in a peering mode and suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
Simple mobile myspace-type sites would be pretty huge for a mososo. Particularly if it's integrated with file/stream sharing and a decent discovery app.
The amusing part of that line of argument is that the local government-granted (read: paid for by lobbyists) monopolies in the US don't offer any broadband to Americans who actually live that far out. If your house is more than ~30m from your neighbor you probably don't get anything, so using them as an excuse as to why the rest of us don't have modern access is laughable.
The problem is the purchased legislation that prohibits municipal data, and the lobbyist-purchased government-granted monopolies that leave the infrastructure firms to do whatever they want. IME, in the few areas in the US where these are not in the way, there is always superior phone, data and voice service at better prices. Everywhere else? There's nothing but 30 year old infrastructure, overpriced, shoddy service and excuses.
A B movie isn't analogous to an unplayable game. Just as you can watch and follow a B movie, you should be able to play a B game.
What makes a movie a B movie is laughably bad story execution, acting, etc. So a B game should be completely playable, but with a laughably bad story execution, voice acting, etc.
The problem is that describes every story-driven video game out there this side of the True Greats. Example: Gears of War. In the space of video games, it tells a coherent story with fairly high production values. But in a film, without gameplay as camouflage, those characterizations and that dialogue would get nervous laughter while people tried to figure out whether it was intentional parody.
So the question really is: where are our 'A' games?
You mean like everyone used to do with traditional desktops? (and students, artists, draftsmen, etc notably still do today)
Sure, if you drape yourself over the desk it can be a pain. Similarly, if you slouch in your chair while reading slashdot you can develop horrible back problems too. But if you sit up straight it's no problem with either configuration. Tilt a tabletop display like a draftsman's table and it's even easier to avoid back problems.
Correct, derivative works each have their own copyright. If the copyright on ANH expired tomorrow, Boba Fett would still be locked up for a couple years. (as would any characters/locales/concepts introduced through later works: Endor, Imperial Walkers, Mace, Darth Maul, Midichlorians, etc)
Peter Pan probably wasn't the best trivial example, no. I only used it because most people are generally aware of several derivatives.
I guess another way to phrase this would be if the Star Wars copyright were to expire tommorrow, would the trademark still prevent you from using Luke Skywalker character in an alternate movie set in the Star Wars universe?
If the copyright on Star Wars were to expire tomorrow, no trademark could stop you from writing and selling a Star Wars derivative book or movie. The trademark on 'Star Wars' in the familiar font would prevent you from using 'Star Wars' in the familiar font on your book jacket or in your movie trailer. You'd also probably save alot of time and hassle if you called it something different, say, "MontyApollo's Star Wars".
But there'd be nothing to stop you from actually writing and selling a book about further adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, etc. You'd just have to steer clear from existing marks in your promotional materials, packaging, licensed goodies, etc. So, if Lucas Licensing still had a standard character mark on Luke Skywalker for action figures, it'd be challenging for you to market an action figure built on your use of Luke. (You'd have to be careful to ensure there wasn't a reasonable chance someone could confuse yours with lucas'.)
But none of those trademark concerns would prevent you from using him the movie/book in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the Neo is a project and lots of people just want a product?
So unless you're in the digital billboard industry, there's still alot more than 2-4 years of work to be done before it matters - if ever.
I'm sure there'll be an 'illuminator' ring built into the bezel by at least the second wave of backlight-free screens.
There are just too many practical situations where it's convenient to be able to see your mobile screen in low-to-no ambient light situations.
meetings/classes with a projector in use
at the pub or theatre
in bed
outside at night
in a car/plane/train at night
etc.
Saying things might change in the future just doesn't matter. If it -does- turn around, it can be re-evaluated whenever that -actually- happens.
And odds are by the PS3 makes sense, it'll be cheaper to have bought a 360 or wii today and a PS3 then, rather than buy a PS3 today and twiddle your thumbs in the interim. Gamers like games. They don't gain anything by denying themselves games in some odd form of platform loyalty.
That whole 'fan' thing is just silly.
It used to be XBox fans defending claims that their console has a worse selection of games with lines like:
'but it's more powerful!'
'b-b-but A/V quality'
'its doing better than the PS2 did at the same point in its release!'
and
'just wait until A and B killer titles release'
And now it's almost perfectly reversed.
Proving once again that people who talk about platforms and potential rather than games are only useful as comic relief.
Exactly. If you look at the products that, e.g., the Chinese make for the Chinese market -- they've already 'cut us out'.
But that doesn't mean they want to stop doing production runs of American designs for the American markets. Not when there's still a pile of cash to be made from factories that would otherwise sit idle. As their own market becomes larger and larger it'll naturally be less and less advantageous for both of us to continue the relationship - and we'll amicably part ways and our manufacturing will move on down the line.
Yesterday, Taiwan. Today, China. Tomorrow, Vietnam/Cambodia. and so on.
Manufacturing will go fully automated (and probably distributed) long before globalism shrinks the pool of cheap labor to a point where the US would get burned for coughing up our manufacturing infrastructure.
I don't like Flash because I don't like the idea of large chunks of the web being built on proprietary standards.
What flash did, that was good, is vector graphics and proper animation. That was stuff html didn't do well, when it even tried, but that does have a good place on the web. I just don't think we need to rely on a proprietary plug-in for it. That functionality should be encapsulated in an html extension, and any browser that cares to support the extension should be free to do so.
But what flash does, and will do, is increasingly large bits of platform crap. We do not need flash to stream video. We have it, because there was no good standard video codec back in the day, and video plug-ins were kind of left in the ghetto. Now that we have h.264 - that any number of players can play - we don't need flash.
And we don't need flash as a chubby client for asynchronous apps. We have ajax and that'll work well-enough to get us through the development of an open standard to do such apps in a better way.
Proprietary standards blow, because we're left to the whim of the company in question as to whether new platforms are viable.
New browsers, new operating systems, new devices - you'll need Adobe to see the ROI and see eye-to-eye with the new platform's goals to get their blessing. And that's a barrier to entry the Internet works far better without.
Or maybe you think the internet was better off when ActiveX and IE were assumed?
Because we're headed to a place where the IE/ActiveX years come back in the form of AIR.
(Why do you think Microsoft is so keen to replace it with Silverlight?)
I'd like to think we'd learned our lesson.
The masses might still bring it to pass. But that doesn't mean it's good technologically.
and I'm talking about the sites of interest probably just offering plain h.264 streams, now that they'll be maintaining an h.264 repository anyway.
either way, it'd be fairly straightforward to write an applet that ignores the flash and latches onto the h.264 stream. Unless adobe tries to obfuscate the data stream. Which I wouldn't put past them but it wouldn't make the problem that much harder.
Once sites like metacafe and youtube start offering their content via h.264 streams we can ditch flash for video altogether.
I can certainly sympathize with complaints about the disparity between violence/sexuality when it comes to ratings and with complaints that console makers that are obviously targeting adults shouldn't ban adult content.
But if developers want to explore topics outside of what is mainstream - why don't they just distribute these games outside the mainstream? Surely they don't need 20M from a publisher to realize their artistic expression. Why not just crank out an independently-released adult game in between blockbuster titles every now and again. If you get these worthwhile titles out into the open and demonstrate the market, you'll have a much better chance at getting Microsoft, Sony and the ESRB to change their tune.
They already know that -- that's why they seed the networks with new albums from time to time.
Trick is: DRM-free music obviates everything that the labels provide to musicians.
The manufacturing, the distribution, the guaranteed shelf-space, etc.
If swapping DRM-free music became the legal, accepted industry standard - they'd be cut out of the loop. They'd die.
Why do you think they're fighting so hard?
I don't know how much more they could've said it. Every time their PR people open their mouths it's "Blu-ray" this and "computer in your living room" that.
Trick is, it's a Playstation. Playstation is now synonymous with 'games' they way Nintendo is. You could print in big block letters "THIS THING DOES NOT PLAY GAMES" and people would still buy the PS3 to play games and nothing more.
It goes back to the 'don't care' portion of your rhetorical. They simply don't care. Regardless of how you position these boxes, gamers just want to play games.
Similarly: Nintendo isn't winning because they stayed away from HD and next-gen disc formats. They stayed away last-gen and that didn't help them any. The Wii is selling like gangbusters because it provides a social game experience that's unmatched anywhere else. Nintendo focused on what gamers were focused on: the fun. If the Wii did HD video it'd still be selling like gangbusters: and their HD cables would be just as under-utilized as those of the 360 and PS3.
And if you're going to give people workable email and videochat, why not allow them to browse? People don't have to use it, but the capability has to exist in hardware so it's basically free to include.
As to your battery concerns, there's nothing stopping someone from releasing a smartphone that earmarks x% of battery capacity for phone use, and cuts off the garnish apps before the entire device is dead (e.g. gaming, music, video, wifi). They'd just have to put some basic smarts in the battery pack to rotate which cells are prevented from running down and add some basic power management to the OS. I'm actually surprised Apple (self-proclaimed kings of the 'it just works'-world) didn't cram something like that into the iPhone.
IMO, truly personal computers are going to redefine computing and being connected is an important part of that. Not only connected to the internet, mind you - but connected to everyone and everything around you. While random internet browsing might always suck, any number of peer-to-peer clients, web-based device interfaces and mososo apps could easily justify the otherwise superfluous browser.
Example: It isn't ideal to read slashdot on my n800 - but i do enjoy being able to upload to flickr, check on my router logs/configs and schedule torrents from wherever I happen to be sitting and without waiting for a machine to boot up.
It's the best mud-hut on the fault-line.
The by-line says 'no'.
My guess is that their addition to multi-core processing, and the meat of the alleged infringement, revolves around dynamic, exclusive assignment of chunks of shared memory to each worker core.
Setting up and stacking shared memory so that each worker core doesn't have to copy-in its working data set, nor copy out its results and still maintain data integrity gives a huge performance advantage. That is, core A is assigned shared memory chunk M1 exclusively, and when it's done processing, the control core assigns exclusive control of M1 to core B, so it can continue processing; Rather than core A copying in the contents of M1, then processing and then copying back out its results.
Simply shifting exclusive control saves you the time of shuffling all that data between each core and shared memory and lets do more with the same local-memory and memory bandwidth. Even today, most of the multi-threaded apps I've seen burn a considerable number of cycles copying 'shared' data in to a worker thread/core and results back out.
I would be surprised if that wasn't novel hardware design in 1989, though I'm certainly open to the possibility that it wasn't.
Before 1989 I was a bit more concerned with the health risks associated with exposure to cooties.
The problem is that there is.
American residential lots are bigger and mixed commercial/residential areas don't really exist in suburbia.
The practical differences of all that space are much larger than you're giving them credit for.
We can't walk anywhere. We don't have mass transit worth a damn. So we drive. Everywhere. And even we don't like all this driving, so we combine trips. Alot. Can a mini get an adult, two kids and groceries back and forth? Sure. But not when you throw in football/hockey equipment and/or an instrument or two, and/or a couple bags of softener salt, and/or a dog or two, and/or a couple bags from clothes shopping, and/or school supply shopping and/or a couple week's worth of non-perishables and maybe some dry cleaning. Even in a full-size sedan mixing two or three of those trips will be a squeeze at least a couple times a month.
Sure, we could split those trips up and still use a sedan comfortably. But who the hell wants to? The shops are all on one end of town, and your house on the other. You'd wind up burning even more gas and time going back and forth. And it's not like suburban shopping is itself an enjoyable diversion, as it might be in a city with sane zoning laws.
The landscape is cut up, the destinations separated by space, concrete barriers and often pedestrian-hostile traffic-flow. So we Drive. Park. Shop. Load up. Drive to the next store. Repeat. It's another one of those reasons we get head-scratchers like indoor malls, strip malls and giant one-stop behemoths -- all built around our annoyance with our own suburban zoning and our propensity to combine trips.
We also have an outdoor/roadtrip culture that sees the family + luggage + recreational gear jumping in the car and driving a couple hundred miles a few times a year. (Skiing/snowmobiling/fishing/camping/etc). Not even full-size sedans are really suited to that task -- which is why the station wagons sprung up shortly after American suburbia exploded. As style changed, mini-vans replaced station wagons and now most SUVs are just 'more stylish' wagons or minivans.
But its not like they're buying an Escalade instead of a Camry. 90% are buying the SUV because they're in mini-van-denial.
As previously noted: most American families have more than one vehicle, and in the vast majority of cases they have a reasonable sedan too. We just move around enough junk, often enough, that the alternatives make less sense than having an SUV.
No-one said they weren't fun, just that the design is stagnant.
In general, you do have a great point: Why should anyway care that some crotchety bastards think the genre is stagnant, when more people than ever are paying $15/mo to play a Diku?
It's similar to the old:
If five hundred thousand people are happily playing EQ, why would you think anything's wrong with the design?
The answer to that, of course, is nine million people happily playing WoW.
When design stagnates, it doesn't mean no-one's having fun. It just means that if the next game is the same, it can't grow the market.
He's building a game. We don't know whether it will be better or not.
;)
Also, he left Origin in 2000 and ostensibly started conceptualizing Tabula Rasa shortly thereafter.
That's a 3D Realms-style dry spell, punctuated with his occassional 'massmogs are niche/stagnant/whatever' articles.
Granted, TR will almost certainly hit shelves before DNF, but 3DRealms already had a Vaporware Lifetime Achievement award after 7 years. Surely he's due some 'pipe down until you ship' sentiment.
The other sticking point is that anyone who's followed the genre for more than a couple years knows the popular games are stagnating to a degree. And anyone who has any appreciable knowledge of the genre knows they've been stuck for more than 10 years -- all the most popular games are still pretty much derivatives of Diku, itself not a very big step away from D&D. One would more accurately say that massmogs have been largely stagnant since the first bastard child of Gygax and Bartle.
And yet the subtle change between EQ's level grind and WoW's level grind had a much larger practical impact on Diku play than the 'moral choices' seen thus far in Tabula Rasa. Granted, TR's still beta, but the system itself looks like a more slight update to faction mechanics than WoW's update to quest mechanics. So calling everyone onto the carpet while your own contribution is still minor compared to theirs, is ill-advised.
However, I do grant Garriott any and all respect for whatever role he had in UO releasing as a Koster-land. Even if he merely hired the guy who actually had good ideas, that's worth some points. Unfortunately, TR's less ambitious design does make it look like he only green-lit such a bold design because he didn't know any different.
Also, the bonus points one gets for 'leaving a comfy job' are significantly diminished when you're already fabulously wealthy.
I think the rule is: first personal castle takes half and extraplanetary property takes the other half.
Any subsequent castles or russian rovers make him a valid target of scorn if he ever doesn't have his own company.
When you have a capable smartphone at a meeting you can fall back on plausible deniability: you could be taking notes.
I know I much prefer thumbpad-chatting with my n800 in plain sight over trying to discretely t9 anything useful.
Put the wifi in a peering mode and suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
Simple mobile myspace-type sites would be pretty huge for a mososo.
Particularly if it's integrated with file/stream sharing and a decent discovery app.
The amusing part of that line of argument is that the local government-granted (read: paid for by lobbyists) monopolies in the US don't offer any broadband to Americans who actually live that far out. If your house is more than ~30m from your neighbor you probably don't get anything, so using them as an excuse as to why the rest of us don't have modern access is laughable.
The problem is the purchased legislation that prohibits municipal data, and the lobbyist-purchased government-granted monopolies that leave the infrastructure firms to do whatever they want. IME, in the few areas in the US where these are not in the way, there is always superior phone, data and voice service at better prices. Everywhere else? There's nothing but 30 year old infrastructure, overpriced, shoddy service and excuses.
A B movie isn't analogous to an unplayable game.
Just as you can watch and follow a B movie, you should be able to play a B game.
What makes a movie a B movie is laughably bad story execution, acting, etc.
So a B game should be completely playable, but with a laughably bad story execution, voice acting, etc.
The problem is that describes every story-driven video game out there this side of the True Greats.
Example: Gears of War. In the space of video games, it tells a coherent story with fairly high production values. But in a film, without gameplay as camouflage, those characterizations and that dialogue would get nervous laughter while people tried to figure out whether it was intentional parody.
So the question really is: where are our 'A' games?
You mean like everyone used to do with traditional desktops? (and students, artists, draftsmen, etc notably still do today)
Sure, if you drape yourself over the desk it can be a pain. Similarly, if you slouch in your chair while reading slashdot you can develop horrible back problems too. But if you sit up straight it's no problem with either configuration.
Tilt a tabletop display like a draftsman's table and it's even easier to avoid back problems.
Correct, derivative works each have their own copyright.
If the copyright on ANH expired tomorrow, Boba Fett would still be locked up for a couple years.
(as would any characters/locales/concepts introduced through later works: Endor, Imperial Walkers, Mace, Darth Maul, Midichlorians, etc)
If the copyright on Star Wars were to expire tomorrow, no trademark could stop you from writing and selling a Star Wars derivative book or movie. The trademark on 'Star Wars' in the familiar font would prevent you from using 'Star Wars' in the familiar font on your book jacket or in your movie trailer. You'd also probably save alot of time and hassle if you called it something different, say, "MontyApollo's Star Wars".
But there'd be nothing to stop you from actually writing and selling a book about further adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, etc. You'd just have to steer clear from existing marks in your promotional materials, packaging, licensed goodies, etc. So, if Lucas Licensing still had a standard character mark on Luke Skywalker for action figures, it'd be challenging for you to market an action figure built on your use of Luke. (You'd have to be careful to ensure there wasn't a reasonable chance someone could confuse yours with lucas'.)
But none of those trademark concerns would prevent you from using him the movie/book in the first place.