B&N seems entirely more committed to openness and interoperability than Amazon. The Kindle can't use EPUB files for instance (and no, the existance of Calibre doesn't make up for Amazon trying to lock down its platform, no matter how much Amazon's apologists wish it would). I seriously doubt we'll ever see the same level of hardware openness from Amazon that we see from B&N.
Moreover, it's not like there aren't monetary relationships present in open source too. The developers of the Linux kernel don't get royalties whenever it gets sold as part of an embedded system (for example), but that doesn't mean that no one benefits from it.
Come on, how many passwords do you still see pasted on monitors, or sticky's on the desktop?
Unless your machine is in an easily accessible place, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'd rather have users who write down complex passwords than ones that use "password1" for everything.
"Millions could be saved by Steam by making the community work for free."
So when open source crowdsources development it's great, but when video game companies do it it's exploitative? And how exactly are volunteers "forced" to do anything?
If the costs of professional translation are as high as the article suggests (nearly $1 million just to translate Steam storefront pages), then this move makes sense to me. How many sales are you going to gain by having 26 different translations of a game? How many people who might use a translation wouldn't have just played the game in English in the absence of one? Even Valve's AAA titles from before this weren't in 26 languages. Half-Life 2 is only in 18. And that's for a big budget game. For smaller titles, the benefit from translating is undoubtedly not worth the cost.
Given that, I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Rather than fans of a game having to organize a team to translate it and hack up a patch, there is now a way for everyone to contribute as much as they like to a publisher-sponsored effort. You'd have to be pretty damn cynical to see this as a bad thing.
You're guessing incorrectly. I played SWG back in the day, and my clan in another MMO still played SWG when SOE announced that it was shutting it down. It uses a subscription-based system and ran on centralized servers, like most MMOs.
On the other hand, have you looked at MacBook prices ever? A bare-bones 13in (i5, 4GB RAM, no discrete graphics) costs more than a loaded 17in laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, 540M, 1080p screen, Bluray drive, more hard-disk space) from other manufacturers. I've used MacBooks. Their build quality is good, but not that good.
Two points: First, the $50 fee you paid never gave you the right to play the game, it was your monthly fee that did that. If this comes as a shock to you, why are you playing MMO games? MMOs aren't about software as a product in the same way that other games are, they're software as a service. You're essentially asking that a company be legally obligated to run a set of servers indefinitely. I hope you realize how crazy that is.
Second, even though the source code will eventually enter the public domain, SOE has no obligation to actually distribute that code. So at that point you could copy the binary with impunity, but good luck getting your hands on the source.
Except that's not what an inspector general does. They are responsible for investigating misconduct in a government agency (in this case, the Department of the Interior).
And that's where the problem lies. if you read the transcript, Monnett worked for the Minerals Management Service (MMS). Yes, that MMS.
So, when a government agency is working in the interests of the citizens of the United States, then yes, the inspector general preforms a valuable function. When the agency is in bed with the industry it is supposed to be regulating, then the office of the inspector general becomes a tool to stifle people who oppose the pro-industry narrative. Look at this case. If you read the transcript, the issue is that someone who can't do math reported Monnet to the OIG for scientific misconduct. Rather than checking the peer-review process or consulting with an expert, the investigators repeated the same flawed math and suspended him. You want to talk about "embedded biases"? Take a look at the OIG.
My college has a program doing just that. They've been working with educational institutions, but the directions and parts list are available for anyone who wants to create their own. I'm not sure if it would be the best performance you could get for the price, but it's pretty easy to set up and low-maintenance as far as clusters go.
First XCOM, now this. What I don't get is why. It's not like the typical FPS gamer today was playing strategy games in the 90s, so why all the old properties? What's the point in recycling IPs if your target audience has never heard of them?
On a slightly less pessimistic note, it could be the continuation of a trend in the medical insurance industry to emphasize preventative care. At one point, my parents were getting about a call per week for my father from insurance company nurses trying to give him health advice (He has high blood pressure, among other things. However, he is also a doctor, so their efforts might have been misaligned a bit.).
I could see this being part of a similar system. It might even be better suited to being at your insurance company; with access to your medical records, it can connect symptoms and complaints from various different visits, even if the patient or GP doesn't connect them his or herself.
One US publishing executive told The Wall Street Journal: “What it [the digital book rental service] would do is downgrade the value of the book business.”
But it is like that because we've liked it that way for some time. This is changing as time goes on;
Not changing very quickly, though. At the end of the Science Friday segment about this Ira Flatow asked the scientists about the high resolution scans they made of the skulls and made an offhand comment about 3D printers and releasing the data to the public. The scientist made a big deal about how they had made the data available for months now, if you were a scientist and showed up at the Smithsonian.
That was what the scientists behind the discovery argued on Science Friday. Even Berger, who found it (and was implied to be saying it was a human ancestor) argued that it was more significant in opening up our idea of what morphology defines the genus Homo than in being a possible ancestor.
The Science Friday story (audio on the left side of the page) is definitely worth listening to. Quick version: sediba has some features, in the hands and elsewhere, that are associated with the genus Homo and our direct ancestors. But it also has very ape-like qualities that make it less likely to be a direct ancestor. It's also notable in that it was discovered as two very complete skeletons rather than fragments, as many transitional species are.
Sure, there are many single-player games being produced, but they don't make the recurring revenue from the consoles' online services.
Neither do console games with online components. Either the online service is free (PS3), or the owner of the platform gets the money (Xbox 360). Unless you're talking about MMOs, of which there are very few for consoles.
Prior art (also known as state of the art, which also has other meanings, or background art), in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality.
Just inventing it isn't enough to qualify as prior art, the information needs to be public.
Slashdot Mirror
B&N seems entirely more committed to openness and interoperability than Amazon. The Kindle can't use EPUB files for instance (and no, the existance of Calibre doesn't make up for Amazon trying to lock down its platform, no matter how much Amazon's apologists wish it would). I seriously doubt we'll ever see the same level of hardware openness from Amazon that we see from B&N.
I seem to recall Recettear being on the front page during it's time at the top of the sales charts. That was truly independently published.
Moreover, it's not like there aren't monetary relationships present in open source too. The developers of the Linux kernel don't get royalties whenever it gets sold as part of an embedded system (for example), but that doesn't mean that no one benefits from it.
Come on, how many passwords do you still see pasted on monitors, or sticky's on the desktop?
Unless your machine is in an easily accessible place, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'd rather have users who write down complex passwords than ones that use "password1" for everything.
"Millions could be saved by Steam by making the community work for free."
So when open source crowdsources development it's great, but when video game companies do it it's exploitative? And how exactly are volunteers "forced" to do anything?
If the costs of professional translation are as high as the article suggests (nearly $1 million just to translate Steam storefront pages), then this move makes sense to me. How many sales are you going to gain by having 26 different translations of a game? How many people who might use a translation wouldn't have just played the game in English in the absence of one? Even Valve's AAA titles from before this weren't in 26 languages. Half-Life 2 is only in 18. And that's for a big budget game. For smaller titles, the benefit from translating is undoubtedly not worth the cost.
Given that, I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Rather than fans of a game having to organize a team to translate it and hack up a patch, there is now a way for everyone to contribute as much as they like to a publisher-sponsored effort. You'd have to be pretty damn cynical to see this as a bad thing.
Yes, Chinese crap is much better than other Chinese crap. Oh, wait.
If that were true, Gamestop would have gone out of business years ago. As would a number of grocery chains.
The fact is, people don't care about giving away their personal information.
You're guessing incorrectly. I played SWG back in the day, and my clan in another MMO still played SWG when SOE announced that it was shutting it down. It uses a subscription-based system and ran on centralized servers, like most MMOs.
On the other hand, have you looked at MacBook prices ever? A bare-bones 13in (i5, 4GB RAM, no discrete graphics) costs more than a loaded 17in laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, 540M, 1080p screen, Bluray drive, more hard-disk space) from other manufacturers. I've used MacBooks. Their build quality is good, but not that good.
Two points: First, the $50 fee you paid never gave you the right to play the game, it was your monthly fee that did that. If this comes as a shock to you, why are you playing MMO games? MMOs aren't about software as a product in the same way that other games are, they're software as a service. You're essentially asking that a company be legally obligated to run a set of servers indefinitely. I hope you realize how crazy that is.
Second, even though the source code will eventually enter the public domain, SOE has no obligation to actually distribute that code. So at that point you could copy the binary with impunity, but good luck getting your hands on the source.
Except that's not what an inspector general does. They are responsible for investigating misconduct in a government agency (in this case, the Department of the Interior).
And that's where the problem lies. if you read the transcript, Monnett worked for the Minerals Management Service (MMS). Yes, that MMS.
So, when a government agency is working in the interests of the citizens of the United States, then yes, the inspector general preforms a valuable function. When the agency is in bed with the industry it is supposed to be regulating, then the office of the inspector general becomes a tool to stifle people who oppose the pro-industry narrative. Look at this case. If you read the transcript, the issue is that someone who can't do math reported Monnet to the OIG for scientific misconduct. Rather than checking the peer-review process or consulting with an expert, the investigators repeated the same flawed math and suspended him. You want to talk about "embedded biases"? Take a look at the OIG.
Tracking personal vehicles without a warrant? Why not? If it's good enough for one agency of the government, why not for all of them?
More like 100s of millions of people who try it once and then never run it again because their battery life went to hell.
My college has a program doing just that. They've been working with educational institutions, but the directions and parts list are available for anyone who wants to create their own. I'm not sure if it would be the best performance you could get for the price, but it's pretty easy to set up and low-maintenance as far as clusters go.
Wow, you've looked at a bad situation and found a way to make it even worse. Why would the USPTO invalidate any patents under your system?
First XCOM, now this. What I don't get is why. It's not like the typical FPS gamer today was playing strategy games in the 90s, so why all the old properties? What's the point in recycling IPs if your target audience has never heard of them?
On a slightly less pessimistic note, it could be the continuation of a trend in the medical insurance industry to emphasize preventative care. At one point, my parents were getting about a call per week for my father from insurance company nurses trying to give him health advice (He has high blood pressure, among other things. However, he is also a doctor, so their efforts might have been misaligned a bit.).
I could see this being part of a similar system. It might even be better suited to being at your insurance company; with access to your medical records, it can connect symptoms and complaints from various different visits, even if the patient or GP doesn't connect them his or herself.
One US publishing executive told The Wall Street Journal: “What it [the digital book rental service] would do is downgrade the value of the book business.”
In other news, libraries exist.
Yeah, that kind of threw me for a loop. Companies like Exxon "no honestly, we do pay income taxes, I swear" Mobil complaining about weird accounting? Go figure.
That's why it's happening now, but it couldn't have happened without decades of attacks on nuclear power by some environmentalists.
But it is like that because we've liked it that way for some time. This is changing as time goes on;
Not changing very quickly, though. At the end of the Science Friday segment about this Ira Flatow asked the scientists about the high resolution scans they made of the skulls and made an offhand comment about 3D printers and releasing the data to the public. The scientist made a big deal about how they had made the data available for months now, if you were a scientist and showed up at the Smithsonian.
So close, and yet so far away.
That was what the scientists behind the discovery argued on Science Friday. Even Berger, who found it (and was implied to be saying it was a human ancestor) argued that it was more significant in opening up our idea of what morphology defines the genus Homo than in being a possible ancestor.
The Science Friday story (audio on the left side of the page) is definitely worth listening to. Quick version: sediba has some features, in the hands and elsewhere, that are associated with the genus Homo and our direct ancestors. But it also has very ape-like qualities that make it less likely to be a direct ancestor. It's also notable in that it was discovered as two very complete skeletons rather than fragments, as many transitional species are.
Cool story all around.
Sure, there are many single-player games being produced, but they don't make the recurring revenue from the consoles' online services.
Neither do console games with online components. Either the online service is free (PS3), or the owner of the platform gets the money (Xbox 360). Unless you're talking about MMOs, of which there are very few for consoles.
Prior art (also known as state of the art, which also has other meanings, or background art), in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality.
Just inventing it isn't enough to qualify as prior art, the information needs to be public.
Yeah, the news came out on Monday. Last Monday. It's been a week and four days.