I was going to post my best attempt at a well thought-out reply, but then I scrolled up and saw Jon Katz and said "Fsck it".
Re:Probably not going to happen
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 1
Top 5 reasons why Gamecube won't beat PS2 :
5. Nintendo's CEO is way too cocky and overconfident; he's just begging for a beatdown from the competition
4. Nintendo doesn't market enough "advanced" games, they're mostly too easy except for a handful.
3. PS2 looks like it belongs on top of your TV set with a sleek, black box. No clunky bulky controllers, no fat cartridges that resemble fisher price toys.
2. PS2 is backwards compatible with the PS1's huge library of games, so you can give your ditzy little PS1 to your nephew along with the Crap Bandicoot series and have a family orgasm.
1. You can watch La Blue Girl DVD on PS2. Try to put that on a 64mb cart. Ha!
The more control there is, the greater potential there is for corruption. Outlaw all guns and only outlaws will sell guns. Sure, legislation may prevent your psychotic divorced light-minded neighbor from shooting her ex-husband thrice in the crotch, but it won't stop organized and disorganized crime one bit. They're attacking the right problem the wrong way.
I've had the black book for many years now, and have used it as a true bible for low-level graphics programming; it is a rare gem (albeit a heavy one). However most everything in that book is somewhat obsoleted now by the advent of hardware accelerated 3D and the divergence away from assembler coding.
Back in 1994 it was still popular to write major parts of your game in pure assembler, relying on a high-level language to glue the asm routines together and set up the game flow. These days people just rely on the compiler to write 'optimized' code, and it does a pretty good job too, but no compiler will dare use extreme tweaking measures such as those detailed in Abrash's Zen of Assembler, such as unrolled loops, memory/cache latency timing, even clock counting. That's why you could run a decent action game at 30fps on a 486-dx2 or dx4, but when Win95 games started pouring out the wastepipe you found yourself playing cheap side-scrollers a-la-Mario at about 5 fps in a small window on your screen. "Who needs speed, we've got Win95!"
Indeed, few of those who could tweak asm knew a thing about this mystical OS, so they just gave up. Those who persisted went on to start projects like Visual Assembler, but without coordination and support, they just fell through.
It has simply become too cumbersome to write good code because the advent of more intricate OS' and exotic (read : OEM crap) hardware have made software development a mess. We have no choice but to rely on commercial libraries like DirectX to get anywhere. Don't even think of writing your own low-latency SoundBlaster driver, you'll miss out on half of your potential customer base that own lame stuff like onboard "almost SB compatible" chipsets or Yamaha 10$ sound cards. Drivers make all the difference these days, especially with video cards.
Let's face it: Games no longer use or need good coders, all they care about are artists and designers. Having a good designer is primo, but artists ? Games don't need to look good if they play good. Just look at Alpha Centauri from our fellow brainiac Sid Meier. So-so graphics but great gameplay turned it into a guaranteed hit, because we don't want to watch the game, we want to play it.
Abrash's insight still gives important lessons on good software design, not only graphics. It remains a true bible to those who dare walk through its pages and lift off the tender morsels of genius it contains.
I just turned an old P200 into a Dos box just to play this exact game less than a month ago. I had almost forgotten how long it takes to level up. I must have been throwing rocks at this staircase for hours just to see those little green letters "Gando gained a ninja level", while my mage was busy making mana and wisdom potions in order to gain magic levels in record time. Ahh.. 180 Wisdom, now that's a quick learner:)
Ever since the day I first loaded it up ten years ago on a friend's Amiga 500, to the sunny day in 1995 when I found it in a bargain bin and gave up hot afternoons poolside with the cuspies in exchange for endless hours of fun in front of this VGA masterpiece, and now when I go back in time and play it one more time, I just can't help but feel profoundly absorbed by the game, not for nostalgia but for pure entertainment value. No other game comes close to that level of fantasy and immersion. Not even Dungeon Master 2 (which was rather depressing). It is truly a timeless classic for all adventure fans.
That kind of quarter-hungry mentality goes back much earlier to 1991, the year of the Terminator 2 shooting game. One credit (which was of course.25c back then) would last perhaps one or two minutes.. four if you were really good and lucky. Finishing the whole thing required upwards of 5.00$ per player, since playing with a friend made the enemies more plentiful and aggressive. Still the game was so fast-paced and action-packed that people were just hooked and kept cranking the quarters in, yelling back to their partner "Push Start for me" while they anxiously waited for the arcade operator to cough up more change.
Sure, it was fun, but that game was something of an experiment, a "pilot project" if you will, that paved the way for the greedy trend that soon ensued. A little later came the Dungeons and Dragons series, where you'd get your ass kicked just as quickly. The breeding rate of such thieving games kept on increasing exponentially while the actual replay value and "funfactor" kept on decreasing at the same rate. Good game designers were evaluated by their ability to make a game profitable instead of playable.
Another example is racing games. There used to be a time when you got a free play whenever you and your buddies finished first in a race. Now you lose no matter which place you finish in. Daytona USA makes you pay whether you win or lose, because you almost always win against the CPU cars which suck so badly. They took the common goal of all racing and threw it out the window. "You win. Good for you, give me another dollar now." Games are about fantasy, about placing yourself in someone else's shoes. Well I'm pretty damned sure Nascar racers don't get ignored when they win the nationals. It's all become a sham.
Please forgive my poor knowledge of sourceforce. I have yet to work on anything there. However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site ? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site ?
I'm no corporate shrink, but my personal belief is that the problem with work-related stress isn't the actual work burden, it's just that most jobs are just seen as a chore and bore. Maybe it's caused by poor camaraderie in the workplace, or a reality-challenged boss, or an excessively light workload leading to daily boredom (my situation), or maybe you're just working at Walmart, but the bottom line is that if people get jittery when they think of Mondays, maybe they should look for work elsewhere. Work should provide personal satisfaction and pride, not just a paycheck.
Having read the article, I still feel it's a little foolish to fire a big fat laser near combustibles. Since they're drilling for oil, wouldn't it be a Bad Thing for the laser to actually heat up the underground oil and ignite it ? This seems so obvious that they must have considered it in the laser design, but the risk is still there and I wouldn't want to see the chaos effect caused by igniting an underground oil patch.. the gas pressure would probably fsck up the landscape pretty quickly and nastily. Of course my high school physics and chemistry classes aren't exactly fresh in my mind anymore.
As long as they get raped at least once in jail by some big guy named B1FF I'll be satisfied. Then we could start a pr0n site featuring pics and videos of spammers and the ass-pirates who love them.
Let's simplify every damn copryight/domain/competition dispute since the past 2-3 years :
"EvilCorp tries to buy out LittleBiz, LittleBiz refuses, so EvilCorp just plain steals LittleBiz from the grips of their owners."
Sounds a hell of a lot like organised crime. If you don't shut up and take the money, _they_ shut you up and keep the money. Last I heard, gangsterism was still illegal, why should corporate gangsterism be any different ? Instead of sending armed thugs to your home, they send legal threats. The vehicles of destruction may be different, but the modus operandi are one and the same. Once again, I hope Fox eventually gets gang-raped by the little guys they crushed and swallowed. They're no better than Microsoft, in fact they're much sloppier than Gates' legal henchmen.
Here's what a smart missionary would do : bring in a few iOpeners and introduce all these sweatshop workers to eBay =) In just one week they'll have earned more than their yearly salary =)
>and I have to admit that there's plenty of useless crap that's come out of the CS field lately
such as?
90% of everything labeled as B2B or any multi-zillion dollar not-so-expert system like Peoplesoft and its clones. It's so full of yeast and buzz it's just disgusting.
Although I can't help but agree with some of the (few) arguments cited in the article, and I have to admit that there's plenty of useless crap that's come out of the CS field lately, but these scientists and researchers seem to have ignored the not-so-intellectual side of things : making the damned PC more popular and attractive to common people.
While there may not have been many remarkable technological achievements, marketing and image have been steadily improving and focusing on Joe Random Luser. This will bring more eyeballs to the next great neat project that will be perceived as the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the long run, more people will ultimately benefit from future advances in computing. Now I'd like to see an astrophysicist say the same about their practice.
Before I even start, IANAHSGP (hot shot graphics programmer). While reading the article and learning how this chip does its thing, I had the sinking sensation that it's simply doing things the way old software renderers used to do it (especially the good old demos by Future Crew and friends).
The whole concept of wasteful polygon rendering comes from early hardware acceleration, which needed a simplified rendering scheme in its early days in order to produce hardware that is cheap enough to mass-market. They simply didn't have the means to put a pseudo-raytracer on a chip fast enough to play games, and the bottlenecks were elsewhere anyway (host CPU and bus).
Nevertheless, it's a smart deviation from the herd and sounds like good competition against Geforce MX (which is more like a TNT2 on steroids) as well as ATI's mid-range Fury and low-range Radeons that are gathering good popularity in the bargain performance market.
Billions of bibiflops in the PS3, and yet no one will be good enough to develop software that pushes it beyond the limit. Heck, they're still bitching about how the PS2's underused. They're going to be spitting out a couple bazillion triangles even though the TV screen is only around 720x528. If only it had an SVGA hookup to run it at 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor; now that would be impressive, but they're about to reach a point where the bottleneck is no longer the console, but actually the hardware that's plugged into it.
I wish they'd invest more in getting good developers and designers working on titles for their existing consoles instead of focusing so strongly on the hardware aspect. You'd think they learned from the Playstation, where its success was based on the immense selection of games available. N64 came short because you had less than 60 games available 2 years after it was released, and that's why it's not nearly as popular as the technologically inferior PSX.
People don't care much about shiny graphics and thundering sound if they can't find games to fit their tastes. For a PC component manufacturer like NVidia, they can focus on releasing wad-blowing hardware because there are thousands of software houses that will take care of the software, but for a console like the PS2, developers need to go through Sony to get their games licensed and pay royalties and whatnot, which severely limits the amount of people available to work on games. You won't see a bunch of teens writing a killer PS2 game because they just don't have the money and business clout to deal with SCEA's business model.
IMHO, I would sooner go for a dedicated out-of-the-box router at 130$ than put a perfectly functional laptop to such braindead use. They're just as compact, and it hurts the mind less to see a cheap bluish plastic router sitting idle in the corner than to waste the omnipotent processing power of a P75 that can do so much more than just juggle packets. Now if you had said iBook, my answer might have been different *wide-evil-anti-mac-grin*. But seriously, a laptop, no matter which big name it comes from, is best used on your lap, not hidden away beneath your printer stand.
Did they make you sign a contract stating that you'd get a 0.003% share of whatever direct profits they make from your cd submissions ? Nope you didn't. You have no defense. In every sense, the information you've submitted in the past is now theirs and they are free to do whatever.
What would be funny is if the RIAA were to sue Gracenote/CDDB because they claim "ownership" of the track names and whatnot.
1. It's no faster than a regular car, 80km average speed isn't that much. I'll grant the fact that you avoid traffic by riding on railways, but it's still very marginal and the time spent just travelling to the railway would probably defeat the purpose. This is just a different form of public bus transportation, in smaller units. It still shares most of the same fallacies as regular bus transit, with the exception that you don't have to ride 45 minutes with that smelly freak who likes to stare at your ears.
2. This is just another thing that will be purchased and vaporized by the big auto manufacturers, just like the water-powered car that you saw only on the discovery channel. GM, Chevy, and Ford will pull a 'Microsoft' move on this one, i'm pretty sure.
I just don't think this thing is innovative and effective enough to make a strong entry into the market. This stupid shit works in Asia, where cars are much less of a commodity than here in America, but for us car lovers it just won't get too far.
Why not just change a few things, like renaming instructions (find & replace) and just doing any little thing to break compatibility with Company X's language, but in a way that allows you to convert the old language to your own very trivially. They couldn't say you copied their language since their own code won't compile on your rig. Of course IANAL but if this is false, then I don't see why the makers of Cobol (ack!) don't just sue everyone for writing a "programming language that uses commands and variables" ? If it's even slightly different then it's no longer the same, at all.
I wish they'd stop calling it a religion and start calling it what it really is : an association of capitalist mind purification specialists. I don't care whether it's scientology, solar temple, or something more tame like christianity and the hundreds of others; it's still brain-filler to patch up those black patches in your mind where intelligence is too weak to bridge over.
In a sense, capitalism is akin to religion since you feed bullshit to people in order to hide your own fallacies and still get paid and be happy. Religion feeds you more or less credible blurb that soothes the mind from its infinite existential questions, hide your faults and keep you happy. No matter how honest or crooked it may be, it still serves its purpose of filling your brain and making you feel good about yourself. So what if you just paid a 3k$ for some guy to tell you you're the "chosen one", you walk out feeling radiant and full of self-confidence. Faith has its place in the world, just not in my life.
I've got two smart probes right here, they're called hands. Sorry but this is just something I wouldn't trust a machine to tell if there's risk or not. Machines fail, that's why most of us have jobs to fix them.
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I was going to post my best attempt at a well thought-out reply, but then I scrolled up and saw Jon Katz and said "Fsck it".
Top 5 reasons why Gamecube won't beat PS2 :
5. Nintendo's CEO is way too cocky and overconfident; he's just begging for a beatdown from the competition
4. Nintendo doesn't market enough "advanced" games, they're mostly too easy except for a handful.
3. PS2 looks like it belongs on top of your TV set with a sleek, black box. No clunky bulky controllers, no fat cartridges that resemble fisher price toys.
2. PS2 is backwards compatible with the PS1's huge library of games, so you can give your ditzy little PS1 to your nephew along with the Crap Bandicoot series and have a family orgasm.
1. You can watch La Blue Girl DVD on PS2. Try to put that on a 64mb cart. Ha!
The more control there is, the greater potential there is for corruption. Outlaw all guns and only outlaws will sell guns. Sure, legislation may prevent your psychotic divorced light-minded neighbor from shooting her ex-husband thrice in the crotch, but it won't stop organized and disorganized crime one bit. They're attacking the right problem the wrong way.
I've had the black book for many years now, and have used it as a true bible for low-level graphics programming; it is a rare gem (albeit a heavy one). However most everything in that book is somewhat obsoleted now by the advent of hardware accelerated 3D and the divergence away from assembler coding.
Back in 1994 it was still popular to write major parts of your game in pure assembler, relying on a high-level language to glue the asm routines together and set up the game flow. These days people just rely on the compiler to write 'optimized' code, and it does a pretty good job too, but no compiler will dare use extreme tweaking measures such as those detailed in Abrash's Zen of Assembler, such as unrolled loops, memory/cache latency timing, even clock counting. That's why you could run a decent action game at 30fps on a 486-dx2 or dx4, but when Win95 games started pouring out the wastepipe you found yourself playing cheap side-scrollers a-la-Mario at about 5 fps in a small window on your screen. "Who needs speed, we've got Win95!"
Indeed, few of those who could tweak asm knew a thing about this mystical OS, so they just gave up. Those who persisted went on to start projects like Visual Assembler, but without coordination and support, they just fell through.
It has simply become too cumbersome to write good code because the advent of more intricate OS' and exotic (read : OEM crap) hardware have made software development a mess. We have no choice but to rely on commercial libraries like DirectX to get anywhere. Don't even think of writing your own low-latency SoundBlaster driver, you'll miss out on half of your potential customer base that own lame stuff like onboard "almost SB compatible" chipsets or Yamaha 10$ sound cards. Drivers make all the difference these days, especially with video cards.
Let's face it: Games no longer use or need good coders, all they care about are artists and designers. Having a good designer is primo, but artists ? Games don't need to look good if they play good. Just look at Alpha Centauri from our fellow brainiac Sid Meier. So-so graphics but great gameplay turned it into a guaranteed hit, because we don't want to watch the game, we want to play it.
Abrash's insight still gives important lessons on good software design, not only graphics. It remains a true bible to those who dare walk through its pages and lift off the tender morsels of genius it contains.
If everyone stopped buying Britney Spears CDs we wouldn't need research because everyone would be instantly intelligent.
I just turned an old P200 into a Dos box just to play this exact game less than a month ago. I had almost forgotten how long it takes to level up. I must have been throwing rocks at this staircase for hours just to see those little green letters "Gando gained a ninja level", while my mage was busy making mana and wisdom potions in order to gain magic levels in record time. Ahh.. 180 Wisdom, now that's a quick learner :)
Ever since the day I first loaded it up ten years ago on a friend's Amiga 500, to the sunny day in 1995 when I found it in a bargain bin and gave up hot afternoons poolside with the cuspies in exchange for endless hours of fun in front of this VGA masterpiece, and now when I go back in time and play it one more time, I just can't help but feel profoundly absorbed by the game, not for nostalgia but for pure entertainment value. No other game comes close to that level of fantasy and immersion. Not even Dungeon Master 2 (which was rather depressing). It is truly a timeless classic for all adventure fans.
That kind of quarter-hungry mentality goes back much earlier to 1991, the year of the Terminator 2 shooting game. One credit (which was of course .25c back then) would last perhaps one or two minutes.. four if you were really good and lucky. Finishing the whole thing required upwards of 5.00$ per player, since playing with a friend made the enemies more plentiful and aggressive. Still the game was so fast-paced and action-packed that people were just hooked and kept cranking the quarters in, yelling back to their partner "Push Start for me" while they anxiously waited for the arcade operator to cough up more change.
Sure, it was fun, but that game was something of an experiment, a "pilot project" if you will, that paved the way for the greedy trend that soon ensued. A little later came the Dungeons and Dragons series, where you'd get your ass kicked just as quickly. The breeding rate of such thieving games kept on increasing exponentially while the actual replay value and "funfactor" kept on decreasing at the same rate. Good game designers were evaluated by their ability to make a game profitable instead of playable.
Another example is racing games. There used to be a time when you got a free play whenever you and your buddies finished first in a race. Now you lose no matter which place you finish in. Daytona USA makes you pay whether you win or lose, because you almost always win against the CPU cars which suck so badly. They took the common goal of all racing and threw it out the window. "You win. Good for you, give me another dollar now." Games are about fantasy, about placing yourself in someone else's shoes. Well I'm pretty damned sure Nascar racers don't get ignored when they win the nationals. It's all become a sham.
You'd expect SourceForge's holders to at least have the decency to send mail to the project admins so they can grab their stuff and leave.
Of course these days dot-coms only care about staying afloat, good practices are low on the priority list.
Please forgive my poor knowledge of sourceforce. I have yet to work on anything there. However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site ? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site ?
I'm no corporate shrink, but my personal belief is that the problem with work-related stress isn't the actual work burden, it's just that most jobs are just seen as a chore and bore. Maybe it's caused by poor camaraderie in the workplace, or a reality-challenged boss, or an excessively light workload leading to daily boredom (my situation), or maybe you're just working at Walmart, but the bottom line is that if people get jittery when they think of Mondays, maybe they should look for work elsewhere. Work should provide personal satisfaction and pride, not just a paycheck.
Having read the article, I still feel it's a little foolish to fire a big fat laser near combustibles. Since they're drilling for oil, wouldn't it be a Bad Thing for the laser to actually heat up the underground oil and ignite it ? This seems so obvious that they must have considered it in the laser design, but the risk is still there and I wouldn't want to see the chaos effect caused by igniting an underground oil patch.. the gas pressure would probably fsck up the landscape pretty quickly and nastily. Of course my high school physics and chemistry classes aren't exactly fresh in my mind anymore.
As long as they get raped at least once in jail by some big guy named B1FF I'll be satisfied. Then we could start a pr0n site featuring pics and videos of spammers and the ass-pirates who love them.
Let's simplify every damn copryight/domain/competition dispute since the past 2-3 years :
"EvilCorp tries to buy out LittleBiz, LittleBiz refuses, so EvilCorp just plain steals LittleBiz from the grips of their owners."
Sounds a hell of a lot like organised crime. If you don't shut up and take the money, _they_ shut you up and keep the money. Last I heard, gangsterism was still illegal, why should corporate gangsterism be any different ? Instead of sending armed thugs to your home, they send legal threats. The vehicles of destruction may be different, but the modus operandi are one and the same. Once again, I hope Fox eventually gets gang-raped by the little guys they crushed and swallowed. They're no better than Microsoft, in fact they're much sloppier than Gates' legal henchmen.
Here's what a smart missionary would do : bring in a few iOpeners and introduce all these sweatshop workers to eBay =) In just one week they'll have earned more than their yearly salary =)
>and I have to admit that there's plenty of useless crap that's come out of the CS field lately
such as?
90% of everything labeled as B2B or any multi-zillion dollar not-so-expert system like Peoplesoft and its clones.
It's so full of yeast and buzz it's just disgusting.
Although I can't help but agree with some of the (few) arguments cited in the article, and I have to admit that there's plenty of useless crap that's come out of the CS field lately, but these scientists and researchers seem to have ignored the not-so-intellectual side of things : making the damned PC more popular and attractive to common people.
While there may not have been many remarkable technological achievements, marketing and image have been steadily improving and focusing on Joe Random Luser. This will bring more eyeballs to the next great neat project that will be perceived as the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the long run, more people will ultimately benefit from future advances in computing. Now I'd like to see an astrophysicist say the same about their practice.
Before I even start, IANAHSGP (hot shot graphics programmer). While reading the article and learning how this chip does its thing, I had the sinking sensation that it's simply doing things the way old software renderers used to do it (especially the good old demos by Future Crew and friends).
The whole concept of wasteful polygon rendering comes from early hardware acceleration, which needed a simplified rendering scheme in its early days in order to produce hardware that is cheap enough to mass-market. They simply didn't have the means to put a pseudo-raytracer on a chip fast enough to play games, and the bottlenecks were elsewhere anyway (host CPU and bus).
Nevertheless, it's a smart deviation from the herd and sounds like good competition against Geforce MX (which is more like a TNT2 on steroids) as well as ATI's mid-range Fury and low-range Radeons that are gathering good popularity in the bargain performance market.
Billions of bibiflops in the PS3, and yet no one will be good enough to develop software that pushes it beyond the limit. Heck, they're still bitching about how the PS2's underused. They're going to be spitting out a couple bazillion triangles even though the TV screen is only around 720x528. If only it had an SVGA hookup to run it at 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor; now that would be impressive, but they're about to reach a point where the bottleneck is no longer the console, but actually the hardware that's plugged into it.
I wish they'd invest more in getting good developers and designers working on titles for their existing consoles instead of focusing so strongly on the hardware aspect. You'd think they learned from the Playstation, where its success was based on the immense selection of games available. N64 came short because you had less than 60 games available 2 years after it was released, and that's why it's not nearly as popular as the technologically inferior PSX.
People don't care much about shiny graphics and thundering sound if they can't find games to fit their tastes. For a PC component manufacturer like NVidia, they can focus on releasing wad-blowing hardware because there are thousands of software houses that will take care of the software, but for a console like the PS2, developers need to go through Sony to get their games licensed and pay royalties and whatnot, which severely limits the amount of people available to work on games. You won't see a bunch of teens writing a killer PS2 game because they just don't have the money and business clout to deal with SCEA's business model.
IMHO, I would sooner go for a dedicated out-of-the-box router at 130$ than put a perfectly functional laptop to such braindead use. They're just as compact, and it hurts the mind less to see a cheap bluish plastic router sitting idle in the corner than to waste the omnipotent processing power of a P75 that can do so much more than just juggle packets. Now if you had said iBook, my answer might have been different *wide-evil-anti-mac-grin*. But seriously, a laptop, no matter which big name it comes from, is best used on your lap, not hidden away beneath your printer stand.
If it's called the Children's Online Protection Act, shouldn't the acronym be COPA and not CIPA ?
Did they make you sign a contract stating that you'd get a 0.003% share of whatever direct profits they make from your cd submissions ? Nope you didn't. You have no defense. In every sense, the information you've submitted in the past is now theirs and they are free to do whatever.
What would be funny is if the RIAA were to sue Gracenote/CDDB because they claim "ownership" of the track names and whatnot.
1. It's no faster than a regular car, 80km average speed isn't that much. I'll grant the fact that you avoid traffic by riding on railways, but it's still very marginal and the time spent just travelling to the railway would probably defeat the purpose. This is just a different form of public bus transportation, in smaller units. It still shares most of the same fallacies as regular bus transit, with the exception that you don't have to ride 45 minutes with that smelly freak who likes to stare at your ears.
2. This is just another thing that will be purchased and vaporized by the big auto manufacturers, just like the water-powered car that you saw only on the discovery channel. GM, Chevy, and Ford will pull a 'Microsoft' move on this one, i'm pretty sure.
I just don't think this thing is innovative and effective enough to make a strong entry into the market. This stupid shit works in Asia, where cars are much less of a commodity than here in America, but for us car lovers it just won't get too far.
Why not just change a few things, like renaming instructions (find & replace) and just doing any little thing to break compatibility with Company X's language, but in a way that allows you to convert the old language to your own very trivially. They couldn't say you copied their language since their own code won't compile on your rig. Of course IANAL but if this is false, then I don't see why the makers of Cobol (ack!) don't just sue everyone for writing a "programming language that uses commands and variables" ? If it's even slightly different then it's no longer the same, at all.
I wish they'd stop calling it a religion and start calling it what it really is : an association of capitalist mind purification specialists. I don't care whether it's scientology, solar temple, or something more tame like christianity and the hundreds of others; it's still brain-filler to patch up those black patches in your mind where intelligence is too weak to bridge over.
In a sense, capitalism is akin to religion since you feed bullshit to people in order to hide your own fallacies and still get paid and be happy. Religion feeds you more or less credible blurb that soothes the mind from its infinite existential questions, hide your faults and keep you happy. No matter how honest or crooked it may be, it still serves its purpose of filling your brain and making you feel good about yourself. So what if you just paid a 3k$ for some guy to tell you you're the "chosen one", you walk out feeling radiant and full of self-confidence. Faith has its place in the world, just not in my life.
I've got two smart probes right here, they're called hands. Sorry but this is just something I wouldn't trust a machine to tell if there's risk or not. Machines fail, that's why most of us have jobs to fix them.