I did 5 start ups and was part owner of a game company (10%) I've done everything you said not to do and you are right. You would be better off selling hats off the side of the road. On the other hand, I had one hell of a lot of fun.
Your first point is very very true and is exactly what I did. Kids are worth the cost. Sure, I would be a multimillionaire if we had not had kids, but what the hell. Not getting married may be a good idea but I have been married for 37 years to an ME and that is a wonderful way to spend your life.
Not very long ago... 20 years or so, all employers paid technical empolyees to take classes. The classes were even often taught at the companies location. Local colleges would send full professors to teach classes that started just after the close of business so that they were convenient for the workers. It was normal to give employees time off during the day to take day classes. The employees were oftern paid for time and the employer allways paid for the tuition, books, and lab fees.
Technical employess used to be considered a valuable asset. Now they are not.
"Sputnik moment" I do not think it means what they think it means. I turned 5 years old just a few days before Sputnik was launched. My father, who was in the invasion fleet on the way to Japan when the only nuclear bombs used in war were dropped, was working at the Hanford plant in southeast Washinton making plutonium for more nuclear bombs. For a family outing we went out and watched a simulated nuclear explosion.... That is what my life was like when Sputnik showed up in the sky.
Sputnik meant that suddenly every point in the US was subject to nuclear destruction with no warning. The level of fear was so high you could walk on it. For the rest of his life my father kept a survival kit in the trunks of his cars because he knew that the only hope you had for surviving a nuclear war was to be far enough away from where the bombs come down Burrowing under ground was just a way to bury yourself.
A "Sputnik moment" is a moment when every little bit of security you thought you had disapears. I suspect the people of Boston had a minor "Sputnik moment" when the bombs went off. The fear and anger I saw after 911 as not 1% of what the US experienced when sputnik appeared in the sky. The fear and anger were backed by huge frustration because unlike 911 we could not invade the USSR because we did not want to try to survive a nuclear war. Instead of spending time and money destroying them we spent the time and money making sure that if they tried to destroy us, we WOULD destroy them.
Back when I got my BSCS in the '70s CS and all other engineering students were allowed to take any upper division business classes they wanted to no matter if they had the prerequisites or the 3.5/4.0 GPA required for business majors to take the same classes. In other words, the business department comsidered a sophomore in engineering to be superior to a senior in their own department.
At that time a BSCS required work equivalent to a doctorate in buisness. Even with the dramatic reduction in the requirements for CS degrees since then a BSCS is still the equivalent of at least an MBA. Not to mention that most people consider a 50 year old MBA to be highly experience while a 40 year old code monkey is considerred to be over the hill and good only for checking reciepts at the door at Sam's Club.
So, yes, why would anyone bother to train to be a code monkey these days? I made sure my kids did not make the same mistake I made...
Stonewolf
P.S.
I would gladly take $15/hour to teach CS. I've even taken the courses and passed all the tests to be able to do just that. Guess what? Public schools do not want MEN to teach classes. They especially do not want MEN who expect to be treated like humans. But, if they would allow me to teach I would happily do it for $15/hour because that is better than the $0/hour I can make as a 61 year old software engineer.
Ruining it? You must be joking.... Or, merely naive? Forcing AT&T to increase performance while decreasing price might, must might, reduce their profit margin from nearly infinite to something you can compute with long double precision. Remember AT&T used to make over 1200% profit on caller-id. And that was computed using the special accounting rules that only AT&T and the baby bells get to use.
I live just out side of Austin (groan... there goes my property value...) and I've been watching this mess for a long time. Austin started to build a network like this one back in the '90s. Then the telcos used their pet politicos to get a law pass in Texas that makes it illegal for a City to build its own network. That was the end of high speed Internet hopes for cities in Texas. Then, AT&T. Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast got pissed off because the cities were requiring them to build out what passed for high speed Internet through out entire cities if they wanted to build it at all. So..... they went to their pet politicos (the folks we refer as the people in the owners box at the legislature) and got the law changed so that only the state gets to tell them where they can or can't build their networks, so AT&T is putting in fiber to the curb in new developments with million dollar homes and in working class neighborhoods you are lucky to get minimal DSL.
Now Google is rolling out gigabit Internet to with in half a mile of my home, but not to my home. I could just cry. This is going to kill Round Rock. And, believe me, ever since Dell moved here Austin has been gunning for Round Rock.
Yep, I was working for SBC (now known as AT&T) during the time you are talking about. SBC used the money to buy AT&T after buying everything else they could find that was worth buying, and that was cheap enough to buy.
I coded an infinite loop. Then I typed "run" and then I realized that there doesn't seem to be anyway to halt a program once it is running. There must be a big red octagonal button on the screen with the letters "STOP" in it that actually stops the program.
I tried to code an IF statement. I had to look up the syntax because "if i 0 then goto 2" got a syntax error. I can almost forgive using the C like "if()" for the if statement but using FORTRAN like "LT" for "" is pretty nasty if you ask me.... But, you didn't:-)
You have a "declare record" statement when just "record" would do. Using "declare" make sense if you are planning to add more things to declare, otherwise it is just a waste. And, seriously, no "for.. next" statement, no "if... then... else..." statement, no while statement, no multi-line statements at all. I see that you have reserved some keywords for those so it looks like you are planning to add them in the future. Please, these are critical parts of any language. I know for a fact, having done it, that it is f(&#$@#*$&^King easy to implement those compared to some of the things you have already added.
I tested what would happen if I typed "run" for a program that has a syntax error. It went away forever. No error messages, no output at all. It just stopped reacting to the keyboard. This is a serious bug.
The documentation is really really really poor. Very few examples. No real introduction. You use things like "boolean-expr" but do not define that anywhere it the document.
"turn" is great, but you need left and right also. Kids understand left and right. Positive and negative angles are a bit harder for them.
Palettes? Really? It is very hard to find a computing device that can run a modern browser that is not using RGB pixels. Why put this ancient cruft in the way of kids? Color values are RGB in the range 0 to 1. There are no palettes anymore.
Sprite maps? Nostalgia is an addictive drug, but like all drugs it is damaging when used to excess. Why not just have a place on the screen to browse and drop graphics that can then be used in your program?
I've written an ANSI standard BASIC compiler, I've written a Logo interpreter (or 2 or 3:-), and I've taught courses in which the final project was a Lisp interpreter. In fact, I've written many compilers, interpreters, and even a linker once. I've also used both basic and logo to teach kids aged 5 to 12 to program. And, I have to say that while you have a good idea your implementation is far from ready for use by kids if I can break it in 5 minutes doing exactly the kind of things kids do.
It looks to me like you have focused on the "cool" parts, the graphics and the math library, but have skipped, or at least skimped on the critical part. The critical part is creating a system that works, followed by the documentation needed to use it.
BTW, WTF is "proof" for? It is left over from back in the day (your nostalgia is showing...) when you actually had to type in code that was published in magazines. OMFG!!!!! We live in a world where magazines have websites (in reality a few websites still have magazines) and flash drives are nearly cheap enough to show up in cracker jack boxes (yeah... I'm old, I learned Basic and Logo on an Univac 1108a:-). We do not do that anymore!
You have a good idea. But, shake off the nostalgia and make something that acknowledges the 21st century.
Yes, I know I have been harsh on you. If I didn't really like the idea of what you are doing I wouldn't bother to find the flaws, let alone spend the time to point them out.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I've recently managed to eliminated the use of paper in all the classes I teach. Doing that has really pissed off the English teachers who still insist on paper and give tests using blue books.
As you said the DMCA is about copyright and not about ideas. He did copy the idea, but that is not the question. Anyway, ideas are protected by patents, not copyrights. If there were any patents on Pac-Man they should have expired by now.
You say that the question is whether or not he copied the artwork or code. Sorry, no. It does not matter if he copied the code at all. If you go to his website you'll see that he clearly copied the artwork. Copying does not mean getting a copy of the orignal art work. It does not mean running something through a copy machine or type "cp" in to a command line. A copy is a copy if the copier had access to the original and the copy looks "substantially" like the original. That is why you are violating copyright if you draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Humanity made copies long before there were computers. Copyright law goes back centuries.
which is the federal district court ruling on a similar case from 1982. It just happens to cover exactly the same circumstances but 28 years earlier. It goes into depth on the method used by the court to determine that an illegal copy had been made and covers the law and precedents that applied up through 1982. This isn't a case of the DMCA making something illegal that used to be legal. This is a case of the owners of Pac-Man using recent law to rather politely and cheaply stop a blatant case of copyright infringement.
Like I said earlier, they could have sued him and left him penniless for the rest of his life. All they did was stop him from being able to continue to distribute their property. The new version of the game he has posted is most likely still in violation. All he did was change a little art to make it look a little different. Considering the existing precedent it would be a cheap suit to prosecute. It is the same circumstance as the one I pointed out from 28 years ago. I bet the court would just give them a summary judgment based on screen shots. The scum bag who asked the question would be sitting with a bill for legal costs and damages that he would probably never be able to pay off.
You should take your own advice. If you follow the link and look at his artwork he clearly stole the design of the characters and the overall look of the game. He is lucky he just got a take down notice and not a suit for damages. He would likely be having his income garnished for the rest of his life to pay that debt.
Copyright and trademark are two ways the law (also known as the basis of civil society) establishes the existence and rules for intellectual property. Once you accept the concept of intellectual property then you must accept the concept that taking someones intellectual property is theft just as taking someones physical property is theft.
So, yes, this scum bag created a game that is essentially a clone of Pac-Man and even use the same images for his muncher and the ghosts. You don't have to actually use the original art work. If you make a copy of a piece of art, even by your own hand, then you are breaking the rules of copyright. After all, what does the word mean? Copyright literally means "the right to make a copy". Making a copy without permission is theft.
Using the a trademark with out permission is not only theft from the owner, but theft from the buyer. The idea of a trademark is to insure that when it says "Gucci" on the bag you are getting something actually designed and made by "Gucci". When you make some that looks like Pac-Man, but isn't you are stealing from the owner of the trade mark and from customers who are not getting the real Pac-Man.
So, yes, this is about copyright, trademark, and theft from both the owners of the trademark and copyrights and from the people who purchased it.
The person who posted the original question is a thief who is looking for information that he hopes will allow him to continue as a game developer without continuing as a thief. This is a good goal.
The easiest thing to do in his case is to be a little bit creative. If you want to do a game based on the Japanese folk hero Paku he should research the legend and design a new game. If he wants to just be inspired by Pak-Man then he should be inspired by it enough to create a new game that includes the basic ideas but is not the same game, with the same style of art, with characters that look just like the original characters, and without the same scoring and strategy.
As an example, take a look at the relationship between "Dungeons & Dragons" and "The Lord of the Rings" or even "Bunnies and Burrows" and "Watership Down". Not to mention the relationship between "B&B" and "D&D". (And think of how lucky were are that AFAIK there is no A&A, C&C... Z&Z"!)
The key is that "inspired by" does not mean that it is a near perfect copy down to the art work. A near perfect copy is theft. Inspired by can be great art.
I would suggest that the person who asked the question should get an education. I would suggest starting with a book on the intellectual history of the world. Failing that, at least find, and read, three or four books on the basic concepts of law and especially intellectual property law.
If anyone doubts the importance of intellectual property law let me point out that the basic rights most Americans take for granted were added to the Constitution in the form of the Bill of Rights, aka the first ten amendments to the Constitution. OTOH, The legal basis for US intellectual property law is in the core of the original text of the constitution. The founding fathers all came to agree on the need to guarantee intellectual property rights. But, some of them thought it was a bad idea to limit the states right to control religion, speech, the press, weapons, searches, and the states power to use torture to extract a confession.
The simple fact is that a lot of programmers, like the rest of humanity are idiots.
People want to be associated with the rich and famous, They think that some how that makes them better in someway. The same thing makes people walk around wearing a football jersey with someone else's name and number on it.
As a result people line up to be abused by the rich and famous and that goes double for rich and famous companies.
For every job open at a major game company there are hundreds, if not thousands, or people applying for that job. That fact encourages companies to treat employees as toilet paper. OTOH, the few people who are truly exceptional can rise high and rise quickly. They are well paid and well treated. But, that isn't what happens to most people.
Game development is a highly entrepreneurial business. Which means you have to watch out for your self and it means you are only as good as your last project. Many companies hire you for the duration of a project. When the project is done you are laid off. The project might be done when it ships, and it might be done after lunch today because the producer decided to use the money for a game that appears to have a better ROI.
Once you have been laid off you get to look around for another project. You will be unemployed during that hunting time. Even if you were making over $20,000/month (never happens for programmers) in your last project you might not get that in your next project. And, you might have to live on savings for anywhere from a month to a year between projects. Not to mention that you may find your self work 80 hours/week while you are working. So, yeah the salary might look nice, but when you look at actual yearly earnings it doesn't look that good. When you break it down to $/hour you might find you could do better working behind the bar at Starbucks or delivering pizzas.
The funniest thing is how many people think that if they will get a cut of the revenue from the game. You don't. The stock holders get the revenue. If you want to make money from games develop them and market them your self.
I'm currently teaching game development. I have taught it in the classroom and on line since 2004. I run a mailing list for wanna be game developers, I have run it for more than 10 years. I helped a college develop their game programming curriculum, for some reason they won't let me teach game dev there any more:-) I used to be game developer. I only did that for 2 full time years, but I was in the computer graphics industry for 10 years after I got my MSCS and before I went into game development. After being part owner of a game company, programmer, and technical director, I moved on. I went to work for a fortune 50 company doing technical and business analysis for games. Now I'm a teacher. And, I am damn near 60 years old. Oh, yeah, I also did 5 major start ups not counting my times as an independent software developer. I had founders shares in 2 of the start ups.
I designed my first game (not a video game:-) when I was 12 and my first paid programming job was porting games from a minicomputer to a mainframe back in the early '70s.
I have a large number of students from my classroom classes who are working in the computer game business. Most of them are developers. I have an even larger number of people who started on my mailing list who are now working in the game development business. I think I have something to say about this subject.
First off, the best way to get a job at one of the Majors is to create a successful independent studio and then sell you studio to one of the majors. Sure, you can get hired at one of the Majors, but then you will be just like the rest of the toilet paper. Cheap, disposable, and only really good for one use because after you use it it is covered in... well you get the picture.
OTOH, if they have to *buy* your company they will respect you at least a little bit and you will at least have a nice office and a real salary. But, get the money in cash, not in stock. Stock is like toilet paper... Cash is something you can spend.
Secondly, the best way to get any job in game development is to develop games and sell them or find some other way to make money off of them. Yes, by fart the best, easiest, and most lucrative way to get a game development job is to start your own company. If you do not know how you can learn how quickly. Most states, the federal government, many cities, and every community college I know of in the US has courses on small business management and entrepreneurship. Take them, and make sure you get at least on class on contract law while you are at it. Those classes along with a couple of semesters of probabilaity and statistics will be worth more to you over the next 40 years than anything you learn about programming or graphics. All the tech stuff will be obsolete in 5 years, the business, statistics, and law stuff will still be accurate.
As for education. A degree in CS used to be a good place to start. I'm not so sure about that anymore. If you go to a school that only uses one language all the way through (especially if that language is Java or C#) you should find a real school. But, it is still probably better to get a CS degree than a physics degree. Math is kind of a wash. A math degree with a CSMS is not a bad combo. If you can find a school that offers CS degree with a strong emphasis on software engineering you are in pretty good shape. You need to take trigonometry, college algebra with computational geometry, linear algebra with lots of matrices, calculus, numerical analysis, and probably differential equations. I didn't get linear algebra and DiffEQ as an under grad so I had to teach my self linear algebra and I'm married to an ME so I go to her when I need help with DiffEQ. But, you really need at least DiffEQ to understand physics. Yes, you also need to take physics at least a good introduction. A couple of years of physics in high school is good enough. You need need to take a few art classes. I would suggest an art history course, and courses in something l
the task of cleaning out the closet where I've been dumping my old computers and parts came to the top of the infamous honey-do list. I found 8 40gig drives a couple of 30gig drives and a 20gig drive. After testing I had 6 working 30gig drives. I tore down the others just for grins and giggles and to pass around in some of my classes. Not to mention the magnets in the head positioning system are fun to play with.
I also found an old mother board, 3 or 4 CDROM drives, RAM, a couple of power supplies and a very very old PC case. So, I built a PC. We call it Frankenputer. I got a working Athlon 1.5Ghz processor from the computer goodwill store and I lucked out and found some PCI IDE interface cards at the same place. (I had to update all the ROMs in the whole system to get it to work. Finding the BIOSes for a bunch of discontinued cards made by out of business companies was not as hard it sounds.) I had one set of rails for installing a 3.5 inch hard drive in a 5.25 bay. I found several more at computer Goodwill Computer store! I picked up a 30 dollar case at Fry's.
Thanks to google, Goodwill, and freedos I got it all working. I used FreeDos and GParted to get all the disks configured and tested as a raid. Then, I installed Ubuntu using the "alternative" installation disk.
Even though the drives were all "40GB" drives each manufacturers drives were of a different size. So, I created a partition the size of the smallest drive on each drive. Then in the extra space I created a partition of the size of the empty space on the next largest drive. The odd bits of space left at the end of two drives I just partitioned as their actual size. I used the 6 large partitions as a RAID 0, the second set became another RAID 0. The rest of the partitions just became normal drives.
I stuck an old NVidia video card and a old but good network card in there and the thing actually works. It is an absurdly fast disk server.
Every 3.5 inch bay has a drive in it. Every 5.25 inch drive bay has a drive in it.
All the rest of the stuff in the closet went to Goodwill or the dump. Recently a new item went on my list... Move Frankenputer out of the living room. Oh well. And it looks so good on the book shelf:-) For some reason she wants me to move the table saw out of the living room too. Can't imagine why? Can you?
I appreciate your going to the effort to make it easy on me. Seriously, I do. But, I still do not understand what you are trying to say.
If I'm correctly decoding what you said, and I've been a programmer for nearly 40 years so I'm probably conditioned to be completely incapable of understand you:-) but I'll try anyway, ok?
What I see is two sequential statements. The first one says that if every is in agreement then we must split hairs. If we all agree, they why are we splitting hairs? It makes no sense to me. When we are all in agreement we have no hairs to split.
The second statement says that if we all dis agreement then we must reconcile our view points. That is a potentially nonterminating processes so if we go off to reconcile view points we may never return.
It looks to me like the code is flawed. At the very least is should be coded as an if() {} else if() {} else {};
structure. Not as two sequential if()s. Also I'm guessing it needs to be embedded in an iterative structure of some type or in a recursive function.
I do not see any attempt to address the state in which we form factions. The code seems to assume that we all either agree or disagree. A situation that never happens.
I do not see any thing in the code that addresses the key question of what to do when one group is correct and one is not but can not see their error. That is not a reconcilable situation.
What I think is really missing is an attempt to link what you said back to why some people believe they actually need have a rule for stupid little shit like how many spaces to put at the end of a sentence. It also does not address the question of why anyone would pay any attention to such a rule if it did indeed exist. What kind of person would allow themselves to be controlled in such a way?
The fact is that we obey rules because disobeying them has consequences. If disobeying a rule can result in harm to you or other people then it makes sense to obey the rule. The only reason to have a rule is as a way to codify dangerous behavior.
Rules are a useful learning tool for those who are capable of understanding the reasons behind the rule and are useful as threats used to enforce socially acceptable behavior in those individuals (children, sociopaths, and idiots) who are incapable of understanding the reasons for a rule.
If disobeying a rule causes no to harm to myself or to others then what is the point of even having such a rule? If disobeying a rule causes no harm to others and I am willing to accept 100% of the consequences then I am free to ignore the rule.
I can not fathom the kind of mind that would ask the question that started this discussion. But, people like that have cost me many many hours of valuable time by making up pointless rules.
So, what were you trying to say?
Stonewolf
"I felt like a child with" .....
on
Beautiful Data
·
· Score: 1
"an attention deficit disorder"
Did you really? How do you know what that feels like? Do you have an attentional disorder? If not, then you do not have any idea what it feels like to be a child, or an adult, with an attentional disorder.
Let me try this a different way: If I wrote an that I "felt like a tall stacked blonde walking nude into a male prison block" would you believe that I knew what I was talking about? Well yeah, if I were such a woman who had done what I described then maybe you would accept that I know what I am talking about. But, since I am a fat man who has never walked nude into any place but my bathroom it is clear that I can only use that line in a work of fiction.
So, do you have an attentional disorder? Or is your review a work of fiction? If you do not, do you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you make such a statement?
No, I do not care about how many spaces you, or anyone else, put at the end of a sentence. I do care that there are people who care about how many spaces they put at the end of a sentence. I firmly believe that being able to care about such a thing is a mental illness similar to OCD.
If you do in fact care then I hope you die from a million paper cuts.
Some people have to have rule for everything and then they go around trying to force the sane people to comply with them. I wonder how such people manage to reproduce. Do they have a rule for how often to do it? How far to put it in? Use a metronome to comply with the insertion frequency rules?
This? This? is the kind of crap that the/. editors choose to post?
The supreme court decided that money is speech. That means that anyone can spend any amount of money to support any political point of view they want. That means that the more money you have, the more freedom of speech you have, and the more political power you have.
The supreme court just decided that corporations, you know, a legal fiction that is not a human being, a thing that is really just a mask for the people who run it, a thing that is not born and does not die, a thing that can not breath, bleed, or vote... the supreme court just decided that corporations have the right of free speech. That means that the people who control public corporations are allowed to use unlimited amounts of corporate money to support any kind of political action they want with no restrictions of any kind.
Yep, ATT, Verizon, Timewarner, ComCast... all get to use the money you pay them to buy our state legislatures and our national legislature. They can use the money you pay them to make sure that they can charge any price they want, that they can mess with the Internet in any way they want.
You wonder why a US Representative would apologize to BP? Maybe it is because he is owned out right by BP. You think that maybe the same guy is bending over and saying thank you when ever BP asks for a BJ? You think the same guy isn't doing the same thing for ATT and the rest of the scum?
Do you think they all aren't doing the same thing?
Big Telcom is coming in with a plan to charge you by the bit and make you pay extra to access any service they don't want you to have. Timewarner already tried it and only backed off because of opposition organized over the Internet. But, hey now they can pay to have a law that keeps you from being able to organize over the Internet. They can get a law that lets them charge anyway they want. You want to use Google? That will be an extra $10/month, but with Google you'll also get Bing and Yahoo whether you want them or not. You want to use YouTube? Well that is part of the video tier and costs $50 per month but hey, you get to upload too.
Slashdot? You want slashdot? Then you must be one of those subversive hackers and we'll just have to turn you over to the feds like we do anyone who wants to look at wikipedia or the democratic (fill in the name of any organization that ever made a statement in favor of regulation) party's web site.
Yeah....
Get used to having no rights at all. You don't have enough money to balance the free speech rights of the big corporations.
Oh, yeah... we can fix the problem in a very short time if y'all would vote. But, it seems that y'all don't vote.
Slashdot Mirror
I did 5 start ups and was part owner of a game company (10%) I've done everything you said not to do and you are right. You would be better off selling hats off the side of the road. On the other hand, I had one hell of a lot of fun.
TheGrumpyProgrammer
Do you happen to know who is in that picture? That is John McCarthy the inventor of Lisp. The joke is on you.
Well, not quite. Live your life like you are going to be fired TODAY. Be prepared for change.
Your first point is very very true and is exactly what I did. Kids are worth the cost. Sure, I would be a multimillionaire if we had not had kids, but what the hell. Not getting married may be a good idea but I have been married for 37 years to an ME and that is a wonderful way to spend your life.
TheGrumpyProgrammer
The "the" is there because I could not get .org .net, and .com of grumpyprogrammer,
Not very long ago... 20 years or so, all employers paid technical empolyees to take classes. The classes were even often taught at the companies location. Local colleges would send full professors to teach classes that started just after the close of business so that they were convenient for the workers. It was normal to give employees time off during the day to take day classes. The employees were oftern paid for time and the employer allways paid for the tuition, books, and lab fees.
Technical employess used to be considered a valuable asset. Now they are not.
Stonewolf
"Sputnik moment" I do not think it means what they think it means. I turned 5 years old just a few days before Sputnik was launched. My father, who was in the invasion fleet on the way to Japan when the only nuclear bombs used in war were dropped, was working at the Hanford plant in southeast Washinton making plutonium for more nuclear bombs. For a family outing we went out and watched a simulated nuclear explosion.... That is what my life was like when Sputnik showed up in the sky.
Sputnik meant that suddenly every point in the US was subject to nuclear destruction with no warning. The level of fear was so high you could walk on it. For the rest of his life my father kept a survival kit in the trunks of his cars because he knew that the only hope you had for surviving a nuclear war was to be far enough away from where the bombs come down Burrowing under ground was just a way to bury yourself.
A "Sputnik moment" is a moment when every little bit of security you thought you had disapears. I suspect the people of Boston had a minor "Sputnik moment" when the bombs went off. The fear and anger I saw after 911 as not 1% of what the US experienced when sputnik appeared in the sky. The fear and anger were backed by huge frustration because unlike 911 we could not invade the USSR because we did not want to try to survive a nuclear war. Instead of spending time and money destroying them we spent the time and money making sure that if they tried to destroy us, we WOULD destroy them.
Stonewolf
Back when I got my BSCS in the '70s CS and all other engineering students were allowed to take any upper division business classes they wanted to no matter if they had the prerequisites or the 3.5/4.0 GPA required for business majors to take the same classes. In other words, the business department comsidered a sophomore in engineering to be superior to a senior in their own department.
At that time a BSCS required work equivalent to a doctorate in buisness. Even with the dramatic reduction in the requirements for CS degrees since then a BSCS is still the equivalent of at least an MBA. Not to mention that most people consider a 50 year old MBA to be highly experience while a 40 year old code monkey is considerred to be over the hill and good only for checking reciepts at the door at Sam's Club.
So, yes, why would anyone bother to train to be a code monkey these days? I made sure my kids did not make the same mistake I made...
Stonewolf
P.S.
I would gladly take $15/hour to teach CS. I've even taken the courses and passed all the tests to be able to do just that. Guess what? Public schools do not want MEN to teach classes. They especially do not want MEN who expect to be treated like humans. But, if they would allow me to teach I would happily do it for $15/hour because that is better than the $0/hour I can make as a 61 year old software engineer.
Ruining it? You must be joking.... Or, merely naive? Forcing AT&T to increase performance while decreasing price might, must might, reduce their profit margin from nearly infinite to something you can compute with long double precision. Remember AT&T used to make over 1200% profit on caller-id. And that was computed using the special accounting rules that only AT&T and the baby bells get to use.
I live just out side of Austin (groan... there goes my property value...) and I've been watching this mess for a long time. Austin started to build a network like this one back in the '90s. Then the telcos used their pet politicos to get a law pass in Texas that makes it illegal for a City to build its own network. That was the end of high speed Internet hopes for cities in Texas. Then, AT&T. Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast got pissed off because the cities were requiring them to build out what passed for high speed Internet through out entire cities if they wanted to build it at all. So..... they went to their pet politicos (the folks we refer as the people in the owners box at the legislature) and got the law changed so that only the state gets to tell them where they can or can't build their networks, so AT&T is putting in fiber to the curb in new developments with million dollar homes and in working class neighborhoods you are lucky to get minimal DSL.
Now Google is rolling out gigabit Internet to with in half a mile of my home, but not to my home. I could just cry. This is going to kill Round Rock. And, believe me, ever since Dell moved here Austin has been gunning for Round Rock.
Yep, I was working for SBC (now known as AT&T) during the time you are talking about. SBC used the money to buy AT&T after buying everything else they could find that was worth buying, and that was cheap enough to buy.
Just tried your system out. Found a few bugs.
I coded an infinite loop. Then I typed "run" and then I realized that there doesn't seem to be anyway to halt a program once it is running. There must be a big red octagonal button on the screen with the letters "STOP" in it that actually stops the program.
I tried to code an IF statement. I had to look up the syntax because "if i 0 then goto 2" got a syntax error. I can almost forgive using the C like "if()" for the if statement but using FORTRAN like "LT" for "" is pretty nasty if you ask me.... But, you didn't :-)
You have a "declare record" statement when just "record" would do. Using "declare" make sense if you are planning to add more things to declare, otherwise it is just a waste. And, seriously, no "for .. next" statement, no "if ... then ... else..." statement, no while statement, no multi-line statements at all. I see that you have reserved some keywords for those so it looks like you are planning to add them in the future. Please, these are critical parts of any language. I know for a fact, having done it, that it is f(&#$@#*$&^King easy to implement those compared to some of the things you have already added.
I tested what would happen if I typed "run" for a program that has a syntax error. It went away forever. No error messages, no output at all. It just stopped reacting to the keyboard. This is a serious bug.
The documentation is really really really poor. Very few examples. No real introduction. You use things like "boolean-expr" but do not define that anywhere it the document.
"turn" is great, but you need left and right also. Kids understand left and right. Positive and negative angles are a bit harder for them.
Palettes? Really? It is very hard to find a computing device that can run a modern browser that is not using RGB pixels. Why put this ancient cruft in the way of kids? Color values are RGB in the range 0 to 1. There are no palettes anymore.
Sprite maps? Nostalgia is an addictive drug, but like all drugs it is damaging when used to excess. Why not just have a place on the screen to browse and drop graphics that can then be used in your program?
I've written an ANSI standard BASIC compiler, I've written a Logo interpreter (or 2 or 3 :-), and I've taught courses in which the final project was a Lisp interpreter. In fact, I've written many compilers, interpreters, and even a linker once. I've also used both basic and logo to teach kids aged 5 to 12 to program. And, I have to say that while you have a good idea your implementation is far from ready for use by kids if I can break it in 5 minutes doing exactly the kind of things kids do.
It looks to me like you have focused on the "cool" parts, the graphics and the math library, but have skipped, or at least skimped on the critical part. The critical part is creating a system that works, followed by the documentation needed to use it.
BTW, WTF is "proof" for? It is left over from back in the day (your nostalgia is showing...) when you actually had to type in code that was published in magazines. OMFG!!!!! We live in a world where magazines have websites (in reality a few websites still have magazines) and flash drives are nearly cheap enough to show up in cracker jack boxes (yeah... I'm old, I learned Basic and Logo on an Univac 1108a :-). We do not do that anymore!
You have a good idea. But, shake off the nostalgia and make something that acknowledges the 21st century.
Yes, I know I have been harsh on you. If I didn't really like the idea of what you are doing I wouldn't bother to find the flaws, let alone spend the time to point them out.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I've recently managed to eliminated the use of paper in all the classes I teach. Doing that has really pissed off the English teachers who still insist on paper and give tests using blue books.
As you said the DMCA is about copyright and not about ideas. He did copy the idea, but that is not the question. Anyway, ideas are protected by patents, not copyrights. If there were any patents on Pac-Man they should have expired by now.
You say that the question is whether or not he copied the artwork or code. Sorry, no. It does not matter if he copied the code at all. If you go to his website you'll see that he clearly copied the artwork. Copying does not mean getting a copy of the orignal art work. It does not mean running something through a copy machine or type "cp" in to a command line. A copy is a copy if the copier had access to the original and the copy looks "substantially" like the original. That is why you are violating copyright if you draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Humanity made copies long before there were computers. Copyright law goes back centuries.
For further reading I suggest you all go look at:
Atari v. NORTH AMERICAN PHILIPS CONSUMER ELECTRONICS CORP
http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/672/672.F2d.607.81-2920.html
which is the federal district court ruling on a similar case from 1982. It just happens to cover exactly the same circumstances but 28 years earlier. It goes into depth on the method used by the court to determine that an illegal copy had been made and covers the law and precedents that applied up through 1982. This isn't a case of the DMCA making something illegal that used to be legal. This is a case of the owners of Pac-Man using recent law to rather politely and cheaply stop a blatant case of copyright infringement.
Like I said earlier, they could have sued him and left him penniless for the rest of his life. All they did was stop him from being able to continue to distribute their property. The new version of the game he has posted is most likely still in violation. All he did was change a little art to make it look a little different. Considering the existing precedent it would be a cheap suit to prosecute. It is the same circumstance as the one I pointed out from 28 years ago. I bet the court would just give them a summary judgment based on screen shots. The scum bag who asked the question would be sitting with a bill for legal costs and damages that he would probably never be able to pay off.
Stonewolf
You should take your own advice. If you follow the link and look at his artwork he clearly stole the design of the characters and the overall look of the game. He is lucky he just got a take down notice and not a suit for damages. He would likely be having his income garnished for the rest of his life to pay that debt.
Stonewolf
Copyright and trademark are two ways the law (also known as the basis of civil society) establishes the existence and rules for intellectual property. Once you accept the concept of intellectual property then you must accept the concept that taking someones intellectual property is theft just as taking someones physical property is theft.
So, yes, this scum bag created a game that is essentially a clone of Pac-Man and even use the same images for his muncher and the ghosts. You don't have to actually use the original art work. If you make a copy of a piece of art, even by your own hand, then you are breaking the rules of copyright. After all, what does the word mean? Copyright literally means "the right to make a copy". Making a copy without permission is theft.
Using the a trademark with out permission is not only theft from the owner, but theft from the buyer. The idea of a trademark is to insure that when it says "Gucci" on the bag you are getting something actually designed and made by "Gucci". When you make some that looks like Pac-Man, but isn't you are stealing from the owner of the trade mark and from customers who are not getting the real Pac-Man.
So, yes, this is about copyright, trademark, and theft from both the owners of the trademark and copyrights and from the people who purchased it.
The person who posted the original question is a thief who is looking for information that he hopes will allow him to continue as a game developer without continuing as a thief. This is a good goal.
The easiest thing to do in his case is to be a little bit creative. If you want to do a game based on the Japanese folk hero Paku he should research the legend and design a new game. If he wants to just be inspired by Pak-Man then he should be inspired by it enough to create a new game that includes the basic ideas but is not the same game, with the same style of art, with characters that look just like the original characters, and without the same scoring and strategy.
As an example, take a look at the relationship between "Dungeons & Dragons" and "The Lord of the Rings" or even "Bunnies and Burrows" and "Watership Down". Not to mention the relationship between "B&B" and "D&D". (And think of how lucky were are that AFAIK there is no A&A, C&C... Z&Z"!)
The key is that "inspired by" does not mean that it is a near perfect copy down to the art work. A near perfect copy is theft. Inspired by can be great art.
I would suggest that the person who asked the question should get an education. I would suggest starting with a book on the intellectual history of the world. Failing that, at least find, and read, three or four books on the basic concepts of law and especially intellectual property law.
If anyone doubts the importance of intellectual property law let me point out that the basic rights most Americans take for granted were added to the Constitution in the form of the Bill of Rights, aka the first ten amendments to the Constitution. OTOH, The legal basis for US intellectual property law is in the core of the original text of the constitution. The founding fathers all came to agree on the need to guarantee intellectual property rights. But, some of them thought it was a bad idea to limit the states right to control religion, speech, the press, weapons, searches, and the states power to use torture to extract a confession.
Stonewolf
The simple fact is that a lot of programmers, like the rest of humanity are idiots.
People want to be associated with the rich and famous, They think that some how that makes them better in someway. The same thing makes people walk around wearing a football jersey with someone else's name and number on it.
As a result people line up to be abused by the rich and famous and that goes double for rich and famous companies.
For every job open at a major game company there are hundreds, if not thousands, or people applying for that job. That fact encourages companies to treat employees as toilet paper. OTOH, the few people who are truly exceptional can rise high and rise quickly. They are well paid and well treated. But, that isn't what happens to most people.
Stonewolf
Game development is a highly entrepreneurial business. Which means you have to watch out for your self and it means you are only as good as your last project. Many companies hire you for the duration of a project. When the project is done you are laid off. The project might be done when it ships, and it might be done after lunch today because the producer decided to use the money for a game that appears to have a better ROI.
Once you have been laid off you get to look around for another project. You will be unemployed during that hunting time. Even if you were making over $20,000/month (never happens for programmers) in your last project you might not get that in your next project. And, you might have to live on savings for anywhere from a month to a year between projects. Not to mention that you may find your self work 80 hours/week while you are working. So, yeah the salary might look nice, but when you look at actual yearly earnings it doesn't look that good. When you break it down to $/hour you might find you could do better working behind the bar at Starbucks or delivering pizzas.
The funniest thing is how many people think that if they will get a cut of the revenue from the game. You don't. The stock holders get the revenue. If you want to make money from games develop them and market them your self.
Stonewolf
I'm currently teaching game development. I have taught it in the classroom and on line since 2004. I run a mailing list for wanna be game developers, I have run it for more than 10 years. I helped a college develop their game programming curriculum, for some reason they won't let me teach game dev there any more :-) I used to be game developer. I only did that for 2 full time years, but I was in the computer graphics industry for 10 years after I got my MSCS and before I went into game development. After being part owner of a game company, programmer, and technical director, I moved on. I went to work for a fortune 50 company doing technical and business analysis for games. Now I'm a teacher. And, I am damn near 60 years old. Oh, yeah, I also did 5 major start ups not counting my times as an independent software developer. I had founders shares in 2 of the start ups.
I designed my first game (not a video game :-) when I was 12 and my first paid programming job was porting games from a minicomputer to a mainframe back in the early '70s.
I have a large number of students from my classroom classes who are working in the computer game business. Most of them are developers. I have an even larger number of people who started on my mailing list who are now working in the game development business. I think I have something to say about this subject.
First off, the best way to get a job at one of the Majors is to create a successful independent studio and then sell you studio to one of the majors. Sure, you can get hired at one of the Majors, but then you will be just like the rest of the toilet paper. Cheap, disposable, and only really good for one use because after you use it it is covered in ... well you get the picture.
OTOH, if they have to *buy* your company they will respect you at least a little bit and you will at least have a nice office and a real salary. But, get the money in cash, not in stock. Stock is like toilet paper... Cash is something you can spend.
Secondly, the best way to get any job in game development is to develop games and sell them or find some other way to make money off of them. Yes, by fart the best, easiest, and most lucrative way to get a game development job is to start your own company. If you do not know how you can learn how quickly. Most states, the federal government, many cities, and every community college I know of in the US has courses on small business management and entrepreneurship. Take them, and make sure you get at least on class on contract law while you are at it. Those classes along with a couple of semesters of probabilaity and statistics will be worth more to you over the next 40 years than anything you learn about programming or graphics. All the tech stuff will be obsolete in 5 years, the business, statistics, and law stuff will still be accurate.
As for education. A degree in CS used to be a good place to start. I'm not so sure about that anymore. If you go to a school that only uses one language all the way through (especially if that language is Java or C#) you should find a real school. But, it is still probably better to get a CS degree than a physics degree. Math is kind of a wash. A math degree with a CSMS is not a bad combo. If you can find a school that offers CS degree with a strong emphasis on software engineering you are in pretty good shape. You need to take trigonometry, college algebra with computational geometry, linear algebra with lots of matrices, calculus, numerical analysis, and probably differential equations. I didn't get linear algebra and DiffEQ as an under grad so I had to teach my self linear algebra and I'm married to an ME so I go to her when I need help with DiffEQ. But, you really need at least DiffEQ to understand physics. Yes, you also need to take physics at least a good introduction. A couple of years of physics in high school is good enough. You need need to take a few art classes. I would suggest an art history course, and courses in something l
the task of cleaning out the closet where I've been dumping my old computers and parts came to the top of the infamous honey-do list. I found 8 40gig drives a couple of 30gig drives and a 20gig drive. After testing I had 6 working 30gig drives. I tore down the others just for grins and giggles and to pass around in some of my classes. Not to mention the magnets in the head positioning system are fun to play with.
I also found an old mother board, 3 or 4 CDROM drives, RAM, a couple of power supplies and a very very old PC case. So, I built a PC. We call it Frankenputer. I got a working Athlon 1.5Ghz processor from the computer goodwill store and I lucked out and found some PCI IDE interface cards at the same place. (I had to update all the ROMs in the whole system to get it to work. Finding the BIOSes for a bunch of discontinued cards made by out of business companies was not as hard it sounds.) I had one set of rails for installing a 3.5 inch hard drive in a 5.25 bay. I found several more at computer Goodwill Computer store! I picked up a 30 dollar case at Fry's.
Thanks to google, Goodwill, and freedos I got it all working. I used FreeDos and GParted to get all the disks configured and tested as a raid. Then, I installed Ubuntu using the "alternative" installation disk.
Even though the drives were all "40GB" drives each manufacturers drives were of a different size. So, I created a partition the size of the smallest drive on each drive. Then in the extra space I created a partition of the size of the empty space on the next largest drive. The odd bits of space left at the end of two drives I just partitioned as their actual size. I used the 6 large partitions as a RAID 0, the second set became another RAID 0. The rest of the partitions just became normal drives.
I stuck an old NVidia video card and a old but good network card in there and the thing actually works. It is an absurdly fast disk server.
Every 3.5 inch bay has a drive in it. Every 5.25 inch drive bay has a drive in it.
All the rest of the stuff in the closet went to Goodwill or the dump. Recently a new item went on my list... Move Frankenputer out of the living room. Oh well. And it looks so good on the book shelf :-) For some reason she wants me to move the table saw out of the living room too. Can't imagine why? Can you?
Stonewolf
I appreciate your going to the effort to make it easy on me. Seriously, I do. But, I still do not understand what you are trying to say.
If I'm correctly decoding what you said, and I've been a programmer for nearly 40 years so I'm probably conditioned to be completely incapable of understand you :-) but I'll try anyway, ok?
What I see is two sequential statements. The first one says that if every is in agreement then we must split hairs. If we all agree, they why are we splitting hairs? It makes no sense to me. When we are all in agreement we have no hairs to split.
The second statement says that if we all dis agreement then we must reconcile our view points. That is a potentially nonterminating processes so if we go off to reconcile view points we may never return.
It looks to me like the code is flawed. At the very least is should be coded as an
if() {}
else if() {}
else {};
structure. Not as two sequential if()s. Also I'm guessing it needs to be embedded in an iterative structure of some type or in a recursive function.
I do not see any attempt to address the state in which we form factions. The code seems to assume that we all either agree or disagree. A situation that never happens.
I do not see any thing in the code that addresses the key question of what to do when one group is correct and one is not but can not see their error. That is not a reconcilable situation.
What I think is really missing is an attempt to link what you said back to why some people believe they actually need have a rule for stupid little shit like how many spaces to put at the end of a sentence. It also does not address the question of why anyone would pay any attention to such a rule if it did indeed exist. What kind of person would allow themselves to be controlled in such a way?
The fact is that we obey rules because disobeying them has consequences. If disobeying a rule can result in harm to you or other people then it makes sense to obey the rule. The only reason to have a rule is as a way to codify dangerous behavior.
Rules are a useful learning tool for those who are capable of understanding the reasons behind the rule and are useful as threats used to enforce socially acceptable behavior in those individuals (children, sociopaths, and idiots) who are incapable of understanding the reasons for a rule.
If disobeying a rule causes no to harm to myself or to others then what is the point of even having such a rule? If disobeying a rule causes no harm to others and I am willing to accept 100% of the consequences then I am free to ignore the rule.
I can not fathom the kind of mind that would ask the question that started this discussion. But, people like that have cost me many many hours of valuable time by making up pointless rules.
So, what were you trying to say?
Stonewolf
"an attention deficit disorder"
Did you really? How do you know what that feels like? Do you have an attentional disorder? If not, then you do not have any idea what it feels like to be a child, or an adult, with an attentional disorder.
Let me try this a different way: If I wrote an that I "felt like a tall stacked blonde walking nude into a male prison block" would you believe that I knew what I was talking about? Well yeah, if I were such a woman who had done what I described then maybe you would accept that I know what I am talking about. But, since I am a fat man who has never walked nude into any place but my bathroom it is clear that I can only use that line in a work of fiction.
So, do you have an attentional disorder? Or is your review a work of fiction? If you do not, do you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you make such a statement?
Stonewolf
The truly sad thing is that you believe that your post contains information.
No, I do not care about how many spaces you, or anyone else, put at the end of a sentence. I do care that there are people who care about how many spaces they put at the end of a sentence. I firmly believe that being able to care about such a thing is a mental illness similar to OCD.
OTOH, did you read my title?
Right?
I mean, seriously, no body &*^&%$*^ cares.
If you do in fact care then I hope you die from a million paper cuts.
Some people have to have rule for everything and then they go around trying to force the sane people to comply with them. I wonder how such people manage to reproduce. Do they have a rule for how often to do it? How far to put it in? Use a metronome to comply with the insertion frequency rules?
This? This? is the kind of crap that the /. editors choose to post?
I'm sorry I bothered to come here today.
Stonewolf
Well.... there goes my "Excellent" karma...
The supreme court decided that money is speech. That means that anyone can spend any amount of money to support any political point of view they want. That means that the more money you have, the more freedom of speech you have, and the more political power you have.
The supreme court just decided that corporations, you know, a legal fiction that is not a human being, a thing that is really just a mask for the people who run it, a thing that is not born and does not die, a thing that can not breath, bleed, or vote... the supreme court just decided that corporations have the right of free speech. That means that the people who control public corporations are allowed to use unlimited amounts of corporate money to support any kind of political action they want with no restrictions of any kind.
Yep, ATT, Verizon, Timewarner, ComCast... all get to use the money you pay them to buy our state legislatures and our national legislature. They can use the money you pay them to make sure that they can charge any price they want, that they can mess with the Internet in any way they want.
You wonder why a US Representative would apologize to BP? Maybe it is because he is owned out right by BP. You think that maybe the same guy is bending over and saying thank you when ever BP asks for a BJ? You think the same guy isn't doing the same thing for ATT and the rest of the scum?
Do you think they all aren't doing the same thing?
Big Telcom is coming in with a plan to charge you by the bit and make you pay extra to access any service they don't want you to have. Timewarner already tried it and only backed off because of opposition organized over the Internet. But, hey now they can pay to have a law that keeps you from being able to organize over the Internet. They can get a law that lets them charge anyway they want. You want to use Google? That will be an extra $10/month, but with Google you'll also get Bing and Yahoo whether you want them or not. You want to use YouTube? Well that is part of the video tier and costs $50 per month but hey, you get to upload too.
Slashdot? You want slashdot? Then you must be one of those subversive hackers and we'll just have to turn you over to the feds like we do anyone who wants to look at wikipedia or the democratic (fill in the name of any organization that ever made a statement in favor of regulation) party's web site.
Yeah....
Get used to having no rights at all. You don't have enough money to balance the free speech rights of the big corporations.
Oh, yeah... we can fix the problem in a very short time if y'all would vote. But, it seems that y'all don't vote.