First, you yourself need to develop an opinion as to whether this type of deal is tenable in your situation. If you are an enterpreneurial type, you may be building cool tech in your garage and this type of IP agreement would apply to your whizbang secret garage toys. However, you may not have that bug, and you may not be thinking of building a whizbang in your garage. If the latter applies, then maybe you don't care about those rights, and ergo you would have no problem signing them over. Six hundred monkeys on Slashdot are not going to tell you how you yourself feel. If the former situation applies, think about a Plan B -- quitting and working somewhere else, taking a pay cut, negotiating a different contract, etc.
Second, you are asking for legal advice on Slashdot. This is exactly the wrong place to go for opinions of legal or medical significance. There are guaranteed to be zero doctors or lawyers reading Slashdot at any given time. Fork over the $300 or so that it would take a lawyer to explain your options to you.
In retrospect, it's now fascinating to go back and read the original Open Letter to the Open Source Community written by Darl McBride, with the knowledge that SCO is going to bankrupt in four years.
Note to VCs: it's impossible to litigate your way to profitability.
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of reality, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends in reality.
Not all problems can be solved through programming.
Social networks are successful precisely because they are closed. You have no business in my little black book, and I have no business in yours.
I claim that, historically, companies that depend on patents and litigation for their income tend to crater. Some classic examples include the Wright patents and the Calotype patent.
Microsoft's PR department is backpedaling against Brad Smith's statements in Fortune. One of two things is going to occur. One, Ballmer or Gates will smack down Brad Smith and all will continue as before. Two, Microsoft's sales problems with Vista will gain political traction for Brad Smith within Microsoft, and Microsoft will turn into a lawsuit juggernaut. If point two comes to pass, Microsoft will bleed slowly, just like all the other companies that have depended on lawsuits for income.
If I could moderate Slashdot itself down for posting this crap, I would. Stick to Linux distro reviews and USB coffee warmers and leave the ham-handed irony to the late-night TV shows, eh?
If an operating system release is not supported with security patches in the long term, it may not be a good long-term choice for production machines. The folks maintaining http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ recently announced that they were punting on maintaining everything before Core 4. Ask yourself: in 1.5 years, do I really want to be forced to install a new OS because I can't get security patches on this one? Compare against Ubuntu LTS, which will be around for at least 3-5 more years.
It's becoming commonplace nowadays for game industry veterans to purchase intellectual property from dead or dying video game developers, acquire financing and then develop new franchises based on the old IP. So I think the notion that old games must be "abandonware" is fallacious. Someone always owns that old IP, and it's not the guys who are copying the games around the 'Net...
Actually, your example of on-the-fly MPEG is a particularly difficult case for Cell... you don't have access to an entire frame buffer at one time. It's necessary to slice up the HD frame buffer into 256 KB sized chunks to get any kind of decent performance. And remember that you want access to P and B frames most of the time, which means that if you leave cache at least twice for encoding or decoding most frames. It can be done, but a naive implementation will suck spectacularly.
Nearly all software is licensed, not sold. All MS software is provided under a fairly specific, limited license, so I think your common-law implications of warranty and merchantability (as applied to typical physical goods) don't apply.
This conversation sucks. I'm going to go back to lurk mode.
You are incorrect. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are not using non-infringing code. From the Microsoft EULA:
"THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE PRODUCT."
The key word in there is "non-infringement." You are taking all legal liability for the Microsoft product infringing any patent or copyright claim, should such a claim exist. Microsoft will not indemnify you.
This is a common negotiation point during software licensing, but Microsoft is very historically consistent in the way that it phrases this limitation of warranty.
And yes, I do negotiate IP licenses for a living...
When we were about to graduate from high school, you and I and every other Slashdot member were brainwashed into thinking that our SAT scores were to determine our lifelong social status.
It doesn't. People in the Real World will never ask you your SAT scores. No one actually cares what your SAT scores were.
This guy has achieved some sort of karmic grace. He has reduced the SAT to the elitist joke that it truly is. He has beaten the SAT.
The quoted article was pretty left-field and ignores a body of relevant, practical work on game AI. A highly theoretical discussion of how a game might be improved given some Prolog-like goal direction techniques. Many of these problems have already been solved. Many of them cannot be solved.
Not recommended for professional game development.
Great, Slashdot is now accepting articles on writing videogames from the technical editor of O'Reilly. That's like having George Lucas write an article on Perl syntax.
chromatic seems to presume that the primary problem in developing a game is determining which scripting language to use. That's like saying that the primary problem in making a movie is determining which camera to shoot with... it is a valid technical concern but there are about 300 other technical, artistic, and business concerns that are more relevant.
chromatic suggests that you can make a game that sells 20k units and costs $5k to make. Again, check your sources. More experienced studios than chromatic have desperately tried to perfect the cheapo game... guess what, people: consumers don't give a shit about your cheesy-ass Tetris clone. You'll be in the hole for the cost of the media, and Best Buy and Wal-Mart will laugh loudly when you ask to get shelf space from them.
This guy chromatic has clearly never worked on a real videogame project and has no knowledge of the current nature of the business. Caveat emptor Slashdot.
Just because the game doesn't have the words "construction set" on the box doesn't mean it isn't a construction set. Take The Sims for example: the whole point of the game is to build simulated environments for simulated people. It's a Dollhouse Construction Set. Or, take Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was one of the top ten selling games of 2000. If it had been called Roller Coaster Construction Set, would you have bought it? And Zoo Tycoon did very well this past Christmas, or Zoo Construction Set, if you prefer.
Bill Budge is still in the game industry and he's currently optimizing PS2 rendering code, by the way.
A lame, fuzzy article with a superficial understanding of the issues involved in creating rendering pipelines. Just go here if you want to start reading tech docs.
That's not true. Chess is a HIGHLY psychological game. At least half of the game is based on understanding the psychology of the opponent. Since none of us are perfect chess-playing automata, we have to rely on intuition in order to find the right moves. Listen to grandmasters talk; they can and do calculate moves, but usually they prefer to talk about "centralizing" or "gaining space" or "taking the initiative"... all those sorts of things that computers DON'T do as well as people.
Read an advanced chess strategy book, like "How to Reassess Your Chess," by Jeremy Silman. Instead of calculating moves, Silman teaches intuitively approaching a position and finding the imbalances in that position. Again, not an entirely mathematical approach to chess.
Chess is useful because it teaches you something about yourself as you play. The best move is always the move that the opponent would least like to see. NEVER give up; never walk away in surrender; never let your emotions get the better of you; always learn from your mistakes, and the mistakes of others; find the weaknesses of your opponent and exploit them. Damn useful life lessons if you ask me.
There's wisdom in that there cynicism... it demonstrates the limitations of the geek mindset. In the "creating an online community" case, Slashdot geeks tend to think that all they need to do is create the message board (mailing list, online forum, whatever) and They Will Come. They will not, for the same reason that if you decide to have a party in your basement, and you don't invite any friends, No One Will Come.
But this sounds unduly harsh. What I mean, more precisely, is that online communities model physical communities. It's not what you know, it's who you know. If you can't convince your friends, face-to-face or via e-mail, to join your community, then who the hell WILL you convince? Introduce your coworkers, your high-school hacking club, whoever you think might be interested in your forum. If they use it, it's a success. If they don't, rethink the architecture of the forum.
Content is not enough. Usability is not enough. If people can talk with people they want to hear from through the abstraction of your forum, that's enough.
Ars's comments are a little cynical. He's correct in that it's wrong to seek management/career advice in an online anonymous forum. However, managers can and do seek advice from more experienced managers. If you don't have a circle of professional contacts and acquaintances within your industry whom you can use as advisors, you'll find the going doubly hard.
Management ain't engineering. Different job requirements. No one is ever completely ready to make the switch, but once you have some management experience you'll feel silly that you once solicited Slashdot for advice.
I came across this web site from randomly searching on Google. I have always been intrigued by "alternative" technologies where they relate to artificial locomotion, especially when they're developed by 85-year-old insane geriatric patients in Ohio. For some reason Slashdot gets a lot of submissions of wacko energy concepts - Perhaps this is more of the same, but rather than try to get independent confirmation of it before putting it front and center on Slashdot, I thought I'd moderate it up. After all, it's not my responsibility to fact-check this stuff. I'm just a moderator here.
The Reply-To munging question is worth at least a chapter in itself; there are the technical considerations (Lyris can do it, as can Listserv, but some mail programs ignore it anyway and simply reply to the From field!) and there is the moderation concern that you'll get a bunch of mail directed to your list that was never intended to go there.
There is no correct solution to Reply-To that works for everybody. I personally put the effort into manually forwarding messages to people that were incorrectly intended for the list. This means that discussions tend to end up on the list that might have originally been private. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you begin rootkitting your customers, ask yourself: should I really entrust my company's security architecture to Charles Darwin?
Okay, there are several things broken here.
First, you yourself need to develop an opinion as to whether this type of deal is tenable in your situation. If you are an enterpreneurial type, you may be building cool tech in your garage and this type of IP agreement would apply to your whizbang secret garage toys. However, you may not have that bug, and you may not be thinking of building a whizbang in your garage. If the latter applies, then maybe you don't care about those rights, and ergo you would have no problem signing them over. Six hundred monkeys on Slashdot are not going to tell you how you yourself feel. If the former situation applies, think about a Plan B -- quitting and working somewhere else, taking a pay cut, negotiating a different contract, etc.
Second, you are asking for legal advice on Slashdot. This is exactly the wrong place to go for opinions of legal or medical significance. There are guaranteed to be zero doctors or lawyers reading Slashdot at any given time. Fork over the $300 or so that it would take a lawyer to explain your options to you.
In retrospect, it's now fascinating to go back and read the original Open Letter to the Open Source Community written by Darl McBride, with the knowledge that SCO is going to bankrupt in four years.
Note to VCs: it's impossible to litigate your way to profitability.
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large.
While we've largely outgrown the limitations of reality, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends in reality.
Not all problems can be solved through programming.
Social networks are successful precisely because they are closed. You have no business in my little black book, and I have no business in yours.
This article makes as much sense as proposing new SQL programming techniques on http://chat.lawinfo.com/ .
For once, can't we find and quote an article from a lawyer on reforming the patent system? Or maybe have some lawyers participate in the discussion?
Every Slashdot article on patents or intellectual property starts and ends up with several hundred laymen talking legal theory.
Mod me up or down; you know it's the truth.
I claim that, historically, companies that depend on patents and litigation for their income tend to crater. Some classic examples include the Wright patents and the Calotype patent.
Microsoft's PR department is backpedaling against Brad Smith's statements in Fortune. One of two things is going to occur. One, Ballmer or Gates will smack down Brad Smith and all will continue as before. Two, Microsoft's sales problems with Vista will gain political traction for Brad Smith within Microsoft, and Microsoft will turn into a lawsuit juggernaut. If point two comes to pass, Microsoft will bleed slowly, just like all the other companies that have depended on lawsuits for income.
If I could moderate Slashdot itself down for posting this crap, I would. Stick to Linux distro reviews and USB coffee warmers and leave the ham-handed irony to the late-night TV shows, eh?
If an operating system release is not supported with security patches in the long term, it may not be a good long-term choice for production machines. The folks maintaining http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ recently announced that they were punting on maintaining everything before Core 4. Ask yourself: in 1.5 years, do I really want to be forced to install a new OS because I can't get security patches on this one? Compare against Ubuntu LTS, which will be around for at least 3-5 more years.
It's becoming commonplace nowadays for game industry veterans to purchase intellectual property from dead or dying video game developers, acquire financing and then develop new franchises based on the old IP. So I think the notion that old games must be "abandonware" is fallacious. Someone always owns that old IP, and it's not the guys who are copying the games around the 'Net...
Actually, your example of on-the-fly MPEG is a particularly difficult case for Cell... you don't have access to an entire frame buffer at one time. It's necessary to slice up the HD frame buffer into 256 KB sized chunks to get any kind of decent performance. And remember that you want access to P and B frames most of the time, which means that if you leave cache at least twice for encoding or decoding most frames. It can be done, but a naive implementation will suck spectacularly.
Nearly all software is licensed, not sold. All MS software is provided under a fairly specific, limited license, so I think your common-law implications of warranty and merchantability (as applied to typical physical goods) don't apply.
This conversation sucks. I'm going to go back to lurk mode.
You are incorrect. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are not using non-infringing code. From the Microsoft EULA:
"THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE PRODUCT."
The key word in there is "non-infringement." You are taking all legal liability for the Microsoft product infringing any patent or copyright claim, should such a claim exist. Microsoft will not indemnify you.
This is a common negotiation point during software licensing, but Microsoft is very historically consistent in the way that it phrases this limitation of warranty.
And yes, I do negotiate IP licenses for a living...
The IDEA archive has a far more complete collection of accents and voice samples. Excellent source material for geeks who work in film, TV or theater.
I'll pay $17 for the first person to port Mozilla to the Commodore 64. Bonus of $3 if you don't require a double-notched floppy.
When we were about to graduate from high school, you and I and every other Slashdot member were brainwashed into thinking that our SAT scores were to determine our lifelong social status.
It doesn't. People in the Real World will never ask you your SAT scores. No one actually cares what your SAT scores were.
This guy has achieved some sort of karmic grace. He has reduced the SAT to the elitist joke that it truly is. He has beaten the SAT.
(1470 combined, in 1987)
The quoted article was pretty left-field and ignores a body of relevant, practical work on game AI. A highly theoretical discussion of how a game might be improved given some Prolog-like goal direction techniques. Many of these problems have already been solved. Many of them cannot be solved.
Not recommended for professional game development.
Great, Slashdot is now accepting articles on writing videogames from the technical editor of O'Reilly. That's like having George Lucas write an article on Perl syntax.
chromatic seems to presume that the primary problem in developing a game is determining which scripting language to use. That's like saying that the primary problem in making a movie is determining which camera to shoot with... it is a valid technical concern but there are about 300 other technical, artistic, and business concerns that are more relevant.
chromatic suggests that you can make a game that sells 20k units and costs $5k to make. Again, check your sources. More experienced studios than chromatic have desperately tried to perfect the cheapo game... guess what, people: consumers don't give a shit about your cheesy-ass Tetris clone. You'll be in the hole for the cost of the media, and Best Buy and Wal-Mart will laugh loudly when you ask to get shelf space from them.
This guy chromatic has clearly never worked on a real videogame project and has no knowledge of the current nature of the business. Caveat emptor Slashdot.
Just because the game doesn't have the words "construction set" on the box doesn't mean it isn't a construction set. Take The Sims for example: the whole point of the game is to build simulated environments for simulated people. It's a Dollhouse Construction Set. Or, take Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was one of the top ten selling games of 2000. If it had been called Roller Coaster Construction Set, would you have bought it? And Zoo Tycoon did very well this past Christmas, or Zoo Construction Set, if you prefer.
Bill Budge is still in the game industry and he's currently optimizing PS2 rendering code, by the way.
Amen brother. Somebody please mod this guy up.
A lame, fuzzy article with a superficial understanding of the issues involved in creating rendering pipelines. Just go here if you want to start reading tech docs.
That's not true. Chess is a HIGHLY psychological game. At least half of the game is based on understanding the psychology of the opponent. Since none of us are perfect chess-playing automata, we have to rely on intuition in order to find the right moves. Listen to grandmasters talk; they can and do calculate moves, but usually they prefer to talk about "centralizing" or "gaining space" or "taking the initiative"... all those sorts of things that computers DON'T do as well as people.
Read an advanced chess strategy book, like "How to Reassess Your Chess," by Jeremy Silman. Instead of calculating moves, Silman teaches intuitively approaching a position and finding the imbalances in that position. Again, not an entirely mathematical approach to chess.
Chess is useful because it teaches you something about yourself as you play. The best move is always the move that the opponent would least like to see. NEVER give up; never walk away in surrender; never let your emotions get the better of you; always learn from your mistakes, and the mistakes of others; find the weaknesses of your opponent and exploit them. Damn useful life lessons if you ask me.
There's wisdom in that there cynicism... it demonstrates the limitations of the geek mindset. In the "creating an online community" case, Slashdot geeks tend to think that all they need to do is create the message board (mailing list, online forum, whatever) and They Will Come. They will not, for the same reason that if you decide to have a party in your basement, and you don't invite any friends, No One Will Come.
But this sounds unduly harsh. What I mean, more precisely, is that online communities model physical communities. It's not what you know, it's who you know. If you can't convince your friends, face-to-face or via e-mail, to join your community, then who the hell WILL you convince? Introduce your coworkers, your high-school hacking club, whoever you think might be interested in your forum. If they use it, it's a success. If they don't, rethink the architecture of the forum.
Content is not enough. Usability is not enough. If people can talk with people they want to hear from through the abstraction of your forum, that's enough.
Ars's comments are a little cynical. He's correct in that it's wrong to seek management/career advice in an online anonymous forum. However, managers can and do seek advice from more experienced managers. If you don't have a circle of professional contacts and acquaintances within your industry whom you can use as advisors, you'll find the going doubly hard.
Management ain't engineering. Different job requirements. No one is ever completely ready to make the switch, but once you have some management experience you'll feel silly that you once solicited Slashdot for advice.
I came across this web site from randomly searching on Google. I have always been intrigued by "alternative" technologies where they relate to artificial locomotion, especially when they're developed by 85-year-old insane geriatric patients in Ohio. For some reason Slashdot gets a lot of submissions of wacko energy concepts - Perhaps this is more of the same, but rather than try to get independent confirmation of it before putting it front and center on Slashdot, I thought I'd moderate it up. After all, it's not my responsibility to fact-check this stuff. I'm just a moderator here.
The Reply-To munging question is worth at least a chapter in itself; there are the technical considerations (Lyris can do it, as can Listserv, but some mail programs ignore it anyway and simply reply to the From field!) and there is the moderation concern that you'll get a bunch of mail directed to your list that was never intended to go there.
There is no correct solution to Reply-To that works for everybody. I personally put the effort into manually forwarding messages to people that were incorrectly intended for the list. This means that discussions tend to end up on the list that might have originally been private. YMMV.