I fail to see how funding people's wages is any different than funding chemistry research. Where does most of the cost of refining chemicals come from? Wages to people for the slow and ardruous task of making them.
If anything because the "90-99%" of the research is intellectual, it can be argued that more of the money goes to exactly what it is that you want more of.
Plus you now have the problem that as more and more money goes into the corporate sector, fewer and fewer people benefit. While the military's relationship with higher education has always had a little tension, it's the right place for the funding to flow to. If you fund research into advanced data mining techniques using quantum computers at a college, the money goes to creating research that can be used by everyone, including corporations, individuals, and other research institutions. You contribute to the education of more computer science students. If you decide to go elsewhere for your follow-up project, you can take the body of research that was done and go anywhere. By relying on private corporations, all you're doing is subsidizing the CEO's golf club memberships and tying yourself to a single vendor.
If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard). The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships. When was the last time the head of a college recieved a 30 million dollar golden parachute?
If you can't phathom where the research money is going, you are in no position to say that it is being wasted.
DARPA has always been the blue-sky arm of the military funding group, and it has served the country well in that respect. The internet is it's most obvious triumph (which is also comp sci), and that took something like 30 years to catch on. They also funded BSD, nuclear test detection research, and a whole lot else. To say that they're going to fund practical immediate research for making weapons instead is a little silly, we have branches of the military and civillian companies who do this regularly. DARPA, however, funds projects that have a 1 in 100 chance of taking off and changing the world. And DARPA funds hundreds of them.
Still, if I pay cash - why should I wait for a check in the mail? Cashing a check isn't cheap for people who don't have checking accounts, not everyone does have one too. Hell, they discourage the use of checks as it is.
I'm guessing they do this because it makes it less tempting for people at the till to issue fraudulent refunds. You "forget" to give a few of your customers their recipts, or you go through the garbage can in front of the store. You then refund the non-existent stuff as broken, and take the cash for yourself.
Because it was rung up and paid for, none of the cash registers are going to be under. You have the recipt, so the paperwork is in order. And because few stores track damaged merchandise, most not requiring the original box to be returned, the total merchandise on the floor is correct. The only way they have to catch someone they suspect is doing something on the down low is to figure out where those refunds are actually going. A check has to be issued to someone, which makes tracking a lot easier.
A lot of annoying store policies are in place not to make the life of their customers harder, but to try and stop their underpaid, unappreciated employees from robbing the store blind.
"We couldn't possibly get a dupe of this," we thought "It's April fool's day. April fool's day is nothing but a flood of lame and painfully unfunny jokes: it couldn't possibly be posted again today. This is a serious article, there is no way this could become a dupe."
When I think of Disaster, Linux, and WordPerfect, I think of their attempt to port the entire suite to Java. Attempting to capitalize on "write once, run anywhere," and wholeheartedly ignoring the reality of such systems, it ran in a JVM in a browser window. Unfortunately, the computers trying to run the thing couldn't ignore reality, and as such loading a heavily stripped down version of WP took several minutes. It also couldn't take advatage of OS API's, and had to reinvent the wheel many times. I've spoken to a coder from that project, who says it was basically a hell that they knew management wasn't going to let them out of until one or both of them were dead. As Corel laid the lot of them off, it would appear it was both.
You can still try out their beta if you would like, though ironically for a "write once run anywhere" suite you'll be hard pressed to find a browser old enough to run it.
The subsequent version of WP was recoded in C and C++.
8)People realize that they'd rather watch movies on a 42" TV set or a 15" portable than on a 3" thumb screen. 9)People realize that the PSP is a great gaming unit and a terrible media playback unit, in much the same way that the Archos Jukebox is a great media playing unit and a terrible gaming unit. 10)The Sony download service joins the many, many other movie download services currently operating in obscurity. 11)Sony bloodymindedly pushes ahead anyway for years, intentionally ignoring reality until finally a management change convinces them to put a bullet in it.
12)Shortly thereafter, everyone forgets the failure of the previous round of convergent gaming devices, and the cycle starts all over again. 13)Netflix and it's clones continue to thrive.
How can you know where your limits are if you don't push beyond them? How can you know where your interests lie if you don't discover where they don't lie? Or your abilities? I may have aced a Nietzche course that required 100 pages of reading and a 10 page paper a week for a lousy 4 undergraduate credits, but it took three years to get through a years worth of Japanese, and that wasn't for lack of trying. I know a girl who struggled for nearly 6 years to get through a two class calculous series, a prerequisite for her to get beyond community college. I know another girl who worked for 35 hours a week, lived out of her car, and took 20 units. She failed a course every now and then, but it's not like she was slacking off watching television.
Not every failure is a noble one. I think what can be noble about failure is the realization that there are higher goals than grades. Such as the exploration of the world, or the exploration of the self. Or even simple learning, which grades don't always represent. While I knew a pretty broad spectrum of people in college, the ones that I knew were going to do OK in life were the ones that weren't motivated by grades. They were exploring their options, discovering what they wanted to do in life, and looked at everything as a learning experience. Many (though by no means all) of the people who were motivated by grades were barreling headlong into a career that was grossly inappropriate for them, and everyone but them could see it. Ultimately these people are now out in the real world and are floundering because the opportunities to explore possibilities in the real world are not anywhere near as available as in college. If you want to see what being a teacher is like in college, you can take an education course by adding a little tick mark on a sign up sheet. If you want to see what being a teacher is like in the real world... you've got a long ways to go to find out. And if you've been barreling towards that medical degree for the past 4 years, you may not have the first clue where to start.
And why cry sexism in the middle of an unrelated discussion? We all know that 60% of incoming freshmen are female and that females have a higher overall graduation rate than males. Girls get called on more in elementary and high-school classrooms than boys do, and recieve on average more personalized attention from both their teachers and their parents. You're no longer academically oppressed, and haven't been for many years... Well, maybe at Harvard.
The question has become why has male college graduation rates declined? Why are fewer men going to college? Why are females in certain ethnic communities struggling to find similarly educated males? At what point did we fail the boys, and is there a way we can solve this problem without creating a segregated zero-sum game?
If you want we can lob some statistics back and forth and play the "more oppressed than thou" game, but that's a different discussion.
Not impossible, but probably more effort than just passing the class through legit means.
True. I always thought there was nobility in failing a few classes in college. If you didn't fail a few, you weren't really pushing yourself hard enough. My transcript represented this worldview pretty well.
But the social aspect of the hack is interesting, even if it isn't useful. The best hack is not one that is never resolved, but one that is resolved neatly, definitively, and completely wrong.
I knew someone in High School who was a master keygrabber. He would arrange intricate dances around all of the teachers so that he could grab their key ring for an hour and make copies of everything. This ranged from "intimate talks" about problems that didn't exist, to mundane copier issues, to larger things like students getting "caught" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
It was the plausable misdirection that made him a master. Somehow the instructions to change the sprinkler times to 10:30 would be communicated to the gardener as 6:30, and due to this oversite two weeks later all of the people at the homecoming game would freak out and go running for the gardener's shed, where they would cut off the lock, and turn off the sprinklers. There, the typo would be discovered in the instructions, and the case would be closed. Bad typing was to blame. In their rush, nobody noticed that the lock they cut off of the gardener's shed wasn't keyed the same as the lock that originally was on the shed. Nor did they notice that the full set of maintenence keys that were in the gardener's shed was now slightly warm to the touch.
Never try to "get away with it" by being untracable. "Get away with it" by giving people a plausable explanation for the inconsistincies they see... something believeable, easy, and invisibly incorrect. Never leave a case open.
When I read the article I kept thinking "Someone had to own her machine." It's the perfect crime. You take control of another student's machine, and you change a lot of people's grades including your own. Now if you're really good, at this point you've changed the backup grades, so that when they find out and knock you back down from the A the "Criminal" gave you in Hyperdimensional Fold Mathematics for Painters to the B they thought you really got, you will be in the clear with their stamp of approval. And someone else takes the fall, case closed.
Sadly, she admitted to the crime. One good theory ruined by bumbling criminals not really being criminal masterminds in disguise.
I don't think I've ever heard a publisher talk in terms of individual purchasers. Whether an average consumer would want to buy something at X amount of money, to them, is beside the point.
The equation that the publishers are optimizing for, is "starting at 50 dollars and lowering the price every month, how can I maximize revenue." Games always start at 50. You always get a crowd of early adopters who really want the game, no matter how bad the game is, and so you always start at that high price to sell to them. At some point, sales start declining as the early adopters leave... but because your price started out so high, you've earned 1/2 of your expected income already. Now you start incrementally lowering the price, smoothing along a curve in an attempt to get the maximum number of people buying at any given price point along the curve until the game hits a stable price point or dies. Unfortunately because you're game is already "going down" and is therefore less glamorous, it quickly becomes abandoned by the publisher in terms of sales and promotion.
Equally unfortunately, nowhere in that description did the words "Launch at 20" come out, a strategy that worked wonders for Katamari and a few other games.
I still remember the price drop in Playstation days... Back then all games sold for 50 dollars by Sony mandate, period. However one Christmas Crash Bandicoot 2 came out while Crash Bandicoot 1 was still on the shelves. Because of this, Sony authorized a lower price on Crash 1... 45 dollars instead of 50. Crash Bandicoot 1 that Christmas sold as well as Crash 2, proving that the market wanted lower price games.
Sadly, publishers don't "get" that there is something fundamentally different about launching a 50 dollar game and abandoning it when sales slack and they start dumping it at 30, and launching a title at 30 with the full backing of their advertising. In one case you're blowing your chance to reach people at a price they're willing to accept, and in the other you're missing your chance to milk the early adopters, but you can sell a product at a price people will pay without the mar of being a bargain-bin game.
I'm scared of things that have the potential to be pathogenic. Not to mention terrestrial bacteria might not be so hapyp on Mars, though some have been found in some pretty harsh conditions. Robots might be a tiny bit safer; just wipe out their circuits with a giant electromagnetic pulse. (I read that in a scifi novel way back, heh.)
And if we created something that was self-replicating, what makes you think it would stay succeptible to EM radiation?
Area-effect thermal detonators: all of the players around a boss have to scatter for a second or they'll get toasted. Repeating ion cannons: someone in the back fires but people on the front lines have to be properly equipped with a repeater to magnify the attack. Plasma shields: people in the front of an attack pull out a shield and click rapidly to absorb damage, and which falls after several seconds and takes a minute to recharge. Force Modifiers: One player uses the force to lift an enemy, increasing their force powers and reducing their physical defenses, while another group safely lobs area-effect thermal detonators at it. A chain of force users form to lift eachother up in the air, granting great power to the last player to be levitated.
I'm not saying SWG is doing any of these, of course, but there are ways to make a MMPORPG with interesting combat from the Star Wars Universe.
2-wheeled, 4-wheeled, hovering, 2-footed, 4-footed vehicles, animals of all sorts, blasters, rifles, mini blasters, mega ground-mounted blasters, light sabers, double light sabers, short sabers, mind control mind attacks, environment control attacks, flying sabers, wrist-mounted tow ropes, tazers, harpoons, giant glowing balls, arrows, slings, giant logs, traps, biological weapons, roll-out droids, torture droids, small spacecraft, large spacecraft, super large spacecraft, space stations...
There is plenty of variety of weapons in Star Wars to design a decent combat system even without getting creative or dipping into the millions of other Star Wars games. There is more than enough material to design a good MMPORPG.
Don't blame the source material: the developers dropped the ball. And they know it, and this is part of their attempt to fix things and make a better game. And more power to them for that. I hope it works out for them.
Will the current administration please repeat after me:
The United States was never meant to have transparent citizenship. The United States was meant to have transparent government.
I'm perfectly happy giving all of my data to the current administration. In return, though, I expect they won't mind my installing webcams around the oval office, tapping Bush's phone line, rifling through his financial records, and interviewing his daughters... I mean, unless he's doing something wrong, he's got nothing to hide. Right?
The question, to a large degree, is "Why?" Why are they collecting this data? They stated reason is to get "better information on graduation rates and what students pay for college." However, that doesn't make any sense, as A: agregate information would reveal the answer to that and B: you just don't do a sociological study by polling everyone. Attempting to get data on every individual student in the US is a terribly, terribly wasteful study. Therefore, they must be looking for something different.
And that is the fear, that the govermnet is fishing for dissidents. Lots of people subscribe to Mother Jones. But subscribing to Mother Jones, majoring in ecology at Berkeley, and flying out to Montana every 6 months? Must be a nut, they go on the TSA grey list. White, rich, and majoring in business administration? Must be OK.
And that's really one of the major problems with data mining people. It's difficult to make such generalizations without being racist or discriminatory. Even if it is statistically justified, it still goes against a lot of the ideals of this country to say that being Muslim makes you more likely to hijack a plane, or that being poor increases your chances of trying to blow something up.
There are volumes of aggregate information out there. There are huge repositories of privately-owned data that anyone can buy a piece of. But to have individual histories at such resolution and without stating the real reason you collect that data? It's a little scary.
Of course, nothing that bad could ever happen here.
Slashdot is considered a blog. It follows the blog structure, it has people posting stories, people commenting on them... and being as widely read as it is it really is the MOAB: the Mother Of All Blogs. Slashcode is pretty similar to other blogging software packages, like WordPress, for example, with some specialized extras like friend / foe and journals.
The only difference between Slashdot and a normal blog is that normal bloggers read their stories before posting.
Ok, this is a part of patent law that wasn't covered in technology law in college.
So the patent holder can file a "continuation," which has an effective date of the original filing? If something fell within the scope of the original filing, why would someone need to continue it? If some thing didn't fall within the scope of the original filing, why would you allow a "continuation" with the original date?
The original patent, or one of them, 5,734,373, appears to cover putting a microprocessor into a joystick to offload the feedback processing requirement, and that the feedback must be along one of the axis of control of said joystick. It also mentions direction parameters as one of the terms of the claims seciton. As the dual-shock provides no direct feedback, I fail to see how this would apply.
But details of this aside, what must be present to qualify as a "continuation" of a previous patent? What must be present for, say, a directional resistance-based force feedback joystick in 1995 to suddenly become a vibration-based joystickless feedback mechanism in 2004?
P.S. There is no part of this that doesn't sound like the patent system needs reform badly.
To sum up your quote, they didn't patent force feedback, they've patented having a sensor to make sure that your force feedback doesn't push too hard. And this is not a logical extension of force feedback because...? Just because it uses intentionally complicated language doesn't mean that the concept isn't simple.
That's probably not what they're fighting over, though. It's probably one of the volumes of other patents that Immersion has recieved. Let's look at a random one, shall we? 6,563,487 describes using force feedback on the D-pad of a controller. It doesn't describe how this is any different than using force feedback on a button, but there it is. There is also force feedback for a knob (6,636,197) and the terrible idea of the vibrating touchpad (6,429,846). I guess that compliments their vibrating Laptop (6,822,635).
Hey, here is one... (6,693,622) a patent for a vibrating mass inside of a controller, granted on February 17, 2004. 2004? Was the patent examiner in a cave? Every console shipped with vibrating controllers years before this, in exactly the manner they describe.
There is mounds of prior art for a lot of this. The kickback in the guns in POW. Battletech centers. The wheel feedbacks in arcade and home games such as Hard Drivin', etc, etc.
The patent system is broken. This is not just/. rhetoric. Some of the things they've patented are obvious extensions of the existing idea, and some have just mountains of prior art. Most are of the "with X" kind of patent, where they patent pretty much daily activities "with force feedback."
We need to stop allowing patents of ideas, not implementations. A battery would be the perfect example of a classic patent, as one would have listed out the copper and various other ingredients that went into it, the chemical reactions that take place, and so on. These days, it would just be listed as "a device that stores electrical charge," and left at that to sue everyone who makes batteries, capacitors, carpets, combs, and anything else that happens to eventually fall under that umbrella.
Heck, they patented force feedback over a computer network (6,859,819), last month, 2005. Isn't this what cybersex was supposed to be all about? Wasn't there already teledildontics at that point?
Though maybe I'm just bitter because I work at a company which made on one of the games on the list. But these patents ring bogus to me, and I applaud Sony's efforts to fight on everybody's behalf.
I'd also like to point out that just because someone has bought a license from SCO doesn't mean SCO has the right to sell a license. Just because Nintendo didn't fight against this doesn't mean that it is valid. And quite frankly, even if it is valid and holds up in court, it's still downright questionable. I'm guessing Immersion just set the cost of licensing the patents at a number smaller than the cost of fighting the patents in court.
Re:Wow! think of all them IP addresses.
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Yes, but that number goes down substantially for every cubic foot of area that people could build. Or the number of devices that may want multiple IP's. A 50 floor office building would only have 1 per square foot, and that may be divided amongst things which, for sake of electronics efficiency, may all require an IP. IP over power lines may become standard, and everything may want to feed back state and / or tracking information over it.
Let's not forget the ever-present allocation inefficiencies. I wouldn't be surprised if cable modem providers gave each household 100 IP's, and that NAT routers were unheard of.
And in 50 years, who knows... maybe our children on Mars will be cursing our shortsightedness.
I'm not saying that IPv6 isn't a great step forward. I'm just saying that network traffic has a habit of expanding to encompass all available IP's. Wasn't it just 80 years ago that the gas engine was going to be the "clean machine" that gave humanity infinite energy and rescued it from the environmental catastrophy that was horse poo?
I had thought they were just too busy switching over to the far more profitable phishing schemes to write more viruses. I'm getting about 4 phishers a day here, compared to zero e-mail viruses.
As a side note, does anyone offer transparent color LCD's? I know transparent black and white LCD's have been available for years now in clocks and other devices. And the luminosity would be terrible, of course. I'm just wondering if such a thing would be technically possible, perhaps with a little creative afterburner-style front lighting.
It's a little ironic, as I really want a PSP. Some of the guys at work were playing with a pair of Japanese units... trying to see how far away they could be from eachother while still staying connected (about 50 feet). The controls seem solid, the system looks super smooth, and the form factor is just right. If I hadn't had to fix my car this month, I may have picked one up already. I wasn't intending to flame anyone.
But it's clearly not a media player. Not that the portable media player market is doing terrifically well either, but the PSP is neither a portable DVD player or an iPod. Not by a long shot.
Maybe it was the Terry Pratchett comment. Maybe some people feel strongly enough about the-situation-that-will-not-be-named to mod down a comment. Or maybe people just don't know the history of convergent devices.
Honestly I'd rather it was the Pratchett comment: I'm more comfortable with people being fundamentalist about human life than I am with people being fundamentalist about a gaming system.
First, the demons took off in their hellacoptors. They then called on the Covenant to come down from Delta Hella. They remade their Humanity's DNA to form a spiraling Hellix. It was Hellatious, even though they just wanted to say Hello.
All I have to say, it be glad they're not Helzaforming.
Target is generally one of the better places to look when a game / system sells out. Their electronics department is pretty well stocked, and they always overestimate demand, as it doesn't cost them shelf-space. They're also good about sending stuff back, so it isn't much of a risk to them. And when a system fails, target clears out of a lot of them... cheap.
Another great place to look is Sears. Yes, Sears. Yes, most Sears sell games. Generally Sears has a random assortment of games that are old and frequently out of print. Not intentionally, mind you, it's just that nobody buys games at Sears. Hence, if you want a copy of, say, Ikaruga for the Game Cube, the chance that it will be at Sears is much higher than other places with a real software sales department and turn over rate.
Costco was also good for this reason, though I haven't been in one in years.
If you're willing to pay full price, a lot of big music chains decided to get into games, not realizing that there wasn't as much crossover as they thought. Many of their game departments are disused, and full of little gems that went out of print a long time ago. They're generally not cheap: full price or more, but if you're really looking for a copy of something out of print, they're a great place to pop in.
Newberry Comics also has very cheap games. Generally, look for stores that have no business selling games, but who might have thought games were "hip" and decided to try and sell them. Or big chains that have all departments, therefore electronics departments, therefore they sell games. Some of these cater exclusively to a 50+ crowd who by and large don't buy many games, and as such are frequently overstocked.
It doesn't need more than 32 megabytes of storage space. It's a gaming machine. If you think of it as anything more than a gaming machine, you've bought into the marketing. That's the same marketing that used ROB to get the NES into electronics stores.
The PSP is a gaming machine. It's not a video playback device: when was the last time you bought a movie on UMD? Would you be willing to buy a moving on UMD knowing that it would look terrible on a full-sized TV? Where would you even get a movie on UMD?
The PSP is a gaming machine. It is not a web browser. Whatever you may have heard about it's browsing capabilities, the screen is tiny and has low resolution compared to a laptop, and it has no text input. Browsing on the PSP would be painful.
The PSP is a gaming machine. It is not an MP3 player. The archos Jukebox and iPod are MP3 players. If you want an MP3 player, you can get a CF-based one for 40 bucks these days. The PSP hasn't the on-board storage or the battery life to be a primary MP3 player. It can do it, but don't expect to throw out your current one just yet.
The PSP is a gaming machine. If you believe otherwise, you've bought into the marketing hooks. The only systems right now that can claim to be more than just gaming machines are your PC, any PS2 or Xbox that you use as DVD players, and the N-Gage (which is a halfway descent phone). But even those are basically just gaming machines.
The PSP may be capable of being your personal organizer. You may theoretically be able to run your 802.11b home automation equipment with it. You might be able to use it as a teleprompter, a floor wax, or to make Julianne fries. But the fact is that nearly everyone who buys one will use it as a game machine. Pretty much like all the other gaming machines in the world. Period.
That's not to say that it is "just" a gaming machine any more than a Ferrari is "just" a car, or a 6' plasma screen is "just" a TV. But don't expect the 6' plasma screen to improve your love life, and don't expect the PSP to do anything but play games really, really well.
And yes, we should all keep Terry Pratchett in our prayers. That poor, poor diskworld...
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I fail to see how funding people's wages is any different than funding chemistry research. Where does most of the cost of refining chemicals come from? Wages to people for the slow and ardruous task of making them.
If anything because the "90-99%" of the research is intellectual, it can be argued that more of the money goes to exactly what it is that you want more of.
Plus you now have the problem that as more and more money goes into the corporate sector, fewer and fewer people benefit. While the military's relationship with higher education has always had a little tension, it's the right place for the funding to flow to. If you fund research into advanced data mining techniques using quantum computers at a college, the money goes to creating research that can be used by everyone, including corporations, individuals, and other research institutions. You contribute to the education of more computer science students. If you decide to go elsewhere for your follow-up project, you can take the body of research that was done and go anywhere. By relying on private corporations, all you're doing is subsidizing the CEO's golf club memberships and tying yourself to a single vendor.
If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard). The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships. When was the last time the head of a college recieved a 30 million dollar golden parachute?
If you can't phathom where the research money is going, you are in no position to say that it is being wasted.
DARPA has always been the blue-sky arm of the military funding group, and it has served the country well in that respect. The internet is it's most obvious triumph (which is also comp sci), and that took something like 30 years to catch on. They also funded BSD, nuclear test detection research, and a whole lot else. To say that they're going to fund practical immediate research for making weapons instead is a little silly, we have branches of the military and civillian companies who do this regularly. DARPA, however, funds projects that have a 1 in 100 chance of taking off and changing the world. And DARPA funds hundreds of them.
Still, if I pay cash - why should I wait for a check in the mail? Cashing a check isn't cheap for people who don't have checking accounts, not everyone does have one too. Hell, they discourage the use of checks as it is.
I'm guessing they do this because it makes it less tempting for people at the till to issue fraudulent refunds. You "forget" to give a few of your customers their recipts, or you go through the garbage can in front of the store. You then refund the non-existent stuff as broken, and take the cash for yourself.
Because it was rung up and paid for, none of the cash registers are going to be under. You have the recipt, so the paperwork is in order. And because few stores track damaged merchandise, most not requiring the original box to be returned, the total merchandise on the floor is correct. The only way they have to catch someone they suspect is doing something on the down low is to figure out where those refunds are actually going. A check has to be issued to someone, which makes tracking a lot easier.
A lot of annoying store policies are in place not to make the life of their customers harder, but to try and stop their underpaid, unappreciated employees from robbing the store blind.
How is this any different than what they currently do?
"We couldn't possibly get a dupe of this," we thought "It's April fool's day. April fool's day is nothing but a flood of lame and painfully unfunny jokes: it couldn't possibly be posted again today. This is a serious article, there is no way this could become a dupe."
Sadly, those wily editors fooled us again.
When I think of Disaster, Linux, and WordPerfect, I think of their attempt to port the entire suite to Java. Attempting to capitalize on "write once, run anywhere," and wholeheartedly ignoring the reality of such systems, it ran in a JVM in a browser window. Unfortunately, the computers trying to run the thing couldn't ignore reality, and as such loading a heavily stripped down version of WP took several minutes. It also couldn't take advatage of OS API's, and had to reinvent the wheel many times. I've spoken to a coder from that project, who says it was basically a hell that they knew management wasn't going to let them out of until one or both of them were dead. As Corel laid the lot of them off, it would appear it was both.
You can still try out their beta if you would like, though ironically for a "write once run anywhere" suite you'll be hard pressed to find a browser old enough to run it.
The subsequent version of WP was recoded in C and C++.
8)People realize that they'd rather watch movies on a 42" TV set or a 15" portable than on a 3" thumb screen.
9)People realize that the PSP is a great gaming unit and a terrible media playback unit, in much the same way that the Archos Jukebox is a great media playing unit and a terrible gaming unit.
10)The Sony download service joins the many, many other movie download services currently operating in obscurity.
11)Sony bloodymindedly pushes ahead anyway for years, intentionally ignoring reality until finally a management change convinces them to put a bullet in it.
12)Shortly thereafter, everyone forgets the failure of the previous round of convergent gaming devices, and the cycle starts all over again.
13)Netflix and it's clones continue to thrive.
How can you know where your limits are if you don't push beyond them? How can you know where your interests lie if you don't discover where they don't lie? Or your abilities? I may have aced a Nietzche course that required 100 pages of reading and a 10 page paper a week for a lousy 4 undergraduate credits, but it took three years to get through a years worth of Japanese, and that wasn't for lack of trying. I know a girl who struggled for nearly 6 years to get through a two class calculous series, a prerequisite for her to get beyond community college. I know another girl who worked for 35 hours a week, lived out of her car, and took 20 units. She failed a course every now and then, but it's not like she was slacking off watching television.
Not every failure is a noble one. I think what can be noble about failure is the realization that there are higher goals than grades. Such as the exploration of the world, or the exploration of the self. Or even simple learning, which grades don't always represent. While I knew a pretty broad spectrum of people in college, the ones that I knew were going to do OK in life were the ones that weren't motivated by grades. They were exploring their options, discovering what they wanted to do in life, and looked at everything as a learning experience. Many (though by no means all) of the people who were motivated by grades were barreling headlong into a career that was grossly inappropriate for them, and everyone but them could see it. Ultimately these people are now out in the real world and are floundering because the opportunities to explore possibilities in the real world are not anywhere near as available as in college. If you want to see what being a teacher is like in college, you can take an education course by adding a little tick mark on a sign up sheet. If you want to see what being a teacher is like in the real world... you've got a long ways to go to find out. And if you've been barreling towards that medical degree for the past 4 years, you may not have the first clue where to start.
And why cry sexism in the middle of an unrelated discussion? We all know that 60% of incoming freshmen are female and that females have a higher overall graduation rate than males. Girls get called on more in elementary and high-school classrooms than boys do, and recieve on average more personalized attention from both their teachers and their parents. You're no longer academically oppressed, and haven't been for many years... Well, maybe at Harvard.
The question has become why has male college graduation rates declined? Why are fewer men going to college? Why are females in certain ethnic communities struggling to find similarly educated males? At what point did we fail the boys, and is there a way we can solve this problem without creating a segregated zero-sum game?
If you want we can lob some statistics back and forth and play the "more oppressed than thou" game, but that's a different discussion.
Not impossible, but probably more effort than just passing the class through legit means.
True. I always thought there was nobility in failing a few classes in college. If you didn't fail a few, you weren't really pushing yourself hard enough. My transcript represented this worldview pretty well.
But the social aspect of the hack is interesting, even if it isn't useful. The best hack is not one that is never resolved, but one that is resolved neatly, definitively, and completely wrong.
I knew someone in High School who was a master keygrabber. He would arrange intricate dances around all of the teachers so that he could grab their key ring for an hour and make copies of everything. This ranged from "intimate talks" about problems that didn't exist, to mundane copier issues, to larger things like students getting "caught" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
It was the plausable misdirection that made him a master. Somehow the instructions to change the sprinkler times to 10:30 would be communicated to the gardener as 6:30, and due to this oversite two weeks later all of the people at the homecoming game would freak out and go running for the gardener's shed, where they would cut off the lock, and turn off the sprinklers. There, the typo would be discovered in the instructions, and the case would be closed. Bad typing was to blame. In their rush, nobody noticed that the lock they cut off of the gardener's shed wasn't keyed the same as the lock that originally was on the shed. Nor did they notice that the full set of maintenence keys that were in the gardener's shed was now slightly warm to the touch.
Never try to "get away with it" by being untracable. "Get away with it" by giving people a plausable explanation for the inconsistincies they see... something believeable, easy, and invisibly incorrect. Never leave a case open.
When I read the article I kept thinking "Someone had to own her machine." It's the perfect crime. You take control of another student's machine, and you change a lot of people's grades including your own. Now if you're really good, at this point you've changed the backup grades, so that when they find out and knock you back down from the A the "Criminal" gave you in Hyperdimensional Fold Mathematics for Painters to the B they thought you really got, you will be in the clear with their stamp of approval. And someone else takes the fall, case closed.
Sadly, she admitted to the crime. One good theory ruined by bumbling criminals not really being criminal masterminds in disguise.
I don't think I've ever heard a publisher talk in terms of individual purchasers. Whether an average consumer would want to buy something at X amount of money, to them, is beside the point.
The equation that the publishers are optimizing for, is "starting at 50 dollars and lowering the price every month, how can I maximize revenue." Games always start at 50. You always get a crowd of early adopters who really want the game, no matter how bad the game is, and so you always start at that high price to sell to them. At some point, sales start declining as the early adopters leave... but because your price started out so high, you've earned 1/2 of your expected income already. Now you start incrementally lowering the price, smoothing along a curve in an attempt to get the maximum number of people buying at any given price point along the curve until the game hits a stable price point or dies. Unfortunately because you're game is already "going down" and is therefore less glamorous, it quickly becomes abandoned by the publisher in terms of sales and promotion.
Equally unfortunately, nowhere in that description did the words "Launch at 20" come out, a strategy that worked wonders for Katamari and a few other games.
I still remember the price drop in Playstation days... Back then all games sold for 50 dollars by Sony mandate, period. However one Christmas Crash Bandicoot 2 came out while Crash Bandicoot 1 was still on the shelves. Because of this, Sony authorized a lower price on Crash 1... 45 dollars instead of 50. Crash Bandicoot 1 that Christmas sold as well as Crash 2, proving that the market wanted lower price games.
Sadly, publishers don't "get" that there is something fundamentally different about launching a 50 dollar game and abandoning it when sales slack and they start dumping it at 30, and launching a title at 30 with the full backing of their advertising. In one case you're blowing your chance to reach people at a price they're willing to accept, and in the other you're missing your chance to milk the early adopters, but you can sell a product at a price people will pay without the mar of being a bargain-bin game.
I'm scared of things that have the potential to be pathogenic. Not to mention terrestrial bacteria might not be so hapyp on Mars, though some have been found in some pretty harsh conditions. Robots might be a tiny bit safer; just wipe out their circuits with a giant electromagnetic pulse. (I read that in a scifi novel way back, heh.)
And if we created something that was self-replicating, what makes you think it would stay succeptible to EM radiation?
Area-effect thermal detonators: all of the players around a boss have to scatter for a second or they'll get toasted. Repeating ion cannons: someone in the back fires but people on the front lines have to be properly equipped with a repeater to magnify the attack. Plasma shields: people in the front of an attack pull out a shield and click rapidly to absorb damage, and which falls after several seconds and takes a minute to recharge. Force Modifiers: One player uses the force to lift an enemy, increasing their force powers and reducing their physical defenses, while another group safely lobs area-effect thermal detonators at it. A chain of force users form to lift eachother up in the air, granting great power to the last player to be levitated.
I'm not saying SWG is doing any of these, of course, but there are ways to make a MMPORPG with interesting combat from the Star Wars Universe.
2-wheeled, 4-wheeled, hovering, 2-footed, 4-footed vehicles, animals of all sorts, blasters, rifles, mini blasters, mega ground-mounted blasters, light sabers, double light sabers, short sabers, mind control mind attacks, environment control attacks, flying sabers, wrist-mounted tow ropes, tazers, harpoons, giant glowing balls, arrows, slings, giant logs, traps, biological weapons, roll-out droids, torture droids, small spacecraft, large spacecraft, super large spacecraft, space stations...
There is plenty of variety of weapons in Star Wars to design a decent combat system even without getting creative or dipping into the millions of other Star Wars games. There is more than enough material to design a good MMPORPG.
Don't blame the source material: the developers dropped the ball. And they know it, and this is part of their attempt to fix things and make a better game. And more power to them for that. I hope it works out for them.
Will the current administration please repeat after me:
The United States was never meant to have transparent citizenship. The United States was meant to have transparent government.
I'm perfectly happy giving all of my data to the current administration. In return, though, I expect they won't mind my installing webcams around the oval office, tapping Bush's phone line, rifling through his financial records, and interviewing his daughters... I mean, unless he's doing something wrong, he's got nothing to hide. Right?
The question, to a large degree, is "Why?" Why are they collecting this data? They stated reason is to get "better information on graduation rates and what students pay for college." However, that doesn't make any sense, as A: agregate information would reveal the answer to that and B: you just don't do a sociological study by polling everyone. Attempting to get data on every individual student in the US is a terribly, terribly wasteful study. Therefore, they must be looking for something different.
And that is the fear, that the govermnet is fishing for dissidents. Lots of people subscribe to Mother Jones. But subscribing to Mother Jones, majoring in ecology at Berkeley, and flying out to Montana every 6 months? Must be a nut, they go on the TSA grey list. White, rich, and majoring in business administration? Must be OK.
And that's really one of the major problems with data mining people. It's difficult to make such generalizations without being racist or discriminatory. Even if it is statistically justified, it still goes against a lot of the ideals of this country to say that being Muslim makes you more likely to hijack a plane, or that being poor increases your chances of trying to blow something up.
There are volumes of aggregate information out there. There are huge repositories of privately-owned data that anyone can buy a piece of. But to have individual histories at such resolution and without stating the real reason you collect that data? It's a little scary.
Of course, nothing that bad could ever happen here.
Slashdot is considered a blog. It follows the blog structure, it has people posting stories, people commenting on them... and being as widely read as it is it really is the MOAB: the Mother Of All Blogs. Slashcode is pretty similar to other blogging software packages, like WordPress, for example, with some specialized extras like friend / foe and journals.
The only difference between Slashdot and a normal blog is that normal bloggers read their stories before posting.
Ok, this is a part of patent law that wasn't covered in technology law in college.
So the patent holder can file a "continuation," which has an effective date of the original filing? If something fell within the scope of the original filing, why would someone need to continue it? If some thing didn't fall within the scope of the original filing, why would you allow a "continuation" with the original date?
The original patent, or one of them, 5,734,373, appears to cover putting a microprocessor into a joystick to offload the feedback processing requirement, and that the feedback must be along one of the axis of control of said joystick. It also mentions direction parameters as one of the terms of the claims seciton. As the dual-shock provides no direct feedback, I fail to see how this would apply.
But details of this aside, what must be present to qualify as a "continuation" of a previous patent? What must be present for, say, a directional resistance-based force feedback joystick in 1995 to suddenly become a vibration-based joystickless feedback mechanism in 2004?
P.S. There is no part of this that doesn't sound like the patent system needs reform badly.
To sum up your quote, they didn't patent force feedback, they've patented having a sensor to make sure that your force feedback doesn't push too hard. And this is not a logical extension of force feedback because...? Just because it uses intentionally complicated language doesn't mean that the concept isn't simple.
/. rhetoric. Some of the things they've patented are obvious extensions of the existing idea, and some have just mountains of prior art. Most are of the "with X" kind of patent, where they patent pretty much daily activities "with force feedback."
That's probably not what they're fighting over, though. It's probably one of the volumes of other patents that Immersion has recieved. Let's look at a random one, shall we? 6,563,487 describes using force feedback on the D-pad of a controller. It doesn't describe how this is any different than using force feedback on a button, but there it is. There is also force feedback for a knob (6,636,197) and the terrible idea of the vibrating touchpad (6,429,846). I guess that compliments their vibrating Laptop (6,822,635).
Hey, here is one... (6,693,622) a patent for a vibrating mass inside of a controller, granted on February 17, 2004. 2004? Was the patent examiner in a cave? Every console shipped with vibrating controllers years before this, in exactly the manner they describe.
There is mounds of prior art for a lot of this. The kickback in the guns in POW. Battletech centers. The wheel feedbacks in arcade and home games such as Hard Drivin', etc, etc.
The patent system is broken. This is not just
We need to stop allowing patents of ideas, not implementations. A battery would be the perfect example of a classic patent, as one would have listed out the copper and various other ingredients that went into it, the chemical reactions that take place, and so on. These days, it would just be listed as "a device that stores electrical charge," and left at that to sue everyone who makes batteries, capacitors, carpets, combs, and anything else that happens to eventually fall under that umbrella.
Heck, they patented force feedback over a computer network (6,859,819), last month, 2005. Isn't this what cybersex was supposed to be all about? Wasn't there already teledildontics at that point?
Though maybe I'm just bitter because I work at a company which made on one of the games on the list. But these patents ring bogus to me, and I applaud Sony's efforts to fight on everybody's behalf.
I'd also like to point out that just because someone has bought a license from SCO doesn't mean SCO has the right to sell a license. Just because Nintendo didn't fight against this doesn't mean that it is valid. And quite frankly, even if it is valid and holds up in court, it's still downright questionable. I'm guessing Immersion just set the cost of licensing the patents at a number smaller than the cost of fighting the patents in court.
Yes, but that number goes down substantially for every cubic foot of area that people could build. Or the number of devices that may want multiple IP's. A 50 floor office building would only have 1 per square foot, and that may be divided amongst things which, for sake of electronics efficiency, may all require an IP. IP over power lines may become standard, and everything may want to feed back state and / or tracking information over it.
Let's not forget the ever-present allocation inefficiencies. I wouldn't be surprised if cable modem providers gave each household 100 IP's, and that NAT routers were unheard of.
And in 50 years, who knows... maybe our children on Mars will be cursing our shortsightedness.
I'm not saying that IPv6 isn't a great step forward. I'm just saying that network traffic has a habit of expanding to encompass all available IP's. Wasn't it just 80 years ago that the gas engine was going to be the "clean machine" that gave humanity infinite energy and rescued it from the environmental catastrophy that was horse poo?
I had thought they were just too busy switching over to the far more profitable phishing schemes to write more viruses. I'm getting about 4 phishers a day here, compared to zero e-mail viruses.
As a side note, does anyone offer transparent color LCD's? I know transparent black and white LCD's have been available for years now in clocks and other devices. And the luminosity would be terrible, of course. I'm just wondering if such a thing would be technically possible, perhaps with a little creative afterburner-style front lighting.
I was actually wondering that myself.
It's a little ironic, as I really want a PSP. Some of the guys at work were playing with a pair of Japanese units... trying to see how far away they could be from eachother while still staying connected (about 50 feet). The controls seem solid, the system looks super smooth, and the form factor is just right. If I hadn't had to fix my car this month, I may have picked one up already. I wasn't intending to flame anyone.
But it's clearly not a media player. Not that the portable media player market is doing terrifically well either, but the PSP is neither a portable DVD player or an iPod. Not by a long shot.
Maybe it was the Terry Pratchett comment. Maybe some people feel strongly enough about the-situation-that-will-not-be-named to mod down a comment. Or maybe people just don't know the history of convergent devices.
Honestly I'd rather it was the Pratchett comment: I'm more comfortable with people being fundamentalist about human life than I am with people being fundamentalist about a gaming system.
How did they do it?
First, the demons took off in their hellacoptors. They then called on the Covenant to come down from Delta Hella. They remade their Humanity's DNA to form a spiraling Hellix. It was Hellatious, even though they just wanted to say Hello.
All I have to say, it be glad they're not Helzaforming.
Target is generally one of the better places to look when a game / system sells out. Their electronics department is pretty well stocked, and they always overestimate demand, as it doesn't cost them shelf-space. They're also good about sending stuff back, so it isn't much of a risk to them. And when a system fails, target clears out of a lot of them... cheap.
Another great place to look is Sears. Yes, Sears. Yes, most Sears sell games. Generally Sears has a random assortment of games that are old and frequently out of print. Not intentionally, mind you, it's just that nobody buys games at Sears. Hence, if you want a copy of, say, Ikaruga for the Game Cube, the chance that it will be at Sears is much higher than other places with a real software sales department and turn over rate.
Costco was also good for this reason, though I haven't been in one in years.
If you're willing to pay full price, a lot of big music chains decided to get into games, not realizing that there wasn't as much crossover as they thought. Many of their game departments are disused, and full of little gems that went out of print a long time ago. They're generally not cheap: full price or more, but if you're really looking for a copy of something out of print, they're a great place to pop in.
Newberry Comics also has very cheap games. Generally, look for stores that have no business selling games, but who might have thought games were "hip" and decided to try and sell them. Or big chains that have all departments, therefore electronics departments, therefore they sell games. Some of these cater exclusively to a 50+ crowd who by and large don't buy many games, and as such are frequently overstocked.
It doesn't need more than 32 megabytes of storage space. It's a gaming machine. If you think of it as anything more than a gaming machine, you've bought into the marketing. That's the same marketing that used ROB to get the NES into electronics stores.
The PSP is a gaming machine. It's not a video playback device: when was the last time you bought a movie on UMD? Would you be willing to buy a moving on UMD knowing that it would look terrible on a full-sized TV? Where would you even get a movie on UMD?
The PSP is a gaming machine. It is not a web browser. Whatever you may have heard about it's browsing capabilities, the screen is tiny and has low resolution compared to a laptop, and it has no text input. Browsing on the PSP would be painful.
The PSP is a gaming machine. It is not an MP3 player. The archos Jukebox and iPod are MP3 players. If you want an MP3 player, you can get a CF-based one for 40 bucks these days. The PSP hasn't the on-board storage or the battery life to be a primary MP3 player. It can do it, but don't expect to throw out your current one just yet.
The PSP is a gaming machine. If you believe otherwise, you've bought into the marketing hooks. The only systems right now that can claim to be more than just gaming machines are your PC, any PS2 or Xbox that you use as DVD players, and the N-Gage (which is a halfway descent phone). But even those are basically just gaming machines.
The PSP may be capable of being your personal organizer. You may theoretically be able to run your 802.11b home automation equipment with it. You might be able to use it as a teleprompter, a floor wax, or to make Julianne fries. But the fact is that nearly everyone who buys one will use it as a game machine. Pretty much like all the other gaming machines in the world. Period.
That's not to say that it is "just" a gaming machine any more than a Ferrari is "just" a car, or a 6' plasma screen is "just" a TV. But don't expect the 6' plasma screen to improve your love life, and don't expect the PSP to do anything but play games really, really well.
And yes, we should all keep Terry Pratchett in our prayers. That poor, poor diskworld...