Most high-level content isn't created until near the end of the development cycle. Until you're relatively certain the graphics format, sound format, gameplay ideas, and every thing else are panning out, why fill out content that you may have to redo? Better to focus on your engine and gameplay early on, while filling out the world with Blizzard production level art and design once the technical side is stable. They probably have a few of the God monsters artwork and quests complete (though not balanced), but it is doubtful they are just holding back on the universe. It's Beta because it is not done, and except for bug fixes Art and Level Designs are the last to go in.
You can be pretty sure that the level 65 monster with the big fangs and the ability to throw things will pan out correctly if the level 16 monster with the hunchback and the ability to throw things is working well.
Besides, what do you think they will be doing during the next six months? Strictly playbalance?
I forgot Dell did that too. Allow me to change my analogy then to Godzilla vs. Gamara and Mothra.
"Chips May Physically Reconfigure Themselves"
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A History of PowerPC
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· Score: 1
Self-modifying silicon? Geez. And I though self-modifying code was complicated.*
The Sony connection is nothing surprising, as it has already been announced that Sony is creating silicon with IBM for their next-gen chipset. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to see a PS3 running on a cluster of rebranded (and possibly modified) PPC chips.
P.S. Does anyone know why Windows has never been adapted to run under PPC? While the transition for Apple from PPC to x86 may be without technical merit, why hasn't Microsoft created a server line based on the lower-powered PPC chipset?
*they mention that 'researchers and electronics makers' will be able to modify the chip, and as such the above quote is probably incorrect. The chip may be modifiable, but it is unlikely that will happen at runtime.
A while back Microsoft decided to forbid the sale of boxes without an OS. Walmart in turn decided the best way to get around this was to sell boxes with a copy of FreeDOS on a floppy. Microsoft relented.
It's nice when an evil monopolistic 900 lb gorilla gets beaten down by another evil monopolistic 900 lb gorilla. It's like that Godzilla vs Gamara movie, except that we like Godzilla and Gamara.
Walmart.com actually has had a lot of options in terms of pre-loaded OS's. They come / have come with Windows, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake, Sun Java Desktop, and FreeDOS. Or you can get them naked.
True, all of these are cheaper than Windows (except for, of course, Windows), but if all Walmart was interested in was being Cheap, they would all be using Lindows (remember flat rate licensing?). The inclusion of Lycoris and Sun Java Desktop is an indication that they see value in having a variety of Linux desktops available.
Now, it may very well be that they simply contract out through individual companies, so that if someone wants to sell a Lycoris desktop through Walmart.com it presents no risk to Walmart, but that doesn't mean Walmart is inherently exploitive.*
The fact that you have to chip it to unleash those abilities just shows that there's no market (yet) in selling those abilities for the Xbox, or you would be able to get them commercially.
You can get them commercially. Where do you think mod chips come from, churches?
How is the wheelman offtopic to a discussion on alternative transportation? As the entire line was hit with the offtopic stick, it's obvious that one of Slashdot's editors is to blame. But why? The question at hand was
Are we likely to see similar advances in other forms of transport?
Right? If Segway isn't offtopic, and it isn't, why would a portable, low-speed, tiny 20 mph vehicle be offtopic? Much like the Segway claimed to be, this could actually be the perfect vehicle for short jaunts to the store or visiting friends... the kind of short-range trips that the car is overkill but for which people refuse to walk. Why would a discussion about new forms of transportation discussing the cost benefits of 2 stroke engines vs 4 stroke engines in small vehicles be offtopic?
I'm not saying you have to mod us back up. I'm just asking, WTF were you thinking? Dear Slashdot editor, seriously, what were you thinking? Justify yourself.
I'd like to point out here that it isn't the gaming industry saying this. It is the tech reporter for the Boston Globe. Most of the game developers that I know realize that only a very small percentage of consoles that are chipped, and even then those that are probably wouldn't have bought your game anyway. I've seen rough estimates that piracy in computer games hovers around %10, and that sounds about right. When you're trying to pull your title from 30,000 sales to 1,000,000 sales, that %10 just doesn't seem worth devoting too many resources to. And that percentage is a lot smaller on consoles. A lot smaller.
Sony and Microsoft do go after chippers as a matter of routine, and they always give some plausable reason for it. But they too know that we're in the buildup phase to another generation of consoles, and they too expect sales to have started sloping off by now. Unlike certain other industries, very few of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo's press releases are related to the subject of piracy... in fact I can't think of one offhand since they shut down Lik Sang:(.
This is just an attempt by a newspaper tech reporter to sensationalize a currently very minor problem to the game development industry by tying it to another industry's hype. At the GDC there was only one track related to piracy, and it was entirely sponsored by a copyprotection company. Generally speaking, we have more important things to do.
And finally, Microsoft really did drop the ball with the XBox. They could promised to deliver the mythical of the set-top box, and they almost succeeded. For the first time, the technology was there, the hardware was there, and the public was ready, but the terrible software just killed it. The fact that you have to chip it to unleash abilities completely unrelated to piracy and regional lockout should be a clue as to where they went wrong.
4 stroke engines are much more complicated to build and work on. This isn't made by Honda. Plus, while 4 stroke motorcycle engines are making a comeback, they're still pretty big.
Compared to a go-kart, this is pretty small. While still larger, mopeds would be a fairer comparison, and those tend to top out at 30. In that small space you need an engine, a gearing system, the unique wheel-driving system, exhaust, fuel storage and injection, etc, etc.
Still, I'm glad it tops at 20. I couldn't imagine one of those things cruising at 60. Did you read up on how you're supposed to brake? While they might be keeping it at 20 for legal reasons, in this case it is probably in the customer's best interests.
The wheelman is faster, cheaper, and has a greater operating range than the Segway. It is even very, very safe, so long as you would consider riding a skateboard at 20 MPH on asphault wearing nothing more than a bikini "safe".
I think you hit on the big reason for alternative transportation in cities.
Parking
The North End in Boston is one the of the best places in the United States to get truly amazing Italian food, but don't bring the car. You'll generally spend an hour circling around, only to find a spot so far away that you're basically home. Chinatown isn't quite that bad, but don't bother bringing a car on Friday Night. And anyone who wants to park on Newbury street had better have either a ton of patience or a Commercial plate.
Thanks to the Big Dig traffic through Boston isn't so bad, but parking is still a nightmare. Better to just take the T wherever you need to go, and get some reading done.
New York and San Fransisco are similar. Expect to find parking at best five or six blocks away after circling for an hour (or pay 40 dollars for a spot in a lot, making cabs much cheaper).
Transportation infrastructure isn't going to change significantly until something significantly better arrives, or the current situation gets significantly worse. Driving is getting worse and worse every day.
The problem is that we seldom build cities. Cities morph -- especially in our suburban mindset we've have for the past century or so. Cities have in fact become more sprawling simply because of our transportation. So trying to "build" a city that is counter-culture will not only be tough, but not popular.
That's not entirely true. The further forward we go, the more often cities are built in large chunks (or in the case of Irvine, all at one go). Furthermore, City planners have a surprisingly large amount of power when it comes to things like deciding the direction of a transportation infrastructure. Portland, for example, created a well-defined busing system with exclusive lanes and lots of riders. Boston's city planners just sunk ten billion dollars and countless contruction hours into submerging the transportation system underground. San Fransisco is in the far more affordable process of striping more bike lanes, and has joined with the surrounding communities to create a 500 mile bike trail encircling the bay.
Are cities are car-focused because that is how we choose to make them. Just because you don't see your friendly neighborhood city planner doesn't mean he didn't expect the traffic you are stuck in.
Perhaps we should create a series of lanes, or standard satellite orbiting trajectories. All satellites going around the earth (in a non geo-synchronous orbit) do so in a west-to-east fashion, for example, to reduce the difference in speed between orbiting vehicles and debris.
There are a lot of parallels between orbital space now and the roadway system before signs were erected.
Unfortunately, many patents issued these days fail the "high school kid" test. I'm sure they know exactly where they are going when they type in markhammil.geocities.com. While in theory a patent should be non-obvious... Can you say, 1-click shopping?
The site you reference is out of date, as methods of doing business have been declared patentable, as have mathematical formulas and many medical treatments. Again, 1-click shopping springs to mind. The Patent office has declared that it will accept patents on integer numbers. Apparently floating point numbers are not precise enough for the protection of the law. And while I can't think of a patent on a new revolutionary way to do CPR, there is a thriving industry on patenting drugs and devices for medical purposes.
Furthermore, as friends in law school have told me an this site repeats, only about 1% of patents are ever litigated, and as such only about a thousand patents per year are thrown out. That's out of 20,000 or so that are filed. Which means that the average patent has a 99.5% chance of holding as true.
Remember, Bezos' Bozo* one-click patent held up in court.
*I'm sure he's never heard that one before. Well, consider it a form of punishment Mr. We-must-have-business-process-patents.
The Vaio Picture Book C1VN gets 5 1/2 hours on a set of batteries, weighs 2.2 pounds, and fits in a tiny 9.8 x 6.0 x 1.14. It only has a 9 inch screen, but it is mostly horizontal space for easier reading of text. The processor is a dog and you will pay through the nose, but nothing beats a Picture Book for usable size. I would recommend having small hands and enjoying the extra speed of being %10 closer to all of the keys.
I used to write on my Powerbook back in my days in college. Freed from the constraints of the Lab or the evil Roommate's Computer, my Powerbook and I roamed the hallways, sticking ourselves into little corners to tat-tat-tat the day away. It was uber convenient compared to the alternatives. I did manage to get my TI-95 hooked up to a modem working as a dumb terminal for a shell account, but when it comes right down to it, you want the largest screen you can get, you want the largest keyboard you can get, and you need a pretty decent processor... The TI-95 just didn't have that. As you will spend more of your time working with the machine rather than just carrying it around, try to optimize for the experience of writing rather than the convenience of portability.
We recently had to remove the old 21" monitor from our dual setup due to excessive fuzziness, and have fallen back on our 17". 17" just doesn't feel like it is large enough to write well. You can fit two or three paragraphs on a screen, enough to see the previous paragraph and the next one while doing revisions, but not much else. More screen real estate provides for a lot more context. Writing on a 4-line display is difficult at best. I wouldn't want to do it.
The Cidco ran on custom hardware, nothing that would even touch a Palm OS, so the only possibility is QuickPAD. But the Mailstation keyboard was also not full sized, and never understood 802.11b. They did / do have "wireless" connections, but in the context of the Cidco that means 2.4 Ghz connections to a base station with a modem. The QuickPAD does have folders and direct printing that sounds suspiciously like things the Cidco did. But the ram sizes are different, as are the internal voltages, the screen size, and available software.
I'd be surprised if they were related. During their entire existence Mailstations have changed very little. They all have identical screens, identical key layouts, identical file size limitations that make them unsuitable for most real usage (8k), identical firmware, identical ports with the addition of wireless connections in two models, identical keyboards with slightly different key moulds. They did add a pair of scroll buttons to the top-left of models released in the past few years and have a model with twice the inadequate memory, but you can basically take apart any "modern" mailstation and swap parts with the older ones. My 3 mailstations are all interchangeable, though one is original unlocked white, one is older Fn-Shft-T single modifiable Cidco black, and one is the locked more modern Yahoo version. Well, it was modern back when the concept was abandoned.
The Mailstation, and all related IP, was sold to Earthlink for more than it was worth.
The problem then is that you no longer have the point of sale presentation. A big part of the battle along the entire chain is getting the game on store shelves and in front of people. Anyone who has ever had to redo any part of their game to qualify for a Teen rating and, qed, the shelves of Walmart knows what I'm talking about. The wholesalers and retailers provide a service: they take something that comes in a few large shipments, sort it, manages it, finds buyers for it, ships it by region, and present it at thousands of locations for millions of people to peruse, buy, steal, return, and generally abuse.
Direct downloading would be a step in the right direction (and downloading through Bittorrent would be even better), but that economic model is well known... It's called shareware, and despite some high quality releases it tends to produce riches far below what would be attainable through traditional retail channels. If a player can't hold the box, can't feel it in his or her hands, it is much more difficult to convince them to pull out their credit card.
The manufacturer could also sell boxes to the public. However, you would still need to do basically all of the above... Ship to regional distribution centers around the US, manage the product, run a call center to interact with buyers, take returns... Aforementioned lower total sales aside, you still have the entire warehousing cost and much of the customer relations to deal with. You might manage to cut your total retail (equivalent) expenditure in half by storing your product in less expensive real estate, but you have to tack on an additional $5 for shipping. So, in essence, you have done nothing but bought the inventory control and customer relations side at the expense of the ability to aggregate the cost of selling the game with other games in a large pipeline.
Personally I want to see more direct downloads being used as a sales model, but I just don't see that happening any time soon. Having a physical thing in your hand is too tempting for the player, and broadband penetration is still too shallow. Plus, the model won't work for consoles unless a publisher were to design the console specifically around it. For more examples of the future as envisioned here, see Steam, and The Phantom.
Yes, Methane. A clear and present weapons of mass destruction related program activity indicator. Furthermore, we have reason to believe they may not have stopped their destructive Dihydrogen Monoxide production, but merely moved it all underground.
I know this is confusing, but the two frogs you kill in Blaster Master are actually different mutated frogs. During the ending sequence to the game you will see that your frog is back to normal. Apparently mutagenic compounds function a lot like vampires: kill the master and all of the genetically modified life forms return to normal.
But the weirdest thing about the whole story is that at the beginning of the game the frog becomes radioactive, grows to enormous proportion, and jumps down the hole in shame. I never understood the kind of relationship that a boy can have with his frog such that the frog could feel shame about his appearance. All I can say is "ew."
Compared to that, a radioactive canister falling through the crust of the earth to an underground world full of gun-toting mutants seems kind of pedestrian.
"In the year 199X, a secret command, Saber Tiger, is engaged in a savage war with the Demon's Batallion. The Saber Tiger's youngest leader, "Bang", played a very large role in the fight to the admiration of his fellow commanders. After the completion of one campaign, Bang and his girlfriend, Mary, are enjoying a longawaited vacation at the beach. Suddenly, they recieve an urgent communication from head quarters. It reads 'EMERGENCY CODE NO. 2568623. The inventor of the Doomsday Bomb, Professor Plum, is being held by the enemy, atop Demon's Head Mountain, and it appears the the world is doomed unless Earth surrenders. If the bomb explodes, the Earth will be a dead planet. A mass attack on Demon Head is impossible for the enemy vows to detonate the bomb on sight. Our colleague, Joe, has failed to return from a reconnaisance mission. Bang, only you can rescue Professor plum and save the planet. Now, you've got to get to Demon's Head Mountain at once!'
In the ruins of Demon Head, there dwells a fearsome demon that has terrified generations of people. Bang, and Bang alone, must set out on a daredevil mission to these unknown lands and seek to rescue Plum and deactivate the Doomsday Bomb.
As Bang sets off on his perilous journey to destroy the Demon's Batallion, Mary must remain behind deeply concerned for his life."
Despite what I just said, the point of the game must be to rescue your girlfriend, or else why would she be on the cover... with the flying guy on the motorcycle and the shard of electric glass? Wait... Isn't the point to rescue the professor? Collect the seven coins from the seven swirly bad guy thingies? Why do you need so much money? What happened to the bomb? It's so confusing!
I don't have a degree in Obscure Japanese Mythological Symbology systems! Why is the mushroom with black dancers protecting the talisman of the sun? What did I do to offend the teeth with blue hair? Who the heck are these guys anyway? What's that thing doing? NGYAAAAA!
Re:...just become part of the muck...
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Buckyballs Kill Fish
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Human beings have odd beliefs about what happens when you disintegrate something.
But it's amazing how far people will go to justify stealing music. Just say you steal and move on. There's nothing to argue about and no one will judge you any different.
The thing is, they do. Remember how rediculous it sounded when the MPAA and RIAA started using the term "Intellectual Property," right about the big DeCSS case? We all knew that there was no such thing as "intellectual property," there was just copyrights and patents which defined certain limited rights afforded to one party or another. Now that "intellectual property" has become lexicon, you hear phrases like "they can do anything they want with it. It's their intellectual property." Substitute the word "copyright" in that previous sentence and it just doesn't work. By defining copyrights as a form of property, property rights go along with it.
Likewise, by defining copyright violations as a form of theft, additional punative measures go along with it. A "theif" has a clear-cut definition and a lot of cultural associations with it. Being a thief means you have deprived a rightful owner of something for personal gain, and you must return the thing and be punished. Violating copyright is something completely different. That's not to say that copyright violaters shouldn't be punished, that's to say that copyright violaters didn't deprive a rightful owner of a physical object. There are also the labels of "arsonist," "mugger," "hacker," "slanderer," "murderer," "terrorist," and "con-man." They all have different legal meanings, and different cultural associations, and should all should be punished. But to call a "hacker" a "terrorist" would be disingenuous, a clear attempt to draw an inappropriate punishment for a less severe infraction. The same is true with calling a copyright violator a "thief."
Personally I like the term "pirate." It's such an antiquated term that it lacks most of its original meaning, actual piracy is incredibly rare, and it is culturally entrenched enough to become an accepted standard. I would prefer if copyright violations kept the name copyright violations, but realistically with seven syllables it would have to be shortened in Japanese fashion to copvi, and even that might have one syllable too many. "Pirate" is a good compromise term.
Slashdot Mirror
Most high-level content isn't created until near the end of the development cycle. Until you're relatively certain the graphics format, sound format, gameplay ideas, and every thing else are panning out, why fill out content that you may have to redo? Better to focus on your engine and gameplay early on, while filling out the world with Blizzard production level art and design once the technical side is stable. They probably have a few of the God monsters artwork and quests complete (though not balanced), but it is doubtful they are just holding back on the universe. It's Beta because it is not done, and except for bug fixes Art and Level Designs are the last to go in.
You can be pretty sure that the level 65 monster with the big fangs and the ability to throw things will pan out correctly if the level 16 monster with the hunchback and the ability to throw things is working well.
Besides, what do you think they will be doing during the next six months? Strictly playbalance?
I forgot Dell did that too. Allow me to change my analogy then to Godzilla vs. Gamara and Mothra.
Self-modifying silicon? Geez. And I though self-modifying code was complicated.*
The Sony connection is nothing surprising, as it has already been announced that Sony is creating silicon with IBM for their next-gen chipset. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to see a PS3 running on a cluster of rebranded (and possibly modified) PPC chips.
P.S. Does anyone know why Windows has never been adapted to run under PPC? While the transition for Apple from PPC to x86 may be without technical merit, why hasn't Microsoft created a server line based on the lower-powered PPC chipset?
*they mention that 'researchers and electronics makers' will be able to modify the chip, and as such the above quote is probably incorrect. The chip may be modifiable, but it is unlikely that will happen at runtime.
when did they offer FreeDOS boxes?
A while back Microsoft decided to forbid the sale of boxes without an OS. Walmart in turn decided the best way to get around this was to sell boxes with a copy of FreeDOS on a floppy. Microsoft relented.
It's nice when an evil monopolistic 900 lb gorilla gets beaten down by another evil monopolistic 900 lb gorilla. It's like that Godzilla vs Gamara movie, except that we like Godzilla and Gamara.
Walmart.com actually has had a lot of options in terms of pre-loaded OS's. They come / have come with Windows, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake, Sun Java Desktop, and FreeDOS. Or you can get them naked.
True, all of these are cheaper than Windows (except for, of course, Windows), but if all Walmart was interested in was being Cheap, they would all be using Lindows (remember flat rate licensing?). The inclusion of Lycoris and Sun Java Desktop is an indication that they see value in having a variety of Linux desktops available.
Now, it may very well be that they simply contract out through individual companies, so that if someone wants to sell a Lycoris desktop through Walmart.com it presents no risk to Walmart, but that doesn't mean Walmart is inherently exploitive.*
*on this particular issue.
The fact that you have to chip it to unleash those abilities just shows that there's no market (yet) in selling those abilities for the Xbox, or you would be able to get them commercially.
You can get them commercially. Where do you think mod chips come from, churches?
How is the wheelman offtopic to a discussion on alternative transportation? As the entire line was hit with the offtopic stick, it's obvious that one of Slashdot's editors is to blame. But why? The question at hand was
Are we likely to see similar advances in other forms of transport?
Right? If Segway isn't offtopic, and it isn't, why would a portable, low-speed, tiny 20 mph vehicle be offtopic? Much like the Segway claimed to be, this could actually be the perfect vehicle for short jaunts to the store or visiting friends... the kind of short-range trips that the car is overkill but for which people refuse to walk. Why would a discussion about new forms of transportation discussing the cost benefits of 2 stroke engines vs 4 stroke engines in small vehicles be offtopic?
I'm not saying you have to mod us back up. I'm just asking, WTF were you thinking? Dear Slashdot editor, seriously, what were you thinking? Justify yourself.
Do editors get meta-moded?
I'd like to point out here that it isn't the gaming industry saying this. It is the tech reporter for the Boston Globe. Most of the game developers that I know realize that only a very small percentage of consoles that are chipped, and even then those that are probably wouldn't have bought your game anyway. I've seen rough estimates that piracy in computer games hovers around %10, and that sounds about right. When you're trying to pull your title from 30,000 sales to 1,000,000 sales, that %10 just doesn't seem worth devoting too many resources to. And that percentage is a lot smaller on consoles. A lot smaller.
:(.
Sony and Microsoft do go after chippers as a matter of routine, and they always give some plausable reason for it. But they too know that we're in the buildup phase to another generation of consoles, and they too expect sales to have started sloping off by now. Unlike certain other industries, very few of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo's press releases are related to the subject of piracy... in fact I can't think of one offhand since they shut down Lik Sang
This is just an attempt by a newspaper tech reporter to sensationalize a currently very minor problem to the game development industry by tying it to another industry's hype. At the GDC there was only one track related to piracy, and it was entirely sponsored by a copyprotection company. Generally speaking, we have more important things to do.
And finally, Microsoft really did drop the ball with the XBox. They could promised to deliver the mythical of the set-top box, and they almost succeeded. For the first time, the technology was there, the hardware was there, and the public was ready, but the terrible software just killed it. The fact that you have to chip it to unleash abilities completely unrelated to piracy and regional lockout should be a clue as to where they went wrong.
4 stroke engines are much more complicated to build and work on. This isn't made by Honda. Plus, while 4 stroke motorcycle engines are making a comeback, they're still pretty big.
Compared to a go-kart, this is pretty small. While still larger, mopeds would be a fairer comparison, and those tend to top out at 30. In that small space you need an engine, a gearing system, the unique wheel-driving system, exhaust, fuel storage and injection, etc, etc.
Still, I'm glad it tops at 20. I couldn't imagine one of those things cruising at 60. Did you read up on how you're supposed to brake? While they might be keeping it at 20 for legal reasons, in this case it is probably in the customer's best interests.
The Wheelman is much cooler.
The wheelman is faster, cheaper, and has a greater operating range than the Segway. It is even very, very safe, so long as you would consider riding a skateboard at 20 MPH on asphault wearing nothing more than a bikini "safe".
I think you hit on the big reason for alternative transportation in cities.
Parking
The North End in Boston is one the of the best places in the United States to get truly amazing Italian food, but don't bring the car. You'll generally spend an hour circling around, only to find a spot so far away that you're basically home. Chinatown isn't quite that bad, but don't bother bringing a car on Friday Night. And anyone who wants to park on Newbury street had better have either a ton of patience or a Commercial plate.
Thanks to the Big Dig traffic through Boston isn't so bad, but parking is still a nightmare. Better to just take the T wherever you need to go, and get some reading done.
New York and San Fransisco are similar. Expect to find parking at best five or six blocks away after circling for an hour (or pay 40 dollars for a spot in a lot, making cabs much cheaper).
Transportation infrastructure isn't going to change significantly until something significantly better arrives, or the current situation gets significantly worse. Driving is getting worse and worse every day.
The problem is that we seldom build cities. Cities morph -- especially in our suburban mindset we've have for the past century or so. Cities have in fact become more sprawling simply because of our transportation. So trying to "build" a city that is counter-culture will not only be tough, but not popular.
That's not entirely true. The further forward we go, the more often cities are built in large chunks (or in the case of Irvine, all at one go). Furthermore, City planners have a surprisingly large amount of power when it comes to things like deciding the direction of a transportation infrastructure. Portland, for example, created a well-defined busing system with exclusive lanes and lots of riders. Boston's city planners just sunk ten billion dollars and countless contruction hours into submerging the transportation system underground. San Fransisco is in the far more affordable process of striping more bike lanes, and has joined with the surrounding communities to create a 500 mile bike trail encircling the bay.
Are cities are car-focused because that is how we choose to make them. Just because you don't see your friendly neighborhood city planner doesn't mean he didn't expect the traffic you are stuck in.
It's not illegal... it's just a violation of a contract, and you know how SCO loves to go looking for legal loopholes in contracts...
Or perceived legal loopholes in contracts. They, of course, can't show the actual loophole because it would be a violation of their Lawyer's IP.
Perhaps we should create a series of lanes, or standard satellite orbiting trajectories. All satellites going around the earth (in a non geo-synchronous orbit) do so in a west-to-east fashion, for example, to reduce the difference in speed between orbiting vehicles and debris.
There are a lot of parallels between orbital space now and the roadway system before signs were erected.
Unfortunately, many patents issued these days fail the "high school kid" test. I'm sure they know exactly where they are going when they type in markhammil.geocities.com. While in theory a patent should be non-obvious... Can you say, 1-click shopping?
The site you reference is out of date, as methods of doing business have been declared patentable, as have mathematical formulas and many medical treatments. Again, 1-click shopping springs to mind. The Patent office has declared that it will accept patents on integer numbers. Apparently floating point numbers are not precise enough for the protection of the law. And while I can't think of a patent on a new revolutionary way to do CPR, there is a thriving industry on patenting drugs and devices for medical purposes.
Furthermore, as friends in law school have told me an this site repeats, only about 1% of patents are ever litigated, and as such only about a thousand patents per year are thrown out. That's out of 20,000 or so that are filed. Which means that the average patent has a 99.5% chance of holding as true.
Remember, Bezos' Bozo* one-click patent held up in court.
*I'm sure he's never heard that one before. Well, consider it a form of punishment Mr. We-must-have-business-process-patents.
The Vaio Picture Book C1VN gets 5 1/2 hours on a set of batteries, weighs 2.2 pounds, and fits in a tiny 9.8 x 6.0 x 1.14. It only has a 9 inch screen, but it is mostly horizontal space for easier reading of text. The processor is a dog and you will pay through the nose, but nothing beats a Picture Book for usable size. I would recommend having small hands and enjoying the extra speed of being %10 closer to all of the keys.
I used to write on my Powerbook back in my days in college. Freed from the constraints of the Lab or the evil Roommate's Computer, my Powerbook and I roamed the hallways, sticking ourselves into little corners to tat-tat-tat the day away. It was uber convenient compared to the alternatives. I did manage to get my TI-95 hooked up to a modem working as a dumb terminal for a shell account, but when it comes right down to it, you want the largest screen you can get, you want the largest keyboard you can get, and you need a pretty decent processor... The TI-95 just didn't have that. As you will spend more of your time working with the machine rather than just carrying it around, try to optimize for the experience of writing rather than the convenience of portability.
We recently had to remove the old 21" monitor from our dual setup due to excessive fuzziness, and have fallen back on our 17". 17" just doesn't feel like it is large enough to write well. You can fit two or three paragraphs on a screen, enough to see the previous paragraph and the next one while doing revisions, but not much else. More screen real estate provides for a lot more context. Writing on a 4-line display is difficult at best. I wouldn't want to do it.
The Cidco ran on custom hardware, nothing that would even touch a Palm OS, so the only possibility is QuickPAD. But the Mailstation keyboard was also not full sized, and never understood 802.11b. They did / do have "wireless" connections, but in the context of the Cidco that means 2.4 Ghz connections to a base station with a modem. The QuickPAD does have folders and direct printing that sounds suspiciously like things the Cidco did. But the ram sizes are different, as are the internal voltages, the screen size, and available software.
I'd be surprised if they were related. During their entire existence Mailstations have changed very little. They all have identical screens, identical key layouts, identical file size limitations that make them unsuitable for most real usage (8k), identical firmware, identical ports with the addition of wireless connections in two models, identical keyboards with slightly different key moulds. They did add a pair of scroll buttons to the top-left of models released in the past few years and have a model with twice the inadequate memory, but you can basically take apart any "modern" mailstation and swap parts with the older ones. My 3 mailstations are all interchangeable, though one is original unlocked white, one is older Fn-Shft-T single modifiable Cidco black, and one is the locked more modern Yahoo version. Well, it was modern back when the concept was abandoned.
The Mailstation, and all related IP, was sold to Earthlink for more than it was worth.
The problem then is that you no longer have the point of sale presentation. A big part of the battle along the entire chain is getting the game on store shelves and in front of people. Anyone who has ever had to redo any part of their game to qualify for a Teen rating and, qed, the shelves of Walmart knows what I'm talking about. The wholesalers and retailers provide a service: they take something that comes in a few large shipments, sort it, manages it, finds buyers for it, ships it by region, and present it at thousands of locations for millions of people to peruse, buy, steal, return, and generally abuse.
Direct downloading would be a step in the right direction (and downloading through Bittorrent would be even better), but that economic model is well known... It's called shareware, and despite some high quality releases it tends to produce riches far below what would be attainable through traditional retail channels. If a player can't hold the box, can't feel it in his or her hands, it is much more difficult to convince them to pull out their credit card.
The manufacturer could also sell boxes to the public. However, you would still need to do basically all of the above... Ship to regional distribution centers around the US, manage the product, run a call center to interact with buyers, take returns... Aforementioned lower total sales aside, you still have the entire warehousing cost and much of the customer relations to deal with. You might manage to cut your total retail (equivalent) expenditure in half by storing your product in less expensive real estate, but you have to tack on an additional $5 for shipping. So, in essence, you have done nothing but bought the inventory control and customer relations side at the expense of the ability to aggregate the cost of selling the game with other games in a large pipeline.
Personally I want to see more direct downloads being used as a sales model, but I just don't see that happening any time soon. Having a physical thing in your hand is too tempting for the player, and broadband penetration is still too shallow. Plus, the model won't work for consoles unless a publisher were to design the console specifically around it. For more examples of the future as envisioned here, see Steam, and The Phantom.
Dos is not dead, it's just gone embedded. My camera ships with a version of DOS as an internal OS, but you wouldn't know it from use.
Hidden, Dos plots it's revenge.
Where else would the phone lines be flaming?
Yes, Methane. A clear and present weapons of mass destruction related program activity indicator. Furthermore, we have reason to believe they may not have stopped their destructive Dihydrogen Monoxide production, but merely moved it all underground.
I know this is confusing, but the two frogs you kill in Blaster Master are actually different mutated frogs. During the ending sequence to the game you will see that your frog is back to normal. Apparently mutagenic compounds function a lot like vampires: kill the master and all of the genetically modified life forms return to normal.
But the weirdest thing about the whole story is that at the beginning of the game the frog becomes radioactive, grows to enormous proportion, and jumps down the hole in shame. I never understood the kind of relationship that a boy can have with his frog such that the frog could feel shame about his appearance. All I can say is "ew."
Compared to that, a radioactive canister falling through the crust of the earth to an underground world full of gun-toting mutants seems kind of pedestrian.
(Courtesy of some guy.)
"In the year 199X, a secret command, Saber Tiger, is engaged in a savage war with the Demon's Batallion. The Saber Tiger's youngest leader, "Bang", played a very large role in the fight to the admiration of his fellow commanders. After the completion of one campaign, Bang and his girlfriend, Mary, are enjoying a longawaited vacation at the beach. Suddenly, they recieve an urgent communication from head quarters. It reads 'EMERGENCY CODE NO. 2568623. The inventor of the Doomsday Bomb, Professor Plum, is being held by the enemy, atop Demon's Head Mountain, and it appears the the world is doomed unless Earth surrenders. If the bomb explodes, the Earth will be a dead planet. A mass attack on Demon Head is impossible for the enemy vows to detonate the bomb on sight. Our colleague, Joe, has failed to return from a reconnaisance mission. Bang, only you can rescue Professor plum and save the planet. Now, you've got to get to Demon's Head Mountain at once!'
In the ruins of Demon Head, there dwells a fearsome demon that has terrified generations of people. Bang, and Bang alone, must set out on a daredevil mission to these unknown lands and seek to rescue Plum and deactivate the Doomsday Bomb.
As Bang sets off on his perilous journey to destroy the Demon's Batallion, Mary must remain behind deeply concerned for his life."
Despite what I just said, the point of the game must be to rescue your girlfriend, or else why would she be on the cover... with the flying guy on the motorcycle and the shard of electric glass? Wait... Isn't the point to rescue the professor? Collect the seven coins from the seven swirly bad guy thingies? Why do you need so much money? What happened to the bomb? It's so confusing!
I don't have a degree in Obscure Japanese Mythological Symbology systems! Why is the mushroom with black dancers protecting the talisman of the sun? What did I do to offend the teeth with blue hair? Who the heck are these guys anyway? What's that thing doing? NGYAAAAA!
Human beings have odd beliefs about what happens when you disintegrate something.
But it's amazing how far people will go to justify stealing music. Just say you steal and move on. There's nothing to argue about and no one will judge you any different.
The thing is, they do. Remember how rediculous it sounded when the MPAA and RIAA started using the term "Intellectual Property," right about the big DeCSS case? We all knew that there was no such thing as "intellectual property," there was just copyrights and patents which defined certain limited rights afforded to one party or another. Now that "intellectual property" has become lexicon, you hear phrases like "they can do anything they want with it. It's their intellectual property." Substitute the word "copyright" in that previous sentence and it just doesn't work. By defining copyrights as a form of property, property rights go along with it.
Likewise, by defining copyright violations as a form of theft, additional punative measures go along with it. A "theif" has a clear-cut definition and a lot of cultural associations with it. Being a thief means you have deprived a rightful owner of something for personal gain, and you must return the thing and be punished. Violating copyright is something completely different. That's not to say that copyright violaters shouldn't be punished, that's to say that copyright violaters didn't deprive a rightful owner of a physical object. There are also the labels of "arsonist," "mugger," "hacker," "slanderer," "murderer," "terrorist," and "con-man." They all have different legal meanings, and different cultural associations, and should all should be punished. But to call a "hacker" a "terrorist" would be disingenuous, a clear attempt to draw an inappropriate punishment for a less severe infraction. The same is true with calling a copyright violator a "thief."
Personally I like the term "pirate." It's such an antiquated term that it lacks most of its original meaning, actual piracy is incredibly rare, and it is culturally entrenched enough to become an accepted standard. I would prefer if copyright violations kept the name copyright violations, but realistically with seven syllables it would have to be shortened in Japanese fashion to copvi, and even that might have one syllable too many. "Pirate" is a good compromise term.