To refine your analogy into, well, basically what is happening now. You own a store, and enter into an agreement with the publisher that you will attempt to sell their product, but if it doesn't sell they must refund your money and you will destroy the recordings. This is a very common arrangement in the publishing industry, where the publisher assumes some of the risk for a new product. The store fails to sell-through 90% of said product. You then tears off the covers to send to you as proof of sell-through rates, and instead of adequately destroying said material as per the contract you simply throws them in the garbage. Kids dive through your trash, and claim the abandoned material. Kids sell material to eachother and other kids.
If it is your job to destroy property X, and you fail to do so instead abandoning it, person Y has every right to pick it up and claim it. Piracy is the willful copying of an expressive medium for which you do not hold the right to do so. You were contractually obliged to destroy the medium upon which the copyrighted material was located, but failed to do so. In your MP3 situation, you violated copyright law by selling MP3's without adequately destroying the source material (abandonment does not equal destruction). In the above mentioned situation, and indeed in the one in real life, the company that threw away the patterns is guilty of breach of contract... failure to adequately destroy said property.
The dumpster divers should be in the clear on this one, in my NSHO, but the company that threw it out needs to get an incenirator or contract to a garbage company who will come onto their property to collect the dirty goods.
I believe the statement is being taken out of context. What it sounds like he is trying to say, is that due to Iraq swimming in Oil, their (already battered) economy was immune to further sanctions or diplomatic pressures. Therefore, war was the only remaining option.
A PVR-DVD-PS2 combo with CDRW capabilities, as well as a Broadband-Harddrive adaptor, is a platform shift. (Just in time too, my PS2 burned out from overuse) That, coupled with the fact that several big upcoming games require the nontrivial additions (vibrating joysticks were trivial) and you may have problems.
The DVD player gamecube was a very cool machine, but it was released early enough that it cannot be said to dillute the brand.
The X 1.5 probably won't dillute the power of the name either, as it isn't a platform shift so much as a hardware shift, something the markets have been comfortable with in the past, though it usually signals the end of life of a system.
GameFAQs presents an interesting business dilemma. The proprietars don't own the resource people come for. GameFAQs consists of FAQs which are written by amatures and whose work the authors retain the copyright upon. As an author of several pieces on that site, GameFAQs has no more right to sell my work than any other publication.
So what is being sold? A well-respected name, first of all. The rights to control which directions the site takes. The ability to more tightly integrate with Gamespot.
Is GameFaqs going to change? I tend to doubt that. As a community-driven site, I would expect that major changes would cause a backlash, and a backlash on community sites means that you not only have less visitors, but you have less authors, which in turn reduces the visitors even further, and so on.
Why would C-Net, the company that bought news.com, gamespot.com, zdnet.com, and just about every other techie site out there, buy GameFAQs? Because GameFAQs is both a good property and is profitable. The owner actually makes a living with ad sales, enough of a living to go on vacation. It's profitable, it's shining, it's relied upon by many, many gamers... It could be used to drive traffic to Gamespot, it could serve as a gateway to Gamespot's paid professional FAQs, or it could just have been bought because it was shiny and well loved, and C|net loves to buy shiny things.
I'm not too worried here. Good decision, GameFAQs guy.
Company A pays large amounts of royalties for CDs for music to be broadcast across the internet. Company A transfers the legally paid for music to another medium for internal use only, in preparation for a service that would pay an additional fee. Company B-F, represented by the RIAA, sues company A for copyright infringement.
The RIAA has been making the case for quite some time, unsuccessfully, that consumers do not have the right to meduim-shift the music they purchase licenses for. It is no surprise that they are attacking an old enemy with this old stick. If they win, they have a powerful prescident and a hobbled competitor. If they lose, they still progress in their plan to litigate threats to death.
This suit is saying that you don't have the right to make a casette copy of a CD for play in your car, a right courts have upheld time and time again.
It took you as far as The Wind 'Wanker' to realize the immaturity of this child? The comment about homosexual mushroom haircuts didn't tip you off? (BTW, while fungi exhibit both sexual and asexual reproduction, there is only one gender. QED all mushrooms are inherently homosexual.)
The kid was burned by hype and is bitter, plain and simple. While the Cube has many sequals, some of them are considered the best games in the industry right now. Nintendo has a long history of true sequals, sequals that build upon the strength of that which has come before. Anyone with a sense of history should know that, and should apply some degree of independent thought to the hype presented at E3. Resident Evil was a knockoff sequal (by Capcom, not Nintendo), a sequal which provides nothing substantively new, but nobody forced this person to buy it.
If he eloquently stated that the Game Cube needed more original titles and less sequals to draw in an experienced audience, he might have a valid point. But expressing it as a whiny diatribe based on, and I'm summarizing, "That Fa&&ot Said!" leaves the weight of presented evidence a bit underwhelming.
"Here here. This meeting of the BSA will come to order. First order of business, Bradly will bring us up to date on overall sales."
"Well, overall sales have seen a decline since the stock market crash and the attacks of Sep.11. We also saw declines during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This can be attributable to one thing: Piracy."
"How do you suggest we get our sales back up."
"Well, Bob in accounting kicked around some figures for how many units must be sold for Microsoft to meet its 100% margins, and apparently we're currently 40% below that target."
"Same as last year. Let's call it 39% just so that people think we're doing something. Now, how do we sell that much software?"
"That's the ingenious part of my plan. MS's 100% margin is based upon the case of their complete ownership of the market and complete compliance with their new Software Licencing 2.0 scheme... err, paradigm."
"Yes..."
"So obviously without viable commercial alternatives to Windows, the %100 figure represents the ideal, natural state of the market."
"Go on."
"What is the difference between the ideal sales market and the real market? Why, piracy of course. Whether it is pirated copies of Office or pirated SCO code, it all comes down to illegal piracy. Pirates pirating pirated piracies. Pirates. Pirates! Pirates! Piraaaaaates!"
"Bradly, you're locking up again. Come on back to us Bradly. Bill, would you slap Bradly please."
"Gladly."
SMACK
"Oww. Thanks. So because of this discrepancy, we should make it illegal to not meet our sales target. Then everyone from local law enforcement to the FBI will be out there trying to help us meet our sales goals. If we play our cards right, we can even be entitled to compensatory damages from the governments of the world who, after all, represent the population who is doing this pira... illegal activity (p..p..pirates. Pirates!)."
"Brilliant work Bradly. We'll get back on track towards Government 2.0 in no time."
Ok, so I've been rooting for Nintendo to make a comeback for several years. Unlike Sony, they make hardware that I would like to justify developing for. And unlike Microsoft, I don't have to feel like I'm supporting the destruction of gaming ecology.
But back to the point, with both Sony and Microsoft releasing 1.5 systems, they are going to have a hard time selling more systems in the near future. Sony especially, because the system it is releasing has new features, but whenever a new increment of a system is released and sold the people it is sold to will expect a reasonable lifetime for that system, not just a final year or two before an update. Plus, they lose some of the hype surrounding the next big system from _____, as the last big system just came out. Would we be discussing a slightly smaller X-Box if it wasn't consuming some of the interest in the next generation of systems?
Stopgap measures in the gaming industry have proven fatal for sales time and time again. With both Sony and Microsoft shooting for their toes, perhaps the Nintendo Tessaract will have a better chance in the market.
The $30 one at K-Mart and Target is, I believe, a rolodex. Unfortunately, it is fixed-purpose electronics and cannot run external programs. Not much memory, no backups, no real pen imput... It is a toy, like those little electronic things with rubber keypads in pink with Hello Kitty on the cover.
Entry level, $100 Palm based devices (From Palm, Handspring, or Sony) have an extensible, programmable OS. This allows for example, for encrypted password storage vaults, automatically synchronized web page readers, sketch programs, heirarchical planning software, thesauruses, Japanese Dictionaries... whatever someone can think of. They also generally have a greyscale screen and an adequate amount of RAM (well, sony does anyway). When you go up in price you spend more to get brightly colored screens, slightly faster processors, and model-specific features like built-in cameras, cellphones, or MP3 players.
Spend a bit more (300+)and you have a Pocket PC or Linux based device. These are larger and heavier than Palm-based PDAs, but have more compatible software (It is easier to port an existing Windows application to a Pocket PC handheld than to a Palm PDA. Same for Linux). They usually have faster processors, but slower software which take up significantly more ram. Someone else on this board can extoll the virtues of the above, I simply don't like how large and inelegant those devices can be.
Personally I find my Clie to be terrifically useful compared to the dayrunner which was too large to fit in a pocket. But not everyone does. Truthfully, if I hadn't gone out looking for useful software, it wouldn't provide any added benefit over a standard day planner.
In short, the value of one depends on what kind of person you are. Do you love technology? Do you normally keep notes digitally? Do you travel a lot, network frequently, or have an irregular schedule?
I know this whole segue is a bit offtopic, but I hope it helps.
If a driver is optimized to run a benchmark faster, that SHOULD mean that the real world apps should run faster, too. If not, the benchmark is useless.
Ahem.
If a driver is optimized to run a given program faster, that generally means they are cheating or cutting corners in some way that is application specific: like knowing the size of the arena needed to be rendered, the order of operations of the application, etc. Optimizing a card for Quake 3 will only speed up gameplay under Quake 3 (and possibly derivitaves).
Benchmarks are there to test unoptimized speeds... to provide a level playing field for the comparison of future or unoptimized games. Optimizations for a benchmark will generally be useless to all the other applications out there, and will therefore present a false pretext of speed.
Futuremark is arguing (rather poorly) that an optimized driver for a benchmark represents a rough number for comparing speed on other optimized titles. But the application-specific altercations to the driver are not beneficial to the other applications, merely supposedly representative of what the card is capable in artificial circumstances.
If an optimization of a card is generalized and applies to more than just one program, it is considered a speed-up, and warm fuzzies are handed out.
Futuremark Statement: Paragraph 1: We're making a statement. Paragraph 2: nVidia didn't really cheat. Paragraph 3: Most computer games cheat. Paragraph 4: We don't allow companies to cheat in their code. Paragraph 5: Therefore, we should cheat in ours.
Nvidia Statement: They should have worked with us for a better cheat.
Joint Statement:We should all cheat together.
Footer 1: Futuremark rocks. Footer 2: Don't steal our IP. Footer 3: Nvidia rocks. Footer 4: Really it does. Footer 5: Of course, we could be lying. Footer 6: Don't steal our IP.
But it does pose an interesting technical question: how does one bypass the V-Chip? Assuming the V-chip only blocks audio and video transmissions, a simple bridge might suffice. However, the industry might have come up with a few more difficult technical hurdles, despite having to retain backwards compatability.
Does anyone have a pinout diagram for a V-Chip? I can't seem to google one.
Right, and why bother upgrading to XP on your existing computer when you should just buy one freshly pre-installed from Dell? Why replace the cracked screen on your PDA when it isn't nearly as fast or as colorful as the latest and greatest? Your car is five years old: It will break down any minute. You should chuck it and buy a new one. Why go through the hassle?
You don't know how technology works anyway. Even if you did, you wouldn't know how this one would work, so don't bother trying. It's safer and easier to throw it out and get a new replacement than it is to diagnose a problem and improvise a solution. There is a reason electronics ship in black boxes, right?
(You did buy the extended warranty didn't you?)
This comment shouldn't be modded "insightful." It should be modded "sad."
Likewise, the N64 could have marked the begining of the end for Nintendo's set top consoles. With a poor library of games and the beginning of horrid developer relations, many lost faith with the big N for their lack of judgment. Now, despite the few beneficial qualities of the GC (great first party titles, excelent hardware engineering, etc.), I hear many people making statemets about Nintendo that are very similar to the gripes that most held with Sega prior to the fall of the DC.
This one is wise in the ways of the force.
Allow me to remind you of one of the main problems with the N64/Ultra64. It was called "Project Reality," and it consisted of teaming up with the most prominent graphics developer of the time, specing out an insane level of polygon-pushing power, and waiting for years until Moore's law caught up to ship. Killer Instinct, the title that Nintendo invested too much social capital in to prove the power of the system, not only failed to ship in a timely fashion, but the N64 version failed to fully re-create the somewhat lackluster and cheeze-friendly arcade game experience. The SNES version, the only one available for many months to die-hard players, was downright pathetic.
After years (and years and years) of waiting for the product to ship "real soon now," ultimately it underdelivered on everything except for Mario, a game that the developers crammed into a whopping 64mb. Square, and many others, balked at such pithy restrictions.
One of my points, is that Nintendo has a Looooooooooooong history of vaporware stall tactics. Any reports that they will be shipping in 2005 should be taken with a rather large grain of salt. No ship date from them should ever be taken seriously unless there is hardware in developer's hands and developers are looking at 50-90% finished software (that didn't save the *ahem* Nintendo Playstation, mind you, but they managed to vaporware that for years until the Sega CD issue died of its own accord).
The other one, is that people buy console names as if they were buying a consumer format. Sega = Betamax, Sony = DVD, Nintendo = VHS. Perhaps console companies like Nintendo should disappear after losing public interest, and re-emerge as a completely re-branded machine with no use of the prior name except as a 1st party developer. Sega's name as a company hindered the sales of dreamcasts, but help software sales. Perhaps Nintendo should cloak themselves in an unrelated name, such as "The Otaku" selling "The Otaku Tessaract," which happens to have Nintendo as a prominent second-party developer.
We know that the longer Apple uses the PowerPC platform, the less likely the possibility of it switching to an Intel/AMD platform becomes.
You know, the longer Apple has been around, the more likely it has become. Years ago there was only broad speculation. Now there is a feasibility build. Give it another 10 years and they will have a *BSD/OSX combination running happily, and with enough proprietary hardware to make it worth Apple's while.
Why they would do such a financially suicidal thing is beyond me (though I would be very happy if they did), but the idea that they must do so soon or risk missing out is a bit unfounded.
For notes, nothing beats the Paper and Pen system. You can edit, revise, and imput in a non-linear fashion. You can do such without annoying your classmates. As most notes will never be looked over again anyway, it is a great form of muscle memory that other imput sources just can't match.
For scheduling, a PDA. A $100 clie should be just fine, with a protective case of some sort.
Timmy should bring a bike, too. Don't buy Timmy a car, or else he will discover drinking, dancing, and dating. He'll probably also get a job, take up hobbies... Basically he will mature and have a real life. But you want them to study all of the time, so keep them on campus with a bicycle.
Timmy needs a whiteboard to communicate with his roommates. F2F interaction can be so daunting, and it's much easier to write "If you have to study at 6 in the morning on a Saturday, turn the #@*$ing radio off," than it is to pull yourself out of your hangover long enough to be comprehensibly annoyed.
Likewise, a Cellular phone with free nationwide long distance is a lot cheaper than a landline, especially when Timmy discoveres the love of his life is a graduate student of Journalism at Colombia University in New York City. Besides, that way you might actually have a chance of speaking to your cutie-wootie widdle child, rather than his roommate who can only speak in Simpsons quotes.
If a laptop is too pricey for our little Timmy, look into a USB keychain drive. Assuming the campus lab people only disable the running of executables and not the mounting of drives, you can keep a lot of papers on a 128MB partition.
Our Timmy is obviously going to be spending a lot of time at the lab... He needs a portable Swedish Foam pillow. Hardworking college students need to get the idea that they will be sleeping in labs, between classes, at the library, at binges... Basically there is no reason for a college student to actually be in their room. And neck pains kill productivity, so a good portable pillow is worth it's weight in percocets.
Speaking of percocets, you might want to give your child an ACLU approved booklet of what to do when you get arrested.
What we need is not a postal system that reduces our mailing address from three human-decipherable lines to one line of machinespeak (how many people know their zip+4 extension?), but a postal address that follows you wherever you go.
Using such codes as forwarding addresses would be great. You could update your address at a central database controlled by the postoffice, and all mail going to "FWD: NiceGuy101, USA" could be routed to the appropriate person, whether they just left for college, moved down the street, left for their summer home, or what have you. Perhaps the service would cost 5 dollars per month, which would recoup the costs of the printer ink required to mark the letters with appropriate routing barcodes. A simple but effective service.
80BFH 2X2KZ? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me...
The article claims that these will be universal codes for all over the world, but what about for countries that don't use the standard western alphabet?
Isn't that what unicode is for? And what could be more simple than remembering the bit-equivalent of unicode kanji?
Re:This game raises a few questions
on
Matrix MMORPG
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Four, how will a squad-based 5-good-guys-against-the-world movie translate into an individualistic 20 million good guys against the 3 agents game? A large part of the ambiance of the Matrix came from the sense of isolation. What happens when there are so many people that you want to move to a different server? Hopefully they will take a cue from PSO and make it a squad-based MMPORPG that isn't really MMP.
Five, what will the player do to level up? How many innocents must you kill to get superman flight? Experience is obviously earned by fighting, but I would question the "richness" of the Matrix world as it currently stands to support a sufficiently large variety of expendable mook cows. Another run down the casino to kill guards? Or at the bank to kill... guards?
Six, is there sufficient variety in a dirty city to keep the game visually interesting? Two hours staring at subways and dirty apartments isn't that taxing, but two months? I already live in a dirty apartment. Does The Matrix provide enough potential set pieces to keep people visually stimulated? Or will that subtle shade of green drive everyone nuts.
Nobody is "bypassing" a copy protection scheme. Nobody is breaking in order to enter.
What we have here is a third-party decryptor. It's a viewer that walks right through the front door with a perfectly legitimate key. There is no breaking, there is no crowbar. The "copy protection" offered by the current arrangement is not the actual process of encryption / decryption, but that duplication is not a feature of devices that can decrypt. DeCSS also does not duplicate a DVD except in a court-accepted medium necessary for playback, and DeCSS does not itself contain any code that would duplicate the output.
What DeCSS offers is a videostream comparable though sharper than what one would recieve streaming out of the back of their DVD players, a point of compromise that is accepted in the current generation of hardware. It doesn't "bypass" the encryption the way a sidestreet "bypasses" the highway, it decrypts in the same way that all other players decrypt.
The legality of the key and the derivative keys might be in question, but the key poses no actual artistic or expressive merit and therefore is not covered under copyright law. It might be covered under trade secrets law if it had been leaked, but it was left unprotected and lying around. If a reporter publishes information found in a file that was left at a resturant, they have not broken any trade secret laws because the information was not at all protected. Patent law? Nothing new here.
The Key is legal under pre-DMCA law, in short, and using a legal key to unlock a legal door is, to stretch an analogy, legal. Now, is the Key a method of bypassing copy protection schemes? Once again, no, as it is the accepted way to view DVD's in standard players.
In essence, the only thing that could throw the book at DeCSS, is if the DMCA granted exclusive and transferrable right directly or indirectly to the original creator of the medium to create players compatible with that medium. This would of course create a fourth-type of IP law. Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks would be joined by Medium rights, or the rights to oversee and control an entire Medium. Somehow I doubt any court would rule that was the intention of congress when enacting this law.
Sadly, I don't get to decide which arguments the judge will believe. Likely, we will see the proliferation of these controls until such a time as it becomes so bad as to warrant congressional intervention.
The industry's point of view (and backed up by law) is not that they've sold you something, but that you've bought a license. Which means that they get to tell you the terms by which you can use it.
Try convincing your friendly local computer store that you disagree with the click-through license of the software you have bought and therefore have every right to return it, opened, for a full refund, as per the agreement in the license. Except for Frys (who will take anything back), I haven't had any bites.
The industry is a bit delusional about the enforcibility of unreasonable conditions of the licenses they sell, and many don't hold up in court for that very reason. Contract law is not black-and-white, but requires the active participation of both parties and is more enforceable the more compromise is involved.
And BTW, Ford still owns the copyright on the car you purchased. You can't duplicate the artistic expression parts of the design without Ford's permission*. But the courts have upheld your right to export that vehicle and sell it elsewhere. If Ford suddenly decided that they wanted regional protection on their cars so that subsidiaries wouldn't be competing with eachother, the courts probably wouldn't uphold such a clause.
Despite what the industry might want you to believe, you HAVE bought something physical in addition to the license, and the rights granted to you by the industry are those rights which the industry has legal control over. Additional conditions, whereby the user gives up rights (such as the right to complain about a product without the company's permission) have largely been struck down in court.
Before you know it, we'll have "sticker through" licenses on fruit, saying that you can only eat this fruit on fine Corningware(tm) brand dinnerware.
*Doesn't apply to boat hulls except in Florida. Don't ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
That is piracy, at that point.
Breach of contract, I believe.
To refine your analogy into, well, basically what is happening now. You own a store, and enter into an agreement with the publisher that you will attempt to sell their product, but if it doesn't sell they must refund your money and you will destroy the recordings. This is a very common arrangement in the publishing industry, where the publisher assumes some of the risk for a new product. The store fails to sell-through 90% of said product. You then tears off the covers to send to you as proof of sell-through rates, and instead of adequately destroying said material as per the contract you simply throws them in the garbage. Kids dive through your trash, and claim the abandoned material. Kids sell material to eachother and other kids.
If it is your job to destroy property X, and you fail to do so instead abandoning it, person Y has every right to pick it up and claim it. Piracy is the willful copying of an expressive medium for which you do not hold the right to do so. You were contractually obliged to destroy the medium upon which the copyrighted material was located, but failed to do so. In your MP3 situation, you violated copyright law by selling MP3's without adequately destroying the source material (abandonment does not equal destruction). In the above mentioned situation, and indeed in the one in real life, the company that threw away the patterns is guilty of breach of contract... failure to adequately destroy said property.
The dumpster divers should be in the clear on this one, in my NSHO, but the company that threw it out needs to get an incenirator or contract to a garbage company who will come onto their property to collect the dirty goods.
I believe the statement is being taken out of context. What it sounds like he is trying to say, is that due to Iraq swimming in Oil, their (already battered) economy was immune to further sanctions or diplomatic pressures. Therefore, war was the only remaining option.
I really hope that's what he meant to say.
My goodness, can you imagine what would happen if we found an Earth-sized planet that was alive? What would it eat?
It would be like the Transformers Movie all over again.
A PVR-DVD-PS2 combo with CDRW capabilities, as well as a Broadband-Harddrive adaptor, is a platform shift. (Just in time too, my PS2 burned out from overuse) That, coupled with the fact that several big upcoming games require the nontrivial additions (vibrating joysticks were trivial) and you may have problems.
The DVD player gamecube was a very cool machine, but it was released early enough that it cannot be said to dillute the brand.
The X 1.5 probably won't dillute the power of the name either, as it isn't a platform shift so much as a hardware shift, something the markets have been comfortable with in the past, though it usually signals the end of life of a system.
GameFAQs presents an interesting business dilemma. The proprietars don't own the resource people come for. GameFAQs consists of FAQs which are written by amatures and whose work the authors retain the copyright upon. As an author of several pieces on that site, GameFAQs has no more right to sell my work than any other publication.
So what is being sold? A well-respected name, first of all. The rights to control which directions the site takes. The ability to more tightly integrate with Gamespot.
Is GameFaqs going to change? I tend to doubt that. As a community-driven site, I would expect that major changes would cause a backlash, and a backlash on community sites means that you not only have less visitors, but you have less authors, which in turn reduces the visitors even further, and so on.
Why would C-Net, the company that bought news.com, gamespot.com, zdnet.com, and just about every other techie site out there, buy GameFAQs? Because GameFAQs is both a good property and is profitable. The owner actually makes a living with ad sales, enough of a living to go on vacation. It's profitable, it's shining, it's relied upon by many, many gamers... It could be used to drive traffic to Gamespot, it could serve as a gateway to Gamespot's paid professional FAQs, or it could just have been bought because it was shiny and well loved, and C|net loves to buy shiny things.
I'm not too worried here. Good decision, GameFAQs guy.
Company A pays large amounts of royalties for CDs for music to be broadcast across the internet. Company A transfers the legally paid for music to another medium for internal use only, in preparation for a service that would pay an additional fee. Company B-F, represented by the RIAA, sues company A for copyright infringement.
The RIAA has been making the case for quite some time, unsuccessfully, that consumers do not have the right to meduim-shift the music they purchase licenses for. It is no surprise that they are attacking an old enemy with this old stick. If they win, they have a powerful prescident and a hobbled competitor. If they lose, they still progress in their plan to litigate threats to death.
This suit is saying that you don't have the right to make a casette copy of a CD for play in your car, a right courts have upheld time and time again.
Frivolous.
It took you as far as The Wind 'Wanker' to realize the immaturity of this child? The comment about homosexual mushroom haircuts didn't tip you off? (BTW, while fungi exhibit both sexual and asexual reproduction, there is only one gender. QED all mushrooms are inherently homosexual.)
The kid was burned by hype and is bitter, plain and simple. While the Cube has many sequals, some of them are considered the best games in the industry right now. Nintendo has a long history of true sequals, sequals that build upon the strength of that which has come before. Anyone with a sense of history should know that, and should apply some degree of independent thought to the hype presented at E3. Resident Evil was a knockoff sequal (by Capcom, not Nintendo), a sequal which provides nothing substantively new, but nobody forced this person to buy it.
If he eloquently stated that the Game Cube needed more original titles and less sequals to draw in an experienced audience, he might have a valid point. But expressing it as a whiny diatribe based on, and I'm summarizing, "That Fa&&ot Said!" leaves the weight of presented evidence a bit underwhelming.
"Here here. This meeting of the BSA will come to order. First order of business, Bradly will bring us up to date on overall sales."
"Well, overall sales have seen a decline since the stock market crash and the attacks of Sep.11. We also saw declines during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This can be attributable to one thing: Piracy."
"How do you suggest we get our sales back up."
"Well, Bob in accounting kicked around some figures for how many units must be sold for Microsoft to meet its 100% margins, and apparently we're currently 40% below that target."
"Same as last year. Let's call it 39% just so that people think we're doing something. Now, how do we sell that much software?"
"That's the ingenious part of my plan. MS's 100% margin is based upon the case of their complete ownership of the market and complete compliance with their new Software Licencing 2.0 scheme... err, paradigm."
"Yes..."
"So obviously without viable commercial alternatives to Windows, the %100 figure represents the ideal, natural state of the market."
"Go on."
"What is the difference between the ideal sales market and the real market? Why, piracy of course. Whether it is pirated copies of Office or pirated SCO code, it all comes down to illegal piracy. Pirates pirating pirated piracies. Pirates. Pirates! Pirates! Piraaaaaates!"
"Bradly, you're locking up again. Come on back to us Bradly. Bill, would you slap Bradly please."
"Gladly."
SMACK
"Oww. Thanks. So because of this discrepancy, we should make it illegal to not meet our sales target. Then everyone from local law enforcement to the FBI will be out there trying to help us meet our sales goals. If we play our cards right, we can even be entitled to compensatory damages from the governments of the world who, after all, represent the population who is doing this pira... illegal activity (p..p..pirates. Pirates!)."
"Brilliant work Bradly. We'll get back on track towards Government 2.0 in no time."
"Thank you Mr. Ballmer."
Ok, so I've been rooting for Nintendo to make a comeback for several years. Unlike Sony, they make hardware that I would like to justify developing for. And unlike Microsoft, I don't have to feel like I'm supporting the destruction of gaming ecology.
But back to the point, with both Sony and Microsoft releasing 1.5 systems, they are going to have a hard time selling more systems in the near future. Sony especially, because the system it is releasing has new features, but whenever a new increment of a system is released and sold the people it is sold to will expect a reasonable lifetime for that system, not just a final year or two before an update. Plus, they lose some of the hype surrounding the next big system from _____, as the last big system just came out. Would we be discussing a slightly smaller X-Box if it wasn't consuming some of the interest in the next generation of systems?
Stopgap measures in the gaming industry have proven fatal for sales time and time again. With both Sony and Microsoft shooting for their toes, perhaps the Nintendo Tessaract will have a better chance in the market.
The $30 one at K-Mart and Target is, I believe, a rolodex. Unfortunately, it is fixed-purpose electronics and cannot run external programs. Not much memory, no backups, no real pen imput... It is a toy, like those little electronic things with rubber keypads in pink with Hello Kitty on the cover.
Entry level, $100 Palm based devices (From Palm, Handspring, or Sony) have an extensible, programmable OS. This allows for example, for encrypted password storage vaults, automatically synchronized web page readers, sketch programs, heirarchical planning software, thesauruses, Japanese Dictionaries... whatever someone can think of. They also generally have a greyscale screen and an adequate amount of RAM (well, sony does anyway). When you go up in price you spend more to get brightly colored screens, slightly faster processors, and model-specific features like built-in cameras, cellphones, or MP3 players.
Spend a bit more (300+)and you have a Pocket PC or Linux based device. These are larger and heavier than Palm-based PDAs, but have more compatible software (It is easier to port an existing Windows application to a Pocket PC handheld than to a Palm PDA. Same for Linux). They usually have faster processors, but slower software which take up significantly more ram. Someone else on this board can extoll the virtues of the above, I simply don't like how large and inelegant those devices can be.
Personally I find my Clie to be terrifically useful compared to the dayrunner which was too large to fit in a pocket. But not everyone does. Truthfully, if I hadn't gone out looking for useful software, it wouldn't provide any added benefit over a standard day planner.
In short, the value of one depends on what kind of person you are. Do you love technology? Do you normally keep notes digitally? Do you travel a lot, network frequently, or have an irregular schedule?
I know this whole segue is a bit offtopic, but I hope it helps.
Ok, I can completely understand an "overrated" rating, but "offtopic?"
If a driver is optimized to run a benchmark faster, that SHOULD mean that the real world apps should run faster, too. If not, the benchmark is useless.
Ahem.
If a driver is optimized to run a given program faster, that generally means they are cheating or cutting corners in some way that is application specific: like knowing the size of the arena needed to be rendered, the order of operations of the application, etc. Optimizing a card for Quake 3 will only speed up gameplay under Quake 3 (and possibly derivitaves).
Benchmarks are there to test unoptimized speeds... to provide a level playing field for the comparison of future or unoptimized games. Optimizations for a benchmark will generally be useless to all the other applications out there, and will therefore present a false pretext of speed.
Futuremark is arguing (rather poorly) that an optimized driver for a benchmark represents a rough number for comparing speed on other optimized titles. But the application-specific altercations to the driver are not beneficial to the other applications, merely supposedly representative of what the card is capable in artificial circumstances.
If an optimization of a card is generalized and applies to more than just one program, it is considered a speed-up, and warm fuzzies are handed out.
Futuremark Statement:
Paragraph 1: We're making a statement.
Paragraph 2: nVidia didn't really cheat.
Paragraph 3: Most computer games cheat.
Paragraph 4: We don't allow companies to cheat in their code.
Paragraph 5: Therefore, we should cheat in ours.
Nvidia Statement: They should have worked with us for a better cheat.
Joint Statement:We should all cheat together.
Footer 1: Futuremark rocks.
Footer 2: Don't steal our IP.
Footer 3: Nvidia rocks.
Footer 4: Really it does.
Footer 5: Of course, we could be lying.
Footer 6: Don't steal our IP.
I know, I know, not freeware. Yet everyone seems to have a copy.
a creative pro article about correcting barrel distortion, and one at Fred Miranda.
Will you be able to go to Zion and fly around on hoverships? And will you be able to break out of THAT Matrix?
I can't help but think the solution to the entire game will be to put down the keyboard and go outside.
But it does pose an interesting technical question: how does one bypass the V-Chip? Assuming the V-chip only blocks audio and video transmissions, a simple bridge might suffice. However, the industry might have come up with a few more difficult technical hurdles, despite having to retain backwards compatability.
Does anyone have a pinout diagram for a V-Chip? I can't seem to google one.
Right, and why bother upgrading to XP on your existing computer when you should just buy one freshly pre-installed from Dell? Why replace the cracked screen on your PDA when it isn't nearly as fast or as colorful as the latest and greatest? Your car is five years old: It will break down any minute. You should chuck it and buy a new one. Why go through the hassle?
You don't know how technology works anyway. Even if you did, you wouldn't know how this one would work, so don't bother trying. It's safer and easier to throw it out and get a new replacement than it is to diagnose a problem and improvise a solution. There is a reason electronics ship in black boxes, right?
(You did buy the extended warranty didn't you?)
This comment shouldn't be modded "insightful." It should be modded "sad."
Likewise, the N64 could have marked the begining of the end for Nintendo's set top consoles. With a poor library of games and the beginning of horrid developer relations, many lost faith with the big N for their lack of judgment. Now, despite the few beneficial qualities of the GC (great first party titles, excelent hardware engineering, etc.), I hear many people making statemets about Nintendo that are very similar to the gripes that most held with Sega prior to the fall of the DC.
This one is wise in the ways of the force.
Allow me to remind you of one of the main problems with the N64/Ultra64. It was called "Project Reality," and it consisted of teaming up with the most prominent graphics developer of the time, specing out an insane level of polygon-pushing power, and waiting for years until Moore's law caught up to ship. Killer Instinct, the title that Nintendo invested too much social capital in to prove the power of the system, not only failed to ship in a timely fashion, but the N64 version failed to fully re-create the somewhat lackluster and cheeze-friendly arcade game experience. The SNES version, the only one available for many months to die-hard players, was downright pathetic.
After years (and years and years) of waiting for the product to ship "real soon now," ultimately it underdelivered on everything except for Mario, a game that the developers crammed into a whopping 64mb. Square, and many others, balked at such pithy restrictions.
One of my points, is that Nintendo has a Looooooooooooong history of vaporware stall tactics. Any reports that they will be shipping in 2005 should be taken with a rather large grain of salt. No ship date from them should ever be taken seriously unless there is hardware in developer's hands and developers are looking at 50-90% finished software (that didn't save the *ahem* Nintendo Playstation, mind you, but they managed to vaporware that for years until the Sega CD issue died of its own accord).
The other one, is that people buy console names as if they were buying a consumer format. Sega = Betamax, Sony = DVD, Nintendo = VHS. Perhaps console companies like Nintendo should disappear after losing public interest, and re-emerge as a completely re-branded machine with no use of the prior name except as a 1st party developer. Sega's name as a company hindered the sales of dreamcasts, but help software sales. Perhaps Nintendo should cloak themselves in an unrelated name, such as "The Otaku" selling "The Otaku Tessaract," which happens to have Nintendo as a prominent second-party developer.
We know that the longer Apple uses the PowerPC platform, the less likely the possibility of it switching to an Intel/AMD platform becomes.
You know, the longer Apple has been around, the more likely it has become. Years ago there was only broad speculation. Now there is a feasibility build. Give it another 10 years and they will have a *BSD/OSX combination running happily, and with enough proprietary hardware to make it worth Apple's while.
Why they would do such a financially suicidal thing is beyond me (though I would be very happy if they did), but the idea that they must do so soon or risk missing out is a bit unfounded.
For notes, nothing beats the Paper and Pen system. You can edit, revise, and imput in a non-linear fashion. You can do such without annoying your classmates. As most notes will never be looked over again anyway, it is a great form of muscle memory that other imput sources just can't match.
For scheduling, a PDA. A $100 clie should be just fine, with a protective case of some sort.
Timmy should bring a bike, too. Don't buy Timmy a car, or else he will discover drinking, dancing, and dating. He'll probably also get a job, take up hobbies... Basically he will mature and have a real life. But you want them to study all of the time, so keep them on campus with a bicycle.
Timmy needs a whiteboard to communicate with his roommates. F2F interaction can be so daunting, and it's much easier to write "If you have to study at 6 in the morning on a Saturday, turn the #@*$ing radio off," than it is to pull yourself out of your hangover long enough to be comprehensibly annoyed.
Likewise, a Cellular phone with free nationwide long distance is a lot cheaper than a landline, especially when Timmy discoveres the love of his life is a graduate student of Journalism at Colombia University in New York City. Besides, that way you might actually have a chance of speaking to your cutie-wootie widdle child, rather than his roommate who can only speak in Simpsons quotes.
If a laptop is too pricey for our little Timmy, look into a USB keychain drive. Assuming the campus lab people only disable the running of executables and not the mounting of drives, you can keep a lot of papers on a 128MB partition.
Our Timmy is obviously going to be spending a lot of time at the lab... He needs a portable Swedish Foam pillow. Hardworking college students need to get the idea that they will be sleeping in labs, between classes, at the library, at binges... Basically there is no reason for a college student to actually be in their room. And neck pains kill productivity, so a good portable pillow is worth it's weight in percocets.
Speaking of percocets, you might want to give your child an ACLU approved booklet of what to do when you get arrested.
What we need is not a postal system that reduces our mailing address from three human-decipherable lines to one line of machinespeak (how many people know their zip+4 extension?), but a postal address that follows you wherever you go.
Using such codes as forwarding addresses would be great. You could update your address at a central database controlled by the postoffice, and all mail going to "FWD: NiceGuy101, USA" could be routed to the appropriate person, whether they just left for college, moved down the street, left for their summer home, or what have you. Perhaps the service would cost 5 dollars per month, which would recoup the costs of the printer ink required to mark the letters with appropriate routing barcodes. A simple but effective service.
80BFH 2X2KZ? That doesn't sound like an improvement to me...
The article claims that these will be universal codes for all over the world, but what about for countries that don't use the standard western alphabet?
Isn't that what unicode is for? And what could be more simple than remembering the bit-equivalent of unicode kanji?
Four, how will a squad-based 5-good-guys-against-the-world movie translate into an individualistic 20 million good guys against the 3 agents game? A large part of the ambiance of the Matrix came from the sense of isolation. What happens when there are so many people that you want to move to a different server? Hopefully they will take a cue from PSO and make it a squad-based MMPORPG that isn't really MMP.
Five, what will the player do to level up? How many innocents must you kill to get superman flight? Experience is obviously earned by fighting, but I would question the "richness" of the Matrix world as it currently stands to support a sufficiently large variety of expendable mook cows. Another run down the casino to kill guards? Or at the bank to kill... guards?
Six, is there sufficient variety in a dirty city to keep the game visually interesting? Two hours staring at subways and dirty apartments isn't that taxing, but two months? I already live in a dirty apartment. Does The Matrix provide enough potential set pieces to keep people visually stimulated? Or will that subtle shade of green drive everyone nuts.
You bring up an interesting point.
Nobody is "bypassing" a copy protection scheme. Nobody is breaking in order to enter.
What we have here is a third-party decryptor. It's a viewer that walks right through the front door with a perfectly legitimate key. There is no breaking, there is no crowbar. The "copy protection" offered by the current arrangement is not the actual process of encryption / decryption, but that duplication is not a feature of devices that can decrypt. DeCSS also does not duplicate a DVD except in a court-accepted medium necessary for playback, and DeCSS does not itself contain any code that would duplicate the output.
What DeCSS offers is a videostream comparable though sharper than what one would recieve streaming out of the back of their DVD players, a point of compromise that is accepted in the current generation of hardware. It doesn't "bypass" the encryption the way a sidestreet "bypasses" the highway, it decrypts in the same way that all other players decrypt.
The legality of the key and the derivative keys might be in question, but the key poses no actual artistic or expressive merit and therefore is not covered under copyright law. It might be covered under trade secrets law if it had been leaked, but it was left unprotected and lying around. If a reporter publishes information found in a file that was left at a resturant, they have not broken any trade secret laws because the information was not at all protected. Patent law? Nothing new here.
The Key is legal under pre-DMCA law, in short, and using a legal key to unlock a legal door is, to stretch an analogy, legal. Now, is the Key a method of bypassing copy protection schemes? Once again, no, as it is the accepted way to view DVD's in standard players.
In essence, the only thing that could throw the book at DeCSS, is if the DMCA granted exclusive and transferrable right directly or indirectly to the original creator of the medium to create players compatible with that medium. This would of course create a fourth-type of IP law. Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks would be joined by Medium rights, or the rights to oversee and control an entire Medium. Somehow I doubt any court would rule that was the intention of congress when enacting this law.
Sadly, I don't get to decide which arguments the judge will believe. Likely, we will see the proliferation of these controls until such a time as it becomes so bad as to warrant congressional intervention.
The industry's point of view (and backed up by law) is not that they've sold you something, but that you've bought a license. Which means that they get to tell you the terms by which you can use it.
Try convincing your friendly local computer store that you disagree with the click-through license of the software you have bought and therefore have every right to return it, opened, for a full refund, as per the agreement in the license. Except for Frys (who will take anything back), I haven't had any bites.
The industry is a bit delusional about the enforcibility of unreasonable conditions of the licenses they sell, and many don't hold up in court for that very reason. Contract law is not black-and-white, but requires the active participation of both parties and is more enforceable the more compromise is involved.
And BTW, Ford still owns the copyright on the car you purchased. You can't duplicate the artistic expression parts of the design without Ford's permission*. But the courts have upheld your right to export that vehicle and sell it elsewhere. If Ford suddenly decided that they wanted regional protection on their cars so that subsidiaries wouldn't be competing with eachother, the courts probably wouldn't uphold such a clause.
Despite what the industry might want you to believe, you HAVE bought something physical in addition to the license, and the rights granted to you by the industry are those rights which the industry has legal control over. Additional conditions, whereby the user gives up rights (such as the right to complain about a product without the company's permission) have largely been struck down in court.
Before you know it, we'll have "sticker through" licenses on fruit, saying that you can only eat this fruit on fine Corningware(tm) brand dinnerware.
*Doesn't apply to boat hulls except in Florida. Don't ask me.