Secret 1: Outsource everything. Secret 2: Employees are interchangeable. Secret 3: Good enough is probably too expensive. Secret 4: There is still at least enough good will for the HP name to milk another five years.
That's extremely damning. For those following along at home, this is the image up on Commodore USA's website, and this is the original image from ten years ago. The difference? The image up on Commodore USA's website has a bad photoshop hack job of removing the word "fantasy" from the top right of the keyboard, and the word fantasy from the mouse cord (and the cord itself). It still attributes the image to Marko Hirv.
I don't think there can be more irrefutable proof that this is a scam.
On less straightforward fronts, The Phantom console was an outright scam and The Gizmondo was a way of laundering money. Both of these smelled incredibly fishy to tech journalists. And a properly informing press would tell their clients that neither of these developers seemed on the up-and-up. For the first year or two the press gave The Phantom a mostly free pass, allowing investors to be suckered into pouring money into an organization that didn't seem to be producing anything other than doctored screenshots. Eventually the press started drawing conclusions and doing actual reporting. And, lo and behold, there wasn't any "there" there.
Gizmondo's failed initial launch and failed re-launch were so short lived, that nobody reported about the console's strange development and unlikelyhood of surviving in the marketplace until after a rather spectacular flare up.
Either way, call a spade a spade. The worldwide Amiga people claim that Commodore USA has no such rights. Commodore USA doesn't appear to have actually shipped any of the products it offers and sells. Oh, and their "legal department" has now been confirmed to be one non-lawyer copying and pasting takedown notices incorrectly. It probably is a con.
If you were sending out a legal letter about defamation, would you do so while indulging in copyright infringement?
Similarly, not only was the take down notice embarrassingly amateurish and potentially criminal, it was an attempt to take down an article that claimed they were embarrassingly amateurish and potentially criminals. I could definitely see this takedown notice being used by the defense in a civil proceeding to show the article's merit.
The parallax barrier screens I've seen have a few sweet spots, that were about 2 feet apart from eachother around the front at a distance of about 15 feet. These degraded a bit the farther offcenter you got, but they worked.. I presume if these things make it into the home, you'll adjust the barrier a bit so that the sweet spots hit the sides of your couch, and / or major recliner. And that people will slide over a few feet in a given direction to see the screen.
Of course, for stereo vision at home you need a display capable of 120 Hz cycling, a little bluetooth dongle for timing, shutter glasses, and a relatively recent iteration of HDMI. All of these things the television makers have already done, and done cheaply. Now they're hoping to upsell this existing technology for a premium,
The Sega Master System had 3d shutter glasses almost 30 years ago. It worked rather well, actually. But without the CPU strength to do much with the 3D, the $100 premium that the glasses system added was too much for most people. Now we have a nice convergence of system strength, affordable screens, and an industry desperate for something past "HD!" to keep prices up.
I'd argue that 3D for games isn't just a gimmick, but actually makes you a better player.
In driving games, knowing how far away a corner is can mean the difference between success and crashing horribly. Similarly, if you're lobbing a grenade at an opponent, you need to have an intuitive sense for how far away they are. In traditional 2D games, you have to build in lots of visual cues (straight lines, false shadows, distance blur, etc) to get even partway decent 3D estimations by your players. 3D screens, on the other hand, give a real and immediate sense in a completely natural way.
1. Resolution. They're tremendously expensive to make at any sort of resolution. You know that super-high definition LCD screen they finally came out with for the iPhone? That's still way too big for one eye of a visor, and not high enough resolution. Lower resolution screens just look like lots and lots of pixels.
2. Focus. Because of 1, there are lots of optical tricks used to get a higher-resolution image from a larger source down to the size needed to display at your eyes. That all takes focusing of various lenses, and that all goes blurry the moment you do anything unexpected.
3. Lag. Your brain immediately notices when the world isn't following your eyes. They're getting better, but lag on these things (last time I tried one) doesn't seem to be going away entirely.
4. Head Mount. You can spend hours fitting a bicycle helmet to your head, and it still wiggles like mad. Head Mounts just aren't that solid. Which means the helmet wiggles a bit around your head. Which means the world wiggles a bit around your head. Ew.
5. Too Private. This is a big issue that Nintendo bumped up into with the Virtual Boy. If nobody can watch you play, playing video games becomes an inherently anti-social activity.
By the way, Full-sized parallax barrier screens, like the one in the 3DS, have been available in Asia for some time. Due to content shortages, they're mostly relegated to displays. But they're out there, and they work.
Try Wario Land for the Virtual Boy. There are levels where the far background does not parallax (appear to scroll more slowly because it is farther away), but does appear to be farther back in the 3D effect. The worst is a moment in level 2, where the background appears to be deep away in 3D, and it parallaxes correctly horizontally, but breaks parallax scrolling completely vertically. I nearly threw up when I saw that.
In the article, they mention a problem with crosshairs popping forward and back too rapidly in 3-space. You could probably do something with a spring system and friction. And you might want to do some degree of scaling up and down for distance, but not a real amount. That's all degrees of polish, which we won't really understand well until several titles come out attacking the problem in different ways.
I did the LA->San Jose drive up I5 about once every two months for four years. Maybe it has slowed down in the 10 years since I've moved out to Boston, but on I5 between San Jose and the Grapevine I could usually set the cruise control at 90, and just go for hours. At night, you used to get a bunch of trucks that would all cruise together at about 100. 580 over the bay at 4 AM also had a huge average speed for the few cars that were out there. A group of us cars were casually rolling along at 110, when we had a cop pass us at about 130. Similarly, a commute up 280 at 7pm or so fluctuated between 70 and 90 mph or so as a normal traffic speed. Those last two routes I only did for two months, but I did a full trip round the bay every day. You'd better believe I figured out which roads had the fastest average speeds.
The police must have been clamping down on speeding recently. I can't imagine any other reason for the numbers you're coming up with. Trucks rarely exceeding 55 mph? I never used to see those guys doing anything less than 70. Most of the time they defined the speed of traffic, and they were in a rush. You're not in any sort of official-looking vehicle, are you?
All things considered, this could be the safety required for a roadway with those speeds. Or it could just be that Germany engineering is so much better than the crap the rest of the world puts up with. Having driven safely at 110 MPH on freeways in California (once being passed by a cop doing about 130), I'm guessing they're just being German.
People drive 90mph already on those roads anyway. Highway 5 in California has stretches that routinely flow-of-traffic at my car's electronically limited top speed.
The old "55 everywhere" limit was put in place 40 years ago when that hit the fuel efficiency curve of cars at the time. That is no longer true. Now we have a voting block of really old people who don't feel comfortable driving at the normal flow of traffic, and as such keep voting down speed increases. Sigh.
Amusingly enough, the US actually has laws protecting US Citizens from UK libel laws. IANAL, but in the US you need to show that the defendant was malicious or reckless, and the claimant has to prove that the claim is false. In the UK, it is on the defendant to prove that the claim is true.
So while the problem of buying justice in civil actions is true across the board, the UK is particularly egregious in this respect. Supposedly the UK government will propose a libel reform in March of next year, though details have not been forthcoming.
If nothing else, the story is that it costs $200,000 to defend against false libel claims in British courts. Remember, this isn't the criminal justice system where you have the choice of a state-appointed lawyer or spending the money on your own. If he hadn't spent the $200,000, he would have needed to bow down to every ridiculous demand of the the British Chiropractic Association, despite being obviously correct in what he says. Freedom of Speech doesn't mean freedom to lie arbitrarily about people. But it does need to include the freedom to critique. In England, that right does not exist.
We actually have laws on the books now in America specifically to protect Americans from being sued under the UK's ridiculous libel laws. It's a terrible system, and it has to change. That is the story.
And, somehow shooting Germans or us Japs is better, because it is less recent? I lost about a quarter of my bloodline in Hiroshima, yet games still involve nukes.
I do love how nobody is upset about the option of killing americans, just that the cluster of polygons doing the killing (removing from rounds of tag for a 10 second cooldown time) are labeled as someone we don't like.
There were much better ways of making faster chips. The gHz thing went on long after it provided tangible speed benefit.
Think of it this way. A Hz is a "Beat" of your chip. On this beat, old chips did one thing. Slightly less old chips had pipelines of things to do. Now, you have multiple separate huge pipelines of instructions... if you had a pipeline 30 instructions long, you effectively did 30 things each beat (this depended on having thing that pipelined well). Then you have multiple pipelines that you can put instructions in, and multiple chips on-a-die that create multiple sets of multiple pipelines.
The Hz rating just determines how fast each batch happens. And for years, the marketing thing was to push up that rating, while ignoring the number of instructions you could execute per cycle. But squeezing out more Hz makes hotter chips that take more power and more cooling, which co-coincidently are things you have to optimize for in laptops. Now things have swung the other way, and we have more focus on the number and quality of instructions, as well as making sure the pipelines can be continually fed with data.
Of course, I suspect part of the reason why people let up on the gHz monkier is because AMD stopped being a real threat.
R-Type had a wonderful Turbo Graphics-16 port, as well as a surprisingly decent Master System port and a poor Game Boy port. It's currently on the Virtual Console (TG-16 & SMS) and Xbox Live Arcade (Arcade).
Also, it was created by Irem in 1987 on their custom hardware, 3 years before the Neo Geo existed.
The mac's keyboard system only accepted input from 2 keys at once, plus modifiers. This is why you'd find shooters with weird setups like Arrows + Ctrl, Shift, Apple + Mouse. It absolutely kneecapped Descent if you didn't have a joystick.
While in many other ways the Mac was a better platform for writing games on (yay toolboxes, off-the-shelf UI's, resource forks, etc), that keyboard was a huge bottleneck.
Is it really a problem though? A patent on a product just lists a number. You have to look up that number to see what the actual protection is, and there you will see quite easily if it is expired.
Falsely listing copyright would be a big thing because it covers all aspects of the product. But patents just apply to one technical aspect that you have to look up anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Secret 1: Outsource everything.
Secret 2: Employees are interchangeable.
Secret 3: Good enough is probably too expensive.
Secret 4: There is still at least enough good will for the HP name to milk another five years.
But man did we want them...
That's extremely damning. For those following along at home, this is the image up on Commodore USA's website, and this is the original image from ten years ago. The difference? The image up on Commodore USA's website has a bad photoshop hack job of removing the word "fantasy" from the top right of the keyboard, and the word fantasy from the mouse cord (and the cord itself). It still attributes the image to Marko Hirv.
I don't think there can be more irrefutable proof that this is a scam.
On less straightforward fronts, The Phantom console was an outright scam and The Gizmondo was a way of laundering money. Both of these smelled incredibly fishy to tech journalists. And a properly informing press would tell their clients that neither of these developers seemed on the up-and-up. For the first year or two the press gave The Phantom a mostly free pass, allowing investors to be suckered into pouring money into an organization that didn't seem to be producing anything other than doctored screenshots. Eventually the press started drawing conclusions and doing actual reporting. And, lo and behold, there wasn't any "there" there.
Gizmondo's failed initial launch and failed re-launch were so short lived, that nobody reported about the console's strange development and unlikelyhood of surviving in the marketplace until after a rather spectacular flare up.
Either way, call a spade a spade. The worldwide Amiga people claim that Commodore USA has no such rights. Commodore USA doesn't appear to have actually shipped any of the products it offers and sells. Oh, and their "legal department" has now been confirmed to be one non-lawyer copying and pasting takedown notices incorrectly. It probably is a con.
If you were sending out a legal letter about defamation, would you do so while indulging in copyright infringement?
Similarly, not only was the take down notice embarrassingly amateurish and potentially criminal, it was an attempt to take down an article that claimed they were embarrassingly amateurish and potentially criminals. I could definitely see this takedown notice being used by the defense in a civil proceeding to show the article's merit.
The parallax barrier screens I've seen have a few sweet spots, that were about 2 feet apart from eachother around the front at a distance of about 15 feet. These degraded a bit the farther offcenter you got, but they worked.. I presume if these things make it into the home, you'll adjust the barrier a bit so that the sweet spots hit the sides of your couch, and / or major recliner. And that people will slide over a few feet in a given direction to see the screen.
Of course, for stereo vision at home you need a display capable of 120 Hz cycling, a little bluetooth dongle for timing, shutter glasses, and a relatively recent iteration of HDMI. All of these things the television makers have already done, and done cheaply. Now they're hoping to upsell this existing technology for a premium,
The Sega Master System had 3d shutter glasses almost 30 years ago. It worked rather well, actually. But without the CPU strength to do much with the 3D, the $100 premium that the glasses system added was too much for most people. Now we have a nice convergence of system strength, affordable screens, and an industry desperate for something past "HD!" to keep prices up.
I'd argue that 3D for games isn't just a gimmick, but actually makes you a better player.
In driving games, knowing how far away a corner is can mean the difference between success and crashing horribly. Similarly, if you're lobbing a grenade at an opponent, you need to have an intuitive sense for how far away they are. In traditional 2D games, you have to build in lots of visual cues (straight lines, false shadows, distance blur, etc) to get even partway decent 3D estimations by your players. 3D screens, on the other hand, give a real and immediate sense in a completely natural way.
The other problems with helmets are:
1. Resolution. They're tremendously expensive to make at any sort of resolution. You know that super-high definition LCD screen they finally came out with for the iPhone? That's still way too big for one eye of a visor, and not high enough resolution. Lower resolution screens just look like lots and lots of pixels.
2. Focus. Because of 1, there are lots of optical tricks used to get a higher-resolution image from a larger source down to the size needed to display at your eyes. That all takes focusing of various lenses, and that all goes blurry the moment you do anything unexpected.
3. Lag. Your brain immediately notices when the world isn't following your eyes. They're getting better, but lag on these things (last time I tried one) doesn't seem to be going away entirely.
4. Head Mount. You can spend hours fitting a bicycle helmet to your head, and it still wiggles like mad. Head Mounts just aren't that solid. Which means the helmet wiggles a bit around your head. Which means the world wiggles a bit around your head. Ew.
5. Too Private. This is a big issue that Nintendo bumped up into with the Virtual Boy. If nobody can watch you play, playing video games becomes an inherently anti-social activity.
By the way, Full-sized parallax barrier screens, like the one in the 3DS, have been available in Asia for some time. Due to content shortages, they're mostly relegated to displays. But they're out there, and they work.
It has been worse:
Try Wario Land for the Virtual Boy. There are levels where the far background does not parallax (appear to scroll more slowly because it is farther away), but does appear to be farther back in the 3D effect. The worst is a moment in level 2, where the background appears to be deep away in 3D, and it parallaxes correctly horizontally, but breaks parallax scrolling completely vertically. I nearly threw up when I saw that.
In the article, they mention a problem with crosshairs popping forward and back too rapidly in 3-space. You could probably do something with a spring system and friction. And you might want to do some degree of scaling up and down for distance, but not a real amount. That's all degrees of polish, which we won't really understand well until several titles come out attacking the problem in different ways.
It is possible to plagiarize works that are out of copyright.
I did the LA->San Jose drive up I5 about once every two months for four years. Maybe it has slowed down in the 10 years since I've moved out to Boston, but on I5 between San Jose and the Grapevine I could usually set the cruise control at 90, and just go for hours. At night, you used to get a bunch of trucks that would all cruise together at about 100. 580 over the bay at 4 AM also had a huge average speed for the few cars that were out there. A group of us cars were casually rolling along at 110, when we had a cop pass us at about 130. Similarly, a commute up 280 at 7pm or so fluctuated between 70 and 90 mph or so as a normal traffic speed. Those last two routes I only did for two months, but I did a full trip round the bay every day. You'd better believe I figured out which roads had the fastest average speeds.
The police must have been clamping down on speeding recently. I can't imagine any other reason for the numbers you're coming up with. Trucks rarely exceeding 55 mph? I never used to see those guys doing anything less than 70. Most of the time they defined the speed of traffic, and they were in a rush. You're not in any sort of official-looking vehicle, are you?
"I'm sorry senator, you're over the state incompetence limit. You'll have to come with me."
Fixed that for you.
They are German.
All things considered, this could be the safety required for a roadway with those speeds. Or it could just be that Germany engineering is so much better than the crap the rest of the world puts up with. Having driven safely at 110 MPH on freeways in California (once being passed by a cop doing about 130), I'm guessing they're just being German.
People drive 90mph already on those roads anyway. Highway 5 in California has stretches that routinely flow-of-traffic at my car's electronically limited top speed.
The old "55 everywhere" limit was put in place 40 years ago when that hit the fuel efficiency curve of cars at the time. That is no longer true. Now we have a voting block of really old people who don't feel comfortable driving at the normal flow of traffic, and as such keep voting down speed increases. Sigh.
Amusingly enough, the US actually has laws protecting US Citizens from UK libel laws. IANAL, but in the US you need to show that the defendant was malicious or reckless, and the claimant has to prove that the claim is false. In the UK, it is on the defendant to prove that the claim is true.
So while the problem of buying justice in civil actions is true across the board, the UK is particularly egregious in this respect. Supposedly the UK government will propose a libel reform in March of next year, though details have not been forthcoming.
Weather Forecasting.
If nothing else, the story is that it costs $200,000 to defend against false libel claims in British courts. Remember, this isn't the criminal justice system where you have the choice of a state-appointed lawyer or spending the money on your own. If he hadn't spent the $200,000, he would have needed to bow down to every ridiculous demand of the the British Chiropractic Association, despite being obviously correct in what he says. Freedom of Speech doesn't mean freedom to lie arbitrarily about people. But it does need to include the freedom to critique. In England, that right does not exist.
We actually have laws on the books now in America specifically to protect Americans from being sued under the UK's ridiculous libel laws. It's a terrible system, and it has to change. That is the story.
And, somehow shooting Germans or us Japs is better, because it is less recent? I lost about a quarter of my bloodline in Hiroshima, yet games still involve nukes.
I do love how nobody is upset about the option of killing americans, just that the cluster of polygons doing the killing (removing from rounds of tag for a 10 second cooldown time) are labeled as someone we don't like.
There were much better ways of making faster chips. The gHz thing went on long after it provided tangible speed benefit.
Think of it this way. A Hz is a "Beat" of your chip. On this beat, old chips did one thing. Slightly less old chips had pipelines of things to do. Now, you have multiple separate huge pipelines of instructions... if you had a pipeline 30 instructions long, you effectively did 30 things each beat (this depended on having thing that pipelined well). Then you have multiple pipelines that you can put instructions in, and multiple chips on-a-die that create multiple sets of multiple pipelines.
The Hz rating just determines how fast each batch happens. And for years, the marketing thing was to push up that rating, while ignoring the number of instructions you could execute per cycle. But squeezing out more Hz makes hotter chips that take more power and more cooling, which co-coincidently are things you have to optimize for in laptops. Now things have swung the other way, and we have more focus on the number and quality of instructions, as well as making sure the pipelines can be continually fed with data.
Of course, I suspect part of the reason why people let up on the gHz monkier is because AMD stopped being a real threat.
They say it's an old CISC architecture. This is probably the sort of system that runs horribly outdated and un-updatable code, like the tax system.
R-Type had a wonderful Turbo Graphics-16 port, as well as a surprisingly decent Master System port and a poor Game Boy port. It's currently on the Virtual Console (TG-16 & SMS) and Xbox Live Arcade (Arcade).
Also, it was created by Irem in 1987 on their custom hardware, 3 years before the Neo Geo existed.
The mac's keyboard system only accepted input from 2 keys at once, plus modifiers. This is why you'd find shooters with weird setups like Arrows + Ctrl, Shift, Apple + Mouse. It absolutely kneecapped Descent if you didn't have a joystick.
While in many other ways the Mac was a better platform for writing games on (yay toolboxes, off-the-shelf UI's, resource forks, etc), that keyboard was a huge bottleneck.
Is it really a problem though? A patent on a product just lists a number. You have to look up that number to see what the actual protection is, and there you will see quite easily if it is expired.
Falsely listing copyright would be a big thing because it covers all aspects of the product. But patents just apply to one technical aspect that you have to look up anyway.