The problem is that Security by Obscurity is the defense of lazy vendors who should damn well know better. On the one hand, it's "obscure" that a particular keyphrase known by trusted people will get you to a layer of network security. It is slightly less "obscure" to have your server up on an unresponsive IP address. It's technically a form of "obscurity" to think the hackers wouldn't notice that you left an FTP server up and running without realizing it, or that the default login was still viable. But when vendors use that form of the term obscurity, they're just masking the fact that they are selling you rubbish.
Any properly secured system should be able to proudly proclaim all of its pertinent information to the world, including source code to all available participants, and still be secure. ONLY THEN, should obscurity be layered on. But if your vendor or contractor starts talking about obscurity first, they don't have a clue what they're doing.
Obscurity is icing. Minimalist, properly protected system design with multiple layers of protection, iron-clad internal logging, and no routes to priviledge escalation (especially social) is the route to security. Obscurity is a mildly nice icing that makes maintaining servers less problematic. It also usually leads to lazy vendors creating the illusion of security out of a soon-to-be-had massive privacy lawsuit.
used by marketers to deliver enhanced annoyance to users.
Honestly, I think this is the root of why people hate flash. Marketers use it to annoy users. But guess what? Any replacement technology is going to be immediately used by marketers to annoy users. That's what marketers do. If you think HTML5 is going to be a bucket of kittens, you've got another thing coming.
Flash is probably the best place to prototype 2d games, and get your hands dirty with programming that can actually have an interface. It is just the best tool out there for low, low end indie development. ActionScript can be finicky in odd ways, but it is also shockingly powerful and fast. And as much as I'm looking forward to HTML5 game development, the tools really aren't there yet.
The best complaint that can be lobbed at Flash is that it hasn't changed functionality in years. It hasn't gotten more powerful, or more networked, etc. A symmetrical simultaneous networked Flash session handled in-engine, for example, would be massively useful. And now that there is competition, maybe things like that will happen.
Or maybe Adobe will forget it and move on, like they have with Dreamweaver.
What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean? Apple doesn't sell "MultiTouch" phones, they sell iPhones. And sure, those iPhones are Multi-Touch iPhones, but they're also BatteryBased, can connect to WiFi, and HaveColor. They don't even make the screens themselves.
It's not like they're trying to trademark a business mark they're going to engage in trade under. It's a mark for, essentially, an advertising branding of a component they didn't even make. That's like Microsoft trademarking the START Menu. Or me trademarking ImWearingPants.
It's not that a million monkeys could randomly create the works of Shakespeare. It is that an infinite number of monkeys could recreate all of the work in the known world, including Shakespeare. The thing about infinity, is that it is really, really big. If the amount of resources thrown at a problem is truly infinite, all possible results just happen, no matter how improbable.
The point of the saying is how mind-meldingly large infinite is, and how bad our minds are at comprehending the ramifications. This is one.
You could prove that for the length of a work of Shakespeare (N), the amount of "monkeys" required to solve the problem in the same amount of time is 26^(N-9). Or, as it relates to the proverb, the solution to the equation has the time required to create a work of Shakespeare as infinite and the number of monkeys required to solve it in that time as infinite.
Of course, that solution didn't require programming the monkeys. But it is extrapolatable out to an entire work.
Don't forget though, this wasn't a MS employee leaking an MS secret. This was a MS employee leaking a Nokia secret. They probably had to fire the guy to help maintain the good working relationship between the two companies.
The thing is, the Xbox is already a successful TV platform. Streaming Netflix took off in large part because of Xbox's living room integration. Hulu on Xbox... actually, I have no idea how Hulu is doing on Xbox. But Netflix is solidly there, Hulu is on, and ESPN streams to Xbox (if your cable carrier includes it, weirdly).
This is all heresy, but Netflix and Hulu have displaced traditional premium cable for a large number of friends and colleagues. Why pay $100 a month for 50 channels of crap that never quite corresponds to what you want, when you can pay $20 a month for 1/2 of what you want whenever you want it? Really, the parts of the equation that Xbox is missing currently is the real-time information... news, weather, and sports (well, except for ESPN).
RIM's problem is basically same as Nokia's was - they didn't do anything to justify their platform's existence. All of these companies seem to think they can copy Apple's success by doing exactly what Apple is doing. That's not how it works. What Apple did, was something truly unique in the market that got their platform established. This is true on iPhone and iPad. Android came along, and offered a platform to a wide variety of vendors, where the users had the freedom to do and change almost everything. And then Windows Phone 7 came out which offered... Um... WebOS came out which was a slightly more polished iOS. PlayBook is... what exactly?
Offer the consumer something really, really unique and worthwhile. Or you're not going to get over the hump of platform transition. It's not just a question of having lots of applications...Linux-on-Phone has that. It's a question of offering a few really, genuinely compelling key points that nobody else does. 'Droid did that. RIM, at the moment, hasn't delivered that since the early Blackberry days.
eliminates crap like Flash that's proprietary, hurts performance, etc. It's a competitive move that raises the bar for other browsers to become more secure and stop supporting things that people don't want.
That also destroys competition and invention in the browser market, and ensures that the only technologies that survive are Microsoft Approved. Let's go over some things that exist because of plug-ins: 1. YouTube 2. Indie web gaming in general 3. Java and the cross-platform coding movement 4. Pop-up killers and browser modifiers
Of course this is a DRM / Straightjacket. THIS means that nobody can modify the browser except for Microsoft. If you need to do 3D in-browser, you can no longer just use Unity... you have to use Microsoft's technology of choice. If you need to write a new little app, you can't just use actionscript or Java: You have to use HTML 5 or Silverlight.
And say what you will about HTML 5, but it IS slow as heck and there is zero client-side security. The tools are nowhere near as mature, and it isn't supported by all of your viewers. It's not a magic wand to solve all problems: it's a Flash competitor that has some advantages and some drawbacks. But it is a COMPETITOR. There are a lot of completely valid and strong reasons to use Flash on a project. And killing off all potential future browser expansion, because of this one potential tool, is just asinine.
As a long-time hardware silence modifier, I second silentpcreview.com.
Some Rules:
1. Be aware of how much air circulates around the device. Those TV cubby-holes that are built to enclose systems are absolutely terrible for air circulation. Either put the system outside of the TV stand, or add fans there too. 2. BIGGER fans can move the same amount of air while moving more slowly... the smaller the fan, the more it tends to scream. Certain big 'ole desk or table-fans can run slowly enough to be silent, yet move a hell of a lot of air. You get a lot more mileage than you should by pointing a 2' wide desk fan at the back of a computer. 3. Faster components, when run more slowly, need less cooling. If you're getting an i3 processor that goes up to 3 ghz, get the one at 1.5 ghz, or underclock one down further. Don't go for the top-of-the-line graphics card, go for the budget model of the same year, if it is using similar parts. 4. Always go for full sized (3.5") Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) based Hard Drives, spun at 5400 RPM. I believe Seagate (Barracuda) and Maxtor (now part of seagate) made these. HDD's are by far the most difficult component to quiet down without accidentally destroying them.
Windows 7 / 64 boot times including BIOS POST, but measured to the point where the UI actually responds to input. I do have it skipping most of the BIOS tests and going straight to the right drive, so the BIOS setup is reasonably optimized.
The Linux partition hadn't suffered as much from slow boot times, so it's hard to say how much the SSD is helping. The Linux partition went from fast enough that I didn't notice any slowdown, to fast enough that I didn't notice any slowdown.
I have a 128GB SSD for OS and scratch partition, with data and programs on a larger traditional HDD. Going to SSD, the boot speed more than doubled. Applications that rely on scratch disks, like Photoshop... Well, Photoshop is a bit confused by the whole setup. But SMARTER applications that rely upon scratch disks are lightning fast. It's not just that the SSD functions as a scratch disk faster, but that by offloading those IO interactions means that the normal disk is entirely free for more traditional linear disk-ley things.
It was an extra $200 for the drive. But getting that kind of performance boost out of faster processors or more cutting edge FSB's, etc, would probably cost in the realm of a grand or more.
ActiveX has the worst reputation because it was a fundamentally insecure architecture that also happened to be poorly written. And despite being a default installation on a default browser of the default operating system for over a decade now, the only place I can think where it is actively in use is Microsoft's own websites.
Remember, ActiveX was attempting to compete with Flash and Java. At that it failed miserably.
There have been a couple of cases of the internets picking up on a police officer making a wrong call that was an understandable mistake (such as a plain-clothed off duty officer pulling a gun on a motorcyclist). But by far what show up are genuine abuses: officers ruthlessly beating compliant suspects while surveillance cam operators intentionally look the other way. Unarmed men lying on the floor in a prone position getting shot in the back. Rodney King, which reflected the abusive police interactions in LA at the time. Or even this interpretation of this law itself, where your only protection against abuses is considered illegal on a BS technicality. And these show up in the destruction of evidence (collecting cell phones) and denial of evidence (the surveillance camera footage).
Personally, I think we do give officers a lot of moderated attitude. A friend had a gun pulled on him at a (15 mph) speeding stop by a trainee officer. The elder officer overseeing her pulled her aside, taught her proper procedure, and let my friend off with a non-documented warning. It was a completely non-procedure way of dealing with an officer drawing her gun without provocation, but it was handled well. I had a gun drawn on me for having a broken white plastic Halloween samurai sword as a teenager. But the professionalism of the officer never made me feel in danger.
A lot of these officers are not used to being on the internet. They're not used to the level of abuse where if 10,000 people are calling for the immediate dismemberment of you and your family, you're doing fine. Someone makes a flash video of you beating down dancing flower children, it pretty much goes with the territory. Unfortunately, most people don't have a thick enough skin for the internet, and it is sad that this may be their first exposure (except the beating down of the dancing flower children cop. That guy deserved it.)
95% of the officers I've interacted with have been professional, helpful (or at least trying to be), and safety-conscious. But some are abusive when they think they can get away with it, and the only protection we have is documentation. The moment we lose the right to document our interactions with the police, is the moment the police go from helpful to a threat. And that puts everyone, civillians and police, at risk.
There is also the option that you could do something UNIQUE in the space. The Kindle is basically a tablet with buttons, and it has sold out over and over again.
None of these analysis seem to take "come up with something unique to justify your existence" into account.
1. The sound patent bumps into a bit of an ugly area that I have a history with. I'll just say to search for Konami based patents. And if you're working in this area, Harmonix and Activision too. 2. Crazy Taxi arrow patent - U.S. Patent 6200138. And yes, they've upheld this one over and over again. 3. The haptic patent is from Immersion, which covers vibration based feedback. There are some strange limitations and extensions here, (nintendo has a different vibration feedback patent, for example) so if this is your issue you might want to get a skilled lawyer and engineer in a room together. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_v._Sony. 4. This is a KOEI patent. http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/07/patent-us-pat-no-6729954-attack-power.html. 5. Cloud-based gaming patent. http://www.shacknews.com/article/66833/onlive-claims-patent-for-cloud.
I am not a lawyer. From my interactions with lots of patent lawyers, even they don't quite understand this stuff, so expect weird / odd / contradictory interpretations. In short, if you're not going to go to the expense of a head-on attack to get one of these invalidated, and you don't have patents of your own that you can use as counterfire, stay the hell away from anything patented.
I will also say, that these represent a very small fraction of the game-related patents out there. There are many, and many of them cover pretty mundane things. I believe Sony, for example, had a patent on feeding a camera's direct signal into a game world. And, of course, Namco has a patent on playing minigames while waiting for the main game to load (Ridge Racer). It's silly / crazy the stuff that has been patented.
Wouldn't it be great if most patents actually reflected 100's of millions of dollars of research?
In the industry where I work (video games) there are patents on 1. Playing 2 sounds at once when the player hits one button. 2. A big arrow pointing to where the player needs to go (the "Crazy Taxi" patent). 3. The entire idea of haptic feedback when applied to game controllers. 4. Changing the strength of an attack based upon how many enemies are clumped in an area. 5. Cloud-based gaming. All of it.
And there are literally thousands more, that cover every aspect of gaming from how you can score players to how you can monitor their inputs. Most of them are good ideas. All of them are obvious (Big Arrow pointing where you need to go). None of them took any actual money to develop whatsoever. And taken as a whole, they're grossly stifling.
If the patent system is to reach the original goal of protecting major investments in research, we need to get back to that. Because at the moment, the patent system just rewards people who file patents for anything, then sue everyone else.
Your car analogy isn't terribly far from the truth. Most manufacturers have a limited range of engines and other parts. Some of these parts are up or down tuned to match the targeted market segment. Now, it's true that these more closely track the cost of the part in question... Toyota's NZ engine used in their line of small cares genuinely is an underpowered engine, no matter how you slice it. And when engines are weakened to fit a market segment, usually they are tuned to get additional Fuel Economy in the bargain. So there is generally a benefit and tradeoff involved. But there are definitely artificial distinctions made between 20k dollar cars and 50k dollar cars, in an attempt to hit the sweet spot in market segmentation.
Say that you buy a can with "12 oz" of soda inside. You open it up and drink it. Then you take a look at the can. The can actually holds 16oz. And the manufacturer actually made all 16oz of soda. But to sell a 12oz can, they put 4oz of the soda within a thick plastic resin, thus destroying it for all time. The bottom of your 12oz can is 4oz of wasted plastic graveyard devoted to market segmentation.
They sold you 12 oz of soda, and you got 12 oz of soda. But they ALSO made an extra 4oz of soda. Since you didn't pay for that extra 4oz of soda, they destroyed it rather than letting you or someone else have it.
And yes, that's how the chip industry works. That's also how the car, and certain other industries, works. From the business perspective, it is a way of segmenting your market and supporting tiered pricing options. From an end-consumer standpoint, the company lobotomized something they sold to them, because they aren't the overpaid elite. And whenever they're waiting for an install to complete, or a copy of Outlook to open, they know that bits of their lives are being wasted because a company artificially decided to make the processor in their machine suck 20% more.
It makes perfect business and engineering sense. But that's not how people feel about it. The average person isn't buying a specs sheet. They're buying the fastest processor they can afford. And as it turns out, the processor they bought could be even faster, but some company stopped it for completely artificial reasons. People are going to be frustrated by that.
I'm kind of curious why everyone is so up-in-arms wanting HL2:e3. HL2 was brilliant. HL2:e1 was a solid extension of that. HL2:e2 was a good game that started to feel a bit redundant. But neither of them reached the brilliance that was HL2. Since HL2, Valve has had brilliant moments with Team Fortress 2 and Portal 1 / 2 and Left 4 Dead. They're letting the Half Life universe rest, until they either have something unique to say or a unique way of saying it.
The last CS game was CS:Source, which was just CS1 updated for the HL2 engine. That was pre- HL2:e1. An update to make Counter Strike relevant to a modern audience is long overdue. And Half Life, as brilliant a series as it has been, can wait until they have something real to say again.
BART accommodates expressive activities that are constitutionally protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Liberty of Speech Clause of the California Constitution (expressive activity), and has made available certain areas of its property for expressive activity.
They have a very interesting interpretation of how constitutional protections can be interpreted WRT small boxes drawn on the floor.
Good post. I'd add that realism is there, in a large sense, to help players get sucked into the experience. But different types of realism interact with the experience differently... Visual realism is very important for certain players to feel a part of the experience. But a realistic damage model, where you get shot in the leg and are trying to drag yourself around the level slowly, actually make it more difficult to get lost in the movement model, and work against the mind's acceptance of the experience. Realism seems to work best as flavor text... A moment that anchors your mind to very day-to-day real world events, then gets out of the way. For example, a scene where wood catches fire, rather than have a burnable property on every object in the game made out of wood.
From Dirt is a pretty has a pretty good usage of realistic visuals. Since the game is so inherently ungrounded, to help anchor the experience the developers went for hyper realistic visuals... or as hyper realistic as dirt can be. And I have to say, it worked.
Sadly, I suspect it's less the game designers and more the publishers and businessmen that drink the kool-aid of realism. It's easier to explain to a ex-toothpaste executive why your game will be amazing if it is "the most realistic experience ever" rather than "it's some kid in a pointy green suit swinging swords at bats." "It's like Afghanistan in your living room!" vs "It's about a jumping pink puff ball, but everything is made out of yarn." Realism is easier to push through a committee that's deciding on the fate of 40 million dollars than a more creative idea that is difficult for a glorified banker to grasp.
Slashdot Mirror
Per second? Per tablet? Per transaction?
And what about data efficiency? A lot of the old cellphone standards are still supported, and they wasted bandwidth left and right.
The problem is that Security by Obscurity is the defense of lazy vendors who should damn well know better. On the one hand, it's "obscure" that a particular keyphrase known by trusted people will get you to a layer of network security. It is slightly less "obscure" to have your server up on an unresponsive IP address. It's technically a form of "obscurity" to think the hackers wouldn't notice that you left an FTP server up and running without realizing it, or that the default login was still viable. But when vendors use that form of the term obscurity, they're just masking the fact that they are selling you rubbish.
Any properly secured system should be able to proudly proclaim all of its pertinent information to the world, including source code to all available participants, and still be secure. ONLY THEN, should obscurity be layered on. But if your vendor or contractor starts talking about obscurity first, they don't have a clue what they're doing.
Obscurity is icing. Minimalist, properly protected system design with multiple layers of protection, iron-clad internal logging, and no routes to priviledge escalation (especially social) is the route to security. Obscurity is a mildly nice icing that makes maintaining servers less problematic. It also usually leads to lazy vendors creating the illusion of security out of a soon-to-be-had massive privacy lawsuit.
used by marketers to deliver enhanced annoyance to users.
Honestly, I think this is the root of why people hate flash. Marketers use it to annoy users. But guess what? Any replacement technology is going to be immediately used by marketers to annoy users. That's what marketers do. If you think HTML5 is going to be a bucket of kittens, you've got another thing coming.
Flash is probably the best place to prototype 2d games, and get your hands dirty with programming that can actually have an interface. It is just the best tool out there for low, low end indie development. ActionScript can be finicky in odd ways, but it is also shockingly powerful and fast. And as much as I'm looking forward to HTML5 game development, the tools really aren't there yet.
The best complaint that can be lobbed at Flash is that it hasn't changed functionality in years. It hasn't gotten more powerful, or more networked, etc. A symmetrical simultaneous networked Flash session handled in-engine, for example, would be massively useful. And now that there is competition, maybe things like that will happen.
Or maybe Adobe will forget it and move on, like they have with Dreamweaver.
What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean? Apple doesn't sell "MultiTouch" phones, they sell iPhones. And sure, those iPhones are Multi-Touch iPhones, but they're also BatteryBased, can connect to WiFi, and HaveColor. They don't even make the screens themselves.
It's not like they're trying to trademark a business mark they're going to engage in trade under. It's a mark for, essentially, an advertising branding of a component they didn't even make. That's like Microsoft trademarking the START Menu. Or me trademarking ImWearingPants.
It's not that a million monkeys could randomly create the works of Shakespeare. It is that an infinite number of monkeys could recreate all of the work in the known world, including Shakespeare. The thing about infinity, is that it is really, really big. If the amount of resources thrown at a problem is truly infinite, all possible results just happen, no matter how improbable.
The point of the saying is how mind-meldingly large infinite is, and how bad our minds are at comprehending the ramifications. This is one.
You could prove that for the length of a work of Shakespeare (N), the amount of "monkeys" required to solve the problem in the same amount of time is 26^(N-9). Or, as it relates to the proverb, the solution to the equation has the time required to create a work of Shakespeare as infinite and the number of monkeys required to solve it in that time as infinite.
Of course, that solution didn't require programming the monkeys. But it is extrapolatable out to an entire work.
The TechCrunch article about the new Kindle.
Don't forget though, this wasn't a MS employee leaking an MS secret. This was a MS employee leaking a Nokia secret. They probably had to fire the guy to help maintain the good working relationship between the two companies.
The thing is, the Xbox is already a successful TV platform. Streaming Netflix took off in large part because of Xbox's living room integration. Hulu on Xbox... actually, I have no idea how Hulu is doing on Xbox. But Netflix is solidly there, Hulu is on, and ESPN streams to Xbox (if your cable carrier includes it, weirdly).
This is all heresy, but Netflix and Hulu have displaced traditional premium cable for a large number of friends and colleagues. Why pay $100 a month for 50 channels of crap that never quite corresponds to what you want, when you can pay $20 a month for 1/2 of what you want whenever you want it? Really, the parts of the equation that Xbox is missing currently is the real-time information... news, weather, and sports (well, except for ESPN).
RIM's problem is basically same as Nokia's was - they didn't do anything to justify their platform's existence. All of these companies seem to think they can copy Apple's success by doing exactly what Apple is doing. That's not how it works. What Apple did, was something truly unique in the market that got their platform established. This is true on iPhone and iPad. Android came along, and offered a platform to a wide variety of vendors, where the users had the freedom to do and change almost everything. And then Windows Phone 7 came out which offered... Um... WebOS came out which was a slightly more polished iOS. PlayBook is... what exactly?
Offer the consumer something really, really unique and worthwhile. Or you're not going to get over the hump of platform transition. It's not just a question of having lots of applications...Linux-on-Phone has that. It's a question of offering a few really, genuinely compelling key points that nobody else does. 'Droid did that. RIM, at the moment, hasn't delivered that since the early Blackberry days.
eliminates crap like Flash that's proprietary, hurts performance, etc. It's a competitive move that raises the bar for other browsers to become more secure and stop supporting things that people don't want.
That also destroys competition and invention in the browser market, and ensures that the only technologies that survive are Microsoft Approved. Let's go over some things that exist because of plug-ins:
1. YouTube
2. Indie web gaming in general
3. Java and the cross-platform coding movement
4. Pop-up killers and browser modifiers
Of course this is a DRM / Straightjacket. THIS means that nobody can modify the browser except for Microsoft. If you need to do 3D in-browser, you can no longer just use Unity... you have to use Microsoft's technology of choice. If you need to write a new little app, you can't just use actionscript or Java: You have to use HTML 5 or Silverlight.
And say what you will about HTML 5, but it IS slow as heck and there is zero client-side security. The tools are nowhere near as mature, and it isn't supported by all of your viewers. It's not a magic wand to solve all problems: it's a Flash competitor that has some advantages and some drawbacks. But it is a COMPETITOR. There are a lot of completely valid and strong reasons to use Flash on a project. And killing off all potential future browser expansion, because of this one potential tool, is just asinine.
As a long-time hardware silence modifier, I second silentpcreview.com.
Some Rules:
1. Be aware of how much air circulates around the device. Those TV cubby-holes that are built to enclose systems are absolutely terrible for air circulation. Either put the system outside of the TV stand, or add fans there too.
2. BIGGER fans can move the same amount of air while moving more slowly... the smaller the fan, the more it tends to scream. Certain big 'ole desk or table-fans can run slowly enough to be silent, yet move a hell of a lot of air. You get a lot more mileage than you should by pointing a 2' wide desk fan at the back of a computer.
3. Faster components, when run more slowly, need less cooling. If you're getting an i3 processor that goes up to 3 ghz, get the one at 1.5 ghz, or underclock one down further. Don't go for the top-of-the-line graphics card, go for the budget model of the same year, if it is using similar parts.
4. Always go for full sized (3.5") Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) based Hard Drives, spun at 5400 RPM. I believe Seagate (Barracuda) and Maxtor (now part of seagate) made these. HDD's are by far the most difficult component to quiet down without accidentally destroying them.
Windows 7 / 64 boot times including BIOS POST, but measured to the point where the UI actually responds to input. I do have it skipping most of the BIOS tests and going straight to the right drive, so the BIOS setup is reasonably optimized.
The Linux partition hadn't suffered as much from slow boot times, so it's hard to say how much the SSD is helping. The Linux partition went from fast enough that I didn't notice any slowdown, to fast enough that I didn't notice any slowdown.
I have a 128GB SSD for OS and scratch partition, with data and programs on a larger traditional HDD. Going to SSD, the boot speed more than doubled. Applications that rely on scratch disks, like Photoshop... Well, Photoshop is a bit confused by the whole setup. But SMARTER applications that rely upon scratch disks are lightning fast. It's not just that the SSD functions as a scratch disk faster, but that by offloading those IO interactions means that the normal disk is entirely free for more traditional linear disk-ley things.
It was an extra $200 for the drive. But getting that kind of performance boost out of faster processors or more cutting edge FSB's, etc, would probably cost in the realm of a grand or more.
ActiveX has the worst reputation because it was a fundamentally insecure architecture that also happened to be poorly written. And despite being a default installation on a default browser of the default operating system for over a decade now, the only place I can think where it is actively in use is Microsoft's own websites.
Remember, ActiveX was attempting to compete with Flash and Java. At that it failed miserably.
HTML 5 and Javascript achieve that well. What native client gets you is SPEED.
There have been a couple of cases of the internets picking up on a police officer making a wrong call that was an understandable mistake (such as a plain-clothed off duty officer pulling a gun on a motorcyclist). But by far what show up are genuine abuses: officers ruthlessly beating compliant suspects while surveillance cam operators intentionally look the other way. Unarmed men lying on the floor in a prone position getting shot in the back. Rodney King, which reflected the abusive police interactions in LA at the time. Or even this interpretation of this law itself, where your only protection against abuses is considered illegal on a BS technicality. And these show up in the destruction of evidence (collecting cell phones) and denial of evidence (the surveillance camera footage).
Personally, I think we do give officers a lot of moderated attitude. A friend had a gun pulled on him at a (15 mph) speeding stop by a trainee officer. The elder officer overseeing her pulled her aside, taught her proper procedure, and let my friend off with a non-documented warning. It was a completely non-procedure way of dealing with an officer drawing her gun without provocation, but it was handled well. I had a gun drawn on me for having a broken white plastic Halloween samurai sword as a teenager. But the professionalism of the officer never made me feel in danger.
A lot of these officers are not used to being on the internet. They're not used to the level of abuse where if 10,000 people are calling for the immediate dismemberment of you and your family, you're doing fine. Someone makes a flash video of you beating down dancing flower children, it pretty much goes with the territory. Unfortunately, most people don't have a thick enough skin for the internet, and it is sad that this may be their first exposure (except the beating down of the dancing flower children cop. That guy deserved it.)
95% of the officers I've interacted with have been professional, helpful (or at least trying to be), and safety-conscious. But some are abusive when they think they can get away with it, and the only protection we have is documentation. The moment we lose the right to document our interactions with the police, is the moment the police go from helpful to a threat. And that puts everyone, civillians and police, at risk.
There is also the option that you could do something UNIQUE in the space. The Kindle is basically a tablet with buttons, and it has sold out over and over again.
None of these analysis seem to take "come up with something unique to justify your existence" into account.
1. The sound patent bumps into a bit of an ugly area that I have a history with. I'll just say to search for Konami based patents. And if you're working in this area, Harmonix and Activision too.
2. Crazy Taxi arrow patent - U.S. Patent 6200138. And yes, they've upheld this one over and over again.
3. The haptic patent is from Immersion, which covers vibration based feedback. There are some strange limitations and extensions here, (nintendo has a different vibration feedback patent, for example) so if this is your issue you might want to get a skilled lawyer and engineer in a room together. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_v._Sony.
4. This is a KOEI patent. http://www.patentarcade.com/2007/07/patent-us-pat-no-6729954-attack-power.html.
5. Cloud-based gaming patent. http://www.shacknews.com/article/66833/onlive-claims-patent-for-cloud.
I am not a lawyer. From my interactions with lots of patent lawyers, even they don't quite understand this stuff, so expect weird / odd / contradictory interpretations. In short, if you're not going to go to the expense of a head-on attack to get one of these invalidated, and you don't have patents of your own that you can use as counterfire, stay the hell away from anything patented.
I will also say, that these represent a very small fraction of the game-related patents out there. There are many, and many of them cover pretty mundane things. I believe Sony, for example, had a patent on feeding a camera's direct signal into a game world. And, of course, Namco has a patent on playing minigames while waiting for the main game to load (Ridge Racer). It's silly / crazy the stuff that has been patented.
Wouldn't it be great if most patents actually reflected 100's of millions of dollars of research?
In the industry where I work (video games) there are patents on
1. Playing 2 sounds at once when the player hits one button.
2. A big arrow pointing to where the player needs to go (the "Crazy Taxi" patent).
3. The entire idea of haptic feedback when applied to game controllers.
4. Changing the strength of an attack based upon how many enemies are clumped in an area.
5. Cloud-based gaming. All of it.
And there are literally thousands more, that cover every aspect of gaming from how you can score players to how you can monitor their inputs. Most of them are good ideas. All of them are obvious (Big Arrow pointing where you need to go). None of them took any actual money to develop whatsoever. And taken as a whole, they're grossly stifling.
If the patent system is to reach the original goal of protecting major investments in research, we need to get back to that. Because at the moment, the patent system just rewards people who file patents for anything, then sue everyone else.
Your car analogy isn't terribly far from the truth. Most manufacturers have a limited range of engines and other parts. Some of these parts are up or down tuned to match the targeted market segment. Now, it's true that these more closely track the cost of the part in question... Toyota's NZ engine used in their line of small cares genuinely is an underpowered engine, no matter how you slice it. And when engines are weakened to fit a market segment, usually they are tuned to get additional Fuel Economy in the bargain. So there is generally a benefit and tradeoff involved. But there are definitely artificial distinctions made between 20k dollar cars and 50k dollar cars, in an attempt to hit the sweet spot in market segmentation.
Say that you buy a can with "12 oz" of soda inside. You open it up and drink it. Then you take a look at the can. The can actually holds 16oz. And the manufacturer actually made all 16oz of soda. But to sell a 12oz can, they put 4oz of the soda within a thick plastic resin, thus destroying it for all time. The bottom of your 12oz can is 4oz of wasted plastic graveyard devoted to market segmentation.
They sold you 12 oz of soda, and you got 12 oz of soda. But they ALSO made an extra 4oz of soda. Since you didn't pay for that extra 4oz of soda, they destroyed it rather than letting you or someone else have it.
And yes, that's how the chip industry works. That's also how the car, and certain other industries, works. From the business perspective, it is a way of segmenting your market and supporting tiered pricing options. From an end-consumer standpoint, the company lobotomized something they sold to them, because they aren't the overpaid elite. And whenever they're waiting for an install to complete, or a copy of Outlook to open, they know that bits of their lives are being wasted because a company artificially decided to make the processor in their machine suck 20% more.
It makes perfect business and engineering sense. But that's not how people feel about it. The average person isn't buying a specs sheet. They're buying the fastest processor they can afford. And as it turns out, the processor they bought could be even faster, but some company stopped it for completely artificial reasons. People are going to be frustrated by that.
I'm kind of curious why everyone is so up-in-arms wanting HL2:e3. HL2 was brilliant. HL2:e1 was a solid extension of that. HL2:e2 was a good game that started to feel a bit redundant. But neither of them reached the brilliance that was HL2. Since HL2, Valve has had brilliant moments with Team Fortress 2 and Portal 1 / 2 and Left 4 Dead. They're letting the Half Life universe rest, until they either have something unique to say or a unique way of saying it.
The last CS game was CS:Source, which was just CS1 updated for the HL2 engine. That was pre- HL2:e1. An update to make Counter Strike relevant to a modern audience is long overdue. And Half Life, as brilliant a series as it has been, can wait until they have something real to say again.
BART accommodates expressive activities that are constitutionally protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Liberty of Speech Clause of the California Constitution (expressive activity), and has made available certain areas of its property for expressive activity.
They have a very interesting interpretation of how constitutional protections can be interpreted WRT small boxes drawn on the floor.
Good post. I'd add that realism is there, in a large sense, to help players get sucked into the experience. But different types of realism interact with the experience differently... Visual realism is very important for certain players to feel a part of the experience. But a realistic damage model, where you get shot in the leg and are trying to drag yourself around the level slowly, actually make it more difficult to get lost in the movement model, and work against the mind's acceptance of the experience. Realism seems to work best as flavor text... A moment that anchors your mind to very day-to-day real world events, then gets out of the way. For example, a scene where wood catches fire, rather than have a burnable property on every object in the game made out of wood.
From Dirt is a pretty has a pretty good usage of realistic visuals. Since the game is so inherently ungrounded, to help anchor the experience the developers went for hyper realistic visuals... or as hyper realistic as dirt can be. And I have to say, it worked.
Sadly, I suspect it's less the game designers and more the publishers and businessmen that drink the kool-aid of realism. It's easier to explain to a ex-toothpaste executive why your game will be amazing if it is "the most realistic experience ever" rather than "it's some kid in a pointy green suit swinging swords at bats." "It's like Afghanistan in your living room!" vs "It's about a jumping pink puff ball, but everything is made out of yarn." Realism is easier to push through a committee that's deciding on the fate of 40 million dollars than a more creative idea that is difficult for a glorified banker to grasp.