Software is a set of instructions. Just as patenting tying your shoes is ludicrous, patenting a optimal flow algorithm is similiarly ludicrous. Patenting a program that implements that algorithm is also silly. Should you be able to patent something liek "1 click buying" or "click to link to a hyper page"? This is tantamount to patenting "breathing", "opening a door". The fact that prior art exists doesn't seem to deter courts from awarding damages to these patent trolls. This signals the judges weren't compitent to actually try the case and the system lacks enough people who understand the actual technologie seven in a general way. Particularly that one patent troll judge in Texas shoudl really get the boot.
now I am going to be stuck footing the bill for 30 years of keeping this worthless piece of crap alive in a prison where bleeding heart pansies have demanded that criminals be treated better than the average citizen. So he will have cable, a gym, free food, a place to sleep, etc...I'm sure plenty of homeless would kill for that (and probably have because we have set up such a sweet deal for them). For all your "prison is a rough place" people...I imagine living on the street, not eating, and frequently being beaten or killed by moron teens for sport, or maybe mauled for insurance fraud reasons, is probably a bit worse.
Prison isn't fun. A friend of mine spend 2 in a Canadian prison for sellign pot and turned his life around because he never wants to go back. This is a massively built black guy who would never have to worry about beingont he receiving end of prison rape.
The whole "but homeless people would kill to be there" is a fallacy too. Life on the streets is rough but you still have some freedoms to massage your vices or turn it around. In America/Canada you still can eat regularly as well and you pan handle enough to get some booze or food fairly easily. How often do you hear in hedlines that a homeless person comitted a crime to go to prison. I have never heard of this. I live in one of the coldest cities in NA. I'm sure it happens in some places but the arguementis a fallacy because our prisons here and there aren't filled with homeless. Their filled with drug dealers. Check the stats.
I'm sure you're not- but I'll bet your future wife will really like it when you give her the virus and you have to raise your children alone because she died of cancer.
The real point, however, is that you're taking a stupid risk, for what? 30 seconds of pleasure?
I have a medical problem. I can't even fathom 30s. My average is 45m with outlysers of 20m and 145m. And if you don't find the right person who is in for doign it that logn it can be pretty frustrating. I have to rule out quickies all together and I have to schedule things because damn it take me a while. I'm so fortunate to find a understanding GF who is willing to work at it.
My fault- I said pregnancy when I meant something more like STD infection. Though a broken condom is much more likely to cause a danger of having to discuss intimacy issues- after all, sex without birth control is *designed* to last 21 years when done right.
Depends on which STD. herpes is a pretty high transmission rate even given condoms while HIV is a pretty low natural rate and greatly reduced with condoms. Many are greatly reduced by condoms other stopped other uneffected. Get check before doing the deed maybe? only way to be sure is do mutual tests then lock each other in a cage for 6 mo. test again and then do it. If you really want to be sure.
60% of the "free condoms" split at 3 PSI in a Consumer Reports test. 2% of Trojans did. The moral of this story- buy your condoms, don't take the free ones the college hands out, but you still are running a 2% chance of pregnancy regardless.
Ahh someone with no knowledge of biology.
Human fertility isn't 100% during all phased of the cycle. It's not 100%. You must have sex within a week of ovulation till 1-2 days after. So if you have sex, and you did so within a week of ovulation or up to 2 days after (sperm survives for 3 days on average with outliers of 8 days reported, the ova has 1 day to be fertilized afterovulation or it's flushed) and the condom must fail then the ova must implant as well which isn't 100% then you may get pregnant. So under ideal conditions for fertility using a condom means less then 1% of getting pregnant even with the condom breaking.
The averaged out odds for a single encounter is generous 3-5% with unprotected sex fatcoring in the window, the 1/3-1/2 odds then even with a the right conditions the sperm may not meet egg or the fertilized egg may nto implant. So you have 2%*3% in general. = 0.06% if you use a condom factoring the fail rate you gave for trojans and the averaged natural conception rate per encounter.
Add the pill into theequation or even morning after if it's legal where you are and it's pretty unlikely.
Sex is a complicated dance with a lot of involentary signals. The closer you are to "normal/average" the easier it is to relate or find a similiar partner. Those on the low end can't puzzle out what they need to do and thos eon the top end over analyse and muck up because they find it hard to relate.
With time the bottom end eventually find someone or the money to pay for it. While the top end eventually puzzles it out or find a similiar outlier partner or pay for it. By pay for it I mean either become a good provider or pay for it directly.
Re:Well, this would be keeping
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 1
with Sony's near-perfect record of failure in the format wars. From the Betamax to a dozen or so idiotic, proprietary audio formats for their cheap-but-expensive MP3 players, Sony needs about a dozen strokes with a clue-by-four.
This is what happens, of course, when one of your subsidiaries is RIAA-member Sony Music.
IT's really about 1 fails:1 successes.
Remember 3.5" were them. So were CD's and DVD's. MD's were a raging success in asia. Failures include MD's in the US, UMD, Betamax. pretty close to 1:1.
Re:No preferred media for me.
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 1
A better codec will shrink that down, but you aren't going to cut it down by more than half without losing picture quality. I really love how HD movies look, 1080p movies on a 1080p large projected screen is exceedingly nice. I'm not going to like anything that's bitrate starved to save on bandwidth. Disney's Pirates of the Carribean regularly exceeded 20Mbps, and that was with H.264 AVC.
You do know compression isn't auto-magical and there is theoretical limits to how hard you can squeeze a data stream and have it look okay at the other end eh?
Sure current codecs are much better then mpeg1 but I think the law of diminishing returns has kicked in in the formats since mpeg2.
Re:Am I the only one who just doesn't care about H
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 1
CSI:Miami looks fantastic, as does Saturday night AFL
For a second I thought you said Saturday Night Live.... nothing on earth can make that look good.
Japan has some seriously restrictive porn laws (all that hentai porn is something of a loophole concerning animation). Perhaps Sony would be taxed higher or incur the possibility of contributory liability if they pressed porn discs?
Really? Well.. Thats news to me. Have you even seen any Japaneses porn?
Why bother with physical media when you can get much more diverse pr0n over the internet.
Why spend up on players etc that might go obsolete?
Some people have money but no credit thus have limited options to pay. Some people have credit but fear letting the CC numbers out. Others still can't wait the umm.. 5-15 (30-2j for HD content) minutes it takes to download or the possibility of Trojans and various other computer nastiness.
Re:Any consensus?
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 2, Informative
Almost 1/3 have HDTV? Really? I live in Canada, and it isn't that different from the USA up here, and I cannot believe that for a second. I would say that maybe 10% of the people I know own an HDTV. And I know some people with a lot of money. Most people I know just don't see the need for it. Granted most people will probably buy HDTV when it's time to upgrade, since it's hard to find a decent SDTV, but people aren't just running out and buying these things.
Happen to live on th far east coast where ma and pa have only a quarter and nickel to rub together? Over here in Alberta almost every house hold in my family and friends has one. Of course the housing boom in my city has made everyone more flamboyant with their spending but it's very common here. In my family of close cousins all of them have one in their house/condo. In my circle of friend all of them except the "suffering for my art" ones have one too. Anecdotal certainly. but so is your evidence.
You all do know that the assertion that Bluray won't support porn was spread by a single person at a convention because he though sony was ignoring him right?
Apparently he was backing the other format and just wanted to grab some PR and slag the compitition. I doubt there ever was a "ban" or even a "we wont' do this but try one of our FRIENDS" policy at Sony.
Their critical knock against their marketing drew a ton more publicity then it deserves. I'm really hoping there is a comical back lash and NO ONE will pick up a copy to punish this lazy PR.
Not saying it isn't bad, I'm saying it's sporatic... I have seen people on here claim that every person they know with a 360 has had to return it at least once, and then there are others (such as myself) that barely know anyone with any issues. Hence the phrase "sporatic".
Ironically, those that tend to have issues themselves tend to have friends that also have issues with the 360...as others have mentioned, this is likely due to "bad batches"
The PS2 was said to have a bad fail rate but the only one I saw "fail" was my best friends. Mine is a launch one that served me faithfully without a glitch while his ate FFX and gave up the ghost. No one else "Failed". Even his is suspicious because he has cats so the air was filled with fur and he had a rather violent temper in relation to inanimate objects that induce frustration. The rest of us either have our original PS2 or the one we got to replace it after mishaps with drinks or moving. Considering I know 5 people who own 360's who've replaced them and they happen to be the only 5 who got them I sure it is at leats as bad or worse. And by most indications it's worse.
I think it's related to how defective units bunch up. It might be the 360's are less resistant to jostling due to how it was designed and it's heating issues. So a little violence on the way to the store and you have a eventually defective unit. Since they bunch up it may be that some groups are exposed to it more then others. So while in my social group we're 5/5 for defective 360's you may only be 2/30.
In either case the exact failrue rate is undisclosed but speculated to be high.
Can we get a -1 "didn't RTFA's" or is it a -1 "you must be new here" for me?
Re:You love it... You should buy it.
on
Protoss For a Day
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· Score: 1
The developer is ussually not as important as the publisher for distribution and advertising. For instance many small developers make quirky deep RPG's but it's Atlus who uses their clout (not much) to publish them. those individual studios couldn't ever hope to get a deal here for distribution but Atlus can. Look up the role of publishers in video games. THQ published SupCom while Bliz self published war 3 (although though Capcom in japan and sierra in parts of europe)
The game styles of those games just didn't hit the same audience or have the same longevity as Blizzard games. People still play SC in large numbers. Diablo II still has many active players. None of it has anything to do with the relative clout of the publisher. MS publishe age of games and none of them have an active player base exceeding that of War 3.
GP was wrong about the XBox drive - it's DVD, as you mention. However, you're wrong to compare the speed of the drives. A 12X DVD drive, like in the XBox 360, reads 16MB/s. A 2X BluRay drive, like in the PS3, reads data at 72MB/s. So, all things otherwise equal*, the PS3 should load much faster than the XBox 360.
*all things are not otherwise equal
From what I've read, the ps3's BD drive is slower on seak time due to the data density while it's read time is faster. So on average a Ps3 game loads a bit slower then a 360's due exclusively to a higher seek tiem related to higher data density. Not by a huge margine. More liek 10%-20% range.
The garenteed presence of a HD completely negates this advantage so long as the programmer isn't stupid and caches some data, the pre-caching will negate the speed difference. Although I think your confusing Mbit and MB. Blu ray is 72 Mbit while the x16 DVd is 16 MB. all theoretical.
Re:You love it... You should buy it.
on
Protoss For a Day
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· Score: 1
THQ is a little known company? It seems to be about half the size of Blizzard but I'd think their in comparable catagories. SupCom is exstremely new but it's user base is still smaller then War 3's. C&C was also published by EA. Is that a small house? C&C 3 and C&C generals are all new too.
I think War 3 just has more mass appeal. User created maps problably have contributed ot it's longevity. The unskilled play DOTA and defence maps whiel the skileld still play ladder. Of the ladde rplayers ther eis a considerable amount. I think it's due to the short duration of games (avg game is 20 min) and the manual dexsterity required for high elvel play. In the other catagory of mass rush games it's less about skill more about defensive strategies and a bit of luck thus it shines less to the hardcore.
compared to it's contempararies it held up pretty well. Considering 4/5 above used voxel/2d graphics. It was one of the few "true" 3d games of that time. Blizzard does aim low to ensure it can do 6 players of 12-30 units (72-180) on screen at a time with little to no lag On my 5 year old computer.
The character models are hideously blocky, everything moves as if through water, the designs are uninspired,.. yeah that about sums it up. It came out well after games that looked tons better in every way.
They aimed low for system req and I think the art direction help up pretty well against it's competators. I think yoru objection to them is simply a subjective style preference. You liek photo realistic they aimed for something else. I found the graphics perfectly acceptabel at the time and even now. Compared to a more recent one like Dawn of war or C&C 3 it's still holds up.
Slashdot Mirror
Software is a set of instructions. Just as patenting tying your shoes is ludicrous, patenting a optimal flow algorithm is similiarly ludicrous. Patenting a program that implements that algorithm is also silly. Should you be able to patent something liek "1 click buying" or "click to link to a hyper page"? This is tantamount to patenting "breathing", "opening a door". The fact that prior art exists doesn't seem to deter courts from awarding damages to these patent trolls. This signals the judges weren't compitent to actually try the case and the system lacks enough people who understand the actual technologie seven in a general way. Particularly that one patent troll judge in Texas shoudl really get the boot.
now I am going to be stuck footing the bill for 30 years of keeping this worthless piece of crap alive in a prison where bleeding heart pansies have demanded that criminals be treated better than the average citizen. So he will have cable, a gym, free food, a place to sleep, etc...I'm sure plenty of homeless would kill for that (and probably have because we have set up such a sweet deal for them). For all your "prison is a rough place" people...I imagine living on the street, not eating, and frequently being beaten or killed by moron teens for sport, or maybe mauled for insurance fraud reasons, is probably a bit worse.
Prison isn't fun. A friend of mine spend 2 in a Canadian prison for sellign pot and turned his life around because he never wants to go back. This is a massively built black guy who would never have to worry about beingont he receiving end of prison rape.
The whole "but homeless people would kill to be there" is a fallacy too. Life on the streets is rough but you still have some freedoms to massage your vices or turn it around. In America/Canada you still can eat regularly as well and you pan handle enough to get some booze or food fairly easily. How often do you hear in hedlines that a homeless person comitted a crime to go to prison. I have never heard of this. I live in one of the coldest cities in NA. I'm sure it happens in some places but the arguementis a fallacy because our prisons here and there aren't filled with homeless. Their filled with drug dealers. Check the stats.
I'm sure you're not- but I'll bet your future wife will really like it when you give her the virus and you have to raise your children alone because she died of cancer.
The real point, however, is that you're taking a stupid risk, for what? 30 seconds of pleasure?
I have a medical problem. I can't even fathom 30s. My average is 45m with outlysers of 20m and 145m. And if you don't find the right person who is in for doign it that logn it can be pretty frustrating. I have to rule out quickies all together and I have to schedule things because damn it take me a while. I'm so fortunate to find a understanding GF who is willing to work at it.
My fault- I said pregnancy when I meant something more like STD infection. Though a broken condom is much more likely to cause a danger of having to discuss intimacy issues- after all, sex without birth control is *designed* to last 21 years when done right.
Depends on which STD. herpes is a pretty high transmission rate even given condoms while HIV is a pretty low natural rate and greatly reduced with condoms. Many are greatly reduced by condoms other stopped other uneffected. Get check before doing the deed maybe? only way to be sure is do mutual tests then lock each other in a cage for 6 mo. test again and then do it. If you really want to be sure.
60% of the "free condoms" split at 3 PSI in a Consumer Reports test. 2% of Trojans did. The moral of this story- buy your condoms, don't take the free ones the college hands out, but you still are running a 2% chance of pregnancy regardless.
Ahh someone with no knowledge of biology.
Human fertility isn't 100% during all phased of the cycle. It's not 100%. You must have sex within a week of ovulation till 1-2 days after. So if you have sex, and you did so within a week of ovulation or up to 2 days after (sperm survives for 3 days on average with outliers of 8 days reported, the ova has 1 day to be fertilized afterovulation or it's flushed) and the condom must fail then the ova must implant as well which isn't 100% then you may get pregnant. So under ideal conditions for fertility using a condom means less then 1% of getting pregnant even with the condom breaking.
The averaged out odds for a single encounter is generous 3-5% with unprotected sex fatcoring in the window, the 1/3-1/2 odds then even with a the right conditions the sperm may not meet egg or the fertilized egg may nto implant. So you have 2%*3% in general. = 0.06% if you use a condom factoring the fail rate you gave for trojans and the averaged natural conception rate per encounter.
Add the pill into theequation or even morning after if it's legal where you are and it's pretty unlikely.
Sex is a complicated dance with a lot of involentary signals. The closer you are to "normal/average" the easier it is to relate or find a similiar partner. Those on the low end can't puzzle out what they need to do and thos eon the top end over analyse and muck up because they find it hard to relate.
With time the bottom end eventually find someone or the money to pay for it. While the top end eventually puzzles it out or find a similiar outlier partner or pay for it. By pay for it I mean either become a good provider or pay for it directly.
with Sony's near-perfect record of failure in the format wars. From the Betamax to a dozen or so idiotic, proprietary audio formats for their cheap-but-expensive MP3 players, Sony needs about a dozen strokes with a clue-by-four.
This is what happens, of course, when one of your subsidiaries is RIAA-member Sony Music.
IT's really about 1 fails:1 successes.
Remember 3.5" were them. So were CD's and DVD's. MD's were a raging success in asia. Failures include MD's in the US, UMD, Betamax. pretty close to 1:1.
A better codec will shrink that down, but you aren't going to cut it down by more than half without losing picture quality. I really love how HD movies look, 1080p movies on a 1080p large projected screen is exceedingly nice. I'm not going to like anything that's bitrate starved to save on bandwidth. Disney's Pirates of the Carribean regularly exceeded 20Mbps, and that was with H.264 AVC.
You do know compression isn't auto-magical and there is theoretical limits to how hard you can squeeze a data stream and have it look okay at the other end eh?
Sure current codecs are much better then mpeg1 but I think the law of diminishing returns has kicked in in the formats since mpeg2.
CSI:Miami looks fantastic, as does Saturday night AFL
For a second I thought you said Saturday Night Live.... nothing on earth can make that look good.
Japan has some seriously restrictive porn laws (all that hentai porn is something of a loophole concerning animation). Perhaps Sony would be taxed higher or incur the possibility of contributory liability if they pressed porn discs?
Really? Well.. Thats news to me. Have you even seen any Japaneses porn?
Why bother with physical media when you can get much more diverse pr0n over the internet.
Why spend up on players etc that might go obsolete?
Some people have money but no credit thus have limited options to pay. Some people have credit but fear letting the CC numbers out. Others still can't wait the umm.. 5-15 (30-2j for HD content) minutes it takes to download or the possibility of Trojans and various other computer nastiness.
Almost 1/3 have HDTV? Really? I live in Canada, and it isn't that different from the USA up here, and I cannot believe that for a second. I would say that maybe 10% of the people I know own an HDTV. And I know some people with a lot of money. Most people I know just don't see the need for it. Granted most people will probably buy HDTV when it's time to upgrade, since it's hard to find a decent SDTV, but people aren't just running out and buying these things.
Happen to live on th far east coast where ma and pa have only a quarter and nickel to rub together? Over here in Alberta almost every house hold in my family and friends has one. Of course the housing boom in my city has made everyone more flamboyant with their spending but it's very common here. In my family of close cousins all of them have one in their house/condo. In my circle of friend all of them except the "suffering for my art" ones have one too. Anecdotal certainly. but so is your evidence.
You all do know that the assertion that Bluray won't support porn was spread by a single person at a convention because he though sony was ignoring him right?
Someone makes a claim
Turns out he was trolling
Apparently he was backing the other format and just wanted to grab some PR and slag the compitition. I doubt there ever was a "ban" or even a "we wont' do this but try one of our FRIENDS" policy at Sony.
Their critical knock against their marketing drew a ton more publicity then it deserves. I'm really hoping there is a comical back lash and NO ONE will pick up a copy to punish this lazy PR.
Not saying it isn't bad, I'm saying it's sporatic... I have seen people on here claim that every person they know with a 360 has had to return it at least once, and then there are others (such as myself) that barely know anyone with any issues. Hence the phrase "sporatic".
Ironically, those that tend to have issues themselves tend to have friends that also have issues with the 360...as others have mentioned, this is likely due to "bad batches"
The PS2 was said to have a bad fail rate but the only one I saw "fail" was my best friends. Mine is a launch one that served me faithfully without a glitch while his ate FFX and gave up the ghost. No one else "Failed". Even his is suspicious because he has cats so the air was filled with fur and he had a rather violent temper in relation to inanimate objects that induce frustration. The rest of us either have our original PS2 or the one we got to replace it after mishaps with drinks or moving. Considering I know 5 people who own 360's who've replaced them and they happen to be the only 5 who got them I sure it is at leats as bad or worse. And by most indications it's worse.
I think it's related to how defective units bunch up. It might be the 360's are less resistant to jostling due to how it was designed and it's heating issues. So a little violence on the way to the store and you have a eventually defective unit. Since they bunch up it may be that some groups are exposed to it more then others. So while in my social group we're 5/5 for defective 360's you may only be 2/30.
In either case the exact failrue rate is undisclosed but speculated to be high.
Exactly when Duke nukem forever is released.
I agree THQ has more men. But Blizzard has double the revenue. So it's 200 Zippers vs 12 battle cruisers or some horribly stretched analogy like that.
Can we get a -1 "didn't RTFA's" or is it a -1 "you must be new here" for me?
The developer is ussually not as important as the publisher for distribution and advertising. For instance many small developers make quirky deep RPG's but it's Atlus who uses their clout (not much) to publish them. those individual studios couldn't ever hope to get a deal here for distribution but Atlus can. Look up the role of publishers in video games. THQ published SupCom while Bliz self published war 3 (although though Capcom in japan and sierra in parts of europe)
The game styles of those games just didn't hit the same audience or have the same longevity as Blizzard games. People still play SC in large numbers. Diablo II still has many active players. None of it has anything to do with the relative clout of the publisher. MS publishe age of games and none of them have an active player base exceeding that of War 3.
GP was wrong about the XBox drive - it's DVD, as you mention. However, you're wrong to compare the speed of the drives. A 12X DVD drive, like in the XBox 360, reads 16MB/s. A 2X BluRay drive, like in the PS3, reads data at 72MB/s. So, all things otherwise equal*, the PS3 should load much faster than the XBox 360.
*all things are not otherwise equal
From what I've read, the ps3's BD drive is slower on seak time due to the data density while it's read time is faster. So on average a Ps3 game loads a bit slower then a 360's due exclusively to a higher seek tiem related to higher data density. Not by a huge margine. More liek 10%-20% range.
The garenteed presence of a HD completely negates this advantage so long as the programmer isn't stupid and caches some data, the pre-caching will negate the speed difference. Although I think your confusing Mbit and MB. Blu ray is 72 Mbit while the x16 DVd is 16 MB. all theoretical.
THQ is a little known company? It seems to be about half the size of Blizzard but I'd think their in comparable catagories. SupCom is exstremely new but it's user base is still smaller then War 3's. C&C was also published by EA. Is that a small house? C&C 3 and C&C generals are all new too.
I think War 3 just has more mass appeal. User created maps problably have contributed ot it's longevity. The unskilled play DOTA and defence maps whiel the skileld still play ladder. Of the ladde rplayers ther eis a considerable amount. I think it's due to the short duration of games (avg game is 20 min) and the manual dexsterity required for high elvel play. In the other catagory of mass rush games it's less about skill more about defensive strategies and a bit of luck thus it shines less to the hardcore.
damn I replied to myself.
lookg here
Age of mythologies
Age of wonders 2
Stronghold: crusader
Warlords: battlecry
Commandos 2
Warcraft 3 ROC
compared to it's contempararies it held up pretty well. Considering 4/5 above used voxel/2d graphics. It was one of the few "true" 3d games of that time. Blizzard does aim low to ensure it can do 6 players of 12-30 units (72-180) on screen at a time with little to no lag On my 5 year old computer.
The character models are hideously blocky, everything moves as if through water, the designs are uninspired, .. yeah that about sums it up. It came out well after games that looked tons better in every way.
They aimed low for system req and I think the art direction help up pretty well against it's competators. I think yoru objection to them is simply a subjective style preference. You liek photo realistic they aimed for something else. I found the graphics perfectly acceptabel at the time and even now. Compared to a more recent one like Dawn of war or C&C 3 it's still holds up.