..and this is significant. Many popular titles are released on all 3 systems. For someone with a "new" GC and an "old" PS2, many of these non-exclusive game sales are going to go to the GC.
I think the GC will come out of this console war OK in terms of profit. The bigger question is perception going into the next round. If people feel like they got a good deal on a GameCube, it may mean Nintendo will have a better shot next time.
Both companies (MS and AOL) like to have a stock of wacky patents. It protects them from each other, and from other real software companies (pretty much all of which have patents on something). They all know that a patent war would be Mutually-Assured-Destruction-by-1000-Year-Litigati on, so they lay off bludgeoning each other with stupid patents like this one.
The only time software patents have really been problems is when they are held by a company that doesn't produce a lot of software. These companies (like Eolas) can extort money without fear because they can't be extorted in return (they can't violate patents because they don't create anything).
My solution? 3 year limit on software/"business method" type patents.
Press OK to continue loading the content of this page....specifically to make it clear that there was no functionality here (ie, that this wasn't some new security feature or something) - that it is just a time wasting interstitial.
I think your wording accomplishes the same, while also perhaps giving the unclued developer some hint as to how to fix it. Perhaps they also could have had an extra little help button to provide an explanation of where the box came from.
...might have had a chance if it had a little fancier hardware. Rudimentary hardware 3d would have been a good start - at least they could have made a reasonable THPS4 instead of the isometric style one they appear to have as a flagship game.
As it stands, it's not going to deliver compellingly more than a GBA in terms of game functionality. And at $300 (the price of a GBA and about 8 games) it's going to need to do something compellingly (besides non-starters like its media features).
Ever met someone with a GamePark32? It's great too, I'm told. Really. But it'll never really show up on the market radar, and will never attract wide developer support. Like Tapwave and the Nnnannnagn, it's too little improvement too late in the cycle.
Looks like the good games don't seem to follow the hardware
Yes they do. The PS2 has significantly more good games than the GameCube/XBox, according to your list. Of the 3, it was the one that had the right hardware at the right time. So it got more good games. If you delete first-party-titles (Nintendo), purchased exclusives (MS), and titles released for all consoles, then the numbers would be even more clear.
The XBox and GameCube are both good hardware, but released at the wrong time (ie. too late - the PS2 had too much lead, and the others couldn't distinguish themselves significantly).
There's a lot of strategy in timing. For example, the next round of portables will be interesing. When will Nintendo release the next GameBoy? When the PSP? The timing is as important as the hardware. Remember the Genesis/SNES fight? In this round of consoles, the PS2 won the timing fight handily (and it's hardware had other benefits too).
The Dreamcast had a couple problems. Despite the rather good hardware it had (which still wasn't PS2 level and needed to be), it didn't sell itself well enough on hardware merits (and yes, advertising is important). It also had a large problem which is external to what we've talked about so far - Sega had developed a horrible reputation in the hardware market (32X, Sega CD, Saturn...) that hurt DC sales.
I have an AfterBurner-ed GBA - and I just went through Zelda and Yoshi's Island. Great games. Even though I botched the AB, it really is a great console - and I appreciate the 15 hour battery life (especially on long flights).
Still, I think the PSP could do very well if its hardware is solid. Its success will also depend on what Nintendo does, as any future GB is going to be big news as well. It'll be interesting to see their strategies going into next round.
I wonder if they could build a handheld around GameCube sized mini-discs....
Good games follow good hardware. In a few years, someone will say "Nnannag failed because of poor game support". They'll be making the same mistake - the correct thing to say will be "Nobody made good games for the Nnnanag because it was a horrible console released at the wrong time. Thus nobody bought it.".
The PS2 survived an early dearth of good games because it was good hardware released at the right time. The Dreamcast wasn't bad hardware, but it wasn't good enough for its time - thus we see mediocre game support and poor sales.
Similarly, Game Gear and Lynx were both "not enough hardware" to beat the incumbent. The Game Gear failed despite game support that was really quite good early on.
If the Nnannang was great hardware, it would currently be getting great reviews, selling lots, and it would get great games. It isn't, so it won't (barring a miracle).
If HTML had been a patented product of some company then nobody would have used it. It really wouldn't have been that hard to come up with a competitor language. Or perhaps they could have hid the patent for years, and then dug it up to blackmail everyone in 1999 with it. Great!
Alternatively, perhaps they could have patented the whole idea of markup language (or something). Wouldn't you have been glad this patent wore off after 3 years (say, around 1995)? Do you remember that Netscape charged a lot of money for their browser at one point, and made a lot of money doing so? If they had had exclusivity from a patent, they could have made more.
A 3 year patent would have done absolutely nothing to help them
They certainly could have got off to a good start in that much time. Evidence: they did - even without a patent preventing competition (and they made money doing so). Do you remember the period in which Netscape still charged $50 for Navigator and Internet Explorer was free? 3 years is an eternity for software.
Windows CE. What is patentable there? The idea of a handheld operating system? Well, in that case Palm definitely demonstrated that you can build a solid business out of a short lead. A perfect example, really. Imagine if they'd had 3 years of exclusivity on the whole idea? Or if Psion had? Or even HP?
Imagine now that someone had been able to patent "software to play mp3s on a portable device". Supposing it took a year to get to market, that's still two years of monopoly. That would be a huge windfall to pay for their innovation.
Because the software world hasn't had big, market changing innovations lately. Really, I mean that. And I see no reason why a new software idea couldn't be on the market within a year.
Think I'm wrong? Name one real software idea that fits these criteria:
1. Patented in the last 3 years 2. Could not be exploited for a reasonable "head start" profit in 3 years
Show me that, and I'll show you a useless, obvious or redundant patent - a patent that will only be used to harm innovation down the road.
It's only been luck that we haven't seen more damage from bad software patents. Law should be changed now, or we'll see real problems in 2015. 3 years (or thereabouts) is a compromise that could protect most legitimate interests, I think.
...and very likely can't, by law (as you suggest).
I was only responding to the notion that they would have no interest in doing so (see top post). It's likely, rather, the casinos will use identity tracking for research and/or other kinds of compensation.
While there's lots of problems with the Nnanang that have been beaten over repeatedly, none of them would matter so much if the processing/video capability were truly a break from that of the Game Boy Advance. If I could play modern-era games on a portable system with a reasonable screen/controller, that would be something.
Even if I did have to use a soldering iron to change games.
Who's giving me this? Snoy! Sony promises PS2 level power (and an analog stick, and a magnetic monopole) in the upcoming PSP. And that's the only way the GBA will be superseded - by a machine with compellingly more gaming power.
I don't know that there was one. Their only other alternative was a dialog box with a choice. From their descriptions, it sounds like the user can pick this alternative if they'd like. Pretending the dialog box is some kind of security measure would be retarded, given how easy it is to work around (and working around it is what MS wants everyone to do!).
And that's the real solution - everyone will work around this to get back to "the way it always was". Web authors will quickly discover how to accomplish exactly the same things (seamless integration) using script and such (as MS explains on the article page).
That message box will quickly be seen as an error message, the equivalent of "page authors didn't update page to take into account this thing - hit OK to continue". And that's exactly what MS wants it to be - an obstacle to get everyone to work around.
And luckily enough for the casinos, just letting the machines follow their normal default behavior does exactly this! No further per-client tweaking is required to accomplish it.
Not true. Over the long term, distributions will be normal (and conducive to continued gambling) certainly. However, over the short term (say, an hour's play) all sorts of non-optimal patterns will emerge.
Last time I was on a cruise ship, I watched people gamble for hours. Fascinating, really. Cruise ship gamblers are often casual, and I watched a good few leave (perhaps permanently) after they lost a few straight right when they started playing.
They'll never find out whether the machine was about to give them the starter win - an unfortunate sequence (for the casinos mostly) meant that they were out.
It seems to me that it's definitely in the casino's best interest to change odds in order to present specific patrons with the most addictive sequences of wins and losses.
Comps may help, but nobody plays through the night to get a great comp.
.. but I'm not sure why you included the other link. Just because buddy finds some of modern physics incomprehensible doesn't mean it's wrong.
Have a look at actual physics research over the last 30 years and you'll be reassured by its practicality, empirical backup and reasonability. Spend too much time reading pop science summaries (which are written to be entertaining, often by people with incomplete understanding) and you'll be convinced physicists are nutjobs.
They have no incentive to modify the odds in the way you suggest
Customer management, in this case, could be a little more complex than you seem to believe. Gambling is most addictive when the pattern of reward is very specific. A customer has very little idea how everyone else is doing, and a very good idea of how he is doing.
In order to keep him gambling the most money, it makes sense to present him, in particular, with a pattern of reward that encourages him to lose the most money. For example, I would avoid presenting a single player with too many straight losses in a row, as I do not want him to give up. I'd also prevent too many wins in a row, as the extra wins above the first few are not providing added incentive to play (and are costing money).
The ideal plan, from behavioral studies, is small rewards fairly often and large rewards at long, very random intervals.
I don't know if casinos are planning to do this, but, if it's legal, I assume they're savvy enough to try.
..or useful or good in any real way - but I suppose you already knew that.
I think we'll be seeing more and more of this garbage in the years to come - software coded awkwardly to get around useless patents.
My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.
It takes some effort to appreciate something like Max Payne's story - much less effort to write it off as stupid. It took courage for the developers to play the story straight when lapsing into parody would have been so easy. But if they had lapsed into parody, it wouldn't have worked like it did.
They set out to create something pulpy and dramatic and different - and, if you let yourself enjoy it, you'll find a great story and a fairly solid game.
On every forum on games, music, sports, or anything not directly related to "our continued survival as a race", there'll be some idiot who chirps up some "this is a waste of time, think of the children!"
Today, you're that idiot.
There's plenty of places to out your insightless politic - games.slashdot.org isn't one of them.
I don't think this is going to happen either, but you've come up with the silly reasons.
There are lots of software that runs off of MS OSs and not Linux. There are tonnes of games like this alone
Developers write for what people have. They write stuff for Windows, GameCubes, and whatever else. Using a bootable CD would mean that, instead of writing for Windows or Linux, they'd be writing a game for "a pc". They could do this with a bootable Windows disk too, if not for licensing issues.
There is a reason why we moved to harddrives, its more convient.
Booting and running from a disk do not preclude using the hard disk to store/cache data.
Uptime anyone? What the use of Linux stability if you have to reboot it every time you want to switch an application?
You're right, this isn't a good way to play games on your servers if they need to stay up all the time. Or something.
At one time there was: ctrl-alt-delete is a special key (reboot) in real mode on old world PC's - this used to be relevant. The only reason to continue has been consistency, but that's not entirely worth discounting. If an average user saw "hit F12-Break to log in", they wouldn't trust it now. Perhaps the solution is to add a special key to the keyboard for logging in (and leave ctrl-alt-delete as an alternate for a while).
It's very possible to intercept the interrupt (which wasn't the normal INT 8 - I don't think ctrl-break was just INT 8 either) in protected mode (not sure what things looked like in real mode). Naturally, under protected mode such interception would be mediated by the OS.
Under NT 4, I'm not sure whether it would be possible to intercept without replacing/exploiting a driver - I don't believe so.
It makes a fake-password-grab-screen (which would otherwise be trivial) difficult enough to implement that it's not ever going to be a preferred attack on systems which use it.
The fake-password-grab-screen was a favorite in a few of my old CS labs.
Slashdot Mirror
..and this is significant. Many popular titles are released on all 3 systems. For someone with a "new" GC and an "old" PS2, many of these non-exclusive game sales are going to go to the GC.
I think the GC will come out of this console war OK in terms of profit. The bigger question is perception going into the next round. If people feel like they got a good deal on a GameCube, it may mean Nintendo will have a better shot next time.
This price cut will make money now and later.
And that's the whole point of this.
i on, so they lay off bludgeoning each other with stupid patents like this one.
Both companies (MS and AOL) like to have a stock of wacky patents. It protects them from each other, and from other real software companies (pretty much all of which have patents on something). They all know that a patent war would be Mutually-Assured-Destruction-by-1000-Year-Litigat
The only time software patents have really been problems is when they are held by a company that doesn't produce a lot of software. These companies (like Eolas) can extort money without fear because they can't be extorted in return (they can't violate patents because they don't create anything).
My solution? 3 year limit on software/"business method" type patents.
I think MS chose the wording they did...
...specifically to make it clear that there was no functionality here (ie, that this wasn't some new security feature or something) - that it is just a time wasting interstitial.
Press OK to continue loading the content of this page.
I think your wording accomplishes the same, while also perhaps giving the unclued developer some hint as to how to fix it. Perhaps they also could have had an extra little help button to provide an explanation of where the box came from.
Anyways, the whole thing frustrates me...
...might have had a chance if it had a little fancier hardware. Rudimentary hardware 3d would have been a good start - at least they could have made a reasonable THPS4 instead of the isometric style one they appear to have as a flagship game.
As it stands, it's not going to deliver compellingly more than a GBA in terms of game functionality. And at $300 (the price of a GBA and about 8 games) it's going to need to do something compellingly (besides non-starters like its media features).
Ever met someone with a GamePark32? It's great too, I'm told. Really. But it'll never really show up on the market radar, and will never attract wide developer support. Like Tapwave and the Nnnannnagn, it's too little improvement too late in the cycle.
Looks like the good games don't seem to follow the hardware
Yes they do. The PS2 has significantly more good games than the GameCube/XBox, according to your list. Of the 3, it was the one that had the right hardware at the right time. So it got more good games. If you delete first-party-titles (Nintendo), purchased exclusives (MS), and titles released for all consoles, then the numbers would be even more clear.
The XBox and GameCube are both good hardware, but released at the wrong time (ie. too late - the PS2 had too much lead, and the others couldn't distinguish themselves significantly).
There's a lot of strategy in timing. For example, the next round of portables will be interesing. When will Nintendo release the next GameBoy? When the PSP? The timing is as important as the hardware. Remember the Genesis/SNES fight? In this round of consoles, the PS2 won the timing fight handily (and it's hardware had other benefits too).
The Dreamcast had a couple problems. Despite the rather good hardware it had (which still wasn't PS2 level and needed to be), it didn't sell itself well enough on hardware merits (and yes, advertising is important). It also had a large problem which is external to what we've talked about so far - Sega had developed a horrible reputation in the hardware market (32X, Sega CD, Saturn...) that hurt DC sales.
I have an AfterBurner-ed GBA - and I just went through Zelda and Yoshi's Island. Great games. Even though I botched the AB, it really is a great console - and I appreciate the 15 hour battery life (especially on long flights).
Still, I think the PSP could do very well if its hardware is solid. Its success will also depend on what Nintendo does, as any future GB is going to be big news as well. It'll be interesting to see their strategies going into next round.
I wonder if they could build a handheld around GameCube sized mini-discs....
...the theft problem is definitely surmountable.
I only brought it up as one reason not to try to emulate a simple device with an expensive, complex one.
Similarly, they could use Tablet PC's for audio tours of museums and for restaurant-queue-pagers. But they don't.
Good games follow good hardware. In a few years, someone will say "Nnannag failed because of poor game support". They'll be making the same mistake - the correct thing to say will be "Nobody made good games for the Nnnanag because it was a horrible console released at the wrong time. Thus nobody bought it.".
The PS2 survived an early dearth of good games because it was good hardware released at the right time. The Dreamcast wasn't bad hardware, but it wasn't good enough for its time - thus we see mediocre game support and poor sales.
Similarly, Game Gear and Lynx were both "not enough hardware" to beat the incumbent. The Game Gear failed despite game support that was really quite good early on.
If the Nnannang was great hardware, it would currently be getting great reviews, selling lots, and it would get great games. It isn't, so it won't (barring a miracle).
If HTML had been a patented product of some company then nobody would have used it. It really wouldn't have been that hard to come up with a competitor language. Or perhaps they could have hid the patent for years, and then dug it up to blackmail everyone in 1999 with it. Great!
Alternatively, perhaps they could have patented the whole idea of markup language (or something). Wouldn't you have been glad this patent wore off after 3 years (say, around 1995)? Do you remember that Netscape charged a lot of money for their browser at one point, and made a lot of money doing so? If they had had exclusivity from a patent, they could have made more.
A 3 year patent would have done absolutely nothing to help them
They certainly could have got off to a good start in that much time. Evidence: they did - even without a patent preventing competition (and they made money doing so). Do you remember the period in which Netscape still charged $50 for Navigator and Internet Explorer was free? 3 years is an eternity for software.
Windows CE. What is patentable there? The idea of a handheld operating system? Well, in that case Palm definitely demonstrated that you can build a solid business out of a short lead. A perfect example, really. Imagine if they'd had 3 years of exclusivity on the whole idea? Or if Psion had? Or even HP?
Imagine now that someone had been able to patent "software to play mp3s on a portable device". Supposing it took a year to get to market, that's still two years of monopoly. That would be a huge windfall to pay for their innovation.
Again, I can't think of bad example.
Because the software world hasn't had big, market changing innovations lately. Really, I mean that. And I see no reason why a new software idea couldn't be on the market within a year.
Think I'm wrong? Name one real software idea that fits these criteria:
1. Patented in the last 3 years
2. Could not be exploited for a reasonable "head start" profit in 3 years
Show me that, and I'll show you a useless, obvious or redundant patent - a patent that will only be used to harm innovation down the road.
It's only been luck that we haven't seen more damage from bad software patents. Law should be changed now, or we'll see real problems in 2015. 3 years (or thereabouts) is a compromise that could protect most legitimate interests, I think.
...and very likely can't, by law (as you suggest).
I was only responding to the notion that they would have no interest in doing so (see top post). It's likely, rather, the casinos will use identity tracking for research and/or other kinds of compensation.
While there's lots of problems with the Nnanang that have been beaten over repeatedly, none of them would matter so much if the processing/video capability were truly a break from that of the Game Boy Advance. If I could play modern-era games on a portable system with a reasonable screen/controller, that would be something.
Even if I did have to use a soldering iron to change games.
Who's giving me this? Snoy! Sony promises PS2 level power (and an analog stick, and a magnetic monopole) in the upcoming PSP. And that's the only way the GBA will be superseded - by a machine with compellingly more gaming power.
Unless, that is, you want a SWAT team ready to jump anyone who takes little CoCo to the bathroom.
With a $450 piece of hardware, the only solution is to get a credit card deposit. This presents its own set of hassles.
Too expensive ($450), too many features, and not too well suited for renting out (not especially rugged, too desirable for theives).
I don't know that there was one. Their only other alternative was a dialog box with a choice. From their descriptions, it sounds like the user can pick this alternative if they'd like. Pretending the dialog box is some kind of security measure would be retarded, given how easy it is to work around (and working around it is what MS wants everyone to do!).
And that's the real solution - everyone will work around this to get back to "the way it always was". Web authors will quickly discover how to accomplish exactly the same things (seamless integration) using script and such (as MS explains on the article page).
That message box will quickly be seen as an error message, the equivalent of "page authors didn't update page to take into account this thing - hit OK to continue". And that's exactly what MS wants it to be - an obstacle to get everyone to work around.
And luckily enough for the casinos, just letting the machines follow their normal default behavior does exactly this! No further per-client tweaking is required to accomplish it.
Not true. Over the long term, distributions will be normal (and conducive to continued gambling) certainly. However, over the short term (say, an hour's play) all sorts of non-optimal patterns will emerge.
Last time I was on a cruise ship, I watched people gamble for hours. Fascinating, really. Cruise ship gamblers are often casual, and I watched a good few leave (perhaps permanently) after they lost a few straight right when they started playing.
They'll never find out whether the machine was about to give them the starter win - an unfortunate sequence (for the casinos mostly) meant that they were out.
It seems to me that it's definitely in the casino's best interest to change odds in order to present specific patrons with the most addictive sequences of wins and losses.
Comps may help, but nobody plays through the night to get a great comp.
.. but I'm not sure why you included the other link. Just because buddy finds some of modern physics incomprehensible doesn't mean it's wrong.
Have a look at actual physics research over the last 30 years and you'll be reassured by its practicality, empirical backup and reasonability. Spend too much time reading pop science summaries (which are written to be entertaining, often by people with incomplete understanding) and you'll be convinced physicists are nutjobs.
They have no incentive to modify the odds in the way you suggest
Customer management, in this case, could be a little more complex than you seem to believe. Gambling is most addictive when the pattern of reward is very specific. A customer has very little idea how everyone else is doing, and a very good idea of how he is doing.
In order to keep him gambling the most money, it makes sense to present him, in particular, with a pattern of reward that encourages him to lose the most money. For example, I would avoid presenting a single player with too many straight losses in a row, as I do not want him to give up. I'd also prevent too many wins in a row, as the extra wins above the first few are not providing added incentive to play (and are costing money).
The ideal plan, from behavioral studies, is small rewards fairly often and large rewards at long, very random intervals.
I don't know if casinos are planning to do this, but, if it's legal, I assume they're savvy enough to try.
..or useful or good in any real way - but I suppose you already knew that.
I think we'll be seeing more and more of this garbage in the years to come - software coded awkwardly to get around useless patents.
My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.
It takes some effort to appreciate something like Max Payne's story - much less effort to write it off as stupid. It took courage for the developers to play the story straight when lapsing into parody would have been so easy. But if they had lapsed into parody, it wouldn't have worked like it did.
They set out to create something pulpy and dramatic and different - and, if you let yourself enjoy it, you'll find a great story and a fairly solid game.
On every forum on games, music, sports, or anything not directly related to "our continued survival as a race", there'll be some idiot who chirps up some "this is a waste of time, think of the children!"
Today, you're that idiot.
There's plenty of places to out your insightless politic - games.slashdot.org isn't one of them.
I don't think this is going to happen either, but you've come up with the silly reasons.
There are lots of software that runs off of MS OSs and not Linux. There are tonnes of games like this alone
Developers write for what people have. They write stuff for Windows, GameCubes, and whatever else. Using a bootable CD would mean that, instead of writing for Windows or Linux, they'd be writing a game for "a pc". They could do this with a bootable Windows disk too, if not for licensing issues.
There is a reason why we moved to harddrives, its more convient.
Booting and running from a disk do not preclude using the hard disk to store/cache data.
Uptime anyone? What the use of Linux stability if you have to reboot it every time you want to switch an application?
You're right, this isn't a good way to play games on your servers if they need to stay up all the time. Or something.
At one time there was: ctrl-alt-delete is a special key (reboot) in real mode on old world PC's - this used to be relevant. The only reason to continue has been consistency, but that's not entirely worth discounting. If an average user saw "hit F12-Break to log in", they wouldn't trust it now. Perhaps the solution is to add a special key to the keyboard for logging in (and leave ctrl-alt-delete as an alternate for a while).
It's very possible to intercept the interrupt (which wasn't the normal INT 8 - I don't think ctrl-break was just INT 8 either) in protected mode (not sure what things looked like in real mode). Naturally, under protected mode such interception would be mediated by the OS.
Under NT 4, I'm not sure whether it would be possible to intercept without replacing/exploiting a driver - I don't believe so.
It makes a fake-password-grab-screen (which would otherwise be trivial) difficult enough to implement that it's not ever going to be a preferred attack on systems which use it.
The fake-password-grab-screen was a favorite in a few of my old CS labs.