If the creator didn't get it together to publish their creative work during their lifetime The problem here is that the big publishers probably won't take the work in the authors lifetime if the author is old or sick and thus expected to not life much longer. It is cheaper for them to wait for the death, then to pay for the work now. This is not exactly behavior that I would like to encourage.
A copyright reform should give the small guy, those who actually created the work, more rights, not the big cooperations more reasons to screw them.
Does it promote the sciences and useful arts in some other way? How exactly? Most people care about their family and if they know that all their work will do nothing do help their family after their death, they simply might stop what they are doing and getting a normal job instead with a more regular pay check. It of course also wouldn't exactly encourage the heirs to publish anything that the author didn't publish before his death, when they couldn't make money with it.
### Please explain the big difference you see between copyright lasting until the death of the author and copyright lasting 70 years after the death of the author as is currently the case.
70 years after the death of the author is basically meaningless. All it means it that nothing of the work created today will be public domain in our lifetime, which is very close to 'never' and the next copyright reform will surely come before the end of those 70 years, so the chance of that 70 years ever getting applied properly is very slim.
Directly after the death of the author is completly different, since it can mean tomorrow or in 70 years or at any other point. Its totally random. The record companies might not send around killers, but they for surely will be happy to avoid selling royalties surviving dependants, which I don't consider a good thing. Copyright shouldn't depend on random events that have *nothing* to do with the work in question.
A simple fixed term, say 10 or 20 years is a far better solution.
Your reform would be great in giving the small guy nothing (most of his work would fall into public domain since he fails to register) and the big cooperations even more control (registration don't bother them, since their legal department handles them). So, very bad idea.
And on the downside it can be quite a bit slower then the xargs version, since -exec starts a new process for each file, while xargs uses a single process for as many files as fit in the command line.
### there's no real reason not to use ray tracing.
For the time being there is a very good reason to not use ray tracing: Everybody has rasterizing GPUs, while nobody has special hardware for raytracing and won't have anytime soon. And the GPU development isn't exactly going to stop and wait for ray-tracing so it will have a really though time to catch up. And that is assuming that ray-tracing actually is better. All the talk about how it doesn't work so well for dynamic scenes might not have sounded so bad 10 years ago, but today where physics engines are everywhere that sounds pretty problematic.
In the end I think the major advantages in the next years won't really be a matter of rasterizing or raytracing anyway, physics engines, fluid-dynamics, AI and all that stuff that doesn't care much about the rendering, but about constructing and moving the underlying 3D world has far more influence on the overall experience then a few more polygons.
All that said, it would be nice to have a realistic game with millions of polygons where each and every tiny detail is modeled, like this Boeing 777 model with 350mil polygons, but then who would ever have the time and money to build that for a game?
Normal maps are automatically generated and with tools like ZBrush you are modeling at multiple levels of resolutions automatically anyway, so the low-res model comes out just by itself. I doubt that ray-tracing would have any significant impact on the artist.
The problem I have with ray-tracing is that I find it hard to see its advantages. Sure, it can put out more polygons then raster and it can do reflective spheres and sharp shadow. But those things have very little to do with visual quality. Reflections are pretty much a non-issue, nobody really cares as long as there is something that looks somewhat close to a reflection and environment maps can get that done. Sharp shadows are actually extremely ugly and people are moving onto soft shadows now. Higher polygon counts, sure nice to have, but again not really all that important, slap on a few normal maps and you can have your 5'000'000 reduced to a 5'000 polygon model without noticeable detail loss.
The majority of quality improvement these days seems to come from post processing effect and clever textures and programmable shader use. If you want to get fur on an animal via polygons you will have to spend a load of rendering time, but if you fake it with textures you can get pretty good results on todays hardware. Same with shadows and a lot of other stuff. Doing it 'right' takes a load of computing power, faking it works in realtime.
I simply haven't seen all that much raytracing that actually could compete with current day 3D hardware, those that do look better then todays 3D hardware is done in offline renderers and takes hours for a single frame.
Paralympics already exist. Give it a bit of time and they might turn into some cyborg competition. When it comes to drugs you have the problem that the really effective ones have the tendency to kill people after a while, it simply wouldn't make good news to have all those big sport stars of yesterday dieing, you already have the problem today with though drug regulation, if you lift that all you would end in a big mess. Also you have the problem that a whole bunch of performance enhancing drugs are illegal in many countries.
I really wouldn't trust that number a bit. What is a gamer? Those guys that play GTA or that secretary that has spend a bit of time with Solitaire? The later case might we called a gamer when you define it loosely enough, but it for sure doesn't care a thing about any video game related laws.
### Why bother with paying for a Dungeon Seige license
It is cheap, it comes with a build-in fan-base and it is free advertisment, i.e. this discussion wouldn't exist if it would be 100% original content not based on video game.
The idea is nice, but 3cm sounds awfully tiny, i.e. just holding the device the wrong way around would break the connection. Also why does this need a seperate standard? Couldn't one just do a special low-range mode in W-USB?
Put it next to a N800 and the OLPC looks pretty big again, which is why I prefer to see the OLPC as a really big PDA/handheld instead of a tiny laptop.
### But nowadays it seems like everyone is scared to get up out of their chair.
You know what happened to the places where I played back when I was young? They build apartment buildings and shopping centers on that ground. If I would grew up today I would have a much harder time to find a place to play. Things are simply getting pretty crowded these days and playgrounds for kids are often the first thing that will go. I can't really blame kids when they don't want to go outside to play, when the next place where they actually can play is a few miles away. And I can't really blame parents for getting overprotective either, when the most likely place where their kids will play is the street instead of the forest or another much less dangerous place.
### Direct debit can only be set up for large institutions
At least in Germany you don't have to be very large institution, works for random internet shops quite fine as well. The thing that makes it relatively 'safe' against fraud is simply that you only can transfer from one account to another, so you always know where the money went, also you can get your money back within six weeks or so if it left your account via direct debit.
That said, I still think its a very stupid idea to have the same account number for direct debit as you have for a normal bank transfer, since that means you have to give people from which you want money a number with which they can take money from you.
Re:Got my OLPC a few days ago
on
Negroponte vs Intel
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· Score: 2, Informative
### I suggest you do. And if you're an old fart like me who knew what X Windows looked like in the 1980s you'll agree that it's eerily familiar.
I don't really see how Sugar is anything like X Windows back in the 1980s. I agree that it is not really revolutionary, it is basically the same thing like every other OS, with the difference that applications are running in fullscreen. But I don't see what should be so bad about the interface. Closing an application quite consistently, you either press the Stop button in the Activity menu or you do it via the Task Manager/Home thing. There might be a few applications that are out of line, but that should be fixable without to much trouble and isn't a problem with the overall UI design.
True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know? I wouldn't mind it so much if the recoloring would be there to make it somewhat closer to how it really would looked, but the examples here kind of show that the coloring is completly arbitrary, what is red in one picture is blue in another, that kind of feels like cheating.
The DS has plenty of slots into which you can stuff SD card adapters and gigabytes of SD cards. It would be trivial to release such an official add-on, dozens of unofficial ones already exist.
### I mean sure I get the new sword and the new shield and now I can goto another area, but I have no sense of progress.
I think Gothic2 solved this very nicely, at least for most part. You could go basically everywhere whenever you want, but doing so early on would kill you very quickly, since you neither had the equipment nor the experience. Later in the game you earned that experience and could thus more freely navigate around. What helped a lot is that Gothic2 didn't have respawning enemies, so once you cleared an area it stayed that way, so to level up you had to explore more, the whole repeating RTS grind never happened because your leveling up came automatically by exploring new areas. And exploring was for most part quite fun, because it wasn't generic heightmap terrain, but quite nicely done real 3D terrain, caves overhangs, bridges and all that stuff that you don't see in heightmaps. Another aspect of the game I liked a lot was that the leveling up wasn't all out of limits. A creature that could kill you at the start of the game still could kill you at the end, it was unlikely, but encountering multiple of them at once and a bit of bad timing could quickly put you into trouble.
All that said, after 30h of the 60h I played it, it did get a little repetitive and the NPC interaction died down for most part, so I wouldn't have minded it if the game would have ended a little earlier.
What I consider important about a game however isn't so much if it really is open ended or not, but something far simpler: Does the game allow me play? Might sound stupid, of course every game lets you play, but in many cases its not real play, its following the level designers instructions. Mario64 for example is a great example on how to get things right, it is not open ended in any kind, but it gives you a level and a goal and not much else. How you explore the level to reach the goal is completely up to you, there are no borders beside the level geometry and your characters abilities. So the level isn't just a level, but a playground for you and your character.
Works the other way around too, Wii not having a Ethernet connector is just plain stupid, those things must cost in the range of pennies and I would much prefer to just stick a cable into the Wii instead of using my rather unreliable and slow WLAN router (the "slow" part comes thanks to the DS, which just doesn't work unless I limit the router to 2Mbit).
"Luckily" one can buy those things seperate, but while 30EUR for a Nintendo Ethernet Adapter is already is a little step, 70EUR for Microsofts WLAN Adapter are utterly ridiculous, for half that money one can buy a WLAN bridge. Would be nice somebody at Microsoft gets a clue and include those in later revisions of the XBox360.
The problem aren't cut scenes themselves, since sometimes you need them to tell a complete story (Half Life, I am looking at you...). However cutscenes become a problem when they show you stuff that should have been gameplay, if my hero does something, I want to do it, not watch it play out by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
A copyright reform should give the small guy, those who actually created the work, more rights, not the big cooperations more reasons to screw them.
### Please explain the big difference you see between copyright lasting until the death of the author and copyright lasting 70 years after the death of the author as is currently the case.
70 years after the death of the author is basically meaningless. All it means it that nothing of the work created today will be public domain in our lifetime, which is very close to 'never' and the next copyright reform will surely come before the end of those 70 years, so the chance of that 70 years ever getting applied properly is very slim.
Directly after the death of the author is completly different, since it can mean tomorrow or in 70 years or at any other point. Its totally random. The record companies might not send around killers, but they for surely will be happy to avoid selling royalties surviving dependants, which I don't consider a good thing. Copyright shouldn't depend on random events that have *nothing* to do with the work in question.
A simple fixed term, say 10 or 20 years is a far better solution.
Your reform would be great in giving the small guy nothing (most of his work would fall into public domain since he fails to register) and the big cooperations even more control (registration don't bother them, since their legal department handles them). So, very bad idea.
And on the downside it can be quite a bit slower then the xargs version, since -exec starts a new process for each file, while xargs uses a single process for as many files as fit in the command line.
### Just because a game is a shooter doesn't mean it can't be really engaging and pull you into the atmosphere.
That worked for the first 10-20 mins in Half Life 2, after that it turned into yet another shooter.
### there's no real reason not to use ray tracing.
For the time being there is a very good reason to not use ray tracing: Everybody has rasterizing GPUs, while nobody has special hardware for raytracing and won't have anytime soon. And the GPU development isn't exactly going to stop and wait for ray-tracing so it will have a really though time to catch up. And that is assuming that ray-tracing actually is better. All the talk about how it doesn't work so well for dynamic scenes might not have sounded so bad 10 years ago, but today where physics engines are everywhere that sounds pretty problematic.
In the end I think the major advantages in the next years won't really be a matter of rasterizing or raytracing anyway, physics engines, fluid-dynamics, AI and all that stuff that doesn't care much about the rendering, but about constructing and moving the underlying 3D world has far more influence on the overall experience then a few more polygons.
All that said, it would be nice to have a realistic game with millions of polygons where each and every tiny detail is modeled, like this Boeing 777 model with 350mil polygons, but then who would ever have the time and money to build that for a game?
Normal maps are automatically generated and with tools like ZBrush you are modeling at multiple levels of resolutions automatically anyway, so the low-res model comes out just by itself. I doubt that ray-tracing would have any significant impact on the artist.
The problem I have with ray-tracing is that I find it hard to see its advantages. Sure, it can put out more polygons then raster and it can do reflective spheres and sharp shadow. But those things have very little to do with visual quality. Reflections are pretty much a non-issue, nobody really cares as long as there is something that looks somewhat close to a reflection and environment maps can get that done. Sharp shadows are actually extremely ugly and people are moving onto soft shadows now. Higher polygon counts, sure nice to have, but again not really all that important, slap on a few normal maps and you can have your 5'000'000 reduced to a 5'000 polygon model without noticeable detail loss.
The majority of quality improvement these days seems to come from post processing effect and clever textures and programmable shader use. If you want to get fur on an animal via polygons you will have to spend a load of rendering time, but if you fake it with textures you can get pretty good results on todays hardware. Same with shadows and a lot of other stuff. Doing it 'right' takes a load of computing power, faking it works in realtime.
I simply haven't seen all that much raytracing that actually could compete with current day 3D hardware, those that do look better then todays 3D hardware is done in offline renderers and takes hours for a single frame.
Paralympics already exist. Give it a bit of time and they might turn into some cyborg competition. When it comes to drugs you have the problem that the really effective ones have the tendency to kill people after a while, it simply wouldn't make good news to have all those big sport stars of yesterday dieing, you already have the problem today with though drug regulation, if you lift that all you would end in a big mess. Also you have the problem that a whole bunch of performance enhancing drugs are illegal in many countries.
### For the same reason your house needs a separate hookup for phone and electricity.
Which reason would that be? A good one or just "because thats how it always was"?
Just for the record, my phone works without connecting it to a seperate power supply, power comes right from the phone cable.
### However, I don't expect my monitor to have a single connection to the PC any time soon.
NeXT monitor doesn't need a seperate power connector, comes all in one cable.
I really wouldn't trust that number a bit. What is a gamer? Those guys that play GTA or that secretary that has spend a bit of time with Solitaire? The later case might we called a gamer when you define it loosely enough, but it for sure doesn't care a thing about any video game related laws.
### Why bother with paying for a Dungeon Seige license
It is cheap, it comes with a build-in fan-base and it is free advertisment, i.e. this discussion wouldn't exist if it would be 100% original content not based on video game.
The idea is nice, but 3cm sounds awfully tiny, i.e. just holding the device the wrong way around would break the connection. Also why does this need a seperate standard? Couldn't one just do a special low-range mode in W-USB?
Put it next to a N800 and the OLPC looks pretty big again, which is why I prefer to see the OLPC as a really big PDA/handheld instead of a tiny laptop.
### But nowadays it seems like everyone is scared to get up out of their chair.
You know what happened to the places where I played back when I was young? They build apartment buildings and shopping centers on that ground. If I would grew up today I would have a much harder time to find a place to play. Things are simply getting pretty crowded these days and playgrounds for kids are often the first thing that will go. I can't really blame kids when they don't want to go outside to play, when the next place where they actually can play is a few miles away. And I can't really blame parents for getting overprotective either, when the most likely place where their kids will play is the street instead of the forest or another much less dangerous place.
The problem is that direct debit by design doesn't require proper ID check.
### Direct debit can only be set up for large institutions
At least in Germany you don't have to be very large institution, works for random internet shops quite fine as well. The thing that makes it relatively 'safe' against fraud is simply that you only can transfer from one account to another, so you always know where the money went, also you can get your money back within six weeks or so if it left your account via direct debit.
That said, I still think its a very stupid idea to have the same account number for direct debit as you have for a normal bank transfer, since that means you have to give people from which you want money a number with which they can take money from you.
### I suggest you do. And if you're an old fart like me who knew what X Windows looked like in the 1980s you'll agree that it's eerily familiar.
I don't really see how Sugar is anything like X Windows back in the 1980s. I agree that it is not really revolutionary, it is basically the same thing like every other OS, with the difference that applications are running in fullscreen. But I don't see what should be so bad about the interface. Closing an application quite consistently, you either press the Stop button in the Activity menu or you do it via the Task Manager/Home thing. There might be a few applications that are out of line, but that should be fixable without to much trouble and isn't a problem with the overall UI design.
True, but how about some good old black&white then when the original color isn't know? I wouldn't mind it so much if the recoloring would be there to make it somewhat closer to how it really would looked, but the examples here kind of show that the coloring is completly arbitrary, what is red in one picture is blue in another, that kind of feels like cheating.
The DS has plenty of slots into which you can stuff SD card adapters and gigabytes of SD cards. It would be trivial to release such an official add-on, dozens of unofficial ones already exist.
### I mean sure I get the new sword and the new shield and now I can goto another area, but I have no sense of progress.
I think Gothic2 solved this very nicely, at least for most part. You could go basically everywhere whenever you want, but doing so early on would kill you very quickly, since you neither had the equipment nor the experience. Later in the game you earned that experience and could thus more freely navigate around. What helped a lot is that Gothic2 didn't have respawning enemies, so once you cleared an area it stayed that way, so to level up you had to explore more, the whole repeating RTS grind never happened because your leveling up came automatically by exploring new areas. And exploring was for most part quite fun, because it wasn't generic heightmap terrain, but quite nicely done real 3D terrain, caves overhangs, bridges and all that stuff that you don't see in heightmaps.
Another aspect of the game I liked a lot was that the leveling up wasn't all out of limits. A creature that could kill you at the start of the game still could kill you at the end, it was unlikely, but encountering multiple of them at once and a bit of bad timing could quickly put you into trouble.
All that said, after 30h of the 60h I played it, it did get a little repetitive and the NPC interaction died down for most part, so I wouldn't have minded it if the game would have ended a little earlier.
What I consider important about a game however isn't so much if it really is open ended or not, but something far simpler: Does the game allow me play? Might sound stupid, of course every game lets you play, but in many cases its not real play, its following the level designers instructions. Mario64 for example is a great example on how to get things right, it is not open ended in any kind, but it gives you a level and a goal and not much else. How you explore the level to reach the goal is completely up to you, there are no borders beside the level geometry and your characters abilities. So the level isn't just a level, but a playground for you and your character.
Works the other way around too, Wii not having a Ethernet connector is just plain stupid, those things must cost in the range of pennies and I would much prefer to just stick a cable into the Wii instead of using my rather unreliable and slow WLAN router (the "slow" part comes thanks to the DS, which just doesn't work unless I limit the router to 2Mbit).
"Luckily" one can buy those things seperate, but while 30EUR for a Nintendo Ethernet Adapter is already is a little step, 70EUR for Microsofts WLAN Adapter are utterly ridiculous, for half that money one can buy a WLAN bridge. Would be nice somebody at Microsoft gets a clue and include those in later revisions of the XBox360.
### Some people like cut scenes.
The problem aren't cut scenes themselves, since sometimes you need them to tell a complete story (Half Life, I am looking at you...). However cutscenes become a problem when they show you stuff that should have been gameplay, if my hero does something, I want to do it, not watch it play out by itself.