but there's a lot of games waiting in the wings for some reason or other (my theory is to help keep gamers going if there's a big drought of Wii games).
I recall reading on/. an interview with a NofAmerica rep who basically said that. He was explaining the difference between the Japanese and North American VC release list, saying that in Japan they released a bunch of stuff early, but in America had decided to be more "strategic" about when to release the A-list games. I don't think he explicitly said "to keep gamers happy during a drought of Wii titles", but he did say he didn't want, e.g. a Zelda Wii game and Zelda on VC conflicting with each other, which basically means releasing the VC titles when no major Nintendo-published Wii game was coming out.
If I've got an RS-232 cable plugged into a computer and its nothing more than few lengths of copper wire, then I run a piece of software on the computer and now there's electrical current on pins 2, 8, and 11 of the cable, I'd say that's caused a change in the physical world. It's not just a "mental process," any more than a [patentable] method of putting threads on a screw is a mental process.
Search the above quote for the bolded part to see both the thing that turns software from an abstract representation of math concepts into actual physical changes in the physical world, and the thing that as a physical invention is (and should be) patentable.
I made the argument a while back to a friend that software is not math, but language
Yeah, if you want to be very precise, software is a language for describing math. "height = v_initial * time - 9.8 * time * time" is literally a sequence of characters that represents a mathematical equation. Much like a math textbook contains language, some English, some in a specialized language for expressing math, but pretty much all of it describing mathematical concepts. You're right in that you end up at the same point either way -- language describing math should not be patentable, even if the language is one ammenable to computers.
Software is unique, though, in that it is literally nothing more than math. Everything at some level involves math, as in it follows the physical laws of the universe, but that doesn't mean it is math. Software is math. Software is about a concept, and the concept that software describes with every single line and statement of actual code is a mathematical concept.
There's a very clear difference here, as you should be able to see by three things involving parabolas:
Math book: h = vi * t - 9.8 * t^2
C code: double height = v_initial * time - 9.8 * time * time;
Physics: Toss a rock straight up in the air with some initial velocity, and check its height after some period of time.
Minus innaccuracy in the gravitational acceleration, all of these things in some way describe the same concept: motion of an object subject to gravity. Math is involved in some way. However by virtue of being representations, two of these methods are only the math, while the third also involves a real physical object that undergoes change. Note especially that the math book (Which I hope you'll agree is math) is basically identical to the C code version, except one is designed to be read by both humans and computers. Though with programs like Maple, even the first version is "computer readable", despite being most definitely a representation of math and nothing more.
The subject is patents, not copyrights. And because copyrights protect specific representations, yes you can have a copyright on a number. You can't copyright the first million digits of Pi (because you didn't create them), but you can copyright, say, a t-shirt with the first X digits of Pi arranged to look from a distance as the symbol Pi. A treatise on math cannot be patented, but it can be copyrighted.
Can you show us a plausible proof for that assertion [that software is nothing but a computer-understandable representation of math]?
It's not an assertion, it's a definition. That's what software is: Encoding mathematical operations in a computer-readable format. The human-readable source code is also nothing but an encoding of math, and even borrows much syntax from traditional math literature, modulo the limitations of standard computer character sets. If you'd ever looked at software before this should be clear.
If you don't think so, then I give you what should be the easier challenge: Prove that software isn't math through counter-example, by showing me a single instruction or line of code whose semantic meaning is not directly translatable into simple statements of boolean logic or, rarely, analog (real number) math?
There is an incredible amount of source code out there for you to look at. Should be easy to find a counter example if I'm wrong. However I'm not wrong, what I say is obvious, and you can feel free to spend years looking for something that doesn't exist just to conclude what everyone else knew all along, ala Douglas Adam's Maximegalon Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.
By your logic, running a warehouse is nothing more than a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
Please stop using the word logic if this is how you are going to abuse it. Running a warehouse isn't a representation of the motion of molecules, it is the motion of real molecules. If you merely describe how a warehouse should be run using mathematical formulae then you have something analagous to software, and yes, it is then just a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
Note that running software involves a device for executing encoded mathematical representations, aka a computer, which is a piece of hardware and patentable.
Math is not patentable. Software is nothing but a computer-understandable representation of math. A software patent however does not involve such a computer-understandable representation, it merely covers the idea. The idea behind software is pure math. Therefore a software patent is a patent on math, and should not be granted.
That may seem circular, but math not being patentable is a matter of law. Not to mention a good idea, since math is the fundamental language of the universe, it is the language by which we describe all scientific progress. To patent math is to patent the foundation of science, and will cripple progress. Just like software patents are crippling progress.
Have you ever seen a patent on a math book? Of course not, math isn't patentable. Yet suddenly when you encode that math in a computer language, it is patentable? Hell, with a program like Maple the content of the math book could be "computer readable", so does Maple mean math textbooks can be patented?
FTA: "Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.
Which, yes, is exactly the kind of common sense that seems to have been lacking and that I'm very glad the Court supported. That's the whole problem with patenting "obvious" things -- other people, perhaps many other people, would come up with the idea anyway in the course of solving whatever problem they are working on. Yet if it is patented, then suddenly the idea they would have come up with independently as a solution becomes instead a roadblock that they either have to find a way to work around (and work arounds may be very non-obvious) or pay royalty fees. I think anyone who works in technology developent has seen this happen.
Personally I would probably extend the court's reasoning beyond what they mean, because I think even in cases of real innovation (granted a difficult definition) patents often retard progress. It's all in the phrase I used above "in the course of solving whatever problem they are working on". The vast majority of the time patents are not submitted by a lone inventor who came up with a neat idea they want industry to pay for if they use it, nor are they submitted by a company whose sole desire is to create IP. Normally, it's a company that is trying to make a product, and in the course of creating it they come up with some stuff and decide to patent it. Those patents are mostly there to be weapons in the event of patent litigation, to force negotiations.
Take an example in a field I'm familiar with. Intel and AMD file many patents a year. Yet that IP is not their business. Creating processors that deliver the performance and features customers want, and better than the competition, is their business. They spend years creating a new design with the sole intention of meeting their perf/power/feature/price goals. In the course of so doing, they will come up with quite a few tricks some of which undeniably fit the definition of "real innovation". These will be patented, but again, that patent does little for the company except give them more armament should a patent suit be brought against them. The patent itself doesn't help the goal of creating better processors, because you can't necessarily just slap some random idea into an existing design, and a new design that uses the patent would take years to make and even then would only be a small part of a huge design. Yet those patents also get in the way of anyone else who, in the course of trying to make a microprocessor, would come across the same idea.
That's really part of the fundamental problem. Even things which pass the smell test of "non-obvious" may be independently invented by multiple people. There is basically no thought so unique that it cannot be thought twice. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be patentable, but it does mean that if no patent is necessary (when the idea in the patent is a tiny part in the solution to the company's real problem) then innovation is being unecessarily hindered. Companies like Intel and AMD use their patents as a way to stiff-arm competitors, and as a way to prevent lawsuits from aggressive patent-IP-lawsuit firms, who are in my opinion the real problem. They invent nothing, create nothing, but buy up proprietary ideas as if they were pieces of furniture and use them to attack companies doing real work.
That rant got off track. Suffice to say I'm very glad SCOTUS ruled that an overly limited definition of obvious is contradictory. The fewer "obvious" ideas that can be patented, then the fewer patents will be filed by companies that don't necessarily get any direct benefit from patents but feel they must due to the way patent law works.
P.S. The Microsoft ruling just boggles me, though. Jurisdiction is one of the things all courts seem to be sticklers about, readily stating that some case or part of a case involves actions outside their jurisdiction. Microsoft selling software in Asia et. al. seems to be a really obvious one, so I'm just surprised that the lower court ruled as it did. Again, kudos to SCOTUS for common sense.
I know it's confusing because we're reading an announcement about an announcement, but it's still pretty clear.
"Also, we have a very strong connection with the characters and settings of StarCraft, and we do plan to revisit that universe at some point in the future, but we don't have anything new to announce in that regard at present."
They are announcing that they have something in the works they can't say, and they will announce more on May 19th. Then he says that they have nothing to announce about starcraft. You could think that doesn't rule out the possibility that the May 19th announcement is starcraft, but it rules out the possibility that today's announcement is about starcraft, and todays announcement is about the future one. He's saying that he's announcing something, he can't say what it is, but it isn't startcraft.
You can't just make a global network and call it "The Internet." It has to be connected to the existing framework.
Exactly. The technology is irrelevent, it's what you are connecting to.
What differentiates The Internet from other global networks is the format of bits, how they are handled, and where they can go.
No, what differentiates The Internet is that it isn't a restricted access private network like all other global networks. Instead of being controlled by one source, it is an agreement between many parties with the effect that essentially anyone in the world can set up an ISP and/or get an internet connection. That's the difference.
The format of bits is irrelevent. Again, other networks use the same format of bits, but this means nothing they still aren't The Internet. The only reason the format of bits matter is that they must agree. There must be a protocol, but what that actual protocol is means nothing at all as far as defining what The Internet is. So no, IPvWhatever has absolutely zero to do with the definition of the Internet.
The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.
Not just that, but games shipped as buggy crap tend to stay buggy crap, and the patches only make it perhaps somewhat less so. If they half-ass it on the initial quality so as to make a deadline, then the patches will probably be half-assed as well. Most likely in these companies most or all of the development team moves on immediately to try to finish a different game by its deadline, while the patch to fix their previous crappy game has no explicit deadline at all so it gets deprioritized.
I'm not sure entirely. I know he has clients, usually he represents them when they go to sue the games industry for some tragedy. I don't know on what basis he was paid, but hopefully for him by the hour and not contigency since he loses most of these cases. All of his other antics could from that standpoint just be considered advertising for his ambulence-chasing have-you-been-hurt-by-videogames? practice.
Um, not even. For one, you can use the same types of connections and the exact same protocols in any network, and that doesn't make them The Internet. And for two, The Internet is still The Internet when the protocol changes or a new connection type (e.g. satellite) is added to the mix.
The tech is irrelevent, and will change. It will still be The Internet. The Internet is the global network, and that's what makes it what it is. Not the format of the bits going across it.
That's a really good definition. You are right that the key observation is that the technological means by which all of the computers are connected and the protocols they use are not important.
However since we are defining The Internet and not merely any computer network (to which your definition would apply), you should mention that this is a globally connected public system.
Just think if Harry had been alive and in office during the Battle of the Bulge, he would have pulled us out of Europe, screaming the war has been lost.
Make sure you always start your rants by comparing the current situation in Iraq with WWII circa Bulge, so anyone listening to you will know right off the bat that you have no freaking clue what you are talking about. As if the last major counter-offensive against our successfull invasion of Europe is comparable to the consistent, non-stop, and continuing attacks by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. They've been saying the insurgents were on their last legs and "desperate" for over three years now.
Well, wait, actually there is a vague resemblence, just probably not the one you want.
The Bulge was a last-ditch effort by Germany to push back the advancing Ally line, the idea being that by attacking a lightly fortified point in the line and breaking through the German army could split the Allies and outflank them, spoiling the advance and possibly even surrounding the Allies. The German army, exhausted and drained from fighting on the Eastern Front, was not able to push through before the Allies brought reinforcements. They created a brief bulge in the line, but then it was gone. Tactically, this was a minor achievement, and strategically it was meaningless.
The Surge is a last-ditch effort by the Bush Administration to push back the insurgents, the idea being that by placing a large amounts of troops down in select areas they can create pockets of safety in which to create a functioning society and government. The U.S. Army, exhausted from repeated tours and limited in manpower due to a lack of recruits, is not able to secure more than a few small pockets around Baghdad. They have created pockets of relative safety, but they will vanish as soon as the extra troops move to protect some other area, and meanwhile even more devastating suicide bombs have been going off in the unprotected areas, and even inside the only thing resembling a stable and safe area, the Green Zone. Tactically, the Surge is creating some minor success, but strategically it is meaningless.
This is of course not a great comparison (Vietnam or Algeria make for better), there are thousands of differences, but if you haven't figured it out, we're the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. You sound like a German commander insisting that they weren't losing, and that the Bulge would fix everything even though it was plain it would be insufficient, and then jumping on someone as being a traitor for pointing out the obvious truth. Or like a Japanese general insisting that you were going to win even though the Allies had just fire bombed Tokyo and you couldn't retaliate because your entire navy was gone, who then beheads an underling for pointing out that victory was basically impossible. Like you, the Japanese at the time though that belief in victory was sufficient no matter what facts they had to ignore.
Even while we were building these extra safe zones for John McCain to walk around in, a bomb went off inside the Parliament building in the middle of the Green Zone. We can't retaliate, because it isn't clear we have any idea who did it (could have been any of dozens of groups) or even how (though assuming they got help from someone in the Iraqi security forces which are known to be deeply infiltrated by insurgents seems pretty safe). How many more car bombs are going to have to go off before you realize that the strategy we are using simply will not work? When the Green Zone becomes as dangerous as the rest of Baghdad then at least the commanders staying there will have no choice but to admit the truth. We'll end up coming home, whatever happens in Iraq afterwards will happen, and people like you will spend the next 30 years talking about how if we'd just believed in victory, it would have happened, we only lost because we stopped believing. No. We will only stop bleeding when we stop believing in an imaginary "vic
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
You're absolutely right. I was sure that they would find Counterstrike or some similar game on his computer, simply because he was an engineering college student, and Jack would of course scream that he had made a fantastic prediction and been proven right. That there isn't even a hypothetical link to games any more turns this around 180, and now people who would have listened to Jack in the aftermath of the tragedy are instead annoyed at his stupidity and arrogance in the aftermath of the tragedy.
But really, I was just so disgusted by the way he leapt at the chance for publicity the same day as the shootings, I can't tell you how happy I am that it blew up in his face, and that's as a person not a gamer.
Imagine that you have built a business around selling tiger-repelling rocks. Not crazy huge, but enough that you live quite comfortably and can even get on TV being interviewed about your success as a self-made entrepeneur.
Would you ever admit that the idea of a tiger-repelling rock is nonsense? Would you accept any proof that was offered, no matter how robust and bulletproof, that your rocks did nothing? Of course not. You might know that your rock is useless, but you aren't going to say so, because as long as your insistence that your rock does its job perfectly convinces some people, then they will buy your rocks and you continue to make money. When nobody believes you any more, well, then you just come out with the wolverine-repelling friendship bracelet and you're back in business.
"Video games (as opposed to complex social problems) cause violence" is all JT has. He isn't going to give that up so long as a single person is willing to point a microphone at him while he rants. When that day finally comes, then he'll find another boogey man to blame all of society's ills on, and suddenly people will start listening again. Just like he moved on from rap music to video games.
I don't think for a second that JT really thinks games drive people crazy. I think he thinks it's his only meal ticket. He's a lawyer, and being a lawyer is all about arguing for something vehemently that you don't necessarily agree with at all. While JT may be crazy, and most of his statements do give that impression, his fundamental motivation is probably greed rather than a distorted view of reality.
Obviously it doesn't matter at all if you already own a console that the game was originally targetted for and still is, except of course for the fanbois and their pissing contests. It does matter if you own a console that the game wasn't targetted for but is now.
The important part, though, is for people who don't own a console but want one and are deciding which to get. That's the whole reason why exclusives are important, as it gives a reason to buy that console instead of another. At least theoretically this means that a person interested in a PS3, but drawn to the Xbox360 due to its exclusives, may end up deciding to go with a PS3 instead of xbox.
In practice, I highly doubt the loss of either of these titles is going to drive anyone away from the xbox.
I have the same problem of having learned the word from Great Space Coaster (man, haven't thought about that show in years). I think we should declare our pronunciation correct and work to get it mainstreamed.
And while Moore's Law is about transistor counts, what we're really interested in is what we can do with those transistors, and that generally means trying to get more performance. Performance has been growing exponentially along with transistor count, though slower since it's hard to turn a 1% increase in transistor count into a full 1% of performance (not to mention harder to quantify). I think 2 years is the commonly used time constant for the doubling of performance, vs 18 months for transistor counts.
Which gives the CPU design team, looking 5 years into the future, a performance target to shoot for. Combined with some predictions on how process technology will advance and thus how fast your transistors can be, the design team can aim for whatever IPC enhancements they will need to get the performance they'll need to be competitive. Using more transistors in part and parcel of this, which is why transistor budgets are also important, but the driving force is perf competitiveness, and they try very hard to track "Moore's Law".
That performance is getting harder to achieve, though. Both Intel and AMD have fallen short of the doubling-in-2-years performance intepretation of Moore's Law in the last five years, even though transistor counts have still been roughly following the rule. This is part of why multiple cores have become popular as a way to take advantage of large transistor counts without having to come up with more single-core IPC-enhancing widgets.
P.S. There is a practical upper bound to die size (and thus transistor count) in most cases -- the size of the reticle used to etch the silicon. For companies and products in markets where the margins were high enough that die size didn't matter, they might simply declare that the size of the chip was going to be the size of the reticle's rectangle and the designers could go nuts within that boundary. This I believe was the story behind HP's PA-RISC processors, which had 2MB on-die L1 data caches in the early nineties.
"Put away" isn't necessarily "hide"; that could just be the cop's interpretation. I have no idea, really. Since the box was searched and no pot was found in it, thus making it assuredly "just a box", your question is academic not pertinent.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he wasn't referring to the tasty energy drink... /. editors are pretty weird.
but there's a lot of games waiting in the wings for some reason or other (my theory is to help keep gamers going if there's a big drought of Wii games).
/. an interview with a NofAmerica rep who basically said that. He was explaining the difference between the Japanese and North American VC release list, saying that in Japan they released a bunch of stuff early, but in America had decided to be more "strategic" about when to release the A-list games. I don't think he explicitly said "to keep gamers happy during a drought of Wii titles", but he did say he didn't want, e.g. a Zelda Wii game and Zelda on VC conflicting with each other, which basically means releasing the VC titles when no major Nintendo-published Wii game was coming out.
I recall reading on
If I've got an RS-232 cable plugged into a computer and its nothing more than few lengths of copper wire, then I run a piece of software on the computer and now there's electrical current on pins 2, 8, and 11 of the cable, I'd say that's caused a change in the physical world. It's not just a "mental process," any more than a [patentable] method of putting threads on a screw is a mental process.
Search the above quote for the bolded part to see both the thing that turns software from an abstract representation of math concepts into actual physical changes in the physical world, and the thing that as a physical invention is (and should be) patentable.
I made the argument a while back to a friend that software is not math, but language
Yeah, if you want to be very precise, software is a language for describing math. "height = v_initial * time - 9.8 * time * time" is literally a sequence of characters that represents a mathematical equation. Much like a math textbook contains language, some English, some in a specialized language for expressing math, but pretty much all of it describing mathematical concepts. You're right in that you end up at the same point either way -- language describing math should not be patentable, even if the language is one ammenable to computers.
Software is unique, though, in that it is literally nothing more than math. Everything at some level involves math, as in it follows the physical laws of the universe, but that doesn't mean it is math. Software is math. Software is about a concept, and the concept that software describes with every single line and statement of actual code is a mathematical concept.
There's a very clear difference here, as you should be able to see by three things involving parabolas:
Math book: h = vi * t - 9.8 * t^2
C code: double height = v_initial * time - 9.8 * time * time;
Physics: Toss a rock straight up in the air with some initial velocity, and check its height after some period of time.
Minus innaccuracy in the gravitational acceleration, all of these things in some way describe the same concept: motion of an object subject to gravity. Math is involved in some way. However by virtue of being representations, two of these methods are only the math, while the third also involves a real physical object that undergoes change. Note especially that the math book (Which I hope you'll agree is math) is basically identical to the C code version, except one is designed to be read by both humans and computers. Though with programs like Maple, even the first version is "computer readable", despite being most definitely a representation of math and nothing more.
The subject is patents, not copyrights. And because copyrights protect specific representations, yes you can have a copyright on a number. You can't copyright the first million digits of Pi (because you didn't create them), but you can copyright, say, a t-shirt with the first X digits of Pi arranged to look from a distance as the symbol Pi. A treatise on math cannot be patented, but it can be copyrighted.
Can you show us a plausible proof for that assertion [that software is nothing but a computer-understandable representation of math]?
It's not an assertion, it's a definition. That's what software is: Encoding mathematical operations in a computer-readable format. The human-readable source code is also nothing but an encoding of math, and even borrows much syntax from traditional math literature, modulo the limitations of standard computer character sets. If you'd ever looked at software before this should be clear.
If you don't think so, then I give you what should be the easier challenge: Prove that software isn't math through counter-example, by showing me a single instruction or line of code whose semantic meaning is not directly translatable into simple statements of boolean logic or, rarely, analog (real number) math?
There is an incredible amount of source code out there for you to look at. Should be easy to find a counter example if I'm wrong. However I'm not wrong, what I say is obvious, and you can feel free to spend years looking for something that doesn't exist just to conclude what everyone else knew all along, ala Douglas Adam's Maximegalon Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.
By your logic, running a warehouse is nothing more than a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
Please stop using the word logic if this is how you are going to abuse it. Running a warehouse isn't a representation of the motion of molecules, it is the motion of real molecules. If you merely describe how a warehouse should be run using mathematical formulae then you have something analagous to software, and yes, it is then just a human-understandable representation of the motion of molecules.
Note that running software involves a device for executing encoded mathematical representations, aka a computer, which is a piece of hardware and patentable.
Math is not patentable. Software is nothing but a computer-understandable representation of math. A software patent however does not involve such a computer-understandable representation, it merely covers the idea. The idea behind software is pure math. Therefore a software patent is a patent on math, and should not be granted.
That may seem circular, but math not being patentable is a matter of law. Not to mention a good idea, since math is the fundamental language of the universe, it is the language by which we describe all scientific progress. To patent math is to patent the foundation of science, and will cripple progress. Just like software patents are crippling progress.
Have you ever seen a patent on a math book? Of course not, math isn't patentable. Yet suddenly when you encode that math in a computer language, it is patentable? Hell, with a program like Maple the content of the math book could be "computer readable", so does Maple mean math textbooks can be patented?
FTA: "Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.
Which, yes, is exactly the kind of common sense that seems to have been lacking and that I'm very glad the Court supported. That's the whole problem with patenting "obvious" things -- other people, perhaps many other people, would come up with the idea anyway in the course of solving whatever problem they are working on. Yet if it is patented, then suddenly the idea they would have come up with independently as a solution becomes instead a roadblock that they either have to find a way to work around (and work arounds may be very non-obvious) or pay royalty fees. I think anyone who works in technology developent has seen this happen.
Personally I would probably extend the court's reasoning beyond what they mean, because I think even in cases of real innovation (granted a difficult definition) patents often retard progress. It's all in the phrase I used above "in the course of solving whatever problem they are working on". The vast majority of the time patents are not submitted by a lone inventor who came up with a neat idea they want industry to pay for if they use it, nor are they submitted by a company whose sole desire is to create IP. Normally, it's a company that is trying to make a product, and in the course of creating it they come up with some stuff and decide to patent it. Those patents are mostly there to be weapons in the event of patent litigation, to force negotiations.
Take an example in a field I'm familiar with. Intel and AMD file many patents a year. Yet that IP is not their business. Creating processors that deliver the performance and features customers want, and better than the competition, is their business. They spend years creating a new design with the sole intention of meeting their perf/power/feature/price goals. In the course of so doing, they will come up with quite a few tricks some of which undeniably fit the definition of "real innovation". These will be patented, but again, that patent does little for the company except give them more armament should a patent suit be brought against them. The patent itself doesn't help the goal of creating better processors, because you can't necessarily just slap some random idea into an existing design, and a new design that uses the patent would take years to make and even then would only be a small part of a huge design. Yet those patents also get in the way of anyone else who, in the course of trying to make a microprocessor, would come across the same idea.
That's really part of the fundamental problem. Even things which pass the smell test of "non-obvious" may be independently invented by multiple people. There is basically no thought so unique that it cannot be thought twice. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be patentable, but it does mean that if no patent is necessary (when the idea in the patent is a tiny part in the solution to the company's real problem) then innovation is being unecessarily hindered. Companies like Intel and AMD use their patents as a way to stiff-arm competitors, and as a way to prevent lawsuits from aggressive patent-IP-lawsuit firms, who are in my opinion the real problem. They invent nothing, create nothing, but buy up proprietary ideas as if they were pieces of furniture and use them to attack companies doing real work.
That rant got off track. Suffice to say I'm very glad SCOTUS ruled that an overly limited definition of obvious is contradictory. The fewer "obvious" ideas that can be patented, then the fewer patents will be filed by companies that don't necessarily get any direct benefit from patents but feel they must due to the way patent law works.
P.S. The Microsoft ruling just boggles me, though. Jurisdiction is one of the things all courts seem to be sticklers about, readily stating that some case or part of a case involves actions outside their jurisdiction. Microsoft selling software in Asia et. al. seems to be a really obvious one, so I'm just surprised that the lower court ruled as it did. Again, kudos to SCOTUS for common sense.
I know it's confusing because we're reading an announcement about an announcement, but it's still pretty clear.
"Also, we have a very strong connection with the characters and settings of StarCraft, and we do plan to revisit that universe at some point in the future, but we don't have anything new to announce in that regard at present."
They are announcing that they have something in the works they can't say, and they will announce more on May 19th. Then he says that they have nothing to announce about starcraft. You could think that doesn't rule out the possibility that the May 19th announcement is starcraft, but it rules out the possibility that today's announcement is about starcraft, and todays announcement is about the future one. He's saying that he's announcing something, he can't say what it is, but it isn't startcraft.
You can't just make a global network and call it "The Internet." It has to be connected to the existing framework.
Exactly. The technology is irrelevent, it's what you are connecting to.
What differentiates The Internet from other global networks is the format of bits, how they are handled, and where they can go.
No, what differentiates The Internet is that it isn't a restricted access private network like all other global networks. Instead of being controlled by one source, it is an agreement between many parties with the effect that essentially anyone in the world can set up an ISP and/or get an internet connection. That's the difference.
The format of bits is irrelevent. Again, other networks use the same format of bits, but this means nothing they still aren't The Internet. The only reason the format of bits matter is that they must agree. There must be a protocol, but what that actual protocol is means nothing at all as far as defining what The Internet is. So no, IPvWhatever has absolutely zero to do with the definition of the Internet.
Everybody knows that umbrellas make it rain. It's just common sense.
Where I come from everybody knows it's the absence of umbrellas that makes it rain.
The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.
Not just that, but games shipped as buggy crap tend to stay buggy crap, and the patches only make it perhaps somewhat less so. If they half-ass it on the initial quality so as to make a deadline, then the patches will probably be half-assed as well. Most likely in these companies most or all of the development team moves on immediately to try to finish a different game by its deadline, while the patch to fix their previous crappy game has no explicit deadline at all so it gets deprioritized.
I'm not sure entirely. I know he has clients, usually he represents them when they go to sue the games industry for some tragedy. I don't know on what basis he was paid, but hopefully for him by the hour and not contigency since he loses most of these cases. All of his other antics could from that standpoint just be considered advertising for his ambulence-chasing have-you-been-hurt-by-videogames? practice.
Um, not even. For one, you can use the same types of connections and the exact same protocols in any network, and that doesn't make them The Internet. And for two, The Internet is still The Internet when the protocol changes or a new connection type (e.g. satellite) is added to the mix.
The tech is irrelevent, and will change. It will still be The Internet. The Internet is the global network, and that's what makes it what it is. Not the format of the bits going across it.
That's a really good definition. You are right that the key observation is that the technological means by which all of the computers are connected and the protocols they use are not important.
However since we are defining The Internet and not merely any computer network (to which your definition would apply), you should mention that this is a globally connected public system.
Just think if Harry had been alive and in office during the Battle of the Bulge, he would have pulled us out of Europe, screaming the war has been lost.
Make sure you always start your rants by comparing the current situation in Iraq with WWII circa Bulge, so anyone listening to you will know right off the bat that you have no freaking clue what you are talking about. As if the last major counter-offensive against our successfull invasion of Europe is comparable to the consistent, non-stop, and continuing attacks by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. They've been saying the insurgents were on their last legs and "desperate" for over three years now.
Well, wait, actually there is a vague resemblence, just probably not the one you want.
The Bulge was a last-ditch effort by Germany to push back the advancing Ally line, the idea being that by attacking a lightly fortified point in the line and breaking through the German army could split the Allies and outflank them, spoiling the advance and possibly even surrounding the Allies. The German army, exhausted and drained from fighting on the Eastern Front, was not able to push through before the Allies brought reinforcements. They created a brief bulge in the line, but then it was gone. Tactically, this was a minor achievement, and strategically it was meaningless.
The Surge is a last-ditch effort by the Bush Administration to push back the insurgents, the idea being that by placing a large amounts of troops down in select areas they can create pockets of safety in which to create a functioning society and government. The U.S. Army, exhausted from repeated tours and limited in manpower due to a lack of recruits, is not able to secure more than a few small pockets around Baghdad. They have created pockets of relative safety, but they will vanish as soon as the extra troops move to protect some other area, and meanwhile even more devastating suicide bombs have been going off in the unprotected areas, and even inside the only thing resembling a stable and safe area, the Green Zone. Tactically, the Surge is creating some minor success, but strategically it is meaningless.
This is of course not a great comparison (Vietnam or Algeria make for better), there are thousands of differences, but if you haven't figured it out, we're the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. You sound like a German commander insisting that they weren't losing, and that the Bulge would fix everything even though it was plain it would be insufficient, and then jumping on someone as being a traitor for pointing out the obvious truth. Or like a Japanese general insisting that you were going to win even though the Allies had just fire bombed Tokyo and you couldn't retaliate because your entire navy was gone, who then beheads an underling for pointing out that victory was basically impossible. Like you, the Japanese at the time though that belief in victory was sufficient no matter what facts they had to ignore.
Even while we were building these extra safe zones for John McCain to walk around in, a bomb went off inside the Parliament building in the middle of the Green Zone. We can't retaliate, because it isn't clear we have any idea who did it (could have been any of dozens of groups) or even how (though assuming they got help from someone in the Iraqi security forces which are known to be deeply infiltrated by insurgents seems pretty safe). How many more car bombs are going to have to go off before you realize that the strategy we are using simply will not work? When the Green Zone becomes as dangerous as the rest of Baghdad then at least the commanders staying there will have no choice but to admit the truth. We'll end up coming home, whatever happens in Iraq afterwards will happen, and people like you will spend the next 30 years talking about how if we'd just believed in victory, it would have happened, we only lost because we stopped believing. No. We will only stop bleeding when we stop believing in an imaginary "vic
THe best thing to ever happen in the favor of gamers was Jack's soap box jump within hours of Vtech. Blaming games, and saying Cho never would NEVER have "learned to enjoy killing withoutplaying violent video games". Only to later find out, that Cho, well never really played games. Maybe mine sweaper to pass some boring class time.
You're absolutely right. I was sure that they would find Counterstrike or some similar game on his computer, simply because he was an engineering college student, and Jack would of course scream that he had made a fantastic prediction and been proven right. That there isn't even a hypothetical link to games any more turns this around 180, and now people who would have listened to Jack in the aftermath of the tragedy are instead annoyed at his stupidity and arrogance in the aftermath of the tragedy.
But really, I was just so disgusted by the way he leapt at the chance for publicity the same day as the shootings, I can't tell you how happy I am that it blew up in his face, and that's as a person not a gamer.
It's not that hard to understand.
Imagine that you have built a business around selling tiger-repelling rocks. Not crazy huge, but enough that you live quite comfortably and can even get on TV being interviewed about your success as a self-made entrepeneur.
Would you ever admit that the idea of a tiger-repelling rock is nonsense? Would you accept any proof that was offered, no matter how robust and bulletproof, that your rocks did nothing? Of course not. You might know that your rock is useless, but you aren't going to say so, because as long as your insistence that your rock does its job perfectly convinces some people, then they will buy your rocks and you continue to make money. When nobody believes you any more, well, then you just come out with the wolverine-repelling friendship bracelet and you're back in business.
"Video games (as opposed to complex social problems) cause violence" is all JT has. He isn't going to give that up so long as a single person is willing to point a microphone at him while he rants. When that day finally comes, then he'll find another boogey man to blame all of society's ills on, and suddenly people will start listening again. Just like he moved on from rap music to video games.
I don't think for a second that JT really thinks games drive people crazy. I think he thinks it's his only meal ticket. He's a lawyer, and being a lawyer is all about arguing for something vehemently that you don't necessarily agree with at all. While JT may be crazy, and most of his statements do give that impression, his fundamental motivation is probably greed rather than a distorted view of reality.
And with someone like Corky leading the charge, there's no way we could lose!
[I bet you never get tired of that one... : p ]
I never get sick of fans! Especially ones who want my help in important causes like this one.
Unless you're just making fun of my disability, in which case you're a jerk.
Obviously it doesn't matter at all if you already own a console that the game was originally targetted for and still is, except of course for the fanbois and their pissing contests. It does matter if you own a console that the game wasn't targetted for but is now.
The important part, though, is for people who don't own a console but want one and are deciding which to get. That's the whole reason why exclusives are important, as it gives a reason to buy that console instead of another. At least theoretically this means that a person interested in a PS3, but drawn to the Xbox360 due to its exclusives, may end up deciding to go with a PS3 instead of xbox.
In practice, I highly doubt the loss of either of these titles is going to drive anyone away from the xbox.
I have the same problem of having learned the word from Great Space Coaster (man, haven't thought about that show in years). I think we should declare our pronunciation correct and work to get it mainstreamed.
They played various Wii games with a group of woman until past midnight. One guy even scored. That would not have happened with an Xbox 360 party.
But if it did, would it increase your Gamerscore on Live? Or would you lose points for doing the opposite of gaming?
And while Moore's Law is about transistor counts, what we're really interested in is what we can do with those transistors, and that generally means trying to get more performance. Performance has been growing exponentially along with transistor count, though slower since it's hard to turn a 1% increase in transistor count into a full 1% of performance (not to mention harder to quantify). I think 2 years is the commonly used time constant for the doubling of performance, vs 18 months for transistor counts.
Which gives the CPU design team, looking 5 years into the future, a performance target to shoot for. Combined with some predictions on how process technology will advance and thus how fast your transistors can be, the design team can aim for whatever IPC enhancements they will need to get the performance they'll need to be competitive. Using more transistors in part and parcel of this, which is why transistor budgets are also important, but the driving force is perf competitiveness, and they try very hard to track "Moore's Law".
That performance is getting harder to achieve, though. Both Intel and AMD have fallen short of the doubling-in-2-years performance intepretation of Moore's Law in the last five years, even though transistor counts have still been roughly following the rule. This is part of why multiple cores have become popular as a way to take advantage of large transistor counts without having to come up with more single-core IPC-enhancing widgets.
P.S. There is a practical upper bound to die size (and thus transistor count) in most cases -- the size of the reticle used to etch the silicon. For companies and products in markets where the margins were high enough that die size didn't matter, they might simply declare that the size of the chip was going to be the size of the reticle's rectangle and the designers could go nuts within that boundary. This I believe was the story behind HP's PA-RISC processors, which had 2MB on-die L1 data caches in the early nineties.
"Put away" isn't necessarily "hide"; that could just be the cop's interpretation. I have no idea, really. Since the box was searched and no pot was found in it, thus making it assuredly "just a box", your question is academic not pertinent.