Not even close. If PoP counted, then you might as well just say Pitfall Harry- or say that Space Invaders was the model for Doom. But none of those has a similar playing feel playing feel to Tomb Raider. (Mario64 isn't close either, of course).
This is SO pointless. Remote-controlled robots to perform surgey in space, on the slight chance that an astronaut has an unforseen urgent emergency? Why not just build robots to do the astronauts' jobs via remote-control, and skip this trickiness?
Consider the relative difficulty of invasive surgery in comparison to installing a PCI card or changing the lubricant in an automobile. Repair work on a machine (which can have been intentionally designed for easy servicing) is incomprably simpler than trying to heal a live human by cutting her up.
The differences are magnified at orbital or interplanetary distances, were telecommunications lag comes into play. Even a few seconds delay between commands could have a human patient bleeding to death, but machines can be powered down before maintenance, meaning NASA can easily take 60 minutes to direct each individual step (and then wait the same time to get images of the result).
Once we've got robots that can reliably fix a flat-tire by transcontinental remote-control, then we can start to think about robosurgery. Walk before you can run; solder before you can suture.
(Furthermore, if something goes wrong, a dead astronaut killed by a misaligned surgeon-bot is more expensive than a satellite disabled by a mechanic-bot, once all the costs from negative publicity have been factored in)
Rather, large business needing to run monthly or quarterly Monte Carlo simulations,
Users like that will fairly quickly decide that if monthly simulations are good, then weekly will be even better. And while they're at it, do 4x more variations on each sim, to get "better" outputs.
So-called "intermittent" jobs have a way of expanding to fill all availible processing time. It happens on desktop PCs, it can happen on enterprise-level sims too. Soon enough, "intermittent" has become "twice-annual maintenance shutdowns".
I'm also pretty sure that they would be able to get Sun to not publish their use of the grid.
If you're so paranoid that you don't want enemies to even know you used a 3rd party for your compute jobs, then you're already far past the point where you'd trust a 3rd party to handle the job.
3) Raise prices until the customers/costs/profits are balanced to favor profits 4) Profit
That's not "Profit", just "Revenue". Profit would be if the income exceeded the investment they'd made in the Grid computers, which won't necessarily be the case.
All that approach guarantees is a partial recoup of sunk costs- and it might not even do that, if the salaries of the marketers and engineers who operate that service exceed the income.
However, drastically dropping prices would still be a good idea. If Sun wants any hope of their Grid service getting off the ground, they need to build up some customer volume- create a critical mass of IT people who are comfortable running jobs on a mysterious external Grid. Then later they can increase prices to the level of profitability, and hope the users are willing to stick around.
It's a small market, but not nonexistant. Anyone doing high-energy physics needs as much processing power as they can get.
"As much as they can get" is very different from "huge numbers of intermittent cycles".
Academic phycists (like your link) aren't going to suddenly notice that they need 20,000 Ghz-hours within two weeks. If they had that kind of spurt demand, they'd be a good customer for Sun's grid.
Instead, users like that will have a fixed annual budget, and will try to maximize their Ghz-hours. Currently, you can get more computation per dollar by purchasing hardware, instead of leasing from Sun. That is unlikely to ever change, because Sun's pricing has to include overhead for the flexiblity of the grid, big bandwidth to move the data in and out, and liability/security costs to assure customers of their privacy.
Only if Sun achieves a superb economy-of-scale with administration will they ever be more affordable than in-house servers or other, simpler CPU rentals.
PS. Academics have a subsidized supply of white-collar labor in the form of grad-students, who can adequately admin the bought hardware for little cost.
Sure, they could use wiretapping on known VOIP services, but what's to stop someone from programming their own, using strong encryption.
There's only one way to stop it: outlaw encryption. People found with encryption software will be arrested, and anyone whose TCP/IP data is opaque to random test-searches will have her PC seized and searched (for possible evidence of crypto).
That is the inescapable implication of this wiretapping law: the law will be USELESS if encryption is widespread. Therefore, if the government is enforcing this law, they are either stupid, insane, or intend to criminalize encryption.
The reflexive flippant response will be to say that the government is actually both insane AND stupid, but don't dismiss the threat so easily. It's a mistake to rely on enemy incompetence for your only defense- someday, the opposition will finally get its act together.
And what about headset chat in Halo2 on Microsoft XBox Live? Seriously, why would it be exempt?
In fact, suppose I'm blind and have a text-to-speech webbrowser, with speech recog for input. That makes Slashdot a VOIP provider (since I can hear your posts), and subject to wiretapping!
Do you want to pay more per month for it? That's what you're suggesting amounts to.
They don't want to pay per month for admins to manually check on names and decide that "CmdrTaco" is illegal, which is what the current system amounts to.
Oh, and one more major error in that ruling: search for the word "arbitrage", and you can see him follow the fallacy that "the law owes you a living". He observes that since ProCD's business model depends on his ruling, that he must rule in their favor.
Sorry, but no. If the law is inadequate to promote business, that's a matter for the legislature, not a jurist.
As to your million dollar example the EULA would almost certainly state that modification is not allowed,
But if I haven't agreed to an EULA, why would I care what it happens to state?
Since the copyright holder has never agreed to that offer (by conduct or otherwise) you would be in violation of copyright as you never accepted the holder's only offer of license.
Exactly when would copyright be violated? Say very specifically when an infringing copy or distribution might be performed, bearing in mind that the "First Sale" has already occured.
I'd be interested to see your views on that case; having read Easterbrook's comments on that particular case, the judgement seems well-reasoned and balanced to my non-lawyer's mind.
I'd be interested in seeing what you think is well-reasoned about Easterbrook's ruling. (The fact that it is "balanced" is irrelevant to the justice, since the balance between murder and mercy is vicious mutilation. Just because you can find people arguing for opposite sides doesn't mean the truth is half-way in between)
Easterbrook's ruling is a parade of false analogies. First, is the fact that the ProCD case is actually about a telephone directory, not software (included with the directory was software to search it, but that software was not the intellectual property under dispute). So a case in the domain of phone-lists was poorly stretched to apply to software.
Second, he uses examples of concert / airline tickets, risk insurance, and such stuff as established examples of contract terms being revealed only after the exchange of money. But that's a wrong comparison: in all the existing, valid cases, the customer is contracting for a service to be performed in the future. If you buy a plane ticket and the pilot immediately explodes, your expenditure is worthless. But if Microsoft sinks into a volcano just after you buy WindowsXP, the software never stops working.
Promises for future service are not analogous to selling a videogame. The true analogy is to attempts to put shrink-wrap terms on physical property, which were conclusively outlawed back in the 1950s.
Third, he mentions in-box warranty text as another example that hidden post-sale binding terms were already acceptable. That's another non-sequitor. A warranty isn't a contract; it's a gift. The warranty text doesn't ask or claim to take anything away from the customer- it only makes him an offer of certain reimbursment if a failure occurs. If a buyer doesn't want a warranty, she can easily ignore it- the thing is totally optional. But if software EULAs were also totally optional, then we wouldn't be having this topic at all.
In exchange for your agreeing to the EULA (and maybe your money), they let you use the software. Another example: in exchange for $500, I agree to let you drive a backhoe across my yard so you can dig your swimming pool.
Driving on your yard: trespassing, which is illegal without permission. Therefore a contract is needed to secure that permission.
Installing software you've already paid for: legal. Neither the copyright holder nor the previous owner of the physical media has any leverage to prohibit your use after the sale is final. Or do you think that I could sell my house and then later tell the new owners that going inside will indicate acceptance to some new promissary terms?
(4) Contracts do NOT have to be open to negotiation. I don't know where you get this from.
It's true, although in cases such as a Coke machine, one party has already decided a-priori to reject any proposed modification. This condition is fairly irrelevant to EULAs, because since nothing is being exchanged, there's nothing to negotiate about. The publisher wants something for nothing.
We cannot build something that compares to the size and accuracy of the pyramids in Egypt,
We cannot land on the moon either.
It's not a matter of misunderstood technology- just an unwillingness to spend 10% of the national GDP on something completely useless. Convince 20,000 men to work at it for 50 years, and they'll build you your pyramid.
You cannot just take my list of tools or ideas, leave a few out and then claim them as your own.
150+ years ago, that was explicitly allowed. Anyone who could take an existing patented invention and produce a functional copy with a fewer number of individual parts could recieve a new patent for the smaller device.
It's in the Doom genre, but it added a much deeper storytelling aspect to it that Doom never had.
That falsehood is quite commonly repeated. It is a sign of a misunderstanding what "storytelling" actually means, which is difficult to address without suggesting a course in creative writing and/or literary appreciation.
In terms of storytelling, Halflife was only minorly stronger than Doom, and barely any different in terms of plotline. "Nasty government scientists in their wasteland underground lab experiment with teleporters and unlease weird monsters"
This was a good thing: it was to Valve's credit that they didn't attempt much in the way of story, which would've distracted from Half-life's better elements. (The same can be said for when Tom Hall's storyline was removed from the original Doom)
But transplant that story to another structure, and the game still could have done well.
Absolutely not. Fully 75% of Half-life's sales (over 6 years) were based on its effectiveness as a story-free competitive online game (the name "Counter-Strike" might ring a bell)
or getting 5 bucks a week for taking out the trash
The 1980s called, they want their allowance back.
They largely play social games online, such as pop cap or MSN games, but they do pay and they do play.
Ad impressions from a demographic that advertisers don't desire anyhow- does that really qualify as "payment"?
2. Half-Life was based more on classic adventure games than Doom. It certainly didn't "follow the Doom model."
No, it wasn't based on "adventure games" at all. Half-life fits directly into the chain of FPS starting with Wolf3d.
The main challenge facing a player of Half-life is how to shoot things before they hurt you (exactly the same as in Doom). Adventure games are based on collecting and using objects to open puzzles, and while many FPS have minor elements of puzzle-solving, just think about a simple question:
Which change would've hurt Half-life's sales more- replacing the mild puzzle-solving with Doom-style "red/blue keycards", or removing the gun-shooting and monster-dodging? The answer should tell you which genre it's really from.
Console gaming and movies don't "crave" the 13 - 25 year old male audience.
Yes they do. The average gameplayer may be 30, but people of that age and above spent far less money and time on games (console especially). The folks who buy 8+ full-price games per year are kids or college students, sucking parental earnings.
Furthermore, the most effective way to get adults of 30+ to play a game is for them to build a video-game habit as teens. Middle-aged people who didn't grow up with games are unlikely to start.
Quality code CAN happen... but first things must change...
Good, you left space number #0 free for the most important reason:
0 - Customers must stop happily paying for bad code.
Until there are marketplace penalties for a vendor repeatedly selling unstable and insecure software, they'll keep doing it.
And, the fastest way to create those penalties would be reduce the police budget dedicated to "cybersecurity", which is in truth a government subsidy for bad software vendors. Why should Bill Gates have to protect Windows Vista from hackers, when the FBI will do that job for him?
Since XML is a proper subset of prior art that existed prior to the filing of this patent,
Subsets of an existing idea are individually patentable. A 3x3x3m block of steel, after all, is a superset of thousands of different useful machines- just eliminate the excess molecule(s), and there it is! "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
The XML specification is a subset of/dev/random.
Re:i wonder...
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
if the copy "protection" (prevention) works in linux...
It didn't back in Doom3. You just install the separately-distributed Linux executable, copy a directory from each of the CDs onto your hard drive, and play from disc henceforth.
Currently, securerom-style copyprotection on Linux would be a waste of effort. There are many Windows customers who don't know how to install no-cd patches, but nearly everyone running Linux has that level of technical skill.
Re:Demo in a good long while
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Expect the same release time, with no demo, ever, for linux.
And, in the case of Doom3, waiting 3 months was a clever marketing decision. If a demo had been out before commericial release, many customers would've been off by knowing that 80% of the game was spent squinting at blackness.
Slashdot Mirror
Prince of Persia, duh. Do I win?
Not even close. If PoP counted, then you might as well just say Pitfall Harry- or say that Space Invaders was the model for Doom. But none of those has a similar playing feel playing feel to Tomb Raider. (Mario64 isn't close either, of course).
This is SO pointless. Remote-controlled robots to perform surgey in space, on the slight chance that an astronaut has an unforseen urgent emergency? Why not just build robots to do the astronauts' jobs via remote-control, and skip this trickiness?
Consider the relative difficulty of invasive surgery in comparison to installing a PCI card or changing the lubricant in an automobile. Repair work on a machine (which can have been intentionally designed for easy servicing) is incomprably simpler than trying to heal a live human by cutting her up.
The differences are magnified at orbital or interplanetary distances, were telecommunications lag comes into play. Even a few seconds delay between commands could have a human patient bleeding to death, but machines can be powered down before maintenance, meaning NASA can easily take 60 minutes to direct each individual step (and then wait the same time to get images of the result).
Once we've got robots that can reliably fix a flat-tire by transcontinental remote-control, then we can start to think about robosurgery. Walk before you can run; solder before you can suture.
(Furthermore, if something goes wrong, a dead astronaut killed by a misaligned surgeon-bot is more expensive than a satellite disabled by a mechanic-bot, once all the costs from negative publicity have been factored in)
the style of gameplay was done before
Go on, name an earlier title with the style of Tomb Raider.
but the next big cross-platform game probably won't do so well on the Revolution.
Except that traditional Gamecube controllers can be plugged into the Revolution, so cross-platform games can run exactly as well as they ever did.
Rather, large business needing to run monthly or quarterly Monte Carlo simulations,
Users like that will fairly quickly decide that if monthly simulations are good, then weekly will be even better. And while they're at it, do 4x more variations on each sim, to get "better" outputs.
So-called "intermittent" jobs have a way of expanding to fill all availible processing time. It happens on desktop PCs, it can happen on enterprise-level sims too. Soon enough, "intermittent" has become "twice-annual maintenance shutdowns".
I'm also pretty sure that they would be able to get Sun to not publish their use of the grid.
If you're so paranoid that you don't want enemies to even know you used a 3rd party for your compute jobs, then you're already far past the point where you'd trust a 3rd party to handle the job.
3) Raise prices until the customers/costs/profits are balanced to favor profits
4) Profit
That's not "Profit", just "Revenue". Profit would be if the income exceeded the investment they'd made in the Grid computers, which won't necessarily be the case.
All that approach guarantees is a partial recoup of sunk costs- and it might not even do that, if the salaries of the marketers and engineers who operate that service exceed the income.
However, drastically dropping prices would still be a good idea. If Sun wants any hope of their Grid service getting off the ground, they need to build up some customer volume- create a critical mass of IT people who are comfortable running jobs on a mysterious external Grid. Then later they can increase prices to the level of profitability, and hope the users are willing to stick around.
Might not work, but it's the only possibility.
It's a small market, but not nonexistant. Anyone doing high-energy physics needs as much processing power as they can get.
"As much as they can get" is very different from "huge numbers of intermittent cycles".
Academic phycists (like your link) aren't going to suddenly notice that they need 20,000 Ghz-hours within two weeks. If they had that kind of spurt demand, they'd be a good customer for Sun's grid.
Instead, users like that will have a fixed annual budget, and will try to maximize their Ghz-hours. Currently, you can get more computation per dollar by purchasing hardware, instead of leasing from Sun. That is unlikely to ever change, because Sun's pricing has to include overhead for the flexiblity of the grid, big bandwidth to move the data in and out, and liability/security costs to assure customers of their privacy.
Only if Sun achieves a superb economy-of-scale with administration will they ever be more affordable than in-house servers or other, simpler CPU rentals.
PS. Academics have a subsidized supply of white-collar labor in the form of grad-students, who can adequately admin the bought hardware for little cost.
Sure, they could use wiretapping on known VOIP services, but what's to stop someone from programming their own, using strong encryption.
There's only one way to stop it: outlaw encryption. People found with encryption software will be arrested, and anyone whose TCP/IP data is opaque to random test-searches will have her PC seized and searched (for possible evidence of crypto).
That is the inescapable implication of this wiretapping law: the law will be USELESS if encryption is widespread. Therefore, if the government is enforcing this law, they are either stupid, insane, or intend to criminalize encryption.
The reflexive flippant response will be to say that the government is actually both insane AND stupid, but don't dismiss the threat so easily. It's a mistake to rely on enemy incompetence for your only defense- someday, the opposition will finally get its act together.
And what about headset chat in Halo2 on Microsoft XBox Live?
Seriously, why would it be exempt?
In fact, suppose I'm blind and have a text-to-speech webbrowser, with speech recog for input. That makes Slashdot a VOIP provider (since I can hear your posts), and subject to wiretapping!
Do you want to pay more per month for it? That's what you're suggesting amounts to.
They don't want to pay per month for admins to manually check on names and decide that "CmdrTaco" is illegal, which is what the current system amounts to.
Oh, and one more major error in that ruling: search for the word "arbitrage", and you can see him follow the fallacy that "the law owes you a living". He observes that since ProCD's business model depends on his ruling, that he must rule in their favor.
Sorry, but no. If the law is inadequate to promote business, that's a matter for the legislature, not a jurist.
As to your million dollar example the EULA would almost certainly state that modification is not allowed,
But if I haven't agreed to an EULA, why would I care what it happens to state?
Since the copyright holder has never agreed to that offer (by conduct or otherwise) you would be in violation of copyright as you never accepted the holder's only offer of license.
Exactly when would copyright be violated? Say very specifically when an infringing copy or distribution might be performed, bearing in mind that the "First Sale" has already occured.
I'd be interested to see your views on that case; having read Easterbrook's comments on that particular case, the judgement seems well-reasoned and balanced to my non-lawyer's mind.
I'd be interested in seeing what you think is well-reasoned about Easterbrook's ruling. (The fact that it is "balanced" is irrelevant to the justice, since the balance between murder and mercy is vicious mutilation. Just because you can find people arguing for opposite sides doesn't mean the truth is half-way in between)
Easterbrook's ruling is a parade of false analogies. First, is the fact that the ProCD case is actually about a telephone directory, not software (included with the directory was software to search it, but that software was not the intellectual property under dispute). So a case in the domain of phone-lists was poorly stretched to apply to software.
Second, he uses examples of concert / airline tickets, risk insurance, and such stuff as established examples of contract terms being revealed only after the exchange of money. But that's a wrong comparison: in all the existing, valid cases, the customer is contracting for a service to be performed in the future. If you buy a plane ticket and the pilot immediately explodes, your expenditure is worthless. But if Microsoft sinks into a volcano just after you buy WindowsXP, the software never stops working.
Promises for future service are not analogous to selling a videogame. The true analogy is to attempts to put shrink-wrap terms on physical property, which were conclusively outlawed back in the 1950s.
Third, he mentions in-box warranty text as another example that hidden post-sale binding terms were already acceptable. That's another non-sequitor. A warranty isn't a contract; it's a gift. The warranty text doesn't ask or claim to take anything away from the customer- it only makes him an offer of certain reimbursment if a failure occurs. If a buyer doesn't want a warranty, she can easily ignore it- the thing is totally optional. But if software EULAs were also totally optional, then we wouldn't be having this topic at all.
In exchange for your agreeing to the EULA (and maybe your money), they let you use the software. Another example: in exchange for $500, I agree to let you drive a backhoe across my yard so you can dig your swimming pool.
Driving on your yard: trespassing, which is illegal without permission. Therefore a contract is needed to secure that permission.
Installing software you've already paid for: legal. Neither the copyright holder nor the previous owner of the physical media has any leverage to prohibit your use after the sale is final. Or do you think that I could sell my house and then later tell the new owners that going inside will indicate acceptance to some new promissary terms?
(4) Contracts do NOT have to be open to negotiation. I don't know where you get this from.
It's true, although in cases such as a Coke machine, one party has already decided a-priori to reject any proposed modification. This condition is fairly irrelevant to EULAs, because since nothing is being exchanged, there's nothing to negotiate about. The publisher wants something for nothing.
The ancient Greeks certainly had no petroleum, but did they have access to other combustible fluids?
Did the Greeks have flammable liquid? Is that a trick question?
We cannot build something that compares to the size and accuracy of the pyramids in Egypt,
We cannot land on the moon either.
It's not a matter of misunderstood technology- just an unwillingness to spend 10% of the national GDP on something completely useless. Convince 20,000 men to work at it for 50 years, and they'll build you your pyramid.
You cannot just take my list of tools or ideas, leave a few out and then claim them as your own.
150+ years ago, that was explicitly allowed. Anyone who could take an existing patented invention and produce a functional copy with a fewer number of individual parts could recieve a new patent for the smaller device.
It's in the Doom genre, but it added a much deeper storytelling aspect to it that Doom never had.
That falsehood is quite commonly repeated. It is a sign of a misunderstanding what "storytelling" actually means, which is difficult to address without suggesting a course in creative writing and/or literary appreciation.
In terms of storytelling, Halflife was only minorly stronger than Doom, and barely any different in terms of plotline. "Nasty government scientists in their wasteland underground lab experiment with teleporters and unlease weird monsters"
This was a good thing: it was to Valve's credit that they didn't attempt much in the way of story, which would've distracted from Half-life's better elements. (The same can be said for when Tom Hall's storyline was removed from the original Doom)
But transplant that story to another structure, and the game still could have done well.
Absolutely not. Fully 75% of Half-life's sales (over 6 years) were based on its effectiveness as a story-free competitive online game (the name "Counter-Strike" might ring a bell)
or getting 5 bucks a week for taking out the trash
The 1980s called, they want their allowance back.
They largely play social games online, such as pop cap or MSN games, but they do pay and they do play.
Ad impressions from a demographic that advertisers don't desire anyhow- does that really qualify as "payment"?
2. Half-Life was based more on classic adventure games than Doom. It certainly didn't "follow the Doom model."
No, it wasn't based on "adventure games" at all. Half-life fits directly into the chain of FPS starting with Wolf3d.
The main challenge facing a player of Half-life is how to shoot things before they hurt you (exactly the same as in Doom). Adventure games are based on collecting and using objects to open puzzles, and while many FPS have minor elements of puzzle-solving, just think about a simple question:
Which change would've hurt Half-life's sales more- replacing the mild puzzle-solving with Doom-style "red/blue keycards", or removing the gun-shooting and monster-dodging? The answer should tell you which genre it's really from.
Console gaming and movies don't "crave" the 13 - 25 year old male audience.
Yes they do. The average gameplayer may be 30, but people of that age and above spent far less money and time on games (console especially). The folks who buy 8+ full-price games per year are kids or college students, sucking parental earnings.
Furthermore, the most effective way to get adults of 30+ to play a game is for them to build a video-game habit as teens. Middle-aged people who didn't grow up with games are unlikely to start.
Quality code CAN happen... but first things must change...
Good, you left space number #0 free for the most important reason:
0 - Customers must stop happily paying for bad code.
Until there are marketplace penalties for a vendor repeatedly selling unstable and insecure software, they'll keep doing it.
And, the fastest way to create those penalties would be reduce the police budget dedicated to "cybersecurity", which is in truth a government subsidy for bad software vendors. Why should Bill Gates have to protect Windows Vista from hackers, when the FBI will do that job for him?
Since XML is a proper subset of prior art that existed prior to the filing of this patent,
/dev/random.
Subsets of an existing idea are individually patentable. A 3x3x3m block of steel, after all, is a superset of thousands of different useful machines- just eliminate the excess molecule(s), and there it is! "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
The XML specification is a subset of
if the copy "protection" (prevention) works in linux...
It didn't back in Doom3. You just install the separately-distributed Linux executable, copy a directory from each of the CDs onto your hard drive, and play from disc henceforth.
Currently, securerom-style copyprotection on Linux would be a waste of effort. There are many Windows customers who don't know how to install no-cd patches, but nearly everyone running Linux has that level of technical skill.
Expect the same release time, with no demo, ever, for linux.
Linux Doom3 had a demo.
And, in the case of Doom3, waiting 3 months was a clever marketing decision. If a demo had been out before commericial release, many customers would've been off by knowing that 80% of the game was spent squinting at blackness.
It's interesting how all the discussion of the report fails to take any note of a supposed 5% rate of severe mental illness.
The USA has 295,000,000 people.
Of those, 20,000,000 have prescriptions for medical treatment of mental illness.
That's a 6.7% rate, and that's only counting people recieving pharmaceutical treatment.
So, are you asking why the programmers have a 1.7% lower rate of mental illness than the public at large?
PS. If you're a programmer with difficulty concentrating, faking mental illness to get a Adderall prescription can really boost your productivity!