This has led me to thinking of developing games. I've never once seen a video game patent case. Are games immune from patents? They are software, and really it seems like pretty much the same thing to me. For example, Tetris was really unique for its time, but now there are hundreds of clones. What really is different between an inventive form of gameplay vs. some of the foolish software patents that are out there now? Really, I want to know why this is so different! Please any comments welcome.:)
Didn't some company just get done with pulling that patent thing on every game company of consequence over some form of spherical texture mapping? Didn't Creative just hold John Carmack hostage over his own algorithim?
With all the dupes this current story is likely to get, I'd say Atlantis is bound to be discovered again and again(and again etc..) Possibly even multiple times this week!
It can be NBA2k6 Off Court Edition, starring Kobe Bryant. He runs around the offices, grabbing sleeping bags from under the developer's desks and rolling them up into balls and free throwing them. It's called hiding evidence. If he scores a three pointer, OJ Simpons squeezes into a tiny pair of gloves, and murders a witness.
If you get the high score, you are treated to a cutscene of Bill Gates raping Will Wright. If you push the buttons in the right rhythim, Kobe will give Bill some tips on how to get away with it.
When the xbox was manuafactured, they had 3 different companies supply the DVD drives. You either got a Samsung drive, a phillips drive, or a shitty Thompson drive. The age of the system has nothing to do with it.
Only 1st hand account of problems with a gamesystem is my friends psx2 stop reading discs, he took it back under warranty and got a new one and hasn't had a problem since.
The problem is that these shitty drives last just long enough for the warranties to run out in most cases.
"The Thomspon Drive" is well known to XBox players. They break down after a few months of use, and microsoft has pretty much thrown their hands up in the air at the whole situation. In all these years they have never done or said anything about it. The only thing you can do is send it in for repair, at which they charge you for it full price as if it was your own fault.
That would be fine if a few failure, but this is a failure on a massive scale. Almost everyone who has an XBox with a thompson drive has a failing system. Mine has recently started to break down, and I'm lucky the new Baldur's Gate game has a save point every 2 minutes, because I had to retstart the machine 20 times in a span of 45 minutes the last time I played.
Yeah. Finally. They have found a use for all those millions of AOL CDs taking up city space. No landfill or dump will take them. So distribute them to the citizens of the city, and let them deal with the problem.
Or it could be short for Not Even Water? now we just need Fabio to go and film a commercial. "I can't belive it's not even water!" And then get a close-up of his new yellow smile.
Could it be that the people who are running the spyware for this data to be mined for the research are more prone to losing their P2Ped mp3s when the 128 kilibyte.exe they downloaded thinking it was some game nuked their drive.?:)
Now we can get a new HUD in the windows to with a paperclip to overstate the obvious, and flood us with propaganda.
You are being over-charged.
This dealership is raping you.
You are paying extra to have your car washed before you drive off the lot, but the only one taking a bath is you.
I'm a no good piece of shit built with expensive hard to find parts. Might as well be made by Dell.
PSST, drive off this cliff... do it for Bill. Microsoft loves you.
That asshole uses Linux... RUN HIM OVER! It's okay.. Microsoft backs you.
Did you know!? (Insert useless bullshit here)
Please pull over at the next corner, exit the vehicle, pull down your pants and bend over. A gloved Microsoft employee will be by to service you soon. You did read the EULA didn't you?
ALERT: You changed your bumper stickers. Please contact Microsoft ASAP for vehicle reactivation.
Did you know!? No, we don't run on Linux, we run over Linux.
Did you know!? Would you like to continue seeing these pointers upon ignition? [YES] [NO, (but yes really)]
ALERT: User SCUM~: You must updgrade to PRO to listen to this radio station. Such as...
Microsoft Media Player Radio v0.1845 SP 45 Thank you for choosing Microso.... *BSOD*
Where do you want to go today? Think about it. It's Wenesday you know. This car isn't going anywhere.
Maybe this can serve as inspiration for a spineoff series.
GTORRENT: INSIDE JOB
You free roam around town looking for DVD-R bargains and pepper-spraying coders and stealing their code.
You can walk into cyber-cafes and upload your stolen goods to one of the popular servers, and then with the money you saved you can buy some Doritos and Pepsi(PRODUCT PLACEMENT, w00t!), and maybe have enough left over to pay the eldery women not to kick your ass on the dangerous trek back to your dorm room on the bus.
Here's the system requirements, take a look at the noitce near the bottom.:S
Supported OS: Win98SE/2000/XP Processor: Pentium® III 1 GHz or AMD Athlon(TM) 1 GHz RAM: 256 MB Video Card: DirectX® 9-compliant graphics card (see supported list*) Sound Card: DirectX® 8-compliant sound card DirectX Version: 9.0c (included on disc) CD-ROM: 16X CD-ROM or 4X DVD-ROM Hard Drive Space: 2Gigs
*Supported Video Cards at Time of Release NVIDIA® GeForce(TM) 3/4/FX series (including 4MX) ATI® Radeon(TM) 7500/8500/9000 families or newer
Laptop models of these cards not supported. These chipsets are the only ones that will run this game. Additional chipsets may be supported after release. For an up-to-date list of supported chipsets, please visit the FAQ for this game on our support website at: http://support.ubi.com.
NOTICE: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some CD-RW, DVD-RW, and virtual drives.
Slashdot Mirror
This has led me to thinking of developing games. I've never once seen a video game patent case. Are games immune from patents? They are software, and really it seems like pretty much the same thing to me. For example, Tetris was really unique for its time, but now there are hundreds of clones. What really is different between an inventive form of gameplay vs. some of the foolish software patents that are out there now? Really, I want to know why this is so different! Please any comments welcome. :)
Didn't some company just get done with pulling that patent thing on every game company of consequence over some form of spherical texture mapping? Didn't Creative just hold John Carmack hostage over his own algorithim?
That said, of course, I wouldn't run a program created by the MPAA on my computer period.
Because it's only available on VHS?
With all the dupes this current story is likely to get, I'd say Atlantis is bound to be discovered again and again(and again etc..) Possibly even multiple times this week!
They don't monitor the every move of their employees.
They save that precious gift for their users.
It can be NBA2k6 Off Court Edition, starring Kobe Bryant. He runs around the offices, grabbing sleeping bags from under the developer's desks and rolling them up into balls and free throwing them. It's called hiding evidence. If he scores a three pointer, OJ Simpons squeezes into a tiny pair of gloves, and murders a witness.
If you get the high score, you are treated to a cutscene of Bill Gates raping Will Wright. If you push the buttons in the right rhythim, Kobe will give Bill some tips on how to get away with it.
Shouldn't there be two ghosts then, one for the good young Anakin who dies in Episode III and one for the good older Anakin who died in Jedi?
Nooooooooooo! We don't need another sequel. Star Wars 47: Attack of the Ghost of the Clone of the Aparition
What's a PS2, again? 500Mhz and 128 megs of RAM?
:)
You wish. More like 333 mnz and 32 mb.
When the xbox was manuafactured, they had 3 different companies supply the DVD drives. You either got a Samsung drive, a phillips drive, or a shitty Thompson drive. The age of the system has nothing to do with it.
Only 1st hand account of problems with a gamesystem is my friends psx2 stop reading discs, he took it back under warranty and got a new one and hasn't had a problem since.
The problem is that these shitty drives last just long enough for the warranties to run out in most cases.
"The Thomspon Drive" is well known to XBox players. They break down after a few months of use, and microsoft has pretty much thrown their hands up in the air at the whole situation. In all these years they have never done or said anything about it. The only thing you can do is send it in for repair, at which they charge you for it full price as if it was your own fault.
That would be fine if a few failure, but this is a failure on a massive scale. Almost everyone who has an XBox with a thompson drive has a failing system. Mine has recently started to break down, and I'm lucky the new Baldur's Gate game has a save point every 2 minutes, because I had to retstart the machine 20 times in a span of 45 minutes the last time I played.
There goes a Halo 2 sale.
If all the OSS trimmed their features, keeping only the ones that worked and were documtented, certain Distros could fit on a floppy.
Yeah. Finally. They have found a use for all those millions of AOL CDs taking up city space. No landfill or dump will take them. So distribute them to the citizens of the city, and let them deal with the problem.
FREE INTERNET FOR EVERYONE!
Or it could be short for Not Even Water? now we just need Fabio to go and film a commercial. "I can't belive it's not even water!" And then get a close-up of his new yellow smile.
How will the village people manage without you until then?
Why exactly does a question on why OGG suposedly went to hell get modded down?
Care to elaborate for the uniformed?
Could it be that the people who are running the spyware for this data to be mined for the research are more prone to losing their P2Ped mp3s when the 128 kilibyte .exe they downloaded thinking it was some game nuked their drive.? :)
Now we can get a new HUD in the windows to with a paperclip to overstate the obvious, and flood us with propaganda.
You are being over-charged.
This dealership is raping you.
You are paying extra to have your car washed before you drive off the lot, but the only one taking a bath is you.
I'm a no good piece of shit built with expensive hard to find parts. Might as well be made by Dell.
PSST, drive off this cliff... do it for Bill. Microsoft loves you.
That asshole uses Linux... RUN HIM OVER! It's okay.. Microsoft backs you.
Did you know!? (Insert useless bullshit here)
Please pull over at the next corner, exit the vehicle, pull down your pants and bend over. A gloved Microsoft employee will be by to service you soon. You did read the EULA didn't you?
ALERT: You changed your bumper stickers. Please contact Microsoft ASAP for vehicle reactivation.
Did you know!? No, we don't run on Linux, we run over Linux.
Did you know!? Would you like to continue seeing these pointers upon ignition? [YES] [NO, (but yes really)]
ALERT: User SCUM~: You must updgrade to PRO to listen to this radio station. Such as...
Microsoft Media Player Radio v0.1845 SP 45
Thank you for choosing Microso.... *BSOD*
Where do you want to go today? Think about it. It's Wenesday you know. This car isn't going anywhere.
ILLEGAL OPERATION: U-TURN... CANNOT FIND STOPSIGN.DLL. FULLSPEED AHEAD!
Maybe it's because cheap hardware doesn't meet the requirements for anything worth pirating?
Maybe this can serve as inspiration for a spineoff series.
GTORRENT: INSIDE JOB
You free roam around town looking for DVD-R bargains and pepper-spraying coders and stealing their code.
You can walk into cyber-cafes and upload your stolen goods to one of the popular servers, and then with the money you saved you can buy some Doritos and Pepsi(PRODUCT PLACEMENT, w00t!), and maybe have enough left over to pay the eldery women not to kick your ass on the dangerous trek back to your dorm room on the bus.
Here's the system requirements, take a look at the noitce near the bottom. :S
Supported OS: Win98SE/2000/XP
Processor: Pentium® III 1 GHz or AMD Athlon(TM) 1 GHz
RAM: 256 MB
Video Card: DirectX® 9-compliant graphics card (see supported list*)
Sound Card: DirectX® 8-compliant sound card
DirectX Version: 9.0c (included on disc)
CD-ROM: 16X CD-ROM or 4X DVD-ROM
Hard Drive Space: 2Gigs
*Supported Video Cards at Time of Release
NVIDIA® GeForce(TM) 3/4/FX series (including 4MX)
ATI® Radeon(TM) 7500/8500/9000 families or newer
Laptop models of these cards not supported. These chipsets are the only ones that will run this game. Additional chipsets may be supported after release. For an up-to-date list of supported chipsets, please visit the FAQ for this game on our support website at: http://support.ubi.com.
NOTICE: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some CD-RW, DVD-RW, and virtual drives.
Wrong story jackass. if there something worse than a troll, it's a lost troll. :)
Does it say "Powered by Microsoft?"?
The next one of you to commit some stupid crime, blame windows, maybe we can get it banned.
And next, .PNG Armageddon!
AUTO FAQ SOFTWARE OUTPUT. (Please fill in the answers as relevant to your software.)
1a Does it run on Linux?
1b Can you imagine a bewulf cluster of these?