As for the automatic generation of structured documents, isn't there also tons of prior art there? How old is that patent? Isn't source code structured? Automatic code generation is quite ancient.
I don't think anyone sane disagrees that patent laws suck. But if it's possible to get something good by abusing those bad laws through DPL trolls, I say let's do it. It's better than being at the mercy of the big corps and just hope they leave us alone.
Everybody who stays up to date with new languages and platforms. It's a modern Lisp designed for the JVM. As such it's part of the wave of new JVM languages (which includes Groovy, JRuby, Scale, Jython, etc).
I guess this is as good a place as any to post my opinion of these games.
World of Goo is genius in every possible way. Wonderful gameplay, funny, looks cool. And after finishing a lot of levels, there's a ton more!
Aquaria looks absolutely gorgeous, great narration, and it's a wonderful experience just swimming through that ocean and watching all the colourful fish and other things float by. Apparently there's supposed to be a game in there, but I haven't found it yet. There's lots to explore, though.
Lugaru could very well be genius if it's your kind of game. I honestly wouldn't know.
Samorost 2 looks cute and funny and has a few nice puzzle, but there's not a lot of actual game in it. It's mostly moving your mouse cursor around, looking for stuff you can interact with (not a lot), and then experimenting with combinations or timing. Looks pretty, though.
More precisely: conservative means: "do whatever the oil industry wants", and liberal means: "do whatever Hollywood wants".
Or, as a slightly more serious addition to this discussion: "liberal" comes from "liber", which means "free". You'd expect liberals to defend liberties, and I think fair use counts.
It's going to crash a lot and get a lot of viruses?/duck
No viruses that I know of, but the stability of my Milestone is a bit disappointing. It's completely awesome in every other respect, but stability is definitely an issue.
It doesn't crash every day or even every week, but I've had one day where it kept crashing dozens of times in a row, and I was completely unable to use it. The next day everything was fine again.
The big question is when "multitasking" is no longer the major difference between platforms what will be the next Android marketing slogan?
There's also screen resolution. All the high-end Android phones have about twice the resolution of the iPhone. It's an easy fix of course: just make a new iPhone with a better screen (I don't think the screen has seen any improvement at all since the original iPhone, has it?).
Also, Android's way of showing notifications is (in my opinion at least) far superior to the iPhone's. (Unless they've changed that in the mean time.)
You should have read your contract before you signed it, but if you didn't, then now is definitely the time to do it.
Does the contract say anything about who owns the code you write during working hours? Does it say anything about who owns the code you write during off-hours? And, since the project was apparently based on a private project that existed before employment started, does the contract say anything about that?
If the contract doesn't say anything, then the employer probably doesn't own any of the pre-existing code, and can only use it with your permission (though you should always check what kind of weird legalities exist in your legislation). Maybe permission was implicitly given, but who knows, it might still give you some leverage. You might be able to claim that your implicit permission was based on the equally implicit assumption that the rest of the code would become part of the same (open source?) code base.
And that's exactly the problem with piracy these days. People think that restrictive DRM warrants an illegal download while the only legal solution to your problem would be to simply not play Civ V at all if you don't like the DRM.
Depends on where you live. Buying and installing a patch that removes the DRM is also legal in many places. And I think that where I live, not buying but downloading a complete cracked version is also legal, as long as I don't use torrent to do it (because then I'd be uploading at the same time).
Not for a useful meaning of "potential customer". If I publish a Mario clone for iPhone my potential customers are iPhone owners who would consider playing a Mario clone or who fail to understand my description of the game and think they're buying something else. In talking about potential customers you have to think about the market of people who want your product.
So how do you get an accurate count of the people who want your product? You can't. Also, what do you mean by "want"? Are willing to try it for free? Are willing to pay for it?
It's rather obvious that the number of people who are willing to try something for free is far bigger than the number of people willing to pay money for it. Yet the industry's estimate compares the number of non-pirates who were willing to pay the asking price to the number of pirates who were willing to try it for free. It's comparing apples to oranges. It's a completely meaningless statistic.
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
No, it isn't. If 80.000 people pirate my Mario clone then, ignoring publicity effects, the number of lost sales is somewhere between 0 and 80.000. So at least it gives an upper bound, which is more than knowing the number of people with an iPhone does.
But a hard upper bound is not the same as a meaningful estimate. The number of iPhone owners also gives an upper bound to the number of lost sales.
But more than that: the industry's logic that "anywhere between 0 and 80,000 == 80,000" is completely wrong, yet that is what they do: they don't claim that this is a (very loose) upper bound, they claim it's the number of lost sales. And that's a lie.
There are 6 relevant figures:
A. The number of people with jailed phones who bought the product
B. The number with jailed phones who didn't buy
C. The number with jail-broken phones who bought
D. The number with jail-broken phones who pirated it but would buy it if they couldn't pirate (~= lost sales)
E. The number who pirated it but would never buy it
F. The number with jail-broken phones who neither bought nor pirated it.
We are given two figures: (A + B) / (C + D + E + F) ~= 9 ; (A + C) / (D + E) ~= 0.25. That is simply insufficient information to even estimate D.
True, but which of the following two claims would you say is most likely:
A/B =~ (C+D)/(E+F) E =~ 0
The industry is claiming the second one is true. TFA says the first is a more reasonable assumption. I'm inclined to agree with TFA.
Even so, I seem to remember that some years ago, Ubuntu was extremely purist, not even showing the Firefox logo on Firefox because it was a trademark. And now they license patented tech.
The real implicit statement in TFS (and I presume in TFA too, but you never know with/.) is that "every iPhone user is a potential customer of your iPhone game". That's completely false.
Really? Every iPhone user is able to buy the game, and therefore a potential customer.
Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
seems even more flawed than the *AA claim. At least the *AA try take into account the number of pirated copies in computing the number of lost sales,
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
whereas Random Blogger thinks he can get a figure solely from the number of jailbroken phones.
Very rough estimates of your potential customer base are by no means accurate, but it's many orders of magnitude less biased than any statistic based on the number of pirated copies.
You may be correct that 10% is a better estimate than whatever the *AA estimate, but if so it's a case of reaching a good conclusion via dodgy reasoning, and GPP's "just as wrong" was attacking the reasoning rather than the final figure.
It's by no means accurate, but the reasoning is a lot less dodgy and skewed than the 80% figure. And inaccurate but relevant estimate means more than accurate but completely irrelevant statistics pulled out of context. An illegal download does not equal a lost sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it generic in 1995?
It is now. Like kleenex.
Why do women, even the most intelligent ones, tend to use the word girl in their names?
Geekwoman just doesn't sound the same.
Just like when I see boy in a name, I tend to think the person behind it is a dimwitted moron with no imagination.
Yeah, Geekman is much better.
I think there's some established prior art there.
As for the automatic generation of structured documents, isn't there also tons of prior art there? How old is that patent? Isn't source code structured? Automatic code generation is quite ancient.
I don't think anyone sane disagrees that patent laws suck. But if it's possible to get something good by abusing those bad laws through DPL trolls, I say let's do it. It's better than being at the mercy of the big corps and just hope they leave us alone.
If that were true, then lighter browswers like Chrome should not be gaining in marketshare.
Lightness is also a feature.
Javascript is Lisp badly disguised as C.
Who here has ever heard of this "Clojure"?
Everybody who stays up to date with new languages and platforms. It's a modern Lisp designed for the JVM. As such it's part of the wave of new JVM languages (which includes Groovy, JRuby, Scale, Jython, etc).
I still think zeppelin would be the coolest method of slow "green" travel.
I agree! But I'm afraid zeppelins will be going a *lot* slower. I suspect that's going to be closer to travelling by ship than by plane.
I guess this is as good a place as any to post my opinion of these games.
World of Goo is genius in every possible way. Wonderful gameplay, funny, looks cool. And after finishing a lot of levels, there's a ton more!
Aquaria looks absolutely gorgeous, great narration, and it's a wonderful experience just swimming through that ocean and watching all the colourful fish and other things float by. Apparently there's supposed to be a game in there, but I haven't found it yet. There's lots to explore, though.
Lugaru could very well be genius if it's your kind of game. I honestly wouldn't know.
Samorost 2 looks cute and funny and has a few nice puzzle, but there's not a lot of actual game in it. It's mostly moving your mouse cursor around, looking for stuff you can interact with (not a lot), and then experimenting with combinations or timing. Looks pretty, though.
I haven't tried Penumbra or Gish yet.
Did Gray ever get fired for loss of the first phone?
For that matter, has anyone heard anything from him recently?
Dude. No offense, but if this is the case, a life is something you need more of.
Getting a mortgage for a quarter of a million was probably the scariest thing in my life.
I paid 50% more than many of the cheap bastards out there: $0.02
Yeah! All those cheap bastards who are only willing to pay $0.0033 over the minimum price!
More precisely: conservative means: "do whatever the oil industry wants", and liberal means: "do whatever Hollywood wants".
Or, as a slightly more serious addition to this discussion: "liberal" comes from "liber", which means "free". You'd expect liberals to defend liberties, and I think fair use counts.
In fact.. I can't think of a game that I actually want to play, that doesn't run on linux (given enough work).
Medieval Total War 2. I've looked at the lists of games on winehq, Cedega, PlaysOnLinux, etc. Nobody got it actually working.
I'm not saying that it is super easy to make all these work,
That's a problem for me. I want to spend my spare time playing games, not configuring them.
I'd love to be able to play all my games on Linux or Mac, but for the time being I've given up on it. Too much work, too much uncertainty.
That's because it's not real stats.
I downloaded the Windows version, paid $30 for it, and reported as using Mac and Linux.
And that's before I even saw this discussion on Slashdot.
It's going to crash a lot and get a lot of viruses? /duck
No viruses that I know of, but the stability of my Milestone is a bit disappointing. It's completely awesome in every other respect, but stability is definitely an issue.
It doesn't crash every day or even every week, but I've had one day where it kept crashing dozens of times in a row, and I was completely unable to use it. The next day everything was fine again.
The big question is when "multitasking" is no longer the major difference between platforms what will be the next Android marketing slogan?
There's also screen resolution. All the high-end Android phones have about twice the resolution of the iPhone. It's an easy fix of course: just make a new iPhone with a better screen (I don't think the screen has seen any improvement at all since the original iPhone, has it?).
Also, Android's way of showing notifications is (in my opinion at least) far superior to the iPhone's. (Unless they've changed that in the mean time.)
You should have read your contract before you signed it, but if you didn't, then now is definitely the time to do it.
Does the contract say anything about who owns the code you write during working hours? Does it say anything about who owns the code you write during off-hours? And, since the project was apparently based on a private project that existed before employment started, does the contract say anything about that?
If the contract doesn't say anything, then the employer probably doesn't own any of the pre-existing code, and can only use it with your permission (though you should always check what kind of weird legalities exist in your legislation). Maybe permission was implicitly given, but who knows, it might still give you some leverage. You might be able to claim that your implicit permission was based on the equally implicit assumption that the rest of the code would become part of the same (open source?) code base.
The iPhone definitely has bad reception. My iPhone had no signal in areas where my Milestone with the same subscription has excellent reception.
Would you care to state for the court, in what location in the world software piracy is legal?
What court are you talking about?
And if you'd read what I wrote, you could have seen that I said distribution is still illegal.
But apparently downloading a complete cracked game is also illegal. Apparently the rules for software are different than those for music and movies.
My first thought was: Steam tech in Civ? What'll they think of next? Horseback Riding?
And that's exactly the problem with piracy these days. People think that restrictive DRM warrants an illegal download while the only legal solution to your problem would be to simply not play Civ V at all if you don't like the DRM.
Depends on where you live. Buying and installing a patch that removes the DRM is also legal in many places. And I think that where I live, not buying but downloading a complete cracked version is also legal, as long as I don't use torrent to do it (because then I'd be uploading at the same time).
Not for a useful meaning of "potential customer". If I publish a Mario clone for iPhone my potential customers are iPhone owners who would consider playing a Mario clone or who fail to understand my description of the game and think they're buying something else. In talking about potential customers you have to think about the market of people who want your product.
So how do you get an accurate count of the people who want your product? You can't. Also, what do you mean by "want"? Are willing to try it for free? Are willing to pay for it?
It's rather obvious that the number of people who are willing to try something for free is far bigger than the number of people willing to pay money for it. Yet the industry's estimate compares the number of non-pirates who were willing to pay the asking price to the number of pirates who were willing to try it for free. It's comparing apples to oranges. It's a completely meaningless statistic.
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
No, it isn't. If 80.000 people pirate my Mario clone then, ignoring publicity effects, the number of lost sales is somewhere between 0 and 80.000. So at least it gives an upper bound, which is more than knowing the number of people with an iPhone does.
But a hard upper bound is not the same as a meaningful estimate. The number of iPhone owners also gives an upper bound to the number of lost sales.
But more than that: the industry's logic that "anywhere between 0 and 80,000 == 80,000" is completely wrong, yet that is what they do: they don't claim that this is a (very loose) upper bound, they claim it's the number of lost sales. And that's a lie.
There are 6 relevant figures:
A. The number of people with jailed phones who bought the product
B. The number with jailed phones who didn't buy
C. The number with jail-broken phones who bought
D. The number with jail-broken phones who pirated it but would buy it if they couldn't pirate (~= lost sales)
E. The number who pirated it but would never buy it
F. The number with jail-broken phones who neither bought nor pirated it.
We are given two figures: (A + B) / (C + D + E + F) ~= 9 ; (A + C) / (D + E) ~= 0.25. That is simply insufficient information to even estimate D.
True, but which of the following two claims would you say is most likely:
A/B =~ (C+D)/(E+F)
E =~ 0
The industry is claiming the second one is true. TFA says the first is a more reasonable assumption. I'm inclined to agree with TFA.
Even so, I seem to remember that some years ago, Ubuntu was extremely purist, not even showing the Firefox logo on Firefox because it was a trademark. And now they license patented tech.
The real implicit statement in TFS (and I presume in TFA too, but you never know with /.) is that "every iPhone user is a potential customer of your iPhone game". That's completely false.
Really? Every iPhone user is able to buy the game, and therefore a potential customer.
Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
seems even more flawed than the *AA claim. At least the *AA try take into account the number of pirated copies in computing the number of lost sales,
But that's the entire point! The number of pirated copies is completely irrelevant when estimating the number of lost sales.
whereas Random Blogger thinks he can get a figure solely from the number of jailbroken phones.
Very rough estimates of your potential customer base are by no means accurate, but it's many orders of magnitude less biased than any statistic based on the number of pirated copies.
You may be correct that 10% is a better estimate than whatever the *AA estimate, but if so it's a case of reaching a good conclusion via dodgy reasoning, and GPP's "just as wrong" was attacking the reasoning rather than the final figure.
It's by no means accurate, but the reasoning is a lot less dodgy and skewed than the 80% figure. And inaccurate but relevant estimate means more than accurate but completely irrelevant statistics pulled out of context. An illegal download does not equal a lost sale.