The name "Dominion Of Canada" is generally put forth as the long form of Canada's name. It's in the 1867 Constitution Act, but not the 1982 Constitution Act, nor the 1982 Canada Act. It's been used by the federal government to a greater or lesser degree throughout Canadian history, and according to the federal government, Canada's official name is still "The Dominion Of Canada":
On the other hand, the CIA World Factbook says that there is no long name for the country of Canada, and I don't recall ever seeing/hearing the phrase used in any current context.
(FWIW: The CIA World Factbook gives "United States", not "America", as the short form of "United States of America". But that's the thing about colloquialisms...they're not "official", just widespread and commonly understood.)
> Second, you can only make copies of music that you legally own. > For example, you may make a copy of a CD you own and give it to a > freind... but your friend cannot make a copy of their copy and give > it away.
I can't speak for the rest of your post, but this, at least, is incorrect.
Canada's Copyright Act, Part VII, Subsection 80:
---
Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
---
In other words: If you make the copy for yourself, and keep the copy, you're in the clear. It doesn't matter if you own the original media or not - you can borrow it from a friend, or take it out of the library, or sell the original to someone else.
You may NOT, however, make a copy of a CD you have and give the copy to a friend. To my reading, it looks like anything approaching distribution of a copy is illegal. You may, however, lend the original to a friend and let him make a copy.
The subsection (2) referred to in the quote above stipulates that you may not take the copy and sell it, give it away, broadcast it, communicate it to the general public, etc. etc.. The copy is for your private use.
Your "universal photo data tag" wouldn't be EXIF, would it?
It's most well-known use is in digital cameras - the image gets tagged with all the relevant photo settings (date and time, shutter speed, focal length, aperture, flash settings...) and has a whole bunch of possible fields, including GPS data.
It's normally used in connection with JPEG (any digital camera you buy will put EXIF info into the JPEGs it records), though I get the impression it can also work with TIFF, and possibly other formats as well.
Yes. Look at the response time. Lower (i.e. faster) is better. My LCD (a Viewsonic VG700) has a 16ms response time, which gives no ghosting that I've ever noticed (and I've looked for it). Cheaper displays still have worse response time (25ms or higher), and on those you can start to see problems.
Unlike CRTs, you should -not- pay much attention to refresh rate. I've never seen one that's not 60 Hz. This does not result in the nasty-bad flicker that a 60 Hz CRT has. The only possible negative to this is that the display can't show more than 60 fps...but if you set your video drivers to sync with your monitor, then you get a nice smooth 60 fps at all times, and it looks gorgeous.
It's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I've heard this mostly from people that have never touched an SLR in their life, and are now considering a Digital Rebel or D70. Somewhere they heard about the 1.6x crop factor without fully understanding it, and now think that a 200mm "is" a 300mm lens on a DSLR, even though the numbers 200 and 300 really don't mean anything to them.
If you've been shooting 35mm for years and know what sort of field of view to expect from various focal lengths, then making that mental adjustment is totally logical. But when people new to cameras tell me "I'm buying a 300mm lens for my camera" and then later mention "Well, it's labeled 200mm, but that's because it's for film cameras...on digital cameras it's 300mm" I get (slightly) irritated. Not at them, really; they're new to the field, and I'll try to enlighten them. I just have a minor vendetta about the misinformation that gets spouted on the subject.
Your statement is perfectly accurate. But a lot of people new to photography don't understand it.
I may not have been totally clear. I was referring to the fact that to calculate depth of field, you need to take into account the magnification of the image...an image may have a 50 meter depth of field when printed at 4x6, but only 25 meters when printed at 8x10, since in the enlarged image, fuzzy edges are more apparant. This assumes you keep the same definition for the circle of confusion, and it assumes the relationship is linear (I think it is but I'm too lazy to look it up).
Given the same focal length, you'll need to enlarge an image from an APS-sized sensor (DRebel) 1.6x more than an image from a 35mm sensor (1Ds). Because of the crop, of course, they won't be the -same- image. However, the extra enlargement (unless I'm totally off-base) will decrease DoF if you don't loosen your standards. Many images that look just fine printed at 4x6 will lose sharpness if you blow them up to 8x12...suddenly they don't look in focus anymore.
I totally ignoring the tendency of the image to degrade away from the axis -- as you say, this is just a narrow part of it. I also know squat about T/S lenses (don't have 'em, can't afford 'em). My only point was that DoF is not an intrinsic attribute of small sensors, but rather an property that comes out of the entire optics system wrapped around it.
The meaning of the cropping factor is something I'm definitely *not* confused about...I've broken into tirades when people tell me "Well it's a 200mm lens, but on a digital camera it's a 300mm."
I wondered this for a while before tripping over the answer, which is actually pretty straightforward.
It's all about image quality.
Running an LCD preview (either on the camera back, or EVF) requires pulling a live video feed off the sensor, which requires extra, dedicated circuitry. Every square nanometer on the sensor that's dedicated to support circuitry is a square nanometer that's *not* dedicated to actual photosensors.
So by removing the live electronic preview, the size of the photosensors can be increased. More light falls on each sensor, which means that less amplification is needed, which results in less noise in the final picture.
This is also why dSLRs don't have movie mode. They'd have to sacrifice image quality to support it.
I can't say that I think an EVF has any advantage over an optical viewfinder, but using the back LCD panel as a preview would definitely be a nice feature. I think the right way to implement this would be to use a second low-res CCD in the camera, dedicated to the preview, would work well. If you throw in another flippable mirror, you can switch between normal optical viewfinder and LCD preview at will.
I realize your post was a joke, but I avoid flash as much as possible. I find available-light photography looks far better.
However, I'm still using the on-camera flash on my Digital Rebel. No diffuser, no bounce. I've been thinking about investing in a proper flash (probably the Sigma Super 500). If I ever actually do that, my opinion may chage.
Larger -focal lengths- give greater depth of field at a given aperture, assuming you're measuring focal length as an f-number. An aperture of f/4 means that the actual aperture size is the focal length divided by four. Clever, eh?
So, grabbing a random shot from my point-and-shoot Fujifilm camera, I see that it's got a focal length of 6mm, and an aperture of f/3.5. This means that the actual physical size of the aperture is about 1.7 mm. To get the same actual aperture opening on my Digital Rebel (and thus let in the same amount of light) at, say, 50mm, would require me to set the aperture to f/30.
Now, smaller sensors tend to -imply- shorter focal lengths, and thus smaller apertures, but that's not always the case. A Digital Rebel has a smaller sensor than a Canon 1Ds, but it uses exactly the same focal length. In this case, a picture taken at the same settings will actually have *less* depth of field on the Rebel (the smaller sensor).
Why? Because you're using a smaller section of the lens's projected image. The out-of-focus sections are *more* out-of-focus with respect to the image size on the Rebel. You have to enlarge the image more to get the same 4x6 print, so you're more sensitive to blurriness.
So all things equal, a smaller sensor actually equates to -less- depth of field. But you also tend to use shorter focal lengths, so there's a bit of a balancing effect. (I think it's actually a squared relationship, which is why pictures taken on really small sensors tend to have such a huge DOF).
Canon claims that a lot of this is dependant on their DIGIC processor. Could be true - their processor/CMOS sensor combo has been remarkably low-noise since it was introduced, and it keeps getting better.
If the processor can make that big a difference, then this technology can be applied to camera phones...if the manufacturers are willing to invest that sort of power, die space, and research into that area.
The human eye is also only really decent in the center of the image. Anything outside the central part of your retina is pretty poor image quality (try to read an entire line of text without moving your eyes).
Chromatic abberation can probably be dealt with in a single-lens system, because you know exactly how bad the CA is at each point. In a fixed-lens camera phone, if the image quality is high enough that CA is evident, and the lens can't be improved to remove it, I'm willing to be that a sufficiently motivated group could take a bunch of reference images to map the CA for each part of the image, and reverse it in software. Not perfectly, but better than nothing.
This does assume that the lenses are being manufactured in such a way that they all have the same (or similar) characteristics. Since people report differences even among individual same-model SLR lenses costing several hundred bucks, this strikes me as unlikely...
Well, your best bet would be the extremely sensitive CCD. Colour depth isn't the issiue - the problem is that with the size of the aperture, not much light is getting in. It's almost entirely a question of signal-to-noise ratios.
If a sensor (CCD, CMOS, or something else entirely) could be developed that was extremely light-sensitive, or extremely low-noise, then a small aperture would still allow you to take noise-free images. Very clever processing circuits can also help here. That's the first half of the battle.
After that, you start to get into questions of focusing, image sharpness, chromatic aberration, and all sorts of other fun topics. A lot of image quality issues that aren't apparant in a low-res pic become visible in a high-res snap, and will also be more evident in a noise-free image.
Because this is for a hypothetical -phone-, not a camera, I'd suggest using a fixed-focus lens, focused at the hyperfocal distance (i.e. everything from some point X meters from the camera out to infinity is 'in focus'). The more features you add (variable focusing, optical zoom), the more complex your optical system needs to be. Stick with a medium-resolution sensor (at 2MP, each pixel of the sensor gets ~3x the light that pixels from a same-sized 6MP sensor will get). A phone camera that takes 2-3MP pictures, of good enough quality to be printed at 4x6 and be indistinguishable from a typical 35mm camera, is not outside the bounds of reason.
Get too ambitious, and you have to make decisions about how much of the physical bulk of the phone you want your camera to take up.
If I only need to infringe on a single claim to infringe on the entire patent, then what's the purpose of, e.g., claim 2, which restricts it to BASIC? This claim builds on claim 1, and I can't think of a single way you'd infringe on claim 2 without also infringing on claim 1.
In fact, claims 2-14 all boil down to "Claim 1, and also this"...so to infringe on any of them, you must also infringe on claim 1, so what purpose do any of these serve? Obviously they describe the particular implementation, but if you can still infringe with a -different- implementation, why does any of this matter?
I'm willing to stand corrected - I got an A in the course, but it was four years ago:)
There's always the remote possibility that Canadian patent law differs from US patent law (which is what would be applicable here), but I'm not confident enough to make that claim...
That's not prior art, because this patent specifically covers BASIC.
As others have mentioned, what's more relevant is whether or not the IsNot operator is sufficiently non-obvious. This patent can't get rejected due to exact prior art, unless someone's made IsNot in BASIC before. But it can get rejected on the grounds that, based on the knowledge in the field, it's bleeding obvious. That's up to the patent office though.
Well, I Am Not A Lawyer But I Took A Course In University That Covered Canadian Patent Law.....
From what I remember, an invention can only infringe on a patent if every single claim in the patent applies to that invention. So, doing this in C wouldn't infringe (claim 2). Calling the operator Isnt or Aint or != wouldn't infringe (claim 3). Doing this in an interpreter instead of a compiler may not infringe (claim 4, but see also claim 14, which makes it sound like it doesn't have to be actual machine language opcodes that you assemble to).
The same rules apply to prior art claims. Saying that LISP did it years ago is irrelevant - the patent's not about LISP, it's about BASIC. A patent doesn't have to be for a 100% new idea, it can be for a new application of an old idea.
This is why you tend to see items listing a couple dozen patent numbers on them - rather than patent an entire television, the company will patent individual parts. Otherwise, you could remove one part, clone everything else exactly, and not infringe (because one of the claims in the patent would not be true of your copy).
I'm willing to bet that the purpose of this patent is to prevent people from writing VB compilers of their own (i.e. for Linux), keeping VB programmers locked into MS/Windows.
The developers would happily agree with you on that point - they don't even call it an MMORPG themselves. It's a rather odd hybrid sort of game, which is why it came to mind when I was talking about developers making an effort to break out of the mold.
That, and the fact that I played it heavily during the recent preview, so it's been on my mind lately.
But how do you define "better"? Is there any reasonable way to say what's "good" in a game, apart from what's fun?
It's ridiculous to say "Well, this is a good game design, but nobody will play it because they're not enjoying themselves". This is -entertainment- we're dealing with.
I disagree with Bartle when he says it will be rejected by newbies. I think people will try it for sheer novelty. But if it's not fun, the game will die...because it's a *bad idea*.
Many, many games are modified during alpha testing to make them more fun. The alpha testers don't turn up their noses and say "It's different, I'm not playing it". They play it, then say "Idea X rules, idea Y kinda sucks". Bartle's article reads very, very much like he's saying "I know what's right, and the fact that no one else wants to play this proves they're sheep."
(I've written a few responses now, and I think I'm getting progressively crankier. Bartle, if you're reading -- sorry)
The market pressures are encouraging innovation, not wholesale cloning.
It goes like this: One day, a massively successful game (Everquest) is released. People play it for hours and spend a gazillion dollars on fees.
Then, every software company clones it, probably badly. A few succeed.
Now, for a new MMORPG to get any attention, there has to be something interesting about it. That could be just name recognition (World of Warcraft), or it could be the developer consciously breaking out of the mold (Guild Wars...which has heavy instancing, so Bartle probably hates it).
The point is, when a design team sits down to make an MMORPG now, they need to stand out from the crowd. The easiest way to do that is to write something that's got a major difference. The forums will be all over it, people will be asking "How will they make permadeath viable?", the gamers will hunger for press releases and demos, and even people that say "MadHobbit's game will suck because it has permadeath" are still out there passing the name around.
By the time it's actually released, there'll be a few demos, and if you've done your job right at -all-, the online gaming rags will be saying "MadHobbit's innovative new game is a refreshing break from the repetitive gameplay of the rest of the genre".
And people *will* buy it, and if it's actually a good idea, they'll have fun (because that's what defines a good idea in a game), and you can buy a swimming pool and fill it with money. (Step 3: Profit...)
But Bartle hasn't indicated anything to the contrary.
It's very possible that there is a way that a MMORPG can implement permadeath and not result in a lot of repetition. For instance, Nethack has permadeath, but starting over at level 1 isn't dull, because the game is more about strategy than grinds.
However, if Bartle simply says "Permadeath is good" and doesn't suggest what else he'd do different, there's no reason to believe you wouldn't go through the grind all over again. Point #3, which you refer to, is "the world you first got into". However, this is more a matter of "virtually everything on the market"...not exactly the same thing.
His individual points are mostly good, but I don't believe they add up to his conclusion. Point #2 is the weakest, because:
- Many gamers will grab whatever new game is on the market, just to try something new, and
- Real newbies, people that haven't played and MMORPG before, have nothing to compare the game against.
This is a fair-sized chunk of people that will try out a game with a new idea. And if it's fun in the long-term, the game will succeed, and others will copy it. If it's not fun, then the players aren't being short-sighted. If it's not fun, it's a bad game.
If you start a MMORPG with perma-death, a lot of players will avoid it.
Bartle seems to claim that this proves players will always hold back design. Well, maybe they only *think* they don't like it, because it's different. But his argument requires you to accept that permadeath is *always* good, and all players that don't like it are short-sighted.
Here I think he's wrong. I'm going to propose the radical ideas that people play games to have fun, and the different people think different things are fun.
If a MMORPG is designed that uses a new idea, people -will- try it. Some will turn away, either because they're narrowminded, or because they simply don't like it. Others will play it, and some of these will be newbies, who, following Bartle's logic, will then demand the new idea in other games. His mechanism for the propogation of "bad" ideas works just as well for "good" idea.
But of course, there aren't "good" ideas, just "fun" ideas. And since people have different tastes, two opposite ideas can -both- be fun...
Slashdot Mirror
Re: The name of Canada: It depends who you ask.
a llenge/reponses-answers_e.cfm
The name "Dominion Of Canada" is generally put forth as the long form of Canada's name. It's in the 1867 Constitution Act, but not the 1982 Constitution Act, nor the 1982 Canada Act. It's been used by the federal government to a greater or lesser degree throughout Canadian history, and according to the federal government, Canada's official name is still "The Dominion Of Canada":
http://www.pch.gc.ca/special/flag-drapeau/defi-ch
On the other hand, the CIA World Factbook says that there is no long name for the country of Canada, and I don't recall ever seeing/hearing the phrase used in any current context.
(FWIW: The CIA World Factbook gives "United States", not "America", as the short form of "United States of America". But that's the thing about colloquialisms...they're not "official", just widespread and commonly understood.)
> Second, you can only make copies of music that you legally own.
> For example, you may make a copy of a CD you own and give it to a
> freind... but your friend cannot make a copy of their copy and give
> it away.
I can't speak for the rest of your post, but this, at least, is incorrect.
Canada's Copyright Act, Part VII, Subsection 80:
---
Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
---
In other words: If you make the copy for yourself, and keep the copy, you're in the clear. It doesn't matter if you own the original media or not - you can borrow it from a friend, or take it out of the library, or sell the original to someone else.
You may NOT, however, make a copy of a CD you have and give the copy to a friend. To my reading, it looks like anything approaching distribution of a copy is illegal. You may, however, lend the original to a friend and let him make a copy.
The subsection (2) referred to in the quote above stipulates that you may not take the copy and sell it, give it away, broadcast it, communicate it to the general public, etc. etc.. The copy is for your private use.
Which system would that be? Certainly not GPS - the satellites are all in (roughly) 12-hour orbits around the earth.
Your "universal photo data tag" wouldn't be EXIF, would it?
It's most well-known use is in digital cameras - the image gets tagged with all the relevant photo settings (date and time, shutter speed, focal length, aperture, flash settings...) and has a whole bunch of possible fields, including GPS data.
It's normally used in connection with JPEG (any digital camera you buy will put EXIF info into the JPEGs it records), though I get the impression it can also work with TIFF, and possibly other formats as well.
In the interest of accuracy, I'll correct myself and state that I have a VG710, not a VG700.
Yes. Look at the response time. Lower (i.e. faster) is better. My LCD (a Viewsonic VG700) has a 16ms response time, which gives no ghosting that I've ever noticed (and I've looked for it). Cheaper displays still have worse response time (25ms or higher), and on those you can start to see problems.
Unlike CRTs, you should -not- pay much attention to refresh rate. I've never seen one that's not 60 Hz. This does not result in the nasty-bad flicker that a 60 Hz CRT has. The only possible negative to this is that the display can't show more than 60 fps...but if you set your video drivers to sync with your monitor, then you get a nice smooth 60 fps at all times, and it looks gorgeous.
It's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I've heard this mostly from people that have never touched an SLR in their life, and are now considering a Digital Rebel or D70. Somewhere they heard about the 1.6x crop factor without fully understanding it, and now think that a 200mm "is" a 300mm lens on a DSLR, even though the numbers 200 and 300 really don't mean anything to them.
If you've been shooting 35mm for years and know what sort of field of view to expect from various focal lengths, then making that mental adjustment is totally logical. But when people new to cameras tell me "I'm buying a 300mm lens for my camera" and then later mention "Well, it's labeled 200mm, but that's because it's for film cameras...on digital cameras it's 300mm" I get (slightly) irritated. Not at them, really; they're new to the field, and I'll try to enlighten them. I just have a minor vendetta about the misinformation that gets spouted on the subject.
Your statement is perfectly accurate. But a lot of people new to photography don't understand it.
I may not have been totally clear. I was referring to the fact that to calculate depth of field, you need to take into account the magnification of the image...an image may have a 50 meter depth of field when printed at 4x6, but only 25 meters when printed at 8x10, since in the enlarged image, fuzzy edges are more apparant. This assumes you keep the same definition for the circle of confusion, and it assumes the relationship is linear (I think it is but I'm too lazy to look it up).
:)
Given the same focal length, you'll need to enlarge an image from an APS-sized sensor (DRebel) 1.6x more than an image from a 35mm sensor (1Ds). Because of the crop, of course, they won't be the -same- image. However, the extra enlargement (unless I'm totally off-base) will decrease DoF if you don't loosen your standards. Many images that look just fine printed at 4x6 will lose sharpness if you blow them up to 8x12...suddenly they don't look in focus anymore.
I totally ignoring the tendency of the image to degrade away from the axis -- as you say, this is just a narrow part of it. I also know squat about T/S lenses (don't have 'em, can't afford 'em). My only point was that DoF is not an intrinsic attribute of small sensors, but rather an property that comes out of the entire optics system wrapped around it.
The meaning of the cropping factor is something I'm definitely *not* confused about...I've broken into tirades when people tell me "Well it's a 200mm lens, but on a digital camera it's a 300mm."
Maybe I care too much
I wondered this for a while before tripping over the answer, which is actually pretty straightforward.
It's all about image quality.
Running an LCD preview (either on the camera back, or EVF) requires pulling a live video feed off the sensor, which requires extra, dedicated circuitry. Every square nanometer on the sensor that's dedicated to support circuitry is a square nanometer that's *not* dedicated to actual photosensors.
So by removing the live electronic preview, the size of the photosensors can be increased. More light falls on each sensor, which means that less amplification is needed, which results in less noise in the final picture.
This is also why dSLRs don't have movie mode. They'd have to sacrifice image quality to support it.
I can't say that I think an EVF has any advantage over an optical viewfinder, but using the back LCD panel as a preview would definitely be a nice feature. I think the right way to implement this would be to use a second low-res CCD in the camera, dedicated to the preview, would work well. If you throw in another flippable mirror, you can switch between normal optical viewfinder and LCD preview at will.
I realize your post was a joke, but I avoid flash as much as possible. I find available-light photography looks far better.
However, I'm still using the on-camera flash on my Digital Rebel. No diffuser, no bounce. I've been thinking about investing in a proper flash (probably the Sigma Super 500). If I ever actually do that, my opinion may chage.
Almost, but not quite, true.
Larger -focal lengths- give greater depth of field at a given aperture, assuming you're measuring focal length as an f-number. An aperture of f/4 means that the actual aperture size is the focal length divided by four. Clever, eh?
So, grabbing a random shot from my point-and-shoot Fujifilm camera, I see that it's got a focal length of 6mm, and an aperture of f/3.5. This means that the actual physical size of the aperture is about 1.7 mm. To get the same actual aperture opening on my Digital Rebel (and thus let in the same amount of light) at, say, 50mm, would require me to set the aperture to f/30.
Now, smaller sensors tend to -imply- shorter focal lengths, and thus smaller apertures, but that's not always the case. A Digital Rebel has a smaller sensor than a Canon 1Ds, but it uses exactly the same focal length. In this case, a picture taken at the same settings will actually have *less* depth of field on the Rebel (the smaller sensor).
Why? Because you're using a smaller section of the lens's projected image. The out-of-focus sections are *more* out-of-focus with respect to the image size on the Rebel. You have to enlarge the image more to get the same 4x6 print, so you're more sensitive to blurriness.
So all things equal, a smaller sensor actually equates to -less- depth of field. But you also tend to use shorter focal lengths, so there's a bit of a balancing effect. (I think it's actually a squared relationship, which is why pictures taken on really small sensors tend to have such a huge DOF).
Canon claims that a lot of this is dependant on their DIGIC processor. Could be true - their processor/CMOS sensor combo has been remarkably low-noise since it was introduced, and it keeps getting better.
If the processor can make that big a difference, then this technology can be applied to camera phones...if the manufacturers are willing to invest that sort of power, die space, and research into that area.
The human eye is also only really decent in the center of the image. Anything outside the central part of your retina is pretty poor image quality (try to read an entire line of text without moving your eyes).
Chromatic abberation can probably be dealt with in a single-lens system, because you know exactly how bad the CA is at each point. In a fixed-lens camera phone, if the image quality is high enough that CA is evident, and the lens can't be improved to remove it, I'm willing to be that a sufficiently motivated group could take a bunch of reference images to map the CA for each part of the image, and reverse it in software. Not perfectly, but better than nothing.
This does assume that the lenses are being manufactured in such a way that they all have the same (or similar) characteristics. Since people report differences even among individual same-model SLR lenses costing several hundred bucks, this strikes me as unlikely...
Well, your best bet would be the extremely sensitive CCD. Colour depth isn't the issiue - the problem is that with the size of the aperture, not much light is getting in. It's almost entirely a question of signal-to-noise ratios.
If a sensor (CCD, CMOS, or something else entirely) could be developed that was extremely light-sensitive, or extremely low-noise, then a small aperture would still allow you to take noise-free images. Very clever processing circuits can also help here. That's the first half of the battle.
After that, you start to get into questions of focusing, image sharpness, chromatic aberration, and all sorts of other fun topics. A lot of image quality issues that aren't apparant in a low-res pic become visible in a high-res snap, and will also be more evident in a noise-free image.
Because this is for a hypothetical -phone-, not a camera, I'd suggest using a fixed-focus lens, focused at the hyperfocal distance (i.e. everything from some point X meters from the camera out to infinity is 'in focus'). The more features you add (variable focusing, optical zoom), the more complex your optical system needs to be. Stick with a medium-resolution sensor (at 2MP, each pixel of the sensor gets ~3x the light that pixels from a same-sized 6MP sensor will get). A phone camera that takes 2-3MP pictures, of good enough quality to be printed at 4x6 and be indistinguishable from a typical 35mm camera, is not outside the bounds of reason.
Get too ambitious, and you have to make decisions about how much of the physical bulk of the phone you want your camera to take up.
Maybe not as much as I thought...based on a discussion in another thread, I'm given to believe that I misremembered the details of patent law :)
A question:
If I only need to infringe on a single claim to infringe on the entire patent, then what's the purpose of, e.g., claim 2, which restricts it to BASIC? This claim builds on claim 1, and I can't think of a single way you'd infringe on claim 2 without also infringing on claim 1.
In fact, claims 2-14 all boil down to "Claim 1, and also this"...so to infringe on any of them, you must also infringe on claim 1, so what purpose do any of these serve? Obviously they describe the particular implementation, but if you can still infringe with a -different- implementation, why does any of this matter?
Oh, you wanted an -informed- opinion on the topic. My bad :)
I'm willing to stand corrected - I got an A in the course, but it was four years ago :)
There's always the remote possibility that Canadian patent law differs from US patent law (which is what would be applicable here), but I'm not confident enough to make that claim...
That's not prior art, because this patent specifically covers BASIC.
As others have mentioned, what's more relevant is whether or not the IsNot operator is sufficiently non-obvious. This patent can't get rejected due to exact prior art, unless someone's made IsNot in BASIC before. But it can get rejected on the grounds that, based on the knowledge in the field, it's bleeding obvious. That's up to the patent office though.
Well, I Am Not A Lawyer But I Took A Course In University That Covered Canadian Patent Law.....
From what I remember, an invention can only infringe on a patent if every single claim in the patent applies to that invention. So, doing this in C wouldn't infringe (claim 2). Calling the operator Isnt or Aint or != wouldn't infringe (claim 3). Doing this in an interpreter instead of a compiler may not infringe (claim 4, but see also claim 14, which makes it sound like it doesn't have to be actual machine language opcodes that you assemble to).
The same rules apply to prior art claims. Saying that LISP did it years ago is irrelevant - the patent's not about LISP, it's about BASIC. A patent doesn't have to be for a 100% new idea, it can be for a new application of an old idea.
This is why you tend to see items listing a couple dozen patent numbers on them - rather than patent an entire television, the company will patent individual parts. Otherwise, you could remove one part, clone everything else exactly, and not infringe (because one of the claims in the patent would not be true of your copy).
I'm willing to bet that the purpose of this patent is to prevent people from writing VB compilers of their own (i.e. for Linux), keeping VB programmers locked into MS/Windows.
The developers would happily agree with you on that point - they don't even call it an MMORPG themselves. It's a rather odd hybrid sort of game, which is why it came to mind when I was talking about developers making an effort to break out of the mold.
That, and the fact that I played it heavily during the recent preview, so it's been on my mind lately.
But how do you define "better"? Is there any reasonable way to say what's "good" in a game, apart from what's fun?
It's ridiculous to say "Well, this is a good game design, but nobody will play it because they're not enjoying themselves". This is -entertainment- we're dealing with.
I disagree with Bartle when he says it will be rejected by newbies. I think people will try it for sheer novelty. But if it's not fun, the game will die...because it's a *bad idea*.
Many, many games are modified during alpha testing to make them more fun. The alpha testers don't turn up their noses and say "It's different, I'm not playing it". They play it, then say "Idea X rules, idea Y kinda sucks". Bartle's article reads very, very much like he's saying "I know what's right, and the fact that no one else wants to play this proves they're sheep."
(I've written a few responses now, and I think I'm getting progressively crankier. Bartle, if you're reading -- sorry)
The market pressures are encouraging innovation, not wholesale cloning.
It goes like this: One day, a massively successful game (Everquest) is released. People play it for hours and spend a gazillion dollars on fees.
Then, every software company clones it, probably badly. A few succeed.
Now, for a new MMORPG to get any attention, there has to be something interesting about it. That could be just name recognition (World of Warcraft), or it could be the developer consciously breaking out of the mold (Guild Wars...which has heavy instancing, so Bartle probably hates it).
The point is, when a design team sits down to make an MMORPG now, they need to stand out from the crowd. The easiest way to do that is to write something that's got a major difference. The forums will be all over it, people will be asking "How will they make permadeath viable?", the gamers will hunger for press releases and demos, and even people that say "MadHobbit's game will suck because it has permadeath" are still out there passing the name around.
By the time it's actually released, there'll be a few demos, and if you've done your job right at -all-, the online gaming rags will be saying "MadHobbit's innovative new game is a refreshing break from the repetitive gameplay of the rest of the genre".
And people *will* buy it, and if it's actually a good idea, they'll have fun (because that's what defines a good idea in a game), and you can buy a swimming pool and fill it with money. (Step 3: Profit...)
But Bartle hasn't indicated anything to the contrary.
It's very possible that there is a way that a MMORPG can implement permadeath and not result in a lot of repetition. For instance, Nethack has permadeath, but starting over at level 1 isn't dull, because the game is more about strategy than grinds.
However, if Bartle simply says "Permadeath is good" and doesn't suggest what else he'd do different, there's no reason to believe you wouldn't go through the grind all over again. Point #3, which you refer to, is "the world you first got into". However, this is more a matter of "virtually everything on the market"...not exactly the same thing.
His individual points are mostly good, but I don't believe they add up to his conclusion. Point #2 is the weakest, because:
- Many gamers will grab whatever new game is on the market, just to try something new, and
- Real newbies, people that haven't played and MMORPG before, have nothing to compare the game against.
This is a fair-sized chunk of people that will try out a game with a new idea. And if it's fun in the long-term, the game will succeed, and others will copy it. If it's not fun, then the players aren't being short-sighted. If it's not fun, it's a bad game.
If you start a MMORPG with perma-death, a lot of players will avoid it.
Bartle seems to claim that this proves players will always hold back design. Well, maybe they only *think* they don't like it, because it's different. But his argument requires you to accept that permadeath is *always* good, and all players that don't like it are short-sighted.
Here I think he's wrong. I'm going to propose the radical ideas that people play games to have fun, and the different people think different things are fun.
If a MMORPG is designed that uses a new idea, people -will- try it. Some will turn away, either because they're narrowminded, or because they simply don't like it. Others will play it, and some of these will be newbies, who, following Bartle's logic, will then demand the new idea in other games. His mechanism for the propogation of "bad" ideas works just as well for "good" idea.
But of course, there aren't "good" ideas, just "fun" ideas. And since people have different tastes, two opposite ideas can -both- be fun...