No idea if this story is true, but it sure is interesting. I read the whole thing over the past 45 minutes.
It certainly got me interested in Eve, anyway. I'm downloading it now.
Though, somehow, I suspect I won't be investing in any battleships blueprints.
It's a small industry. Monopolies are created when you effectively have control of the market. (Not when you have 100% control, as most people think). As such, if EA, with their very deep pockets, can cripple the competition just by hiring away a few key individuals, they're exercising monopoly powers rather than just engaging in fair competition.
Ubisoft on the other hand, as a defence, is trying to strongarm their employees to do what they want. Though, as another posted mentioned, it's common practice to sign non-competition agreements, this is not the same thing - let's face it, if you're a game developer in Montreal, and you don't want to work for Ubisoft any more, where are you going to go? Courts will generally not uphold an agreement that forces someone to be left unemployed (and effectively unemployable if they're wanting to use their skill set).
Once again though - EA is using their lawyers to defend the poaching of employees, under the guise of looking out for the employees interests. Somehow, based on their history, I think we can be pretty sure that EA isn't looking for their employees' best interests....
Re:Why? Who wants to devalue their product?
on
Fast Track to Fine Wine?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
People who make their own product for their own consumption is who. My brother makes his own wines for himself - imagine the fun he'd have seeing what his wine would taste like in one, two or three years with this machine. I agree - most 'real' wine makers probably wouldn't want to touch this, except for the vineyards that already 'temper' their wine to taste the same year after year like the Ernest and Julio Gallo types, but I think there's a huge home market possibility here.
Human beings are so varied, I really can't see how this could be useful. If I'm upset because my boss just gave me a 20 minute deadline to finish something, and the computer senses this and starts popping 'helpful' windows, that's way more likely to make you freak at a critical moment than a computer that just does what's expected. I think a few hours worth of education into the user will be way more useful than a computer that's going to try and figure out what problem you might be having that day from your facial expression. I can only imagine how many people that are naturally hot tempered will end up destroying their computers in frustration.
In my humble opinion, this research is a total waste of time until AI is so fully developed that a computer can understand context.
Though I agree, strategy games (apart from the obvious like chess) really benefit from good commentary. Someone who can do a strategic analysis to make one *really* appreciate the skill behind the players during a game brings a new light on it.
I never used to watch kickboxing til I took up the sport. Still don't watch it much or anything - but I get a new insight on it when you get to see it through other people's eyes.
Given Sony's ethics lately, I think I can safely say that I won't be buying anything with the Sony brand name stamped on it for a long time to come, especially if the device stores any data. Frankly, I won't even buy any CD's with the Sony label any more. I really hope the class action lawsuit against them cripples them pretty seriously, though I suspect it'll be more of the slap-on-the-hand variety of justice. If only the courts could take a division of a company as punishment, sell it off, and prohibit them from playing ball in that field in the future.
I'm not sure why you'd expect Slashdot to be unbiased. They're a privately owned company, after all, and can do what they want. Look at someone like Fox - they reach far more people and their news is unbelievably biased. Personally, I don't like it, but that's their prerogative.
On topic now - you seem to think the RIAA are doing something good.
I would counter your points with the following questions:
1. Of all the money the RIAA has gathered (through lawsuits) on behalf of the artists that have 'lost money', can you name even one artist who has gotten one dollar of that money? In fact, has ANYONE gotten better from their lawsuits except the RIAA? Is there ANY evidence that pirating has slowed as a result of their actions? Yes, pirating has slowed online actually, but mostly from migration to pay for services like ITunes. Frankly, people are happy to pay for it - they just needed a convenient medium - as convenient as file sharing was.
2. Is there any proof that the RIAA protects the artists at all (rather than the record companies)? Companies like ITunes allow artists to represent themselves. Artists get 60 cents on every dollar for music put online that way. Compare this to less than 10 cents (or even as little as none) through any record companies. I would not be surprised to see the RIAA suing ITunes soon, for some odd reason or another.
BTW - I do agree they do beat up on Microsoft too much on this forum. If I have to read yet another article about how great Firefox is.... a product that is buggy, and provides basically the same functionality as IE over 5 years after MS released it, ain't that impressive. Only thing impressive about it is that it was done through collective mind power of a community, rather than a corporation.
The way they've done it is interesting. They've basically said "it's illegal - but you go find the guy, then we'll prosecute.". Which, in the cases of companies like EBay, they might just do.
Now of course, you're right, there's no way we can reach the Nigerians (etc) yet, but there are plenty of Americans out there doing it. And those that are stupid enough to defy laws within their own country where they can be easily pinned - well, at least you're getting some of them. http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/the spamreport/0,39025001,39125582,00.htmhttp://itvibe.com/news/2560/
Yes, there are stupid people out there. It's our duty to help protect them, not say that they deserve to be ripped off for being stupid and greedy.
When Arnold makes California his own country and goes and invades Nigeria, then you'll be glad we have a law!
...and anything else you might need to beat a hasty retreat from the idiots who were choosing to loot and pillage instead of helping people get off roofs. Might Kevlar be useful?
I think you're right on most counts, except the one that this topic is about. That's where we get to vote with our cash. (Unlike property tax, cameras, patriot act, etc, where we get no say). I have a sony handheld, and after I discovered that I had to use THEIR unbelievably crappy software to put music onto it, and it would convert it to their shitty format that couldn't be transferred (all done to protect their music division), I can guarantee you I won't be suckered again. There's good reason Sony went from market leader in handheld music players to being so far back in the race that you can't even see em any more. There will be plenty of people who want into the SanDisk market who don't have an agenda (except making cash of course)and who will happily promote 'copy anything you want!' right on their packaging.
Hold on - you are saying something completely different from everyone else here. I mean, I can see why it's useful for the record companies, but why would anyone buy it? Or are you implying that it's for a different market than I am aware? Also, once it's on the hard drive, in bits and bytes form, and then gets cracked, how does this technology help?
Really, with multimedia getting so prevalent, will anyone buy any product that enforces DRM if they have their choice? I mean, i'll never buy another Sony handheld device after I was forced to use their crappy software to drop music in their crappy format onto my handheld player. And look where they are now - gone from market leader to being 'sony who?' compared to IPods.
Really, we don't want to exclude blogs. Though I do think being able to specify them explicitly is nice. The solution is to provide a preliminary breakdown of results when there are pissloads of em. (Like over 100 maybe?). For instance, group them into bubbles, so if you search for Katrina, one bubble would be all entries about the Hurricane, another would be famous people called Katrina, a third locations of that name, etc. Even having a second set of results that sort by genre of web page would be handy - one by news, another by blog, etc. This would seem far more sensible than creating a separate search tool for each type of entry - we can just drill down into whatever category is most useful at the time.
This logic seems good to me. But what about companies like Virgin, which is made up of incredibly diverse companies, all of which make boat loads of money? He just hires smart guys to run each company and sits back. Surely Branson is pretty recession proof as a result. It's not like airlines have anything to do with music. Or cell phones. (Well, music and cell phones are maybe converging a little bit, but not much...)
Actually, I think that's the best response to my comment overall. You're right I think, it is the least of the evils. My father just retired from the coast guard, where he did high end analysis type work, and was responsible for educating people to boot. As you can well imagine, environmentalism is very high on the coast guards' agenda. One of the most interesting pair of facts he told me was the following:
1. CO2 levels normally flucuate over thousands of years between 100 ppm to 300 ppm (we know this from glacier samples). Once it hits the upper or lower limits 'something happens'. In short, there is a correction that nature takes.
2. We're currently at 400 ppm. Interestingly, the impact isn't that we have more 'serious' events like tidal waves and hurricanes. In fact, it's almost exactly the same number every year, predictably so. (sits around 160 world wide). However, the severity of these events has increased substantially. Something like 150 of the 160 last year were the most severe in recorded history.
It's not the risk of a Chernobyl type reaction that's the issue. It's the nuclear waste. Where the hell do you put something that will never stop being incredibly dangerous? This is a problem that has never been resolved, and still has no solution in the offing.
I do pay for cable. Just the minimum package. And yes, I do feel like a hypocrite, but I really like watching new episodes of "Family Guy" and "Simpsons". However, when I'm watching TV, i'm usually on the comp as well, so I can divert my attention during the commercials. I am a bit rabid in my anti-advertising views (just seems a little overwhelming how much crap gets pushed at me in a day) but you're totally right - it's far easier to get shows off the net now. One of the most enjoyable periods of my tv watching life was when I downloaded 7 years of Buffy the vampire slayer episodes and spent the next few months watching them. (My secret shame, btw so tell no one). Blissfully commercial free, pausable, rewindable, and I could leave it for a week and come back and it'd still be there. I would happily have payed a buck an episode to watch them in that format, which is probably more than the advertising is worth. Once they get their act together and figure out a business model that caters to this, I'll be the first in line to endorse it.
Well, they're welcome to do what they like. Lots of pay for clothing with logos on them, advertising the company that made it. Personally, I never pay for advertising. If someone gives me a shirt for free with their company name on it, I'll consider wearing it, but that's about it. This philosophy also applies to video games, if they want to go that route. Give it to me for free, and i'll consider playing it. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay good money to be barraged with advertising.
Interesting point. I know that World of Warcraft adds a new dungeon or something here and there, but for the most part any changes are slow in coming and rare. They really need more rapid development tools so they can keep it coming at a really rapid pace. Ideally, someone should make a MMOG that has a base set of rules (like physics) that can't be screwed with, and release the dev tools to their community so users can make cool interesting add-ons for the game as well.
Ha! Funny. Very true though - and frankly, sports are boring. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing some sports, but seriously, do I want to sit in a virtual infield for a couple hours on the off chance that someone hits the ball my way? Even something like football - if you're not the quarterback or a receiver, is it really going to be fun? And what makes it massive? It's not like you're going to have 10,000 people playing one game of baseball. A simple multiplayer game with some central server for tracking would be more than adequate.
Hm... the RFID tags they stick in CD's and clothes and stuff are not powered. They do generate unique identifiers when they're designed right. Key fobs, or those scannable ID cards are all examples of the type of RFID you are describing. So yes, it's been patented, methinks.
RFID chips are easy to replicate. You bounce a signal off it, it bounces a unique signal back. (This is the same technology used in stores to detect when goods are being stolen). Set up a portable unit to capture a whole bunch of unique signals, create your own RFID chips using them. Find someone with kick ass insurance and sell copies of that chip to dozens of people.
RFID has it's uses, but this isn't it. This technology is stupid on so many levels:
1. It doesn't allow any form of security, unless you're using a second form of authentication (thumbprint to correlate against, for example.) In which case, why bother in the first place.
2. People put a lot of faith in technology. If the chip says it's so, it must be so. This bodes very poorly in case of a problem.
3. If it's implanted, there's no off switch.
The earlier posting was correct though - if it becomes common enough, it'll become like a drivers license or credit card. You'll need them to perform virtually any function.
It totally depends on the plugin. The plugin will determine size of the image, quality of the image, compression of the image and whether it does stuff like only send changes to the image (by that I mean if a color is the same in a given pixel, it ignores it, and only sends the changed pixel information). That saves tons of bandwidth right there. So in short, there's no good answer short of either doing a pissload of research on a given plugin, or just running it and measuring what's going through the nic. There's some pretty damn efficient ones these days though. I suspect an hour would cost him about 5-20 mb of throughput, assuming he's on high speed. That's a total guesstimate though.
It is totally free, as long as both ends have Skype. Much like any other chat program. The advantage of the "calling card" feature (or whatever you want to call it)is that you can use Skype to call someone that doesn't even have a computer, by which it uses Skype to communicate to the country in question over the net which then routes to a local exchange and dials out from there, which is why it's so cheap.
I researched the USB phones a while back. Personally, I'd want a portable, but they're european only at this point (they'll work fine here, but they use a wavelength that is prohibited in north america. Nothing stopping one from trying to get it shipped in, I guess). They do look super cool though. Lots of good display features, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Though, somehow, I suspect I won't be investing in any battleships blueprints.
Ubisoft on the other hand, as a defence, is trying to strongarm their employees to do what they want. Though, as another posted mentioned, it's common practice to sign non-competition agreements, this is not the same thing - let's face it, if you're a game developer in Montreal, and you don't want to work for Ubisoft any more, where are you going to go? Courts will generally not uphold an agreement that forces someone to be left unemployed (and effectively unemployable if they're wanting to use their skill set).
Once again though - EA is using their lawyers to defend the poaching of employees, under the guise of looking out for the employees interests. Somehow, based on their history, I think we can be pretty sure that EA isn't looking for their employees' best interests....
People who make their own product for their own consumption is who. My brother makes his own wines for himself - imagine the fun he'd have seeing what his wine would taste like in one, two or three years with this machine. I agree - most 'real' wine makers probably wouldn't want to touch this, except for the vineyards that already 'temper' their wine to taste the same year after year like the Ernest and Julio Gallo types, but I think there's a huge home market possibility here.
But try having sex. Most people find that preferable to pretty much anything else.
In my humble opinion, this research is a total waste of time until AI is so fully developed that a computer can understand context.
Though I agree, strategy games (apart from the obvious like chess) really benefit from good commentary. Someone who can do a strategic analysis to make one *really* appreciate the skill behind the players during a game brings a new light on it. I never used to watch kickboxing til I took up the sport. Still don't watch it much or anything - but I get a new insight on it when you get to see it through other people's eyes.
Given Sony's ethics lately, I think I can safely say that I won't be buying anything with the Sony brand name stamped on it for a long time to come, especially if the device stores any data. Frankly, I won't even buy any CD's with the Sony label any more. I really hope the class action lawsuit against them cripples them pretty seriously, though I suspect it'll be more of the slap-on-the-hand variety of justice. If only the courts could take a division of a company as punishment, sell it off, and prohibit them from playing ball in that field in the future.
I'm not sure why you'd expect Slashdot to be unbiased. They're a privately owned company, after all, and can do what they want. Look at someone like Fox - they reach far more people and their news is unbelievably biased. Personally, I don't like it, but that's their prerogative. On topic now - you seem to think the RIAA are doing something good. I would counter your points with the following questions: 1. Of all the money the RIAA has gathered (through lawsuits) on behalf of the artists that have 'lost money', can you name even one artist who has gotten one dollar of that money? In fact, has ANYONE gotten better from their lawsuits except the RIAA? Is there ANY evidence that pirating has slowed as a result of their actions? Yes, pirating has slowed online actually, but mostly from migration to pay for services like ITunes. Frankly, people are happy to pay for it - they just needed a convenient medium - as convenient as file sharing was. 2. Is there any proof that the RIAA protects the artists at all (rather than the record companies)? Companies like ITunes allow artists to represent themselves. Artists get 60 cents on every dollar for music put online that way. Compare this to less than 10 cents (or even as little as none) through any record companies. I would not be surprised to see the RIAA suing ITunes soon, for some odd reason or another. BTW - I do agree they do beat up on Microsoft too much on this forum. If I have to read yet another article about how great Firefox is.... a product that is buggy, and provides basically the same functionality as IE over 5 years after MS released it, ain't that impressive. Only thing impressive about it is that it was done through collective mind power of a community, rather than a corporation.
The way they've done it is interesting. They've basically said "it's illegal - but you go find the guy, then we'll prosecute.". Which, in the cases of companies like EBay, they might just do. Now of course, you're right, there's no way we can reach the Nigerians (etc) yet, but there are plenty of Americans out there doing it. And those that are stupid enough to defy laws within their own country where they can be easily pinned - well, at least you're getting some of them. http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/the spamreport/0,39025001,39125582,00.htm
http://itvibe.com/news/2560/
Yes, there are stupid people out there. It's our duty to help protect them, not say that they deserve to be ripped off for being stupid and greedy.
When Arnold makes California his own country and goes and invades Nigeria, then you'll be glad we have a law!
...and anything else you might need to beat a hasty retreat from the idiots who were choosing to loot and pillage instead of helping people get off roofs. Might Kevlar be useful?
I think you're right on most counts, except the one that this topic is about. That's where we get to vote with our cash. (Unlike property tax, cameras, patriot act, etc, where we get no say). I have a sony handheld, and after I discovered that I had to use THEIR unbelievably crappy software to put music onto it, and it would convert it to their shitty format that couldn't be transferred (all done to protect their music division), I can guarantee you I won't be suckered again. There's good reason Sony went from market leader in handheld music players to being so far back in the race that you can't even see em any more. There will be plenty of people who want into the SanDisk market who don't have an agenda (except making cash of course)and who will happily promote 'copy anything you want!' right on their packaging.
Hold on - you are saying something completely different from everyone else here. I mean, I can see why it's useful for the record companies, but why would anyone buy it? Or are you implying that it's for a different market than I am aware? Also, once it's on the hard drive, in bits and bytes form, and then gets cracked, how does this technology help?
Really, with multimedia getting so prevalent, will anyone buy any product that enforces DRM if they have their choice? I mean, i'll never buy another Sony handheld device after I was forced to use their crappy software to drop music in their crappy format onto my handheld player. And look where they are now - gone from market leader to being 'sony who?' compared to IPods.
Wow. You're cynical. I like it.
You're probably right too. It's like doctors who do analysis of drugs on behalf of the drug companies. Who's kidding who?
Really, we don't want to exclude blogs. Though I do think being able to specify them explicitly is nice. The solution is to provide a preliminary breakdown of results when there are pissloads of em. (Like over 100 maybe?). For instance, group them into bubbles, so if you search for Katrina, one bubble would be all entries about the Hurricane, another would be famous people called Katrina, a third locations of that name, etc. Even having a second set of results that sort by genre of web page would be handy - one by news, another by blog, etc. This would seem far more sensible than creating a separate search tool for each type of entry - we can just drill down into whatever category is most useful at the time.
This logic seems good to me. But what about companies like Virgin, which is made up of incredibly diverse companies, all of which make boat loads of money? He just hires smart guys to run each company and sits back. Surely Branson is pretty recession proof as a result. It's not like airlines have anything to do with music. Or cell phones. (Well, music and cell phones are maybe converging a little bit, but not much...)
Actually, I think that's the best response to my comment overall. You're right I think, it is the least of the evils. My father just retired from the coast guard, where he did high end analysis type work, and was responsible for educating people to boot. As you can well imagine, environmentalism is very high on the coast guards' agenda. One of the most interesting pair of facts he told me was the following: 1. CO2 levels normally flucuate over thousands of years between 100 ppm to 300 ppm (we know this from glacier samples). Once it hits the upper or lower limits 'something happens'. In short, there is a correction that nature takes. 2. We're currently at 400 ppm. Interestingly, the impact isn't that we have more 'serious' events like tidal waves and hurricanes. In fact, it's almost exactly the same number every year, predictably so. (sits around 160 world wide). However, the severity of these events has increased substantially. Something like 150 of the 160 last year were the most severe in recorded history.
It's not the risk of a Chernobyl type reaction that's the issue. It's the nuclear waste. Where the hell do you put something that will never stop being incredibly dangerous? This is a problem that has never been resolved, and still has no solution in the offing.
I do pay for cable. Just the minimum package. And yes, I do feel like a hypocrite, but I really like watching new episodes of "Family Guy" and "Simpsons". However, when I'm watching TV, i'm usually on the comp as well, so I can divert my attention during the commercials. I am a bit rabid in my anti-advertising views (just seems a little overwhelming how much crap gets pushed at me in a day) but you're totally right - it's far easier to get shows off the net now. One of the most enjoyable periods of my tv watching life was when I downloaded 7 years of Buffy the vampire slayer episodes and spent the next few months watching them. (My secret shame, btw so tell no one). Blissfully commercial free, pausable, rewindable, and I could leave it for a week and come back and it'd still be there. I would happily have payed a buck an episode to watch them in that format, which is probably more than the advertising is worth. Once they get their act together and figure out a business model that caters to this, I'll be the first in line to endorse it.
Well, they're welcome to do what they like. Lots of pay for clothing with logos on them, advertising the company that made it. Personally, I never pay for advertising. If someone gives me a shirt for free with their company name on it, I'll consider wearing it, but that's about it. This philosophy also applies to video games, if they want to go that route. Give it to me for free, and i'll consider playing it. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay good money to be barraged with advertising.
Interesting point. I know that World of Warcraft adds a new dungeon or something here and there, but for the most part any changes are slow in coming and rare. They really need more rapid development tools so they can keep it coming at a really rapid pace. Ideally, someone should make a MMOG that has a base set of rules (like physics) that can't be screwed with, and release the dev tools to their community so users can make cool interesting add-ons for the game as well.
Ha! Funny. Very true though - and frankly, sports are boring. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing some sports, but seriously, do I want to sit in a virtual infield for a couple hours on the off chance that someone hits the ball my way? Even something like football - if you're not the quarterback or a receiver, is it really going to be fun? And what makes it massive? It's not like you're going to have 10,000 people playing one game of baseball. A simple multiplayer game with some central server for tracking would be more than adequate.
Hm... the RFID tags they stick in CD's and clothes and stuff are not powered. They do generate unique identifiers when they're designed right. Key fobs, or those scannable ID cards are all examples of the type of RFID you are describing. So yes, it's been patented, methinks.
RFID has it's uses, but this isn't it. This technology is stupid on so many levels:
1. It doesn't allow any form of security, unless you're using a second form of authentication (thumbprint to correlate against, for example.) In which case, why bother in the first place. 2. People put a lot of faith in technology. If the chip says it's so, it must be so. This bodes very poorly in case of a problem. 3. If it's implanted, there's no off switch.
The earlier posting was correct though - if it becomes common enough, it'll become like a drivers license or credit card. You'll need them to perform virtually any function.
It totally depends on the plugin. The plugin will determine size of the image, quality of the image, compression of the image and whether it does stuff like only send changes to the image (by that I mean if a color is the same in a given pixel, it ignores it, and only sends the changed pixel information). That saves tons of bandwidth right there. So in short, there's no good answer short of either doing a pissload of research on a given plugin, or just running it and measuring what's going through the nic. There's some pretty damn efficient ones these days though. I suspect an hour would cost him about 5-20 mb of throughput, assuming he's on high speed. That's a total guesstimate though.
It is totally free, as long as both ends have Skype. Much like any other chat program. The advantage of the "calling card" feature (or whatever you want to call it)is that you can use Skype to call someone that doesn't even have a computer, by which it uses Skype to communicate to the country in question over the net which then routes to a local exchange and dials out from there, which is why it's so cheap. I researched the USB phones a while back. Personally, I'd want a portable, but they're european only at this point (they'll work fine here, but they use a wavelength that is prohibited in north america. Nothing stopping one from trying to get it shipped in, I guess). They do look super cool though. Lots of good display features, etc.