Considering the customization of the visible avatar in Call of Duty isn't much greater than what Doom offered this cannot be an integral part of the patent.
So basically they had a patent from 1995, amended it with new stuff in 2009 and now sue people as if they had invented the amended stuff back in 1995? If this was continuous development then why was there a 14 year gap between filings?
I hope the joke is just the name and the stuff announced today, not the whole space game. After all Notch did announce a "firefly-style" space game some weeks ago.
Rebellion is probably more impacted by that as their games lately were pretty weak and people are more likely to trade them in for the meagre amount of money that stores like GameStop offer. On the other hand you got companies like Nintendo whose flagship games (not all games but their biggest sellers like Mario Kart or New Super Mario Bros) still cost full price even 5 years after release and few used copies are in circulation because demand far exceeds the trade-in supply (also the trade-in values remain high because the demand is there, with other games those values collapse in a matter of months).
Clustered stores make sense as long as they're different companies, after all they're competing with each other and when they cluster that's usually a sign that the area has a lot of people looking for that kind of store. Having redundant stores or banks of the same company is where it gets weird.
Games only learn what they are programmed to learn. They aren't remotely as flexible as large animals because that kind of learning is so damn complex that it'd take way too much processing power. To learn from an action you first have to understand what the action was, games only store simple things like "player likes to use item X" but if a situation arises that the designer of the algorithm has not anticipated the game cannot adapt. Clicking on a button does not tell you why clicking the button was the right thing to do in the situation and that may be a vital difference. If you look for a pattern you have to define which factors to include in the pattern and the human may have used factors that you didn't include. Maybe humans like aesthetically pleasing color arrangements and try to reach them but how can a computer even see that that happened?
Simply looking at the entire system state would be problematic because generating a library of patterns out of that could easily take more effort than simply following your old computer algorithm.
The basic visual sense of a large animal includes an insane amount of brainpower for pattern recognition, interpretation and such things. There's a reason even very dumb animals can maneuver through the world much faster than our smartest robots. The heuristics used by humans in tasks like that are likely backed by the enormous processing power of the brain when it comes to analyzing pictures and patterns so they may not be terribly useful for computers.
How about Java? If you run your program in debug mode inside Eclipse it'll do hot code replacement every time you save (doesn't ALWAYS work and obviously won't retroactively change results of previous calculations).
That's when opportunity cost comes into play. If spending X$ on Android support gives 2X$ revenue and spending X$ on something else gives 6X$ revenue then supporting Android is the bad choice despite being profitable. Since his investment is in the form of his time he cannot spend it on both. He could hire a third developer for the company but that's a significant expense that may not be justified for the returns.
A different story I heard from co-workers that made Android apps in their free time was that the payment systems are too lacking. You need a credit card to buy anything from Android and in my home country (Germany, fourth highest GDP in the world) those things are a rarity. Apple, Amazon, etc have adjusted by offering different payment options that don't require a CC. Google hasn't. Insisting on a CC is one of the biggest signs that a company hasn't bothered to research and adapt to the peculiarities of the local market. I expect this situation to be similar throughout the EU so Google is forfeiting a large part of the tech hungry world.
These people cannot buy paid apps on Android at all, they can only get ad-supported ones. iOS offers all kinds of payment options including those value cards you buy in stores (and are available practically everywhere now, even in grocery stores), that allows anyone to buy paid apps on iOS.
This article would be less FUD if it actually went into the reasons why the Android platform is unsustainable.
How about "sales are significantly lower"? They say they're making about 5% of their income from Android with the remaining 95% presumably from iOS (I doubt that Windows Phone is a factor). That would mean iOS gets 19 sales for every 1 sale Android gets. If this applies to more than this developer then it's a real reason to make iOS software instead of Android software.
If the additional income was big enough they'd probably do that work but it seems the sales on Android aren't up to snuff either. Maybe it has to do with the terrible layout of the marketplace that makes it literally impossible to see apps that aren't in the top lists without knowing a name to search for.
Of course it takes work, the question is if the work invested gives enough of a return to warrant doing it. Turns out it doesn't pay well so it gets dropped in favor of more profitable endeavors.
If you require that every time the velocity goes across a certain threshold people are going to get extremely annoyed. And the idiots in the cars will just get even more distracted as they deal with their phone's unlock challenge.
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Latinum itself is a liquid. The gold bars and such are just containers.
Considering the customization of the visible avatar in Call of Duty isn't much greater than what Doom offered this cannot be an integral part of the patent.
So basically they had a patent from 1995, amended it with new stuff in 2009 and now sue people as if they had invented the amended stuff back in 1995? If this was continuous development then why was there a 14 year gap between filings?
Isn't that what's called a submarine patent? Why the huge discrepancy in dates between the two?
I hope the joke is just the name and the stuff announced today, not the whole space game. After all Notch did announce a "firefly-style" space game some weeks ago.
Hussein didn't do nearly as much provoking as, say, the North Korean or Iranian governments.
How are we preventing further evolution? Civilization does not even exist for a timespan in which meaningful evolution happens.
The Chinese answer may be "don't worry, we arrested the terrorists when they left their homes".
Game over.
Rebellion is probably more impacted by that as their games lately were pretty weak and people are more likely to trade them in for the meagre amount of money that stores like GameStop offer. On the other hand you got companies like Nintendo whose flagship games (not all games but their biggest sellers like Mario Kart or New Super Mario Bros) still cost full price even 5 years after release and few used copies are in circulation because demand far exceeds the trade-in supply (also the trade-in values remain high because the demand is there, with other games those values collapse in a matter of months).
Clustered stores make sense as long as they're different companies, after all they're competing with each other and when they cluster that's usually a sign that the area has a lot of people looking for that kind of store. Having redundant stores or banks of the same company is where it gets weird.
Steam, sure but the others aren't replacements for retail stores as they offer completely different products.
Games only learn what they are programmed to learn. They aren't remotely as flexible as large animals because that kind of learning is so damn complex that it'd take way too much processing power. To learn from an action you first have to understand what the action was, games only store simple things like "player likes to use item X" but if a situation arises that the designer of the algorithm has not anticipated the game cannot adapt. Clicking on a button does not tell you why clicking the button was the right thing to do in the situation and that may be a vital difference. If you look for a pattern you have to define which factors to include in the pattern and the human may have used factors that you didn't include. Maybe humans like aesthetically pleasing color arrangements and try to reach them but how can a computer even see that that happened?
Simply looking at the entire system state would be problematic because generating a library of patterns out of that could easily take more effort than simply following your old computer algorithm.
The basic visual sense of a large animal includes an insane amount of brainpower for pattern recognition, interpretation and such things. There's a reason even very dumb animals can maneuver through the world much faster than our smartest robots. The heuristics used by humans in tasks like that are likely backed by the enormous processing power of the brain when it comes to analyzing pictures and patterns so they may not be terribly useful for computers.
How about Java? If you run your program in debug mode inside Eclipse it'll do hot code replacement every time you save (doesn't ALWAYS work and obviously won't retroactively change results of previous calculations).
Or you're debugging.
That's when opportunity cost comes into play. If spending X$ on Android support gives 2X$ revenue and spending X$ on something else gives 6X$ revenue then supporting Android is the bad choice despite being profitable. Since his investment is in the form of his time he cannot spend it on both. He could hire a third developer for the company but that's a significant expense that may not be justified for the returns.
A different story I heard from co-workers that made Android apps in their free time was that the payment systems are too lacking. You need a credit card to buy anything from Android and in my home country (Germany, fourth highest GDP in the world) those things are a rarity. Apple, Amazon, etc have adjusted by offering different payment options that don't require a CC. Google hasn't. Insisting on a CC is one of the biggest signs that a company hasn't bothered to research and adapt to the peculiarities of the local market. I expect this situation to be similar throughout the EU so Google is forfeiting a large part of the tech hungry world.
These people cannot buy paid apps on Android at all, they can only get ad-supported ones. iOS offers all kinds of payment options including those value cards you buy in stores (and are available practically everywhere now, even in grocery stores), that allows anyone to buy paid apps on iOS.
Unfortunately that doesn't apply to software, anything priced higher than a dollar with years of developer support is a hard sale on iOS.
How about "sales are significantly lower"? They say they're making about 5% of their income from Android with the remaining 95% presumably from iOS (I doubt that Windows Phone is a factor). That would mean iOS gets 19 sales for every 1 sale Android gets. If this applies to more than this developer then it's a real reason to make iOS software instead of Android software.
Which is why they're making good money on the Apple market, right?
If the additional income was big enough they'd probably do that work but it seems the sales on Android aren't up to snuff either. Maybe it has to do with the terrible layout of the marketplace that makes it literally impossible to see apps that aren't in the top lists without knowing a name to search for.
Of course it takes work, the question is if the work invested gives enough of a return to warrant doing it. Turns out it doesn't pay well so it gets dropped in favor of more profitable endeavors.
If you require that every time the velocity goes across a certain threshold people are going to get extremely annoyed. And the idiots in the cars will just get even more distracted as they deal with their phone's unlock challenge.
More importantly there's very little ventilation in a mine.