that is, if you made a car driving game, and included some feature of a real car that is patented by an automobile maker, could they sue for infringment in a simulation?
How about a simple USB jack on the wireless router, and another on the remote device; if you plug the remote unit into the hub when it's at factory default, it accepts settings (keys, channels, etc.) from the router, then you unplug, and slap it on the remote computer, viola, all done.
I could imagine a collection of settings on the remote device (Home, Office, Starbucks) that once set, are kept and automatically scanned through when powered on, and uniquely indentified. (each user getting a key set could get a serial number, and an expiration time from 30 minutes to 30 years)
heck you could use that one-wire connection technology, and just have a small metal plate you touch the remote against, and it authenticates in a short low power burst, I think you can even use the human body as a conductor.
Give the company running the new game the username/password to your old service, they login and analyse your character/inventory (perhaps in an automated way) and give you starting benifits in their new game based upon what you had in the old, then destroy/delete your character from the old game...
That is so wrong, and such a bad idea, someone is absolutly going to try it.
What I really want is an invite-only MM game, like G-mail, with invites being per-server.
the bonus part being, assuming a basic Everquest style interface, that you can target another player, and rate them Positive or Negative, and your rating, as given by other players, would help determine if/when/how many invites you get, as well as being publicly viewable (I suppose a bit like Slashdot moderations).
while this conflicts with the idea of getting as many subscribers as possible, you would also hopefully get a higher quality of subscribers, with better retention, and maybe lower support costs, due to reduced griefing/exploiting.
it also has a 'Cartmanland' marketing appeal, where the simple fact of it being hard to get in, makes it even more desirable, and if the game is any good, you'll have a nice viral marketing effect, like when g-mail was new, I continually saw message board posts along the lines of 'first 3 people to PM me get invites'
Any Patents on it would still have 7-10 years left.
I think Software patents would be OK, if they only lasted 3-5 years, things just move too fast in the software world, and it's holding back progress instead of encouraging it.
The computer in the career room, the only one used by both students and teachers didn't have any physically accessable drives, and just had a modem for connecting to the district database, and no normal terminal software.
So, I had to enter my keylogger with "copy con: kl.com", then alt-### alt-### alt-###... to get it on the system, that was tedious, particularly while avoiding notice.
I checked back later and managed to get a teacher password, so I started the teacher application, and got to the screens for entering grades.
then, I did nothing.
Because my teachers actually knew what grades they gave to students, and I was the only student with the ability, and poor grades. (2 others possibly could have done it... but they both had 3.5+ gpa's anyway... I checked.)
I cleaned up after myself, and as far as I know, nothing ever came of it.
The lesson? if teachers actually knew their students, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
I figure Kutztown could probably afford to buy the laptops, because they wern't hiring teachers.
Two Teachers: $90,000 salary + benifits, each has a class of 22-23 students; or One teacher, and 45 $1000 laptops + support, and that teacher now has to watch 45 kids and their machines.
a while back I was testing Outlook at Microsoft, and I dropped a potential privacy hole into the bug database. They resolved it as an unimportant issue.
a couple years later, I saw the bug mentioned again...
That's why the Olympics will never come to Seattle, as we have a great view of the Olympic Mountains, so a large number of businesses are named after them.
Actually, there appears to be a link between combat willingness and being addiction prone.
In the absence of addictive materials, those who crave stimulation have often found it by doing battle. The genetic tendancy to addiction appears more often in people from races that had a war-like history, particularly those that survived long term oppression.
Exactly how much genetics affects personality is not completely known but there is an effect, such as the recent discovery of a gene that corellates to people with Tattoos and Piercings.
Googles biggest problem right now seems to be Click Fraud, as if they released an IM client, It would probably include Google Ad support. As far as I know, Ads is their main revenue source, aside from licensing IP, and if that's broke, they are broke.
From what I hear, they generally place the most expensive Ad first in a day, as without fraud, that would generate the most revenue. Unfortunetly, this allows Clickers to drain an advertisers account very quickly.
ah, because it is in a way, meta-moderation itself.
couldn't that work in reverse though?, if you mod something 'overrated', and someone else mods it up, then meta-mods agree with the modding up, would the 'overrater' lose mod status?
If the pages are not for public consumption, but rather an internal tool, keeping costs down for something that might be used by under 100 people in it's lifetime might be the way to go.
for a public website, not testing multiple platforms would be just stupid. but that dosn't sound like what is being developed here.
I would say a factor is how he's getting the power for charging; plugging into a coal-based electric grid, or solar panels on his roof?
last I read (many years ago) a solar panel cost more to make, and produced more waste in manufacture than simple batteries; hopefully things have gotten better, and perhaps that source was wrong.
but yes, simply moving the problem dosn't help in the long run (landfill plastic bags, or tree shredding paper bags?) The only real solution is to reduce consumption.
What about the application would make it IE specific? active X controls?, or using the Browser object as a control? needs a recent feature, that is implented differently?
Is it simply a means to control costs? the testing and bug fixing time would be much greater if multiple platforms are supported, and for an internal application, where the client is under their control, I can't think of a good business reason not to use the browser that comes with the PC's. Do the PC's even have access to the internet to be vulnerable to attacks?
Firefox is not bug free, for example, if I mouse over to the scrollbar in the text edit box, the left edge of the thumb gets filled with random pixels, this happens on both Windows 98, XP and Linux/KDE for me. Randomly scrambled pixels is not a good sign. Also the more amusing case of the installer saying something like "click 'Next' to continue", when the button was labeled 'Proceed', I forget the exact words, but if the software isn't consistant in a single window, it dosn't install a sense of confidance.
Some applications just don't work within the standards; as far as I can tell, there is no mechanism in HTML, CSS or SVG to rotate characters in a font. Which is something I needed to do in a web application recently. (I ended up sending.PNG's of the text)
I was asked the other day how computers store numbers, and ended up describing fixed vs. floating point, decimal, binary, hexidecimal, COBOL, bc, little endian, big endian, how to do basic math in binary, char/int, signed vs unsigned, wraparound, fibonucci...
Different solutions for different applications.
as the saying goes, "The nice thing about Standards is that there are so many to choose from."
Honestly, this is why the few times I have given out software I wrote for free (usually, I write applications for a specific client) I just do it anonymously.
that's true at the low level, but if you're running something like Microsoft Word, without all the doodads turned off, sometimes it has trouble keeping up with a fast typist on a gigahertz machine.
Slashdot Mirror
X is a pain, The more I read about it, the more horrible it seems to be.
At some point the backwards compatibility with old mistakes should be thrown out.
I'm not hopeful for X11R7, I want X12.
Are simulations of existing things patentable?
that is, if you made a car driving game, and included some feature of a real car that is patented by an automobile maker, could they sue for infringment in a simulation?
You also need peers.
How about a simple USB jack on the wireless router, and another on the remote device; if you plug the remote unit into the hub when it's at factory default, it accepts settings (keys, channels, etc.) from the router, then you unplug, and slap it on the remote computer, viola, all done.
I could imagine a collection of settings on the remote device (Home, Office, Starbucks) that once set, are kept and automatically scanned through when powered on, and uniquely indentified. (each user getting a key set could get a serial number, and an expiration time from 30 minutes to 30 years)
heck you could use that one-wire connection technology, and just have a small metal plate you touch the remote against, and it authenticates in a short low power burst, I think you can even use the human body as a conductor.
Competitive Upgrades.
Give the company running the new game the username/password to your old service, they login and analyse your character/inventory (perhaps in an automated way) and give you starting benifits in their new game based upon what you had in the old, then destroy/delete your character from the old game...
That is so wrong, and such a bad idea, someone is absolutly going to try it.
What I really want is an invite-only MM game, like G-mail, with invites being per-server.
the bonus part being, assuming a basic Everquest style interface, that you can target another player, and rate them Positive or Negative, and your rating, as given by other players, would help determine if/when/how many invites you get, as well as being publicly viewable (I suppose a bit like Slashdot moderations).
while this conflicts with the idea of getting as many subscribers as possible, you would also hopefully get a higher quality of subscribers, with better retention, and maybe lower support costs, due to reduced griefing/exploiting.
it also has a 'Cartmanland' marketing appeal, where the simple fact of it being hard to get in, makes it even more desirable, and if the game is any good, you'll have a nice viral marketing effect, like when g-mail was new, I continually saw message board posts along the lines of 'first 3 people to PM me get invites'
I heard the Slashdot editors were getting sued by Amazon over the one-click patent.
Any Patents on it would still have 7-10 years left.
I think Software patents would be OK, if they only lasted 3-5 years, things just move too fast in the software world, and it's holding back progress instead of encouraging it.
The computer in the career room, the only one used by both students and teachers didn't have any physically accessable drives, and just had a modem for connecting to the district database, and no normal terminal software.
So, I had to enter my keylogger with "copy con: kl.com", then alt-### alt-### alt-###... to get it on the system, that was tedious, particularly while avoiding notice.
I checked back later and managed to get a teacher password, so I started the teacher application, and got to the screens for entering grades.
then, I did nothing.
Because my teachers actually knew what grades they gave to students, and I was the only student with the ability, and poor grades. (2 others possibly could have done it... but they both had 3.5+ gpa's anyway... I checked.)
I cleaned up after myself, and as far as I know, nothing ever came of it.
The lesson? if teachers actually knew their students, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
I figure Kutztown could probably afford to buy the laptops, because they wern't hiring teachers.
Two Teachers: $90,000 salary + benifits, each has a class of 22-23 students; or One teacher, and 45 $1000 laptops + support, and that teacher now has to watch 45 kids and their machines.
Could you wrap a pringles can, or such, around each antenna, so that each covers a different direction, thereby increasing the range?
a while back I was testing Outlook at Microsoft, and I dropped a potential privacy hole into the bug database. They resolved it as an unimportant issue.
a couple years later, I saw the bug mentioned again...
on CNN.
That's why the Olympics will never come to Seattle, as we have a great view of the Olympic Mountains, so a large number of businesses are named after them.
"3. Guarantee that every human being who uses them will see ads"
and that's pretty tough, if you combine ad-blockers, click fraud, non web applications, SSL...
Dosn't that really depend on their Corporate Charter?
There are many intentionally non-profit corporations, I don't see anyone sueing PBS for not maximizing monetary gain.
Actually, there appears to be a link between combat willingness and being addiction prone.
In the absence of addictive materials, those who crave stimulation have often found it by doing battle. The genetic tendancy to addiction appears more often in people from races that had a war-like history, particularly those that survived long term oppression.
Exactly how much genetics affects personality is not completely known but there is an effect, such as the recent discovery of a gene that corellates to people with Tattoos and Piercings.
Googles biggest problem right now seems to be Click Fraud, as if they released an IM client, It would probably include Google Ad support. As far as I know, Ads is their main revenue source, aside from licensing IP, and if that's broke, they are broke.
From what I hear, they generally place the most expensive Ad first in a day, as without fraud, that would generate the most revenue. Unfortunetly, this allows Clickers to drain an advertisers account very quickly.
Yeah, right near the troll, under 99
Hopefully China will have some manned missions soon, to give the U.S. Space program a kick in the pants.
ah, because it is in a way, meta-moderation itself.
couldn't that work in reverse though?, if you mod something 'overrated', and someone else mods it up, then meta-mods agree with the modding up, would the 'overrater' lose mod status?
If the pages are not for public consumption, but rather an internal tool, keeping costs down for something that might be used by under 100 people in it's lifetime might be the way to go.
for a public website, not testing multiple platforms would be just stupid. but that dosn't sound like what is being developed here.
ok, one moderation, 'Overrated'
do you even know what that word means?
I would say a factor is how he's getting the power for charging; plugging into a coal-based electric grid, or solar panels on his roof?
last I read (many years ago) a solar panel cost more to make, and produced more waste in manufacture than simple batteries; hopefully things have gotten better, and perhaps that source was wrong.
but yes, simply moving the problem dosn't help in the long run (landfill plastic bags, or tree shredding paper bags?) The only real solution is to reduce consumption.
What about the application would make it IE specific? active X controls?, or using the Browser object as a control? needs a recent feature, that is implented differently?
.PNG's of the text)
Is it simply a means to control costs? the testing and bug fixing time would be much greater if multiple platforms are supported, and for an internal application, where the client is under their control, I can't think of a good business reason not to use the browser that comes with the PC's. Do the PC's even have access to the internet to be vulnerable to attacks?
Firefox is not bug free, for example, if I mouse over to the scrollbar in the text edit box, the left edge of the thumb gets filled with random pixels, this happens on both Windows 98, XP and Linux/KDE for me. Randomly scrambled pixels is not a good sign. Also the more amusing case of the installer saying something like "click 'Next' to continue", when the button was labeled 'Proceed', I forget the exact words, but if the software isn't consistant in a single window, it dosn't install a sense of confidance.
Some applications just don't work within the standards; as far as I can tell, there is no mechanism in HTML, CSS or SVG to rotate characters in a font. Which is something I needed to do in a web application recently. (I ended up sending
I was asked the other day how computers store numbers, and ended up describing fixed vs. floating point, decimal, binary, hexidecimal, COBOL, bc, little endian, big endian, how to do basic math in binary, char/int, signed vs unsigned, wraparound, fibonucci...
Different solutions for different applications.
as the saying goes, "The nice thing about Standards is that there are so many to choose from."
heh that's the first thing I thought of as well, but then, I've been thinking about an "OS X-Box", which I'm sure every MS hater would enjoy.
Honestly, this is why the few times I have given out software I wrote for free (usually, I write applications for a specific client) I just do it anonymously.
that's true at the low level, but if you're running something like Microsoft Word, without all the doodads turned off, sometimes it has trouble keeping up with a fast typist on a gigahertz machine.