I imagined that the "planned" babies are more the exception than the rule. I vaguely remember one of my parents mentioning, years ago, that only one of their 3 kids was planned. But you know, the funny thing is that I don't remember which one of us it was. I guess it just didn't seem important enough to make a note of it.
So again, why? A number of people here have previously said they'll be lining up to buy this thing when it comes out, so maybe one of them can explain where I've gone wrong? It just makes no sense to me whatsoever.
So basically, your question is: why are consoles and console games big business? Well, here's why I will probably be lining up for one of these puppies. The whole thing will probably cost a little more than the latest PC graphics card, and give better performance than you will get unless you happen to have a brand new PC. My home PC is set up at a desk for work. That's where I spend a lot of my time already; it's not where I care to spend my leisure time. It's also a few years old. Fine for the work I do at home, but limited for games. But while I enjoy playing games, I don't love them so much that I care to spend the price of a brand new PC and large screen high resolution monitor for my rec room. A few hundred bucks is about it. The TV in my rec room isn't high res, and probably won't be for a few years, until prices drop quite a bit--I'm just not that much of a videophile. Given that I will save hundreds of dollars on the console, as compared to a new PC and monitor, I don't really object to paying a few extra bucks in license fees for the games themselves--so Microsoft will ultimately be able to make a profit (although knowing Microsoft, they probably will let most of the profits go to developers for the first year or two, to hook them into developing for their system).
I'd say it would have been a better PR exercise if they hadn't gone around sending emails saying "you ordered at this price. we're shipping at this price. if you don't like it, then cancel your order, it'll sit there until you approve/cancel it".
I'd agree, if there was any reason to believe that this was part of their test. But does that really make sense? After all, in their standard tests, there wasn't any going back on the deal. And did they really need to experiment to find out that people would jump at drastic, money-losing price cuts? It sounds more like a simple mistake.
Besides, if it was 'just a test, sorry', shouldn't we be compensated for doing their testing?
So what, specifically, do you think you deserve compensation for: buying a product at a price that you though was reasonable? Or not buying a product because the price wasn't low enough?
I think it is funny that some people are getting hot and bothered over this, yet we accept the fact that virtually all stores have sales. Is it really reasonable to arbitrarily offer a lower price to customers who happened to come in last week, but not to those who come in this week--but unreasonable to use a random number generator to decide who gets a shot at a bargain?
Same with a game. If you use the maze idea from PacMan and name it something else and make the ghosts skeletons and the power pills pumpkins, you're OK. But changing just one feature gets you a "cease and desist" pretty quick.
A court would have to decide how significant the changes were. Actually, the changes you describe probably wouldn't be enough--they are pretty much the sort of thing done for the game "Jawbreaker," which was ruled to infringe on Pac-Man.
If the company making the derivative work did so without ever seeing or copying Hasbro's code, then it should be legal. This is not something that should be enforced by copyright. This seems more like a patent issue. It's extremely ridiculous by any standard though. almost as bad as "business model patents."
You may wish that was the case, but this issue was decided something like 15 years ago in various "look and feel" decisions. No common code is required for something to be considered a derivative work, and infringing under the copyright law.
This is the foot in the door. It transfers control from the consumer--who currently makes the absolute decision as to what broadcasts to record and what not to record--to the broadcaster-influenced FCC. Sure, right now, they only want to limit Pay-Per-View, but the crux of the disagreement is that the industry won't accept a technology that restricts them to that. Once the hardware limitations have been imposed upon consumer hardware, the industry is free to lobby for extensions in what can be protected, arguing that new regulations are required to respond to "changes in technology."
For example, what happens when some hacker works out a way to program his set-top box (whatever that turns out to be) to record programs without commercials? We all know this is going to happen, and you can bet that the broadcast industry does, too. With copy protection hardware in place, they could go back to the FCC and insist that this invalidates the basis for time-shifting, and that they should be allowed to protect all programs.
And how about video on demand? Once this is available, couldn't the industry argue that this obviates the need for consumer time-shifting, and that all programs could be protected.
Connectix made a lot of headway in court when they were able to show that their emulator was developed in a 'clean room' environment - with only the Playstation APIs to implement to.
No, that's not true. From the court decision (http://www.gpla.homepage.com/CASES/OTHER/9915852. html)
Connectix engineers purchased a
Sony PlayStation console and extracted the Sony BIOS from
a chip inside the console. Connectix engineers then copied the
Sony BIOS into the RAM of their computers and observed the
functioning of the Sony BIOS in conjunction with the Virtual
Game Station hardware emulation software as that hardware
emulation software was being developed by Connectix. The
engineers observed the operation of the Sony BIOS through
use of a debugging program that permitted the engineers to
observe the signals sent between the BIOS and the hardware
emulation software....
Once they had developed the hardware emulation software,
Connectix engineers also used the Sony BIOS to "debug" the
emulation software. In doing so, they repeatedly copied and
disassembled discrete portions of the Sony BIOS....
Early in the development process, Connectix engineer
Aaron Giles disassembled a copy of the entire Sony BIOS that
he had downloaded from the Internet. He did so for the pur-
pose of testing a "disassembler" program he had written. The
print-out of the source code was not used to develop the Vir-
tual Game Station emulator. Connectix engineers initially
used this copy of the Sony BIOS to begin the reverse engi-
neering process, but abandoned it after realizing that it was a
Japanese-language version.
So Connectix engineers were not working just from API's, but from actual Playstations and disassembled code. However, Sony was not able to show that any actual Sony code is in the VGS, and the judge ultimately ruled that Connectix's use of Sony code was not "substantial" enough to make the VGS an infringing product.
seems like Sony lost 7 of their 9 copyright infringement suits, and afterwards they withdrew their patent infringement suits. That's not the same as they losing their case.
What's more, Sony withdrew the patent infringement charges only to reinstate them with modifications. Connectix declared victory, but AFIK the case is still pending.
If Darwinism is simply "Survival of the fittest" then every species that we've made extinct was less fit than us. However, what if we cause our own extinction by killing off too many other species?
Would that mean that we're so fit as to be unfit?
"Survival of the fittest" is actually a rather misleading way to think about natural selection. "Fitness" doesn't really apply to species at all, but to individuals within a species. All it means, really, is that those individuals that survive well enough to produce the most offspring make a larger genetic contribution to the next generation. There is no guarantee that the overall process results in increased fitness for the species as a whole, and it is quite possible for a species to evolve itself into extinction, because the "fittest" individuals do not necessarily possess the characteristics (genes) required for the species as a whole to survive. Nor can one conclude that the species that survive are "more fit" than those that don't--they may just be luckier.
This is a much more difficult concept to grasp than natural selection. A lot of people who think they've accepted the idea of evolution have merely substituted "natural selection" for "God," and "evolution" for "God's plan." So if something evolved "naturally" it must therefore be good, and if we interfere with natural selection that must be bad.
However, the PSX quickly became "King of the Consoles" despite this fact, because, unlike Nintendo, both Sony and the game producers recognised the fact that games consoles are no longer the sole domain of ten year old kids - and consequently produced games with more adult, complex, violent, and engaging themes...this diversity resulted in unprecedented sales, in turn leading to more concentrated development efforts and games of a standard which few could have predicted...a profitable feedback loop.
Actually, very few of those "more adult" games were from Sony--they were produced by 3rd party developers who previously developed "more adult" games for the SNES. They migrated to the PS because it's CD format made it a cheaper, and therefore less risky, system to develop for.
For Nintendo to avoid abject failure, they have to kill off the juvenile Mario, Waveracer, and Pokemon, and start targeting that nameless bunch of beer drinking lads shamelessly gathered around Tekken, Fifa or Metal Gear Solid on a winter's night. Having glanced at the demos linked to, Nintendo look like making the same mistake all over again...also, why make the same mistake as Sega in using a proprietary CD format??? Regardless of how apparently unpleasant the PS2 is to code on, consumers will pick it up not only to play sequels to some of the finest console games ever, but also as their domestic DVD player.
I don't think it hurts Nintendo to have games like Mario, any more than it hurts Sony to have games like Ape Escape. Note that Tekken and Metal Gear are both from developers who previously developed for Nintendo consoles, but moved to the PS because of its cheaper format. If anything, Nintendo has become more adult, with games like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark from its subsidiary Rare.
The odd format is clearly an anti-piracy move, and will probably pay off. I think Sony will clearly pick up some PS2 sales because of DVD compatibility--that's certainly why I'm buying one, since the games so far do not impress me much. However, it is questionable whether that will translate into strong game sales, which is what is important to developers--it clearly has not in Japan. In any case, Nintendo is coming in a year later, and I suspect that DVD video will be much less of a draw by then; most people will already have DVD players of one sort or another, and stand-alone players will probably be even cheaper than they are now.
First of all, putting the d-pad where they did seems like a bad idea to me - but I'd have to have the controller in my hand first. I find that my thumbs "work" just about right for the button-use position and the stick-use position on the DualShock - I'm not sure that I'd find myself being able to use the Nintendo controller quite as easily.
The positioning of the analog and D-pads on the PS controller gives priority to the D-pad--it gets the prime position in line with the thumb, such that the distal joint of the thumb controls the Y direction and the proximal joint controls the X direction. The toward-the-center position of the analog pad is a bit harder to learn and affords less precision, because to movement on the X or Y coordinates requires complex coordination of two joints. The reversal of the positions of these two pads on the Nintendo stick is an acknowledgement that analog control has become dominant, with the D-pad now relegated to the more awkward position.
PC games are all produced on CD or DVD now, when have you seen one that was cheaper than a floppy disk based game? They wont be cheaper, at best they will be the same price, and I doubt that. There is no reason for them to reduce the price below what people are already paying, it cuts into their greed margins.
The comparison was not to floppy, but to previous Nintendo systems that used cartridges. Cartridges are expensive, and that tends to drive up the price of the games. With CD/DVD or floppy, media costs are negligible, and game prices are essentially determined by what they are worth to the consumer. So unless N-cube games are so impressive that they are seen as offering greater value than Playstation games (which is unlikely, since consumers quickly become jaded about improved graphics), they will probably cost about the same.
I don't understand why is it necessary to erase memory. What if the memory size is greater than the number of gas molecules in the box?
This is not fundamentally different from asking, "What if the demon has a battery?" The answer is that the demon can separate hot from cold until the battery runs down/memory fills up.
A good reference on thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon is the book, Maxwell's Demon, by Harvey S Leff and Andrew F Rex, which reprints many of the classic papers. It also includes some excellent discussion of the thermodynamics of computing.
The bottom line is that the step that creates entropy is erasing memory, which is necessary to complete the cycle of computation for any kind of Maxwell's Demon.
Be careful though, it makes it that much harder to drive a real car responsibly.
I agree. The politicians rail against FPS's, but I'm much more worried about being on the road with somebody who's just finished playing 2 hours of Driver, or Sega's Crazy Taxi.
Zork was wonderful for its time, but Iif Myst killed the adventure game, it did so by raising the bar so high that few developers could surmount it. Compared to the detailed texture of Myst and (to an even greater extent) Riven, traditional adventure games seemed dull and hackneyed. Whereas in most such games, the puzzles concerned accomplishing basic tasks toward an well-defined--and generally trite--goal, in the Myst games the true puzzle was understanding the nature of the game's world. The detailed texture of the game's objects and scenery was immensely evocative and imaginative, and motivated the player to continue, and to solve the minor puzzles, just to understand what was going on. A Riven-like adventure, implemented in real-time 3D, could be immensely successful, but there are few developers with the originality and imagination to accomplish the task.
Actually, what appeals to physicists about superstring theory *is* its simplicity. Among other things, it hopes to eliminate a lot of arbitrary constants, which are sort of like the epicycles of current theory.
The problem about simplicity is that you sometimes have to look at things the right way to see it. Can't you imagine a Copernican physicist saying to Kepler (or more historically, probably Kepler saying to himself): "Why all of those complicated ellipses? Every one requires *two* variables to specify. Circles are so much simpler." But once you have Newton's laws, the ellipses turn out to be expressions of a simple underlying structure.
And simple equations aren't always simple to solve, as those who tackled the three-body problem of Newtonian physics discovered.
More accurately, if we can solve the equations of SuperString theory, we'll have a chance of being able to devise experiments to determine whether it is correct. If it isn't, well, back to square zero.
For instance, take the work of Godel. Granted that the poor guy was nutty as a Payday, but he hit the nail on the head when he said that you couldn't even begin to translate the real world into logical statements. His proof was both elegant and simple: "This statement is a lie". That phrase cannot be made to fit any standard logical expression set.
Yes, but it's easily dealt with in the way that Russell did: such self-negating statements, which can neither be true nor false, are easily rejected as meaningless.
What Godel did was more subtle: "This statement cannot be proved." Such a statement must be true in any non-contradictory system. Therefore, there exist true statements that nevertheless cannot be derived logically from that system's premises. That doesn't mean that "you can't translate the real world into logical statements" because it says nothing at all about the real world. What it does is is use logic to define the limits to logic: There is no set of premises that will let you derive all true statements within a system. In other words, there exist valid questions that nevertheless cannot be answered.
If it was, could how you know it? You and your measuring equipment wouldn't exist outside the discrete intervals. So to you time would always appear continuous.
It might have observable consequences, however. After all, when you numerically solve differential equations, you can get artifacts, such as weird oscillations, if your delta-t is too large. So if nature is doing the same thing, maybe some kinds of fast interactions work differently than you'd expect if time was continuous.
it was in all likelehood off his professors web site
Nope. I don't know where they're getting them. But they have stuff from our lab, and it's definitely not posted on our web site. They might have cut a deal with the university, however.
Actually, in some instances that is a valid defense. The law is quite clear about how one can attest rights to abandoned physical property (IE maritime salvage, squatter's rights, etc).
The key phrase here is "in some instances." There is no general right to appropriate unused property, although there are some specific exceptions. Both of the examples you cite are rather exceptional circumstances: in the one case, you have been living on a property for years, with no objection from the owner; in the other, you have engaged in a dangerous and expensive retrieval at sea operation. And in fact, there already is such a provision in copyright law: copyrighted items eventually revert to the public domain.
The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create. If they've abandoned their work, there's no need for copyright -- they've already gotten all the benefit they're going to get from it.
Ah, yes, the "I didn't steal it--you put it down; I thought that you didn't want it any more" defense.
But one way in which copyright encourages people to create is by providing them with the certainty that they can be secure in the rights to what they create for a set period of time, even if they aren't doing anything with it at the moment.
The purpose of a stop sign is to allow cross traffic to pass safely, but that doesn't mean that you are entitled ignore the sign if there is no cross-traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagined that the "planned" babies are more the exception than the rule. I vaguely remember one of my parents mentioning, years ago, that only one of their 3 kids was planned. But you know, the funny thing is that I don't remember which one of us it was. I guess it just didn't seem important enough to make a note of it.
I think it is funny that some people are getting hot and bothered over this, yet we accept the fact that virtually all stores have sales. Is it really reasonable to arbitrarily offer a lower price to customers who happened to come in last week, but not to those who come in this week--but unreasonable to use a random number generator to decide who gets a shot at a bargain?
A court would have to decide how significant the changes were. Actually, the changes you describe probably wouldn't be enough--they are pretty much the sort of thing done for the game "Jawbreaker," which was ruled to infringe on Pac-Man.
You may wish that was the case, but this issue was decided something like 15 years ago in various "look and feel" decisions. No common code is required for something to be considered a derivative work, and infringing under the copyright law.
For example, what happens when some hacker works out a way to program his set-top box (whatever that turns out to be) to record programs without commercials? We all know this is going to happen, and you can bet that the broadcast industry does, too. With copy protection hardware in place, they could go back to the FCC and insist that this invalidates the basis for time-shifting, and that they should be allowed to protect all programs.
And how about video on demand? Once this is available, couldn't the industry argue that this obviates the need for consumer time-shifting, and that all programs could be protected.
The odd format is clearly an anti-piracy move, and will probably pay off. I think Sony will clearly pick up some PS2 sales because of DVD compatibility--that's certainly why I'm buying one, since the games so far do not impress me much. However, it is questionable whether that will translate into strong game sales, which is what is important to developers--it clearly has not in Japan. In any case, Nintendo is coming in a year later, and I suspect that DVD video will be much less of a draw by then; most people will already have DVD players of one sort or another, and stand-alone players will probably be even cheaper than they are now.
A good reference on thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon is the book, Maxwell's Demon, by Harvey S Leff and Andrew F Rex, which reprints many of the classic papers. It also includes some excellent discussion of the thermodynamics of computing. The bottom line is that the step that creates entropy is erasing memory, which is necessary to complete the cycle of computation for any kind of Maxwell's Demon.
Zork was wonderful for its time, but Iif Myst killed the adventure game, it did so by raising the bar so high that few developers could surmount it. Compared to the detailed texture of Myst and (to an even greater extent) Riven, traditional adventure games seemed dull and hackneyed. Whereas in most such games, the puzzles concerned accomplishing basic tasks toward an well-defined--and generally trite--goal, in the Myst games the true puzzle was understanding the nature of the game's world. The detailed texture of the game's objects and scenery was immensely evocative and imaginative, and motivated the player to continue, and to solve the minor puzzles, just to understand what was going on. A Riven-like adventure, implemented in real-time 3D, could be immensely successful, but there are few developers with the originality and imagination to accomplish the task.
Actually, what appeals to physicists about superstring theory *is* its simplicity. Among other things, it hopes to eliminate a lot of arbitrary constants, which are sort of like the epicycles of current theory.
The problem about simplicity is that you sometimes have to look at things the right way to see it. Can't you imagine a Copernican physicist saying to Kepler (or more historically, probably Kepler saying to himself): "Why all of those complicated ellipses? Every one requires *two* variables to specify. Circles are so much simpler." But once you have Newton's laws, the ellipses turn out to be expressions of a simple underlying structure.
And simple equations aren't always simple to solve, as those who tackled the three-body problem of Newtonian physics discovered.
More accurately, if we can solve the equations of SuperString theory, we'll have a chance of being able to devise experiments to determine whether it is correct. If it isn't, well, back to square zero.
But one way in which copyright encourages people to create is by providing them with the certainty that they can be secure in the rights to what they create for a set period of time, even if they aren't doing anything with it at the moment.
The purpose of a stop sign is to allow cross traffic to pass safely, but that doesn't mean that you are entitled ignore the sign if there is no cross-traffic.