Soon they'll propose a counter offer that costs less than the open-source solution.. for the next few years. Then they concentrate on taking the deciding parties to cruises, trips to USA and Bahamas etc. to keep them from ever again even thinking about migrating to another system.
Or maybe I'm just becoming a bit jaded?:-)
Bah. Selling a product is so last century. Now licensing a product to an customer multiple times instead of selling it to them once for the same price, that's the latest big thing. Why kill the cow when you can milk it for all of it's worth?
Offtopic, but just trying to correct any misconceptions:-)
Actually the only time Finnish people put up the flag is on either a) national holidays b) someone from the household (this includes big apartment buildings too) dying. Some people do this also when something big is happening in their household (the typical rituals like marriages etc.) that particular day.
And btw. Finland is not both Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is just another official language, that's all. (Nitpicking, I know)
Let's say that you MPAA affiliates get $10 for each moviegoer, which is an overly optimistic estimate to begin with. That makes 610 million tickets that were never sold because of piracy. What, that's like one visit per 10 people on this planet. That's completely absurd. Even with full priced DVD's (let's say they get 20 bucks per sold DVD) it's 300 million DVD's left unsold. Again: this is just stupid. I don't get how they can make such stupid arguments with a plain face..
Well, this time the game is actually done. Basically everything but the engine (scripts, graphics, sounds, all the quests etc) is already done. I don't see why they couldn't actually port the engine to the PS3 in the next 5-6 months. It's not like these new consoles have that big restrictions performancewise compared to PC that they need to be mega-optimized (like in the case of Max Payne and 64MB of memory of xbox).
Yeah, this strategy might work for an US startup. But what about startups from other countries where software patenting has not yet evolved to the stage of cold war? Let's say they're doing great in their own country or even internationally. The next step? Of course they want to expand to US. And what has happened? Some US big companies might have already copied their ideas and patented them before this is happening. And there's always the patent trolls too.
From this point of view I'd say the patent system is working well in keeping away the smaller foreign competetion. Only bigger firms with the capital and strategy/vision of patenting obivious things in US has a fighting chance of surviving the system when dipping their feet into the US market.
Or am I understanding the situation wrong? I sure hope so.
And that's the single most clear sign of your patent system being failed and abused. If you have to get "defensive patents" for stuff that you didn't even actually invent first just so that you can keep the status quo (no big boys suing each other since everyone infringes at least one patent in the other's portfolio), man, that's just plain lame. Software patenting ftw!
Maybe it has something to do with Backus leading the project that created the FORTRAN language. You know, one of the most used languages ever. That is still used for scientific calculating.
Hopefully wine will catch up soon, although I hear WV will have all sorts of DRM bundled into it. In any case, I'm migrating over to Linux for good when XP becomes obsolete. Who needs new games when I've got wine, dosbox, c64 and amiga emulators plus nethack;)
Just a thought.. Why on earth would a kid from Sudan listen to something as godawful as N'Sync or for that matter pretty much anything else that RIAA has published. I'm sure they would mostly distribute stuff that they already listen / watch to.
Oh well, it may even be that America's culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the world. Hooray for monoculturism;)
"... Hint to the music publishers: It's not going to work. There have been easy workarounds to every system that's been tried, and the more stringent the copy protection.."
That's easily solved. Just do like they did in Finland: lobby in a copyright law that makes it illeagal even to (organizedly) discuss about methods of circuimventing DRMs. Of course, this doesn't fix the "angry customers not buying your crap" problem, but just make it compulsory to use 1% of each paycheck in compensation to *AA for lost sales in grounds of "everybody dl's warez". What? You don't consume mass culture? Shame on you, you unpatriotic slime! You must be a terrorist!
Xbox has a history of having generally boring-ass games. FPSs and driving games and more FPSs and driving games. And when you think about the themes, they're mostly american or european. No japanese rpgs or other genres thought as a minority here but ones that are seriously popular over there.
On FPSs, a bit offtopic: A friend once told me that the japanese don't generally play fps-games because they get headaches from them.. Is this just another urban legend or something real?
For a new fad to come up and blow away all this "controversy" surrounding videogames. It's always the same.. "TRAVELING ON THE TRAIN WILL MAKE YOU MAD, THE SPEED WILL MESS UP YOUR BRAIN FOR GOOD!!" or "MICROWAVE OVENS CAUSE BRAIN TUMOUR!!" with every single new thing that comes up. I'm not even defending idiotic video game violence, I'd be more than happy to play the game Valve suggested.. (building stuff with people sounds interesting although not new. Ludocraft of Oulu, Finland (of Airbuccaneers-fame) created an Unreal mod called TeamGame back in 2002 in which people had to solve problems together, and I'm sure other folk have done it before too... but back to the topic)
There might be a connection to connection to violence. For myself, ever since the first Doom whenever I play fps-games I calm down. It's a good way to get rid of aggression by beating someone IN A GODDAMN GAME. And by beating them I mean besting them at something, not the mauling-to-pieces part. If people get aggressive with fps or other games it's either because of a game bug, losing to someone badly or playing with cheaters. IMHO, if you're gonna go blasting people away it's not because of the games. It's because you're just born insane and anything will trigger it. These people would have been considered prime soldiers a few hundred years ago.
I don't know anyone who has become more violent due to games. And I've been playing these horrible mind-twisting evil murder-trainers since I was 7 years old. When Doom came out I was 10-11 and had a blast with it with my friends. I've never hit anyone. And I'm pretty sure my friends haven't either.
Sure, put the school massacres on videogames or whatever. I call bullshit and bad parenting. It's not that hard to get a gun or other means of killing anywhere in the world and the only other school killing that I'm aware that didn't happen in the States is the one that happened in Germany. Oh, and they blamed it on Counter Strike. I'm thinking there's something else wrong in your country. Your culture is so overwhelming that even here in my small country called Finland we play the same games you do, made and published mostly by American corporations, and see the same tv-shows and movies and read the same books as you guys. And still kids here don't go blasting away each other.
All I'm saying is the same many other have said before and will say again: Stop finding outside reasons to blame for things that are caused by bad parenting and pre-existing mental disorders. Spend more time with your kids and get to know them. When I'll have kids I won't let them play violent games too young. I'm not stupid and as I said before, I'm not defending game violence itself. I think it can be harmful if parents don't tell kids what violence truly is (the basic stuff: people die and it's not fun, hitting others hurt them etc). Not in the sense that they'll go and killing people later on but in that there are better things for kids to do, like doing things with theirs friends and playing outside developing social and verbal skills.
straight to the ways of the Eastern Europe Block back on the days of Cold War. I mean come on, not a single other western country would even dream of adopting something like this. Oh, of course they'll do that after you've done it first, because most of our politicians are just drones that take your ideas and implement it here. All for the sake of "interoperatibility in laws" or some such nonsense.
But then again, I might be wrong. Maybe every single western country is headed this way on it's own fucked up logic. 80-100 years in the future they'll say that these acts were the proof that the terrorist won. They certainly cannot take away our freedoms on their own, but they give our goverments the reason to do so, for the sake of security. Next step: Police States all around.
I've used username/password + one time pad when actually doing transactions since 1998 with my bank with no problems at all. Just don't keep everything in the same place, that's just stupid. (Just because we're on Slashdot one can't assume that everyone memorizes their u/p's.)
Few will care if MS titles aren't *that* strong at the get go - the graphics will apparently be awesome. And, for a while anyway, that will be important.
And to me, that's the saddest part. It clearly shows how unoriginal todays games are, when only better graphics in the only category they can try to compete in. I call it the EA Sport-effect.
And back to the topic, I don't think that they are going to delay the release. Last time Dreamcast was coming out of the woods and as always people are timid to invest their money to an brand they aren't that familiar with (OK, Sega was famous, but they've always been better known from their games, not hardware). Now, even if XBox didn't sell so well in Japan (an understatement) it still did compare pretty well against PS2 in Europe and US and got a big fanbase (propably due to XBox Live). I'm saying the risk of losing market share is just too big this time around.
Of people these "peaceholics" trying to bully them into not releasing a game called "Bully".
On another note, these kind of people make me sad. I t's just stupid that they get all riled up over a goddamn game. There are bigger things wrong in this life ffs. How many deaths are accountable by games? How about the "war on terrorism" and the one basically still going on in Iraq? Which one detoriates "traditional" moral values of upstanding citizens, teaching them that it's perfectly OK to kill _real_ people or giving people a chance to immerse themselves in a role of a bully, seeing some unrealistic pixel sex or giving them a chance to shoot some polygons that represent a cop.
It's strange, on their logic these games should be making people more aggressive and violent. I've played games since I was like six years old, and I don't remember ever hitting someone on purpose or even when I got really pissed off the last time.
Right about now someone will say that one evil doesn't counter another. Well, I don't even think violence in games is a bad thing. The sex on the other hand.. Laughable. I'd rather watch porn, it's more realistic;)
Isn't there a simple way to fix this? If USPTO makes money off of patent filings change the system a bit:
Filing a patent costs. The patent gets examined and if the patent is granted you pay a small sum of money for the examination process. Now, instead if the patent is _not_ granted you end up paying a bigger sum of money (like 5x the granting sum).
Now everyone wins: USPTO will be more likely to fail stupid patents and people who file stupid patent requests get fined more for their stupidity.
Try it. The game is very, very challenging, way beyond chess in it's complexity. It should be possible to play with a headmouse too with long enough time settings. Basically it's a game of territory where both players, black and white, place stones in the crossings of a 19x19 grid. For more information:
Slashdot Mirror
Soon they'll propose a counter offer that costs less than the open-source solution.. for the next few years. Then they concentrate on taking the deciding parties to cruises, trips to USA and Bahamas etc. to keep them from ever again even thinking about migrating to another system. Or maybe I'm just becoming a bit jaded? :-)
Hehe. Bram Cohen will like his new title.
Bah. Selling a product is so last century. Now licensing a product to an customer multiple times instead of selling it to them once for the same price, that's the latest big thing. Why kill the cow when you can milk it for all of it's worth?
Offtopic, but just trying to correct any misconceptions :-)
Actually the only time Finnish people put up the flag is on either a) national holidays b) someone from the household (this includes big apartment buildings too) dying. Some people do this also when something big is happening in their household (the typical rituals like marriages etc.) that particular day.
And btw. Finland is not both Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is just another official language, that's all. (Nitpicking, I know)
Let's say that you MPAA affiliates get $10 for each moviegoer, which is an overly optimistic estimate to begin with. That makes 610 million tickets that were never sold because of piracy. What, that's like one visit per 10 people on this planet. That's completely absurd. Even with full priced DVD's (let's say they get 20 bucks per sold DVD) it's 300 million DVD's left unsold. Again: this is just stupid. I don't get how they can make such stupid arguments with a plain face..
Well, this time the game is actually done. Basically everything but the engine (scripts, graphics, sounds, all the quests etc) is already done. I don't see why they couldn't actually port the engine to the PS3 in the next 5-6 months. It's not like these new consoles have that big restrictions performancewise compared to PC that they need to be mega-optimized (like in the case of Max Payne and 64MB of memory of xbox).
Yeah, this strategy might work for an US startup. But what about startups from other countries where software patenting has not yet evolved to the stage of cold war? Let's say they're doing great in their own country or even internationally. The next step? Of course they want to expand to US. And what has happened? Some US big companies might have already copied their ideas and patented them before this is happening. And there's always the patent trolls too.
From this point of view I'd say the patent system is working well in keeping away the smaller foreign competetion. Only bigger firms with the capital and strategy/vision of patenting obivious things in US has a fighting chance of surviving the system when dipping their feet into the US market.
Or am I understanding the situation wrong? I sure hope so.
And that's the single most clear sign of your patent system being failed and abused. If you have to get "defensive patents" for stuff that you didn't even actually invent first just so that you can keep the status quo (no big boys suing each other since everyone infringes at least one patent in the other's portfolio), man, that's just plain lame. Software patenting ftw!
Maybe it has something to do with Backus leading the project that created the FORTRAN language. You know, one of the most used languages ever. That is still used for scientific calculating.
Hopefully wine will catch up soon, although I hear WV will have all sorts of DRM bundled into it. In any case, I'm migrating over to Linux for good when XP becomes obsolete. Who needs new games when I've got wine, dosbox, c64 and amiga emulators plus nethack ;)
Just a thought.. Why on earth would a kid from Sudan listen to something as godawful as N'Sync or for that matter pretty much anything else that RIAA has published. I'm sure they would mostly distribute stuff that they already listen / watch to.
;)
Oh well, it may even be that America's culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the world. Hooray for monoculturism
"... Hint to the music publishers: It's not going to work. There have been easy workarounds to every system that's been tried, and the more stringent the copy protection.."
That's easily solved. Just do like they did in Finland: lobby in a copyright law that makes it illeagal even to (organizedly) discuss about methods of circuimventing DRMs. Of course, this doesn't fix the "angry customers not buying your crap" problem, but just make it compulsory to use 1% of each paycheck in compensation to *AA for lost sales in grounds of "everybody dl's warez". What? You don't consume mass culture? Shame on you, you unpatriotic slime! You must be a terrorist!
Xbox has a history of having generally boring-ass games. FPSs and driving games and more FPSs and driving games. And when you think about the themes, they're mostly american or european. No japanese rpgs or other genres thought as a minority here but ones that are seriously popular over there.
On FPSs, a bit offtopic: A friend once told me that the japanese don't generally play fps-games because they get headaches from them.. Is this just another urban legend or something real?
For a new fad to come up and blow away all this "controversy" surrounding videogames. It's always the same.. "TRAVELING ON THE TRAIN WILL MAKE YOU MAD, THE SPEED WILL MESS UP YOUR BRAIN FOR GOOD!!" or "MICROWAVE OVENS CAUSE BRAIN TUMOUR!!" with every single new thing that comes up. I'm not even defending idiotic video game violence, I'd be more than happy to play the game Valve suggested.. (building stuff with people sounds interesting although not new. Ludocraft of Oulu, Finland (of Airbuccaneers-fame) created an Unreal mod called TeamGame back in 2002 in which people had to solve problems together, and I'm sure other folk have done it before too. .. but back to the topic)
There might be a connection to connection to violence. For myself, ever since the first Doom whenever I play fps-games I calm down. It's a good way to get rid of aggression by beating someone IN A GODDAMN GAME. And by beating them I mean besting them at something, not the mauling-to-pieces part. If people get aggressive with fps or other games it's either because of a game bug, losing to someone badly or playing with cheaters. IMHO, if you're gonna go blasting people away it's not because of the games. It's because you're just born insane and anything will trigger it. These people would have been considered prime soldiers a few hundred years ago.
I don't know anyone who has become more violent due to games. And I've been playing these horrible mind-twisting evil murder-trainers since I was 7 years old. When Doom came out I was 10-11 and had a blast with it with my friends. I've never hit anyone. And I'm pretty sure my friends haven't either.
Sure, put the school massacres on videogames or whatever. I call bullshit and bad parenting. It's not that hard to get a gun or other means of killing anywhere in the world and the only other school killing that I'm aware that didn't happen in the States is the one that happened in Germany. Oh, and they blamed it on Counter Strike. I'm thinking there's something else wrong in your country. Your culture is so overwhelming that even here in my small country called Finland we play the same games you do, made and published mostly by American corporations, and see the same tv-shows and movies and read the same books as you guys. And still kids here don't go blasting away each other.
All I'm saying is the same many other have said before and will say again: Stop finding outside reasons to blame for things that are caused by bad parenting and pre-existing mental disorders. Spend more time with your kids and get to know them. When I'll have kids I won't let them play violent games too young. I'm not stupid and as I said before, I'm not defending game violence itself. I think it can be harmful if parents don't tell kids what violence truly is (the basic stuff: people die and it's not fun, hitting others hurt them etc). Not in the sense that they'll go and killing people later on but in that there are better things for kids to do, like doing things with theirs friends and playing outside developing social and verbal skills.
End of transmission -- incoherent_rant.txtIt doesn't really matter what the game is. The point is that these guys will learn to play any game better than we could ever hope to.
straight to the ways of the Eastern Europe Block back on the days of Cold War. I mean come on, not a single other western country would even dream of adopting something like this. Oh, of course they'll do that after you've done it first, because most of our politicians are just drones that take your ideas and implement it here. All for the sake of "interoperatibility in laws" or some such nonsense.
But then again, I might be wrong. Maybe every single western country is headed this way on it's own fucked up logic. 80-100 years in the future they'll say that these acts were the proof that the terrorist won. They certainly cannot take away our freedoms on their own, but they give our goverments the reason to do so, for the sake of security. Next step: Police States all around.
I've used username/password + one time pad when actually doing transactions since 1998 with my bank with no problems at all. Just don't keep everything in the same place, that's just stupid. (Just because we're on Slashdot one can't assume that everyone memorizes their u/p's.)
when we got Tom Bearden and his 10:1 producing Motionless Electromagnetic Generator!
;)
With this patent pending peer-proven cheap gadget everyone gets cheap unlimited energy from active vacuum!
Few will care if MS titles aren't *that* strong at the get go - the graphics will apparently be awesome. And, for a while anyway, that will be important.
And to me, that's the saddest part. It clearly shows how unoriginal todays games are, when only better graphics in the only category they can try to compete in. I call it the EA Sport-effect.
And back to the topic, I don't think that they are going to delay the release. Last time Dreamcast was coming out of the woods and as always people are timid to invest their money to an brand they aren't that familiar with (OK, Sega was famous, but they've always been better known from their games, not hardware). Now, even if XBox didn't sell so well in Japan (an understatement) it still did compare pretty well against PS2 in Europe and US and got a big fanbase (propably due to XBox Live). I'm saying the risk of losing market share is just too big this time around.
And as for the PS2 release games? 90% crap.
Of people these "peaceholics" trying to bully them into not releasing a game called "Bully". On another note, these kind of people make me sad. I t's just stupid that they get all riled up over a goddamn game. There are bigger things wrong in this life ffs. How many deaths are accountable by games? How about the "war on terrorism" and the one basically still going on in Iraq? Which one detoriates "traditional" moral values of upstanding citizens, teaching them that it's perfectly OK to kill _real_ people or giving people a chance to immerse themselves in a role of a bully, seeing some unrealistic pixel sex or giving them a chance to shoot some polygons that represent a cop. It's strange, on their logic these games should be making people more aggressive and violent. I've played games since I was like six years old, and I don't remember ever hitting someone on purpose or even when I got really pissed off the last time. Right about now someone will say that one evil doesn't counter another. Well, I don't even think violence in games is a bad thing. The sex on the other hand.. Laughable. I'd rather watch porn, it's more realistic ;)
Car manufacturers and the US goverment get blamed for providing vehicles and roads (respectively) for people who like to drive too fast.
Reminds me of what Nokia said about N-Gage. How very well that went.
Isn't there a simple way to fix this? If USPTO makes money off of patent filings change the system a bit:
Filing a patent costs. The patent gets examined and if the patent is granted you pay a small sum of money for the examination process. Now, instead if the patent is _not_ granted you end up paying a bigger sum of money (like 5x the granting sum).
Now everyone wins: USPTO will be more likely to fail stupid patents and people who file stupid patent requests get fined more for their stupidity.
Try it. The game is very, very challenging, way beyond chess in it's complexity. It should be possible to play with a headmouse too with long enough time settings. Basically it's a game of territory where both players, black and white, place stones in the crossings of a 19x19 grid. For more information:
An interactive tutorial
Kiseido Go Server - An Internet go server with an easy to use GUI and lot's of helpful people online.
Sensei's libarary - A good resource site in form of a wiki.
Goproblems.com - A Nice selection of Life & Death problems.
Gobase.org - Rumblings in the go world.