I was with you up to the last point. Dynamically branching stories aren't just "very hard"; to be anything other than awful, it'd require an AI smart enough to pass the Turing test (to simulate realistic NPCs), AND it would have to be cleverer and more creative than a good percentage of humans (try playing tabletop D&D with a crappy DM if you doubt the point).
If a computer could write a convincing dynamic game plot, it could write a decent novel, and that's a loooong way off.
It's just dumb to say that games "devalue" AI in the mind of the public. In fact, I'd say game AI is the only medium wherein the public gets any real sense of AI as something intelligent - as a hypothetical "person" and a viable adversary.
The most obvious example is Deep Blue, which is probably still the most famous AI in the world. Nobody cares about the efficiency of its sorting algorithms or any other academic-level AI questions; what they care about is that it can match the world's best human in one particular game.
The same is true of the more mundane, even crappy AI you see in fighters, FPS games, etc. Those bots in Quake 3 probably weren't getting any invites to Robot MENSA, but they FELT almost as real and as dangerous as human adversaries.
Cassettes and CDs don't have DRM. DVD-Audio probably does, along with some of those dumb Sony formats like minidisk, but they're not exactly dominating the market. So "lack of DRM" is a pretty stupid reason to switch to vinyl.
Nintendo is selling oodles of consoles and games, which is obviously their game plan. I don't think anyone doubts that they're happy with this generation so far.
Xbox 360 is selling decently, they're well on their way to being the "mainstay" system for hardcore gamers, and they're selling all sorts of crap that used to be free through their online service. Plus, they've got some great exclusives lined up (Mass Effect woo!) and they haven't even played the Halo card yet.
Sony isn't selling as well as they might like, BUT they seem to have achieved their primary goal with the PS3: leveraging the console to push Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Their console sales may suffer, but for some reason Sony seems to think that achieving Blu-Ray dominance is paramount, so I wouldn't guess they're disappointed quite yet.
So really, while Sony and MS might each prefer to be grinding all opposition beneath their iron heels, it's not like they're failing at what they set out to do here.
That is assuredly true. But you have to bear in mind that alternate codecs, browser plugins, etc. are only for the tech-savvy crowd. All those millions of folks who log into YouTube to watch videos of cute kittens probably aren't going to know how to skip the ads. Sort of like the current situation with AdBlock and its kin.
Hey, great idea! Let's put the politicians in charge of ALL medical research! I'm sure the Bush administration would do a swell job allocating money to promising areas like stem cell research, birth control methods, the morning after pill (that they improperly kept the FDA from approving for over-the-counter), etc.
I see a lot of people saying that encryption is futile because all it takes is one person breaking the encryption for it to be all over the internet. This is certainly true, but I don't think that's the kind of piracy Sony is trying to stop with these particular measures. They're probably just trying to make it a pain in the ass for me to pop a rented DVD into my PowerBook and rip or copy it, for myself or my friends. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who don't use p2p (either because they don't have the bandwidth, or they're intimidated by the MPAA, or they think it's immoral), but wouldn't hesitate to burn a copy for a friend. After all, even the courts considered that "fair use" for cassettes at some point, didn't they?
Well, when they get the mirror close enough to absolute zero, apparently it will "show its quantum behavior for the first time," which I assume means it will reflect THE FUTURE.
According to that article yesterday, Nintendo is selling more than twice as many units as PS3 or Xbox360. So I doubt this is really a case of "artificial" shortage, although obviously the Nintendo marketing guys will spin it to their best advantage.
...what? Factory farming of cattle does nothing to help deal with overpopulation; it would be vastly more energy-efficient to just sell vegetable crops directly to people. (Remember, 90% of the energy is lost in each step of the food chain.)
The only time animal-farming makes sense from a pure efficiency standard is when you're raising animals on land that can grow grass but would be inefficient or impractical to grow crops on. (Goats, wild deer, etc.) When you start packing animals into factory farms and feeding them corn, you're just reducing the amount of food available as a whole.
GIMP is great until you need to, say, draw a straight line. Then you get bounced around their website to a highly sarcastic tutorial that makes it sound like ANY moron should know their weird shift-clicking technique with no explanation. And then OSS people say it's unfair that they have a rep for not being "user-friendly."/rant
It is kind of irrelevant to the Zune/iPod debate, but the Mac marketshare is pretty important. If Macs had, say, a 50% marketshare, a lot more software would be developed for OSX (and probably less for Windows). This would in turn make the Mac more desirable to remaining PC users, like those guys who always post about needing Windows to play games.
I don't know why you assume she doesn't get the patent rights as well. If I were her, I'd use my first installment of that $100 grand to buy myself a good patent attorney and PR person. I think they hang out behind Home Depot in a pickup truck.
In both of their major product categories, the competition is either free (Linux, OpenOffice) or tied to specific hardware that's bundled with the software anyway (MacOS). So... I'm not sure what their point is.
Slashdot Mirror
"I used to -hate- the GPL. Now, I like the LGPL and I'm starting to think the GPL is the right way to go after all. "
After all, none of this SCO crap would have started if only Linux was licensed under the GPL!
Think they'd buy it?
I was with you up to the last point. Dynamically branching stories aren't just "very hard"; to be anything other than awful, it'd require an AI smart enough to pass the Turing test (to simulate realistic NPCs), AND it would have to be cleverer and more creative than a good percentage of humans (try playing tabletop D&D with a crappy DM if you doubt the point).
If a computer could write a convincing dynamic game plot, it could write a decent novel, and that's a loooong way off.
It's just dumb to say that games "devalue" AI in the mind of the public. In fact, I'd say game AI is the only medium wherein the public gets any real sense of AI as something intelligent - as a hypothetical "person" and a viable adversary.
The most obvious example is Deep Blue, which is probably still the most famous AI in the world. Nobody cares about the efficiency of its sorting algorithms or any other academic-level AI questions; what they care about is that it can match the world's best human in one particular game.
The same is true of the more mundane, even crappy AI you see in fighters, FPS games, etc. Those bots in Quake 3 probably weren't getting any invites to Robot MENSA, but they FELT almost as real and as dangerous as human adversaries.
When I'm editing a 200-page Pages document, I get up to five seconds of lag per keystroke on my G4 Powerbook.
"A diversity of backgrounds, both gender, ethnic, and class, are good for any team, as it provides more perspectives to look at a problem."
Yes, I'm sure there are numerous algorithms that would be twice as efficient if only someone on the dev teams had ovaries.
I really really hope he's talking about the site linked in his username, which is his personal homepage replete with kitten videos.
FIREFOX HAS CORNERED THE AMATEUR KITTEN-VIDEO DEMO!
Cassettes and CDs don't have DRM. DVD-Audio probably does, along with some of those dumb Sony formats like minidisk, but they're not exactly dominating the market. So "lack of DRM" is a pretty stupid reason to switch to vinyl.
Nintendo is selling oodles of consoles and games, which is obviously their game plan. I don't think anyone doubts that they're happy with this generation so far.
Xbox 360 is selling decently, they're well on their way to being the "mainstay" system for hardcore gamers, and they're selling all sorts of crap that used to be free through their online service. Plus, they've got some great exclusives lined up (Mass Effect woo!) and they haven't even played the Halo card yet.
Sony isn't selling as well as they might like, BUT they seem to have achieved their primary goal with the PS3: leveraging the console to push Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Their console sales may suffer, but for some reason Sony seems to think that achieving Blu-Ray dominance is paramount, so I wouldn't guess they're disappointed quite yet.
So really, while Sony and MS might each prefer to be grinding all opposition beneath their iron heels, it's not like they're failing at what they set out to do here.
That is assuredly true. But you have to bear in mind that alternate codecs, browser plugins, etc. are only for the tech-savvy crowd. All those millions of folks who log into YouTube to watch videos of cute kittens probably aren't going to know how to skip the ads. Sort of like the current situation with AdBlock and its kin.
Hey, great idea! Let's put the politicians in charge of ALL medical research! I'm sure the Bush administration would do a swell job allocating money to promising areas like stem cell research, birth control methods, the morning after pill (that they improperly kept the FDA from approving for over-the-counter), etc.
I see a lot of people saying that encryption is futile because all it takes is one person breaking the encryption for it to be all over the internet. This is certainly true, but I don't think that's the kind of piracy Sony is trying to stop with these particular measures. They're probably just trying to make it a pain in the ass for me to pop a rented DVD into my PowerBook and rip or copy it, for myself or my friends. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who don't use p2p (either because they don't have the bandwidth, or they're intimidated by the MPAA, or they think it's immoral), but wouldn't hesitate to burn a copy for a friend. After all, even the courts considered that "fair use" for cassettes at some point, didn't they?
Or I could stay home and watch internet porn instead and have exactly as much effect on the election results! Yay!
I mean, it would be a shame if students could just go to some other site that carried the exact same articles.
Well, when they get the mirror close enough to absolute zero, apparently it will "show its quantum behavior for the first time," which I assume means it will reflect THE FUTURE.
and some VC games that any PC less then a decade old can emulate...
...illegally.
According to that article yesterday, Nintendo is selling more than twice as many units as PS3 or Xbox360. So I doubt this is really a case of "artificial" shortage, although obviously the Nintendo marketing guys will spin it to their best advantage.
Surprise?
Yay, back to the good old days where the only art produced was that that explicitly glorified the extremely wealthy!
...what? Factory farming of cattle does nothing to help deal with overpopulation; it would be vastly more energy-efficient to just sell vegetable crops directly to people. (Remember, 90% of the energy is lost in each step of the food chain.)
The only time animal-farming makes sense from a pure efficiency standard is when you're raising animals on land that can grow grass but would be inefficient or impractical to grow crops on. (Goats, wild deer, etc.) When you start packing animals into factory farms and feeding them corn, you're just reducing the amount of food available as a whole.
GIMP is great until you need to, say, draw a straight line. Then you get bounced around their website to a highly sarcastic tutorial that makes it sound like ANY moron should know their weird shift-clicking technique with no explanation. And then OSS people say it's unfair that they have a rep for not being "user-friendly." /rant
It is kind of irrelevant to the Zune/iPod debate, but the Mac marketshare is pretty important. If Macs had, say, a 50% marketshare, a lot more software would be developed for OSX (and probably less for Windows). This would in turn make the Mac more desirable to remaining PC users, like those guys who always post about needing Windows to play games.
I don't know why you assume she doesn't get the patent rights as well. If I were her, I'd use my first installment of that $100 grand to buy myself a good patent attorney and PR person. I think they hang out behind Home Depot in a pickup truck.
Except that that's exactly UNlike Napster, which was p2p.
In both of their major product categories, the competition is either free (Linux, OpenOffice) or tied to specific hardware that's bundled with the software anyway (MacOS). So... I'm not sure what their point is.