That's a good idea; but here's a question... if you re-rendered it using something like Renderman (and it ended up looking a lot better than the actual game) would that be considered false advertising? I guess you'd have to re-render it frame-by-frame on a similar card, and individually capture each frame. It wouldn't be realtime, but you could play it back at realtime.
But also, aren't 3D GPU's state machines? i.e. just because you have all the vertex data and everything doesn't necesarily mean you know how to reproduce the image; you'd have to begin recording from the very beginning of execution (as oppose to just recording the few seconds that you need). I'm not a graphics programming expert or anything, so I could just be spitting in the wind here...:)
I personally like how John Carmack relates software patents to getting mugged... to state loosely what he said, you think of the patent system as being in place to help the poor inventor guy who spends his whole life working on his one little invention, and then some large billion dollar company comes along and steals the idea and gets rich, leaving no credit to him. In that case, patents are great.
But if five companies hire five programmers to set out and do the exact same thing, the first one to make it to the patent office takes the cake and everyone else gets sucked into the legal blackhole (or just goes home with their tail between their legs).
It's definitely time to revisit our patent laws regarding technology; the industry moves too fast - patents like this literally stop innovation and cause consumers to pay out the ass for everything.
I agree that copyrights are a little more reasonable; it should be illegal to clone the next guy's solution; but it should not be illegal to solve the same problem.
I wonder, in the event that MS did have to pull all of their consoles, if any already-released games would need to be pulled and revised to use a different kind of technology, or if they can still use the same MPEG2 encoding, just with different technology than what Lucent has patented. If the court actually ordered them to pull all 360's, that could be a thorn in MS' side... but if they had to recall a bunch of games that were now totally unusable because of this missing MPEG2 technology - that would be a pretty big loss for MS, and would certainly mean fortune in the future of Sony and Nintendo.
At first I thought MS could swallow Lucent whole, but it turns out Lucent earns in a fiscal quarter about what MS does in a year (Lucent posted ~ $9 billion in revenue for FY05, MS posted around that for Q3 FY04). That means that a few million dollars in go-away money probably won't persuade Lucent to buzz off. This is actually the second suit; according to TFA, the first one was thrown out due to typographical errors in Lucent's patent papers. It seems that MS would have already made an out-of-court move if they thought they could...
I'm sure glad the 360 costs so damn much... otherwise, I might have actually bought one already.:)
I assume the kid would have to want their parents to see wherver they go, otherwise they could just turn the phone off? I know I always used to tell my mom that my battery died, when she couldn't get ahold of me (and I was up to no good =])
Are there other phones with GPS capabilities? I could see a lot of useful applications for that - if they make it tiny & easy enough, it would eliminate the need for GPS receivers (obviously) - if I am in a large parking lot, at a sports event or something, it would make for a pretty easy way to meet up with friends & whatnot, if I can just get my phone to send their phone my GPS coordinates.
It would sure make losing your phone a less painful experience...
Well I'm sorry, that's not what I meant. Of course I don't think there's a bunch of Portugese neo-nazis attempting to create a digital race or something. But, I can see why a law in the US might prevent any kind of experimental optical messing-with (and that law probably predates this type of technology by a longshot). Ultimately, laws like that force us to think about the implications of our medical research and development (just like the cloning and genetic alteration/modification laws) before we put a stamp of approval on it.
It's certainly time to revisit the law. I have to admit, when I heard about a law preventing the surgery from taking place in the US, I did think of the Nazis.
Well for one thing you pretty much accused President Bush of forbidding her to have the surgery. Somehow I doubt he's the reason; there's probably legal restrictions in place because eyesight operation is scarily remnant of the Holocaust (with the Nazis trying to change the color of poeples' eyes & such, trying to create a perfect race & whatnot). Albeit, I don't think this type of surgery is what they had in mind, but think about the possibilities.
If something like the Holocaust ever happened again, people with perfectly good eyesight could be held hostage and could have special implants done to their eyes... similar to this, but instead of seeing through a camera, you'd see... whatever they wanted you to see.
Messing with a human's visual perception has some scary implications. What if you had an X-Ray camera implanted or nightvision? A bionic human is not out of reality with a device like this. Of course in this case, it sounds like this woman was the recipient of a true miracle.
Btw, I didn't have mod points and I didn't call your post Flamebait (I don't think it is). But don't be so quick to blame President Bush for everything... not that I'm one of his biggest fans or anything.
Certainly, at least partly why people justify this to themselves is simply the quality of the content.
Ever since I can remember (I'm 23) almost every CD that's come out has at BEST five tracks I actually want to listen to; usually it's two or three. I'm not going to spend much for 10 or 12 minutes of music. Of course if it's an artist I really love, I might be willing to spend $7 or $8; I'd try to find the CD used.
But really, copying anything digital is easily justified if you think about it hard enough. If you take a CD from somebody else, or from a store (i.e. steal it) that's money lost somewhere. Somebody spent money to produce it and distribute it, but you did not return that money (or any profit) in exchange for it.
If I pirate something I would never buy in the first place such as a piece of horrendously expensive software, or an obscure one hit wonder single from the 80s, there's no money lost anywhere. I wouldn't have bought it anyway... I didn't steal it from somewhere, I cloned it. Obviously of course, this can't be true if you share it with other people, or even use it to make money (such as using 3D studio for your web design business when you didn't purchase it).
Ultimately, it's still wrong, simply because if you are benefiting from somebody else's work without their permission and without compensating them fairly, you're using them in a morally negative way. And I think many people know this; but it just isn't that big of a deal to them vs. stealing money (directly or indirectly). If you could clone a Bentley, even though you already own a perfectly good Toyota and would never dream of buying a Bentley, wouldn't you at least consider it?
Of course, there's always the truly wrong people who do pirate things they would go out and buy if they couldn't have it for free, such as MS Office or Windows (especially the only copy they own, let alone multiple PCs and networks).
Does this mean ATM's will spit out more denominations than just $20? If I get a check for $36.41 it would have to give me one of every denomination of currency.
Or maybe it will give me a $20 bill and $16.41 in pennies?
Honestly, I didn't start using XP until after SP2 came out. I probably won't buy Vista until I get a 64-bit chip. Just because it doesn't run on every existing system the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean a whole lot; certainly two years after it's released people will have had time to upgrade.
I can't imagine what kind of 3D GUI they're going to have that won't work with a less-than-$100 Radeon. I find it difficult to believe they're going to be using vertex shaders and curved surfaces a whole lot; app screens don't take hundreds of megs of video memory (remember when video memory was a luxury?) either. I remember before Win95 came out (they were calling it Windows 4.0) and I had a 386SX/16 w/ 4MB RAM. I had to buy a new computer to upgrade.
Another point: I'm seeing a lot of people who seem to think that Vista is XP with a 3D GUI; that's not so!
Vista moves a lot of OS software out of kernel space (where it will crash the whole machine if it dies) and into user space. For instance, the networking and driver interfaces. This is good for security, but helps a lot with stability too. In theory, you won't have to reboot if you install a driver, as I understand it.
I use Gentoo and XP. XP is a LOT more stable than Win2k and NT4 were; Vista will be that much better.
I'm not crazy about the way MS designs software (Windows in particular), but they're rewriting a lot of code that has been with Win32 since NT4 (and even Win95 and older). That doesn't mean it will work; but it's a far cry from being XP with a new GUI. Also, Windows XP isn't 64-bit (unless you get the 64-bit version with less-than-Linux driver support - basically XP recompiled to support 64-bit), whereas Vista will probably do some things that 32-bit windows couldn't do, if you have a 64-bit chip.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good idea; but here's a question... if you re-rendered it using something like Renderman (and it ended up looking a lot better than the actual game) would that be considered false advertising? I guess you'd have to re-render it frame-by-frame on a similar card, and individually capture each frame. It wouldn't be realtime, but you could play it back at realtime.
:)
But also, aren't 3D GPU's state machines? i.e. just because you have all the vertex data and everything doesn't necesarily mean you know how to reproduce the image; you'd have to begin recording from the very beginning of execution (as oppose to just recording the few seconds that you need). I'm not a graphics programming expert or anything, so I could just be spitting in the wind here...
Nintendo: (in millhouse voice) hah hah!
I personally like how John Carmack relates software patents to getting mugged... to state loosely what he said, you think of the patent system as being in place to help the poor inventor guy who spends his whole life working on his one little invention, and then some large billion dollar company comes along and steals the idea and gets rich, leaving no credit to him. In that case, patents are great.
But if five companies hire five programmers to set out and do the exact same thing, the first one to make it to the patent office takes the cake and everyone else gets sucked into the legal blackhole (or just goes home with their tail between their legs).
It's definitely time to revisit our patent laws regarding technology; the industry moves too fast - patents like this literally stop innovation and cause consumers to pay out the ass for everything.
I agree that copyrights are a little more reasonable; it should be illegal to clone the next guy's solution; but it should not be illegal to solve the same problem.
...in MS' Cheerios?
:)
I wonder, in the event that MS did have to pull all of their consoles, if any already-released games would need to be pulled and revised to use a different kind of technology, or if they can still use the same MPEG2 encoding, just with different technology than what Lucent has patented. If the court actually ordered them to pull all 360's, that could be a thorn in MS' side... but if they had to recall a bunch of games that were now totally unusable because of this missing MPEG2 technology - that would be a pretty big loss for MS, and would certainly mean fortune in the future of Sony and Nintendo.
At first I thought MS could swallow Lucent whole, but it turns out Lucent earns in a fiscal quarter about what MS does in a year (Lucent posted ~ $9 billion in revenue for FY05, MS posted around that for Q3 FY04). That means that a few million dollars in go-away money probably won't persuade Lucent to buzz off. This is actually the second suit; according to TFA, the first one was thrown out due to typographical errors in Lucent's patent papers. It seems that MS would have already made an out-of-court move if they thought they could...
I'm sure glad the 360 costs so damn much... otherwise, I might have actually bought one already.
Umm, I'm new here... but is this not the most boring story ever posted?
I could write a long narrative about the ethics of post-modern male chauvinism... anybody?
Due to that, it seems the interest on learning Japanese is steadily growing, specially for anime addicts.
No kidding...
I assume the kid would have to want their parents to see wherver they go, otherwise they could just turn the phone off? I know I always used to tell my mom that my battery died, when she couldn't get ahold of me (and I was up to no good =])
Are there other phones with GPS capabilities? I could see a lot of useful applications for that - if they make it tiny & easy enough, it would eliminate the need for GPS receivers (obviously) - if I am in a large parking lot, at a sports event or something, it would make for a pretty easy way to meet up with friends & whatnot, if I can just get my phone to send their phone my GPS coordinates.
It would sure make losing your phone a less painful experience...
Well I'm sorry, that's not what I meant. Of course I don't think there's a bunch of Portugese neo-nazis attempting to create a digital race or something. But, I can see why a law in the US might prevent any kind of experimental optical messing-with (and that law probably predates this type of technology by a longshot). Ultimately, laws like that force us to think about the implications of our medical research and development (just like the cloning and genetic alteration/modification laws) before we put a stamp of approval on it.
It's certainly time to revisit the law. I have to admit, when I heard about a law preventing the surgery from taking place in the US, I did think of the Nazis.
Well for one thing you pretty much accused President Bush of forbidding her to have the surgery. Somehow I doubt he's the reason; there's probably legal restrictions in place because eyesight operation is scarily remnant of the Holocaust (with the Nazis trying to change the color of poeples' eyes & such, trying to create a perfect race & whatnot). Albeit, I don't think this type of surgery is what they had in mind, but think about the possibilities.
If something like the Holocaust ever happened again, people with perfectly good eyesight could be held hostage and could have special implants done to their eyes... similar to this, but instead of seeing through a camera, you'd see... whatever they wanted you to see.
Messing with a human's visual perception has some scary implications. What if you had an X-Ray camera implanted or nightvision? A bionic human is not out of reality with a device like this. Of course in this case, it sounds like this woman was the recipient of a true miracle.
Btw, I didn't have mod points and I didn't call your post Flamebait (I don't think it is). But don't be so quick to blame President Bush for everything... not that I'm one of his biggest fans or anything.
Now that's good for your
Honestly, that's pretty slick :) But my Grand Am could do that as good as any Japanese car with the same tires...
peaceIf you can't master this after about three attempts, let's just say I would recommend a nice icepick lobotomy.
And after three attempts, the guy waiting behind you might just be ready & willing.
Certainly, at least partly why people justify this to themselves is simply the quality of the content.
Ever since I can remember (I'm 23) almost every CD that's come out has at BEST five tracks I actually want to listen to; usually it's two or three. I'm not going to spend much for 10 or 12 minutes of music. Of course if it's an artist I really love, I might be willing to spend $7 or $8; I'd try to find the CD used.
But really, copying anything digital is easily justified if you think about it hard enough. If you take a CD from somebody else, or from a store (i.e. steal it) that's money lost somewhere. Somebody spent money to produce it and distribute it, but you did not return that money (or any profit) in exchange for it.
If I pirate something I would never buy in the first place such as a piece of horrendously expensive software, or an obscure one hit wonder single from the 80s, there's no money lost anywhere. I wouldn't have bought it anyway... I didn't steal it from somewhere, I cloned it. Obviously of course, this can't be true if you share it with other people, or even use it to make money (such as using 3D studio for your web design business when you didn't purchase it).
Ultimately, it's still wrong, simply because if you are benefiting from somebody else's work without their permission and without compensating them fairly, you're using them in a morally negative way. And I think many people know this; but it just isn't that big of a deal to them vs. stealing money (directly or indirectly). If you could clone a Bentley, even though you already own a perfectly good Toyota and would never dream of buying a Bentley, wouldn't you at least consider it?
Of course, there's always the truly wrong people who do pirate things they would go out and buy if they couldn't have it for free, such as MS Office or Windows (especially the only copy they own, let alone multiple PCs and networks).
Does this mean ATM's will spit out more denominations than just $20? If I get a check for $36.41 it would have to give me one of every denomination of currency.
Or maybe it will give me a $20 bill and $16.41 in pennies?
Honestly, I didn't start using XP until after SP2 came out. I probably won't buy Vista until I get a 64-bit chip. Just because it doesn't run on every existing system the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean a whole lot; certainly two years after it's released people will have had time to upgrade.
I can't imagine what kind of 3D GUI they're going to have that won't work with a less-than-$100 Radeon. I find it difficult to believe they're going to be using vertex shaders and curved surfaces a whole lot; app screens don't take hundreds of megs of video memory (remember when video memory was a luxury?) either. I remember before Win95 came out (they were calling it Windows 4.0) and I had a 386SX/16 w/ 4MB RAM. I had to buy a new computer to upgrade.
Another point: I'm seeing a lot of people who seem to think that Vista is XP with a 3D GUI; that's not so!
Vista moves a lot of OS software out of kernel space (where it will crash the whole machine if it dies) and into user space. For instance, the networking and driver interfaces. This is good for security, but helps a lot with stability too. In theory, you won't have to reboot if you install a driver, as I understand it.
I use Gentoo and XP. XP is a LOT more stable than Win2k and NT4 were; Vista will be that much better.
I'm not crazy about the way MS designs software (Windows in particular), but they're rewriting a lot of code that has been with Win32 since NT4 (and even Win95 and older). That doesn't mean it will work; but it's a far cry from being XP with a new GUI. Also, Windows XP isn't 64-bit (unless you get the 64-bit version with less-than-Linux driver support - basically XP recompiled to support 64-bit), whereas Vista will probably do some things that 32-bit windows couldn't do, if you have a 64-bit chip.