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Month: March 2008 (Page 2 of 2)

Psst, Gibson… Guitar Heroes Aren’t Really Playing

Gibson’s suit against Activision for patent infringement would be laughable if it wasn’t such a crystal clear example of how the patent process is being abused.

Briefly, Gibson says that Activision stole its patented idea that lets guitar players inject their licks and chops into some larger score as part of a virtual reality program. Back in the mid 90s, I actually had a program on an old Mac that let me do something like this with my old guitar (a Martin, not a Gibson); I don’t remember the name of the app, but it was fun even though the pre-mixed music was pretty hokey.

But really; Guitar Heroes as a VR concert? Yes, I’ve seen folks pretend they are Slash, The Edge, or Keith Richards while in the throes of Guitar Heroes. In fact, I could probably embarrass (but won’t) at least one of my PC-Doctor colleagues who does a great Pete Townsend impression.
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But here’s the point: Not one of them has actually played a power chord or plucked a note. Why? Because the Gibsonesque guitar (that Activision licenses from Gibson, oh by the way) is a game controller, not a musical instrument. At the risk of bursting a few bubbles, the people playing Guitar Hero aren’t playing music at all.

Here’s hoping that cooler heads will prevail and this patent harassment is stopped sooner rather than later.

Static Analysis of Untyped Languages

A while ago I wrote about whether or not untyped languages were a good idea or a bad idea. I didn’t come to any real conclusions at the time, and it’s bothered me. I’d like to outline a way to gather some real conclusions now. I still won’t be able to come to a conclusion, but I think this approach sounds interesting.

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to untyped languages. One of the disadvantages is that, because variables have no type, you can assign the wrong type to them. A strongly typed language can avoid most of this problem. (You might still have problems involving type conversion, but a good programmer or a strict language can avoid those problems.) Continue reading

Netflix uses One Million Dollar Prize to Solve Customer Recommendation Software Problem

I found this Netflix article just fascinating – Netflix has found a way to extract value from knowledge experts thousands of miles away who are giving the company value before ever getting paid.

We at PC-Doctor have our own software development challenges and we sure should look closely at the way Netflix is innovating. To sum up the problem. Netflix is trying to improve upon Cinematch, its movie recommending software, in an effort to increase and retain subscribers. To do so, it didn’t hire more developers, it outsourced the work . . . sort of . . . or at least their model seems to work like outsourcing. Yet, their model is many times better. Continue reading

May the Best Hi Def Win

The decision by Toshiba to drop HD DVD was just enough motivation for me to find out for myself which standard is ultimately better: HD DVD or Blueray (I’ll name them HD and BD from now on for simplicity). I don’t want to rehash the marketing glossies which overlook the entire mess of the implementation. In fact, I believe that the only useful pieces of information from the marketing slicks are the following:

  1. HD stores about 15 GB per layer, and 30GB per side of a disc.
  2. BD stores about 25 GB per layer, and 50GB per side of a disc.
  3. HD uses "HDi", a combination of XML and JavaScript for interactivity, with the specification inspired by Microsoft.
  4. BD uses a subset of Java for interactivity, with the specification inspired by Sony.

Continue reading

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