Quoting: kerossinGoogle is great at coming up with new tech solutions and running systems at a global scale but boy do they suck at supporting their customers. We've seen this countless on YouTube with dubious DMCA claims taking down channels and only after a big enough uproar do things get looked at by someone at Google.

At this rate Google will make the owner of https://killedbygoogle.com/ bankrupt because of constantly having to upgrade the hosting plan to accommodate all the dead Google projects lol.

Also, Liam makes a good point about relying on one provider for a lot of things. While it is convenient having one account but the risk of losing everything is too high. At the very least moving your email to a different provider might be good enough since email is used as a recovery method for most services so you could also lose access to other non-Google accounts if Google decides to terminate your account.

Not trying to defend Google here (I have no love for them) but the problem on Youtube is the DMCA itself and not Google/YouTube. As a provider you are not allowed to judge if a DMCA request is valid or fraudulent, you have to obey the request at all times.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeSo a 'greater good' thing really shouldn't be patentable, or yes it is fine as long as it is an open patent.
Like I said before, the patent system is not at fault here. There needs to be a method for inventors to be able to get rewarded for their invention. Otherwise no one would ever invent things except by accident.
The cost to actually get a patent makes it unavailable for someone making something in their garage. So they have to go to a company most of the time to get it done, and then the company owns it and the inventor usually gets screwed.
They need to change the fees and the process.
Either way, "we put paddles on the bottom of a controller" should not be a patent...

Yeah it's very strange that Valve wasn't successful in invalidating the patent, or perhaps they never tried that route, very few details of the case so far.

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Quoting: SeegrasI didn't write what you quoted as mine.

Quoting: F.UltraI have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

First off, we have a problem with pharmacy inflating these costs by a factor of 10, by including marketing and so on. And they've been doing this for decades.
https://www.thebodypro.com/article/r-d-really-cost -- 70 million instead of 700 in 2001. There are more of these papers out there, and they all get to the same conclusion, R&D costs get inflated by roughly a factor of 10. So it's not billions, but millions. See also the article I linked to.

Second, you can't just reproduce these things, even if they're (like the modeRNA vaccine) completely open. Usually competitors need around 3 years to catch up. And that's way enough time to recoup the R&D costs.

Finally, I don't see why I should constantly repeat arguments scientists have already made, and correct your mis-assumptions, just because you're too lazy to read the papers:
http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm (and read that chapter about pharmaceuticals here http://dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf)
https://www.researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/

It seems like that I accidentally kept the wrong author when I trimmed the quote down for readability (aka the post that I did responded to contained a quote by you and I deleted the wrong author from the whole quote). Sorry about that!

The argument that I had was not for drugs but for vaccines in particular and $70M wouldn't even get you through the 3 trail phases. BARDA alone awarded Moderna $955M to speed up development of it's Covid-19 vaccine.

However, even if the full R&D cost plus all trials was only $70M then how is that an argument that they should just release it for free to all their competitors the same second they had developed it?

Please note that this is not an argument that patents are "the best thing ever", nor "the only solution" or that patents should be as long as 25 years and so forth. It was just an argument for why a company that have invested money in developing a vaccine could not just release it for free or be labelled as psychopathic. Nor is it an argument against letting drug companies in 3d world countries getting free access to such vaccines.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: SeegrasIn chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

That's a way we the society ensure that. It's not at all the only way. For instance, Moderna's development of a Covid vaccine was financed entirely up front by the US government--they didn't spend a dime of their own money and indeed made a profit before they'd ever started manufacturing. Then they were given a patent as well, but I don't see what the point of that was.

It's kind of an odd approach generally. I mean, most people who defend the patent system for pharmaceuticals concede that the big pharma companies don't really do a whole lot of original basic research--that's mainly public sector and pharma mostly piggybacks off the public sector ideas. What pharma does is lots of clinical trials, which cost a lot of money. OK, fine, for clinical trials to be done, money has to be spent, but what should that have to do with patents? It's a fairly mechanical process that doesn't involve coming up with original ideas, so why should our method of compensating it pretend that it does?

And as a method, it doesn't work terribly well. Vaccines don't typically make pharmaceutical companies a ton of money, so they don't spend that much money developing them. But vaccines are very useful in terms of public health. In fact, in terms of medicines, there is to some extent an inverse relationship between utility and profitability. Palliative treatments are more profitable than cures, since they can be sold again and again.
If you're a fan of "free markets" (which, OK, I'm not), patents are a massive distortion of those whether you're talking about the original Adam Smith et al. sense or the modern sense, since from Smith's perspective they create huge windfall economic rents and from the modern perspective they involve massive government intervention and from both perspectives they represent the literal creation of monopoly for the express purpose of distorting prices.
Those prices can get jacked up especially high because of the nature of medicine--how much will you pay the only person who can save your life? The highest profit will necessarily come at a price-point high enough that many won't be able to afford it. This is cruel and immoral. But there is also a substantial public interest issue. Bad public health has social and economic implications.
So between these issues, leaving it to the (patent-distorted) market to decide just which treatments and vaccines should be pursued is inevitably going to give you perverse outcomes where worse medicines are emphasized over better ones, and the medicines produced are undersupplied and overcharged for, leaving many untreated, and sucking unnecessarily huge amounts of money out of the broader economy, leaving pharmaceutical companies with huge windfall profits.

Those windfall profits are also a huge motivator to falsify the outcomes of clinical trials to make drugs look better and less risky than they are. This has caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would be better to just have companies that do clinical trials, have public agencies that decided which drugs should have trials done, and pay them to do them. The public agency's purpose would be to improve public health, not make a profit from perverse outcomes. So they wouldn't be motivated to avoid cures in favour of palliative treatments, nor to falsify results of clinical trials. Clinical trial companies would compete on price and accuracy. Then the drugs, once approved, could be handed over to generic drug makers who would manufacture them cheaply and, again, in competition rather than with a monopoly. And that's just one possibility. I'm sure there are plenty of other approaches that would be better than what we have for everything except letting big pharma siphon off windfall profits.

I agree completely with you, I believe that pharmaceutical research should be funded by government and the results not patented.

I simply replied back to the argument that companies funding everything in private should immediately release their findings for free or be seen as psychopathic.

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[quote=Arehandoro]

Quoting: SeegrasIn chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

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Quoting: randyl

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: MohandevirFunny... Thinking about it... 5 "random" (Yeah right!) gamers that seem to be unable to correctly read a EULA learned of the MFN which is closed behind an NDA between developpers and Valve... Who broke the NDA then? Will the plantiffs be able to produce the proof of the MFN without compromising the identity of the NDA leaker(s)? Because that could legally cost them a lot. Like it was said... Follow the money.

Did I get something wrong?

That one thing is no problem for the plaintiffs, if this goes to court then Valve will be forced to disclose the MFN to the court and to the plaintiffs during the discovery phase. So there is no need to produce who was the leaker, however the court could of course deem that this whole affair is nothing more than a fishing expedition to make the MFN public so the whole thing can die right there.

This is not accurate. There is no "MFN". An "MFN" isn't a contract in and of itself. There is a contractual agreement with an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) between Valve and the publisher. This may or may not be introduced, but it isn't an absolute given and the plaintiffs don't necessarily have the ability to include that. The fact that they didn't include it in the complaint, and the implication behind that, was discussed in the video.

The contract between Valve and the publishers/developers may have clauses or stipulations which give an "MFN" status and that has to be determined during the hearing. And then it has to be proven to be proven unfavorable to consumers. And then they have to prove that Valve and those publishers colluded to set prices to the detriment of the public while also harming those publishers who colluded to set prices.

The video linked earlier in the article is really worth watching. It helps clarify a lot and can eliminate some of our lay assumptions and understandings. A lot of the comments in this thread are emotionally based on what posters think should happen, but the court proceedings will be based on law and precedence.

I fail to see how you contradict me in any way?

edit: sounds like you have a problem with me using "MFN" for the Valve vs Developer agreement, I simply used that in haste due to the post that I quoted, the context should IMHO be clear however.

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Quoting: MohandevirFunny... Thinking about it... 5 "random" (Yeah right!) gamers that seem to be unable to correctly read a EULA learned of the MFN which is closed behind an NDA between developpers and Valve... Who broke the NDA then? Will the plantiffs be able to produce the proof of the MFN without compromising the identity of the NDA leaker(s)? Because that could legally cost them a lot. Like it was said... Follow the money.

Did I get something wrong?

That one thing is no problem for the plaintiffs, if this goes to court then Valve will be forced to disclose the MFN to the court and to the plaintiffs during the discovery phase. So there is no need to produce who was the leaker, however the court could of course deem that this whole affair is nothing more than a fishing expedition to make the MFN public so the whole thing can die right there.

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Took me until I read the actual filing to realise that the 5 plaintiffs where all gamers, I for some reason thought that they where game developers. So this does sound like a frivolous suit that most likely will be thrown out quite quickly. Since they are not devs none of the plaintiffs had access to the NDA:d distribution agreement so their claims that it contains price fixing language is most likely not factual.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: GuestOlder games for older hardware that didn't vary, aimed at 640x480 at best, many with a 25fps target (hooked up to a tv rather than a dedicated monitor), 16bit graphics, limited or absolutely no networking, far more simplified audio, no multitasking worries, and with a much higher barrier to development entry compared to today (both economically and for required technical knowledge).

Still, they were a lot of fun.

Never said they weren't, just pointing out the incredible differences in hardware targets back then. Actually older games were often more fun I find, because they had to use gameplay to be fun rather than distract with "ooooh, shiny".

Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: GuestJust bear that in mind when comparing against modern games.

Let's take Ballsy! vs Sensible soccer.

GPU:
* Ballsy: Any modern GPU
* SS: Amiga OCS blitter was capable of almost 1k pixel per second, no 3D, the copper and that was it.
* Ratio: Almost a number bigger as you want

Also no shaders, no windowing subsystems to worry about, and far fewer pixels at a much reduced rate to be concerned with. You really can't compare them quite so easily.

Quoting: kokoko3kHD space:
* Ballsy: 200MB of Storage
* SS: 880KB of Storage
* Ratio: 225X

Textures alone will account for a lot of that space. Sure, some of it can probably be compressed, or procedural generated (the pitch itself is probably the most simple version of that) - but using a little more space can be more flexible, especially for an artist, and easier to test with and update. So textures alone (32bit vs 16bit, much larger resolution, applied in more areas) will almost certainly give more flexibility in what can be done.

Quoting: kokoko3kRAM:
* Ballsy: 512 MB of RAM
* SS: 512KB of RAM
* Ratio: 1000X

CPU:
* SS: 68000@7mhz: something around 2.5 MIPS
* Ballsy: 64bit processor... Intel Core2 Duo is over 20k MIPS
* Ratio: around 8000x

And also deal with a lot more. Seriously a lot more. On top of a fully-fledged OS, and without the benefit of knowing exactly the memory requirements (differing resolutions, number of players, what can be allocated by the OS and where, the list goes on). Of course there is some layering that the game developer can't do much about (graphics stacks for example, Vulkan showed how much slimmer they can be), which leads me to....

Quoting: kokoko3kAnd today if you read the system requirements for Ballsy, you can even easilly say "Wow, this game is very light!"

Yes it is, relatively. Could it be lighter? Sure, but that's why before I mentioned about barrier to game development entry. The demo scene people still produce incredible feats with 64kB. It also requires a lot more effort to get that done. This game is very light considering the technical knowledge required to get a game out the door.

It's simply an invalid comparison to try scale up some numbers when there are so many other factors to take into account.

Sensi on the Amiga was 50fps (remember that the discussion is that it was less sluggish, not more) also the pixel format on the Amiga was orders of magnitude more resource intensive to work with since you had bitplanes and not chunky pixels as you have on PC.

Also remember that you can play Sensi in a emulator on a modern pc with far better performance that was available back then on real hw, and then the emulator is afflicted by all of the things that you list that a modern system have to cope with except for the single issue of resolution.

Sensi was a 320x256 game with 32 colors, so 5 bitplanes. Not sure if the game used all 32 colors though but the display mode supported 32 colors. So each frame was 51200 bytes. A modern 1920x1080 game have what, 16 bits per pixel? So 4147200 bytes per frame which is only 81 times more bytes per frame (and in a much easier chunky format vs handling bitplanes).

The A500 could move memory at 7MiB per second (no caches) to chipmem (where all the graphics are), my "modern" Ryzen 1600x can move around 5800 times that and my RX480 can move around 37000 times that.

But I don't think that Ballsy is thousands of times slower than Sensi due to incompetence, I think that it's by design.

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Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: kokoko3kWell judging from what i see, SWOS feels so much better...
I just played today via FS-UAE and my brand new quickshot 2 turbo hooked via an adaptor to the usb port ^_^
Also there is this: https://www.sensiblesoccer.de/swos-2020
but it seems Windows and Amiga only.

Yeah it's a bit strange that a game from 2021 with all the advanced in cpu+gpu power still is more sluggish than a game from 1992 running on a 14Mhz machine with 2MB RAM...

I think Sensible soccer required just 7mhz and 512kb of ram when running from the floppy drive :)
Playing with word meanings, 'strange' is not right unfortunately, quite the opposite, indeed.
It is fairly typical in the whole computer and operating systems development history started when pc-ibm took over the amiga and the "let's optimize software that can run on actual hardware" paradigm switched to "You've to buy new hardware to run my software"...
So that today, to read a bunch of kilobytes of text out of the web before growing old, you need a bunch of gigaherts and a bunch of gigabytes of ram ^.^.
Sadly, not strange at all :/

Yeah you are right, memory told me that SS required a A1200 but I see now that they released both a ECS and a AGA version that explains it, everybody at our local computer club played Sensi on the A1200:s that we had there.

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