Looks like it's not vaporware

[Zeus]

I checked this thing out at E3 2004 and haven't heard much about it since. Didn't even know it was already released in the UK. Looks like it's coming out here in August. Made by Tiger, BTW, the company that did all those little LCD handheld games and the Game.com, if I'm not mistaken

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/07 ... 28714.html

[SineSwiper]

Heh, the only vaporware I know of is Duke Nukem Forever and the Phantom console. What in the hell is "predictive text"?

[Nev]

At E3, Andrew Vestal was telling me about how there's a website somewhere devoted to showing what games and consoles have been proposed, developed, released, and become obsolete while Duke Nukem Forever has been in production. I thought that was moderately funny.

Oh, and predictive text is, for example, when you use ITAP or T9 for your cell phone and it guesses the word you want based on typing 2-9 instead of numbers. You know, like how 2 is abc, 3 is def, etc, but you don't have to hit each number until the letter you want shows up - you can hit 2-3 and it'll guess "be" automatically, since it's the only English word that you can make out of those letter combinations.

[SineSwiper]

Oh, and predictive text is, for example, when you use ITAP or T9 for your cell phone and it guesses the word you want based on typing 2-9 instead of numbers. You know, like how 2 is abc, 3 is def, etc, but you don't have to hit each number until the letter you want shows up - you can hit 2-3 and it'll guess "be" automatically, since it's the only English word that you can make out of those letter combinations.

Oh, I had that on my old Nokia phone. I thought it was great. That shit is copyrighted? That blows. Probably the reason why it's not on my current phone. Seems like it's akin to copyrighting spell check.

[Kupek]

And in March, the Board of Regents of the University of Texas filed a <i><b>copyright</b></i> infringement action against the company claiming that predictive text software used in the Gizmondo infringes on a <i><b>patent</b></i> held by the University.

Whoops.

[Nev]

Hey, they're game journalists. With a few of my last experiences at E3 meeting a few wannabe game journalists, we ought to be glad the article didn't start out "Suck ass electronics maker gets sued by hick university". If there's only one relatively minor factual error in the article, I think they're doing well.

Not to say there aren't a few good ones out there (Andrew Vestal comes to mind), but some of the guys I met at E3 were a little sketchy.

And to respond to your post, Sine, I actually dunno what I think about software patents. One of the developers at one of the E3 panels I went to said "software patents are a bad idea", and I don't know if I agree completely, but I'm sure I do at least partially. I think copyrighting specific code instances or programs is great - you can't let people rip off your code verbatim - but patenting seems like a grant of monopoly power that seems that it might not be as necessary in the software industry and might stifle innovation if a new and innovative technology.

If some organization or individual worked asses off creating something innovative that, say, Microsoft or other companies with loose ethics were likely to glom onto, pour a lot of money into, and monopolize the market on, I could see how a patent or a year or two might be indicated, but otherwise it seems like it stifles the use of technologies that could benefit society as a whole.

Andrew "wow I'm getting socialist these days" Seidman

[SineSwiper]

It's a problem of outdated time limits for patent laws that were designed at a time when innovation wasn't occuring so fast. There's no point to patenting something for every 10 years with software. That's pure death to innovation.

It's not like somebody inventing a fork or a telephone or an airplane. Those technologies progress very slowly. Hell, just look at our 150-year-old toilet, almost completely unchanged. Software progresses mindnumbingly fast. It's a bane to software's progression to allow patents to last more than, say, 2-3 years.

[Nev]

Agreed. Do software patents last ten years? I'm going to look into how to lobby to change that...