Reunions, Patents, and Gaming

After a semester scattered to the winds, our little group is (mostly) back together. Well, we're at least all in the same Country, and mostly in the same state. Larom has returned from his semester abroad, spent mostly in Switzerland. My internship has ended, and so I have returned home as well. And while our adventures elsewhere will be missed, it is good to be back with the group. Though it's a kind of bittersweet reunion. What with the school year ended, people are moving back home and or graduating. Both Karen, Kate, and Stefanie Walked this weekend. Both Kate and Karen will be sticking around Blacksburg for a while yet, however. Karen will be getting her Masters at tech before she goes on to teach. Kate needs to finish up a few classes and will be an official graduate with me in December. Stefanie will go on to get her PhD in Bio-Chemistry at Duke. It will be sad to not have her around as much, but we all wish her the very best. And we will of course all come and crash at her place without telling her ahead of time. =P And of course, she will never leave the Comedity team, and will continue to hang out with our comic counterparts, even if we can't hang out in person.

One of the great headaches that CCi (the design firm I was interning with) faced was Patent protection issues. Hardly a day seemed to go by when one of our projects wasn't confounded, made more complicated, derailed, delayed, or aggravated because of patent infringement issues. Most of the time, it was a patent held by Black&Decker. In a vaguely related issue, Sony has had some legal troubles lately in selling PS2 consols in the US. For those who don't already know, it seems that the vibration mechanism in the PS2 controlers is a technology patented by a US company, Immersion. It appears that Sony developed the technology in-house before Immersion did, but didn't get a US patent on it, which is why they left it up to the courts to decide whether or not they were truly infringing on Immersion's technology. Well, the court found that they were, and fined Sony a fair bit. But the outcome isn't what I really care about, it's the bizzar world of patents that we find ourselves in. Patents don't transfer from country to country, and there isn't a single "international patent." The process to get one is long, tedious, and all too often rediculously broad patents are granted. For instance, one company has a patent on the .jpg file format, another has a patent on power tool chargers that are smaller than the battery itself, the list just goes on and on. And you wonder how these kinds of broad sweeping patents are alowed. The notion of the patent, protecting one's work and ensuring that [i]you[/i] the inventor gets the rewards for your work, is a good one. However, frequently patents wind up stiffling creativity, and adding levels of complication to devices that would otherwise be far simpler. And for the record, design patents are almost completely useless. You can get around a design patent by just changing how the product looks, which is of course, all that's being patented in a design patent. Technology patents, however, are harder to work around. I don't have a clever solution for the patent issue, and many people don't think it is one. But it is quite annoying at times, and I just thought I should say so.

I am not a consol person. I have never owned a gaming consol, and I may never own one. The kind of games I enjoy have always been best on the PC, and that's how I like them. No mater how you slice it, any First Person Shooter is a better game play experience on the PC than it is on a consol. This is my mouse, there are many like it but this one is mine.... Far better than those damn thumb sticks. I did finally find out how to adjust the sensitivity in Halo 2 (just because I don't own a consol, doesn't mean I haven't played on one), and on it's highest setting ("insane" I believe is the label) it roughly approximates how sensitive my mouse is for most FPS games (which is about less than half the maximum sensitivity). No wonder manuvering MasterChief feels like driving a cow. But I digress. I've never been a consol guy, but the Xbox 360 is probably the first consol that is legitimately sexy. Yes, the PSP is sexy too, but it's a hand-held. I've been tempted to by both simply because of their design. I may never play them, but damn if they aren't sexy designs.

Oh, and I'm going to be at the beach this week with Karen (hence the comic, this time exploring what else the inside of Garth's head can look like), and there are some nice close up shots behind the vote buttons. Clicky Clicky.

Welcome to the Comedity. Don't step on the Penguin.
Garth (Sunday - May 15, 2005) -00:03:55