MooseBoys

@[email protected]

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MooseBoys,

Not really a problem with UDP itself, but with some very old protocols like DNS that rely on UDP but can’t be changed because of compatibility. If you’re writing a new service that uses UDP, there’s nothing stopping you from designing it so that it doesn’t provide an opportunity for bandwidth amplification.

MooseBoys,

The fact that most universities will graduate CS majors without ever teaching them how to use a debugger, build system, or version control system shows how useful they are to actual engineering work.

MooseBoys,

I don’t understand how this is getting approved.

Because you get promoted for changing things, not for keeping things the same. Almost every change like this is motivated by someone trying to get promoted.

MooseBoys,

ich_lel on the front page - time for bed!

MooseBoys,

deleting someone’s entire git history

Based on the image text this is for new accounts only. My account has neither phone nor credit card and I’ve not been asked to re-verify. Maybe they’re having problems with bots at the moment.

MooseBoys,

I thought Fight Club was a boxing movie and had no interest in seeing it. I only saw it because I tried downloading Jackass on Kazaa and it ended up being Fight Club. The intro had me hooked.

MooseBoys,

Pascal’s little-known friend Luigi’s wager.

MooseBoys,

This is brilliant. Definitely going to try this tomorrow.

MooseBoys,

”On a scale of 1 to 10, how often do you think about killing yourself?”

“Uhhh… 3?”

”That’ll be $40”

MooseBoys,

Not only that - they’re dying in the street immediately adjacent to vacant luxury condos.

MooseBoys,

A good pair of pliers, like the Knipex Cobra.

MooseBoys,

Textures have been the biggest size contributor by far for a while.

MooseBoys,

It seems silly to be distrustful of proprietary BIOS firmware without having the same skepticism of the actual hardware.

MooseBoys,

No one makes christmas lists that are short like Gaston!

MooseBoys,

Least helpful debugging duck.

MooseBoys,

Keto excludes high-carb foods like bread which almost never contribute to a person’s essential vitamin, mineral, and protein intake. Vegan, on the other hand, excludes plenty of foods that are common sources of essential nutrients and especially protein.

It’s obviously possible to be malnourished on any diet, but if you take a normal healthy diet and exclude keto-unfriendly items, it will almost certainly still be a healthy diet. If you did the same for vegan-unfriendly items, on the other hand, you’d almost certainly have an unhealthy diet without consciously finding suitable vegan replacements.

MooseBoys,

3 nanometer

That’s a silicon lattice just six atoms thick. What a time to be alive!

MooseBoys,

Wow, I had no clue. TIL

MooseBoys,

TIL a single T-72B3 costs less than $2M.

MooseBoys,

A pig with horns holding up two dancing penguins.

MooseBoys, (edited )

They’ve built a library of small building blocks for character movements. These blocks can be combined in various ways to create a wide range of animations. … Instead of designing separate animations for each of these situations, they use these building blocks to put together the character’s movements naturally.

This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.

Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.

Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:

attributes can include conditions, properties, events, flags, graphs, values, references, and variants

MooseBoys,

I work in patents. If it wasn’t novel it wouldn’t be granted, believe me.

I work in computer graphics software. My former employer preferred that engineers liberally apply for “defensive” patents because of how often people would get a patent for something we already did and then try to sue us for it. Plus we got a small cash bonus when our patents were approved. Through this process, I was granted six patents for my work there. It would be unwise to put something to text that could be used as evidence to invalidate the patents, so I’ll just say that my opinion on how low the bar is to getting software patents approved is definitely well-informed.

understanding the law and understanding how to assess novelty in a proper way

I’ll admit I have little understanding of the legal definition of “novel”, but insofar as the intent of the patent system, the current bar is way too low for software patents. Although remedied recently, the plethora of software patents that still exist for “(Something people have done for decades) but do it on a computer” is ridiculous.

MooseBoys,

It’s definitely possible they’re doing something novel internally, but the details that would support that interpretation are missing from the filing. One of the requirements for patents is that it “sufficient disclosure of the invention so that it can be reproduced by others”. I would say I qualify as an expert in the domain covered, and I have no idea what they’re actually doing based on the patent alone.

MooseBoys,

If it was something you already did prior to filing and you could prove it then their case would be extremely flimsy

A brief search shows a variety of publications that seem to do what is described by the patent:

…siggraph.org/…/neural-animation-layering-for-syn…

advances.realtimerendering.com/…/index.html

www.cs.ucdavis.edu/…/correlationMapsEG07.pdf

docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimationLayers.html

MooseBoys,
  1. A locomotion system for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: a rendering engine; a core system logic communicatively coupled to the rendering engine for executing core game logic of the virtual environment …

This is basically a description of a game engine that supports movement and animation. Descent (1994) would be the earliest production use of such an engine.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a key identifies one or more variables of the blackboard, the key comprising a human readable name associated with the variables to provide the selection criteria.

Congratulations, you just described “variables”, a concept at least as old as ENIAC (1945).

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the core game logic defines one or more desired physical movements to sequence the motion type objects blocks.

Yes, that’s one way to describe “animation”

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines a fallback archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.

Variables having a default value is the default behavior of most programming languages and software systems.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block defines the character’s default animation.

Yea, we’re talking about animation here. Default value of animation description = default animation.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected archetype block of the character is unique from a second archetype block of a second character and at least one motion type block is common across the character and the second character.

Inheritance, a property of most software designs since the 1980s.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks is defined by a series of extensible markup language (XML)-based meta files.

Storing configuration in a data file. You’d be hard pressed to find an alternative. Maybe some genius will come along and find some way to represent it in JSON…

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein a selected attribute of a selected motion animation block includes at least one of a clip set that is used by a selected motion of the character, an overloadable animation blend tree to be used for the selected motion, named additional clips within specific clip sets, parametric blends from sets that can be named, a Boolean that specifies whether play speed of the selected motion can be modified, a minimum speed, and a maximum speed.

This seems to be the main claim of the patent, but seems to have a huge amount of prior art (see links). “Parametric blends” and other terms are just jargon.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, wherein the attributes of the motion animation block are custom float values.

Oh my god. Really? Shall we also include “doubles”, “halfs”, or maybe “rationals”?

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising one or more transition tables to control a relationship between motion animation blocks.

“Translation table” seems to just be referring to the graph topology of the system. Yes, graphs are the most common way to represent arbitrary N:M relationships.

  1. The locomotion system of claim 1, further comprising an in-game graphical user interface for real-time modification of at least one of the motion animation blocks, the motion type blocks, and the archetype blocks.

Node-based editing; standard practice in all 3D modeling.

  1. A computer-implemented method for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …

Yes, you already described what a game engine is and an animation system is. Game engines certainly do have animation systems…

  1. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.

Picking animation keys based on game logic. What else would you base it on exactly?

  1. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.

Yes, default values do be defaultin’.

  1. A computer program product for controlling animation of a character in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment, the computer program product including a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a device to cause the device to perform a method comprising: executing core game logic to render the virtual environment using a core system logic communicatively coupled to a rendering engine …

Yep, software sure does run on computers. Computers are neat. And they have storage.

  1. The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a second archetype block, the common set of motion type objects blocks and the motion animation blocks of the second archetype block altering the animation of the character as a game story defined by the core game logic develops.

Are we really going to enumerate all the permutations of engine + animation + defaults claims?

  1. The computer program product of claim 15, wherein said animating the character further comprises identifying a fallback archetype block of the archetype block, the fallback archetype block defining at least one new motion animation block or motion type block not present in the selected archetype block and inheriting any remaining motion type objects blocks and motion animation blocks from the selected archetype block.

I guess we are…

MooseBoys, (edited )

All the claims except 8 are “obvious” IMO. Claim 8 fails novelty because of the huge amount of prior art on the matter.

Note that I’m using “novelty” and “obvious” according to their english definitions, and the intent of patent protection. If they’re different in practice, that’s a failing of current patent law.

For reference, here’s what I would consider to be a “good” software patent: patents.justia.com/patent/6721362

MooseBoys,

Good thing we still have Keanu.

MooseBoys, (edited )

Alien (1986), not to be confused with the first installment of the series, Alien (1979) or its subsequent third, Alien 1 (1992).

1, the story of King Leonidas’s foolish attempt to take on the entire Persian army by himself (Runtime: 3 minutes).

One Shade of Grey, the story of one man’s quest to change the industry standard Pantone color palette.

MooseBoys,

Just don’t force me to drive into your downtown office with paid parking that’s often full just to sit at a desk and video-conference with people halfway across the country in the name of some misguided “return to office” mandate.

MooseBoys,

It’s often difficult to find meeting rooms with enough space, so sometimes all you can do is have everyone get their own 1-person phone room. Meeting in someone’s office isn’t a thing because nobody has personal offices anymore - it’s all “open concept” bullshit.

MooseBoys,

Top Gun Maverick did it perfectly IMO.

MooseBoys,

The lack of breaks is the main reason I don’t see movies in theaters anymore.

MooseBoys,

I have 7 trees on my property. If you pay me $700 I’ll promise not to cut them down for five years, and you can subtract 35 tons of CO2 from your environmental balance sheet.

That’s how carbon offsets work. They’re bullshit.

MooseBoys,

Blocked by my employer’s security policies.

MooseBoys,

Wait, you’re telling me poop screams aren’t normal?

MooseBoys,

Insurers aren’t really to blame here. Florida is a fundamentally high-risk place to build and live now, and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future due to climate change. Even a non-profit insurer would need to price Florida insurance at a premium, lest its funds be exhausted when the inevitable category-6 hurricane hits the state.

Arguably the ones most to blame (after the fossil fuel industry, for putting us in this position in the first place of course) is corrupt politicians and developers who allow such shoddy construction in the state in the first place.

MooseBoys,

I was using cat6 as a stand-in for “all the bad stuff”. There’s never been a category 6 hurricane before.

How Ubuntu Linux snuck into high-end Dell laptops (and why it's called 'Project Sputnik') (www.zdnet.com)

Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying...

MooseBoys,

I think it’s more like “snuck up on us” than any kind of nefarious connotation. Kind of like “how did a niche game like BG3 sneak into the top ten games list”?

MooseBoys,

I had a linux 5520 and it was terrible. Standby and bluetooth never worked properly. Are the new models any better?

MooseBoys,

Are you certain it’s actually safe? There was a recent attack in which multiple Steam publisher accounts were hijacked to spread malware.

MooseBoys,

Just read both Al Jazeera and The Jerusalem Post and take the average.

MooseBoys, (edited )

720kph is 5 seconds per km. I would guess there’s a time step interval of 5 seconds on the device, and for some reason instead of properly recording or using the timestep of the last km checkpoint, it just used T-1, resulting in 1km / 5 seconds = 720kph.

MooseBoys, (edited )

Disabled need not apply.

MooseBoys, (edited )

I object to your implied assertion that the intersection of the sets “computer nerds” and “hot women” is the empty set.

MooseBoys,

I think you meant IAbstractBlahBlahManagerFactoryControlBeansHandlerFactoryFactory6ProxyHandlerAsync_Compat3, and of course its test counterpart, IAbstractBlahBlahManagerFactoryControlBeansHandlerFactoryFactory6ProxyHandlerAsync_Compat3::FakeMockVirtualDeviceTestManagerBeansFactory2_HACK_DO_NOT_USE

MooseBoys,

I don’t think there were any computers designed for K-12 schools at the time. They were PowerMacs, and later, iMacs. They weren’t even set up for multi-user; they were just unlocked all the time.

Samsung joins Google in RCS shaming Apple (www.theverge.com)

Samsung has released a new video in support of Google’s #GetTheMessage campaign which calls for Apple to adopt RCS or “Rich Communication Services,” the cross-platform protocol pitched as a successor to SMS that adopts many of the features found in modern messaging apps… like Apple’s own iMessage.

MooseBoys, (edited )

but I have WhatsApp and signal and like 19 other apps that offer messaging

That’s the problem. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Americans seem to be quite averse to downloading a new app or signing up for a new service just to communicate with someone if I have their phone number. As a result, it needs to be supported by default on all phones as shipped. Today, the only thing that fits that is SMS.

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