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The Artificial Life of the App Store
mikejuk writes "How does the Apple App Store actually work? What is the best strategy to employ if you want to get some users and make some money? There are some pointers on how it all works from an unusual source — artificial life. A pair of researchers Soo Ling Lim and Peter Bentley from University College London, set up an artificial life simulation of the app store's ecosystem. They created app developers with strategies such as — innovate, copy other apps, create useless variations on a basic app or try and optimize the app you have. What they found, among other things, was that the CopyCat strategy was on average the best. When they allow the strategies to compete and developer agents to swap then the use of the CopyCat fell to only 10%. The reason — more than 10% CopyCats resulted in nothing new to copy!"
Perhaps they can simulate how to make slashdot summaries make sense next?
Of course a copycat can be minimum efford maximum profit in a simplified model, but this strongly depends on the calculation of the fitness-function. I think it can be hard to match the real world fitness-function, because some of the factors that are relevant to an actual user are hard to calculate.
In my simulation the best strategy was to take 30% of everyone's revenues.
1% didn't trigger anything, it was just a marketing blurb. More relevant is that Occupy was never more than 0.0001% of the population so it died out.
1% thinking about whether gold or platinum toiletseats would looks best on they new yatch
98.9999% busy watching idols and/or making ends meet
0.0001% young and naive enough to think they could change anything....
It died out because not even hippies like to camp out in the winter. The current reboot of it is calling itself "The American Spring" or "the 99% spring" and they're back to protesting now that the weather is warm again.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I hope that healthcare you can afford results in malpractice and kills you, bourgie scum.
It died out because it was just a way for lazy people to moan for more money from the hardworking. Lazy people don't like to camp when it takes effort, you know, like in the winter.
I hope that healthcare you can afford results in malpractice and kills you, bourgie scum.
I live in a country that has universal health care, you unfortunate and sad excuse for a human being.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You make a great point.
Because nobody in the history of humanity has ever spent $748 in a single year ($64 a month) on a hobby before. EVER.
(You realize that your argument is equally retarded for the standard Open Source dev model, too, right?)
Gentlemen, we see here a textbook example of homo sapiens capitalus in it's natural environment: shortly to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Occupy had no idea what they were talking about, though. The rhetoric they aimed at "The 1%" was more realistically aimed at the "0.05% who have billions of dollars and live off their investment income." Most of "The 1%" is not living very differently from the protesters. MOST of "The 1%" is working a full time professional job, just like the protesters.
"The 1%" includes most *households* in the US with an income somewhere between $200-250k, which is easily achieved these days by a 2-professional household with a few years of industry experience in their respective fields. If you're a professional with 5+ years of experience, and your SO is as well, there's a good chance you're part of "The 1%." Even if you're not quite in the 200k range, if you have a "professional" job, you're almost certainly in the top 5%. Those people are certainly comfortable, but please, go find a professional couple and get them to tell you how much money they're wasting fueling their campfires with stacks of $100 bills.
The "1% vs 99%" rhetoric was primarily a way for unemployed, unemployable people with master's degrees in ancient roman handweaving techniques to bitch about how they weren't "getting their fair share," defined as "anybody who has more than I do owes me some of their money." If they really cared about solving the problem of corporate buyouts of government bodies, they wouldn't propose that centralizing more power and authority in the hands of the federal government (the very reason those gov't agencies have become takeover targets) was the solution.
I just wanted to know how strongly you clung to the "don't patronize reimplementors" mentality. The Tetris keiretsu has similar practices: copying someone else's concept to make Feevo while suing anyone else who sells a falling tetromino game. The problem here is that casual games tend to have so few core rules that the line between making an original game in the same subgenre and misappropriation of original expression is harder to discern. What do you think of Quadrapassel?
I'll believe it's a real protest movement when it targets Democrats and Republicans equally, because Democrats deserve at least as much blame for the current economic situation as anyone else.
But it has become pretty obvious that whatever you call it, the movement is financed by the left, complete with ACORN employees putting in their time. It's the same as MoveOn, supposedly a protest movement until the financiers behind it were exposed.
Try again. To be in the 1%, you must have an adjusted gross income of $343,927 which would probably equate to an unadjusted family income of over $400,000. Not easily achievable.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Not easily achievable.
Yea, in fact only about 1% of taxpayers are in the top 1%. Funny how that works out.
From the link you posted:
One percent of taxpayers reported almost 17% of all taxable income. But that same tiny group also kicked in 37% of all the taxes paid.
1% of the population is only paying 37% of the total income tax revenue collected by the government. Clearly they're parasites
Been to any technical conferences or colleges lately?
Not lately, but when I attended Rose-Hulman, I don't think I saw more than six Macs in dorms. Every student had the school-issued laptop, and it ran Windows.
Now you are making up $200 out of thin air.
MSRP for Windows 7 retail. (The OEM version isn't for Macs.)
If I were to use Linux, I'd have to use Wine, whose compatibility isn't really any greater than that of the Mac version of Wine as far as I know.
Clearly they're parasites
Why do you limit yourself to humans? Aren't corporations treated like persons? (oh, my apologies, I guess they indeed are treated better).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
In the two sample runs they show, the Innovator does well in one and the "Milker" with multiple redundant apps does well in the other. The "Optimizer" who improves their best app comes in second in both, and I'd wonder if that holds over a larger set of simulations.
I suspect that what might be more interesting is the standard deviation of ending positions over many runs.
fencepost
just a little off
The "not for profit" part of the previous post suggest he would not recoup his costs, nor would he expect to.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'll grant that point - my source attributed the 200-250k figure to 2003 census data, the numbers appear to have changed.
Point still remains: even 343k per year is not exactly "fuck you" money, where you light your illegal cuban cigars with $100 bills while hookers serve you cocaine from solid gold spoons. The majority of that 1% is still largely educated professionals - engineers, doctors, lawyers, and the like, and small business owners. Not fat cat ceo's drinking the blood of underage sweatshop workers imported fresh daily from China while they dine on Bald Eagle buffalo wings and Endangered Species shish kebabs.
And as somebody else noted, from your own source - that "parasitic" 1% is paying 37% of all federal tax receipts. Exactly how much more should that top 1% be paying, out of curiosity? Or let me ask it this way: assuming no political consequences for any changes you make, everybody accepts it and says "thanks for fixing the tax system" - what does your ideal "blue sky" tax system look like? Honest question, no hidden agenda or trap waiting to be sprung - I'm genuinely interested in hearing how you would fix the tax system, because I think it's very easy to say "those people who are not me need to pay more," but actually quite difficult to come up with an equitable system that doesn't require massive spending cuts or vastly higher tax rates on anybody middle-class-and-above.
I seem to recall reading that, in fact, the majority of the 1% were neither CEOs nor doctors, but instead in the financial sector. Clearly, some of the financial sector benefits society as a whole, whole other parts (HFT) are just parasites on the markets.
As for your comments the 1% paying 37% of the taxes, I don't support a flat tax system. I do believe that high earners should pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes. Finally, let's not forget that income taxes are not the only form of taxation. It is well known that the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in sales taxes than the wealthy do.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do find it abhorrent that people like Warren Buffet pay a lower proportion of their income in taxes than anyone else in their offices. Don't you?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They are not parasites. They are just lacking good accountants. Most rich people pay a far lower % of income tax than the man on the street, courtesy of tax minimisation planning and clever accountants.
It's at most $50 for VMWare, and then you use VMWare Converter to create a VM image from your current Windows OS install.
Provided that your existing Windows OS install is retail, not OEM. If it's OEM, the license is not transferable to your Mac's motherboard.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding, but where I come from, "not for profit" means that a business is privately held and reinvests all earnings back into the enterprise rather than distributing them to shareholders as dividends.
Actually, most of the 99%ers I know are equally pissed at the Democrats and a large number of them are Ron Paul supporters (or at least they are based on his official platform, not his actual voting history or beliefs.) Their biggest target isn't the political parties at all, but Wall Street speculators who caused the housing crash with their fantasy math and are currently in the process of speculating gas prices towards four dollars a gallon.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
And as somebody else noted, from your own source - that "parasitic" 1% is paying 37% of all federal tax receipts. Exactly how much more should that top 1% be paying, out of curiosity?
Their taxes should be based on the portion of society's fruits they enjoy, not on the portion of the population they comprise.
If they have 99% of the wealth, they should be paying 99% of the taxes. How hard is that to grasp?
Top 1% earned 17% of the taxable income, and payed 37% of federal tax receipts. (From the Kiplinger's article linked above).
So are we to assume that you'd support reducing their taxes to 17% of federal tax receipts, and issuing them an apology for making them pay far more taxes than they should have been for so long? And what will you say to the lower ends of the tax scale who are paying FAR less in taxes - do you support increasing their taxes, too? Or are you advocating cutting taxes on the top end, and then drastically cutting government spending as a result? Or running even larger deficits?
I'm not sure you've thought through your position, friend.
They're extracting value that would otherwise be lost to inefficiency and "friction" in the market. I'm not certain I'd declare them parasitic and unfit to exist - they serve a purpose, and there most definitely needs to be some oversight, but HFTs & algorithmic trading are not inherently evil (nor inherently good).
Indeed, and that's the main reason I wouldn't ever support a sales/consumption tax scheme - you either create a million loopholes for low-income people to avoid being overly taxed, or you penalize low-income households disproportionately. The former invites all kinds of games and idiocy to figure out ways for the rich to "appear low-income" on their tax returns, and the latter is monstrously unfair.
Well, there's the rub. Most of Warren Buffett's income is from investments, which are taxed at capital gains rates instead of income tax. Now, we COULD jack up the rates on investment income, but then you start squeezing the retirement savings of pretty much all of middle-class america who has a 401k or 403b - those are (will be) taxed as investment income when you start drawing down your retirement. Knowing that you'd be taxed at a higher-than-when-you-worked tax rate in retirement is... well, sort of a bummer. And would really destroy a lot of retirement plans. I'm not sure I find it "abhorrent," that he pays a lower percentage - the tax system is set up to encourage the rich to reinvest in businesses because that has proven time and again to be the key to economic growth. Doing something to discourage that investment is going to have a lot of unintended (and mostly negative) side effects.
You could also tie investment tax rate to AGI or some similar measure, but again, that's just going to prompt rich people to game the system to appear poorer on paper than they actually are.
What I find most obnoxious, honestly, is Warren Buffett thumbing his nose at the government, saying "you didn't take enough from me last year." If Mr. Buffett feels that he's underpaying on his tax return, he's perfectly capable of writing a very large check above and beyond his minimum due, but instead, he seems to prefer pointing out that he's paying very little, advocating tax increases, and then saying, "but I'm not paying another red cent until I'm required to by law." I'd have much more respect for his argument if he accompanied his op-eds with a rather large check to the IRS.
Actually, I said "society's fruits", specifically to avoid the weaselly term "taxable income". Poor billionaires, they pay an higher tax rate on the meager portion of their income they haven't been able to buy legislation declaring "untaxable".
You may assume that I am in favor of including capital gains, dividends, and all the other little hideyholes the pyramid-climbers use to avoid paying their fair share in "taxable income". Then, once everyone pays a tax proportional to their wealth, a dialog can be opened regarding the reduction of everyone's taxes.
There is an exception to be made for citizens who live below the poverty line- it is unreasonable to expect them to pay taxes. As the saying has it, you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
Billionaires who cry "life's not fair!" when they don't get the same tax-exemptions as people who live below the poverty line are pretty disgusting.
The problem with a an interpreted language like JavaScript is copy-catting of the source code. And not in a 'thanks to the author' way. Script kiddies know enough to change the colours and author tag of a clock applet. Then they publish it as their own work. So people looking for an clock with specific layout have to download 200 hundred versions of the same applet to discover the 201st applet is different.
Such plagiarism is another version of print-your-own-diploma. If script kiddies need credibility so badly, they can find a homeless cat/parrot/child!
As autonomous animals, we are selfish. But to build a society we need to co-operate. Game theory, largely deals with this contradiction. But there is a very simple generalization. Humans will cheat as much as, or frequently more than, they think is possible.
For instance: From general work (bludging/gold-bricking), from ethical behaviour (embezzlement, date-rape). But how much misbehaviour is too much? Usually people recognize when oneself is guaranteed to perform some act and react in a protective manner. So the trick is to keep the people around oneself guessing: Will oneself be honest or dishonest today? So one must be dishonest as possible but honest more times than dishonest. So the magic number is about one-third dishonesty, two-thirds honesty.
The next issue is the level of dishonesty. Example: Murder is unforgivable in most circumstances so we need to be less destructive than murder when acting dishonestly.
Not lately, but when I attended Rose-HulmanMSRP for Windows 7 retail. (The OEM version isn't for Macs.)
You had to go full retard...
Why would you buy that?
That would assume you have Windows applications already you'd like to run. Which means YOU ALREADY OWN A WINDOWS BOX YOU CAN KEEP USING!
Retard.
The secondary level of mental damage you exhibit, the one that has you going FULL retard, is knowing you CAN run OEM Windows 7 copies under virtualization but insisting people know or care what the license says. Pointing at a license means nothing, especially when as noted you are retarded and cannot understand it anyway.
I had to use the word "retard", but honestly you deserve it. The really sad thing is you will continue to post the same retarded notions in thread after thread after thread even after being corrected. That in the end, the inability to learn from your terrible mistakes, is what earns you the "retarded" label. Or at best, idiot savant since you can type.
I'll grant you the last response, I have done enough to prove to the casual reader of your mental deficiency so there's no further need to read or respond to whatever pours forth from you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's say I want to buy a copy of Windows, because it doesn't come with my Mac.
At this point there are very few people indeed that require a Windows license. There is almost no software you cannot have now on the Mac, and as noted at this point most students get macs as first computers anyway so migration is really moot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which means YOU ALREADY OWN A WINDOWS BOX YOU CAN KEEP USING!
Then please explain what you meant by the sentence "You need a computer anyway" in your previous comment. If we take for granted that one already owns a Windows box and is not selling it to afford the Mac, then the Mac is bought to run one application. Such an expense is perfectly justifiable for a day job, I'll grant, but tougher to explain to one's SO for a hobby-turned-business built with sweat equity in one's spare time. I will further grant that there is one situation where already owning a Mac is likely, namely someone who had fully switched to the Mac years ago. Our dispute appears to be how common this situation is comparing to already owning a Windows PC and no Mac.
So you use one weaselly term to avoid another weaselly term. How weaselly.
Let's assume then, that all income regardless of source is treated as taxable. Consider:
1) Capital gains taxes are only paid on income from investments, not total assets invested;
2) "regular folks" also pay capital gains taxes - more and more so since the ascendancy of Defined Contribution (401k, 403b) plans versus Defined Benefit (pension/annuity) plans; You going to start nailing somebody's 401k with a high tax rate, too? And if so, are you prepared to support a generation of paupers because they simply will not have the money to survive in retirement because the 10-25% more of their 401k income than they planned for is being devoured by taxes?
3) Declaring that people must pay tax based on "their wealth" suggests that you're going to start forcing rich people to sell a portion of their wealth off each year so they pay a certain amount of capital gains taxes - this means that, every year, the companies in which those investments are held will lose billions of dollars in investment capital as rich people sell off their stocks to pay their mandatory taxes-as-percentage-of wealth;
4) Loopholes will still abound, and armies of lawyers and accountants will STILL find a way to minimize the tax rates of the rich; Because paying a lawyer $150k / year to save you 20 million a year is still a good value;
5) If you only wish to tax income, then you can bet the very rich will find ways to minimize their taxable income by selling off their lagging stocks every year, as well, to make their taxable investment income much lower on paper than it actually is;
It's not as clear-cut as you seem to want it to be.
There is an issue too with what should be universally accessible. If one argues healthcare (as many do), as long as that is not included, it requires a progressive tax, as spending is essentially regressive as a % of income.
Similarly the same argument could be made for roads, and was essentially one, with toll roads being fee are far between compared to times of old (I drive on 2 former turnpikes in my 9 mile commute).
One could go extreme and argue everyone should have a car (chicken in every pot, car in every garage), if you assume that this should be true, you are either going to need to provide it via government, or have a progressive tax, so that more people can afford them.
Is personally see nothing wrong, or unethical about saying the cash strapped (even for very high definitions of cash strapped) pay a lower percentage of income, they can't afford higher, and that lower tax buys them more improvement in quality of life.
Something like a flat 20% (no deductions) on all income over median sounds reasonable to me, would probably grow revenue, or be neutral.
Note: I don't think everyone deserves a car, but that argument has been made, my point is simply that many things people are expected to have access to in a modern society (and those expectations can vary person to person) are things we are expected to earn for ourselves. Hitting the base leaves a lot less disposable income at the low end, the point of a progressive tax is to tax disposable income higher than the rest.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
One percent of taxpayers reported almost 17% of all taxable income. But that same tiny group also kicked in 37% of all the taxes paid.
1% of the population is only paying 37% of the total income tax revenue collected by the government. Clearly they're parasites
The problem with your argument is that "taxable income" is defined as income subject to income tax. It does not include income from capital gains or investments. If you included that income into the total, you would find that the "income" break point to enter the top 1% is considerably higher than ~$350k, and that they "earn" considerably more than 17% of total income.
Also, a more appropriate measure for this resource inequality discussion is probably wealth, and the numbers for wealth inequality are much more skewed.
The Times had estimated the threshold for being in the top 1 percent in household income at about $380,000, 7.5 times median household income, using census data from 2008 through 2010. But for net worth, the 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million, or 69 times the median household’s net holdings of $121,000.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, there's the rub. Most of Warren Buffett's income is from investments, which are taxed at capital gains rates instead of income tax. Now, we COULD jack up the rates on investment income, but then you start squeezing the retirement savings of pretty much all of middle-class america who has a 401k or 403b - those are (will be) taxed as investment income when you start drawing down your retirement.
No, 401(k) income is taxed as regular income when you withdraw it (assuming you don't withdraw early in which case you pay additional penalties). But given that Cap Gain rates are lower than income tax rates (and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future), most people would welcome the scenario you suggest.
If you are really smart, and make less than ~$100k, you would put in the maximum you can into a Roth IRA so that you pay the income tax up front and get your withdrawals tax free - you get to avoid all taxes on any gains your Roth investments make over then next 10-40 years.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
That's something a little more approximately reasonable, but as you know, the devil's in the details. Where do you set the breakpoint to say "Anything over this is taxable?" Ask a hundred people, and you'll get a hundred different answers - and those answers will probably take the form of something like, "Tax anything higher than Respondent's Current Income + 10%."
While I'm sensitive to the notion that low-income households can't afford to pay a lot in taxes, *everybody* should be making some contribution into the system. I'd like to see a system where low income households can choose: a nominal low income tax (e.g., 1%), performing community service (e.g., X hrs of community service over the course of a year = no taxes this year"), or participating in some sort of educational program (e.g., "if you're actively learning new skills to get yourself a better job and grow your income, we will cut you slack on your tax bill this year.")
Make these program unavailable to higher income households so you don't have stories like, "Warren Buffett spent 40 hours volunteering at a soup kitchen this year, and paid no taxes on his billions of dollars!", and make the income tax increase sharply above the median point, but I think going from "0% taxes under the median" to "20% above the median" is likely to cause some controversy: median US household income is (was) about $46k in 2006, and for a married-filing-jointly household, that's currently taxed in the 15% bracket. If you want to enact a flat tax, I think you'd have to go higher than median as the cutoff point. I'd much rather see the taxes increase in a stepped fashion, rather than a single flat tax, anyway, but flat tax would almost certainly have to apply to median + X% for it to be politically viable, and not send a whole lot of middle-class households into the lower class.
It seems my mod points ran out as I was reading your post, so I will comment to confirm this. If there is an app that is needed, I may download and try out the free or cheap apps, but will be more than happy to pay more for a non-buggy version that is supported. Various fields I have hobbies in such as RPGs and photography use various apps like PDF readers and model consent form apps. There are many free or cheap versions of both but word gets around pretty quickly on forums which ones are the best ones to get and we end up paying out $10-$20 for the ones that actually work. If somebody makes a good, creative app but doesn't support it, another person can come along, copy it, support it (thus cutting out the bugs and adding new features), and charge more money, and everybody ends up happy including the users.
I stand corrected - and I should have remembered that. As my only defense, it was late when I wrote that comment.
I thought median was a good defensible choice, no-matter what one makes (doesn't mean it's agreeable, just understandable).
But the ideal point on where will vary from person to person, not just on what people earn (self interest bias), but also on what people believe to be lower middle class lifestyle, and what is being provided for the money.
If healthcare (a regressive cost, $7k per person/ per year) were provided by government, then the income that starts getting taxed higher would be at a lower number, as it is greatly reducing a cost for people in the lower middle class bracket.
In a highly socialist system (with some capitalism), I would think a flat tax is fair, as if all basic needs are met, all income is disposable. At that point a progressive tax would have the sole purpose of wealth redistribution (which I am not trying to take a stance on).
I really like the idea of a simplified tax code, and think a flat tax with cost of living deduction is the way to go (or perhaps a cost of living refundable credit, allowing those at the very bottom to get a little extra). This is not because I believe in wealth redistribution, but because I believe that it's the disposable income that should be taxed, and it should be done so generally at a flat rate.
If I wanted wealth redistribution, I'd advocate a tax on wealth (not income).
The poor are paying into the system by working for so little, that's a big plus to society too.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg