Redhat exceeded its own expectations. Nice but hardly surprising since I'm sure there is a margin of safety in the expectations they set for themselves. The question is now, are they making money yet? The answer is still no, but they are losing less money per share than they were a year ago.
This just doesn't seem like a sterling endorsement to me. Hey we still haven't made dime one, but were losing less money than we thought we would. This coupled with the fact that much of redhats customer base was probably now defunct tech companies doesn't fill me with enthusiasm. The information revolution is, in many ways, almost over and where is their steady income going to come from now?
The internet information revolution was just that, a revolution. It completely changed how many things are done, like stock market trading for instance. These were revolutionary changes in that things changed fast and what came about was nothing like what was in place previously.
Now it appears that the revolution is for the most part over, at least in the US. We are left to develop and improve on what we already have. This is an evolutionary process of gradual improvement. This will continue , in general, until the next big revolutionary change and the cycle will repeat itself.
In short major innovations are uncommon, gradual improvement is the norm. Welcome back to normal.
Ummm I hate to tell you but Roddenberry wasn't exactly a conservative. In fact much of the liberalness of Star Trek flows from the fact that most of Roddenberries original philosophies that he based Star Trek on were fundamentally flawed. You can't run a government like the Federation.
Step One: Read your employment contract and if there is any area you are not sure of, talk to a lawyer about it. If what you are doing in your free time is close enough to what you do for a living, your employer may actually already own it. Its called an invention and innovation clause I think. It depends on your contract though so find out. The end result is by selling this to your client you may be breaking your contract and even committing a crime.
Step Two: Consult a lawyer anyway. Get him to confirm what you think is going on in your contract. This may get down to legal wrangling in the end and he will have specific advice for you that is far better than what you can get on Slashdot.
If at this point you find out that you don't actually legally own this then you are screwed and just wasted a whole lot of your free time. Sorry but it pays to know your contractual obligations.
Step Three: If you are the true owner of your work (sounds funny saying it that way but it is true) then for God sake finish it fast. Take a vacation now, before you have to do anything on your employers version of this. Refuse to do anything or even hear anything on this project from your employer. Even talking about things may give him cause to try to take ownership. Build up a suitable level of deniability.
If necessary explain what is going on to your employer. Tell him that he doesn't own this contractually and that you refuse to compromise yourself. Let him know that you have already talked to a lawyer. Give him the lawyers name if he asks it. If your employer is smart, chances are he will want to avoid the court system too if you are in the right. Especially if you are ahead of him in the process.
It might be a good idea to talk to your clients too. See if they will give you help since its in their best interest as well.
The 6000 year part is only for some creationists not all. The evolutionists need a very long timescale to make evolution plausible but the creationists do not. Therefore evolutionists have believed in a very old earth even before they had anything to back it up.
BTW a favorite tactics of young earth creationists is to take a rock that is known to be only 20 years old (say from an lava flow on Mt. St. Helens) and have it dated using the normal techniques. The scientists then tell them that this rock is X million years old. The creationists smile and nod and note that the scientists using "reliable" techniques were almost always between 5 to 8 orders of magnitude off. Then they take the same rock somewhere else and get a completely different number.:)
In short don't be smug because for millenia scientists knew the earth was flat or any number of other wrong things.
Actually the lightning strikes are used to get the acids in the first place, not to get the acids into proteins and the protiens into organized cells. This was shown in a pretty famous experiment whose name unfortunately escapes me. We really don't know how abiogenesis works or, to satisfy creationists (like me), whether it is capable of happening at all.
I hate to be the voice of the devils advocate, but we need a lot more than animo acids to show that there is life on other worlds. Simple organic chem experiments show that given the right elements, its pretty easy to get animo acids. Finding them is actually no big surprise.
The hardest part of the whole abiogenesis equation that we need is the formation of simple life from its ubiquitous amino acid building blocks. We essentially need some way for the building blocks to logically result in the creation of a castle through either random collisions or some other mechanism. This is the difficult part and some advances have been made in looking at organic chemistry in Zero-G. The problem is that we are still orders of magnitude away from getting a living and more importantly reproducing cell that natural selection requires for further evolution.
In short, don't count your eggs before their hatched because we still have a long way to go. We really don't know how abiogenesis occured on earth yet, so to start saying that its occuring all over the universe may be a bit of a stretch.
Ummm, ok I can understand the whole vacuum forming thing. Its cheap as industrial processes go and give you a good surface finish on one side, but why do you have to build a body cast of yourself? A simple manniquin (sp?) of similar approximate size should do. I'm betting the movie suits don't require the actors to undergo this. In fact I'm sure of it since they used the same suits on two sets of actors, one set for the Original ANH and another set for the extra scenes in the Special Edition. A full plaster body cast seems pretty unnecessary to me.
The US government currently uses military R&D to fund a wide variety of necessary developing technology fields. One of these is composites. If this field wasn't getting military money it would either be underfunded. In short military R&D spending is not confined to military applications. The technology used to build much of the next generation of tanks for the US military will also build much of the next generation of buses for US public transportation.
Adding glue will not necessarily make them more fragile, it will in fact make probably make them tougher in the material science and engineering sense of damage resistance. It will make them weaker (lower specific strength) and probably more flexible (lower specific stiffness).
As someone how works with composites I would like to take this time to point out of few things to the less experienced and therefore point out why a "self-healing" composite of this type is not really that advantageous.
Composites are used mostly because they have superior specific strengths and stiffnesses to more conventional materials like metals. This means that you can make something out of composites do the same job as something out of steel but have it be significantly lighter. This is usually a big advantage.
Composites also have superior fatigue characteristics to most metals. Fatigue occurs because cracks grow in a material as it is loaded cyclicly. Except steel most metals to not have infinite fatigue life. If you have an aluminum bar that takes 10000 lbs to break in one shot, but you load it cyclically at 2000 lbs, eventually this bar will break. Composites don't have much of a problem in fatigue however because cracks end up hitting material interfaces as they try to grow. A crack can only grow so far before it hits a fiber and to move on it has to break this fiber which is pretty difficult. In short if you put a composite sample into a machine to do fatigue tests on it, it is not uncommon for the metal fatigue machine to break before the composite sample does.
Why is all this important? Because this "self-healing" ability is only good for small cracks and it has inferior material properties to a non-healing composite. It helps stop fatigue which is not a big problem in composites anyway. What composites need is a self-healing ability that can cure delaminations and other large scale failures in the composite. This will be important an big news because it is the introduction of large scale problems within a composite that causes the most damage in composites.
If you are open source then your competitors which are using your code must be, by definition and legal license, open source as well. Therefore they will have player mods just like you and the sum of their players will certainly be more than yours so your competitors as a whole will have more of an advantage with a grass roots player mod movement. Yeah, yeah, you've got the innovative reputation but your opponents are cheaper so players may go with helping out the cheaper server to get the best of both worlds in terms of cost and game play.
Anyway I still think a better choice for games design will always be closed source development with good server scripting abilities for possible player mods. Maybe release a small multiplayer server package capable of supporting a few individuals who want to roleplay. Small enough that you can't consider it an MMPORPG anymore so it won't cut into your market. You should be able to carve out a good two years of use without significant competition, during which time you can still be creating the next generation game instead of being trapped in a short-term constant upgrade path in order to maintain your customer base.
Anyway I think we have to agree to disagree because this discussion doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Thanks for the distraction from my dreary hum-drum existence.:)
AOL survives on ease of implementation not on community. Everyone I know who has ever been on AOL started there because it was an easy place to get started. They all left AOL when they realized they were paying too much for what they were getting.
The problem with your model is that many people will go with a cheaper alternative than your bleeding edge game. The services your competitors provide will be essentially subsidized by your own efforts. It is substantially cheaper to reimplement your work than to develop it themselves. Your business model will be inherently more expensive than theirs because you must work harder than them to stay ahead. This is assuming you don't make a mistake and allow them to catch up. Once that happens your business model fails entirely.
Now if you offer your work as Closed Source, then they have to essentially reverse engineer every new thing you do. This expensive unlike simply giving your innovations away for free in OS development.
In short, running a business is much like fighting a war. You want to be able to win definitively and then exploit that, not consistantly scrape by fighting with attrition. You want the fight to be as lopsided as possible because it allows you to make the most profits and that is what business is all about.
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 2
Rampant deregulation of narcotics has a habit of creating a drug epidemics, see 19th century China. History is actually pretty unclear as what is the best way to combat drug abuse.
Yes but it is during the "slacking off" phase that you make the majority of your profits because it does take as much effort to stay on top once you get there. Under your model you breed competition for yourself, not necessarily a good thing. Besides any strictly coding improvement can be almost instantly implemented by your competitors with little to no cost to them. Since you have to stay the innovator to keep on top, you end up spending the majority of the development money and reaping few benefits for it.
Having to constantly work harder than your competition is not a recipe for success.
Counting on a good "community" to keep your customer base is nice, but how long will that last if you have to charge more than your competitors because you are forced into the role of innovator? Don't bet your business on intangibles like "community."
I have seen a lot of posts basically saying this: "The Drug War is a failure and it historically never works, we should just legalize everything as save ourselves the money." Question: Does legalizing everything work either?
Alright, drugs are legalized. What happens? First and foremost, drugs get relatively cheap and most likely get weaker. The hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, who were basically created by regulation, become less widespread. The system becomes less violent because there aren't as many profits to be made. No more drug related shootings in the streets, because the street gangs need to do something else to make their cash. These are the good things.
The bad things? Drug use skyrockets. Lots more users, more addicts, more overdoses, more everything. The barrier to entry is now practically nil so lots of people use pharmaceuticals recreationally. The smart individuals stop after a while when they get tired of it or realize its taking over their lives. The stupid or short-sighted progress to harder drugs and the problems for them escalate. So after about five years the problem will got from a serious criminal problem before deregulation to a serious public health problem afterwards.
In short deregulation is not as simple as it sounds. You could quite possibly end up with a culture reminiscent of mainland china at the turn of the 20th century. Chronic opium use was characteristic of over 30% of the society. How did they finally combat it? The Communists began summarily executing the opium users, providers, and everything else in the whole system. They started and won a Drug War.
So deregulation is trading a huge expensive criminal problem for a huge expensive social problem. The deregulation of liquor did not destroy alcoholism did it? It just brought it back out in the open. I will admit that the war on drugs is a fiasco, but will deregulation be any better?
My guess is no. It will demarginalize the problem and create an epidemic. If we are to really stop the problem of drug use we will need to start going for its throat at the source suppliers instead of biting off its fingers in the distribution networks.
Alright, I'm making an OS MMORPG. I make my money off subscription sales. Question: How do I secure my business model? What is to prevent a million people from copying me and destroying my customer base?
If everyone has access to the client and server code then anyone can run a server that can afford the hardware etc. I don't expect the hardware to be a big barrier to entry for that much longer though because its getting progressively cheaper.
In short, your business model would work for about a year or two. Maybe three if you don't release your server code (since you don't have to because it isn't actually distributed). Then other similar services will be up and probably as good as yours. They will also be cheaper since they didn't have to pay the original development costs for the software and you did. Suddenly your customer base has been cut a million different ways and your revenue drys up. You lose.
Its simple, because 3D engines aren't the expensive part! Games have 4 times the numbers of artists and various other creative talent than programmers. The programmers themselves are really just a pretty small part. Thats why there are so few OS games. Because game production is a manufacturing process not a service process like so much network gear is. Its relatively easy to write the server, etc. but the art and plot of the game is the creative and expensive bottleneck.
True these things haven't been patented, but most if not all of them are protectively licensed ala the GPL, BSDL, whatever. Do you honestly think there would be a linux in its current incarnation if not for these licenses? Without the legal protection to make sure that the work was not subsumed by a corporate entity for free I doubt that these things would exist in their present forms.
Real objects are patented for just the same reason. To make sure that you have control over the ideas you have developed. This allows you to make a profit while developing the next big patentable discovery.
Uhmm... Just an aside, but Carrie Fisher made a living for a while as a script editor like this. She's written a best selling novel (Postcards from the Edge) which was made into a movie. Its quite possible she's a better writer than many of the minds behind Star Wars.
Actually it looks like the effect is localized to the muscle or muscle groups hit. This is bad since being shot in the chest by this thing will probably only immobilize the muscles being directly effected. This means the gunman can quite possibly still shoot you because you didn't hit the right muscle groups with the immobilizer. So its probably not as useful as it sounds.
I have not seen this movie yet, but I intend to before it leaves theatres. That said I would like to say this:
Frankly being offended because someone stole something from Star Wars is laughable. Why? Because Star Wars is almost completely stolen from other places itself. The pod race is stolen from Ben Hur. The whole setting is essentially stolen from a dozen fantasy/fairy tales. Darth Vader is a black knight. The Emperor is an evil wizard. It goes on and on. Get the picture? Star Wars is a fantasy movie dressed up as a space opera. Do not blame an actual fantasy movie from drawing from its fantasy roots and coming out similar.
Also, do not criticise the movie for "copying Ep 1". This movie was written ten years ago, thats before Lucas started writing episode 1. Hence any coincidence between the plots (such as they are) of ep 1 and D&D are almost certainly due to working in parallel not due to "theft".
In short, just because Star Wars and D&D have many of the same characters and plot twists does not mean the D&D is intended as a copy of Star Wars. Both are movies deliberately making use of standard fantasy architypes. They should have many things that are similar.
Quality control has interesting problems in the computer industry. The issue is this, what happens if something breaks? In the case of a standard PC, not much. You lose time and lose money but in the end no one is hurt or dies. Plus with the companies declaring that they aren't liable for the reliability of their products in their licensing, nothing can be done to make them liable for the cost of this lost time and money. Hence the computer industry isn't changing, especially sice consumers have aquired a tolerance for Windows crashing occasionally. Some sort of large scale legal argument for making software and hardware companies liable for their work might be nice though.
Also comparing a computer to a VCR is a false comparison. In terms of equipment and design, a computer is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a VCR with significantly more and more complex moving parts like the various components of the disk drives. The truth is that computers are assembled by computer companies but the parts are much more frequently built by someone else down the line. If a part breaks it is more likely its manufacturers fault not Dells. This is also not quite true for VCRs or toaster ovens.
I also find it interesting that the author spends most of the last page of the article complaining about his Dell laptop and how crappy their tech support was. I think I'm seeing his personal motivation for this piece. Nice to see someone scratching his itch.
Slashdot Mirror
Redhat exceeded its own expectations. Nice but hardly surprising since I'm sure there is a margin of safety in the expectations they set for themselves. The question is now, are they making money yet? The answer is still no, but they are losing less money per share than they were a year ago.
This just doesn't seem like a sterling endorsement to me. Hey we still haven't made dime one, but were losing less money than we thought we would. This coupled with the fact that much of redhats customer base was probably now defunct tech companies doesn't fill me with enthusiasm. The information revolution is, in many ways, almost over and where is their steady income going to come from now?
The internet information revolution was just that, a revolution. It completely changed how many things are done, like stock market trading for instance. These were revolutionary changes in that things changed fast and what came about was nothing like what was in place previously.
Now it appears that the revolution is for the most part over, at least in the US. We are left to develop and improve on what we already have. This is an evolutionary process of gradual improvement. This will continue , in general, until the next big revolutionary change and the cycle will repeat itself.
In short major innovations are uncommon, gradual improvement is the norm. Welcome back to normal.
Ummm I hate to tell you but Roddenberry wasn't exactly a conservative. In fact much of the liberalness of Star Trek flows from the fact that most of Roddenberries original philosophies that he based Star Trek on were fundamentally flawed. You can't run a government like the Federation.
Step One: Read your employment contract and if there is any area you are not sure of, talk to a lawyer about it. If what you are doing in your free time is close enough to what you do for a living, your employer may actually already own it. Its called an invention and innovation clause I think. It depends on your contract though so find out. The end result is by selling this to your client you may be breaking your contract and even committing a crime.
Step Two: Consult a lawyer anyway. Get him to confirm what you think is going on in your contract. This may get down to legal wrangling in the end and he will have specific advice for you that is far better than what you can get on Slashdot.
If at this point you find out that you don't actually legally own this then you are screwed and just wasted a whole lot of your free time. Sorry but it pays to know your contractual obligations.
Step Three: If you are the true owner of your work (sounds funny saying it that way but it is true) then for God sake finish it fast. Take a vacation now, before you have to do anything on your employers version of this. Refuse to do anything or even hear anything on this project from your employer. Even talking about things may give him cause to try to take ownership. Build up a suitable level of deniability.
If necessary explain what is going on to your employer. Tell him that he doesn't own this contractually and that you refuse to compromise yourself. Let him know that you have already talked to a lawyer. Give him the lawyers name if he asks it. If your employer is smart, chances are he will want to avoid the court system too if you are in the right. Especially if you are ahead of him in the process.
It might be a good idea to talk to your clients too. See if they will give you help since its in their best interest as well.
The 6000 year part is only for some creationists not all. The evolutionists need a very long timescale to make evolution plausible but the creationists do not. Therefore evolutionists have believed in a very old earth even before they had anything to back it up.
BTW a favorite tactics of young earth creationists is to take a rock that is known to be only 20 years old (say from an lava flow on Mt. St. Helens) and have it dated using the normal techniques. The scientists then tell them that this rock is X million years old. The creationists smile and nod and note that the scientists using "reliable" techniques were almost always between 5 to 8 orders of magnitude off. Then they take the same rock somewhere else and get a completely different number. :)
In short don't be smug because for millenia scientists knew the earth was flat or any number of other wrong things.
Actually the lightning strikes are used to get the acids in the first place, not to get the acids into proteins and the protiens into organized cells. This was shown in a pretty famous experiment whose name unfortunately escapes me. We really don't know how abiogenesis works or, to satisfy creationists (like me), whether it is capable of happening at all.
I hate to be the voice of the devils advocate, but we need a lot more than animo acids to show that there is life on other worlds. Simple organic chem experiments show that given the right elements, its pretty easy to get animo acids. Finding them is actually no big surprise.
The hardest part of the whole abiogenesis equation that we need is the formation of simple life from its ubiquitous amino acid building blocks. We essentially need some way for the building blocks to logically result in the creation of a castle through either random collisions or some other mechanism. This is the difficult part and some advances have been made in looking at organic chemistry in Zero-G. The problem is that we are still orders of magnitude away from getting a living and more importantly reproducing cell that natural selection requires for further evolution.
In short, don't count your eggs before their hatched because we still have a long way to go. We really don't know how abiogenesis occured on earth yet, so to start saying that its occuring all over the universe may be a bit of a stretch.
Ummm, ok I can understand the whole vacuum forming thing. Its cheap as industrial processes go and give you a good surface finish on one side, but why do you have to build a body cast of yourself? A simple manniquin (sp?) of similar approximate size should do. I'm betting the movie suits don't require the actors to undergo this. In fact I'm sure of it since they used the same suits on two sets of actors, one set for the Original ANH and another set for the extra scenes in the Special Edition. A full plaster body cast seems pretty unnecessary to me.
The US government currently uses military R&D to fund a wide variety of necessary developing technology fields. One of these is composites. If this field wasn't getting military money it would either be underfunded. In short military R&D spending is not confined to military applications. The technology used to build much of the next generation of tanks for the US military will also build much of the next generation of buses for US public transportation.
Adding glue will not necessarily make them more fragile, it will in fact make probably make them tougher in the material science and engineering sense of damage resistance. It will make them weaker (lower specific strength) and probably more flexible (lower specific stiffness).
As someone how works with composites I would like to take this time to point out of few things to the less experienced and therefore point out why a "self-healing" composite of this type is not really that advantageous.
Composites are used mostly because they have superior specific strengths and stiffnesses to more conventional materials like metals. This means that you can make something out of composites do the same job as something out of steel but have it be significantly lighter. This is usually a big advantage.
Composites also have superior fatigue characteristics to most metals. Fatigue occurs because cracks grow in a material as it is loaded cyclicly. Except steel most metals to not have infinite fatigue life. If you have an aluminum bar that takes 10000 lbs to break in one shot, but you load it cyclically at 2000 lbs, eventually this bar will break. Composites don't have much of a problem in fatigue however because cracks end up hitting material interfaces as they try to grow. A crack can only grow so far before it hits a fiber and to move on it has to break this fiber which is pretty difficult. In short if you put a composite sample into a machine to do fatigue tests on it, it is not uncommon for the metal fatigue machine to break before the composite sample does.
Why is all this important? Because this "self-healing" ability is only good for small cracks and it has inferior material properties to a non-healing composite. It helps stop fatigue which is not a big problem in composites anyway. What composites need is a self-healing ability that can cure delaminations and other large scale failures in the composite. This will be important an big news because it is the introduction of large scale problems within a composite that causes the most damage in composites.
I find it just a bit ironic that the world's largest crystals are found in Chihuahua. I mean why not in "Great" Denmark.
You forgot the infamous zeroth Law of Thermodynamics:
0) Temperature works thermodynamically.
If you are open source then your competitors which are using your code must be, by definition and legal license, open source as well. Therefore they will have player mods just like you and the sum of their players will certainly be more than yours so your competitors as a whole will have more of an advantage with a grass roots player mod movement. Yeah, yeah, you've got the innovative reputation but your opponents are cheaper so players may go with helping out the cheaper server to get the best of both worlds in terms of cost and game play.
Anyway I still think a better choice for games design will always be closed source development with good server scripting abilities for possible player mods. Maybe release a small multiplayer server package capable of supporting a few individuals who want to roleplay. Small enough that you can't consider it an MMPORPG anymore so it won't cut into your market. You should be able to carve out a good two years of use without significant competition, during which time you can still be creating the next generation game instead of being trapped in a short-term constant upgrade path in order to maintain your customer base.
Anyway I think we have to agree to disagree because this discussion doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Thanks for the distraction from my dreary hum-drum existence. :)
AOL survives on ease of implementation not on community. Everyone I know who has ever been on AOL started there because it was an easy place to get started. They all left AOL when they realized they were paying too much for what they were getting.
The problem with your model is that many people will go with a cheaper alternative than your bleeding edge game. The services your competitors provide will be essentially subsidized by your own efforts. It is substantially cheaper to reimplement your work than to develop it themselves. Your business model will be inherently more expensive than theirs because you must work harder than them to stay ahead. This is assuming you don't make a mistake and allow them to catch up. Once that happens your business model fails entirely.
Now if you offer your work as Closed Source, then they have to essentially reverse engineer every new thing you do. This expensive unlike simply giving your innovations away for free in OS development.
In short, running a business is much like fighting a war. You want to be able to win definitively and then exploit that, not consistantly scrape by fighting with attrition. You want the fight to be as lopsided as possible because it allows you to make the most profits and that is what business is all about.
Rampant deregulation of narcotics has a habit of creating a drug epidemics, see 19th century China. History is actually pretty unclear as what is the best way to combat drug abuse.
Yes but it is during the "slacking off" phase that you make the majority of your profits because it does take as much effort to stay on top once you get there. Under your model you breed competition for yourself, not necessarily a good thing. Besides any strictly coding improvement can be almost instantly implemented by your competitors with little to no cost to them. Since you have to stay the innovator to keep on top, you end up spending the majority of the development money and reaping few benefits for it.
Having to constantly work harder than your competition is not a recipe for success.
Counting on a good "community" to keep your customer base is nice, but how long will that last if you have to charge more than your competitors because you are forced into the role of innovator? Don't bet your business on intangibles like "community."
I have seen a lot of posts basically saying this: "The Drug War is a failure and it historically never works, we should just legalize everything as save ourselves the money." Question: Does legalizing everything work either?
Alright, drugs are legalized. What happens? First and foremost, drugs get relatively cheap and most likely get weaker. The hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, who were basically created by regulation, become less widespread. The system becomes less violent because there aren't as many profits to be made. No more drug related shootings in the streets, because the street gangs need to do something else to make their cash. These are the good things.
The bad things? Drug use skyrockets. Lots more users, more addicts, more overdoses, more everything. The barrier to entry is now practically nil so lots of people use pharmaceuticals recreationally. The smart individuals stop after a while when they get tired of it or realize its taking over their lives. The stupid or short-sighted progress to harder drugs and the problems for them escalate. So after about five years the problem will got from a serious criminal problem before deregulation to a serious public health problem afterwards.
In short deregulation is not as simple as it sounds. You could quite possibly end up with a culture reminiscent of mainland china at the turn of the 20th century. Chronic opium use was characteristic of over 30% of the society. How did they finally combat it? The Communists began summarily executing the opium users, providers, and everything else in the whole system. They started and won a Drug War.
So deregulation is trading a huge expensive criminal problem for a huge expensive social problem. The deregulation of liquor did not destroy alcoholism did it? It just brought it back out in the open. I will admit that the war on drugs is a fiasco, but will deregulation be any better?
My guess is no. It will demarginalize the problem and create an epidemic. If we are to really stop the problem of drug use we will need to start going for its throat at the source suppliers instead of biting off its fingers in the distribution networks.
Alright, I'm making an OS MMORPG. I make my money off subscription sales. Question: How do I secure my business model? What is to prevent a million people from copying me and destroying my customer base?
If everyone has access to the client and server code then anyone can run a server that can afford the hardware etc. I don't expect the hardware to be a big barrier to entry for that much longer though because its getting progressively cheaper.
In short, your business model would work for about a year or two. Maybe three if you don't release your server code (since you don't have to because it isn't actually distributed). Then other similar services will be up and probably as good as yours. They will also be cheaper since they didn't have to pay the original development costs for the software and you did. Suddenly your customer base has been cut a million different ways and your revenue drys up. You lose.
Its simple, because 3D engines aren't the expensive part! Games have 4 times the numbers of artists and various other creative talent than programmers. The programmers themselves are really just a pretty small part. Thats why there are so few OS games. Because game production is a manufacturing process not a service process like so much network gear is. Its relatively easy to write the server, etc. but the art and plot of the game is the creative and expensive bottleneck.
True these things haven't been patented, but most if not all of them are protectively licensed ala the GPL, BSDL, whatever. Do you honestly think there would be a linux in its current incarnation if not for these licenses? Without the legal protection to make sure that the work was not subsumed by a corporate entity for free I doubt that these things would exist in their present forms.
Real objects are patented for just the same reason. To make sure that you have control over the ideas you have developed. This allows you to make a profit while developing the next big patentable discovery.
Uhmm... Just an aside, but Carrie Fisher made a living for a while as a script editor like this. She's written a best selling novel (Postcards from the Edge) which was made into a movie. Its quite possible she's a better writer than many of the minds behind Star Wars.
Actually it looks like the effect is localized to the muscle or muscle groups hit. This is bad since being shot in the chest by this thing will probably only immobilize the muscles being directly effected. This means the gunman can quite possibly still shoot you because you didn't hit the right muscle groups with the immobilizer. So its probably not as useful as it sounds.
I have not seen this movie yet, but I intend to before it leaves theatres. That said I would like to say this:
Frankly being offended because someone stole something from Star Wars is laughable. Why? Because Star Wars is almost completely stolen from other places itself. The pod race is stolen from Ben Hur. The whole setting is essentially stolen from a dozen fantasy/fairy tales. Darth Vader is a black knight. The Emperor is an evil wizard. It goes on and on. Get the picture? Star Wars is a fantasy movie dressed up as a space opera. Do not blame an actual fantasy movie from drawing from its fantasy roots and coming out similar.
Also, do not criticise the movie for "copying Ep 1". This movie was written ten years ago, thats before Lucas started writing episode 1. Hence any coincidence between the plots (such as they are) of ep 1 and D&D are almost certainly due to working in parallel not due to "theft".
In short, just because Star Wars and D&D have many of the same characters and plot twists does not mean the D&D is intended as a copy of Star Wars. Both are movies deliberately making use of standard fantasy architypes. They should have many things that are similar.
Quality control has interesting problems in the computer industry. The issue is this, what happens if something breaks? In the case of a standard PC, not much. You lose time and lose money but in the end no one is hurt or dies. Plus with the companies declaring that they aren't liable for the reliability of their products in their licensing, nothing can be done to make them liable for the cost of this lost time and money. Hence the computer industry isn't changing, especially sice consumers have aquired a tolerance for Windows crashing occasionally. Some sort of large scale legal argument for making software and hardware companies liable for their work might be nice though.
Also comparing a computer to a VCR is a false comparison. In terms of equipment and design, a computer is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a VCR with significantly more and more complex moving parts like the various components of the disk drives. The truth is that computers are assembled by computer companies but the parts are much more frequently built by someone else down the line. If a part breaks it is more likely its manufacturers fault not Dells. This is also not quite true for VCRs or toaster ovens.
I also find it interesting that the author spends most of the last page of the article complaining about his Dell laptop and how crappy their tech support was. I think I'm seeing his personal motivation for this piece. Nice to see someone scratching his itch.