Well, you're probably spot-on with -phyte, but it's not technically a computer (yet, despite my crack in the posting), so cyber- is inaccurate (even if marketing-friendly). Robo- is probably better, because these plants do stuff in response to signals received and report back sensor data. They are, literally, robotic plants, no?
They have "for the chIIIIldrun".
Now, we have "for the lIIIIbraries".
Only to be used with people who can't think logically, of course. But, realistically, there are a lot of such people out there, and convincing them of our cause will be necessary if we are to win.
Would that it were true, but alas, 'tis not so. Disney, for example, has been around long enough that its famous mouse would now be public domain, if not for the most recent copyright extension. All signs are that they will continue to exist until the current one pans out, too.
How about creating the robots in motion to each other? That is, at the end of each manufacturing step, the newly created robot and the creator robot push off from each other. Possible problem: for robots A,B,C,D, where D created B, then D made C and B made A, C and B might collide since they'd be pushed towards each other. Workaround: for each generation, pick a new direction so you something that robot X creates doesn't run into something that robot Y creates. This would be limited in the number of generations by how much of an angle difference you would need, but by making the push-off velocities fast enough and the robots small enough, you could scale this up to whatever finite limit you wanted to.
If you are open source then your competitors which are using your code must be, by definition and legal license, open source as well.
Only if your license requires it, and only if they're using your code as opposed to coming up with their own. Give them the opportunity to go totally closed source, with no player mods, and you'd be surprised how many would be competitors place control of their product over good player experience (and thus, ultimately, over income).
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.
Actually, I was thinking the path I outlined could last for quite longer than two years. With appropriate mods, including upgrade transition paths (say, from 2D to 3D as the tech comes into place), this could last until...well, MMPORPGs themselves go out of style. (Except for the "massive" bit, they've arguably been around since before the Web.)
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.
So, it comes down to yesterday's features at a lower price, or tomorrow's features at a higher price. The only question is, can you stay ahead far enough to justify the prices you do charge? Your competition has the advantage of cheap and quick - though not free and instant - adaptation of your stuff to theirs. You have the advantage that your more technically advanced players, at least those who don't want to be competitors, can and will make "their" game better by submitting new mods back to you (you being the only open game in town); you'll still have to integrate and QA it, but there's less development cost all the same.
Unlike in a war, you can never totally defeat your opposition; new competitors can spring up out of nowhere. (Even if you go closed source, if your feature set stagnates, that allows time for wannabe competitors to reverse engineer everything you have, and you won't necessarily have warning until they're taking your customers away.) So you've got to dominate not only everyone who is, but everyone who could be. This, if done well, is one possible way to do that for a long time.
Besides any strictly coding improvement can be almost instantly implemented by your competitors with little to no cost to them.
Negative, for the exact same reason that you have a bit of lead time with your initial product. It takes time to reverse engineer (or just, if your product is open source, learn about and comprehend) any improvements you make. While your competitors do this, you make money off the improvements, and forge ahead with new ones.
Granted, you can make more profits - in the short term - by slacking off the innovation. But this almost inevitably comes at the cost of maintaining the lead which has generated your revenues to begin with, until you're just another competitor with no more profits than anyone else. And then you're in trouble.
One more thing:
Don't bet your business on intangibles like "community."
You'd be surprised how many sucessful businesses (like AOL) survive mainly by doing just that.
It takes time for people to copy what you are. In that time, you can upgrade yourself to be ahead of the competition. Keep it up, and you've got customers for life. Slack off, and...well, remember the dinosaurs? There's a reason that metaphor is so popular in business, and this type of situation is it.
Wannabe competitors can copy or emulate your code. But they can't as easily duplicate the community and rich world you'd already have.
The litmus test is this: when all is said and done, if we feel sorry for Anakin, just plain sorry for him, Lucas has failed. But if we feel shaken and sick at heart, because we see that it could be us making those choices and _choosing_ the dark side- Lucas will have succeeded.
ObHumor: we feel shaken and sick at heart, or we see that it could be us making those choices and choosing the dark side? Or maybe, we feel sorry for Anakin not because he chose the dark side, but because the way he chose it cut him off from the best possible benefits of the dark side?;)
As it just so happens, I'm the chief tech at a service that does basically this. I think we're within a month of being able to launch our public beta. Contact info's on the site if you wish to use our services. We're doing Maya rendering first, but we would be more than happy to add support for other formats (possibly including processing music - we hadn't thought of that one - and definitely including stuff like Premiere) on request, though of course we'll need a bit of time (hopefully not more than a week or two, but no promises yet) to add more formats.
Yeah, so this post is a shameless commercial plug. It's also what was requested.
The right thing to do however would be to leave the door unlocked so that if my neighbor ran out of sugar in her baking she could walk in and get it.
Nope. The right thing to do would be to give your neighbor, and anyone else you trust, a key to your house. It has been mathematically proven that "trust always" and "never trust" are not optimal solutions to a wide variety of Real Life cases, at least where they can be reduced to math (for instance, Prisoner's Dillema). "Trust but verify" isn't just a catchy name for an algorithm in some abstract case; it works quite well in the real world. Assuming the common assumption that what works best in the long term is morally correct (that being how history tends to be written), why should anyone feel bad about doing what works?
NASA didn't choose the name, at least not as a unified whole. "Alpha" is the callsign that the current crew asked to use once they were on the station, with no say by anyone on the ground (though the ground crew could have objected if they felt strongly enough). That one act, above any other, is what sealed the station's name.
On the other hand, if you haven't done any of these things, and think you've never done anything illegal in your life (including knowingly allowing others to do illegal things), I'd like to hear from you.
Well...if one can plausibly deny "knowingly" letting certain others do specific illegal things (as opposed to "there's a crime going on somewhere in the U.S.; why haven't you stopped it?")...
<html><head><title>HTML is easier than that!</title></head><body>
And, of course, you can simply strip out most of the advanced stuff when you just want to quickly bang out a few pages.
</body></html>
Shouldn't these, and the clear potential for more down the road, be enough to convice some commercial enterprise to put up the money?
Not if the payoff is so risky, so unknown, and/or so far in the future that commercial enterprises never desire to invest in it. There's a reason that "basic" R&D isn't done by any but the largest companies...
So leave the quote unattributed. That gives it the "patina of received wisdow" without containing a lie.
On a separate note, the quote does kinda contain nice symmetry, especially if one inserts a phase between abundance and selfishness:
Faith <-> Selfishness
Courage <-> Complacency
Liberty <-> Apathy
Abundance <-> Dependency
Mastery <-> Bondage
Granted, the Gameboy has limited input capability, but...with the economies of scale on this thing, how long is it going to be before someone puts out a limited-capability PDA cartridge, with address book, appointment list, and other stuff?
It's not like they couldn't adapt the "keyboard" code written to input names and other text for various games into serving this...
...and you open up some interesting possibilities, that is, assuming the phone can recognize some hand movements. For instance, flicking my middle finger might speed-dial 911 (or whatever the local police number is).
Too bad they can't just transmit all the way up the skeleton, though. Maybe a phone-collar, with mike and speaker attached to one's skull...
Is removing the labels ok? It feels wrong, because we remember the ideologies in the first example, and want to somehow account for the two liberal candidates wearing the same political label. But from an outside viewpoint, it doesn't matter what the particulars of their policies are. The point of the election is to generate consensus whereever possible, minority rights wherever threatened, and majority rule whenever it is needed. If the two 30% candidates can't agree to a common viewpoints, then it doesn't matter what their label is-- they are different political groups. A minor difference is only minor in the eyes of the beholder.
Except for one thing: the fact that two of the candidates share the same ideology means that they are likely to agree on common viewpoints, at least far more so than they would agree with the third candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
...the bacterium that causes leprosy seems to have lost nearly half of its nonessential genes, more than any other organisms studied so far.
So, the leprosy genome is, itself, leprous? ^_^
Well, you're probably spot-on with -phyte, but it's not technically a computer (yet, despite my crack in the posting), so cyber- is inaccurate (even if marketing-friendly). Robo- is probably better, because these plants do stuff in response to signals received and report back sensor data. They are, literally, robotic plants, no?
They have "for the chIIIIldrun".
Now, we have "for the lIIIIbraries".
Only to be used with people who can't think logically, of course. But, realistically, there are a lot of such people out there, and convincing them of our cause will be necessary if we are to win.
Would that it were true, but alas, 'tis not so. Disney, for example, has been around long enough that its famous mouse would now be public domain, if not for the most recent copyright extension. All signs are that they will continue to exist until the current one pans out, too.
How about creating the robots in motion to each other? That is, at the end of each manufacturing step, the newly created robot and the creator robot push off from each other. Possible problem: for robots A,B,C,D, where D created B, then D made C and B made A, C and B might collide since they'd be pushed towards each other. Workaround: for each generation, pick a new direction so you something that robot X creates doesn't run into something that robot Y creates. This would be limited in the number of generations by how much of an angle difference you would need, but by making the push-off velocities fast enough and the robots small enough, you could scale this up to whatever finite limit you wanted to.
If you are open source then your competitors which are using your code must be, by definition and legal license, open source as well.
Only if your license requires it, and only if they're using your code as opposed to coming up with their own. Give them the opportunity to go totally closed source, with no player mods, and you'd be surprised how many would be competitors place control of their product over good player experience (and thus, ultimately, over income).
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.
Actually, I was thinking the path I outlined could last for quite longer than two years. With appropriate mods, including upgrade transition paths (say, from 2D to 3D as the tech comes into place), this could last until...well, MMPORPGs themselves go out of style. (Except for the "massive" bit, they've arguably been around since before the Web.)
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.
Agreed, and you're welcome. ^_^
So, it comes down to yesterday's features at a lower price, or tomorrow's features at a higher price. The only question is, can you stay ahead far enough to justify the prices you do charge? Your competition has the advantage of cheap and quick - though not free and instant - adaptation of your stuff to theirs. You have the advantage that your more technically advanced players, at least those who don't want to be competitors, can and will make "their" game better by submitting new mods back to you (you being the only open game in town); you'll still have to integrate and QA it, but there's less development cost all the same.
Unlike in a war, you can never totally defeat your opposition; new competitors can spring up out of nowhere. (Even if you go closed source, if your feature set stagnates, that allows time for wannabe competitors to reverse engineer everything you have, and you won't necessarily have warning until they're taking your customers away.) So you've got to dominate not only everyone who is, but everyone who could be. This, if done well, is one possible way to do that for a long time.
Mostly correct, except for one fatal flaw...
Besides any strictly coding improvement can be almost instantly implemented by your competitors with little to no cost to them.
Negative, for the exact same reason that you have a bit of lead time with your initial product. It takes time to reverse engineer (or just, if your product is open source, learn about and comprehend) any improvements you make. While your competitors do this, you make money off the improvements, and forge ahead with new ones.
Granted, you can make more profits - in the short term - by slacking off the innovation. But this almost inevitably comes at the cost of maintaining the lead which has generated your revenues to begin with, until you're just another competitor with no more profits than anyone else. And then you're in trouble.
One more thing:
Don't bet your business on intangibles like "community."
You'd be surprised how many sucessful businesses (like AOL) survive mainly by doing just that.
It takes time for people to copy what you are. In that time, you can upgrade yourself to be ahead of the competition. Keep it up, and you've got customers for life. Slack off, and...well, remember the dinosaurs? There's a reason that metaphor is so popular in business, and this type of situation is it.
Wannabe competitors can copy or emulate your code. But they can't as easily duplicate the community and rich world you'd already have.
The litmus test is this: when all is said and done, if we feel sorry for Anakin, just plain sorry for him, Lucas has failed. But if we feel shaken and sick at heart, because we see that it could be us making those choices and _choosing_ the dark side- Lucas will have succeeded.
;)
ObHumor: we feel shaken and sick at heart, or we see that it could be us making those choices and choosing the dark side? Or maybe, we feel sorry for Anakin not because he chose the dark side, but because the way he chose it cut him off from the best possible benefits of the dark side?
As it just so happens, I'm the chief tech at a service that does basically this. I think we're within a month of being able to launch our public beta. Contact info's on the site if you wish to use our services. We're doing Maya rendering first, but we would be more than happy to add support for other formats (possibly including processing music - we hadn't thought of that one - and definitely including stuff like Premiere) on request, though of course we'll need a bit of time (hopefully not more than a week or two, but no promises yet) to add more formats.
Yeah, so this post is a shameless commercial plug. It's also what was requested.
It ain't over 'til the orbiter(s) come down.
Oh, yeah, and first post.
Reply or moderate...reply or moderate...
The right thing to do however would be to leave the door unlocked so that if my neighbor ran out of sugar in her baking she could walk in and get it.
Nope. The right thing to do would be to give your neighbor, and anyone else you trust, a key to your house. It has been mathematically proven that "trust always" and "never trust" are not optimal solutions to a wide variety of Real Life cases, at least where they can be reduced to math (for instance, Prisoner's Dillema). "Trust but verify" isn't just a catchy name for an algorithm in some abstract case; it works quite well in the real world. Assuming the common assumption that what works best in the long term is morally correct (that being how history tends to be written), why should anyone feel bad about doing what works?
NASA didn't choose the name, at least not as a unified whole. "Alpha" is the callsign that the current crew asked to use once they were on the station, with no say by anyone on the ground (though the ground crew could have objected if they felt strongly enough). That one act, above any other, is what sealed the station's name.
On the other hand, if you haven't done any of these things, and think you've never done anything illegal in your life (including knowingly allowing others to do illegal things), I'd like to hear from you.
Well...if one can plausibly deny "knowingly" letting certain others do specific illegal things (as opposed to "there's a crime going on somewhere in the U.S.; why haven't you stopped it?")...
<slowly raises hand>
<html><head><title>HTML is easier than that!</title></head><body>
And, of course, you can simply strip out most of the advanced stuff when you just want to quickly bang out a few pages.
</body></html>
Shouldn't these, and the clear potential for more down the road, be enough to convice some commercial enterprise to put up the money?
Not if the payoff is so risky, so unknown, and/or so far in the future that commercial enterprises never desire to invest in it. There's a reason that "basic" R&D isn't done by any but the largest companies...
Can you prove that you will die, someday? Medical science is getting better all the time.
So leave the quote unattributed. That gives it the "patina of received wisdow" without containing a lie.
On a separate note, the quote does kinda contain nice symmetry, especially if one inserts a phase between abundance and selfishness:
Faith <-> Selfishness
Courage <-> Complacency
Liberty <-> Apathy
Abundance <-> Dependency
Mastery <-> Bondage
Duuude...you're posting to Slashdot, and you still think you have a chance of breeding? ;)
a whole PLANET devoted towards the production of Canadian Dry ginger ale.
Well, you know what they say: "Free as in beer, or as in speech?"
Granted, the Gameboy has limited input capability, but...with the economies of scale on this thing, how long is it going to be before someone puts out a limited-capability PDA cartridge, with address book, appointment list, and other stuff?
It's not like they couldn't adapt the "keyboard" code written to input names and other text for various games into serving this...
...and you open up some interesting possibilities, that is, assuming the phone can recognize some hand movements. For instance, flicking my middle finger might speed-dial 911 (or whatever the local police number is).
Too bad they can't just transmit all the way up the skeleton, though. Maybe a phone-collar, with mike and speaker attached to one's skull...
Is removing the labels ok? It feels wrong, because we remember the ideologies in the first example, and want to somehow account for the two liberal candidates wearing the same political label. But from an outside viewpoint, it doesn't matter what the particulars of their policies are. The point of the election is to generate consensus whereever possible, minority rights wherever threatened, and majority rule whenever it is needed. If the two 30% candidates can't agree to a common viewpoints, then it doesn't matter what their label is-- they are different political groups. A minor difference is only minor in the eyes of the beholder.
Except for one thing: the fact that two of the candidates share the same ideology means that they are likely to agree on common viewpoints, at least far more so than they would agree with the third candidate.