The reason UO objects have a value in real life is that they have a unique assignable _identity_ within the closed environment of UO. You can only transfer ownership from within the UO environment and they can't live outside of that single proprietary runtime environment.
Real-life virtual objects(!) don't have this property. Suppose I design a virtual Stradivarius containing some revolutionary algorithms for producing virtual violin sounds never before heard on a computer. I decide to make a single instance of this violin and sell it to the highest bidder. The price I get must be at least equal to the value I place on the algorithms as intellectual property, because no matter what method I use to safeguard the bits, once it runs on a machine not controlled by me, those algorithms are now freely available to at least the buyer. I won't get a buyer willing to pay the price I need, unless of course the buyer is buying with the intent to reverse engineer my algorithms, because 'honest' buyers know that all it takes is inadvertently allowing someone dishonest access to the Stradivarius (maybe I lend it to a friend) for it to be rendered worthless.
The difference between my virtual Stradivarius and a real-life Stradivarius is that it's not so easy to copy a Stradivarius in real-life (as seen in real-life) as it is in virtual life. I don't risk losing all my hard-won knowledge and my violin-making business when I sell the final product in RL.
The worst code I've ever seen was written by a guy who wrote a lot of it. He also went on to become a well-respected manager, nuff said. Some of the best code I've ever seen e.g. the Python source, has exactly the right number, no more, no less. My personal goal is to approach 0 LOC, which seems to be happening as I find I can get more real work done using only scripting languages these days.
BTW, despite the fact that a lot of the best programmers in the history of computer science were electrical engineers first, why is it tha invariably the ones I come across in the real world are incapable of writing elegant or even passable code? Just wondering.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason UO objects have a value in real life is that they have a unique assignable _identity_ within the closed environment of UO. You can only transfer ownership from within the UO environment and they can't live outside of that single proprietary runtime environment.
Real-life virtual objects(!) don't have this property. Suppose I design a virtual Stradivarius containing some revolutionary algorithms for producing virtual violin sounds never before heard on a computer. I decide to make a single instance of this violin and sell it to the highest bidder. The price I get must be at least equal to the value I place on the algorithms as intellectual property, because no matter what method I use to safeguard the bits, once it runs on a machine not controlled by me, those algorithms are now freely available to at least the buyer. I won't get a buyer willing to pay the price I need, unless of course the buyer is buying with the intent to reverse engineer my algorithms, because 'honest' buyers know that all it takes is inadvertently allowing someone dishonest access to the Stradivarius (maybe I lend it to a friend) for it to be rendered worthless.
The difference between my virtual Stradivarius and a real-life Stradivarius is that it's not so easy to copy a Stradivarius in real-life (as seen in real-life) as it is in virtual life. I don't risk losing all my hard-won knowledge and my violin-making business when I sell the final product in RL.
The worst code I've ever seen was written by a guy who wrote a lot of it. He also went on to become a well-respected manager, nuff said. Some of the best code I've ever seen e.g. the Python source, has exactly the right number, no more, no less. My personal goal is to approach 0 LOC, which seems to be happening as I find I can get more real work done using only scripting languages these days.
BTW, despite the fact that a lot of the best programmers in the history of computer science were electrical engineers first, why is it tha invariably the ones I come across in the real world are incapable of writing elegant or even passable code? Just wondering.