actually customers == people who want you to worry about the codebase while they get on with their business.
Even if the source is 'out there', customers don't have the time, skills or interest in modifying it for their stock tables, inventory tracking systems or CRM modules. Meanwhile your open source codebase is losing bugs and growing ever larger (and harder for your competitors to assimilate:-)
I don't know about being the nemesis of the gaming industry, but I buy and sell used games alongside new ones in my store.
We offer 1/3 of new price as a trade in and sell them at 1/2 price (miles short of a 1000% profit). Oddly, most people who trade in old games pick up new ones in return. Most of our second hand game sales are to school kids, who probably aren't in the market for an AU$100 game anyway.
A small percentage of our customers only buy and trade second hand games, but we don't have a game hire store in town, and I think these folks would be hiring the games rather than buying if they had the choice.
If Natural Selection were intelligent then the dinosaurs would not be extinct, nor would the miryad of complex and promising creatures of the Edicarian Fauna. Intelligent design would not waste such potential sources of design diversity.
Eh? Far be it for me to claim the intellectual powers of natural selection, but I know when one of my projects fails due to circumstances beyond my control (hard disk crash, project manager decides to use XML, meteorite strike) I can almost always think of a new and better way of approaching the original problem. So, if I was redesigning after a small Cretaceous mishap, I'd want to come up with something better than a dinosaur too.
as an ageing but committed cyclist I too found the daily grind wearing me down, until I sprung for an electric assist from CurrieTech http://www.currietech.com.au/products/uspd. (I think they distribute in the US too) - it was the best thing I ever did. I've clocked up 1,000km on it the last few months and still get a great buzz from letting it climb hills for me *and* I can pedal whenever I want - forget the Segway, build on known tech. I say.
I can't beleive no-one tried suggesting you use a Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation device (TENS) - you plug into one of these babies and it sends pulses of electricity through the muscles, contracting and relaxing them while you sit around playing your favourite computer game - you grow short fat muscle fibre without any major effort - ah the magic of science!
I don't know about broadcast radio, but in the early days of telegraphy a lot of effort was put into stopping the radio waves from propogating along the ground. The more signal they could beam up into the air the further they could transmit.
Early antennas were so bad at this that farmers in Holland could put a wire around their cows horns with a lightbulb attatched - the current induced in the wire by the RF would light up the bulb so they could see where they were when it came time for milking.
Another hoary old timers tale: when the Empire state building first went up it was considered prime real estate for radio transmission towers. There was so much RF going through the office that workers could keep warm by wrapping up in unplugged electric blankets, the radio waves would induce enough current in the blanket's wiring to keep them warm.
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EA might be Swedish, but they're wholly owned by the all American Electronic Arts
I've had some success with scanning and OCR software on my iPhone... http://www.creaceed.com/prizmo/iphone/
Even if the source is 'out there', customers don't have the time, skills or interest in modifying it for their stock tables, inventory tracking systems or CRM modules. Meanwhile your open source codebase is losing bugs and growing ever larger (and harder for your competitors to assimilate :-)
We offer 1/3 of new price as a trade in and sell them at 1/2 price (miles short of a 1000% profit). Oddly, most people who trade in old games pick up new ones in return. Most of our second hand game sales are to school kids, who probably aren't in the market for an AU$100 game anyway.
A small percentage of our customers only buy and trade second hand games, but we don't have a game hire store in town, and I think these folks would be hiring the games rather than buying if they had the choice.
Eh? Far be it for me to claim the intellectual powers of natural selection, but I know when one of my projects fails due to circumstances beyond my control (hard disk crash, project manager decides to use XML, meteorite strike) I can almost always think of a new and better way of approaching the original problem. So, if I was redesigning after a small Cretaceous mishap, I'd want to come up with something better than a dinosaur too.
as an ageing but committed cyclist I too found the daily grind wearing me down, until I sprung for an electric assist from CurrieTech http://www.currietech.com.au/products/uspd. (I think they distribute in the US too) - it was the best thing I ever did. I've clocked up 1,000km on it the last few months and still get a great buzz from letting it climb hills for me *and* I can pedal whenever I want - forget the Segway, build on known tech. I say.
I can't beleive no-one tried suggesting you use a Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation device (TENS) - you plug into one of these babies and it sends pulses of electricity through the muscles, contracting and relaxing them while you sit around playing your favourite computer game - you grow short fat muscle fibre without any major effort - ah the magic of science!
I don't know about broadcast radio, but in the early days of telegraphy a lot of effort was put into stopping the radio waves from propogating along the ground. The more signal they could beam up into the air the further they could transmit. Early antennas were so bad at this that farmers in Holland could put a wire around their cows horns with a lightbulb attatched - the current induced in the wire by the RF would light up the bulb so they could see where they were when it came time for milking. Another hoary old timers tale: when the Empire state building first went up it was considered prime real estate for radio transmission towers. There was so much RF going through the office that workers could keep warm by wrapping up in unplugged electric blankets, the radio waves would induce enough current in the blanket's wiring to keep them warm.