I guess this doesn't make a lot of sense to me until such time as these games start to be shown on TV, where rounds can be surrounded by ads and what have you.
Of course, this might be an interesting direction for games to go in. Unreal Tournament 2004 isn't too exciting to watch unless you're actually playing in it, so what types of games would do well on tv?
Another area that I find fascinating is the potential for people to do "useful" things in games. Could gamers solve potentially large problems by the fractal differential of the quantum encoding of their movements in a game of Doom? Will games move so far into the realm of virtual lives that people physically do work there?
I think the parent does have some merit though. I think the reality is that often what makes a good movie doesn't necessarily make a good game. I pretty much think, for example, that the "film" versions of Doom 3 will fall flat on its face, unless it's like those "inspired by" soundtracks, that, er, have nothing to do with anything.
Fundamentally, computer games and movies are such different mediums - games are obviously all about interaction and using your brain (somewhat), while movies are about sitting back and eating popcorn, maybe throwing an arm around a lovely lass, and so forth.
I think what they're really doing here is utilizing name branding. Wow, that Day After Tomorrow movie was really good. Oh, there's a game named that too? Perhaps it'll be good too. By the time you figure out it sucks, there's $50 down the drain.
Why write notes when you can hear yourself talking! Maybe I'm missing the point of the question, but wouldn't it be easier to buy one of those cool digital voice-recorders, and later write the notes from that, when you get home? I understand you can even get ones that will download content onto a PC at the end of the day.
Been meaning to buy one for myself for ages. Especially in the traffic in the morning, when I have a bright idea, hell of a lot easier to speak it than write it down.
I've thought long and hard about how the ideals of Open Source could impact businesses. Primarily of interest to me has been the concept of "intrinsic motivation" wherein people are about a thousand times more likely to be motivated to do something if they choose to do it themselves, rather than being told to do it. Open Source then obviously has a massive advantage over the traditional business model in terms of motivation, because I can simply log on to Sourceforge, and choose to participate in a project which interests me personally, without having been told to do it.
I'm not aware of any statistics in this area, but I'd love to see them - for example, just how much more productive is somebody working on Open Source than in a traditional business setting? Further, can this model be made to work in a business setting at all? Take a simple example of a business which allows its employees to work on whichever projects they choose. The company designates a specific set of projects, and you are allowed to migrate at will to those which most interest you. What would be the end-game of this strategy? Would programmers, for example, congregrate around the most "interesting" projects, even if those projects weren't the best for the financial health of the company? Would other projects die for simple lack of interest? What guarantees do we have that the optimal solution in terms of "interest" would be the optimal solution in terms of "making money"?
Of course, the Open Source model really points to a future where corporations are largely irrelevant, and everybody participates in an extremely organic, dynamic model where we all act as free agents, working on the projects which most interest us. But, don't even get me started on that topic.
Nonetheless, I can't find anything which is more intelectually fascinating than these topics at the present time. Anthropic cosmological principle! Bah!
I still don't get it sometimes when people say this. I would only feel comfortable making this sort of statement based on some evidence. Not a troll or anything, but has anybody ever seen any evidence which indicates what majority of the PC-using community understand what a "firewall" means, and, if they do, how to turn it on when they receive their brand-spanking new PC from Dell?
If that number turned out to be unusually low, perhaps the key is to really shove this sort of education down people's throats. How? I don't know. A series of ads on TV? Not likely. Get it into the headlines? Not likely. So I'm just not sure how this could be done.
One thing's for sure, my mom wouldn't know what a firewall is, nor how to turn it on, and I shudder at the thought of trying to explain it. Honestly.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft folks in Redmond, WA appear to have overlooked the Xbox' potential as a multimedia center
Ummmm, no. Don't you see? The XBox is just the first step of many. Microsoft has the money and the skills to be patient. The home entertainment market is going to be absolutely massive, and Microsoft is going to be in everybody's living room, whether it be the XBox 2 or XBox 3 or 4 or 5. Hell, they're already in many DVD players, aren't they? Even if you hate them, you have to admit they have a bunch of smart sons of proverbials up there.
Forget the CDs, the technology will change before the CDs rot.
Take my DVD collection, for example. Already the companies are battling to define the next standard. Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
A technology-independent, perpetual, safe storage service for the general public is just a business opportunity waiting to happen. So is the market to sell rights to a movie or song, independent of its format.
Yeah, there are companies that are truly innovative like 3M and GE and then there are companies that, er, aren't. You're selectively choosing your companies to support your argument.
On the other hand, the IT industry is filled with companies sending jobs overseas, holding back costly initiatives, and downsizing their R&D departments, because they cost money and impact the bottom line. Further, companies absolutely make decisions on a yearly timescale when they have to report to the public. A 5-year project which will take $100 million off the bottom line each year before yielding dividends? Good luck selling that proposal.
The wonderful thing about science fiction is that, imho, it isn't really about science at all. Instead, it gives writers an opportunity to change small (or large) details about the world around humans, and see how they react. So, SF is all about humans at the end of the day. For a while, Star Trek understood that. Almost all of the first series understood that, with wise old Gene at the helm. TNG understood that as well, which is why "The Inner Light" is one. of. the. best. damn. episodes. of. any. series. ever.
Berman and his band of merry idiots don't understand this simple fact. I remember reading an article in which he said something like: "Star Trek fans loves aliens and time travel."
Star Trek 2, 4 and 6 understood that it's all about the people. First Contact was good because it was so damn cool, and nobody can dislike anything with the Borg in it.
So yeah, if I have simply lost interest in Star Trek because Berman wants to fill every movie with "aliens" and "time travel" then troll me.
CNN.com reports that sources close to Berman cryptically referred to the movie as "more of the same old crap from the same old people."
Why, oh why, do they continue to insist on beating this dead horse into the dust? I'm as big a Star Trek fan as anybody, but it's gone way too far away from its roots, and quite frankly the last couple of movies have sucked so hard that I can't stand thinking about what they're going to bring out next.
I guess there are lots of facets to this kind of story. I hear that in 2010 the US will face a shortage of 10 million-odd workers, though I haven't heard what industries those shortages will be in. If it's in computer science-related areas, then I can only imagine that the remaining 81% of people pursuing these degrees will be stoked.
On the other hand, I think the person quoted as proceeding to an MBA is doing the right thing. If you can't beat them, join them, as they say, and that's precisely what I intend to do myself. Better to be the outsourcer than the outsourcee. Of course, this argument will fall through when they shift those jobs overseas as well.
I didn't see where these 19% are going though, apart from this one quote. In my view, the safer bet nowadays is migrating to jobs where you physically -have- to be there to do the job. Medicine jumps to mind, though the robots are coming, I know. And, God help us, lawyers.
I can't get to the article - it appears to already be/.'ed. However, I must say I strongly disagree with the assumption that software is a commodity. I think what Open Source has done is place into question the approach which the software industry takes. In my view, this does not in and of itself make software a commodity.
As others have already noted - and which was noted in "IT doesn't matter" - is that the issue with packaged software is that everybody can buy it for a reasonably small price. In so much, it by definition becomes a commodity. However, packaged software covers only a small portion of the market for software. In-house solutions and so forth could not be considered a commodity if they provide a sustainable competitive advantage for some particular company. Imagine a software toolkit which allowed a company to estimate, with 99% accuracy, the future movements of markets in which they compete. It would be laughable to consider such a piece of software a commodity.
So what's the point of all this. I think what Open Source has done is pressure the big software houses to become more innovative than ever before. It's not good enough to come up with a good idea (a la MS Office or MS Windows) and tack feature after useless feature onto it just to get people to upgrade. Companies then need only buy software upgradesto "keep up with the Jones." However, there isn't any competitive advantage in this, and the economics of IT has borne that statement out - nobody has ever really revolutionized their companies using IT. What the software houses need to do is envisage IT products in terms of months of useful life, and not years, or even decades. The key issue here will become: "how long can this piece of software give me a competitive advantage before everybody has it?" Exclusive contracts with software houses will become the norm, before software is released "to the masses." Software products will be canibalized within months by the same company that originally produced it. Sales cycles will decrease to days, rather than months or years as it stands now.
Finally, for-profit companies will need to mobilize to head off the threat of Open-Source. Intrinsic motivation is a hard battle to fight, and software companies will need to fundamentally change the way they approach HR issues and corporate reporting hierarchies if they want to compete with a legion of programmers who write code because they want to and they enjoy it. Monetary compensation schemes simply can't bring that level of devotion to a task.
Yes, the software industry as we know it, and the software it produces, will become a "commodity." Companies that understand how to avoid this will just blow away their competitors by bringing fundamentally brilliant software products to market. And you know what? The customer, as always, will win, over and over again.
Bravo to Open Source for forcing this upon the industry.
I wonder if there'd be any value in an "Open Source Constitution", which could serve as the bedrock against which issues such as this could be judged by the community.
Or, does the GPL already serve essentially the same purpose?
Any electrical engineers out there who have an idea what might be able to cause this? I can't understand why this would affect just this one type of system, and no others. For example, just at a conceptual level, why wouldn't it also cause issues with wireless telephones, or TV remote controls, or garage door openers? Is is purely a frequency issue, whatever it is?
In my view, this type of feature creep is really founded in the difficulty of coming up with new technologies that will be successful in the market. There are entire books on the subject of incremental creep, and its use as a successful technique for top-line growth.
So, as much as it sucks, I can at least understand why companies do this.
What bothers me is that there's no community memory about these sorts of things. Say I have a guy who walks into my office looking to fill a job position I have. How do I know he isn't some scum who ripped off a bunch of little old ladies last year when he was a stocktrader on the floor on the New York Stock Exchange? How do I know he's not the marketing guy who named his car 'Le Masturbation'?
Maybe that's a role played by HR consulting firms that I'm simply not aware of, but my understanding is that those guys typically search criminal records and so forth.
Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment? Otherwise these guys just prey on our lack of communal memory.
It has always struck me that putting more and more power close to people is the wrong way to go. Instead, why not make these machines effectively a "dumb terminal" and hook it in the Internet through a wireless connection, where it would interact with web services? Then, you can have a supercomputer on your side, and you wouldn't even know it.
But, I guess that goes against the post. My other thought is the social stigma associated with these things. I still get people telling me in an embarassed tone of voice that they can't remember my number any more without their cell phone handy. I see these things being huge in the area of 'intelligence augmentation' and 'external memories', if only people could accept that learning things rote is no longer something we actually have to do any more.
OK so here comes my rant. I'm thinking of the company I work for, where the total expenditure of the company dwarfs the total cost of employing its people. Marketing, real estate, and so forth. Further, there's a certain percentage of the workforce you simple can't move. You need your salesforce to physically shake hands with your customers. As Dell found out, it's sometimes a bad idea for a guy named "Tom" to pick up the customer support call in a thick Indian accent.
So, in my view, at the end of the day, outsourcing is only going to impact the bottom line a certain amount. There are certain costs which can't be shipped overseas. American businesses are generally coming to the end of the line when it comes to cost cutting exercises. The real focus now is on increasing the top line. Will moving jobs to India be good for the top line? That's a far more difficult proposition to support, given a simple lack of evidence.
Given all of this, what I'm yet to see is a sound theory of global economic equilibrium. Market forces are pushing jobs to India today. Tomorrow, will that force increase or decrease? What is impacting it? Inflation, for sure is one, but it seems a particularly thorny issue. What about the cost of education in America? Alan Greenspan can sit around and say the jobs will be replaced all he likes, but without some formal and concrete evidence, I'm not impressed. If there's anything I've learned in Data Warehousing, the past is rarely and dangerously an indicator of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, this might be an interesting direction for games to go in. Unreal Tournament 2004 isn't too exciting to watch unless you're actually playing in it, so what types of games would do well on tv?
Another area that I find fascinating is the potential for people to do "useful" things in games. Could gamers solve potentially large problems by the fractal differential of the quantum encoding of their movements in a game of Doom? Will games move so far into the realm of virtual lives that people physically do work there?
Fundamentally, computer games and movies are such different mediums - games are obviously all about interaction and using your brain (somewhat), while movies are about sitting back and eating popcorn, maybe throwing an arm around a lovely lass, and so forth.
I think what they're really doing here is utilizing name branding. Wow, that Day After Tomorrow movie was really good. Oh, there's a game named that too? Perhaps it'll be good too. By the time you figure out it sucks, there's $50 down the drain.
Been meaning to buy one for myself for ages. Especially in the traffic in the morning, when I have a bright idea, hell of a lot easier to speak it than write it down.
I'm not aware of any statistics in this area, but I'd love to see them - for example, just how much more productive is somebody working on Open Source than in a traditional business setting? Further, can this model be made to work in a business setting at all? Take a simple example of a business which allows its employees to work on whichever projects they choose. The company designates a specific set of projects, and you are allowed to migrate at will to those which most interest you. What would be the end-game of this strategy? Would programmers, for example, congregrate around the most "interesting" projects, even if those projects weren't the best for the financial health of the company? Would other projects die for simple lack of interest? What guarantees do we have that the optimal solution in terms of "interest" would be the optimal solution in terms of "making money"?
Of course, the Open Source model really points to a future where corporations are largely irrelevant, and everybody participates in an extremely organic, dynamic model where we all act as free agents, working on the projects which most interest us. But, don't even get me started on that topic.
Nonetheless, I can't find anything which is more intelectually fascinating than these topics at the present time. Anthropic cosmological principle! Bah!
If that number turned out to be unusually low, perhaps the key is to really shove this sort of education down people's throats. How? I don't know. A series of ads on TV? Not likely. Get it into the headlines? Not likely. So I'm just not sure how this could be done.
One thing's for sure, my mom wouldn't know what a firewall is, nor how to turn it on, and I shudder at the thought of trying to explain it. Honestly.
Ummmm, no. Don't you see? The XBox is just the first step of many. Microsoft has the money and the skills to be patient. The home entertainment market is going to be absolutely massive, and Microsoft is going to be in everybody's living room, whether it be the XBox 2 or XBox 3 or 4 or 5. Hell, they're already in many DVD players, aren't they? Even if you hate them, you have to admit they have a bunch of smart sons of proverbials up there.
This is the most insightful posting on Slashdot today. Maybe even this week. Damnit when I don't have moderator points!
Take my DVD collection, for example. Already the companies are battling to define the next standard. Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
A technology-independent, perpetual, safe storage service for the general public is just a business opportunity waiting to happen. So is the market to sell rights to a movie or song, independent of its format.
On the other hand, the IT industry is filled with companies sending jobs overseas, holding back costly initiatives, and downsizing their R&D departments, because they cost money and impact the bottom line. Further, companies absolutely make decisions on a yearly timescale when they have to report to the public. A 5-year project which will take $100 million off the bottom line each year before yielding dividends? Good luck selling that proposal.
The wonderful thing about science fiction is that, imho, it isn't really about science at all. Instead, it gives writers an opportunity to change small (or large) details about the world around humans, and see how they react. So, SF is all about humans at the end of the day. For a while, Star Trek understood that. Almost all of the first series understood that, with wise old Gene at the helm. TNG understood that as well, which is why "The Inner Light" is one. of. the. best. damn. episodes. of. any. series. ever.
Berman and his band of merry idiots don't understand this simple fact. I remember reading an article in which he said something like: "Star Trek fans loves aliens and time travel."
Star Trek 2, 4 and 6 understood that it's all about the people. First Contact was good because it was so damn cool, and nobody can dislike anything with the Borg in it.
So yeah, if I have simply lost interest in Star Trek because Berman wants to fill every movie with "aliens" and "time travel" then troll me.
Why, oh why, do they continue to insist on beating this dead horse into the dust? I'm as big a Star Trek fan as anybody, but it's gone way too far away from its roots, and quite frankly the last couple of movies have sucked so hard that I can't stand thinking about what they're going to bring out next.
Long live TNG on DVD.
If nothing else, this really indicates to me just how much money Microsoft has, and what a slap on the wrist the potential EU anti-trust fine is.
Nothing like a few good leaks to set the free publicity machine rolling.
On the other hand, I think the person quoted as proceeding to an MBA is doing the right thing. If you can't beat them, join them, as they say, and that's precisely what I intend to do myself. Better to be the outsourcer than the outsourcee. Of course, this argument will fall through when they shift those jobs overseas as well.
I didn't see where these 19% are going though, apart from this one quote. In my view, the safer bet nowadays is migrating to jobs where you physically -have- to be there to do the job. Medicine jumps to mind, though the robots are coming, I know. And, God help us, lawyers.
As others have already noted - and which was noted in "IT doesn't matter" - is that the issue with packaged software is that everybody can buy it for a reasonably small price. In so much, it by definition becomes a commodity. However, packaged software covers only a small portion of the market for software. In-house solutions and so forth could not be considered a commodity if they provide a sustainable competitive advantage for some particular company. Imagine a software toolkit which allowed a company to estimate, with 99% accuracy, the future movements of markets in which they compete. It would be laughable to consider such a piece of software a commodity.
So what's the point of all this. I think what Open Source has done is pressure the big software houses to become more innovative than ever before. It's not good enough to come up with a good idea (a la MS Office or MS Windows) and tack feature after useless feature onto it just to get people to upgrade. Companies then need only buy software upgradesto "keep up with the Jones." However, there isn't any competitive advantage in this, and the economics of IT has borne that statement out - nobody has ever really revolutionized their companies using IT. What the software houses need to do is envisage IT products in terms of months of useful life, and not years, or even decades. The key issue here will become: "how long can this piece of software give me a competitive advantage before everybody has it?" Exclusive contracts with software houses will become the norm, before software is released "to the masses." Software products will be canibalized within months by the same company that originally produced it. Sales cycles will decrease to days, rather than months or years as it stands now.
Finally, for-profit companies will need to mobilize to head off the threat of Open-Source. Intrinsic motivation is a hard battle to fight, and software companies will need to fundamentally change the way they approach HR issues and corporate reporting hierarchies if they want to compete with a legion of programmers who write code because they want to and they enjoy it. Monetary compensation schemes simply can't bring that level of devotion to a task.
Yes, the software industry as we know it, and the software it produces, will become a "commodity." Companies that understand how to avoid this will just blow away their competitors by bringing fundamentally brilliant software products to market. And you know what? The customer, as always, will win, over and over again.
Bravo to Open Source for forcing this upon the industry.
Did EV1.net just admit their own previous culpability by buying the licenses?
Or, does the GPL already serve essentially the same purpose?
Any electrical engineers out there who have an idea what might be able to cause this? I can't understand why this would affect just this one type of system, and no others. For example, just at a conceptual level, why wouldn't it also cause issues with wireless telephones, or TV remote controls, or garage door openers? Is is purely a frequency issue, whatever it is?
Is that the sound of big fat bonuses, popping champagne corks, and clapping I can hear?
So, as much as it sucks, I can at least understand why companies do this.
Maybe that's a role played by HR consulting firms that I'm simply not aware of, but my understanding is that those guys typically search criminal records and so forth.
Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment? Otherwise these guys just prey on our lack of communal memory.
I defy anybody to be able to make my clothes match up though, what with this being /. and all. We shall not be cool!
There will a short exam to test your knowledge at 3.
But, I guess that goes against the post. My other thought is the social stigma associated with these things. I still get people telling me in an embarassed tone of voice that they can't remember my number any more without their cell phone handy. I see these things being huge in the area of 'intelligence augmentation' and 'external memories', if only people could accept that learning things rote is no longer something we actually have to do any more.
So, in my view, at the end of the day, outsourcing is only going to impact the bottom line a certain amount. There are certain costs which can't be shipped overseas. American businesses are generally coming to the end of the line when it comes to cost cutting exercises. The real focus now is on increasing the top line. Will moving jobs to India be good for the top line? That's a far more difficult proposition to support, given a simple lack of evidence.
Given all of this, what I'm yet to see is a sound theory of global economic equilibrium. Market forces are pushing jobs to India today. Tomorrow, will that force increase or decrease? What is impacting it? Inflation, for sure is one, but it seems a particularly thorny issue. What about the cost of education in America? Alan Greenspan can sit around and say the jobs will be replaced all he likes, but without some formal and concrete evidence, I'm not impressed. If there's anything I've learned in Data Warehousing, the past is rarely and dangerously an indicator of the future.