If X is the number of polygons a game normally requires the computer to calculate to create a scene, "see through" portal requires another X polygons. A scene with n portals in view requires about (n+1)*x polygons.
If you saw HL2, there were some serious budget cuts on the scenery - try doing some grenade jump tricks or otherwise getting into the "you're not supposed to be here" area. Where other games put full 4-wall houses, just because that's easier, where they put a bit of far landscape or place normal "gameplay area" models in the background, HL2 removes "never visible" walls, uses replacement simplified models, places 2D sprites (trees!) and cuts off right at the visible edge. Every polygon counts and still HL2 didn't have very low requirements for its launch date. Later games were increasing number of details, view distance etc. This costs in polygon count too. The "X" required by game was always near to maximum count the mainstream gfx cards could pull at reasonable speed.
Now modern hardware made it possible to simplify the looks jumping maybe 5 years back in detail level (which really changes very little) and have the card to create several times more polygons than required to create one scene. Then add portals.
Actually, if I did want to express my individuality (which I don't, because I don't have low self-esteem), I would prefer to make my own site.
There are two other non-exclusive factors besides low self-esteem.
If you're (too stupid to learn proper HTML and make webpages, or too lazy to bother) and (have low self-esteem) you go for sites like MySpace. Individualism doesn't trump stupidity nor laziness.
It doesn't have to be a startup script. It may be launched by common use or a standard startup program - explorer.exe, winupdate, one of several dozens of programs that briefly launch on startup - or programs that simply are commonly used - msword, outlook (okay, this one is networked so gets scrutinized), msphotoedit (default picture viewer), media player (xbox got hacked because media player didn't check for validity of its font files), "archived folder manager" (built-in compressor), or whatever a joe average is likely to click within first 20 minutes of work on his peecee.
They won't work on PCs of users who don't use this kind of software, but these users are usually too advanced to be worth the risk. The rootkit only cares to remain -undetected- on all PCs, not necessarily running. It's about the size of the botnet, not about access to one specific PC.
BTW, heard about that hellish trojan from ancient times? It was compiled into the login process, granting a backdoor. But if you wanted to recompile the login binary, it was also included in the C compiler, changing the sources of the login program on the fly, plugging itself during compilation. And if you were really paranoid and wanted to recompile the C compiler from sources, it would patch the sources of the compiler as well, infecting the new binary. No amount of scrutinizing the sources or startup scripts would reveal it. But it's still possible. Replace windows update binary, replace any of startup binaries, replace some of the built-in security software, break any known antivirus while it installs, and the only thing that changes is md5sum of given binary, but then even md5sum.exe can be modified to return fake sums of modified programs and itself once you install it. The limit would be only the range of "supported" programs, one day a new antivirus would be released and old versions of the rootkit wouldn't detect it, it would notice system files notified (unless OS file access API wasn't modified and the rootkit just bypasses it...) and the rootkit would be detected. But on most systems running common software it would remain undetectable.
A registry entry, a buffer overflow, a trojan binary replacing standard with minor modification, a system service called with unusual parameters...
Most safely the buffer overflow. Buffer overflow vulnerablities are considered dangerous in apps that have access from outside or run at elevated privledges. Networked allow remote access, elevated mean access at higher privledges. Local userspace overflow means no profit - it's just a fancy method of launching a program, if you can do this through local overflow, you can do this directly through startup files (registry, scripts.) Nobody checks notepad.exe for buffer overflows. And few expect a local file's creation date field to contain an exploit...
No disaster during launch. Minor problems detected while in orbit. Then hopefully successful landing. And we have the shuttle on a complete finished successful roundtrip from Earth into orbit and back.
Gagarin did about as much.
Now did/will the shuttle do anything beyond that? Any delivery? Any research? Any discoveries? Anything more than launch, orbit, landing?
Any voice of this in the press? Any actual -success-, or just no failure?
Of course I'll be glad to hear here what they -actually- do besides the routine of flying the shuttle and assuring safe return, but even more I'll be glad to hear why no media write about it.
Phehehe, so what you're saying is that writing that documentation is impossible, because said protocols are so abhorrently wroten that they are undocummentable?
Well, well, in this case we're seeing a nice phenomenon when a big company is being fined for writing bad code?
Remember that hiding in alternate data streams is a "last resort" tool. These are normally not scanned, and I'm really not sure about their support under other OSes, so this allows for some obscuring of them, but still the primary method of hiding the rootkit is to remove all visible vectors of access to it from the running OS - actively override directory listing etc in the filesystem drivers or stuff like that - as long as you're running OS from the infected filesystem you will -not- see the rootkit. The only access would be through an OS from alternate boot - preventing the rootkit from even starting its cloaking devices, when "alternate data streams" could provide some hideout - but generally when it comes to this, you're so bound on finding the rootkit that they will not help. In basic case there's simply no way to guess they are there, so why scan, why seek when you see no hint there is any need to......and if they are overflow exploits on a common general-purpose program (windows explorer?) if you insert the disk in a different windows machine and access it... ouch, you just infected the other machine:)
Heh, a chorded keyboard could really be the key, once I learn using it. I've been fascinated by the idea for quite a while, though always thought of them in means of "use while travelling, sitting down", not while walking or such. A model that doesn't require resting your hand while typing could be a great thing for this. Thanks for the idea.
or that a vulnerablity of some metadata-reading program will be exploited. Say, buffer overflow in reading the metadata of "infected" file. Even in non-privledged program this will allow the rootkit to execute and escape the alternate data streams sandbox, then proceed with escalating its privledges and doing all the nasty stuff. This means there will be only legit entries in the registry and original (even though vulnerable) binaries in the normal data namespace.
AFAIK most of their methods of protection would fail. Still, they could quite nicely hide in "alternate data streams" - every file or directory in NTFS chan have arbitrary metadata attached to it. Usually it's things like ownerships, permissions etc, but 'arbitrary' in this case means that besides the official metadata you can attach whole files making them invisible in the filesystem tree, existing in separate namespace, each file entry being a root directory for a whole invisible filesystem. So plain 'ls' won't show them. You need a tool that will examine each file, extract its metadata, discard the "standard" metadata and list whatever has been attached to files additionally.
No, synchronously as in if one cannon requires 1 second to fully reload, cool down enough not to overheat and shoot again, the four fire continuously with 0.25s delay from each other, efficiently launching one shot every 0.25s
A single barrel is a cannon. If it's for example 4 cannons shooting synchronously for increased rate of fire, while retaining the same direction, it's called battery.
Attention these devices require in typing makes doing any actual -thinking- nearly impossible. I don't know about twiddler, but I spent some time with Dasher, and while typing using this thing is possible and after a while even mostly easy, it requires far too much attention to be able to split it between typing, writing, walking, and not walking into something.
Good voice recognition systems could do the trick I think...
The problem is, if I stand up for a bit longer, my legs start to ache. I may keep walking for hours, but tell me to stand in one place for 20 minutes and I just need to move. So standing while working, nope.
And of course I get lots of good ideas and such while walking, but when I get something that requires deeper thought, I stop. On threadmill - crash, bang, kaboom, you know the drill from commedy movies. Again, sucks. Plus walking in one place sucks. I'd much rather go for a walk in the far, rural suburbs if I have to "design" something. But then writing things down while walking sucks a big time.
I wish there was a wearable computer that would make taking notes while walking easy.
Potato chips cost lots to transport - bullshit. A bag of corn snacks that is HUGE (volume of about 6 XXL packs of potato chips, a tube about a meter long) can be bought for less than a small bag of potato chips. If transport costs so much, why isn't it at least twice as expensive as the big pack?
Knock-offs of the major soda manufacturers: 0.65zl 1.5l bottle of cola-alike, 4,50zl for 2l genuine. And they both weight about the same. So the manufacturer manages to contain ALL the costs plus profit in less than 20% the cost of the genuine brand. Of course the leading manufacturers spend a lot on advertising, but considering costs of producing such bulk amounts, and the fact that they roll their own extract (the knock-offs ride on extract purchased from Pepsi or Coca Cola), actual manufacture and sale, including transport, salaries, machinery etc, accounts for less than 20% of the price.
Of course there are no drugs for common cold. In the meantime there are already vaccinations that fight most of variants of flu. And nothing I know of for treating the disease is actually in the lab. Meantime the sales of over-the-counter treatments of the symptoms go over the top every winter, and these things, often made according to 100 years old recipes, and cheap in production cost arm and leg.
Most of university-employed PhDs are earning just the same as the rest of academic crew. Jobs in education suck a big time, I can tell you this from my own experience. And these who work for "market research" companies and such, don't go around flapping their jaws about their secrets. Most of economy&marketing students end up as highly qualified cashiers in supermarkets.
because it's hard to market good AI. Screenshots are the first impression. Then come numerical data: size of levels, number of enemies, number of weapons etc. Then some extra perks. "Better AI" entry there will show up no matter if the bot jumps randomly once in a hour or can kill the player at any time. So why bother? The player passes the money the moment they buy the game, and later they may bitch on sucky AI all they want.
Remember the Half-life 2 AI hype? Or Oblivion? bleah.
What about game enemies learning tricks from the player? Play a deathmatch against bots, that learn movement patterns of players, instead of using predefined paths, learn new ones by watching the players and follow them, becoming more of a challenge, less predictable, learning most efficient tricks? At first the game is just a game against bots. Later it becomes a game against yourself. And if you limit the bot to learn from you, and not from the "hive mind" that contains tricks from all players, fighting it you learn your own weaknesses.
Yeah, because technology of producing potato chips is nearly as advanced and sophisticated as technology of producing CPUs. Potatos: 0.5%. Oil: 2%. Machinery, energy: 4%. Employees: 5%. Taxes (various) about 20%. Transport, storage and all the rest - maybe 5%. The rest is pure profit.
You can buy cheap crappy cables, but you can't buy cheap good cables anymore. Competition eliminated.
I think cartridges like the old HP, the size of a cigarette boxes aren't too big. I see no profit in matchbox sized ones used instead. And the old ones easily took refill of plain fountain pen ink, $1/200ml bottle, and worked just fine so please no bullshit about "ink is expensive". If the technology brings price from $1/200ml to $40/5ml, maybe tripling efficiency of mililiters per page but increasing cost per page about ten times, this is NOT advancement. Print quality increased from 600DPI to 2400DPI while all professional poligraphy works in 600dpi so the increase is a snake oil. If you prefer to pay $40 for 80 pages of print, please don't discuss economy with me. My old printer can run about 800 for $25, even without messing with refill sets.
About "big pharma", I can only tell this, that the moment western concerns took over pharmaceutical industry in Poland, drugs prices for things like common cold increased about 1000%, some highly efficient drugs vanished from the market and got replaced with expensive, inefficient crap. You could make an appointment with a dentist in 3 days and go on for 3 days on Veramid with a full-strength tooth ache. Now Veramid is no longer in production, replaced by things like Ibuprom, that don't do shit against tooth ache but instead of 0.45zl per 10 tabs cost 6zl per 6 tabs. And try to find a dentist who could do anything more than pull your tooth on saturday or sunday...
If PhDs of economy knew shit about real market, they'd be making money on the market and not teaching.
They simply could license the technology to GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. Actually, this is what they would do
Yeah. Each of them. Not that GM, Ford, Toyota, would manufacture cars based on all of these technologies. They would pick one that is most efficient and licesing it is cheapest.
Since the demand for gas would drop, the company would depend on profit from the licence (very low, everyone wanted their licence sold, because otherwise they are left without this, even slim source of revenue and must depend strictly on vaning oil market), sales of the new fuel (likely much cheaper than gasoline, or a competing technology that uses cheaper fuel would be picked, plus probably non-monopoly, struggling against competition), and on vaning profits from oil. It would be worse off than before, and other companies in the sector would be MUCH worse off than before.
As long as we hold the patent, we can make the consumer just a whee bit better off and keep the rest of the new pie for ourselves
Small incremental changes. Not a revolution. This is allowed. Cold war, race of arms. Build better, stronger weapons (buy patents, explore the new technologies), but use conventional forces (small upgrades) and diplomacy (marketing) in conflict zones. The moment you launch your nukes, the opponent will do so too.
If your company depended strictly on one product, and was one of many on the market, which depend on that product, if you had a technology that makes the product obsolete, but some of the competitors did too, and maybe even better... Would you release the new product? You kill current production of yourself -and- the competition in one hit. You get a monopoly for a moment. But then the competition releases their product that may or may not, but likely will make your new product obsolete. If they fail, you still have the monopoly. If they succeed, you lost markets both for old and the new product, you're out of business. Doesn't matter if you do this yourself, or sublicense. The effect is the same, only in case of sublicensing your potential profit margins in case of victory will be fixed at the dumping price from times of the war.
Microsoft and Sony are a multi-brand industry, so they can afford HD-DVD vs BluRay format war - the loser will lose just one segment of market, Sony will still release their Vaio and rootkited CDs, Microsoft will still try to roll out Vista and release crappy games for XBOX. Hitachi has quite enough of other products that they could roll out their "perpendicular writing" HD technology - if some company had something of similar size or better up their sleeves, Hitachi would still live on consumer electronics. AMD and Intel are at open war, shooting their best cannons at each other, don't have anything that could kill the opponent, no cold war, but normal warfare. Google has several segments of the market and lives strong, continuously releasing something new and wild they grab, "eat this, losers", stuffing their best in faces of Microsoft and Yahoo, forcing them to release their hidden arms or copy them (1GB mail, simple, almost ad-free search page) and flail them at the superior power.
But there are few industries that purposedly block progress, artificially inflate prices, either use their monopoly position or make pacts of non-aggression. Oil, diamonds, record industry (oh, iTunes hurts them sooo much! And Yahoo music? Seen the attempts to delegalize it?), games developers (often buy out small studios working on something revolutionary just to can the project), cables (look up the real story of factory in Ozarow Mazowiecki, selling cables at realistic prices. Bought then closed to keep the market size in check), potato chips (1kg of potato chips costs 200 times as much as 1kg of potatos, of course no room for great innovation but price fixing all the way...), inkjet printers (Why not throw in a 5x bigger cartridge for the same price and blow the competition out of water? Because they will do the same and your revenue on cartridges will drop 5x.)
Nope, not the point. In Oblivion you can actually make a pretty "tank" mage character by enchanting several pieces of clothes with "shield" effect, giving protection of heaviest, best armour (and you can do it early in the game, while said armour starts appearing when you are level 20!)
The point is in the levelling system: Skills are everything. Levels are a handicap. The higher your level, the harder the game, but there's few if any profits from gaining levels. You gain levels from gaining "class skills". So to get skills you use high while keeping your level low, you pick class skills you're never going to use, and use strictly non-class skills instead. The non-class skills grow without negative impact on gameplay difficulty while the class skills rot there at their apprentice level forever and you use them once in a blue moon, or when the game feels too easy and you're looking for a challenge - then you "train" them (spend a night sneaking around a bed of a sleeping person, keep casting the same useless spell over and over, abort lockpicking minigame when you're about to press the last tumbler, try again, keep rolling the speechcraft minigame over and over, or find a mudcrab and let it attack you, while you wear steel armour, keeping healing yourself. You gain them, you gain a level, game gets harder but some extras get unlocked. The problem is these extras are hardly worth the increase in difficulty...
If it was "just a change" then yes. But look at the thread above. What if it was a HUGE war (which would likely occur if (unlikely) Exxon did it? The "new" cars instead of being (normally) more expensive than traditional ones, would be sold at huge loss, to gain a market share for one technology. Very cheap new cars, very cheap fuel (also sold at loss to create incentive to use it instead of the competition's fuel), only few fans of the old cars wouldn't move or keep using the old ones. The transition would be rapid and violent. And not only cars... to create more incentive for use of own product, and try to enter other markets. Transition in other domains would be slower (an engine is only a small part of price of a big airplane) and in some would not occur (plastic is not going to go anytime soon) but it would happen.
Still, the up-front losses created by investment into winning the war and likely heavy decrease of value due to much lower demand for oil, would kill or seriously damage all losers of that war. Not worth the risk. Too much to lose, too slim chance of victory, even if the victory would be spectacular. People don't spend their whole salaries on lottery tickets, companies avoid investing in technologies that may bring loss or endanger current position.
If I hang 2000 padlocks on most from the 2200 doors of my house, it will be most secured in the whole neighbourhood. Not more secure than the guy across the street, with front and back door, one good quality lock in each, and good windows from break-proof glass.
Windows is too big to be secured whole, it has too many dependencies on insecure behaviours of programs, the security too often stands in the way of usablity and as such will often be disabled or neglected. If you need to type admin password 50 times a day to perform quite simple (though potentially remotely risky) tasks, you will type in the 51st time when a trojan asks you to do so.
Moment moment, the optimistic choice is sure that, but the pessimistic, and WAY MORE LIKELY one is that you cease from existence, file for bankruptcy, lose everything. Nobody buys your cars because only 1/4 of the country gas stations support them, while a competitor bought out three others and his cars are supported on 2/3 of gas stations of the US, plus get 20% more horsepower at expense of 10% higher fuel consumption. Nobody wants your oil. Nobody wants to buy your shares, because you have $15bln of debt, money spent on upgrading all the stations to the new standard and nearly giving away your cars to make them more popular than what the competition sells. Before the war is won, it brings COLLOSAL losses and when it's lost, what is lost, can't be recovered, no matter what.
If the victory was assured, why not, you'd likely do it (assuming others don't unite against you or don't pull some unlikely aces off their sleeves - and you are sure they won't) But the victory is not only not assured, but quite unlikely - the powers are quite ballanced and if there are 15 big players on the market, your chance is about 1 in 15. Why not keep the status quo, safely cutting coupons and raising gas prices, why risk everything for a slim chance of destroying the competition and quadrupling own value, at risk of losing everything, while current income is safe, sure, and entirely sufficient for everyone in the company?
Most big companies prefer to play it safe. Hollywood and games industry being good examples. Don't risk big money in a stunt that might bring huge profit but might just as well appear to be a flop. Instead keep producing the same "old, good" and keep the revenue flowing at reasonable pace without risks.
Slashdot Mirror
*WHOOOOSHHHH*
(the sound the idea makes going over your head)
If X is the number of polygons a game normally requires the computer to calculate to create a scene, "see through" portal requires another X polygons. A scene with n portals in view requires about (n+1)*x polygons.
If you saw HL2, there were some serious budget cuts on the scenery - try doing some grenade jump tricks or otherwise getting into the "you're not supposed to be here" area. Where other games put full 4-wall houses, just because that's easier, where they put a bit of far landscape or place normal "gameplay area" models in the background, HL2 removes "never visible" walls, uses replacement simplified models, places 2D sprites (trees!) and cuts off right at the visible edge. Every polygon counts and still HL2 didn't have very low requirements for its launch date.
Later games were increasing number of details, view distance etc. This costs in polygon count too. The "X" required by game was always near to maximum count the mainstream gfx cards could pull at reasonable speed.
Now modern hardware made it possible to simplify the looks jumping maybe 5 years back in detail level (which really changes very little) and have the card to create several times more polygons than required to create one scene. Then add portals.
Actually, if I did want to express my individuality (which I don't, because I don't have low self-esteem), I would prefer to make my own site.
There are two other non-exclusive factors besides low self-esteem.
If you're (too stupid to learn proper HTML and make webpages, or too lazy to bother) and (have low self-esteem) you go for sites like MySpace. Individualism doesn't trump stupidity nor laziness.
It doesn't have to be a startup script. It may be launched by common use or a standard startup program - explorer.exe, winupdate, one of several dozens of programs that briefly launch on startup - or programs that simply are commonly used - msword, outlook (okay, this one is networked so gets scrutinized), msphotoedit (default picture viewer), media player (xbox got hacked because media player didn't check for validity of its font files), "archived folder manager" (built-in compressor), or whatever a joe average is likely to click within first 20 minutes of work on his peecee.
They won't work on PCs of users who don't use this kind of software, but these users are usually too advanced to be worth the risk. The rootkit only cares to remain -undetected- on all PCs, not necessarily running. It's about the size of the botnet, not about access to one specific PC.
BTW, heard about that hellish trojan from ancient times? It was compiled into the login process, granting a backdoor. But if you wanted to recompile the login binary, it was also included in the C compiler, changing the sources of the login program on the fly, plugging itself during compilation. And if you were really paranoid and wanted to recompile the C compiler from sources, it would patch the sources of the compiler as well, infecting the new binary. No amount of scrutinizing the sources or startup scripts would reveal it. But it's still possible. Replace windows update binary, replace any of startup binaries, replace some of the built-in security software, break any known antivirus while it installs, and the only thing that changes is md5sum of given binary, but then even md5sum.exe can be modified to return fake sums of modified programs and itself once you install it. The limit would be only the range of "supported" programs, one day a new antivirus would be released and old versions of the rootkit wouldn't detect it, it would notice system files notified (unless OS file access API wasn't modified and the rootkit just bypasses it...) and the rootkit would be detected. But on most systems running common software it would remain undetectable.
A registry entry, a buffer overflow, a trojan binary replacing standard with minor modification, a system service called with unusual parameters...
Most safely the buffer overflow. Buffer overflow vulnerablities are considered dangerous in apps that have access from outside or run at elevated privledges. Networked allow remote access, elevated mean access at higher privledges. Local userspace overflow means no profit - it's just a fancy method of launching a program, if you can do this through local overflow, you can do this directly through startup files (registry, scripts.) Nobody checks notepad.exe for buffer overflows. And few expect a local file's creation date field to contain an exploit...
No disaster during launch. Minor problems detected while in orbit. Then hopefully successful landing. And we have the shuttle on a complete finished successful roundtrip from Earth into orbit and back.
Gagarin did about as much.
Now did/will the shuttle do anything beyond that? Any delivery? Any research? Any discoveries? Anything more than launch, orbit, landing?
Any voice of this in the press? Any actual -success-, or just no failure?
Of course I'll be glad to hear here what they -actually- do besides the routine of flying the shuttle and assuring safe return, but even more I'll be glad to hear why no media write about it.
Phehehe, so what you're saying is that writing that documentation is impossible, because said protocols are so abhorrently wroten that they are undocummentable?
Well, well, in this case we're seeing a nice phenomenon when a big company is being fined for writing bad code?
Remember that hiding in alternate data streams is a "last resort" tool. These are normally not scanned, and I'm really not sure about their support under other OSes, so this allows for some obscuring of them, but still the primary method of hiding the rootkit is to remove all visible vectors of access to it from the running OS - actively override directory listing etc in the filesystem drivers or stuff like that - as long as you're running OS from the infected filesystem you will -not- see the rootkit. The only access would be through an OS from alternate boot - preventing the rootkit from even starting its cloaking devices, when "alternate data streams" could provide some hideout - but generally when it comes to this, you're so bound on finding the rootkit that they will not help. In basic case there's simply no way to guess they are there, so why scan, why seek when you see no hint there is any need to... ...and if they are overflow exploits on a common general-purpose program (windows explorer?) if you insert the disk in a different windows machine and access it... ouch, you just infected the other machine :)
Heh, a chorded keyboard could really be the key, once I learn using it. I've been fascinated by the idea for quite a while, though always thought of them in means of "use while travelling, sitting down", not while walking or such. A model that doesn't require resting your hand while typing could be a great thing for this. Thanks for the idea.
or that a vulnerablity of some metadata-reading program will be exploited. Say, buffer overflow in reading the metadata of "infected" file. Even in non-privledged program this will allow the rootkit to execute and escape the alternate data streams sandbox, then proceed with escalating its privledges and doing all the nasty stuff. This means there will be only legit entries in the registry and original (even though vulnerable) binaries in the normal data namespace.
AFAIK most of their methods of protection would fail. Still, they could quite nicely hide in "alternate data streams" - every file or directory in NTFS chan have arbitrary metadata attached to it. Usually it's things like ownerships, permissions etc, but 'arbitrary' in this case means that besides the official metadata you can attach whole files making them invisible in the filesystem tree, existing in separate namespace, each file entry being a root directory for a whole invisible filesystem. So plain 'ls' won't show them. You need a tool that will examine each file, extract its metadata, discard the "standard" metadata and list whatever has been attached to files additionally.
No, synchronously as in if one cannon requires 1 second to fully reload, cool down enough not to overheat and shoot again, the four fire continuously with 0.25s delay from each other, efficiently launching one shot every 0.25s
A single barrel is a cannon. If it's for example 4 cannons shooting synchronously for increased rate of fire, while retaining the same direction, it's called battery.
Attention these devices require in typing makes doing any actual -thinking- nearly impossible. I don't know about twiddler, but I spent some time with Dasher, and while typing using this thing is possible and after a while even mostly easy, it requires far too much attention to be able to split it between typing, writing, walking, and not walking into something.
Good voice recognition systems could do the trick I think...
The problem is, if I stand up for a bit longer, my legs start to ache. I may keep walking for hours, but tell me to stand in one place for 20 minutes and I just need to move. So standing while working, nope.
And of course I get lots of good ideas and such while walking, but when I get something that requires deeper thought, I stop. On threadmill - crash, bang, kaboom, you know the drill from commedy movies. Again, sucks. Plus walking in one place sucks. I'd much rather go for a walk in the far, rural suburbs if I have to "design" something. But then writing things down while walking sucks a big time.
I wish there was a wearable computer that would make taking notes while walking easy.
Potato chips cost lots to transport - bullshit. A bag of corn snacks that is HUGE (volume of about 6 XXL packs of potato chips, a tube about a meter long) can be bought for less than a small bag of potato chips. If transport costs so much, why isn't it at least twice as expensive as the big pack?
Knock-offs of the major soda manufacturers: 0.65zl 1.5l bottle of cola-alike, 4,50zl for 2l genuine. And they both weight about the same. So the manufacturer manages to contain ALL the costs plus profit in less than 20% the cost of the genuine brand. Of course the leading manufacturers spend a lot on advertising, but considering costs of producing such bulk amounts, and the fact that they roll their own extract (the knock-offs ride on extract purchased from Pepsi or Coca Cola), actual manufacture and sale, including transport, salaries, machinery etc, accounts for less than 20% of the price.
Of course there are no drugs for common cold. In the meantime there are already vaccinations that fight most of variants of flu. And nothing I know of for treating the disease is actually in the lab. Meantime the sales of over-the-counter treatments of the symptoms go over the top every winter, and these things, often made according to 100 years old recipes, and cheap in production cost arm and leg.
Most of university-employed PhDs are earning just the same as the rest of academic crew. Jobs in education suck a big time, I can tell you this from my own experience. And these who work for "market research" companies and such, don't go around flapping their jaws about their secrets.
Most of economy&marketing students end up as highly qualified cashiers in supermarkets.
because it's hard to market good AI. Screenshots are the first impression. Then come numerical data: size of levels, number of enemies, number of weapons etc. Then some extra perks. "Better AI" entry there will show up no matter if the bot jumps randomly once in a hour or can kill the player at any time. So why bother? The player passes the money the moment they buy the game, and later they may bitch on sucky AI all they want.
Remember the Half-life 2 AI hype? Or Oblivion?
bleah.
What about game enemies learning tricks from the player?
Play a deathmatch against bots, that learn movement patterns of players, instead of using predefined paths, learn new ones by watching the players and follow them, becoming more of a challenge, less predictable, learning most efficient tricks? At first the game is just a game against bots. Later it becomes a game against yourself. And if you limit the bot to learn from you, and not from the "hive mind" that contains tricks from all players, fighting it you learn your own weaknesses.
Who would pay $800 to fight a giant enemy crab on screen, if you can do it probably cheaper IRL?
I wonder where their weak spot is.
Yeah, because technology of producing potato chips is nearly as advanced and sophisticated as technology of producing CPUs. Potatos: 0.5%. Oil: 2%. Machinery, energy: 4%. Employees: 5%. Taxes (various) about 20%. Transport, storage and all the rest - maybe 5%. The rest is pure profit.
You can buy cheap crappy cables, but you can't buy cheap good cables anymore. Competition eliminated.
I think cartridges like the old HP, the size of a cigarette boxes aren't too big. I see no profit in matchbox sized ones used instead. And the old ones easily took refill of plain fountain pen ink, $1/200ml bottle, and worked just fine so please no bullshit about "ink is expensive". If the technology brings price from $1/200ml to $40/5ml, maybe tripling efficiency of mililiters per page but increasing cost per page about ten times, this is NOT advancement. Print quality increased from 600DPI to 2400DPI while all professional poligraphy works in 600dpi so the increase is a snake oil. If you prefer to pay $40 for 80 pages of print, please don't discuss economy with me. My old printer can run about 800 for $25, even without messing with refill sets.
About "big pharma", I can only tell this, that the moment western concerns took over pharmaceutical industry in Poland, drugs prices for things like common cold increased about 1000%, some highly efficient drugs vanished from the market and got replaced with expensive, inefficient crap. You could make an appointment with a dentist in 3 days and go on for 3 days on Veramid with a full-strength tooth ache. Now Veramid is no longer in production, replaced by things like Ibuprom, that don't do shit against tooth ache but instead of 0.45zl per 10 tabs cost 6zl per 6 tabs. And try to find a dentist who could do anything more than pull your tooth on saturday or sunday...
If PhDs of economy knew shit about real market, they'd be making money on the market and not teaching.
They simply could license the technology to GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. Actually, this is what they would do
Yeah. Each of them. Not that GM, Ford, Toyota, would manufacture cars based on all of these technologies. They would pick one that is most efficient and licesing it is cheapest.
Since the demand for gas would drop, the company would depend on profit from the licence (very low, everyone wanted their licence sold, because otherwise they are left without this, even slim source of revenue and must depend strictly on vaning oil market), sales of the new fuel (likely much cheaper than gasoline, or a competing technology that uses cheaper fuel would be picked, plus probably non-monopoly, struggling against competition), and on vaning profits from oil. It would be worse off than before, and other companies in the sector would be MUCH worse off than before.
As long as we hold the patent, we can make the consumer just a whee bit better off and keep the rest of the new pie for ourselves
Small incremental changes. Not a revolution. This is allowed. Cold war, race of arms. Build better, stronger weapons (buy patents, explore the new technologies), but use conventional forces (small upgrades) and diplomacy (marketing) in conflict zones. The moment you launch your nukes, the opponent will do so too.
If your company depended strictly on one product, and was one of many on the market, which depend on that product, if you had a technology that makes the product obsolete, but some of the competitors did too, and maybe even better... Would you release the new product? You kill current production of yourself -and- the competition in one hit. You get a monopoly for a moment. But then the competition releases their product that may or may not, but likely will make your new product obsolete. If they fail, you still have the monopoly. If they succeed, you lost markets both for old and the new product, you're out of business.
Doesn't matter if you do this yourself, or sublicense. The effect is the same, only in case of sublicensing your potential profit margins in case of victory will be fixed at the dumping price from times of the war.
Microsoft and Sony are a multi-brand industry, so they can afford HD-DVD vs BluRay format war - the loser will lose just one segment of market, Sony will still release their Vaio and rootkited CDs, Microsoft will still try to roll out Vista and release crappy games for XBOX. Hitachi has quite enough of other products that they could roll out their "perpendicular writing" HD technology - if some company had something of similar size or better up their sleeves, Hitachi would still live on consumer electronics. AMD and Intel are at open war, shooting their best cannons at each other, don't have anything that could kill the opponent, no cold war, but normal warfare. Google has several segments of the market and lives strong, continuously releasing something new and wild they grab, "eat this, losers", stuffing their best in faces of Microsoft and Yahoo, forcing them to release their hidden arms or copy them (1GB mail, simple, almost ad-free search page) and flail them at the superior power.
But there are few industries that purposedly block progress, artificially inflate prices, either use their monopoly position or make pacts of non-aggression. Oil, diamonds, record industry (oh, iTunes hurts them sooo much! And Yahoo music? Seen the attempts to delegalize it?), games developers (often buy out small studios working on something revolutionary just to can the project), cables (look up the real story of factory in Ozarow Mazowiecki, selling cables at realistic prices. Bought then closed to keep the market size in check), potato chips (1kg of potato chips costs 200 times as much as 1kg of potatos, of course no room for great innovation but price fixing all the way...), inkjet printers (Why not throw in a 5x bigger cartridge for the same price and blow the competition out of water? Because they will do the same and your revenue on cartridges will drop 5x.)
Nope, not the point. In Oblivion you can actually make a pretty "tank" mage character by enchanting several pieces of clothes with "shield" effect, giving protection of heaviest, best armour (and you can do it early in the game, while said armour starts appearing when you are level 20!)
The point is in the levelling system: Skills are everything. Levels are a handicap. The higher your level, the harder the game, but there's few if any profits from gaining levels. You gain levels from gaining "class skills". So to get skills you use high while keeping your level low, you pick class skills you're never going to use, and use strictly non-class skills instead. The non-class skills grow without negative impact on gameplay difficulty while the class skills rot there at their apprentice level forever and you use them once in a blue moon, or when the game feels too easy and you're looking for a challenge - then you "train" them (spend a night sneaking around a bed of a sleeping person, keep casting the same useless spell over and over, abort lockpicking minigame when you're about to press the last tumbler, try again, keep rolling the speechcraft minigame over and over, or find a mudcrab and let it attack you, while you wear steel armour, keeping healing yourself. You gain them, you gain a level, game gets harder but some extras get unlocked. The problem is these extras are hardly worth the increase in difficulty...
If it was "just a change" then yes. But look at the thread above. What if it was a HUGE war (which would likely occur if (unlikely) Exxon did it? The "new" cars instead of being (normally) more expensive than traditional ones, would be sold at huge loss, to gain a market share for one technology. Very cheap new cars, very cheap fuel (also sold at loss to create incentive to use it instead of the competition's fuel), only few fans of the old cars wouldn't move or keep using the old ones. The transition would be rapid and violent. And not only cars... to create more incentive for use of own product, and try to enter other markets. Transition in other domains would be slower (an engine is only a small part of price of a big airplane) and in some would not occur (plastic is not going to go anytime soon) but it would happen.
Still, the up-front losses created by investment into winning the war and likely heavy decrease of value due to much lower demand for oil, would kill or seriously damage all losers of that war. Not worth the risk. Too much to lose, too slim chance of victory, even if the victory would be spectacular. People don't spend their whole salaries on lottery tickets, companies avoid investing in technologies that may bring loss or endanger current position.
If I hang 2000 padlocks on most from the 2200 doors of my house, it will be most secured in the whole neighbourhood. Not more secure than the guy across the street, with front and back door, one good quality lock in each, and good windows from break-proof glass.
Windows is too big to be secured whole, it has too many dependencies on insecure behaviours of programs, the security too often stands in the way of usablity and as such will often be disabled or neglected. If you need to type admin password 50 times a day to perform quite simple (though potentially remotely risky) tasks, you will type in the 51st time when a trojan asks you to do so.
Moment moment, the optimistic choice is sure that, but the pessimistic, and WAY MORE LIKELY one is that you cease from existence, file for bankruptcy, lose everything. Nobody buys your cars because only 1/4 of the country gas stations support them, while a competitor bought out three others and his cars are supported on 2/3 of gas stations of the US, plus get 20% more horsepower at expense of 10% higher fuel consumption. Nobody wants your oil. Nobody wants to buy your shares, because you have $15bln of debt, money spent on upgrading all the stations to the new standard and nearly giving away your cars to make them more popular than what the competition sells. Before the war is won, it brings COLLOSAL losses and when it's lost, what is lost, can't be recovered, no matter what.
If the victory was assured, why not, you'd likely do it (assuming others don't unite against you or don't pull some unlikely aces off their sleeves - and you are sure they won't) But the victory is not only not assured, but quite unlikely - the powers are quite ballanced and if there are 15 big players on the market, your chance is about 1 in 15. Why not keep the status quo, safely cutting coupons and raising gas prices, why risk everything for a slim chance of destroying the competition and quadrupling own value, at risk of losing everything, while current income is safe, sure, and entirely sufficient for everyone in the company?
Most big companies prefer to play it safe. Hollywood and games industry being good examples. Don't risk big money in a stunt that might bring huge profit but might just as well appear to be a flop. Instead keep producing the same "old, good" and keep the revenue flowing at reasonable pace without risks.