My charger has a light that shows when the battery is charging. When the battery is charged, the light turns off.
The charger light turns on when the TV or music is loud. It switches off not quite as fast as a scope would show activity, but soon enough to know that something draws more current when there is significant audio input.
I bet a phone with a dead battery could be used to track audio spying pretty easily.
I love your point about storage. Some apps queue their data for upload on reconnect.
Today I created a list of nouns from a physical dictionary to use as honey-pot terms. I think the right thing to do is mention the terms aloud and log the time/date. Capture the ads as the terms show up --as screenshots.
Thanks for the interesting submission. Thanks for keeping up with the replies with quality comments. Please keep blogging because the world needs people who can connect dots more than it needs people who can recite straight-up facts.
Logarithmic chart axis scales are used to make logarithmic functions easier to draw by hand-- when you show a logarithmic function against a logarithmic axis scale, they present as a straight line instead of a curved line. Zip, the straight edge does all the work to make the result very nice, thank you Mr. Straight Edge and Mr. Light Table. Logarithmic axis scales are also used in the case of a computer-drawn chart of a function formerly/typically shown with logarithmic axis scales when drawn by hand. This disc performance chart is neither! It's simply confusing, because the slower drives' functions appear to be bigger than they normally would in comparison to a linear scale. Does any other site or graph show disc performance data on a logarithmic chart?
Here are excerpts from Science Made Stupid -- be sure to look up the Universe, Life, Chemistry, and Evolution. This book, by Tom Welling (not Tom Weller), has all our Slashdot favorites and more! It is now out of print. I saw a price for a used copy of $195-- which makes me want to sell my beater copy of this book for $100! The master of the pan flute, Zamfir, loved it. You will never have a finer science laugh.
Hiding the consoles like you are and tracking their use "just in case" is the same as failing to inform management, which makes your acts lies of omission. Think twice. Make sure your management actually understands what you intend to do. They should see the reports of developer gaming time that I think you're going to produce.
Of course, the monitoring will make the developers quit gaming, so I think you should just abandon the effort. Do something more constructive with your time and theirs: write the software your shareholders pay them to write. If they have a problem with work/life balance, tell them to cut out all goofing off at work and to go home when the whistle blows.
(Yes, I'm making a lot of assumptions! Chastise below!)
If Microsoft can put files on my computer without my knowledge, then it is really Microsoft's computer, which is control that I find extremely objectionable.
You've hit the nail on the head here, OP. Computers running Windows (and probably every commercial OS) belong to Corporate America. Our "experience" on those computers is tuned to project Corporate America's image-- their thoughts, their desires, their decisions about how we should exist and consume-- right at us... and it's hardly subliminal. If our experience is full of bugs, viruses, trojans, etc., we won't use our computers to hear or view licensed media, and the relationship between MSFT and the media companies/consortiums will evaporate-- so they must get it right. If they fail, we won't use our computers to play their partnership-driven advertising-filled games, we won't use our computers to experience the corporately pristine Internet in its AdSense-driven ways, and most of all, we just won't use their product. Corporate America is at a cusp, where getting it right or losing everything are their choices. Linux makes that possible.
Corporate America has found that the power of Linux isn't just to compel them to write better software. Nope, these companies have found that Linux removes their ability to control what we see, hear, play, and where we do it; Linux removes their ability to color our experiences and allows us to actually own our computers-- and maybe our lives.
They have to figure out what to do next, and so do we.
So they bought their phone on eBay, 'cause they were all out, or 'cause they got it for $559 ("cheapest price on the Internet!"). Now they have no recourse to "their $100" and just to rub salt in the wound, the guy who bought it at the store gets another $100.
Or, the guys all trying to sell the iPhones for $559 just had "their market" bottom out. To sell, they have to get price-competitive. There's a $100 pantsing they have to suffer.
I think you're right. I was thinking about some of my online gaming friends. They are without real names, genders, or physical bodies-- to me-- but they/are/ a collection of ideas, opinions, emotions, and interactions.
Those aren't the only things that count, but we are rapidly seeing the changes that prove those characteristics are the only requirements for discourse. I don't need my online friend's visage to miss discourse with him when he's gone. Reminds me of online funerals for deceased-in-Real-Life gamers.
Hardware switches can look straight at layer 2 encapsulation and shuffle packets based on that information. The switch's main CPU never sees the packet. The "naked" version of the switch still has enough main CPU in it to program the switch controller chip(s). More "clothed" switches have the spanning tree protocol, SNMP bits, and any other cool features you might have.
Routers have to look at layer 3. Back when I was writing code for a major switch/router manufacturer, most switch chips didn't pass the (de-encapsulated) packet up to the main CPU (or back down). The chip only gave notification that a packet arrived (etc) in the form of an incremented register. This meant the chips were unsuitable for routing because the main CPU had no visibility into the packet whatsoever.
Either of these designs generally require a separate Ethernet NIC for the main CPU, as the switch ports are too busy with external connections. That NIC might be connected to the switch chip on the switch's main board, or it might appear externally as a "management interface port." You'll be programming this NIC, too-- but hopefully, just with ifconfig(1M)
Suggestion: Look for commercial switch chips that can pass the packet to and from the main CPU. Find a company which has a COTS switch with the combination of your favorite switch chip and a CPU that will run your Linux version (or uCLinux). Make sure the implementation hardware is wired properly to be able to get the packets to and from the main CPU-- your favorite chip might have a separate HW interface for communicating with the main CPU that could be unconnected in the implementation hardware. At this point, you essentially have the naked switch that can route. Learn how to boot Linux on the implementation hardware and build a flash filesystem that the switch's bootloader will read. Then start writing code to add the capability you require (to routed?).
Suggestion: Once it works, sell the thing. Or open the source up for others. You went through a lot of trouble to get that capability in the system, and it's got to be so cool because it isn't already in a commercial router. You might consider selling it on the open market yourself, or finding someone to sell it to. Or drop it on Sourceforge for others to upgrade.
Suggestion: Or, you can get your cool feature embodied as an RFC and get the main router vendors to build it in. Or contribute the code to routed(or whatever). You can probably skip the effort of building this one-off switch/router.
I realize the answers to these questions vary by project, but let's say we have a pretty hot idea and the only contribution is the software IP. Let's say it's a web site. We've got something working but need money for a production deployment (ie bandwidth, systems hosting, customer service reps, support staff, etc. In short, our cost model can look like PayPal's cost model).
What amount of control (ie % ownership) typically goes to the investors? 90% ?
How is the VC money returned to the investors? Examples: is it given back as percentage of profit (20 % of gross or NIAT), or like a loan (all returned within 5 years?) or is it in perpetuity (VCs get 20% of everything, forever) ?
Does risk still equal reward? Seems to me the reward in the Internet/OSS project space is outrageously high, but the risk can't get any greater than the money you lay out + potential loss of goodwill/reputation.
What's the percentage in item 2 that VCs actually get for a project like this? 20%?
Adam Smith was a great thinker who has wound up giving us a fine equation for dealing with this problem. He mentioned the idea of a "natural price--" a value at or above the cost of a good's production.
Today's "production", especially for music, movies, or e-books, can take the form of a digital download. Since the cost of the download to the copyright owner is very close to zero, the natural price of the product is also very close to zero. Amortizing the cost of the production of the music and passing that amount on to consumers isn't actually happening, even in the case of physical media, because the label makes the band pay for it in their contracts (which amount to a giant loan) and pay them back out of the sales proceeds. It essentially costs labels nothing to make this music due to the contracts. So we're talking about essentially zero cost-- a zero natural price-- for music/movie/e-books.
As for information on other media subject to copyright, let's just take physical books as an example: nobody really photocopies whole books except broke college kids with access to the departmental photocopier-- so let's just consider music/movie copying. Magazine/newspaper articles get copied. However, nobody's worried about the penalties there (but they're still misaligned)
Using this natural price argument, the penalties for violating someone's copyright on digitally-delivered works are currently infinitely many times the natural price of the work. This makes the per-violation cost to the copyright holder certainly not $150,000 as specified by the law. I'm not sure there are no examples of copyrighted items that cost $150,000 each so I won't say "never." Nonetheless, it's easy to see how misaligned the actions and consequences are: zero natural price versus $150,000 cost.
We've taken an incorrect path with these overbearing copyright penalties. In essence, the government subsidizes the record labels' old-school distribution methods in an era of free distribution. They're subsidizing the labels with our money and with the fear of being penalized (forcing people to buy CDs/DVDs/e-Books). Subsidizing labels is wrong! Copyright penalties should be in line with the actual costs, not with an arbitrarily-high windfall guess about how much damage has been done to our "poor liddle label."
How then should the labels make money? Through sales of things that cannot be (easily) digitally reproduced-- things that have a natural price > 0. T-shirts, high-quality art prints, labels on other merchandise-- the Cafe' Press approach to merchandising. Or even, do the labels need to exist? Currently, it's the artists who do the merchanidising and it's the artists that make the money from it (not the labels).
Do the labels need to make money? Let's consider that one. It used to be that labels existed to ensure records made it onto store bins. Records/do/ cost money (okay, tapes too). (Please shoot me when the day comes that the labels try to sell me an SD card preloaded with another posthumous Tupac collection...) We already know that digital downloads cost a dime. So what are labels selling their shareholders? A market position and that's it. They aren't selling the shareholders an investment in a good company, or one that tries to better itself. They really aren't selling the shareholders an investment in their company's future. Physical distribution is obsolete, again, propped up by copyright law!
It's possible a label could be pushing digital downloads. So how does an all-digital label make money? Not rapidly! (but not "not at all." Some can find ways. Merchandising, anyone? ) Is $0.99 a fair price for a song when it can be downloaded for zero cost to the label? No.
However, until the law changes, it's still the law. We fix this by electing politicians who get it. Help me out and tell me which ones do.
Ya know, it's quite interesting that the point of this discussion was economic. I came to the conclusion that the price of a digital download should be equal to zero because its production cost can be made to be zero. What I didn't think I was going to conclude was this: Information Wants to be Free.
Execution fails (mostly, the coop post contains great counter-examples) with extra folks.
Perhaps the sufficient part of this OS Business concept should be the businss idea and plan itself. We could work out a sustainable business model that would allow for differentiation in services/products or price, and so on.
An example of a market that can sustain this level of competition is health care. Differentiation in that sector invites regulatory scruntiny. So how come there is so much competition? Is there really enough success to support the number of hospitals we have in the US? Must be, because the sector requires additional staffers!
So while running a company "out in the open" may not be good for its future, an open source business plan with closed execution might be the corporate equivalent to a "secure" encryption algorithm with a strong key.
My weekly DnD 3.5 game has a local DM, me, and two internet-based out-of-towners. We use a Logitech webcam and Yahoo instant messenger's voice + video services. We have a great time playing, now that the technology discussions and problems are out of the way.
Our requirements: 1. The DM wants to be able to move the minis around the map and sit on the DM's side of the table, and wants me to run the tech side of things for him. He wants to be able to draw a quick map or a picture of what we're seeing and show either to the players. This means hands-free communication for the DM and me to the out-of-towners and a picture of what he's drawn, taken by some type of camera. 2. We need to be able to "talk over" each other-- or at least know when more than one person is trying to talk. 3. Quickly sharing a changing map environment is crucial-- and the DM can't get me to draw everything in a tool because of the time it takes to explain things, or have himself draw them on paper and have me re-draw them in a tool. 4. We need to have a way for the players to communicate without the DM overhearing (and without chasing the DM out of the room) 5. I have a nice iBook and an iSight camera-- we should use it! 6. It shouldn't cost us anything "per month" to play. I didn't want to turn our out-of-towners off the game due to service subscription fees "just for a game." 7. We need the tech "out of the gaming process" so we can focus on DnD.
How things worked out: 1. I looked for a lot of cross-platform voice + video solutions with "talk-over" capability. Wouldn't you know it, but a two years or so ago, when I did the research, cross-platform, integrated tools with all other requirements just wasn't happening. We looked at stand-alone video tools running simultaneously with stand-along voice tools. We looked at "camming software" and only joked about playing in the buff. Consider AIM, which Apple's iSight can talk to with iChat. That seemed to be my only cross-platform solution, but the out-of-town players didn't want to sign up for "yet another IM system." So, I removed the cross-platform requirement. Things got easier. Remember, I did this research 2 years ago, so specific details are lost to me. I play DnD now, and don't spend my days looking for tech solutions to a problem I've already adequately solved. 2. We settled on Yahoo IM on the PC only. Yahoo's voice system allows you to know if you are "talking over" someone else because it beeps at you when a voice collision happens. The video support is decent, too. When the players need to communicate without DM knowledge, we just type. The DM doesn't look at the computer screen often. 3. Our little camera can go anywhere. We reposition it according to need. I have a little test pattern placard I can put in front of the camera for when the GM and I are setting up. That's double-nerdly, in case you didn't notice.:) We have various-sized boxes upon which we place the video camera to allow the right viewpoint for the out-of-towners. Sometimes we need to move the camera to allow different out-of-towners to see different parts of the game, but mostly, the battles converge to a single area and the camera movement slows down until the "move to next battle area" part of DnD. 4. We use an external microphone, a little cheap one, and lay it on the gaming table between the DM and me. Sometimes the players hear mumbling, but that's mostly when we accidently talk away from the mic (say, past the table, down to the floor.) 5. Sometimes the tech fails: eg: Yahoo wants to upgrade the client. The DM's internet is out (again). The wireless router is dead. The reception is poor because of the running microwave. Yahoo booted us again. The wireless reception failed. 6. We did not get a tool that lets us draw on the screen. We just draw on a piece of paper and point the webcam at it. Much faster and much less prone to perfectionism.
7. Most of all-- this feels like real DnD. The tech, now that it works, is out of the w
I was going to build out an online stock market in There; I was also going to build out an online bank. I thought about it really hard and decided that the US Gov't would come in and do several things:
Tax income
Check if I am an equal-opportunity lender
Review my bank for proper loan reserves
Bring in the SEC to investigate trades
Ensure that I treat customer information according to the Graham-Leach-Blyley Act (GLBA)
Probably something to do with Sarbanes-Oxley, too
Ask to see my records.
In general, I got discouraged. I could just see the US Gov't regulating my additions to There's virtual economy to the point where the There adventure became a nightmare. Social experiments just invite regulation, to keep people from messing themselves up. I know my scruples; I cannot know my social experiments' partners' scruples and thus I'm pretty sure the regulatory agencies would come down on the experiments like a ton of bricks. Remember, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a bank and subject to real regulation (at least as soon as the governments wake up)
Well, that's assuming the US Gov't would be the only governemtn to assert its regulations inside the There environment. I'm pretty sure they won't be.
I just built the computer bits, not the robot bits, because my family was living in a tiny military housing home at the time, and there was no room for all of Rodney. I remember ignoring my teachers to write assembly in class and being frustrated with switch-flipping.
There was a series of Byte articles on building your own processor out of LS components, too... "Komputar" or something like that. I didn't build that one, but maybe I still will. Of course, I'll do it today with VHDL just to tickle my programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
My charger has a light that shows when the battery is charging. When the battery is charged, the light turns off.
The charger light turns on when the TV or music is loud. It switches off not quite as fast as a scope would show activity, but soon enough to know that something draws more current when there is significant audio input.
I bet a phone with a dead battery could be used to track audio spying pretty easily.
I love your point about storage. Some apps queue their data for upload on reconnect.
How do we tell the advertising companies that I want to target people who said certain words aloud?
I bet they will easily sell you "this person is interested in term X...." but not "this person said term X aloud."
Today I created a list of nouns from a physical dictionary to use as honey-pot terms. I think the right thing to do is mention the terms aloud and log the time/date. Capture the ads as the terms show up --as screenshots.
When I look at the Planescape page at GOG, it doesn't show a Mac option. Did I miss something? I'd give 'em $9.99 in a heartbeat.
Thanks for the interesting submission. Thanks for keeping up with the replies with quality comments. Please keep blogging because the world needs people who can connect dots more than it needs people who can recite straight-up facts.
Logarithmic chart axis scales are used to make logarithmic functions easier to draw by hand-- when you show a logarithmic function against a logarithmic axis scale, they present as a straight line instead of a curved line. Zip, the straight edge does all the work to make the result very nice, thank you Mr. Straight Edge and Mr. Light Table. Logarithmic axis scales are also used in the case of a computer-drawn chart of a function formerly/typically shown with logarithmic axis scales when drawn by hand. This disc performance chart is neither! It's simply confusing, because the slower drives' functions appear to be bigger than they normally would in comparison to a linear scale. Does any other site or graph show disc performance data on a logarithmic chart?
I believe the orbital baby would be a great source for giant stem cells. Good thinking, Tynin!
Here are excerpts from Science Made Stupid -- be sure to look up the Universe, Life, Chemistry, and Evolution. This book, by Tom Welling (not Tom Weller), has all our Slashdot favorites and more! It is now out of print. I saw a price for a used copy of $195-- which makes me want to sell my beater copy of this book for $100! The master of the pan flute, Zamfir, loved it. You will never have a finer science laugh.
Oh yes, finally. It has occurred! A story duped right next to each itself. Timothy FTW!
... and there's no room for lying in business.
Hiding the consoles like you are and tracking their use "just in case" is the same as failing to inform management, which makes your acts lies of omission. Think twice. Make sure your management actually understands what you intend to do. They should see the reports of developer gaming time that I think you're going to produce.
Of course, the monitoring will make the developers quit gaming, so I think you should just abandon the effort. Do something more constructive with your time and theirs: write the software your shareholders pay them to write. If they have a problem with work/life balance, tell them to cut out all goofing off at work and to go home when the whistle blows.
(Yes, I'm making a lot of assumptions! Chastise below!)
Tell them you sweep the floors and clean up the mess that everyone else makes. Sometimes you get to do something cool, too, like painting a wall.
Tell them you also fix computers when your friends ask, and that you get to help out at 3AM when someone really needs the knick-knacks dusted.
You probably also do a lot of handholding, too. "Here, I will show you the way around this horrible mud puddle."
Try not to make it too condescending. It's a dirty job, and I'm just glad someone else than me is doing it now.
You've hit the nail on the head here, OP. Computers running Windows (and probably every commercial OS) belong to Corporate America. Our "experience" on those computers is tuned to project Corporate America's image-- their thoughts, their desires, their decisions about how we should exist and consume-- right at us... and it's hardly subliminal. If our experience is full of bugs, viruses, trojans, etc., we won't use our computers to hear or view licensed media, and the relationship between MSFT and the media companies/consortiums will evaporate-- so they must get it right. If they fail, we won't use our computers to play their partnership-driven advertising-filled games, we won't use our computers to experience the corporately pristine Internet in its AdSense-driven ways, and most of all, we just won't use their product. Corporate America is at a cusp, where getting it right or losing everything are their choices. Linux makes that possible.
Corporate America has found that the power of Linux isn't just to compel them to write better software. Nope, these companies have found that Linux removes their ability to control what we see, hear, play, and where we do it; Linux removes their ability to color our experiences and allows us to actually own our computers-- and maybe our lives.
They have to figure out what to do next, and so do we.
So they bought their phone on eBay, 'cause they were all out, or 'cause they got it for $559 ("cheapest price on the Internet!"). Now they have no recourse to "their $100" and just to rub salt in the wound, the guy who bought it at the store gets another $100.
Or, the guys all trying to sell the iPhones for $559 just had "their market" bottom out. To sell, they have to get price-competitive. There's a $100 pantsing they have to suffer.
Whoops! Speculation has its price!
1541 anyone?
I think you're right. I was thinking about some of my online gaming friends. They are without real names, genders, or physical bodies-- to me-- but they /are/ a collection of ideas, opinions, emotions, and interactions.
Those aren't the only things that count, but we are rapidly seeing the changes that prove those characteristics are the only requirements for discourse. I don't need my online friend's visage to miss discourse with him when he's gone. Reminds me of online funerals for deceased-in-Real-Life gamers.
Hardware switches can look straight at layer 2 encapsulation and shuffle packets based on that information. The switch's main CPU never sees the packet. The "naked" version of the switch still has enough main CPU in it to program the switch controller chip(s). More "clothed" switches have the spanning tree protocol, SNMP bits, and any other cool features you might have.
Routers have to look at layer 3. Back when I was writing code for a major switch/router manufacturer, most switch chips didn't pass the (de-encapsulated) packet up to the main CPU (or back down). The chip only gave notification that a packet arrived (etc) in the form of an incremented register. This meant the chips were unsuitable for routing because the main CPU had no visibility into the packet whatsoever.
Either of these designs generally require a separate Ethernet NIC for the main CPU, as the switch ports are too busy with external connections. That NIC might be connected to the switch chip on the switch's main board, or it might appear externally as a "management interface port." You'll be programming this NIC, too-- but hopefully, just with ifconfig(1M)
Suggestion: Look for commercial switch chips that can pass the packet to and from the main CPU. Find a company which has a COTS switch with the combination of your favorite switch chip and a CPU that will run your Linux version (or uCLinux). Make sure the implementation hardware is wired properly to be able to get the packets to and from the main CPU-- your favorite chip might have a separate HW interface for communicating with the main CPU that could be unconnected in the implementation hardware. At this point, you essentially have the naked switch that can route. Learn how to boot Linux on the implementation hardware and build a flash filesystem that the switch's bootloader will read. Then start writing code to add the capability you require (to routed?).
Suggestion: Once it works, sell the thing. Or open the source up for others. You went through a lot of trouble to get that capability in the system, and it's got to be so cool because it isn't already in a commercial router. You might consider selling it on the open market yourself, or finding someone to sell it to. Or drop it on Sourceforge for others to upgrade.
Suggestion: Or, you can get your cool feature embodied as an RFC and get the main router vendors to build it in. Or contribute the code to routed(or whatever). You can probably skip the effort of building this one-off switch/router.
Adam Smith was a great thinker who has wound up giving us a fine equation for dealing with this problem. He mentioned the idea of a "natural price--" a value at or above the cost of a good's production.
/do/ cost money (okay, tapes too). (Please shoot me when the day comes that the labels try to sell me an SD card preloaded with another posthumous Tupac collection...) We already know that digital downloads cost a dime. So what are labels selling their shareholders? A market position and that's it. They aren't selling the shareholders an investment in a good company, or one that tries to better itself. They really aren't selling the shareholders an investment in their company's future. Physical distribution is obsolete, again, propped up by copyright law!
Today's "production", especially for music, movies, or e-books, can take the form of a digital download. Since the cost of the download to the copyright owner is very close to zero, the natural price of the product is also very close to zero. Amortizing the cost of the production of the music and passing that amount on to consumers isn't actually happening, even in the case of physical media, because the label makes the band pay for it in their contracts (which amount to a giant loan) and pay them back out of the sales proceeds. It essentially costs labels nothing to make this music due to the contracts. So we're talking about essentially zero cost-- a zero natural price-- for music/movie/e-books.
As for information on other media subject to copyright, let's just take physical books as an example: nobody really photocopies whole books except broke college kids with access to the departmental photocopier-- so let's just consider music/movie copying. Magazine/newspaper articles get copied. However, nobody's worried about the penalties there (but they're still misaligned)
Using this natural price argument, the penalties for violating someone's copyright on digitally-delivered works are currently infinitely many times the natural price of the work. This makes the per-violation cost to the copyright holder certainly not $150,000 as specified by the law. I'm not sure there are no examples of copyrighted items that cost $150,000 each so I won't say "never." Nonetheless, it's easy to see how misaligned the actions and consequences are: zero natural price versus $150,000 cost.
We've taken an incorrect path with these overbearing copyright penalties. In essence, the government subsidizes the record labels' old-school distribution methods in an era of free distribution. They're subsidizing the labels with our money and with the fear of being penalized (forcing people to buy CDs/DVDs/e-Books). Subsidizing labels is wrong! Copyright penalties should be in line with the actual costs, not with an arbitrarily-high windfall guess about how much damage has been done to our "poor liddle label."
How then should the labels make money? Through sales of things that cannot be (easily) digitally reproduced-- things that have a natural price > 0. T-shirts, high-quality art prints, labels on other merchandise-- the Cafe' Press approach to merchandising. Or even, do the labels need to exist? Currently, it's the artists who do the merchanidising and it's the artists that make the money from it (not the labels).
Do the labels need to make money? Let's consider that one. It used to be that labels existed to ensure records made it onto store bins. Records
It's possible a label could be pushing digital downloads. So how does an all-digital label make money? Not rapidly! (but not "not at all." Some can find ways. Merchandising, anyone? ) Is $0.99 a fair price for a song when it can be downloaded for zero cost to the label? No.
However, until the law changes, it's still the law. We fix this by electing politicians who get it. Help me out and tell me which ones do.
Ya know, it's quite interesting that the point of this discussion was economic. I came to the conclusion that the price of a digital download should be equal to zero because its production cost can be made to be zero. What I didn't think I was going to conclude was this: Information Wants to be Free.
Now where have I heard that before... ?
If you play a borg does one of the other borgs make all the gameplay decisions for you?
Welcome to Slashdot, where The Collective won't let you live down a mistake, even in a joke.
Business Plans improve (mostly) with extra folks.
Execution fails (mostly, the coop post contains great counter-examples) with extra folks.
Perhaps the sufficient part of this OS Business concept should be the businss idea and plan itself. We could work out a sustainable business model that would allow for differentiation in services/products or price, and so on.
An example of a market that can sustain this level of competition is health care. Differentiation in that sector invites regulatory scruntiny. So how come there is so much competition? Is there really enough success to support the number of hospitals we have in the US? Must be, because the sector requires additional staffers!
So while running a company "out in the open" may not be good for its future, an open source business plan with closed execution might be the corporate equivalent to a "secure" encryption algorithm with a strong key.
Thoughts?
My weekly DnD 3.5 game has a local DM, me, and two internet-based out-of-towners. We use a Logitech webcam and Yahoo instant messenger's voice + video services. We have a great time playing, now that the technology discussions and problems are out of the way.
:) We have various-sized boxes upon which we place the video camera to allow the right viewpoint for the out-of-towners. Sometimes we need to move the camera to allow different out-of-towners to see different parts of the game, but mostly, the battles converge to a single area and the camera movement slows down until the "move to next battle area" part of DnD.
Our requirements:
1. The DM wants to be able to move the minis around the map and sit on the DM's side of the table, and wants me to run the tech side of things for him. He wants to be able to draw a quick map or a picture of what we're seeing and show either to the players. This means hands-free communication for the DM and me to the out-of-towners and a picture of what he's drawn, taken by some type of camera.
2. We need to be able to "talk over" each other-- or at least know when more than one person is trying to talk.
3. Quickly sharing a changing map environment is crucial-- and the DM can't get me to draw everything in a tool because of the time it takes to explain things, or have himself draw them on paper and have me re-draw them in a tool.
4. We need to have a way for the players to communicate without the DM overhearing (and without chasing the DM out of the room)
5. I have a nice iBook and an iSight camera-- we should use it!
6. It shouldn't cost us anything "per month" to play. I didn't want to turn our out-of-towners off the game due to service subscription fees "just for a game."
7. We need the tech "out of the gaming process" so we can focus on DnD.
How things worked out:
1. I looked for a lot of cross-platform voice + video solutions with "talk-over" capability. Wouldn't you know it, but a two years or so ago, when I did the research, cross-platform, integrated tools with all other requirements just wasn't happening. We looked at stand-alone video tools running simultaneously with stand-along voice tools. We looked at "camming software" and only joked about playing in the buff. Consider AIM, which Apple's iSight can talk to with iChat. That seemed to be my only cross-platform solution, but the out-of-town players didn't want to sign up for "yet another IM system." So, I removed the cross-platform requirement. Things got easier. Remember, I did this research 2 years ago, so specific details are lost to me. I play DnD now, and don't spend my days looking for tech solutions to a problem I've already adequately solved.
2. We settled on Yahoo IM on the PC only. Yahoo's voice system allows you to know if you are "talking over" someone else because it beeps at you when a voice collision happens. The video support is decent, too. When the players need to communicate without DM knowledge, we just type. The DM doesn't look at the computer screen often.
3. Our little camera can go anywhere. We reposition it according to need. I have a little test pattern placard I can put in front of the camera for when the GM and I are setting up. That's double-nerdly, in case you didn't notice.
4. We use an external microphone, a little cheap one, and lay it on the gaming table between the DM and me. Sometimes the players hear mumbling, but that's mostly when we accidently talk away from the mic (say, past the table, down to the floor.)
5. Sometimes the tech fails: eg: Yahoo wants to upgrade the client. The DM's internet is out (again). The wireless router is dead. The reception is poor because of the running microwave. Yahoo booted us again. The wireless reception failed.
6. We did not get a tool that lets us draw on the screen. We just draw on a piece of paper and point the webcam at it. Much faster and much less prone to perfectionism.
7. Most of all-- this feels like real DnD. The tech, now that it works, is out of the w
In general, I got discouraged. I could just see the US Gov't regulating my additions to There's virtual economy to the point where the There adventure became a nightmare. Social experiments just invite regulation, to keep people from messing themselves up. I know my scruples; I cannot know my social experiments' partners' scruples and thus I'm pretty sure the regulatory agencies would come down on the experiments like a ton of bricks. Remember, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a bank and subject to real regulation (at least as soon as the governments wake up)
Well, that's assuming the US Gov't would be the only governemtn to assert its regulations inside the There environment. I'm pretty sure they won't be.
THINK!
Maybe they need to bring that one back. Innovation is hard! The Next Big Thing is hiding between the Mountain Dew and the Cubical Wall.
8085-based.
See "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot" by David Heiserman. It makes a great starting point.
I just built the computer bits, not the robot bits, because my family was living in a tiny military housing home at the time, and there was no room for all of Rodney. I remember ignoring my teachers to write assembly in class and being frustrated with switch-flipping.
There was a series of Byte articles on building your own processor out of LS components, too... "Komputar" or something like that. I didn't build that one, but maybe I still will. Of course, I'll do it today with VHDL just to tickle my programmer.