(It was my blog, incidentally. I don't know why the submitter had interest in a days old blog about a years old experiment, but eh, I'm happy you found it interesting.)
Slashdotters will almost certainly find the original article at http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people -register-shareware.html as or more interesting as my blog summary of it, which strips out all the detail in favor of talking about another example (Movable Type) and two current programs (one mine, one somebody else's) and their different crippling strategies (features vs. time).
(I would have modded the parent up but I get 2 points for free and modding only gives the AC 1. Sorry, AC.)
I got Dungeon Keeper for -$10 at Best Buy. Yes, negative -- $9.99 with a $20 rebate. I was psyched since I had heard it was actually a pretty good game. So I got it home and started playing around without reading the manual, digging gold and marveling at the (at the time) mind-blowingly cool graphics. Two of my little brothers were watching me zoom in on an Imp while I was impatiently waiting around to get more money to build something or other.
"Hey, you're a hand. Wouldn't it be cool if you could, like, smack him to make him go faster?" said one of my little brothers.
At that moment, my finger slipped and right clicked the imp instead of left click. SMACK. There was silence in the room. Then I did it again. SMACK. Riotous laugher and cries of "I can't believe it actually lets you do that!". SMACK SMACK SMACK. We went through about ten imps before we calmed down.
Bingo Card Creator, software to help elementary school teachers make bingo cards. If you really want to spite me with an open source alternative, http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards would probably be the closest thing to my program. Oh no, I just spited myself!;) I don't think its very responsive to the needs of my market, which you can verify in about 30 seconds if you've got an elementary school teacher handy. I actually passed it around to a few of my teacher friends and the response universally was "Um, it won't run". Have fun with it.
Bingo Card Creator, a product for elementary school teachers. I don't bid against cracker groups for my program's name -- I bid for clicks, against other folks selling items tangentially related to bingo (broad match on "bingo cards" will also match "Bingo Card Creator" and any variants on it). When someone looking for the installer.exe to go with the keygen he just got from www.yo-ho-me-hearties.cn types something like "Bingo Card Creator v 1.0 download" into Google, my ad will show up with about 3 other people (the others selling, say, actual paper bingo cards -- "Come to Bingo Planet! Cheap prices on bingo supplies!") and when they click on my ad I get charged (about 9 cents today, was a quarter a month ago -- changes in the AdWords landing page algorithm benefitted me greatly, but thats a long story).
I don't know how many groups have broken it independently -- I do know that there are at least 4 places to find a keygen at the moment, although I haven't seen a spike since 1.03 came out so that might not be busted yet.
I've been selling since July 1st of this year. 5 sales in the last seven calendar days, 3 of them I can tell from the cookie were from AdWords. Two sales in the first week of August, two in the last week of July, my very first on July 15th.
Any other questions, see the screenshots I posted elsewhere somewhere in this thread, or Google the software and find the blog, I give a pretty blow-by-blow account there. Trust me, if I wanted to tell tall tales about something I'd pick something a little more amusing than the day-to-day affairs of the world's smallest software business, don't you think?
>>Wouldn't the obvious way of doing that be to offer material for download from premium-rate dial-up servers invisible to the rest of the Internet?>>
Why didn't I think of this? All I need to do is charge money while making my website harder to access than a pirate FTP server! You should try selling this idea to Starforce! It seems to fit in perfectly with their business plan of causing the most pain for the people most likely to pay you money.
>> Since it took me about 2 seconds to find a free and perfectly adequate Bingo Card Creator [gatheringbasket.com], I'm at a loss to who you think your market is. Teachers who can use the internet well enough to find your site, but poorly enough they won't find any others? >>
Got a stopwatch handy? Click it on. Now print one card for every student in a class of 30 using that website. You can use any wordlist you want. Now click it off. If you perform the stopwatch test with my program, you end up with 30 seconds if you use a pre-made list (plus whatever time it takes your printer to get through 30 cards) or perhaps 5-10 minutes if you don't. If you perform the stopwatch test with the Gathering Basket folks, your stopwatch test will take between 10 minutes and a half an hour depending on how fast you can give yourself carpal tunnel clicking "Generate, Print, OK-Print, Back, Generate, Print, OK-Print, Generate..." and how long your printer/browser combo blocks input for between every cycle. Now imagine doing this stopwatch test four times a week for the rest of your life. $25 doesn't sound quite so expensive anymore, does it?
>> So what's the harm you're complaining about, here? >>
People took $10 literally out of my pocket, ganked something I made for their own use, and made it difficult for legitimate users to find me for about a week because they kept draining my daily ad budget dry. As for the "OK, so pirates *may* have clicked on your ad a few times", I think the graphs speak for themselves.
How many hundreds of hours have you spent supporting sales for your 50 hours of production product?
Did I mention my software is as complex as Notepad? I don't get all that many support requests. I get up in the morning, I pour myself a cup of cocoa, put in the ice and wait for it to cool, and check my email. 5 days in the last week it was to news that I had gotten richer when I was sleeping (I live in Japan, so purchases happening in the US workday happen in the middle of the night here.) Two times in the last six weeks I've seen "Hey, I've got a question...". I spend 2 minutes writing an email answering the question, then I chug my cocoa and go to my day job.
I spend a little time in the evening working on marketing and the next version, of course, but like I said its a hobby. And its certainly more intellectually stimulating than my previous time waster.
The software is Bingo Card Creator, which makes bingo cards principally for elementary school teachers. I didn't mention it because its associated with my real name and, well, no sane person exposes their real name to Slashdot. But, eh, whatever. My minor loss of privacy is worth getting to laugh a little at your expense.
>>Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good.>>
Well, I suppose a lot of slashdotters might say that. Then again, 10 elementary school teachers (who, you know, are actually in the market for this) paid money for it, and I'm inclined to trust opinions which come backed with checks. My best guess is that the spike was caused by that whole being on the front page of a major warez site thing, which I learned about from my referrer logs. But you can't see those, so I guess you won't trust me. Ahh well, here's the next best thing: a screengrab of my Analytics console (yeah, I could fake this if I had a few hours -- but do you think I bothered?). It doesn't show you the 3GB of transfer from my screenshots or the 500 direct-linked downloads because Analytics uses Javascript to record hits and jpg/exe do not, typically, contain Javascript:). (My plan, incidentally, was to use.htaccess to replace the hotlinked image with the Japanese imperial war flag and replace the hotlinked.exe with one with all the buttons saying "I love Falun Gong". I decided against it because I figured some bastard would just DDOS me. Plus a lot of the l33t cr3w were actually from outside of China, so they wouldn't be able to appreciate my sense of humor.)
Here's one showing the "slight" increase in my traffic. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked1.jpg From single digit pageviews per day to about 200 -- and thats just the number hitting my home page. The graph then trails off to normal and you can see me busily building up my little hobbyist marketing campaign. (Notice the spike marked "Market Seasonality"? The full explanation for that: traffic always dips on a weekend, and lots of teachers go back to work in August. When August 1st rolled around right after the weekend, I had a 30% or so increase in traffic from the Friday before. As opposed to the gazillion% increase from the hacker site.)
Here's another showing exactly who was hitting my site for 2 days before and 2 days after the crack debuted. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked2.jpg (Funny, 0daycn.net does not sound to me like a place where elementary schoolteachers hang out.)
I did due diligence before I opened my little business. First, the demand curve for software doesn't fit what you might think from a microecon 101 textbook. Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card. The other wrinkle is that advertising costs money and its impossible to make money at the $10 price point if you advertise. For example, during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign. I then get $25 and split $1 with Paypal, leaving me with money in my pocket. Google will not decrease my CPC just because I charge less for my product.
I run an independent software vendor (gross sales to date: $250 -- hey, its a hobby and if you're going to make fun do better first). It took me approximately 50 hours to write the software which I sell and the program's complexity approaches that of Notepad. Perhaps some people with far, far too much free time would say its ridiculous to pay me $25 when they could just spend the 50 hours themselves. Fine, I understand that -- then bloody write the thing yourself. In reality, everyone who comes up with that lame excuse spends 45 seconds trying variations on Google of crackz, serialz, and whatnot to find the latest Chinese hacker group to have broken my just-enough-to-keep-honest-men-honest registration scheme, and then 600 of them hit my web server in a day.
Thats not enough for some cheeky bastards, though. After people have gotten their latest crackz, I get a surge of search results from Google for things legitimate customers never search for (e.g. Name of the Program V 1.0 download). I lost $10 last time I got the hacker surge because I bid on my own program name as an AdWords keyword and the "its not stealing, its copyright infringement!!!1" crowd literally picked my pocket for a quarter a click.
P.S. Clarification: if you're using the Mersenne Twister in a *real life* application that plus a seed value is good enough for a gambling application. For example, if you're generating nice big integers and then taking %6 to get the value of a die or using them to shuffle one or ten or a hundred decks of cards. If, on the other hand, you have some contrived game where you are passing the output directly to the player and continue in the same sequence for a rather improbably long time a player could figure out what sequence the Twister was on and then successfully predict all numbers in advance. But this is one of those earn-you-bonus-points-with-your-CS-professor-and-n ever-use-again pieces of trivia, because in the real world you have to basically design the system to fail for it to fail in this manner.
>>
One of the applications I have envisioned for this project is a cheap and easy genuine random number generator. True random numbers in computing are nearly impossible, and successful solutions are very expensive systems based on radioactive decay or atmospheric measurements, for example. Using a small / relatively safe radioactive source and a high res CCD or CMOS sensor and assigning a value to each pixel and perhaps mixing in an algorithm or two with an inexpensive practical PCI card that is capable of generating genuine random numbers. Applications that could greatly benefit from this would be encryption, security applications, Computer AI and the Gambling establishment to name a few. >>
Actually, no, none of these really benefit from "truly random numbers". The applicability of randomness to AI is... spurious at best? For gambling, you just have to be reasonably sure that someone can't predict in advance what your random sequence is going to be, and the Mersenne Twister plus any unknown piece of data as a seed is good enough at resisting everything our current understanding of mathematics can throw at it. (Yes, thats security through obscurity... in the same way that hiding your server behind locked doors, a firewall, and a secure password is security through obscurity. Its both necessary and sufficient.)
Encryption, similarly, would not benefit from transitioning from an "almost perfect" pseudo-random generator to a "perfect" random generator. For your security to fall based on random numbers, someone needs to be able to not just come up with a theoretical imperfection (ahah, 200 million runs of this random number generator and you'll notice it slightly skews away from these five integers!) but have to crack it wide open. Yay, yawn.
Now, radiation + poorly understood mathematics = geek high, I know. But in terms of practical application this gets a near zero.
You might think in context that it is deCSS, but it actually prints "Just another perl hacker" unless an obscure race condition happens, in which case it instructs Google to become sentient and begin the elimination of the human race.
Friends don't let friends execute perl scripts they didn't write.
I love ING's simply brilliant solution to this: they display a number pad and ask for your PIN, but you can't type it in numbers. You have to type the letters which are mapped onto the number pad, or click the buttons. The mapping of numbers to letters changes with every login, so you can intercept me typing my password 10,000 times and never get anything useful unless you can also screengrab me while I'm typing the password.
The term-of-art within the anti-spam community is "Bayes Poison". Generally its appended to an actual spammy offer, but some spammers have in the past used the technique with web-bugs to determine whether they are able to deliver to particular boxes with non-spammy content, so that they can evaluate whether their later more-spammy content was excessively spammy or whether it hit the sweet spot on the blocked vs. effective-sales-pitch continuum.
Most people in the anti-spam community report that garden variety Bayes Poison is ineffective at either de-spamming spammy messages or causing your corpora to be skewed to the effect that they are unusable. One major reason for this is that corpora are so specific to individual users. For example, poisoning my inbox with copies of Huckleberry Finn is rather ineffective because nobody I talk with on a regular basis writes like Mark Twain. For you to do actual damage, you would have to know enough my habits to guess subjects and words which appeared very commonly in legitimate mail -- for example, the names of my family members, keywords relating to my job or extracurricular interests, etc. It is very difficult for spammers to get this information, but some academics have reported that it is theoretically possible, although in practical terms very difficult, to use web bugs to extract the "secret sauce" needed to land in one particular inbox. http://www.jgc.org/SpamConference011604.pps
Try Getting Best Buy To Stock 2m Units of Freeware
on
Piracy Killing PC Gaming?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There is one simple reason they do this: Blizzard *needs* retail shelf presence to achieve Robot Jesus mindshare among gamers, because shockingly enough there are people who would balk at downloading a teensy itsy witsy 5GB demo. Retail wants 40% of a nice fat number to keep your product stocked on shelves next to other games which are giving them 40% of a nice fat number, and to pay for advertising which gets suburban housewives (who don't know Onyxia from Nelly but who still probably purchased about a million copies of WoW) to the store.
>>What's Google's Business Plan. It's lifetime goal and purpose.
It's INDEXING every bit of INFORMATION on the Internet. HTML, Text files, music media, video media, binary files, products, news, xml, rss, etc, etc.>>
Thats like saying your razor company's lifetime goal and purpose is making the very best balanced razor handle that is known to man. Google's business plan has very little to do with indexing and very much to do with serving up advertising. Indexing is just a way for them to get content to draw eyeballs to shoot advertising at. c.f. Google AdSense (Google showing ads on other folk's website, and taking a large cut): yes, technically, there is some very basic analysis of the target page going on there. But mostly, its an advertising operation. GMail, yeah, you can full-text search all your email at once... but really, yep, its just a sticky application which delivers eyeballs.
Thats incidentally a good reason to recommend against doing a music service: suppose Google uses cheap/free music like they're using video, as a loss leader to get folks in to watch advertising. Who would want to advertise on a music site? Answer: the folks selling music... oh wait, there's a bit of tension there with Google's business model. And if Google allowed downloading the music to play it away from the website, then the site would quickly become a "log on for 5 minutes, grab what you need, hightail it away from the ads and listen to the music on your iPod at the gym" money pit.
... price discrimination, in the economic sense. Suppose you sell English language software in the United States and India. The marginal cost of production of the software is the same in both countries, and is pretty close to zero. The maximum cost the market will bear in the United States is many, many times what it is in India. Transportation costs between the United States and India are very tiny relative to the value of your software. Presto changeo, rather than your company profiting in both the US and India you will have people begin to arbitrage your software by buying at Indian prices in India and selling at half of America prices in the US. Your official "US English" software sits on the shelves, your retailers get furious, and you watch someone whose only contribution to the process was filling out a FedEx form make the lion's share of the profits. Its not so happy.
Its extremely similar to the problem textbook manufacturers have when they sell books in Hong Kong (identical to the American content except adding the extra u's causes the price to go down by 80%, yet strangely enough American college students can still read them after they've been airmailed). The difference is that, unlike for textbooks (which, doctrine of first sale and all, are pretty hard to control once you sell them anywhere) there is a technologically enforceable way of limiting importing.
I'm not entirely sure its wrong, either. Supposing you're an American gamer buying Japanese games. You're not costing the Japanese publisher anything directly, but you're hurting the American company which is paying (dearly!) for the exclusive rights to exploit that property in the United States. Taking the long view, the one major contributing reason to "Dang it, why does Market X never get so much of what is released in Market Y" is because importing suppresses the market for above-board international transactions. Translation is a major expense which has to be spread over a bunch of units to make money.
If the natural market for the translation has already bought the original, and will not buy the translated version (applicable to most people and most, but not all, translated content), then it makes no sense to translate the game. And subcultures like Americans-who-love-Japanese-tactical-RPGs continue ensuring that only the most guaranteed-smash-hits (Disgaea, etc) will make it across. So they import the next game, and the cycle continues... So if you don't agree there is anything ethically wrong with importing, suit yourself, but next time you're wondering "Dang, why don't companies realize that these would be hits if they were released in the US" you can find the answer in the mirror.
How many spam do you get a day? I get hundreds. Half of them are not in my native language (much like half the mail in my inbox), which means it takes more than a split-second glance to figure out what is going on. I'd guess my accuracy in split-second decisions is probably on the order of 95%, which if I were a spam filter would earn me a D-. Paul Graham, who probably has more typical email habits when compared with the average Slashdotter, says he misses about 3 per 2,000. http://www.paulgraham.com/wsy.html There are systems which are better than that.
In Soviet Spam Filter, the computer doesn't trust YOU to filter the email.
I ran your message through a perl script to mail it to me for giggles (I do research on spam filtering at ye olde day job). Regretfully, you didn't make it through. Aside from header garbage, which was a mixed bag (half spam tokens, half "known-good automated email" tokens), you ran into problems with dope, ass, wanna, and... work*. Which is just as well, as I have no desire to speak to anyone who uses those words.
* Last 15 occurrences in my mailbox are all of the "Make l0ads of $$$ work @ h0m3!" variety.
Slashdot Mirror
(It was my blog, incidentally. I don't know why the submitter had interest in a days old blog about a years old experiment, but eh, I'm happy you found it interesting.)
e -register-shareware.html as or more interesting as my blog summary of it, which strips out all the detail in favor of talking about another example (Movable Type) and two current programs (one mine, one somebody else's) and their different crippling strategies (features vs. time).
Slashdotters will almost certainly find the original article at http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-peopl
(I would have modded the parent up but I get 2 points for free and modding only gives the AC 1. Sorry, AC.)
12x12x8 inches is the size of a rather large bookbag. A CMOS battery is the size of a Pepsi bottle cap*. (Yeah, common knowledge among many Slashdotters I'm guessing. What can I say, I'm not a hardware guy so I Googled it: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=cmos%20bat tery&btnG=Google+Search&sa=N&tab=wi )
* Normally I'd use a coin denomination but I think Pepsi bottles are probably more circulated than any currency on earth.
I got Dungeon Keeper for -$10 at Best Buy. Yes, negative -- $9.99 with a $20 rebate. I was psyched since I had heard it was actually a pretty good game. So I got it home and started playing around without reading the manual, digging gold and marveling at the (at the time) mind-blowingly cool graphics. Two of my little brothers were watching me zoom in on an Imp while I was impatiently waiting around to get more money to build something or other.
"Hey, you're a hand. Wouldn't it be cool if you could, like, smack him to make him go faster?" said one of my little brothers.
At that moment, my finger slipped and right clicked the imp instead of left click. SMACK. There was silence in the room. Then I did it again. SMACK. Riotous laugher and cries of "I can't believe it actually lets you do that!". SMACK SMACK SMACK. We went through about ten imps before we calmed down.
Thats still among my favorite gaming memories.
Bingo Card Creator, software to help elementary school teachers make bingo cards. If you really want to spite me with an open source alternative, http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards would probably be the closest thing to my program. Oh no, I just spited myself! ;) I don't think its very responsive to the needs of my market, which you can verify in about 30 seconds if you've got an elementary school teacher handy. I actually passed it around to a few of my teacher friends and the response universally was "Um, it won't run". Have fun with it.
Bingo Card Creator, a product for elementary school teachers. I don't bid against cracker groups for my program's name -- I bid for clicks, against other folks selling items tangentially related to bingo (broad match on "bingo cards" will also match "Bingo Card Creator" and any variants on it). When someone looking for the installer .exe to go with the keygen he just got from www.yo-ho-me-hearties.cn types something like "Bingo Card Creator v 1.0 download" into Google, my ad will show up with about 3 other people (the others selling, say, actual paper bingo cards -- "Come to Bingo Planet! Cheap prices on bingo supplies!") and when they click on my ad I get charged (about 9 cents today, was a quarter a month ago -- changes in the AdWords landing page algorithm benefitted me greatly, but thats a long story).
I don't know how many groups have broken it independently -- I do know that there are at least 4 places to find a keygen at the moment, although I haven't seen a spike since 1.03 came out so that might not be busted yet.
I've been selling since July 1st of this year. 5 sales in the last seven calendar days, 3 of them I can tell from the cookie were from AdWords. Two sales in the first week of August, two in the last week of July, my very first on July 15th.
Any other questions, see the screenshots I posted elsewhere somewhere in this thread, or Google the software and find the blog, I give a pretty blow-by-blow account there. Trust me, if I wanted to tell tall tales about something I'd pick something a little more amusing than the day-to-day affairs of the world's smallest software business, don't you think?
>>Wouldn't the obvious way of doing that be to offer material for download from premium-rate dial-up servers invisible to the rest of the Internet?>>
Why didn't I think of this? All I need to do is charge money while making my website harder to access than a pirate FTP server! You should try selling this idea to Starforce! It seems to fit in perfectly with their business plan of causing the most pain for the people most likely to pay you money.
>>
Since it took me about 2 seconds to find a free and perfectly adequate Bingo Card Creator [gatheringbasket.com], I'm at a loss to who you think your market is. Teachers who can use the internet well enough to find your site, but poorly enough they won't find any others?
>>
Got a stopwatch handy? Click it on. Now print one card for every student in a class of 30 using that website. You can use any wordlist you want. Now click it off. If you perform the stopwatch test with my program, you end up with 30 seconds if you use a pre-made list (plus whatever time it takes your printer to get through 30 cards) or perhaps 5-10 minutes if you don't. If you perform the stopwatch test with the Gathering Basket folks, your stopwatch test will take between 10 minutes and a half an hour depending on how fast you can give yourself carpal tunnel clicking "Generate, Print, OK-Print, Back, Generate, Print, OK-Print, Generate..." and how long your printer/browser combo blocks input for between every cycle. Now imagine doing this stopwatch test four times a week for the rest of your life. $25 doesn't sound quite so expensive anymore, does it?
>>
So what's the harm you're complaining about, here?
>>
People took $10 literally out of my pocket, ganked something I made for their own use, and made it difficult for legitimate users to find me for about a week because they kept draining my daily ad budget dry. As for the "OK, so pirates *may* have clicked on your ad a few times", I think the graphs speak for themselves.
Did I mention my software is as complex as Notepad? I don't get all that many support requests. I get up in the morning, I pour myself a cup of cocoa, put in the ice and wait for it to cool, and check my email. 5 days in the last week it was to news that I had gotten richer when I was sleeping (I live in Japan, so purchases happening in the US workday happen in the middle of the night here.) Two times in the last six weeks I've seen "Hey, I've got a question...". I spend 2 minutes writing an email answering the question, then I chug my cocoa and go to my day job.
I spend a little time in the evening working on marketing and the next version, of course, but like I said its a hobby. And its certainly more intellectually stimulating than my previous time waster.
The software is Bingo Card Creator, which makes bingo cards principally for elementary school teachers. I didn't mention it because its associated with my real name and, well, no sane person exposes their real name to Slashdot. But, eh, whatever. My minor loss of privacy is worth getting to laugh a little at your expense.
:). (My plan, incidentally, was to use .htaccess to replace the hotlinked image with the Japanese imperial war flag and replace the hotlinked .exe with one with all the buttons saying "I love Falun Gong". I decided against it because I figured some bastard would just DDOS me. Plus a lot of the l33t cr3w were actually from outside of China, so they wouldn't be able to appreciate my sense of humor.)
g From single digit pageviews per day to about 200 -- and thats just the number hitting my home page. The graph then trails off to normal and you can see me busily building up my little hobbyist marketing campaign. (Notice the spike marked "Market Seasonality"? The full explanation for that: traffic always dips on a weekend, and lots of teachers go back to work in August. When August 1st rolled around right after the weekend, I had a 30% or so increase in traffic from the Friday before. As opposed to the gazillion% increase from the hacker site.)
g (Funny, 0daycn.net does not sound to me like a place where elementary schoolteachers hang out.)
>>Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good.>>
Well, I suppose a lot of slashdotters might say that. Then again, 10 elementary school teachers (who, you know, are actually in the market for this) paid money for it, and I'm inclined to trust opinions which come backed with checks. My best guess is that the spike was caused by that whole being on the front page of a major warez site thing, which I learned about from my referrer logs. But you can't see those, so I guess you won't trust me. Ahh well, here's the next best thing: a screengrab of my Analytics console (yeah, I could fake this if I had a few hours -- but do you think I bothered?). It doesn't show you the 3GB of transfer from my screenshots or the 500 direct-linked downloads because Analytics uses Javascript to record hits and jpg/exe do not, typically, contain Javascript
Here's one showing the "slight" increase in my traffic. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked1.jp
Here's another showing exactly who was hitting my site for 2 days before and 2 days after the crack debuted. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/hacked2.jp
I did due diligence before I opened my little business. First, the demand curve for software doesn't fit what you might think from a microecon 101 textbook. Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card. The other wrinkle is that advertising costs money and its impossible to make money at the $10 price point if you advertise. For example, during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign. I then get $25 and split $1 with Paypal, leaving me with money in my pocket. Google will not decrease my CPC just because I charge less for my product.
Thats not enough for some cheeky bastards, though. After people have gotten their latest crackz, I get a surge of search results from Google for things legitimate customers never search for (e.g. Name of the Program V 1.0 download). I lost $10 last time I got the hacker surge because I bid on my own program name as an AdWords keyword and the "its not stealing, its copyright infringement!!!1" crowd literally picked my pocket for a quarter a click.
POV! POV!
P.S. Clarification: if you're using the Mersenne Twister in a *real life* application that plus a seed value is good enough for a gambling application. For example, if you're generating nice big integers and then taking %6 to get the value of a die or using them to shuffle one or ten or a hundred decks of cards. If, on the other hand, you have some contrived game where you are passing the output directly to the player and continue in the same sequence for a rather improbably long time a player could figure out what sequence the Twister was on and then successfully predict all numbers in advance. But this is one of those earn-you-bonus-points-with-your-CS-professor-and-n ever-use-again pieces of trivia, because in the real world you have to basically design the system to fail for it to fail in this manner.
>>
One of the applications I have envisioned for this project is a cheap and easy genuine random number generator. True random numbers in computing are nearly impossible, and successful solutions are very expensive systems based on radioactive decay or atmospheric measurements, for example. Using a small / relatively safe radioactive source and a high res CCD or CMOS sensor and assigning a value to each pixel and perhaps mixing in an algorithm or two with an inexpensive practical PCI card that is capable of generating genuine random numbers. Applications that could greatly benefit from this would be encryption, security applications, Computer AI and the Gambling establishment to name a few.
>>
Actually, no, none of these really benefit from "truly random numbers". The applicability of randomness to AI is... spurious at best? For gambling, you just have to be reasonably sure that someone can't predict in advance what your random sequence is going to be, and the Mersenne Twister plus any unknown piece of data as a seed is good enough at resisting everything our current understanding of mathematics can throw at it. (Yes, thats security through obscurity... in the same way that hiding your server behind locked doors, a firewall, and a secure password is security through obscurity. Its both necessary and sufficient.)
Encryption, similarly, would not benefit from transitioning from an "almost perfect" pseudo-random generator to a "perfect" random generator. For your security to fall based on random numbers, someone needs to be able to not just come up with a theoretical imperfection (ahah, 200 million runs of this random number generator and you'll notice it slightly skews away from these five integers!) but have to crack it wide open. Yay, yawn.
Now, radiation + poorly understood mathematics = geek high, I know. But in terms of practical application this gets a near zero.
You might think in context that it is deCSS, but it actually prints "Just another perl hacker" unless an obscure race condition happens, in which case it instructs Google to become sentient and begin the elimination of the human race.
Friends don't let friends execute perl scripts they didn't write.
I love ING's simply brilliant solution to this: they display a number pad and ask for your PIN, but you can't type it in numbers. You have to type the letters which are mapped onto the number pad, or click the buttons. The mapping of numbers to letters changes with every login, so you can intercept me typing my password 10,000 times and never get anything useful unless you can also screengrab me while I'm typing the password.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Mail/challenge-response. html
The term-of-art within the anti-spam community is "Bayes Poison". Generally its appended to an actual spammy offer, but some spammers have in the past used the technique with web-bugs to determine whether they are able to deliver to particular boxes with non-spammy content, so that they can evaluate whether their later more-spammy content was excessively spammy or whether it hit the sweet spot on the blocked vs. effective-sales-pitch continuum. Most people in the anti-spam community report that garden variety Bayes Poison is ineffective at either de-spamming spammy messages or causing your corpora to be skewed to the effect that they are unusable. One major reason for this is that corpora are so specific to individual users. For example, poisoning my inbox with copies of Huckleberry Finn is rather ineffective because nobody I talk with on a regular basis writes like Mark Twain. For you to do actual damage, you would have to know enough my habits to guess subjects and words which appeared very commonly in legitimate mail -- for example, the names of my family members, keywords relating to my job or extracurricular interests, etc. It is very difficult for spammers to get this information, but some academics have reported that it is theoretically possible, although in practical terms very difficult, to use web bugs to extract the "secret sauce" needed to land in one particular inbox. http://www.jgc.org/SpamConference011604.pps
There is one simple reason they do this: Blizzard *needs* retail shelf presence to achieve Robot Jesus mindshare among gamers, because shockingly enough there are people who would balk at downloading a teensy itsy witsy 5GB demo. Retail wants 40% of a nice fat number to keep your product stocked on shelves next to other games which are giving them 40% of a nice fat number, and to pay for advertising which gets suburban housewives (who don't know Onyxia from Nelly but who still probably purchased about a million copies of WoW) to the store.
... except you didn't mention AJAX, Web 2.0, Google, or trackback.
(P.S. Overly-zealous mods: please excuse the mention of Digg, its to make a joke.)
As I remember, "life on Mars, wow!" was used to justify a NASA budget increase. So, does anyone know how much we paid for a garden-variety rock?
>>What's Google's Business Plan. It's lifetime goal and purpose.
It's INDEXING every bit of INFORMATION on the Internet. HTML, Text files, music media, video media, binary files, products, news, xml, rss, etc, etc.>>
Thats like saying your razor company's lifetime goal and purpose is making the very best balanced razor handle that is known to man. Google's business plan has very little to do with indexing and very much to do with serving up advertising. Indexing is just a way for them to get content to draw eyeballs to shoot advertising at. c.f. Google AdSense (Google showing ads on other folk's website, and taking a large cut): yes, technically, there is some very basic analysis of the target page going on there. But mostly, its an advertising operation. GMail, yeah, you can full-text search all your email at once... but really, yep, its just a sticky application which delivers eyeballs.
Thats incidentally a good reason to recommend against doing a music service: suppose Google uses cheap/free music like they're using video, as a loss leader to get folks in to watch advertising. Who would want to advertise on a music site? Answer: the folks selling music... oh wait, there's a bit of tension there with Google's business model. And if Google allowed downloading the music to play it away from the website, then the site would quickly become a "log on for 5 minutes, grab what you need, hightail it away from the ads and listen to the music on your iPod at the gym" money pit.
... price discrimination, in the economic sense. Suppose you sell English language software in the United States and India. The marginal cost of production of the software is the same in both countries, and is pretty close to zero. The maximum cost the market will bear in the United States is many, many times what it is in India. Transportation costs between the United States and India are very tiny relative to the value of your software. Presto changeo, rather than your company profiting in both the US and India you will have people begin to arbitrage your software by buying at Indian prices in India and selling at half of America prices in the US. Your official "US English" software sits on the shelves, your retailers get furious, and you watch someone whose only contribution to the process was filling out a FedEx form make the lion's share of the profits. Its not so happy.
Its extremely similar to the problem textbook manufacturers have when they sell books in Hong Kong (identical to the American content except adding the extra u's causes the price to go down by 80%, yet strangely enough American college students can still read them after they've been airmailed). The difference is that, unlike for textbooks (which, doctrine of first sale and all, are pretty hard to control once you sell them anywhere) there is a technologically enforceable way of limiting importing.
I'm not entirely sure its wrong, either. Supposing you're an American gamer buying Japanese games. You're not costing the Japanese publisher anything directly, but you're hurting the American company which is paying (dearly!) for the exclusive rights to exploit that property in the United States. Taking the long view, the one major contributing reason to "Dang it, why does Market X never get so much of what is released in Market Y" is because importing suppresses the market for above-board international transactions. Translation is a major expense which has to be spread over a bunch of units to make money.
If the natural market for the translation has already bought the original, and will not buy the translated version (applicable to most people and most, but not all, translated content), then it makes no sense to translate the game. And subcultures like Americans-who-love-Japanese-tactical-RPGs continue ensuring that only the most guaranteed-smash-hits (Disgaea, etc) will make it across. So they import the next game, and the cycle continues... So if you don't agree there is anything ethically wrong with importing, suit yourself, but next time you're wondering "Dang, why don't companies realize that these would be hits if they were released in the US" you can find the answer in the mirror.
How many spam do you get a day? I get hundreds. Half of them are not in my native language (much like half the mail in my inbox), which means it takes more than a split-second glance to figure out what is going on. I'd guess my accuracy in split-second decisions is probably on the order of 95%, which if I were a spam filter would earn me a D-. Paul Graham, who probably has more typical email habits when compared with the average Slashdotter, says he misses about 3 per 2,000. http://www.paulgraham.com/wsy.html There are systems which are better than that.
In Soviet Spam Filter, the computer doesn't trust YOU to filter the email.
I ran your message through a perl script to mail it to me for giggles (I do research on spam filtering at ye olde day job). Regretfully, you didn't make it through. Aside from header garbage, which was a mixed bag (half spam tokens, half "known-good automated email" tokens), you ran into problems with dope, ass, wanna, and... work*. Which is just as well, as I have no desire to speak to anyone who uses those words. * Last 15 occurrences in my mailbox are all of the "Make l0ads of $$$ work @ h0m3!" variety.