Aging has existed since society has existed, but it was accompanied by another human perinneal: the mathematical certainty of early death for the vast majority of the population. Japan has the aging, but not the early death (50% of the girls born today will see their 85th birthday). They've also got a depressed birthrate (off the top of my head, 1.1 -- 2.1 is the replacement rate).
Yes, "pay the youth to take care of the elderly" sounds great in theory -- but where does their salary come from? From taxes on people who are still building cars, programming PCs, and selling udon, naturally. Here's the rub -- when 33% of your population is above the age of 65 and you've got roughly a quarter of the remainder employed as nurses you won't have enough folks left making cars/PCs/udon to support the level of taxation you need to pay your nurses.
Thus Japan is searching, with increasing immediacy, for new ways to handle elderly care. Robots are one, increasing immigration or birthrate is another (more kids around today is more workers around 15 years from now, meaning either more taxes or more nurses or both), technological advances for delaying senescence, care paradigms which maximize the elderly-to-nurse ratio (a half hour visit a day in the morning for Mrs. Sakamoto, the 80 year old lady down the street who is pretty competent about handling her own affairs but needs to be reminded to take her medication and to make sure she's still as genki as she's been for the last 20 years, assisted living communities transitioning into old folks homes transitioning into hospitalization, yadda yadda),.
Lifestyles and the changing family structure is one part of the consideration... the other is just plain old demographics. Japan is aging, fast. The birthrate is slowing to a crawl. I don't have a copy of the powerpoint slide on me (saw it at our research meeting last week, I work for the gov't here and a lot of the research involves "how to equip society to deal with a lot of aged folks", including a portion of our robot research) at the second but the Ministry of Health & Welfare forcasts 1 out of every 3 Japanese to be over the age of 65 by either 2020 or 2050.
There is no way you can make one-to-one care work at that proportion. Japan is currently experimenting with a variety of methods for alleviating this: the current profusion of old folks homes, for example, breaks the traditional one-caretaker-who-is-probably-a-daughter-or-inlaw- per-elderly paradigm. Then there are bots and immigration. I guess I benefit rather directly from policies which encourage the later:) But in the end its going to have to be a confluence of efforts.
Of course, this problem on the societal scale is closely related to the low birthrate (Japan hovers at something like, off the top of my head, 1.1). Yeah. Combine that with an average life expectancy which is the highest in the world and increases every year and demographics sure look like destiny.
Oh, the Japanese government is quite happy to throw LOTS of money at this problem. We're spending a couple million of it two floors below me as we speak. If you're ever find yourself in Gifu, drop by and we'll arrange for a demonstration (although, in fairness, the private industry bots kick our tail in every possible way -- my memory is getting a little rusty but I think it was the Honda bot that had our department head very vexed about after he saw it at the Aichi Expo). Our researchers are throwing most of their time at the hardware (cameras, mainly) and image processing algorithms/challenges.
www.softopia.or.jp , although I don't think you'll find anything interesting about this project in specific if you can't read Japanese. But, anyhow, just trust me, How To Deal With Our Aging Society gets mentioned often enough in seminars here that you'd think it was Dilbertized like "business synergy paradigm" or something.
I remember an ex-coworker of mine who has worked in secure environments so long it was practically in his bloodstream. The man, an engineering genius, couldn't use a graphing calculator because he had never bothered to learn because ever since they had more than a M+/MR key they'd be banned at his office. What do you do for a cellphone, I asked him. He just laughed. "Son, I'll own a cell phone the day somebody starts making a special Security Enhanced version which can't record so much as a contact list." He then showed me his Security Enhanced laptop : a GI notebook with an industry-standard.08 kilopages of memory, military-grade electronics-intelligence resistant input/output surface, and protocols for storage and disposal which put ISMS to shame. If Nokia goes into the Security Enhanced market I suggest something like two tin cans on a string, except without the second can or the string. Oh, and make the can slim, branded, and in some sexy high-tech color like sleek black (or, with the recent iPod craze, glossy white -- Apple would make an excellent Security Enhanced cellphone, I think, but first thing they'd do is add the ability to get ringtones by putting one end next to an iPod and thats game over). And, given the typical government procurement for anything security-related, you can probably charge like $1000 per can for the base-line model, with pricing increasing exponentially with features.
Re:Sounds like typical video game designers...
on
Playing The Escape
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· Score: 1
Pishposh. It can't be a video game level -- where is the mention of crates and barrels?
I really wish I was a Senator. Happily, I'm now the #1 result for text, but when I did an image search for inclusion in a company newsletter ("Hmm, must be a shot of me from college lying around on a friend's blog somewhere, and thats quicker than filling out a requisition for a digital camera for 5 minutes...") I got some very strange looks from coworkers when the result page popped up. I'll leave it to your imagination what the other guy does for a living.
OK, its unlikely to go away if you keep it around as an interesting cocktail conversation stuffer (I was once called a vampire in court!) and throw out an open challenge to Slashdot to find it. But, be that as it may, if you're OK with it I guess I'll steal the free karma for looking it up (and, yep, all I did was a whois followed by a couple of Google searches. You'll be happy to know that your name is reasonably clean, even when added to vampire, but only one Charles Perkins has ever showed up in News of the Odd. Watch those minor corraborative details, they're killers!).
Luckily, you can't copyright an idea, you can only copyright an expression of an idea. Dan Brown's large (and completely unjustified, his books are terrible and I want to slit my own wrists for buying three of them after it was perfectly obvious from the first one) commercial success might bring out "Oh no you CLEARLY stole my unpublished manuscript" claims but they'll be legally dead on arrival. I could write a hackish novel about a middle-aged Harvard professor discovering an ancient conspiracy in the Catholic Church to fake the existence of a female Pope threatening me and my improbably sexy and vapid love interest with death at the hands of the Inquisition if I don't keep uncovering clues with my comprehensive knowledge of medieval calliagraphy and Dan Brown would have no legal recourse other than slapping himself in the forehead and saying "Dang, why didn't I bang out that terrible excuse for a work of fiction first". IANAL, I just work for them from time to time.
Just like the PS2's strong launch lineup propelled it to victory last time around? Who could forget such classics as Orphen, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round Two, X-Squad, and ESPN International Track and Field. (OK, I'm being a *little* unfair. But of the 29 launch games there are only about four to five that would rate a rental, and not a single killer app (at least to me). The game that sold a gazillion machines came, as I recall, over a year later: Final Fantasy VII. You can look at their lineup here: ESPN International Track and Field )
With an open source OS, the applications are free too, and the internet is your helpdesk.
A pity the help desk doesn't speak your language. Gates is right, you *need* a local geek. We've all done the "Help your mother get on the Internet for the very first time" routine here. Getting on the Internet is a big enough hurdle for a first time user, and the target market for this computer will be struggling with literacy in their own language to add to the "I'm clicking my mouse and nothing is happening *knocks on non-button part of mouse* this must be broken" thing.
I hate to discourage folks from trying to be innovative, but competing head to head with a company backed by Gooooooooooooogle when they're releasing their product free isn't likely to be very successful. And Picasa is actually feature-complete...
These companies pay for people to keep up their network systems, maybe they could pay people to keep up the virtual systems, too.
Network engineers scale, DMs do not, and this is why you will never see a major commercial service try this. Can you imagine paying somebody $65k a year (or double/triple that) if the server he was maintaining served only eight accounts at a time?
Lets say you have God's own GM scheduling technology, so you never have to deal with GMs idling when there aren't enough players or players kvetching because there aren't enough GMs. Your GM costs you $10 an hour and you somehow manage to solve the problems of a massive peak in usage on Friday-Saturday and troughs throughout the rest of the week. If your GM can service eight people at a time (a good D&D GM's sweet-spot past which more players add more hassle than they do fun), that works out into about $1.25 per hour per player *just for that one employee*.
You'd *have* to bill players for each hour of play or each instance used because the prevailing all-players-are-equal subscription model would *wreck* you at any price. And the price you'd be charging would be many, many multiples of your competitors, for a service that would be very uneven (a different GM every night, having wildly different styles and abilities, etc) and a constant customer service nightmare ("GM Bob wiped our group unfairly wtf he haxxxed our to-hit roles because we were too good for him nerfplz i paid $30!!!!!!! for that instance where are my epxi!?!?!").
If I got 3 extra points of intellect out of the deal my mage would wear Nike. I'm not even kidding. Here's a bidding war, companies: I will wear your logo on my chest, and gladly, if it comes with a stamina boosting enchantment. And it will be associated in the minds of millions of Horde players with a rush of enjoyment: every time they see my mage charging at them, they'll know Coca Cola = honorable kill for free. You work out the details with Blizzard, the one with the best bonuses gets my chest piece. Losers take heart, I've got 10 other locations to auction off bit by bit.
... there were several billion dollars of CDs sold last year, and there will be several billion dollars of CDs sold next year. Even VHS, a format which is inferior in every possible way to DVD (a player for which can be had for less than the price of the media that plays on it), is still a multi-billion a year business. The wave of the future it ain't, but CDs will be a *viable, profitable business* for decades.
Otherwise, it'll just be another linear "RPG on rails" a la WoW.
Yeah. What kind of gaming company would pass up a chance for a commercial smash-hit like Second Life: The Second Coming in exchange for a derivative also-ran like World of Warcraft.
Any programmer who doesn't stop themselves and think that writing something like fprintf(logfile, "root password entered is: %s\n", password); is not the best idea should not be writing code for a secure operating system.
I agree, just looking at that code segment should raise red flags. No real C programmer uses variable names which contain more than two characters. Its like a Perl hacker writing a comment to explain what that four line regex actually does -- its just not done.
Yes. You, too, can go out to your back yard right now, and find an anthill which was totally unknown to science. It may even be part of a cluster of anthills descendent from a queen once studied by a professor at your local community college. I'm so breathless with anticipation I'm going to stop reading this article about the most mundane inanity I can even conceive of and go find myself Patio11's Anthill right now!
When I read that title, I thought the Mossad had filled up a nano with 2 GB of "We Hate America and Joooooooooooos"* and 2 ounces of Pentex, then FedExed it to Hamas headquarters with a note saying "A gift, to the chief of Hamas, from your loving friends at the Fatah Party".
* Palestinian music critics say its got a nice base line but is derivative and far inferior to the Jew-hating songs of yesteryear.
[quote]
I wonder if this is due to laziness, maliciousness, or a combination of both?[/quote]
How about "lack of a business case in support of EFI"? Why spend a couple million in development resources and ongoing support costs for something which the gigantic majority of your customers will not find any value in and which will not sell marginal boxes? Whats the rationale for EFI anyhow, aside from "a bright and shiny new way to do the most basic, boring thing your computer is capable of"? Its not like Microsoft shies from devoting resources to hardware when there is an actual gain in customer value (and sales) from doing so: c.f. Plug & Play, USB, signed drivers, DirectX, wireless networking wizards, yadda yadda. There are obvious advantages to those. Why use EFI?
IAOASD, but I think the next step for the band might be, oh, shot in the dark, transforming "fans" into "customers". And then they're going to learn the fundamental truth of the dot-com bubble -- eyeballs do not equal dollars. CD distribution contracts, on the other hand, do -- the entire "stable" model of publishing is that you get some money up front plus a (comparitively small) rake of the total in return for Team Lesser Evil subsidizing the marketing campaign that has proven success in actually convincing people to spend money (and subsidizing the artists who don't make the mega-hits). And if your CD fails you still get something to live off of. 250,000 enthusiastic fans and $3.99 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
MMORPG servers could accomplish less server lag simply by delegating more work to the client... but they won't, because the client is the enemy. It doesn't matter whether you give the client the calculations to be done by hardware, software, firmware, or an abacus, the server cannot afford to be in a situation where they have to trust any data coming from you because it *will* be compromised by some hacker eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
I am going to be executing gamecubesSold++ as soon as the new Zelda game comes out, and I don't think I'll be alone.
Yes, "pay the youth to take care of the elderly" sounds great in theory -- but where does their salary come from? From taxes on people who are still building cars, programming PCs, and selling udon, naturally. Here's the rub -- when 33% of your population is above the age of 65 and you've got roughly a quarter of the remainder employed as nurses you won't have enough folks left making cars/PCs/udon to support the level of taxation you need to pay your nurses.
Thus Japan is searching, with increasing immediacy, for new ways to handle elderly care. Robots are one, increasing immigration or birthrate is another (more kids around today is more workers around 15 years from now, meaning either more taxes or more nurses or both), technological advances for delaying senescence, care paradigms which maximize the elderly-to-nurse ratio (a half hour visit a day in the morning for Mrs. Sakamoto, the 80 year old lady down the street who is pretty competent about handling her own affairs but needs to be reminded to take her medication and to make sure she's still as genki as she's been for the last 20 years, assisted living communities transitioning into old folks homes transitioning into hospitalization, yadda yadda),.
There is no way you can make one-to-one care work at that proportion. Japan is currently experimenting with a variety of methods for alleviating this: the current profusion of old folks homes, for example, breaks the traditional one-caretaker-who-is-probably-a-daughter-or-inlaw- per-elderly paradigm. Then there are bots and immigration. I guess I benefit rather directly from policies which encourage the later :) But in the end its going to have to be a confluence of efforts.
Of course, this problem on the societal scale is closely related to the low birthrate (Japan hovers at something like, off the top of my head, 1.1). Yeah. Combine that with an average life expectancy which is the highest in the world and increases every year and demographics sure look like destiny.
www.softopia.or.jp , although I don't think you'll find anything interesting about this project in specific if you can't read Japanese. But, anyhow, just trust me, How To Deal With Our Aging Society gets mentioned often enough in seminars here that you'd think it was Dilbertized like "business synergy paradigm" or something.
I remember an ex-coworker of mine who has worked in secure environments so long it was practically in his bloodstream. The man, an engineering genius, couldn't use a graphing calculator because he had never bothered to learn because ever since they had more than a M+/MR key they'd be banned at his office. What do you do for a cellphone, I asked him. He just laughed. "Son, I'll own a cell phone the day somebody starts making a special Security Enhanced version which can't record so much as a contact list." He then showed me his Security Enhanced laptop : a GI notebook with an industry-standard .08 kilopages of memory, military-grade electronics-intelligence resistant input/output surface, and protocols for storage and disposal which put ISMS to shame. If Nokia goes into the Security Enhanced market I suggest something like two tin cans on a string, except without the second can or the string. Oh, and make the can slim, branded, and in some sexy high-tech color like sleek black (or, with the recent iPod craze, glossy white -- Apple would make an excellent Security Enhanced cellphone, I think, but first thing they'd do is add the ability to get ringtones by putting one end next to an iPod and thats game over). And, given the typical government procurement for anything security-related, you can probably charge like $1000 per can for the base-line model, with pricing increasing exponentially with features.
Pishposh. It can't be a video game level -- where is the mention of crates and barrels?
I really wish I was a Senator. Happily, I'm now the #1 result for text, but when I did an image search for inclusion in a company newsletter ("Hmm, must be a shot of me from college lying around on a friend's blog somewhere, and thats quicker than filling out a requisition for a digital camera for 5 minutes...") I got some very strange looks from coworkers when the result page popped up. I'll leave it to your imagination what the other guy does for a living.
OK, its unlikely to go away if you keep it around as an interesting cocktail conversation stuffer (I was once called a vampire in court!) and throw out an open challenge to Slashdot to find it. But, be that as it may, if you're OK with it I guess I'll steal the free karma for looking it up (and, yep, all I did was a whois followed by a couple of Google searches. You'll be happy to know that your name is reasonably clean, even when added to vampire, but only one Charles Perkins has ever showed up in News of the Odd. Watch those minor corraborative details, they're killers!).
Luckily, you can't copyright an idea, you can only copyright an expression of an idea. Dan Brown's large (and completely unjustified, his books are terrible and I want to slit my own wrists for buying three of them after it was perfectly obvious from the first one) commercial success might bring out "Oh no you CLEARLY stole my unpublished manuscript" claims but they'll be legally dead on arrival. I could write a hackish novel about a middle-aged Harvard professor discovering an ancient conspiracy in the Catholic Church to fake the existence of a female Pope threatening me and my improbably sexy and vapid love interest with death at the hands of the Inquisition if I don't keep uncovering clues with my comprehensive knowledge of medieval calliagraphy and Dan Brown would have no legal recourse other than slapping himself in the forehead and saying "Dang, why didn't I bang out that terrible excuse for a work of fiction first". IANAL, I just work for them from time to time.
Typo: rate a rental -> rate more than a rental. I'm a Nintendo fanboy but not totally blind. :)
Just like the PS2's strong launch lineup propelled it to victory last time around? Who could forget such classics as Orphen, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round Two, X-Squad, and ESPN International Track and Field. (OK, I'm being a *little* unfair. But of the 29 launch games there are only about four to five that would rate a rental, and not a single killer app (at least to me). The game that sold a gazillion machines came, as I recall, over a year later: Final Fantasy VII. You can look at their lineup here: ESPN International Track and Field )
A pity the help desk doesn't speak your language. Gates is right, you *need* a local geek. We've all done the "Help your mother get on the Internet for the very first time" routine here. Getting on the Internet is a big enough hurdle for a first time user, and the target market for this computer will be struggling with literacy in their own language to add to the "I'm clicking my mouse and nothing is happening *knocks on non-button part of mouse* this must be broken" thing.
I hate to discourage folks from trying to be innovative, but competing head to head with a company backed by Gooooooooooooogle when they're releasing their product free isn't likely to be very successful. And Picasa is actually feature-complete...
Network engineers scale, DMs do not, and this is why you will never see a major commercial service try this. Can you imagine paying somebody $65k a year (or double/triple that) if the server he was maintaining served only eight accounts at a time?
Lets say you have God's own GM scheduling technology, so you never have to deal with GMs idling when there aren't enough players or players kvetching because there aren't enough GMs. Your GM costs you $10 an hour and you somehow manage to solve the problems of a massive peak in usage on Friday-Saturday and troughs throughout the rest of the week. If your GM can service eight people at a time (a good D&D GM's sweet-spot past which more players add more hassle than they do fun), that works out into about $1.25 per hour per player *just for that one employee*.
You'd *have* to bill players for each hour of play or each instance used because the prevailing all-players-are-equal subscription model would *wreck* you at any price. And the price you'd be charging would be many, many multiples of your competitors, for a service that would be very uneven (a different GM every night, having wildly different styles and abilities, etc) and a constant customer service nightmare ("GM Bob wiped our group unfairly wtf he haxxxed our to-hit roles because we were too good for him nerfplz i paid $30!!!!!!! for that instance where are my epxi!?!?!").
If I got 3 extra points of intellect out of the deal my mage would wear Nike. I'm not even kidding. Here's a bidding war, companies: I will wear your logo on my chest, and gladly, if it comes with a stamina boosting enchantment. And it will be associated in the minds of millions of Horde players with a rush of enjoyment: every time they see my mage charging at them, they'll know Coca Cola = honorable kill for free. You work out the details with Blizzard, the one with the best bonuses gets my chest piece. Losers take heart, I've got 10 other locations to auction off bit by bit.
... there were several billion dollars of CDs sold last year, and there will be several billion dollars of CDs sold next year. Even VHS, a format which is inferior in every possible way to DVD (a player for which can be had for less than the price of the media that plays on it), is still a multi-billion a year business. The wave of the future it ain't, but CDs will be a *viable, profitable business* for decades.
Yeah. What kind of gaming company would pass up a chance for a commercial smash-hit like Second Life: The Second Coming in exchange for a derivative also-ran like World of Warcraft.
I agree, just looking at that code segment should raise red flags. No real C programmer uses variable names which contain more than two characters. Its like a Perl hacker writing a comment to explain what that four line regex actually does -- its just not done.
Yes. You, too, can go out to your back yard right now, and find an anthill which was totally unknown to science. It may even be part of a cluster of anthills descendent from a queen once studied by a professor at your local community college. I'm so breathless with anticipation I'm going to stop reading this article about the most mundane inanity I can even conceive of and go find myself Patio11's Anthill right now!
* Palestinian music critics say its got a nice base line but is derivative and far inferior to the Jew-hating songs of yesteryear.
Sweet! Next time one of my programming code segments gets munched I'll just encrypt it and post! Thanks, Slashdot!
How about "lack of a business case in support of EFI"? Why spend a couple million in development resources and ongoing support costs for something which the gigantic majority of your customers will not find any value in and which will not sell marginal boxes? Whats the rationale for EFI anyhow, aside from "a bright and shiny new way to do the most basic, boring thing your computer is capable of"? Its not like Microsoft shies from devoting resources to hardware when there is an actual gain in customer value (and sales) from doing so: c.f. Plug & Play, USB, signed drivers, DirectX, wireless networking wizards, yadda yadda. There are obvious advantages to those. Why use EFI?
IAOASD, but I think the next step for the band might be, oh, shot in the dark, transforming "fans" into "customers". And then they're going to learn the fundamental truth of the dot-com bubble -- eyeballs do not equal dollars. CD distribution contracts, on the other hand, do -- the entire "stable" model of publishing is that you get some money up front plus a (comparitively small) rake of the total in return for Team Lesser Evil subsidizing the marketing campaign that has proven success in actually convincing people to spend money (and subsidizing the artists who don't make the mega-hits). And if your CD fails you still get something to live off of. 250,000 enthusiastic fans and $3.99 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
You can find a more reasonable approximation here: http://www.psychochild.org/?p=127 . Chinese players pay about six cents an hour.
MMORPG servers could accomplish less server lag simply by delegating more work to the client... but they won't, because the client is the enemy. It doesn't matter whether you give the client the calculations to be done by hardware, software, firmware, or an abacus, the server cannot afford to be in a situation where they have to trust any data coming from you because it *will* be compromised by some hacker eventually.