You could do that today. Hotmail accounts have been put under the umbrella of Live Id. You can create a Live Id with any email address. This is the same account that one's 360 GamerTag is attached to. If you have a 360 GamerTag then you have a Live Id.
Granted, Yahoo email account will at some point become associated with Live Ids if purchase goes through. Who knows how quickly that will happen.
Except that would cause Microsoft to lose market share in the email space. Microsoft is trying to catch up to Google. They don't want to push customers that they purchase with Yahoo away to Google.
The only way I could see Microsoft leveraging Windows to win search share is to make it a default on the OS. But the courts have already caught onto that tactic. If you buy a new PC is as likely to have Google as the default search engine as anything else (mostly because Google pays companies that sell systems to set it as default in install the Google toolbar).
But maybe you have some creative ideas that I don't see.
Nah... Microsoft would probably not switch all yahoo email addresses to hotmail. That would destroy a valuable brand. It is more likely that yahoo email accounts would being displaying ads sold by Microsoft.
Selling ads is what matters in the search business. Selling niche ads is what made Google money. To sell niche ads you have to have lots and lots of niches. To have lots and lots of niches you have to have lots and lots of customers and you have to know what niche those customers are in. To have lots and lots of customers you need quality results. Luckily in search, your customers tell you what niche they are in with their search queries. Also, if you someone manage to get lots and lots of customers you can use their search behavior to improve your results. The search engine with the largest number of customers improves their search engine the fastest. They also happen to make the most money.
As long as Moore's law holds, computing power will increase at an expoential rate. Any exponential problem can therefore be solved in linear time simply by waiting around for a faster computer.
Let the doubling time for Moore's Law be 12 months for sake of argument.
Today's computer takes 2^1024 seconds to solve problem X. Next year it takes 2^512. The following year 2^256.... In just a decade you can solve problem X in 2 seconds.
And subscriptions often result in the opposite of lock-in.
For example, if you were able to buy a Zune music subscription there is nothing preventing you from switching to another service. However, if you buy a bunch of songs on iTunes then you lose the ability to play them should you switch from iPod to Zune. Apple gets to charge a premium on iPods partly because of this fact (the fact that they are beautifully designed also helps). Buyng songs on iTunes locks you into Apple. Subscribing to the Zune service does not lock you into Zune.
In fact, if someone else offers a slightly less expensive equivalent service it is really easy to switch subscriptions.
Of course the music companies would not license at a rate that allows a slightly less expensive service.
Languages are regularized every generation. I think it is probably more a function of zipf's law. Commonly used words have more complex forms because the extra complexity is useful. Verb tense adds important information. Irregular verbs aid in disambiguation. The benefit of disambiguating words like 'be' and 'have' is greater than the disadvantage of having to remember multiple forms. Another way to think of it is that each form of 'be' is used often enough to make it worthwhile.
I saw a talk a few years ago by a researcher claiming that a "mirror system" in the brain is responsible for the development of language. The "mirror system" is a structure that activates in the same way both for performing a grasping action and for seeing a grasping action. It allows the brain to learn grasping more quickly by helping imitation. His theory was that this enabled to gestural languages which lead to spoken language.
But once you get machinery that small there ends up being a single optimal design. The original replicators encountered by SG-1 were primitive in comparison to the Pegasus replicators. But after modiyfing themselves for many thousands of years in the time dialation field, the Milky Way replicator hardware converged to the same design as the Pegasus replicators.
As always, the hardware became commodity while the new and valuable changes occur in software.
Can we just give up the game, please? This is obviously an advance introduction of the replicator technology gathered from the off-world explorations of our "stargate" program. Yes, just like SG-1 which was produced to created "plausible deniability" in case information leaked.
Yes, I realize that was a plot on one of the shows -- creating a show about the "real" stargate program, but that plotline was only created to create "plausible deniability" in case information about the real effort to create plausible deniability was ever leaked.
And do I even need to mention that doing replicator research on Earth is a really bad idea. It isn't even that great of an idea if you do it off-world. Seriously, entire civilizations have been destroyed messing with this stuff.
I remember Sony releasing pictures of an old man's face with some quote of a huge number of polygons that far, far surpassed the Dreamcast. Many of my friends said that they were waiting for the vastly superior PS2. When it finally came out they were all ooh and ahh. I pointed out that the graphics didn't look better than the Dreamcast and in fact might have been worse. A few of my friends agreed with me, but most didn't care.
Re:Cinematic Titanic versus RiffTrax/Film Crew
on
Joel Hodgson Answers
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· Score: 2, Funny
but if someone who really knows the answer to why the 'Bots will likely never be seen in new material again, I'd be interested to hear it.
Joel used special parts to make his robot friends and we seem to be fresh out of special parts to make more.
I'm a computer science major. After taking an ecommerce class in graduate school I became much more interested in the world of economics. There is a surprising amount of overlap.
Tshirts are not reproducable like mp3s are reproducable.
If your time to reproduce a tshirt is worth less than $7 then it makes sense for you to do that. Now try to sell your bootleg tshirt. You have to undercut the real band so your time is worth even less now. You have to be physically present to sell the shirts so the risk of legal trouble is greater than nearly anonymous file sharing over the internet. The more money you make the more visible you become.
Physical CDs are rival and excludable. You can make money off of them as long as people value the atoms enough to pay for them over the mp3s they can likely get for free. On the other hand, they can bootleg a CD from the mp3s for a few bucks (to use your counter point about the tshirts).
As far as concert profitability, I have no idea. No one said that making a living as a musician was easy. Yes, DRM is an attempt to move digial music back to rival/excludable. Maybe that will be a successful business model. Then again, maybe it will be a miserable failure. Time will tell. Napster steaming service is a big fail. XM Radio streaming service seems to be a win.
I do not see any way to lock someone in with streaming subscriptions. The iTunes model where you purchase music that only plays on the iPod can lock a user in. A user with a music subscription has nothing invested (except perhaps commodity hardware) and can switch easily. The ability of a customer to switch to a competior easily means you make very little money.
One can make a matrix of these two categories and place most products into one of the quadrants.
Music recordings used to be rival/excludable. You could only get them on CD (or tape). If you were using that CD then someone else could not (rival). CDs cost money at the store and such are excludable. It is pretty easy to make money on goods that are rival/excludable as long as people want those goods.
Digital technology has turned music recordings into nonrival/nonexcludable. I can rip your CD and we can now both listen to the music (nonrival). One could put that recording on the internet making it available to everyone (nonexcludable). It is extremely difficult to make money on goods that are nonrival/nonexcludable. DRM technology is an attempt to move goods like this back towards rival/excludable.
Some argue that once your product becomes nonrival/nonexcludable then you shouldn't try to change your product to be profitable but should instead change your business model to fit the new marketplace. Treat the nonrival/nonexcludable product as advertising to sell something else that is rival or excludable -- like concerts or t-shirts.
As a counter point, the film theory I've encountered says that film narratives are interesting when the protagonist goes through an emotional change. The plot of the movie exists only to distract you from this emotional change so that the change doesn't seem droll.
Many games have slim to none emotional arc. That is okay. There is nothing wrong with an action game like Doom not having much of a story. But when you make it into a movie, you need to add an emotional arc.
Some games do have emotional arcs. They are usually preplanned scripts though -- sort of like a movie. I don't think I've seen any games where the player is actually a participant in creating the emotional arc.
The emotional change does not occur because the protagonist messes up. Instead he is operating effectively in his world when suddenly the rug is pulled out from under him in some way. Suddenly, the way he operates no longer works the way it used to. He has to find a new way in this new world. I think that principle could work very well in a game.
One of the past Ultima games (six maybe?) started by asking you questions that sorted the "virtues" in the game according to what was most important to you -- the player. It made you choose between scenarions like: "Would you rather turn a friend into the police or allow a crime to go unpunished." I would like to see a game that gives you choices like that so that the game can build a profile of your personality (within the context of the game). Then it would set up scenarios that use emotional attachments to game characters to challenge and attempt to change aspects of that profile.
You currently need permission to publish pictures or videos of non-celebrity people. Within ten years, GM claims they will be putting robotic vehicles on the road. Should an artificially created consciousness have fewer rights than a naturally occuring consciousness? Ford is blazing a legal trail for our new robotic partners. If robot rights are not in place by the time they arrive in the marketspace ecology then we will violate them and next thing you know -- robot uprising. I've seen that movie and, while filled with cool explosions and special effects, it isn't very desirable reality. Ford has seen the future and is saving the human race by ensuring that robots and humans step forward into the galaxy as peers instead of a master/slave relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
But Google was first to the search market with effective statistical natural language processing techniques.
You could do that today. Hotmail accounts have been put under the umbrella of Live Id. You can create a Live Id with any email address. This is the same account that one's 360 GamerTag is attached to. If you have a 360 GamerTag then you have a Live Id.
Granted, Yahoo email account will at some point become associated with Live Ids if purchase goes through. Who knows how quickly that will happen.
Except that would cause Microsoft to lose market share in the email space. Microsoft is trying to catch up to Google. They don't want to push customers that they purchase with Yahoo away to Google.
The only way I could see Microsoft leveraging Windows to win search share is to make it a default on the OS. But the courts have already caught onto that tactic. If you buy a new PC is as likely to have Google as the default search engine as anything else (mostly because Google pays companies that sell systems to set it as default in install the Google toolbar).
But maybe you have some creative ideas that I don't see.
Google was the first to play that game. Yahoo is a media company. Google is an artificial intelligence company.
Nah... Microsoft would probably not switch all yahoo email addresses to hotmail. That would destroy a valuable brand. It is more likely that yahoo email accounts would being displaying ads sold by Microsoft.
Selling ads is what matters in the search business.
Selling niche ads is what made Google money.
To sell niche ads you have to have lots and lots of niches.
To have lots and lots of niches you have to have lots and lots of customers and you have to know what niche those customers are in.
To have lots and lots of customers you need quality results.
Luckily in search, your customers tell you what niche they are in with their search queries.
Also, if you someone manage to get lots and lots of customers you can use their search behavior to improve your results.
The search engine with the largest number of customers improves their search engine the fastest.
They also happen to make the most money.
Saying that he only wants Yahoo for the marketshare does not make Yahoo employees feel any better about being part of an aquisition.
OMG, I'm an idiot.
Thank you for correcting me.
In that case you only have to wait around a thousand years to solve a problem that would take around 10^300 years with a computer today.
As long as Moore's law holds, computing power will increase at an expoential rate. Any exponential problem can therefore be solved in linear time simply by waiting around for a faster computer.
...
Let the doubling time for Moore's Law be 12 months for sake of argument.
Today's computer takes 2^1024 seconds to solve problem X.
Next year it takes 2^512.
The following year 2^256.
In just a decade you can solve problem X in 2 seconds.
Warrent Buffet calls it a moat.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
And subscriptions often result in the opposite of lock-in.
For example, if you were able to buy a Zune music subscription there is nothing preventing you from switching to another service. However, if you buy a bunch of songs on iTunes then you lose the ability to play them should you switch from iPod to Zune. Apple gets to charge a premium on iPods partly because of this fact (the fact that they are beautifully designed also helps). Buyng songs on iTunes locks you into Apple. Subscribing to the Zune service does not lock you into Zune.
In fact, if someone else offers a slightly less expensive equivalent service it is really easy to switch subscriptions.
Of course the music companies would not license at a rate that allows a slightly less expensive service.
Which just supports the GP post that evil people try to get into power and they may not follow the obvious path.
Languages are regularized every generation. I think it is probably more a function of zipf's law. Commonly used words have more complex forms because the extra complexity is useful. Verb tense adds important information. Irregular verbs aid in disambiguation. The benefit of disambiguating words like 'be' and 'have' is greater than the disadvantage of having to remember multiple forms. Another way to think of it is that each form of 'be' is used often enough to make it worthwhile.
I saw a talk a few years ago by a researcher claiming that a "mirror system" in the brain is responsible for the development of language. The "mirror system" is a structure that activates in the same way both for performing a grasping action and for seeing a grasping action. It allows the brain to learn grasping more quickly by helping imitation. His theory was that this enabled to gestural languages which lead to spoken language.
For some reason the wikipedia article about this has an odd name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minde_alterig_drugs
Here is a 2000 paper covering the theory: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci564/lec-notes_fall2001/28.%20Mirror%20System%20and%20Language%20Evolution.pdf
Possibility four: The car itself is a robot, drives itself, and refuels when it does not have a passenger.
Ob link: http://www.darpagrandchallenge.com/
What alternative would you prefer:
a) Microsoft develops the network software on their own. Webcorp goes out of business.
b) Microsoft does nothing. You buy Windows. Then you buy Webcorp.
But once you get machinery that small there ends up being a single optimal design. The original replicators encountered by SG-1 were primitive in comparison to the Pegasus replicators. But after modiyfing themselves for many thousands of years in the time dialation field, the Milky Way replicator hardware converged to the same design as the Pegasus replicators.
As always, the hardware became commodity while the new and valuable changes occur in software.
Can we just give up the game, please? This is obviously an advance introduction of the replicator technology gathered from the off-world explorations of our "stargate" program. Yes, just like SG-1 which was produced to created "plausible deniability" in case information leaked.
Yes, I realize that was a plot on one of the shows -- creating a show about the "real" stargate program, but that plotline was only created to create "plausible deniability" in case information about the real effort to create plausible deniability was ever leaked.
And do I even need to mention that doing replicator research on Earth is a really bad idea. It isn't even that great of an idea if you do it off-world. Seriously, entire civilizations have been destroyed messing with this stuff.
I remember Sony releasing pictures of an old man's face with some quote of a huge number of polygons that far, far surpassed the Dreamcast. Many of my friends said that they were waiting for the vastly superior PS2. When it finally came out they were all ooh and ahh. I pointed out that the graphics didn't look better than the Dreamcast and in fact might have been worse. A few of my friends agreed with me, but most didn't care.
but if someone who really knows the answer to why the 'Bots will likely never be seen in new material again, I'd be interested to hear it.
Joel used special parts to make his robot friends and we seem to be fresh out of special parts to make more.
I'm a computer science major. After taking an ecommerce class in graduate school I became much more interested in the world of economics. There is a surprising amount of overlap.
Very good, sir!
Tshirts are not reproducable like mp3s are reproducable.
If your time to reproduce a tshirt is worth less than $7 then it makes sense for you to do that. Now try to sell your bootleg tshirt. You have to undercut the real band so your time is worth even less now. You have to be physically present to sell the shirts so the risk of legal trouble is greater than nearly anonymous file sharing over the internet. The more money you make the more visible you become.
Physical CDs are rival and excludable. You can make money off of them as long as people value the atoms enough to pay for them over the mp3s they can likely get for free. On the other hand, they can bootleg a CD from the mp3s for a few bucks (to use your counter point about the tshirts).
As far as concert profitability, I have no idea. No one said that making a living as a musician was easy.
Yes, DRM is an attempt to move digial music back to rival/excludable. Maybe that will be a successful business model. Then again, maybe it will be a miserable failure. Time will tell. Napster steaming service is a big fail. XM Radio streaming service seems to be a win.
I do not see any way to lock someone in with streaming subscriptions. The iTunes model where you purchase music that only plays on the iPod can lock a user in.
A user with a music subscription has nothing invested (except perhaps commodity hardware) and can switch easily. The ability of a customer to switch to a competior easily means you make very little money.
You are looking for the terms "rival" and "nonrival".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalrous
A related concept is "excludability".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
One can make a matrix of these two categories and place most products into one of the quadrants.
Music recordings used to be rival/excludable. You could only get them on CD (or tape). If you were using that CD then someone else could not (rival). CDs cost money at the store and such are excludable. It is pretty easy to make money on goods that are rival/excludable as long as people want those goods.
Digital technology has turned music recordings into nonrival/nonexcludable. I can rip your CD and we can now both listen to the music (nonrival). One could put that recording on the internet making it available to everyone (nonexcludable). It is extremely difficult to make money on goods that are nonrival/nonexcludable. DRM technology is an attempt to move goods like this back towards rival/excludable.
Some argue that once your product becomes nonrival/nonexcludable then you shouldn't try to change your product to be profitable but should instead change your business model to fit the new marketplace. Treat the nonrival/nonexcludable product as advertising to sell something else that is rival or excludable -- like concerts or t-shirts.
As a counter point, the film theory I've encountered says that film narratives are interesting when the protagonist goes through an emotional change. The plot of the movie exists only to distract you from this emotional change so that the change doesn't seem droll.
Many games have slim to none emotional arc. That is okay. There is nothing wrong with an action game like Doom not having much of a story. But when you make it into a movie, you need to add an emotional arc.
Some games do have emotional arcs. They are usually preplanned scripts though -- sort of like a movie. I don't think I've seen any games where the player is actually a participant in creating the emotional arc.
The emotional change does not occur because the protagonist messes up. Instead he is operating effectively in his world when suddenly the rug is pulled out from under him in some way. Suddenly, the way he operates no longer works the way it used to. He has to find a new way in this new world. I think that principle could work very well in a game.
One of the past Ultima games (six maybe?) started by asking you questions that sorted the "virtues" in the game according to what was most important to you -- the player. It made you choose between scenarions like: "Would you rather turn a friend into the police or allow a crime to go unpunished." I would like to see a game that gives you choices like that so that the game can build a profile of your personality (within the context of the game). Then it would set up scenarios that use emotional attachments to game characters to challenge and attempt to change aspects of that profile.
You currently need permission to publish pictures or videos of non-celebrity people. Within ten years, GM claims they will be putting robotic vehicles on the road. Should an artificially created consciousness have fewer rights than a naturally occuring consciousness? Ford is blazing a legal trail for our new robotic partners. If robot rights are not in place by the time they arrive in the marketspace ecology then we will violate them and next thing you know -- robot uprising. I've seen that movie and, while filled with cool explosions and special effects, it isn't very desirable reality. Ford has seen the future and is saving the human race by ensuring that robots and humans step forward into the galaxy as peers instead of a master/slave relationship.