Forgot your password?

Comment: Re: Cheap (Score 2) 296

by PitaBred (#42171385) Attached to: Researchers Create New Cheap, Shatterproof, Plastic Light Bulbs

He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).

The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.

What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...

Comment: Re:I am having a vision of the future... (Score 1) 296

by PitaBred (#42171321) Attached to: Researchers Create New Cheap, Shatterproof, Plastic Light Bulbs

Part of the problem is that CFL's do color banding, whereas incandescent is full spectrum. So even if the color profile is tuned to a reasonable value, it's still lacking output in fairly large color bands. Which, incidentally, is probably why your wife doesn't like it... women are more likely to have better color sensitivity than the average male, especially in the red/green bands

Comment: Re:That's one way to interpret it (Score 2) 488

by PitaBred (#40375627) Attached to: U.S. Students Struggle With Reasoning Skills

So... if I go get some food and my expectation is that I get the right thing, and they give me the wrong thing, it's entirely possible that my expectations are just off, and I'm expecting too much?

They showed that the kids were all very good at getting answers when given a structured set of data and tests, but not when asked to design an experiment. That means that design skills are lacking relative to analysis skills. There's no running study needed.


+ - Can the Elite-like niche sustain a small scale product?->

Submitted by Heliosphere1
Heliosphere1 writes "I'm the sole developer of an Elite-like indie game in development called Heliosphere: I made some demo videos to show what I have done so far. If someone wants to toss the original AVIs up on bittorrent, that's cool; I can post filehosting links separately. I recommend using fullscreen and "HD" mode on DM:


There is no staff or money behind this effort. I decided to take the last few years before I can retire to try something creative, and attempt to write a game. I'm just over one year into the project, so the road ahead is long. I'm trying to decide whether this is viable to pursue. I'm aware of about 4 or 5 other impressive efforts in this genre, all of which have more resources (programmers, sometimes artists and/or money, where anything more than 1 person and zero dollars can be defined as "a large project" from my POV).

On one hand, I think it's absurdly cool that this genre might stage a bit of a comeback, and also that the efforts are coming from indie developers, who in my opinion are keeping gaming alive in the face of various major studios who are crushing it. I hope at least some of those indie projects will see wild success. On the other, Elite-likes are a small niche: for every gamer interested in such games and who hasn't abandoned the PC as a gaming platform, there are a million who'd prefer Angry Farmville In Space. It's unclear to me whether this niche can sustain a lone developer with all the limitations and constraints that brings on what I can create. Unfortunately, I will need to make a living wage, as I am currently chewing through my retirement savings to create this. It's this, or a few more years at the grindstone.

I can answer questions about the project here, but cannot accept or read implementation ideas.

(And yes, it runs on Linux, as well as Windows).

[Editors: Sorry for the double submission: the first attempt appeared to disappear from the queue — not down voted, but just gone, after about 5 minutes, so I figured it didn't work.]"

Link to Original Source
