[MUD-Dev] Moore's Law sucks (was: 3D graphics)

[Mike Sellers]

At 08:24 PM 2/13/98 PST8PDT, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:
>On Fri, 13 Feb 1998 16:24:56, Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> wrote:
>>-- Moore's Law still rules. :)  
>
>The tiresome Moore's Law rhetoric.  

Perhaps you don't know enough about Moore's Law.  It is neither tiresome
nor rhetoric (nor divine prophesy, I might add -- merely extremely
insightful technological and market prediction).  It has been demonstrably
accurate using robust technical measures (with a statistically significant
correlation) since before there _was_ a "personal computer" industry, has
been instrumental in the strategies of several of the world's largest and
most profitable companies, and has survived many occasions on which people
predicted its demise from reasons ranging from basic physics to market
forces.  

So, when you co-found a company like Intel, use one of your insights as to
why Moore's Law is rubbish to help turn it into a multi-billion dollar
empire, and thus predict the future of computing accurately enough to spend
millions of dollars in the right places rather than the many wrong places,
well, then I'll put more weight on your scoffing of a law you appear to
simply misunderstand.  

> [deletia]
>On the plus side, as big business needlessly upgrades their machines the
>"obsolete" machines are falling into the hands of artists, educators, and
>non-first world citizens.  This market is not reflected in Intel's 
>sales reports and Intel has no idea what people may be doing with those
>machines.

No, this is simply incorrect.  You assume you know things about how Intel
operates and forecasts that you clearly have no clue about.  One of Intel's
two biggest market foci, according to Andy Grove, is the below-$1000 retail
market.  The other is the higher end consumer market, where the new chips
drive down the prices of the older ones, making the sub-$1K market viable.
If you think that companies like Intel just sit on their hands wondering
what it is that people do with their machines (old or new), you don't give
them nearly enough credit.  From my personal experience, I've done some
usability work for them, and was surprised at the thoroughness and
nimbleness of their ability to find out important things like what the real
life cycle of their products are.  

>Third, designing for non-existant technology is a dumb-assed design 
>constraint.

Uh, right.  So: you're in charge of producing a new game that has a
36-month design cycle.  What technology would you recommend designing for?
The existant technology will be totally obsolete in market terms by the
time your project is finished.  


>Designing for an imaginary machine is a gamble.  Some people can afford
>to make that gamble, and some of them might make a lot of money off of
>it.  But overall, blindly accepting high-stake risks is not only
>foolhardy, it is bad business practice.

It's just a guess, but I'll guess you have little to no business education,
and little to no experience in actually managing software projects,
especially consumer or industrial end-user projects.  What you call "bad
business practice" has many billions of dollars behind it that would argue
otherwise.  

>To somehow tie this back to a list-relevant topic: Mike is advocating
>that product cycles should be targeted towards cutting-edge machines,
>because cutting-edge is cool? important? profitable?  Someone has to
>have analyzed this claim with actual numbers by now.  If a product
>is delayed by six months/a year (an obvious risk when you are pretending
>to program on a machine that you don't have) doesn't that indicate there
>needs to be something more to the product than "cutting edge" design?

If your design goals are predicated on something being cool or somehow
"important", please send me the names of your investors -- I have a bridge
to sell them.  OTOH, if your design goals are focused on making something
for an neophile market that is targeted for release this Christmas and to
run on a P166 with 8Mb of RAM... well, I have that same bridge available.  

>I'm all for progress in the world of muds, but I think the design
>criteria, especially for the upcoming generation of graphical
>muds/UOII/whatever, should be focused on the strengths of what is
>already successful.
>
>A short list:
>- having a large and divers world to explore that can be affected by
>players
>- semi-intelligent interaction with non-player creatures.
>- emphasis on social relationships and actions, in particular:
>   - being able to walk around naked/inappropriately dressed
>   - tinysex
> 
>Things I don't buy that have not been proven successful:
>- wholesale ecological/economic simulation 
>- high-bandwidth/dedicated network solutions

Well, be my guest.  I have to wonder about what goes into your definition
of "successful" as apparently it isn't user satisfaction, number of users,
breadth of different kinds of users, or rate of growth of the user
population.  But hey, one of the great things about this is that you can
pursue your goals and prove everyone else wrong -- just like Intel.  


--

Mike Sellers   Chief Alchemist -- Online Alchemy   mike at online-alchemy.com

"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others 
may despise it, is the invention of good games.  And it cannot be done 
by men out of touch with their instinctive values."  - Carl Jung