On 6/17/2011 11:37 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
On Jun 15, 2011, at 8:55 AM, Ian Piumarta<[email protected]> wrote:
Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly
understood) receives lip service in the press, but no current-day vehicle
exists to to nurture it.
+360
+360! I love this expression, it doesn't just say "I agree," it also says "let's
think our way back around to where we are now and see what we can learn."
interesting...
I had just interpreted it mostly like "+1, but much more so".
In this case, I'll offer a smaller variation made out of exactly half as much
stuff:
+180
As in, "let's turn this situation around." We'll end up at a different vantage
point, where history's forced-perspective might appear more obvious.
maybe it is because maybe 95% of innovation and invention does not
succeed in the market, and so investors would be hard-pressed to invest
in anything inventive/innovative, on the basis that it would likely go
nowhere and turn into lost profits?...
in this case, to really have much assurance that it is something which
may turn a profit, basically the creator has to already have it made and
in a roughly "ready for market" form, which naturally limits innovation
some, since going too far outside the "tried and true" will often
severely limit ones' ability to get a potential product developed to
this stage.
the ultimate result is that most technologies which have "a snowmans'
chance" will be necessarily uncreative.
another factor is that of potential market perception:
an "original" technology may strike possible customers as "now, just
what the hell is this thing? and what would I use it for?..." meaning
that one has to have some assurance that there will be a market for it.
hence, it is generally a safer bet to go head-first into already
established markets, with a relatively generic product, and use
"innovative" as a marketing term.
"behold this innovative new product which does things you have so
totally not been seeing other people doing already...". that, or just
make some easy-to-use widget which does ordinary tasks slightly faster...
"
Tired of having to individually cut bologna into squares? enter the
revolutionary new 'Bologna Trimmer', which removes these unwanted edges
from your bologna, making it fit nicely onto the bread and mesh
wonderfully with this pre-sliced cheese...
Watch as it can also can remove that nasty crust from this bread, so
that you can have your sandwich perfect every time.
".
meanwhile, as one cuts to recordings of smiling kids eating sandwiches,
... in addition to them showing some blonde housewife-type character
daintily pressing a button to invoke its "cutting action", and totally
leave out shots of other requisite tasks (positioning the bread and
bologna, or cleaning the thing) which IRL could likely add more to the
cost of using the thing than would be the gain of not using a knife to
cut the bread or bologna.
but, it is the natural problem, that most true innovation would not have
an immediate market, and by the time it has become valuable, it can no
longer be mass marketed.
enter the patent portfolio, ...
thus, it all becomes lip service.
meanwhile, I might consider writing an article where I compare/contrast
my BGBScript language against the languages it is most closely related
to, namely JavaScript and ActionScript...
meanwhile, "ignoring" the few places where it falls into a few
standards-conformance holes (WRT ECMA-262 5th Ed), mostly relating to
default floating-point accuracy and a few other things. well, and also
the implementation is far less "mature". granted, it is technically a
different language than ECMAScript (and not intended to be run in a
browser).
granted, yes, not a whole lot of innovation here...
meanwhile, a person on usenet continues to call my stuff a "joke"
because of my practice of mostly building most basic functionality into
the compiler/VM, rather than building it as part of the in-language
libraries, and because of my use of C-based plug-ins for any extensions
to the core language.
but, really, I don't personally see what if any real value-added there
is of doing a minimalist script language and building nearly everything
via macros. minimalism just doesn't really seem like a terribly useful
goal...
granted, I will admit that, yes, probably no one has any reason to care
about or ever considering using my stuff, and I probably spam it far too
much as it is...
oh well...
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
