On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:13:36AM -0800, Kelly Linden wrote: > I place a high value on simplicity. I want to trivially understand where I > am, > how much headroom I have, how close I am to what limits there are. I don't
The swimming pool ----------------- Once upon a time there was a swimming pool that costed $100 per day to run. Every day 100 people came to swim. Of course, they didn't come all at the same time, thank God no! Imagine that... you'd only have 1/100th of the water to swim in! No, sometimes there were a little more and sometimes there were a little less people. Not everyone stayed 24 hours per day, after all. One day, one of the customers complained to the management of the swimming pool, saying "Last Wednesday I could swim in my own lane, but today it's way too crowded to swim! I wish I could see how many people are inside before I pay the entrance fee!" and he looked really mad. Now the manager, Mr.Kelly, was a smart man and he found quickly a solution that everyone would understand, and after which everyone would have precisely the same area to swim in no matter when they would come! He said: Although there come 100 people every day, I think that at the most busy moments of the say I've ever only seen 30 at the same time. That number might be changed a bit, but lets say that's the maximum. Then we can garantee that you have the same area to swim in at every moment by giving you 1/30 of the swimming pool. From now on, even if the pool is EMPTY... or when there are only 3 people like on Sunday mornings, you are not allowed to use more than 1/30 of the swimming pool area. This way we have solved the problem of those griefer school kids too that come here with 100 kids at once, just to obstruct and annoy the other swimmers: as soon as there are really 30 people inside, we close the doors :). And so, everyone was happy-- because now they knew that whenever they came, they would have precisely 1/30 of the swimming pool... Well, except for about 90% of the customers, who were used to having MUCH more space normally, but they were quickly convinced that they only PAID for 1/30 (after all the math was such that nobody could argue here). And yeah, the entrence price remained the same too. One year later the swimming pool was broke. The End -- Carlo Wood <ca...@alinoe.com> _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
