Limitations

Talk to me long enough and you’ll hear me refer to the book Illusions by Richard Bach.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you’ve seen mention of it a few times.  Within the book is a book, the Messiah’s Handbook, which is filled with all the things a messiah needs to know, and it is quoted on numerous occasions throughout the novel.  One of my favorites is as follows:

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.

Illusions isn’t the only place this idea crops up.  In Star Wars, Yoda tells Luke “Do, or do not.  There is no ‘try’.”  In the Matrix, a boy explains to Neo:

Boy: Do not try to bend the spoon; that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.

The fact that this comes up so often in stories, about shaking off some feeling of the impossible and overcoming it to success, in my opinion, only lends to the truth of it, and to the fact that so many people spend so much effort in arguing for their limitations.  So, I’m not horribly surprised when the announcement of some cool new technology, like OnLive, is met with such resistance by many (read the comments).  Luckily, there are people out there capable and willing to see beyond what is to what could be and move things forward.

Personally, I look forward to watching OnLive’s development.  Although, I do agree that input lag could be an issue for them if they stay with the plan I read about where they have five or six data centers spread around the country.  I think they might find value in co-location with ISPs.  Like, if Comcast wants to offer their customers OnLive gaming as part of their cable package, put an OnLive data center directly on the Comcast network, with them subsidizing the cost of the installation in return for a share of the subscription fees.  Setting the servers as close to the end user as possible is one way to overcome input lag.  Once you get over that, connection to a game server to play with other people is no different than connecting to that game server from your own PC without OnLive, and people do that all the time.

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