Sony appears to have patched it from firmware 4.06 and up. The adieu in the title appears to refer to bidding a farewell to the exploit rather than a codename for it ;-)
Phusion co-founder here (creators of the Passenger app server); just wanted to chime in and say that this article resonated a lot with our experiences with VCs and our ventures in open source. Even down to the "lifestyle business" remark. Like OP, I'd encourage first-time founders to talk to VCs when starting out just to get an idea of how they perceive your business. Yes, even if you don't plan on raising. You may walk away learning a thing or two :-)
As for RethinkDB; we loved it, and even wrote an article about it a few weeks ago, outlining how it could be awesomely used with Rails 5 [1]. Having tried to bootstrap a company solely around an open source product ourselves as well[2], we can't help but share their pain here a bit. For instance, and I'm just going on what OP has shared about RethinkDBs business model, we tried to build our business solely on support contracts initially too. That didn't work out great for us.
And it kind of makes sense if you think about it: the support contract is available in case your software is failing during critical operations, yet your main efforts in product improvements are to minimize those chances. So you may have two conflicting interests, and I think you will find yourself having a hard time satisfying both. Through product improvements, you're basically minimizing the probability that such a support contract is needed. That might make it more enticing to only get the contract whenever you actually really need it, and that moment might never come. Especially if you consider how many hoops customers have to jump through to procure something within the enterprise. I can imagine something similar happening for RethinkDB.
This was an important realization for us though: rather than charge for the probability of problems, consider charging for the product's merits instead. As much as it pained us to introduce a closed source premium version of Passenger a few years ago to do this, I can confidently say that it was the best choice we could have made for our open source users as well; it allowed us to have a sustainable income and allowed us to rapidly improve Passenger's open source core alongside the closed source version as well. So even though I commend OPs determination into keeping things strictly open source, I'd encourage him to look into a hybrid option as well. We wouldn't be around here today as a company if we didn't.
Lastly, seeing as OP is a fellow bootstrapper and a fan of Basecamp as well, I think Jason Fried put it best when it comes to VC monies: "if you start out by raising money, you get good at spending money, but if you start without money, you get really good at making money", or something like that :-)
As for (former) top tiers: you're forgetting Yang ;-) He was considered top tier in Arcade Edition too, and was nerfed considerably in Arcade Edition 2012 to the point many thought he was not tournament viable anymore. The game gradually went from favouring defensive characters to rush down characters, and now with Ultra Street Fighter 4, back to zoning/footsie characters: I believe Ultra Street Fighter 4 has seen the most diverse top 8 in tournaments (see Evo for example) from all iterations when it came to characters, which makes me believe that it is currently balanced quite nicely, meaning that almost all characters have a good shot at winning a tournament. Well, except for maybe Dee Jay, Honda and Dhalsim unfortunately.
For those wondering why there have been so many iterations of Street Fighter over the past few years: aside from introducing new mechanics and characters, SF has been "broken" a few times in the past with the discovery of so called un-blockable setups. These unblockable setups caused hitboxes to overlap in such a way that it would leave your opponent in a state where he/she could do nothing other than to get hit with an the attack. The only way to block it was to do it frame-perfect, which is incredibly hard to do considering the game runs at 60fps. Especially under tournament pressure :)
It was broken again with the discovery of so called vortex setups, which kept your opponent in constant 50-50 guessing state after being knocked down: will the attack hit from the front or back? It wasn't uncommon for even the aggressor to not know what side it would hit. A vortex like that could easily lead to stun, and a subsequent KO if you guessed wrong for more than 2 times. Talk about unforgiving right? ;-) Characters like Ibuki and Akuma benefitted strongly from this and almost allowed for autopilot gameplay. No fun if you were on the receiving side indeed.
In an effort to combat gamebreaking setups like unblockables and vortexes, Ultra Street Fighter 4 introduced the delayed wakeup mechanic which allowed you to mess up the timing of your opponent if they tried to do a vortex/unblockable setup. It's kind of a lazy fix, as I think it'd been better to just fix the hitboxes. Even though it does a decent job at combatting these setups, it also considerably slows down the pacing of the game as well.
As the article shows, some characters do better against other types of characters: zoning characters have historically been able to do incredibly well against grapplers for example by playing a keep-away game. Grapplers on the other hand generally tend to have the advantage against rushdown characters, and rushdown characters usually are able to blow up zoning characters. Considering that the game has been out on the market for a while, it shouldn't come as a surprise that most tournament players are able to play 2 or more characters from different "archetypes" at a high level. This "counter-picking" was historically frowned upon and considered a "cheap" move, but I believe it has become more accepted as of late due to bigger prize pots coming into play in tournaments.
I've unfortunately been able to infer how the article factored in some character specific strategies: divekicks can generally be mitigated with a fast standing jab for example, and some characters are prone to longer combo's due to larger hitboxes. It'd be interesting to see how this would affect their model as it is something that I think matters in matches: Dudley is able to do an extended bread and butter combo for example on Balrog(boxer)/Abel, which leads to not only more damage, but also more stun.
After playing the SF4 series for over 6 years, I still thoroughly enjoy playing this game in my spare time and in tournaments. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that some fellow startup founders coughTobi Lutke from Shopifycough are incredibly good at the game as well, and can't wait for them to improve the net code in Street Fighter 5. Probably has to do with being competitive I guess ;)
Multiple income streams is the best starting point imo if you don't know what you want to double down on. Getting $100k itself is not an easy task, let alone trying to get $100k off of a single thing. It's easier (and more pragmatic) to get to $100k by getting $5k on product A in YRR, $20k on product B etc... These things will eventually add up and need to be easily maintainable projects (as opposed to timesink projects). I wouldn't recommend writing a super complex app consisting of millions of lines of code for example that requires a lot of support towards your customers; instead, consider writing an e-book and selling it for $10-30 a pop. Or a SaaS that nets you $10 MRR per customer.
Another upside imo of this approach is that you can discern at a later stage which one of your projects is most successful and has the most chance of getting you to $100k YRR, on its own. This will allow you to decide if you want to double down on it or not.
Also, consider building things someone wants: I know, I know, easier said than done, but it's often a good place to start at what you'd like yourself. In a worst case scenario, you'll at least have 1 customer (yourself) ;-)
Disclaimer: co-founder of a company called Phusion who started the company in his final year of graduating CS... in Enschede, The Netherlands (a city you might have never heard of before, and that I wanted to mention just to underline that it's possible to create a company pretty much anywhere thanks to the internet).
I think what you're struggling with is more of a mentality thing. I used to think I was trapped like you (but then took a macbook to the knee ;-)), but figured out there were a few things I could do about it:
- Complain about it (i.e. stating the obvious) which would not solve my situation.
- Move to the states to found the company there, which would not solve the situation for future generations.
- Try to deal with it somehow, and try to contribute our little share in the hopes of cultivating a local tech industry.
We chose the latter, because we're the adventurous type I guess and would love to see NL get on the map when it comes to tech startups. Even though this arguably has made things a lot harder for us than they needed to be, we learned a lot by doing it this way. The absence of like-minded people was especially hard for us: startups tend to take a lot of time to set up and can be pretty lonely if you don't have people around you that are going through similar stuff as you are. We eventually found a precious few of them in Amsterdam, with whom we regularly have coffee with up till this very day. Now, Italy is a lot larger than the Netherlands so I suspect there are more startups there as well; you just need to find them, perhaps this post will contribute in finding them.
Unless you're on an applied university, from my experience, programming isn't really taught at CS at university level. Instead, the focus is put more teaching you "a way of thinking" and it assumes that you'll pick up things like programming in languages like Python/Ruby, and learn about REST on your own time.
I believe you might have enrolled into university with the wrong set of expectations: during my entire CS curriculum, I've only had 2 programming courses, but they were focussed more on the paradigms than elaborating syntax; the latter things were assumed trivial and had to be figured out on your own time.
It's easy to get caught up in things that an "environment" is doing wrong, and to lose sight in what it does right. Personally, I can't imagine living somewhere else at this moment in my life than the Netherlands for example, where we have pretty good healthcare, affordable universities, and so forth. If you're unable to come up with a list like this, then it might indeed be a good idea to consider moving to another country for a little while and see if the grass is indeed greener on the other side. Shouldn't be too hard as an EU citizen right? :)
These pictures are beautiful, and I wish I had thought of doing this as well. As someone who has seen this disease run its course on a loved one, they brought back a lot of memories. Especially the effect chemo and a mastectomy usually has on that someone and their family. From losing their hair to having a swollen face due to retention of water, to being bedbound etc. The last 3 pictures are unfortunately all too familiar.
Great and insightful write-up nonetheless!