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A lot of this stuff really just comes around to mindsets. It's true of the businesses and true of the individuals who work at them.

One of the smartest pieces I ever read about the differences between how software shops approach business was a piece from the co-founder of The Omni Group that compared farming vs. mining. The Silicon Valley bubble has a strange obsession with "mining" schemes and exit strategies that leave rubble in their wake. That mindset permeates the culture, with many of them living as if they were oblivious to the fact that outside of their bubble most people lead happier, more fulfilled lives by going out of their way to avoid working and living in those sorts of conditions.

Speaking personally, I had a few offers on the table when I was a fresh out of grad school several years ago. One was for $50K/yr at a small software consulting company in a town most people have never heard of. One was for some interesting government work in D.C. at $75K/yr.. The last was for $75K/yr + stock options at a startup in Austin that was on course to have a big IPO soon.

I took the first one. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

The location has a low cost of living, delightful people, decent schools, and is populous enough to provide all of the benefits associated with the suburbs of a major city. The company is averse to overtime, small enough that we all know each other, big enough to attract a diverse set of clients, provides incredible benefits, and takes great pride in its work. I get to enjoy the satisfaction each night of a job well done without having to take my work home with me.

My income has increased modestly to $65K since accepting the job, which is easily enough for my wife and I to...
- Live off my income alone
- Enjoy a 7 minute traffic-free commute at 30mph
- Have an 1800 sqft. house on 1/3 acre
- Have a $580/mo. mortgage as our only debt
- Donate $10,000+/year to charity
- Enjoy big vacations on a regular basis
- Have time for family, friends, and ourselves
- Give my wife ample time for charitable service
- Retire early if we keep on as we have been

And all of that for a take-home pay that's roughly comparable to what the guy in the summary is paying in rent alone.

I mean, I get it. Prior to getting married, my wife was making $65K/yr in D.C., which was only enough to rent a small basement that was an hour commute from where she worked. When we were deciding whether to move there or here, it was pretty obvious which choice was the right one. Likewise, I've occasionally checked on that Austin startup over the last few years as a "what if". Turns out that after their last round of funding and claims they were going to hire 100 more people in advance of an IPO, the execs mostly all left to found a new startup and the company quietly announced layoffs.

It sounds like the guy in the summary has wants that outstrip his income. Hopefully he'll come to terms with the reality of his situation sooner rather than later, and maybe even wake up to the fact that there are viable alternatives that will provide not only a better quality of life, but may even provide more spending money.

Wil Shipley posted a (ficticious) interview with the TSA that I think covers the problem perfectly.

There was also a post on Reddit today that pointed out that the TSA would save more lives (statistically) if all they did was listen to people's hearts, check their blood pressure, and refer them to a doctor if it was outside the normal range.

What percent of the 20+ million devices running iPhone OS do you think are jail broken? It's just not a reliable answer for most people.

Some people see things how they are.

• John Gruber's fictional diary of an app store reviewer was both hilarious and on the mark.
• Wil Shipley has a very well thought out piece on the problems with the app store and realistic suggestions of ways you might be able to fix them.
• Craig Hockenberry has also recently analyzed where the app store is today.

Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster test drove a Tesla and wrote about it in his blog.

Here is part of what he had to say about:

It's crazy-fast. It handles like a jet fighter. It gets the equivalent of about 140 mpg. It has no gears ...

That may have been true at one time, but in its latest incarnation, it has a gearbox with two forward speeds, because low speed acceleration was wanting. The gearbox has proved to be its achilles heel. They have not been able to make it durable enough to last more than a short time.

Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster test drove a Tesla and wrote about it in his blog.

Here is part of what he had to say about:

It's crazy-fast. It handles like a jet fighter. It gets the equivalent of about 140 mpg. It has no gears. It requires almost no maintenance.e It's gorgeous. It's whisper-quiet. And, in Seattle, runs off hydro power.

Mac developer Wil Shipley found that despite the Macbook AIr being significantly slower than his Macbook Pro, it was able to compile a large piece of software slightly quicker, due to the SSD. Additionally, he found application switching quicker, due to swap space all being extremely low latency.

Yea. Apple takes care of notifying users of updates. Apple takes care of bandwidth and server costs. Apple takes care of anti-piracy. Sounds rather nice to me. I'd be willing to give up only 30% of my possible profit to avoid all those different headaches. If your application becomes popular, those things can get complex and expensive.

It will be interesting to see what some of the Mac Developer Bloggers think about this (Daniel Jalkut, John Gruber, and Wil Shipley for example).

This is the best explanation of why the MacBook Air doesn't have $yourFavoriteFeature I've read so far.
http://wilshipley.com/blog/

Sure, if MS had to develop their own TCP stack, they'd have less of an advantage in the OS market. Would this have translated to more BSD users?
No. The market isn't a zero sum game. If Windows doesn't do as well, there's no reason BSD would do better. Afterall, they could have both sucked it up and OS/2 could have won.

In fact, if the BSD implementation was not as open as it were, every OS would have had to develop their own TCP stack or go GPL.
Going GPL is obviously not in the interest of many businesses.

What does this imply? TCP would not have become the standard it is now. And we'd be back in the same situation as the 80s where every network device had to speak Arcnet, Appletalk, a version of TCP compatible for each OS' TCP stack bugs, Lantastic, IPX/SPX...etc...

Simply put, if the reference design for TCP was GPLed instead of BSD, we're all fucked. Only GPLed OSs, of which there are little compared to non-GPL OSs, would have that stack. Every other OS would have their own implementation complete with various bugs and inconsistencies.

If you think that "oh, that web page doesn't work with my version of firefox" is bad, then what about "oh, my linux box can't talk with any solaris hosts, unless it's got solaris TCP version 7.56.9-beta42 and my kernel is 2.8.666." or some crap like that.

The simple fact that because a BSD-licensed TCP stack allows any OS, regardless of size, intentions, or evilness as judged by us Slashdotters, to take the stack and integrate it into their OS demonstrates it's own ability to maintain freedom:
If everybody's starting with this stack, you're starting with a standard version of which you need to maintain compatibility with or you have cut yourself out of the community to your own detriment.
If you have some brilliant ideas to make it better, sure, you can let everybody else know and contribute back, or it could be a trade secret of yours that you'll have to maintain on your own. The fact that the original code is free and out there and enjoyed by as many people as possible has already been fulfilled even when you closed your fork. Besides, maintaining and significant changes and then merging in new developments from the mainline is still a pain in the ass no matter what. If it wern't, you probably didn't make any changes significant enough for people to care anyways, so it's not like we as a whole lose.

As far as the users of the code are concerned, in the case of TCP, they are enjoying one of the most important freedoms the writers intended: That their computer can communicate with the world. The majority of Windows users arn't programmers anyways. But no matter who you are, having a computer that can network with everybody else's is pretty important.

The way I see it. BSD helps proliferation. GPL encourages work to be consolidated. The question isn't what's "freer", it's who you want using it.

Anyways, I agree with the claim this doesn't harm BSD because this is exactly what they wanted. They want people using their code.
Another way of thinking of it? You know OLPC right? And how Intel/MS wanted to subsidize cheap PCs in the OLPC market just to proliferate Windows? Read this and tell me what you think: http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/11/youve-gotta-fig ht-for-your-right-to.html
I see the similarity. When Windows adopted the BSD stack, the authors of the BSD stack basically won.

From the article:
While many people believe that Adobe products are DRM-free, did you know that they, in fact, have a "poison tip?"

Getting a LITTLE off topic, but thanks to both of the posts clarifying the relationship of Carbon and Cocoa! As I said, I'm the new guy! But a little more quick research finds that a significant enough part of the community has a hard time with the differences as well. A few informative bits here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/05/23/coc oa_vs_carbon.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/ 10/70789.aspx
http://daringfireball.net/2006/10/some_assembly_re quired
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/10/pimp-my-code-pa rt-12-frozen-in.html

I have much to learn!

This guy's take on MS-on-Comcast is right on. It's been nothing short of godawful.

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/03/this-post-is-mi crosoft-enhanced-tm.html

You may want to view this presentation given by Wil Shipley at the 2005 WWDC. In fact, anyone who doesn't get why Apple development is a profitable business decision should view this presentation.

...So do you think Nicholas Negroponte will feel like he's lost if his OLPC initiative forces Intel and Microsoft to subsidize PCs for children in every developing nation in the world?

I do not.

Oh, sure, I know he's a proud man, and naturally part of him wants the credit for changing the world. And he'll be (validly) pissed that the Classmate is not based open source and that he's not able to prevent Microsoft from basically using this as a chance to infect the rest of the world with its blecherous software...

But deep down in his heart? He's laughing. He wins.

Here's what I know of and/or could find for the ones I didn't.

• Aaron Hillegas
• Adam & Tonya Engst
• Amit Singh
• Andrina Kelly
• Andy Ihnatko
• Ben Wilson
• Brent Simmons
• Dan Frakes
• Danny Goodman
• David Pogue
• Drunkenbatman
• John Gruber
• John Siracusa
• Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch
• Josh Wisenbaker
• Michael Bartosh
• Mike Breeden
• Nigel Kersten
• Ray Barber
• Ric Ford
• Rich Siegel (Bare Bones SW)
• Rob Griffiths
• Rosyna Keller
• Scott Knaster
• Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)

I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns.

This is exactly the reason that one of my favorite apps, OmniOutliner (Mac OS X) was created.

"when the Excel product manager got up on stage at MacWorld several years ago and said, "We've found that 85% of our customers use Excel just to make lists and outlines," we (Omni) said, "Shoot, that'll be our next product. We can do a GOOD job of making lists and outlines, and sell it for a lot less."" -- Wil Shipley, Omni co-founder

It seems like there might be a market opening up in the "things that people are already misusing Office for" sector.

There are so many arguments for switching. One of the best was laid out by Wil Shipley. If you have not read his blog, I strongly suggest that you do.

I have been a developer for over 20 years. I have gone through numerous languages and operating systems in that time. When I started working with Objective-C and Cocoa is was like coming in from the cold.

I think Shipley said it best in a podcast interview over at Cocoa Radio (paraphrased):

Microsoft is it's own best customer. As long as their development tools work for them, they do not really care if they are hard to use by anyone else. The harder their tools are to use, the less competition they will have. Apple needs developers. It is incumbent upon them to make development for OS X as easy as possible.

If you want to get into Objective-C Aaron Hillegass has an excellent book out. Follow through the examples in that book and you will be up to speed in no time. If you already have Java, C and/or C++ under your belt, the transition is simple.

Shipley put's the virus situation in an interesting perspective:

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/mac-os-x-viruse s-put-up-or-shut-up.html

We don't have virus, we're virus free. For now.

According to Wil Shipley, there has been maybe one real virus for Mac OS X, maybe. Even then, it didn't spread much and no one's sure if it really existed in the wild and it may have just been a trojan.

The way one local (and now powerful) company did it was by "hiring" people for pizza. If the product is cool, then you'll corral some college geeks to do the groundwork and free up your good coders for the cool work.

This has been touched on recently in some blogs ( http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/ and http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/00 0713.html ) that college students, who were used and abused during the bubble, remain a good resource of, dare I say it, cheap labour. They like the prestige, need the experience, and are used to working in small project teams. And yeah, you can pay them peanuts.

And no, they don't even need to be in college. Two of the most impressive code monkeys I know dropped out of High School.....

Available here.

The accompanying audio (.M4A) I forgot to link to in the blurb.

Make sure to ctrl-a to actually be able to read the text.
I guess the pdf had a black background or something.
Actually, let me just copy/paste this:

This is a really long line since apparently filler at the end of the textarea isn't counted toward the average characters per line, and you know, it really sucks that legitimate users have to do crap like this to post a real post (stupid bullet point powerpoint presentations - even if it isn't really powerpoint this time around - and is the line long enough already - just now I was at 26.9 chars, what's the limit anyway, am I there yet? No apparently not, 29.9 now, I wonder how many more words I still need to get to whatever stupid limit there is to be able to post this comment. So now I'm at 32.0 and I'm just going to copy/paste this line again, I do most sincerely apologize for all this crap as I'm only trying to provide a useful service to those who hate pdfs as much as I do. This is a really long line since apparently filler at the end of the textarea isn't counted toward the average characters per line, and you know, it really sucks that legitimate users have to do crap like this to post a real post (stupid bullet point powerpoint presentations - even if it isn't really powerpoint this time around - and is the line long enough already - just now I was at 26.9 chars, what's the limit anyway, am I there yet? No apparently not, 29.9 now, I wonder how many more words I still need to get to whatever stupid limit there is to be able to post this comment. So now I'm at 32.0 and I'm just going to copy/paste this line again, I do most sincerely apologize for all this crap as I'm only trying to provide a useful service to those who hate pdfs as much as I do.

This is the html version of the file http://wilshipley.com/blog/WWDC_Student_Talk.pdf. G o o g l e automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web. To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:D7mbdKHrgJEJ: wilshipley.com/blog/WWDC_Student_Talk.pdf+&hl=en&c lient=mozilla Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

How to Succeed Writing Mac Software
Or, How to Make a Zillion Dollars and Not Lose Your Soul

I'm going to babble about writing and selling software for Mac OS X
It's easy
It's fun
It's lucrative
Moms like it, because it's good for you

Introduction

This talk is not endorsed by Apple
Everything I say reflects only my own personal thoughts
Nobody at Apple checked or approved this speech
My feelings aren't necessarily those of my company
They may not even be my feelings
I could just be yanking your chains

Why would you listen to me?
I've started two Macintosh software companies
I've been in the business for 20 years
I roll in a totally pimp ride
Food won't be served for another hour
I promise you success

"Follow my advice and I promise that you will be successful, happy, fulfilled, and drive a hot car."
Wil Shipley, just now

Five parts
Part Un: Why Mac?
Part Deux: Get a Job
Part Trois: Starting Your Own Business
Part Quatre: Programming Tips
Part Cinq: Think for Yourself

Part Un: Why Mac?
"It was a rilly good paper... it was kind of a bummer."

"Why don't you port to Windows?"
Windows has 95% market share (for now)
-That's, like, 20x the market of Macs
All the other kids are doing it
Come on, how bad can it be
I heard this one guy ported to Windows and he made, like, a million dollars or something

My response:

"Doing what 'everyone else' is doing is the surest route to failure."
Wil Shipley, just now

Mac people use their computers
Windows people put up with their c

It seems to me the trick with developing to sell software on Windows is to perform a delicate balancing act: to be popular and not so popular that Microsoft won't put your marketshare in their cross-hairs and slam your business model. Clearly, applications targeted at niche markets may be an answer (like productivity software for medical offices), but haven't you then scoped down your potential user base to Apple-magnitude numbers by choosing your niche?

Seems to me there's got to be some upside to developing for people who like their computers; think about how after-market items for cars succeed: people who love their cars, or who make their cars into an element of their identity buy that stuff.

... piracy. Wil runs a successful boutique-app company called Delicious Monster and is something of a geek celeb in the Mac world.

Replace "applications" with "movies" and I bet it still applies.

It is my informed impression that the large majority of the people downloading this stuff (i.e., the market) either A) can't afford it due to youth or income and therefore wouldn't have bought it anyway (i.e., it's not a lost sale), or B) don't have it available to them via normal channels.

If you like what Wil had to say about this, definitely check out the PDF of his presentation on "doing your own thing". It is pretty inspiring stuff if you are a creative geek who is tired of not doing what you'd really like to be doing.

... piracy. Wil runs a successful boutique-app company called Delicious Monster and is something of a geek celeb in the Mac world.

Replace "applications" with "movies" and I bet it still applies.

It is my informed impression that the large majority of the people downloading this stuff (i.e., the market) either A) can't afford it due to youth or income and therefore wouldn't have bought it anyway (i.e., it's not a lost sale), or B) don't have it available to them via normal channels.

If you like what Wil had to say about this, definitely check out the PDF of his presentation on "doing your own thing". It is pretty inspiring stuff if you are a creative geek who is tired of not doing what you'd really like to be doing.

Well, sorry to disappoint you, but there really wasn't any wailing and gnashing of teeth, either at WWDC or a few blocks away at the Apple Store.

What this means to Cocoa developers is a day or so of work, (and in many cases, not even that), and for Carbon developers, it means that they'll have to get off of CodeWarrior, and fix any endian dependencies in their code.

-jcr