The purpose of the economy is to produce what is needed not to guarantee the buggy whip manufacturer a job.
No, the purpose of the economy is to keep the people civilized through the production of goods, rather than the destruction of rivals. Necessity is often an illusion.
A buggy whip would be more useful than say, all magazines currently being printed, because I could at least beat horses and people with it.
Surprise, two liberal papers start bitching about how someone isn't paying their "fair share" of taxes, overlooking, as usual, that everyone who invests in Amazon already pays an increasing tax for it, the people that work at Amazon already pay taxes, the people that sell to Amazon pay taxes, and now they just want to add the people that buy from Amazon to that list. Really, its just about getting more money into the government coffers so they can blow it on a bunch of crap, and the only definition of fair for any liberal is more money for them.
How about this? Let's have the liberal media pay its fair share. I say that intellectual property should be property taxed. Shouldn't the New York Times and the LA Times be charged a property tax for every back article they have ever written? If they can sell old reprints, doesn't that mean they are floating on property taxes? Why is it that someone like a Linus Torvalds or GNU can hold a copyright to code worth billions of dollars without having paying taxes on it? If I had a thousand acres of property, I should have to pay taxes on it. Just because someone can live in my house for free doesn't change its assessed value. Why shouldn't they pay for the property taxes they own? I think we should get rid of this baked in advantage for IP industries and demand that they too pay their fair share.
If big media wants us to treat IP like it is real property, then tax it like real property.
It is not the Germans that spread this myth. But we are not offended either.:
Oh, come on. I was watching a documentary the other day about Blom and Voss (sp?) and how to this day there is some piece of leftover steel from the Bizmarck sitting there that was just too big to move, and the guy is like - "look, this is quality german steel.." And I'm like, dude, if the Bizmarck was so well built, the thing wouldn't have sunk so easily. The fact of the matter is, the only reason Germany competes on quality is that they tend to devote a higher degree of floor space to fixing things after they are built... its like Mercedes is two ticks better in quality than Chevy, but its way more expensive. If anything, American quality blows Europe out of the water.
That's not to say America doesn't have its delusional myths. Every country does. We call ourselves the kings of banking and international finance, and since the 1980s our banks have been subject to numerous government bailouts, failed reforms, blown mergers... really, American banking is just a colossal waste of the world's capital.... but, oh, Wall Street is great.
so really, the reality is this:
Americans actually make the best stuff, but world banking should be headquartered in Berlin.
Europeans take themselves way too seriously. Like, Americans will knock themselves 50/50, depending on what it is that's being talked about. But god forbid, you knock Europe... gets all foaming in the mouth nationalism and you'd think they were all a bunch of john waynes, except they never had any nationalists that cool. I mean, Heinrich Himmler had a pretty cool looking uniform but he was still a chinless chicken farmer...
Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia.
The Germans like to perpetuate this myth that they are the masters of quality. So they always come at you with, "we're Germans, therefor, we have quality", which survives right up until you actually measure it, and find that even Mercedes in terms of break down rate isn't all that much different than a fricking Chevy.
There is an annoying thing in American media that every second has to have some sort of sound in it. Really, its almost like welfare for sound people that work in media. But honestly, I like that NASA TV goes for long stretches of silence. I don't want talking heads jabbering on about stupid shit. If I want people jabbering and pontificating about stupid shit, I'll just jack into slashdot, and that way I can be one of them.
Yes, downloading a zip file containing all your documents that you can read in, for instance, OpenOffice, and doing so in 1 click is really a complex API for you to figure out. Not to mention the fact that open APIs drive down costs and multiple implementation
do something with the big crap that you downloaded. And, you just admitted that the people are locked into openoffice. What's the big difference.
Why can't you fricking zealots ever tell the truth? Open source is just another kind of vendor lock in.
And your answer means what, exactly ? Comparing apples to apples, do you believe it's easier to reverse engineer MS Word format (and do it flawlessly) than implement an open standard ?
Well first off lets eject the phrase "do it flawlessly", because, that's probably impossible in both cases. Two of the most successful standards of software are C++ and HTML/CSS and we are just getting close to flawless implementations of those. When standards are forward thinking, and set a roadmap for vendors to implement, like how OpenGL used to be, then implementing standards can be a genuine bitch.
Now, with that said, I agree with you. If I had a choice between some sort of Open document format versus a binary Word format, the Open document would be much easier. But my point is, that, reverse engineering a closed file format from 10-20 years ago might actually be easier than dealing with a completely new open standard. The issue is really how many tasks one has to accomplish to complete and in the case of simple file formats, it might just be a matter of looking at a binary layout and figuring the record size.
As far as DOS reverse engineering vs man page for Unix Linux, it could actually depend and depend even more on what version of the Linux you are talking about and what you are trying to do. I'd bet that it would be easier for an assembly language to open up a full screen bitmapped display under DOS than it would be under Linux, or, oddly, figuring out how to copy a file might actually be easier under DOS because you don't have to worry about permissions, mounts and all the things that DOS can't actually do.
Now, as for my original argument, again, its not FUD, primarily because the openness of the API is but a cost saver and costs are still going to go up as applications and their data become more complex. If Google gives you a set of APIs to supposedly get your data out, you are going to have to make some sort of an investment as to figure out how to read and translate that stuff into a way that you can understand. It might take a week, or even a month, but even a week's wages would actually put you into the realm of just purchasing Microsoft Office. The cost of implementing even an Open API is so much more than just purchasing the application to use it, that, the lock in is not the openness of the API, its the cost to implement it. In essence, all open source really says is that APIs have gotten sufficiently complex that you don't need to have closed APIs to have vendor lock in.
And see now, that's actually where Google falls flat on its face compared to a PC office suite. Google could, because it hosts its apps, detect situations where the app might be being reverse engineered. It's pretty hard to script a web app compared to a COM app, anyway, simply. But if I had a Word instance, and a scripting language of my choice, I can generate scripts to create different kinds of documents in response to different features and see what it does, and there's not a damn thing MS can do about it, when the network cord is unplugged.
The bottom line is, just because an API is open, does not mean that you cannot be locked in. All it takes to be locked in is to make it expensive to switch, and a large and complex API, open or not, is sufficient to do that.
Regarding the rest, I don't understand your argument: Google strives for making sure users can get their data and move it away any time they like, and also strives for implementing open standards and publishing APIs fully
These days, open API's are more complex than closed API's were in the past. To wit, there's way more complexity in an open XML format and all the ins and outs of representing a document than there was in figuring out some undocumented DOS call or learning about some undocumented register on a graphics card.
I think you see the Google Chrome OS as something Google is trying to use to take over every computer, which is certainly not true. Google wants to use it to create a new class of computer, a netbook that only does internet and nothing else.
Well you miss the point. First off, the question was really, what would the world be like if Google dominated computing as much as Microsoft did, and therefor, my "dystopian fantasy" was a viable answer. Google's business model envisions everyone accessing their data on third party computers with dumb internet only appliances. Therefor, to be a host, you have to get Google's permission, and, consumers will never own their data. That's what this is.
Even worse than Swing sucking was that the Java 1.1's original GUI environment was a limited unix centric vehicle that lacked many of the basics found on Windows at that day.
If Google wins it would be far, far worse than anything Microsoft could do. It would mean that desktop computers would be hobbled based on a low level baseline of common functionality, that, applications would be subject to be found only based on what Google likes or dislike, and that users data will not even belong to them.
Is that right around the same time Microsoft started thinking about using its bulk and business practices to achieve marketing ends, is right around the same time its innovation, risk taking, and other admirable traits about the company slacked off. I mean, yeah, it might have been hurtful to Borland for Microsoft to buy the superior Fox and use it to crush dBase, but at least the market did get a better product. And it might have been wrong to use Windows money to fund the development of Visual Studio to propel it past Turbo C++, but, again, the consumer got a better product. Even IE4 was better than Netscape.
But this email is from 1997, when MS had won the OS wars, the browser wars, and since then, what has happened? MS has lost its focus on computing entirely. Folding the Windows NT core into the Windows 95 shell to get first Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 were the best things the company did, and since then, we've had really not much to write home about.
We developed our initial product (imVOX... http://imvox.com/ [imvox.com] in.NET for Windows
What's interesting is that using a virtual machine like.NET has gained so much more acceptance for portability than when Java first took it for a spin, or USCD p-System did so many years before that.
As a practical matter, rewriting your product in C++ would seem to be foolish.
Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.
There's always lock in with even free software. Let's someone pulled the plug on the license for some piece of GPL software that you relied on for your product. Yes, you could continue with that fork as it was, but, the original team that owned the original code and moved on in non-free mode would have the advantage of the brand name, the development process and infrastructure, and above all, the expertise and vision.
Let's say Linus said, "eek, I'm now going to charge a tax on the Linux kernel..." What would I do? There would be some percentage of people that would sigh about the terrible world and then pay the tax.
Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product.
Yes, but the commercial product is free as in beer, and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only, so what's really the point, except to get locked into a clone of another technology?
I mean, if you are that into.NET, why not just use Windows?
By removing GPL code, the Mono team has laid the groundwork for a closed source, commercial implementation. You watch. Mono is going to become a product, something that will be an instant-cripple for any Linux distribution that comes to rely on it.
You know, if you are going to devote your life to making a C# clone on Linux, then at least quit screwing around with applications and focus on the language. I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?
I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.
No, they really didn't, especially with video cards. Video cards back in those days were just framebuffers somewhat compliant with VESA standards, and even that level of compatibility was shaky. Applications had to actually be written to support them all and if you wanted to get the most of out of them, you had to go and touch the chips to do things. Even the so-called 320x200x256 color mode so often used for PC games was actually kind of a hack. I have a book called "Progamming EGA/VGA controllers" on my shelf by someone named Ferrar or something like that that went through the various modes and ins and outs of the more popular cards of the day. Tseng Labs was popular, for one, and there were others.
And then, God help you if you wanted to put graphics on a printer. Do you even remember the crap about flipping a printer to graphics mode and then sending stuff over the wire to it?
All of that went away with Windows 3.1 and the introduction of GDI.
As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong,
Ah but you are wrong again. Application logic, particularly games, in those days had a loop which usually polled the main input chumpies, such as the keyboard. They would be written to simply poll the keyboard, calculate the character moves, animations and so forth, then repeat. Borland had a call in conio.h that was like getch but without waiting for a keypress that was pretty useful, but in the pre-IBM days of like Atari you would just go and read the keyboard register and see if a key was down and go with that.
And, sometimes touching the special registers had timing implications... like, you could write and then had to wait some x amount of time to get answer back... so it was common to do something like write, sit in a busy loop for a few clicks, and then read.
It's issues like this, where, if you could even get an old copy of MS-DOS to actually boot on a modern machine (good luck finding a really tiny hard drive), old games that depended on timing loops could work. That's why some of the original PC's had "Turbo" switches on the front, so you could lower the clock to be compatible with whatever IBM AT's clock speed was for those games and other apps that had hardwired timing loops.
Windows changed all of that on PC's, and for many developers, losing both the control of the graphics hardware AND shifting to the event driven paradigm we take for granted.
Steve Wozniak - Apple I, II - (uber king because he did hardware and software) Bill Gates / Paul Allen - original MS Basic Charles Simonyi - Word, Excel, Multiplan Ellison,Miner,Oats - Oracle Mitch Kapor - Lotus 123 Ray Ozzie / David Woolley - Lotus Notes John Carmack / Michael Abrash - Doom, Quake Linus Torvalds - Linux Mark Andreseen - Netscape
Most of those people on the above list were just programmers starting out without really all that much but a computer and an idea. Most of them went on to be billionaires. Below them are another tier of thousands of unnameable programmers that are millionaires, and below them are millions who form the back bone of their departments.
It's pretty much, you get paid great not to just code, but more importantly, to have great ideas and code them.
Then why do so many specialty stores, such as Spencer's, have "no photography" policies?
Probably because every tiny detail of the interior of a retail store is considered proprietary information. It's not just pricing, its arrangement of items on shelves, everything.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I don't think that code has that much monetary value, since he can't actually sell it.
That's not all that different from how cities calculate taxes on the assessed values of homes.
The purpose of the economy is to produce what is needed not to guarantee the buggy whip manufacturer a job.
No, the purpose of the economy is to keep the people civilized through the production of goods, rather than the destruction of rivals. Necessity is often an illusion.
A buggy whip would be more useful than say, all magazines currently being printed, because I could at least beat horses and people with it.
Surprise, two liberal papers start bitching about how someone isn't paying their "fair share" of taxes, overlooking, as usual, that everyone who invests in Amazon already pays an increasing tax for it, the people that work at Amazon already pay taxes, the people that sell to Amazon pay taxes, and now they just want to add the people that buy from Amazon to that list. Really, its just about getting more money into the government coffers so they can blow it on a bunch of crap, and the only definition of fair for any liberal is more money for them.
How about this? Let's have the liberal media pay its fair share. I say that intellectual property should be property taxed. Shouldn't the New York Times and the LA Times be charged a property tax for every back article they have ever written? If they can sell old reprints, doesn't that mean they are floating on property taxes? Why is it that someone like a Linus Torvalds or GNU can hold a copyright to code worth billions of dollars without having paying taxes on it? If I had a thousand acres of property, I should have to pay taxes on it. Just because someone can live in my house for free doesn't change its assessed value. Why shouldn't they pay for the property taxes they own? I think we should get rid of this baked in advantage for IP industries and demand that they too pay their fair share.
If big media wants us to treat IP like it is real property, then tax it like real property.
Some would argue that deaths due to firearms in Germany is lower than the US. But try averaging over the last 100 years.
I would think the right to keep and bear arms does not include Lancasters, B-17s and Red Army divisions.
It is not the Germans that spread this myth. But we are not offended either. :
Oh, come on. I was watching a documentary the other day about Blom and Voss (sp?) and how to this day there is some piece of leftover steel from the Bizmarck sitting there that was just too big to move, and the guy is like - "look, this is quality german steel.." And I'm like, dude, if the Bizmarck was so well built, the thing wouldn't have sunk so easily. The fact of the matter is, the only reason Germany competes on quality is that they tend to devote a higher degree of floor space to fixing things after they are built... its like Mercedes is two ticks better in quality than Chevy, but its way more expensive. If anything, American quality blows Europe out of the water.
That's not to say America doesn't have its delusional myths. Every country does. We call ourselves the kings of banking and international finance, and since the 1980s our banks have been subject to numerous government bailouts, failed reforms, blown mergers ... really, American banking is just a colossal waste of the world's capital.... but, oh, Wall Street is great.
so really, the reality is this:
Americans actually make the best stuff, but world banking should be headquartered in Berlin.
I see some Germans have mod points today
Europeans take themselves way too seriously. Like, Americans will knock themselves 50/50, depending on what it is that's being talked about. But god forbid, you knock Europe... gets all foaming in the mouth nationalism and you'd think they were all a bunch of john waynes, except they never had any nationalists that cool. I mean, Heinrich Himmler had a pretty cool looking uniform but he was still a chinless chicken farmer...
Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia.
The Germans like to perpetuate this myth that they are the masters of quality. So they always come at you with, "we're Germans, therefor, we have quality", which survives right up until you actually measure it, and find that even Mercedes in terms of break down rate isn't all that much different than a fricking Chevy.
You are laboring under the delusion that most broadcasting aims to communicate information..........
I think you probably could have summed up the entire thing you wrote as "The media is entertainment, not information."
There is an annoying thing in American media that every second has to have some sort of sound in it. Really, its almost like welfare for sound people that work in media. But honestly, I like that NASA TV goes for long stretches of silence. I don't want talking heads jabbering on about stupid shit. If I want people jabbering and pontificating about stupid shit, I'll just jack into slashdot, and that way I can be one of them.
Yes, downloading a zip file containing all your documents that you can read in, for instance, OpenOffice, and doing so in 1 click is really a complex API for you to figure out. Not to mention the fact that open APIs drive down costs and multiple implementation
do something with the big crap that you downloaded. And, you just admitted that the people are locked into openoffice. What's the big difference.
Why can't you fricking zealots ever tell the truth? Open source is just another kind of vendor lock in.
And your answer means what, exactly ? Comparing apples to apples, do you believe it's easier to reverse engineer MS Word format (and do it flawlessly) than implement an open standard ?
Well first off lets eject the phrase "do it flawlessly", because, that's probably impossible in both cases. Two of the most successful standards of software are C++ and HTML/CSS and we are just getting close to flawless implementations of those. When standards are forward thinking, and set a roadmap for vendors to implement, like how OpenGL used to be, then implementing standards can be a genuine bitch.
Now, with that said, I agree with you. If I had a choice between some sort of Open document format versus a binary Word format, the Open document would be much easier. But my point is, that, reverse engineering a closed file format from 10-20 years ago might actually be easier than dealing with a completely new open standard. The issue is really how many tasks one has to accomplish to complete and in the case of simple file formats, it might just be a matter of looking at a binary layout and figuring the record size.
As far as DOS reverse engineering vs man page for Unix Linux, it could actually depend and depend even more on what version of the Linux you are talking about and what you are trying to do. I'd bet that it would be easier for an assembly language to open up a full screen bitmapped display under DOS than it would be under Linux, or, oddly, figuring out how to copy a file might actually be easier under DOS because you don't have to worry about permissions, mounts and all the things that DOS can't actually do.
Now, as for my original argument, again, its not FUD, primarily because the openness of the API is but a cost saver and costs are still going to go up as applications and their data become more complex. If Google gives you a set of APIs to supposedly get your data out, you are going to have to make some sort of an investment as to figure out how to read and translate that stuff into a way that you can understand. It might take a week, or even a month, but even a week's wages would actually put you into the realm of just purchasing Microsoft Office. The cost of implementing even an Open API is so much more than just purchasing the application to use it, that, the lock in is not the openness of the API, its the cost to implement it. In essence, all open source really says is that APIs have gotten sufficiently complex that you don't need to have closed APIs to have vendor lock in.
And see now, that's actually where Google falls flat on its face compared to a PC office suite. Google could, because it hosts its apps, detect situations where the app might be being reverse engineered. It's pretty hard to script a web app compared to a COM app, anyway, simply. But if I had a Word instance, and a scripting language of my choice, I can generate scripts to create different kinds of documents in response to different features and see what it does, and there's not a damn thing MS can do about it, when the network cord is unplugged.
The bottom line is, just because an API is open, does not mean that you cannot be locked in. All it takes to be locked in is to make it expensive to switch, and a large and complex API, open or not, is sufficient to do that.
Regarding the rest, I don't understand your argument: Google strives for making sure users can get their data and move it away any time they like, and also strives for implementing open standards and publishing APIs fully
These days, open API's are more complex than closed API's were in the past. To wit, there's way more complexity in an open XML format and all the ins and outs of representing a document than there was in figuring out some undocumented DOS call or learning about some undocumented register on a graphics card.
I think you see the Google Chrome OS as something Google is trying to use to take over every computer, which is certainly not true. Google wants to use it to create a new class of computer, a netbook that only does internet and nothing else.
Well you miss the point. First off, the question was really, what would the world be like if Google dominated computing as much as Microsoft did, and therefor, my "dystopian fantasy" was a viable answer. Google's business model envisions everyone accessing their data on third party computers with dumb internet only appliances. Therefor, to be a host, you have to get Google's permission, and, consumers will never own their data. That's what this is.
The first was the Swing sucked.
Even worse than Swing sucking was that the Java 1.1's original GUI environment was a limited unix centric vehicle that lacked many of the basics found on Windows at that day.
If Google wins it would be far, far worse than anything Microsoft could do. It would mean that desktop computers would be hobbled based on a low level baseline of common functionality, that, applications would be subject to be found only based on what Google likes or dislike, and that users data will not even belong to them.
Is that right around the same time Microsoft started thinking about using its bulk and business practices to achieve marketing ends, is right around the same time its innovation, risk taking, and other admirable traits about the company slacked off. I mean, yeah, it might have been hurtful to Borland for Microsoft to buy the superior Fox and use it to crush dBase, but at least the market did get a better product. And it might have been wrong to use Windows money to fund the development of Visual Studio to propel it past Turbo C++, but, again, the consumer got a better product. Even IE4 was better than Netscape.
But this email is from 1997, when MS had won the OS wars, the browser wars, and since then, what has happened? MS has lost its focus on computing entirely. Folding the Windows NT core into the Windows 95 shell to get first Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 were the best things the company did, and since then, we've had really not much to write home about.
We developed our initial product (imVOX... http://imvox.com/ [imvox.com] in .NET for Windows
What's interesting is that using a virtual machine like .NET has gained so much more acceptance for portability than when Java first took it for a spin, or USCD p-System did so many years before that.
As a practical matter, rewriting your product in C++ would seem to be foolish.
Best of luck to you.
Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.
There's always lock in with even free software. Let's someone pulled the plug on the license for some piece of GPL software that you relied on for your product. Yes, you could continue with that fork as it was, but, the original team that owned the original code and moved on in non-free mode would have the advantage of the brand name, the development process and infrastructure, and above all, the expertise and vision.
Let's say Linus said, "eek, I'm now going to charge a tax on the Linux kernel..." What would I do? There would be some percentage of people that would sigh about the terrible world and then pay the tax.
Wow. Imagine, an open source project cloning the functionality of a commercial product that doesn't support the latest features of the commercial product.
Yes, but the commercial product is free as in beer, and the open source product is moving to be free as in beer only, so what's really the point, except to get locked into a clone of another technology?
I mean, if you are that into .NET, why not just use Windows?
Tis not done yet.
WCF client and server, the subset exposed by Silverlight 2.0.
LINQ to SQL using DbLinq.
More complete 3.5 API coverage.
So they are missing stuff.
By removing GPL code, the Mono team has laid the groundwork for a closed source, commercial implementation. You watch. Mono is going to become a product, something that will be an instant-cripple for any Linux distribution that comes to rely on it.
You know, if you are going to devote your life to making a C# clone on Linux, then at least quit screwing around with applications and focus on the language. I mean, come on, where's WPF? Where's WCF? Where's LINQ to SQL?
Mono, you suck.
I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.
No, they really didn't, especially with video cards. Video cards back in those days were just framebuffers somewhat compliant with VESA standards, and even that level of compatibility was shaky. Applications had to actually be written to support them all and if you wanted to get the most of out of them, you had to go and touch the chips to do things. Even the so-called 320x200x256 color mode so often used for PC games was actually kind of a hack. I have a book called "Progamming EGA/VGA controllers" on my shelf by someone named Ferrar or something like that that went through the various modes and ins and outs of the more popular cards of the day. Tseng Labs was popular, for one, and there were others.
And then, God help you if you wanted to put graphics on a printer. Do you even remember the crap about flipping a printer to graphics mode and then sending stuff over the wire to it?
All of that went away with Windows 3.1 and the introduction of GDI.
As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong,
Ah but you are wrong again. Application logic, particularly games, in those days had a loop which usually polled the main input chumpies, such as the keyboard. They would be written to simply poll the keyboard, calculate the character moves, animations and so forth, then repeat. Borland had a call in conio.h that was like getch but without waiting for a keypress that was pretty useful, but in the pre-IBM days of like Atari you would just go and read the keyboard register and see if a key was down and go with that.
And, sometimes touching the special registers had timing implications... like, you could write and then had to wait some x amount of time to get answer back... so it was common to do something like write, sit in a busy loop for a few clicks, and then read.
It's issues like this, where, if you could even get an old copy of MS-DOS to actually boot on a modern machine (good luck finding a really tiny hard drive), old games that depended on timing loops could work. That's why some of the original PC's had "Turbo" switches on the front, so you could lower the clock to be compatible with whatever IBM AT's clock speed was for those games and other apps that had hardwired timing loops.
Windows changed all of that on PC's, and for many developers, losing both the control of the graphics hardware AND shifting to the event driven paradigm we take for granted.
Just to throw some names out there:
Steve Wozniak - Apple I, II - (uber king because he did hardware and software)
Bill Gates / Paul Allen - original MS Basic
Charles Simonyi - Word, Excel, Multiplan
Ellison,Miner,Oats - Oracle
Mitch Kapor - Lotus 123
Ray Ozzie / David Woolley - Lotus Notes
John Carmack / Michael Abrash - Doom, Quake
Linus Torvalds - Linux
Mark Andreseen - Netscape
Most of those people on the above list were just programmers starting out without really all that much but a computer and an idea. Most of them went on to be billionaires. Below them are another tier of thousands of unnameable programmers that are millionaires, and below them are millions who form the back bone of their departments.
It's pretty much, you get paid great not to just code, but more importantly, to have great ideas and code them.
Then why do so many specialty stores, such as Spencer's, have "no photography" policies?
Probably because every tiny detail of the interior of a retail store is considered proprietary information. It's not just pricing, its arrangement of items on shelves, everything.