I know several people that could easily retire comfortably right now. They are healthy enough to likely live for years but they won't because the have zero interests outside "work". No hobbies or interests. They will sit behind a keyboard till they drop.
Myself I cannot wait for the day I figure out the finances to stop working (I may never manage that:-( ). I have several hobbies that would fill my every waking minute. I will not be bored!!
How folks exist today without hobbies or interests makes me sad for them. I am even happy to accept that "coding" is their hobby/passion but when I suggest they do it for themselves I get blank stares back. Oh well.
I was at the big M during the anti-trust days. Even though I was "them" at the time I thought what that did deserved at least the slap they got. Looking back they should have been broken up and I think these days Google and a host of other tech companies need to be similarly carved up.
But bringing back basically trying to prevent the installation of a 3rd party browser, that is just too funny. How quickly the past is forgotten. All I can say is good luck with that Microsoft! Maybe start to claim it is for "security", oh, then follow it with an "opt in" to allow Microsoft to have all your PC's data sent to them "to improve your experience!". Yeah, folks will buy that!
Money, industry, the work and location. OK, more details, very big pay bump. I am back in the gaming industry, my last place was not a software company and didn't want to do what it takes to be one (claimed it couldn't find software engineers in Seattle:-O ) and my last company was in a place was becoming overrun with homeless camps. I got tired of the feces on the sidewalk every morning.
This is the case at all the big tech companies I've seen. I've been stuck in the contractor grind for some time. Some folks seem to like it, I do not. You are treated as a lower class everywhere I've been, you won't be at moral events, you won't get stock, most companies are requiring the hiring agencies that place you to provide some health care and some PTO but it won't be at parity with a "true" employee. You usually will get paid less in the end and at many companies you have a "sell by" date that forces some amount of time off after some interval. At Microsoft it means every 18 months you are out of work for 6 months. So forget any sort of career trajectory. Also expect to be given all the worst of the work while it is assumed the reason you are a contractor is because "you couldn't cut it" as a real full time employee. So these gigs will pay the bills and sometimes there can be actual time and half overtime which is nice (assuming your contract doesn't have a 40 hour a week cap, many do so in that case you just won't get paid). Forget things like health club memberships, access to company specific bus service like the "Connector" buses at Microsoft. Well, I guess you do get out of the horrible review process at some of these companies. Would I rather be a real "full time" employee, yup. Now that I am a lowly contractor do I ever expect to get back to that, not so much, If you really want to go direct employee most folks have to go someplace as a non-contractor first then only consider a direct role with a larger company from that point on to scrub off the contractor stain!:-)
Before you bash Amazon (also realize Amazon is rapidly staffing its warehouses with mobile work forces of RV dwelling retires that need the job to make ends meet)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
consider that a lot of pilots early in their career would have wages low enough to qualify for food stamps. They often make less than the flight attendants on their flights who also make low wages.
I need to lose a few pounds, I'm working on it and it is not easy. But I know that is a better choice than trying to make society accept my poor choices that led to the weight as attractive.
Here in America we have a food industry dedicated to making you obese. So many of us in the U.S. are far heavier than we should be. Yes there are corner cases where the excess weight has some other root cause. But those are outliers. The fact is a lot of folks here in Umerika eat poorly and too much.
So along comes this sad attempt to normalize that as a healthy life style choice. Its no longer fat, its "body positive"! Seriously I am happy Hollywood has not yet tried to normalize poor choices. In fact thinking about it I am surprised given the SJW nature of the entertainment industry.
"He is now on TV trying to encourage others to treat women badly. " Really? I've seen a number of interviews and I have yet to see anyplace where he suggested anything that was close to "treat women badly". I think you statement shows you are the sort of person who creates the unhealthy culture that actually results in treating women badly. I'd argue that treating women as some sort of class that needs special consideration is one way to treat women badly.
I read the memo and found it well written and I think it pointed out how the SWJ and left leaning bias at Google isn't good for anyone including the class of people that the wrong headed policies seek to help. Google is clearly all about respecting everyone's opinion so long as they are the "correct" ones.
So he said "You can get the people you want" and immediately everyone imagines what he means. He hasn't DONE anything and he prides himself on closing deals by basically saying whatever it takes. So I've learned with Trump look to actions, not invented interpretations of his random comments.
I'd suggest that there are lots of those "people" tech leaders need right here in the good old "US" of "A". Sure, maybe he will revert the H1B situation to the same or even worse (from the perspective of an older US tech worker) but he hasn't taken any steps to do that yet. But if you are imagining outcomes how about imagine something good. He discovers unicorns that poop gold.
I mean seriously. I've seen predictions of him bringing in Russians in the responses implying they'd be put to work on our voting systems!. Where is there any indication of that? What Trump has proven to be is a very effective way to get people to spew their inner dark imaginations. It is a great time in history to own popcorn stocks and sit back and watch it all unfold. What he has proven is that the world is all far less fragile than everyone seems to think.
So a direct experience. A personal friend was a relatively wealth older fellow. Towards the end of his life he'd have lunch regularly. One day he shared he was trying decide what to do with one of his investments. At some time on the past he'd bought a wind turbine near Palm Springs. With tax incentive's, what it made by selling power and depreciation it made him a small but steady income. He had some sort of arraignment with a company there to look after it. Some small regular fee for a maintenance contract. But his accountant had just told him that with changes in tax laws and the fact the turbine had finally "depreciated" to zero value on the books it was no longer going to be a sure income source. He had been an engineer during the brief period of his life he actually worked and he hated the idea of shutting down a perfectly functional energy source. It really pained him but in the end fiscal "responsibility" won out and he had it decommissioned. I always wondered if its still sitting there today.
In the end its always the dollars that drive the decisions.
I hope you do have my CP/M. I was the first one to support 80 track drives and offered some options like opposing sides of the floppy and double stepping to read 40 track media in an 80 track drive. S.A.I.L. CP/M. I can't believe I still remember any of that!:-)
Ii think you nailed most of the reason for CP/Ms demise in the end. You had to buy it separate of the PC and it was pricey. There really wasn't anything compelling about CP/M compared to PC DOS that would warrant the extra expense. Rather than post twice I'd also add a comment about the 8.3 file names. There was a mindset in the earliest days of personal computers that resources were going to be very limited so there was a definite bias towards smaller and less complex. There also was to some degree a lack of forward vision.
Networking was hardly thought about. I expect a crazy thing I built as a "one off" for a client was a good example. I had a client that needed to find a way to have an office of accountants enter data into a single data store. In this case it was a 15 inch SMD removable platter hard drive that featured a fixed platter and a removable one that was primarily used for back up. (Yes, I also managed to cobble together an 8 inch tape driver interface for back up for another client). The client I did this solution for had a weird accounting system he had written himself over years and did not want to try and replace that. It ran on Northstar Horizons using the Northstar DOS. The hard drive was interfaced through a two board interface from a company in the Phoenix area who I had worked with previously. So a good friend had tried to start his own consulting business taking on the CPA as his first client. He had thought he could build some sort of S-100 bus multiplexer and had spun his wheels for months. So he asked me to bail him out.
What I did (because it really was a sort of DYI culture back then) was get a Polymorphic S-100 chassis, a Northstar Z-80 CPU card which had a ROM socket an 8K static ram card and a Cromenco 8PIO card that gave me a parallel port. Most of the code to access the commands for the disc controller were on ROM on the disk controller. So I reverse engineered the block IO operations from the patched Northstar OS the CPA was using and built a small kernel that I put in ROM on the Z-80 processor card. Then I patched the DOS that booted off of floppy on each individual Northstar computer to change the block IO calls to the disk controller to a routine that used each computers parallel port to talk to a port of the central Polymorphic chassis 8PIO card. Add some cables and some simple code in the Polymorphic based system to do a round robin polling service of each port. Each Northstar worked like it had a local hard drive. The central system fed everything. The final icing on the cake was to add support of a semaphore system resident in the central controller. This allowed for crude file locking system to be added to the system. I called it the "Pollyplexer". Darned if the silly thing didn't work like a champ. That CPA used it for another 4 years, sold the practice and the system and it ran for another 3+ years until it became impossible to keep the disk drive working. It is still one of the most fun things I ever did.:-) It was amazing what you could cobble together if you put your mind to it!
So I was lucky enough to have been around during those days. I had a small business that resold CP/M. I'd done an implementation for the Northstar Horizon. So I'd see Gary at conferences and trade shows and the hospitality events he threw for his re-sellers. He seemed appreciative and a pretty decent guy. I also got to see the younger Gates regularly. I have to say Bill was a bit harder to like in the early days. The software business for personal computers was a lot different then and it was those early personalities that got us to where we are today.
I was sad when I learned how Gary went. He seemed to have deserved much better. I know I'd like to read his entire book as I know I'd not hold anything he wrote later in life against him. He clearly had some demons and definitely missed out on the next wave of the personal computers rise to popularity. So Digital Research is a memory, much like dBase, Novel (sorry, what they became was very different than they were then), MicroPro, and countless companies that bet on the Z-80 over the X86. But I think there would be value in reading Gary's later thoughts even if they may be colored by his personal struggles. I hope someday the rest is released.
I sort of feel sorry for folks just getting into computers these days, those earlier times were insanely fun. So many new things emerging. We were drinking from a fire hose then. And Gary was a part of that. I guess thinking about this I should dig out an old Northstar and see if I can still get it to boot CP/M. I doubt I remember any of the command line operations! Good thing I kept all the manuals!
I hope at least they are using a Persci voice coil drive and not an old stepper motor drive! When your launching nuclear weapons access time could matter!!:-)
So a lot of folks seem to think there are more laws about R/C models than there really are. The AMA has worked with the FAA and established a lot of guidelines. There are guidelines, not laws. Thank god most serious modelers use common sense and follow them.
The drone crowd to me however really seem to lack any common sense. I had a conversation today with a drone enthusiast that thinks it is a good idea to have self guiding drones flying around in data centers looking for servers with thermal issues or fans failing while folks are in there working. Sorry, not interested in autonomous drones in my work space! Will I be expected to where a hardhat at work? I've also seen so many examples of photo ops ending with drones failing and plummeting to the ground over people. I think this will eventually hurt someone seriously and I fear those guidelines we modelers have worked with so long will turn into laws. Most of the drone folks I've met have no R/C background and really fail to see just how wrong drones can go.
Very worried about some badly behaving drone folks ruining it for other modelers.
Sorry there is no law about R/C altitude limits, there are guidelines generally related to proximity airports.
Public Law 112-95, signed into law by President Obama in February of 2012, establishes criteria for defining a model aircraft and operating conditions under which no additional FAA regulation is required. The operating conditions do not include an altitude ceiling. The key criteria to qualify as a model aircraft is that it is flown strictly for recreational or hobby purposes, and within the visual line of sight of the pilot. To-date, the FAA has not enacted a process through which AMA and the modelers it represents may proceed to operate under the new federal guidance, so for the time being, modelers continue to operate under the provisions of AC 91-57 and the AMA Safety Code.
So big model and good eyes is pretty high!
It has been appealed but the has been no ruling on the appeal. That appeal remains to be heard. So hardly "fixed". Many folks think the appeal is likely to fail. So the authority of the FAA over model aircraft is still up in the air.
At the moment most serious R/C modelers voluntarily stay within the guidelines establish working in an advisory capacity with the AMA. and the FAA.
I love golf, but I only play it this way, find a nice course where you can carry your clubs. Never keep score! This is very important! Finally course must have a beer cart!
So it turns into a nice walk, a little exercise with beer! Perfect day!!
So I am a member of the CSM. I think everyone needs to take a few things into account. Nothing about the CSM changes the "laws of physics" of software development. Changes take time. Also, CCP has some great ideas of their own about how to make Eve better.
The CSM is in my mind more about oversight of CCP that players demanded after several major game exploits were uncovered. I think to expect the CSM to somehow be the "good idea feature faries" and make CCP somehow change the game faster is destine for epic fail.
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I know several people that could easily retire comfortably right now. They are healthy enough to likely live for years but they won't because the have zero interests outside "work". No hobbies or interests. They will sit behind a keyboard till they drop.
:-( ). I have several hobbies that would fill my every waking minute. I will not be bored!!
Myself I cannot wait for the day I figure out the finances to stop working (I may never manage that
How folks exist today without hobbies or interests makes me sad for them. I am even happy to accept that "coding" is their hobby/passion but when I suggest they do it for themselves I get blank stares back. Oh well.
I was at the big M during the anti-trust days. Even though I was "them" at the time I thought what that did deserved at least the slap they got. Looking back they should have been broken up and I think these days Google and a host of other tech companies need to be similarly carved up.
But bringing back basically trying to prevent the installation of a 3rd party browser, that is just too funny. How quickly the past is forgotten. All I can say is good luck with that Microsoft! Maybe start to claim it is for "security", oh, then follow it with an "opt in" to allow Microsoft to have all your PC's data sent to them "to improve your experience!". Yeah, folks will buy that!
Money, industry, the work and location. OK, more details, very big pay bump. I am back in the gaming industry, my last place was not a software company and didn't want to do what it takes to be one (claimed it couldn't find software engineers in Seattle :-O ) and my last company was in a place was becoming overrun with homeless camps. I got tired of the feces on the sidewalk every morning.
This is the case at all the big tech companies I've seen. I've been stuck in the contractor grind for some time. Some folks seem to like it, I do not. You are treated as a lower class everywhere I've been, you won't be at moral events, you won't get stock, most companies are requiring the hiring agencies that place you to provide some health care and some PTO but it won't be at parity with a "true" employee. You usually will get paid less in the end and at many companies you have a "sell by" date that forces some amount of time off after some interval. At Microsoft it means every 18 months you are out of work for 6 months. So forget any sort of career trajectory. Also expect to be given all the worst of the work while it is assumed the reason you are a contractor is because "you couldn't cut it" as a real full time employee. So these gigs will pay the bills and sometimes there can be actual time and half overtime which is nice (assuming your contract doesn't have a 40 hour a week cap, many do so in that case you just won't get paid). Forget things like health club memberships, access to company specific bus service like the "Connector" buses at Microsoft. Well, I guess you do get out of the horrible review process at some of these companies. Would I rather be a real "full time" employee, yup. Now that I am a lowly contractor do I ever expect to get back to that, not so much, If you really want to go direct employee most folks have to go someplace as a non-contractor first then only consider a direct role with a larger company from that point on to scrub off the contractor stain! :-)
Before you bash Amazon (also realize Amazon is rapidly staffing its warehouses with mobile work forces of RV dwelling retires that need the job to make ends meet) https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... consider that a lot of pilots early in their career would have wages low enough to qualify for food stamps. They often make less than the flight attendants on their flights who also make low wages.
I need to lose a few pounds, I'm working on it and it is not easy. But I know that is a better choice than trying to make society accept my poor choices that led to the weight as attractive.
Here in America we have a food industry dedicated to making you obese. So many of us in the U.S. are far heavier than we should be. Yes there are corner cases where the excess weight has some other root cause. But those are outliers. The fact is a lot of folks here in Umerika eat poorly and too much.
So along comes this sad attempt to normalize that as a healthy life style choice. Its no longer fat, its "body positive"! Seriously I am happy Hollywood has not yet tried to normalize poor choices. In fact thinking about it I am surprised given the SJW nature of the entertainment industry.
"He is now on TV trying to encourage others to treat women badly. " Really? I've seen a number of interviews and I have yet to see anyplace where he suggested anything that was close to "treat women badly". I think you statement shows you are the sort of person who creates the unhealthy culture that actually results in treating women badly. I'd argue that treating women as some sort of class that needs special consideration is one way to treat women badly.
I read the memo and found it well written and I think it pointed out how the SWJ and left leaning bias at Google isn't good for anyone including the class of people that the wrong headed policies seek to help. Google is clearly all about respecting everyone's opinion so long as they are the "correct" ones.
So he said "You can get the people you want" and immediately everyone imagines what he means. He hasn't DONE anything and he prides himself on closing deals by basically saying whatever it takes. So I've learned with Trump look to actions, not invented interpretations of his random comments.
I'd suggest that there are lots of those "people" tech leaders need right here in the good old "US" of "A". Sure, maybe he will revert the H1B situation to the same or even worse (from the perspective of an older US tech worker) but he hasn't taken any steps to do that yet. But if you are imagining outcomes how about imagine something good. He discovers unicorns that poop gold.
I mean seriously. I've seen predictions of him bringing in Russians in the responses implying they'd be put to work on our voting systems!. Where is there any indication of that? What Trump has proven to be is a very effective way to get people to spew their inner dark imaginations. It is a great time in history to own popcorn stocks and sit back and watch it all unfold. What he has proven is that the world is all far less fragile than everyone seems to think.
So a direct experience. A personal friend was a relatively wealth older fellow. Towards the end of his life he'd have lunch regularly. One day he shared he was trying decide what to do with one of his investments. At some time on the past he'd bought a wind turbine near Palm Springs. With tax incentive's, what it made by selling power and depreciation it made him a small but steady income. He had some sort of arraignment with a company there to look after it. Some small regular fee for a maintenance contract. But his accountant had just told him that with changes in tax laws and the fact the turbine had finally "depreciated" to zero value on the books it was no longer going to be a sure income source. He had been an engineer during the brief period of his life he actually worked and he hated the idea of shutting down a perfectly functional energy source. It really pained him but in the end fiscal "responsibility" won out and he had it decommissioned. I always wondered if its still sitting there today.
In the end its always the dollars that drive the decisions.
I hope you do have my CP/M. I was the first one to support 80 track drives and offered some options like opposing sides of the floppy and double stepping to read 40 track media in an 80 track drive. S.A.I.L. CP/M. I can't believe I still remember any of that! :-)
Ii think you nailed most of the reason for CP/Ms demise in the end. You had to buy it separate of the PC and it was pricey. There really wasn't anything compelling about CP/M compared to PC DOS that would warrant the extra expense. Rather than post twice I'd also add a comment about the 8.3 file names. There was a mindset in the earliest days of personal computers that resources were going to be very limited so there was a definite bias towards smaller and less complex. There also was to some degree a lack of forward vision.
:-) It was amazing what you could cobble together if you put your mind to it!
Networking was hardly thought about. I expect a crazy thing I built as a "one off" for a client was a good example. I had a client that needed to find a way to have an office of accountants enter data into a single data store. In this case it was a 15 inch SMD removable platter hard drive that featured a fixed platter and a removable one that was primarily used for back up. (Yes, I also managed to cobble together an 8 inch tape driver interface for back up for another client). The client I did this solution for had a weird accounting system he had written himself over years and did not want to try and replace that. It ran on Northstar Horizons using the Northstar DOS. The hard drive was interfaced through a two board interface from a company in the Phoenix area who I had worked with previously. So a good friend had tried to start his own consulting business taking on the CPA as his first client. He had thought he could build some sort of S-100 bus multiplexer and had spun his wheels for months. So he asked me to bail him out.
What I did (because it really was a sort of DYI culture back then) was get a Polymorphic S-100 chassis, a Northstar Z-80 CPU card which had a ROM socket an 8K static ram card and a Cromenco 8PIO card that gave me a parallel port. Most of the code to access the commands for the disc controller were on ROM on the disk controller. So I reverse engineered the block IO operations from the patched Northstar OS the CPA was using and built a small kernel that I put in ROM on the Z-80 processor card. Then I patched the DOS that booted off of floppy on each individual Northstar computer to change the block IO calls to the disk controller to a routine that used each computers parallel port to talk to a port of the central Polymorphic chassis 8PIO card. Add some cables and some simple code in the Polymorphic based system to do a round robin polling service of each port. Each Northstar worked like it had a local hard drive. The central system fed everything. The final icing on the cake was to add support of a semaphore system resident in the central controller. This allowed for crude file locking system to be added to the system. I called it the "Pollyplexer". Darned if the silly thing didn't work like a champ. That CPA used it for another 4 years, sold the practice and the system and it ran for another 3+ years until it became impossible to keep the disk drive working. It is still one of the most fun things I ever did.
So I was lucky enough to have been around during those days. I had a small business that resold CP/M. I'd done an implementation for the Northstar Horizon. So I'd see Gary at conferences and trade shows and the hospitality events he threw for his re-sellers. He seemed appreciative and a pretty decent guy. I also got to see the younger Gates regularly. I have to say Bill was a bit harder to like in the early days. The software business for personal computers was a lot different then and it was those early personalities that got us to where we are today. I was sad when I learned how Gary went. He seemed to have deserved much better. I know I'd like to read his entire book as I know I'd not hold anything he wrote later in life against him. He clearly had some demons and definitely missed out on the next wave of the personal computers rise to popularity. So Digital Research is a memory, much like dBase, Novel (sorry, what they became was very different than they were then), MicroPro, and countless companies that bet on the Z-80 over the X86. But I think there would be value in reading Gary's later thoughts even if they may be colored by his personal struggles. I hope someday the rest is released. I sort of feel sorry for folks just getting into computers these days, those earlier times were insanely fun. So many new things emerging. We were drinking from a fire hose then. And Gary was a part of that. I guess thinking about this I should dig out an old Northstar and see if I can still get it to boot CP/M. I doubt I remember any of the command line operations! Good thing I kept all the manuals!
I hope at least they are using a Persci voice coil drive and not an old stepper motor drive! When your launching nuclear weapons access time could matter!! :-)
So a lot of folks seem to think there are more laws about R/C models than there really are. The AMA has worked with the FAA and established a lot of guidelines. There are guidelines, not laws. Thank god most serious modelers use common sense and follow them. The drone crowd to me however really seem to lack any common sense. I had a conversation today with a drone enthusiast that thinks it is a good idea to have self guiding drones flying around in data centers looking for servers with thermal issues or fans failing while folks are in there working. Sorry, not interested in autonomous drones in my work space! Will I be expected to where a hardhat at work? I've also seen so many examples of photo ops ending with drones failing and plummeting to the ground over people. I think this will eventually hurt someone seriously and I fear those guidelines we modelers have worked with so long will turn into laws. Most of the drone folks I've met have no R/C background and really fail to see just how wrong drones can go. Very worried about some badly behaving drone folks ruining it for other modelers.
Sorry there is no law about R/C altitude limits, there are guidelines generally related to proximity airports. Public Law 112-95, signed into law by President Obama in February of 2012, establishes criteria for defining a model aircraft and operating conditions under which no additional FAA regulation is required. The operating conditions do not include an altitude ceiling. The key criteria to qualify as a model aircraft is that it is flown strictly for recreational or hobby purposes, and within the visual line of sight of the pilot. To-date, the FAA has not enacted a process through which AMA and the modelers it represents may proceed to operate under the new federal guidance, so for the time being, modelers continue to operate under the provisions of AC 91-57 and the AMA Safety Code. So big model and good eyes is pretty high!
It has been appealed but the has been no ruling on the appeal. That appeal remains to be heard. So hardly "fixed". Many folks think the appeal is likely to fail. So the authority of the FAA over model aircraft is still up in the air. At the moment most serious R/C modelers voluntarily stay within the guidelines establish working in an advisory capacity with the AMA. and the FAA.
I love golf, but I only play it this way, find a nice course where you can carry your clubs. Never keep score! This is very important! Finally course must have a beer cart! So it turns into a nice walk, a little exercise with beer! Perfect day!!
So I am a member of the CSM. I think everyone needs to take a few things into account. Nothing about the CSM changes the "laws of physics" of software development. Changes take time. Also, CCP has some great ideas of their own about how to make Eve better. The CSM is in my mind more about oversight of CCP that players demanded after several major game exploits were uncovered. I think to expect the CSM to somehow be the "good idea feature faries" and make CCP somehow change the game faster is destine for epic fail.